Go Hard or Go Home
Posted On: 2014-05-22
Well that was an experiment that lasted all of two weeks.
Someone who looks a lot like my partner complained that the sound of me typing on my old Microsoft keyboard ... the one that I really like and have in my office here at home ... was so loud that it was waking him up in the mornings. So I reluctantly dug out an equally old ... but rarely used ... ergonomic keyboard and worked with that.
It was certainly quieter but it had an annoying habit of not registering hits on the space bar so whenever I sat down to write one of these columns at home there was a lot of corrections ... and a lot of grumpiness.
Today it finally got the better of me and now the quiet ergonomic keyboard is unplugged and heading for the garbage while my noisy old Microsoft keyboard is back and I'm happy.
Yesterday I was reading an article written by a pay-per-click expert and even though we can't do pay-per-click for adult anymore what he wrote still had a lot of application for us here in adult.
This guy works for a firm that specialises in managing pay-per-click accounts so he had access to a lot of data about keywords and keyword phrases and he had taken that data and compared average position with click through rates.
If you have never done any pay-per-click then I should explain that your ad can move up or down through the day ... depending on a number of factors ... and so Google averages out that fluctuation in it's reports. Your average position is measured in half positions so it can be 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5 etc.
When the guy who wrote the article analyzed the results he found that if your average position was right at the top ... #1 ... then you could expect to get a click through rate of something like 12 percent.
The click through rate dropped significantly if your average position was 1.5 and by the time you got to an average position of 3.5 you were down to a click through rate of just 0.1 percent.
0.1 percent? It's hardly worth playing if all your going to get is just 0.1 percent of all the click throughs and what sort of return on the investment of time and money you would have to spend to manage your account if all you're getting is 0.1 percent of the click throughs?
And yet we find a lot of people who want to play the pay-per-click game but they don't want to go hard at it. They don't want to be at the top of the list ... they want to appear down around position four or five because they're afraid that they're going to spend too much money and not be able to turn all those click throughs into paying customers.
They don't want to go hard and they expect us to charge them less for managing their account simply because they don't want to play hard. But what's the point of playing if you're not playing to win?
Some businesses do have good reasons for not wanting to hit the top spot and I understand that ... but most of the people who come to us don't want to be in the top spot simply because they're afraid that they might actually succeed in getting a lot more work.
They would rather fiddle around on the edges ... feeding on the scraps that the businesses who are playing hard leave for them. And ultimately ... if they're honest with themselves ... by not playing to win they're actually playing to lose.
So what sort of game are you playing here in adult. Are you playing to win? Are you playing hard or are you just playing around the edges ... just doing enough to make ends meet ... not doing too much because it's easier to just do enough rather than too much.
If you are just doing enough to keep some reasonable money rolling in then I've got news for you ... you're ultimately playing to lose and you will lose. It may not happen this month It might not happen next month or even next year ... but there will come a time when it will dawn on you that you haven't played hard enough and you've just been more cannon fodder for the industry that rewards winners and punishes losers.
So get out there and play to win ... play hard ... or save yourself a lot of future pain and just go home now.