I just read a scathing review of the new edition of Google AdWords 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.

Find out more about AdWords Ball, and the zero-risk guarantee, at http://askhowie.com/adwordsball.

Watch an AdWords Ball introductory web clinic here: http://askhowie.com/adwords-ball-video.

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.

My answer: Read the rest of this entry »

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.

So Go Forth and Blog!

A reader asks:

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: Read the rest of this entry »

  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:

http://pre.thesystemseminar.org

  Just make sure to do it before Ken takes them down and focuses all his effort on the live Seminar.

  And if you decide to come to Chicago for the live System Seminar, give me a shout and we’ll do lunch.

A reader asks:

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.

Today’s AdWords Color Tip: Red for Attention.

Every night when I go to bed, I write a todo list for the following day. I put little things ("Iron and fold the underwear") and big things ("Save the cheerleader, save the world") on the list. I include errands ("Buy more of those things you’re almost out of") and decisions ("Pay Visa bill or move to Siberia"). And the first item on the list is always the same: "Read the list."

You get where I’m going, right? If I don’t read the list, how will I know to read the list? It turns out the most important thing about the list isn’t what’s on it, but that it gets read in the first place.

That’s true of this email as well.

You, wise reader, are reading this email – Relax, I’m not psychic, it’s just a parlor trick – but some other subscriber to my email list is not.

Why? Maybe the subject line didn’t appeal to them. Perhaps they haven’t emptied their inbox since 1997 and can’t bear to log in and see eight years of junk. Maybe they chose to open the boss’s email instead of mine. Whatever.

I could be writing the one secret that will change their life utterly and completely, and it doesn’t matter. Because they aren’t going to read this. Because I couldn’t get their attention.

The primary currency of marketing is attention. No eyes or ears, no sales. And attention is harder and harder to get these days. More stimuli, less time; more hype, less trust; more ADD, less focus.

Speaking of ADD (I used to be a school teacher, so I’ve seen quite a bit of diagnosed Attention Deficits in my day), we’re all ADD online. The medium demands it. How many windows are open on your desktop right now? How long are you willing to wait for a web page to load? Can you imagine calling a movie theater box office to find out the showtimes when you can just type "Movies 27712" into Google and get the complete listings for every local cinema, including reviews and trailers and online ticket sales, within 3 seconds? (I used to veg out so completely during those recordings, that I’d have to listen to the message repeat three or four times to catch the showtimes for the movie I was interested in. Now I get to daydream all I want, and when I come back to earth, the web page with the info I want is still waiting for me.)

The primary task of your ad is to compel attention. As the 11th century Talmudic scholar Rashi might have said were he alive today, "No lookie, no clickie."

Just as stop signs, online error messages, and immediate attention triage tags are red, your ad must wave a red flag in front of your prospect that says, "Stop for a second and consider this."

How do you get their attention? My marketing mentor Ken McCarthy has a very handy three-word response that he strives for in his ads:

"That’s for Me!"

How can you get your prospect to glance at your ad and immediately think, "That’s for me"? By naming them, talking about things that matter to them, and making them hungry for more.

Chapter 6 of AdWords For Dummies includes seven specific headline strategies for grabbing attention. I’m going to reveal three of the strategies here. Want the other four? Then go down to Barnes & Noble, buy your coffee and raisin-nut bar, and turn to page 141. (Or, just buy the book, if that’s not too self-serving a suggestion. http://askhowie.com/afd will take you to the amazon product page.)

Attention Grabbing Strategy #1: Name Them

• Considering a Unicycle
• Mind Maps for Teachers
• Actor’s Disability Insur.

Attention Grabbing Strategy #2: Mirror Their Itch

• Suffering from Gout?
• Rotten-Egg Water Odors?
• Disorganized?

Attention Grabbing Strategy #4: Arouse Curiosity

• Are You Right-Brained?
• Are You a Slacker Mom?
• Copywriting Secret #19

Get the other four attention grabbing headline strategies – and so much more! – in AdWords For Dummies.

Glenn Livingston and I spent about an hour on the phone yesterday, chewing the fat about AdWords and online marketing in general. We talk about:

• my Official AdWords For Dummies Official AdWords checklist – including Glenn’s improvement
• Glenn’s AdWords journal – how he uses an ongoing word document to get a birds-eye view of long-running campaigns
• Glenn’s extremely clever process for choosing a great ad headline before he even buys a domain name or sets up a web site
• the famous person Glenn sat next to in homeroom
• how to improve your content network results with site-targeting and CPM bidding
• when you should NOT split test your ads

Although Glenn was interviewing me, I spent about half the time asking him stuff. He’s brilliant at breaking down systems into their key parts, and streamlining processes to make them easier, cheaper, and more effective. Talking with Glenn is like reading "Zen and the Art of AdWords Maintenance."

Download the interview – free – from Glenn’s site:

The Glenn Livingston – Howie Jacobson AdWords Interview