The challenge is that these hot buttons are most times unspoken. The spoken reasons given for making a purchase are the logical reasons used to rationalize purchases to ourselves or others. Things like lowest price, highest quality, most features, and most efficient are the logical reasons for a purchase. Somebody joining Weight Watchers is obviously trying to lose weight. But why? Maybe to get healthier. Maybe to impress a guy or girl. Maybe to win a reality TV show prize. Maybe even for camraderie. Why would somebody want these things? The key is hot buttons.

Starting from a “blank sheet” and determining a niche’s hot buttons is pretty tough - at least for me. A couple of months ago, though, I happened across a book at Border’s that caught my attention. It is titled Hot Button Marketing by Barry Feig. It details 16 hot buttons that all consumers have that marketers can “push” to drive sales and profits. Since reading the book, I attribute at least one and most times several hot buttons to each niche I promote to. Usually, I pick one main hot button and several sub-hot buttons based on my niche research in forums and other industry sources. I use the selected hot buttons to create all of my ads and landing page copy.

The book is an excellent resource, in my opinion, but it is mainly geared toward “corporate” marketing and sales. It requires a bit of translating to apply it to internet marketing. Below are the 16 hot buttons listed in the book and my interpretation of how they apply to targetting niches and writing copy for internet marketing. They help me “get inside the head” of the people I am trying to market to.

#1 - The Desire For control - Many people are influenced by this hot button. When so many of us feel out of control, it is no surprise that products and services that promise to help us regain control are booming. To give a customer a sense of control, emphasize guarantees, warranties, timing, success rates, and other facts that remove uncertainty from a purchase. The more specific you can be, the better. Scientific research, case studies, comparisons, and statistics help give customers that “warm fuzzy feeling.” From your research, determine what your niche wants control over and use these tactics to push their hot button. Words like “guarantee,” “quality,” “timlely,” “safe,” “trouble-free,” and “sure fire” can be big motivators.

#2 - I’m Better Than You - This hot button is about prestige and status. Brand names and price are very important. Brand names associated with high quality and exclusiveness are key, as is a high price. People who buy based on this hot button want to be sure that not just anyone can get what they have. Moreso than with other hot buttons, it is important to have a landing page with a pleasing design. Words like “luxury,” “elite,” “elegant,” “exclusive,” “superior,” and “rare” work well with the I’m Better Than You crowd.

#3 - The Excitement of Discovery - This hot button is for people in niches that are driven by the thrill of discovery. People enjoy finding out new things or new uses for existing products. They enjoy the feeling of exclusiveness when they pass along new information to their friends and their friends respond with, “I didn’t know that.” Words like “secret,” “new,” “exclusive,” “state of the art,” “discover,” “little known,” and “undiscovered” work well with this hot button.

#4 - Revaluing - This hot button primarily relates to the Baby Boomer generation. Generally, these people are more interested in experiences than products. If you are marketing products to this group, emphasize the experience the product will provide. Baby Boomers want to enjoy life and experience the things they did not experience when they were younger.

#5 - Family Values - As the title states, this hot button is about the relationships in families. If you are promoting digital cameras, you can target the “Mom” crowd by emphasizing the ability to take great family photos or action shots of the kids. You are not selling digital cameras, but family memories. Pictures on landing pages can be particularly effective by showing families playing games together, eating together, etc. Coupling this hot button with the “Poverty of Time” hot button can be particularly effective if you are promoting a time saving product to a niche that craves more family time.

#6 - The Desire to Belong - This is the peer pressure, or “everybody’s doing it” hot button. It is one of the most powerful and one of the hot buttons I use most. Many niches have certain identifiers that signify a person “belongs” to that niche. It could be lingo or speech patterns, products used, services subscribed to, places visited, physical features, etc. Using internet forums and community sites like MySpace and Facebook is particularly valuable for determining what these identifiers are for a particular niche. Once you determine what these identifiers are for the niche you are targetting, try emphasizing how the particular products or services you are promoting will improve a person’s status in the niche, help a person bond with others, help a person be more like others in the niche, and just plain fit in. Targetting this hot button is particularly important to get right, because if you use the wrong lingo or promote the wrong product, it will be painfully obvious that you do not understand what people in the niche are all about, and your sales will suffer.

#7 - Fun is its Own Reward - Everybody likes to have fun. Jokes and games are two of the hottest categories on the internet. Most often, I use this as a sub-hot button instead of the main hot button. Humor can be used in ads and landing page copy. If the product or service you are promoting lends itself to it, you can come up with some fun ways to use the product and post articles or videos showing this.

#8 - Poverty of Time - We all have this one, don’t we? Oftentimes, customers who buy things like software are not really buying “software,” but rather the extra time they will have by completing tasks in a more timely and efficient manner. The same can be said for shopping online vs. offline. One prime niche where the Poverty of Time is a major hot button is internet marketing. How many times have you felt like 24 hours in a day were just not enough to get all of your projects done? The trick with the Poverty of Time hot button is that it has to be paired with another hot button, in my experience. Saving somebody time is not enough. You have to know which other hot buttons are important to her to show her what she can do with her newfound free time. Maybe it is “Family Values” and you can emphasize all of the extra time she can spend with her family. Maybe it is “Self-Achievement” and you can show how much more quickly she will reach her goal. Maybe it is “I’m Better than You” and you can show her how she can spend extra hours laying around the pool all day getting a tan and making her friends jealous.

#9 - The Desire to Get the Best - This works well with high priced, high quality products. Emphasizing the time and effort that went into designing or manufacturing a product helps build up the perceived quality. In addition, products that are in short supply relative to demand are also desirable for targetting this hot button. Feig notes that this hot button is not so much related to the “I’m Better than You” hot button as it is to the “Self-Achievement” and “Make Me Smarter” hot buttons. When targetting people searching for such high priced, high quality products, try using words like “cutting edge,” “premium,” “ultimate,” “uber,” “finest,” “precision,” and “craftsmanship.”

#10 - Self-Achievement - This hot button relates to improving one’s self and achieving goals. I put the desire for recognition in this bucket. Research has shown that the desire for recognition even outweighs money as a motivation driver. Reaching goals and gaining recognition improve the way we perceive ourselves. That is a powerful hot button. There is a huge trend that has been going on for some time around do-it-yourself projects and “hacking” or “modding” products. Many times, this is a result of people being driven by the Self-Achievement hot button. Techniques for pushing this hot button include tutorials that enable the completion of a task, and offering recognition to your visitors, especially in community sites or forums. Discussing the difficulty of completing a particular task or program, but giving prominent recognition to those that do can be a powerful motivator. Often, it overlaps with the “Make Me Smarter” hot button.

#11 - Sex, Love & Romance - As we all know, sex and love are two of the most powerful and primal urges of the human condition. We’ve heard it before - sex sells. Outside of overtly promoting sex related products, how do you incorporate sex into your internet marketing arsenal? When a man buys diamonds or flowers for his lady, sure he wants to make her happy, but ultimately he wants to make himself happy :). Suggestive pictures or language help hit this hot button when marketing applicable products. Showing how a product makes a person more attractive to the opposite sex is also an effective technique. This could be applied to weight loss and self improvement products, vanity and ego purchases, dating, and even financial products. Just remember that women and men respond to sex differently, so keep your target audience in mind when designing your ads and pages.

#12 - The Nurturing Response - Not suprisingly, this hot button is usually relevant when marketing to parents, especially mothers; however, there are other areas where it can be applied, such as to pet owners and grandparents. The basis for The Nurturing Response is empathy and caring for others and improving relationships between people. One of the keys to pushing this hot button is to emphasize that the person purchasing the product or service (the nurturer) is saving the day. The nurturer wants to be given credit for finding a way to help someone else rather than the product or service getting the credit.

#13 - Reinventing Oneself - This hot button references the desire nearly everyone has at some point in their life to change something about themselves. Generally, this is because things have not gone the way that person wants. An obvious target for this hot button is the online dating niche. People who have been successful with dating and relationships are less likely to sign up for an online dating service than those who have been less successful (keep in mind that success is determined by the perceptions of the individual, so be wary of your own definitions of relationship success). Meeting someone new is a chance for these people to reinvent themselves and correct the dating mistakes they have made in the past. Other ways “Reinventing Oneself” manifest include changing the way one looks, changing habits, moving, and changing jobs. Words like “start,” “begin,” “change,” “transform,” “new,” “improved,” “renewed,” “reborn,” “awaken,” and “remake,” are powerful in targetting this hot button.

#14 - Make Me Smarter - This hot button is about the nearly insatiable thirst for knowledge many people have. It is related to the “Desire for Control,” “I’m Better than You,” and “Power, Dominance & Influence” hot buttons. There are generally three main ways people are impacted by the “Make Me Smarter” hot button. The first is if they want knowledge for knowelege’s sake, the second is to feel they are well informed prior to making a purchase, and the third is to learn new and better ways to do things. If the “Make Me Smarter” hot button is dominant for the niche you are targetting, keep in mind that these people generally hate to be sold. They want to make their own decisions. Your goal should be to educate and guide rather than sell. If you are very knowlegable in the field, position yourself as an expert. A variety of educational materials, such as how-to’s, white papers, videos, in-depth reviews, product and price comparisons, and case studies are valued by these consumers. Many times, these people want to learn things that are perceived to be unique, cutting edge or secret. Words like “discover,” “revealed,” “secret,” “explore,” “pioneer,” and “unearth” are useful to use in ad and landing page copy.

#15 - Power, Dominance & Influence - This hot button is closely related to the “Desire for Control” and “I’m Better than You” hot buttons. Many times it is associated with expensive, luxury products. It can also be associated with specialized knowledge products and new, cutting edge products. For the Power, Dominance & Influence hot button, the reputation of the customer is paramount. To push the hot button, emphasize how the product or service you are promoting will improve or maintain the customer’s reputation. If you are marketing tools to auto mechanics, talk about how not having the latest tools opens the door to lesser skilled mechanics to produce higher quality work - implying that your customer will take a hit to his reputation if he doesn’t stay a step ahead of the competition.

#16 - Wish Fulfillment - This hot button is generally found in adventure, health and “feel good” types of products and services. It is synergistic with many other hot buttons, including the “Desire for Control,” “Fun is its Own Reward,” “Self Achievement,” “Sex, Love & Romance,” “Desire to Belong,” and “Power, Dominance & Influence” hot buttons. To identify the Wish Fulfillment hot button, look for statements like, “I wish,” “if only,” “my dream,” etc. Picture your target customer with a starry look in his eyes and imagine what he day dreams about. When Wish Fulfillment is the primary hot button, stay 100% positive and use the words “your dream” in your copy. These consumers want a positive, inspirational message.

Everybody knows that making PPC campaigns profitable is about trying different things, tracking them and testing them. I often struggle with creating multiple ads for an ad group or multiple versions of a landing page to test. Using the 16 hot buttons above makes it easier. I start with ads and landing pages that emphasize what I believe to be the main hot button. Then, to come up with the alternative ads and landing pages to test, I select one of the sub-hot buttons that apply to the niche and make it the main hot button, just in case I was wrong about which was the main one. It is much easier to create new versions this way and takes the stress out of picking the main hot button.

The who and the why are the ultimate drivers of sales. Too often, us marketers get caught up in the latest promotion methods or money making techniques and forget the fundamentals. It has been said many times before, but it is so important that it bears repeating. Like Soylent Green, “niches are people….PEOPLE!!”

Pede

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IMGTD is NOT about reporting on the latest pyramid scheme site or the hottest e-book. Everything I post will either be things I have tested or methods I am currently using. As a result, posts will be infrequent, long and hopefully of extreme value to you.

Because my posting will be infrequent and I know how frustrating it is to visit blogs hoping the blogger has posted something only to find the same information you found 3 weeks ago, I added a countdown timer at the top of the main page to keep you informed as to when to expect my next post. In addition, you can subscribe to the IMGTD RSS feed in the upper right hand corner of the main page.

Stay tuned.

Pede

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1. Set up your individual keyword URL’s. If you were going to send someone to your landing page and your URL looks like this:

http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php

Change it so that each keyword has it’s own unique URL. I like to assign a number to each keyword. If I had 6 keywords, my URL’s would look like this:

http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=1
http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=2
http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=3
http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=4
http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=5
http://www.mykickasslandingpage.com/sweat.php?tid=6

In this case, we are using a Clickbank product as an example. Each affiliate network has it’s own SubID tracking code.

Clickbank = tid
Commission Junction = sid
Share A Sale = afftrack
Linkshare = u1
Performics = mid

Make sure to use the appropriate code for the affiliate network you are using. If you do not use the right SubID code, the affiliate network cannot report which keyword made the conversion for you.

2. Paste your URL’s and keywords to Adwords. You can do this in the “Quick Add” screen for your keywords. The format to use is:

KEYWORD ** BID ** URL

3. Set up your affiliate link with PHP code. If your affiliate link looks like this:

<a href=”http://XXXXX.stopsweat.hop.clickbank.net”>Stop Sweating Now!</a>

Change it to this:

<a href”http://XXXXX.stopsweat.hop.clickbank.net?tid=<?php echo $_REQUEST[’tid’]; ?>" >Stop Sweating Now!</a>

This code will automatically take the tid from the URL and place it at the end of your affiliate link. Your affiliate network (Clickbank in this example) will record this tid and you can then view your transaction reports to determine which keyword generated the sale for you.

Adding the ?tid=<?php echo $_REQUEST[’tid’]; ?> to your affiliate link is all the coding you have to do. Again, make sure you are using the appropriate SubID tracking code specific to the affiliate network you are using.

4. Paste your affiliate link and PHP code into your landing page. Save your landing page with the .php extension so that the PHP code we insert in this step will work. If you save your landing page as a .html or some other extension, the PHP code will not work.

Pretty easy, and the benefits are ginormous. This won’t quite get you to be a tracking ninja yet, but you’ve definitely reached yellow belt status and you’ll kick the crap out of all those white belt marketers out there.

Questions you can answer using this method of PPC keyword conversion tracking:

Which keywords are profitable?
Which keywords are losing money?
How much profit am I making per keyword?
How much can I raise my PPC bids and still make a profit?

From there, you can begin to analyze WHY certain keywords are profitable and others are not. This will help you determine what you can do to get more profitable keywords.

Check out this video for more detailed information. If you want to view the video in full screen mode, right click the video and select “Zoom.”

To get the spreadsheet I used in the video, click here:
Link Generating Spreadsheet

Update: Here is the Mac Version of the video. Right click to download.

Pede

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