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CleanFlicks and CleanFilms Edited DVD’s forsale!

Friday, October 13th, 2006

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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New Mac TV Ads

Thursday, October 12th, 2006

There are a couple of new Mac TV ads. It was during one of these ads that I thought to myself, “I will get a Mac.” These are the ads that pushed me over the edge.

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Posted in Other Reviews, Uncategorized, apple, internet marketing | No Comments »

What tools did I use to create this blog?

Monday, October 9th, 2006

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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Google Docs/Writely – the “Wikipedia Deathmatch”

Saturday, October 7th, 2006

Every week I receive 5 to 10 emails from my Religion class members saying. “Hey everyone, I missed class today, can you send me your notes?” It is important that I respond to these emails because I know that I am going to need others notes just as much as they need mine, but I thought there must be a better way. I decided that I would post all my notes on writely, an online word processer (there are several of these online word processors out there, from my experience, writely and zoho writer are the best of the bunch—I would use zoho but the backspace has issues), and then I sent out this email to everyone:

Hey yall’

There is a group of us using writely (just like Microsoft Word but by Google) so that anyone who wants to can be involved in collaborating notes for each lecture. Here is how it will work.

I post my notes each day on writely after class. Everyone else in the class can get on the same notes to read them, edit them, add to them, or share them with even more class members or others you think would like to see them. You can also view them if you miss class. We have collaborated like this in some other classes and it works great.

Just let me know if you want to be a part of our group and I will send you an email with a link to each days notes.

Thanks
Jeff Harmon

Within 30 seconds of sending this email out, I received 2 responses. In the next 16 hours I had more than 50 peers asking for links to collaborate(writely only allows 50)! Everyone LOVED the idea. I was blown away. By the time I got done inviting them all, I wished writely would connect straight into my Gmail groups so that I could just send invites to a group. It was a pain to copy all those emails in. Google should pay me for this. I not only just invited 50 users to writely, but I also just converted about three-quarters of those to get Gmail accounts (you have to have a Gmail account to use writely).

Talk about viral marketing.

Here are some other ways I have used writely:

  1. I wrote my essay application to BYU on writely. At the same time I was writing the application, my sister-in-law in Oregon was editing it.
  2. The other morning, 1 hour before my paper was due, my mom—850 miles away—collaborated with me to get a project done. We were on the phone talking while we both looked at the same document. I could see as she made corrections, ALL REAL TIME!
  3. Yesterday, Daniel and I learned that we had to push out a, 700+ word, press release for iMemoryBook in less than a day. We had at least three people working on the document from two states. It was a synergistic experience. Theron, my brother helping to edit the document from Oregon, was talking to Daniel on the phone. New to writely, Theron asked, “So we can write on this at the exact same time?… wow, this like a wickipedia deathmatch!”
  4. I have used writely for several group projects.

Collaboration is King

The power of writely and zoho writer is completely derived from cleanly executed collaboration. There are also spreadsheet collaboration systems from Zoho and Google (these are not near effective enough to replace Excel in most situations yet). Here at FamilyLearn we followed these principles and have created a powerful online collaboration system for families to create and print: wedding books, anniversary books, retirement books, teacher books, family histories, and all kinds of other books. It is called iMemoryBook (the internet memory book). Snapfish recently released sharing/collaboration online as well for creating their photo books. There are countless other collaborative project springing up each year. I think it was Paul Allen who told me that the original guys who started the internet had collaboration in mind as the internet’s primary purpose.

So… how long will it be before we can invite anyone we would like to collaborate with us in, an email document, or even a common blog entry, online photo sharing, family home video editing, and pretty much any thing else? In five years I could see a “collaborate” button as common as spell check on any rich text editing system. Just watch, it is too helpful to not happen.

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Posted in Google Docs vs Zoho, Other Reviews, Surviving as a Student, Uncategorized, collaboration, internet marketing | 2 Comments »

Managing a PayPerClick Campaign

Friday, October 6th, 2006

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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Internet Marketing with Paul Allen – Search Engine Marketing Part 1, Paid search engine traffic.

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

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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Yahoo!, Google, or AOL are the internet, aren’t they?

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

I spend a significant amount to time contacting and selling FamilyLearn’s iMemoryBook and pyxlin’. To help clients catch the vision of FamilyLearn I usually have to get them on our resellers website. As often as not, the dialog of our conversation goes like this:

Me: “Can you please go to www.familylearn.com?” I then hear them typing on their computer.

My Client: “Is it the one that says, ‘FamilyLearn: Genealogy, Family Tree and Family History come to life!’?”

This is the point that I realize that they just typed www.familylearn.com into Google or Yahoo! search bar because the FamilyLearn doesn’t say that unless you search for it. They don’t just use search to find our website, but everytime they return to our website or anyother website. To them the internet is Yahoo! or Google. Their internet world lies inside the confines of their default search engine. It doesn’t matter to them that they are making two extra mouse clicks. They don’t know anything different and they don’t need anything different.

I think to many, who don’t remember their first days of muddling through the internet, this is quite a shock. There are people who don’t even know where, or how, or why, to type in a direct URL? Let me tell you, I was just this way for my first several years with the internet. http:// might as well have been Chinese. My online world was Hotmail and anywhere hotmail connected me; MSN Messenger, and MSNBC (all of which I rarely use now I know what else is out there).

I have been reading the insightful book, Don’t Make Me Think!, by Steve Krug(said Kroog). He answers the question of why this happens:
• It’s not important to us. For most of us, it doesn’t matter to us whether we understand how things work, as long as we can use them. It’s not lack of intelligence, but a lack for caring. In the great scheme of things it is not important to us [to know how to type a URL into the browser].
• If we find something that works, we stick to it. Once we find something that works—no matter how badly—we tend not to look for a better way. We’ll use a better way if we stumble across one, but we seldom look for one.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to make their website more intuitive. It is a must read.

It took years for me to pull away from hotmail. I didn’t know I had any other options and I didn’t know how to look for them even if I knew they were there.

We are working very hard with our very little resources to make the new iMemoryBook and pyxlin’ systems (to be released Jan 2007) as intuitive as possible. If, when they are released, they don’t feel intuitive enough, please let me know.

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Notes from Paul Allen’s Class at BYU

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

Team FamilyLearn – I have decided to post my notes from my internet marketing class each week here at my blog. Here is todays.

Paul was unable to come to school again today and he had us visit his blog and watch a seminar that he gave at BYU a while back.

CONDENSED PARAGRAPH OF WHAT I FOUND HELPFUL

Looks don’t matter on a website unless they lead to higher conversions. Web analytics are key to success in internet marketing because they let you track what works and what doesn’t and they give you the ability to track almost every little change you make to your website–even the color of your buttons. Install analytics on your website BEFORE you begin driving traffic. (sources that I know for analytics: Google analytics FREE and Omniture.) When you overhaul your website avoid “linkrot”; i.e. losing your old optimized links when you release your new website. 18% of the web suffers from “linkrot”. Divide and conquer to build your conversion rates and web traffic. Put each person a a special assignment. Read “Love is the Killer App“ - I read this book a year ago and it is fantastic!

My unedited notes from the lecture

Site design is not Paul’s forte. He said that ugly sites are making a lot of money. Paul’s focus is not in looks. You must always start with functionality. People who have done this is Craig’s list, google. In some cases design doesn’t matter that much.

On every computer Paul has he puts Google tool bar and the Alexa (essential part of you marketing tools) tool bar. Alex is primarily techies.

Paul’s Blog is the most popular part of his website. Traffic doesn’t come from looks.

10X marketing- He thought about everything he had learned in the past six years. He was reading 6-8 periodicals and go to conferences each month. He took these lessons and made a list of all the Internet marketing tactics, a list of 196. 10x was a project that tested these tactics and refined them.

A Lot of people have opinions of how a site should look. They completely overhaul their site without putting any research into what matters on the back end. Jacob Nelson, on the advisory board of google, he has been resented. Google applied his tactics. Useit.com. “Link rot” what happens when you take down a page on your website that has been spider ed by google. 18% of pages on the web each year are taken out by “link rot”.

Tactics from his 196 tactics. Paul Hates consulting work.

  • It is more important to improve you conversion rate than to just get a bunch of visitors.
  • Place an Anylitics system on your website BEFORE you start getting your traffic. These have “click maps” Click maps help to make conversion go up. It helps reduce the debates between graphic designers and the analytical people. It was a constant battle. As soon as they put in the click maps they were able to see what no one clicked on. You could go to any link on the site and see what people really actually used. Without this you are just guessing.
  • Report on your traffic each week. Baby it day by day until you have built your traffic and conversion rates.

Conversion Rate:

  • 1000 unique visitors 1% conversion rate, $10 per sale= $100 a day
  • Solution: Devide up your team
  • double the unique visitors
  • Conversion rate
  • double price
  • Suddenly you have $800 a day in Revenue

    • Increasing Conversion Rates:

    • If you are monitoring you stats over time you will be able
    • When ever you make a change you note that change and then look at what happens on your Click maps and conversion rates. Monitor every move.

    Case Study
    80% of visitors didn’t go pass the first page. This was called their bounce off rate. They used some conversion rate things and then they

    Adwords take about 15 minutes to set up. google takes the (highest bid x click through rate)= top position and puts that ad at the top.

    FIND UNIQUE SEARCH TERMS
    150000 sirnames in the united states.
    Ansestry asked to bid on these names
    They only had 35000 sirnames that had been searched on
    soon they had about .02 cents per click. 100s of new subscrib 286000 in revenue and it was only custion about 1/5th that much. Do what others are not. Think outside the box. THink of words that no one exsle is bidding on that have something to do with your business.

    Search Engine Optimization
    Paid adds are not near as effective as the optimized websites. These are the sites that google says are the most relavent. 20% click on #1 spot. Site ranked at the top always get loads of money.

    1. decide what key word you want to rank high on. then decide how hard it is going to be to rank high on that key word.
    2. Build a webpage built around that key word. Make sure that key word is in the url eg. http://onlinestore.com/[keyword]
    3. Title of the ducument should be the key word.
    4. Use an H1 tag to ebusiness.byu.edu

    You do these right and you will have 100’s to 1000’s of FREE visitors.

    Book Recommendations
    Read “Love is the Killer App”

    Comments from me:

    I found it harder to follow him when he is on a video like this. It really feels like he jumps around. This isn’t a big deal when he is in class but when you are trying to take notes and he suddenly say’s while talking about Web Anilytics, “You should read Love is the Killer app, it is a great book” (by the way this book has nothing to do with web anilytics) and then he just returns to what he was talking about. I think it takes away from the power of the presention. But, regardless, Paul is a great teacher and he teaches my favorite class this semester.

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