The danger of this concept is obviously the fact that the talent have absolutely no bargaining power – the producers can simply replace them with another person. Which is ultimately the holy grail fort Hollywood execs – they have control over what is hot and what is not… if you don’t like your contract, we can simply find someone off the street to replace you.

The Winning Headline Formula?

No, this is not about people craving puppies (Because really, no one knows exact how Google is broad matching you), this is about double checking your ads and making sure you’ve actually typed in the right code to trigger Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Hats off to you Staples for going after Dell’s branded terms, but that 2nd bracket should be a “}” and not a “)”

I wonder how long will this text ad be running before someone said something ?

The House Always Wins

It doesn’t matter the client you are working for or the affiliate program that you are in, the Search Engines are always going to cash in on your success / failure as long as you are running a campaign with them. Same thing with gambling, the house always takes a percentage of the payouts and/or stacks the odds against you no matter what the outcome.

Calculated Risks

Professional gamblers read through tons of statistics on the games they are betting on. Chances are, they bet the most amount of money on the games that they feel will most likely go in their favor. Even card counting systems in Blackjack, such as the Hi Opt 1 emphasises on betting more when the card stack is in your favor.

In SEM, you always have to spend money in order to (ultimately) make money. There are certain keywords that we feel like might be profitable and others that are more borderline. Now, after working in the industry for a while you kind of get a feel of what might work and what might not (and for the most part, I am usually more right than wrong), but I’ve been wrong before and I am sure I’ll be wrong in the future. In the end you usually come out ahead but that doesn’t mean you don’t go into the red a couple of times a year. Calculated risks are still risks… which brings up point #3:

Know When to Go For It and When to Quit

Good gamblers will stay away from stuff that they know will most likely end badly, for example a sports betting line that could go either way (meaning a 50/50 shot at best) or games that significantly favors the house (slot machines).

In SEM, there are campaigns that clients like to run that you know is most likely to fall short from their expectations from the get go, for example a parity product where the competitor has a much better offer and has a significant edge in brand awareness and/or SEM due to historical account performances. In this case it might be wise to have a discussion with the client telling them that in order for them to succeed they’ll need to do X, Y and Z in addition to running a SEM campaign and that it’s not possible to hit their lofty goals. If the client has other products that are more competitive, suggesting allocating a bigger portion of their advertising budget to that product instead.

Until next time!

Moses

- Wonder if using MosesChang in my URL helped with SEO

Now the question becomes, can traditional grocery giants survive if all they are able to sell are perishable, fresh foods such as produce, meat and dairy? I don’t have the stats in front of me but I think it’s safe to say they are able to generate a lot more profit from AXE Deodorants and electronic toothbrushes than a pound of onions.

How should traditional grocery stores transform their business model to survive this? In this economic climate people are more willing to sacrifice the “I Want It NOW!” mentality to make their dollar last longer… my feeling is that in order for them to survive they might be forced to shrink their store front to the good o’ days of corner stores and/or incorporate enough online element into their stores (home delivery).

Again, the “I Want It NOW!” mentality in this country could be strong enough that I am just worrying about a whole bunch of nothing…

Now I have the blog up and running, here comes the hard part – what do I write about? I’d say that since I spend a fair amount of my time working on PPC campaigns, I can probably put in my $0.02 about online marketing. Although the urge to write about random stuff still lingers…

I’ll update the blog as often as I can, and hopefully what I have to say is interesting enough that people will actually want to read it

Sincerely,
Moses