In the hilarious (and – be warned – raunchy) video I'll share at the bottom of this post, Axis of Awesome goes through a medley of pop songs with the exact same 4-chord structure. From The Beatles' 'Let it Be" to Jason Mraz's "I'm Yours" to Banjo Patterson's "Waltzing Matilda" to Toto's "Africa," it's amazing how many different – and great – tunes can come from this one simple structure.

Marketing, like music, can seem to be a highly complex activity. But like music, marketing follows basic rules and principles. When people fail at marketing, it's generally not because they don't have incredible technical skills, or they aren't hypnotically persuasive, or they haven't bought the latest course on using Twitter or Facebook or Gazoomba (made that one up, as far as I know). 

Instead, people fail mostly for ignoring the basic 4-chord structure.

Here it is:

1. Market – Who's your customer? What do they want? Where can you find them? 

2. Message – What can you say to convince them to buy?

3. Medium – Where can you reach them predictably and affordably?

4. Money – Can you make a profit on the transaction, including the marketing costs?

Everything else about selling stuff to people is an advanced technique. I love advanced techniques, but only when they're built on solid foundations.

Free Pre-Camp Checkmate Training Series – a Solid Foundation

Sign up below for the Camp Checkmate training series – a 6-week online course designed to promote Camp Checkmate Chicago, held June 10-11, 2010. In the pre-camp training, you'll discover how to find and read the mind of your Ideal Customer, out-position your competitors, and become the Obvious Choice to your market. 

It's powerful – has to be if I want to convince you of the value of a live 2-day workshop – and it's free.

Sign up here:

And now, Axis of Awesome with the only four chords you'll ever need:

My friend and business mentor Danny Warshay of DEWventures.com and I had our bi-weekly “intimate-phone-chat-that-we-record-and-send-to-anyone-who-will-listen” on Monday.

Danny teaches entrepreneurship at Brown University, the only Ivy League school named after the first word of a Van Morrison song title, and he is an alum of Harvard Business School, which impresses you even if you won’t admit it.

Plus he spent a few years in brand management at Procter & Gamble.

Plus he’s a serial start-up guy, lending his talents to a bunch of new ventures in publishing, natural health, engineering, and so on.

Plus plus he travels around the world teaching and consulting on entrepreneurship, from China to Egypt to Portugal to Israel to I can’t even keep track of where else.

So when we got on the horn to talk about what he calls “bottom up research,” I was all ears.

My Beginner Entrepreneurial Mistake

And when – this was totally unrehearsed – I mentioned an early mistake I made when I was first starting out on my own, I got Danny onto his soapbox in a big way. It starts at 4 minutes 30 seconds in the audio (below).

Danny’s mild-mannered, calm, earnest demeanor vanished as he ranted about how many times he hears otherwise savvy entrepreneurs pull out this particular number – the one I had used – to justify their business plan to themselves, to partners and to investors.

In the process, you’ll discover how to conduct free research that’s arguably more valuable than anything you can buy or commission. Danny shares two examples of “bottom up research” from his P&G days, showing how Tide and Dawn teams innovated based on this method of research that’s available to all of us, regardless of how pinched our pennies.

Click the arrow below for a short course in entrepreneurship from one of the leading teachers in the US. Or click the blue link to download the MP3 for listening at your leisure:

Click here to download the Danny Warshay “Bottom Up Research” Interview

But first: Last chance to register for either of two live web clinics today.

Spend an hour on the phone and the computer with me, learning about "How to Create a Surge of Traffic to Your Site."

One clinic at 1pm EDT (10am Pacific), the other at 8pm EDT (5pm Pacific). Sign up for whichever is more convenient.

http://askhowie.com/traffic-surge-web-clinic

When I started marketing online, I saw myself as a "creative" type who looked at numbers, charts, and graphs the way Queen Elizabeth might view a mouse in her Yorkshire pudding.

"Ugh," I would think. "I can’t fill my sensitive and sparkly marketing brain with a bunch of data. How unromantic!"

After a while, it became clear that I needed to learn how to respect the numbers. Generate them. Look at them. Learn from them. And I discovered something amazing: those numbers actually allowed me to become more empathetic, more sensitive, and more creative. And then I remembered…

1980: The Year I Fell In Love… Repeatedly

I was 15, and I began falling in love as a habit.

Melissa, Gabi, Erica, and at least a dozen more.

The fact that my affection was generally unrequited (and in all probability, completely unnoticed) just made the experience all the more intense.

Here’s what I remember most: the single-minded attention I paid to the current girl of my dreams.

In gym class, I would track The One no matter what I was doing, my team was doing, or she was doing.

I’m up at bat during springtime softball, the score is tied with 5 minutes left until the period is over, two runners on base.

Am I sizing up the pitcher? No.
Taking in the outfield alignment? Hardly.
I’m checking to see if She’s watching me.

Is she at the water fountain?
Talking with friends?
Resting with her eyes closed?

Huh? Strike three? What the… ?

I could have told you everything about The One at the end of the day. What she smiled and laughed at. Which of my jokes met with annoyed eye-rolling.

What she doodled in the margins of her social studies notebook. What she ate for lunch. And so much more…

Are You in Love with Your Market?

If you really want to run a successful online business, you have two choices. You can be truly, madly, deeply in love with your market, or you can fake it.

I’m not here to lecture you about business ethics, so all I’ll say here is, it’s a heck of a lot harder to fake it.

If you’re in love with your market, you’ll pay close attention to what they want. What they say. How they act on your site.

You’ll track them as they encounter your various ads, sign up or not for your free reports or e-courses, and convert or not to paying clients and customers.

Love turns out to be the mediating force between the opposite poles of bean counting and creative promoting.

When you’re in love with someone, you’re hungry to know everything about them. "Market research" changes from tedious chore to pleasurable obsession.

Split testing goes from technical gymnastics to fascinating questions and answers.

"Customer service" goes from necessary evil to delightful opportunity.

The Secret to a Surge of Leads and Sales to Your Site

The secret isn’t some fancy SEO technique.

It isn’t a stealth AdWords network nobody else has heard about.

It’s knowing as much as you can about your market.

- How many of them are there?
- What do they want so badly they’ll spend time searching for it?
- How do they currently satisfy that desire?
- What actual words do they use when they search?
- Who is currently serving them well right now?
- What are the economics of reaching that market predictably and consistently?

And the secret of staying on top of all this data is to combine the passion of a young lover with the analytical bent of an accountant.

And there’s no better medium to start combining the two mindsets than AdWords:
Virtually instant data, simple testing, clear reporting.
Short, haiku-like advertisements.

So whether you’re by nature a poet or an accountant, you can use AdWords as the crucible to strengthen your non-dominant side.

Just imagine the love songs this could inspire:

"Oh, baby, won’t you raise my CTR?"

"Since I been lovin’ you right, I haven’t got any wrong impressions."

"I’ll have to say I love you in an ad."

No-cost Web Clinic today (Wed May 6): Traffic Surge

• Do you have a web site and not enough visitors and sales?
• Have you been "noodling around" online but haven’t found a market or a business model to commit to?
• Are you running a successful business and just know there’s a way to use the web to take it to the next level?
• Are you just getting started with AdWords and hitting the brick wall of Google Confusion?
• Are you overwhelmed by all the different techniques and tactics and programs and courses, but don’t feel like you’ve found a solid foundation yet?

If you’re nodding your head in self-recognition at any of this, join me for the zero-cost Traffic Surge web clinic:

http://askhowie.com/traffic-surge-web-clinic

Wishing you health, happiness, prosperity, the soul of Rumi and the brain of Einstein,
Howie

Wanna know what your visitors want when they come to your site? Give them a search box and find out!

This four-minute video shows you exactly how to get a Free Google search engine for your website.

Want more great short videos to help you master AdWords and online marketing? Check out the "Look Over My Shoulder" (LOMS) Video Tutorial Series.

I had a European client once who was advertising their publication in Germany. Through market research, they had discovered a sizeable Turkish-speaking market in Germany.

So they hired someone to translate their keywords and ads into Turkish.

Immediately, they saw a significant uptick in traffic – impressions and clicks.

And a significant downturn in ROI.

Why? Because they hadn’t bothered to translate their landing page, their sales process, or the publication itself.

They enticed Turkish speakers to – a brick wall of German.

In honor of you not making this mistake, I present my favorite video of the week – a Spanish-language soap opera for those of us whose linguistic facility is limited to 3 weeks of Spanish in 4th grade, augmented by a well-intentioned but short-lived stint of Pimsleur immersion tapes during the morning commute:

Check out this week’s video newsletter for some tips and tools about finding multi-lingual and global markets for your products and services.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Imal Wagner, my publicist, for a course she’s teaching on getting more website traffic.

Imal sent me the mp3, which I’m posting here:

It’s a good strategic introduction to AdWords, and contains my clearest rant to date on how to get started. Also, the answer to the question, Why is Google like Aladdin’s lamp?

Also, why you won’t find any AdWords ads tattooed on my backside – yet.

At the close of the call, I mention a new TeleCourse that will begin in December 2008 called AdWords Ball. It’s NOT for complete beginners. You need to be driving AdWords traffic to your site already in order to benefit. Read all about it here.

On page 79 of AdWords For Dummies, I mention PayPal Shops as a way of doing market research on which products are selling well online.

A reader can’t find the link off the PayPal home page, and wonders where it is.

Click "Products and Services" at the top of the PayPal home page and you’ll see the "Shops" link at the bottom of the page.

if that’s too much work, this link will take you there directly: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_shop-ext