Z-Man: Wannabe or Pro? Working on his dynamics and control

One of the essential differences between a true professional musician and a mere wannabe is control of dynamics. Whatever you do – whether you sing, play guitar, piano, bass, percussion, whatever – you have a finite range of energy and a finite bag of tools with which to express yourself. Amateur musicians get excited too soon and expend all their energy in the first two minutes of the song. They’re playing as hard and as loud as they can in the middle of the song, and they don’t have any reserve left for the climax at the end.

Dynamics, Color, Copywriting and Persuasion

You know what’s the most nauseating thing about amateur copywriting? It’s when fireworks and cleverness get in the way of telling the real story. I don’t get a lot of critiques like this, but I sure do see a lot of it on the web. There are some really pathetic examples out there.

Fastest way for a drummer to get fired from a band: He gets excessively preoccupied with his wonderful, showboat self and inserts cool little drum solos in the middle of every song. The singer, angry and exasperated, whirls around and screams would you please stop that right now and just keep time! It’s like Mr. Showboat is dumping the whole salt shaker in the soup when someone asks for just a little bit more spice.

Muzak and Velveeta Jazz

“Elevator Music” is thankfully not nearly as common as it was 20 years ago. (It’s been replaced by ‘Mall Jazz’ which some might argue is less de-humanizing.) But when Laura and I were first dating, I would gleefully slam the stuff. There was one station in town that played it 24/7. After awhile she got irritated at my ranting, and asked me to tell her what Muzak actually was. “Define Muzak,” she demanded.

I had to think about it for awhile, but finally I came up something good: “Muzak is when the identity of the composer and performers are intentionally irrelevant – its personality has been castrated.

“I think people who make music like that should go hungry – if not go to jail.”

Laura and I have agreed to disagree about the Muzak people going hungry and going to jail part.

She figures it’s their God-given right as Americans to play it. But I still think there’s a special place in purgatory for those sorry souls. In that horrible place, they’re forced to listen to their own tunes, at wavery, fluttery half speed, until they repent of their wicked ways and are absolved of their sin.

There’s something about neutered personality that just violates my sensibilities. Which of course is exactly what’s wrong with most corporate marketing. It has personality, of course – it’s just a thoroughly fake personality. It’s corporate monotone with glossy colors slapped on the brochure. There’s no real person behind it, just committees.

Charlie Parker said, “Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Music doesn’t just have personality, it is personality. Mick Jagger, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Elvis Presley, Madonna, Quincy Jones, Ray Charles, Kurt Cobain – all flamboyant personalities. Fans are more in love with the persona than the music itself. Music flows from the personality.

Selling with Borrowed Credibility

The marketing of musical instruments revolves almost entirely around celebrities, both big and small. Rarely is there any real explanation of why the instrument is better or how it is made. Is it really an indication of how commoditized it is, how much the same all the different brands of instruments may actually be?

Most markets don’t use enough celebrities in their market; guitar and amp and keyboard manufacturers rely on it too much. But here’s a case study in two different ways of doing it.

Example #1: The Wrong Way to Do Celebrity Endorsements

Istanbul makes great cymbals, really they do. But this ad, as you can see is… um, somewhat lacking in explanation. I’m not hip to all the cool drummers in the world, so maybe I’m an exception, but… who’s Patrick Hallahan? Who’s Ned Brower? Do they have anything to say about these cymbals?

Like a real actual reason why they’re better than some other cymbal? Can’t tell.

Again, most industries don’t make nearly enough use of celebrities, or even testimonials. I worked for years in the industrial market and the trade rags had very few ads featuring or interviewing real customers.

Articles doing so, yes, but ads, no. Sometimes they’d talk about companies but they never featured the people.

There was no personality.

Example #2: A Better Way to do Celebrity Endorsements

Many times I’ve talked about Big Ass Fans using Refrigerator Perry as their company spokesman – and the hundreds of people who line up at trade shows to get the Fridge’s autograph.

One of my friends Scott Tucker started using the Fridge as his spokesman for his Mortgage business, after hearing about it from me.

Since Fridge is famous in Chicago, and Scott’s in Chicago, it’s a natural fit.

Right here is an example of celebrity endorsements with good copy, layering on the benefits, and a real, tangible offer of a free CD. Variations of this ad have been running for almost a decade in the drum magazines.

Another fine example of an entire company built on a simple ad and a sales letter.

Admittedly it would be better if he had photos of these people and used more space (he does in his sales letters). But he uses his available space to maximize the promise of benefits to the customer.

Joe Stronsick’s ad sells instructional videos, but there’s no reason why this same approach couldn’t be used to sell anything else. Let’s take drum sticks for example. A local drum shop owner complained to me that it’s a nightmare to stock drumsticks because every superstar has his own model of signature sticks. People come in and ask for the Tommy Lee sticks or the Gene Krupa sticks or whatever.

Obviously this works.

But a good advertorial that describes the meticulous care the sticks are made with, the special variety of hickory that’s only grown in the far reaches of Northern Quebec, the $125,000 lathe, the computerized matched pairs, the lacquer that increases the clarity of high frequencies… you get the idea.

Blend that with a celebrity endorsement and you’ve got a killer marketing plan for selling hunks of wood.

What Happens When Cheaper Technology Lowers the Barrier to Entry

25 years ago, if your album was a full digital recording, you were hot stuff. In 1980, a sixteen track digital tape recorder cost half a million dollars.

Today, a 16 track digital recorder costs $799. (Just checked on Froogle.) Your teenage son can have a full digital recording of his band Trevor and the Destroyerz, captured with pirated software and reproduced for 50 cents a CD. Or downloadable free online.

Recording studios are dropping like flies as do-it-yourselfers mix albums on their PC’s.

Musicians are out of work because people with no chops, no talent and no musical sense can hack something out and then edit it with ProTools until it sounds right.

When technology takes one opportunity away, it introduces another somewhere else. Will Denton is a drummer (his main gig is with Stephen Curtis Chapman) who does a lot of recording work via the Internet. He built a home studio and learned the nuances of miking drums, which is quite difficult to do properly. He promotes a service on his website – people send him files they’ve recorded. They email him notes detailing what they want in terms of drum parts. Will records them and sends back a file. It’s almost like he’s phoning in his parts, and he gets paid via Paypal. Never even meets most of his customers in person.

He says lots of people can afford to pay a drummer the day rate for a record; they just can’t afford to fly to Nashville, pay for housing and meals and rent a studio. It’s a completely viable way of getting the job done more affordably.

This has obvious parallels in every other industry. There’s hardly a business or cause you can think of that couldn’t use teleseminars or webcasts to reach large numbers of customers or prospects, and no one has to go anywhere. These days I do a lot of this stuff, and have most of it transcribed – the transcriptions are useful for all kinds of content needs.

At the Bencivenga 100 seminar in New York City, a question that came up during Q&A is how

copywriters make sure they get paid in the age of the web. In Gary’s world of direct mail, he charges a flat rate of 5 cents per envelope mailed, end of story. His client just sends him a copy of the receipts from the post office. Very cut-and-dry. But a copywriter can’t realistically charge for, say, hits on a website.

What a copywriter can do, though, is deliver a complete package. I told the group that when I take on copywriting projects, it usually includes the web traffic and a multi-step sales process, too.

Google ad campaigns, squeeze page, autoresponder series and sales letter, all in one package. I’m in control of all that.

You can take this one step further and function as a controlling affiliate – you own the website and everything, you buy the traffic with your own money, and you get a big cut. If the client doesn’t pay, you shut the traffic down, the same way the utility company shuts off your electricity if you don’t pay up.

The person who owns the traffic and owns the customers, for all practical purposes owns the business.

The Hazards of Making a Living in an Enthusiast Market

I get my haircuts at a Spanish-speaking barber shop, because if the person who cuts my hair doesn’t speak English, they won’t get all chatty with me and I can relax a little bit. But anyway, my Spanish-speaking barber shop had an English copy of Guns & Ammo Magazine one day.

I’m no NRA fanatic, but I picked it up to see what was all about. In it was a letter from an aspiring writer. Young guy, still in college, and he thought writing about guns for a living was just about the coolest imaginable job. He smartly asked if the editor had any tips for getting a job like that.

you’re in Western Nebraska or East Pakistan:

http://www.bb-elec.com/product_family.asp

WIRELESS: More than 802.11!

You’d have to be living in Siberia to not notice the avalanche of wireless mania that’s going on right now. Won’t be long before babies start saying “802.11″ along with “mommy” and “daddy”.

But hey, sometimes 802.11 is just not what you want.

Why not? Well obviously security is a concern.

If someone can buy a gadget at Circuit City and intercept your data, that might be a bad thing. Fortunately there are many other kinds of wireless.

We’ve got a whole collection of radios that operate at 900MHz and 2.4GHz. Each transmits data in its own proprietary format which means it takes a determined hacker to crack ‘em. Most can transmit many miles (no small feat with 802.11!).

See http://www.bb-elec.com/product_multi_family.asp Is a YAGI ANTENNA just the thing for you?

Whether your motive is greater range or increased security, a directional antenna will do much to further your cause. It keeps your signal where it belongs.

Yagis are dipole antennas with a reflector on one end. If you hold out your arms to form a dipole and have the reflector behind you, you would receive signals with maximum gain from in front of you.

We have a collection of Yagi antennas on Page 37 of our catalog, so you can focus your signal exactly as you wish. Our YE240015 has an impressive 12.5dB of gain. Find our antenna collection online at:

http://www.bb-elec.com/product_multi_family.asp?

I gotta go to the theater now – I’m hoping I can dodge the boss, Don, and get a sneak preview of the movie “Ray.” Rumor has it that the performance of “Georgia On My Mind” is a barn burner.

Off to the movies!

Questions? Comments? Rants? Raves? Email us at mailto:support@bb-elec.ccom.

I’ll get to ‘em when I get in tomorrow. But shhh!

Don’t tell Don about my secret matinee.

Happy Connections,

Mike Fahrion

B&B Electronics

mailto:support@bb-elec.com

The editor replied that there are oh, maybe eight people in the whole world who manage to make a full time living writing about guns, everybody else is just weekenders who pick up some spare change sharing the details of their hunting trips with everybody else. He added that if you’re going to write about guns and get paid for it, you’d better be a good photographer, too.

Such is the nature of a job where the work itself is the reward. For 2½ years I worked in a music-related, enthusiast market, designing car speakers at Jensen.

Solving acoustics problems isn’t necessarily any easier than playing Rachmaninoff, nor it doesn’t always pay better. People who work in the audio industry do so because they like speakers, they like equipment, they like music. For them, it takes a higher pay scale to lure them out of the audio biz. I made about 20% less at that job than I would have made working at a power plant or designing plastic injection molding machines or whatever.

In an enthusiast market, you sell to people who are somewhat like yourself, and they’re always trying to knock you off and start their own gig. There’s less money in deals like that; the competition is more plentiful and often more committed, even if only for idealistic reasons.

If you’re going to be in a market like that, you’d better sharpen your pencil. And you’d better love what you do.

Enthusiast markets also naturally have better ads than ‘business’ markets. Why? Because enthusiasts know how to talk to other enthusiasts, regardless of whether they’ve cracked a marketing book or not. The ads in Guns & Ammo – some of them are great ads, if only because they communicate passion for the sport. Same in Guitar Player magazine, same in Black Belt, same in a knitting mag.

I suspect there’s also more “under the table” money in enthusiast markets. I won’t name any names, but anywhere from 50% to 100% of the equipment reviews in high end audio mags are pure fiction – purple prose. (Really good prose, too.) If you want your new $6,000 preamp to be rated better than the other guy’s $6,000 preamp, the wine had better be flowing, the French cuisine superb, and the check good.

There’s a shady side to the music biz. My friend Bob Rosenthal used to be a lighting specialist for pro Rock tours. He worked with all kinds of bands – Neil Young, Rush, Beastie Boys, many others – and he said “Man, it’s impossible to describe, but when you pull off a really great show – when everything just clicks and there’s that magic in the air – it’s the most unbeatable thing. It’s better than sex.”

I said to him, “Better than sex? Hmmm, somehow I suspect that there must also be a dark side that’s just as evil and scary as the good side is thrilling.”

“You’re kind of a philosophical guy, aren’t you, Perry?”

“You could say that.”

“Yes, absolutely. There’s a horrible dark side. Now some of these guys were just fantastic to work with. Neil Young, for example, great, wonderful guy. But some of the bands I worked for were just horrible. They’d treat everyone else like crap and I had to work for them. There were several times when I just walked, right in the middle of the tour. Told ‘em I couldn’t take it anymore and I was going home.

“Which is exactly what I did. As soon as that show was over I got on a plane and went home.

“And half the time there would be a FEDEX package waiting for me when I got there, with a big fat check in it, apologizing and bribing me to come back, because they couldn’t do a great show without a great lighting guy.”

Bob got so sick of the music biz, he got out. Now he sells Real Estate leads.

Ray Charles Sells ‘Boring’ Industrial Products

As you may know I ghost write an email newsletter for B&B Electronics, who sell what most people would consider to be mind-numbingly boring industrial communication components. But the marketing need not be dull – most of the time it’s a rant. Every time we send out the e-connections newsletter, we get an email box full of raves from engineers out there in Dilbert-Cube land who love the diversion.

When the movie Ray rolled out (the Ray Charles story) I wrote a different kind of email newsletter – a bluesy newsletter, appreciating Ray and his music.

It was important to me not to come across like I was prostituting Ray to hawk a bunch of stuff. Notice how I walk the line carefully.

I think you’ll enjoy this….especially the part about the secret matinee.

Music is Connected to Everything Else

I believe in serendipity. I think that interesting, provocative, fascinating things happen when you just go ahead and pursue your passions and talents and let them take you wherever they lead. A story in this month’s Wired magazine describes Edward Teller, the prominent Hungarian scientist who worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II. Teller was deeply moved by music: He had his grand piano transported to Los Alamos national laboratory, and many of his most profound contributions to science were accomplished late at night as he played Beethoven sonatas.

When you explore new worlds, you gain important new insights into worlds already familiar.

And that’s exactly what this issue is all about – marketing, music and the muse. Pay close attention today, because whether you’re a music lover or not, almost everything I talk about applies not only to music, but your business.

All the fun stuff happens in the irrational side of the world. U2’s on tour right now… how many C-level executives are in the crowd tonight in Anytown USA, standing on their chairs or holding up cigarette lighters, holding hands, singing along with Bono? How many are immersed in the sensory experience, all self consciousness melted away, doing air guitar, imagining that they’re Edge, that a coliseum of surging, raving fans is swinging to their axe? How many middle-aged, middle-management, normally staid men are sitting their in their seat with tears streaming down their cheeks when the band finishes How Long Will We Sing This Song and Larry Mullen finally lays down his sticks and exits the stage?

After witnessing that, can you ever again delude yourself into thinking that we’re all just logical, rational creatures? Can you ever again suppose that above a certain income level or social status, people somehow stop being the quivering mass of feelings and emotions that make us all human?

Andrew Fletcher said, “Let me write the songs of a nation; I don’t care who writes its laws.” The waves of music carry us faster and further than the laws of logic ever can. Doesn’t matter that music itself is entirely mathematical, that it’s subdivisions of twos and threes and fours and eights, that harmony is based on integers and ratios. Music is not the domain of the brain, but the language of the heart.

The marketing of music is one of the toughest challenges of all – second only to fiction and poetry. Don’t know if it’s true, but somewhere I heard that the number of living poets actually earning a living in the US is zero. But anyway, I once asked a radio station manager why you hear the same songs on the air over and over and over again instead of hearing something new; why each station plays such an impoverished range of styles. He replied that it’s all demographics and statistics – the average person has very narrow tastes, and during the 17 minutes he spends listening in his car, he’d rather hear something familiar than something strange.

Thus it’s very, very hard to break in – it’s the 99.9/0.1 rule. 99.9% of the music you hear is from 0.1% of the musicians. A good ol’ boys club. That’s why the classic rock station is playing More Than A Feeling by Boston for the fortieth time this week. It’s risk management, and corporate radio don’t take no risks. It only bets on the horse it knows will bring home the bacon.

What that means is that when you do break in – when your song hits #78 on the Hot 100 – your job is to assemble a fan base as fast and aggressively as humanly possible. And continue to serve up more and more tunes that hit their sweet spot. You assume that musical chairs is going to stop, and you’d better have a chair to sit down on when it does.

And that, my friend, is the difference between the guy on VH1’s “Where are they now” who’s selling insurance in Des Moines, vs. the guy who’s playing for 150 people in a theater this Thursday night.

20 years ago it was very, very difficult for a band with meager resources to cultivate a fan base.

If they lost their record contract, their access to new fans was choked off and the only way to serve the existing ones was to roll into town after town after town. Now, with the Internet, it’s a much different story. The big record companies are losing control of distribution. Discussion forums, blogs, email newsletters and fan clubs feed the flame, inexpensively. Beneath the surface of corporate music is a vast underground. Progressive Rocker Neal Morse even has an Inner Circle, where for only $10 per month you get a CD or DVD in the mail – clips from a recent concert, interviews, jam sessions at his house.

By your standards and my standards though, most bands to a pretty lousy job of marketing to their existing customers. I went to a big concert last weekend and saw six bands, back to back. The crew did a magnificent job of moving the equipment around during set changes, and one singer did a magnificent job of insulting a fat guy in the front row. But none of them told the 5,000+ people there they could get a cool downloadable freebie (an MP3 maybe?) by visiting their website and entering their email address.

Big mistake!

Subject Line: Goodbye RS232, Part II Last year Joe Desposito at EE Product News posted a sad little editorial about losing the trusty serial ports on our PC’s to the faster, hipper world of USB.

It was bluesy and soulful, almost like a tribute to Ray Charles. (My favorite Ray Charles song is the one he did with Quincy Jones: “I’ll be good to you/

I’ll give it up with my credit cards/Like Visa, MasterCharge, American Express/Turn my pants upside down/Any day of the week!”)

Ah yes, the inimitable Ray Charles. Playing his Baby Grand with Billy Joel. And I’ve Got a Woman, and Hallelujah

I love her so. Gotta love ol’ Ray.

Ray Charles lives on, my friend. He’s immortalized by music. And, my subscribers, my serial ports live on too, doggonit.

So what, you ask, makes a serial port immortal?

Verily, serial ports shall live on as long as there shall be devices that want to talk to them. Information wants to be liberated. Whether it’s dusty serial ports in the bowels of your factory, patiently awaiting the fellowship of your laptop, or a copy of “Do I ever Cross Your Mind” in a dusty record bin, some things never die.

Joe was deluged with responses from the Goodbye RS232 column. 232 has many supporters. So now that your new Dell or Toshiba lacks a serial port, what shall we do about it?

Your options are legion. But for our customers, the answer is usually a serial server. Transports your serial data via Ethernet and the Internet to any location in the world.

Not all serial servers are created equal. We keep refining ours. The latest innovation is the ability to multicast or unicast your serial data to a single or multiple locations, via Ethernet. You want multiple monitors in your SCADA system to report the data?

Multiple IP addresses, not a problem. You can do this with UDP (ultra fast) or with TCP (up to 8 client connections).

Plus we made it a LOT easier to configure and diagnose your connections remotely, with a cool browserbased control panel. Give the serial server an IP address and you can access it from anywhere, whether (continued on next page)

Regardless of what you do or what you sell, there’s an equivalent in your business of having a hit song in the Top 40. You go speak at a trade show or seminar, you get some free publicity in your local newspaper, you drop a load of direct mail, you get a free #3 ranking on Google for some important keyword – that’s your airtime. It can come to an end at any moment or become much harder to come by. What have you put in place to harvest that opportunity and propel it forward?

Whatever your circumstances now, the safest assumption you can make is that the cost of acquiring new customers is going to go up. What you do with the customers you already have, and the customers you’re going to acquire this week, is the question.

Marketing, Music, and the Muse

“If you’ve ever been successful in music, you can always get a gig – because people will pay good money just to see what you’ve deteriorated to.” -Interview with a pianist on NPR “Dude, this totally does not suck.” -Dee Snider, lead singer of Twisted Sister, when the band ‘hit the big time’

“Why does a piano smash when it hits the sidewalk?” –Richard Feynman, Atomic Physicist

Have you ever decided to take up a new craft, a new skill? Ever gotten into it, then suddenly felt overwhelmed, intimidated by the huge learning curve before you?

Six year old boy watches the Tour de France on TV, mesmerized and inspired. Goes outside and climbs on his bicycle (complete with training wheels) and pedals on down the sidewalk.

That’s me, playing my drums.

That’s right – I’d been banging on stuff for almost 25 years, a “steering wheel drummer.” Never actually played though. Earlier this year I finally decided to go take some serious lessons and learn how.

You know what? Things that look simple never are.

Keeping time – being the engine room of the band – quarter notes on left foot, dotted quarter notes on right, eighth notes on the left hand, alternating between 5/4 time and 6/4 time with the right – doing four things at once is not nearly as easy as it looks. A downright humbling experience, actually.

It’s one thing to listen to your iPod and critique world-class musicians; it’s another thing to play what they play.

So if staring at that blank Microsoft WORD document and trying to bang out a great headline is a sometimes maddening, difficult experience for you, I feel your pain. I happen to feel the exact same way when I’m sittin’ behind those skins, learning a new piece of music.

Why did I do this, anyway?

Can’t really tell you. I just had to for some reason. I have no specific ambition to be a rock star, no delusion about making a platinum-selling record, no affection for the music business.

It’s just that I admire great music and great musical performances. When I go to a concert, or when I hear a smokin’ performance driving down the road in my car, I say to myself, I’ve gotta do that.

I don’t feel that way about bass, or piano, or guitar, or vocals… or French horn or cello or trumpet. Or even yodeling.

Only drums.

I haven’t the slightest idea where this musical adventure is going to lead. I just know that I’m a musician at heart who never took 5th grade trumpet lessons seriously (trumpet was the only choice I was given, ‘cuz my dad had one), and while ambitious parents start their kids’ Suzuki violin lessons at age 6, I waited ‘til 36. Late bloomer.

I have a friend named Mike Van Norden (radio publicity genius, you might know him) who’s a rabid, incurable Van Halen fan, loves Eddie’s wicked guitar. Finally he couldn’t stand it anymore and Mike dropped a couple grand on a Charvell guitar and a Peavey 5150 combo amp, just like Eddie plays.

Then he hired a guitar teacher for some lessons, one who played Van Halen stuff. He said, “OK,

I want you to teach me how to play Spanish Fly, Eruption, and The Cradle Will Rock.”

The guy looked at him like he’d just applied for Chief Astronaut on NASA’s next mission to Mars. He said, “Son, it takes a guy 20 years to learn how to play those tunes right. You could learn Back in Black in maybe a month… you think you could start with something a little more reasonable… like twelve bar blues or something?”

He tried for awhile, but discouraged and dejected, Mike eventually sold his gear at a pawnshop and went back to just being a fan.

¡Qué lástima!

The steepest part of any learning curve is the “spending time in the woodshed” part where you’re not even good enough to have fun yet. That’s why teaching adults to read is so hard. When you’re 30 years old, barely sounding out Dick and Jane, you discover there’s nothing written for 2nd graders that’s actually interesting. It’s much harder work, reading at a second grade level than at high school level.

Well here’s why you won’t be seeing my drums in the front window of a pawn shop anytime soon. First, I haven’t exactly started out trying to be Buddy Rich. Second, in all my endeavors I’ve learned to appreciate the process, to lean into the wind and enjoy the struggle. And to be perfectly honest, The humble pie of mastering a new craft from the bottom up can only be healthy. I’ve got more than enough people telling me I’m Mr. Wonderful in the business department. I remember Jeff Paul saying once, “Don’t listen to your own PR, because you meet the same people on the way down that you met on the way up.” Don’t know who said it first, but I heard it from Zig Ziglar: Anything worth doing, is worth doing poorly, until you can learn to do it well.

Google Ads & the Amazon Rain Forest

I’ve never been to the Amazon rain forest, but they tell me the trees are so dense there, barely a lay of sunlight reaches the ground.

That’s because the trees are doing their job: They’re competing for sunlight. The trees themselves are designed to grow towards the sun’s rays and soak up every bit of sunlight they can get.

Maybe you’ve noticed that plants literally grow towards a sunny window, to take maximum advantage of the available light.

A tree’s job is to maximally match the available sunlight to the soil and nutrients in the ground – to use photosynthesis and create new life. The tree that can capture the most sunlight, wins.

It grows the tallest and the widest.

Then seeds fall to the ground and more trees grow, filling in the spaces in the forest roof until the ground below is dark.

Similarly, your job is to maximally match the available traffic and its desires to the products and services on your shelf, until there’s no one left searching who hasn’t found a solution to their problem.

There is an exact analogy to Google AdWords:

Sunlight = Traffic

Leaves = Keywords

Twigs = A Single Ad Group & The ads you’ve written for that group

Branches = Individual Landing Pages on your Website

Trunk = Your Product Sales Page

Roots = Your Website

Soil = Raw Materials & Talent That Create What You Sell

The way you organize your marketing funnels *exactly* mirrors that tree. You don’t want 100 leaves per twig; trees aren’t designed that way. You want only 3 or 5 or 10 keywords for each ad – that makes sense (especially for the most popular keywords).

“Red Paint” and “Red Paint Brush” are related – but at minimum they represent two different branches. They really are two different products. Maybe they’re even different trees, different websites, different stores.

When you do your keyword research, you will often find keywords for which no one is really selling an exact solution. That’s like a big open space in the forest canopy, a place where sunlight is falling on the ground. You can probably grow a tree there. Maybe a small tree, maybe a big one.

If you keep this tree analogy in your mind as you grow your PPC business, it will lead you to the correct decisions: Maybe your ad group needs its own special landing page on your site. Maybe this campaign needs a whole new product that you haven’t developed yet. Maybe there’s a clearing where you can plant a whole new forest!

One last thought: Some markets are like the Amazon: there’s lots of sunlight, lots of water, tropical heat, and plants grow like crazy. You cut something down, it grows back the very next day.

Traffic comes really really fast, you can split test new things every few hours, and the race goes to the swift and agile.

Other markets are like the northern Canadian tundra – the growing season is so short, the ground so cold, plants take years to grow. You can still see the charred remains of a forest fire 30 years after it happened, because sunlight and nutrients are scarce.

Some narrow niches are like that. The race goes not to the swift but to the tenacious. Once you’ve established your place, it’s so un-noticeable to others that you’re probably exclusive by default.

Most people wouldn’t have the patience or expertise to grow there, but you do. You’ve staked your claim.

Perry Marshall

Next CD interview: Ragtag David Army smashes billion-dollar Goliath.