Category: The Marketeer

Categories
Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search

Paid Search=3 second spot

I reached a tipping point with a number of paid search campaigns over the past month. More than one client has thrown in the towel at click prices that have increased 100x in the past year. This made me think more about relevancy – the old model was to cover as many keywords as possible. The new price points make that no longer feasible. At 5 cents a click you can deal with a 1% conversion rate. At $5 a click your expense has gone from $5 to $500 per lead (and that’s assuming a 1% conversion rate, which is well targeted, all those marginal ones down at 0.5% are now edging into $1000). Unless you are selling medical devices or airplanes it’s time to start looking at blogs, vertical publications, or just about anything else.

So does this mean that paid search has hit it’s peak? Unless newer customers come in with a higher threshold for pain than mine, there’s no more money to get…

Categories
Great Marketing

Bum Rush Continues

I woke up this morning and found Black Lab at #99 on the charts. Bum Rush the Charts pushed an indie artist into the top 100 on iTunes – incredible!

I’m also getting to the final prep of my latest new project, Marketing Over Coffee – keep your ears open! It’s been a crazy week and I’m going to catch up on some sleep.

Categories
Podcasting The Marketeer

Cracking the iTunes Code and Synchronicity

It’s strange how things all come together sometimes. For the past couple of days I have been listening to the audio presentations from the TED Conference (Mitch Joel – I will not stop until I have a beer with you at TED, and I don’t give a damn if it’s in 2037). Tony Robbins was speaking about what gives meaning to life and he broke it into 6 needs (a new Maslow, if you will). Four were base needs to survive, the upper two were spiritual – the need to grow and the need to give.

Instantly this focused the understanding of my fascination with Bum Rush the Charts. It’s a chance to grow and try to figure out the puzzle that is iTunes without being able to see behind the curtain. With the proceeds going towards a scholarship the effort has a higher meaning.

I also had two other threads weave together. Seth Godin made a lasting impact when I was listening to him months ago on Across the Sound. He refused to criticize a campaign because he said that at least the group was trying, the only people that deserved criticism were those who didn’t do anything, or took the safe route (he goes further to say that safe is the new risky). Since then I have made an effort to not criticize those who are brave enough to try something new. This echoed back to me today listening to Adam Curry on the DSC. It’s easy for people to complain, those are the people you don’t need to hang out with – spend your time with people who make an effort to do something.

So enough with the sermon – what have we learned? Rock is weak, the number 1 track in rock is number 5 overall, but it tails off quickly – only the top 12 or so tracks make it into the top 100 overall. Hip-Hop and Pop run the charts *groan*
Mine Again will continue to rise up in the charts. I’m going to put some chips down here. It appears that the track only moved once, it wasn’t on the chart and then everything moved around 11am Eastern. My theory is that the scoring is a 7-day moving average. Chris says that the landing page had over 10k hits, let’s say only half bought the track. I find it difficult to believe that more than 5,000 people bought Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar on Me during the same period (and that’s hard for me to say as I believe that could be one of the 5 greatest singles of all time). Assuming there wasn’t some kind of Def Leppard the Charts going on that I didn’t know about, we’d say it was a normal day for that track and if it did beat the bum rush there would be over 2 million iPods or more with this hot track from Hysteria on it.

I think we can safely presume that the track may actually be penalized right now for squeezing all the buys into a single day (in theory the total sales today divided by the length of the measuring cycle – i.e. if it’s 7 days we are only seeing 1/7th of the total impact as the previous 6 days are much closer to zero). Check out Christopher Penn’s latest update to see if I’ve still got the J-Funk.

Talk to you tomorrow.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Messaging goes beyond what you write

“Stay on message” or “What is our messaging” are tired old marketing phrases. Spending a lot of time crafting the first paragraph of your boilerplate company description, or for your website or press release is boring stuff. I’ve been thinking more about Jordan’s Furniture and other experiences that make me want to buy one thing over another.

I stick to a high protein diet because my body doesn’t seem to handle processed flour or sugar very well. As a result I tend to get tired of eggs for breakfast 7 days a week and have a protein shake instead. I was at the local nutrition store and they were out of the magic powder I normally buy. The guy working there said I should try another brand since the one I buy is from a company that does more marketing than research and they don’t have the best reputation.

On a side note – here’s a missed opportunity. I asked if they had samples of other products and he said no, but there was a money back guarantee. Like I’m going to buy some 5-gallon pail and take the time to drive it back to the mall if it tastes like oatmeal sludge. If they just had one open and I could give it a try, I could be riding another brand now.

The young man looked like he was student-aged and I would say of average build (except now it seems that means 15 lbs. overweight), as in pretty good shape. This was at lunch near work and there’s a similar store near my home (run by a different company though). I found the massive container I needed of my fave and went up to the register. The dude working here was about 6 ft. and probably around 220lbs, and could easily crush a monkey skull with his bare hands (i.e. jacked). He asked how I liked the Syntha6 and I said it tasted good. He said he really likes the products from that company and he’d have to try it. I’m no longer concerned if I’m with the right product.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Seth Godin’s Next Big Thing

For the past 5 years I’ve had a major shift in my philosophy towards work and education. Forget being well-rounded – find one thing and do it better than anyone else. I was excited to see that Seth Godin has a new book coming out and a blog to go with it. If you are a fan, check out The Dip.

Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

Big Webinar is Watching You

We ran another webinar today and there’s an interesting new feature. GoToWebinar can tell if the participant’s window is active or not. In other words, if someone is watching the webinar and they switch to another window (to surf the web or check email). A flag shows up on the presenter’s window and there’s an overall score for the percentage of people that are presumably paying attention. Pretty cool… and fun to fire off a quick IM to friendly attendees that aren’t paying attention.

Categories
Graphic Design The Marketeer

Goin’ Double Wide

Back in the dark ages (about 5 years ago), designers would still worry about 800×600 screen size. My latest logs show that’s about 2% of my traffic. We’re blowin’ it out, and that means room for Revver – hello higher quality video!

revver(119372)

Categories
SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search

IT’S ALIVE! and Google too.

After literally months of struggling we finally managed to get the SalesForce.com / Google integration going. I’m definitely geeking out, but how cool is it to look at a closed deal and say “one year ago you searched for this specific term, we paid $2.75 for that click and it turned into a 6-figure deal”. Lots of cool stuff, now all we need is for some data to pile up.

In other Google news I was invited to take part in a beta for cost per click (CPC) ads in the content network. Up until now you could only pay cost per click for Google search results, not their affiliate sites. There’s also supposed to be some way to choose which sites in the content network you want to be featured on. I couldn’t find these features, but it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to find stuff in Adwords (and I’m not alone).

And finally, I’ll be rolling some site upgrades out in the next 24 hours…

Categories
Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

SEO is Dead

Last week I had heard some rumblings about Google continuing to use individual search history to influence results. There are differing opinions on this but I am all for it. If, after months of searching, Google realizes that I can’t speak spanish, then it would be great if I never had to see any results in spanish.

But this begs the question: What will SEO vendors do when there are no consistent results? At first I thought they would become some sort of modified copywriters, a few best practices, but mainly focused on writing quality content. Now I’m thinking it may even go beyond that – who’s willing to tie conversion results to the work they do?

Categories
Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Jordan’s Furniture and Seth Godin

Seth Godin had a great post last week about performing a show as part of business. It reminded me of the profound advice up on the wall at my local Jordan’s Furniture – “There’s no business that’s not show business”