My AdWords Debacle: Statistics and Stories

Everything looked good except the actual sales numbers.

As I mentioned in Tuesday's post, I keep track of a bunch of metrics in order to see how our sales process is working. Beyond the most important number (monthly sales), I look at Web site traffic; the number of inquiries coming in each day, week, and month; the number of proposals written; and how much each salesman contributes to these totals.

My records are kept on various spreadsheets, which are on Google Docs and are shared with my salesmen. The Web stats are done through the AdWords campaign management screens, which I access by logging into my AdWords account. (These screens are so complex that I can't des cribe them - and Google doesn't even have a help page explaining them, or at least I couldn't find it.) At any rate, I keep track of enough information that I can form a statistical picture of what is happening. And I do this for many other aspects of our operation besides sales.

The business generates a huge amount of data. We have all of the basic financial information that we track with QuickBooks. I keep another set of spreadsheets that I use specifically to track cash flow. We have a database program that tracks manufacturing data, including: the number of hours and materials used per project, the difference between these totals and our cost estimates, and whether we are ahead of or behind schedule. I have payroll data.

I also have information that isn't quantitative but is important, like the mood in the shop, the state of the machines, the number and nature of mistakes made by workers, and the amount of waste in the trash cans. And, like everyone else, I a m subject to the ebb and flow of news from the outside world, particularly stories about the economy and business. It all adds up to something like Niagara Falls landing on my head. The challenge, of course, is to pick meaning out of all of that falling data and come up with a plan of action that makes sense.

As winter turned to spring this year, many of my statistics were looking good. But there was a worrisome trend to sales - the monthly total was falling. I wrote about this in April, but these sales numbers say it all:

January: $193,154.
February: $213,669.
March: $135,732.
April: $146,677.

Of course I was worried, but the vast majority of the metrics I was tracking looked good. The shop was operating efficiently. The number of incoming inquiries in the first quarter was steady with recent months and 20 percent ahead of 2011. The sales force was churning out proposals fast enough to keep up with the inquir ies. We had sold more jobs than during the same period in 2011. Everything looked good except the actual sales numbers.

My business has been through a lot since 1986, including booms, recessions, and stagnation. Our clientele over the years has been a pretty good snapshot of the segments of the economy that are doing well. In 2007 and 2008 we did a lot of work for financial titans in New York. After the crash, that work disappeared, but health care companies took up some of the slack. The military and defense contractors have been steady for the last five years. Same with lawyers and accountants.

We also get a lot of inquiries from a grab bag of smaller companies - these calls tend to come directly from the bosses, owners who are looking for a table that they can be proud of for their own office. I call these “boss-driven transactions,” and they are our bread and butter. These clients aren't as price sensitive as others, and they tend to make buying decisions quickly. We close a higher percentage of these sales than any other type. They vanished in 2009, but we saw them reappear in 2010 and stay strong in 2011 and the beginning of 2012.

Then, in the spring, I noticed a change in our mix of inquiries. Driven by our successful product roll out, we were seeing more calls for low-priced modular tables. These were coming from schools, municipal governments, and nonprofits. But there was a noticeable slow down in both large corporate clients and boss-driven clients. And the total number of calls per week began to swing wildly, with the average dropping almost 25 percent (from 16 in the first quarter to 12 in April and May.)

Maybe I'm unusual, but I like to have a story to tell myself about what's happening in my business at any given moment. It doesn't matter what the subject is, I will come up with a theory. Of course my business has dominated my thoughts for most of my adult life, and I'm adept at spinning a narrative to fit whatever is happening at the moment. Every day I tell myself a story about what is going on, and I draft future chapters that help me decide what to do next.

As sales fell in the spring of 2012, I put together one of these fables in my mind. What was happening? The sky was falling again, I concluded, just as it had in 2008 - bosses and corporations everywhere were scaling back on spending, hunkering down for another bad period. I was about to be victimized by vast forces that were beyond my control. Having convinced myself that this was the case, I now needed to decide how to respond.

Thursday: Waiting for a Miracle.

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Times Must Aggressively Cover Mark Thompson\'s Role in BBC\'s Troubles

One of the most difficult challenges for news organizations is reporting on what goes on inside their own corporate walls. Two global media companies, the BBC and The New York Times, are dealing with that challenge right now, as a complicated sexual abuse scandal â€" with a media scandal component - unfolds in Britain.

On Tuesday, the director general of the BBC, George Entwistle, was grilled by Parliament about his role in the events at the well-respected British media company.

A tough investigative committee is raking him over the coals about whether he knew what was going on when the BBC killed an investigative segment on its “Newsnight” program about a celebrity TV personality, Jimmy Savile, accused of sexually abusing hundreds of young girls. Mr. Savile died last year.

Killing the story has impugned the BBC's integrity.

Mr. Entwistle, though, was not the director general of the BBC when all of this was going on last year.

That was Mark Thompson, who is now the incoming president and chief executive officer of The New York Times Company. Mr. Thompson was said to be in the Times building on Monday for preliminary meetings, but he hasn't started yet. In fact, Times reporters and editors were reminded on Monday in a style note not to refer to him in articles as the current president and chief executive:

Mr. Thompson will be the president and C.E.O. of The New York Times Company starting Nov. 12, per Robert Christie, senior vice president of corporate communications. Until then, he is still “incoming.”

The style note even resulted in a correction on the Web site of The Times.

To its credit, The Times is reporting this story regularly though its London bureau, and has displayed it several times on the Web site's home page. The London article was summarized in a brief on the front page on Tuesday.

Mr. Thompson has been quoted repe atedly saying he knew nothing about the investigation being conducted by the “Newsnight” program, or at least that he was never formally notified about it. Here's The Guardian's report on that.

How likely is it that he knew nothing? A director general of a giant media company is something like a newspaper's publisher. Would a publisher be very likely to know if an investigation of one of its own people on sexual abuse charges had been killed? The answer to that is not as easy as it sounds. Because of the intentional separation between editorial and business-side operations, publishers usually don't know about editorial decisions - unless they are very big ones, fraught with legal implications. A Reuters story explores this subject.

And for that matter, how likely is it that the Times Company will continue with its plan to bring Mr. Thompson on as chief executive? (It's worth noting that as public editor, I have no inside knowledge on such corporate matters.) His integrity and decision-making are bound to affect The Times and its journalism - profoundly. It's worth considering now whether he is the right person for the job, given this turn of events.

All these questions ought to be asked. I hope The Times rises to the challenge and thoroughly reports what it finds. The Times might start by publishing an in-depth interview with Mr. Thompson exploring what exactly he knew, and when, about what happened at the BBC. What are the implications of these problems for him as incoming Times chief executive? What are the implications for the Times Company to have its new C.E.O. â€" who needs to deal with many tough business challenges here â€" arriving with so much unwanted baggage?

As the BBC has found out in the most painful way, for The Times to pull its punches will not be a wise way to go.

Using Crowdfunding to Start a Company With a Cause

Courtesy of braGGs Kara Gorski (left) and Kristin Gembala, sisters.

Two sisters, Kara Gorski and Kristin Gembala, have developed a bra designed to help breast cancer survivors who have had mastectomies and reconstructive surgery. So far, the sisters, who invested $25,000 from their savings, have designed and patented two styles and built a Web site. Currently, they are trying to raise money to begin manufacturing through a new crowdfunding platform.

For Ms. Gorski, a Ph.D. in economics with two children who works for a consulting firm in the Washington area, and Ms. Gembala, a stay-at-home mother with four children, the business - known as braGGs -
is persona l. Their mother died of breast cancer at age 39, when the sisters were just 7 and 12 years old. Twenty-eight years later, at age 35, Ms. Gorski discovered her own breast cancer. Soon, both sisters were found to carry the BRCA1 genetic mutation, which the National Institutes of Health says means an 87 percent chance of developing breast cancer and a 45 percent chance of developing ovarian cancer.

Both sisters elected to have surgery - Ms. Gembala prophylactically, since she had never been diagnosed with cancer. After hysterectomies and double mastectomies with reconstruction, the sisters expected to be able to wear regular bras. When they learned this was not possible, they set about designing and creating a reconstruction bra specifically for women like them. “So many women have told us about the serious problems with trying to find a functional and beautiful bra after such a difficult journey,” Ms. Gorski said.

Once they had pro totypes, they needed capital to start manufacturing. They started out pitching themselves to Kickstarter for a crowdfunding campaign and were turned down. Determined not to give up, the sisters reached out to a niche crowdfunding site, MedStartr, that specializes in projects and start-ups that involve health care. It was started by Mike Pence, who helped develop Kickstarter, and Alex Fair, an entrepreneur and health care advocate.

Mr. Fair said MedStartr was trying to do crowdfunding differently. “Kickstarter and Indiegogo are self-service for great ideas looking for funding,” he said. “Our customers need more help. They didn't go to business school or design school. They went to med school or graduate school. If they need marketing, we have P.R. people. If they need a video, we have video people. If they need help figuring out how their business model should work, we help them with that, too.” For now, MedStartr takes 5 percent of what is raised and offers the mentoring and marketing support free of charge.

The site helped Ms. Gorski and Ms. Gembala with promotion and partnership aspects of their project. Mr. Fair took them to make a presentation at the Department of Health and Human Services and connected them with a breast cancer support group, TalkAboutHealth. Ms. Gorski and Ms. Gembala were also provided with assistance in drafting press releases and driving daily traffic to the site, which resulted in more than 7,000 people watching braGG's pitch video.

Before posting their pitch on MedStartr, Ms. Gorski and Ms. Gembala considered how much money they would need to begin manufacturing. “We struggled a lot actually in deciding how much to ask for, teetering between $5,000 and $10,000,” Ms. Gorski said. “We did the math and knew financially we needed the $10,000 to get us through a first manufacturing round, so decided to go for it.” Their goal was to raise $10,000 by Oct. 1, which they did, but MedStartr is allowing them to continue their campaign until the end of October because it is Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

For those interested in trying crowdfunding, Ms. Gorski and Ms. Gembala offered the following advice:

Use social media: Get your audience involved and invested. Ms. Gorski explained how they got Facebook fans and Twitter followers involved: “BraGGs bras have hidden messages of inspiration inside to make women feel special and confident through their day - a little hug from us to them. When we were deciding on which messages to include, we put up four options on Facebook and Twitter and had everyone vote.”

Video is crucial: Explain what problem you are solving and how you will do it. Ms. Gorski said it is critical to explain how much you are asking for and how the money will be used.

Tell a story: Being passionate about your story will make others passionate about it as well. “They will want to become invested in being a part of someth ing great,” Ms. Gorski said.

Melinda Emerson is founder and chief executive of Quintessence Multimedia, a social media strategy and content development firm. You can follow her on Twitter.

My AdWords Debacle: A New Product

Although I didn't realize it at the time, the trouble I started to describe in Monday's post began at the end of 2011. That's when we got a call from a client for a low-cost, modular, folding table. This is a particular configuration of conference table that we weren't making at that time, mostly because the best solution to the problem involves using metal components that we cannot fabricate in my factory (which concentrates on woodworking.) But we had been getting a steady stream of calls for this type of table, and I decided that we should put some effort into developing our own version.

We found a manufacturer of table components, based in Michigan, who had a particular leg design that we could use with our own top s and base parts. This leg had a very nice folding mechanism. I ordered one to see whether it was as good in person as it seemed online, and we built a prototype. It worked well. We were even able to engineer a way to include power and data capabilities - a tricky design problem, which is why most makers don't include them in folding tables. We showed the prototype to the client, closed the deal, and made the first batch.

The manufacturing times were acceptable, so I put the new product up on our Web site, with pricing per table of $1,594. When I first posted the table, we had the price prominently displayed at the top of the page. If you read the body text, it was clear that we were talking about each table in what would most likely be a multiple table order, but a quick glance at the whole page, with the picture showing four tables, left the impression that you could get a set of four for under $2,000.

Now, there are lots of cheap tables that are in that price range, but we don't really cater to people with that small a budget. Given the costs of our design and selling process, I consider $5,000 a reasonable minimum order. Our average order is closer to $15,000. In my mind, I was happy to add a new product to our line that hit a low but acceptable price point (in the quantity that most people would need, four or more) and that would serve as a starting point on further developments of that type of table.

We had been making modular tables previously, but most of them were large and complicated. While we had a page of our site devoted to them, I was not targeting them specifically with their own keywords or ad group. I decided that, with my new economy model, I would take a fresh look at this. Using the Google Keyword Tool, I found that “modular tables” was a very high-traffic search string. Great! So I generated a new group of keywords around that concept, set them up with their own ad group and started driving traffic to our Modular Tables page. Greeting visitors at the top left of the page was our Folding Modular Table, with its low, low price of $1,594 (per table) prominently displayed. I did all of this on Jan. 5.

A few weeks later, I went back to see how the group was doing. Basic ad group maintenance requires checking how many e-mail inquiries we get, whether the click-through rates are comparable to the overall campaign, which keywords generate the most traffic, and whether the ads are being triggered by searches that are relevant. For instance, we have an ad group called “Big Table” that was aimed at people looking for really large tables but was also triggered by people searching for information on a particular type of barbecue called the Big Green Egg.

Apparently, the Big Green Egg is an awkward shape, and lots of people want a custom table to hold it. There is a lot of search traffic around this concept, and a significant number of peo ple would click our ads. These clicks cost me money but do not result in any sales. Google's robots, however, see these clicks as perfectly successful, so they continued to serve our ads until I turned all Big Green Egg searches into negative keywords. Establishing effective negative keyword lists for each ad group can be done only after running them for a while and wasting a lot of money. Believe me, you can not predict the irrelevant search strings people will come up with.

After a month of running the Modular Table ad group, things were looking good. Not only were we seeing decent stats for the ads, we were also starting to get a significant number of calls about lower priced modular tables. Success! I had developed a new product, supported it with advertising, and now the calls were coming in. With a healthy inquiry pipeline, I turned my attention to our sales process.

Inquiries come to us in two forms: either via e-mail or as a phone call. In either case our response was the same. We have a list of 10 questions that allow us to make a recommendation for the client. The questions are designed to reveal the functional aspects of the problem - that is, they concentrate on things like the desired size, the desired number of users, the size of the room. Functional stuff.

When we feel we have enough information, we prepare a proposal, a pdf document that contains images of the options we recommend and information on wood choices, power/data options and pricing. The proposal, I believe, is an impressive piece of work. I had come up with the format over years of interacting with clients and designed it so that it explained itself. My theory is that the document needs to be something that can be sent from person to person in an organization and understood regardless of whether I am there to explain it. I did it this way because many of our transactions are done through relatively low-level people who pass the information on to the decision makers. My other theory about selling was that this document needed to be produced quickly. We could turn one of these around in less than two hours if the job were simple and within 24 hours even if the job were complicated.

This system - get a call, make a proposal, send it off and hope - actually worked pretty well for many years. I created the basic format in 2007 and didn't change it even through the downturn or the recovery that we experienced in 2010. In 2011 we broke all of our previous sales records and made money to boot. As spring of 2012 approached, it looked as though we would repeat that success. Incoming inquiries were strong, and my two sales engineers were churning out proposals in response. The numbers looked fine, and I was confident that success was assured. But I was about to find out that a high level of sales activity doesn't necessarily guarantee results.

Wednesday: The metrics I track and the stories I tell myself.

Paul Do wns founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.

Contradictions and Confusion on an Agreement With Iran

The lead news article in Sunday's Times raised questions for a number of readers, who were either puzzled or angered by its apparent contradictions.

In the “bulldog” edition, published Saturday afternoon, The Times reported that Iran and the United States had agreed to one-on-one negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. The news â€" certainly a major development on a hugely important subjectâ€" was attributed to unnamed Obama administration officials.

In subsequent online editions and in the late print edition, which now appears on NYTimes.com, new information was added to the article, and here's where the confusion began. The White House now denied that an agreement had been reached. So the words “in principle” had been added to the first paragraph to describe the agreement, and a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, was quoted denying there was an agreement.

(If you want to see the different iterations of the story t hroughout Saturday, visit NewsDiffs.org.)

By Monday's paper, both sides â€" the White House and Iran's foreign minister - were officially denying an agreement.

Readers wanted to know a few things: Is this story for real? Is there indeed an agreement? Whom are we to believe?

I posed the questions to the executive editor Jill Abramson, who called the Sunday story “solid and true.” She said that the White House was “hair-splitting” when it denied that there was an agreement, and that information was added to the original article to reflect the denial while still standing by its original reporting.

“Good journalism practice sometimes involves changes between editions. We did not see these changes as significant,” Ms. Abramson said.

Complicating the issue is that the reporting is based on unidentified sources, described only as “Obama administration officials” or “U.S. officials.”

One reader, Bill O'Fallon of Brentwood, Tenn ., expressed his reaction this way:

Who are these “U.S. officials?” How strong are the sources? Strong enough to contradict Mr. Vietor? Who shall we believe in this obvious contradiction?

The prominent display of the article, and Ms. Abramson's answer, says that there is indeed an agreement and that the denials are relatively unimportant.

A former foreign editor of The Times, Bernard Gwertzman, was another who wrote, calling himself an “unhappy reader.”

I would like The Times to be more specific. Is there an agreement or not? If there is, the White House is lying. If there is not, The Times is guilty of overplaying a phony story.

When newspapers use unidentified sources â€" as sometimes they are justified in doing â€" they say to the reader: “Trust us. We know what we're talking about.” And that trust is earned over time.

The more information about the sources that can be includ ed, the more the reader has to go on. It makes for a more transparent and far better process.

It's unfortunate that there wasn't much information offered about the unidentified sources in this case. While that may not have been feasible, the result of the vagueness is that it puts the reader in the position of not knowing quite what to believe.

The Megawatt Hour Responds to Reader Comments on Its Web Site

In my last post, Deirdre Lord requested - and got - reader feedback on her start-up's Web site. During the last meeting of the She Owns It business group, Ms. Lord talked about how helpful she found many of the comments.

One of her main goals in soliciting feedback was to learn whether the site helps a general audience understand what her company does. On that count, the Megawatt Hour's Web site seemed to succeed, she said. “It is clear what you do and how you do it,” said one commenter.

Ms. Lord was especially thankful for the specific advice she got. One commenter, for example, urged her to add language that describes the “magic bullet” her company offers - what can it give customers that no one else can? “We give customers access to their own pricing model - no one else does that,” she replied. Adding that “magic bullet” language will probably be one of the first changes she makes. “It's pretty easy, as long as the layout doesn't change dramatically, to add one sentence about how we're different,” she said.

She also appreciated a suggestion that she move her video to the left side of the page, because people read left to right. This same commenter noted that Ms. Lord's voice in the video sounded very dry and not at all passionate. “It's true, I've heard that about my voice since I was 12-years-old,” Ms. Lord said, adding that the comment “was delivered very thoughtfully.” To ensure that her passion for her business comes through, she is considering hiring someone to do a voiceover through VoiceBunny, a start-up that uses crowdsourcing to find voiceover talent.

Some comments raised issues the Megawatt Hour had planned to address “at some point,” she said. The Web site's use of the color gray was one. She said it was chosen in an attempt to differentiate the Megawatt Hour from other energy-related businesses, which tended to use blue and green on their sites. “We don't want to look like everybody else,” she said. “But it's probably true that the palate is not perfect.”

“Changing the palate is relatively easy as opposed to changing the layout or the content,” said a group member, Jessica Johnson, who owns Johnson Security Bureau.

Ms. Lord agreed. She added that the Megawatt Hour spent most of its time and resources on the platform that sat behind its site. The success of the business, she said, depends on that platform. “Our business won't sink or swim based on the landing page for this Web site, but it's important that people get past that landing page to our actual platform.”

“What do you think your competitors will think or do as a result of seeing t he post and the feedback you've gotten about your Web site?” Ms. Johnson asked. The Megawatt Hour considers energy brokers and consultants to be competition, although they operate on a different model.

“I'm not sure, but I don't feel like we exposed any kind of major weakness or any great secrets,” Ms. Lord replied. “Having any clarity around these issues is a big step up for our customers and sets us apart from our competitors.”

In future posts, we'll catch up with all of the business group's owners and review additional sites. Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Tutoring, and Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit, are redesigning theirs.

You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.

My AdWords Debacle: Dumb and Happy

Courtesy: Paul Downs Cabinetmakers Paul Downs: The first two months of 2012 were great.

I'm going to tell you a story. It's a narrative that is built around a set of facts and events that happened over the last six months. I am starting with this explanation because, in the end, the problem I confronted was how to understand what was going on. And I'm still not certain that I really know what happened.

Here's the broad outline: In the spring, we stopped getting a certain kind of customer inquiry for the conference tables we sell. At the same time, sales started to contract with alarming speed - to the point where June of this year was the worst sales month I have had this decade. In June and July, I made a number of changes to my Google AdWords campaign and now incoming inquiries and sales are back where they should be. But I'm still nervous. I haven't paid myself since April.

Those are facts. What's trickier is to see how they relate to each other, and whether my reactions to the events as they unfolded were as good as they could have been. It's possible that all of my worrying, all of my hours spent thinking about what was happening, and all of the things I did were irrelevant. Reality is uneven, after all. Sales go up and down for reasons that are beyond my control. I'm ostensibly in charge of my business, but how much control do I really have? Maybe not so much.

But a boss has to act. I was confronted with an issue and I was going to do something. So here are the details. They are complicated, so this story will play out in five blog posts. You can be the judge as to whether the narrative makes sense and whether I did a good job.

Let's start at the beginning of the year. The first two months of 2012 were great. We had finished 2011 on a high note, I had money in the bank, and sales for January and February were strong. I was convinced that after many years of struggle, I had finally figured out how to run a profitable business.

My two sales engineers were closing deals, to the extent that I felt that I could ease myself out of the selling side of things and take a look at other issues. One of the items I turned my spotlight on was our Web site. I hadn't updated it in the previous months, because it seemed to be working well - we were averaging 16 inquiries a week through the first eight weeks of the year, as opposed to an average of 12 per week in 2011.

As I have mentioned before, we rely on Google AdWords as our primary source of customers. It's a very cost-effective way to drive traffic to our site. I've been participating in the program sin ce 2004, and I feel I have a good grasp of the basic principles of how to choose keywords and write ads. If you aren't familiar with AdWords, here's how it works:

Keywords are the base units of AdWords advertising. A bunch of similar keywords can be organized into an ad group. If you sell more than one product, it's a good idea to have more than one ad group, as there will be a wide variety of keywords, related to potential searches, that can describe your product.

A group of ad groups is called a campaign. When you start with AdWords, your first step is to make a campaign, then add keywords, then organize them into ad groups. When I started with AdWords, I began with several campaigns that had to do with residential furniture we were making. I had one for dining room furniture, one for office furniture and one for bedroom furniture. Eventually, in 2006, I shut down all of these and replaced them with one campaign focusing on conference tables. It wasn't very wel l designed, and my Web site at the time wasn't very good, but it still produced sales.

In 2009, I replaced my site with a better designed version and replaced the old campaign with a new one that reflected what I had learned about the different types of conference tables that people buy. I called that campaign “Long Tail,” after the marketing concept that encourages extreme specialization in one's product line. It contained a large number of ad groups. Each ad group was designed to show a very specifically worded ad to the viewer. For example: if people search for “black conference tables,” they are shown an ad that has “black conference tables” in the headline, and they land on a page with - you guessed it - black conference tables. We buy lots of keywords (553 as of today) and organize them into lots of ad groups (66 as of today, 59 at the beginning of the year).

AdWords is an auction. I tell Google how much I am willing to pay for my ad to appear a t the top of a page of search results, and, if no one else bids more, my ad shows up in the No. 1 spot, at the top of the page. If one person outbids me, I'm in the second position. If two outbid me, I'm in the third. And if three outbid me, my ad is shown at the right side of the page of search results. (It's actually more complicated than that, as Google wants to make sure that the content shown in the ads is relevant to the search, but I won't go into that here.)

The first and second positions are by far the best places to be. It's well known that people rarely click the other ads as often as they do the top slots, which is why I'm willing to bid high to be at the top. Each time someone clicks on my ad, Google charges me money. It's expensive. The average cost per click for all my ads is $3.51. That may seem like a lot (a topic The Times covered recently), but I sell a pricey product, so it's worth it to me.

I can set limits on how much I spend per day. I des ignate an amount that I am willing to spend for my entire campaign, and each click on any of the ads in my campaign uses up some of that amount. At the beginning of 2012, my daily budget was $475. Most days, I use up the entire budget. As soon as all of my money is spent, Google stops showing my ads. Someone else's ad will appear where mine had been. I may still have a presence on a given search page, as a link to my site may appear in the unpaid, or organic, search results. But as I demonstrated last year, those free links don't produce nearly as many inquiries for me as AdWords does.

So in January and February, my campaign was generating 16 calls per week, and my sales were great. We were hitting my target of $200,000 in revenue a month. But I was about to make a terrible mistake.

Tuesday: We introduce a new product and the trouble begins.

Paul Downs founded Paul Downs Cabinetmakers in 1986. It is based outside Philadelphia.