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Thinking on cringe as the road to insight I realized I hadn’t had any major incidences of cringe lately. And immediately started knocking on wood, throwing salt, and generally assuring the God Murphy that I was not mocking him
Then I realized I had winced a few times recently and was a little wiser for it.
For one I recently did a little dance with a client that ended in me refunding what retainer had been paid to me (at my suggestion) as the easiest way to get out of the relationship. The final fly in the ointment was local geographic targeting via Google AdWords. Anyone that has worked with that knows it is far from an exact science. When I realized my client did not have the background to understand, the temperament to do any research himself, nor the resources to pay me for exhaustive tutoring, I bailed out.
Lesson learned (again): In this business you do have to be somewhat selective of the clients you accept. Ability to communicate with the client, their temperament for advertising in general, ppc in particular, and their resources can be critical as to whether or nor your work for them will succeed. Unless of course you are just churning clients.
Another area where I have dined on some crow lately concerns AdWords content targeting. I often pontificate to clients about the limitations of content targeting; how it is good for branding and promotion but not very good for conversions in the short term, yada, yada. Twice though fairly recently that has proven not to be the case. In fact content targeting resulted in some nice conversion numbers rather quickly, whereas some of the keyword-search campaigns from which I would have expected better ROI, were out performed by the content campaigns.
I don’t have enough data yet for a paper or anything but my hunch is Google has made some nice improvements with their content algorithm. If the rumors of improved transparency and control for content/site targeting are true things are going to get even better very soon.
Lesson learned: Each client situation is different, and the market is ever changing. Test BEFORE you pontificate. Unless you like the taste of crow.
-T
This a personal branding cringe moment that continues to test and hone my budding search marketing skills – however, triumph is around the corner!
Many years ago I was in a romantic relationship that blew up dramatically and I broke it off with the guy in a manner that was abrupt and in retrospect not very sensitive.
This was before the days I was web savvy and SEO conscious.
One day I get this anonymous email sent to me through a 3rd party site accusing me of use and abuse. At first I was like “Who”? And then it dawned on me who sent it. Given that the whole flareup was recent and upsetting, this immediately made me mad.
I typed up a scathing response back and hit send. Never type when you are angry!
Unfortunately as my email address had my true first and last name indicated on it, for years, whenever you’d search my name, my scathing, emasculating response would pop up in position 1.
Not good. Since I’ve entered the search world, I’ve made it my challenge to create enough positive web presence about myself to push this embarrassing search result down. As I’m not a famous person frequently in the public eye, who naturally has references made about me all over the web from sites with oodles of linkjuice, this has been some work.
I’m please to see the embarrassing entry drop down to page 2.
However, I want to bury it completely. Any recos on how to banish it out of sight more quickly?
Laura,
I’ve found that creating profiles on sites, such as LinkedIn.com, Meetup.com, and others and being semi-active by joining a few groups here and there can help you push down that result further. It’s amazing how quickly listings from those websites will show up for your name.
Jason