I’m working on a longer post about monetization, but like every blog owner I go around checking out backlinks and mentions. Much to my amusement, my blog ranks higher in Technorati for the tag “Autofellatio/Self-Sucking” than for any online marketing term. I always knew that I would live or die by colorful use of metaphor, but I had no idea I would begin to capture the vaunted online marketing/autofellatio demographic so early in the game.
Next stop: the bank.
Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Thursday, December 15, 2011
The Rumors of Email Marketing’s Death Have Been Greatly Overhyped By Morons
I’ve been consulting on email marketing as part of the larger field of online marketing for a number of years, so it comes as no surprise to me when the digerati (i.e. - hyperventilating nerds with blogs) declare email DEAD as a form of online marketing for the 652nd time. R.I.P., email, your time is up! What a bunch of slack jawed dumbasses these people are. As if to buttress my point, they generally start with a bombastic headline and then completely retreat from their stance with a giant caveat by the end of their post. It’s as bad as sports writing or cable financial news networks, if not worse. Bloggers, making weathermen look prescient since the 1990s!
What brought this up was a brief comment discussion I got into with Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports -my first blogger circlejerk linkfest! Woooohoo, how exciting! Even though we probably disagree on a lot of finer points about where the lines are in email marketing, I think Mark’s blog is pretty damn informative as blogs go. Just to make sure, I stopped to read about six months worth of entries and it held up. Anyway, in response to my comments and of his own volition, Mark posted a roundup of positive comments and posts concerning the state of email marketing that were made by people with the correct number of chromosomes and who, consequently, breathe with their mouths closed (without aid of a paper bag).
Mark’s entry can be found here and has links to some halfway decent posts on the topic:
Email is dead. Long live email.
In particular, the retort to the recent spate of news stories and breathless blogger tirades about how “TEENS HAVE GIVEN UP ON EMAIL” is welcome. I caught that on the news today and when I heard it spoken aloud without a trace of irony I nearly spit the dummy. Morons.
As always, enjoy! Or don’t!
p.s. - I’ve decided that the best way to avoid scraping and feed hijacking is to curse profusely in your blog entries, rendering them un-fucking-suitable for commercial application.
What brought this up was a brief comment discussion I got into with Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports -my first blogger circlejerk linkfest! Woooohoo, how exciting! Even though we probably disagree on a lot of finer points about where the lines are in email marketing, I think Mark’s blog is pretty damn informative as blogs go. Just to make sure, I stopped to read about six months worth of entries and it held up. Anyway, in response to my comments and of his own volition, Mark posted a roundup of positive comments and posts concerning the state of email marketing that were made by people with the correct number of chromosomes and who, consequently, breathe with their mouths closed (without aid of a paper bag).
Mark’s entry can be found here and has links to some halfway decent posts on the topic:
Email is dead. Long live email.
In particular, the retort to the recent spate of news stories and breathless blogger tirades about how “TEENS HAVE GIVEN UP ON EMAIL” is welcome. I caught that on the news today and when I heard it spoken aloud without a trace of irony I nearly spit the dummy. Morons.
As always, enjoy! Or don’t!
p.s. - I’ve decided that the best way to avoid scraping and feed hijacking is to curse profusely in your blog entries, rendering them un-fucking-suitable for commercial application.
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Top 5 Dumbass Forum Questions - Affiliate Marketing Edition
We’ve all been dumbasses at one time or another and we tend to be dumbasses in one regard or another throughout our lives. When you read online marketing forums regularly, which is a punishment rendered unconstitutional by the eighth amendment, you encounter a level of pugnacious stupidity that can only be described as: Fuck You.
The other thing that happens when you read online marketing forums as much as I do is you see patterns emerge. For the uninitiated, you can imagine that this is similar to something out of the scenes in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe, playing John Nash, stares at a board full of numbers until the numbers begin to float off the board and start forming patterns in his mind. The difference is that I’m not very bright (a statement backed up by the fact that I read online marketing forums daily) and in my world I read the same fucking questions day after day until they begin to float off the screen and form patterns of dumb, but instead of having paranoid delusions and talking to my imaginary roommate (who is deaf) I just stare really hard at the reply button, count to ten and then close the tab instead. I can only imagine how shithouse crazy Nash would have gone trying to deal with the boastful, dishonest, imaptient simians who populate our industry.
Anyway, having seen the same questions for years now, I thought I’d put together a top 5 list of forum posts that I see EVERY GODDAMN DAY for every field of online marketing that I read about (every broadly and commonly defined field, anyway) and answer them. Why not top 10? Because I’m a lazy piece of shit. Reading and understanding the complex and detailed answers on this list is a good way to avoid looking like a newb on various online marketing forums:
The other thing that happens when you read online marketing forums as much as I do is you see patterns emerge. For the uninitiated, you can imagine that this is similar to something out of the scenes in A Beautiful Mind where Russell Crowe, playing John Nash, stares at a board full of numbers until the numbers begin to float off the board and start forming patterns in his mind. The difference is that I’m not very bright (a statement backed up by the fact that I read online marketing forums daily) and in my world I read the same fucking questions day after day until they begin to float off the screen and form patterns of dumb, but instead of having paranoid delusions and talking to my imaginary roommate (who is deaf) I just stare really hard at the reply button, count to ten and then close the tab instead. I can only imagine how shithouse crazy Nash would have gone trying to deal with the boastful, dishonest, imaptient simians who populate our industry.
Anyway, having seen the same questions for years now, I thought I’d put together a top 5 list of forum posts that I see EVERY GODDAMN DAY for every field of online marketing that I read about (every broadly and commonly defined field, anyway) and answer them. Why not top 10? Because I’m a lazy piece of shit. Reading and understanding the complex and detailed answers on this list is a good way to avoid looking like a newb on various online marketing forums:
Saturday, December 10, 2011
(b)adCenter Day 394: Campaign Uploading Surprise!
I could do an entire blog just about what a piece of shit adCenter is not only from a user interface point of view, but also from a service point of view and even a support point of view. Basically, I wouldn’t piss on adCenter if it was on fire. In fact, the web could collectively save a lot of time by making a text file containing all the good things about adCenter. 45 seconds after we started, the entire web could go out for drinks - not that I want to drink beer with the ragtag group of libertarians, kiddy fiddlers and pimply MMORPG dorks that make up the net. Back to the point, though, today’s particular issue only seemed worth mentioning because it was so damned odd that hopefully someone else with the same issue might stumble across this blog entry and save him or herself the time of trying to apply logic to adCenter (something one should never do) in discovering a solution.
My current client had been using adCenter for about a year with limited traffic when suddenly, one day, the keywords all showed up paused. Long story short, MSN first claimed it was a glitch, then said the glitch was fixed and then, when it became obvious that they had no control over their shit-tastic application, they mumbled back to the client something about improving the quality of their pages. After a month of re-working the campaign strategy and deciding that MSN’s only value was as a testbed for PPC tactics, I and the client set up a new account with the same keywords pointing to the same pages, in some cases using the same ads. The account is running basically fine, the quality is apparently good enough this time around, so, in short, adCenter is not only a piece of shit, but it’s apparently serviced on the support end by a bunch of Indian call center reps armed with ouija boards and tarot cards.
My current client had been using adCenter for about a year with limited traffic when suddenly, one day, the keywords all showed up paused. Long story short, MSN first claimed it was a glitch, then said the glitch was fixed and then, when it became obvious that they had no control over their shit-tastic application, they mumbled back to the client something about improving the quality of their pages. After a month of re-working the campaign strategy and deciding that MSN’s only value was as a testbed for PPC tactics, I and the client set up a new account with the same keywords pointing to the same pages, in some cases using the same ads. The account is running basically fine, the quality is apparently good enough this time around, so, in short, adCenter is not only a piece of shit, but it’s apparently serviced on the support end by a bunch of Indian call center reps armed with ouija boards and tarot cards.
Friday, December 9, 2011
Behavioral Targeting For The Hoi Polloi Using PPC, Web & Email
The online marketing outhouse is full to the shitter’s brim with guerilla online marketers. You know the type, they track their entire operation in a series of confusing spreadsheets, pass keywords straight through to their affiliate networks and generally have no larger idea what they’re doing in architectural or strategic terms, but they make money. These scrappy, rascally nogoodniks are entertaining as Hell and often quite innovative and effective. Why do they make money? Because we’re in online marketing, not online marketing, and these characters are marketers first and foremost.
As they wander our little minefield of a niche, they inevitably bounce off of walls like little market inefficiency-sucking roombas, vacuuming up dollars in one direction until they hit an obstacle, then changing course to repeat the process in another direction. Similar to the wildcatters of yesteryear, they’ll blow out a well and leave it uncapped as long as they can make enough money off the deal to remain profitable - sometimes fucking up things for the rest of us.
As they wander our little minefield of a niche, they inevitably bounce off of walls like little market inefficiency-sucking roombas, vacuuming up dollars in one direction until they hit an obstacle, then changing course to repeat the process in another direction. Similar to the wildcatters of yesteryear, they’ll blow out a well and leave it uncapped as long as they can make enough money off the deal to remain profitable - sometimes fucking up things for the rest of us.
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Uncov Rips Flowery, Sunshine-Up-The-Butt-Blower A New One
The field of online marketing is 80% full of shameless self-promoters who ruin it for the other 20% of us by trying to guise themselves either as knowledgeable experts who mysteriously speak only in buzzwords and of only insanely-broad concepts or as honest brokers who aren’t trying to sell you what they’re actually trying to sell you while they’re trying to sell you on it. You know, it’s how the rest of you feel about our entire field. Microcosms within microcosms. I imagine even the shysters and the blowhards have other shysters and blowhards that they can’t stand.
Uncov is a new blog dedicated to two things: sarcastic cynicism concerning our larger industry and Idiocracy. There are few hobbies dearer to my heart. The other day, they wrote a scathing blog post about the hollow insight of a particular member of the web 2.0 propaganda brigade, Steve Rubel.
I did want to add that if more blogs spent more time deconstructing this kind of technowank fluff job nonsense then maybe every time I download an episode of Charlie Rose or flip through my favorite tech news sources, I wouldn’t have to pick through ten pounds of shit to get to one ounce of corn. At the very least, if we could stick a cork in the shitpipe of the self-fellating web 2.0 obsessed AJAX 9000 blogdroids then maybe the signal to noise ratio on our end of the web would level back out to something resembling tolerable.
Just a thought.
Uncov is a new blog dedicated to two things: sarcastic cynicism concerning our larger industry and Idiocracy. There are few hobbies dearer to my heart. The other day, they wrote a scathing blog post about the hollow insight of a particular member of the web 2.0 propaganda brigade, Steve Rubel.
I did want to add that if more blogs spent more time deconstructing this kind of technowank fluff job nonsense then maybe every time I download an episode of Charlie Rose or flip through my favorite tech news sources, I wouldn’t have to pick through ten pounds of shit to get to one ounce of corn. At the very least, if we could stick a cork in the shitpipe of the self-fellating web 2.0 obsessed AJAX 9000 blogdroids then maybe the signal to noise ratio on our end of the web would level back out to something resembling tolerable.
Just a thought.
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Gaming The PPC/Proxy Site Nexus
I work on a variety of projects in online marketing and I’m pretty busy already, so this is nothing I’ve actually tried or even plan to try, but I thought I’d float it out there because I’ve not heard of it being done and it struck me as interesting.
I know that proxy sites are all the rage because they’re easy to set up and people can, with little labor, arbitrage them using CPC ads. I personally work in the affiliate-email-ppc-content site world, so this isn’t my bread and butter, but that doesn’t stop me from daydreaming on occasion. Last week I was checking Google from here in Asia without a proxy and a person who works with my client forgot for a moment about the territorial restrictions on the client’s PPC ads. He asked why our ads didn’t rank on the first page and I replied that “The ads aren’t showing up because they’re US only.” Following our exchange, we got into a discussion about using free net access to funnel people into an obscure IP range geolocated in a small or medium sized foreign country and then bidding up US-based ads in that country only while linking the ads to your sites.
I quickly pointed out that most people don’t use free net access and that providing it would be a pain and the discussion ended because, you know, we had actual work to do. Fast forward to the next day and this puzzle was still gnawing away at my brain. In theory, you could accomplish the same thing using proxy sites, instead of free net access, to small or medium sized countries. When the ads are presented through the proxy site, it would simply be necessary to have them launch in a new window, which would launch outside of the confines of the proxy and, therefore, place the user within a geolocated US IP range. This would obviate the problem with foreign IPs killing affiliate ads on the affiliate network end of the equation. The obvious benefit here is that bidding on terms in these obscure countries would no doubt be cheaper and you’d be competing for much less traffic, segmented to your chosen language and provided largely by you. Quite literally, you would have your very own captive audience.
I’ve been in this business for ten years, which is long enough to know that when you have a new idea it’s only new until you hit Google and figure out someone else has done it, but I thought this one was interesting enough to post about even if it has been done. I’d be interested to find out what experience anyone has had with such a method.
I know that proxy sites are all the rage because they’re easy to set up and people can, with little labor, arbitrage them using CPC ads. I personally work in the affiliate-email-ppc-content site world, so this isn’t my bread and butter, but that doesn’t stop me from daydreaming on occasion. Last week I was checking Google from here in Asia without a proxy and a person who works with my client forgot for a moment about the territorial restrictions on the client’s PPC ads. He asked why our ads didn’t rank on the first page and I replied that “The ads aren’t showing up because they’re US only.” Following our exchange, we got into a discussion about using free net access to funnel people into an obscure IP range geolocated in a small or medium sized foreign country and then bidding up US-based ads in that country only while linking the ads to your sites.
I quickly pointed out that most people don’t use free net access and that providing it would be a pain and the discussion ended because, you know, we had actual work to do. Fast forward to the next day and this puzzle was still gnawing away at my brain. In theory, you could accomplish the same thing using proxy sites, instead of free net access, to small or medium sized countries. When the ads are presented through the proxy site, it would simply be necessary to have them launch in a new window, which would launch outside of the confines of the proxy and, therefore, place the user within a geolocated US IP range. This would obviate the problem with foreign IPs killing affiliate ads on the affiliate network end of the equation. The obvious benefit here is that bidding on terms in these obscure countries would no doubt be cheaper and you’d be competing for much less traffic, segmented to your chosen language and provided largely by you. Quite literally, you would have your very own captive audience.
I’ve been in this business for ten years, which is long enough to know that when you have a new idea it’s only new until you hit Google and figure out someone else has done it, but I thought this one was interesting enough to post about even if it has been done. I’d be interested to find out what experience anyone has had with such a method.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
PPC Marketing Strategy: An Unorthodox Approach
PPC can be a bit of a black box affair at best, largely because the networks involved feed us shit and keep us in the dark when it comes to many of the algorithms and metrics used to decide how, when and where they display our ads as well as how much they charge us and why that is. While they give us a lot of information, they never give us quite enough to figure the puzzle out (Quality Score).
The client I’m currently working with has a medium-large sized PPC program that runs completely an auto-pilot: thousands of keywords lumped together in a very few adgroups on which they spend deeply into five figures a month all with absolutely no internal tracking other than total conversions per network. Over the last month or so, I’ve been working with a junior employee at the company to architect a PPC strategy and definea PPC manager role. During this time, we’ve been playing around with all kinds of small tactics to get better control of our programs and I think that last week witnessed a watershed moment.
During a drunken dinner out with what happened to be all the male members of the local staff, I requested that everyone please go home and beat off with their left hands that night. The next morning conversions were up about 10-12%. I am a PPC wizard.
The client I’m currently working with has a medium-large sized PPC program that runs completely an auto-pilot: thousands of keywords lumped together in a very few adgroups on which they spend deeply into five figures a month all with absolutely no internal tracking other than total conversions per network. Over the last month or so, I’ve been working with a junior employee at the company to architect a PPC strategy and definea PPC manager role. During this time, we’ve been playing around with all kinds of small tactics to get better control of our programs and I think that last week witnessed a watershed moment.
During a drunken dinner out with what happened to be all the male members of the local staff, I requested that everyone please go home and beat off with their left hands that night. The next morning conversions were up about 10-12%. I am a PPC wizard.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Basic Rube Goldberg Affiliate Marketing Accounting
The point of the Rube Goldberg series of articles is to give some advice to the uninitiated on how to spend the least wasted effort to structure their online marketing so that they can make the most back out of it. All non-technical marketers start off their online marketing lives with small efforts like one-off pages linked to one-off offers and inevitably end up asking questions. How can they find out who is buying what? How can they link that data back to the purchaser? How can they handle abrupt changes in the status of affiliate offers without having to manually change 100s of links?
There are a million questions that those of us who work inside the industry have been forced to answer already, but that remain mysterious to the neophytes who haven’t been bloodied over the years as the industry grew up around them. The solutions I offer and the advice I give are technology non-specific where possible, deal only with light theory for the most part and are not geared for the experienced operator. After reading, the smaller online marketer without much tech experience should have a grounding in the basic theory of how their systems can begin to work together to more efficiently support their marketing efforts. This will enrich their reporting, their accounting and increase their flexibility so that they can make better marketing decisions with less footwork. It’s not about specific technology, it’s about concepts.
If you’re already at the peak of the game then please drop in and correct my errors or offer your own point of view - all help is appreciated. Being an internet tough guy, however, is not.
Thursday, December 1, 2011
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