Entries Tagged 'Miscellaneous' ↓

Well I’ve been on holiday for the last week or so, and today as I was trudging through my neglected emails I came across a class action lawsuit that involves people who have been involved with CJ either as an advertiser or a publisher, since 2003. That’s me. So I read it. (If that’s you, click here to find out more). Seems like twice a year lately I get one of these class action emails about some network or other I’ve been part of.

So anyways, I guess it involves CJ’s use or non-use of some sort of software that should have been industry compliant, but wasn’t. So what’s in it for us, the publishers? Not a lot, as it turns out. One million dollars has been allocated (if approved) for the settlement. First you take off the lawyers fees and everyone’s expenses related to anything remotely close to the case, and whatever is left over, you split between the advertisers and the publishers (us) 70 / 30.

Ok, so what is the best case scenario here? Well, first off, as a publisher, it looks like I get my share of the 30 percent left over. Ok, so what is that share? Well, first, that depends on how much CJ actually paid out in commissions between 2003 and July 2008. My guess is it is quite a big number. I have no actual facts about this (I did do about 2 minutes worth of Google research but couldn’t find much other than 2001 figures of 997 Million in sales for the first three quarters) so I’m purely speaking off the top of my head, making this up as I go. But let’s just say, for argument’s sake, that they pay out $10 million per month in commissions. Ok, make it only $1 million, just for fun. Where does that leave me? Well, we’re talking about roughly 5 years here. So that would be roughly 60 million in commissions. Do the math and I figure I get about $112, assuming that the full 300,000 remains for paying the publishers. My guess is that becomes more like 200,000. My guess is, they’ve paid out a LOT more than a million a month as well.

So I guess I’m in line for a free dinner, courtesy of CJ. It might be McDonald’s, or it might be a bit nicer, but I’ll probably still get something out of it. I’m not holding my breath though. My last payout from Google came to $8.37.

I just found out about this cool site the other day, called the Mechanical Turk. The site is named for a machine some guy made a long time ago, dubbed the Mechanical Turk. The machine could apparently play chess, quite well in fact. Except after quite a lot of publicity etc etc the secret got out of the bag that it was in fact a little guy inside the machine who happened to be quite good at chess. Surprise Surprise!

So what does that have to do with mturk.com? Well, basically, mturk lets people get inside the machine. People post things on there that seem almost mindless sometimes. For example: does this picture match this description? Yes or No? Any human that is half awake can probably tell you in a heartbeat whether or not it does. However, it is very hard to get a computer to do that. Hence the person in the machine. So on Mechanical Turk you can accept these strange jobs, and get paid a set rate for them. Now, before you go and get all excited on me… let me just say the standard rate is measured in pennies… not dollars! The task I just mentioned would likely bring 1 penny for 1 match.

That is all from the perspective of the worker (or Turker, as they like to call themselves!). Now lets look at it from the perspective of the requester. Think of something you’d like to get done done and pay very little for!

Would you like to get a whole bunch of articles written for cheap cheap? I just submitted a “hit” to get 20 articles written on digital picture frames at a staggering rate of 25 cents each! I’ve got one back so far… it isn’t the most amazing thing you will ever read, but it is sincere and I can definitely use it as filler text somewhere on one of my site’s pages.

Another idea could be getting Turkers to bookmark your site on social networking sites… Del.icio.us, Technorati, StumbleUpon, Propeller, etc. Pay them a penny for the job, while driving traffic and rankings for your site!

Have a blog you’re trying to promote? You can pay people pennies to come and leave comments, which helps give your blog the impression of being a bustle of activity (no, I’ve not paid for comments here, and won’t =).

Why not go over to mturk.com and check out what people are looking to get done? You might be surprised how cheaply you can get the same things done!

I’ve been getting a flurry of sales calls lately, mostly offering me costly SEO services (typically $1000-6000). I think this is due to the fact that I’ve just launched DigitalFrameGuy.com and I guess it hit some list somewhere of newly launched e-biz sites.

Problem is, I’m becoming increasingly calloused to sales calls because I’ve been taken in by a few things in the past, and I don’t really have a great desire to throw more money down the golden toilet.

So I’ve learned a few statistics, courtesy of my friendly cold-callers. Here’s one: 92% of all web sales apparently come from search engines, hence the high focus on rankings. These people seemingly completely write off all other forms of marketing, which I think is incredibly narrow-minded. Yes, I will agree that for a web-store, SEO is incredibly important. But to take the line that it is more important that anything else, and that you’re basically wasting your time if you think of doing anything else (hahaha - you newbie moron! - you’re doing PPC?). I know internet marketers who have had amazing success just using lists, and others who are producing amazing results with social media marketing. Personally, I’ve had tremendous success with pay-per-click.

The problem is that these phone marketers don’t know me from Adam, and don’t have a clue that internet marketing is what I’ve chosen to do. I realize I need help along the way, but primarily, I want to learn how to do it myself, not turn my site over to some outfit who will charge a couple grand for an XML sitemap and a few hundred directory submissions.

One outfit guaranteed me page 1 or page 2 on Google, within six months, or my money back. Now that is an offer that is more interesting; however I have this desire to do something for myself. I want to achieve something on my own here! I suppose you could make a business model on having people do everything for you, all the time; however I think it would be a very expensive one. Being naturally techie minded, I’ve learned so much along the way that I can now do in minutes, which other people outsource. Yes, they save a small amount of time, and at some point if life gets busy enough I may do the same. However, I think that until you truly understand what the key elements of your business are you won’t truly have the keys you need to get ahead anyways. Putting 10 outsourcers together is brilliant; and I hope to do it one day, but I MUST know what each one is doing, and why, and how they relate to each other. That knowledge will likely only be gained by doing it yourself, at least the first time.

I’m getting off topic. Back to the sales calls. I am typically polite to callers, and I usually try to hear them out. Sometimes I even learn something. But I really wish they could somehow get a better grasp of who I am before they launch into their one-size-fits-all sales rant. If they actually took the time to find out where I was coming from, I’m sure they would be a lot more effective.

 So because this site is fairly new and all I’ve been playing around with the theme on Wordpress, and I just recently setup some Adsense Ads on the left sidebar. (Please pay attention to them I’d appreciate it =) Anyways, out of curiosity I went to a few of my posts to see what would be advertised alongside them. Most of them had fairly relevant offers posted there; however I was curious what they would put on my post about Google’s Anti-Competitive URL Policy and strangely enough they couldn’t think of anything to put there except for horoscope ads, and ways to tell the future! I’m sure there’s a joke there I just can’t think of it at the moment.

PS I’ve since hit refresh a few times and they appear to have picked up the relevancy a bit better… now they are for affiliate/PPC type offers.