Categories
Marketing

How Google Steals Billions From Ads Customers (& why you should be terrified to use them)

If you’ve run many ad campaigns on Google in the past, you will know about a thing called Adsense. Adsense places your content on various kosher properties on the internet who have opted in to receive a small payout every time someone views or clicks an ad. It has been around for decades and is one of Google’s oldest and biggest money makers. Google also has other products: Search Ads, Gmail Ads, Local Ads, Youtube Ads, and more.

Since I didn’t have a fortune 500 budget and wanted my targeting specific, my plan was to advertise my e-course on Airbnb (airbnb10k) arbitrage to the specific audience of a Youtube channel based on airbnb. I set it up and looked away for 2 weeks with $20/day of ad spend put towards a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) budget.

When I went back to check on the performance because I hadn’t made any sales, I was horrified to see ZERO views on the channel I chose but $357 spent on worthless ads. In fact, this number would have been much greater if my credit card had not been expired.

Little did I know, google automatically enrolls your Youtube or other ads in Adsense as well and starts to burn through your ad spend placing your ads on any sites that it possibly can, showing your carefully crafted video targeting entrepreneurs to teenagers in random countries playing free video games.

And do they tell you about this? Of course not!
Carefully hidden in your placements menu, you can see the terrible and ineffective placements Google Ads has intentionally tricked you into purchasing, in my case at a CPM of as much as $32.00!

When I dug deeper and looked at the sited, I realized what a racket was happening. Here are just a few examples of sites blatantly created just to farm a more-than-complicit Adsense campaign.

Some of these sites have somehow been getting views and worthless clicks but are not even up due to a server error. This is just blatant fraud now.

So I went to Google support thinking “Their goal is to make me a better customer by making the entire marketing experience more seamless for all parties.. not to make money off of obvious scam sites. Support will help me out when I point out that I did not ask for Adsense or authorize spend on it! Right?”

NOPE! This is all part of their strategy to dupe you. Here is the response from support:

When a dishonest company has as much unchecked power as Google, bad things begin to happen to their users and customers simply because a monopoly can respond with middle finger to complaints. It is no surprise to me now why in 2018, google removed the “Don’t be evil.” clause from its code of conduct.

Thanks to the incredible amount of money taken with this scheme and the massive pool of victims, this would appear to be a red letter day for a class action firm, and I certainly hope one does soon.

Categories
Marketing

Why Local Marketing is eating the world

Dennis Yu, friend and founder of BlitzMetrics has spent the last 24 months focusing on local companies. Using powerful white label marketing and SEO tools like Vendasta, he has brought the best tools to Chiropractors, Dentists, Eye Doctors, Personal Injury Attorneys, Home Services, Senior Living Providers among other verticals.

“It starts with a solid lighthouse, a figurehead of an industry who has dominated in their space by using proven techniques. They lead others in their space to success by teaching our processes through a lens specific to their industry”, explained Dennis

What ties all the techniques together is the concept of personal branding and learn-do-teach. If you plan to coach people to start a digital agency or market Dentistry, you need to have done so yourself.

The Topic Wheel is a brainstorming tool for mapping out your network and the ways you add value through skills and connections.

The 3×3 is a template for making one-minute videos that will get the point across, show what you believe in and be digestible for many mobile audiences.

Ads are actually the last part. Marketing in 2021 is 90% creative 10% analytics, thanks to the sophisticated algorithms like edge rank.

The system works so well, that I launced my own agency for Senior Care called SeniorScorecard, which uses web software to reveal the gaps in a local companys marketing. Filling those gaps gives you a higher score which leads to more high-quality leads.

Marketing will always be a changing game, but local is where 90% of the dollars are spent, and that will not change for service providers.

Categories
Marketing Software

How to Communicate and Moderate on Clubhouse

Screen Shot 2021-03-06 at 11.50.18 AM

Clubhouse is the new “chat” room, that much is established by its rapid popularization by a user-base that sometimes is even featured as the logo of the app.

It is also a powerful tool for networking, learning and business.

In order to leverage the benefits of clubhouse, there are a few key things you need to bring to your room:

  • Your Network — The biggest rooms are led by those with the biggest existing network.
  • A Topic — For out-of-network follows, pick an interesting topic and name.
  • Communication Skills — You must know how to speak quickly and clearly.
  • Good Moderation — The moderator keeps the room alive, and is essential in preventing chaos.

Communication:

Unlike in a real life scenario, the others in your conversation cannot see your body language, so you must put extra emphasis into clarity.

Also unlike a typical conversation, a successful clubhouse room has 90%+ audience and 10%- quality speakers. This means that you need to make absolutely sure that what you say is of relevance to the audience.

Remember your principles:

No “umms, and ahhs”, stick to the point, and if something is not relevant, leave it out!

Moderation:

The moderator needs to be highly aware of the conversation and keep the topic to the room subject. People joined the room to hear about THAT topic, so unless many hands are being raised, they probably want to stay there and hear more about it.

Sometimes a guest will go off on a long tangent when given the stage and this must be curtailed swiftly but politely. It can be challenging to grasp the microphone away from overly confident speakers who have boguarded the stage. Even if carefully letting down the speaker, you can end up in a conflict, such a what happened to Dennis Yu last month when he tried to remove a speaker. (Grizzly details in link)

So with this in mind, get on clubhouse to community build. Use it to both listen and teach.

Go forth and build your clubhouse empire!

Oh and follow me on clubhouse @skiwheelr

M