How to hire jazz legend John Coltrane for “union scale”
Ken McCarthy sent me a quick note yesterday:
"For the first two years when he arrived in NYC, John Coltrane was available to play on anyone's record for union scale. It only lasted two years, but still…imagine that."
Ken says: "How many "legends in their own mind" are unwilling to work cheap (or free) until they prove themselves?"
http://www.youtube.com/user/JazzVideoGuy#p/a/u/1/mAyDIhy5V5s
(If you're into jazz at all, this is a great video.)
I have said many times that talented marketing consultants are only available for about 2 years. After that they become prohibitively expensive and often they form their own band rather than playing for somebody else's.
Now (thanks to Ken) I call that "The John Coltrane Phenomenon."
The best way to get your 10,000 hours in is to get PAID to practice. Even if it's the wages of a union musician. Most of the best marketing people I know (Howie Jacobson immediately comes to mind) spent a couple of years in this mode.
Most people don't know that guitarist Jimmy Paige played elevator muzak for awhile, until he got sick of it and formed Led Zeppelin.
When you're playing for other people you encounter all kinds of things you'd never find all by yourself and it perfects your chops.
If you know that there's a John Coltrane genius lurking deep inside of you, don't deny him any opportunity to develop his vocabulary. Even John Coltrane was not above playing with whoever would hire him for a buck seventy-five an hour, for a little while.
Perry Marshall
More Emotional Marketing Examples
A few months ago I made a post about “rational purchasing consciousness” the essence of which was to underscore the need to communicate emotional benefits subtly in order to avoid harming the consumer’s desire to perceive themselves as a smart shopper.
In other words … “Show Them, Don’t Tell Them”
At that time, several people asked for more detail on exactly HOW to do this.
So Sharon and I recorded this little audio … hope you enjoy!
Dr. G 
www.HyperResponsiveMarketingSecrets.com
How to Make Decisions Easier
Being an entrepreneur inevitably means having way more projects and opportunities than you can possibly handle. Around this time of year, we all get busy with our planning systems and spreadsheets, setting goals, and making plans.
The bad news is, the longer you work as an entrepreneur, the more opportunities you’ll get, and the harder the decisions seem to become…
But the good news is, there are tools and systems for making these decisions much easier.
One of my favorites is a simple little spreadsheet technique for calculating weighted averages. I just list out my projects or choices one per row, and evaluate them against all the factors which I consider important to the decision in the columns. Finally, I assign a relative importance level to each of the factors, and the simple spreadsheet calculates a “batting average” (overall score) for each project.
Have a look at the video to see what I mean, and feel free to download this example here
NOTE: be sure to download the spreadsheet here to follow along.
(My apologies for the visual quality of this particular video)
Hope it helps,
Dr. G
PS – Are you relatively new to the game, or still struggling to make your first dollar of profit online? If so, I’d highly recommend you pick up a copy of the Internet Marketing Truthprints
10 Predictions for 2010-2019
This is a real sign on I-75 in Georgia.
1. In 2010, Google AdWords will announce a procedure for "hearings and fair trials" for banned advertisers. This will enable them to play "Good Cop-Bad Cop" with you if your accounts get shut down.
2. Twitter will get sold to a larger company for less than the $500 million they turned down from Facebook in 2009.
3. The next rage in pay per click is cookie-ing visitors on your site and then having targeted contextual ads "stalk your prospects" on other sites as they surf the Internet. Jonathan Mizel will cover this extensively in a January 29 teleseminar.
4. By 2014 the newspaper will be drastically different than it is now. Most local papers will have vanished; large pubs will consolidate down to just a few like the New York Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal. Sorry, but there's no need for 200 different newspapers to all be running the same stories from the wires; it's duplicate content. Meanwhile a minority of high-traffic bloggers will be identified as doing better research with better reporting and less bias than the traditional media.
5. The music industry is headed in the same direction. The bands that succeed during the next 10 years will be the ones who figure out how to connect directly to their audience via social media and direct marketing. Recently I had a conversation with a recording artist whose advance for making a CD has shriveled from $50K+ down to $15K now, because piracy and digital distribution are shrinking the pie. He can't depend on them to bring him an audience anymore. (Does that sound at all familiar?) Neil Peart of Rush said essentially the same thing, reporting they want to do an album in 2010 but the record company won't pay for it. The band is now in search of some other mechanism. I predict that membership and continuity models are the future of the music industry.
6. There will always be demand for excellent content, regardless of what happens to TV networks, record companies, etc. Case in point: DVD and iTunes sales of TV series like "24" and "Lost" are strong, because those shows are superbly produced. I bought the first four seasons of 24, myself. The worst place to be in media is in the "expensive bureaucratic mediocre middle."
7. I gave away some Amazon Kindles for Christmas this year, and electronic books are most definitely on the rise. Electronic readers are awesome, they'll become the norm, and the future is not bright for traditional printing and publishing models. However… excellent magazines and books will NEVER disappear. Ever.
8. The traditional HTML website site hand-crafted by an HTML editor and uploaded via FTP is fast becoming a relic, replaced by Content Management Systems and platforms like Wordpress and Joomla.
9. There is a small, vocal minority of people that insist that in biology, evolution is entirely purposeless and random. This crowd dominates the current academic scene and cooks up anti-scientific theories like "Junk DNA." My professional experience in our fast-evolving, "darwinian" online world tells me, evolution is supremely intelligent, NOT random. The intellectual Berlin Wall of 19th century Darwinism will crack in 2013. A 21st century version of evolution is coming, one that doesn't sneer at religion. I blogged about this last week.
10. Wikipedia will silence its critics. Obviously it's immensely practical and it's worked, having entirely replaced the traditional encyclopedia. However, vandalism is a constant problem for some categories. Wikipedia has always had a reputation for smearing controversial people and topics. But they're cleaning up, and for the most part doing an excellent job. I made a donation for the first time the other day and I think Wikipedia has made a huge contribution to the speed of getting research done. Nothing has done more for bringing the Open Source movement to the masses.
Happy New Year, and here's to you in your mission to advance in your own corner of the world during this digital decade.
Perry Marshall
What do YOU predict? Post your thoughts in the comment box below…
New Videos For the December 09 Holidays
The holiday weeks have left us fairly light on videos the past two weeks. Since I missed the holiday video post, I’ve included both weeks together (which still makes this lighter than past weeks).
There aren’t any must see videos. If you’re into Analytics, than this Q&A video with Avanish & Nick will keep you entertained for 20 minutes.
Since we mostly talk marketing on this blog, we rarely examine some of the other videos that can be found. I’m a big fan of Google Tech Talks. Google has experts come into their offices several times a month to give presentations, answer Q&A, etc. All of these videos are recorded and stored on YouTube. The latest is about Personal Informational Management. This is approached from the tech provider standpoint about how different people organize info and how you can offer services.
As I’m an organizational junkie. I have meeting rules, Outlook rules, email rules, RSS rules, etc that would drive most people crazy; but they let me get a tremendous amount done; I like examining the different ways that people use technology to pick up tidbits here and there. It also helps with making system workflows when you want to organize your information to be part of someone’s daily life.
Videos from the Week of 12/24/09
New Videos from AtGoogleTalks
- Authors@Google: Stephen Elliott
- Authors@Google: Jennifer Jordan
- Musicians@Google: Tony Fletcher
- Authors@Google: Ben Huh
New Videos from Google
New Videos from GoogleChannelUK
New Videos from Google Developers
New Videos from googletechtalks
New Videos from google analytics
Videos for the Week of 12/28/09.
New Videos from Yahoo Ad Buzz
| Learn Advanced AdWords Techniques at Google's Supported Seminar Series | |
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Learn More about the Seminars: |
New Videos For the December 09 Holidays
Share and Enjoy:
Related posts:
- All the New Google Videos for the week of 11/13/09 New Videos from Google Webmaster Help Snippets and Titles...
- Video Friday: All the new Google Videos in One Place Google creates a large amount of videos every week. They...
- New Google & Yahoo Videos for the week of 12/11/09. Bonus SES & Wordstream Videos. Most of the new videos this week are for developers....
LAST CHANCE: Beat the 2010 Price Increase
For those of you who don’t know, here’s how the Hyper-Responsive Marketing Club developed.
I started out as a psychologist and a Fortune 500 advertising consultant, doing work for large companies like AT&T, Lipton, Novartis, Whirlpool, Exxon, Nextel, Citibank, Colgate-Palmolive, Panasonic, Nabisco.
But I freaked out at all the travel and corporate nonsense (one time I had to go to Japan for a one hour meeting and turn right around and come home, seriously).
So, with Perry Marshall’s help (amongst others), I wound up in niche marketing, applying the same advertising research techniques to keyword research and analysis (and then product and sales funnel development) as I had used with the large companies.
It was kind of like an atom bomb… I entered 17 markets successfully (more or less consecutively). People noticed and started asking me to speak at seminars, develop my own course, and teach teach teach.
Well, the problem was, early on I didn’t realize the average person found my systems hard to implement. Not hard as in difficult… hard as in most people didn’t want to take the kind of time I was taking to research the market before they started marketing. (Hard for me to understand this, but that’s how people are I guess).
Anyway, after about 1,000 copies of the $1,000 system were sold, I had coached enough people who implemented it successfully IN PIECES AND PARTS to see that it WAS possible to get about 50% of the benefit with 20% of the work. Moreover, I just got SICK SICK SICK of people telling me it was brilliant but they’d never do it. (I haven’t actually vomited in 20 years… but if one more person told me that I swear I was going to break my streak… especially since I was getting letters and calls from the few people who DID do it and were paying off their mortgages, building full time incomes, thanking me profusely, etc)
So I TOOK THE THING OFF THE MARKET, and re-worked it into a much simpler system. At the same time, the internet had evolved dramatically, especially where Google’s rules for Quality Score were concerned, and it was no longer possible to just jump in and buy PPC traffic for a survey without having a substantial site which anticipated to a certain extent what would please the audience.
AND… I had started Rocket Clicks, the done-for-you PPC service which grew faster than any of us could have imagined, and gave me the opportunity to look deeply into literally hundreds of business models… not just in theory, but actually evaluating dollars in vs. dollars out so I could see what worked. (In the middle of the economic disaster in 2008 to boot)
The outcome was clear to me… I had to help people use my techniques on FEWER keywords, which they’d conquer with focus and determination, so they could establish a CENTER OF GRAVITY IN ADWORDS…
Turns out, the stronger you are on a bulls eye keyword, the more Google’s fuzzy logic algorithms can succeed in bringing your more traffic.
FEWER KEYWORDS = MORE MONEY!
COURTESY NOTICE: Last chance to beat the 2010 price increase on the Hyper-Responsive Marketing club: (lock in your rates today)
Thankfully, fewer keywords also meant:
-Less competitors to study
- Less time spent managing advertising
- A clearer focus in SEO
- A pristine filter for separating the noise from the gold in the social media chatter
- An easier to write salesletter and autoresponder sequence
- Less money and other resources wasted on inefficient advertising
- A simpler and more hyper-focused web design task
-A generally more focused and successful business (and owner)
But if you’re going to focus on one center of gravity, you’d better have a logical, systematic way to choose it, otherwise you’ll never have the CONFIDENCE to put so many eggs in that one basket.
So I developed and tested a mathematical formula which accounts for volume, relevance, bid price, and combines them into one metric, as well as a process for identifying candidates and choosing the ABSOLUTE BEST ONE for your business.
It turns out that this FOCUS was the GOLDEN KEY which made it possible for people to start IMPLEMENTING my systems successfully. Because it cut down the work dramatically and amplified the results.
Moreover, as the social media world has entered the fray, it’s now possible to gather enough intelligence about your market without spending a dime, that you can put up a reasonably good site before you do your survey. (In fact, for competitive markets I recommend to many people that they launch their project and build their survey into their opt in process)
Anyway, I can’t over-emphasize the power of what I’ve found. FEWER KEYWORDS = MORE MONEY. And month by month I’ll show you how to implement this:
- Month 1: Choosing Your Bulls Eye Keyword
- Month 2: Building an Automated Hyper-Intelligence Machine
- Month 3: The Modified Survey Method
- Month 4: Turning Intelligence Into Words That Sell
- Month 5: Hyper-Design Principles for Your Bulls Eye Target
- Month 6: Building a Hyper-Responsive Follow Up System
- Month 7: Hyper-Converting High Quality Landing Pages for Adwords
- Month 8: Business Launch Cash Flow Planning
- Month 9: Over My Shoulder Adwords Launch Method
- Month 10: Public Relations for Bulls Eye Targets …. and so on.
But perhaps the best thing I’ve discovered is that people seem to learn best when they WATCH ME IMPLEMENT the techniques on a real business… NOT when they just hear me talk about it in a lecture like a stodgy old college professor.
So after a few months I got up my nerve and decided to crack the weight loss market and let you watch. (The first 2 months are on Migraines). Guess what… it’s working!
COURTESY NOTICE: Last chance to beat the 2010 price increase on the Hyper-Responsive Marketing club: (lock in your rates today)
Anyway… I suppose the last thing I’d like to say about the club is, because I’ve been around the internet marketing game a long time, and because this initially was more of a labor of love than a true business venture (I just couldn’t stand people not implementing my work), … I decided to deliver approximately 6 to 12 hours of content every month, rather than the traditional 1 or 2 hours most gurus provide for a LOT more than I charge!
I figured, the real business changing events in my life were full day seminars, where I really got immersed in a focused topic, and walked away with a single, practical insight. Not dozens of rah-rah things I COULD do, but ONE thing I WOULD do to change my business when I returned.
So that’s kind of how I think of the club each month. And I WAS rewarded for my efforts…
- Over the first 9 months, I lost only 5% of members each month. That’s unheard of in this market, where the average retention is 70% (some people might want to join, just to see how that’s done)
- People DID start implementing and succeeding – I was able to raise the price every few months and because of the reputation (I plan to keep raising it until I hit major resistance, while letting people lock in their original order rate)
COURTESY NOTICE: Last chance to beat the 2010 price increase on the Hyper-Responsive Marketing club: (lock in your rates today)
So please permit me to summarize why you should join TODAY:
1) WATCH A REAL BUSINESS BEING DEVELOPED: This club is one of the very, very few places you can actually watch a real business being developed from scratch. In other words, I don’t only TALK about what to do in some electronic classroom in the sky, I actually SHOW YOU me DOING it as I develop a REAL business.
2) GET 6 To 12 HOURS FOR 1/2 THE PRICE OTHERS CHARGE FOR ONLY ONE: While most other gurus are charging $97/mo for only an hour or two of THEORY, Glenn’s delivering virtually a whole seminar (6 to 12 hours/mo) for much less.
3) LEARN FROM AN AGENCY OWNER: I’m not only a marketing educator, I’m a Rocket Clicks founder and I’ve seen hundreds of business models from the inside out. Which means, I don’t just guess about what’s working and what’s not, I’ve seen the dollars in vs. dollars out reports. I’m not talking theory!
4) I’VE LIVED IN THE REAL WORLD: I’ve consulted for dozens of real companies … Lipton, AT&T, Novartis, Panasonic, Whirlpool, Colgate-Palmolive, Bausch & Lomb, Nextel, etc. I might be known in our circles as “the guinea pig direct response guy”, but my techniques are explosive in these circles because they come from an entirely different industry.
5) I’VE DONE WHAT I’M TEACHING: I’ve launched over 17 markets profitably, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the IM crowd. I’m not a guru who’s done nothing but be a guru.
6) I’M HONEST: You won’t get rich next month using my work. It’s not even within the realm of possibility. But you WILL learn how to build a secure foundation for your business so it can grow and grow and grow.
7) YOU’LL LEARN A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT MARKETING: Perhaps most importantly, I’ll teach you a different way to think about marketing which will last you a lifetime. *
COURTESY NOTICE: Last chance to beat the 2010 price increase on the Hyper-Responsive Marketing club: (lock in your rates today)
Our Top PPC Blog Posts of 2009!
Here at ROI Revolution we've enjoyed reviewing our most popular posts of the past year. There have been a lot of changes in the Pay-Per-Click world over the last twelve months, and it's been exciting to watch them unfold.
To wrap up the year we've ranked our top 7 PPC blog posts of 2009:
1. The One vs. Many-Per-Click Breakdown --Turn to this article for a breakdown of the One Vs. Many-Per-Click conversion change that happened in Google AdWords this past year. Since conversions are a reflection of your bottom line, understanding this change is crucial!
2. Top 5 Free PPC Tools --There are tons of FREE PPC tools on the web. Some of them are great, some are alright, and some are just OK. Here are ROI we've had experience with almost all of them, and have compiled a list of the top 5 for you to reference.
3. Introduction to Google's Ad Auction, Part 1: Quality Score --This 2 part blog series summarizes a video put together by Google's Chief Economist. Part 1 outlines Google's Quality Score and what is required to have a good one.
4. Introduction to Google's Ad Auction, Part 2: AdRank and CPC -- Getting to the top of Google can be tricky (and expensive). This blog article outlines exactly how Google calculates AdRank and the cost you pay per click.
5.How to Use Negative Keywords When Targeting Google's Content Network -- Setting up campaigns to target Google's content network can be confusing enough, add in negative keywords and you've got yourself a double whammy. This article explains best practices when using negative keywords when targeting Google's content network.
6. Have You Used Google's New Wonder Wheel? -- We loved Google's new tool so much we blogged about it! Google's Wonder Wheel can help you expand your keyword list, build out content campaigns, find new negative keywords, and much more!
7.Google's New Interface Will Make Your Advertising Life Easier -- Google released their new interface for AdWords in 2009. Our article outlines the top features and benefits, and also links to our New AdWords user interface webinar where you'll see how the new AdWords User Interface will save you hours of your limited time, help you cut wasted adspend, and discover hew highly relevant keywords and placements to scale your online profits!
We hope you have enjoyed recapping our top posts of 2009.
Best wishes in the new year!
I’m thankful.
It's the day before New Years Eve, I've been up since 6am getting all kinds of projects done. It'll be at least a year before most of this morning's work sees the light of day, but it's on the conveyor belt.
Snowflakes are drifting down from the sky outside my window and I just came back from a walk around the neighborhood. (I prefer a brisk walk outdoors to an exercise machine, personally.)
At my fingertips, access to most of the world's information and the greatest minds, both living and dead.
At my fingertips, tens of thousands of awesome customers and virtual friends who give me the honor of their trust, with important business and marketing decisions. They've given me permission to talk to them when I feel I have something worthwhile to say and that's a high privilege.
Downstairs, a very close friend of ours is making lunch.
In Saint Louis, my wife is at a conference where she met a woman just yesterday who is helping former child soldiers in Uganda. Something can now be done to right something that for years has been horribly wrong.
On my headphones, jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan is performing a remake of Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" and he's doing a superlative job, in my humble opinion.
Outside in the snow, my kids are playing some crazy game with their friends, running around with imaginary weapons and preparing for more serious games they'll be playing decades from now.
The World Wide Web is the most radical technological development since fire, and 20 years ago it didn't exist. The most influential company on the Internet didn't even exist 12 years ago. In the next 10 years, companies will spring up even faster than Google, and make even more money.
5 years from now you may be in a business that has never been thought of in 2009.
What an incredible time to be alive.
Yes, I know about the problems. I know about the global warming and the slave trade and the earthquakes and tsunamis and Osama Bin Laden. I know about cancer and birth defects and the bloody 20th century and the pollution in China and the prostitution rings in Bangkok. I know about all that.
But you don't get rid of bad things by obsessing about them. You create alternatives.
You don't free enslaved people by enslaving free people. You work to make free people even freer.
This morning a guy named Steve posted a comment on my blog: "Your devotion to helping small time Entrepreneur's make it big is without a doubt the most noble profession any human being could take on and you should be praised for you commitment to helping your fellow man."
Wow, what a high compliment. I'm thankful to be assisting a ragtag collection of geeks, freaks and misfits find their way in this crazy, digital world. I'm thankful to be surrounded by a community of passionate entrepreneurs who help each other and watch each others' backs and build things together.
I'm thankful to have been taught principles by the world's wisest people, both past and present. I'm thankful to live in a country that has a constitution and faith in right and liberty and human rights.
I'm thankful that despite whatever paranoia the media throws into the stir-fry today, I have the right to ignore them and charge forward and build a better world for next week and next year and the next century.
I'm thankful for customers who believe as I do, for people who face insurmountable odds (there are occasional days when NOBODY would ever choose to be an entrepreneur, right?).
I'm thankful for victories and resilience and the never-ending stream of innovations and ideas.
We truly live in miraculous times. Don't ever let anyone make you forget that.
Here's to living your own resounding success story in 2010 – the story you will someday tell.
Perry Marshall
More Unusual Adwords Tips to Save Money in 2010
OK, well, the year is rapidly drawing to a close, so let me leave you with several additional quick adwords tips to save you money in 2010 (Thanks VERY much to Jerrold Burke, Jered Klima, Dan Zuzanski, Laureen Hoeft, Rob Sieracki, and all the rest of the Rocket Clicks PPC team for helping me compile this):
- Don’t judge the success of the content network without cleaning it up first. Aggressively look for site and category exclusions (in the content placement report AND the standard user interface for the campaign). As a last resort consider managing effective placements discovered on a CPM basis while you gradually throttle down the automatic placement campaign (you can drag and drop placements between two campaigns using the Adwords Editor)
- In your most profitable adgroups, don’t necessarily split test a new ad with 50% of your traffic unless you’re very early in the game and you’re fairly sure you’ve got a good change to beat the control. Instead, use the Adwords Editor to make several copies of the existing ad, and change only ONE of them. This way, you’re only exposing the TEST to a small percentage of your otherwise profitable traffic… if it’s a bomb, you lose a lot less. If it starts to look like a winner, you can delete many of the other copies to increase the exposure frequency of the test ad (but be careful not to delete the CONTROL copy with all the history until the winner has been firmly declared)
- Don’t be content using just text ads. Local Business Ads, Ad Extensions, and Ad Site Links are very effective yet underutilized media for many businesses. (And in the content network, don’t forget to test display advertising)
- Test something wildly and insanely different from your existing control ad. I mean, something which kind of irks you to try. Onesentance.org is a good source of inspiration for ad copy in this light (thanks to David Bullock for pointing this out). Another good source is to write a controversial ad which goes 100% against all the benefits your competitors are touting. For example, in the adwords market itself you used to see ads saying “You will make money tonight”… so what you’d do instead is say “Some of these animals are lying! Be the tortoise, not the hare”… see where I’m going?
- Take advantage of Google’s Betas, especially if you’re a more traditional e-commerce marketing with an actual catalog of products sold through a shopping cart.
- Don’t use the same copy or landing pages in the content network as you do in search. Content surfers are READERS, searchers are SCANNERS. (We’ll do more on this in a future audio)
- Go through the reporting center once a week to see if there are new metrics available which could be of use. (These days, new data points seem to be accelerating on an almost monthly basis)
And for heaven’s sake, if you’re not a member of my Hyper Responsive Club already, get out there and join before the price increases forever on Friday (or when I hit 1,000 members, which is looking like it might happen before then since Perry Marshall decided to tell his list of 250,000+ people to jump on board today).
Because without the information in this club, I can virtually guarantee you haven’t carefully defined a very specific keyword target to conquer online with focus and determination. And if you haven’t done that, I know you’re suffering with much lower click through, conversion, and quality scores than you’d otherwise have. Join now
I know everyone hesitates to join a new monthly club, and no one wants to commit to a new monthly expense. (Note: you can cancel any time, and even the first month is refundable if you decide you don’t like it for any reason, or no reason at all)
But the thing is, hardly anyone is sorry once they’ve joined mine. Join now
That’s because:
1) YOU’LL SEE A REAL BUSINESS BEING DEVELOPED: This club is one of the very, very few places you can actually watch a real business being developed from scratch. In other words, I don’t only TALK about what to do in some electronic classroom in the sky, I actually SHOW YOU me DOING it as I develop a REAL business. Join now
2) YOU GET 6 To 12 HOURS FOR MUCH LESS THAN WHAT OTHERS CHARGE FOR ONLY 1 HOUR: While most other gurus are charging $97/mo for only an hour or two of THEORY, Glenn’s delivering virtually a whole seminar (6 to 12 hours/mo) for much less. Join now
3) YOU’LL LEARN FROM AN AGENCY OWNER: I’m not only a marketing educator, I’m a Rocket Clicks founder and I’ve seen hundreds of business models from the inside out. Which means, I don’t just guess about what’s working and what’s not, I’ve seen the dollars in vs. dollars out reports. I’m not talking theory, and I’m not going to pee on your back while I tell you it’s raining. You’ll get the straight truth, even when it’s not sexy. Which is what you NEED in order to succeed, rather than just to feel good for a few months while you consume another piece of intellectual entertainment. Join now
4) I’VE LIVED IN THE REAL WORLD: I’ve consulted for dozens of real companies … Lipton, AT&T, Novartis, Panasonic, Whirlpool, Colgate-Palmolive, Bausch & Lomb, Nextel, etc. I might be known in our circles as “the guinea pig direct response guy”, but my techniques are explosive in these circles because they come from an entirely different industry. Join now
5) I’VE DONE WHAT I’M TEACHING: I’ve launched over 17 markets profitably, the vast majority of which had nothing to do with the IM crowd. I’m not a guru who’s done nothing but be a guru.
6) I’M HONEST: You won’t get rich next month using my work. It’s not even within the realm of possibility. But you WILL learn how to build a secure foundation for your business so it can grow and grow and grow. Join now
7) YOU’LL LEARN A DIFFERENT WAY TO THINK ABOUT MARKETING: Perhaps most importantly, I’ll teach you a different way to think about marketing which will last you a lifetime.
BEAT THE PRICE RAISE (On January 1st): Join now
And have a Happy New Year!
Dr. G
Our 8 Most Popular Analytics Posts of 2009
The end of the year is a nice time to take a look back over all that was accomplished throughout the year. To that end, I'm going to give you a list of our top 8 Analytics Blog Posts of 2009. As we go through the list, I'll give you a short description of each post as well as any random thoughts I have about the post.
Enjoy the posts and have a Happy New Year!
#1. 6 Tools Every GA User Should Have
Shawn Purtell
Random Thoughts:
This was by far the most popular post of 2009. It did so well that I decided to steal its format in hope of boosting the popularity of this post. It now includes 7 tools instead of 6 for added tool enjoyment. Looking over this list, even though this post was written back in January of '09, most of these tools are still very useful enhancements of the Google Analytics Interface and have even been updated since the writing of the post. GANotes, on the other hand, has achieved what every Google Analytics Tool dreams of becoming one day: it is now a Google Analytics fully-fledged feature known as Annotations.
#2. Tracking Transactions back to Initial Referrer
Jeremy Aube
Random Thoughts:
What's up with that frog? Apparently the idea is that considering the size of that frog, this is probably the first time it's been touched by human hands, i.e. first touch. There's a lot of talk about first-touch attribution vs. last-touch attribution. This post explains a way to get both in Google Analytics.
#3. Five Google Analytics FAILS
Michael Harrison
Random Thoughts:
We've seen people do a lot of crazy Google Analytics setups. Unfortunately, many of these fails are all too common. This post is worth reading just for the laughs alone (well, OK, it's GA humor, but it's still pretty funny), but it also serves as a much needed warning sign. Most of these fails resulted in permanent damage of one sort or another to Google Analytics data.
#4 ga.js code for GWO
Jeremy Aube
Random Thoughts:
Yet another update to GARE. This particular update was nice because allowed you to get the appropriate modifications for subdomain and multiple domain tracking. I'm not sure if this particular GARE feature still works (Update 12/30/2009: just fixed this. It should work fine now.); Google updated the Google Website Optimizer Interface so that ga.js code is provided by default.
#5. 5 Advanced Segments for Ecommerce
Michael Harrison
Random Thoughts:
Another list post, this one dealing with using the fairly-new, enterprise-level feature, advanced segments, to uncover more than ever before about your ecommerce data. My particular favorite advanced segment is #2. It used to be very difficult to determine the influence of a landing page on your site, but advanced segments makes this easy (and maybe even fun!).
#6. 6 Tools to Troubleshoot GA
Shawn Purtell
Random:
For some reason, I'm reminded of a quote: "So far alls I've come up with is the effects of gasoline. {pauses a bit} On fire." There are a lot of things on fire in this post too. We use most of these tools every day. Personally, my life would be pretty much over if I didn't have FireBug.
#7. Stressing About Ecommerce Variables?
Caitlin Cook
Random Thoughts:
Yes, those ecommerce functions sure do ask a lot of you. Fortunately you don't have to give into their demands. This post tells you exactly which variables you need to make Google Analytics ecommerce tracking work for you.
#8. Viewing A/B Experiments in Google Analytics
Shawn Purtell
Random Thoughts:
Getting Google Website Optimizer data for multi-variate tests into Google Analytics takes a little bit of work. For A/B tests, this data is available by default in Google Analytics since each combination in your test is a separate page. This post tells you how to further unlock your A/B test data in Google Analytics using advanced segments. It also has a really nice screenshot of GARE in action.
