Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 30 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: Finding your audience
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: More on finding your audience today. The video was pretty good, but mostly common sense stuff. It basically dealt with finding people you can connect with that correspond to your niche. It’s kind [...]

Thank you for subscribing to Blueverse!

Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 17 – Shoemoney System Review

Marketing ROI: A guide to the free MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Point of personal weakness – I love buffets! I try to eat healthy, I try to live in moderation, but when I see a gorgeous spread of fresh seafood and fruit and all sorts of goodies like at the Marketplace at Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas, I just don’t know where to begin.

I’m afraid we might have created the same situation with our new MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal…

Our desire was to create a one-stop resource that you can refer to throughout the quarter to give you ideas, insights, and (dare I say) inspiration to drive ROI with testing and optimization. The Research Journal includes never-before-published social media research along with content that our loyal blog readers will recognize – all in one convenient package.

However, with so much information in the same place, the initial reaction might be to take it all in at once. According to Internet Standard Time, after something has been posted for five minutes (the half-life of a tweet), it is old news.

We take a different, principle-based approach to marketing. As opposed to a relentless pursuit of the latest “everyone-else-is-doing-it-and-so-must-I” practice, we share higher-level principles that apply across media, timeframes, and executions. We pair those principles with tactical advice to help put them into action the right way for your organization right now.

With that in mind, here are three simple ways you can get value out of the MarketingExperiments Research Journal every day this quarter…

Research

What is your biggest marketing challenge today? Email? Social media? Your website? Go to that section and read the applicable research or actionable insights. Again, don’t try to push through the entire Journal in one day, let each day’s challenge dictate your intake.

Relate

As opposed to pure or theoretical research, we focused on ROI-based marketing research that can help the evidence-based marketer drive results in her organization. Combine the principles from our research with your own experience knowing your business inside and out. It’s not up to the tools to make it happen. It’s not up to rote adherence to best practices. It’s up to you.

Respond

This Research Journal, along with everything MarketingExperiments publishes, is meant to be just one part of a conversation with you. How can we better educate you? Take our three-minute survey. What works for your organization? Send a letter to the editor. What success have you driven? Share your story for a chance to win a Landing Page Optimization package.

Related Resources

MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal, Q1 2010

Methodology

2010 Online Marketing ROI Tour

 Marketing ROI: A guide to the free MarketingExperiments Quarterly Research Journal

Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks

This is more of a gentle reminder for those of you spending money promoting your site, services, affiliate products, etc. I recently started working on doing more media buys. Simply put, media buying is buying primarily banner ads on sites of all sizes and popularity. Everything from small ma and pa sites to Top 500 [...]

Thank you for subscribing to Blueverse!

Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks

 Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks  Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks  Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks

 Pay Attention To Ad Campaigns On New Networks

Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 5 minutes
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: N/A
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: Today was about as exciting as watching paint dry. In fact, watching paint dry probably would have been more productive. Since I didn’t have anything new to work on, I decided to put together a [...]

Thank you for subscribing to Blueverse!

Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 16 – Shoemoney System Review

Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

fat twitter bird Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

Is your Twitter name so overweight that it can’t fit into retweets? Do you even have difficulty squeezing the name into a tweet. Does your handle make people cringe to type it?

Face it, Twitter is for dieters. Bit.ly, Tinyurl.com, qwkurl.com have all figured it out. Those 140lbs, um, I mean characters, are a maximum. The scale knows you’re lying to yourself. Those who snack privately can’t hid it openly.

At some point, you really need to put your twitter name on a diet. 40% of all twitter handles can be considered obese. Let’s be honest. You might want to fit into a size 3 characters, but those damn Twitter dieters got to the good names first.

Jiminy Cricket once said, “You buttered your bread. Now sleep in it!”. No truer words were ever spoken by a Disney character with a crunchy exoskeleton.

Then again, in some countries, he’d be just another lunch snack.

So, think about what you really want to do and say on Twitter. Is that extra weight really causing you problems, or do your friends like you for the size 29 characters you really are.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Follow us: @OpenSourceMarketerIsTheBestest

Accelerate your business online using Facebook.

 Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

fat twitter bird Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

Is your Twitter name so overweight that it can’t fit into retweets? Do you even have difficulty squeezing the name into a tweet. Does your handle make people cringe to type it?

Face it, Twitter is for dieters. Bit.ly, Tinyurl.com, qwkurl.com have all figured it out. Those 140lbs, um, I mean characters, are a maximum. The scale knows you’re lying to yourself. Those who snack privately can’t hid it openly.

At some point, you really need to put your twitter name on a diet. 40% of all twitter handles can be considered obese. Let’s be honest. You might want to fit into a size 3 characters, but those damn Twitter dieters got to the good names first.

Jiminy Cricket once said, “You buttered your bread. Now sleep in it!”. No truer words were ever spoken by a Disney character with a crunchy exoskeleton.

Then again, in some countries, he’d be just another lunch snack.

So, think about what you really want to do and say on Twitter. Is that extra weight really causing you problems, or do your friends like you for the size 29 characters you really are.

Toff Ward
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Follow us: @OpenSourceMarketerIsTheBestest

Accelerate your business online using social media.

 Does Your Twitter Handle Make You Look Fat?

Your Competitive Advantage Won’t Last Long!

new Your Competitive Advantage Won’t Last Long!

Look at any competitive PPC area today, and you’ll notice many of the ads are selling the same thing.

This is a fundamental problem.

No matter how great you are at PPC, it the product or service you’re selling is flooded with competition, the more your margins will be squeezed. The more your margins are squeezed, the less you will be able to spend on advertising.

Long-term, that isn’t a recipe for success. Those with the deepest pockets will eventually win.

The Need To Differentiate

Theodore Levitt, an American economist and professor at Harvard Business School, said “There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable”

If you’re pitching very similar products to those offered by other advertisers, you need to find valid points of difference that encourage visitors to choose your product.

If you have control over the product/service you’re selling, you have a number of options available to you. You could differentiate based on an emerging consumer trend. For example, some people are concerned about the origin of food. If you were selling coffee, you could draw attention to the source of the coffee as a valid point of difference. You could use fresh imagery to breath life into an old product, like celebrity endorsement. You could reduce price.

Simple stuff, conceptually.

If you don’t have control over the product, your options are more limited, but you can still differentiate. You could offer a different level of service. You could bundle the product with something else. You could leverage your existing reputation in another area.

The problem is that even if you’re successful with your differentiation, people will soon copy you.

What do you do?

Three Choices

At the point where copyists move in – and this happens fast on the internet – the vendor faces three options:

  • Lower the price and accept lower profits
  • Maintain the price, but lose market share, and ultimately profits
  • Find a *new* point of differentiation and maintain price

Option three is going to be most preferable.

The Need To “Innovate”

You can see this at work on the likes of Clickbank.

Clickbank facilitates the selling of the same old get-rich-quick schemes that have been around for years. But “new” products keep selling, and the way vendors do that is by using new imagery, descriptions and context, and leveraging off older product lines. The price – typically $97 – has been maintained for years. The big selling vendors are often the same old faces who have been selling via that channel since it began.

The lesson here is this:

In order to maintain long term profitability, you cannot rely on your current advantage being maintained over time. Copyists will errode it.

Instead, always be in search of your *next* advantage. You can achieve this by constantly adding value, and/or new valid points of differentiation.

Keep in mind the value of “the new”. Or more precisely, the perception of the new.

There are many examples offline. Car companies introduce new models. These models are pretty much the same as the last model, but if they package them up a little differently, they have a new point of differentiation, and a new story to tell.

Soft-drink companies, like Coca Cola, leverage off their existing brand reputation to introduce new lines. Again, these new lines are bubbly sugary drinks, and aren’t really radically new or different.

The fashion industry changes every season. Microsoft introduce yearly – well, almost – versions of Office, even though a word processor hasn’t really changed much since the 80’s.

Notice a pattern?

Consumers love the new.

Notice another?

This stuff isn’t really new at all!

It’s just perceived as being new.

Being new is an easy point of differentiation to implement and thus maintain strategic advantage, so long as you have a plan to always introduce the new. When we consider that the new isn’t really new at all, and comes down mostly to cosmetic or subtle changes, it becomes even easier.

Do you have a plan to introduce the new as a point of ongoing differentiation? This might be something to consider if your competition is offering all offering the same thing, and stuck in a rut.

Take you product or service and give it a new twist. And have a long term plan to do so regularly icon smile Your Competitive Advantage Won’t Last Long!

Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review

Time Spent: 1 hour
$ Made: $0
Main Focus: Affiliate Offer & Finding Your Audience
Today’s Value (1 to 10): 1
Overall Value (1 to 10): 1
My Thoughts: I watched 2 videos today. Both were more geared toward the newbie. The first dealt with completing an affiliate offer. Jeremy led Jamie through finding an offer that interested her [...]

Thank you for subscribing to Blueverse!

Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review  Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review

 Day 15 – Shoemoney System Review

Building Business Websites Using WordPress

Still trying to decide how to build that business website? Why not use WordPress?
WordPress is a fantastic tool for building business websites. It’s easy to install, simple to manage, offers thousands of plugins for adding website functionality, and allows you to refresh the look and feel of your website without needing to rebuild everything from the ground up.

That’s why we use WordPress exclusively for building sites at Open Source Marketer and we recommend it to everyone we meet, and we do meet a lot of people online and at offline speaking events. Most of them tell us they either can’t afford to hire someone to design and build their website, have the resources but don’t understand what’s involved, or want to do it themselves but don’t know where to get started.

So we decided to host a monthly webinar, to explain the overall thought process we use to build WordPress websites. During the webinar we highlight the benefits of WordPress, show example websites, and outline the process we take to set up WordPress websites for ourselves and for our clients.

For most people, after they understand the process they either decide to tackle their website on their own or they contact us to build it for them. Either way, we’re thrilled for them because we understand that having a clear idea of what steps need to be accomplished helps tremendously.

So here’s the deal. Posted above is a copy of one of our recent webinars explaining the process. What we’d like you to do is watch the video, take notes, and then do one of three things. You can either contact us to build your business website using WordPress, decide to tackle the project on your own, or you can become an Open Source Marketer Member and use the information inside the community to build and market your website on your own.

We have additional video lessons inside the community, private forums for asking questions, weekly webinars for getting more in-depth information, and lots of other helpful information that you can use to get going.

So go ahead. Watch the video. Then decide what you’d like to do next. If you have questions about anything we’ve said or you’d like to know more about becoming an Open Source Marketer, leave your comments below and we’ll answer them there.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

 Building Business Websites Using WordPress

You Still Stink

wet dog You Still Stink

Marketing can sometimes be like taking a bath. If the goal is to get clean, then you have to totally jump in the tub and use soap in order to make that happen.

When your client tells you that they only want to “dip their toe in the water” to see if it really works, you’re going to have to point their eyes to the clean toe or they will look in the mirror at their dirty face and blame you.

Social Media has an even wider gap. Creating an account on Twitter and Facebook, won’t give you sales. You actually need to connect and have a conversation with potential customers. Showing up is important, but if you don’t introduce yourself and start talking, then you’re not much better than gum on the ceiling.

People naturally gravitate to good conversations around topics they are interested in. If you give them that, then you can increase your company’s brand awareness.

I can completely understand being timid about trying new things (well a little bit… maybe), but as a company, if you are not in the same space as your customers, then how do you think they are going to learn about how much your product or service can help them?

Marketing online has literally dozens of avenues to go down. Each one will give you benefit. If you exclude a specific marketing channel you will always have that dirt under your fingernails when you shake hands with someone.

Try not to stink online, ok?

Toff Ward
Open Source Marketer

Accelerate your business online using social media.

 You Still Stink