Never Ending Thoughts…

OK so you have put together a brilliant team of techie folks who have huddled together and turned your great idea into reality. But when it comes to going out there and selling it, you realize how hard it is to make even a single sale. You think that the idea is so cool that it should sell all by itself! As every day passes by you start to realize how difficult it is to sell even the most brilliant idea; and you start envying those crappy products that make no sense to you but are supposedly selling just great!

That’s when you sit back and think what’s missing. Yes if you have been there, or are there, you know what I am talking about. I am talking about “The Marketing Plan”. OK, so now you know what’s missing. What have you done to solve this problem? Perhaps start coming up with a marketing plan; talk with few marketing agencies in your area? Or check out what has worked in the past.

But here’s the interesting problem. A marketing plan that worked in the past for some company that’s doing something similar to what you are doing, might not, and most probably will not work for you! What will make you crazy is the outrageous money you are going to spend in coming up with “that perfect marketing plan”; and to your surprise it won’t give the kind of results you were looking for! As long as your marketing efforts don’t recoil back and hit your image (God that would be a mess), you should take it positively and learn from it.

So how do you solve this problem? Well, the real answer to be frank is that you don’t solve it! You just don’t take it as a problem and don’t try to solve it! In other words, think outside the box. Think about who is going to use your product and how. Remember that story of a boy who, when asked about the benefits of a news paper, told that you can make a boat, a hat and a frog out of it?

A marketing plan doesn’t have to make sense to start with. Many great marketing plans evolve just like a great solution does. A great marketing plan is one that changes with time and morphs itself into what clings on in people’s minds. It might not make sense to start with, but eventually it will.

That doesn’t mean that if your plan it completely outrageous and bold it is going to be a definite hit! What it means is that dare to think outside the box. And try it out on a small scale to test the waters so to say. Don’t throw your current idea down the drain. A great marketing plan always morphs. If you completely change it you are throwing out a message “I messed up” or even worst “I didn’t know what the heck I was doing”. That’s one message you shouldn’t be conveying. A morphing message would convey “Hey what I wanted to say means this too!”.

Have you tried to go out of the box and came up with a marketing plan that didn’t make sense but then eventually took off and everyone said “I kind of knew it’s going to rock the first time you told me…”.

Happy Marketing!

After three attempts, and self learning, I seemed to have found the Twitter Recipe that works for me. And I am going to share some of it with you today. I could have shared it all but then, to be frank, most of it is philosophy; and will perhaps take lot of time and wine sessions to fully throw over the table.

Twitter has definitely proven to be a true viral news platform. The 140 characters limitation enforces the originator of the news to be precise and concise. Sharing the information is as simple as a “one click” re-tweet! I don’t think it can get simpler than that! Anyways; This article is not about what Twitter can and cannot do. It’s about the people who use twitter. It’s about the people like you and me who either follow or have followers and are using Twitter mainly as a channel to spread and share knowledge.

One of the main things that I found on Twitter is that many people just blindly follow. Heck, many “people” on Twitter aren’t even “real people”! Many are just apps and bots that are constantly sniffing for material that their “masters” have programmed them for! When you see 10,000 followers in your Twitter profile and realize that 8000 of them are just apps and bots, believe me the “social” angle just goes down the drain.

So I think what matters on Twitter is not how many people are following you, but rather how many people are you following! When you follow someone or some feed, do you follow it because the material amuses you? gives you peace and harmony? makes you laugh? makes you think? I take Twitter just like any other channel of information. Just like today on my TV I have 100s of channels that I am subscribed to and I watch based on what I want to; I think the same philosophy goes for Twitter.

That brings the discussion to the point that when you follow someone on Twitter, are you really following them to increase your user base hoping that bots and other random people would see that and start following you? Or are you following them because you genuinely like what they say? It might not be the matter of whether or not you actually truly “believe” in what they say; However the question is really about the real reason behind your action of following other people on Twitter.

I believe that once you carefully start looking at it and selectively pick the people and feeds that you believe to some extent and think are useful sources of information, Twitter will be more beneficial for you. Twitter is not about increasing number of followers; It’s about enjoying the information that you love and believe in, and sharing that information with others who you think believe in you and love reading your material!

Or is it just the Friday / Weekend Fever kicking in me? What do you think?

Happy Friday!
GT

Online Advertising has become part of our lives. I say “our” by pointing to the people like you and me who make use of computer and the Internet for living. And so, we like it or not, we have to deal with the daily spams, the flashing pop ups, the ridiculous Google Ads and the many other forms of Ads that don’t stop to amaze me every now and then. Every time I think I have seen it all, a yet another form of online advertising amazes me! In this topic I wanted to cover how transparent these online advertising programs are.

What is Transparency in Online Advertising?

First let’s have a common definition about this so that there are no issues later on. To me, “transparency” in online advertising is a three fold matter. Because there are really three parties involved in any form of online advertising (well for that matter in any form of advertising).

a. The merchant – who wants to advertise a product or a service

The online advertising system should be transparent for the merchant. It should show where the merchant’s Ad is being displayed and who is viewing it etc. The system should be transparent for the merchant in all respects possible. After all the merchant is the one who is paying for all the advertising effort to start with.

b. The publisher – who displays the merchant’s Ad

The online advertising system should be transparent for the publisher too. It should show not only show what the publisher is earning from the merchant, but also what kind of visitors are clicking on the Ads. It should provide a mechanism for the publisher to negotiate better rates and advertising schedules for the benefit of both parties. It should also be flexible and simple for the publisher to get the maximum out of his/her online real estate (i.e. website, blog, forum, etc.).

c. The website visitor (last but not the least)

Last but not the least, the online advertising system should be transparent to the visitor. It should clearly help the visitor distinguish between a paid advertisement and a legitimate article or information. It should also be as non-intrusive as possible so that the visitor’s attention is not diverted from the actual task he/she is doing.

Now let’s look at some of the most successful online advertising platforms and put them to our “transparency” test.

Google AdWords + AdSense = Great Experience but Not Transparent Enough

The Google AdWords product creates a “near transparent” experience for the merchants by providing them as much visitor analytics as possible. However it’s no where close when it comes to providing information about who is displaying the Ad, etc. It doesn’t allow the merchant to directly talk with the publishers and build a relationship that w0uld benefit both parties. Well, in some sense it does provide some clarity by showing from which domain the hits are coming, but the payments and the contractual obligations are still pretty much controlled by Google.

Google AdSense is a great product for publishers who want to monetize from their online real estate by advertising. However, once again, Google does a terrible job in keeping the communication channel between the merchant and the publisher. To some extent, it seems that Google has done this deliberately so that they can secure the major portion of the pie (perhaps that’s how Google makes it’s billions in every quarter! – shame on the merchants and publishers who refuse to use Google even after being so opaque in providing information that both the parties deserve).

Talking about visitors, Google has done a decent job in showing the “Paid Ad” caption at most places. But that’s all that the visitors get. Google’s policies are still pretty much open and things like not displaying pop up Ads, etc. is totally out of Google’s hands. I don’t think Google is to blame in this case, but I do think that given the infrastructure and trust (and not to mention the least – the profit margins) that Google has built, if they can’t do this who else can!

Bing and Others

I feel sad to put “The Great Bing” (pun intended) along with all other search engines who are in the race against Google. To be frank, almost all of them suck. I have used five of them and I know why Google has been able to rule the online advertising market. The answer is very simple actually. And it is that others suck so big time! It’s unbelievable! Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo who already had the resources couldn’t come close! Not even now! And that’s just terrible to say the least.

So where are we headed? Will Online Advertising Ever Be Transparent?

To be frank, I am not sure. I think we at ellipsis AdNet, are trying to keep it as transparent as possible. Of course due to that we are not making that much money; hell, we are not making anything! But then isn’t “advertising” about letting new products grow? Isn’t it about sharing new ideas with the public? Or is it always about hiding the truth? And trying to fool the consumers?

You Decide! Do you want to join hands with us? Or still keep on giving the “middle man” your fair share of the pie?

Article Marketing is one of the proven techniques of spreading the word about a product or a service. There are so many variants of this concept that are available that it can easily span into a full book. You can have someone write articles about a product, write reviews, feature comparisons and what not. At the end of the day, the technique is pretty much simple. You or someone writes articles about your product or service. Articles are circulated across to target readers. But wait. What about “effectiveness”?

What is “effectiveness” in Article Marketing?

The answer to this question pretty much differentiates the “pro” marketing managers from the “not so pro” ones. Everyone can run an article marketing campaign. But then how many campaigns actually help you track the effectiveness of your article marketing effort? For that matter how do you even measure it in the article marketing scenario? Here’s what I think can be measured:

A. How much traffic are the articles bringing to you?

You can measure the traffic coming from articles by checking your website analytics reports. But then what about the articles that were distributed in print format during a conferences? What about those pdf’s that you emailed your target audience? To be able to find the true effectiveness of any article marketing campaign, you need to take into account all the channels that you will be using to spread your articles and a closed loop mechanism that allows you to track exactly how much traffic you are able to generate from your article.

B. How much is it costing you to run the campaign?

Good article writing can cost you some good amount of money. Be it in-house, or out sourced, the articles you write need to be quantified in terms of how much is it costing you either on weekly or daily basis or on per article basis.

C. Is it all worth it?

Once you can clearly identify how much traffic your articles are generating and how much is it costing to write articles you can find the “true cost per click” that’s coming from the article you just spread to your target audience.

This simple case study shows how companies are already doing this using ellipsis AdNet: http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/adnet/article-marketing.pdf

Comments and Thoughts are Welcome!

OK, you must be thinking this guy has gone nuts. When everyone is talking about how important it is for any company to spend money on Internet Marketing, he’s telling that there are down sides to that? If you will read on further, you will agree with me, and trust me it won’t take more than two minutes. Yes, two straight minutes.

Currently Internet Marketing is mainly done via either online banner Ad campaigns, or email marketing. And it’s not that it doesn’t work. In fact it works great! Better than any other advertising medium; especially if your product or service is Internet related. And that is one of the biggest downsides of Internet Marketing. So it’s cost effective and works great; So how’s it a downside? You will know if you have run a successful campaign. Having been easily available and much more quickly modifiable, Internet Marketing can sometimes attract more visitors and bring in more customers than you can handle. That would directly impact your service quality and in the end bad customer experience is going to bite you back with negative ratings which are far more harder to fix than any other thing.

So now we know the risk and downside of Internet Marketing. And how do I make sure not to risk my business into this situation? It’s much easy and straight forward. All you do is make some ground rules and follow them. For example, a) Before spending money on Internet Marketing, carefully analyze your market and your product and figure out what kind of customers you’ll be able to serve. And then b) use extremely targeted Internet Marketing methods to reach out to only those potential customers. This will not only help you spend less Internet Marketing Dollars, it will also help you get the customers that you will be able to easily serve and build a good trust within your market.

The analogy of Fire goes very well with Internet Marketing – It’s good as long as it doesn’t spread out of control.

Happy Internet Marketing Folks!

When it comes to online advertising, there are two main schools of thought – people who want to pay for an impression and people who want to pay for a click. While it might sound obvious that you’d always want to pay for a click, but there are situations where paying for even an impression might be justifiable. The reasons for going with one approach or the other are so hard and subjective that even Google provides both the ways of advertising and leaves it up to the user to decide which one to pick for their campaign.

When would Pay Per Click Make Sense?

Although there is no specific formula around what approach to follow, people generally tend to use pay per click when the intention is to grab a sale. The idea here is to be able to find out how much did it cost you to generate a sale. So for example your margin from selling a book is $10 and your aim on marketing is $5 (so that you make at least $5 on the sale), and you know that 1 in 50 people who will visit your site will buy your book (i.e. 50 clicks would result into a sale), your CPC should be 5/50 = $0.10.

When would Pay Per Impression Make Sense?

On the other hand, with pay per impression, your aim is probably just to be visible and leave an impression at the back of the mind of the person who saw your Ad. Or perhaps it’s a blog that you are marketing – from which you don’t really make any money. So tracking by the click might not make much sense because you can’t really relate it to any sale that you’d make. While, personally I believe it’s still a hard argument to make, but the more I deal with various publishers and advertisers the more I find that pay per impression works well in case your aim is really to just to gain more buzz and not much real sales. The reason is also because traditionally “per click” costs are higher than per impression and so when you know that you are not going to make any sales anyways, you’d rather go with per impression model.

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It has been a few months and I realized that we have gotten into the habit of posting a blog each day. Yesterday we sat back for a while and thought that what are the benefits of posting a blog each day. I know there’s a lot of material out there that talks about the benefits. But we wanted to set that aside and see how much difference has it made to us since we started posting a blog each day. And here’s what we found:

Increased User Base by Exponential Times

Ever since we started blogging on daily basis, we found that our user base started growing up almost exponentially. It was so large in the first few weeks that we had to check server logs, etc. to make sure that users were legitimate. It was amazing to see how people like to come back and even search engine bots start tracking you on daily basis.

Helped us write better blogs!

We found that when we were posting “one of blog” every once in a while, we were really loosing focus and weren’t conveying a focused message in all the blogs. And that’s quite understandable. When you work on something and then leave it for a few days then work again, you tend to loose the grip on the thought. Blogging daily at a certain time becomes pretty much like an ongoing activity, like going to the gym, or meditation, or even like taking a bath each day! You can focus on the thought process and continue on it each day.

Helped us being more aware about our Market!

Believe it or not, blogging each day helps you get more aware about your market! That is only if you are writing good blogs. A good blog is one that is unique, has your personal touch and does not repeat. You don’t want to create 10 versions of the same message and simply bore your readers to death! So then how do you come up with new material every day? You read news and keep up with the latest trends going in your market or topics of interest. You then use them as the basis for your blog. This in turn helps not only write good blogs but also being more aware about your market.

What benefits have your reaped by blogging every day? Share your experience with us!

Let’s talk about something that everyone wants from their Internet Marketing efforts – The Click Through Rate (or better known in short – CTR). Why is CTR important? What makes it a more attractive parameter than many others out there? And what is the best approach to get a high CTR, hands down?

Why is CTR important?

CTR is really important to measure the success of a marketing campaign. Some people still debate that it’s not really the CTR but the actual sales that should be used to measure success of a marketing campaign. But I would humbly argue on the fact that what if you did the best possible marketing and got a really high CTR, but then your product itself wasn’t that good enough – after all customers are not stupid – and you don’t end up making a sale. Who is to blame in this situation? Is it the marketing team who did a phenomenal job getting an exceptional CTR? Or is it the sales team for not doing their part well? Or is it the product development team for not building something that really solve customer’s problems? The question is not who’s to blame, the question rather is that when that happens how do you find where the problem is and how you fix it? Having read that, now most probably you’d agree that a CTR is a good indication of how well your marketing campaign was crafted and run.

What does having a high CTR mean?

Having a high CTR directly reflects how effective your marketing campaign is. This means how many visitors who saw your Ad actually clicked. That tells you won the first step of the battle – i.e. creating the first initial curiosity in the visitor and having him/her come to your landing page.

What is The Best Way to get High CTR?

Before we go into the complicated discussion of finding the right keywords, and going into the territory of speculating how Google Adwords works and things like that, let’s step back and think about it. Let’s take an example. Let’s say you are looking for car loans. And so you of course use Google or Bing or any other search engine and land on pages that talk about how to take car loans, what are the available rates and so forth. Now while you are reading through all those pages that have information related to car loans, would you ever click on a Ad that says “Join school this summer”? Probably not; well may be if that’s something that’s going on at the back of your mind; but then that’s just you. Every person is unique and thankfully Internet is not smart enough to read the “cookies” of our brain! God knows how Google Search Results and Ads would look if they start reading into our brains and start leaving cookies directly into our brain!! Anyways, so the point is that you’d rather click on an Ad that’s relevant to what you are reading about; what you are looking for, etc. For example, you might click on the Ad that says “Looking for a great car loan? click here”, or may be the one that says “click here to compare car loan rates” and so forth.

The best way to get high CTR is by advertising to extremely targeted pages that have content that’s relevant to your Ad. Unfortunately there are very few (in fact none!) systems out there that will provide complete transparency and let you choose exactly where your Ad goes, how much you pay and how much does the person who is hosting the Ad gets paid. If there were such a transparency how would the Ad companies make money! That’s a separate discussion, if high CTR is something that you are looking for, then you might want to check AdNet.

Finally summers are knocking the door in the Bay Area and people are lining up at Lowe’s and Home Depot buying new plants, or getting that pending plumbing or remodeling or patio work done; and so were we last weekend. Finding a good contractor is a mess right now. We were specifically looking for outdoor landscaping ideas. So once we got a few ideas it really came down to contacting a landscaping company and that’s where we got stuck. Currently there are only three main options that you have (yes of course apart from the hundreds of others) – craigslist, servicemagic and angie’s list.

All these approach the same problem from different angles, and so they have different pain points.

craigslist, is really a list; You post the project and be ready to get spammed and bombarded with hundreds of contractors out there trying to entice you with some kind of deal. People have posted so many horror stories of bad work done by contractors who they picked from craigslist, but personally I have used craigslist for small work and haven’t had any bad experience yet. I believe it really depends on knowing when you are really “crossing the limit” when it comes to getting something done more of in an informal fashion – that is the essence of craigslist anyways.

servicemagic is great but to my surprise I got to know about how they sell the leads multiple times. Here’s an interesting story: I posted some plumbing work related request on servicemagic. And this one contractor called me 12 times in 3 days! I was so annoyed that I never answered the call; Yes, everyone is looking for business in this harsh economy, but dude, you’ve got to slow down and play it cool when it comes to building trust! So I replied to the guy that I am no longer looking for the contract right now; Well actually we postponed it because we realized that we could get that work done next month along with some remodeling work. Now here’s the bad part: Poor chap told me that servicemagic charged him 60 bucks just to provide my contact information! So he asked me to tell servicemagic that I didn’t intend to use the service so that they could roll back his transaction. This really doesn’t make any sense to me. First off servicemagic shouldn’t be charging and selling my information (I’m the lead here!) to multiple contractors and charge them money like this. Well, I’m not sure if they should or shouldn’t – that really depends on how they work with these contractors; but at least the contractor shouldn’t be asking me to roll back the transaction!

angie’s list has its set of problems. My friend recommended me to try out angie’s. The website definitely is quite user friendly. The only problem is that they have very few reports. Eventually I had to look up the contractors that it listed on the Internet; I had to check reviews on yelp and other sites. What’s the fun of paying 40 bucks a year fee to angie’s then? Perhaps one good reason is that they employ these sales/marketing/support folks who keep on giving me a call asking me to provide some feedback! Nothing wrong about it, but perhaps angie’s should use customer’s money on making their systems more user friendly and survey oriented so that people fill the reports themselves rather than being bugged every now and then! For example netflix’s survey is really cool; Every time I rent a movie, they send out a survey once in a while asking how good the quality was, did the movie reach in time etc. The survey is so simple that it hardly takes 10 seconds! And you feel good contributing and helping netflix improve so that they can provide better service!

So where’s the void in the licensed contracting World? I think the void is that there is no single fully integrated platform yet where consumers can come and provide their project details and then have contractors bid and provide their estimates or something like that. I’m not sure if something like this exists, but it does exist in the software world (elance, vworker, etc.). It will sure be a hard problem to solve given that most home improvement projects are hard to estimate by the home owner; And that’s one of the biggest voids right there.

What do you think?

WordPress provides one of the best blogging platforms. And it’s success has lead it to be used in the most unimaginative ways. Some people use it for good old style blogging; some use it as a full fledged website; and some use it as a lead generation engine! While posting good material consistently is a good way to generate leads from your blog, have you thought about installing some plugins that would help you generate leads? If not, you should look at these plugins:

The “Add This” Social Bookmarking Button

The “Add This” Social Bookmarking Button helps your visitors to easily share your article with their friends. This is an absolute must have that will help you reach out to friends of your friends or readers. The farther out your blog would reach, greater are the chances that you will get some good leads from your blogging effort.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great tool that will help you identify what keywords people are typing and are finding you. What blog is being read most number of times and how much time people are spending on each blog. It will also help you find out what’s the most common entry point to your blog site and what makes people go away. You do not want your prospective lead to read a material that he/she didn’t like and go away before even reaching to the material that would have eventually attracted them. Having Google or any sort of good analytics will help you figure out what kind of blogs your readers are liking and how you can improve your blogs to attract more readers and retain the ones that you already have.

TDO Mini Forms

There are times you’d want to have your readers provide their contact information so that you could help them out. For example, let’s say you have written a great blog about how to install windows in your room. In the end, it might be a good idea to leave a small form for readers to fill in if just in case they’d want to get some window repair work done at their home. Readers come to your blog at the first place because they think your material is valuable; they agree to your ideas and concepts. Once that level of trust is developed, having a contact form gets you leads easily than you can ever imagine.

WordPress Mobile Pack

More and more readers are now a days catching up on news and blogs while they are traveling. Mobile phones  and small personal devices like ipad, etc. have become increasingly important as compared to just five years back! Having a Mobile Pack will help WordPress render your blog nicely on most mobile devices. This is really cool because now your readers will be able to easily read your material and be in touch with you. This will definitely help you generate some serious leads.

WP Polls

Having a quick poll always helps build some life to your blog. There are situations when people don’t talk about something, but they do have so much to talk about. WP Polls helps readers channel their thoughts towards your blog and have them provide their opinion via a quick poll. When doing a poll, always set some timeline and then write a blog about how your poll went. People love to see results especially when they are part of something. This eventually helps build a good relationship.

These are the few plugins that I think are great to have for your lead generation needs. However I’m still learning, and perhaps always will. So if you have a great plugin that has helped you generate quality leads, please share it with me on this blog!