Take a deep breath. Engage parking brake. Turn ignition on. Shift into first. Disengage parking brake. Clutch up. Gas down. Sputter sputter. Cough. Lurch. Die.
So goes the first 15 minutes of my driving lesson yesterday, the one where I find out how hard it is to work a manual transmission. Mia, my wife, sitting beside me and patiently reminding me not to grind the gears, is wondering if we’ll ever move from this spot. Possibly wondering what’s more dangerous: this, or skydiving? Cliffhanger? Keep reading…
“Jocelyn is a horse whisperer,” I explained to my kids as we pulled into the long driveway of the rural farmhouse in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. “That means she trains horses not with force, but by understanding their psychology and using her posture, movements and words to communicate with them.”
Driving back to North Carolina after a week in Manhattan, we arrived at 8pm in need of a quiet, peaceful, safe place to decompress for the night. Iverson the giant poodle greeted us warmly, without suspicion, even though we were complete strangers to him. Jocelyn Pierce Audet came out and greeted us, suggesting that we spend some time with the horses now before it got too late.
Mia, the kids and I followed Jocelyn down to the barn, where the doors were all open and the horses nowhere to be seen. Jocelyn began calling her horses’ names, inviting them to come meet the new people. As her shouts echoed over the farm’s 52 acres, I saw my kids exchanging glances that clearly said, “She’s a horse whisperer?”
As we waited for the horses to finish grazing and chilling in the fields, Jocelyn explained her training philosophy and methodology.
Understanding Horses
“Horses are herd animals, and they have a very different psychology than humans. As herbivores (grazing prey animals) whose main defense against predators is speed and a good head start, their primary goals in life are safety and peace. In horse whispering parlance we say that horses always seek the place of lowest pressure.”
Serafina, a six year old Andalusian filly, galloped up to meet us and instantly demonstrated this constant need for safety by rotating her ears in all directions, in response to every single noise in her environment.
“In order to train a horse, you have to show her that she’ll be safer and more comfortable with you than she’d be on her own. That’s why I don’t need whips or threats or any kind of force.
“Let’s say I want to train Serafina to walk up the ramp into a trailer. She’s naturally a little scared of this new environment. So I keep her feet moving until she steps on the ramp. Then I let her relax. If she backs down I get her moving again, which corresponds to agitation in her mind. Again, she finds peace, or the spot of lowest pressure, on the ramp. After a bit of this, she’ll naturally be drawn to the ramp as the place she can relax.”
How to Exert Invisible Control
The next morning, Jocelyn invited us to watch as she gave Serafina her workout. We had no idea how Serafina knew to walk in a particular direction, when to start trotting, when to slow down, stop, canter, gallop, or do some fancy side-stepping footwork. Jocelyn used few words and almost no gestures. She just rode and seemed to telepathically communicate her wishes to Serafina. When she dismounted, she turned her attention back to us.
“I speak to Serafina using my core muscles. First I have to really tune in to my own energy, so I’m really conscious of what I’m communicating. Horses are incredibly sensitive, and they often pick up on tension and fear in humans that the people themselves aren’t aware of. Next I assess her mood and state, and see what she needs in order to feel safe and at peace.
“Once those channels of communication are open and clear, I use my muscles to communicate what I want Serafina to do. Since I’m the alpha of the herd, she’s happy to give me the responsibility of taking care of her. So it makes her happy to please me, because in her mind that ensures her own safety. She associates me with that spot of lowest pressure she is always seeking.”
The World Wide Web: A Balance of Safety and Novelty
All that got me thinking about marketing, and the Web, and human beings. I think there are some useful lessons here.
I can totally relate to the horse’s need for safety and peace. After a week in Manhattan that included a family wedding, maneuvering a minivan through three episodes of alternate side of the street parking, never-ending honks and sirens, loud construction, and Chinatown during rush hour, I was craving a shady pasture myself. Some place where I didn’t have to be on high alert, where nothing unexpected would happen, and where I could let down my guard and be taken care of.
Too much of this state of relaxation has a name. Humans call it “boredom.” We also need excitement, novelty, challenge, and surprise. And one requirement of human happiness is the right balance – different for each of us – of excitement and security. Think of the safety/peace requirement as the foundation for the excitement/challenge requirement.
On a physical level, we can only run and jump when our legs are supported by solid ground. On an emotional level, we can make ourselves vulnerable only when we trust the person we’re opening up to. On a transactional level, we can only take a financial risk – aka “buy something” – when we feel safe enough with the entire commercial system to open up our wallet.
What Makes Us Feel Safe (or not) Online?
Online, the “entire commercial system” includes several components.
First, the Web itself. People have to feel comfortable making an online purchase of any kind. In the last century, ecommerce was a scary proposition. I remember the rush of exhilaration and fear as Matt and I sat at my Mac SE in 1990 and ordered a pound of pistachios over CompuServe. I sure was glad it was his credit card!
Second, people must have confidence in the “recommendation engine” that brought them to your site. That, as much as anything, is Google’s main contribution to the Internet. Finding a site on the first page of Google was like “as seen on TV.” Not only were the search results faster and more relevant, they came to seem more trustworthy. After all, Google must employ some quality control to rate Web sites, right?
Third, people who leave Google for a third-party site must feel instant reassurance that they’re in the right place. Think of Serafina’s ears swiveling like a submarine’s sonar, constantly pinging her environment for any sign of danger. On Google.com, the searcher feels safe and protected. Once they leave the protective nest of search, they are momentarily disoriented, unable to process anything beyond “Am I safe here?”
ARR and DEP from Google Airport
Sean D’Souza of Psychotactics.com likens the Web to an airport in a foreign country you’re visiting for the first time and you don’t speak the language. If you’re on your own, without a trusted guide, your overriding question every step of the way is, “Who can I trust here?”
The cab drivers who are beckoning and shouting at you? The guy with the red cap and semi-official uniform? The airport money exchangers? The rental car desk clerks?
Until you decide to trust someone at least a little, you can’t leave the airport. And you can’t really concentrate on their offer until you feel safe in their company.
That’s the Web. Google’s the airport, and all the links on the search results page are offers to take you away from the familiar and into the new. The new is exciting. The new is where all the undiscovered treasures lie. And the new is the only way you make progress on your search. You can’t spend your entire vacation at the airport, and you can’t spend your entire search on Google. At some point you have to venture out into the world and take your chances.
How to Be a Visitor Whisperer
So your first job as a Web site owner is to be a “Visitor Whisperer”: to present a design, content, and functionality that allows your visitor to relax, to feel safe and at peace. Before you can agitate their problem and get them to buy, you must convey your confidence that you can help them. You’ve helped dozens or hundreds of thousands like them before. You’re not afraid of questions and objections.
The fastest way to project this calm, assertive confidence is to align yourself with the whole truth. Eliminate spin, and simply talk about your prospects and how you can help them from a place of integrity. Raise likely objections yourself, and explain clearly whom you can and can’t help. Empower your prospects to trust their own judgment and they will automatically trust you.
And like a horse whisperer, build a trusting relationship slowly, letting your prospect lead. Offer them free useful information on your Web site. Offer them a chance to find out more by leaving an email address or calling you on the phone.
Honor their shy skittishness for the intelligent survival mechanism it is, and demonstrate that the safety and peace they seek can be found in your online pasture.
Only then can both of you run free.
For more information on Jocelyn and her horses, visit Enlightenedhorsemanship.com. And here’s a video of Serafina learning how to jump:
This article was originally published in Fast Company.
Most people who've tried to grow their business with AdWords have given up in apparent failure. After struggling to understand the complicated interface, they finally get a campaign up and quickly see lousy results. They pay lots of money to Google and their sales don't increase at all.
They turn off the campaign, mutter something about another Internet scam, and go back to all the other ways of getting traffic that weren't sufficient before.
Why does this happen so frequently? And what can you do to avoid this gaping chasm of failure? Cliffhanger? Keep reading…
I just read a scathing review of the new edition of GoogleAdWords For Dummies on amazon. Here’s how it begins:
In case your browser cuts off the end of the sentence, it says, “Only about 1/3 of this book is about google adwords. The other 2/3 is about landing pages & customer followups!”
Now, I don’t want to give the impression that everyone feels this way. My mother doesn’t. Neither do my kids. And neither do most of the 80+ reviewers who have give the two editions an average rating of five stars. But since this reviewer makes a point that, on its surface, seems valid, I thought I’d offer a comment.
Here’s the comment:
“Are you out of your freaking mind?”
There, that feels better.
AdWords and Slot Machines
If you came to me to learn how to beat the house in Vegas and I gave you a lesson in how to put coins into a slot machine and pull the lever, I dare say you’d be disappointed.
Yet the ability to set up and run AdWords campaigns, by itself, is about as useful as popping quarters into 1-armed bandits.
And less profitable.
The Only AdWords Metric That Matters
AdWords is a data junkie’s dream. You can run reports with hundreds of thousands of cells. You can calculate average CPC, average ad position by keyword, and hundreds of other metrics.
Novices often ask me to help them navigate the sea of data, to identify the most important metrics to monitor.
The most important AdWords metric is not cost per click, or click through rate, or even cost per conversion. Those are important, sure, but only as throughputs. They aren’t where the money’s at.
The whole goal of AdWords is to maximize the difference between what you pay for a customer and what that customer is worth to your bottom line.
Whoever can generate the biggest margin between cost per conversion and value per conversion wins.
And dominates their market.
That contest is not decided at the first sale.
Expect to Break Even on the First Sale
In every mature market, the cost of customer acquisition trends toward break-even. As the web matures, there are fewer “Wild West” opportunities to make a fortune with no serious competition in sight. Fewer “secret keywords” that no other advertiser has thought of.
Since AdWords consists of a keyword auction, the bid prices inevitably rise toward break-even. As long as they can make a penny in profit, your competitors have incentive to keep paying for that traffic.
The Art of Follow Up
AdWords is not won or lost in the AdWords campaign management console, since that console consists of getting new impressions, new leads and new customers.
You win by selling more and more stuff to the same customer over time. By staying in touch. By building a relationship. By offering consistent value on your site, in your emails, on your blog, in your customer service, and in your product and service delivery.
AdWords For Dummies: A Case Study
AdWords For Dummies retails for $24.95, and you can get it on amazon for under $17. And it includes a $25 gift card that you can spend on a new AdWords account, so you could argue that a basic value proposition of the book is, “Get this book and $8 for free.”
It’s not hard to get people to buy the book, if they have any intention of getting into AdWords.
- Even if they’ve never heard of me.
- Even if they know nothing of my credentials.
- Even if they think “Howie” is a stupid name.
But how many of those book buyers would buy a $497 home study course from me?
Or take a live $999 telecourse on mastering your market in 8 weeks?
Or fly to Durham for a 3-day advanced AdWords workshop for $3995?
Yet lots of book readers eventually find their way to those higher level purchases (yea!).
And every one of them moves from $20 to hundreds and thousands of dollars because of what I do after generating the lead.
So when you read a negative review of Google AdWords For Dummies that complains about the irrelevance of the chapters on landing pages, web strategy, web page testing, and email followup, say a silent prayer that the reviewer is one of your competitors.
Or shout out loud, “Are you out of your freaking mind?” ;)
About the Author (and What He’s Giving Away This Week)
Howie Jacobson, PhD, is the author of Google AdWords For Dummies. He is teaching an 8-part course, AdWords Ball, for online business owners who are making sales via AdWords, but not enough. If you’re not using AdWords Ball methods, you’re guaranteed to be wasting hundreds or thousands of dollars each month on underperforming AdWords campaigns. And that doesn’t include the profits you’re missing out on.
If you aren’t making sales, then AdWords Ball is not for you yet. Instead, check out Traffic Surge, for folks who need more traffic to their sites, or who haven’t found their online market yet. In Traffic Surge, you learn how to use free tools for quick and dirty online research (including the crucial question of whether a market is worth entering in the first place!), and how to apply that research to send qualified traffic to your site.
The first class is available online, at http://askhowie.com/traffic-surge-video. Howie hopes that you find it so valuable, you register for the rest of the series (starts in early October). The sales letter is below the video, for your convenience ;)
"Who is wise? One who learns from everyone."
- Pirkeh Avot (Sayings of the Ancestors)
So today I got a lesson in operational consistency from the US Postal Service: A letter with a label urging me to "NOTIFY SENDER OF NEW ADDRESS" – in which the label covers the sender’s address.
Brilliant.
So, armed with this ironic example of not-to-do, I examined my own site. First thing I noticed, thanks to an email from a reader who wanted to send me a testimonial but couldn’t find my email address: if you name your site "askHowie," then you should give people a way to contact you.
Duh.
Given time, I’m sure I can come up with a dozen more inconsistencies – operational elements that discourage my prospects and customers from doing what I want them to.
A useful exercise – I recommend it. If you find anything worth confessing about your own site, please post to comments.
A reader whose entire online business consists of a $20 book on a health topic wants to know how she can compete, AdWordsily, against big pharmaceutical companies bidding on the same keywords.
It turns out that a blog install on GoDaddy is pretty quick and easy. Just log in to your account, find "Hosting" and then at the top, click the "Manage Apps" button.
Choose "Blog" and then "WordPress" from the dropdown menu:
Follow the wizard instructions, making sure you write down your user names and passwords. Jackie Davis of Roomscape.com wants to remind you that these user names and passwords are case sensitive!
Why am I telling you this? Because a blog is one of the best ways to elevate your site in Google’s eyes. If you’re having quality score issues with AdWords, it may be because Google doesn’t think much of your content. A blog is the quickest and most effective way to start delivering high quality content in a search engine friendly format.
Do you believe Affiliate Marketing is a reasonable and economical starting point for someone trying to learn adwords and is it possible to be able to promptly track the results of ROI and conversion rates? Everything I read in Adwords is tied to having control over my own website which obviously I wouldn’t have as an affiliate.
Here are my thoughts:
This question is like asking me if I think it’s possible for a 5’10" 43-year-old guy to train enough to dunk a basketball if he currently has a vertical leap that wouldn’t clear a soda can. (Not thinking of anyone in particular, mind you.)
Yes, I absolutely believe that success is possible in both cases. But I’ve proven myself quite unwilling (so far) of doing the work that would get me to either goal.
I know some folks who make a good living at affiliate marketing. They know their markets, they test constantly, they track every traffic source for ROI conversion down to the keyword level, and they constantly scout out high-converting merchants. They manage their bids with alertness that would put your cat to shame. And they become brilliant at several forms of traffic generation – not just AdWords, not just article marketing, not just SEO.
Here’s the thing about affiliate marketing: because it seems so easy, it’s incredibly competitive. There’s the lure of easy money with no work and no customers and no website.
Not only that, the pure affiliate business model has structural downsides: you do all the front end heavy lifting of lead acquisition without any of the back end of long-term customer relationship. Also, affiliate programs change, Google changes, companies go out of business – so make sure if you want to be serious that you create a multi-legged stool, for traffic generation (not just AdWords) and affiliate merchants (not just one or two).
That said, affiliate marketing is great for supporting your entry into a marketplace in two significant ways: Cliffhanger? Keep reading…
I first ran into direct marketing on the Internet at a seminar produced by Ken McCarthy in 2002. I attended because I had just started my own business and wanted a website. The $2k tuition was a lot less than the quotes I was getting from local web designers.
I thought I was going to learn how to code in HTML, how to upload files to a server, and how to design pretty pages.
Luckily, the speakers at that event knocked sense into me. They helped me see that the real money in Internet marketing was marketing skill, not technical skill.
A successful writer does not need to know how to manufacture a pencil.
A winning race car driver doesn’t need to know how to build an engine.
A good parent doesn’t have to know how to make a baby.
Maybe scratch that last one…
Yet for some reason, lots of folks who want to grow their business online feel compelled to learn how to program in HTML, how to design in photoshop, and how to debug their apache PHP perl C++ ruby on goats nano-gazoygle.
You wouldn’t take a Photocopier maintenance course at the local community college just so you could fix your office Xerox, would you?
There are plenty of people out there who already know how to do all the technical tasks related to online marketing, and you don’t need to waste your time trying to do all those tasks badly. You can outsource, insource, or soysource every technical aspect of your business, so you can focus on what’s truly important.
What’s truly important?
The Online Marketing Success Formula
The formula for success on the internet that I learned from Ken at that first System Seminar is simple, yet profound:
1. Get the right people to visit your web site
2. Get those people to buy from you, repeatedly
That’s it. The alpha and omega of online success.
Traffic and conversion. That’s all there is. That’s where you, as an entrepreneur, or a marketing professional in your organization, need to be applying your brainpower and time.
AdWords For Dummies provides, I hope, a comprehensive treatment of AdWords and a good overview of the fundamental conversion techniques. But as you probably know, AdWords isn’t the only traffic game in town.
There’s SEO, social media, online video, other PPC search engines, coregistration lists, joint ventures, banner ads, ezine ads, web PR, becoming governer and sleeping with call girls; the list of ways to get people to visit your web site is long, and constantly changing.
And conversion strategies change also, as technology advances and markets mature.
The problem is choosing wisely and prioritizing intelligently from the smorgasbord of options. AdWords is almost always the best place to start, since it’s controllable, measurable, and extremely forgiving. But after AdWords – where to go next?
How to Stay Up to Date on the Interet
For my money, Ken McCarthy is the top internet "talent scout." He can spot hot trends before they materialize (he was writing "The Internet Video Report" before anyone had heard of youtube), and he has a good sense for who’s the real deal – folks who both do and teach competently and ethically.
Every Spring, he brings together the best of the best to serve on the faculty for his legendary System Seminar. Last year, I went as an attendee. In addition to the potent networking opportunities, I learned:
- How to get paid while generating leads on Ebay (a brilliant technique: selling a $0.99 Ebook to build a list of interested and proven buyers. Imagine getting paid by Google for your AdWords leads)
- Several blogging techniques for generating traffic and creating engagement among readers
- A method for getting lots of direct and search engine traffic using syndicated articles
- An advanced testing and improvement methodology (Taguchi testing) made simple
This year, I’m pleased to be on the faculty, sharing my AdWords discoveries of the past few months.
Every year, Ken promotes the System Seminar by giving away a lot of it for free. He discovered that by interviewing faculty members, and sharing the mp3s of these no-fluff, content-rich conversations, he was actually proving the value of the paid seminar and increasing enrollment.
This year, there are already 23 interviews from top experts ready for your consumption. From SEO for online store, to how to sell coaching and consulting online, to developing your online "elevator speech" (crucial to writing a good Google ad), to marketing using cell phones and other mobile devices, to new methods in affiliate marketing, to online lead generation on the PPA networks, to upselling tactics, to strategic use of online video…
There’s enough valuable content here, for free, to power your online business for the next several years.
You can sign up for the 23 interviews (more added all the time), as well as articles and other resources, here:
"The products and services I am passionate about are on the cultural fringe, as they are only known by a few…. So there is not a large MARKET for what I am into YET…. I want to be rich AND I want to honor my cutting-edge passions. Any suggestions?"
Here are my quick thoughts:
You can’t use search marketing for concepts that people aren’t yet searching for. So you have two options:
1. Use search marketing to sell the benefits, things that everybody wants already. You’re not selling anything new, really, just a new way of achieving them. It’s not much different than me selling AdWords education. Every business owner wants to make more money, but few of them have even heard of AdWords.
2. Use interruption marketing to educate them about your stuff. Within AdWords, this means using the content network to provoke curiosity. The movie "The Secret" used this to great effect when nobody had heard about it yet.
Discover why most AdWords campaigns fail, and how to make yours succeed. You'll also receive the Breakthrough Online Profits ezine, and invitations to free webinars and coaching clinics.
Howie Jacobson, PhD., is the author of Google AdWords For Dummies, available on every continent (except Antarctica) wherever fine books, overpriced brownies and cheesy calendars are sold.
Testimonials about Howie’s advice
Thank you sooooo much for your AdWords ER Report. I printed it off yesterday, sat down at work with my yellow highlighter like you recommended (no fruit smoothie) and when I went home from work, I did the stuff you told me to do. I feel like, for the first time, I’m actually beginning to acquire some decent knowledge about Adwords, after experiencing for a couple of months significant frustration not really knowing what the &^@! I’m doing. — Jennifer Quigley
Take a deep breath. Engage parking brake. Turn ignition on. Shift into first. Disengage parking brake. Clutch up. Gas down. Sputter sputter. Cough. Lurch. Die.
