I Worked All Weekend

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Dec. 11

When you’re in corporate online marketing, you have to work from home on the weekend from time to time. The projects line up and you just have to work form home to meet deadlines. (Side note: Always meet your deadlines, no matter what you need to do to get there.) It just so happens that I had an important deadline for my job. So, I worked from home all weekend this weekend. I’m really excited that I finished my project and feel quite energized for the upcoming week. If you’re in corporate online marketing, I’m certain you face this same situation from time to time! Following are a few of my favorite tips when it comes to working weekends.

Tip 1: Take It A Little Easier The Next Week

To Do List

First and foremost, we must recognize that the weekend exists for a reason. No matter how much you love online marketing (believe me, I can’t get enough of this stuff), you need to remember that balance is everything. It’s not about how many hours you put in, but how much you accomplish. After working the weekend, you need to take it a little easier the next week. I’m talking about getting to the office on time (versus early). I’m talking about leaving at the end of the day (as opposed to getting wrapped up in a project and staying late). It’s important to force the balance because career longevity is everything in online marketing.

Tip 2: Make Sure To Exercise

I tend to exercise quite a bit on weekends. When I work at home on weekends, I never compromise my workouts. It’s the balance of exercising and working that keeps my head clear. If you’re in a high power career like online marketing, I always recommend exercising. When the work piles up, always keep up the workouts. It’s amazing how they will help you generate new ideas and excel even more at work.

Tip 3: Don’t Work Every Weekend

I’m the number one proponent of corporate online marketing. When I’m not doing online marketing for my job, I’m blogging about it. It’s an addictive field. That said, it’s all about balance and longevity. Make sure to take time off to spend with your significant other and family. It will keep you balanced and in the game for the long term. While I worked all weekend this weekend, I’m going to strive to take the entire next one off.

Tip 4: Make Your Hard Work Known

In most high powered corporate careers, it’s expected that you work from home (nights and weekends) from time to time. Everyone does it. However, let’s say you go above and beyond. You’re putting in some serious hours on weekends and driving amazing numbers as a result. Let your manager know. You don’t want to go overboard, but subtly make your hard work known. This is something that will likely help you in your next performance review. Want to learn more SEM career tips? I recommend downloading my free eBook highlighting my Top 5 Online Marketing Career Tips.

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Internet Marketing Productivity: Start Small

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Mar. 27

It’s been a while since I blogged about SEM leverage and productivity. Internet marketing, especially in the corporate world, is a discipline where you can easily feel overwhelmed. Add on top of that your commitments outside of work – exercising, hobbies, family, friends, and blogging/affiliate marketing (if you’re like me) – and you could quite possibly lose your sanity! Today’s short post is for those times when you feel so overwhelmed that you don’t know where to start. It’s all about starting small and building momentum.

Prioritize Your Smallest Projects First

Man In Labyrinth

The header above really says it all. If you’re in one of those situations where you’re so overwhelmed you don’t know where to start, I highly recommend starting small. This is actually quite counter-intuitive. Small tasks are typically low leverage. Some small tasks are so small that you could theoretically cross them off the list. However, this tip is not really about getting leverage instantly. It’s not about adding a ton of value instantly. It’s about building up momentum so you can break out of the rut, feel a sense of accomplishment, and then later build up to the big, high value projects.

Of course, if you’re already very focused and already have momentum on your side, I don’t recommend this tip. If you’re in an empowered state of mind, it’s all about harnessing that power and going right after the big projects.

Some of My Favorite Small, Momentum-Building Tasks

In terms of making this advice actionable, here are some small projects I regularly tackle to build up my momentum:

  • Find one exciting blog article about Internet marketing and send it to my team at work, with my commentary on why it’s useful. (Of course, remember to send the email with a low priority flag).
  • Search Google (or Yahoo/Bing) and find one or two interesting paid ads within my vertical. Send the ads to my team to spark creativity in ad copy testing.
  • Search Google (or Yahoo/Bing), just like in the last tip, and find interesting landing page experiences within my vertical. Send the landing page experiences to my team to spark creativity in our own strategy.
  • Search all major search engines manually for trademark violations on our trademarked terms. Even if you have automated software that polices trademarks it’s good to double check it works once in a while!
  • Generate a few keywords manually (just a handful) based on my own industry knowledge and experience. Make sure the new keywords don’t cannibalize old ones (make sure we don’t broad match to the terms), and then deploy them.
  • Record the projects I’ve worked on recently (or plan on this week) in Sharepoint. Our world is moving fast and it’s essential to record completed projects so you remember everything when annual reviews come around.
  • Get routine stuff done such as expense reports, timesheet approvals, invoice approvals, and other similar tasks.
  • Find a project that someone on my team did particularly well and send out a short email to the entire team that celebrates success. I really like this strategy because it not only gets my momentum rolling, but it empowers my entire team.

So, there you have it! Just a few small tasks that can quickly build up my own momentum when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Want to push your productivity even further? I recommend checking out my post about controlling your PPC mind. Thanks for reading and I’d be super curious to see if this start really small strategy works for you?

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Search Engine Relationship Management Tips

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Mar. 30

I’m really excited about today’s post because it covers an important component of the pay per click career path that sometimes gets overlooked: Search engine relationship management. Specifically, I’ll be discussing a few tips to get the most out of your relationships with Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. At the end of the day, it’s all about leverage. Manage your search engine relationships efficiently and your profits will skyrocket!

Tip 1: Your Search Engine Reps Are Part of Your Extended Team

Business Space

My first tip is really simple, yet extremely powerful. It’s easy: View your search engine reps as if they are part of your internal team sitting just a few cubes away! Thinking of your reps this way is very powerful. Let’s say your internal team is comprised of three people, one for each first tier search engine. Now, let’s say you have three search engine reps, again one for each search engine. Rather than having three team members, you actually have six! Now, just think how much work six hard working individuals can accomplish, it’s very powerful stuff.

In reality, this tip is not completely true because your reps are not exclusively dedicated to your account. Even if you’re one of the largest spenders out there, your reps will still have a handful of clients. At the same time, if you are a large spender, your reps will have extra support on their end making the relationship quite powerful.

Tip 2: Your Reps Are Resources – Keep Their Queue Full

So now that we’ve established that your reps are part of your search marketing team, we’ll discuss some great ways to manage these "new" team members. First and foremost, would you ever have your internal team sitting around without any projects to work on? Of course not! Pay per clickers are very expensive and valuable resources. As such, you want to manage your reps just like your internal team and keep them working on the highest leverage projects possible at all times.

From my experience, most reps will go the extra mile. Some projects you may want to consider assigning your reps: keyword generation (both positive and negative), keyword review, keyword categorization, content match suggestions, account growth opportunities, and advanced intelligence. From my experience, those teams that invest sweat equity really do win the PPC game. Sometimes, however, you really need to divide the manual work on the keyword generation, review, and categorization side of things. Involving your reps in the process (in addition to your internal team) is the perfect way to gain scale on those valuable sweat equity type projects, helping the divide the work!

Tip 3: Leverage Search Engine Reps For Advanced Intelligence

What can your reps do that you’re not able to internally? They can provide advanced intelligence around your overall market, search engine trends, and most importantly what your competitors are doing. Therefore, I always like to have at least one intelligence style project in the queue. Now, here’s a word of advice: If you’re always looking at the market and competition, you’re looking backwards. For that reason, I’m always focused on setting new trends. I want the competitors to be following me. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of the market, just don’t spend too much time or else you may lose your first place position.

Tip 4: Manage It All With Weekly (or Bi-Weekly) Calls

The cornerstone of my personal management style hinges around weekly 1-on-1s with my reports. The 1-on-1 provides the perfect opportunity to dive into projects and also career progression. Now, you’re not going to dive into career progression with your reps, but you’ll definitely want to stay on top of their queue. How will you do this? Weekly (or bi-weekly) calls are essential. You’ll want to take close notes, get ETAs, and really stay on top of your reps just like you would with our internal team. Execute on all of this properly and you’ll ensure great productivity!

Now, let me flip this the other way. Excitingly, many reps will bring up great new ideas that you never thought of! They will help drive your priorities. I also like to view these weekly 1-on-1s as a status check on your own work, the work that is being driven by your reps. It’s a great two way street and a reality check for your own progress as well.

Tip 5: In-Person Meetings Are Key

Something I’ve learned over the years: Personal connection is critical in building great business relationships. You really need to know your reps on a personal level and meet them in person for the optimal relationship. It’s easy if you’re in San Francisco like me and can hop on over to Google’s office in a matter of minutes. However, if you’re out of town, I strongly encourage you to make the trip. It will really impress your account management team and will take your search engine relationships to the next level!

As a closing thought: I’m a huge proponent of beta tests. Build strong relationships with your reps (and add as much value for them as they are for you) and you’ll get included in beta tests. This can be a tremendous way to advance your business while being the first mover on new and innovative products before they’re released to the general market.

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Growing PPC Campaigns Is Easy

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Mar. 01

While I’m passionate about all the topics I discuss on PPC Ian, today’s is toward the top of the list. It’s at the top of my list because I’m about to reveal one of the most fundamental secrets behind success in corporate PPC. My secret is extremely simple, but also extremely difficult at the same time. Let’s jump right to the punchline: Growing pay per click search engine marketing campaigns is very easy! I’m serious here. There’s absolutely zero magic. If you have a basic understanding of business operations and math, you are totally capable of understanding all the mechanics behind PPC.

Easy Road

Of course, this is only half of the picture. If PPC were so simple, why do some organizations fail while others succeed? Why do some managers make it to the top and others lose the game? Here’s the difficult part: You need to be an absolute master of process, systems, and execution to thrive in pay per click. While the fundamental mechanics of pay per click are reachable, building scalable systems and consistent execution (on the right projects) is extremely challenging.

Recently, I wrote all about conditioning your PPC mind to focus and execute on difficult PPC projects. When I say "difficult" in this article I really mean "difficult to execute". In theory, the mechanics of what you’re trying to accomplish (especially on a small scale) are not that difficult. However, the execution side can be extremely challenging for a number of reasons:

  1. You’re tired of doing the same thing over and over
  2. You’re constantly looking for the next big thing
  3. You find it challenging to stay focused through large PPC projects
  4. The scale of your keyword set is overwhelming and you’re having trouble building a system to scale
  5. You and your team become complacent and slow down the pace of execution because numbers are doing really well already

In addition to my tips around search marketing leverage, today I’d like to discuss basic pay per click strategies that are easy mechanically but potentially difficult in execution. I’m going to call out some of the execution challenges behind these projects and how you can overcome those barriers. The goal of today’s article: Let’s grow your pay per click campaigns to the next level by executing on the right projects!

PPC Project 1: Consistently Deploy Keywords

Rewinding to my first day in pay per click, I can remember my checklist vividly. Towards the top of my checklist, my manager had something like this in bold: "Deploy keywords each and every day. Keywords are the fundamental driver of growth." Today, this statement is more truthful than ever. However, it constantly astounds me that very few organizations deploy keywords daily, weekly, or even monthly!

There are a number of things that get in the way. The big ones: categorizing keywords, finding the right adgroups, determining the right bids, and simply doing it! My suggestion: Build a system and then execute on it every single morning, pay yourself (and your campaigns) before doing anything else! Your system may include PPC automation, it may even include hiring an intern or two. The key here is developing the most efficient system possible and then running that system as if your life depended on it, no matter how mundane things may become. (It’s ok if you feel like that guy on LOST pushing the button over and over if the results are powerful.) Remember, numbers going up and to the right are never mundane!

PPC Project 2: Consistently Test Ad Copy

Just like keyword deployment, I’m consistently shocked by the small number of organizations that routinely test ad copy. I’m shocked even more by the small number of organizations that leverage statistical significance in their framework. Just think about it: An improvement in ad copy will not only benefit that campaigns you’re testing on, but will potentially lift all (or many) campaigns across all accounts across all search engines!

My overall advice: Develop a framework (in conjunction with your stats team or someone who’s really great at math) and execute upon it routinely. Never fall into a rut and always remember to retest old copy because trends change over time. As another huge tip (one that applies to ad copy testing but also everything else in today’s article): Never become complacent. I’ve seen it many times: The campaigns are doing extremely well and beating expectations so the team starts to take it easy, focus on non-core activities such as beta tests and meetings, and execution on core projects halts to a grind. PPC is volatile so when the storm hits, the system is broken and the team disappoints. In pay per click, even when things are good, I always like to anticipate the bad days and overcompensate for them in the present. If you always force yourself to execute on core projects (and leverage fear to fuel your execution), it is possible to always hit numbers (even when the storm hits).

PPC Project 3: Add Negative Keywords and Sites Weekly

In my opinion, it’s impossible to make broad match work effectively without the right set of negative keywords. It’s impossible to make Yahoo work without the right set of negative partner sites. It’s impossible to make content match work without the right set of negative sites. The natural solution: Add negative keywords and sites weekly. The challenge: Nobody does it. Just like the other tips, it’s up to you to build a system and execute. A system does not always need to include yourself of your team. Make the case to management that you need to expand your team or outsource certain tasks. I’m a tremendous fan of managing remote India SEM Teams.

PPC Project 4: Update Bids Regularly

I’m leaving my favorite project for last! Everyone updates their high volume keywords regularly. However, when it comes to the mid volume and low volume keywords, bids are regularly updated. Why? There’s never enough statistically significant data when you use the same time offset as with your high volume keywords. The solution: Leverage different time periods to evaluate different keywords. The challenge: You need software to accomplish this effectively. This is where many organizations stop. My challenge to you: Audit the solutions out there, think through the build versus buy decision, and make it happen! Your numbers will be thanking you!

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