Dan Grossman

Online. My AdWords account has been essentially unchanged in over a year. Google manages the bids for me with Conversion Optimizer. I set a cost-per-acquisition goal, it always beats that goal, and that goal is low enough that there's a healthy profit margin. I used w3roi (in my signature) to eliminate some keywords and reduce the hours I advertise during to the most profitable ones and now make even more sales for the same spend. That took just a few minutes to do.

I stopped worrying about what the competition was doing a few years ago. It doesn't matter. I already spent the time testing and tweaking to make sure I convert visitors to customers better. I already spent the time testing and tweaking to make sure I get a bigger average sale up front. I already spent the time testing and tweaking to make sure I get more repeat sales from existing customers (the average customer that has ordered more than once orders 4 times; acquisition is costly, repeat orders are much higher profit).

So competition can try outbidding me (costing them more) and undercutting my prices (cutting their profit margins) -- as long as they're not too smart, they price themselves out of business doing so. Since I make more on all fronts, I can afford to keep my ads in top spots without having to manage a thing.

Luckily, there aren't that many smart companies out there. The majority of them either don't test at all, or only test and optimize one metric without considering all the other places they can improve (optimizing ads, keywords, geotargeting, day parting, landing pages, site performance, checkout flow/resistance/abandonment, upsells during and after purchase, repeat sales, pricing and average order size...).

samuraiwriting

I was inspired by the book too. Although I listened to the Audiobook and the guy they got to read it --- wow! He was very authoritive and really got me off my bum to do what I wanted to do instead of slave at an 8 hour job. I like working for myself a lot better! Thanks Timothy Ferriss!!!