I’m in the process of starting my first legitimate PPC campaign. Twice before I’ve set up fly-by-night PPC campaigns and didn’t really take the time to learn the system or become proficient. I was in ‘set it and forget it’ mode and just let it run. Not surprisingly my first campaign hemorrhaged money and was one of the main reasons I had to shut down my first ever ecommerce site. It’s not all bad though considering it was through that site that I learned about SEO and am now making a decent living from it. Anyway, my second PPC campaign I set up was for an affiliate site I set up and although I received a few clicks on my ads that converted into sales, I still was taking a net loss. I haven’t touched that site in a long time and recently decided to pick it back up this weekend.
With a copy of Andrew Goodman’s Winning Results with Google Adwords in hand I’m in the process of setting up my campaign. I’m starting small and hopefully can start turning a profit. Something was working before, but I wasn’t paying enough attention to it to notice what it was. Not sure if the paid ads were driving the sales, or the offer was what was working, but these are all things I’m going to find out now.
This leads me to the point of my post, which is that I think it’s becoming increasingly important for internet marketers to expand their skill sets. In a time of declining budgets, fewer businesses have the budget to hire a PPC specialist, SEO specialist, email marketing guru, etc. I’m currently helping out a friend of mine on her site and I feel insufficient that all I can offer is advice on SEO, when I know there is so much else that can help her that I can’t provide at this time. I want to get to the point where I can provide more wholisitic strategy recommendations if called upon, and I think with my current skillset I’m not there yet, but will be eventually.
My biggest weakness as an SEO is handling complex technical issues, an area I’m improving upon right now with an enormously complex site migration I’m currently working on at work. But Ideally I’d like to learn more about email marketing as relationship building becomes an important part of internet marketing, and conversion rate optimization to improve ROI on traffic generated from SEO efforts. Hopefully this will all come with time.
Do you think it’s a good idea to become above average at multiple disciplines or an expert in one?