Beware of the Gurus
I belong to a marketing forum; it’s a good place to share ideas with others in my field. However, it’s been enlightening to see how many people give out mistaken, over-simplified or simply false information about PPC while claiming to be some sort of “Guru”. These people claim to make untold thousands in suspiciously short periods of time. They say they can teach you how to kill your competition. They claim, and this is my personal favorite, to have “the secrets Google doesn’t want you to know!”
Holy… Crap.
Consider the source. What proof is offered that anything this person is telling you is true? Are they actually rich from employing these secret techniques? How do you know? Secrets Google doesn’t want you to know? There is only so much you can control with an Adwords account, a limited number of variables. These guys don’t have access to some secret admin page with extra functions that the average schmo can’t find on his own.
I’ve read the forum posts and ebooks and all that and it’s astonishing how little the “Gurus” know compared to someone who, like me, actually has a job in the industry. I find myself reading these things and exclaiming, out loud, “what?!?”, “wrooooong…” and “you’ve got to be f-ing kidding me.” I know in my last post I talked about how I’ve managed campaigns that have made millions, but so have many people that work for a real search engine marketing company.
You may have noticed that I share little, if any, techniques and strategies in this blog. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing my own ebook on how real, honest-to-goodness paid search professionals run their campaigns. I’m not sure how much the NDA from my employer allows me to share, but it’s certainly food for thought…
