Steve Clarke - Mentor

One of my mentors, Steve Clarke, challenged our mentoring group today to describe the impact of business mentoring in 2012 so far. Here are some of the benefits of mentoring I’ve enjoyed so far this year, facilitated by Steve and some of his guest speakers in his Gold and Platinum Mentoring groups:

• Improved goal setting and tracking, with trusted peer review
• Improved sales and marketing skills
• Use of more tools and role outsourcing, better delegation – allowing more achievements in less time
• Understanding and use of negotiation skills (guidance from guest Derek Arden) – used successfully to purchase prohibitively expensive tools
• Increased use of Social Media and blogging (influenced by guest Nikki Pilkington)
• Significant increase in use of LinkedIn, including founding the fledgling LinkedIn AdWords Management Group for LinkedIn members that use Google AdWords
• Use of powerful new strategic partnerships
• Started an AdWords mentoring service! More on that below.
• >200% growth in providing white label AdWords Management for other agencies
• Significantly improved turnover, on target for >100% increase this year compared to 10% last year, with foundations to support more growth
• One or two confidential benefits that can only be revealed to the mentoring group!

That’s why mentoring has been worth it to me in 2012 and I’m looking forward to the next group session with video/YouTube/Vimeo topic and guest expert speaker. Thanks Steve! Thanks also to my other mentor for his contributing influence, more on Ian Cass in my next mentoring blog. I can recommend having more than one mentor, it allows a majority opinion for one thing.

Before I go, one more thing on the topic – inspired no doubt by the mentoring I’ve received. I’ve started providing my own mentoring service for AdWords users that want support whilst they manage their AdWords accounts. Currently AdWords mentoring is an email-only service for people that can’t fully let go of the AdWords management role – or can’t afford to. It’s aimed at beginners and intermediates and is priced at a level where even one small improvement per month covers the cost for most people.

• Are you struggling with your AdWords account?
• Worried that you’re losing money, or missing opportunities?
• Or maybe feeling lost now that your AdWords training course is a distant memory?

I can tailor a bespoke AdWords Mentoring and support service to give you peace of mind. Let me know what your AdWords pain is today! Introductory pricing for AdWords mentoring is currently from £47 per month. If you think you are wasting more than that in AdWords costs per month, you probably are. It only costs £47 to find out. Check the home page for latest pricing.

- Rob Hadingham, AdWords Specialist

PS Please comment on this post in LinkedIn, here or here.

Google Science Fair (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From mid-May, exact match will also match to ‘close variation’ searches by default. So it won’t be exact will it? The same trick will happen to phrase matches.

To be fair, in most cases it will probably be a good thing. But sometimes ‘close variations’ aren’t as close as you’d like them to be – and sometimes they are just wrong. Either way, it’s more revenue for Google.

This should have been an opt-in feature. Tsk tsk.

Watch your costs carefully from May onwards.

https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2537522

https://services.google.com/fb/forms/awukgdn/?lo=TESTCODE#sourceidawo

Is there demand for what you are offering?

Can you beat your competitors?

Do visitors buy?

If the answer to any of those questions is ‘no’, AdWords probably won’t work for you until the problem has been fixed, and it certainly can’t be guaranteed to work for you.

If your website is not as compelling as your competitors’ then you’re wasting your visitors’ time, and your own. You don’t need a fabulous design, and you don’t need to be the cheapest (it certainly helps to be the cheapest if you are selling ‘commodity’ or widely available branded products) – but you need to be different and you need to seem to be better, or cheaper, or faster, … or something else of value to your potential customers.

In short, if you’re not selling enough, work on your benefits – don’t just buy more traffic or pay for a web re-design.

On Page One helps to articulate your benefits as part of its Landing Page Optimisation service. Ask for Details Now!