Does Miley Cyrus and the Microsoft SideKick. Come’on NPR!

While listening to NPR- National Public Radio, I learned that Miley Cyrus had quit Twitter and created a rap song about it. Really? Did I really have to hear that on NPR?

How in the world did that make it into a radio broadcast that was mostly about how Microsoft’s phone made by Danger had a server outage which may cause millions of customers to lose all of the information associated to their cell phone such as photos, contacts, videos etc?

Check out this Article from Computer World to learn more about this severe server outage. Oh and… I guess you should watch this Miley Cyrus video too… Obviously somebody thought those topics complimented eachother! Really?

Teach a Process. Create a Video Tutorial!

I recently created my very first video tutorial using a tool called Camtasia. The tutorial walks the viewer through the how to set up an ad code while using an ad tracking tool from Adminder.com.

Unfortunately, I used the Adminder affiliate program in the example which probably makes the tutorial confusing. It needs to be remade using a different example. Regardless, I’m fairly excited and so I posted it on Youtube anyway- the remake will just have to wait. Maybe this will encourage me to go ahead and create version 2.0 of the tutorial.

Anyway… here is my video. Check out Adminder if you ever need to track an online promotion. It’s a super easy tool to use!

Sales and Prospecting

When you’re down in the dumps because customers or prospects just will not buy your product or idea… Remember… it only takes 1 prospect to turn the whole situation around. Just One. So when sales and marketing efforts seem hopeless… just push yourself. One more call… you can do it…

It only takes one…

Project Management is Key to Survival in Business World

“No amount of cool software will replace good sound fundamentals when it comes to creating repeatable processes that can be taken to the masses in an organization and help take it to the next level.”

I completely agree with Brad Egeland in his blog post titled, “Process Trumps Technology“. It’s actually something I’ve personally been dealing with for a while now… staying focused on the end goal and building bomb proof processes. It’s so easy to get swallowed up in the thoughts that in order to do a project better that one must use an awesome software tool. Honestly that’s just not the case. Excel and Word, coupled with a decent file management system… ie… creating folders and grouping project together… is really all you need.

Project Management is not really about word and excel though. It’s more about just creating repeatable processes that can be applied to multiple projects… As the author stated… putting the same face on every project so that the whole organization can work cohesively in solving the problem.

It is my opinion that others who read Brad Egeland’s may find a different meaning and focus to his words. Take what you can when you can… apply it to what you know and then research what you don’t know or understand… eventually you will find the answer you were looking for.

Rant Over- AffiliateGeek Out!

Prospecting Affiliates- The Advertiser’s Role

If you have a product and your main source of revenue comes from affiliate’s promoting your product on their website then how should you go about identifying the best placement for your product on their site? This also goes along with prospecting because essentially you are prospecting affiliate’s to promote your product. You can’t just expect that the affiliate will be willing to spend time to think about where the best place to promote your product is? They’re busy! As an advertiser, the affiliate expects you to approach them with an idea of how and where to promote your product.

Things you might want to look at:

As an advertiser you have to think about the best possible places to promote your product on the affiliate’s website. There are many areas in which a product or service can be promoted on a website. The easiest way for an affiliate to promote your product is through a banner or link on their webpage that links back to your site or landing page. Another very easy way for a publisher to promote your product is through email marketing. Some publishers prefer to promote products via pay-per-click marketing. The latter can be fairly expensive if the affiliate is not experienced in this practice of marekting.

One of the best and most effective means of promoting a product or service is through a customer path… especially if the customer has already made a purchase or completed a desired action such as signing up for a newsletter .

Good touch points for the new advertiser could be :

• Confirmation/Thank you Page
• Member’s Area
• Exit pop
• Co-reg

Creating your project. Things to identify when approaching potential affiliates to promote your product/service.

1. Customer path- what is the exact path that each customer goes through when visiting the affiliate’s page? You should go through this just like a customer. Remember to write down every URL that you visit through your customer experience. Take a screen shot of each page so that it can be evaluated later and so that you can make recommendations to the affiliate. Mozilla Firefox has a free screen capture service AddOn. However, I personally like to use Snagit because it allows me to send to PowerPoint. From that point you can document the exact path and then create machups right from PP.

When evaluating the customer path, be sure to answer these questions: could your product/service benefit or compliment the customer who signed up for the initial product? If yes, then, how?  If you decide that your product or service is a good fit then you need to next identify the “where” piece of the equation. Where would be the best more relevent placement for your product within the affiliate’s website?

How much information is already on the confirmation page? How can you pitch the product or service so that it 1) Fits with the current product or service 2) Offers a benefit to the consumer 3)Teaches the customer something they don’t already know

There are so many ways to promote an affiliate product. It’s overwhelming, but if you get it right then rinse, repeat, rinse repeat. Affiliates do it all the time! It’s time that the advertiser steps with suggestions!

-Rant Over. AffiliateGeek Out!

Competitive Analysis & Project Management

So I just finished creating a competitive analysis of 9 sites that offer website traffic. This was the first paper I’ve written since graduating college in 2004. I had forgotten how much work needs to go into such an important project.

Like most projects, I dove in head first. I did a keyword search on the type of traffic/media buys that were of interest. My list grew to 33 companies. I collected data from each site: Alexa Ranking, Type of traffic offered, Other Services offered, etc. Since 33 companies at almost $80 a pop is a little much, I decided to narrow the search even further. I decided to segment the companies into the *types of traffic that they offered. I was looking for a specific type of traffic and was able to narrow my search to 9 companies. Again, I dove in head first. I created my list of prospects and started the 1st process: “Tracking”.

If you are going to test ANYTHING online or even offline for that matter then “tracking” is absolutely essential. I mean, think about it… you have to “track” the campaigns. You have to “track” the results. You have to “track” the correspondences. Tracking is a BIG deal!

So, let’s expand upon this topic. If your doing a competitive analysis, what needs to be tracked? Well, I can tell you from my experience that you better keep close tabs on the traffic you purchase on the internet. My experience was incredibly confusing.

For Example, and this is for real, I identified a company that offered exactly what I was looking for. They looked totally legitimate. I read through their terms and conditions and everthing appeared fine. Thinkin the company was kosher, I made my purchase. Once I made my purchase I was taken to a confirmation page that told me that I needed to email a company with a completely different domain name the url that I wanted to promote. Guess what… the company name that I purchased from was not even listed on the receipt!

If I hadn’t been smart about purchasing traffic and documenting or tracking my actions then I may have never received my traffic. I mean, think about it… what if I had spent several hundred dollars with this company. Do you think that just because a company has customer support that their really going to help you “find” your order? No! Probably not, especially if the company goes through added steps to make the purchase path incredibly confusing. There is a good possibility that I would have NEVER received my visitors if I had not been tracking and documenting my purchase step by step.

So, that was kindof long winded. I’m sure you get the point. If you’re going to perform a competitive analysis on anything that requires a purchase then you need to document every step. Here’s how I did it:

1. Set up a special Google Mail Account. Gmail.
2. Created Labels in Google Account that corresponded with name of each company that I planned to purchase traffic from.
3. Set up an ad tracking account. (I used Adminder.com for this particular experiment. They offer a 14 day trial with no credit card request. It’s simple but does the trick.)
4. Set up an ad tracking code that helps you identify the company that you purchased traffic from
i.e. I created an ad code called xyz b/c I purchased from xyc company. This helped me identify my purchase b/c the term xyc was in the url which was listed on my receipt
5. If you set up a username and password then place that info with your ad tracking information. For me, this was added to the description alread in my ad tracking tool. I documented the sign up link, user name and password.
6. Take a screen shot of your confirmation page. Save it in a folder that corresponds to that particular company.
7. Immediately check your email for a receipt of purchase.
8. If recieipt of purchase is in your email then quickly label it using the labels you set up in Gmail.
9. Ask questions. Send customer support tickets. You can do this right of the bat. If the company does not answer your customer support tickets then do NOT do business with that company.
10. Hold the company accountable. Make sure you have every piece of information/correspondence available documented. I cannot stress this enough. If the company does not give you the information that you requested then go to IMReport.com or any other review site and write about your experience.

Hope this helps you better organize your media buys. I’m sure this post will get cleaned up in the future, so feel free to ask questions. We’re in this together!

Rant Over- AffiliateGeek Out!

Hosting Packages for Beginners- Lesson #1

A few months ago I started this blog at WordPress.com. I then learned that if I registered a hosting package with GoDaddy that I could migrate my blog from WP.com to my new hosted domain at GD with ease using their WordPress.org plugin. Well, after many attempts to figure out that process- I’m stuck. It’s incredibly frustrating. WordPress.org seems to not have phone support and GoDaddy seems to not handle that type of customer support.

Annoyed and a little discouraged, I decided to start fresh. I bought a hosting package and 1&1 because my coworker swears their interface is easier. Having bought the domain that I wanted to use at GoDaddy, I thought that I would have to transfer the domain to the new hosting company. I started the process and then learned that transferring was not necessary. Apparently you can keep your domain registrar at the parent company and then just change the nameservers.

Well, #1- when I signed up with 1and1 hosting, I thought I was signing up for an account that offered 3 months free hosting and then a recurring cost of $4.99 per month. You can imagine my astonishment when I received an email stating that I signed up for 3 months free antivirus software at that price instead. Atleast, I think that’s what I signed up for. Not sure exactly what hosting service I signed up for at this point. Lesson learned… read the fine print.

#2- A fellow internet marketer agreed to help me set up my website with the new hosting provider and we were unable to just point the name servers from GoDaddy to 1and1 because I had intiated a transfer. Then, I couldn’t figure out how to just cancel the transfer request. Two hours later, I’m left even more confused and unhappy.

So, I guess my lesson to newbie webmasters would be:

1. Try to identify which web host company will be the easiest to navigate-
*Read reviews before making a purchase
*Join Forums: Ask other newbie’s which service they found to be the easiest when building their first website
*Ask the beginners why they chose that particular hosting company
*Ask if the hosting company has phone support- you’ll probably need it.

2. Read the User Guide before setting up your account. (1&1 seemed to have a good user guide, I just didn’t read it before diving in head first)

3. Don’t get discouraged. Tomorrow is another day. Take time, review your mistakes. If you are working with a provider and have already paid for the service then maybe try to resolve the issue. Read the manual. Look at the FAQ. Call the help desk. It’s a learning process.

Rant over-AffiliateGeek Out!

The Sad Acceptance of Michael Jackson’s Death

Sitting at my desk listening to Pandora. I created a station called “Prince” which also plays a ton of Michael Jackson songs. His death truly is very sad. Remember the 80’s? I do! Michael was brilliant. His songs were so fun! Good songs to listen to during the 80’s and energetic music during work. Michael Jackson was an amazing artist. It’s too bad that he’s gone.

GeekOut til You SpeakOut

Curious to know how many hours I’ve spent blogging. What will my writing style look like after I’ve spent 10,000 hours blogging? What’s the best way to keep up with type of metric.

If you are reading this blog and have zero idea of what I’m talking about, then you absolutely need to check out Malcolm Gladwell’s book called “Outliers”. It’s absolutely incredible! He writes about the 10,000 Hour Rule- meaning it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert in any field of study. I would imagine that successful blogging could also be measured by Gladwell’s rule.

The 10,000 hour rule is cool but honestly some of his other examples are even more thought provoking. His theory on plane crashes, mitigated speech and team work was very powerful. Gladwell is just such an amazing story teller. I can’t wait to read his other books!

-Rant Over, AffiliateGeek Out!

Click Fraud & Reputation Management

Need to write a blog about both of these topics. Shouldl the two topics be combined? I guess at this point you do not see the connection. Correct? Ha! They technically can be combined into one category since the example I plan to use deals in both of these subjects. Just need to draft the first blog. Have you ever had writer’s block? Like, you know WHAT you need to write about but the intro just won’t show itself? Odd and bit unfair. So, I’m sitting here writing this just hoping that as I type this random post at midnight something in my brain will click and words that make sense to my topic will just flow through my finger tips but it’s not happening so maybe I should just stop typing and go to bed. Lol. Now the next question is… should I publish this post or not? Lol. Totally gonna post it. Curious to know if anyone clicks on the blog. What if it’s click fraud. What is click fraud anyway? Wishing I could only show the “Excerpt” of my blog so that people actually have to click on the title to get the whole story. Surely there is a setting in WordPress for this, right? Ugh, now I’m thinking about this blogger that I was reading the other day. Where did I see his blog about WordPress? Was it from Twitter? From another Blog. It’s so difficult to keep that stuff organized! Would be cool if there was a project management tool that just could be connected to the human thought process. That would be weird I think. Then the tool would just intuitively know exactly where the person would put that post or that blog or content or news article or whatever and it would be there when the person needed it. Reputation Management. I might need some after this post. Ha!