Do Less, Better

If you’ve been around us Wabbits for a while, you’ve no doubt heard us talk about the Pareto Principle at some point in our relationship — if not, here’s a quick breakdown:

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the “vital few”).

Said another way, 80% of a company’s success will come from 20% of its overall efforts.

Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity.

Others have modified this principle into the “90/10 rule”, or “5/95 thinking” but, they all essentially mean the same thing — except they often don’t give credit to Pareto for their inspiration.

We believe that if you really want to achieve something, it is critical to focus on the essentials, and strip away the excess.

It doesn’t matter what we call this idea, the point remains — In any endeavor, there are a critical few factors that really matter, and those vital few factors are responsible for an overwhelming share of the results.

When it comes to paid traffic, we’ve covered a few of these vital elements already. For example, it is critical that you understand the difference between Active Intent and Passive Potential Interest.

Another of these critical factors in paid traffic is focusing on the quality of your leads instead the quantity of them.

One of the common mistakes of paid traffic is the so-called “throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks” method. For paid search, it usually looks like launching a few not so great ads, targeting 50-100 keyword phrases, and a budget which is always too low for the results expected.

And what happens?

The budget is usually spent within hours, just to support the number of keywords targeted — which means there’s no opportunity for the business in question to see a strong signal within the noise of the hundreds of keywords they’ve chosen.

The low-quality keywords are mixed in with the high-quality ones but, that isn’t obvious in the reporting — because all the keywords are served equally making it so none of them have the opportunity to get real traction.

On top of that, the ad copy isn’t specific to any particular set of keywords so… conversion is low, cash is wasted and — inevitably — weeks/months later the conclusion becomes “paid search didn’t work for my business.”

Truly, it isn’t the fault of paid search, it is an example which clearly shows that the way someone does paid search can be (and often is) the cause of the negative results they end up seeing.

This isn’t exclusive to search either, we can see the “see what sticks” mentality on Facebook too!

Someone will identify an audience, throw together a few ads (usually with curiosity and a big promise), and then wonder why results are terrible. Cue the cries that “Facebook doesn’t work for my business.”

Instead, we could identify one, and only one, very specific keyword phrase that is perfect for our business, like “buy blue bubble machines online with free shipping”

Then, we write one, and only one, really great ad that speaks to the persona who might want to “buy blue bubble machines online with free shipping”

While we write this one ad, we imagine — as vividly as we can — our ideal prospect sitting in front of us. And with this image in mind we ask ourselves:

• What keeps that person up at night?
• What problem does that person have that we are uniquely qualified to solve?
• What does that person want (that we know how to help them achieve) most?

When writing like this, we want to write from the heart — and, make it clear that we understand the problem(s) and desire(s) deeply, and that we have a solution.

If the solution isn’t right for everyone, we’re honest about that. If there are hurdles (like opt-ins or webinars) we mention that too, just like we would for a good friend. Because we want to treat all of our prospects like we would treat a good friend.

We could then spend our entire daily budget on that one search term and study the results every 24 hours. 

If we can’t make the phrase/ad work, then yes, paid search did not work for our business. When we can’t make a perfect search phrase work with a well written ad, there are likely bigger problems to solve.

Some of the best ads we’ve ever seen — when it comes to generating customers — were written by people who never had training in copywriting or advertising. Yet, the ads worked because the copy was full of empathy, knowledge, and understanding — it was authentic, and spoke to the right people in the right way. These ads demonstrated authority and credibility without cramming sales copy down the audience’s throat.

You are going to learn how to write ads like that (ads that can transform your business) in the next section. Because, contrary to what some might tell you, nobody cares about the sizzle of a steak if it tastes like coal.

Rather than focusing on scaling, let’s agree to put that out of our minds for the moment. Instead, we are going to focus on doing one thing exceptionally well before moving on to anything else. You are going to learn about front-loading your advertising process via deep understanding, so that when it is time to scale, you can do so intelligently.

Your assignment for this section is to make sure you have completed all the other assignments up to this point. You’re going to need those ingredients for what comes next. It is tempting to avoid it, but the groundwork we’ve given you exists for a good reason.

Be careful not to sabotage yourself by skipping it.

Proceed when you’re ready.