jeffreyharmon.net » Internet Marketing Class with Paul Allen http://jeffreyharmon.net Improve... Exponentially Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:15:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 $200 in free Pay-Per-Click from MSN until January 15th http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/12/?y%/200-in-free-pay-per-click-from-msn-until-january-15th/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/12/?y%/200-in-free-pay-per-click-from-msn-until-january-15th/%#comments Thu, 07 Dec 2006 00:51:04 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/12/07/200-in-free-pay-per-click-from-msn-until-january-15th/ 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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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/12/?y%/200-in-free-pay-per-click-from-msn-until-january-15th/%/feed 3 Viral Videos, even Coke-a-Cola is catching the vision http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/viral-videos-even-coke-a-cola-is-catching-the-vision/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/viral-videos-even-coke-a-cola-is-catching-the-vision/%#comments Thu, 26 Oct 2006 00:05:41 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/26/viral-videos-even-coke-a-cola-is-catching-the-vision/ Coke-a-Cola recently jumped into the ad world of viral videos. There are two men; one of them looks like he is in his 30’s, the other is older, who are taking Mento’s candies and putting them in Diet Coke bottles. I guess there is a chemical reaction that makes the coke bubble and even explode. Click here to see the video. It reminds me of the paper miche volcanoes I made a as a kid. I would put vinegar, red with food coloring, and baking soda into the manmade mountain and watch as it erupted. I think this Diet Coke and Mentos idea will be one of my next date activities, we can have a Diet Coke war.

The fact that Google just purchased YooTube for a whopping $1.65 billion dollars tells me that this viral video market still had a lot of room to grow. Paul Allen explained in class that right now GooTube and others are not crowded, but in a year they will be. Right now is the time to get in on this market. If I can convince the others at FamilyLearn to use the recourses to do it, I would really like to experiment with some different cheap viral videos. Daniel would be perfect for the Job. The hard part is going to be making iMemoryBook funny.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/viral-videos-even-coke-a-cola-is-catching-the-vision/%/feed 4 Soliciting quality comments on your blog http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/soliciting-quality-comments-on-your-blog/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/soliciting-quality-comments-on-your-blog/%#comments Tue, 24 Oct 2006 18:19:09 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/24/soliciting-quality-comments-on-your-blog/ One of the things we are graded on in my internet marketing class is whether or not we are soliciting comments to our blog; i.e. invited readers to make a comment on your blog.

For example, the other day Paul Allen wrote an article on how Apple is taking a presence in the PC market. At the end of his post he wrote this:

I’ve been in the Microsoft/Intel/Windows camp for almost 20 years, but even I’m thinking that my next PC should probably be a Mac. I don’t think I could ever switch completely, but for so many applications, Macs just seem better.

What do you think?

I was already thinking about the Mac I just bought and how much I love it, but that little question, “What do you think?” was enough that I spent 10 minutes and wrote a comment about this entry.

Ben and I had a great customer experience at Harmon’s (great name by-the-way) grocery store while preparing for the FamilyLearn BBQ the other day. I had talked about the experience throughout the night trying to figure out how Harmon’s trained Nate to sell me a $10 steak, but Ben blogged about it. At the end of his entry he extended his invitation for others to make a comment on his blog:

There is a lot written on effective question asking, but I haven’t read anything yet on how to instill a question asking attitude in an organization. How do you train a team of Nates?

Let me know your thoughts. Please refer me to some good books, articles, or posts.

One of the main purposes for blogging is to develop and learn more about a thought. If you are truly writing your blog to learn, the content your writing will automatically drive comments to your blog. But if you will solicit comments you will dramatically up the chances of your blog getting more comments.

So, what are some other ways I can get people to comment on my blog? I would love to hear your ideas.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/soliciting-quality-comments-on-your-blog/%/feed 2 Free internet cell phone service http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/free-internet-cell-phone-service/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/free-internet-cell-phone-service/%#comments Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:33:44 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/24/free-internet-cell-phone-service/

Today I noticed that Skype has a service for your mobile phone. At this point it only runs on windows PC, makes me wish I had got the Windows version of the Treo. This means you can make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world with your Windows Mobile Pocket PC device, whenever you have a high speed WiFi internet connection. The only thing is that you still have to pay for your mobile internet service. But let me explain how I think we will all have FREE cell phone service in the next few years.

Last Thursday Paul Allen told us that it won’t be long before everyone in the US has access to a FREE WiFi internet connection. Google and others are already giving WiFi internet connections for free in select cities. Also, it seems that each day in my MarketingVOX news letters I see a new Mobile phone advertising service popping up. New services like Pay-Per-Call instead of just pay-per-click (ie. You use your mobile internet phone service to search for a tow truck while you are stranded on the side of the road. Your search engine uses the GPS system in your phone, finds the towing company closest to you and places an ad at the top of your search. You click your ad and your phone automatically calls the towing company.). It won’t be long before a mobile phone service provider disrupts the entire cell phone industry and offers all ad based cell phone service.

Skype’s tag line is, “The whole world can talk for free”. It might just be a dream of mine, but I can’t wait for the day when I don’t have to call Sprint and argue with them about confusing, infuriating, phone bills. No more overages, no more $.10, 60 character limited, text messages, and no more proration.  Freedom from the clutches of the likes of those cell phone giants.

If you liked this post, please let me know what you think. Make a comment.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/free-internet-cell-phone-service/%/feed 1 Gorilla Marketing Tactic – email signiture ad http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/gorilla-marketing-tactic-email-signiture-ad/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/gorilla-marketing-tactic-email-signiture-ad/%#comments Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:48:05 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/20/gorilla-marketing-tactic-email-signiture-ad/ Currently I send out probably 20 emails per day. Some are to teachers, others for work, some to friends. Paul Allen gave us a great idea in class yesterday; you put an ad in your email “signature”. I figure at an average of 20 emails per day times 365 days a year, I will promote what I desire 7300 times per year.

Below I posted my old work email signature vs the new email signature I created yesterday, I kept it small from side to side so that it is easier to read and I made sure that it had a call to action and a link:

–
The information contained in this e-mail and any of it’s attachments is intended for the sole use of the individual or entity it is addressed to above and is considered confidential unless otherwise marked.   If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, they are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited.

VS

–
“God gave us memories, that we might have
June roses in the December of our lives”
- James Barrie – Scottish poet

Preserve your memories at
www.iMemoryBook.com

Which one do you think does more for your business?

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/gorilla-marketing-tactic-email-signiture-ad/%/feed 0 CleanFlicks and CleanFilms Edited DVD’s forsale! http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/edited-dvds-forsale/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/edited-dvds-forsale/%#comments Fri, 13 Oct 2006 17:58:21 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/13/edited-dvds-forsale/ Yesterday in Paul Allen’s internet marketing class a man came in and explained that when he learned that CleanFlicks and CleanFilms, and the others like them were going out of business, he went and looked for a couple of movies that he wanted. He couldn’t find them in his local store. He began calling around for it. Then he had an ingenious idea. He put together a bunch of money and bought out all the inventory of over 50 stores! He is now selling the edited DVD’s online. He has already sold over 600 titles in this project already! Unreal.

This guy (sorry, I didn’t write down his name) now has a complete monopoly. Yet, he is selling them all for $9.95 or less. Not only that, but there is a major scarcity! To maximize the leverage of supply and demand, I would create an Ebay store, and begin auctioning the movies off then I would drive traffic to the store by Pay-Per-Clicks and a couple of press releases on campuses, on the evening News, on KSL, pretty much everywhere I could. I know that if I was in a situation and there was only one edited: Gladiator, or Shawshank Redemption, or BraveHeart, or Last of the Mohicans, I would pay some significant cash for that movie. Add in the auctioning power of Ebay and you will multiply your revenues by 2 fold.

He was in our internet marketing class to find a couple of students who would like to manage his pay-per-click campaigns. He would pay the student until the campaign was over and he would give all the edited FREE movies we want! I almost jumped out of my chair. I had to calm myself down and remember that I am already so swamped with preparations to launch the new iMemoryBook system that I could never effectively add another item to my to do list. Dang…I remember thinking when I first saw the announcement of all these stores going out of business, “Man it would be smart to buy a bunch of these and resale them.” Although I never really seriously considered buying a bunch of these DVD’s I did consider investing a chunk of savings into Google’s IPO, and Vulcan’s IPO (all of these would be fantastic investments). I chickened out on each of them. The only time I have jumped at a great opportunity was when I jumped on with FamilyLearn, which I am certain will pay off sooner than later.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/edited-dvds-forsale/%/feed 1 What tools did I use to create this blog? http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/what-tools-did-i-use-to-create-this-blog/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/what-tools-did-i-use-to-create-this-blog/%#comments Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:05:43 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/09/what-tools-did-i-use-to-create-this-blog/ I have been asked what I used to make my blog twice now. They like the look and feel. Here is what I did to set up my blog. I asked my brother who is a computer geek to help me. He showed me how to do the following. It was a hard process for me to learn. Now that I have done it once, it is really pretty fast to change it all. All I can say is that the blogging world has a pretty high barrier to entry. I feel like I am being assimilated into a geek, checking my analytics several times a day, reading at least an hour of blogs each day. What has happened to me! I suppose it won’t be long before the world of the internet and the real world come together as one world.

  1. I purchased a bluehost account so that I could have my own server (this is not necessary).
  2. Then I signed up with WordPress.
  3. Then I went to “presentation” to “themes” to the bottom of the page under get more themes “wordpress theme directory” to “themes.wordpress.net” to then I picked the theme “TerraFirma 1.0”. OR You can access this theme directly by going to http://wpthemepark.com/themes/terrafirma/.
  4. I downloaded the theme to my desktop.
  5. Then I went into BlueHost and went to my “file manager” then to “public_html” to “wp-content” to “themes” to “upload file(s)”. Then I uploaded my file.
  6. After the file was uploaded, I clicked on it and went over to the right side of the screen and clicked “Extract File Contents”.
  7. Then you can go back to wordpress under presentation and you will see your new web template.

After that Neal went into the HTML and edited my photo and the H1 tags.

 

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/what-tools-did-i-use-to-create-this-blog/%/feed 0 Managing a PayPerClick Campaign http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/managing-a-payperclick-campaign-paul-allen/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/managing-a-payperclick-campaign-paul-allen/%#comments Fri, 06 Oct 2006 01:32:52 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/06/managing-a-payperclick-campaign-paul-allen/ Team FamilyLearn. I started to take notes today as Paul finished up Pay Per Click Marketing, then I realized the PowerPoint he had was so much better. The PowerPoint was made by one of Paul’s former students, Francisco. I think Francisco has something to do with webevident.com, a company that provides search engine optimization services and software. Paul spoke highly of him, and this PowerPoint with Pauls lecture made a fantastic presentation. My mind was spinning with ideas for how to help iMemoryBook reach those who are looking for a collaborative family book publishing system. Sorry I can’t get you the lecture with the PPT, but this PPT is loaded with great stuff. Just check it out:

Click here to learn How to manage pay per click campaigns.

Click here to learn more about search engine optimization.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/managing-a-payperclick-campaign-paul-allen/%/feed 3 Internet Marketing with Paul Allen – Search Engine Marketing Part 1, Paid search engine traffic. http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/internet-marketing-with-paul-allen-search-engine-marketing-part-1-paid-search-engine-traffic/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/internet-marketing-with-paul-allen-search-engine-marketing-part-1-paid-search-engine-traffic/%#comments Thu, 05 Oct 2006 15:20:04 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/05/internet-marketing-with-paul-allen-search-engine-marketing-part-1-paid-search-engine-traffic/ visit the resource center> View bids> [...]]]> Team FamilyLearn, Here are my notes from last week:

Brief Overview: Search Engine Marketing using affiliate marketing programs, paid search engine traffic (focus for today), free search engine traffic (next week). Why use paid search engines? Instant, traceable results.

Fun FREE internet marketing Tools:

Book to read: Scientific Advertising

Combine notes from Lindsey Nehring and myself:
Team assignment: 3 person groups, we will be given an American express credit card with a $100 limit. We will design a lead page to a website. Then all of the people we send to the site and sign up can be traced back to our team and we are rewarded. Great story from Paul about Domain Names: They purchased the domain MyFamily.com for $18,000 in 1998. They had originally considered DearFamily.com but they knew they needed MyFamily. They also had worldhistory.com (I think this is the right domain name). They forgot to renew the name and a “squatter” (a squatter is someone who buys domain names and then squats on them until someone needs to buy them, some people have made millions doing this) in Scotland snatched it up. The Squatter posted porn and all kinds of terrible things on it. Paul was furious. He asked MyFamily to buy it back, but the squatter wanted $100000 for the name. MyFamily said no. Paul finally got MyFamily to agree to buy it and the squatter to agree to $60,000. That is a huge mistake! Don’t loss your domain name. Perhaps we should buy something in the new .mobi names?Telecommunications is a $3 Trillion Dollar industry. MySpace hopes to take a piece of this market with their new cell phone deal.

Search Engine Marketing

Two most popular online activities : email (95%) and search engines ( 88%), NFO/search

If doing market research look for pew (peu)?, a company that produces a yearly consumer study

Favorite ways to increase site traffic

  1. Offer a Free Product or Service (MyFamily’s success)
  2. Affiliate Marketing Program (most important for ancestry)
  3. Paid Search Engine Traffic (focus for today)
  4. Free search engine traffic (next week)
  5. Email Marketing
  6. Viral Marketing

Google has well over 8 billion pages indexed

Google, Yahoo, MSN are largest search engines respectively

Bruce Clay – updated version of search engine relationships Bruceclay.com The search engine world is very complicated Bruce Clay made this sheet.

Search engine related chart. Use this chart to learn where to spend the bulk of your time. LEARN THIS CHART.

Bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

This is important to know, because as marketers we need to know who is supplying who with search results so we know where to spend our money. Ex. Paid adds at yahoo show up on yahoo and msn, so only buy with yahoo and you get double exposure.

At the top of each search in any search engine you have paid results. Then you have the natural ones. Yahoo gives alltheweb.com their results. Yahoo owns alltheweb. If you bid on Yahoo you will also come up on MSN. Not anymore because MSN is no longer using Yahoo.

Yahoo started as a free directory of websites. People wanted a competitor.

Dmoz is an open directory project. Google uses them and many others. As an internet marketer you need to get your website in Dmoz.com. It is really hard to get listed. You could try but you probably won’t succeed. If you do get listed in dmoz you will have your company found. It is worth doing but it can be extremely frustrating. Dmoz is what yahoo once was.

Buy or Build/Partner decision has been very interesting in the past. Because some of the partnerships have helped one company grow very quickly and compete with the other partner, and bit them in the butt. Yahoo used Google until they realized that it was going to destroy them.

“Which brand has affected your life the most?” Google more than Coke, Apple and StarBucks. All but one person in my class uses Google as their primary search. “It is like breathing… we need air… we need google”.

Around 40% of searchers click on the first natural search result. Then it drops to 11% click on the second result. How do you get your website up when you are competing with millions of websites?

Solutions

  • Advertise on search engines through keyword bidding
  • Fast (takes less than 15 mins in google)
  • Easy
  • Increasingly expensive
  • Can be profitable
  • Free tools for finding key words

Book: Scientific Advertising For marketing with tracking

Inefficient advertising model is one that :

Takes a lot of time to negotiate& get the commitment, and then you are locked in for a period of time. 3 months to get a print add up and going and to see the results. If it takes 10 tries to get the brilliant add then it is going to take 3 years to know what works. Radio is at least a week. TV is much more.

FREE tool by Yahoo! Inventory.overture.com “Key word selector tool”. This is so cool. You can just type in a key word and it will tell you how many times these have been searched. With this you can do a new test every hour.

(Multiply this number by 4.44 to get an even more accurate idea of how many searches have been done)

Don’t ever bid on obscure keywords unless you are bidding on extremely large amounts of these obscure search keywords at once. Ex. Surname bidding at ancestry.com

Overture.com then click on visit research center, view bids tool, this will show us how much it will cost to be the number one slot.

Rare names for ancestry were more likely to be your names. I think we need to do this with Funeral homes. We need to put every funeral home name in the industry in the our search terms. Bulk Key Word approach. Trends.google.com is another great site. Overture.com > visit the research center> View bids> Tells you what it is going to cost.

Multiply this result by 4.44 to get the total (this accounts for google and others)

As marketers get more advanced with back end analytics then they are not going to spend as much for some of these biddings, because they now realize that they are way overspending.

Click fraud – over 1 billion dollars last year in click fraud.

My Comments on Pauls Teaching: I was happy to find out that Paul is going to be quizing us once a week on MarketingVox newsletters. He feels these are very important. I really like overture.com. After walking out of this class, I didn’t feel like I had anything to apply. After the first class we were told to make blogs. The second class to put analytics on them, but after this one I didn’t quite know Paul wanted us to do. Lessoned learned for my future: always give an action assignment after teaching anything to anyone. If I go home and just tell someone about something wonderful but don’t help them, or challange them to get started, they are way less likely to retain what I taught them.

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]]> http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/10/?y%/internet-marketing-with-paul-allen-search-engine-marketing-part-1-paid-search-engine-traffic/%/feed 0 Be Controversial http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/09/?y%/be-contraversial/% http://jeffreyharmon.net/2006/09/?y%/be-contraversial/%#comments Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:05:49 +0000 Jeff Harmon http://jeffreyharmon.net/?p=8 One of the things that Phil Windley taught us when he was substituting for Paul Allen is to be controversial. After his class I posted my notes for those in team FamilyLearn to learn from. At the end of my notes I wrote a quick review of what I thought on the lecture and then I thought nothing more of it. I guess I had mentioned that I thought that Phil is a great teacher but that he “rambled” a little when he was asked how a blog can promote a product. Unknown to me Phil found my entry and quickly responded. Soon after Phil had commented on my blog and linked to me, my hits skyrocked on analytics (well for a blog that has been up only a week). I suppose you could say that my comment was contraversial and that is why it worked so well.

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