#AndyTalks 020 – Tell people what to do

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Wow, blue skies. Going to drop the kids off at their minder and then go for a run, beautiful.

The kids are still off this week, so not dropping them at my sister-in-law at half-seven in the morning, that’s just too long a day for her to mind them.

Kind of threw my day a little bit, but that’s why I’m working a little bit later. I’m feeling a bit groggy to be honest. But anyway the run will have me sorted and then maybe I’ll be buzzing so much that I’ll have to get on Periscope or something to just record whatever’s jumbling around in my head.

In touch with an Irish FastLane Forum member today in Nice. It was great, first time I’ve met a forum member in Nice. Very inspiring stories. It was just great listening to his stories and then recounting mine, both rode motorbikes in the past. Stories, love them. We’ve both got sons or step-sons, teenagers and just talking about that.

Something he said and something I’ve been meaning to write up in the forum for a while anyway and I’m just going to talk about it while I go get the kids — it’s great using a phone to talk isn’t it — and that is with kids and with adults you tell people what to do, not “not” what to do.

— my kids are charging around the house and I’m roaring at them, “stop running, someone’s going to get hurt, stop running.” You still hear all the flipping footsteps and thuds and bouncing around and you come charging out before somebody gets hurt. . . . tell them “you’re not supposed to be running, I told you to stop running.”

“We’re skipping.”

“Stop skipping.” So what do they do? They start hopping.

“No, no hopping either, nope stop dancing. Ah lads, walk.”

Just walked over some grass there. Bad of me. Ever see signs that say “please do not walk on the grass.” You know what I think of when I see the sign that says do not walk on the grass, I think of Richard Gere in Pretty Woman with his socks off walking on the grass, and I think “oh that’ll be nice.”

Maybe instead of saying, “Do not walk on the grass,” that sign should have said, “Please walk on the path or the pavement.” Or that sign you see in hotels or buildings, “in the event of fire do not use the lift.” What are people going to do when they see smoke and fire and they’re panicking and they just see a sign that says “fire, lift.” Maybe that sign should say “in the event of fire use the stairs.”

Just come off a call with a UK client, so he’s been working late as well. We were looking through his search terms for the last 30 days, trying to find pockets of good key words that we’re going to rebuild the campaigns or build new campaigns with these good key words and in the process we found some key words that are losing him money. About 12-13% of his spend in the last 30 days was on junk, very simple to fix with one or two negative key words, shared across all the campaigns. So, hopefully tomorrow that will make a big difference anyway.

Just to be on the safe side, I’ve deleted the actual keywords that were bringing in that traffic. I mean they’d been added deliberately but nobody had really checked to see what the search terms were that these keywords were bringing in and they matched pretty close to the keywords but — bad, not very good at all.

Here’s a tip for AdWords consultants who are selling their service to clients. Get them on to a Skype call, look over their shoulder, get them to look at the search terms and get them to see where their wasted spend is. They’ll know better than you what’s a good search term for them because they know their own vertical of the product that they’re selling and they’ll be like “what?!” Bleeding neck.

Shows in their bleeding neck. Goes quite a long way to getting them to hire you.

Right I’m knackered. You can probably tell from the way I’m speaking. I’m a bit punch drunk today, I’ve been in and out of spreadsheets and calls and all sorts, so I’m going to go to bed.