Hello, my name is Jillian.

I am a shop-at-home-a-holic.

My first at-home purchase was made when I was in high school: Debbie Siebers’ “Slim in 6″ training program. I saw the infomercial, picked up the phone and after six to eight weeks of sheer anticipation, there it was – the solution to all my problems. The key to ultimate fitness. The program that would jumpstart my new life as a size two in “no time at all!” Debbie Siebers’ DVD sealed my fate. From that point forward, I was addicted to shopping at home.

Two Joy Mangano products and a tub of Oxi-Clean later, my eyes fell upon Ron Popeil’s Showtime Rotisserie. This thing was a beaut. I likened it to the fireplace at Christmastime- you leave it alone and the next thing you know, you’ve got a present waiting for you. I knew I was destined to have this appliance. It had to have been engineered with me in mind. There was absolutely no question about it.

I had meat on those spits the second I freed my Rotisserie from its plastic wrap straitjacket. I poked my chicken a bit with the handy dandy solid flavor injector, made sure the non-stick drip pan was firmly in place, and carefully slid everything back into the appliance. Then, in a moment of fanfare and coronation, I set my Showtime Rotisserie and smiled with satisfaction as I saw the happy, heated, rotating magic take place before my eyes.

Then… I forgot it, like I thought I was supposed to.

I had expected the roast I placed in my Showtime Rotisserie to emerge juicy, succulent and tender. Instead, the Rotisserie spat out a dry, charred mass of nothing, topped with a whole lot of gross and a side of yuck. I had done everything I was supposed to—I set it up just as I was told, taking extra care in the actual marinating and seasoning process. If it had been fashioned to succeed, why oh why did I end up eating Lean Cuisine that night?!

Like all horrible memories, I quickly pushed that experience to the dusty part of my brain and forgot all about my Showtime Rotisserie (pun totally intended). It wasn’t until I switched careers from amateur, shortcut cook to project coordinator at an online marketing firm that Ron Popeil entered my life once more.

A lot of my clients come to me after running their own pay-per-click campaigns for x amount of years. They had fastidiously built out the keyphrases in their ad groups, down to types of matches and relevant geographic terms. They had conscientiously set their daily ad budgets, remembering to set day parting and turn off their campaigns on the weekend. And, after all was said and done (and might I add — very, very typical of this behavior), they sought the assistance of an online marketing firm, because, as so many argue, “they don’t know why they weren’t getting results!”

The answer is simple. Many search engine marketing specialists can give it, and so can Ron Popeil.

“It’s because you SET IT and FORGET IT.”

As business owners, it’s easy to set up a pay-per-click campaign and subsequently forget it. Many traditional forms of marketing follow this model. You set up a direct mail campaign… then you forget it. You film a television commercial… then you forget it. You’re supposed to forget it, just like you’re supposed to forget about a pot roast in the Showtime Rotisserie. But that’s what sets online marketing apart from traditional forms of marketing… and that’s also why it works better.

Anyone will tell you that the more attention you give any item you cook is proportional to how savory your dish is. It doesn’t matter what new, fangle-dangled appliance you use; it’s still a good rule of thumb to follow. Search engine marketing is the same way. Pay-per-click campaigns are a new notion compared to radio ads, television spots or the Yellow Pages, but just because you’ve heard one or two testimonials about how effective they are doesn’t mean you can “set it and forget it.”

It is absolutely essential to keep an eye on what you’ve got churnin’ and burnin’ if you want to get your desired end result. Watch your pay-per-click campaigns. If you’re losing a lot of juice, make sure you’re basting. If it’s losing flavor, make sure you’re seasoning. If it’s charring the sides, turn down the heat. Do what it takes to make sure you get what you want. At the end of the day, we all want an appetizing pay-off. We can have one if we want one—only when we realize that it takes more than setting it and forgetting it.

Thank God for Spike T.V. finally having the guts to play the number one anticipated event in all of television history- the entire saga of Star Wars! I wouldn’t consider myself a nerd, but I just love this story. This saga is a visionary epic and George Lucas is da man! It’s amazing how a movie based on so much fantasy has multiple applicable real-life meanings. So of course in preparing myself for a hectic work week, I spent my entire weekend watching this series for the 800th time.

Lucky for me, I also took about ten minutes out of my busy weekend to flip through an old dusty book or two (of course, applicable to my client services role at Pop Labs). Don’t we wish our kids were invested so heavily in their future too? Too bad George Lucas didn’t make a movie about those books.

I recall reading about educating your clients on new products and services as well as new uses for existing products. In fact, the book went so far to suggest that anyone in the client services industry that didn’t educate their current happy clients about new products and new benefits for existing products actually does that client a disservice. After all, if the client is happy paying you for Service A and you roll out the brand-new Service B, why wouldn’t you want to offer him service B and contribute just that much more to this client’s happiness and satisfaction?

Lightning strikes and magic happens. It was as if Obi-Wan just handed me my father’s light saber! This whole concept is completely applicable for online marketing as well. The past is the best predictor of the future. If you manage online marketing campaigns or PPC advertising, then you know when your PPC campaign can absorb more clicks. If you have a benchmark for performance and your PPC campaign is a well oiled machine that is consistently turning out ROI, why wouldn’t you offer your client the opportunity to expand their business by asking for a bigger budget?

That’s a rhetorical question young Skywalker…the answer is fear! Is your fear of failure greater than the excitement of success? Fear of sales, fear of the almighty NO, fear of everything this side from death. So below are a few Jedi mind tricks to help get past that fear and moving towards the direction of more profitability, productivity, and success for your clients, Google, and you:

• Love your Clients! - Clients could care less about what you know until they know you care.
• Serve your Clients! - If you’re selling something that the client doesn’t need, then you probably shouldn’t be selling it at all. If they do need it, then you’re not really selling, only consulting through educating and persuading. Remember- people hate being sold, but they love to buy!
• You are Yoda! – Just as every Jedi goes to Yoda, your clients come to you because you have the omniscient, all-knowing Yoda type of knowledge that is responsible for them paying you in the first place.
• Encourage New Ideas! – Keep a questioning nature and always remember that business owners know more about their businesses than you do. So shut up and pay attention…
• Get Hungry! – A closed mouth doesn’t get fed if you want things to happen. You have to initiate the action!

Remember, if you manage online marketing/PPC campaigns for your clients, wouldn’t it be to their benefit if they were willing to give you whatever budget you needed to help grow their online presence? Especially after you have a benchmark for success based on past behavior (e.g. daily budget runs out)? After all, once you establish that you truly care about their business, wouldn’t it be a shame if they decided to spend their advertising budget elsewhere in another form with someone who didn’t care as much as you do? I’d wager to guess that the answers to these questions are “yes,” in which case you have one solution. Get to explaining, educating, and asking for additional budget to support your clients’ business growth.

Last year, I purchased a flat-panel, high-definition television and I must admit, my TV time has definitely increased. The TV has a computer monitor port in the back, so while surfing Joost and looking at some older NBA playoff games, I decided to substitute the computer monitor for the TV. After a few clicks on the remote, I was watching Joost in 48 inches of hi-def, commercial free. Naturally, I viewed my favorite YouTube videos. Eventually the game came on and that was it, until I figured it was a great time to learn how to work the picture in picture. This was great, pointing and clicking while watching the game on the same screen, all in hi-def.

Being in the online marketing field, I obviously began thinking of ways to increase exposure for our clients on this internet TV that is soon to take over. Online marketing is normally in the form of text and graphical ads while commercials are normally run on TV. Maybe we should create a flash video commercial with clickable links (CTA’s) that go to various landing pages. If these internet television commercials were given titles and could be tagged, they could possibly be optimized. We could even launch Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns for it. Joost currently doesn’t feature any advertisements but network stations like ABC, CBS and NBC are featuring streaming episodes of popular shows which do have advertisements on their sites. These advertisements would most likely be in the form of banners. The ability to tag them with TV show names would awesome. For example, if you were a home builder, you may want to tag your ad with “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition,” or if you were doing forensics you would probably tag “CSI: Miami.” It would take more research in regards to your target audience demographic, like the shows they may watch, the time of day they watch TV, average age in the household, etc… but hey, it could and is bound to happen.

Entrepreneurs are, by heart, do-it yourselfers. After all, starting your own business isn’t something you can do without rolling up your selves. Unfortunately, this leads many to try and do everything, including their online marketing. While this might make seem like an easy task, it’s probably not the best use of a business owner’s time or energy. Most entrepreneurs do an extraordinary job at what they specialize in, but can’t possibly be experts in all of the aspects of running a business. They may be lacking the skills in accounting, marketing, or operations and focusing too heavily on these areas personally or even attempting to bring something in-house that should be outsourced could ultimately lead to the demise of their business.

(more…)

Since I am really big on allowing people to use different learning styles it really made me happy when Chuck decided to do a rap to explain the basics of link building at our recent SEM Explosion day. Lots of great presentations that day, but Chuck’s rap was definitely the highlight of the day.