Joe Polish & I Love Marketing Podcast: Facebook Ads
Marketing legends Joe Polish and Dean Jackson interview Perry Marshall & Tom Meloche, on Facebook advertising. If you haven’t caught one of our presentations on Facebook advertising you should definitely check this out. 2012 is the year Facebook will reach 1 billion users.
http://ilovemarketing.com/episode-053the-one-with-perry-marshall-and-tom-meloche/
Should You Let Google “Improve” Your AdWords Campaigns?
Q: Perry, wondering what you (fellow adwords expert) thinks of the new “benefits” Google is bringing out. Constant emails about mobile this, call us for a strategy session on that, conversion blah, upgrade this right now. My client’s campaigns are well refined now & they don’t want Google monkeying with them. Bottom line: The 3+ “upgrade” emails/mo. are overwhelming my clients with nonsense. –Rico
A: I posted this question on my Facebook wall. Look at the powerful response I got:
My Answer: You NEVER let Google touch the campaigns you have painstakingly built by hand with your blood, sweat and tears. EVER.
If I only had a dollar for every person who lost $20,000+ because they committed this grave error.
You can let them build a side campaign for you and put it on pause if you want… and cautiously turn it on… and watch it like a hawk. But 90% of the time they do a disastrous job. I’m dead serious. I’ve seen this over and over again. I cannot specifically recall a single instance that turned out well.
Moral of the story:
Never put a German Shepherd in charge of the ham sandwiches.
Roundtable Chronicles for January 31, 2012
Last week in Orlando Florida my highest level coaching groups had our once-every-4-months Serial Entrepreneur Fest. Highlights:
–>10MIL IN LESS THAN 2 YEARS: Mr. S has grown his company from $1 million to $10 million in 21 months. Just had his first million dollar month this fall. He’s got bugs in his teeth and every kind of growing pain you can think of. Fortunately he takes the mercenary approach to problems, and the guy never looks back.
Challenges:
*The opportunity he’s exploiting is huge but will evaporate in 5 years. He’ll either be in the driver’s seat then, or in a different business. Either he builds the platform that everyone standardizes on, or somebody else does.
*He’s doing business in dozens of countries and each has its own regulations. He’s got all sorts of fun with lawyers, foreign bank accounts, taxes etc. Good problems to have.
*Everyone wants what he’s building. If he plays his cards right, he’ll grow this thing to $100 million and sell to a much larger company.
–>SAFE ENTRY ON A SHOESTRING: Mr. T and his wife sell natural products and their #1 channel is good ol’ fashioned snail mail catalog. They’re about to jump into the Cosmetics market.
Not an easy decision. Because you either have ALL the colors people want, ALL the ingredients of a beautiful face, or none. There’s no doing this halfway. Major investment in containers, labels and product launch, just to get the first sale.
The group brainstormed a new way of getting critical data from a small group of test users without biting off the whole investment. Now they can do this in stages.
–>TAIL WAGS DOG: Mr. B is a specialized lender who gets referrals from major players in his business. 1/3 of his business comes from guys ‘throwing him a bone.’ He grew his biz 31% last year and his marketing is solid.
His next move is to maneuver himself in the tollgate position where he’s the one giving out the referrals and them waiting for him to throw the bone. A total reversal of what’s normal. He’s doing it by exploiting every ounce of authority he’s got. He’s got the perfect demeanor for it and I think he’s gonna pull this off.
–>RE-INVENTING LEAD GEN: Mr. E has been buying leads the old fashioned way. He’s very good at it but I showed him a completely new way to do it, which gets him not leads but qualified buyers, at lower cost per acquisition than he’d ever get from a lead.
–>CHANGING THE WORLD: Mr. N has two businesses and both are doing great. He’s now turned his attention to a burning passion, which is reforming a very specific segment of the education market. This could conceivably be worth millions but that’s not why he’s doing it. The money is not his focus.
Rather, it’s a CAUSE because he knows he can transform the world. (At least for a few hundred thousand kids.) The group gave him input on how to keep some huge company from patenting his ideas and taking them off the market.
–>EVIL LAWYERS: Speaking of patents, Mr. J has been embattled for years with a bogus patent lawsuit perpetrated by bloodthirsty attorneys exploiting the legal system. We explored his situation and concluded: There’s no way to call the dogs off.
In his session, based on advice from an attorney in the group from Italy, we discussed how to move his assets to the European Union and take advantage of the differences in patent law. Hey, sometimes you gotta fight fire with fire.
–>THE POWER AND THE GLORY: I can tell you this guy’s name. Roundtable Member Benji Rabhan of Morris Media Works, age 26, made the Empact100 List, a roster of top young entrepreneurs in the US. In November he attended a special reception at the White House, honored by President Obama for his achievements.
I’m extremely proud of my Roundtable members. If you’d like to apply for the Roundtable waiting list, visit www.perrymarshall.com/roundtable/
Perry Marshall
How much do people respect your time?
My most famous ever blog post is called “Perry’s Greed.” It’s about how, at an evening seminar in Chicago, a bunch of people asked me out to lunch. I told them, “If you pay my fee I’ll be happy to sit down with you.”
This made a lot of people angry. They retorted that I had no right to decline such requests.
I responded: “I’m a charitable guy, but I don’t consider regular American business people to be charity. There’s all kinds of poor kids in developing countries who need it a lot more than they do.”
Shockingly few people ‘got’ what I was saying.
I think that’s because they didn’t want to.
None of the angry people, by the way, had ever actually bought anything from me. (I checked.) They were all FREELOADERS.
The world is FULL of freeloaders. And the more accomplished you are, the more entitled they’ll feel to chewing up your time.
You must steadfastly refuse their guilt-trips and their whining. The only reason I could afford to travel to China last month and bring a little girl to the United States from a state-run orphanage was because I assign far more value to my time than the freeloaders who demand free business advice.
If I had lunch with the freeloaders, they wouldn’t do anything I told them to do anyway. Some of ‘em would stick me with that tab, too.
The only way you’ll be able to accomplish your mission in life is when you tell your own freeloaders “devil take the hindmost” and keep the main thing the main thing.
If making your time exponentially more valuable is high on your list this year, you might consider joining my Private Client group. It’s a 12 month program where I personally and confidentially work with you to get more stretches of $10,000 per hour work in 2012.
It will inevitably mean making less time for less worthy people, so you can make room for what is truly important to you.
What is truly important to you?
http://www.perrymarshall.com/pcg/
Martin Luther King – Equality – USP
Today is Martin Luther King day in the US. 236 years ago the founding fathers of the United States declared:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
MLK had a larger vision. Within those words he heard an even deeper meaning. To him they transcended race, not just social class.
One day in 1955 a certain Rosa Parks decided she’d had enough. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a bus, and provoked a worldwide movement.
In his book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville said every single technological development of the last 1000 years has created more equality, not less. Whether it was intended to or not.
Tocqueville said when you make equality possible, you open the door for people (as we say in Planet Perry :^) to develop their own Unique Selling Proposition. So they can make a unique contribution to everyone else.
In 1835 he needed a word for this, so he invented one:
“Individualism.”
Rosa Parks responded to her inner voice, took a stand by staying seated. She asserted her individualism and shifted the atmosphere of the world.
Martin Luther King responded to his inner voice, acted on his individualism. And led a nation of African Americans to freedom.
You are just as much an individual as Rosa Parks or MLK. What is YOUR inner voice calling YOU to do?
Today, just for five minutes, please, would you do this?
Close your computer.
Switch off the TV.
Turn off your cell phone.
Shut out the distractions.
For five minutes, ask:
“Inner voice, will you please speak?”
Don’t think. Don’t talk.
Just listen.
“Google AdWords for Dummies” book review
Google AdWords for Dummies
by Howie Jacobson, Joel McDonald & Kristie McDonald
Wiley Books ©2011 403 pages
A few years ago at an airport, I got a call from Howie Jacobson. “Hey Perry, the people who publish the ‘Dummies’ books asked me to write an AdWords book and I said yes. Um, I hope that’s okay.”
I’d taught him AdWords early on, and he didn’t wanna tick me off by competing with my own books.
“No problem, Howie. I just want to make sure all the people in the AdWords cartel are my friends.”
Howie is a very good friend of mine and I’m proud of him and his book. I also know his co-authors, Joel and Kristie. The three of them run the online marketing firm Vitruvian. Allow me to tell you about Howie’s book.
The first thing I like about this book is the cartoons. AdWords has gone from being a glamorous “bright shiny object” for make-money-fast types (deservedly so) to being quite a complex undertaking for large accounts.
The result is that about half the AdWords books and courses out there are dreadfully boring. They read like computer manuals. It’s a shame to do that to AdWords because it’s a game for people who understand people just as much as it’s a game for people who do spreadsheets.
Howie’s occasional humor is appreciated. You might want to apply some humor in your AdWords career, as well.
Unless you want to drill down into your AdWords campaigns with Excel pivot tables and mind-numbing detail, this book contains all the basic information you need to build a large and successful campaign.
My favorite chapter is The Ten (or so) Top AdWords Mistakes. Success in AdWords is largely about having layers of refinement that most other advertisers don’t bother with. This tells you what the 10 most important layers are. If you already spend significant dinero on AdWords and want an instant improvement, this chapter will pay for your book a dozen times over.
And the case studies in the following chapter highlight different dimensions of thinking that you need to solve different kinds of problems.
The advantage Howie & company have over most people is, they’ve worked in dozens of different industries, where click behavior varies widely from one to another. This chapter is bound to show you something you’d never notice on your own.
One last thing: Howie’s modesty – to the point of checking in with me before he went and wrote the first edition of this book – tells you something about him. He under-promises, over delivers, and treats readers, vendors and customers with respect. When you’re laying down your cash to grow a business, that’s a big deal.
Howie respects your dollar and that’s what makes him a worthy teacher.
Excellent job, Howie. A top pick.
Google AdWords for Dummies on Amazon
6 Years Slugging it Out & Supremely Frustrated
Got this courageous if depressing blog comment from a guy named Olivier:
Perry: The more i listen to you, the more i feel im screwed and have no chance of ever making it and maintaining my place in a market.
And I always felt i didnt have super value(expertise) to share in any market.
So as a result, should i just give up on the idea of making it online? If im no expert in any market, i dont have a competitive advantage no?
These may seem like basic questions, but believe it or not theyre coming from someone who has tried to make it online for 6 years, and has been through tons of the big guru programs (good and bad)
Oliver
Oliver,
This is a GREAT question. So many layers behind it, too. I’m going to make this question the subject of my next Renaissance Club newsletter which will get mailed out in about 2 weeks.
Short answer:
If you don’t really know what you’re talking about, then God forbid that you should ever become an info marketer. The last thing planet earth needs is another self-proclaimed expert delivering candy-coated advice who is following people who are following people who are lost and doesn’t actually know jack ****.
The reason Google appears to hate so many info marketers is that 75% of them are lame-ass posers. And everybody knows it.
If you don’t have super value to share, then let yourself off the hook. <<Big sigh of relief>> Don’t try. Find someone who does and share THEIR value.
The world has way too many people offering mediocre products and services which have no real justification for their existence. Why clutter the marketplace with more noise and junk?
There are millions of unbelievably good products, inventions, widgets, ideas, books, courses; and bona fide experts who are too modest, too shy, or too uneducated about marketing, etc. to do a good job for themselves. Find one of the good guys and help them.
Lots more could be said about this, much more useful advice on what to actually go out and do. I’ll go deeper in the January Perry Marshall Marketing Letter which goes out snail-mail.
And remember this: In the land of the blind, the man with one eye gets to be king. Many markets are populated by unsophisticated, uneducated marketers. A lot of “turn key” programs and systems that are popular among marketers are aimed at incredibly competitive markets populated by ninjas.
Most markets are a lot easier than that. Pick a battle you can win.
10 Predictions for 2012
1. One of the world’s 3 major economic systems (Europe, USA, Asia) will experience a MAJOR correction. Huge snapping sound propagates ’round the globe.
Where will the tsunami strike first? I don’t know, but some clues:
- Surely nobody needs to remind you about the Unstoppable Force (US government spending), vs. the Immovable Object (reality). The Unstoppable Force is not unstoppable and will hit a wall. The next wave of billionaires will be options traders who bet their money that sooner or later, reality will prevail.
- China is in a massive real estate bubble. A condo in Guangzhou costs every bit as much as a condo in downtown Chicago; in Shanghai it costs more. I have no way of predicting when this is going to end but it will.
- Britain’s debt is even worse than the US.
- Porter Stansberry’s famous “End of America” video (a contrivance of some truly brilliant copywriters) predicts the next apocalypse will come when the world suddenly decides to abandon the dollar.
The reason Porter is wrong is that the other choices are even worse. Sort of like an election, where you vote for the person you suspect to be the least-evil puppet ruler. Karl Deninger said, “The US dollar is a hooker with crabs… all the other currencies have AIDS.”
2. Cost Per Impression for online marketing exceeds that of offline. Online offers no particular price advantage in thick niches; the advantage is in the bells and whistles and targeting. Well worth the money, by the way.
This trend is already firmly established with “Jugular Offers” (troublesome B2C categories like business opportunities, weight loss, alternative medicine) where Google bans are the norm.
This means ninja marketers now use Pay Per Click to test and perfect, then cut deals elsewhere for the big profits. (Funny…. hey, wasn’t I saying that 8 years ago?) Customers acquired offline are more loyal.
Online-offline integration is the name of the game. I know a surprising number of guys who are making big bucks with radio advertising. Almost all the best info marketers I know are using direct mail profitably.
3. Social Media as a hotbed of demographic and psychographic insight – not sales channel.
Yesterday I was eating corn chips and on the bag was the obligatory blue Facebook “F” logo. “Woo hoo!” I thought. “I sure do love Facebook, it’s where I interact with my favorite brands and learn about coupons and special promotions. Happy Happy Joy Joy!”
Before another minute was allowed to pass, I rushed to my computer and became a fan of Frito-Lay.
Seriously, Frito-Lay isn’t going to budge their sales numbers an inch with a Facebook Fan page. However they will get some fans anyway, and the psychographic information they can get from Facebook will tell them stuff about compulsive TV-watching snackers they’d never figure out from a focus group.
This is the whole idea behind our own Fanalytix™. Years ago you couldn’t have bought this information for any price; now it’s buried under your own mattress. Those who use it possess a decisive edge.
Oh, and even though Twitter has no business plan, they can topple Arab regimes. I believe the CIA secretly sends a white van to the alley behind Twitter’s offices and tosses bags of $1000 bills to a guy in an orange suit.
4. Massive Asia Middle Class. Between China and India, their middle class now rivals the entire population of Europe. Asia isn’t nearly the haven of cheap outsourcing that it used to be; people who used to work for 60 cents an hour now cost four bucks.
It also means Asia’s creme de la creme is 3 million strong and they have TONS of cash. I saw more Bentleys in China in 3 weeks than in Chicago all year. If what you sell is expensive and confers status, you need catch the next flight to Shanghai or Bangalore.
5. Facebook hits the wall w/ investors. I doubt this will happen in 2012. Maybe in 2013. But at some point, the money people will wake up and realize Facebook has been playing patty-cake with their kindergarten advertising system. Facebook’s gonna go public and public companies have to make money.
Facebook ads are still the wild west, where people rub sticks together to make fire. The good news is, there’s a lot of dry firewood.
Just as a major correction is inevitable, Facebook turns a corner and finally decides to get serious about advertising. Not a moment too soon.
6. Affluent Europeans and Americans are adding a 2nd residence in developing countries. I have a friend who’s doing a seminar on how to set up a second residence in Guatemala. It’s already sold out.
There are some real advantages: Nobody in Costa Rica worries about riots in London, and the cooks and maids there are really cheap.
7. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has long predicted the coming “Singularity.” This is when, through the power of Moore’s Law, a desktop PC finally exceeds the power of the human brain. He says it’s going to happen in less than 20 years.
At that time all the computers in the world will be networked together to form a global brain of unimaginable power, ushering us into utopia. We’ll all upload ourselves into the cloud and achieve immortality. Some folks are cryogenically freezing their heads so they can be resurrected decades from now.
Kurzweil has somehow not noticed that Microsoft Word took two minutes to open 20 years ago and still takes two minutes now. He’s managed to not notice that your computer today is no more self-aware or capable of will or desire than the PC you had in 1993.
Does anyone *really* believe there’s no problem that can’t be solved with more CPU cycles? (“Dear business owner: Your REAL problem isn’t lack of credit or sagging sales. It’s the fact that your computer is just too slow….”)
Oh yeah, and the Singularity crowd assumes you can trust the IT department to house your brain and not sell the memory of losing your virginity to the porn guys.
Meanwhile, people who swore they’d live to be 150 still have strokes at age 57. The “Singuarity” is a rapture story for secular sophisticates.
8. Google plus will never unseat Facebook, but…. Larry Page has tied 25% of employee bonuses to Google+. What this really means is that Google is amassing even more demographic and psychographic data than Facebook ever dreamed of.
This is handy for Google: Facebook takes all the heat from privacy groups for their massive public gaffes, while Google AdWords gets better and better. This is GREAT for advertisers.
9. Retargeting means that the days of 3 cent clicks on Google’s Display Network are over, unless you’re targeting Trailer Trash prospects.
10. Four horsemen: Netflix, Pandora, Spotify and Amazon. The price of books, movies and music is headed towards zero. You’re already seeing 1-day Kindle specials: $20 books are $2.99, 99 cents or even free.
Amazon will start renting books to you on your Kindle the same way Netflix rents movies.
At Amazon, books are just a loss leader for selling flat-screen TV’s and Christmas presents. For you, books are a loss leader for selling ______?
You better decide right now. And if you don’t come up with a loss-leader strategy for your biz… someone else will.
Sleep with one eye open.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: Groupon’s gonna fizzle.
How to lose 36 million dollars per hour
I always say there are 3 kinds of work:
- $10 per hour
- $100 per hour
- $1000 per hour
But there are not three. There are five.
#4 is:
Earning $10,000 per hour.
That seems almost unfathomable to most people. But almost EVERYONE has earned $10,000 per hour.
For example:
*You’re on the phone with a vendor who’s installing a new phone system. You take an extra three minutes to ask a couple more questions and negotiate a $50 per month feature for free. You use that phone system for 4 years.
In just 3 minutes you just saved yourself three thousand dollars.Do the math: $60,000 per hour. Simply because you had the courage to ask a few questions and ask for a better deal.
Which brings me to the 5th kind of work:
“Negative 1 million dollars per hour.”
Example: It takes 2 seconds to demolish a $20,000 car.
During that two seconds you’re losing 36 million dollars per hour. (A major secret to success is not making huge blunders :^}
Each day contains pivot points that are completely invisible to most people. Almost nobody realizes that some time in the next hour, a $1000 per hour opportunity is going to arrive, then slip by unnoticed.
This is the focus of 80/20 Productivity Express. Currently my time bills at $1300 per hour. I’m going to show you how I set up entire days or weeks of $1000 per hour work, by paying attention to those elusive, transitory $10,000 and $100,000 per hour events that often only last a minute or two.
I’ll show you how you can, too.
My cash-back guarantee is, it’s the best $299 you’ll spend this year:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/productivity/
Perry Marshall
P.S.: A day of $1,000 per hour work is only made possible by a brief, $10,000 per hour burst of inspiration that precedes it. You MUST escape wage slave mentality to experience this!
How derelict slobs get stuff done in 2012, with NO GUILT
If you eat a bowl of ice cream before bed tonight, no big deal.
If you eat a bowl of ice cream before bed EVERY night, your belly becomes a very big deal.
If on the day your baby girl is born, you start investing a dollar a day – with 10% interest – 65 years later she’ll have 1.8 million dollars. Small actions every day earn HUGE returns.
What does this have to do with 2012?
The GOOD news is, you do *not* have to banish your bad habits for 8 hours a day in order to be productive.
80/20 seize that 30 minutes is only 2% of your 24 hours, but determines 60% of your results. That’s a fact.
In 2012 you don’t have to have six pack abs, ruthless financial discipline and a 365 day fast from Social Media.
You just need to harness your 30 minutes.
If you do that, you have my full permission to squander six or eight hours doing stupid stuff. Without GUILT!
And you still accomplish a LOT.
So what do you do during that 30 minutes?
That’s the subject of 80/20 Productivity Express.
It starts Monday January 9 at 1pm ET.
My team will share the secrets they use to deliver the goods.
http://www.perrymarshall.com/productivity/
Perry
