Xurxo Vidal

Hi Steve,

The kind of posts I really enjoy here by order of importance are the following:

* Personal stories about obstacles you face running your business

* Motivational articles focusing on entrepreneurship

* How to increase productivity

* Marketing an online store

Also “How to” posts covering a variety of topics with respect to building and operating an online business is something many will find helpful. Everyone likes to learn from others who have done something similar to what they are trying to do. ... See all content Hide content

2 days, 12 hours ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Brian,

I’ve gotten the same message from Google about how they normalize QS depending on ad position so that lower CTRs don’t impact the QS as much when ads are in lower positions.

At the same time many AdWords reps will recommend that you start off with higher bids initially when launching a new campaign or keywords to give them a “kickstart”.

After reading your post I wonder if some reps are still back in 2002, but personal experience dictates otherwise where starting with higher bids initially does “shock” the campaign into performing better faster.

I think that as a campaign ages, the normalizing effect might kick in more, but there are still wide fluctuations in more competitive industries where minimum first page bids play a larger role in getting a decent ad position, CTR and QS.

I’ve done experiments where increasing bids to match minimum first page bid requirements actually work to improve QS over time presumably because CTR also increases. (And this is in instances where there are no keyword, ad or adgroup structure relevancy or landing page issues so bids and CTR are the main culprits in low QS)

That said, I’m not convinced that CTR/ad positions are normalized for QS as well as Google claims. But do agree that better ad copy leading to a higher CTR is probably what Google is talking about and temporarily increasing bids initially just allows you to get more traffic to test your ads more quickly and make adjustments. ... See all content Hide content

7 months, 1 week ago onWordpress in www.searchenginejournal.com

I share your sentiments on that silly arguement:

“To me, an entrepreneur is anyone willing to take a risk to be their own boss. Someone who is willing to take control of their lives, call the shots and dictate the outcome whether it’s good or bad.”

Interestingly enough they were trying so hard to define what an entrepreneur is I didn’t understand the point they were trying to make, other than who had the right definition.

The real important question I think, revolves around what you create, the value it brings and the ability to generate passive or semi-passive income from building up processes that allow you to operate your business as an owner rather than as an employee. ... See all content Hide content

4 days, 17 hours ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Steve, it would be a pleasure to put together a guest post on PPC or Adwords for your readers.

Looking forward to discussing further…

1 week, 3 days ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Steve,

It takes courage to admit your mistakes with adwords publicly, so hats off to you for sharing so others can benefit!

Using negative keywords especially when using broad match keywords is a must like you pointed out. To add to your advice, one strategy you can use to find negative keywords before you pay for traffic from them is to use the Google adwords keyword tool (https://adwords .google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal).

When you’re doing your keyword research using this tool, you’ll not only get to see what keywords are getting searched more often and how much you can expect to pay to have you ads appear in certain positions, but you’ll also be able to identify keywords that you don’t want to get traffic for and add them in as negative keywords BEFORE you even launch your campaign and spend any money on irrelevant traffic from them.

CTR & QUALITY SCORE

Also important here is that you’ll reduce the number of impressions on your ads which will help your CTR (Click Through Rate). CTR is the most important metric that Google uses to calculate your quality score so the better your CTR, the better your quality score.

Why is your Quality Score important?

Because it determines how much you’ll have to pay per click relative to your competition to have your ads show up in certain positions. So the higher your quality score is the less you have to pay per click to have your ads show up in higher positions.

For more info on Adwords’ Quality Score check out a blog post I put together that includes video from Google explaining it in simple terms:

http://www.makeitbloom.com/blog/how-your-quality-score-impact-your-ad-positions-on-google-adwords

To your continued success Steve! ... See all content Hide content

1 week, 5 days ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Sounds advice here. Makes sense when you break it down like that.

Your advice also matches up with what many sales experts will tell you except that they talk about cold calling where you’ll need more like 5 to 7 jabs (points of contact) before you land the uppercut.

1 week, 5 days ago onWordpress in yukaichou.com

Steve,

Absolutely refreshing post! Like you, I did not go into business for myself with the mindset that failure as an acceptable outcome. I did go into business because I’m aiming to succeed.

FAILURE CAN BE GOOD, BUT IT DEPENDS WHAT YOU DO WITH IT

I understand what the message that many are trying to send is – failure is good because you can learn from your mistakes , but where I part ways with that philosophy is when I hear or read that you have to fail completely to learn something.

LEARN FAST FROM FAILURES

Like you, I think the smart and competent entrepreneur is one that can roll with the punches and recover quickly from setbacks and mistakes. Sure a major fail can teach you something if you’re paying attention and have enough wisdom to learn from the failure, but the wiser person is one who can recognize the mistakes early enough and adjust course to head back in the right direction as you’ve clearly done in your own business.

ALL OR NOTHING MENTALITY IS DANGEROUS

I hope more people read this and don’t fall for the hype that you should fail fast and hard to learn so you can move on to bigger things. Rather you should learn faster and faster from your failures and develop a skill on how to take corrective action more quickly.

Business and Entrepreneurship is not a game of all or nothing. Believing the failing fast and hard advice may well lead a lot of entrepreneurs to a self-fulfilling prophesy where they may have otherwise succeeded.

Well played Steve! ... See all content Hide content

3 weeks, 4 days ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Hi Amber,

I’ve recently been told the same thing by our adwords reps too. Like you, I used to think that paused and deleted adwords did not impact quality score, but now the adwords team has made it clear that they do.

And like Matthew, I too avoided deleting keywords and ads once adwords allowed us to pause them (I remember when you could only delete them), but our reps strongly hinted that there is also a difference between paused and deleted keywords and ads where paused ones can have a higher impact on the overall quality score than deleted ones.

Specifically if a keyword has a very poor quality score (4 or less) with a large number of impressions and low CTR then deleting rather than pausing may be a much better course of action.

Thanks for bringing this up because I’m sure many advertisers and PPC managers still believe that paused and deleted keywords have no bearing on their QS. ... See all content Hide content

1 month, 1 week ago onWordpress in www.ppchero.com

Steve,

I absolutely agree with you. Frugality can only get you so far when it comes to building wealth, especially if the money you save is not put to work in aggressively building passive income for you such as by investing it in dividend paying stocks or automating some of your business processes to make things more efficient with less time and effort.

I’ve come to the same conclusion that you need to make more money to build wealth rather than rely on saving exclusively, more so if you are not already making considerably more than you need to maintain your lifestyle.

It’s definitely a mindset shift where you look for expansion (increasing revenue profitably) rather than working with a limited set of resources (saving from existing revenue) to increase wealth.

Once again some thought provoking material – nice work! ... See all content Hide content

1 month, 1 week ago onWordpress in mywifequitherjob.com

Hi Tanveer,

I’m definitely going with the more productive approach of aiming to be better in smaller steps. Perfection is an all or bust concept that can be very counterproductive in that it is also very subjective like you pointed out.

In addition, running after perfection too often leads to analysis paralysis and hardly anything gets done.

As a very successful friend of mine used to tell me, just do it, get your project going even if you make tons of mistakes along the way. Just make sure to keep making improvements and learning from your experiences. Success doesn’t come from having the perfect idea – it comes from taking action, testing and adapting. ... See all content Hide content

2 months ago onWordpress in www.tanveernaseer.com