I’m finally feeling like I’m back in the game. I still have this annoying itch in my throat but that could just as well be allergies as cold. This is one of the joys of New England. Another – on Tuesday, even though there was still snow in the parking lot I saw my first cloud of black flies.
Just in case you stopped by looking for real content, I’ve got a 7 minute chat on telemarketing over at the best marketing podcast – Marketing Over Coffee.
What a drag it has been this last week. I’m still feeling run down but I’ve been getting better every day. I caught 4 innings of the Sox game over at Fenway last night with the lovely Carin thanks to a ticket hookup from E-413.
On the book front: Email Marketing by the Numbers arrived today, I’ve got 4 blog post-sized entries about email marketing. To celebrate – off to bed before 9 again….
I’m doing a cross-post today because I’m speaking at an event called PR Online Convergence coming up in May in Los Angeles. One of the sessions I’m doing is on RSS and I’d like to get a feel for any questions or visions of the future you may have about RSS. If you could, please check out my post over there and I’d appreciate your comments.
And of course if you are in the LA area, drinks on me.
As far as the video I thought I would have for today… still some codec problems, but a kind soul in Japan has an open source fix that might save the day for me. Talk to you later…. J
I’ve managed to come down with a cold with one day to go to a long weekend. Not much writing in me today but that’s alright because Seth Godin’s latest post directed me to this incredible article about context.
I had a question come in today about some best practices for Google Adwords so here’s some basics that I follow, I’d be interested in anything that people have to add.
For those who have no knowledge of this you should swing over to the official google adwords blog and check out their learning center.
For selecting keywords start with the logs for the client’s website, you should have a nice assortment of keyphrases there to begin working with. The key is to have as many variations as possible, without any duplicates. In all of my testing google gets angry at duplicates and leaves you out in the dust.
The real gold lies is phrases of 3 words or more, you should be able to get these at much cheaper prices than single or two word phrases. Don’t be afraid to go 6 words or more, the more specific and relevant you get, the better your odds at highly qualified traffic at very low prices.
Adwords has its own keyword generator to help you find related phrases. You should leverage that. There are some other paid services I’ve used but keep in mind that the algorithms used by google’s keyword generator are probably very close to the same logic used in the engine. Or to put it a better way – all other keyword generators want you to pay for the service they provide, google is giving you the service so you will do more business with them – who’s got the inside track?
I think this will be one of the critical value-adds you can give to your client. You should even interview the client’s customers to try and get the language as accurate as possible. You have 2 options – spend 100 hours uploading every variation of keyword to find the 3 good ones, or spend 10 hours with the client and try a shorter, more accurate list of 50 and maybe get twice that in good phrases. The days of shotgun phrases are numbered, you need to become an intelligent sniper.
The single most important tip I can give you is to use the Adwords Editor tool for all the heavy lifting rather than messing around with the web interface. Make all your changes in one shot and upload them as a batch.
Bidding is another tough area – some key principles. Odds are your conversion rate is going to be less than half a percent so multiply the bid by 20 and ask your client if they are willing to pay that per lead. If they don’t choke on their own tongue then proceed. You probably want to bid to come in on page 1 so price accordingly.
You pay less if your ad quality is good so work hard to keep your click through rates above half a percent.
Test at least three versions of ads for both clicks and conversions and keep promoting the champions, this keeps the overall program price down.
Test out the content network, especially now that you can select the individual sites you advertise on. I’ve found these to not be effective as the search results pages but they do get your name out there for whatever that’s worth.
If you are lucky enough to be working in a fixed geographic area, adjust your campaigns accordingly. Controlling day of week and time can also help weed out some of the click-crap.
Good luck…
There’s a brand new Podcast in town! If you are into Marketing check out Marketing Over Coffee. Podcamp founder Christopher Penn and I sit down for a chat about what’s going on in marketing. You’ll hear tactics, strategies and opinions, and all around the 15 minute timeframe to fit into your busy day. Please stop by for some coffee!
I got a package in the mail from Jason Calacanis asking me to fill out the application for the A-List. It’s pretty straightforward, you send them $1,095 and that gets things rolling. If you blog daily for 3 years at the end of your probation they flip a switch and you get your choice of a job at Edelman, Crayon or Sequoia plus a guaranteed 250k visitors per month.
Plus once you’re in the circle you get stuff like cars, houses, laptops, etc. for free (as long as you blog about them of course).
They have a special meeting annually where they talk about and laugh at the D-Listers who wreck blogger meetups just by showing up and they also review the B-List to see who’s eligible to get off the farm team. I think Chris Pirillo (dude, THIS is funny) has something to do with it because it’s codenamed Smurfdex. Obviously I’m ecstatic about the chance at the big show, don’t worry, I won’t forget all the little people. I’d promise to blog all about it if/when I make it, but of course the first rule of A-List is “Never talk about A-List”.
Ok, that’s the best I’ve got for you for April Fools. There’s some other funny stuff (better than my lame attempt) such as Seth Godin’s Captain Danger Stunt Monkey Baby Chute (I need to do a radio spot for that), Google hits twice with Toilet based WiFi, and GMail Paper services. Please feel free to add links to any other good pranks in your comments.
And it’s Sunday, that means a new episode of the Best Business Podcast, The M Show, including an interview with the Author of The Strategy Paradox. This week’s show is out early because we may be putting an offer in on a home today. More to follow…
I’ve been running around like crazy with back-to-back events after work. Yesterday was a meetup for author Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox
I have yet to dig into the book, but had a chance to chat with the author and he explained the premise: While the Innovator’s Dilemma explains how proper management actually defeats an organization’s ability to innovate, there is a similar phenomenon in strategic planning where the strategies that would appear most likely to be a runaway success are the same ones that can be complete failures. In the middle are lower risk strategies that have a high probability of meager returns (please keep in mind that these are my words based on about 10 minutes of discussion).
Our chat has been captured in glorious stereomonic and will be included in this Monday’s M Show, so please take a listen.
Tonight was WebInno number 11. The event continues to be a huge success, they must be pushing 300 attendees now. Although Mara’s asking me if I was going to Nantucket nearly drove me to tears (that’s another story), I did persevere long enough to check out the latest:
Strong presentations across the board. In closing I have to congratulate Christopher Penn as tomorrow he will be rolling the 500th episode of The Financial Aid Podcast.
Will Herman sent in a comment on my post bemoaning the end of the pay per click advertising (PPC) gold rush and asked if Pay per Action will replace Pay per Click. There’s been a lot of hype in the past couple of weeks and Google recently moved in that direction by allowing PPC in their content network as opposed to pay per thousand impressions (CPM).
My thoughts here are still evolving, but here’s the best I have so far:
Good question… my only answer so far is… maybe. It’s getting more complex across the board. On one hand you have the advertiser that would love pay-per-action, and on the other side the media property that would prefer to get paid per thousand impressions and leave the risk of ads being relevant or not to the advertiser. Clicks have been a happy medium, with click fraud only being a minor concern.
Paying for conversion shifts more of the risk to the media property – if my advertisers have terrible landing pages I’m not going to get anything – worse yet, they get the impact of their brand on my page for free. These types of affiliate deals are fairly common already, but because of the “free rider” branding most pubs have been very picky about who they will allow to ride side-by-side with their brand.
Most of the current deals like the one described above is a variation though – the affiliate is doing the advertising on behalf of the brand that is selling and the affiliate gets paid when they bring in deals – basically outsourcing a portion of the marketing function. I guess you could say the with a google pay-per-action campaign the marketing is now coming through the source rather than a contractor (rather than someone else coming up with a message for you, now your message goes out into uncharted waters).
I think the market will handle this – qualified leads are worth significantly more than clicks. To use the previous discussion, while I’m not willing to pay $5 for a click, I’d gladly pay $200 for a name that has been pre-qualified through 5 questions, is in the US, and is a confirmed identity with a corporate email address.
This shouldn’t be a tough sell to the media property – they can choose between getting paid a nickel for a click or $100 for a conversion. Publishers will eventually not have to sell advertising space, but rather manage it. They no longer have to worry about empty space, but rather non-performing ads. Sadly, I think this is beyond the core competence of most publishing organizations (think about this – that’s one of the benefits of AdSense now – the publisher does no work at all besides initial setup).
For the savvy publisher this would just be a matter of testing, and now that I think about it Google could arbitrage that since they already have the stats (I don’t know? Is that evil? Gambling? Insurance? All of the above?). So the bottom line is I don’t see pay per action getting big until the tools to do it are as simple as adsense – which I think could happen in as fast as 1 year if Google decides to “work the float”.
This is yet another sign that the land grab is over. The days of farming out 20,0000 keywords at a nickel a pop are over. Just as in adwords the benefits now will be driven to those who can write relevant ads that get (what we consider now to be) exceptionally high click-through rates. The creepiest part of this is that it’s all driving users to increase the level of relevance of their ads – playing into Google’s hand and wallet at the same time.
There are many hackneyed sayings about the cynics being the only true romantics. Most of them revolving around some variation of “the reason many people are cranky is because their optimism is constantly challenged by the seven deadly sins of those around them”. I’ve also been doing some reading about the cyclical nature of human attention and interest and there are many patterns that emerge. One recurring theme is the Tragedy of the Commons. The basic idea is that if there’s stuff out there for free, it’s going to get ruined. In fact, you might want to check out that article before reading on, as it’s something that you should become familiar with if you haven’t already.
The tragedy makes some bold points – without attaching economic cost, you begin to have problems. As much as it goes against our charitable nature, it’s important that things have cost attached to them, and in fact, that cost needs to be high enough to discriminate between other ways to deploy or purchase resources.
A good example – a couple of months back there was some hype about Starbucks paying 2 cents a day or some other pittance to coffee farmers. The not-so-huddled masses gathered and said they should be paying a “fair” wage. Granted, the poverty level in many countries is one of the most important problems we have to face, but throwing money at it will not solve anything. Coffee prices are low because there’s too much of it on the market, paying more for coffee nobody wants will only entice more people to grow coffee, making the situation worse.
A similar problem – standing on the side of a busy intersection with a sign asking for money can be a profitable venture. For the first time I saw two people fighting over turf by the Alewife T Station during the rush hour. I’m not saying that the homeless should be ignored, I’m saying that throwing money at them will probably not change anything for the better.
So, what got me on this rant? A post yesterday about people making death threats against other bloggers. When there’s no cost to doing business in the commons, eventually neighborhoods will get run down. There will still be many great places to spend your time, but there will also be parts of town you don’t want to be seen in.
For me, this is the end of my Golden Age of the Blogosphere.