This post was originally published in Fast Company. Not that I’m bragging. Much.

The van driver rolled down his window and called me over. “I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up earlier–the ladies in the back wouldn’t let me.”

“That’s OK. I wouldn’t pick me up, either.” The ladies smiling, grateful to be let off the hook.

“No, I hate to pass by without helping, since I did so much hiking in my day.”

Here in South Africa, my family and I are getting used to relying on the kindness of strangers. With no car (yet), no contacts, and frequently no clue, we’ve gone from reluctantly accepting assistance to actively sticking our thumbs out, soliciting it.

Particularly when it comes to transportation. We’re about two miles up a mountain from the nearest mini-mart, and three-hour shopping trips for a cartoon of eggs, two onions, and a Cadbury Turkish Delight are getting old.

So I’ve taken to thumbing it as soon as I hear the infrequent rumble of a vehicle engine behind me. And in so doing, I’ve discovered a few things about human nature that make me a smarter marketer.

1. When I hitchhike with a child, I have better luck.

When I’m by myself, my conversion rate of vehicles to rides is quite dismal. One out of ten, or worse. And the drivers stoically reject eye contact, as if I were some kind of psycho with evil intent and the power to mesmerize them with my gaze.

When I have a child in tow, the odds change dramatically. About 50% of drivers stop, and the ones who don’t arrange their faces and gesture sympathetically about not having enough space or time or whatever it is they’re trying to communicate. What they’re really communicating is, “I’d stop if I could.”

So what’s going on? Why does a child increase my odds so dramatically?

I don’t think it’s pity. Not in a region afflicted by poverty and malnutrition and domestic violence. My well-fed, well-dressed kids are in no way Save the Children poster material compared to the dozens of children who walk the hill every day in shoes that have been handed down since the 1970s.

Rather, the presence of a child makes me safer to pick up. I’m a father; therefore I’m probably not an axe murderer. I’m a caring, affectionate father; even better. When we hear the engine approaching, we hold hands, smile, and assume thumbs-out position. Who can resist John-Boy and John Senior needing a lift to pick up Grandma Esther’s heart medicine?

The marketing message is sobering: when I’m first trying to attract prospects, who am I on the inside is far less relevant than who my prospect THINKS I am.

I’m the same person, whether I’m walking solo or dragging a kid who’d rather wait at home. Two days ago, in fact, I went to the store for tummy medicine for my eldest, who was suffering from what she likes to tell people was amoebic dysentery (partly because it sounds dramatic, and partly because it doesn’t contain the word “diarrhea”). I was tired, and busy, and yet I braved the elements in search of over the counter bismuth subsalicylate.

Couldn’t the busy motorists sense that I was on a mission of mercy? Apparently not. To get a ride on that day, I would have needed to drag my poor daughter out of her sickbed to stand with me on the side of the road, so she could demonstrate my virtue and harmlessness.

So what does this mean for marketers?

Mainly, accept that most prospects already don’t trust you. If you’re on the web, you look just like all the online businesses that have scammed or disappointed them in the past, or that they’ve heard stories about, or that they’ve made up stories about.

So include as many trust elements as you can on your landing pages. These include: photos of you and your staff, real phone number and physical address, photo of your location, trust badges like BBB, eTrust, and VeriSign, and logos of already trusted organizations like UPS, Visa, and FedEx.

Also, anticipate and acknowledge visitor concerns by answering them up front. “Yes, there are a lot of fly by night online marketing ‘gurus’ out there, but you can trust my advice since I was selected by Wiley, Inc. to write Google AdWords For Dummies. Also, my client list includes…”

Once they get to know, like and trust you, none of that will matter anymore. Your skills, your ethics, your heart will trump all the logos and badges and honors and awards and certifications you may have accrued. But in order to get to that point, bring a kid with you.

2. The driver’s not the only one who needs to agree to stop and pick me up.

The passengers can veto the driver’s decision. In the case of the van full of ladies, they did. Totally understandable, right? I’m not exactly a hulk, but I am five foot ten (on bad hair days) and I can do three consecutive pushups. What hope would seven female middle-aged tourists from Johannesburg have against me?

Very often, your prospect is not the final or only decision maker. In B2B sales, the searcher generally presents several options to the decision makers. But even for consumer sales, you need to consider the priorities, prejudices and opinions of the passengers.

Spend time discovering the stakeholder constellations for your typical prospects. Do they have to run it by their spouses? Must 20-somethings get financial buy-in from their parents? Do your prospects care about looking stupid in front of their friends?

Develop marketing content that “sells through” as well as “sells to” your prospect to the other passengers in their decision vehicle.

3. The drivers who stop for me typically have done a lot of hitchhiking in their time.

This one is really interesting to me, because it begs the question, “So, what are you going to do once you get a car?”

See, I hardly ever pick up hitchhikers. I just drive right by them, avoiding eye contact. After all, who knows what sort of crazy criminals they might be?

But now I’m on the other side. I see the rigid, fearful faces of the people who don’t stop. I see the warm, smiling faces of the ones who brake just ahead and motion out of the window for me to hop in. It’s clear which one I want to be.

So my behavior is changing based on empathy. Based on being in someone else’s shoes, seeing the world through their eyes.

If you want to market effectively, this sort of perceptual shapeshifting is required. Spend some time searching as if you were your own prospect. Think about what’s at stake. What you wouldn’t know. What would scare you. What you’d want more than anything else. What promise you’d most like to hear and believe.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go shopping. We’re out of bread, and the store’s far away. Wish me luck…

My latest Fast Company article (and hopefully not my last, given the title and subject matter) has just been published.

I hope you’ll check it out, and leave a comment, question, kudo, or criticism.

Read: What Your Marketing Can Learn From a Pooping Sloth.

I recently uploaded a video on how to add a custom site search form to a website to a bunch of video sharing sites. It was accepted by most of them, except for www.revver.com. Here’s the email I got explaining why:

OK, I know you’re curious. So here’s the video (on youtube, whose standards are obviously more lax and permissive than revver). If you can figure out what’s so offensive, please let me know.

If you can stand my “nasty” content, you should check out the entire series of Look Over My Shoulder (LOMS) AdWords Video Tutorials. Learn more here…

I was thumbing through Website magazine the other day when I saw an article that had me floored. Someone had asked a bunch of search marketing professionals what they’d do if they were forced to choose between search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC).

Even more incredibly, they had actually gotten a bunch of people to answer the question (77% opted for SEO). Poor 23% PPC (sniff).

The question makes about as much sense as asking what’s more important about a car, the steering wheel or the accelerator.

Even though I wrote the book about AdWords, I recognize that both have their place in a successful online marketing strategy. (To be fair, the Website magazine article offered interested stats and did end up with a nuanced view of the topic – I’m just picking on them to make a point.)

Let’s compare:

Organic (SEO) traffic is free and can be plentiful. AdWords traffic costs money and can be hard to come by. Score one for SEO.

Organic traffic is more credible than paid ads (at least, judging by searchers’ behavior). Score two for SEO.

Organic traffic can last a lot longer than AdWords traffic, where any idiot with a big checkbook and no understanding of ROI can outbid you and kick you off the first page. Score three for SEO.

PPC traffic used to be more predictable – your organic listings might disappear overnight like dinghies in the Bermuda Triangle when Google tweaked their algorithm, but AdWords was steady and consistent. Until summer 2006, when they started playing with Quality Score and threw the PPC world into an SEO-like tizzy. So no advantage there.

So why is AdWords so great then? Why do I view it as important as SEO? For three reasons:

1. AdWords traffic is perfect for testing and improving your website. What’s the point of getting a top listing in Google if all that traffic visits your site and pukes?

2. AdWords is the perfect medium for figuring out which keywords to optimize for once you get to SEO. You see, SEO is like a big old battleship – slow to get moving, slow to turn once it is moving. You do not want to hire an agency or spend months trading links only to discover that you’ve optimized for the wrong keywords.

3. AdWords is another leg of your business that can support your online efforts if SEO stops working. Anyone who relies exclusively on one traffic source is building a business on a one-legged stool. If that leg gives out, you’re flat on your – well, you know.

But the big money, for most people, is the vast stream of free traffic that Google will send you if you produce Google-worthy content. In my experience, in many markets free traffic will be 10x what you can get from paid. And it’s – guess what? – free :)

Trouble is, SEO changes all the time. Just when I got the hang of inbound links, the game became unrecognizable: all video, all social networking (why does 23-year-old Vanessa want to be my myspace buddy, anyway? I’m 43 and my profile is definitely not screaming “sexy and available”), all article marketing.

So I go back to school every year to make sure my own business can compete online. And so I can continue to guide my clients, once we’ve nailed AdWords, to take what we’ve learned from AdWords and apply it to the rest of their marketing.

I don’t do SEO professionally. But I do know enough to be able to recommend qualified professionals to my clients. Folks who understand the cutting-edge best practices. People who get meaningful results. Professionals who understand that PPC and SEO are not either-or, but both-and.

My school consists of buying lots of ebooks, reading lots of blogs, and masterminding with top people in the field.

Oh, and attending one seminar a year – the System Seminar, the place where each spring hundreds of serious businesspeople gather to share best practices and learn how to stay ahead of the online world from top pros.

I’m a presenter at this year’s event, in Chicago from May 30 to June 1, but for years I paid my own way as an attendee. I couldn’t afford not to go. That’s where I first heard about AdWords. About how to do SEO right. About online PR. About blogging. About article marketing. About online video. About online streaming audio. And I learned about each of these things, on average, two years before they caught on and became common practice. Imagine, a two-year head start to establish insurmountable advantages in several different areas.

This year, I’m looking forward to more of the same. I’ve been browsing the program like a chocoholic reading through the Harbor Sweets catalog. I’ve even built 3 days of empty into my schedule the following week, so I can assimilate and start to implement the things I will have learned.

I haven’t completely decided, but at this moment, I’m looking forward to attending the following breakout sessions:

Saturday May 31:

1:30pm Glenn Livingston: How to Successfully Enter New Markets

I’ve heard Glenn speak a lot, but I always pick up some new aspect of his incredible market research technology when I listen again. It’s so obvious, so elegant, and so powerful that almost no one is implementing his system. (Go figure!) Actually, it involves statistical analysis, which scares a lot of people off. Which is a really good thing if you’re one of the people it doesn’t scare off.

At the same time, my good friend Ann Convery will be teaching how to go from “Who Are You” to “My Wallet’s Out” in 30 seconds – the secret of an effective elevator speech (and AdWords headline, by the way). Ann has coached me over the past year, so I feel OK skipping her talk. (Sorry, Ann :)

And, Tim Gorman will be sharing Article Marketing Secrets. I attended his talk last year and applied his techniques with great success to a couple of markets. Tim, I promise I’ll listen when Ken makes the CDs available to attendees.

3:30pm Nancy Andrews: SEO – It’s Simpler than You Think

Cool. I like simple, and as I already said, I love SEO.

And Nancy’s a hoot. She’s the one who famously remarked that Yahoo is like an old dog and Google is like a woman. (Listen to her interview with Ken to find out what she means, and why this insight is crucial to SEO success.)

For me, that’s more important to my business than James Martell’s How to Make Money with Affiliate Programs, although I’m still flirting with “Marketing with Video on the Internet – Strategy, Tactic, Tips” with Lon Naylor.

Sunday, June 1:

10:40am Colin McDougall: Creating Cashflow Conversations

Colin’s interview with Ken McCarthy, founder of the System Seminar, was eye-opening for me. The cryptic title of his talk, I believe, refers to a simple and logical method of search engine optimization – being so interesting in your market that people actually want to go to your website and see what you’ve got to say. Imagine that – getting lots of traffic by truly deserving it!

I’ll have to pass on the other concurrent sessions, like Timothy Seward sharing his Google Analytics expertise (he helped with Chapter 15 of AdWords for Dummies, and he lives near me, so I kind of think I can pick his brain when I need Analytics guidance), or Chris Daigle and Lloyd Irvin talking about the new face of Real Estate online. And my friend Robert Middleton, laying out the anatomy of his successful online information business. And Christina Hills offering a blueprint for using email to grow profits. Sigh… so many choices, so little time.

1:30pm Undecided

I haven’t decided yet. I’m leaning toward Kim Dushinski’s Mobile Marketing: The Next Gold Rush, but I’m also fascinated by Gauher Chaudhry’s unique take on AdWords and affiliate programs. Oh, and Christian Mickelsen’s presentation about adding coaching to your business (funny thing – I’ve been a coach for a long time, but I haven’t organized any AdWords or internet marketing coaching programs at askHowie. Maybe Christian will inspire me.)

As many topics as I’ve mentioned, there are that many again that I haven’t. You can see and download the full program here.

And you can actually sample the presenters in advance; Ken interviewed each and every one of us, coaxing us to share real content and then publishing the mp3s. You can sign up to listen and to get much more complimentary pre-training.

So no matter what Google does next year (and believe me, they don’t tell me anything), I’ll be prepared to continue to market my own business and assist my clients (and maybe my future coaching students :), based on the insights I’ll receive in Chicago.

There are dozens of traffic generation and conversion strategies available online. You won’t master all of them, but even someone like me, who’s completely identified with one particular brand of PPC, makes sure that he’s got at least a few up his sleeve.