Wizard of Ads Clay Campbell

An interesting adventure I'm on.

I had an experience last night I shall not ever forget.

I have a nephew, Don Crider, and he is helping me learn about raising the rankings of a website in the search engines. I read the book he told me from Plant Ocean. It was a 197 page book that gave me insight and “know how” as to how the search engines “think”.
After I read that, Don says’ “OK, now you gotta order this other book called Sam’s book on How to learn HTML in 21 hours”. (It’s 3 inches thick) I ordered it.
Ray Lane a web master and creative guy in Paducah, Kentucky, had been working on a new web site for me claycampbell.biz but it wasn’t “uploaded” yet. (It is now) Another friend from church, Mickey Hill, also a web builder and IT guy. Mickey came over to “walk me through” all this. He has a site that you can put on your mail server to get rid of spam and viruses. It’s called mime defang.
His site is http://www.mickeyhill.com/mimedefang-howto
So last night I was able (with a lotta help) to move the copy (they call it files) and the pictures and logos (they call that art) from HTML code to a program I didn’t know existed. It was right on my computer under “ all programs” when you click the start button. It was called Front Page. This morning to my own amazement and excitement I was able to go into the Front Page move things change things rewrite things and work on my new website. Then I clicked the file button on the top far left side and scrolled down to “publish web” I hit that button and those changes went online to my site. I closed everything down and went to Yahoo and opened up my site and there were all the changes I had made! It was gratifying to see a goal accomplished! I went to bed exhausted but contented.
If I can do this for my site then now knowing what little I do about HTML and building websites along with what I know about Search Engine Optimization. Don Crider says I am a “dangerous man”.
Don at EUGENOUS.COM helps businesses on a national level go to the #1 spot on Yahoo, Google, Msn, and Ask.com, the four main search engines. I can now help smaller companies on a local level that can’t afford Don’ services.

I called three colleges and talked extensively with the curricula people and a couple professors that teach classes about the web, building sites, and the Internet. But nowhere could I find a course teaching information on how to raise your rank in the search engines. They said that course didn’t exist. I found it. Even the people building websites for a living; very creative and talented do not know how to do this.
This has been an exciting adventure; an interesting road I’m on. If I can learn it, I’m sure anyone can, but probably the vast majority of small business owners are not going to be willing to invest the time energy and effort to learn all this because they’re too busy running their businesses. It would be much easier to just hire someone to help them with all their writing, advertising and marketing efforts and do the website/search engine things that needs to be done if you want a higher ranking in the search engines.

More Later
Clay

What is a good “word of mouth advertising” worth?

What is a good “word of mouth advertising” worth?

A fortune, I’d say. Allow me to elaborate a bit.
Last week I posted an article about the process I went through of buying a motor on ebay and getting my old Mercedes fixed up to drive. Well, I have been driving it around a lot and I get do a lot of looks, smiles, nods and “nice old car” comments. I have told every person that I’ve been in contact with for longer than two minutes how I got the motor for it on ebay for $79. People can’t believe it. They’ve said things like: “Really? You’re kiddin’. Nah. How’d ya do that? On ebay? No Joke? Awesome!
I wrote about it on my blog, and talked about it in my seminars and mentioned it onstage at the Kentucky Opry where I have a Country Music Show on Kentucky Lake. So I estimate, conservatively, that over 2000 people have heard me bloviate about how I got the motor and fixed up my “old car”.
Ebay paid me NOTHING for my great advertising. My only thinking is: “Hey, this was a good deal for me. If you want to find good deals, better go look on ebay”.
What is my good “word of mouth advertising” worth to ebay? Well, the whole company was built on such as this: people telling their friends about something they thought was a good thing. People are like that. All over. Not just in Kentucky. My point for you if you own a business is this: is the word of mouth “out there on the street” on you good or bad?
Great advertising or as I call it “Above Average Advertising” will only accelerate what was going to happen anyway. Are people, after they partake of your service or product, saying good things about you or are they saying nothing, or are they doing like I did about ebay: telling everybody they come in contact with that they are absolutely excited, happy, and tremendously satisfied with you and can’t wait till they can do business with you again??

As I speak around the country, one of the topics of one of my seminars is: How to Achieve Above Average Results from Your Advertising Dollars. I just did one of those in Paducah, Kentucky (that’s right close to where I live) the room was filled with business owners and when I said this they all nodded in agreement because it’s so true. My mentor Roy H. Williams has said these things many times in many different ways in his books articles and Monday Morning Memo’s.
“It is unusual to find a businessperson who will ask advertising to do only what it can. Most small business owners are asking it to do what it can’t.
Advertising can’t repair a broken business. It will not make you better at what you do. It can’t turn failure into success.”
“I’m sure you can name a very successful business or two in Murray, Paris, or Paducah that does virtually no advertising, right? So why does it surprise you that a business can struggle and fail in spite of brilliant ads? If a business has what it takes to succeed, that business can succeed in spite of bad advertising. Advertising will only accelerate and enlarge the success or failure that was going to happen anyway.”
“If you are good at what you do, advertising will make success happen faster and bigger than it would have happened otherwise.”
“But if you aren’t good at what you do, or if people don’t want, or care about what you do, then advertising will be just one more bill that you can’t pay.”

There are Several Ways to make sure that the “word of mouth” about you and your business is good.
# 1 Architectural— Physical design, Product design, or your store’s decoration. Like a piano music store: where the whole front of the store looks like a huge piano. How about a glass bottom floor in a store, so you can see what’s happening on the floor under you. (Canada) What about the volcano outside Mirage Casino in Vegas? How about the restrooms in Shoji Tabutchi’s Theatre in Branson Mo? I’m telling you, it’s worth the price of the show ticket just to see the potty. McDonalds playground (1st restaurant playground) it worked miracles for 20 years to make folks talk about their place of business. (I’ve never heard anyone say “hey you ought to go to McDonalds: they got the best hamburgers I’ve ever had”)

#2 Kinetic— Relating to or product of motion. It goes far beyond “good service”. To be a word of mouth trigger it must be constantly observable by management and the customer. Customer service is delivered privately one on one. The best example is I know personally is; Lambert’s Café Home of the Throwd Roll in Sikeston, Mo and near Branson, Mo. Or: Seattle Pike Place market, or tableside restaurant chefs twirling knives at Benihana, or kissing the cod and being “screeched in” upon 1st arrival in Newfoundland.

#3 Generous —Why not offer free deserts in nice restaurants? Hey, flour, butter and sugar are cheap advertising. Free watch batteries at a jewelry store, free weddings at Why sell it if it’ less valuable then the word of mouth that it will create?Chapel Dulcinea.

These things must go far beyond the boundaries of what is normal.

If you don’t want to be average with your business, then why do you insist on being normal?

It wasn’t normal for a person to find a $5000 motor on sale for 79 bucks. That’s why I’ve been raving about ebay. There’s a very book about the personal experience factor and having customers that rave about you and your business. My Partner Mike Dandridge calls it The One Year Business Turnaround.

I haven’t got back to my intended subject and that is how I looked up a lot of parts for that old car and the part that the search engines played, and how one might go about raising the ranking of your business in the search engines. Or search engine optimization.
Later
Clay

How the Internet changed the way I shop and buy.

I have a 1978 280ce Mercedes. I’m the 3rd owner. I bought it in 1990 and drove it until the motor went out in ’98. It’s just been sitting in my garage ever since. My wife kept saying, “Why don’t you get rid of that old car?” I was tempted to have it towed to the junkyard; at least I could get $200 - $300 out of it. Maybe less.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had rebuilt the transmission and the body is in fantastic shape, so I was very reluctant to part with it. It was worth so little with a blown motor.
I had looked all over trying to find a motor for it years earlier, but no luck except I could buy a new one for $5500 and my wife wouldn’t go for that. Since the Internet came along it has really changed the way I shop for things such as far as finding parts for my old car. I kept searching Yahoo, Google, and Ebay off and on for a couple years. One day typed in Ebay’s search bar Mercedes 1978 280ce. Up popped a photo of the exact motor for my car for an opening bid of $78. I was ecstatic. I jumped up and down. (My wife didn’t share my excitement.) I watched it up ‘til the last minute or so then I bid $79 and no one else bid; so I got it! It would cost $200 to ship it here and my mechanic said he’d take the old one out and put the new one in for $500. So I figured at the most I’d lose was $779. If the engine was no good, I told my wife I’d get rid of the car. She said, “Thank God.”

The seller said the engine ran fine and used no oil and had been running but the body was shot and completely rusted out. We emailed back and forth. (I found it to be very unusual that almost everyone trusts everyone else on Ebay.) He said it had 115,000 miles on it. I believed him. I took the chance and did the Pay Pal thing.
Making a long story longer: The mechanic fired it up and called me to say it ran great: no smoke, and the upper part of the engine had several new parts. Amazing! That at least gave me some hope and also relief that I hadn’t just wasted a lot of time and 779 bucks. My wonderful mechanic, Brian, at Quality Automotive, in PaducahKentucky, said since it ran good; if I wanted to go ahead and “get it in shape it would need a few things”. I said “OK.” It needed a brake master cylinder, an idler arm, a steering damper, a new radiator, windshield washer pump and grommet. It needed front end alignment, an alternator, battery sparkplugs, belts hoses, new stuff put in the old air conditioning unit, a fuel gauge, a fuel pump, license plate lenses and lights, radio antenna, a new gas tank, gear shifter linkage washers and some bulbs. Almost all of which I bought on line.
It had 8 years of sitting and I didn’t realize how much a car goes downhill when you’re not driving it.
The total bill for everything was about $2500. For that I have classy little car in mint shape that is really is FUN to drive. (See attached photo.) This experience and learning curve has a long time horizon; some of those parts were real hard to find. Had it not been for the Internet I couldn’t have done it. It is so unbelievably huge yet so easy to work and find stuff. You just type in what you’re looking for and it comes to your monitor in a couple hundredths of a second.

Now getting to my main point: I had not a clue about keywords, description, meta tag, HTML, how they link one the site to another, how search engines look for things: I never knew or suspected any of that. I was just looking to fix up my old car. Out of the hundreds of sites I found why did I choose to do business with those businesses? That is the subject and my learning curve about Search Engine Optimization raising the ranking of your business on the top four search engines. Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Ask.com
More later on this.
PS. Check out the photo of my little car.

Clay

Monday Morning Memo is a great way to start your week.

I awoke at 4:30 am as usual with the urge to urinate. I like living in a part of the world where I can step out my back door and pee on the grass in my back yard and look at the amazing sky in a pre-dawn state. The half moon is just now setting in the west. The sky is glorious with bright blazing stars. It always makes me fell humble when I do that. I see what God has created and I realize I was created in his image and I can be creative too. Not on the massive scale like God, but still creative none-the-less.
My 80-year-old neighbor is firing up his 18-wheeler and is heading out. He’s always up before me. I sure hope and pray I'm actively doing something useful when I'm 80.

I came inside fired up my computer and clicked my Partner Roy H. Williams' Monday Morning Memo. Been doin' that every Monday for 5 years now. He never fails to tweak my interest and curiosity. He mentioned a new article he wrote for Entrprenour.com
called 10 Unusual Ways to Advertise. I realized these are all things that I would try to do. I've already done some of them. You should too.
Clay

Does your advertising need Viagra?

One of my brilliant Partners Walter Kosnitchzke said of the last 10 posts on my blog, only 3 we written by me. He said if people want to know what others say they will go to their sites. They will come to your site (this site) to read what Clay Campbell thinks.
I have determined to change that and do more writing. So here is what I think!

I don't ever get too excited over something, which very intelligent people
disagree on. Politics, Religion, or Advertising. Some say branding works, some say
don't do it. Some do only ROI and check every little thing and make sure
it's giving you your money back.
Others say take a certain % of your income and spend it on advertising and
put it where you really believe it will do the most good, then STICK WITH
THAT!
I say: what makes small business owners' advertising dollars impotent is they
keep switching from one thing to another to another hoping for those very
elusive instant results. Then they expect me, or someone like me to come
along with some Viagra, Cialis, or Lavetra for their advertising to make it
produce "results". That usually doesn't work.

I believe this with all my heart: Some things will work well for one
business, then another business will try the exact same thing and it doesn't work at all.
An ad that worked great for one jewelry store in Texas did no good at all
for another jewelry store Missouri. As an experiment, in my early days of working in radio, I wrote a great ad for one car dealer which produced results like magic. The exact same ad produced no results whatsoever for another car dealer.
"I believe half of my advertising dollars are wasted but I'm not sure which
half to quit".
That quote is attributed to Henry Ford and also to John Wanamaker.
But, that also could be said by any business owner in America. I deal with
businesses everyday that tell me that same thing too. For my own personal
business, I think of advertising like carrying health insurance or a spare
tire in my trunk. I keep a spare tire aired up and ready in case I need it.
I keep the insurance paid up in case I need it.
Similarly I exercise, drink lots of water, eat healthy food, and take vitamins every day. I don't know for absolutely sure if it works or not; I do it just IN CASE IT WORKS because I want to be healthy and in good shape physically. I don't like it, and its
time consuming and very expensive; but I do it anyway!
I run my business and take care of our customers in a manner so that I am depending
on word of mouth advertising and referrals. I expect my customers to
RAVE to everyone about how well they were treated, the value for the price
they paid, and something we did for them or that we had that NO ONE ELSE DID
OR HAD. Fortunately a combination of that and my advertising strategy has
caused us to prosper and grow and develop 1000's of raving fans.
My solution is:
Find what works for your business. Stick with it.
Do more of it. Find a hundred different ways to do it. And don't ever stop.

Clay Campbell Wizard of Ads Official Partner
Creative Ad Campaigns, Strategy Development
Advertising and Marketing Consultant
claycampbell@wizardofads.com

Success is Easy, But So is Neglect

Jim Rohn - Success is Easy, But So is Neglect
The following is an excerpt from Jim Rohn's The Challenge to Succeed Audio Series.

People often ask me how I became successful in that six-year period of time while many of the people I knew did not. The answer is simple: The things I found to be easy to do, they found to be easy not to do. I found it easy to set the goals that could change my life. They found it easy not to. I found it easy to read the books that could affect my thinking and my ideas. They found that easy not to. I found it easy to attend the classes and the seminars, and to get around other successful people. They said it probably really wouldn't matter. If I had to sum it up, I would say what I found to be easy to do, they found to be easy not to do. Six years later, I'm a millionaire and they are all still blaming the economy, the government, and company policies, yet they neglected to do the basic, easy things.

In fact, the primary reason most people are not doing as well as they could and should, can be summed up in a single word: neglect.

It is not the lack of money - banks are full of money. It is not the lack of opportunity - America, and much of the free World, continues to offer the most unprecedented and abundant opportunities in the last six thousand years of recorded history. It is not the lack of books - libraries are full of books - and they are free! It is not the schools - the classrooms are full of good teachers. We have plenty of ministers, leaders, counselors and advisors.

Everything we would ever need to become rich and powerful and sophisticated is within our reach. The major reason that so few take advantage of all that we have is simply, neglect.

Neglect is like an infection. Left unchecked it will spread throughout our entire system of disciplines and eventually lead to a complete breakdown of a potentially joy-filled and prosperous human life.

Not doing the things we know we should do causes us to feel guilty and guilt leads to an erosion of self-confidence. As our self-confidence diminishes, so does the level of our activity. And as our activity diminishes, our results inevitably decline. And as our results suffer, our attitude begins to weaken. And as our attitude begins the slow shift from positive to negative, our self-confidence diminishes even more... and on and on it goes.

So my suggestion is that when giving the choice of "easy to" and "easy not to" that you do not neglect to do the simple, basic, "easy"; but potentially life-changing activities and disciplines.

Jim Rohn has helped to motivate and train an entire generation of personal development trainers as well as hundreds of executives from America's top corporations. Jim Rohn has authored more than 17 books, audio and video programs. He has been hailed as one of the most influential thinkers of our time. He can be reached at www.jimrohn.com.