This article was originally published in Fast Company.

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?

Then, for one magical moment, I let out the clutch and push down on the accelerator in heavenly harmony. The little blue car slides smoothly forward. I resist the urge to high-five Mia, and instead immediately go into a fantasy of actual usefulness–me buying groceries in Winterton; me driving to the bank to pay our Internet bill; me taking the kids to–huh? What?

Mia is screaming in my left ear. “Second gear! Go to second!” Flustered, I grab the shifter and pull it back, completely forgetting about the clutch. Grind, flobble, lurch, die, whiplash-inducing halt.

Take a deep breath. Engage parking brake… Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

Gradually, I begin to get the hang of it. At one point, I am handling curves in fourth gear (when you don’t have to slow down, it’s easy), and I even make a right turn onto a side road, and then cherry-on-top it with a fancy reverse move known to professional drivers as the “k-turn.” Oh yeah!

Yet my conversion rate from cold dead stop to rolling first gear is still only about 25% by the end of the lesson (which is defined by a total cessation of left-brain function, such as the ability to count to 5 and form recognizable words.) So I have a long way to go.

But hey, 25% ain’t awful. Nobody got killed. And the rental car is back in front of our house, none the worse for wear (at least during a walk-around inspection). Since Session #1 qualifies as a success, I get to share some marketing lessons highlighted by the experience.

1. There’s a big difference between theory and practice.

I need you to understand that I’m not a complete moron. I do get the theory of manual transmission. I ride a 24-speed bicycle. And I’ve seen The Italian Job and Scent of a Woman. So driving a stick isn’t a foreign concept.

But knowing what to do in theory doesn’t count for much in the real world. I know online marketers who are addicted to Amazon.com and email newsletters and new product launches. Whenever they’re faced with a challenge, they run to find and absorb new information. Yet their infatuation with the information ends when it’s time to implement.

No matter how promising, how lucrative, and how easy it seems at the beginning, putting the strategy into practice always involves work, time, and a reduced set of expectations. No fun at all! So it’s on to the next big idea, and the next, ad infinitum.

Mastery is achieved not by understanding theory. It’s achieved by messy movement. By manhandling that clutch until my feet sense the correct pressure and release. By being willing to be bad at something until the trials and feedback and failures start to pay off.

As an author of Google AdWords For Dummies, I deal with a lot of people who want to get involved in AdWords but still can’t figure it out in their heads. They’ve read my book, and usually several others. They’ve attended webinars and seminars and downloaded ebooks and special reports. But they still haven’t set up an account, bid on a single keyword, or written a single ad.

You can’t learn to drive a stick shift–or master a marketing medium–in your head. Mastery is a form of muscle memory.

I’m not saying, by the way, that theory is a bad thing. If I had started to drive stick without understanding the mechanism and potential consequences of my actions, you wouldn’t be reading this now. (Yes, I know what you’re doing right now–don’t be alarmed, it’s just a parlor trick.)

And I certainly recommend that new AdWords users ground themselves in theory before giving Google their credit card.

But don’t confuse preparation for accomplishment with accomplishment itself.

2. Isolate the next step and eliminate distractions

While Mia is driving me to the lesson venue, a quiet, level side road, I am making a sequential list of the skills I need to master.

1. Starting the car on a flat surface.
2. Shifting as I speed up and slow down.
3. Pulling out from a traffic light.
4. Shifting while turning.
5. Starting the car on an uphill using the hand brake.

At first glance, 1 and 3 and 5 appear to be pretty much the same: go from not moving to moving. But context matters a lot. When the big white van races up behind me, oblivious to my left indicator and my auric field of panic, I discover that letting out the clutch while pressing the gas is a lot harder when I’m also concentrating on not getting rammed from behind.

I’d be a fool to try shifting into first gear with 15 cars waiting behind me (even here in Africa, where patience is the rule rather than the exception). It’s just too much to think about.

I see a lot of online marketers falter when overwhelmed. It’s understandable. There’s so much to know, and that knowledge base is a rapidly moving target. But don’t try to take it all in at once. Find the one skill that can move you forward right now.

The trick to learning a skill is to isolate that skill until you can do it repeatedly in an environment of no distraction. Don’t practice jump shots until you can hit free throws. Don’t try to master image ads on the AdWords Display Network until you’ve figured out how text ads work. And so on.

3. Minimize risk

Two elements of this story to highlight. First, it’s a rental car. Low deductible. If I kill the transmission or sideswipe a jacaranda tree, it’s not really that big of a problem for me.

Second, my kids are not in the back seat. Not that I could have bribed them to come along with anything less than an ultra-light plane and tuition for Hogwarts. But I didn’t try. My genetic imperative is to keep them safe.

I’ll be driving them soon enough (as soon as their rational fear of my driving is drowned out by stir craziness). But for the moment, I’m happy knowing that they aren’t in the line of fire.

Many new online advertisers get burned by unknown and unnecessary risks. Setting unlimited budgets while giving Google and Facebook your credit. Accepting the default settings which target huge swaths of humanity rather than a strategically culled few. Sending expensive traffic to untested pages and offers.

Some people think entrepreneurship is all about taking risks. In my experience, most of the time, it’s just the opposite. Entrepreneurship is about planning ahead. About limited risk and exposure and learning from every test and applying what works to bigger and bigger opportunities. As Perry Marshall and Tom Meloche memorably put it in The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, “aim tiny and miss small.”

At the end of the day, marketing and operating a manual transmission are both about balancing momentum and leverage. Movement and power. Opportunity and risk.

And don’t worry, my next article is not going to be, “Marketing Lessons from Skydiving.” Mia refuses to drive me there.

“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:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZuwTHOlbEw

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?

Why I Never Go to California

I live in Durham, North Carolina, and I just hate going to California.

Here's why: On the map, California is west of Durham. But RDU, the nearest airport to me, is in Raleigh, which is east of Durham. So driving east to go west feels like failure. Every mile I put in driving to RDU seems to be taking me farther away from my goal. Therefore, I refuse to go to California because I don't believe I'll ever get there based on the drive.

Oh, and to make things worse, my car is parked slightly north of my house. That's why I have trouble flying to Atlanta and Florida.

And my chest of drawers is west of my bed, so that pretty much rules out Europe, Asia and Africa.

Honestly, I don't know how I make it to the office in the morning.

When the Terrain is Unfamiliar, Almost Everything Can Feel Like Failure

Obviously, the above examples of me not going anywhere because the first steps take me in the opposite direction are ridiculous. But the same faulty thinking can sabotage our success in many other journeys, including the one to AdWords profitability.

When the first steps in unfamiliar terrain don't lead to immediate payoffs, we can quickly conclude that the journey isn't working, that it can't work, or that we can't work it.

In their absolutely fabulous book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath and Dan Heath talk about a fundamental change strategy they call "Shrink the Change." 

What they mean is, chunk down a big change into small initial steps, so that even the very hard part at the beginning feels like a small success. When we "taste blood," we get very motivated. When the first steps don't provide positive feedback, we lose faith and heart.

Overwhelmed by a messy house? Don't try to clean it all at once. You'll wander around, moving stuff from pile to pile, and quickly give up in helpless frustration.

Instead, the Heath brothers advise, set a timer for 5 minutes and tackle the worst spot. Why only 5 minutes? Because it's a small enough sacrifice of time that we're willing to make the gamble, and the effort we put in will almost certainly reward us with a feeling of "this is actually possible."

Why We Love Video Games

Think about how successful video games are designed: we start on Level 1, the easiest level. We get some quick successes: we waste a few aliens, we steer our race car for a few hundred feet before flying off the overpass, we create an Avatar with cool clothes who sort of looks like us.

Instant positive feedback, despite the challenge inherent in this new and strange environment. 

So when we get wasted ourselves, or come in 6th out of 6 cars in the Grand Prix, or accidentally poison all our pets, we're not disheartened. Instead, we want to get back into the game and try again. Right away.

Imagine if AdWords worked like that, instead of being the huge "inadequacy engine" that it now is.

How to Turn AdWords into a Video Game

We have to turn off the giant negative feedback loop built into AdWords. (The one that goes, "work hard, spend money, get nothing in return.")

Obviously, we can't jiggle AdWords so that it starts bringing hungry customers to our Web site right away. We can't make our landing page convert better than it does just by throwing traffic at it. There is a real learning curve at work here, and no wishful thinking will short-cut it (shorten it, yes, but not eliminate the steps).

The trick is to understand the end goal, and how each part of the AdWords process contributes to that goal. Since failure along the way is inevitable, we have to prepare ourselves for multiple failures, and redefine them as experiments that must be conducted to achieve ultimate success.

Redefining AdWords Failure at the Impressions Level

The first thing you need in AdWords is the right traffic. That means choosing the right keywords (let's keep this example simple by focusing only on search, not the Content Network). 

Your first point of failure will be to choose keywords that bring you too few impressions. Luckily, this failure costs you time, but not money. Remember the first rule of AdWords: "No Clicky, No Pay Google."

This failure can show you that there isn't a hungry crowd searching for your product or service (which is a good thing to know before, say, spending all your money building a fancy website and all your time optimizing it for organic search engines).

Or it can show you that you don't understand the mind of your market well enough to predict the words and phrases they use when they are searching for help that you can provide.

Either way, the failure is a smashing success in that it saves you a lot of downriver grief.

AdWords Click Failure = Success

Similarly, what if you get lots of impressions but no clicks. First, you can provisionally congratulate yourself on finding the rich vein of your market. Good job!

The lack of clicks means a disconnect between your ad and the searcher. That can feel like a failure, and most people give up at this point. 

But it's really a huge success, when you think about it. Google has kindly given you a circuit-breaker that saves you money while showing you the disconnect. Imagine if you got charged for impressions instead of clicks! Yikes!

Instead, you've discovered that you need to change the way you talk to your market in order to sell to them. Good thing you learned that on Google's dime rather than your own. 

AdWords Conversion Failure = Success

Now say you've improved your ad so people are clicking on it. Now you're in the game for real, generating data and paying Google for each visitor. But no one's buying. They may be fleeing your Web page almost as soon as they land on it. Now is a really good time to give up in abject failure, right?

Not so fast – you're now almost there, almost at the point of ultimate success. Don't quit now. 

You understand from your ad what capture's your prospects' attention. Now you have to figure out how to turn that attention into interest. You work on the top part of your page to convince the visitor that they're in the right place, that a solution to their problem is likely here.

Once they're spending time on your site but still not buying, you work on removing obstacles to their desire. Proof, testimonials, answering objections. 

And then if they're filling out the shopping cart and still not buying, you work on compelling action through clear directions, policies, and risk reversal. 

You Determine the Meaning of Each Step

Since AdWords is an unfamiliar environment to the beginner, and it's such a lonely activity for most people (unlike, say, learning how to ride a bike or pilot a plane or Salsa dance), you're all alone in assigning meaning to the results of each step.

It's possible, I suppose, to choose the right keywords, craft the right ads, and build the perfect Web site the very first time you try.

I've never heard of such a thing, and it feels just as unlikely as someone who's never been inside a cockpit before flying a 747 from Raleigh to Los Angeles by luck alone.

Since that ain't gonna happen, your job as a novice AdWords aviator is to assign your own meaning to each inflection point along the way. Each piece of feedback is either fuel for the journey, or a breakdown. 

And whichever you think is true, is true for you. So choose carefully…

Camp Checkmate – Free Pre-Camp Email Course

While you're here, I thought I'd just throw in a mention of Camp Checkmate Chicago, which will be held on June 10-11, 2010 in Chicago. 

You can find out more and sign up for the extensive pre-Camp Checkmate training series of articles, tutorials, exercises, and live and recorded webinars and teleseminars at CampCheckmate.com.

I'm giving away so much material because, quite honestly, there's no substitute to being there and experiencing Camp Checkmate. Check out some reactions to a recent Checkmate workshop I gave at the System Seminar:

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:She can’t. Not with AdWords.

AdWords is a lot like poker, a game in which I reached my pinnacle in 7th grade. I’m no shark, mind you, but my brief foray into the game at summer camp taught me two things:

1. Don’t play against people who are much better than you at poker strategy, unless you want to part with your entire summer’s supply of Captain Crunch and Freihofer’s cookies by June 27th.

2. Don’t play against people who are mediocre at poker but have a stash of junk food the size of a offensive lineman in their trunk, and aren’t afraid to bet it all.

In other words, both skill and prodigious amounts of stupid cash can squash an opponent.

True of poker. And true of AdWords.

With AdWords, skill can look like marketing technique: great ads, strategically-chosen positive and negative keywords, insta-blink landing pages, and so on. 

But skill in AdWords also refers to the most important metric in the whole system: visitor value. 

The Importance of Visitor Value

Whoever makes the most money from a click, on average, gets to spend the most to acquire that click. If you sell a $20 self-help book and you compete against someone selling a course of treatment that costs thousands of dollars a year (and that end-users don’t even have to pay full price for because of insurance), you just can’t make the math work for you.

What does this mean for the reader with the $20 book and no way to compete at AdWords?

Two things.

First, use AdWords to hone your marketing, not to make money from book sales. Find out what keywords, what ads, and what sales language on your site do the best.

Second (and if you saw the passion and sense of mission in her question, you’d understand completely), use the non-AdWords web to become a prominent leader in this particular health field. Seth Godin’s new book is about how to create and lead a Tribe using online tools and your own passion and personality. Sean D’Souza has been teaching me a step-by-step methodology to leverage my own expertise and personality to establish a leadership position in my field. (Hey, if you guys both happen to read this post and you haven’t connected personally yet, I highly recommend it. I’d love to eavesdrop on the conversation between two of my marketing heroes.)

Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and all the others – learn from Dan Hollings (Twitter dhollings) how to leverage social media to grow your presence and influence among your target group. When people KLT (know like trust) you, the books will fly off the shelves. 

And if the books are truly helpful, your tribe will joyously share them with others, giving you free viral exposure.

Third (nobody expects the Spanish inquisition), build your business far beyond a $20 book. Come on, you’ve got more than that! Consulting, coaching, courses, patient advocacy, membership web site – think about how to add more value once someone has read your book. Ask your readers what they want (that’s why I survey every AdWords For Dummies reader who gives me their email address).

That’s where AdWords and poker diverge, and it’s the crux of the whole matter. Poker is about taking. Business is about giving. As John Lennon sang, “In the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

A Blatant Pitch

Hey, while I have you here, I’m offering a teleclass series for AdWords advertisers on what I call “AdWords Ball” – measuring and testing everything for quick and significant improvement. It’s easier than it looks, and in 8 weeks you’ll learn – and implement – all my techniques for increasing your sales while decreasing your spend.

The sales letter isn’t up yet, so if you’re interested, just shoot me an email – howie AT askhowie DOT com – or comment on this post and I’ll get back to you.

And if you’re one of the kids who won all my Freihofer’s in 1977, I haven’t forgotten you. I raise you a raisin nut Chunky bar.

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:

1. Learning about markets without investing a lot of time or energy
2. Monetizing your creation of an opt-in list to subsidize your lead gen costs

In other words, use affiliate marketing to answer your question about whether the market you intend to enter is a potential profit source online, by measuring conversion and comparing the success rates of different approaches. And if you’re paying 50 cents a click to get prospects onto your email list while you figure out what to sell them, you can insert affiliate offers into the followup email sequence (using Aweber or another autoresponder service) to recoup your lead gen costs.

When I look at a business opportunity, I ask myself four questions:

1. Is it profitable?

Not having an MBA, I define profitable in terms I can understand: Do I make more than I spend?

That’s an oversimplification, of course. The real question is, will it bring in enough revenue to cover my costs and pay me well for my time. And, having drooled through Economics 101 in college, I do have a vague recollection of something known as Opportunity Cost – the awareness that every endeavor I say "Maybe" to automatically makes me say "No" to a bunch of others at that time.

2. Is it defensible?

Is it a castle on a hill with a moat around it, as Ken McCarthy metaphorized in a conversation the other day? Or can anyone with an AdWords account and access to KeywordSpy.com steal all your keywords and ad copy in 10 minutes?

3. Is it sustainable?

Is it a momentary fad, caused by a loophole in Google’s algorithm (like blog and ping), that will soon be shut down? Is it based on temporary market conditions (like the current mortgage crisis)? Or will my current investment in learning and mastering the business pay off for years to come?

4. Is it attainable by me?

Everything works for somebody. But if someone is pitching the dream life based on the dream business, I make sure I educate myself on the skills, experience, connections and personality traits needed for success in that business. There are lots of great business models that would fit me like a toddler’s glove. Pro basketball player comes to mind. So does crooked politician. So does affiliate marketer.

Me, I’m a teacher and coach and writer and strategist. When I try to be an engineer, I get woozy. Paperwork and administration floors me. I realize that my business can’t run on ideas alone, so I surround myself with employees and colleagues who compensate for my weaknesses. But the main focus of my business is delivering products and services that come from my strengths. Activities I enjoy and do well.

Partly, I’m preaching to myself here – because, honestly, I still spend way too much time doing things I’m not that good at and don’t enjoy particularly. Two bits of inspiration lodged in my brain this week.

1. Ken McCarthy inadvertantly gave me my new business mantra when he wrote in an email, "Unnecessary work is ceasing now."

2. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth contained a line that completely reenergized me to hone my business to just those activities that serve my soul: "There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need." In other words, when I do what I love doing for its own sake, I don’t need to worry about whether I’m living up to my potential or changing the world or making my parents proud. The joyful consciousness that I generate when I fully embody my work is all the meaning my soul needs, and all the healing the world needs.

To finish the thought with which this post began: affiliate marketing…

Some of the smartest affiliate marketers I know will be presenting with me at the System Seminar in Chicago at the end of May 2008. If you’re serious, that seminar might be worth a look. You can preview the entire program here – check out James Martell and Colin McDougall especially.

  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.