The Pareto Principle states, basically, that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. This is often true of online marketing campaigns, where 20% of content or marketing efforts produce 80% of the results. This is also often seen in web analytics data, where 80% of pageviews are driven by 20% of keywords or content.

So if you begin seeing 80/20 appear regularly, you have two choices, right?
1) Embrace it.
2.) Fight it.

By embracing the 80/20 principle, you choose to focus more of your energy towards the 20% to produce a larger 80/20 pie.

By fighting the 80/20 principle, you choose to focus on improving the 80% that does not produce as well.

This does not have to be an either/or decision, though. You have a third choice, and that is to constantly strive for performance excellence through continuous improvement processes.

For more Pareto Principle reading, I recommend “What is the 80/20 Rule, and Why it Will Change Your Life.”

While I do not know what the “Google Cash Kit” is, it probably should not be confused with the Google Cash e-book by Chris Carpenter, which sells for $67 from GoogleCash.com or affiliatejackpot.com. That e-book has also been called a scam, but it is a book you pay once for. A book that you must take action on and experiment using its tips, spending money in the process. This is not free or easy money! The Google Cash e-book is neither the best nor the worst book for basic information regarding affiliate marketing and paid search and some of the complaints about it are as a result of it being out of date, which is the nature of books about the Internet.

Your best bet is to stay away from anything called “Google Cash” and spend your money elsewhere.

UPDATE (April 30, 2009): In hindsight, Google Cash by Chris Carpenter is a decent e-book. Combined with the knowledge that can be gained from the bonuses, the whole package may be worth $67.

If you continue to be interested in making money online, but want to stay away from Google Cash Kit and the e-book, one of the newest affiliate marketing methods out there, which is easy to understand, is Twitter Traffic Machine at just $27.

UPDATE (June 11, 2009): Comments are now closed. Thank you for all of the feedback and for keeping others up to date about the questionable nature of these websites. These websites appear to be deceiving enough in their nature that others have and will continue to make a determination that these are scams. Just remember, always read the fine print carefully!

So what is a reasonable management fee? Honestly, I don’t know that I have an answer. But I can say that agencies don’t all work solely with PPC. If an agency works in site design, copywriting, SEO, social media, and a slew of other services, and are good at what they do, they often charge premium fees for the quality of their work and their expertise. What would be a reasonable management fee for a prospective client looking to spend $1000/month in the PPC ad networks with no other work for the agency? Say an agency decides to charge 15% of the PPC ad spend. In that agency, they will see revenue of $150/month. If the person managing that PPC account can be billed out to clients on a site design for $300/hour, the agency would effectively lose money on the PPC client if the employee spent more than 30 minutes managing the campaigns over the course of the entire month.

Employee on Site Design Job = $300/hour.
Employee on PPC Management = $150/month.
Half an hour on site design job = $150.

The employee above would not want to spend more than 1 minute per day managing the accounts to stay profitable for the employer.

I can tell you from experience that managing a PPC campaign takes more than 1 minute per day. Even with Google’s Adwords Editor, or a 3rd-party PPC management tool, it takes longer than 1 minute to understand the top-level numbers, and reporting on them or making changes is time on top of that.

So if you’re going to pay even the industry rate of 15%, it begs the question of how much time will the PPC manager actually spend on your account? If an agency charges $30/hour for all work, they might be able to spend enough time on a $300/monthly PPC management fee (on a $2,000/monthly PPC spend) to make your campaigns work. Similarly, an agency who bills some tasks at $200 or more for consultations probably won’t make money on you as a client if they spend too much time on a $300/monthly fee, and might be doing you a disservice.

Certainly you should not be purchasing PPC management from an agency based on pricing alone, but it’s important to understand the agency side of things. Now, it’s also important to understand that an agency who does charge 15% fees may be willing to “lose” money on a client, as it’s really the opportunity cost that is lost. If the agency does not do a whole lot of site design at $300/hour, they may gladly spend the time and energy on a PPC campaign that is effectively a $20/hour job.

And that’s not to mention that agencies may pay their employees accordingly. Perhaps PPC management does not cost as much, but the employees are similarly not compensated as well as one who can do site design. Agencies often have very distinct roles for employees, so they don’t run into the issue of wanting to put an employee on one job as opposed to another.

So when selecting a partner for PPC management, find out more about the process and what is included in the management fee.

Is the time you’re putting in worth the output? What output?

1. Friend count and friend requests.
You can go around adding everyone you come across, and you’re bound to develop quite a friend list at some sites. But someone who doesn’t actively seek out friends may find that when they give something back to the community, people will seek them out. Someone who actively makes valuable contributions may find an increase in friend requests.

2. Profile views.
Not everyone is desperate to gain friends. A good measure of the success of your profile may be in a rapidly growing number of views of your profile. More profile views typically come from increased volume in your username being displayed, so you’re probably contributing more to the community.

3. Private messages received.
Private messages from other members may be blasted out to you and a whole bunch of people, or just to you. If you’re receiving private messages, you’ve typically made some form of impression on the sender. The more personal the message, the more meaningful the connection can become.

4. Emails received.
Email addresses may be private or public. Either way, it may be one step more personal than a private message. The more personal the message, the more meaningful the connection can become.

5. IMs received.
IM requires instant chat response. An IM conversation can be a meaningful connection.

6. Phone calls received.
Phone numbers may be private or public. Though Skype and VOIP are making calling with computers nearly one-click affairs, they still require voice discussion, where sarcasm, vocal inflection, and personalization can occur real-time and subsequently a meaningful connnection.

7. Referrals to your website.
A social networking profile may be just a starting point to your website or business. Increased traffic referrals from your social networking profiles to your website is a good measure that your profile is engaging enough for people to want to know even more about you and/or your services.

8. Business referrals.
A referral from someone to contact you for a business deal may be a stamp of approval as to your trustworthiness and service abilities.

9. Speaking engagements.
Requests for you to speak at events could be tied back to a person initially discovering you at a social networking site.

10. Revenue/Profit.
The ultimate in measurement is ROI. Though social networking typically doesn’t require investing money, time is money. If your goal is to generate revenue and you’ve invested 300 hours of your time and received no revenue that can be tied back to your profile, that may be a sign that your profile building isn’t working.

11. Stress versus pleasure.
If building your profile makes you want to pull your hair out, as opposed to giving you a smile and a kick to work on, it may not be worth it.

How do you measure your success in social networking?

You can optimize a campaign after just 30 days, but you’re most likely to drastically cut group two to rarely convert, and cut out the rare converters entirely. With just 30 days of data, you can’t know whether a keyword will be an irregularly converting one. If a keyword costs $600 one month and does not convert, and you go to cut the bid so it won’t be displayed as much, that keyword may spend $10 the next month and not convert. Had it spent another $600, though, it might have converted a dozen times. Some keywords, believe it or not, actually do this.

On the other hand, if a keyword converts well in the first thirty days, you could increase the bid, optimize ad copy, improve landing pages, and improve its ad position, only for it to spend a fortune and not convert well or at all the next month.

My experience: Optimizing keyword bids too early can quickly establish a positive ROI for negative campaigns, but with smaller profit margins because you’re cutting rare converters and not taking chances on keywords that did not convert in the first thirty days, but could have later become irregularly converting keywords.

I don’t believe anything is a trend until it has at least three data points. Two months of data does not show a trend, it just shows one result versus another. At three months and longer, you will begin to see trends. So just because a keyword converted both months or not at all may not be indicative of anything. Still, optimizing after 60 days of data should focus primarily on keywords that have not converted at all, or converted both months.

If a keyword is spending lots of dollars, and its average rank is 1.6, but it didn’t convert either month, that keyword isn’t doing its job. You can always optimize ad copy and landing pages to try and get it to convert, but when it comes to bid optimization, this is the type of keyword that probably just doesn’t convert, and should probably take a cut in its bid. The positioning is very telling about whether a keyword will convert.

A keyword that converts both months and has an average rank of 4.7 may convert twice or thrice as much if it were to show more frequently in the first and second ad positions.

My experience: Increading the bid on keywords that have mediocre average rank is a gamble after 60 days, because it’s often an expensive keyword, but the gamble could be the key to a smashing hit of conversions.

Also, it’s easy to get nervous about high volume keywords that convert one month and not the next. By being upfront with clients about the bid optimization process, I’ve been fortunate to allow some of these keywords to run longer than my gut told me to. I highly recommend this route because it allows keywords to begin to show a trend with 90 days of data, and maybe putting the keyword in the irregularly converting instead of rare converters groups.

Optimizing after 90 days or longer is ideal. With 90 days of data, you can see three months’ average CPCs, three months’ average rank, and three months’ conversion data. A keyword that had a CPC of $1.24 then $1.35 then $1.48 with a steady or dropping average rank and relatively stable conversions may be a candidate for an increased bid, because there is greater competition for the keyword. It may also be a candidate for a decreased bid, though.

My experience: The average rank tells the story in conjunction with the other data points. An average rank dropping from 1.6 to 2.1 but still converting may be able to withstand a decreased bid and maintain conversions, even at the risk of dropping to an average position of 2.4.

NOTE: This post did not address ROI or ROAS or CPA, it simply approached bid optimization/bid management from a converting vs. non-converting point of view. Always optimize keywords while factoring in whether they are providing a satisfactory return on investment/return on advertising spend and/or cost per lead/acquisition.

If you’re looking for more on ppc management strategies, check out my post on faster ppc management.

So if Google lets me buy advertising on radio, in newspapers, in search engines, why not en-route? Why not on airplanes, in airplanes, on airline tickets, in in-flight entertainment, from the in-flight magazines to the in-flight television? Why not let me sponsor the inevitably coming flying wi-fi? And while they’re at it, why don’t those ads subsidize the cost of my flight? This isn’t about Google and the ad networks, it’s about the airlines needing to embrace simpler forms of discovering how I can advertise with them. And it’s also about co-branding. For every offline marketing advertisement, is an opportunity to better brand the airline and discuss its benefits over competing airlines.
Airplane In Flight

And just like that, on my summer vacation, I had spiraled into thoughts on airline marketing strategies and the many opportunities that airlines are missing out on in the advertising world. I can fly cross country for $350, sometimes less, but I’m perpetually on the search for the cheapest flight. I don’t care much who gets me to my destination, simply that I get there as cheaply as possible, and preferably, on time, with the fewest connections. I don’t mind being bombarded by advertising while I travel, (though I may be alone,) there’s a great post from a while back on “in-flight hostage marketing.” But apparently, at least someone, the Inflight Marketing Bureau is trying to capitalize in this area. But really, unlike the profitability concerns described about Skybus, I think we can have cheap, safe, on-time flights in many destinations, and I think advertising is how it’s done.

What are your thoughts on what airlines can be doing in their marketing strategy? And how businesses can embrace the airline and airplane marketing arena?

PPC management is a full time job when the campaigns get this large. Improving your clickthrough rate involves constantly writing, tweaking, and testing ad copy, and remembering to document when changes took place. Improving your landing page relevancy involves design, and then constantly writing, tweaking, and testing copy. Lowering bid costs without actually changing bids will be most successful when it involves both improving your clickthrough rate and your landing page relevancy.

For faster ppc management in large campaigns:
1. Keep ad groups small.
When adding 200 keywords, make sure to group them by relevant keyword themes.

2. Know and monitor your budget.
Month to month, click costs change because your competitors, clickthrough rates, and quality scores may all change. Know your highest volume keywords, if possible, and definitely the rate at which your campaigns increase each week.

3. Test on a schedule.
A/B testing ads and landing pages should happen regularly. Writing a new ad for each adgroup, each week, is a lofty goal for me with multiple clients, so monthly may work better. Note: More often may not be better if ad groups are low volume and inconsistent.

4. Download your account, sort it, and study it.
When working with clients, I pretty up the numbers in an Excel file. It works wonders for quick analysis and questions about individual keywords. Most questions can be answered offline if there’s access to my Excel files. Generally, top level numbers at the top, more granular numbers further down, and really nitty-gritty numbers are on another worksheet.

5. Spending more doesn’t mean converting more.
The long tail says that people are searching for long keyword phrases. Low volume keywords may not convert regularly, if ever. Spending thousands on the long tail each month can be a dangerous strategy and suck up strong ROI. Don’t expect spending more to result in more conversions.

2. Repeat yourself. It’s okay to hit me over the head with one offer, especially if it’s good, and you can discuss the benefits in a clear, concise fashion. The CMSInfusion content management system offered as part of the MarketingMainEvent3 had a great “Advanced Notice Subscribers” email list. They hit me over the head with the MME3 event and CMSInfusion for about three weeks, every single day! But those emails drilled into me the benefits, and the original video was quite fantastic, in my opinion. While I didn’t buy, it’s one of the only times in over two years of receiving autoresponder messages, that I recognized why you, me, and everyone should have bought CMSInfusion at the introductory price.

3. Put the unsubscribe options at the bottom. Don’t tell me upfront that I “can easily unsubscribe from a link at the bottom of this email!” I know it’s easy to unsubscribe, don’t make it too easy. I don’t even know what you’re about to say, and my time is limited, so don’t give me a reason to unsubscribe by inadvertently telling me that you don’t think your content is worthy of my staying on your list.

4. Give me free information that I may not have thought of. You can still promote products and services, especially if you tie them into the free information. Just remember, the free information should be able to stand on its own. A recent email I received said, “8 Ways to Increase the Perceived Value of your Freebies.” It was a great read because it took just a minute, and mentioned things I hadn’t already written down in my internet marketing notes. Brian Simpson regularly emails “feature articles” that are worth far more than a million internet marketing products out there.

5. Update your autoresponder emails. It’s easy to get caught up selling new products, writing up new autoresponder messages for them, and broadcasting messages to old list members who have exhausted the autoresponder, but don’t tell me 2006 is the year of video when we’re halfway through 2007!

6. Cloak your affiliate links. Aweber, and many other autoresponder systems automatically cloak your affiliate links and give you statistics to how many people clicked through. But just because aweber creates links for you doesn’t mean they’re the best links to get clicks. Which looks better to you? clicks.aweber.com/z/ct/54378q5433fd3 or hopurl.com/45332 or http://www.wolftrust.com/recommends/adwordsmiracle/?

7. Know what you’re talking about, and clarify. If you’re not sure how to set up an AdWords campaign, or what can be set in the process, but you’re going to tell potential customers to set up a campaign, do everyone a favor and triple check the setup process so you give accurate information. A recent email told me to set up an AdWords campaign with my budget and click rates. If you could set click rates, don’t you think I’d set it to 100%? So they probably meant setting max CPCs on keywords. Don’t make your potential customer’s guess.

Check out 4 more opt-in email list marketing tips.

Tip 1: Each business should likely use a variety of different opt in email lists.

When used appropriately, these lists are made up of targeted prospects and/or consumers of products or services who can be gently persuaded into purchasing and upgrading those products and services.

Internet Marketing List Building is big business because of its generally inexpensive nature. One person loads up an autoresponder with messages, pushes people to sign up to their list with various (usually) free enticements, and then encourages a user to purchase a product once they’ve signed up.

I frequently sign up for internet marketer’s email lists. It is important to an online marketer to do so to understand trends, read about new methods of customer retention, and analyze compelling copy. As a result of my willingness to sign up for these email courses and autoresponders, I amass large amounts of opt in email.

Tip 2: The one thing that all list builders should work on before marketing their list, is passing spam filters.

I don’t actively look to my spam folders for your message because I have dozens of other internet marketers who promise all sorts of insider secrets on very similar topics to that already pass my spam filters. So once they pass, I often end up with large amounts of unread email because I just can’t keep up.

One inbox I currently use for opt in email lists has 686 unread messages. I decided to collect the names in the “From:” line, to see how many people regularly send me email that I haven’t deleted lately. The idea is to determine whether I even know what they typically sell, and whether their email list is worth staying on.

Tip 3: Just as easily as I opt-in, I can usually opt-out of internet marketers email lists because of compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act.

Comply with the law.

Tip 4: So any internet marketer wishing to catch my attention should do a good job of branding their name and/or business before I ever opt-in to their email list. It’s a tough job, but it can be done.

686 messages came from 109 different “From:” lines. Though some were one person with several lists, it amounts to more than 6 messages per “From:” address that I haven’t read. Of the 109, I could only definitely describe what 5 of them are known for, and could probably guess what another 5-10 are talking about inside their email without looking at their subject line. For the other 90+ of them, they might as well take me off their list because I’m not likely to read their email at this point. I’m so backed up that I’m looking for email from people I trust, and I’m not really looking at the subject lines at all. The subject lines are a bit secondary when I’m this backed up.