ankeshk

There are a few online media companies that are doing really well without organizing events. Copyblogger did really well by partnering with others to develop products that the community could benefit from.

Thats the route you have to take. Partner with others to develop products. You bring the audience. They bring the products that help the audience. Something similar to what EarlyToRise.com did - created a panel of experts each of whom bought their own product to the table. (http://www.earlytorise.com/meet-the-experts/ )

1. Do a google search for any keywords in the URL. Or any related keywords. Find the advertisers. And send a pitch email to the advertisers. These are guys who have already shown that they will spend money behind particular keywords. Show them the SEO benefit and they'll pay more than folks on flippa, sedo etc.

2. For domains like use the source, its hard to find advertisers. So hit the social networks and forums. Find someone who runs a Star Wars forum and ask them if they are interested in buying the domain.

3. If that too doesn't work, then list the domain up on sedo, godaddy and all the other networks out there. But private sales will almost always lead to more money than a sale from a marketplace. So try private selling first.

This news is exciting because it marks the beginning of offline wallet-less transactions. You can go to a store with nothing and end up buying something with your phone number and a pin code.

PayPal retains its crown for convenient payments. Making offline payments with your phone number and a pin code indeed seems like the future.

Its unfortunate however that PayPal is not vendor friendly.

The main take away for me wasn't that Pocket Books introduced 25 cent paperbacks when hardcovers were priced at $2.75. The main take away for me was that Pocket Books changed their distribution model too to disrupt the book publishing industry.

From the article:

"Quantity was key. De Graff knew that if he could print 100,000 paperbound books, production costs would plummet to 10 cents per copy. But it would be impossible for Pocket Books to turn a profit if it couldn’t reach hundreds of thousands of readers. And that would never happen as long as de Graff relied solely on bookstores for distribution. So de Graff devised a plan to get his books into places where books weren’t traditionally sold. His twist? Using magazine distributors to place Pocket Books in newsstands, subway stations, drugstores, and other outlets to reach the underserved suburban and rural populace."

I like the game mechanics.

A story that comes to my mind is: there was a grocery store in London in the 1950s who didn't have the best of locations. They ran a contest: They would randomly select a half an hour time period (eg: 2.20 to 2.50pm). People who had shopped during that time on the previous day could come back with their time stamped receipts and get cash back.

The store tripled their number of customers per day.

This however worked because people didn't go out of their way to buy new things. They just went out of their way to buy the things they needed at a different store to get a chance to get cash back.

So my suggestion is this: source out the "winning" designs on threadless etc in the past 3 months. And list those t-shirts on your website only. Don't ask your audience to submit their designs.

And announce this fact. Re-assure people that they are buying the same "hot" stuff they would buy on other t-shirt sites. But they could just earn a free t-shirt too.

Take away the neg that comes with the "least popular tshirt" tag.

James Webb Young is a copywriting legend. You should read his ads to realize how problem focused ads work better than benefit focused ads.

You first have to raise the problem before you list your solution and benefits.

His full page ad: "Curve of a Woman’s Arm"

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=YC6YKYyHVKwC&pg=PA30&...

(If the above long link doesn't work, go to books.google.com and search for the book "The 100 Greatest Advertisements: Who Wrote Them and what They Did" - the ad is on page 30.)

Airtel was penalized by an institution similar to the small claims court. Airtel didn't contest the complaint. Most likely because it would cost them more in legal fees than the maximum penalty a "District Consumer Disputes Redressal Forum" can reward (Rs100,000. Less than $2,000.)

I'm pretty sure that if there were more complaints filed against them, they would have contested it aggressively.

We had to make a choice: go with a signup form which leads to fewer referrals. Or automatically sign people up when they add their email id at the end of "any" page on your domain to increase adoption rate and get more people to promote you.

This second option could lead to spam worries. Thats why, we offer optional usernames. The first time our system recognizes a new email id, an email is sent out to them with instructions on setting up a username with which they can replace their email id while promoting URLs.

(Also, we'll be launching social media integration buttons next week, which will automatically shorten the URLs and disguise your email ids.)

Thanks for your feedback. Any suggestions on a replacement font?

Thanks for your comment. Good idea. Made the change and lowered the barrier to 5 clicks.

(I had kept the milestone at 15 clicks as a comparison to $3. But you're right, lower base doesn't matter if it can increase the number of people who start sharing.)

Thanks for your comment. I'm at a loss as to how to respond. I'm show casing my startup that is a referral marketing app. Of course, the demo that I set up for it will be about referral marketing too, no?

We're the same guys actually. Promotioner is owned by SuccessNexus :)

Promotioner is a lean rebranding effort to focus more on the site-wide referral idea, and less on the all-in-one ecommerce + mailing list + referral program tool.

Thanks Michael. The long term idea is to bring the idea of referral marketing to blogs and CMS systems.

ALL of the top 500 ecommerce websites have their own referral or affiliate programs. None of the top blogs have their own referral program. And thats because there was no dead simple way of referring blogs yet.

We plan to change that. Launching with reward-for-clicks as our MVP. Will introduce pay-per-sale referral model soon.

Google hasn't shown any harshness to referral programs yet. But even then, we're not going to focus on SEO part a lot. We consider it a side benefit. And it'll have just 1 line on our sales page.

Thanks. Creating a username requires people to signup. Signing up = friction. And makes fewer people promote you.

Allowing people to refer any URL without signing up, simply by adding their email id at the end of the URL seems to be working better in increasing web traffic.

Its a trade off. But its a decision taken because the pay off is worth it (till now. If a lot of users say otherwise, then will switch it).

This seems like a pretty good deal if you go beyond the headlines of Berkshire investing in a declining industry.

1. All the newspapers Berkshire Hathway is buying are modestly profitable according to Poynter Institute. They didn't buy the Tampa Tribune newspaper which is struggling.

2. Berkshire is also loaning $400 million to Media General at 10.5% interest. And providing a $45 million credit line. The interest on that loan will go a long way towards paying for the newspapers.

3. And on top of this, Berkshire is getting stock warrants equivalent to almost 20% of Media General. Media Generals stock prices are already up by 33%.

In essence, Berkshire has put in $600 million which will earn them about $60-80 million per year (from newspaper revenue and interest on the loan.) Gives them 20% of a media company with a market cap of $90 million and room to rise higher. And leaves with a $400 million loan which has to be paid back to them eventually.

This is a bloody genius deal.

You need a coupon for tracking. You don't necessarily have to give hefty discounts that are attractive to the bargain hunters. Even offers like get a soda for free will work in helping you keep track of what is working.

There really aren't that many online to offline tracking devices that work better than coupons.

One other idea is to list a unique phone number on Facebook. So you can track which sales come because of Facebook and which come because of your other marketing activities.

Thanks. To tell you the truth, Google Adwords is a lot more complicated than Facebook ads. With Google, you need to:

1. Work on keyword research. Long tail keywords. Negative keywords. If you only rely on keywords Google recommends, you're missing out on quite a bit.

2. Creating ad groups. You can't create an ad group with a 100 keywords in it. They have to be narrowly focused and shouldn't have more than a handful of keywords in each of them.

3. Focus on landing page quality. Create headlines dynamically based on the keywords.

4. Track ROI. And pause the ad groups and ads that result in negative ROI.

And this is only for the search network. Not the display network.

Compared to this, Facebook is pretty simple. But yes - Facebook needs to do a better job educating folks how to best use their ad platform.

Yellow page ad strategies work for Google because people already have buying intent when they run a search. Radio ad strategies work for Facebook. Its more suitable for brand building. If you are selling cars, and an average person buys a new car every 7 years - you won't see a lot of sales in the first 3-6 months. Facebook needs to educate on this.

So there are quite a few things that Pizza Delicious didn't do right with their Facebook ads.

1. They target people who like Italian food. They don't target people who like Pizza. 15,440 people in New Orleans have liked Pizza on Facebook.

2. They don't target people who like other Pizza Outlets. Or other local restaurants. If a resident likes one local outlet, he is more prone to like other local establishments too.

3. They disregard targeting friends of people who already like Pizza Delicious. And by doing so - they don't use the most powerful feature Facebook has to offer: social proof.

4. That they do any kind of targeting beyond geographic targeting at all is probably erroneous for their type of business. Seriously - if they were running ads offline, would they run an ad in a magazine about Italy? Or would they run it in their daily local newspaper? Pizza is something that has a wide interest. There is no need to restrict based on any kinds of interest.

5. There is no benefit in Liking Pizza Delicious on Facebook. No special Facebook offers. Or discount coupons. And yet they were expecting people to like their page and come visit their place right away. Their call to action is weak. You can't expect facebook likes to convert into orders straight away - when you don't even ask for an order.

6. Their measurement method is very inaccurate. Asking people where they found out about you has been proven to be very very inaccurate. Instead, give them a coupon and track based on that.

7. There was a total mismatch with their online and offline metrics. Do you ever like a page on facebook without knowing about that brand from before? Yet, they are tracking the number of Likes online. But asking people how they found out about them offline.

Actually, Google has this measurement scale called "Quality Score." Your landing page is one of the things they evaluate to measure the quality score. And your quality score affects your CPC.

You can read more on it here: http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&an...

If you lower your CPC bid then the Traffic Estimator shows you the rates for lower positions. The ad on the top of the page always gets more click throughs than the ad that is shown 5th on the page. And thats what Traffic Estimator takes into consideration.

But you should know that the Traffic Estimator is just that - an estimator. Your real cost per click and ad positioning with Google depends on a lot of other factors. Including things like how good your landing page is. And how better your ad is than others.

So determine the CPC at the cliff on their graph. And then optimize your Google ads. (Also, a lot of ad networks are cheaper than Google Adwords. So use Google Traffic Estimator to find an optimal price point. But start advertising your product at other places.)

I have been using this strategy since quite some time now to develop a frontend product. And then use the profits from that product to advertise and attract enough visitors that lead to at least 1 more sale - and create a perpetual traffic cycle out of it. (I'm writing a 60 page book on it.)

Some things I've learned from experience.

1. You don't want to use the Google Keyword Tool. Thats a good tool for keyword suggestions. Not for keyword bidding. You want to use Google's Traffic Estimator tool instead. You will have to login to your Google Adwords account to use it. (Adwords > Tools & Analysis > Traffic Estimator)

2. You don't want to use category defining keywords. You want to make it slightly long tail. Don't search for "crossfit". Search for "crossfit training". Don't search for "speed reading". Search for "learn speed reading". Why? Because Google starts minimum bids for category defining keywords from $1 - even if there aren't any competing advertisers on that keyword. This inflates the numbers in your formula.

3. After searching for a keyword in the Traffic Estimator tool, click on "Impressions" and hover your mouse over the cliff in the graph they show. That is the Max CPC you want to take while calculating your price. (http://i.imgur.com/upj77.png)

With the above steps, the CPC you get for learn speed reading is 41 cents. If you expect a 1% conversion rate, you need a product that sells for about $41 minimum.

If you go to the clickbank.com marketplace and search for speed reading, you will see that the most popular product on speed reading (Quickeye Speed Reading Software) is infact priced at $47.

Actually advertisers have known this since a long time. Ugly wins more attention. More attention = higher conversion.

The first job of ads is winning attention. You have to fight against all the clutter and stand out. You can do so by a variety of tactics. Use human faces. Use cute looking models. Use ugly fonts or clipart. Use mouse pointers. Use fluorescent colors. Use dashed coupon type borders.

You need to know however that while your conversion rates will increase, the number of complaints you receive will increase too.

Thats impressive. Would love to know how you went about promoting the website too. Did you do any SEO / link building / other kind of marketing?

Like the clean interface. Much better than formspring.me

However, each question requires its own permalink. So that people can share a particular Q&A.

Another idea suggestion would be, create a popular answers tab on all users page. So that if someone has answered 101 questions, his best answers don't get lost.

So PG doesn't finish the story of Ooka Tadasuke and how he solves the case of the cook asking the student to pay for enjoying the smell of good food.

The judge asks the student to take a few coins. But instead of paying tangible coins for intangible smell, he asked for the coins to be put in a handkerchief and shook hard. And the payment to be made with the sound the coins made.

(I had heard this story as an Indian story - not a Japanese story. And Ooka Tadasuke was replaced by Birbal - the prime minister of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. "Akbar Birbal" stories are full of such awesomeness.)

Its a good idea because it brings in a level of transparency. But I'm not sure if it'll make a big dent on Hollywood.

Why do some movies do well and others don't? There are a lot of reasons. But if we were to simplify, there are 2 things that matter more than the rest.

1. The buzz factor.

Reason why studios pay $20 million to a well known celebrity is because they know it will generate the buzz and create expectations.

2. The story and the experience.

Once the movie is released, and the first wave of viewers go and watch it, then it all depends on how good their experience was - for the buzz to sustain.

To beat Hollywood, you have to become better than them at telling good stories well, and creating buzz that lasts to make money out of it.

You absolutely have to become good at monetizing the buzz. Only selling the movies for 99 cents is a bad monetization plan. You will never be able to fund a movie like Avatar. And if you can't do that, you'll never be able to take on Hollywood.

If I were to develop a plan to beat Hollywood, it would center around creating buzz. How to use the new media to generate buzz.

Maybe create a new incentivized market... a whacky idea like: the first hundred thousand people who watch a movie can share in its profits.

If you want to outsource to India, you need to find a company that hires super stars. Super stars in India demand a salary of Rs50,000 to Rs 100,000 a month. Which is still quite less from international point of view: its about $1000 to $2000 a month. A company hiring them will bill you a minimum of $20-30 per hour. Usually more like $40-45 per hour.

If you go with a company that is billing you less than that from India, you should know that your work will suffer because that company does not hire the best skilled coders.

Not an article. But a book recommendation.

How I raised myself from failure to success in selling. By Frank Bettger.

http://www.amazon.com/Raised-Myself-Failure-Success-Selling/...

Interesting. I always thought how Jobs made the decision to wear the same clothes was similar to how Feynman made a decision to eat the same icecream (chocolate) all the time. They both thought it was pointless to decide about mundane things and would rather spend time on other more worthy problems.

Interesting to read about how he wore a uniform for better bonding purposes.

However, the best thing to do to learn copywriting is follow the advice of the late copywriting ace Gary Halbert.

Buy a book of control salesletters. ("Control" is an industry jargon which means that its a salesletter that has won in split tests with other versions of salesletters selling the same product.)

Then copy and write the salesletters down by hand. Because copywriting is essentially writing. You can read everything about it and yet be a so-so copywriter. Or you can just copy 30 or so control salesletters and learn more than you would by reading voraciously on the topic.

My swipe file book of control salesletters of choice is World's Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters by Herschell Gordon Lewis. But its out of print. And second hand copies sell for $200-300 or so.

Another good and more affordable book of control salesletters is: Million Dollar Mailings by Denny Hatch