Simplify, Ad Groups, and Keyword Advertising

If I were so sum up the most important point of this week it would be to avoid juggling so many balls when you are starting a business.  To give some background currently I work full time as the principal software engineer for Dynactive Software building online education.  I also am in the middle of selling my primary residence home (hopefully closing on March 1st!) and we just moved into our home that we were renting out.  I also have five children with various needs, school homework that must be done (fortunately which is about building my business), and my business Discover and Change that I am trying to launch with my partner Kevin Skinner.  Realistically if I had thought things through I would have tried to juggle a few less balls at the start of the year.

I sometimes think that business risk is much like that.  On many of my business ventures if I had known how HARD it was going to be when I started the business I don't think I would have taken the risk and moved forward.  If I had known on my first business venture that I would lose 80K trying to launch it I would likely have just passed (since my intent on that business was to actually make money...).  I think on any given business venture or anything in life there has to be a certain amount of unknown, even a bit of unrealistic optimism that allows you to make risks that you wouldn't have taken otherwise.  In all of the things that I have taken major risks in the dividends have been huge.  I may not have been financially successful but the experience and knowledge that I gained both technically and in business is irreplaceable.  None of which I would have taken if I had not gone forward and done some REALLY HARD things.  I would still advise my future self and any others reading this post to thoughtfully consider if you are spreading yourself too thin and change things up if you can.

The other points I would review and summarize is how ad groups function.  Google groups similar keywords into ad groups and you can create specific advertisements for that ad group.  That means you can create a unique landing page and targeted advertising message just for those ad groups.  I really think that's a powerful tool, in addition the ad group has a large number of suggested keywords to include in your campaign that allows me to see keywords I wouldn't have thought to target increasing the number of people I reach out to.  The other thing I found interesting was being able to put in negative keywords so I can exclude people searching for cheap, free, discount etc.  These people would cost me money as they click, but don't actually buy anything.  One point I found interesting was if people have more than 10 words in their search phrase google stops including negative keywords so you could still get a few false positives this way.  However, I think I and a few others are the only ones who put in so many words into a single phrase.