Miscellaneous | Ad.Ventures in Internet Marketing

Category Archives: Miscellaneous

Screw Google: Facebook Now Rules… Whaaat?

With the simple qualification of you being in marketing and having a functioning email address, I can pretty much guarantee that you’ve recently been digitally assaulted with one of the latest renditions from the “Screw Google” crowd.

Specifically, I’m sure you’ve now been educated to the fact that Facebook gets 39+ BILLION page loads per month, 5x more than Google. And that for this very reason, Google is now trembling in their gold-lined, diamond encrusted bunker, aware that their demise must be imminent at the hand of this fearsome foe. Further, savvy marketers should get on the band wagon ASAP, and ditch Google in the hope of greener pastures on the other side of the fence. Why stick it out on the Titanic?

Facebook, so it would seem, is the new Adwords (circa 2004) – king of cheap, targeted traffic.

Proponents say there’s more traffic, you can target by demographics, and that click prices are cheaper.

I’ve been seeing the emails increasing all week long, to the point where I’m getting a little cheesed at this latest ‘slap-Google-back’ stunt. Finally, I just read a good post over at the Affiliate Black Book blog that talked about the issue (yes, that’s where I scraped that fan picture from… thanks X!) and seeing as I was just sitting around here on a Friday evening waiting to go out, I thought why not write my own?

So let’s consider the issues.

Is Facebook a Threat to Big G?

Ok – is Facebook really a threat to Google? Well, depending on your source, Facebook’s projected revenue for 2009 was somewhere between $500 and $550 million. Google’s 2009 reported gross income was $23.65 Billion according to this source. Oh yeah, and they reported net income of $6.52 Billion.

In case you didn’t catch that, there was a B on Google’s statement, and just a little m on Facebooks’.

In case you didn’t catch that, Facebook’s entire 2009 revenue was about 8.4% of Google’s profit.

I highly doubt Google is shaking in their boots about on this one.

Is Facebook Targeted?

Ok, so let’s look at the claims. Facebook is incredibly targeted – you can choose your customers (that’s the claim). Ok, but what are they doing on Facebook? Most people are jumping on Facebook to tell their friends that they just got their hair done, the latest game sucked, or their boss is a jerk. (Careful with that – boss’s are on FB too!). Does that sound like a warmed up prospect? Not to me.

Ok, let’s look at Adwords again. Hmm… prospect types in “XYZ review” sees your ad, and clicks because its relevant. You’ve got a shot at making that sale. He was looking for you. On Facebook, they’re not looking for anything. It’s interruption advertising, same as anything else. Content network, CPV, etc etc. Except search. Oh – and the fact that content network is contextual.

Yes, you can choose your demographics on Facebook, but you can do the same on Google’s content network. And the content network is far larger.

Compared to Google, Facebook’s advertising platform looks like something a 2 year old could rustle up in a sandbox. And need I say that you have FAR MORE OPTIONS on Google’s highly advanced Adwords platform? Anybody who is familiar with the content network on Google knows that Facebook doesn’t offer even 1/10th of the refinement and control that Google does.

Google offers targeted advertising. The best we currently have anyways. Facebook offers you an educated shot in the dark.

Is Facebook Cheaper?

Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

I found a blog post where one fine fellow got quite excited about Facebook’s potential. He says he spent about $500 in a couple of weeks and was able to add about 1000 fans to his new fan page (less 50 of his friends that joined as well… so 950 for $500).

How does that work out? That’s about 53 cents per conversion. To get a fan.

I’m trying desperately to remember how that quote goes about not being able to buy love.

Ok, so 53 cents for a conversion isn’t bad. But how does it compare to the content network, or search network? I’m currently getting conversions for around 83 cents a piece (its still dropping) – but these conversions aren’t joining my fan page. They’re opting in to a sales funnel. Many of them are buying my products. The revenue from my sales overshadows the cost of PPC, thus making list building (and there’s a BIG difference between list building and fan base building) essentially a negative cost. Yes, because of the sales, it costs me less than nothing to build my list.

So yes, you maybe be paying 25-50 cents per click on Facebook, but I can tell you I’m currently getting hundreds of clicks per day at an average of 11 cents each off the content network. Oh, and a quite bunch at 4 cents each off one particularly massive site which I won’t name, just to keep you guessing.

So you can talk about prices, and you can talk about conversions. But even then, most people aren’t talking about the same thing. A conversion can be becoming a fan, opting in to a list, or becoming a paid customer.

Should We Really Ditch Google?

If you had an income stream producing consistent revenue, would you throw it away in favor of something else? No, any rational, sane person would simply test the new source, and if it worked out, add it to the mix. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

I’ll say that again. Only an idiot would throw out something that is working.

So, that gets me to the main tick in my craw. The fact that every marketer, as well as some of their dogs, have been promoting the NewTrafficHoneyHole product from Ryan Deiss.

The same guy who just promoted his product that taught people how to use Google’s content network to target Gmail is now telling people Google sucks.

You can’t have it both ways!

That’s the thing that really gets me about the internet marketing crowd. Gurus are no exception. Somebody comes out with a hot product, and every starts flogging it, because there are a few bucks to be made. Fact is, I and others I know have tested the Gmail tactic and never been wildly successful at it. And I’ve seen Deiss’ course – nothing we weren’t trying in there.

I’m not sure it ever worked that well, and that makes this latest Facebook thing suspect.

Who’s the Real Rival?

The funny thing is, is that in all of this, I haven’t heard a peep about the fact that Yahoo and MSN are now merging their advertising forces. Just heard it on the radio the other day. Now, that’s something to talk about. Both have highly developed advertising platforms, in many respects far closer to Google than Facebook has any hope of being within a couple of years.

They are both established players, and they’re looking to make waves. Bing is not only aiming at Google, they’re firing. With some Yahoo bullets in the chamber, they’ll get a bit further. It’s going to be very interesting to watch that particular game unfold over the next year or so.

What’s the Upshot?

Well, I’ll make no bones of the fact that Google still pisses me off. They act like they’re God, and they just honestly don’t care about me, or you. Doesn’t matter if you spend a buck a year or a million, we’re all human spawn in their eyes. Except if you’re a real big boy like Amazon or Ebay (then you get preferential treatment apparently as their ads seem to be WAY outside the normal relevancy guidelines the rest of us are subject too).

So no, I don’t like Google. Does that mean I don’t do business with them? Well no. It’s profitable for me, and an excellent source of economical, targeted traffic.

So what about Facebook? Well, I’ve just launched a campaign there this week as well, and I’m now testing out different strategies. Am I abandoning Google? Heck no. But I will be evaluating Facebook’s advertising performance against my benchmarks from Google.

So until I’m able to prove it otherwise, Facebook is not ‘da bomb’ that most people are making it out to be right now, and no, I’m not jumping ship from Google, even though I freely admit the thought of doing business with them frequently brings a sinister gleam to my eye.

Last word? Shape up guys. Use some integrity in what you promote eh?

Life As A Merchant (And How to Keep It Simple)

For the past few months now, I’ve been deeply involved in creating and marketing my own products. I still do some affiliate marketing, but for the time being, I’m building my own inventory.

Along with being a product owner comes some unique challenges.

One of these is customer support.

I keep a rough mental tally of how many emails I’m receiving on a given subject, and when things start getting out of hand (ie more than 2-3 emails in a week on a particular question) then I try to come up with a solution. 2-3 emails right now could easily become 10-20 per week later on, and if there is an easy fix, I’ve saved myself tons of time, right?

Ok – so here’s an example. I offer a member’s only download area, and some people were having trouble logging in and downloading. Mostly these questions were due to weak computer skills, and I found myself explaining things like ‘right click and save target as’ over and over. Well, I quickly realized I hadn’t put that particular line on my download page, so I added that, and things improved a bit.

Then I decided to do a walk through screen capture video and talk about everything a member might want to do, and show them how to do it. Boom. Emails dropped off.

Something else I’ve been dealing with lately is failed transactions. It just drives me nuts to see a failed transaction come through, because I know that’s lost revenue for me!

Unfortunately I don’t currently have a way of automatically following up with those people, but I did start emailing each one separately, to see if I could provide some suggestions as to how they might successfully purchase. Anyways, this started to get tiresome as well.

So I created some custom signatures in my email program, Entourage, one for each product. Now if a person tries to purchase product XYZ and fails, I can go into my system, click on their name (which opens an email window), type in a subject line and “Hello Johnny” and then select the signature of my choice and hit send.

The signature is in fact a complete email, complete with a screen capture shot of the order form with red circles and instructions.

So now I have a way of following up in a semi-automated manner, and hopefully capturing back some of those transactions. To date, although I haven’t counted exactly, I have seen a handful return for a successful purchase. Well worth 30 seconds.

You could take this same concept (email signatures) and use it for pretty much any kind of common customer support issue you run into. It is just a really handy way of storing a pre-packaged answer to a common question.

Do you have any little tricks on how you deal with customer support issues as a merchant? I’d love to hear them – leave a comment below!

I Shall Sing You The Song of My People

Does your marketing turn heads?

A picture is worth a thousand words – this one included!

I’ve heard that if you haven’t offended anyone with your marketing, you’re not doing a very good job. Good marketing is truly “sold out” for the cause – you’ve identified your tribe (no puns intended) and you are SUPER relevant to them. The natural outcome of this is that you’re going to annoy and possible anger people outside of your tribe, or herd, as Dan Kennedy likes to call it. But your tribe will love you for being that relevant to them, and will reward you accordingly.

Checkout the caption – “I shall sing you the song of my people” – that’s a tribal type of phrase right?

What about the song? Do you know your target market well enough to know what makes them tick? What makes them laugh, what they talk about, where they hang out, and most importantly, what makes them purchase?

Who is your tribe, what is their song, and are they really “your people?”

Leave a comment below and tell us about it!

How to Replace the Keyboard on a Dell XPS 1530

One of the things I love most about summer, and working from home, is the option of working outside on warm sunny summer days. However, recently working at home got the best of me, in a different way.

I’d left a glass of water near my laptop, and my cat decided that was a nice place to walk past. Unfortunately, clutz that she sometimes is, she managed to knock the glass of water onto my laptop.

Panic stricken, I unplugged everything from the computer as fast as I could, turned it upside down, and started powering down. The blue screen of death beat me to the punch, and on seeing that I knew I had problems. I pulled the battery immediately.

The next half hour was spent digging my way into the bowels of my XPS 1530. I took all the screws out of the bottom, and partially separated the top plate from the innards. I was able to spy several water droplets, most of which I was able to get with a Q-Tip. After I was satisfied that I’d mopped up everything that was readily accessible, I got my wife’s hairdryer, propped it up and let it blow free through the case for about half an hour.

I tried giving it some power, but the light around the power button came on for half a second and then died. That was about all it could muster. I decided to let the thing rest overnight and prayed for the best.

The next morning I was able to get a little further. The computer powered up, but the BIOS registry took forever. Then it started beeping rather angrily at me. Finally though, it worked its way huffing and puffing into safe mode.

Did I mention this happened two days after I had freshly formatted my computer? Argh.

Anyways, satisfied that I was seeing progress, I turned it off and let it rest for most of the day (a Saturday).

Later on, I tried again. Now it went into Windows ok, and everything seemed fine…. EXCEPT my keyboard.

About a dozen keys weren’t working. Several days later nothing had changed. I normally use a wireless keyboard anyways, so it wasn’t the end of the world, but next week I’m traveling for a week and a dud keyboard just won’t do.

So I started looking online, and found a replacement keyboard on Ebay for $17.25 (buy it now – including shipping!).

Anyways, today I finally got the time to dive into my little replacement project. I tried looking online but wasn’t able to find any other tutorials for how to replace the keyboard on an XPS 1530 or 1330, so I’ve decided to share my newfound knowledge with you, dear reader. Here goes.

How to Replace the Keyboard on an XPS 1530/1330

The first step is to remove the battery. Never open your computer without doing that.

Sorry, backup. The first step I took was to make a nice rum and coke and take the operation outside. You’ll need a small Phillips screwdriver, and a small flat screwdriver would be good too.

xps-keyboard

Now, I’m going to show you the short way to do this, but I’ll just let you know that I did indeed tear this sucker apart – and you don’t have to. No, replacing your laptop’s keyboard should only take 10 or 15 minutes if you follow these instructions.

Second – and this is the secret that I found out quite a ways into the process – pop off the two side bits, as you can see from the picture. You can do this with a flat screwdriver. They’re just held in by plastic tabs.

xps-keyboard-9

After you’ve got these bits off, on each side, then you need to pop off the dark plastic bit that runs the width of the laptop, with the holes for the speakers. Again, use the flat screwdriver.

xps-keyboard-10

Don’t bother trying to unplug this, you can just put it aside out of the way. Now you should be looking at the two screws that hold the keyboard in place. Take those out, slide the keyboard out, and you’re halfway done.

The last thing to do is actually unplug the keyboard.

xps-keyboard-12

There’s a plastic bit holding the wire on. The plastic pops upwards, as you can see in the picture.

Now, swap the keyboards, plug it in, put the whole thing back together and you’re done!

The Internet Is Really Pretty Simple…

I was speaking to a client on the phone today, and all of a sudden he said something that just made me burst out laughing. Maybe it was something in my coffee that morning, and then again maybe it has merit.

We were talking about the internet, and marketing, and he said this:

The internet is a big place.

It’s full of people,

And they all have credit cards!

For some reason those three statements just summarized the viewpoint of an optimistic internet marketer. Too often we get sidetracked and think that the market isn’t big enough, or we’re not big enough for the market, or some other such foolishness.

The fact is, there’s a lot, no, make that a TON of buyer’s out there with credit cards.

All you need to do is give them a reason.