Kill Santa: an Internet Marketing story

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When’s the best time to go into Internet Marketing some ask.

Anytime.

But if you’d want to capitalize on huge masses of people, rabid for products, and willing to shell out top dollar for products and services, you can’t get better than special events, celebrations and holidays.

The Olympics and World Cup are way past (with some racking in revenue in the tens of thousands off affiliate marketing) and retailers rejoice as the year-end shopping comes about.

For some retailers, more than half their annual revenue could come from the Christmas shopping season alone, so there’s adequate time to do strategic planning to capitalize on the business opportunities.

We can’t kill Santa, but we can sure make a killing at Christmas.

How fantatical are the consumers? Consider Zach Comm’s (son of Adsense guru Joel Comm) post on: Bionicle – A Fan Critiques the New Sets.
Fanatically loyal fans can make and break the market.

Put toys and Christmas together and you have a lucrative market.
To succeed however, you’d need to do accurate research to position yourself for success.

Here’re some suggestions:

  • Scope out the forums: What’re the hot topics? The Xbox360 and PS3 are on everyone’s lips, but could there be a sleeper hit? Maybe paintball guns? The new-fangled Furbies? Star Wars toys? Only insiders have the inside scoop, so blend in, get the buzz.
  • Top seller’s lists/wishlists: Amazon and other retailers list their bestsellers (possibly updated hourly depending on their order processing infrastructure). Identify trends. What’re the hot new technologies that’ll be in toys? GPS? Bluetooth? USB/firewire connectivity? What will the next ‘killer’ toy be? Is it for boys? girls? unisex?
  • Support for other channels: Successful retailers will tend to expand their branding and presence by branching into other media like Web sites and TV programs, cartoons, etc. You can gauge the popularity of these media by looking at their Alexa/Google PR rankings (for the Web), Nielsen ratings for TV, and rating services for radio programs.
  • Offline still rules: The above channels are adopted by manufacturers/brand owners, but it’s important to adopt a needs-based approach and get feedback from the consumers themselves. Poll your little nephew/niece and his friends. Talk to your friends kids. Get a pulse for what’s hot and hip. Not from the advertisers, but from the consumers.

With good data at your fingertips, you can then position yourself.

Opportunities are always out there.

It’s just a matter of seeing them.

Viral Internet Marketing: fedexfurniture.com

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FedEx FurnitureCredit to Gwen for pointing this site out on her site: GwendolynTan.com.

Let’s look at the elements of this site:

  • An intriguing story

Jose’s friends moved to Seattle and did not have a job. Although they managed to get housing, they didn’t have furniture. They decided to built furniture using Federal Express shipping boxes.

Some time later, Jose moved to Arizona and faced the same problem. He decided to follow their example building his own furniture, which now includes:

  • desk
  • bed
  • couch
  • dining table
  • chairs

Whether you’re curious about how they did it, or just wondering if they’re plain crazy, you’ll be drawn to their site.

How sticky is their site?

Very. Even though they don’t have a technorati account, there are 91 links to their fedexfurniture.com. (now 92 after counting this post!)

Their Google PageRank (PR) is a mighty 6. (anything above a 4 means the Google Spiders crawl your site very regularly). Their Alexa ranking is also a respectable 439,637 (as of Aug 19,2006).

What helps is that lots of traffic has been generated from links from several high authority sources like:

  • Digg
  • Livedoor (a large Japanese portal)
  • USA Today
  • Wired
  • TechCrunch
  • Boing Boing
  • The Seattle Times

Controversy, controversy

The biggest element of their publicity likely has been the frenzy whipped up by FedDex. Look at the legal letters they’ve sent to poor Jose.

It’s better publicity than anything you could buy at Google AdWords.

Where’s the money?

To monetize their traffic, Jose and company could consider revenue streams such as:

  • Google Adsense
  • Leveraging off their PR ranking to sell backlinks to other sites
  • Affiliate marketing to monetize their incoming traffic
  • Do promotions for other companies like furniture or deliveries companies (can you imagine UPS or Ikea advertising on their site?)

Ewen Chia the Internet Marketing and Affiliate Marketing guru

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Ewen Chia Secret Affiliate WeaponI have been looking at Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon for some time.

It’s quite impressive that a Singaporean has gone on to build a list of 200,000 customers from just one product.

I have been quite keen to check out his Secret Affiliate Weapon for some time.

I procrastinated.

And procrastinated.

Even though I’d heard a lot of good things about it, and it only cost $9.97.

I decided to wait. And do nothing.

It took my friend Stuart Tan’s post that Ewen might be going into semi-retirement that spurred me into action.

I took the plunge this afternoon and bought it.

I am glad I did and I should’ve done it sooner.

Secret Affiliate Weapon comes with a whole pack of ebooks and videos that will keep me occupied this weekend.

I am astounded how he has managed to give this much information for $9.97. I’ve bought products in the hundred of dollars which have contained less useful information. This is fantastic value.
To encourage others to get into the world of affiliate marketing, I’ve done a tie-up where I’ll package additional information to those who buy the product on my recommendation.

If you are keen to explore creating another stream of income through affiliate marketing, do check out the offer I’ve put together. You can click on: Andrew Wee’s offer for Ewen Chia’s Secret Affiliate Weapon.

Kelvin Hui: 5 Principles of SEO for Internet Marketing success

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Check out Kelvin Hui’s SEO Principles video.

Quite useful information for Internet Marketers.

This is part of Kelvin Hui’s Backlink video series.
The snippet covers Kelvin Hui’s 5 Principles of SEO

They are:

  1. Postulation: when will your website need SEO
  2. Define the purpose for your online business
  3. Off-Site Optimization
  4. On-Site Optimization
  5. Factors that control the traffic result

Check out the video, it’s worth the time to watch it.

Building your Internet Marketing empire from scratch

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For those taking your tentative steps in Internet Marketing, it can be quite overwhelming.

I’m getting flooded by all the material on blogging, product creating, affiliate marketing, adsense, domain parking, etc.

To make sense of it all, i’d suggest to focus on ONE area, and work on it.

There’s not much point to know a bit about everything, but not be able to implement any one thing, really well.

Remember, it’s better to be a “one-trade master” than a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.

In the midst of my learning, I’ve been sidetracked a number of time, and took a bit of time to regain the track.

Here’re some steps to get focused:

  • Set aside a block of time to establish mastery in a single area. Depending on how many hours you are able to commit 1 to 2 weeks is a good period of time.
  • Get into the habit of spending at least 1 hour a day in this subject area. During this turn, you can choose to go somewhere where you are free of all distracts.
  • Go into it full force. Check out websites, blogs, forums, printed books from the library and bookstores, sign up for mailing lists.

Are you familiar with your selected area?

Take the following self-test:

  • Briefly summarize this technology
  • How can you and others benefit from it?
  • Who are the major players in this subject area?
  • What are the major issues currently?
  • What’s in the next stage of development for this area?

If you are able to confidently answer these issues, especially the benefits, you’ll be able to verbalize and apply this knowledge.

As you establish proficiency in your selected area and only after you are feeling reasonably confident, should you move on to the next area.

Increase your Internet Marketing profile with Alexa

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You may already be somewhat familiar with Alexa.
It inevitably shows up on Spyware detectors like Spybot Search and Destroy and Ad-Aware.
You may even have removed it thinking it’s spyware.

It is in a fashion in that it tracks your surfiing behavior and tracks which sites you visit and registers a ‘vote’ for that site.

In that manner, it ranks websites and blogs by their popularity.

For example, the top ranked site is Yahoo!

Followed by MSN, Google, MySpace, Ebay.

Not so surprising you might say.

At the same time, you can check the ranking of your site too.

For example, as of the time of writing this blog, WhoIsAndrewWee.com is ranked 662,094 out of the universe of websites.

Not too bad, considering that about a month of intensive effort has gone in thus far.

However, Alexa’s rankings should be taking as an indicative guideline, rather than a definite guide.

It tracks users who have the Alexa toolbar installed on their computer, so the surfing behavior of Linux and Apple users may not be accurately reflected. Likewise, Alexa is compatible with Internet Explorer (IE) and may not capture the surfing behavior of Mozilla Firefox users either.

This doesn’t mean that the results are not accurate, however, you can use them as a general guidelines and use audit/tracking software to measure traffic on your site.

As you take a look at the graph above, you can see that this blog has been active since mid July 2006 and traffic has started to increase steadily.

By monitoring the traffic, you have a better idea how events such as product launches, content renewals can affect your viewership.

Alexa also has a set of add-ons which you can add to your website or blog through their developer’s section.

Test it out and feel free to leave comments.