Category Archives: Internet Marketing

How Users Consume Media = Monetization Strategies For You

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I’ve been listening to an increasing number of audio podcasts and video posts in the last 12 months, branching beyond the books, magazines and printed PDFs (and occasional PDF I read on my screen) and a thought came to mind:

If you are a marketer are not going to where your leads/prospects/customers are coming from or going to, you could be putting yourself out of their traffic loop, and ultimately the monetization loop.

If you are a merchant or affiliate and primarily using the text channel – articles, blogs, social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and even text ads on Google AdWords, MSN Adcenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing, are you leaving yourself out of the traffic loop if your best prospects are walking around consuming their media on iPods?

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Here’s a brief rundown of my media consumption:

Text: – newspaper, magazines, books, PDFs, text blogs, email -  I am usually sitting in front of my desk, in front of my computer when consuming text-based information. A large part of it has to do with being tethered to my computer.

Even though I have a laptop (actually 2 now…) and there’re a number of Wi-Fi zones around, and even though I have an Apple Touch, I Continue reading →

Web 2.0 Is A Dirty Word…

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Or should that be “Words”?

However, you cut it and define it, there’re marketers out there who do their best to make use of Twitter, Squidoo, Hubpages, MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Metacafe, Youtube, Revver, forums and other social networking site (of the “Web 2.0” ilk) to generate adsense or affiliate income.

Some of them are spectacularly successful, while others just flame up and die, and have their accounts deleted en-masse.

So is Web 2.0 a “dead” technology for marketers?

Are Web 2.0 site destined to become a dead graveyard populated by “internet polluters“?

I don’t think so.

This issue came up during the taping of a Friday Podcast session with Affiliate Classroom’s Marketing VP and affiliate marketing industry veteran Rachel Honoway.

I was pretty impressed that Web 2.0-based affiliates ranked alongside SEO, PPC, Coupon, shopping comparison and other types of profiled affiliates in Affiliate Classroom’s new AC Certified program for Affiliate Managers.

If you recall, Jim Kukral presented a session on “Bloggers as the Next Generation of Super Affiliates” at Affiliate Summit West 2007.

And it’s great to see these new generation of affiliate marketers being profiled in the new program, and even better, there’re tips for new and experienced affiliate managers to reach out to these marketers.

But back to “Web 2.0” for a second.

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last couple of weeks, you’d pick up the thread that this Continue reading →

Get A New PC For Free…By Cleaning Up Digital Clutter

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Although I’ve a pretty nice compact Fujitsu Lifebook ultraportable (not nearly as small as an Asus eee PC, but much more powerful), I’ve accumulated quite a bit of “digital clutter” on it over the past 2 years that I’ve owned it.

Digital clutter occurs when software is installed on a computer, then uninstalled, frequently leaving bits of code in the bootup sequence, or staying resident in the applications or device drivers loaded in RAM.

Another instance of digital clutter occurs when 2 conflicting device drivers or DLL files clash, with the result that the computer either hangs or reboots itself…

I found myself in the dilemma that the Google AdWords Editor didn’t work anymore, Firefox would suddenly hang every 15 minutes or so, and Internet Explorer hasn’t worked for the last year…

Over the past weekend, I did pretty major housecleaning and everything works like new now.

IE is speedy, so is Firefox, I’ve also downloaded the latest versions of the software I’d been using before and was pretty impressive by how much faster the new versions run and the number of new features.

In the process of upgrading however, I lost a couple hundred megabytes of email from Outlook Express. I guess I had hit one of these limits. I have folders within folders, and probably busted the 100,000 email or so limit…As a result, I’ve got my folders starting with “H” all the way to “Z”, but I’ve lost my folders from “A” to “G”.

If there ever was an occasion for a fresh start, I guess this would be it.

One useful tool was a registry cleaner I used, which helped to clean a lot of digital junk from my system.

It’s the first time I’ve used ParetoLogic’s RegCure product and if you aren’t already using it yet, you should test out the trial version.

Here’s what my scan and cleanup showed:

regcure

That’s right, 3,057 errors were found and cleaned…

My system runs much faster now, especially Continue reading →

The Mike Arrington – Eric Marcoullier Connection…

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…or maybe not.

Anyway, when TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington shows up on your MBL widget, something’s brewing:

mike arrington mybloglog

I am making an educated guess that it’s got something to do with the MyBlogLog post I put up.

And I see that Mike has just put up an update that MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier’s new project, Gnip (or gnip central to be exact).

No official word on Eric’s personal blog.

The Gnip Central site which will focus on “Web 2.0 Infrastructure” is still in stealth mode.

You can however, check out Gnip’s entry in the CrunchBase.

I’m sure there’ll be more updates on TechCrunch in time to come.

Unravelling The Rubik’s Cube Of Business Success

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Talking to a number of budding entrepreneur’s at last evening’s Singapore Facebook Developers Garage and hearing about their growing pains served as an impetus to get this post out. Some of you whom I met up with at Affiliate Summit would have heard parts of this, but here it is in more detail…

No matter whether you live in Las Vegas, or Vancouver, BC, New York city or Singapore, the questions are the same – How do you grow your business?

I’m going to outline 3 discrete stages that I see business go through, and I’m going to paint some generalizations here. (generalizations refer to 90-95% of the people in each of these categories out there. So hold off on the flames, especially if you’re part of the 5-10% of “distribution curve busters” out there)

The 3 stages of Continue reading →

Monetization Options For Facebook Application Developers

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In a couple of hours time I’ll be on the panel at the second Singapore Facebook Developers Garage, which features the topic: “Marketing and Monetization of FB Applications: Hype or Goldmine?”

The session moderator Bernard Leong has posted a kickoff post: Marketing and Monetization of Facebook: Prologue

If you’ve spoken to me or exchanged emails, you’ll know that I’m a pragmatist at heart. Having see the rise of the dotcoms and dot-crashes soon after, I’m certainly not in this application if the end result of facebook monetization is mere “hype”.

Talking to Jason Bailey, whom I’m helping to launch his $uperRewards FB monetization system, I’ve seen the applications and case studies of successful FB applications which are making $100,000 – $200,000 a month.

These applications are probably in the top 5% of Facebook applications that turn a profit and a huge profit at that…and the reality of any capitalist society is that you must benchmark yourself against benchmark yourself against the leaders, rather than the other 90% of Facebook developers who are merely scrambling to find two nickels to rub together…

A business must be able to generate positive cashflow and must be able to sustain a comfortable lifestyle for the application creators. Anything less and you’re running a charity.

Let’s break this down for a moment…

An “average” application might generate $10,000 to $15,000 a month, which could be fairly reasonable…until you break that $15,000 by 30 days, or $500 a day.

$15,000 a month or $500 a day, with an assumption of 50,000 daily active users means you are generating 1 cent per daily user…that’s pretty pathetic…

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Instead, if you want to go big with Facebook Applications, you need to define your goal and reverse engineer the process.

I think $100,000 per month is a decent benchmark. (as a starting point…)

With an average of Continue reading →