Do me a favor please.
Go get a fresh mango and throw a liberal glob of chilli pepper and sea salt on it.
Sounds absolutely disgusting, right?
It’s NOT. In fact, it’s rather amazing, and the unusual combination of flavors will light up your mouth with a relatively low calorie treat that will surprise and delight you. It’s also got a liberal dose of antioxidants and vitamins. And it’s SIMPLE.
Trust me, you’ll love it.
Now, here’s the marketing analogy.
The BEST marketing surprises you with ingredients no one else would think to combine, in a delightfully simple and easy to implement fashion. For example…
Everyone else tells you you’ve gotta have the fanciest digital camera with hundreds of features, as many megapixels as possible, and more buttons than you’ve got fingers. Then along comes the FLIP phone with a single record button, no fancy features, anda direct USB connection to your computer. Boom! Marketing sensation.
Everyone else tells you to use sophisticated bid management software, long tail databases, and endless keyword tools to optimize your AdWords account. But I insist 90% of entrepreneurs are better off sticking with the FREE Google tool, choosing ONE keyword conversation, and learning to manage it with HUMAN attention.
See what I mean?
So… what surprisingly simple, counter-trend elements can YOU combine to surprise and delight your market?
Food for thought.
Dr. G 
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I do not know if you read these. My understanding is Google does NOT rate sites by keyword, only pages; therefore each page in a web site can be optimized for a different keyword (or 2 sometimes) by your method. They DO rank sites by \’page rank\’ though which is why a link to your page from your profile at a high ranking site can help your page rank even thou the profile pages, even at PR5+ sites have an individual PR of zero. Yes, no?
Mark
PS-Still passing on the chili mango, but take your word it is good. Lol.
Hi Mark, thanks for your kind words. I DO read all the comments, but don’t generally have the time to respond. Since you caught my eye with this one, let me just note that what I recommend is defining a central keyword conversation which your business is about because (a) you can’t study everything and expect to know the searchers better than the rest of your market; (b) you can’t isolate your single most important competitor if you don’t know your single most important keyword; (c) you can’t determine the central MESSAGE/USP of your site if you don’t have a singular keyword to “hang your hat on”.
Notwithstanding the above, once you know your CENTER (Bulls Eye), you DO need to define the theme which surrounds it, and build your website out as an authority on that THEME. This means you’ll have multiple landing pages and content pages focused on the short set of keywords which most squarely define that theme.
Also, you START your AdWords campaign with this very, very sparse set of keywords and make them work FIRST. Once they are, you follow how Google expands for you, see what’s actually making you money, and expand accordingly. You can still wind up in the end with thousands of keywords (though we recommend more “torso” than “long tail” these days),… it’s just that these keywords radiate outwards from a clearly defined center, have clearly defined conceptual boundaries, and are found, tested, and proven empirically, not by guesswork or via keyword databases with an overwhelming number of associative entries (in the billions, literally).
For more info, please see the hyper responsive marketing club
I am a HRC member. Thanks. For me, it has been hard to optimize a landing page for more than one or two (maybe if I get lucky 3) keywords, so thousands of keywords to me, means thousands of landing pages.
Having a firm center of tested ROI producing keywords that can be optimized easier (or more completely) by having a URL and landing page optimized just for the ones that are the HR keywords, I think if focusing on a smaller segment steals just one HR client from the competition (due to focusing in on those keywords) can mean more profit in the end than attempting to corral the other 80%.
For example, in a market with 47 players and an average of 20-30 HR customers a month. If I am already getting two each month (or most months) following your system, if I optimize the HR keywords more, or better and instead of focusing in on attracting some of the 80% to round out the income, I spend enough to attract even one or two more HR customers a year, that is better than any of the competition gets, my other (support) costs are lower due to having fewer customers AND lots of the clients that are ’somewhat’ HR end up also attracted to me due to me NOT spending any time, money and focus on trying to attract that 80%; and more on HR keywords than the other 47 people in the market. Because of that, the part of the 80% most attracted to me are the top ones, that sort of get ’sucked up’ by the momentum because they are most like a real HR customer.
That make sense? For a while I had a client in spinal decompression (I still have him but he is expanding too quickly, etc. I am sure you’ve seen it before.) His biggest competition spent 20 times what he did in Adwords. The guy managing the account before me got twice the clicks, but in 6 months zero people came into the clinic off the web site (that we know of, the doctor isn’t good at tracking that, but no clients mentioned the site in 6 months). I had to guess at the HR keywords also because no one tracked anything at the clinic, but averaged 16-20 new clients a month that said they came in because of the web site they found through Google. And that was on half the clicks because I only bid on what I guessed to be the money keywords which were expensive with 47 people bidding on them. (I know guessing isn’t kosher, but I couldn’t even get the doctor to get a dedicated phone line for the web site. My guesses were based on people searching on difficult to spell medical conditions that most surgeons would not operate on, which meant they had already been condemned to constant pain for life, had a piece of paper with their disgnoses spelled correctly on it and were in desperate mode while searching. CTRs for those words were 33-75% but only 2-6 people searched those words each month & I had to out bid one guy who was spending 30K a month along with 46 other people in the game to one degree or another and I was on a $1500 budget.
I got 75-80% of the impressions of those words and at least half of them signed up according to the sr staff person who also said the ones that said they saw his clinic on the web always showed up with x-rays and MRIs in hand.)
Anyway, I think that worked. I am no genius and had to work with what I was able to get out of the staff in the way of statistics. I do know 8-10 new clients a month is better than zero prospects. Lol. How many of those became HR clients I can only guess; but I know from experience, when the Drums of Doom drown out everything else and suddenly hope appears and in most cases produces results better than hoped for, that tends to make an HR out of anyone!
Mark
PS-I know 20 clients for $1500 doesn’t sound good, but the average sale is $6000. and the cheapest keyword I wanted to bid on was $5-20 a piece. I could have easily tripled clicks, but the 2 months I did that, people stopped mentioning the web site.