All the World’s a… Mirror
Last week I made the terrible mistake of looking at my face in the 5x magnifying vanity mirror in our upstairs bathroom.   There was a lot that disturbed me that I couldn’t do anything about, at least not at 6:30 in the morning and without a scalpel and belt sander, but the thing that really got me was the condition of my nose.   In the regular mirror, it looks fine: good skin, no forests growing out of my nostrils, perhaps a bit larger than Hollywood prefers, and with a slight bump at the bridge courtesy of a self-inflicted racquetball injury in 1978, but all in all, a fine specimen of a schnozz not in need of urgent remedial

Segment your traffic from a single keyword
When one of your important keywords represents different market segments, you've got to make some tough landing page choices. If you try to appeal to all the segments at once, your page will be bland, vague and uninteresting. Yet if you choose one segment, you disregard the others. What's an advertiser to do? Ambiguous Keyword Example nanny placement agency Who's looking for that? Families looking for nannies, and nannies looking for jobs. As you can see from the screenshot of the Google SERP (search engine results page), the advertisers focus on the families. There's more money to be made by placing a nanny with a famil

Moving Keywords to a New Ad Group
A reader wonders: When you copy a keyword to another location, all values are reset to zero, is there some sort of delay in transferring or does this mean they are starting from scratch? – I have keywords that are great performers and I’m concerned that I will lose their status if I move them. My response: Since Quality Score (QS) is dynamically recalculated with each search (graded on a curve against competing advertisers), the only thing that is retained is the historical CTR of the keyword. According to Google, the historical CTR of a keyword is remembered if you move that keyword to a differe

Why I Stopped Beating Myself Up
I’m lying on my bed right now, laptop in my lap, pretty much unable to move. This morning, while I was getting into position for my morning yoga practice, I wrenched my lower back and collapsed onto my mat. The pain shot up my spine, down my legs, and left me shaking and gasping. And you know what? It’s all cool. Self-Acceptance: A Cornerstone of Business Success I realize this isn’t my usual article, chock full of business strategies and online marketing tips. But truth is, business tactics and strategies are only as effective as the human beings who execute them.And one of the biggest stumbling blocks for entrepr

Why My Broccoli Casserole Sucks
I’ve been on a rant lately about how changes in AdWords are likely to shift the arenas of potential competitive advantage from keyword wizardly and campaign optimization to a much deeper factor: Uniqueness If you haven’t yet, spend an hour reviewing this week’s webinar, the AdWords 2010 Prognostication Call. (Available only in the Ring of Fire, click here to join. And once you’re a member, look out early next week for an interview with Sean D’Souza, explaining exactly how you find your uniqueness, how you develop it, and how you propogate it.) Today, check out this quote from a