jeffreyharmon.net

Lately it feels like I have ended up in the business of t-shirts. This past Christmas my brothers and I created Status King, a t-shirt store that puts your facebook status update on a t-shirt. It has been fairly successful and now has over 23,000 users.

This week, here at FamilyLink, we released Dadtastic.net. Dadtastic does two things:

1 Make clever Father’s Day t-shirts for Dad.

Here is my favorite t-shirt image. I bought this on for my dad last week.

2 Dadtastic.net gives you a simple way to celebrate Father’s Day on Facebook.

To celebrate Father’s Day simply click “Share on Facebook” and it will automatically upload the image to your facebook.

This being my first project as a Social Marketing Manager at FamilyLink, I am hoping hoping hoping that it goes very viral before Father’s Day.

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I just read a good post by Guy Kawasaki. He gives 10 things to avoid when trying to promote your company online.

I decided that he must know what he is talking about because websites that make you re-type your email address, don’t let you use usernames with “@” symbols, give you unreadable confirmation codes, and don’t work unless you are on internet explorer DRIVE ME NUTS! If you are learning internet marketing you should read these.
Yet I don’t know if I agree with Guy on is his veryt “do not”: Enforced immediate registration. When we released iMemoryBook in November we started out with a very nice system that allowed you to dive into and create your book without registering. You could create an entire book and it was just saved in your cache. Yeah, we thought it was the greatest idea ever. An incredible 30% of traffic landing on beta.iMemoryBook.com were going right into the online bookmaking application! They would play around, even get started on a book, but then they would forget to click the red call to action: “Save this book” (after clicking “save this book” they would move into the registration process. Because iMemoryBook is so new, many people come to the site, love what they see and then say, “I will do one of these books later.”

Unsatisfied with the registration rates, Ben and I decided that we wanted to experiment with asking for their email before we let them in. PhotoBucket has been extremely successful with this technique and is now gaining 80,000 new visitors a day! The idea here is that when a potential customer comes in for a visit, “just taking a look at our system”, we can continue to keep in contact with them by Email until they are ready to create their iMemoryBook. We want an email list. We also decided that our email list is going to be fun and helpful. We will NEVER generate an automatic newsletter. Each one will be handcrafted to be exciting and interesting.

So to the dismay of Neal, Dwain, and Paul–who had spent an enormous amount of time creating the online bookmaking application so that you didn’t need to be registered to use it, we are now testing the “forced registration”. Thus far conversion rates have tripled! I think it is working well.

Other Possibilities:
I am still not certain we have done it just right. I sometime wonder if we should add an opt out option at the bottom of the registration that says: “No thanks… I just want to look” like Screenit.com? Here is a screen shot (screenit needs a makeover):

The funny thing is that I have never registered for Screenit, but I have used them dozens of times to learn if a movie meets my standards. Perhaps we should create something like zohowiki, a link that says “log in as a demo user”. Here is another screenshot:

Zoho once did this with ZohoWriter(like MS Word but online) and sheets but now it is gone. I wonder if the “demo” user wasn’t working. I thought that they must work, that is what got me to start.

What I like most

I lean to this option because it would give our potential customers the chance to see a book that is full of content. Currently when you start an iMemoryBook there are no photos and they are very generic. I like the idea of them being able to view, edit, and play in a book that has already been started. It might help them catch the vision.

Two Problems

I see two downfalls with the Zoho’s demo plan: 1) This option could possibly make it harder to get emails so that we can follow up. I can see myself, very interested in the service, but because I have now seen the system I don’t have any reason to register because I am not planning on making a book today. It is very important that we have an email to follow up with periodically. 2) Our demo books would have thousands of users on them at one time, I can see that causing a collaboration nightmare.

I am not sure how we will have our registration page in the end. It will take a lot of testing to learn which way is best. If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.

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Paul Allen announced in class this past week that you can get $200 in free pay-per-click advertising from MSN adcenter until January 15th. There is just a $5 fee to get an account:

$200 dollars free PPC

$100 dollars free PPC

Adcenter normal Homepage

In class the idea came up that someone could go to business door to door and sell them $200 of adcenter credit for $100. Ben was saying that if everyone here at work signed up we could get over $1000 dollars in free advertising for the launch of the New BETA iMemoryBook system.

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I want a blender that can liquefy marbles and chop up garden rakes, don’t you?

Here is a company right here in Orem Utah called Blendtec. They have created some of the most ingenious viral video ads I have seen thus far. There is no doubt in my mind that these ads will be some of the best spent time Blendtec has ever used. Kudos to Blendtec.

There are three reasons why these videos will be so viral.

1. They are fun. I have already shared them with like ten friends and family members.
2. They are unique. I haven’t seen this before on YouTube.
3. They don’t forget the product. Next time I shop for a blender, there is no doubt in my mind that I will look into Blendtek.

Can you imagine how much these videos would have cost to put on paid TV programing. They would probably be successful there too, but this is little to no cost.

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Early this week I decided to try an experiment with Digg.com. I went through all my posts and picked out the ones that felt others would most like to read. Then I posted each and every one of them on Digg. In the next 24 hours my traffic skyrocketed 10 times my normal! Here are 10 things I have learned to get more traffic to your Digg post.

1. Make a profile. You are always a more trusted source if people know who you are
2. Build a Digg network. Find people who think and digg like you and then make them your friends.
3. Email your Digg link to your mom and your friends. Tell them to come and digg your story right at the beginning. 10 digs will go a long way to pushing through the popularity barrier.
4. Respond to your comments. People like to know you are listening to them. Just like when you are blogging you will learn by creating a conversation. Comments attract comments.
5. Be controversial. Controversy always sells.
6. Integrate digging into your site. This means you can be dugg by people without them even leaving your blog or website.
7. Post valuable content. I put in an article about my Apple MacBook, and it got loads of traffic, yet it didn’t get dugg much because it wasn’t well written.
8. Use “Digg Spy” to learn what people are digging. If you just spend a couple of minutes on “Digg Spy”, you will learn very quickly what kind of keywords, topics, and trends are hot on digg.
9. Post a lot. You know what you would like to read. Just post it, you never know what will catch on. Also you don’t have to feel bad about posting rotten material because it will just get buried immediately anyway. In the mean time you will learn what is worth your while.
10. Timing matters. To get the most time exposure you are best to post at times when others aren’t posting as much. I have found more success if I post early in the morning. I think this is because the majority of posts come late at night while a ton of readers come in the morning. This gives your post more time before it is shoved out by other posts.

Here are a couple of other articles that might give you some more ideas on how to get dugg. “Top 7 ways to get a useless article dugg” or “top ten ways to get dugg”.

What is Digg? Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it! See source for this information.

To digg this post click here.