August 27th, 2010 by andy
I want to continue my thoughts from the last post about making the extra effort to market your product and separate yourself from your competition by retelling the story of a childhood friend’s father.
I’ll start out by telling you that my friend’s father was an extremely intelligent and successful businessman. He owned several businesses and had amassed great wealth already by the time his son and I were in school together. He told me his story once and I never forgot it.
When my friend’s father (I’ll call him Tony) was just about to finish up business school, he (like all his classmates) needed to find work. Rather than pound the pavement and knock on doors asking for work with some big business, Tony targeted one business in particular. He didn’t go through the want ads. He didn’t search for available positions he could fill. What he did was research the company, come up with an idea for them that they weren’t currently doing and build the business model on how they could implement it and what the expected return would be. They liked the idea and hired him to fulfill it.
I contrast that with what is the norm today for so many people trying to find a job. Today, companies advertise their positions on sites like Monster.com and they are deluged with resumes of people looking for work. Some are just resume blasts and some have targeted cover letters. But they all still come in surrounded by competition. Is this really the best way to find a job? Lining up with all the rest just hoping to buck the odds and get picked?
That’s why I named this post ‘Job Hunting vs. Job Pitching’. Job Hunters are hoping to find somewhere to land. Job Pitchers bring clearly defined value to the table and make it an easier hire.
Particularly in the current economy where employers are less inclined to take risk, Job Pitchers make the argument that they are a good investment. And what happens if your idea for them is wrong? What if there’s some wrinkle to their business that isn’t public knowledge that prevents them from being able to capitalize on your idea? Well, you’ve still shown deep thought and consideration about how you can help the company, which is leaps and bounds above the rest of your competition. You’ve shown that that they are the company you want to work for and not just trying to find a job somewhere (anywhere!).
August 12th, 2010 by andy
Several years ago, I worked in the music industry. In college I was a concert promoter both for my school as well as a local club and occasional parties. After college, I worked as a talent agent booking punk and ska bands like Blink 182, Reel Big Fish, the Skatalites and the Toasters into colleges across the country. As a result, I would talk with a lot of bands that were trying to work their way up the ranks into record label deals and agencies such as the one I worked for.
I remember one band in particular that asked me for advice on how they should go about things and if I could help them out. In reality, I was so junior level that I had to struggle to get my phone calls returned, but at that point I was the closest ‘in’ they had. My advice to them was to forget about trying to get the record label deal. They’d most likely end up getting stiffed in the deal and only make a dime for every CD sold if they even got promoted by their own label. For every big band you hear about, there are tons of ‘signed’ bands that just twist in the wind and break up.
I advised them to tour, and by tour I meant starting with a small local circuit getting on stage wherever they could and hitting the same areas every 2 to 3 months, each time gradually expanding the distance of the circuit. They would gradually develop a fanatical fanbase and most bands make their money not on the CD sales in the stores but rather on the merchandise they sell at their shows. In short, slog it out, pay your dues and earn the following. Develop a strong following and ultimately your precious labels will be competing to pick you up and give you a better deal because you’ve got a proven product. They didn’t like my suggestions.
Recently, we sold our house in Boston and moved to Grand Rapids to be closer to family. In preparation to sell the house, we did all the research necessary to come up with a fair price for the market. We got a storage space and moved about 2/3 of our stuff out and ‘staged’ it. Also, we built a website that provided pictures, house details, information about local schools and shopping and its Walk Score and finally timed the open house to meet peak home buying season. In a similar scenario, our neighbors put their house on the market because they wanted to move to another city also to be closer to family. The difference was that they put the house on the market in January, overpriced the asking price, took very few pictures (mostly of the neighbors houses to show the quality of the neighborhood) and didn’t promote their open house at all. Guess whose house sold on the first day and whose house has yet to sell?
The point is this: it doesn’t matter if you are promoting your band, selling your house or trying to sell an e-book online, market it well and you will sell. Determine your audience, build it well, price it fairly, promote it well and it WILL sell. Yes it takes work, but it’s really not that hard to make yourself stand out among your competition because few people are willing to do the work to make it happen.
And that band never toured, never signed a deal and never went anywhere.
June 2nd, 2010 by andy
Right now (as of June 2) there is a conversation ongoing at Webmaster World about the declining value of a #1 organic search ranking. The argument is that the #1 position doesn’t attract as much traffic as it used to (on Google in particular) because of the way that Google has placed ads and added ad sitelinks, etc… all around the top of the page. Not surprisingly there is much bellyaching by the SEO community many of whom have staked their pitch to clients on the claim that 75% of people skip over the ads and go straight to organic.
I have been labeled a PPC guy before, but that’s not quite accurate. I’m just lazy and cautious. I go for the most income for the least amount of effort and risk. If that result can be achieved through organic listings, so be it. However, that’s rarely the case in more competitive spaces. And while dramatic algorithm shifts are less likely today than they were a few years ago, I prefer not to put myself and the expense of my time at risk.
Besides, if you really think about it, does Google REALLY want you to get a #1 ranking? Sure, there’s the whole ‘user experience’ spiel from them and it’s true, to a certain extent. If they delivered total junk results, they’d go the way of Alta Vista, Lycos, Alltheweb, etc…. But they do walk a fine line with wanting to deliver quality results organically (where they make no money from the clicks) versus driving the visitor to the paid listings. Their stock share price doesn’t rise and fall by organic click-thrus. Of COURSE Google wants people to click on the ads and not the organic. But can they really be considered ads anymore?
Google has dealt with this tightrope walk by implementing the Quality Score on paid search, an algorithm that works similar to the organic algorithm. The most relevant ads/landing pages show higher. There are other benefits as well, like lower average cost per click. Quality Score has been around for a couple of years and Google is always improving/refining. Through this Quality Score refinement Google is making the paid listings just as, if not more, relevant as the organic listings.
I think what Google is doing is making the organic results supplementary to the paid listings with no decline in the sacred ‘user experience’.
Does this make me sound like a PPC ‘homer’? I prefer to think of it as walking with the wind at my back instead of in my face.
December 3rd, 2009 by andy
TV drives people to the web. Not exactly breaking news. But too often, TV advertisers fail to take advantage of the waves their ads create.
It’s something I’ve seen for a long time and now has a direct connection to this site. Almost two years ago JK Harris bought backtaxes.com. I wrote about it back in January ’08. Soon thereafter, I was ranking #1 when people went to Google to search for the domain. Even though you or I might go to the URL bar to put in the domain, there are so many people out there that will go to google or yahoo and actually SEARCH for the domain. So without intending to, I was getting a ton of traffic to that post driven by people who had just seen the ad. I happened to have Adsense on there, so I made a little bit of money from it. Accidental profit is fun.
Well, lightning has struck twice. Let’s go even FURTHER back to June 2007. I subscribed to Sirius radio at the time and one of the songs I was hearing a lot was ‘Electric Worry’ by Clutch. It’s very catchy and I couldn’t get it out of my head and I couldn’t buy it from iTunes at the time so I ended up watching the youtube video over and over again. I wrote about it here and soon after I began to see that I wasn’t alone in like the song. I would get a few visitors every day from people searching for the lyrics ‘Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos’. I thought that was kind of cool.
Fast forward to the beginning of November ’09. There’s a new video game being pushed for the holidays called Left 4 Dead 2. I think it has something to do with shooting zombies. In the commercial for the game, ‘Electric Worry’ is the background music. Bang Bang Bang Vamanos Vamanos. On average, 900 people a day are coming to that page from Google since that commercial started airing.
Lesson learned: TV pushes people to the web. Be there to greet them.
December 6th, 2008 by andy
Still crap.
On the upside, they raised the domain exclusion list option to 500.
On the downside…. you’ll need it.
