All posts tagged Marketing

Seth Godin on Standing Out – TED.com talk

By | June 4, 2010 | Marketing | No comments
sethgodin

Seth Godin is without a doubt one of THE most innovative marketers in the world. I recently watched this TED talk and found it super informative and interesting, it also has some great jokes. Enjoy!

 

 

How To Invite All Your Friends To A Facebook Group With One Click

By | May 14, 2010 | How To, Marketing | No comments
facebook-logo

Inviting all of your friends to your fan page or facebook group can be insanely tedious and agonizing. When I made my fan page for my blog I wasn’t about to click 400 names to invite all my friends, that’s just a pure waste of time. Instead I found a way to invite ALL of them with a few clicks and it works like a charm.

To invite ALL your facebook friends to your fan page/group do the following:

1.) Copy/paste this code snippet:


javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’);for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}


2.) Go to your fan page/group and click the “suggest to friends” button.


How To Invite All Your Friends To A Facebook Group With One Click

3.) Once the box pops up asking you who you’d like to invite, paste the snippet into the URL bar of your browser and click enter. It’ll automatically select all your friends, then all you have to do is click send invitations!

 

How To Invite All Your Friends To A Facebook Group With One Click

That’s it! One pretty easy, quick, and useful trick that saved me a lot of time.

How the Halo: Reach Beta Used Suspense to Build Hype

By | May 6, 2010 | Marketing | No comments
haloreachbeta

It’s not often big video game releases or demos/betas use crafty marketing. Halo: Reach is an upcoming video game title by AAA game studio Bungie. Bungie recently released an online beta version of Halo: Reach for people to test and try out. The Halo: Reach Beta was released on Monday and Bungie used a marketing tactic very commonly used for internet marketing product launches. The mechanism Bungie used that I’m referring to is suspense; which is one of the most underutilized and most effective methods of promoting any new product. When “gurus” release internet marketing products they on occasion won’t give a firm time/date when the product will launch, just a general idea. This builds suspense, people talk about it more, and once the product launches the flood gates open and more people buy into it because of all the chatter and hype.

The Halo: Reach beta did something very similar to this. They publicly announced the beta would become available on Monday and claimed that there were too many parties involved to give a firm time. I find that extremely difficult to believe when they have always been able to give firm times and dates when releasing things like map packs and other game downloads. What did this end up doing for them? People tweeted about it all day, people blogged about it, posted about it on forums and just made a huge commotion because people wanted to know when it was going to come out. Once the beta went live so many people logged into the game at the same time the servers crashed for close to 2 hours. This just goes to show that this tactic worked even better than they expected. If they had said it will be available at 2:00 PM it wouldn’t have received anywhere near as much attention in the blogging and social spheres.

I must say I’m impressed someone at Bungie thought of this, it’s great to know there are marketers (or marketing-minded people) inside of bigger companies that really know how to change things up.

Twitter’s New Advertising Platform: Promoted Tweets

By | April 17, 2010 | Advertising, CPM, Monetization | No comments
Twitter Logo

If you follow Twitter or online advertising at all you probably know by now that Twitter has officially revealed it’s source of monetization: “promoted tweets.” People have been debating for the last few years how Twitter is ever going to make money, promoted tweets was one of the common ideas.

If you’re unfamiliar with the all new promoted tweets here’s a quick recap:

  • Promoted tweets are essentially ads placed at the top of search results for given keywords or keyphrases
  • There is only a small handful of advertisers being let in at the moment
  • Promoted tweets must receive a certain ratio of clicks/replies and positive feedback to stay up making quality important
  • Promoted tweets are based on a cost-per-thousand pricing model

I’ve had a few days to digest all of the information Twitter has released about it and have started to compile some thoughts on it.

I’m a little upset the platform isn’t self-serve and open everyone, I was really looking forward to mastering Twitter’s advertising platform as soon as it came out. On the other hand, I can fully understand why Twitter is making smaller steps and approaching it this way for a few reasons:

  • Most ad platforms begin this way to both work out bugs and test the waters so the experience isn’t ruined.
  • This is all new to Twitter, they need to keep a close eye on it for awhile. Striking a balance that doesn’t alienate the spoiled ad-free user base is going to be tricky.
  • Big budget advertisers are going to be willing to drop A LOT more cash on this. Most of them have no idea what they’re doing and know they need to “get on this Twitter thing” which will result in them paying ridicously high cpm rates. (can’t say I blame them for taking advantage)

A lot of Twitter users are outraged because they don’t understand how much it takes to run a website like Twitter. They’re used to Twitter being ad free and want it to stay that way – how dare you Twitter? That brings up what I feel will be the main challenge for Twitter; keeping the promoted tweets aligned with the users best interest. If the promoted tweets further the Twitter experience instead of harm it then Twitter will have NO problem killing it with this. TechCrunch posted a sample promoted tweet that made me see how powerful this can really be. Here’s the promoted tweet:

starbucks promoted tweet Twitters New Advertising Platform: Promoted Tweets

I think Twitter can really make this work. This promoted tweet gave me an idea of the possibilities here for these type of ads to give the user MORE value as opposed to taking it away by an onslaught of useless promoted tweets. As you can see, Starbucks is offering a free cup of brewed coffee if you bring in a reuseable tumbler. If I was searching for Starbucks on Twitter and saw this I’d be pretty damn happy as opposed to seeing a random advertisement that isn’t applicable to anything within my interests.

All in all, I must say that I’m glad Twitter decided to do something. They have missed out on literally millions of dollars in revenue taking so long. I hope that this ad platform will eventually become self-serve and open to everyone because I’d really like to try running some promoted tweets and getting a feel of what the Twitter crowd can do for marketers.

PPV Madness

By | March 14, 2010 | PPV, Traffic | No comments
Pay Per View Traffic

PPV traffic has really caught fire the past month. It’s getting a lot of attention from the higher up make money online bloggers and media buyers. What are your experiences with PPV traffic? It’s hard to tell if it’s really the next big thing or just the bloggers following suit with the rest (which is what usually happens with anything new). My main concern with PPV is the quality of the visitors. If you have a good test run and/or experience with PPV traffic I can see it helping you grow your business/product and bring in lots of new customers for very little money.

The Tainted Image of Being an Affiliate Marketer

By | February 26, 2010 | Marketing | No comments
Affiliate Marketing

Being an affiliate is getting an increasingly bad wrap from the general public. Mainstream media has had a rising interest in the acai berry industry the last few months. I recently saw an hour long segment on a local news station talking about the acai berry “scam” and it amazed me at how misinformed they were about it. (let alone the fact they’re over a year late.) They talked about the nightmare rebill system very commonly found on acai berry websites and the extremely poor consumer ratings.

So what does this have to do with affiliates? They’re on the front line when it comes to blame and lashback moreso than the actual publishers. There are a huge amount of affiliates that are doing borderline unethical/illegal things to make quick cash. This isn’t a “one bad apple spoils the bunch” scenario either; there are thousands of affiliates promoting questionable offers and creating this scammer image. The title of “affiliate” is quickly becoming as mistrusted as used car salesman.

The reason this is happening is simply greed. There was a hole in the system for protecting consumers online by misleading them and it was heavily taken advantage of. Now that firm action has been taken by the FTC most of these affiliates are both whining and struggling to keep their income at the same level.

This is always going to happen with these types of offers which is why long term legitimate campaigns > short term questionable offer.

With all that said, there are plenty of affiliates out there playing by the rules and not exploiting the system that have the ultimate “I told you so” on the others. Props to all of my legitimate affiliate brothers, keep doing what you’re doing and you won’t have a problem making it.