AdSense Gets Better

My most over-generalized advice to Google advertisers has always been to just turn AdSense (“content targeting”) off altogether. This is still good advice just from the standpoint of split testing, because you only get accurate split tests of ads if you turn off all syndication completely and just test with pure Google traffic.

When AdSense was new, advertisers quickly learned that AdSense traffic is sometimes of much lower quality, converts to sales at a lower rate, and was less desirable overall. Some time later Google started automatically adjusting the cost of some AdSense traffic downwards, then eventually made it possible to bid separate prices for it. Now you can have Campaign A with Google traffic only and Campaign B with AdSense traffic only. Most advertisers should be taking advantage of this.

Meanwhile Google has been slowly, steadily working on their AdSense technology and have something like 40 patents related to this now. So in addition to the keywords it finds on a page, Google’s system may now take any of the following factors into account when serving your ads on other peoples’ websites:

• People who visit site A also visit sites G, H and Q; ads that work well on G, H and Q will probably work with A too

• Google also considers conversion data of other advertisers for sites G, H and Q

• People who visit site A never visit sites J, K or Z. Actually, people who visit site A hate people who visit sites J, K and Z.

• Their system is constantly serving up different ads until it finds ones with good CTR’s

• Text alone can’t tell a robot the whole story. Sometimes Republican ads will show up on a Democrat site and vise-versa. But ad serving based on larger traffic patterns reduces these problems.

• AdSense advertisers are getting smarter about placing ads prominently and getting more clicks, and more traffic means more data for Google and better placement.

Repeat Customer Arithmetic

Let’s do the math. If you’re a real estate agent earning a $5,000 commission on the sale of a house, then the cost of acquiring a customer is probably somewhere between $500 and $2000 and maybe an awful lot of shoe leather. How much does it cost to deliver fresh bread and send a letter or two every year? Fifteen or twenty dollars, maybe. If the average American moves once every 7 years and half of those people re-list with you when they move, then you kept a customer instead of having to acquire one, and it only cost you a couple hundred dollars. Not to mention any referrals you get when Suzy tells her neighbor where that delicious bread came from – and what a good job you did selling her house.

Still, when you have a transactional sale, you’ve got a definite window of time in which to act or you lose your prospect with no chance of getting him back again for several years at least.

This means that follow-up mailings and autoresponders are a countdown, not an endless trickle. So if your prospect is an attorney today, going to be an attorney tomorrow and likely to still be an attorney 5 years from now, your mailing sequence to a him as a prospect will probably look like this:

Day

01234567891012345678920123456789301234567894012345678950123456789601234567…

x x x x x x x x x x x

As you can see, the messages space out until he’s getting something from you maybe every month or two – possibly for years.

But let’s say you sell cars and you determine that some of your customers are going to buy sometime in the 6-12 months, or else most of them will get a car within the next 2 weeks. Maybe they pick a number from a pull-down menu and they tell you they’re going to buy within 2 weeks.

If that’s the case then you’re counting down to the sale. Your follow-up sequence may need to look like this:

Day

01234567891012345678920123456789301234567894012345678950123456789601234567…

x x x x xxxxxx

I don’t know exactly what your own sequence should look like, as this example is just for illustration.

But you get the idea. A transactional sale is a countdown and the more you know about when they’re going to make their move, the better.

Also, if you’re in a business where nothing significant really happens until you get the person on the phone, then the real purpose of all those emails and postcards is to get them to call you. You can say whatever you want and give them whatever you think might help them, but don’t lose site of the real purpose: Get ‘em on the phone.

On the subject of real estate, a number of savvy entrepreneurs who have strong lead generation systems in place are getting enormous leverage from this by selling their influence to other investors. This can be done in many businesses.

Here’s an email I got from Renaissance Club Member Greg Jones, in New York City:

Perry,

I had to contact you and say thank you for what you offer to members of the Renaissance Club. Well let me tell you a little about my endeavor. I am the owner of a mortgage business. Because of what you taught in your newsletter:

How to Attain Unfair Credibility Over Your Competitors by Charging for Information Everyone Else is Giving Away Free.

The reason I titled this email “Life Changing Info” is because I am in the last stages of developing a system around working only with a qualified pre-selected group of commercial real estate investors, that not only will be paying me an application fee, but they must be approved by me and then will also pay a monthly membership fee. Before I was able to finish the system, I first identified my USP, then went to work contemplating who I want to work with based on the CD you include on “tummy talks” (smile).

As I identified my USP, I began contacting newspapers here in overcrowded NYC, and offered them a way to access more readers by establishing themselves as a resource based on my USP. The end result is that I have been offered two writing assignments, a book deal, free advertising, four speaking engagements and we are in the process of booking me on FOX 5 News. I am now being considered as an expert. Just for charging and organizing FREE INFO?

Only in America.

The scary thing Perry is that I HAVE NOT YET FINISHED DEVELOPING MY SYSTEM AND THIS IS WHAT HAS HAPPENED! But do you want to know what the real kicker is? I do this part time because I work full time as the Director of Sales for a real estate information company. (GIANT SMILE) I can’t thank you enough for what you teach.

Sincerely,

Greg Jones

Director of Sales

OnBoard LLC

PS I don’t think I will be doing this gig for too long if this keeps up.

Relationship Sale vs. Transaction

Generally in my newsletters and coaching programs I operate with the assumption that your relationship with a prospect or customer is long-term. My entire approach to multi-step marketing, autoresponders and all the rest presumes that. But there are a lot of businesses where that is not the case – or at least it normally isn’t. Real estate, mortgages and automobiles for example. These are normally one-time, transactional sales.

Before I go on I need to mention that the very best marketers and top sales people in all these professions do not run their businesses like transactional, one-time sale businesses. Joe Girard, the famous “#1 car salesman in the world” describes in his book “How to Sell Anything to Anybody” how he got tons of repeat business through birthday cards, referrals and follow-up while the rest of the car salesmen just monitored the lot like vultures. One real estate agent I know delivers fresh bread to her past customers every thanksgiving.

Do you think they consider her when it’s time to sell their house? If more car salesmen were like Joe Girard and less like vultures, do you think the word “car salesman” would have a better connotation than it does? You bet. You shouldn’t be a bit surprised that these people think differently from the rest of their industry.

Poor people have big TV’s. Rich people have big libraries.

-Brian Tracy

We just finished watching Season 3 of The Donald Show, and one of the contestants, Alex I think, made it to the last round and finally lost. When he was riding away in the Taxi (the one with the HotJobs sign on the top) he said, “This totally transformed my idea of how fast you can launch a business – not years, not months, not weeks – but days. I’ve got six ideas I’m gonna launch right away when I get home.”

Forcing business startups to conform to the time pressures of prime time TV makes for a great learning experience.

TV TIP: A couple of seasons of The Apprentice per year, with no commercials, taken in concentrated chunks – very good for your brain. Unfiltered, unregulated, unplanned TV programs spewing into your home day after day, very very bad. It’s like having an open pipe dripping raw sewage right onto your living room floor. If you have a TV in the main traffic area of your house, like near the kitchen where everyone in your family ‘does life’, then you are making a big, huge mistake. My instructions to you are:

Stop reading this newsletter right now, stand up, walk over to the TV, unplug the stupid thing and carry it off to a less-trafficked part of the house where people have to deliberately go if they want to watch TV.

Never allow a television to dominate the atmosphere and conversations of your house. Our TV is not in the living room, not in the dining room, not in the kitchen. It’s in our bedroom in the far corner of the house. A person has to make a deliberate effort to go there; nobody can “accidentally” start watching TV here. And the kids have to get permission.

“One of my greatest pleasures in writing has come from the thought that perhaps my work might annoy someone of comfortably pretentious position. Then comes the saddening realization that such people rarely read.” -John Kenneth Galbraith

Computer Tip: The same TV advice could apply to the family computer in your house… except that keeping it in a public area is a great way to keep an eye on where the kids are surfing on the web. But there’s a business version of the all-pervasive TV. Sitting in front of your PC all day may be quasiproductive but it’s almost never super-productive. A computer keyboard is a lousy place to think and plan, because that computer is laden with distractions. As John Reese once said, the most super-productive things you do usually involve taking a yellow pad of paper somewhere where there is no computer (like your favorite coffee hangout) and thinking and planning. Most of us will get more done by spending less time in front of the computer, not more, and making sure it’s spent executing very specific projects.

Email Tip: The worst thing you can do with your email is set it to interrupt you (“YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”) every time a new message comes in. The best thing you can do is check it at certain times during the day and leave it alone the rest of the time. Email is definitely one of those things that infinitely expands to fill whatever space you give it. Don’t give it any more space than it deserves.

Multiple, Multiple Backup Plans in your Shirt Pocket

Doing consulting work was at the top of my list of “shooting fish in a barrel” options but it was by no means the only thing on that list. There was a bunch of other options on my “B” list, like writing content for industry magazines (“stringer work”), being a Chicago sales rep for one or more companies, actively soliciting consulting projects through direct mail, magazine publicity and ads in trade magazines, starting a new publishing venture with my buddy Heather in Toronto. I was prepared to do any and all of these things.

When you’ve got a backup list that long, and you’re in the middle of a tough negotiation, all you have to do is remind yourself that you’ve got that big long “B” list to fall back on and you easily maintain your composure.

The reason I wrote my special report “How to use Savvy Direct Marketing Techniques to Land a New Job, On Demand, Anytime, Anywhere, with No Begging, No Career Counseling and No Monster.com” was not because getting a new job is on my subscribers’ “A” list, but because it’s a great thing to have on your “B” list. And want you to sit down alone somewhere and write down everything you know how to do that would be worth money to somebody. Most people vastly underestimate their utility.

One of my favorite TV shows is The Apprentice. Actually it’s my only favorite TV show because I literally have not spent an evening watching Prime Time TV even once in more than a year, and I never watch the show itself when it’s actually on the air. Laura and I buy the DVD’s after the season is done and we chunk down 2-3 shows after the kids are in bed, every night for a week or two.

Every now and then I think “Gee, I must be really out of touch with the rest of the world if I’ve never even caught a single episode of Desperate Housewives… maybe I should tune in to the dumbed-down mainstream media every now and then.”

But then I look at my growing stack of unfinished books and think to myself naw, I can’t possibly be missing anything of real significance. If I do, I’m sure somebody will call me and tell me about it.

A Long Shot Is…

A long shot is anything that involves building a list slowly from scratch, extensive and expensive product development, investment of big dollars, slow accumulation of assets. Shooting fish in a barrel is anything where there’s existing, pent-up demand for something you can easily assemble or convert from existing resources, “will-work-for-food” opportunities that pay on an hourly or per-job basis, affiliate or joint venture situations where an existing set of customers can be matched to a new offer.

Again, all of these situations come with a side benefit of giving you a view into situations you wouldn’t otherwise be privy too. Sometimes we can be totally blind to things that are happening right in front of our eyes, for example in my naive Ambot days when I never added up the seminar ticket sales to figure out how much money was being made in the “real” business. I didn’t because I didn’t give myself permission to.

I’ve got a friend named Brad who used to work in a huge railway switching yard in Western Nebraska. To most people that would be the most bleak, dead-end job imaginable. But what was going back and forth right in front of him every day? Thousands of tons of commodities – corn, wheat, soybeans – and watching what came through and which way it was going, one day he realized he could calculate what big companies like ConAgra were anticipating in the commodity markets and play the market accordingly.

One guy merely lays bricks; another builds a wall; another builds a cathedral. There are always easy opportunities sitting right in front of you that you haven’t seized yet.

“Three Fish in a Barrel” Can Take Many Forms

At my Dilbert Cube job, we worked furiously for 4 years and the owners sold the firm to a publicly traded company for $18 million. I left with a check. That happened because of the long shot – we’d invested $2 million (mostly borrowed from Angel Investors) in product development and created a digital communications chip that people in our industry needed.

But that long shot chip was still not even selling yet, and the whole project was only possible in the first place because the company’s bread and butter was something else. We were distributing communication boards from three European companies in the United States and Canada. Buying them, marking them up, and reselling them.

We gained great insights from selling and supporting these products, which helped us design our chip. The margins kept the lights on. It was a natural transition from one to the other – in fact the new chip was designed to be interchangeable with the old computer boards.

Remember that when you buy a product from Germany or Sweden and resell it in the United States, you turn your money around a lot faster than spending two years and $2 million designing a chip.

But even that distribution business was bootstrapped by another business when it was new. At first that business was a long shot. So while we were getting that distribution business in place, with subdistributors and reps all over the country, a process that took a couple of years, we were doing hardware / software consulting projects. A company would come to us and say “Hey, can you write this software for us?” and we’d do it. Hand-to-mouth consulting projects. Shooting fish in a barrel. Putting food on the table in the short term.

People sometimes think they’re above doing simple things that pay the bills because they’re enamored with the romance of their Long Shot deal. Not only do they underestimate the task of making the Long Shot happen, they often don’t recognize that the lesser, related business will teach them many important things they still need to know.

Why it’s hard to hire a good marketing consultant

Many marketing geniuses are on the rise, and the good ones do outstanding work. Problem is, if they’re really good, they’re only available to do project work for a window of time, typically a couple of years. Here’s why.

A gal does crackerjack consulting work – she’s the “rainmaker” for her client – eventually has the following conversation with herself:

“Self, you boosted your client’s sales by 1.5 million dollars this year.”

“By golly I think you’re right.”

“They made $350,000 of additional profit and they paid you $30,000 in fees. Oh, and the CEO’s got heartburn about the $15,000 bonus he’s supposed to pay you at year’s end – you know, the 1% of sales growth thing. He wants to trim that back to 0.5% for next year. But he says we can easily expect another $3 million growth for next year and he feels a $15,000 bonus is real good for a gal your age.”

“You mean I futzed around with that “marketing communications manager” for eight months and pounded all those changes through their bureaucracy, we still grew sales 1.5 million and he’s complaining?

Self, I’ll find a product someplace and we’ll sell it all by ourself, thank you very much, and I won’t have to deal with these tight-fisted morons anymore.”

“Halbert was right, clients do suck.”

She takes fewer and fewer clients at higher and higher fees, only accepting deals that match her growing list of requirements, and eventually she does no client work at all – because she went to a trade show and found a Korean tent manufacturer and now she’s distributing their stuff online and taking a 70% gross margin.

The Korean guys don’t have the slightest idea how to replicate what she does, and she’s got a little blue notebook with seven other promising projects a lot like this one. She can eventually have all of them running in tandem, if she wants. Suddenly those $15,000 bonuses are chump change. Not worthwhile if it takes a fight to get ‘em.

The upshot of all this is that she’s going to be available for 2-3 years and after that she’s unavailable.

‘Cuz she’s doing her own thing.

One time I got into a tiff with a client and I was feeling intimidated. I asked John Carlton for some advice and after I explained the situation to him, he said, “Perry, you’re not just a mouth in the food chain, you are the food chain. Listen up – if the CEO’s hand isn’t shaking when he writes you the check, you’re not charging enough.”

Privileges and Perils of ‘The Club’

Selling information and being a guru is a vastly more demanding game – especially in the marketing profession, where all the competition is razor sharp. Sure, if you’re part of the ‘club’ you get to do joint ventures with people like Yanik Silver and Dan Kennedy and Jonathan Mizel and whoever else. But you also have to be able to survive on your own. And you have to be fully capable of competing with those same people on any given day of the week. They’re the green berets of the marketing world and you don’t just stick a pencil behind your ear and become a marketing guru. Getting to that level was the long shot part of the equation.

I would never want to attempt such a thing if I knew my boats were already burned and there were no alternatives. What if you’ve got 9 months of cash and the learning curve turns out to be 18 months long?

So here’s what I related to Tom: A real nice formula for building a prevailing business with minimal risk is One long Shot and Three Fish in a Barrel. One big project that’s long-term and speculative with huge upside potential; and two or three or four small games you know you can easily win, that will definitely pay the bills, and eliminate the ‘panic factor’ from your decisions.

When people are consumed with fear – and possibly shame because they’re running out of money or whatever – they make bad decisions. Fear alone is always a bad foundation for decision making.

Rude Aside re: Internet Marketing Shell Games – Some things never change, and if 20 years ago all the get-rich-in-mail-order deals were just courses that teach you how to teach people how to do mail order, now the Internet is the same thing all over again. I can think of no greater disservice you could do to a person than teach them how to go into the most crowded, Green-Beret dominated market (Marketing) and pretend they can learn in 3 weeks what took you 5 years to master. See, the game really works like this: The guru teaches you to be his affiliate and he gets a piece of the action whether you make any money or not.

It’s more than a little like MLM. Not good. There are better ways.

The other day on an AdWords Mastermind call, one hot seat was a trucker who desperately wanted to get out of his rig, so he was using the GoogleCash method to sell a how-to-make-money-on-the-Internet course. I told him he should be an affiliate for something that has nothing whatsoever to do with making money on the Internet. The competition’s just too thick for unsuspecting beginners. I’d guess that selling CB Radios or mud flaps or rear view mirrors or trucker’s insurance – things he might have more direct knowledge of by virtue of his profession – may prove to be quite a bit easier.

Risk, Paranoia, and the Burning of Boats

People have wildly different reactions to risk. For me, having a back-up plan does not necessarily mean that I’m going to yank the parachute lever when the going gets tough. (If anything, I’m prone to taking a long, circuitous, “challenging” route when an easier way is sitting right there in plain sight.) Knowing that I do have a backup plan is reassuring because I’m less fearful. The trapeze artist takes bigger risks when she knows there’s a net to catch her if she falls.

Other people may need to close off all exits. The famous story of Cortez burning his boats before conquering Mexico comes to mind… except I researched that story and found out it’s an urban legend.

Cortez didn’t burn his boats at all. He had 12, ran nine into the sand (to keep enemies from using them against him) and kept three – and a master shipbuilder among his crew. According to Fast Company and John Coatsworth, director of Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, “Cortez beached the ships to prevent anyone from heading back to Cuba to report to the Spanish nobilities that he was engaged in an utterly unauthorized and illegal expedition. He was running for cover.”

So much for Cortez motivating his men.

ser·en·dip·i·ty (sĕr’ən-dĭp’ĭ-tē)

1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.

3. An instance of making such a discovery.

Serendipity will bring you from where you thought you wanted to be to where you should have been all along. I don’t know about you, but very few things I’ve ever done turned out exactly the way I envisioned them at the beginning – sometimes much different. It’s usually just plain dumb to “burn the boats.” I’ve long lived by the phrase “never burn a bridge” which normally means Do NOT get all uppity and tell somebody off, even if you’re “sure” you’ll never ever need anything from them in the future – ‘cuz you probably will anyway. I’ve rarely violated that rule and have never been sorry for not breaking it.

Which brings me back to my story about Tom. He was describing the simultaneous launch of three or four different products, and in some cases building a new prospect list from scratch in order to launch them. His plans were thorough, as they normally are with Tom. Still, a little warning bell went off in my head: “Too many long shots at one time” feeling about launching that many products simultaneously.

When I went out on my own, the first order of business was to secure enough monthly retainer income from active consulting projects (hunting) to cover my nut. Then and only then would I embark on a much lengthier process of building a list, selling information and being a ‘guru’ (farming).

For several years I had 3-4 consulting clients who collectively more than paid the bills. So I could afford to invest in developing a robust information business. Once the consulting business was in place, I stopped taking new clients, tightened my belt a little, and invested in list-building and product development.

The guru income slowly matched and replaced the consulting income, giving me more options.

The consulting was kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. For the most part, any particular project was a slam-dunk… writing a white paper or magazine article or press release or building an opt-in page, suddenly getting my client 15 leads a day instead of one or two – that, for me, was easy. (And sometimes a little boring.) They got the results they were after and I got paid.