I’m trying to take my mind off the realization that in 3 months I’ll be the parent of a teenager by thinking about something more cheerful: the economy.

The Current Economic Maelstrom

If businesses are sailboats, then the economy right now is like a strong wind - blowing in the wrong direction.

Yet some sailors are so knowledgeable about the winds and how to handle their craft in the face of them, they can sail against the wind by tacking and a lot of other technical sailing terms that I would just embarrass myself by trying to use correctly.

Other sailors, who do not know how to read the winds, find that they are simply at their mercy, a bobbing plaything driven by forces outside their comprehension and therefore outside their control.

Which Kind of AdWords Sailor Are You?

Take this quick quiz to see whether you know how to read the winds of your AdWords-driven sales funnel:

  1. What is the average value of a visitor to your website?
  2. What are your 10 most profitable keywords?
  3. Which ads are most profitable?
  4. If you are using the content network, which sites deliver the most valuable traffic? (Do you even know which sites are displaying your ads?)
  5. How much time, on average, do visitors spend on each of your landing pages?
  6. Which is more profitable: going for the sale on the first visit, or trying to capture contact information for followup marketing?
  7. What price point delivers the highest profit for each of your products?
  8. What browser size are the majority of your visitors viewing? (And are you making sure that the most important content of your web pages fit inside that area?)
  9. What ad position is most profitable for each of your biggest keywords?
  10. At what place on your landing page do most visitors stop paying attention?

If you can answer questions 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8 off the top of your head, and can find the answers to the other questions in a matter of minutes, then congratulations! You’re an expert AdWords sailor.

If you can’t, then you’re wasting at least 50% of your AdWords budget every single day. At least.

Winds of Change Are Coming

In two days - on Friday, October 31 - I’ll be unveiling my new AdWords TeleCourse. The course is for current AdWords user - not beginners - who want to drive leads, sales and profits through the roof ?while cutting their advertising expenses in half.

The course is limited to 16 participants, and the first 8 signups who are accepted get to attend a live 2.5 day mastermind roundtable with me in February.

You can get the details and register for the TeleCourse on Friday. To make it fair, I’ll send the email at 11am Eastern Time, so West Coast US folks and Europeans will be awake as well. Sorry, Sydney and Singapore :(

If you want to be notified and you’re not on my email list, you can remedy that instantly by entering your email and clicking the sexy red "Subscribe" button at the top right of this page.