At times, I really wish that I carried a camera with me.

This morning, I saw a brilliant piece of advertising, while stuck in rush hour traffic.

While I was waiting for the car in front of me to move, I saw a scooter drivbe by me with a board saying “You don’t have to be a superhero”. It was closelly followed by another one, whose board said “To Fly through traffic…” The third and final one complted the message, with the Vespa Symbol on the back.

I normally do not notice advertising, but this was brilliantly targeted, since only people actually stuck in traffic would notice it, and the the ease with which the Scooters moved through the traffic nicelly highlighted the message.

I am really tempted to get a Vespa now.

Technorati Tags: advertising, vespa, interesting, scooter, targeted advertising

Well, I have decided to start a technorati favourites exchange, inspired by DoshDosh’s attempt at the same.

It works like this. Add my blog to your technorati favourites, by using the handy button in the right column, and leave me a comment with your technorati username, and your blog url, and I will add you to my favourites. What could be simpler than that?
This way, we both get more traffic to our blogs.

So, what are you waiting for? Add me to your Technorati Favorites

Technorati Tags: Technorati, Favourites Exchange, blogs, traffic

A lot of new internet marketing products get released in video format lately, a trend I find very annoying.

I do think that a lot of people learn a lot better by watching, rather than reading. As you may have guessed by now, I am not one of them, but I even have my doubts as to whether all the video products out there actually help anyone.

The reasons I think that video is not a very good tool for teaching internet marketing are as follows (please note, some of these points may not apply to a particular video set, but I have generally found them to hold true):

1. Low-Quality Video Direction:
   1. All the video products I have ever looked at make use of software that records screen activity, with the author providing a voice-over to explain what he is doing on the screen.
   2. Some products actually consist of nothing but those videos, while others add some ‘talking head’ moments, with someone explaining the technique, frequently with bad lighting and set design.
   3. The editing tends to be very bad, with over-long pauses and sudden cuts
2. They are Slow: Maybe its just me, but I read a lot faster than I listen or watch, so it always seems to me like the videos take ages to get to a point. Very often I have seen cases where the author will say something like ‘and now we will go and check X’, followed by thirty seconds of silence, as we watch the cursor move around the screen, navigating on its way to the relevant information. A process which was often demonstrated to the user earlier on in the series.
3. They explain the obvious: To be fair, this is also a problem with a lot of eBooks out there. A lot of video creators seem to assume that a user is completely ignorant of how to use the basics online, and explain such things as how to fill out a form (’… and then type in your address in the address field”). Really, if somebody cannot figure out how to fill in a form on a sign-up page, perhaps, just perhaps, internet marketing is not the field they should be going into.
4. They are not browsable: If you are using an eBook, you can use various methods to find information within it, such as searching, using indexes, links, etc… With a video its a lot harder to find that one piece of information you need, without watching the whole thing.
5. They do not provide other resources: Any good eBook would contain links to other useful resources. While it is possible to embed links in a video, I have not seen any internet marketing videos that make use of this. Leaving the user to remember the URL of any resources mentioned and type it in later. Just to make this a bit more difficult, the urls are often not displayed on the screen for long enough… Unless the creator has erred on the side of caution, and the user is left staring at the link for a couple of minutes.
6. They are not portable: Audio products suffer from some of the same problems as video, but they have one big advantage: I can listen to them while driving. Watching videos while driving would be a really bad idea.
7. Internet Marketing is not a good subject matter for videos: Lets face it, from the visual point of view, internet marketing looks pretty boring. It boils down to one guy/girl sitting in front of a computer, moving the mouse around, and typing stuff. Even the software on screen does not look that exciting.
8. Bandwidth: Videos are big, and most sites that sell them use streaming video, which has the double annoyance of making it difficult to download to your computer (so, if the site goes down, you cannot access the information you paid for), and making it very choppy on a slow connection.

Well, there you have it. Despite what I said in this post, I am sure that more and more internet marketing videos will start to appear, due to the low cost and ease of producing them.

Technorati Tags: video, internet marketing, streaming video, internet marketing videos

Within a couple of days of each other, I have got money from both adsense and Adwords!

One person clicked on one of the ads on this blog, and somebody purchased one of the items I have marketed via adwords, for a commission of $48.80, so now I have made a small profit from the adwords promotion  (I have spent a grand total of approx R320 on adsense before this sale, so my overall profit is about R30)… The profit on this particular product is pretty good, since I spent less than $7 driving the traffic to the merchant.

The low overall profit is due to a single camapaign which had cost me R222 (Approx. $30), without a single sale. I stopped it within the first two days, when it became apparent that it will not perform.

Of the other two campaigns, one is reaching the 100 clicks mark, and if it does not get some sales soon, I will cancel it as well.

The third one is getting a very low CTR and number of searches. I am not sure if I will abandon it, or try to make it work.

At the moment I am looking into expanding my campaign to other PPC engines (specifically Yahoo and MSN). Since I want to see if I can generate mor emoney from the succesful campaign I already have. I will also soon start split testing on it, to see if I can get a higher CTR.

It is incredibly motivating to actually see a little bit of money coming in… Just when I was thinking if its worth it.

Technorati Tags: Adwords, adsense, affiliate marketing, affiliate promotion, profit, making money, online marketing

Well, so far, not so good. I have tried four different campaigns, with very different products. I have gotten over 200 clicks, but not a single conversion. Since then I have deaactivated one of the campaigns, since its opbivous by now that the conversion rate for that one is going to be less than 1% (strangelly enough, this was the campaign that I had the highest hopes for… I guess that’s the value of testing)

The other campaigns have not reached 100 clicks yet, so I will leave them running (I have decided to abandon campaigns with less than a 1% clickthrough rate) .

I will stick with these three campaigns, until they start making a profit, or I decide to drop them. I will keep a minimum of threenew campaigns running at a time.

A couple of mistakes I have made:

• Using the content network. - It got me alot of clicks, but I have read on various sources that they are low quality and unable to convert (I have switched it off since)
• Not taking the time to chose an affiliate program properly. - Adwords Miracle actually comes with a book filled with advice on how to shoe a clickbank product, which I did not even read through before I started my campaigns. I pretty much chose the items with the highest payoff, with no thought how popular they might become. I still need to exert more effort in chosing the right program.
• Not cloaking my links. - At the moment, the links to the merchants page are plain for all to see. I will still need to figure out how to cloak them, which will also make my tracking much easier.

Well, thats about it. I will press on now!

Technorati Tags: clickbank, affiliate marketing, adwords, adwords miracle, promotion

This is partially inspired by this discussion on slashdot about the difficulties in cancelling accounts. It got me to thinking of other occasions where companies shoot themselves in the foot in their attempts to make money.

One of the more blatant examples I can think of happened a couple of months ago. My wife and were in a shopping center, and decided to get some lunch, so we walked around, to find a decent-looking restaurant. We saw one which looked good, but thought we would go there later. As we were walking past it, a waiter stepped in front of us, and asked us if we wanted to come in. We said no, and after continuing a couple of steps, another pesone, from the same restaurant tried to get us into it. We ended up going elsewhere for lunch.

Another aspect of this is adverts which insult my intelligence, or are just plain annoying… there are a couple of companies that I refuse to deal with, purely because they have annoying adverts.

I think that in the modern world, a company needs to try very hard not to care off their customers… Most of the instances where the companies money-making scheme backfires seem to happen when they do not see their customers as human beings, and fail to respect their wishes.

Technorati Tags: slashdot, advertising, business practices, marketing, sales