Digital Marketing Insider | January 2014 by ROARlocal.com

January 2014 ÂŁ 2

Digital Marketing Insider How To Spice Up Your Marriage The Digital Marketing Way The SEO Trick That Lets you Rank On Page 1 Of Google Using Videos What Successful Entrepreneurs Will Do In 2014 Entrepreneur Insights Nicola cairncross

A Note From The Editor First a warm welcome to January’s edition of the Digital Marketing Insider, produced by ROARlocal.com.

If this is the first time you’ve received this a hearty welcome to you! You’re receiving this because we want to show you what we’re all about and also give you some usable strategies to help your businesses grow. Of course, many business owners are being completely distracted from working on their businesses by Christmas and sadly for many business owners Christmas was a bit of a disaster for them sales wise too.. Now for those businesses with an online presence however, according to Nielson online sales were 7% higher this year compared to last, that means BUT overall sales were down 5% from last year.

That means that the high street had MUCH lower sales than last year BUT online retailers crushed it! Now more than ever you must be online, selling your products on the high street is becoming harder and harder, so this month I’m bringing you some great guides to sell more of your stuff online and to dominate your marketplace online. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this months magazine it’s jam packed with our usual level of brilliant content and as always if we can help you in any way please get in touch Neil Asher CEO ROARlocal

About Us

Contents

We create great looking online advertising campaigns that enhance your brand, we use scientifically proven online advertising methods to drive visitors to your website and adverts and then we optimise your site to make sure those visitors become paying customers that tell all their friends and come back for more.

01 / A Note From The Editor

Our team is different, we focus on making you MONEY we couldn’t care less for winning awards for being “creative” our reward is money in your bank. We’re successful online entrepreneurs, world class copywriters, website optimisation specialists, online advertising mavericks and the geekiest SEO people!

02 / How To Spice Up Your Marriage The Digital Marketing Way 03 / The SEO Trick That Lets you Rank On Page 1 Of Google Using Videos 04 / Your Website has .05 Of A Second To Sell Me...Go! 05 / What Successful Entrepreneurs Will Do In 2014 09 / Take Your AdWords Account From Basic to Brilliant with 5 Top Tips 10 / Entrepreneur Insights

How To Spice Up Your Marriage The Digital Marketing Way

by Neil Asher

No this post will not be about buying sexy time lingerie, joining a swingers club or buying some whips and chains a la 50 Shades of Grey!

Having said that, you know how most marriages go though… First you’re dating, and everything you do is centred on that special new person… You woo them, give them gifts, shower them with compliments… You do everything you can to make sure they know how much you like them… How much you want them around… But eventually, once you’ve been married for a handful of years and that honeymoon phase is over, all of that romantic stuff tends to taper off… The marriage advice experts are always talking about putting that spark back into the relationship, spicing things up to keep the romance alive. Well, the same thing happens to your relationship with a customer – that’s what our outsourced marketing department programme is all about… You see, there are three phases in a customer relationship: - The “dating” phase, where your customer gets to know your company and decides if they want to take the relationship further… - The “engagement” phase, where you and the customer agree to take things to the next level, and an agreement is formed to make a purchase… - The “marriage” phase, where a customer has made a purchase and solidified their relationship with your company.

At this point, they are “all-in,” with the product or service they’ve purchased, creating a longterm connection to your business. And just like marriages, many of us make the mistake of forgetting about the romance once the relationship is well-established… Just like the marriage experts say, we’ve got to find ways to spice it up! The parallels between customer relationships and romantic relationships are everywhere… You’ve got to remember to communicate with your customers, offer them tokens of appreciation, pay attention to their needs… You can’t take your customers for granted.

There are plenty of ways you can keep that connection alive, and just like you would get to know the preferences of the person you’re married to, you’ll get to know how your customers want to interact with your company… But it’s up to you to deliver. Think of each and every one of your customers like a long-term relationship – if you want to keep the “marriage” happy, you’ve got to dedicate some time and effort to maintaining the connection you share… Keep that romance alive and you’ll keep your profits alive too!

If their needs aren’t being met, they’ll seek satisfaction somewhere else… and nobody wants that! Your competitors are going to do everything they can to woo your “married” customers away from you… so you’ve got to be on top of your game. To keep the spark in your customer relationships, backtrack to your dating days! What were you doing to pique their interest? To stay in touch? A huge part of the battle is making sure that your customer knows how much you appreciate them! Send friendly emails, make a phone call once in a while, follow up on the purchases they’ve made to offer discounts on upgrades, or special offers on companion products…

The SEO Trick That Lets you Rank On Page 1 Of Google Using Videos

by Neil Asher

use the transcript on YouTube, so save the transcript as a text file.

Here’s the ROARlocal guide that shows you how to get your video to the top of YouTube search. First some facts to consider:

Of course, you also want to make sure that you:

•

Google owns YouTube

Embed the video onto your website

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Videos are 27% more likely to be clicked on in the search engine results than websites

By embedding videos onto your website it will help get the videos more views.

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Videos LOVE mobile phones

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Given the choice between reading and watching, 78% of people prefer to watch something

This is important because Google algorithms want to know how many times a video on YouTube has been watched…

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It is MUCH easier to sell a product via video than text and pictures

the title and search term needs to match your video title.

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Final fact – Zappos and Amazon are moving to videos to sell their products

The title influences the search rankings, as well as the description tag, so make sure you fill those in as well.

Those facts are cool, but for you as a marketer, the HUGE advantage you have with videos over conventional SEO is that it is easier to get a YouTube video to rank on page 1 than it is to rank a website.

And just like normal SEO, it’s much easier to rank videos for long tail keywords, so focus on them instead of going after generic keywords like “credit cards”.

What that means is you can compete for rankings with well-established sites if you have optimised your videos correctly, giving you equal footing with the competition.

Once you figure out the keywords you want to rank for, make sure your video title and descriptions match them, as it will be very difficult to rank them if they don’t.

Google’s algorithm to find and index videos will only get better over time… And the competition for these results will obviously get more competitive, which means first page ranking will get tougher. So if you haven’t created a video yet, you’d better hurry up!

Create a video site map

With that being said, here’s how we rank videos on page 1 of Google. 1. Create Your YouTube Channel If you don’t already have one, create a YouTube channel… And make sure you create a channel name that is related to your industry. You can even go as far as creating a channel name that has your keyword in it. Not many names will be available, so this will take some time. And don’t forget that there is a character limit to the channel name, which seems to be about 30.

You don’t need strict video content to get indexed. Google recognises a lot of other formats as video, like slide shows, screen capture and PowerPoint presentations that are animated. The issue is, Google doesn’t see your video content, which means it searches for other ways to determine what your video is all about. That’s where video SEO comes in… Traditionally, Google reads a page of content to figure out how to index it. But Google, though it is trying, can’t fully read Flash, so the content in the video remains invisible to their spiders. That means you need to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap found at their Webmaster Tools site. Embed your video on pages with text

The fastest way to get the keyword loaded copy is to upload the transcript to YouTube. The procedure is pretty straight forward… You just upload it like it was a caption:

To help search engines like Google get a better understanding of what the content is all about, make sure you are putting copy on the page.

The reason this is important is because all of your keywords are in that transcript, which then gets indexed by Google.

There are two simple ways of doing that.

Enter the keyword in the title, description and keyword tag, and now start building links to it. Focus on long tail keywords. The video title is important. It is what Google is most interested in when it comes to the term that is being used for a search. In other words,

One, write an introduction to the video that goes before the embedded video: The other strategy is to put the transcript on the page, too

The views on the video on your site will get included in that tally. Keep in mind; almost all of the videos that Google show on its blended searches are from YouTube. Upload your video to YouTube So, while it won’t guarantee first-page results, you can be certain that Google will index your video if you upload it to YouTube. The only problem is this won’t accomplish your SEO goal of driving clicks to your site since anyone who clicks on a result on YouTube will get sent to YouTube and not your site. Now, this just won’t be a successful SEO strategy… So that’s not the only thing you should do. Build backlinks to your video If you want to build links to your video I recommend that you hire a professional company (such as ROARlocal) for your linkbuilding tactics. If you want to be lazy about your link building, you could use Fivver. Fiverr is a site where people will do just about anything for $5, like dance in a chick costume. But that’s not what you need! What you need is to look for social bookmark. Once you give him the keyword and URL and pay him $5, he’ll get backlinks to your YouTube video. In about a week he’ll be finished, even giving you a report with all of the links. The amount of time that it takes for your video to actually rank, however, may take anywhere from a week to three weeks after the backlinks have been added. So in total, you could be ranking in one month, but you probably won’t rank as high as you would like, as the links that you’ll get from Fiverr won’t be as high in quality. Which is why I recommend that you ideally try to build them manually or get us to look after this for you

You can insert the transcript under the video. You can get the transcript by using a service like SpeechPad. You are also going to

Your Website has .05 Of A Second To Sell Me… Go!

by Neil Asher

facilities). Only 6% of the feedback was about the actual content. Visual appeal and website navigation had by far the biggest influence on people’s first impressions of the site.

Trust is built on first impressions

At the same time, poor interface design was particularly associated with rapid rejection and mistrust of a website. When participants did not like some aspect of the design, the whole website was often not explored further than the homepage and was not considered suitable.

People make snap judgements. It takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression about a person, and websites are no different. It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. This number comes from specific studies. In the first study, participants twice rated the visual appeal of web home pages presented for 500 ms each. In a follow-up study they reduced the exposure time to 50 ms. Throughout, visual appeal ratings were highly correlated from one phase to the next, as were the correlations between the 50 ms and 500 ms conditions. Thus, visual appeal can be assessed within 50 ms, suggesting that web designers have about 50 ms to make a good first impression This first impression depends on many factors: structure, colours, spacing, symmetry, amount of text, fonts, and more. All the website screenshots below are for illustrative purposes only. Users form design opinions even in 17 ms. Recently Google confirmed the 50 ms number in their own research. In fact, according to their study, some opinions develop even within 17 ms (though the effect was less pronounced on some design factors). The key findings from their study were that websites with low visual complexity and high prototypicality (how representative a design looks for a certain category of websites) were perceived as highly appealing. IMPORTANT: Make your web design simple and familiar (follow conventions – e.g. people have a fixed idea what an e-commerce site should be like). If you go for innovative, unconventional layouts – people are less likely to like them. Eye tracking study identifies key elements. It takes 2.6 seconds for a user’s eyes to land on that area of a website that most influences their first impression.

The researchers monitored students’ eye movements as they scanned the web pages. The researchers then analysed the eyetracking data to determine how long it took for the students to focus on specific sections of a page – such as the menu, logo, images and social media icons – before they moved on to another section. They discovered that the better the first impression, the the longer the participants stayed on the page.

Similar results were found in a study research for Consumer WebWatch, conducted by Stanford University credibility experts. They found that what people *say* about how they evaluate trust of a website and how they *really* do it are different.

The website sections that drew the most interest from viewers were as follows:

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.

The institution’s logo. Users spent about 6.48 seconds focused on this area before moving on.

IMPORTANT: Great design gets people to trust you and to stick around. Poor design creates mistrust and makes people leave.

The main navigation menu. Almost as popular as the logo, subjects spent an average of 6.44 seconds viewing the menu.

The search box, where users focused for just over 6 seconds.

Make sure above the fold area rocks. Over the years “above the fold” issue has been hotly debated. Today’s research indicates that people have no problem scrolling and in fact prefer it to diving the content into many pages. What’s this got to do with first impressions?

The site’s main image, where users’ eyes fixated for an average of 5.94 seconds.

The site’s written content, where users spent about 5.59 seconds.

The bottom of a website, where users spent about 5.25 seconds.

IMPORTANT: Good first impression leads to longer visit duration. Make sure the 6 elements listed here look great. First impressions are 94% design related. British researchers analysed how different design and information content factors influence trust of online health sites. The study showed clearly that the look and feel of the website is the main driver of first impressions. Of all the feedback the test participants gave, 94% was about design (complex, busy layout, lack of navigation aids, boring web design especially use of color, pop up adverts, slow introductions to site, small print, too much text, corporate look and feel, poor search

Here’s a new dimension of thinking to the “above the fold” issue: it needs to be the best part of your website. First impressions are formed in 0.05 seconds. They’re not going to scroll down in that time. Hence, what they see immediately without scroll is what determines whether they even want to scroll down. Conclusion Visual appeal matters a lot. My best advice: don’t try to save money on design, ever. I’ve seen time and again how a “plain design overhaul” resulted in significant conversion boosts. People form their opinion about your site in milliseconds. The first second on your website might matter more than all other seconds that follow. Make sure that second makes a great first impression. Want us to get to make you look BRILLIANT! Then get in touch here and we’ll take care of your online image.

What Successful Entrepreneurs Will Do In 2014 This is one of those blog posts that I agonised over writing…

It’s a blog post that my business partners will lose sleep over for fear that I’ll upset people by being so honest… BUT As it’s the 31st of December 2013, and tomorrow will be the start of a new year, I figure I owe it to you to lay it on the line for you. If you tried, really really hard, and weren’t successful last year… … it was probably mostly your own fault. Yeah, sure, the economy is kinda crappy, politicians were mean, your prospects are all screamin’ idiots, and God had it in for you. All totally excellent excuses for having a crummy bottom line again.

Once you’ve spent even a little time with successful people, you notice something startling: They all have well-defined goals, and they focus on nailing them like terriers going after a squirrel.

You OWE it your under-nourished, vulnerableto-germs, knowledge-hobbled, bug-infested ancestors to take FULL ADVANTAGE of the mind-bending opportunities swirling around you every second.

They are not stopped by lack of skill, or lack of time, or lack of connections in the right places.

I mean, really.

They are not stopped by ADHD (which a LOT of the entrepreneurs I know are saddled with, BTW), or feelings of inferiority (many of the best are entirely motivated by the “I’ll show you” revenge fuel), or lack of education (dropouts galore). And they are not stopped by the main reason most wannabe entrepreneurs never get past that “deer in the headlights” pose: Not knowing what to do next.

It’s not your fault. It can’t be your fault. That… that’s just…

Every single excuse ever floated by anyone in the history of mankind…

… that’s just completely unacceptable that it might be your fault.

… has been met and conquered by people with less brainpower, less money, less skill and less luck than you.

And, hey, maybe you did piss off the universe, and spooky forces beyond your control mucked things up so you had a bad year. I believe you. I really do. However… After you’ve been around the block a few times in life, you start to notice some very interesting things about success. And the big realisation, I’d have to say, is that the idea that success is somehow magically bestowed on people in a spontaneous burst of luck and being in the right place/right time… … is just bullshit. It is. It’s total bullshit. Hollywood likes to pretend it’s a real plot point. And folks clueless about how the world works — who spend their lives outside looking in — use this myth as a comforting excuse for their own lack of goal attainment.

This can really piss you off. Especially if you’re deeply invested in believing that anything other than growing the hell up and getting serious about attaining your dreams is what creates success in this world. Let me remind you: You have one ticket in this life. You’re already on the ride. It doesn’t “start” at some future point when you’re finally ready or finally have your shit together. The game is on NOW. Nobody knows how long your ride will last. There might be a little meteor headed for your ass this very second, BANG, ticket cancelled. More likely, you’re going to continue (for a while) living in the rarest of times, considering our history. Unlike nearly ALL of your ancestors, who ground out a living with backbreaking work, under the yoke of oppressive authority, without even a vague sliver of a dream that things could be better.

How dare you whine about how tough it is to succeed. Those poor people in your past fought, slaved and died for centuries, inching toward a reality where a person might have a little freedom to choose how they lived their life. And yet… … we DO complain, don’t we. Everyone loses perspective over the course of a lifetime. It’s not like the culture helps us out. The distractions built into modern life read like a solid science fiction story. George Orwell is rolling over in his grave. Nevertheless, just because there ARE distractions and obstacles that trip up nearly everyone trying to get something going… … doesn’t mean that YOU have to succumb to them. The biographies of the most successful people you know about ALL have chapters — sometimes multiple chapters — where things looked bleak, and the story could easily have played out as one of a total loser. At some point, a switch just clicks on for most of them. One second, life seems dull and you feel trapped. The next second… BANG, the most critical decision of a lifetime is made. And the adventure begins in earnest. You know what that decision is? It can be as simple as deciding to get started. To take the first step.

by Neil Asher

Success junkies talk about passion a lot. But most people confuse passion with “desire”, which ain’t the same thing at all. Desire is helpless. A long sigh, a breathless wish. Passion is all about movement. You’re breathless only because you’re engaged in hot and heavy action. So, okay… you wanna hear what successful entrepreneurs will do in 2014? You may not like this. I’m warning you. Here we go… 10 traits of successful entrepreneurs. Step 1: TV is for losers… sorry, it is. You don’t “need” multiple hours every night to relax… And racking up time staring at the idiot box isn’t helping your brain, your digestion, your nerves, or your future. Knock off just ONE TV show you’re currently watching every week… and you’ve just found a hot little hour to devote to your new life. Tear the plasma monster off the wall and donate it to charity, and you’ve recovered a second lifetime of hours. Look, don’t go cold turkey if you can’t handle it. But stop pretending you aren’t wasting massive piles of time doing things that… if you were to suddenly come face-to-face with one of your exhausted, oppressed ancestors… … he would haul off and slug you, as hard as he could, for squandering a life crammed with possibilities that he never dreamed of. Seriously… “Dancing With The Stars?” Are you kidding me? Step 2: Get this and all else follows That stands for “discipline”… something few Westerners have even a nodding acquaintance with. It’s simple to put to work, too. Every day, do something you really, really, really don’t want to do (that needs to be done eventually). It can be doing the dishes, or exercising, or getting up early (by going to bed at a decent hour)… … or it can be diving into that business book on your shelf, or that DVD course you bought last year that you never tore the wrapper off. Living even a mildly disciplined life will change your future immediately. You often know what needs to be done… but you use all that potent gray matter in your skull to find ways to AVOID those things. Just stop it. Become an effective person. Start DOING shit that needs doing. Right now, you have a backlog of chores and items on your “to do list”. It’s a happy day when your new chore is to find a new project to dive into,

because you’ve mopped up everything else. Step 3: Be a good animal Eat better (and less often), treat sleep as a sacred necessity for advanced living. Get your butt into the gym or onto the tennis court (or just on a trail). Allow for quality “ponder” time (or uninterrupted meditation), and plan (and enjoy) life with gusto. My motto has always been “moderation in all vices”. Steady as she goes, but let’s kick it up a notch every now and then – test the adrenaline pump. But the Prime Directive remains: Never pretend you’re something other than a complex biological machine, requiring good fuel, attention to wear-and-tear, constant routine maintenance, and ample opportunity for gleefully maxing out the emotional, spiritual, intellectual and kinesthetic possibilities. You could do worse than follow your dog’s lead in most of this. (Except for sniffing other dog’s butts, of course.) Step 4: Face your fears If you’re not keeping a private journal where you can air out everything on your mind without reservation (even if you have to write in code a lot), then start one now. The first pages can be a list of what you’re afraid of. Just get it out of your head and onto a page… so you can stop obsessing for a while. (Obsessive thinking often comes from your brain’s whack notion that if you don’t obsess, you’ll forget. I’ve found that your brain actually knows that writing it all down means it can relax with the memorisation nonsense. It’s like burying your bone in a familiar place — you can stop carrying it around for a while, and concentrate on something else.) The biggie: If you’ve got something bugging you that ain’t going away with simple pop psychology tricks (like journals), then get some pro help. Psychology is a field that

has never lost its inferiority complex among other sciences, and so it keeps dabbling in pharmaceutical bullshit and elaborate protocols for treatment. Now, you may need high-end treatment. There’s zero shame in that — sometimes, our wiring just goes berserk, and modern chemistry may help. I’m not a doctor. If you have serious problems, get serious help. However, if what’s troubling you is more along the line of emotionally-hobbling guilt, or feelings of inferiority or inadequacy, or the all-too-common problem of feeling like you’re a freak trying to hide your freaky nature among the throngs of normal people out there… … you’re ripe for something as simple as “talk therapy”. I’ve slugged my way through every dark alley of pop psychology there is, from Freud to Jung and other stuff you don’t need to know about. (I have a mostly-worthless degree in psych, you should know, from the University of Sydney). And often, what ails us is primarily the incorrect notion that we’re “naughty” and abnormal… when the truth is that everyone out there harbours a squirming nest of personal demons and private failures. Life isn’t something you “figure out” and then coast through. The lessons and challenges come fast and furious, and never let up. It’s sensible to be wary of danger. It’s crippling, though, to be afraid of your own shadow. If you need help, get it. The people having the most fun (and scoring the big results) in life aren’t normal. They’ve just come to terms with their individuality, and figured out how to rock on with the hand they’ve been dealt. You can do it, too. (continued on next page)

What Successful Entrepreneurs Will Do In 2014 (Cont.) Step 5: Stop lying To others. And to yourself. This doesn’t mean you suddenly become that asshole who constantly delivers “the truth” to everyone around them. The “truth” is hard to ascertain in many situations, and living well includes being diplomatic and sensitive to other people’s feelings. Lying often has nothing to do with the truth. It’s just a weak but persistent form of protection for your ego. The key to being honest to yourself and others is to realise that you aren’t required to respond to every question put to you. It’s perfectly all right to say “no comment”, or “um, yeah, I’m not gonna share that”. (The “Magic Word” that all professionals and successful business owners need to have in their arsenal is “No”. Said politely, with a smile, but firmly and without explanation. “I understand that you want me to answer that question. No. What’s the next topic…”, repeated as often as necessary, is NOT being rude. People learn, growing up, that persistence will wear others down and get them to do what you want. Which is fine, for the rest of the world. As a pro, however, you have the right to opt out of that game. Without explanation.) Lying is a hard damn job. You have to remember all kinds of stuff that isn’t true, so you don’t cross up your stories. Being honest means you are freed from the restraints of a complex relationship to what’s going on. To others, you may stop blabbering so much, and instead be a little circumspect with your answers (which is always a good thing). You may even start listening more, which can also change your life.

People will tell you they’ll act in a certain way in a certain situation, and then do the exact opposite. They’re not “bad”, they’re just doing what people always do — ignoring reality. Top marketers constantly observe people’s actions (not their words). Gary Halbert, when he wanted to get a reaction on a new ad he’d just written, had a favorite bar he would go into and read the ad aloud. If everyone said “that’s a great ad, that should be a winner” then he knew he had written a bomb that would fail. The ONLY reaction he wanted to hear was “Holy crap! How can I get one of those for myself?” This same kind of reality check needs to happen inside your head and heart, constantly. What’s really going on with you, right now? What do you want, what do you NOT want, what are you willing or not willing to do to make the good stuff happen? Step 7: Family and friends matter

… and entrepreneurs are starved for networking with other entrepreneurs. Both to find out what’s working or not working out there for others, and to share what they’ve learned. It can be shocking, at first, to realize just how much support you can get even from competitors sometimes. Business can be like a hockey game — brutal, but with total respect for the other team. Every single successful marketer I know has a deep network of buddies and colleagues they call frequently, and share information that outsiders would pay a fortune for (like testing results, and experienced advice). This is why most of the success junkies hit up events and seminars. You can’t really get to know someone from phone chats, or reading their blogs. The real connection comes from face-to-face meetings, hanging out and sharing a drink at the bar (while sharing gossip).

Being honest with yourself is the big payoff, though. Our default position is to spin things so our little ego isn’t damaged. But you can “spin” honestly, too — there are always multiple realities to any situation, and you can look at shocks like failure in ways that put it in perspective, while being honest. (Most successful people have failed a LOT in their career. They just didn’t take failure as the last word on the subject, but rather looked at it honestly, to learn the lessons and come back more prepared for the second round. THAT’S how you win.)

People miss you. You’re horrible at staying in touch, and old timers will vouch for the fact that years can zoom by and destroy even strong relationships if you ignore the maintenance they deserve.

Step 6: See the world as it really is

Step 8: You need entrepreneur friends

But I also learned to quickly recognise others who had lessons for me (again, whether they realised it or not). Some thought of themselves as experts, others were just damn good at their job.

I often say that good salesmen lead better lives… because to make sales, you must see the world and everyone in it as it IS…

People love to talk about what they love doing…

All had fountains of knowledge and skills worth exploring and figuring out.

… not as you wish it was, or believe it should be.

You don’t have to stay in touch with anyone, of course. Relationships that are burdensome can sap energy from you, and they need to be shelved if you’re gonna move forward in life. Still… somebody’s waiting for a call from you, right now. Make it.

Step 9: Get a Mentor Mentoring changed my life. I’ve had multiple mentors along the way, and some didn’t even realize they WERE mentors. (I just observed them very carefully, and deconstructed what they did and how they did it. Some of the writers I learned the most from were dead when I came along, so I had to use critical thinking instead of actually working with them.)

Side note: It’s not a coincidence that many of the best marketers alive are also quite good at a musical instrument.

by Neil Asher

You know why? It’s the PROCESS of learning. It’s hard to get even the basics down for an instrument… and you must dedicate yourself (and use the “D” word) to get to a point of competence. Most people, given the choice, will not go through the physical pain (your fingers will bleed when learning guitar) and mental anguish (because you will fail over and over again on each step — no one gets it right the first hundred times) of learning something as sophisticated as a musical instrument. Most guitarists I know didn’t really have a choice. The desire to master the beast came from within, and they were driven to do it. Still, I’ve met others who did it to please parents, or just because their reference group of friends all did it. And they got the same benefit as the driven ones: The realisation of what it takes to learn something new. It’s a process. And you CAN learn it, and you CAN do it. It just takes a little guidance. There are a lot of great experts out there who teach. There are also a lot of bogus assholes who fake it, and if they teach you anything at all, it will be to never trust someone without vetting them first ever again. The key is to first find ONE expert you feel you can trust. Make them earn your trust. Triplecheck their credibility and credentials. Through this first relationship, you will be introduced to other teachers and guru’s they recommend. It’s still up to you to be an adult, and be critical of anyone you get advice from until they’ve also earned your trust.

Much of the rookie entrepreneurial world is populated with cynical fuck-ups who would rather tear an expert down, than learn anything. It’s like TMZ for business — there will never a lack of rubber-necking, sneering wannabe’s trashing everyone who has dared to be successful. You can hang with these types, if you like. You’ll be entertained. But you won’t get anywhere in life.

Most people don’t even know what they really want. They just know they lack happiness or fulfillment, or something… … and early goal setting under these conditions will be wildly ineffective. Fortunately, with just a little bit of coaching, you can become a goal-achieving monster. And that is the key to moving from where you are in life, to where you want to be.

Cynicism is for bench warmers. You wanna play, put your ego and your sneer away. Find the experts with the experience and the willingness to teach what fits with what you need… … and get involved. Step 10: Set some goals … and putting together a doable plan to achieve them. This is not something you can do intuitively. Nearly everyone thinks they understand what a real goal is. And they also feel they should be able to achieve a goal just with positive thinking (and maybe a few inspirational catch phrases). And they are wrong. Goal setting isn’t rocket science… but it is more like learning a new instrument than it is like buying a new car. Change doesn’t come easy — there are all kinds of obstacles in your head, your heart, in the universe and in the cards that need to be met and conquered along the way. There is a process.

But the first move is always yours. When you’re ready, reach out. Get involved, take advantage of all interactive opportunities, and don’t be shy about sucking up all the free stuff that experts willingly ladle out.

Take Your AdWords Account From Basic to Brilliant with 5 Top Tips

by Libby Thomas

A little while ago, I wrote a blog titled ‘How to Set up the Perfect Google AdWords Account in 3 Hours’. Hopefully you’ve done that, and are ready to take your account from basics to brilliant with these 5 top tips.

1. Quality Score This is a formula that Google use to decide whether your keyword, ad and website are well-connected, relevant and designed to provide a good user-experience for their millions of searchers. They’ll give each keyword a score between 1 and 10 based on those factors. The higher your score, the less you have to pay for a good position on the search engine results page (and remember that the higher your ad appears, the more likely it is to get clicked on). Here are the best ways to get a 10 every time… 1.

Split up your keywords into really focused Ad Groups. Include the keyword in your Ad Headline and again in your Ad Description and URLs.

Also make sure your keywords are all over your landing pages, and optimise those as much as possible. Landing pages should be clear, easy for Google to interpret and a true representation of your business, as depicted by the keywords you’ve chosen and the ads you’ve written.

Include all variations of your keyword (e.g. plurals, misspelling) on Exact match, rather than relying on Phrase or Broad match. Google deem Exact match to be more relevant, so will reward you with a better Q.S.

Work on your click-through rate. The higher it is, the happier Google are. The formula for a good CTR is simple really: keywords that are really relevant to your business + an arresting ad that includes the keyword & says exactly what you do & don’t do.

using CPA bids instead? Or is it time to run an ‘Experiment’? Where you can request that a small portion of your traffic gets to see a different ad so you can test whether alternative messaging might work? Don’t just stick to the tried and tested when it comes to your account settings, but make use of all Google’s cool features. 2.

Ad Extensions. There are 8 of these in total, and they all appear alongside your ad (depending on what else is happening in the auction when your ad is being served). They range from ‘Location Extensions’ where you can include your address beneath your ad (great for physical shops, potentially limiting for national online suppliers) to ‘Social Extensions’ where you can show how much support your business has got on Google Plus beneath your ads. Explore each Extension and include the relevant ones.

Target the right people based on where they are, what day & time they’re looking for your product and what device they’re searching on. The ‘Dimensions’ tab will give you more information on this and the ‘Settings’ tab will allow you to target them. If you’ve got a mobile-friendly site, definitely target users searching on mobile devices, as there’s still a great untapped potential here.

2. Include all of the Bonus Features The nuts and bolts of your AdWords account are what will really drive success, but there are some nifty little extras that can boost its performance too, and make your ad stand out from the crowd. They are: 1.

General Settings. Head to the settings tab and ensure you’ve selected the right basis for your account. For example, is focusing on ‘clicks, manual maximum CPC bidding’ working for you? Or do you have enough conversion data that you could switch on ‘focus on conversions’

3. Remarketing Remarketing is when a user visits your website & a little cookie gets dropped on to their computer. Then, when that user is visiting another website (e.g, youtube.com), an ad that you’ve created can be shown just to them. Remarketing clicks are much cheaper than search ones, and conversion rates tend

to be high because people have already had a good look round your site, and the remarketing ad they see just reminds them to pop back and buy. It’s really easy to set up. To start collecting users just go to Shared Audiences and generate a tag that needs adding to every page of your site. Once 100 visitors are on the list, you can start showing them remarketing ads as they make their way around the web. To do that, set up a new ‘Display Network Only’ Campaign and select the options below. Work through the set up process and you’ll find a fantastic tool that will build a great display ad for you by accessing your website. Easy!

4. Focus on YouTube Within AdWords you can also set up a Campaign that allows you to advertise on YouTube and encourage people to click through to your website. There are 800 million people visiting YouTube every month, so it’s a fantastic market to capitalise on. We wrote a blog recently all about how to do it. 5. Copy your account to Bing/Yahoo! Ads I may be a bit biased here (I used to work at Microsoft for the Bing Ads team) but there’s a lot of value to be had within these alternative search engines. There’s less advertiser competition so clicks are far cheaper and it’s much easier to get your ads at the top of the page. And it’s super easy to copy your AdWords account. Simply set up a Bing Ads account & hit the ‘Import Google AdWords’ and it does the whole lot for you!

Entrepreneur Insights What one thing about your childhood, personality or upbringing do you think had the biggest influence on your becoming an entrepreneur? My mother and grandmother were extremely entrepreneurial albeit working class and pretty poor. I had my first business idea at the age of about 8, it was to rent out all my paperback books (I was a voracious reader) from under the stairs. I made all the classic business mistakes on that one; no market research at all to see if anyone would bite before going to all the work of putting cardboard holders in each book for the ticket (like they do in real libraries!) so my sister and I wasted days!

Author, speaker and self-taught entrepreneur Nicola Cairncross has been making money and marketing real world businesses online since 1995. Now, with co-founder Neil Asher, Nicola is COO of ROARlocal, bringing online marketing strategy & implementation to businesses as diverse as private banks, business mentoring, property investors, fertility, clutter clearing, career & cement specialists and dating gurus.

I kept going though, with business failure following business failure, interspersed with 18 months or so in a boring job before having my next entrepreneurial inspiration. This continued till the age of 38 when I started reading books like “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” and “The E-Myth”, got my first mentors and realised what I was doing wrong. I’d been on plenty of government sponsored training courses but all they taught you was whether to go Limited and how to design your business cards - nothing about Lean Startup and testing your idea before spending too much time and capital. Then I started Artist Manager, wrote “The Money Gym”, started the training/coaching company of the same name and bought my 12 bedroom hotel “The Acacia” using the “no money down” techniques I was learning from the property investment books I was reading by now. I was off on my route to entrepreneurial success at last! How did you do at school and what did you most love or hate about school? I was ok, always in the A stream because I’m intelligent and I read a lot, but I now know I have ADD and number dyslexia and am a very visual learner so if a teacher could SHOW me on the blackboard I was fine - most didn’t though! I was hopeless at revising, knowing nothing about mindmapping in those days and I just scraped 5 passes, including Art and one in typing and that was the most useful longterm I would say!

What would you say was the ONE THING that made the difference in your professional success? I’m creative and great a creating strategic plans, business plans or marketing plans. I’m a massive action taker and I tend to do “just in time” learning, putting what I learn into action immediately. So I test lots of things quickly and stick with what works. Other strengths include the ability to look at a bit of software and see immediately where it would fit into my money-making plans. The one weakness is that if things get tough I tend to give up too easily and I take things very personally, taking responsibility for everything and every one. Being a control freak I’ve found it hard to delegate and build a team, but I’m getting there now. What ONE THING would you do differently, knowing what you know now? Outsource immediately and if you don’t have the resources to do that, find them fast! It leverages your own efforts so magnificently and if you build systems as you go, then just supervise the work, it leaves you free to come up with brilliant new ideas which then get implemented by your team. It not only makes you more money but it makes business much more fun when you don’t equate every new idea as work for you! What really gets you buzzed NOW about being in business? What fulfills you most? Creativity, money and freedom! Having been pretty poor most of my adult life I’m enjoying earning well now and value myself much more highly. I love writing; my books, blogging and guest posting. Working with Neil Asher is a blast, I’ve learned SO MUCH from him; not just tactics but how a really successful entrepreneur thinks too. I enjoy working from home with a flexible diary, working with an international team all around the world, the best people we can find for each role, is very stimulating. Helping other people achieve business or financial success either via my books, mentoring or just “doing the work” for dynamic businesses via ROARlocal.com makes me very happy.

I most hated games, the only lesson I would regularly play truant for and absolutely loved the library where I could go to escape the playground and lose myself in other worlds.

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