Kind of a dramatic title, but I want you to be mindful. I got an email yesterday from someone whom I respect as an expert in the field (hence me being on their email list). The email was talking about how they got their first client. They used a technique similar to something I've used and it was a smart technique. There were enough differences that I believe their approach should be less efficient in that it would take more work, but require less time on the phone, which most want to avoid (myself included). The method was not the problem, though. The problem I had was the next part where he talked about getting one client and never having to do outreach again. All of the rest of the clients came from inbound leads. I can't even begin to tell you how atypical this is. There are millions of marketing agencies in the world that want this outcome and don't get it. I want to point out that this guy is not a bad guy. He's doing great work and helping a ton of people. I just think he didn't realize how damaging his story could be to new (and even seasoned) marketers. When reading his story, there were a lot of elements that would not be relevant to almost anyone else. His first PPC job was in one of the biggest marketing agencies in his country. He worked on accounts spending multiple millions of dollars (something rarely done by even seasoned PPC vets). His first freelance account paid enough to replace his day job. He got a client from sending 10 emails. None of these things is normal. I have a lot of people reaching out to me to ask how to get experience or to get a job with a marketing agency. Most of these people have never worked in a marketing agency or have only worked in one small agency for a brief time. Most do not have sales experience and have not studied the masters of sales and marketing to learn email marketing, cold calling techniques, web or landing page design, social strategy, or inbound strategies. Many have difficulty thinking of connections they may have within their network that either own a business or could introduce them to a business owner.

Hey Ad Masters! I wanted to share that I've officially launched Ad Master Coaching! It's a subscription community with weekly group coaching calls that I'll be recording, transcribing, and cutting into clips that can be searched later. It's only $9/mo for the first 20 members, then $19/mo for the next 100 members. This will be a great place to ask specific questions about ad management, client interaction, data & analytics, tools & resources, etc. It will also be a place for collaboration with others, discussing Google Ads news, sharing horror stories, and more. I'll be posting exclusive content there and will hold the odd bonus training with guest experts. As you interact in the new group (posting, commenting, etc) and level up, you'll get access to exclusive rewards like free one-on-one coaching calls with me, free course content, and more. You can join at https://coaching.admasteracademy.com and, if you're one of the first 20 to join, you can lock in your $9/mo price forever by entering FIRST20 at checkout. Looking forward to this new leg of the Ad Master journey! -Ryan Baker Founder, Ad Master Academy

If you're working with a non-profit client, they may be eligible to use a Google Grants account. Google Grants accounts seem awesome on the surface: You get $10,000 in ad spend given to you every month... FOR FREE. You don't even set up a billing profile! They're just like "Happy advertising!" However, there are some caveats... For one, you can only use Search ads. That's not so bad, really. The Search Network is where you get most of your conversions (outside of ecommerce accounts) and if you don't have to worry about ad spend up to $10,000/mo, you can cover the bottom of the funnel and still branch out into the middle and even upper-funnel search keywords. But there's another caveat... You can't bid more than $2.00 per keyword. How on earth are you supposed to get any Impression Share, especially top or absolute top, if you can only bid $2, especially when your competitors are spending as much as 2, 4, 10, 20 times that amount per click? Well, the good news is that you can use automated bidding strategies and those have the ability to bypass the $2 bid limit. You do have to give them time, but bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions can be the saving grace that gets you into the top search results for competitive keywords. Give the campaigns a bit of time to learn and it's not uncommon to see CPCs at $18+ per click in a grants account. So the downsides to the account can be severely limiting. You can't use non-search campaign types. You basically HAVE to use automated bidding strategies. It can take longer than usual to train the algorithm. You may have to work a lot harder to get the same amount of traffic and conversions. But the upside is impossible to ignore: $10,000 per month in FREE advertising. It's hard to say no to that. If you've got clients in the not-for-profit space, have them apply for a Grant account here: https://www.google.com/grants/get-started/ You can always run these ads alongside a non-search account that they pay for to get the benefits of Display, Discovery, YouTube, & Performance Max while letting the grant account handle their Search traffic.

We're starting to see some new members join, so I wanted to welcome our new members from the past couple of months (I'll be faster with welcoming people in the future!): Welcome: @Kayla Donohue @Adam Woozeer @Mohammed Yusuf @Deleted @Omar Reyes @Lindsey Whitford @Jemaris Guyton @Andrew Austin @John Ho @Alex Makarski @Shubham Soni @Rukhsar Yusuf @Kshitij Basangar @Morgane H Great to have you all with us! You're joining at a good time, as I'm about to release a Workload Management tool and training this week. Feel free to drop a comment below to tell us a bit about yourself and what you do.

Hey Ad Masters! I've put together another free training for you all that I think will really come in handy! It's designed to help you determine your pricing, track your prospects and current clients, and plan our your workweek so you don't feel like you're doing too much or too little for your clients (and you don't forget any of them!). Parts of this will only be helpful for Freelancers or Agency Owners, but other parts will be helpful even if you work for someone else, so feel free to use whatever is helpful and just ignore the rest. You can find the training in the "Classroom" section of Ad Master Academy, or by clicking here: https://www.skool.com/admasteracademy/classroom/61964724 (Full disclosure, there is a lot going on in the tool I made for you and I didn't iron out all of the kinks before recording the training. I fixed any issues that I found and noted the changes in the text under the videos.) I hope this helps you to better understand your goals and achieve them as you build the life and business of your dreams. All the best, -Ryan Baker Founder, Ad Master Academy