Untold legions of people clamor, search and struggle to find a market that actually pays.

The quest to find that place where passion and talent intersect with market demand is a long journey for some.

But here’s the thing:

Once you find it, success is only a matter of being a little more thorough than everyone else. From that point forward, you can go as fast as you want to go.

Let’s say you’re spending one dollar on advertising and getting one dollar back. A tantalizing place to be – break even – churning transactions – treading water. “If only I could just get TWO dollars back, life would be peaches and cream!” You’re on the cusp. You can TASTE it.

My friend, once you’ve hit this stage you’re almost home free. It’s almost as simple as going through the checklist.

In AdWords the checklist looks something like this:

1-Keywords in narrow silos
2-Peel and stick your top 20 keywords
3-Relentless split testing of ads
4-Thorough list of negative keywords
5-Good quality scores
6-Landing pages that match the ads and keywords
7-Savvy geo targeting
8-Nailing the #1 unmet need in your market
9-Separating search from content
10-Conversion tracking

Every time you check one more of these things off your list of refinements, you jump ahead of 1/3 of your competitors. If you’ve got zero items checked off, you’re superior to 0% of your competitors. If you’ve got all 10, you’re superior to 98% of your competitors.

If you’ve got all 10, rare is the market you can’t penetrate.

(I invite the savvy AdWords advertisers in my audience to get out a calculator check out my numbers. You’ll say, ‘yeah… that’s about right.’)

There’s an email marketing version of this too. It’s all about follow up and trust-building. It works like this:

Every 2 emails you add to your follow-up sequence catapults you ahead of 1/3 of your competitors.

If you have a 10 step sequence you’re in the top 13%.

If you have a 20 step sequence you’re in the top 2%.

And almost regardless of what you sell, it’s all profit beyond a certain point.

This is not astro-physics; it’s not rocket-science; it’s not really even ‘hard’ work. (Not unless writing emails is HARD.)

You get to go as fast as you want. Once you’re on the highway, take your foot off the brake. There’s no speed limit. Press your foot down on the accelerator and feel the seat driving you forward, feel the wind in your hair and see the landscape fly by.

Perry Marshall

About the Author

Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.

He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.