Marketing With BillAdventures in Internet Marketing

This site got hacked! Twice!

That should come as no surprise to anyone who visited lately and saw all the links for penis pills and the like. Or the melodramatic “mwa-ha-ha” screen. But it did come as a surprise to me.

Mea culpa: I didn’t keep the WordPress version up to date, and the hacker may have exploited an out of date problem. One nice thing about the way I have things set up is that the attacker didn’t gain access to any of my other websites.The bad part is that I was busy elsewhere, and didn’t notice the hack until the damage was long since done.

I am working on fixing the damage. If you see a link for anything but an IM resource or forex, it’s probably from the hack. Don’t click on it.

The really annoying part is the number of posts that I hadn’t backed up. Learn from my mistake: back up early and often!

I’m conducting an experiment, and I invite you to follow along. The experiment is simple, and regards site names and keywords.

A number of SEO books frankly contradict each other on some issues. One of those issues is whether to tailor your site to a single keyword or a group of related keywords. My take on that is that it depends on how easy it is for you to put up and maintain a lot of sites. If you can put the sites up quickly and easily, and have them pretty much self sustaining (such as an autoblog), my personal take is that single keyword focus makes more sense.

And that brings me to the experiment. The question is whether the site name will rank better with an exact keyword phrase (without spaces) as the subdomain name than with part of the keyword in the subdomain name and part in the domain name.

I have stacked the deck somewhat. I am using “forex robots” as the keyword, and I have two autoblogs up for it. For a while now, I have had a “forex robots” autoblog up at http://robots.forex-perts.com and it has been slowly rising through the rankings. Now I have put up another “forex robots” autoblog at http://forexrobots.forex-perts.com and I intend to compare their rankings over time.

Both are using the same autoblogging software and pulling content from the same sources with the same keywords. Autoblogging, for those who don’t know, is setting up a blog (usually using WordPress) and using some software to automatically pull in content from outside sources (such as Youtube videos and articles from various article sites) and post them as blog posts. The result is a content rich blog that (in theory) requires little or no effort to run. In practice, there are obvious problems with the “duplicate content” issue, and the quality of the content ranges from thoughtful, well written articles to short, blatant advertisements for off-topic websites (which had been posted to the article site with misleading keyword lists). A certain amount of weeding (for the latter) and rewriting (for the duplicate content) is useful with such blogs.

The two blogs are even using the same theme and widgets. On average, they should have the same keyword density. In practice, they will pull different articles in some cases, and the same articles in different orders in other cases, so the keyword density on a given page will vary from day to day. For all intents and purposes, they are the same except for the names and ages.

My theory is that once the spiders from Google, etc. start crawling the newer one (forexrobots), it will quickly outrank the older one (robots) for the keyword “forex robots”. You can keep up with the experiment yourself. When the mood strikes you, use Google to search “forex robots” (including quotes – you want exact phrase) and see which subdomain ranks higher over time. Of course, you will want to visit the sites to see what it is you are following (even if you don’t care about forex or forex robots per se). And links to the sites from your own sites wouldn’t exactly hurt the process.

Over the next couple of months, we can see what happens. Have fun “playing along”, and feel free to make use of the information that comes out of this.

Here’s a comment you won’t often see in a blog addressing internet marketing: I’m glad I didn’t put my book out when I initially planned to.

Yes, the Secret Project I was working on was a study of Facebook Ads. Back when I started this, they were the new “guru’s secret” du jure. There were enthusiastic descriptions of them as “like the early days of Adwords, but better” and the like. I decided to take a systematic approach to the field.

I got the idea from a free webinar which gave a brief overview of the process (then tried to sell us a more detailed – and expensive – course on the process). Instead of buying their books/videos/etc, I took a more hands on approach.

The first thing I did was go to Facebook and read the TOS for the ads. Not the usual skim, but actually read them. That turned out to be a good thing. Aside from the usual prohibitions on porn, fraud, and the like, there were limitations on what the pages can do and on what the ads can say. And a lot of those prohibitions covered standard marketing practices.

For instance: if your ad says “free” book, report, etc., you are prohibited from directing readers to a page that requires an email address before they get that freebie. In other words, they outlawed one of the most time-honored practices in IM.

Another example: they prohibit pop ups and closing hijacks. When you go to a sales page and then try to leave again, chances are good that a screen will pop up saying something like “Wait! Look at this Special Offer before you leave!” If your FB ad points to a page that does that, you are in double violation and will probably fail to get your ad approved. In fact, if the page your ad points to doesn’t do it but has a link to a page that does it, you are in violation and won’t get the ad approved.

That brings up another point: your ads do not go up automatically. They have to be approved by a member of the Facebook advertising staff before they will appear (just as comments on this blog have to be approved by me before they appear here). And they can be disapproved again at any time (as certain “black hat” types found out when they tried modifying their landing pages after the ads were approved).

Once you get past the prohibited practices, you have to deal with the prohibited subjects. Not just the usual “no fraud or adult subjects” boilerplate. Oh no. Virtually all ads related to Internet Marketing (or even the older Direct Response Marketing) are prohibited.

Is it any wonder that there are so many reports and products about how to circumvent the rules on the market now?

For my purposes, I decided to play it straight. After some research (and trial and error), I settled on products in 3 markets: Gardening, Hypnosis, and Woodworking.

One of my first problems was that most of the relevant sales pages did the prohibited things with pop ups and the like. After several rounds of correspondence with the site owners, I got access to versions without the popups and hijacks.

There followed a number of tests establishing the optimum bids for the ads to get the best return. That part of the process was not significantly different than it is for Google ads and the like.

For a while, things worked out well enough. The first sign of real trouble came when I tried scaling up the campaigns. I doubled the daily limit on each, then gave it some time. I got more views, and more clicks. What I didn’t get was significantly more conversions. Campaigns that were mildly profitable at $5.00 per day were losing money at $10.00 per day.

I dropped the limit again, and watched. The conversions didn’t drop. Yet. I dropped it more, and they fell. Returning it to the $5.00 level returned the conversion level.

The first campaign to get in trouble was the Gardening product. It turned out to be very seasonal, and very regional. After the first flush of response, it quickly became unprofitable. I cut it off, but kept my notes. We are now entering the season of better response, so I may restore it.

In the meantime, the rest of the world was having a predictable (but unfortunate) effect. With all the gurus telling everyone about the cheap ad prices (and other advantages) on Facebook, costs started climbing. Ads that had a suggested bid of $0.35 – to $0.62 started seeing the lower end climb to the 60s, 70s, 80s, and then even higher.

I was getting a solid response from the Hypnosis campaign, but it turned unprofitable when the ad prices went up. Instead of an average profit of about $10.00 per week, it started losing a few dollars per week. In the end, I pulled the plug before the last of the previous profits bled away. After 9 months of work, I had a net profit of $78.00.

The woodworking campaign remained profitable for a longer time. But the suggested bids grew from $0.35 up to $3.50 up. And it is continuing to grow. Over the last two months, the impressions per day went from around 31,000 per day to less than 100 per day. And it is still dropping. For all intents and purposes, the campaign is dead.

My book was scheduled to come out about the time the gardening campaign started to falter. I wanted to include the downside for accuracy’s sake, so I held off. Then the other events started cascading. If I had released the book on schedule, it would have been seriously misleading – something I find morally unacceptable. At a time when I would have been encouraging people to enter the field and copy what I had done, what I had done wasn’t really working anymore.

That’s just wrong.

Altogether too many gurus have done exactly that. They have taken advantage of a temporary market phenomenon, then (when returns dropped off) sold reports/courses about how they did it. Most of us would prefer a report about how we can do something like that, and how to recognize when it will work. And especially, how to recognize when it won’t.

With all the questionable ethics floating around the IM field, the only way I see to operate appropriately here is from a position of uncompromising integrety. Anything less will chew you up and spit you out.

Thus endeth the sermon.

I haven’t been posting here all that much lately, but I have an excuse a reason. I’ve been working on a secret project.

A number of “gurus” have been talking (and then selling courses) about some new venues, and I decided to investigate one and write my own results.

I started by reading the rules and losing money (nothing unusual there – pretty much always the case when you start a new venue). Pretty quickly, I was breaking even. After about two months, I was clearly money ahead.

It’s not up to the “retire to the Riveria” level (and it never will be), but there is a clear pattern now.

All I have to do now is write up my results, create a summary ebook, write/record a course covering the same information in more detail, and start marketing the whole thing. Woo-hoo… Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous, here I come!

Well… maybe the odd dinner out for my family anyway.

Watch for the grand unveiling soon!

Oh, and by the way: watch for some brief tutorials on more generally useful stuff, too.

Some things make me feel old. And seeing a new coat of paint on an old scam – one that has made the rounds a number of times in living memory – is one of them.

I have been seeing advertisements (from people who should know better) for the latest thing in list building – The Viral Secret. And people I know (and consider friends) are getting caught up in it as well.  Except… it isn’t anything new.

Back in the old days, it was more often run by mail. It is what is called a Pyramid Scheme, and it is illegal in the US (in general) and is explicitly a felony in several States. It is also illegal in most other countries (such as the Commonwealth countries: UK, Canada, Australia, etc.).

The basic idea of a pyramid scheme is that you give something of value then get something of value – LOTS of something of value – by recruiting new members (who recruit new members, who recruit new members… etc.). In this case, the “something of value” is opt ins for your list.

It sounds easy – almost miraculous – at first blush. After you sign up (opt in) to the lists of the person who sent you the link, and those of the five people “above” him, you get a free website to do the same thing with. You take the “top” person off the list of “newsletters”, move the rest up one spot, then put your link at the bottom. Then you get, say, 10 people to sign up. They get the websites and move people up, so when they recruit 10 people each, you get another 100 opt ins. And when they recruit 10 people each, you get 1,000 more people.

By the time you are bumped off the link list, you have 1,111,110 opt-ins (minus any drop outs). Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? And the site has a nice table showing all those wonderful numbers (which looks almost exactly like the one from the postal version).

It might even work for the first couple of levels. But let’s be optimistic, and say you are the first #6 on the link list and all the gurus above you have only recruited 10 people each. Yeah, we’re already in the land of fairy tales, but let’s go on.

For all of you #6′s to make your 10 person goal, ten million people need to be recruited.  And for them, 100 million. Before you get pushed out the top of the list, the necessary number of people is in the trillions – far more than the entire population of the world.

And that’s why it is illegal. They made you a promise that is mathematically impossible for you and your peers. But worse, all of you are making the same impossible promise to your recruits. And they to theirs.

But that’s not the worst part. After all, if it falls apart and you fail, you haven’t lost all that much.

The worst part is that the FTC is on a “Clean up internet marketing” binge. And this old fashioned con amounts to taping concentric red and white circles on your back.

And it’s an election year in some of the States that have declared such things a felony. DAs running for reelection absolutely love the kind of publicity that comes from breaking a large criminal ring (you).

Maybe you’ll be lucky. Maybe you’ll get a few names and you won’t be the one they come after.

Maybe.

But do you really want to risk everything you have (and then some) on that “maybe”?

There are many advantages to working from home – being your own boss, setting your own hours, etc. etc, etc… you have heard it all before. But there are also some disadvantages.

Please excuse a little self indulgent whining, but I feel miserable. Some sort of cold/flu thing. And therein lies the problem. Back when I worked in an office, such misery would mean expressions of understanding sympathy from my coworkers and a restful day in bed.

But I work (largely) alone, from home.

If I am not up to the “commute” to my basement office (how’s that for a stereotype?), I just stay in bed and work from my laptop – being careful to avoid disturbing my equally sick wife – and do almost everything I otherwise would have. About all I can’t do that way is my graphics processing and any scanning or printing.

And sniffling piteously only draws glares from my loving better half, even though the timing makes is clear that she gave it to me. Nor do I get any sympathy from my daughter, who seems to have a milder case (and is running about the same timing as me) but has to go to some of her college classes anyway. Nor from my son, who seems to have avoided the dreaded plague by virtue of isolating himself from the rest of his family in his electronics-intensive bedroom, when he isn’t at work or visiting with friends.

Still, I can get work done. It’s a little slow, since I need to double check that my fever-addled changes to a landing page don’t come out as “zxdes#& foomra Peach Pit” instead of what I had intended to write, but things get done. This is one of the times that the oft-repeated mantra that “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist” is somewhat comforting.

All told, the ability to work (fairly well) from my sick bed is good for productivity (even if it is bad for morale). I’m not sure whether you’d call that a benefit of working from home, or a disadvantage. Or maybe a little of both.

A recent (Feb. 6,2010) strip of the comic “The Buckets” seems especially relevant to discussions of IM these days.

The son says he is going to need a lot of money for his prefered lifestyle. His father quotes the old business wisdom “Find a need and fill it.” The son comes back with the way he sees the internet marketplace: “Create an obsession and fill it.” Trust me, the strip is better than this summary.

Actually, a lot of people are trying the son’s approach and failing (expensively) and a few are succeeding spectacularly. On the other hand, the father’s approach remains the way for people to successfully start their IM businesses.

The most consistent – and consistently praised as useful – advice to “newbies” is a combination of the two: Find an obsession (a hungry market) and feed it. At the best of times, trying to create an obsession is an expensive, lengthy, and risky proposition. But if you find an obsessive, “hungry” market and feed it, it is relatively easy to make money. A lot of money.

There are a number of potentially profitable choices for “obsession food”, depending on your resources and the nature of the obsession. The two most common are creating your own product and selling someone else’s product (as an affiliate). Obviously, using an existing product is easier and faster, but you only get part of the money.

Just something to think about.

I am about to show you three powerful words – words so powerful they can literally force you to think about something I choose to set up. And I will tell you why they are next to useless for internet marketing.

The words? “The other one”.

What? Nothing happened? Of course not. To work their magic, they require a specific kind of set up. And a particular sequence. And on a sales page, a squeeze page, an online article, and even a blog entry, the person is unlikely to experience the full set up in the appropriate sequence.

In most cases, the best we can hope for is an experience like:

Blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah

Blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah

The Other One

… which will be unlikely to produce any significant effect. More often, it is even worse. The reader skims over the text, producing an effect more like:

Blah blah blah …
…
…           blah blah …
…
…                 blah blah

Blah blah blah blah …
…
…
…                         blah blah
blah blah   …  blah blah blah

The Other One

Back when I was a psychotherapist, interacting face to face with a client toward a therapeutic goal, I was able to use consturcts like this to create significant effects by way of a seemingly innocuous conversation. But I was able to observe their reactions and control the presentation to produce the desired results.

That is part of the reason that audio and video additions to such pages are so effective. There is no feedback to the presenter, but at least the setup and the sequence are preserved – the visitor can’t skip over parts as easily.

Every now and then, you will see a book touting the idea of using these patterns in sales materials. And if you are lucky, the few people who actually read through your page from beginning to end might get some of that effect. But despite their power in face to face use (and sometimes in recordings), they really are pretty much useless in print.

We can debate whether the medium is the message (per the famous quote) all we want, but there is no question that the medium affects the delivery of the message.

If you would really like the delightful surprise of discovering the effectiveness of the magic words, I invite you to read the rest of this paragraph and then the next. You might even find yourself thinking of a blue gorilla with a bright yellow bird on its shoulder.

The other shoulder.

There are a number of patterns which fall into the same category. They work moderately well when you listen to or watch a recording of someone using the patterns with some degree of skill. They work poorly, if at all, when someone is just skimming the page. They leverage the way your brain processes language and patterns. That makes them useful in therapy, when we are trying to disrupt unwanted, established mental patterns like phobias, less than useful reactions, bad habits, and the like. They have names like “embedded commands”, “presuppositions”, “anchors”, “reframing”, “pacing and leading”, “double bind”, and so on (depending on which sources you get them from).

Make no mistake… in the right hands and under the right conditions, they can be insanely powerful. But in written form, in the hands of someone who read an ebook written by someone who “sort of” understood the patterns and figured they should work in ads, they can be embarrasing failures.

And they are not all that useful for marketing when they do work. Sure, I could force you to think about a pile of money in your hand.

The other hand.

But that does not convince you to click the book picture and subscribe to my list. In fact, it doesn’t do much at all to shape what you think about that money or what you are willing to do to get it. And even after you read the book and use it to start the money coming in, they would do nothing to shape what you do with all that money. And they certainly don’t do anything to convince you to send some of that money my way. The quality of the book and the newsletter have to do that all by themselves.

And for all the subtle use of those patterns in that paragraph, chances are good that you still haven’t so much as taken a moment to get the free book. As I said… useless for this (in written form).

Maybe I should write such a book. I know the patterns well, and often use them effortlessly. And I am becoming more and more familiar with IM. What do you think?

I made a few mistakes in my comments about Gmail advertising. First, it reads outgoing mail as well as incoming mail. Second, the ads appear on the upper right hand side of the screen. And it is “ads” – a group of ads in Tower configuration.

In the case of the outgoing mail, the ads appear just after the user hits send.

Although I didn’t say one way or the other, I’ve been asked about keyword insertion. Yes, it works in this context. And if you don’t know what it is, wait until you’re a little more comfortable with Adwords before you try it.

I don’t know how much longer Google is going to do this. A lot of people are more than a little upset about it, and that could translate into laws, regulations, or just a lot of pressure to cancel it. Also, it seems to be limited to the US and Canada at the moment (I could be wrong about that).

I still find it creepy, but people are telling me it’s effective in odd ways. A given ad tends to have a low rate of display, but a relatively high click through rate and a much higher than usual conversion rate. Psychologically, that makes sense – it plays to what the person is thinking at the time.

The privacy advocate in me cringes – a lot – at the notion. Google, in its infinite wisdom desire to cater to advertisers, is treating emails the same as website articles and blog posts. That is to say, users of Gmail have their incoming correspondence read (by a machine) and searched for keywords and their appropriate contexts. When the recipient reads the email, an Adwords ad (text only, for the moment) keyed to those keywords appears at the top of the page.

Let’s say you’re pouring your heart out to your best friend about the disintegration of your marriage, and your fears it could lead to divorce. The top of the page might display an ad for a divorce lawyer. Or maybe (marginally better) an ebook about saving your marriage.

Creepy.

Of course, I’m a little more sensitive than most. Back when I was a psychotherapist, privacy and confidentiality went beyond sacred. They were a moral (and legal) imperitive. I haven’t really gotten over that.

But maybe it isn’t me. I asked my (adult) daughter (who has a Gmail account) what she thought about it. Her initial response would probably violate the Terms of Service of my host, but after that she did agree with my characterization. Creepy.

It’s not as bad as it might sound. The process does not send any identifying information – much less any actual contents of the email – to the advertiser. It just shows the ad to recipients of “appropriate” emails, as determined in much the same way that Google determines which ads to run on a website.

It could even be relatively harmless. Say, your friend is congratulating you on your new puppy. You might see an ad for puppy food, pet supplies, dog training books, or even local vets (they can also determine where you are located, to a certain extent).

Some gurus are beginning to talk about this, with the usual “they don’t want you to know” hype. In this case, they have a bit of a point. Google will tell you (fairly clearly) that you can target your Adwords ads to Gmail by selecting the Content Network (rather than – or in addition to – the Search Network). But if you try to find out how to target them just to Gmail, most resources come up empty. They’ll tell you how to exclude gmail from your Content Network, but not how to target it.

As somebody who has made effective use of 1960s era IBM documentation, I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that stop me. It only got me more curious.With a little more digging, I found a response to an article which gave some valuable clues. Interestingly, the original article was mysteriously gone.

If you really want to try it (and don’t find it too creepy), you can set up an Adwords campaign. When you get to the point of selecting the “Networks” tab, make sure “Google Search”, “Search Partners”, and “Automatic Placements” are off (and “Managed Placements” is on).

Select the “Try The Placement Tools” link. Select “List URLs”. Type “mail.google.com” in the box and click “Get Available Placements”. In the area on the right and the “Site Placements” list (far) down the page, you will find mail.google.com and a location specific reference for “Inbox, Top Center”. Select “add” for that one.

Otherwise, treat the ad like any other Adwords text ad.

Like any other advertising campaign, watch the numbers closely. Left to run unchecked, Adwords (and any other paid advertising) can be an express train to the poorhouse. Some day, I’ll write about that $827 mistake.

Better yet, use less creepy methods of advertising.