Righteous Marketing

Tis better to give than receive.

That’s the spirit of Christmas. In that spirit I would like to honor the following blogs & bloggers for the fantastic information they give away all year long. Without further delay, I present Righteous Marketing’s Top PPC Blogs of 2009:

Best Overall PPC Blog: PPCHero.com

The self-proclaimed “authority on pay-per-click strategy, industry news and great ppc-insider tips”, PPCHero.com consistently delivers top-notch content for PPC advertisers from beginner to agency pro to in-house guru. You get a great mix of flavors with Amber, Joe, Jessica & Brian. If that weren’t enough, the PPC Hero images are awesome!

Honorable Mention: SEMGeek.com

Best AdWords Blog: bg Theory

If you use AdWords and don’t know who Brad Geddes is, this is your call to repentance. He is THE expert on AdWords, from black-hat to best practices. So good in fact that he won this award over the official AdWords blog.

Honorable Mention: The Official Google AdWords Blog

Best PPC Podcast: PPC Rockstars

Okay, technically, this is a web radio show, but all episodes are available as podcasts. Hosted every Monday at 4 pm Eastern by David Szetela of Clix Marketing, PPC Rockstars discusses hot topics in PPC with recognized experts in the field (David is definitely included in that group).

PPC Blogger You Have to Meet in Person: Joanna Lord

She’s been in the industry for quite some time, but only recently became eligible for this award with the launch of JoannaLord.com. Living proof that great things come in small packages.

Honorable Mention: Kate Morris

Best PPC Column: Paid Search

As part of the larger SearchEngineLand.com, the Paid Search column provides a deep-dive into a specific PPC topic every Monday. They get writers from around the industry, including some of the winner mentioned above.

Small Print: If winners would like to brag about their award, I will send you the PNG file of the image above (it has a transparent background and would therefore look really good on your sites). #justsayin

Introducing the fighter in the blue corner. She’s a blogger known for her strong opinions and profuse Twittering. She’s the co-founder and Chief Branding Officer for Outspoken Media while regularly contributing on a number of top SEO blogs. Fighting out of upstate New York, I give you Lisa Barone!

And now, her opponent in the red corner. A former technical evangelist from Microsoft, current employee of Rackspace, and author of the popular Scobleizer blog. He’s 44 years old and is fighting out of Silicon Valley California. Give it up for Robert “Scobleizer” Scoble!

The Rumble in the Blog Comments

This mega-fight is one of those occasions where you get a hungry up-and-coming competitor calling out and established legend. Scoble established his reputation years ago as an evangelist for Microsoft. He was like Darth Vader, but from Return of the Jedi where you actually kinda like him. He’s an established figure in the industry and carries a lot of influence. Therefore, when he posted this blog: “2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?” (question mark included) a lot of people weren’t too happy.

Lisa Barone was one of those people, but she didn’t take this one lying down. She went public with a challenge post titled “Ignore the Silly Man, SEO Still Matters For SMBs“. With everything set up, Scoble came out swinging right from the bell.

Round 1

Scoble led with a strong “you missed the point” argument, saying that businesses shouldn’t focus on only SEO. Lisa blocked with an “I didn’t attack you” and countered with a “you’re pretending SEO hasn’t changed in 5 years”. They traded a few jabs, but Lisa takes the round by getting Scoble to take offense at being called a silly man.

Round 2

In this round Lisa tries to slow down the pace by focusing the fight on the headline of Scoble’s post. However, Scoble has no interest in slowing down and keeps swinging for the fences, even throwing an “idiot” into the mix. Lisa again tries to slow things down, but Robert keeps up the pace, even blocking a commenter on Twitter. The frantic pace continues throughout the round with plenty of blows hitting their mark, but in the end Scoble steals Round 2 on sheer persistence.

Round 3

In this the final round we’re treated to even more fast-paced action with Scoble sticking with his “the title was a question” defense and jabbing with his “I just wanted to start a discussion”. Lisa gets a big boost from her corner as Rae Hoffman changes the title tag of Lisa’s post to include Scoble’s name and moves it into the top 100 Google results for Robert Scoble. While Scoble is distracted, Lisa unleashes the haymaker by calling out George Revutsky’s “I’m disappointed Scoble used our interview this way” comment.

The referee calls the fight at 2:30 of the 3rd round for our winner, Lisa Barone!

Photo by markhillary

A couple weeks ago I was reading a post on SmallBizTrends.com titled “The Keys to Small Business Success” by Rieva Lesonsky. She mentioned a study by the Kauffman Foundation that had interviewed 594 founders of successful businesses. Most of the statistics were not surprising, except for this one.

“68 percent said availability of financing/capital was important, but only 11 percent had received venture capital, and just 9 percent had obtained private/angel financing.”

This statistic stood out to me because it represents a disconnect in what the founders said (availabity of financing/capital was important) and what they actually experienced (only 11% took VC and just 9% took private financing). How can it be that important if so few of them actually needed it?

Financing as a Security Blanket

My opinion (and I welcome your opinions in the comments below) is that financing acts as a security blanket for many entrepreneurs; especially VC and angel financing. They want to spread out the financial risk so that if the ship sinks, at least someone else is keeping them company. They think that initially, but once they start taking steps they realize that it isn’t so bad. They can handle it and so we see 68% who SAY it’s important and then only 20% took VC or private financing. The remaining 48% figured out a way to make do. And that is why entrepreneurs are the key to the economic recovery. They find ways to make good things happen. Some of them just want to feel like they have a safety net.

Monday night I had the opportunity to attend the season opener of the Utah Flash, the NBA D-league affiliate of the Utah Jazz. I’m even a season ticket holder because a friend of mine interns with them and got me a good deal. Leading up to the game and culminating at halftime, the Flash ran a publicity stunt that was supposed to get Michael Jordan to Utah, but went horribly awry.

The Challenge

First, a little background. Back in September Michael Jordan was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Obviously he deserved it, but during his speech he got a little petty and called a lot of people out (watch it here) including Bryon Russell of the Utah Jazz. Well, Bryon Russell wasn’t too happy and together with the owner of the Utah Flash, Brandt Anderson, they hatched a plan to have Bryon Russell play a game of 1-on-1 at halftime of the Utah Flash home opener. Anderson put up $100,000 for the winner’s charity and Bryon Russell went on ESPN to issue MJ the challenge.

The Stunt

Despite talking to Jordan’s agent and going public with the challenge, MJ never confirmed he would show. Basically he ignored the challenge all together. However, that didn’t stop the Flash from hiring a look-alike to be “sighted” in Utah on Monday afternoon with a corresponding report issued on the Daily Herald website. Of course this generated a lot of buzz and hype for the event so that almost 7500 people were in attendance. Halftime came, Bryon Russell came out and then…they marched out the look-alike to a parade of boos from the crowd. Fans even threw back free t-shirts when they realized they had been duped.

Where They Went Wrong

I’m sure there will be plenty of finger-pointing and blame to go around as evidenced by local news articles and the comments on Brandt’s Flash owner blog. However, I think the uproar stems mainly from one decision: hiring the look-alike.

I bought my season tickets weeks before the game knowing that Jordan “might” be at the season opener. I thought it would be a bonus, but knew I would enjoy the tickets regardless. I also liked the idea behind the challenge and thought it got the Flash some publicity because it was a novel idea. However, when the Flash hired a look-alike, put him in the community to “test the strength and effectiveness of viral media” and even paraded him onto the floor at halftime they crossed the line.

Before the look-alike the publicity was natural, arising from the curiosity of fans that something might happen. People could have blamed their friend when MJ didn’t show. However, once the Flash introduced the look-alike they took ownership of the publicity. They actively took steps to hype it up. They even brought the guy to the stadium and introduced him with Jordan-esque fanfare. Fair or not, the Flash then took ownership of the backlash of disappointed fans.

Takeaways

So what can you learn from this? To steal a little from Chris Brogan, it’s all about trust. A lot of fans trusted the Flash and when that trust was violated these same fans were pissed off. You don’t have to read too many blog comments to get that feeling. As for me, I’ll keep attending the games. Lost in the mess was a frantic come-from-behind victory in the final minutes. The Flash are 5-1 and lead their division. It could have been an awesome game for all parties involved.

What would you have done if you had been running the Flash’s marketing department?

Last Thursday I went on somewhat of a rant about an issue I was having with AdWords Customer Support (or the apparent lack thereof.) At the time my client’s ads had been down for less than a week and at least I had a “Specialist Team” on the case. At that point I was unhappy. When I didn’t get an update at all last week on their progress I was pissed off. Now I’m just dumbfounded.

Does Google Want Our Money?

Toward the end of last week I sent a follow-up email and got no response. The ads started running on Friday and I thought everything was good. However, on Monday the account was off again and a quick look at the Billing Summary revealed that the ads were running only briefly on Friday and Saturday because of a couple click quality adjustments that had been posted to the account. Therefore I tried to call the general AdWords phone number at 1-866-2-GOOGLE. However, after navigating the calling tree and entering the 10-digit AdWords ID the system just hung up on me. Very classy.

Next step I went to the live chat feature and got a representative on chat. They of course saw I had a ticket in the system and offered to follow up on the progress. Of course all this meant was that my current rep was pushing me off on the last rep (who hadn’t done anything during the last 5 days) with the promise that I would be contacted by the end of the day. Alas, it’s Tuesday and I didn’t hear from them yesterday. I even waded through my junk mail folder to make sure it didn’t get snagged. Nope.

Conclusion?

Google derives the vast majority of its revenues from AdWords. It’s the cash cow that gives Google the cash to burn on all their free offerings and acquisitions. So why don’t they have better customer service? My advice to Google would be to create an advanced customer service team that deals with agencies and large accounts. Limit it to GAP-certified individuals and agencies or something because this type of customer service is unacceptable. My clients will continue to use Google AdWords, but if a Bing/Yahoo conglomerate can put together a viable alternative with better support, I’ll push clients that direction because I’m sick of apologizing for Google’s shortcomings.

Preface: I love Google and in no way want to incur the wrath of almighty Google (via Google slaps, banned accounts, etc.). I just want to vent a little frustration and everything will be all good when the issue is resolved.

The Situation

I manage the PPC for a large, international company in the payments industry. They prepay their AdWords account by transferring funds directly from their bank. They sent in their last payment in plenty of time to avoid running out of funds. The Billing Summary in AdWords shows the payment as received on Nov. 26. Despite this fact all campaigns are suspended and ads are not showing at this moment.

I contacted my agency rep (she’s great with helping me put together RFPs for new business) and since she doesn’t handle billing she referred me to their regular support. I brought up the issue in an online chat, of course the representative couldn’t fix the issue, and said she would escalate it to the “Specialist Team”. I got an email back about 24 hours later telling me the “Specialist Team” was investigating the matter and would get back to me. Well, it’s been another 24 hours and no word yet. Meanwhile I have a client with money in the AdWords bank who can’t seem to get Google to turn on their ads despite wanting to spend that money.

What The Hell Google?

Last time I checked AdWords was your moneymaker, so why does the customer service suck so bad? I can understand when their isn’t customer service for free offerings like Analytics or Voice, but AdWords? I’m starting to wonder if something isn’t wrong over there when I can’t get a seemingly simple fix made within 24 hours of contacting them. Anyone else having this issue?

If you hadn’t heard, yesterday was Cyber Monday, the biggest online shopping day of the Christmas season. Most sites had some type of discount or sale for the occasion and LotusJump was no exception. We were offering a LotusJump Pro account for just $20/month to Cyber Monday signups (cough…the page is still up here if you hurry…cough). As we planned the promotion we set a goal for the number of signups we wanted to achieve.

Some thought the goal was pretty high, but we set out to achieve our goal anyway. We worked the social media channel hard and it worked like a charm – we reached our goal! But this got me to thinking a little about goals.

How Do You Set Goals?

At LotusJump we just picked a nice round number that sounded big and went for it. There wasn’t a whole lot behind it. Perhaps you’ve also done this by choosing some random number of pounds you want to lose. I submit my thoughts on how to set goals.

Investigate, Evaluate and Set a Date

The first step is to investigate what areas you want to improve. Perhaps you want to be more fit or acquire a new talent. Everyone will have different areas they want to work on, but do a little homework so that you know exactly what you want and what it will take to get it.

Second, you need to evaluate how you’ve done with goals in the past. Have you failed in the past because you didn’t break the goal into small enough steps? If you succeeded, what factors contributed to your success. Look for both the good and the bad.

Lastly, you need to set a date. If your goal is to be more fit, register for a marathon. You’ll have a firm date to work toward and you can put a training program in place to achieve your goal. Want to become a better golfer? Schedule a round at your favorite course months in advance and determine the score you want to shoot in that round. Then practice and prepare. The date gives you a benchmark and allows you (and perhaps some friends) to check your progress.

For most people goal-setting is an annual event associated with New Year’s. That’s fine, but I think that people don’t often take enough time to analyze how they did with last year’s goals before worrying about next year’s goals. Hopefully this post will give you a month to really search for areas of improvement, start thinking about how you’ve done with your past goals and set some dates.