When the music stops, will you still have a chair to sit down in?

When you know one media really, really well, you can always make money as a Joint Venture partner, as an affiliate or as a consultant. Because even if that media has experienced a giant implosion you’re still in the top 1%.

Notice that whether you do the Yin, the Yang, or embrace both, the secret to long-lived success is diversity. The greatest thing about all of this is that you can have the best of both worlds.

You can be tremendously adept at the use of a particular kind of media, always knowing how to leverage it both for yourself and for other people; this can even bring you interesting relationships with your competitors.

Jaco Bolle is a Personal AdWords Coaching grad from Canada who became so good at using AdWords and doing testing and tracking that his competitor came to him on bended knee and asked him if he would consider working something out. Jaco’s sales funnel was literally 20X more effective.

It’s almost certain that Jaco will be able to expand his business even more, incorporating the competitor’s product line into an even larger sales machine, because of his media expertise.

At the same time there is nothing that stops him from diversifying into other forms of online and offline media, making his business diverse, stable, immune from outside attacks, and having the cumulative effect of all those touches in his market. People see his ad in a magazine, they click on his online ad while they’re surfing, they hear about it through a news release, one of their friends mentions it … a powerful reinforcement effect begins to occur.

Roundtable Member Jeff Hughes has built an extraordinary business from zero to 40 employees in about 3 years. He quit his day job less than two years ago. He started just with AdWords, which at the time was a tenuous and slight advantage.

He managed to turn $15,000 a month of losses into $16,000 a month of profit. His advantage in AdWords was so slight it was downright scary. But in that thin spread of profit and that narrow time window… before others caught on to what he was doing, he took off running. He added a powerful telemarketing operation to supplement his company’s sales, both inbound and outbound.

Sometimes Google would hassle him about certain things. One time they slashed and burned thousands of keywords, disabling him for some kind of technicality. Took him a couple of weeks to straighten it out. You’d better diversify fast, Jeff, because being dependent on that one thing is not a good thing. I warned him. He didn’t miss the hint. He doesn’t need any more warnings now, he’s very diverse.

Jeff started experimenting with direct mail. Also started doing online chat to improve his conversions and as a matter of fact now his company takes its specialty in the medium of inbound telemarketing and online chat and sells it to other companies. Website for this service is www.consultsales.com.

The Truth About Shamelessly Exploiting Insecurities

Everybody’s got insecurities, even ultra-successful tycoons with bulletproof exteriors – that’s a fact. That will never change. There are two versions of this, two paths you can take.

1. Shamelessly exploit said insecurity for max profit. Sell him a band-aid, then a band-aid to go on top of the band-aid. Send him a credit card, then another, and another… then a payday loan, then a mafia loan at 45% interest. Then when you’ve ground every last dime out of him, break his legs and leave him for dead in an alley somewhere.

In all honesty this is what most of the mass media does. Take a second look at Elle magazine – the scant relationship advice that’s any good is mixed in with a whole bunch of manipulative, impulsive schlock. You want to know about men, honey? Sweetheart, go ask your grandmother. She knows about men. She lived with one for 46 years.

There’s a big difference between dating advice and relationship advice. Dating advice is all churn. Why would a girl buy a relationship advice book written by a 28 year old single male? A wise girl wouldn’t. Gullible girls will buy it all day long.

If your sole measure of success is daily, monthly or quarterly profits, path #1 is the more immediately profitable. But it does extract a price. There are no free lunches in the world, and the cost of exploiting insecurities and selling people an even-worse problem than they already have is accumulating a whole bunch of customers who are, in reality, on a treadmill of misery. You can’t put that in the drinking water without ingesting some of it yourself.

The other path is:

2. Sell genuine solution to said insecurity. Tell him the ugly truth about his problem and show him how to solve it. You can still pander to his insecurity. You can still say “Is this the elbow that hurts?” then smash it with a hammer to make sure it hurts – “Yeeessssss, that huuuuuuurrrrts reeeeeeaal baaaad”, he whimpers. …But sell a real solution. Don’t just treat symptoms. Get to the underlying cause.

The acid test is asking yourself: Would I recommend this approach to my best friend or son or daughter or cousin? The irony of course is that our best friends and sons and daughters and cousins don’t usually take us all that seriously. I understand that. But if you’ve gotta eat Thanksgiving Dinner with your brother-in-law for the next 10 years, you’ll be understandably cautious about talking him into, say, a risky investment. Treat your customers the same way.

Catering to an insecurity in a way that helps everyone, long term: My wife Laura is a confident, self-assured, secure Home School Mom. She knows what’s good for her kids and she doesn’t second guess her choices very much. But… I’ve discovered that most Home School Moms are not like that. They wring their hands over choosing a spelling or math curriculum. They fear that a bad lesson plan could ruin little Johnny for life.

They whither under the slightest criticism. They know their neighbors think they’re odd for not herding their children to the local public school like cattle to share drugs and venereal diseases with all the other kids in town, and for some reason this bothers them.

If you want to market to home school moms, you have to address this insecurity. You may very well need to start off agitating the insecurity before you begin to address it. But then you do have to address it. You replace her doubts with confidence.

You teach her how to respond to her skeptical next-door neighbor. You arm her to deal with the State Board of Education. You prove to her that home school moms have an 80% success rate, not an 80% failure rate. You show her what the 20% who failed, failed to avoid.

I’ve watched this happen. The best home school vendors carry out this task (for example Sonlight, which is operated by Roundtable member John Holzmann). They take wobbly, unsure, insecure home school moms and turn them into confident, defiant, renegade educators par excellence. Thus Sonlight has a growing brigade of loyal, rabid customer-moms who recruit their friends and lead them down the same path. That’s called Viral Marketing.

You can be really good at placing ads and writing sales pages and getting conversions.

But over a span of 1-5 years your reputation overpowers everything else. If the buzz on the street about you is good, you’ll get all kinds of traffic that costs you nothing.

Everybody talks about viral marketing like it’s some kind of fantastic, mystical magic trick.

Most of the time just comes delivering a product that people are delighted with – a product that liberates them from something that was holding them back and makes a new reality possible. Do that and get the basic marketing steps right at the front end and viral marketing will happen.

The Yin and The Yang of Media and Traffic Expertise

The Yin: If your entire business is dependent upon one source of traffic, one advertising medium, your business is a train wreck waiting to happen.

The Yang: If you are really, truly proficient at the use of one source of traffic, one form of advertising media, you can always cherry pick lucrative advertising opportunities and make money, regardless of what is going on in the market.

Most direct- and online-marketing success stories I’ve seen over the last ten years have this in common: The entrepreneur became extremely proficient at the use of ONE sales channel and used it to develop a firm foothold in a desperately competitive marketplace.

The ones who went on to experience sustained and prolonged success rapidly expanded into other media, other opportunities, and new dimensions of value so as not to be dependent upon that one beginning advantage long-term.

During my stint as sales manager at Synergetic (my last Dilbert Cube post) the initial advantage we had was a steady flow of online leads. It was already in place before I got there and we worked to strengthen and improve it. It was always there. It was the backbone of the company’s success the whole time. But we quickly added other things: We had this geeky little Slide Chart that ‘went viral’ at a trade show and generated leads and publicity for us for three more years.

A couple of years after I started, I made it my mission to become proficient at playing the PR game with magazine and trade journal editors and getting articles published. Within six months I had mastered that craft and we got well over 100 pages of press exposure in a single year in a tiny niche, an extraordinary accomplishment. This in turn made it easy to start my present consulting firm.

We also became very effective at using our reps and distributors and working with them to penetrate target accounts. One such rep – the one in Detroit, which if you’re in manufacturing is the #1 market by far – generated about 20% of the company’s business from ONE key account.

That backbone of online lead generation was a stone for the stone soup. Everything else crystallized around it and added synergy to something that was already fundamentally workable.

Each of these media opportunities enhanced the others.

That early advantage of online lead generation was pretty thin and fragile. This was late ’97 after all. The Internet was a rather small place then. Still, it generated excitement and momentum and a steady trickle of new sales opportunities for me every single day. That alone was enough to transform my own personal experience as a sales person. It relieved me of cold calling and liberated me to work in my strength area, which was the consultative sale.

The power of one opportunity, one crack in the sidewalk where a seed successfully takes root, cannot be overstated. Roundtable member Julie Brumlik owns the company Dremu Skin Care. Julie struggled mightily to get Dremu off the ground, selling via Department Stores. She got her product into the makeup counters of major stores but sales were sabotaged by the gals behind the counter who are employed not by the stores but by the cosmetics companies. They would always manage to sell their own wares instead of Dremu and Julie lost a lot of money.

Julie’s first crack in the sidewalk was Google. She started using AdWords and her sales immediately took off. Julie’s staff is now extremely proficient at the use of Google. But that’s not her only sales channel. She also gets sales through the purchase of remnant space in large newspapers with full page ads, a strategy developed by Gary Halbert.

Print advertising of this kind is one of Gary’s areas of great expertise, and Gary carries this out as a joint venture partner. Julie and team are also constantly experimenting with sources of email promotion sources; publicity opportunities; cultivation of relationships with their own email list; and Search Engine Optimization.

If you pay attention (as well you should!) you will notice that my own business – both the parts that have to do with selling AdWords information and the parts that don’t – is only about 20% dependent on AdWords. The other 80% of our business comes from:

• Ongoing relationships via e-mail and snail-mail with people who opted in 2, 3, 4, even 5 years ago
• Affiliates
• Snail-mail follow-up (Just got an order from a guy who received the CD 3 years ago and finally listened to it… and listened to it again, called to get some questions answered and bought)
• Sales of my bookstore book, The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords
• Media publicity from articles and interviews with people like USA Today
• Word of mouth and reputation
• Banner ads
• Search Engine Optimization
• Articles in other peoples’ e-zines
• Teleseminars and joint ventures with other marketers
• Radio interviews
• Speaking opportunities at live seminars
• Press releases

It’s a wonderful thing not to be dependent on any one thing. Absolutely wonderful. And it’s important to realize that each of these things feeds the other. Do you remember my “Expanding Universe Theory”? The one where you start with AdWords and then do other Pay Per Clicks and SEO and then Affiliates and then print advertising and so on, step by step until you dominate the world?

Notice how the Expanding Universe Theory has a built in diversification factor, and its attendant stability. Eventually people hear about you everywhere they go and if a competitor decides to take you on in any one media, they have to go up against the synergies you’ve developed in all the other media combined. You become a formidable opponent.

In one of my Roundtable groups (Roundtable is my highest level coaching group, an exclusive, $14,000 per year Mastermind forum that meets three times per year) I have a member who spends $10,000 a day on Google; another who spends $15,000 a day, and another who spends $25,000 a day. That’s right, do the math – that’s $3 to $10 million per year of clicks. And in case you’re wondering, yes, these guys are making a ton of dough. Every day.

In one or two of these cases, the massive ad spend is an outgrowth of a wildly successful product offering and promotional strategy and fine-tuned sales funnel. But for all three there is also an extreme proficiency in the art of Google advertising. If any of these guys got shut down today they could, within a week or two, be up and running in some completely different business and/or market and already be on their way to success.

Never P Into The Wind

When you do challenge the Ubiquitous They, do not fight them directly and do not take them on alone. The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab got no funding from the Mother Ship. Their money – totaling about $10 million – all came from private donations. (That’s got to be a marketing case study in and of itself. Probably a boring one that involved a lot of hard work.) Do not write a business plan that expects the Ubiquitous They to provide you with funding.

Whatever your cause – alternative health, better forms of education, a different way to do Futures trading, or just making Geology un-boring – there’s a grass roots out there, waiting to be summoned, who will rally behind you and support you. They will become your raving fans. Build your army in secret and when the Ubiquitous They tries to crush you, they will find that you have become too strong. You are a force to be reckoned with.

Bring on the revolution.

Perry Marshall

The Dignity and Virtue of University Politics

When I was a freshman in college I was in the University of Nebraska Honors program (I managed to stay in for a year until my grades sank too low and I got kicked out) and one of the perks of the Honors program was lunch with various faculty members. One such lunch was with the Dean of the Journalism department. At one point he said, “If you think national politics is nasty, it’s nowhere near as ugly as the politics in a big university.”

You have to understand that what drives most universities is not the pursuit of wisdom – or even knowledge – but money, sex and power. Many are the professors whose curiosity and desire to explore was extinguished long ago, and their primary motivation is a secure job and the admiration that comes with their elite status. They never read anything outside their narrow specialty. Most academics are cowards.

And ironically, the sciences – where books are already becoming obsolete before they’re printed – is the place where you are most likely to be told “Pay no attention to those people, they’re merely selling myth and superstition. We’ve already known how everything works going on 30 years now.”

The New York Times did relate Jahn’s side of the story, but hardly sounded sympathetic.

Remember, the Times is part of the same Establishment. Their advertising revenue and their editorial policies are driven by the same reductionist motives, the same Big Pharma, the same political candidates and hospitals and insurance companies who would have you believe the solution to everything is to take a pill. Your son doesn’t need to go outside and play, Ms. Stephenson, your son just needs five milligrams of Ritalyn each day and he’ll be just fine.”

Do not think for a minute that what you read in the newspaper or see on TV or hear on the radio is in any way objective or complete. Ken McCarthy has a little aphorism:

“Reporters don’t report, they repeat. They don’t investigate, they elaborate.”

The other night I did a coaching call with a woman who, having come from an academic background (an articulate, well-educated gal from the east coast and perhaps an Ivy League education) and she was rather overwhelmed with the rigors of the entrepreneurial world.

In particular she was trying to get used to the idea of appointing herself as the authority on her topic. Writing a report or guide, putting up an opt-in page, buying some clicks and building an email list.

She was somewhat shocked at the idea of… well, just doing this. With no permission from anyone. With nobody checking her work to make sure the information was accurate.

Don’t worry, honey, if your facts are wrong somebody will send you a nasty email before too long and you’ll fix it. How often does the New York Times check their facts? How do you know they’re right? Do you know where most of these reporters get their information? They get ‘em from press releases. Who writes the press releases? Marketers and publicists. That’s why American Idol is on the front page and the earthquake in Lisbon is on page four. Get it?

 

So now you’re a marketer. And what that means is – if you publish a bunch of dreck, people will read the dreck and believe it, at least for a little while. And if you take on the responsibility to tell the truth and help people, then finally somebody will be telling the truth and helping people instead of merely repeating and elaborating.

It’s all up to you, baby. It’s like that conversation in The Matrix, the one Morpheus had with Neo:

I see it in your eyes, Neo. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that’s not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

No.

Why not?

Because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?

The Matrix.

Do you want to know what it is?

Yes.

The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work…when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

What truth?

That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.

Ivy League East Coast gal asks, “Perry, how do you sleep at night, having such a cynical view of things?”

“I sleep just fine. Because I know that most of what you hear from the Ubiquitous They is either wrong or irrelevant. I know that it’s possible to dig deeper and get to the truth about things, when you really want to. I don’t have to put up with the mediocrity and misery that everyone else accepts as ‘normal.’

“And I know that when I find out the truth about something, I can tell other people what’s really going on and the Ubiquitous They can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube once it’s out.”

Once you realize you can’t always trust the scientific establishment and the news and the Ubiquitous They, that’s when you rest easier, because now you know that there are better solutions out there than the ones they sold you. You rest peacefully knowing you’re on your way to the truth, even if it’s not yet in your grasp.

If you want to see a more progressed version of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab story – one that’s had more success in challenging the reigning orthodoxy – watch the Intelligent Design movement. They’ve made a lot of mis-steps and taken some painful beatings, but they continue to gain ground, to the horror of their shrieking opponents.

Richard Sternberg, the editor of a biology journal who published the first peer-reviewed paper advocating ID was viciously trashed by the Establishment once his sin against them was reported to the High Priests. And, as usual, the part of the story that’s actually worth hearing never makes the front page of the newspaper. You have to dig for it, because the Front Page story is engineered to make them appear ridiculous and incompetent.

The same thing happens to countless challengers of orthodoxy: Homeopathy researchers, people with alternative cancer treatments… prophets still get stoned to death outside of town.

Bryan Todd once said to me, “In every subculture there are certain discoveries that are not allowed to be made.”

But here you are, making discoveries anyway. Readers of this newsletter constitute a small but mighty and disproportionately influential brigade of the New Guard – in opposition to the Old Guard. Just you wait. As time unfolds you will see the shift. The Ubiquitous They can impede you but they cannot stop you. Paradigms will change. In time you and I will shape the world that is to come – the opinions, the zeitgeist – and you will achieve success.

And at that time the gravest danger will be accepting your own Orthodoxy as gospel truth.

We see it today with direct marketing. There are many dogmas that have accumulated over the years. Old classics like “They laughed when I sat down at the Piano, but when I started to play…”

Fresh and inspiring when they were new, but that was 70 years ago. Now they’re worn out.

Which of these ads follows a cookie-cutter formula out of a direct marketing book?

I was scammed 37 times - Dannys-Scam-Review.com – These websites are absolute scams I will show you the ones that work

Coffee Exposed - www.coffeefool.com – A secret that coffee co’s don’t want you to know.

What Type of Mom You Are? - www.AreYouASlackerMom.com – 15 fun question that will tell you what type of Parent you are!

Common Sense vs Evolution - www.EveryStudent.com – A frank essay showing some pitfalls of evolution using common sense

Are You a Happy Person? - www.chatterbean.com – This free PhD Certified Test will show how happy you really are!

What Do Guys Really Want? - InsideAGuysMind.com – Learn The “Real” Secret To Catching And Keeping Your Dream Guy.

Are You Romantic? - www.Chatterbean.com/Romantic – Find out with this Free Personality Test to see how Romantic you are!

Why Mommy is a Democrat - littledemocrats.net – The book George Bush doesn’t want your kids to read!

Clinton Climate Change - www.ClintonFoundation.org – Learn how Bill Clinton is making a difference in Climate Change battle

Get Paid for Writing - www.Helium.com - Write Short Articles & Earn Money. Free. Fun. Real. at Helium.com!

If They Are A Virgin - www.Your1Love.com – We Can Predict The Exact Name Of Your 1 True Love, Try It Now!

Turn $600 into $39,000 - www.VisionInvesting.com – The Forgotten Commodity – that could turn every $600 into $39,000!

Never P Into the Wind – www.jrdubar.com – by geologist Dr. Jules R. DuBar. Who said geology had to be boring?

All of these adhere to the principles of direct marketing. But none lifts a technique out of a book and statically applies it. Each adds its own twist of originality. I was talking to John Carlton about this yesterday and he commented to me that all the current dogmas began as a spark of originality in someone’s brain. Don’t be afraid to buck the trend and try something new.

Margins of Reality and The Handcuffs of Orthodoxy

A couple of years ago, Howie Jacobson turned me on to an utterly boring, thoroughly fascinating book: Margins of Reality by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne of the Engineering Anomalies Research Lab at Princeton University.

This book divulges, in mind-numbing detail, exhaustive laboratory experiments conclusively demonstrating that some (not all) people can affect the outcome of scientific tests merely by concentrating. They proved, i.e. with 99.999% statistical confidence, that some people can alter the trajectory of balls falling through the air, or receive telepathic messages from others, or see things that other people are looking at (“remote viewing”).

If you do split tests with your Google ads and go to www.splittester.com to make sure the winner is really the winner, then you know what I’m talking about when I say 99.999% statistical confidence. A lot more confidence than any of us in marketing usually need to have.

It documents the carrying out of these experiments. Being both an engineer and a copywriter, I’ve got a pretty sensitive BS detector, and as I read this book I thought, “This book is waaaaay too boring for anybody to have possibly made this up.” Which is to say, these people indeed proved in a laboratory at Princeton that there is legitimacy to things that most of us would classify as psychic or metaphysical.

Hardly an insignificant discovery. Actually, the implications of this work on almost every field of knowledge are sweeping.

Well just the other day Howie sent me a New York Times article explaining that this lab is now being closed. Jahn and Dunne said that they have overwhelmingly proved their case with all the scientific data that anyone could ever ask for, and… neither Princeton itself nor the mainstream scientific establishment will accept it. They simply refuse. Jahn and Dunne say their work is done.

The article relates how they attempted for years to publish this work in scientific journals and no one anywhere would accept it. One editor said, in his rejection letter, “I’ll accept this paper if you can telepathically transmit it to me.” The Engineering Anomalies Research Lab is a redheaded stepchild of Princeton, the butt of jokes and an object of derision.

The most fascinating chapter in Jahn’s book is the last, which discusses why the scientific establishment refuses to acknowledge or even examine such data. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence. And he points out that the most progressive scientists – people like Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein – were not only open to such possibilities but actively curious. The very top people in all professions usually possess this kind of curiosity.

Buying and Selling Knowledge vs. Wisdom

” Accept a greeting from everyone, but advice from only one in a thousand” –Ben Sira, 180 BC The worst reason to accept advice is because it’s free or cheap. The worst reason to sell it is because the margins are high. Successful people know this. People who turn to Cosmo for relationship advice do not.

There’s a widespread notion that real solutions are more difficult or costly than band-aids.

The more experience I get under my belt the more I’m convinced the opposite is true. Band-aids have their place, but they’re vastly more expensive than real problem solving. They’re also usually more elaborate, more byzantine.

Most problems have very simple root issues underneath all the entanglement and complexity. Knowledge is convoluted and elaborate. Wisdom is simple and unpretentious.

Knowledge is sophisticated and self-congratulating. Wisdom is elegant and demure. Knowledge is brash and and boastful; Wisdom speaks softly. Knowledge arrives with handsomely dressed lawyers and MBA’s; Wisdom abides patiently in a dusty old book.

Knowledge promises you the world but takes it all back in the fine print, with clawbacks.

Wisdom is a stern taskmaster, requiring full tuition in advance and subjecting you to the cruelest of exams. But in the end she rewards you with riches undreamed of. Our old friend Ben Sira puts it this way:

“At first Wisdom will lead him by devious ways, filling him with fear. Her discipline will be a torment to him, and her decrees a hard test until he trusts her with all his heart. Then she will come straight back to him again and gladden and reveal her secrets to him. But if he strays from her, she will desert him and abandon him to his fate.”

What Do Guys Really Want?

Learn The “Real” Secret To Catching And Keeping Your Dream Guy.

InsideAGuysMind.com

…and goes even deeper when you click to the landing page:

Brilliant pitch. Notice the “Christian Carter should go on Oprah” which sure ain’t there by accident. Even the name Christian Carter is cleverly selected. I’m sure it helps that the girlfriend-of-site-owner who wrote this testimonial knows a thing or two about copywriting and PR. :^>

Oh, and don’t overlook the fact that the landing page itself is not about what guys want, it’s all about what girls want. ‘Cuz that’s who’s buying.

Another great Google ad, visible on a web page near you:

Get Paid for Writing

Write Short Articles & Earn Money.

Free. Fun. Real. at Helium.com!

www.Helium.com

If you ask me, the “Free. Fun. Real.” Is the thing that pushes this one over the top. It’s disarming.

No one can overlook a headline that says “Get Paid for Writing.”

Here’s another one I like:

Never P Into the Wind

by geologist Dr. Jules R. DuBar.

Who said geology had to be boring?

www.jrdubar.com

I have to seriously wonder if the book is actually selling, but Dr. Jules did manage to knock out a pretty popular little ad here.

Entering The Jet Stream via Banner Ads

Today in the age of Pay Per Click, the lowly banner ad receives little attention. Few Internet gurus hawk e-books and coaching programs for banner ads.

Is there anyone who has not seen this ad or a similar one from the same company?

This puppy’s been running for years. Maybe almost a decade. I’m sure they have to fiddle with this thing constantly to keep the response up, so it’s not as low-maintenance as the Corns Gone in Five Days ad. But it’s had billions upon billions of impressions and fuels a successful biz.

Bullets of Banner Ad Wisdom – Don’t overlook the fact that banner ads are the original basis for paid Internet traffic:

• Successful banner ads are a study in the relationship between graphics and text

• The secret to banner ad success is the same as Pay Per Click: Split test, split test, split test.

One guy who makes his entire living buying banner ad traffic told me the secret is simple: Test 50 ads.

• Banner ads are sold on a Cost Per 1000 Impressions (“CPM”) basis. It’s an auction and it costs 25 cents or 50 cents or $1.00 or $2.00 to show your ad 1000 times. Few people know that PPC ads are sold the exact same way, people just think they’re paying per click. But because of the Click Thru Rate formula (your position = Bid Price x CTR) the positions are really being sold based on what makes Google or Yahoo the most money per 1000 impressions.

• Banner ad networks are not nearly as targeted as search engines so what works there is massmarket, general consumer offers. Notice that every Jet Stream example I’ve shown you today is a general consumer offer, not a narrow niche. If you want to enter the Jet Stream at the highest level, you have to have truly broad appeal.

Most people don’t know you can run banner ads on Google AdSense. It’s right there in your list of ad creation choices. You can upload 468 x 60 Banners, 728 x 90 Leaderboards, 200 x 200, 250 x 250, 300 x 250 and 336 x 280; 120 x 600 Skyscrapers and 160 x 600 Wide Skyscrapers.

Each of these sizes potentially grabs up inventory that you can’t get any other way.

You start with text that worked in your text ads, which are easy to test, then you combine it with graphics in your banner ad and try some things out. Banner ads get much higher CTR’s than text ads, so if you run your ads under CPM based site-targeting instead of keyword-driven Pay Per Click, you can scoop up some serious bargain traffic.

How Google’s Bot Serves Up Ads

Imagine you’re supposed to come up with some kind of program that reads the words on a web page and matches them to Google ads. At first this looks like it’s gonna be easy, but when you actually do it the results are a little freakish. Teaching robots to read English turns out to be a lot harder than it sounds.

But little by little your team gets better and better at finding ads that match the pages, but the CTR’s are still lousy, the conversion rates are not so good for advertisers and revenues aren’t very good.

So they tweak the formula: The program begins to rotate different ads in and out, and constantly searches for ads that get better and better click-thrus. The system learns how often to serve the same ads vs. how often to rotate new ones. The system starts with a narrow match of topics but then branches out further and further, eventually trying ads that have nothing to do with the content on the page – if they’ve been successful other places.

Gurus start teaching webmasters how to play the AdSense game and the whole Internet becomes better and better optimized for message-to-market match.

The ad I want you to focus on in the screen shot is this one:

Why Mommy is a Democrat

The book George Bush doesn’t want your kids to read!

littledemocrats.net

This ad has nothing to do with the content on this page. I’ve seen this ad everywhere. In GMail it turns up constantly. This ad has entered the Jet Stream. It gets clicks from so many people and places that it doesn’t have to even be “relevant” (in the normal search engine sense of the word) in order to work. In actuality, it’s naturally relevant to LOTS of people. Google’s bot has figured that out and it shows everywhere.

This ad is probably seen hundreds of thousands of times per day and I’m gonna guess that sales at littledemocrats.net are brisk. Write an ad like this one and you’ve hit a home run, baby.

Why does this ad work?

First let’s understand that everything in this ad matters. Everything. The choice of every single word, especially the word “Mommy.” The choice of every capital or lowercase letter. The URL. The choice of where words break between the 2nd and 3rd line. The lowercase “l” and “d” in littledemocrats.net. I even wonder if littledemocrats.net might outperform .com because it sounds less “commercial” to the target audience (hey, some people don’t know that politics is ALL about commerce, and almost nothing else).

This ad works because parents wish to enlist their children as combatants in the culture wars as young as possible. Because there is a culture war and some people hate this ad just as much as others surely love it. Because George Bush and all his cronies are scheming behind closed doors to hide this information from you!

Let’s look at a few more:

Coffee Exposed – www.coffeefool.com – A secret that coffee co’s don’t want you to know.

This ad is ultra-successful, possibly the most successful AdSense ad on Google right now, more successful than littledemocrats.net. And there’s that secret again, the one that a big and powerful someone doesn’t want you to know. Here’s the Alexa traffic graph for Coffeefool – notice the sudden upward lurch in late ‘06:

I think the URL coffeefool.com is intriguing. As a matter of fact I think it’s essential to the intrigue of this ad. CoffeeSecret.com would be just a bit too brassy, too much of a giveaway. I think most marketers underestimate the power of subtlety.

Notice the format Google uses for their ads when they’re displayed in a long horizontal space instead of the usual 4-line format. You see here that the display URL is the 2nd thing in line. Why? Because it’s the 2nd most influential factor in what makes people click.

Here’s another:

What Type of Mom You Are? – www.AreYouASlackerMom.com – 15 fun question that will tell you what type of Parent you are!

Yeah, I know. The grammar and spelling is all wrong in this ad and it’s redundant. If you fixed those problems the ad would stop working.

Why does this ad work? Because moms are insecure. They’re constantly second guessing themselves, ever worried that they’re secretly ruining their children.

Given that women control 80% of all disposable income, I think that pandering to women’s fears and insecurities is the #1 marketing strategy in the whole world. Did you notice that two of these three specifically target women? I bet you the Coffeefool ad gets mostly clicked on by women too.

The exploitation of womens’ insecurity is a study in and of itself. Hey, why don’t we banter about that for a little while?

Here’s the latest issue of Elle magazine:

The first thing I’d like you to understand about women’s magazines (or blush, or foundation, or littledemocrat books, or Petunia Pickle Bottom diaper bags), is that women do not buy these things because they’re confident, self assured and ready to take on the world.

Nor do they buy Elle magazine, or most other things that are sold to women, because they feel lovely and beautiful and adequate.

No, they make these purchases because they feel uncertain and inadequate, lacking in self confidence, fearful of taking on the world.

They feel ugly today, their wardrobe is dated, if only those B cups were C’s, thighs are too big, too many wrinkles, youth is fading fast, and their man may abandon them for a more captivating woman.

Elle magazine throws salt in all those wounds. Let’s de-construct it, starting at the top and going counterclockwise:

Diet pills are unsafe; dressing for your man is a disaster in waiting; Gwen Stefani, the star of the day, has it all together and you don’t.

You’re not getting enough sex, money or respect; in fact nobody really respects you at all. You don’t know what the winning looks are; therapy could destroy your relationship; you’re not wearing the hottest trends, your look is outdated.

Your handbags are uninspiring, your shoes are dowdy, and if your tastes are going to even approach respectability, you’d better have a guide, honey.

When you put it that way, it gets kinda depressing, doesn’t it?

All businesses and all varieties of work are about solving problems. Where there is no problem, there is no business. Invention is the mother of necessity, as Thorstein Veblen said. The uglier the problems are, the deeper the insecurity, the more lucrative the opportunity.

I f all this sounds dreadfully cynical, that’s because it is. (And I will circle back to this later.) But listen, nobody’s going to part with their money if they feel totally comfortable and at ease with themselves and the world. They have to want something first. The agent of change is dissatisfaction. One of the secret criteria for a highly successful niche market, that master marketers intuitively understand, is that your audience has an insecurity that desperately cries out to be alleviated. An itch that is almost unscratchable.

Here are some Jet Stream Google ads that are more targeted at men:

Turn $600 into $39,000 - www.VisionInvesting.com – The Forgotten Commodity – that could turn every $600 into $39,000!

The choice of numbers on this one is especially interesting, and “The Forgotten Commodity” begs to be clicked on.

I was scammed 37 times – Dannys-Scam-Review.com – These websites are absolute scams I will show you the ones that work This one’s everywhere too. The cleverness of this ad is it has the sound and feel of something haphazardly, conversationally written, when in fact I suspect it’s quite carefully engineered.

Standard wisdom in Google ad writing is that capitalizing most of your words works best. I think that’s generally true for Google search but less so on the content network. Here’s an example:

Religion: 7 Great Lies

From the Ridiculous to the Sublime

A Blast of Brutal Honesty

Religion.InCrisis.Info

CTR: 0.19%

seven lies of religion

from the ridiculous to the sublime

a blast of brutal honesty

religion.incrisis.info

CTR: 0.22%

I recognize that these ads aren’t 100% identical – I was just winging it and not doing rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons. (I’m going to be a good boy and test apples to apples from now on.) But sometimes all lowercase creates a conversational Gen-Y feel and attracts more clicks.

BTW do you think those religion ads attack an insecurity?

Let’s take a look at a few more Jet Stream ads:

Are You a Happy Person? – www.chatterbean.com – This free PhD Certified Test will show how happy you really are!

Yeah, I know, taking a PhD certified test to find out how happy you are makes no sense.

Gee, don’t you know if you’re happy already? Still, tests like this – even really serious assessments – are a perpetual source of fascination.

This one gets a little closer to the insecurity jugular:

Using Gmail to De-Construct Google’s AdSense System

AdWords on the Google search engine is a pretty straightforward affair: Bid on keyword, and when keyword is typed in, ad shows up. AdSense, however, is kind of squishy. What web pages will your ads show up on in the AdSense network? Anybody’s guess.

At first, buying ads on AdSense was kind of a lousy deal. For a long time I had little interest in AdSense traffic. The quality was lousy and the ROI was bad. But then I had this one campaign – I think this was three years ago – AdSense was turned off and one day I turned it on just to see what would happen.

Slam, an avalanche of traffic hit my site. That particular web page went from 15-20 opt-ins a day to over 100, instantly. And I mean instantly. It was good traffic, too. Turns out half of Google’s revenue comes from AdSense and a disproportionately large amount of Google’s patents are for AdSense technology. Little by little it gets better.

Wanna reverse-engineer the AdSense system and easily, transparently see how it works?

Open a GMail account.

Here you see a screen shot of an email about Valentines day and NLP skills, with an array of ads around it. Every one of these ads is instructive:

Notice the first two ads are not related to Valentine’s day. The one running across the top in the colored band is for a special needs camp.

Why? Because there’s quite a bit in this email about kids.

“Why Mommy is a Democrat” is one that’s entered the Jet Stream. More about that in a minute.

After that you see a variety of Valentine’s Day ads, selling flowers.

Notice that none of these ads is about NLP.

OK, so how does this AdSense machine actually work?

By doing automatically what the “Corns Gone in 5 Days” people had to discover via trial and error: Serving up ads in a wider and wider circle of places… sifting and sorting until a few gems turn up… finding that there are some ads that work almost anywhere.

Those ads and what makes them tick are the focus of our conversation today.