Archive for the 'Business' Category
May 12th, 2008 by Andy Sweet
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.
April 1st, 2008 by Andy Sweet
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.
March 31st, 2008 by Andy Sweet
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
February 5th, 2008 by Andy Sweet
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.
January 4th, 2008 by Andy Sweet
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.
