Online Marketing Glossary: Eighty Twenty Rule

Posted on Oct 7, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing |

Eighty Twenty Rule:

• A rule of thumb that dictates that typically 80% of the products sold in a category will be consumed by 20% of the customers.

This is also known as the Pareto Principal, and more generally is taken to mean that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.  Applied to affiliate marketing, that also generally means that 80% of your sales will come from 20% of your affiliates.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

Review: The Big Book of Spam

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 in Marketing, Reviews | 2 comments

Have you ever actually bothered to ever read some of the subject lines of the ridiculous spam emails you get?  Author Daniel M. Clark decided to do just that – and record all this sarcastic and funny gut reactions to them all in his new book, The Big Book of Spam, available for a reasonable $13.99.

I admit – without knowing Daniel or much about the book he was writing, he sent me one to reivew and I was worried that it might be dry with marketing analysis of spam headlines, and that I wouldn’t get around to reading it (like the last Joel Comm AdSense Secrets eBook I received that I still haven’t read).  But this was a great fun read while I was jetting around the western United States a couple weeks ago on planes and in airports.

Relatively small considering it’s the BIG book of spam (funny in itself), the fonts are big, there’s generally two subject lines and their remarks per page, and it is really funny.  I want to share with you my top 10 from the book.  I shall warn you in advance, there’s some off-color language in a couple.  More than half the book was devoted to the “Sex and Celebrities” category.

1. Do you wish ladies would have an… An…?  What?  An… aardvark?  An… obelisk?  An… infection?  Eww, no, probably not that. An… ice cream cone?  Oooh, yummy!  Yes, I wish ladies would have an ice cream cone, because maybe I could get a lick.  Of the ice cream cone.
   
2. Avoid enhancement pills I’m working on it.  These days the kids are popping enhancement pills like candy, much the same way that my generation used to “smoke the weed”.  It’s very, very important for the word to get out on “the street” that enhancement pills are very “dangerous”.  Parents, heed the words of our noble spammer.  Make sure your “kids” are “staying away” from the enhancement pills.  This “public service message” brought to you by The Big Book of Spam, the spammer who sent it to us, donations from viewers like you, and this station.  Also by a grant from the Corporation for Annoying the Hell Out of People.  And the letter B.  And the number 7.
3. Girls go wild, screaming and stripping and running after me when they see me at the door. It’s embarrassing, really.  Last time it happened, I was walking into a church.  Talk about awkward.
4. Does your spouse bore you to death?  Cheer up! Are you trapped in a boring, loveless marriage?  Do you wish you were happy?  Do you wish that ugly, overweight, unfuckable hag in the ridiculous house coat would just spontaneously combust?  Cheer up!  For only three easy payments of $1999.99, we can arrange… something.  If you know what we mean.
5. No hardware needed, satellite tv on your pc Computer, monitor, network card or modem, a router perhaps… a big satellite in outer goddamn space… nope, no hardware needed at all.
6. Cleanse your Excess Weight Look, I know I’m not Johnny Six-Pack in the abs here, but I don’t need to be told to cleanse my excess weight.  I do that when I shower, and don’t need to be reminded that I should be hitting the gym instead of sitting in front of a computer for ten hours a day.
7. Locate super and despicable Box Software for PC and All Macs!!! Your thesaurus has failed you.
8. Open Your Eyes to Extreme Multidimensional Mascara! I hope it stops at three, because once you start getting into fouth- and fifth-dimensional mascara, strange shit starts to happen.
9. Have your own Vegas Vacation – Participation Required “Honey, I’m off to Vegas.  What?  NO, this thing says I have to.  I’ll be back in a week, I swear – maybe ten days.  Seriously, the email says I have to.  No, of course I won’t hire any hookers.  No, it won’t be like last time.”
10. Paris Hilton Sextape.  We keep up to date with today’s hottest stars Her sex tape was news in 2003 – you’re not keeping up very well with today’s hottest stars if that’s the best you can do.

Online Marketing Glossary: Cloaking

Posted on Oct 6, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing |

Cloaking:

• A deceptive process that sends search engine spiders to alternative pages that are not seen by the end user.  Search engines record content for a URL that is different from what the visitor sees in order to obtain more favorable search positions.

Okay I could be completely off the mark, but practically speaking I think this is what happens when you click on a result on the SERP that has a description that sounds on the mark, but when you get there it’s nothing what you want.

Seriously, can anyone chime in here for some better (or more accurate) examples of this?

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

Online Marketing Glossary: Text Link

Posted on Oct 5, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing |

Text Link:

• A link that is not accompanied by a graphical image.

More commonly in affiliate marketing, display advertising of using banners is going out the door and we see more text links along side of the more technical widgets, videos, and flash banners.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine

Social Media Marketing Summit: Brian Solis

Posted on Oct 4, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Social Media | 2 comments

As promised, I will deliver with more notes from the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference.  This was the second talk of the conference promising to tell attendees why social media is the new and much better PR and how to garner attention and then make the most of it.  The featured speaker was:

• Brian Solis, Founder and CEO, FutureWorks

I’ve heard of Brian previously and had the pleasure of meeting him upon my arrival at the summit Wednesday morning.  Incredibly nice guy – I later found out through Twitter that it was his anniversary and he’d still agreed to come talk!  And it was a great lesson on social media as public relations.

Brian shared some pretty well-known charts he’s created, which we even mentioned in our panel as well since they’re so provocative.

Bullet Point Review!

• PR people are the most popular at any company.
• Social media is like a renaissance of sorts.
• Markets are conversations, participation is marketing.
• We can’t control the message anymore.
• We miss what we’re not part of.
• One -> One and Many -> Many are important communication concepts to use in social media.
• Something to think about: how do you define influence?
• There are 120,000 new blogs started every day (I believe the source was Technorati).
• Social media is not just blogger relations.
• PR is not about top down anything anymore.
• Old metrics no longer ally with the new web.
• Something to think about: are you an evangelist or a consultant?
• Are you confined to the role of a social marketer or do you represent something with long term value?
• This is about public relations – remember that!
• Everyone feels like they’re an expert about something.
• Social media creates a new hybrid of PR professionals.
• We become influencers.
• Understand how to match people to products.
• There are 3 sides to every story – what you want to say, what people want to hear, and the truth somewhere in the middle.
• People = viral.
• No social media is rooted in broadcast, 1 way streams, or blasts.
• Who owns this channel?  Sometimes it’s advertising, PR, marketing, customer service.
• It requires a champion internally, but it’s really everyone’s responsibility.
• It’s the listening that separates experts from the theorists.
• People become pseudo-sociologists – each community is radically different.
• Chart your social media.
• Identify ways to deliver value.
• It’s about conversations not messages.
• Cultivate relationships.
• Remember you’re speaking with people, not an audience.
• DO NOT jump in and start pushing a message or shilling.
• DO NOT SPAM.
• DO NOT fake it.
• Remember that social media requires daily participation.
• Interactive marketing is starting to seriously clash with traditional advertising.
• PR is contending with outsourced relationship managers.
• Web marketers are grappling with digital content creators.
• PR is no longer defined by hits.
• For every bit of information you push out, the higher your authority as an expert becomes.
• Conversations are traceable.
• Social media is not the final frontier – this is just the beginning.
• The semantic web is around the corner.
• Social media is a means, not an end, and is a lesson.
• Being human vs. humanizing your story.
• Either you’re an employee or you’re an evangelist.
• All your social media efforts work back to building your personal brand.
• Respect the community and it will respect you.
• Companies will earn the relationships they deserve within social media.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• How did you decide where you need to be?  Looked at keywords, thought leading people’s names to see where they were, there are tools to show metrics.
• When asking some major brands why they got into social media, they just said they felt like they needed to be there.  When asking them how they track they said “We don’t.” which is cool but scary at the same time.
• There is math you can do to see where or how deeply to participate.  Look up your brand + sucks to see the suck factor and use that to gauge your success.
• What do you look for in hiring a community manager?  They vary, the ones who really understand social web are very expensive.  Use the social media tools to find them – put out a tweet, use LinkedIn.

Great stuff that helped to set some of the high level concepts on social media for the relative newbies in attendance and people who really had the questions on how to make social media work for their business.  I’ve seen lots of people talk about how powerful social media is, but this was very related to make it really work well for your brand and company.  Great job!

Online Marketing Glossary: Optimization

Posted on Oct 4, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing |

Optimization:

• Changes made to a webpage specifically to improve the positioning of the page on search engines.

SEO is a big industry, and it’s the best and most cost effective thing you can do for your website.  There are companies you can hire to do extensive optimization, like New Edge Media, and you can do smaller things on your own with some basic tool sets available around the internet.

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Glossary Definition From ABC’s of Online Marketing by Alexandra Wharton, Issue 22, Revenue Magazine