Cheaper than AdWords: Google's Best Advertising Method

Friday, March 27, 2015

People are often shocked by the high price of Google AdWords. Not only are ads quite expensive for businesses, but the system is so complex that many companies are forced to offload ad management onto costly AdWords specialists, thus increasing the out-of-pocket costs further.

A recent article suggested that companies will spend more than than half a trillion dollars on advertising this year as profit-hungry firms are forced to compete for consumers' attention.

As Seth Godin often points out, such forms of interruption marketing are rarely the most effective. What if there were a better way?

There is. I recently came across the story of a person who turned advertising on its head. Rather than paying third-parties like Google to show ads to people, he's found a way to get customers to pay him to watch his ads.

For a mere €10, any business can have him provide a five minute review of its website posted to his public YouTube page. The reviews are then posted to his website and act as an advertisement for his services. One can certainly argue that €10 isn't a lot of money, but that's not the proper way to look at it.

In the upside down world of permission-based marketing, he's not only reduced his out of pocket marketing costs to zero, he's actually discovered a way to get paid for them. The more videos that he produces, the more income he generates. At €10 per 5 minute video, he's seeing €120 per hour. Not bad at all! And unlike the case with AdWords, commercials or billboards, his creations will continue to be visible to potential customers years after they've been created.

As his ads become more visible, several benefits will occur:

• He'll build a reputation. As he transitions from being a consultant to that consultant, he'll be able to charge higher rates for his services. Customers will always pay more for a that than for a generic a.
• He'll frame the problem. He is able to frame his area of expertise in exactly the way that he wishes. As a result, folks who need help will prefer his approach to that of his competitors, because each of his rivals will work in a different manner.
• He'll increase his search engine optimization. Google tends to return popular sites higher up in its search engine results. Do you think that Google will consider his increasingly popular YouTube channel when determining the ranking of its search results? Did I mention that Google owns YouTube?

I'm convinced and intend to follow suit. There's no better means of demonstrating one's skills than practicing them out in the open. Don't forget to subscribe to our brand new YouTube channel. It's rather empty at the moment, but new pricing teardowns will be posted there shortly!