Any advice for this struggling MBA student?

Im just not convinced that a professor sitting behind a desk is a better teacher than someone that actually has past experience…

This is at the heart of the quandry. What kind of teaching are you talking about? Economic theory? Business Philosophies etc? Then definitely the professor.

How to make money? Then someone who’s had to make money to pay their rent or feed their family. Definitely.

If the professor was silly enough to “teach students how to make money” then is that professor prepared to put some kind of a personal guarantee on the methods working – Probably not.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with studying for an MBA, it’s a worthy thing to do. But, it’s not a degree in how to make money. The only way you do that is through the entrepreneurial school of hard knocks.

I watched with interest as a group of bankers responsible for losing billions of dollars were paraded in front of the UK government a couple of weeks ago. These guys were incompetent in terms of “how to make money” but great at how to lose it. The shocking thing was that none of them seemed to actually have any banking qualifications or hardcore entrepreneurial experience.

Hey, but guess what. It appears they all had Ivy League MBA’s.

Not knocking the academic route at all. I’m a big fan. Just think about what it is you actually want to be taught.

Ed

This struggling MBA student could trade time to one of your profiting clients. Maybe do research, write content, or provide build out on an already profitable site with successful Adwords campaigns.

Your client would be given access through the management feature to the students account, load proven campaigns to use the credit, and the student would get half the proceeds. In effect, the MBA student would be “hiring” the expert and possibly get a job.

Your client would pause their own campaign (as not to increase their own costs), then after a fixed duration delete the campaign (on the students side) unless the student continues to fund it. At some point, the student either works for your client, or saves enough money buy your program to do it for themselves.

Best,

Justin

As someone who has an MBA I can totally understand the disconnect that the graduate courses have with the real world. In my case I had a marketing professor trying to convince me that the methodologies that she was teaching and using in her position at a large company actually worked. The sad fact is that before the course was over she was laid off from her position. The information taught in these classes are often based on old paradigms that have little barring in the world today. My recommendation is finish your degree. You made it this far and in the end it is a graduate degree and will open doors for you even though you may not use all the information that you are taught there. But, is this not the truth with everything? In the end all of us must use discernment and take what is useful and discard what is not. You have already showed good wisdom in seeking out other marketing ideas..keep seeking…keep learning.

In the spirit of Bryan’s recent six word challenge:

Ultimate Guide
Eighteen Bucks
Low Tuition

http://www.Amazon.com

DF,

The definitive guide by Perry is $59 and probably worth 100 times that easily.

When my brother and I went to a very expensive private college we were able to sell our notes.

I bet you could buy the $59.00 guide, create a set of cheat sheets and notes for fellow classmates, sell them those for $19.00 apeice and not only make back the cost of the guide in just a few sales but also get yourself an A in the process.

If that doesn’t work ask the professor to give you $100 in Google Adwords Credits and tell him to give you $59 for a guide that you need and you will still out do all of your competition.

Hi DF,

I’ve invested tens of thousands of dollars in marketing books, home-study courses, teleseminar series and seminars. Perry’s Google AdWords guide is easily in the top 5 in terms of products that deliver practical, easy-to-implement strategies that WORK. I wouldn’t even think of trying to set up an AdWords campaign without it. If your professor isn’t using Perry’s guide to teach, well, I’d be skeptical about the quality of education you’re receiving too.

My advice? Find $49 to buy the guide — whatever it takes. Heck, go donate plasma if you have to — it’s that good. Not only will you figure out what you need to do to ace this part of your course, you’ll actually learn some practical skills that you can use to make money. (Tip: rustle up a few small businesses that would like help with their AdWords campaigns and use what you learn from Perry to improve their results.)

Jenny Hamby, SeminarMarketingPro.com

Dear MBA Student,

Everything Perry teaches related to Adwords Success is predicated on the assumption that you’ve already got some things in place in your “live” business. In my experience – and this economy is proving it – only a small number of businesses actually have it in place.

Start with this wisdom from Dan Kennedy:

Tools change Constantly
Tactics change Occasionally
Strategies change Rarely
But… Principles NEVER change

The components of Adwords (keyword tools, campaigns, ads, quality scores, CTR, etc.) are all tools and they do change constantly. That’s half the reason we all stick with Perry month after month in his subscription groups – because we find out very quickly what the changes are, what they really mean, and how to react to them.

The tactics of Adwords (Peel and Stick, ad writing, selecting a display URL, split-testing, etc.) change occasionally but they are legitimate and potentially profitable skill sets you can acquire. There’s nobody better on the planet to learn those things from than Perry.

We now get down to strategies and principles and this is where the assumptions about your “live” business come in. One of the greatest lessons I’ve learned form Perry is that he cannot save a business that isn’t based on solid principles and strategies. More than that, he’s not even remotely interested in trying. Adwords is set of tools and tactics – nothing more nothing less. It sits on top of whatever foundation you put it on.

Here’s my elevator version of what the key unchanging principles must be. Without them, nothing else matters:

1) Mass Desire – a sizeable group of identifiable people that all have an urgent desire to attain near instant gratification or avoid near imminent disaster.

2)Good Copy/Salesmanship – the ability to sell something to someone whether in print, online, over the phone, or face to face.

3)An irresistable offer – the crystal clear perception of the huge value they will get vs. the “investment” it will take to get it.

4)Adequate Product – the ability to satisfy the clients desire in a tangible way.

5)Profit – a business model that exists for a single purpose – to generate sustainable, scalable profits from as close to day 1 as possible.

If you’ve got those things, then Perry can help you. If not, nobody can help you. Why? Because if they did, they’d rightfully demand the lion’s share of the profits because the principles are the magic – the rest is just details and commodities.

So, here’s my special student discount offer. Send me an email describing your “live business” or business idea. I’ll read it over and tell you what I think. I’ll also send you back an exercise that you can go through to identify and articulate the principles mentioned above.

After the exercise, you’ll know if you’ve got a shot at really making money online. If you do, then all you need to get started with Perry’s stuff is his Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords. $25 at a bookstore near you.

http://www.borders.com/online/store/TitleDetail?sku=1599180308

Note: I’m not a recognized guru. If I was I wouldn’t be offering to help you because I’d be charging some other dude $1,000/hr to do it for him instead. I’m just a long time student carving my way through the streets of the underbelly of business. I’d benefit from the consulting experience, it will help me sharpen up my chops, and perhaps lead to some type of Joint Venture if it’s exciting. So, take my offer for what you’re paying for it!

Note2: If you don’t have a strong business idea, than I’ve got one that’s been sitting on the shelf for 13 months and would be happy to have your MBA tuition and fees pay to test it out!

Good Luck
Nick Neilson
Email is nickneilson@gmail.com

Well, I’ve worked at 2 fairly large SEM firms in Los Angeles, and neither of ‘em knew (or knows?) @ Perry Marshall. (I don’t think they know what direct response is either.) But hey, I got to run some fairly emotive campaigns (oops, there was that one Yahoo sez they wouldn’t run because it was a financial client and I didn’t include the keyword in the header…not a choice in financial so they said).

Anyway,this kid doesn’t need a dissertation (who does?)…just tell him to call (310) 839-2468 or email (tiad@earthlink.net) me and I’ll help him for free. (Fortunately I have a few PM books up my sleeve.)

Maybe he’s attending a state U in LA.

Here is a “live” biz scenario for you to consider.

Use the google money to run adwords offering to spill the beans, get the inside scoop, on taking and passing an MBA.

The ad takes you to a landing page offering your free Guide to MBA for dummies. The person has to enter their name and email address.

Your then take them to a second page where they can listen to or download your recording and transcript.

To create the product just record yourself and a fellow mba friend talking frankly about all the good things covered on an MBA course.

At the end use some sublte marketing offer to advertise the MBA Course that you took at your college.

If this works right then you could actually drum up new students for the colleage. And you get to test out using an adword strategy at the same time. So you all win.

Good luck.
Steve.
PS Make sure you agree a commission rate for any new students who get signed up

MBA’s are good for one thing: it delays getting a job after ur B.S., LOL

Seriously, and I went to USC’s Marshall School of Business with degrees in Entrepreneurial Studies and Accounting, MBA’s are really good for getting a job in corporate America. It’s really good for networking with other students. It’s gives u 2 more years of beer pong. That’s about it!

Honest.

If you want a corporate job, than an MBA is a must.

If you are an Entrepreneur, than an MBA is a waste of time. (Unless you go to USC of course, LOL!)

If you want to learn practical wealth building information, and network with people who make money, then I think seminars would be a better ROI.

Way, way, way, better.

Build relationships with people at seminars. (Research about their personal interest before hand)

They want to help young kids because at some point they were the kid.

Successful people are usually successful because their insecurities drove them.

Entrepreneurs have this “F the system” attitude. Show them you want to “F the system”. Let them see your insecurities (BTW, proof that this works is that Perry posted ur email on his blog. I bet it hit some emotional cord).

I’ve learned so much more from Perry, and others I’ve met along the way, than I did in school.

I’ve learned from getting my balls crushed from mistakes I’ve make.

And so will YOU!

On a side note, its my (limited) experience that Adwords attracts Entrepreneurs. People willing to take risk.

Ya, big corporations spend(waste) a bunch of money on Adwords, but its really Entrepreneurs fueling the growth of Google.

Anyway, the question at hand:

“I’ve got no money, wasted a bunch on a lame MBA, and just now realize I need to spend money learning from successful people.”

Quick and easy solution: volunteer.

Volunteer at seminars. Beg them to accept you as a volunteer.

Volunteer at business plan competitions.

Get on alumni list, look for retired executives, and call them.

Go to alumni events. Take them to lunch. Unless, its Perry of course, who will charge you his hourly rate, haha (I love u Perry!)

Good luck!
Adam

p.s. enjoy school!
p.p.s wrote this one because i read people look at the second pps the most. is that ur experience.
p.p.p.s Volunteer, show ur insecurites, ask for help in specific ways, follow-through

Hi D.F.,

Here are some tips from my multi-year experience with Adwords which can help you to optimize your learning experience out of this $200 Adwords budget.

1. Spread your budget evenly across the time period because

* on Adwords it is quite easy to spend lots of money real fast if you are sloppy or if you start to gamble it instead of working it.

* if you do it right, each day is better than the day before, especially during the first month or so. So, spending too much of your budget early will leave you without money as soon as it gets really good. Spending to little at the start will leave you without enough traffic to learn from and/or to test with.

So, with your kind of budget, spending it evenly is probably the best idea.

Let’s say that you have 20 days to spend your $200, then you set your daily budget to $10, and let it there, no matter what happens.

If you make sales, you may reinvest parts of the profit and increase your budget accordingly.

2. choose a market with not too much competition so you get a lower price per click and therefore more clicks for your budget. More clicks will help you to learn more and it will help you to get statistically significant numbers faster.

3. disable the content network because $200 will not be sufficient to do any useful amount of testing and optimization on the content network. Plus, the content network is lots harder to get right than search.

However, on search, if you know what you are doing, $200 may get you some useful results and a good learning experience.

4. Use Splittester.com for evaluating your splittests. (thanks to Perry for this great tool)

5. First optimize for clicks, then for leads, then for sales.

6. Get Perry’s guide because

a) if you want to figure it out yourself you will probably not even find out 10% of what you need to be successful

b) figuring out only 10% of Perry’s guide yourself will take you more time than you need to earn the money for Perry’s guide even if you earn it with flipping hamburgers at McDonalds or a similar low-pay job. ( yes, 10 to 20 hours will not be sufficient for figuring out even 10% of Perry’s guide on your own )

Plus figuring out even 10% of Perry’s guide yourself will need an Adwords testing budget way above $200.

Just take the figures from the testimonials on Perry’s site and do a simple ROI-analysis. ( you should have learned how to do *that* in your MBA-education, so your MBA-education may not be as useless as you might think… )

With the knowledge from Perry’s guide, doing Adwords at a quite useful level is kind of easy.

With quite useful I mean: Operating with a profit if the rest of your business is sound.

( If you want to become a world-class master, then there is lots of depth to learn about –> join Perry’s renaissance club if you want to enter that route… )

So in summary, Perry’s guide will give you a huge head-start and will save you lots of time and money.

I know from experience: Before I got to know about Perry’s guide I already did some Adwords.

Yes, I have figured out something by myself thanks to a sound knowledge in psychology and mathematics and having a computer science education and years of experience in computer science:

I figured out about 10-20% of Perry’s guide by myself, while burning several thousand dollars with Adwords and investing lots of time, maybe 50 to 100 hours.

I was glad when I finally found Perry’s guide…

It is the one marketing education product with the highest ROI which I have ever bought, by a huge distance.

Hope this helps,

Chris

Hey,

D.F :”I am wrapping up my MBA, at {large state university} and cant help but think its completely wasting my time”

Oritseyemi: No, I don’t think it is a complete waste of time. Knowing how to “dance the Google” dance is one thing. A lot of folks know how to launch adwords campaign but have no clue how to really manage the business aspect of it.

I personally believe that it is much more deeper than just putting adword campaign together.

Your adwords campaign is just a tiny fraction of what you can use it to do. It is a marketing tool. Very powerful one indeed.

Although you don’t really need an MBA to do this but trust me, it will surely come handy when you need it to run your BUSINESS. The business aspect of it/business management of it is another thing.

D.F: Fortunately one on my professors has enrolled us into the “Google Challenge” – where Google gives $200 in ad words and we focus an actual marketing campaign on a live business.

Oritseyemi: This is an excellent hands on training. This is what separates some of these ivy leagues universities from the rest of them. Although they all might have the same curriculum but how these topics are approached is what separates the wheat from the shaft.

It is like receiving real life case study surgery of life companies done by cocky CEO’s like Jack Welch . You can’t beat that, can you? I wish a lot of universities can enroll their students in this google program and gently expose their students to the practical side of online lead generation.

D.F: My question is this: Based on your emails I received I certainly do not doubt your expertise in this field. However from a broke college student paying way too much in tuition, your products are out of reach at the moment. Do you have any “specials” that would benefit students?

Oritseyemi: Let me tell you a story.

Recently, perry had to charge prospective applicants to apply for a vacant post. There were a lot of folks who reacted negatively to this. At first, I thought to myself “what in the world is this guy doing charging folks to submit resumes for a vacant position”. Here is the link http://www.perrymarshall.com/services/content-czar/

DF,I know think they don’t teach these stuff in the universities. But come to think of it. if you are extremely good at what you do, you won’t be scared of doing the same thing. Moreover, if your time is extremely valuable, then it makes more sense to do that. It will amongst other things save you a heck of a lot of time. Which is to say only the serious candidates will definitely apply. Did perry really need that money?

Heck no!

I think it makes a lot of sense though.

Then came another guy who wanted to invite perry to launch so that he can “hack” perry’s brain. Again, I wondered to myself, what is wrong with that.

Guess what?

A lot was wrong with that kind of free launch too. Read this response and judge for yourself. I was wrong again.http://www.perrymarshall.com/perrys-greed/

What do you think so far?

You are still with me, right?

Ok!

I know you are busy, won’t take your time. I solemnly promise.

D.F: “However from a broke college student paying way too much in tuition, your products are out of reach at the moment. Do you have any “specials” that would benefit students?”

Sorry to hear that you are paying that much for your studies. It will pay off one day.

How?

Listen very well to this.

If you don’t learn anything else from this response of mine, I want you to take note of this point.
I can go on and on on the subject of how much junk the internet is full of.

On any subject, there are so many folks who claim to be “guru” on those subjects.

But since we are on the subject of marketing/lead generation, I have not yet seen any one as good as this guy.

You will regret it for life if you start with someone else. Trust me. Not because he need this $59.00 to survive or something.

It is because he is the real mckoy.

You think you are spending a lot of money on tuition now?

Try jumping from one guru to another, buying one course after another; and not having anything to show for it.

If I were you, I will sacrifice some cups of coffee, skip breakfast or launch or dinner, skip dates with those fine girls, save whatever I can and get his book.

You and I know that you can come up with that money no matter what.

Those cups of coffee at Starbucks or wherever will not add as much value to your life anyway but an investment in a solid book like this will SURELY WILL.

You ignore this advice, you do it at your own peril!

In a nutshell, sacrifice something else or whatever you can sacrifice, buy the book. Read it over and over again.

Get $9.00 and register a domain name. Build a small website. Not a fancy one. Somehow try and use what perry has thought you to start building a list.

Whatever you do, erase your mind with trying to make a million dollars overnight. It is all a “myth”

Your main goal should be to play with the system and see how it works. Start really low though. You know what I mean!

Look into this book for affiliate marketing http://www.superaffiliatehandbook.com/ (ps I am not an affiliate!)

These should get you on the right track.

Check out this link also. http://www.perrymarshall.com/adwords/renaissance/frustrated/

D.F :Looking at some of your practical strategies, I am very interested (and scared) in how our Marketing professor will view the adwords campaign and what kind of strategies will be taught.

Im just not convinced that a professor sitting behind a desk is a better teacher than someone that actually has past experience…

Thanks and Keep the great work up!

Oritseyemi: You are perfectly right about your professor. Until you professor start playing with adwords, all he knows is the theory. No disrespect!

He has no clue about how to dance the Google dance. Because Google changes their “rhythm/beat” all the time and the only people who know how to adapt instantly are those who have been dancing the Google dance for a long time.

Ever seen those tv shows like csi, law and order?
I think that is the kind of relationship perry has with google .

Whatever move google make, perry somehow beign the detective will find a way to counter the move.

Do you know how to play chess? I think you can liken perry’s relationship with google to that of playing chees .

I am not sure if there is any step Google is going to take this guy don’t know about.

In a nutshell, if I were you, I will sacrifice as much as I can possible can, buy his book/s and get my hands dirty.

IF YOU ARE WAITING FOR HIM TO DISCOUNT THAT BOOK, I THINK YOU WILL WAIT FOR ETERNITY.

And whatever book you buy on adwords, it is something that is taken bit by bit from his book. So, why get a wash down version of something when you can get the real deal?

You are a smart guy. I trust you know the answer.

You really owe it to yourself to buy that book now and get your hands dirty IF your are really serious about investing in your future.

God bless.