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!).

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.

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.

I bet this would be really cool if it weren’t created by Yahoo…

http://apt.yahoo.com/index.php

As many of you know, my work is focused on gathering and monetizing traffic. At its root, that’s pretty much what EVERYBODY who does business on the web does whether they describe it that way or not. There are so many ways to accomplish this and I’ve addressed a few of the ways here.

One person I’ve had lengthy conversations with about traffic generation possibilities is Chris Brooks. He’s written some very insightful comments on this blog.

Recently, he told me a competition he’s having as a means to learn more ways to monetize his domain portfolio. We’ve talked about parking and direct navigation, development for search engine rankings, domain sales…. Is there any other way to make money from domains? That’s what his competition is about and he’s going to give 5 of his generic .com domains to anyone that has alternative ideas.

Personally, I think he’s already come up with a fourth way…

1. Park
2. Develop
3. Sell
4. Barter/Giveaway – if parked, these domains might clear their annual registration fee but even if they do, it won’t be by much. There are so many ways to invest that $8 to achieve a better ROI than pure parking. Development is an option but if you don’t know anything about the subject you’ll have to invest time and possibly money to make it pop. You could sell, but I think the market is so flooded with domain sales forums and auctions that unless you’ve got a strong network or know someone to whom this domain would make sense, you’re probably going to have a hard time.

But who would turn down a FREE domain? In exchange, you stand to get some new nuggets of information that can help you with the monetization of the rest of your portfolio as well as possibly giving you new ideas for your business and that information may be worth MUCH more than you’d get from parking or sales.

Check out his domain competition.

Good luck to all.

Frequently you hear athletes, successful business people, etc… saying, “You can accomplish anything if you set your mind to it” or some similar variation of goal achievement. I find that a lot of people (myself included) frequently just lack the goal. Yes, if you have a clear vision of your goal, it’s a lot easier to figure out how to get there.

I’ve been fortunate to work closely with some very, very successful people. Truly game changing visionaries. Wherever they go, their reputation precedes them. Their bio’s tout about how early on, long before anyone else they saw an opportunity and charged full speed ahead. What I’ve found in talking with them candidly is that often is not completely accurate. I’ve learned that they didn’t necessarily know what they were stumbling on and luck was a large part of their success. Where they are today wasn’t a goal back then.

That’s good news for those of us who fret about not seeing the master plan today. As long as you’re out there making yourself open to opportunity, you have a good chance of something coming your way.

Everybody is calling for more transparency. Domainers say the parking companies and the PPC ad networks need to be more transparent. The advertisers pull their hair out because it seems that every ad network and publisher goes out of their way to obfuscate data for the sole purpose of driving bid prices up. Yahoo’s Panama was supposed to be the savior for them, right? That program was going to increase revenue for Yahoo and it wasn’t by opening up the ad network to more exposure. And the PPC networks want to put conversion tracking on advertiser sites so they can get an idea of the cost per conversion.

EVERYBODY wants the OTHER guy to be transparent! Yet, nobody wants to let anybody else know their business. After all, it’s in those secrets where you maximize profitability. Gordon Gecko hates transparency.

So, Yahoo created a new portal/channel/whatever focused on women age 25-54. It’s called Shine. You can reach it at shine.yahoo.com.

But not Shine.com

Let me get this straight…. You pick some abstract word as a title. Hey, I give you props for not going after something like Fasnozzle. Good job there. But why Shine? Anyway, so that’s it. But you pick a term that you don’t even own the domain for? Really???

I shake my head in complete disbelief.

Here’s the news link – http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006722.html

One thing that drives me crazy about industry blogs is that there are so many people saying the exact same thing over and over again.  You can usually find one person will post something of interest and then 100 or so other people who subscribe to that original blog will post pretty much the same thing.  Why??? Why do you do this?  If you follow certain industries, then you have a bunch of industry blogs in your reader.  Inevitably you end up with 101 posts about 1 thing.  It’s just so circular because the people that read the blog with the unoriginal post and just wrote about it on their blog just also saw it on all the other blogs.

So, industry bloggy blogger guy, if you get the urge to regurge what you’ve read on someone else’s industry blog thinking you’re going to enlighten new people and get credit for being such an original thinker…. just stop.

I try to prevent topic overlap with my blogroll to spare people.  If I catch it happening, I merely pull out the source that seems to be the follower.  My roll changes fairly regularly as I move up the chain to credible forward thinkers.

I try not repost stuff that you can just as easily read somewhere else.  It may result in me not following the ‘post every day’ mantra, but what I do post I try to make original.

Sorry, guess I’m still just grumpy about the Pats.

Having been involved in internet marketing since 1997, I’ve traveled far and wide online and participated in many different communities and forums as I learn different facets of the trade. There’s always one general common theme: the other guy is cheating!

On search engine forums you read a lot about how Yahoo and Google (mostly Yahoo) are cheating advertisers out of their PPC dollars by allowing rampant click fraud through their distribution network.

On domainer boards, you can always find people challenging the parking companies because they’re either having their accounts terminated or the parking company is fudging the numbers and keeping an ever-growing share for themselves. Or it’s Yahoo and Google who are keeping the share.

On affiliate marketing focused discussion boards you can find lots of posts about how various affiliate programs screw affiliates paying paltry commissions or by letting them run up huge commissions and then terminating the account right before it’s time to pay the affiliate but also divulging some of the shady methods in which they go about generating traffic and making sales which means the affiliate program managers need to pay small commissions to hedge against all the junk that comes their way.

Put it all together and what do you get? A general state of distrust. It’s the OTHER guy that’s always doing the cheating! Kind of sad, really. Makes the internet look sleazy and unprofessional. But, when you have such a low barrier to entry, you attract all types.