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We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

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Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#71
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're probably not a target audience. A "file system as a service" is a thought that would probably pop in your head if you faced the problem they're trying to solve.

I think the target audience has business problems not file system problems. File system as a service doesn't tell me what business problems can be solved with this.

I think the immediate target audience are still technical people. Business people dealing with business problems indeed don't think about stuff like this. But the tech people that solve business problems for business people - they absolutely do. And they're the ones that select tools and design architectures for the solution.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who is trying to learn and some day launch something like this, thank you so much for this advice! I've been known to complicate descriptions on my OSS packages but still achieved moderate success, so I'm thinking on how to convert this knowledge into revenue and these comments are super helpful. Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing…

> Question: how do you manage to both keep it simple but relevant for SEO? Isn't SEO a lot about keyword stuffing? SEO should be as natural as possible. Keyword stuffing actually has a negative impact on your Quality Score (if you are running Google Ads) in the long run. Do not forget that Google is always optimizing its algorithms. What was possible before isn't possible now. And what is possible to do today isn't p…

> SEO should be as natural as possible

Natural looking to googles algos, not actually as natural as possible.

There are highly effective “unnatural” SEO strategies, for example you could just generate fake bounces on your competitors pages using proxies.

> Don't start by gaming the system. Start by doing it as natural as you can.

This is good advice. You can always game the system, but you probably shouldn’t start out by doing so.

Gaming the system can be incredibly lucrative, but also very difficult. Unless it’s the primary focus of your business, you probably shouldn’t even try.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#73
> Lesson #4: Don’t assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid

Explained in more detail here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677

Prepare to be disappointed by paid traffic conversion going in. Paid traffic isn't there to convert, like you hope since it costs you money. It is primarily there for brand awareness which only works if your branding is visible.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#74

Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just w…

Linking to the UDemy course, since you mentioned it: https://www.udemy.com/course/landing-page-design-best-practi...

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#75

Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just w…

> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…

I have the feeling that "Full stack adaptive delivery" and its ilk are aimed at VCs or BigCorp sourcing managers instead of anyone that would actually use the product. The sad thing is that they seem to be so mutually exclusive nowadays.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#76

Op had some good tactics but an ass backwards strategy. Should have let the agency do the thing they where paid to do. > Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again. I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results…

Some great advice here, thanks for posting it.

Regarding this:

> ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.

What do you mean exactly? Isn't a landing page the top of the funnel by definition?

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#77

Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just w…

> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…

Exactly this.

So many times I have to spend ten minutes digging into what some of these companies actually do.

It’s highly frustrating. Give some examples of what you do. Explain it in simple language. Don’t rely on conceptual language because it doesn’t tell me what your offering does.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#78

This is such impressive blather that I’m now convinced I know nothing at all about modern sales and marketing. It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood. Probably we’ll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.

>>> Thanks to developers’ trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we’re fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations. I’m glad they clarified what “net negative churn” means, that really cleared things up.

let churn = (reduced income from existing customers cancelling the service)

let use_increase = (Increased income from existing customers using the service more)

assert churn > use_increase;

net_churn = churn - use_increase;

assert is_negative(net_churn);

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…

Exactly. I was being polite. I concur with everything you said.

"what are you selling and how is it?"

those very words have scared away so many candidate customers that if I have ever time travelled and come into the possession of a handheld teleport device, I will first test it in pitch meetings, concealing my violation of contemporary physics, by invocation of the identical incantation.

I cannot highly recommend mmend Madison Avenue Manslaughter Michael Farmer. He quit agency life for consulting the year I dived headfirst and submerged my life every day since 1991, as he also. Small difference : Farmer wrote this entire book to relate and lament the insuperable showstopping impasses for which he tells us that the advertising industry has yet to find solutions - the problems my company had to overcome merely to be in business long enough to file accounts to file accounts. Adland that same Adland set upon my world in vexatious and abusive litigation the instant we were in the office front door, has been transformed by this book into the lost brotherhood I crave to bring aids to their needs,' because I now see, between Farmers fantastic faithful rendition of the confusion I left in haste and recall too vividly, become not the call to Arms I had presumed was their only course, instead they atrophied their initiative depleted I have no doubt was the first instinctual reaction, the energetic application required of them lost in inertial encumbrances and the need for a new language to work with the domain problems...

Grab the nearest copy of this book and be ready to undergo on almost every page, a physical jolt to your intellectual mind and counterfactual contemplating corporatice consciousness. you can shower after, bu8uf you buy advertising, you need to be most current with the cases cited and perennial plight impressed painfully perfluous.

Re: We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019)

#80

Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just w…

> Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - there's nothing there to understand ! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near-meaningless phrase. It can be con…

I’m going to steal this whenever someone tells me they are a full stack developer from now on. Oh? So do you ship ICBMs?
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