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On New Years Eve 1999 as a crowd counted down the final seconds of the 20th century, my bro-in-law Ted was struggling to wrap his mind around how fast time flies. He shook his head in disbelief. “Wow, here we are at the threshold of a brand new millennium.”

Where were you that night? Remember the hysteria? The media was in a frenzy over Y2K. The sky was falling, all the computers in the world were going to stop, the electrical grid was gonna shut down and we were all storing up fruit cans and bottled water.

Snap your fingers, a decade has flown by. Four days left before 2010.

I’ll never forget the first time I got fired from a job. I sent a rogue Fax – it’s a pretty funny story that I tell at seminars – but at the time it was a DEEPLY disturbing experience.

Positioning your ads on Google search is a black-and-white proposition. (Once you understand all the nuances, like CTR and quality score and market research and conversion and everything else anyway :^)

Google Search is linear. It fits inside a box.

The Content Network, however, is an ecosystem. It’s not linear, it’s exponential. Which means some people get abysmal results while other people build $50 million empires.

When most people write Google ads (myself included!) we quickly get stuck in one or two ruts. We think we’re testing 20 different ads but really we’re testing 2 different ads 10 times, only with slightly different words.

Every time you bust yourself out of one of those ruts, your checks get FATTER.

Best way to escape from a rut: Get a swipe file.

Raiding your swipe file to test new Google ads is the easiest $1,000-per-hour work I know of.

My friend Matt Kehn from Uganda sent me this ad, where the government is successfully waging a war against AIDS:

The 3rd time I got fired from a job, I was 26 and my wife was 3 months pregnant. I was an engineer and sales were slow and I was in the first of a round of layoffs.

I later found out my boss, who’d had to throw somebody under the bus, felt horribly guilty.

A lot of people were bitter.

People sometimes ask me how to target Gmail as a placement in the Content Network.

This video shows you how:

Yesterday I had a private call for my Mastermind Club members. We explored the dark side of Google.

One member was spending $1 million per year on Google selling coffee and they shut him down. (He wasn’t selling Warez, or ebooks, or get rich quick, or affiliate programs, or anything like that).

No explanation. No recourse.

Google said, “Stop sending us emails.”

This morning I spoke at a Chicago meeting for hi-tech marketing folks, hosted by one of my fine estudiantes, Kelly Muldoon. In the audience, several people were “in transition” – i.e. looking for a job. (Merry Christmas!)

A woman approached me, she’d been recently downsized. Casting about for opportunities. Looked like she was hanging on by her fingernails. Asked me if I had any advice to give.

Today, links to six super-useful free tools: 1. One of the secrets to writing great copy is making it REALLY easy to read. 7th grade reading level or lower = good copy. College level = BAD copy. Bad. (Always!) Most of Gary Halbert’s classic letters read at the 4th to 5th grade level. That’s why they’re so “primal,” and so … Read More