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Internet Business Toolbar

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Last week I was doing my usual Internet Business blog reading when I came across a recommendation for  30 Minute Backlinks. I checked it out and bought it immediately.

The course teaches you how to create your own software and to have it promoted by software directories. These directories are often highly respected by the search engines and the one-way incoming links are valuable. What a great idea, I thought.

And then I started creating my first software. A toolbar for Internet Explorer and for Firefox. I’m not a big fan of toolbars since they reduce the viewing space in the browser window, especially if you are already running Roboform and have your bookmarks bar open. ut what the heck, I wasn’t creating this to be useful, i was doing it for the links.

And then I started adding links. First I added links to the top 2 dozen Internet business blogs I read regularly. (I’ve actually seen my colleagues sell there bookmarks.) Then I added links to free Internet business tools I use, such as domain finder and smart button creator. Then I thought, why not include links to all the resources, all the software you need to get startd or continue to operate an internet business. I added a menu with links to buy domains, purchase hosting, Roboform, an opt-in page generator, autoresponder, and more. All the tools you need and I use to operate my business.

You can download the toolbar for Internet Explorer here:
http://aliyamarketing.com/Toolbar/InternetBusinessToolbar.exe
or for the Internet Business Toolbar for Firefox, just click here: http://aliyamarketing.com/Toolbar/InternetBusinessToolbar.xpi

Enjoy it with my compliments. You only need to install it once. Any update or changes I make will be reflected automatically. So when I find a new resource, you will have it too. I’m loving this thing for the added productivity, and all I thought I’d be getting was some incoming links.

Let me know what you think and if there is anything you want added.

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Filed in Internet Business, Internet Business Software | Comments (0)

Best Super Bowl Ad Campaign

Monday, February 4, 2008

Five million dollars per minute. $2.6 million for 30 seconds. How can any business justify it? How can you turn a profit spending $2.6 million plus production costs for a 30 second commercial? Web 2.0 to the rescue.

The key to a successful Super Bowl campaign has become creating buzz with your ad. In 2005, CNN money wrote an article noting that one way to get the most bang for your buck is to “Produce a tasteless ad that television executives reject, make it publicly available, and let the free publicity flow.” Sounds like great advice if you don’t care much for your reputation.

I think Doritos, on the hand, figured out the real formula. Sponsor a contest in conjunction with a big Web 2.o such as Facebook, MySpace, or YouTube. I think Doritos went with Yahoo and another. They created a contest and issued a challenge to have anyone who wanted to do so to create a commercial for them. Can you say “zero production cost?” Can you say “Zero creative costs?”

OK, so we know that they had to pay the agency to come up with the idea and to promote the contest, so there were some creative costs. But think about the bang for the buck. While other advertisers were spending all their money on 30 seconds, Doritos invested the money that otherwise would have been spent on production promoting the contest, and their product for, three to six months. Brilliant!

They know that the social networking websites already get more traffic combined than does Google. Yes, those are big numbers. And they are growing by double digits every quarter and multiples annual. Of course that kind of growth cannot continue forever, but who cares. If you want to generate real traffic, you need a way to access those people who are online on the social networking sites.

I’m on them and testing software to make my presence more impactful and to use them to drive traffic to my money sites. How about you? Stay tuned for reviews or insights into what I discover.

Oh yes, I thought the Doritos Super Bowl Ad was one of the best ones too. Funny and memorable. What more can you ask for in 30 seconds? What did you think?

Filed in Internet Business, Traffic | Comments (0)

RaSof Recommendations in Plain English for Free!

Thursday, January 17, 2008

OK, I’m about to do something a little crazy. I’m going to give away a product for which I currently have subscribers paying $75 per month. I could tell you it is for Christmas, but we know it is a little late for that. I could say it’s for my son’s birthday which was last week and the party is this weekend. I love him, but that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m not going to pretend that I’m not getting something for it. But first, here is your free gift and how to get it.

If you are a subscriber to James Brausch’s RaSof, then you know how powerful it is. It analyzes your web page and gives you a spreadsheet with a score. As you make changes to your site to increase your score, the likelihood of your search engine rankings goes up as you improve your on page ranking factors, which account for about 40% of how Google ranks you. (I just saw the other day that Google market share now exceeds 60% of all searches).

Many of us have used RaSof to raise our rankings to get page one rankings for specific keywords. At its current price of $100 per month, RaSof is a good deal even if you only have one website to optimize. But it takes time to decipher and if you haven’t also purchased his Ranking Factors course, which is no longer available, then your changes are all guessework. It is impossible to have a plan.

I created OpraSof for my own sanity and to save time. After running a RaSof report, all I do is copy and paste the URL from the RaSof report into OpraSof. Within seconds it translates the numbers into actionable recommendations based on the underlying data. Should you increase the number of keywords in your page description or decrease them? OpraSof points the way for both the quickest way to increase your score and the optimal way.

If that sounds like it might save you some time, you are right. So how do you get it for free? Simple.

I want more incoming links to this blog. That’s right, no crap about holidays or birthdays or inventory. I’m telling you straight out and upfront what I want and why I’m doing this. I’m giving you a $75/month piece of software for free because I want to increase my incoming links.

So if you have RaSof and you want to see how OpraSof can save you time and aggravation, just trackback to this post from your blog. I’ll email you the link to use OpraSof. And if for some reason you don’t have a blog, just put a link on your web page and post a comment letting me know where to find it. I’m not guaranteeing I’ll approve your comment with a link to your site, but i will check out your site.

Here is the code to make it easy to put a link on your site. Just copy and paste:

<a href=”http://internetbusiness.aliyamarketing.com” target=”_blank”>Internet Business Reflections</a>

And since I’m all about great customer service, I’m going to shoot myself in the foot too. I don’t want my paying customers to get upset that they are paying for something that you are not. If you are already a subscriber to OpraSof, feel free to link to this post or another on my site and if you want to use OpraSof for free, just cancel your subscription going forward. I’ll leave it at the same URL. I’m happy to make this gift and I’ve no doubt you will resubscribe when the time comes.

Oh yes, there is a method to my madness. We all know that RaSof is in the process of being upgraded for 2008 with new data. I don’t know when Brausch will release the new version, but my guess is within a month or two. When that happens, I will need to upgrade OpraSof as well. When I do, I’ll want more people to subscribe. The best way I know how to do that is to give you a free trial. It might last a month, a week, or two months. Whatever it is, I’m convinced that once you use OpraSof, you won’t want to be without it.

I’m also thinking about creating my own software that will analyze any website and provide advice on how to optimize the on page factors. The data, of course, would be culled from actual search results. And like OpraSof, it’s advice would be in plain English and be easy to follow. Regarding that, I have two questions:

  1. There is much out there on SEO, but it is hard to separate fact from fiction. What are your most burning questions related to on page ranking factors that if I create this software, you would want included?
  2. How much would you be willing to pay for software that gives you plain English advice, reverse engineered from Google itself, on how to optimize your on page ranking factors in order to help you get higher rankings in Google?
Filed in Internet Business, Internet Business Software, SEO | Comments (0)

CVS - Customer Service at its Worst

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

CVS, once a small Rhode Island drugstore, is now one of the largest pharmacy and convenience store chains in the country. Here in little RI, we specialize in corruption, so it was not a shocker last year when the CEO of CVS, one of the state’s largest companies, was implicated in bribing public officials. As a taxpayer, that got me mad, but not nearly as mad as the business practices of this chain.

I’m a pretty good father. I am crazy about my 9 year old son and 6 year old daughter. They both love photography, like I do, so I let the older one use my older camera and for the little one I have been buying one shot cameras. With 24 or 35 shots per camera, she burns through them pretty well. Unfortunately, we don’t always rush them to get developed.

A couple of weeks ago we finally dropped off 5 or 6 cameras that had accumulated, and we headed out of town for the New Year. The next day I got a call from a Providence police detective telling me he needed to meet with me, but he was very cryptic about why.

When I finally charmed him into to telling me what it was about, I discovered that CVS had called the police when they saw some of the photos we had dropped for developing. Evidently the help at CVS couldn’t tell the difference between child porn and a five-year old shooting nudes of friends. The policeman almost apologized but said we had to meet. Given that he was wasting my time, I asked him to drop by the house instead of me going to him. No problem.

I was surprised not to recognize the girls in the photos. I later discovered my daughter had taken them the previous summer on vacation with her mom and another family. There were definitely some nudes and a few close ups as well. As the detective noted, it was pretty clear the kids were having fun and they were healthy. He left the photos and thanked me for my time.

I picked up the photos the next day at CVS. I paid for them and then looked at them when I got to the car. Only four rolls had prints, but I paid for five. They had charged me for the photos they printed and gave to the police, but they never gave them to me. I didn’t particularly care that the police had. I had given CVS 5 rolls, they charged me and gave me 4 printed and gave the 5th to someone else, yet they charged me for it.

I went back in and when I request a credit they called the manager. He tried to tell me that he printed them for the police and that I had to pay. I asked if they often give product to someone and charge someone else for it. He refused to refund my $7.

The fascinating part of all this is that they had just given me a $2 off coupon to get me to come back in the store. I spend well over $1,000 per year at CVS and most of it in that location which is 100 yards from my home. But this genius couldn’t figure out that it might be worth it to give me the credit to satisfy an angry customer even one that spends a good amount in his store (he can check how much I spend because I have one of those little cards that lets them track). Some loyalty program!

I have high expectations for customer service since I used to be in retail and regularly provided it. James Brausch just posted on the lifetime value of a customer. I always understood it and regularly went out of my to provide it as you can see in stories on my fundraising blog, but used to be my combined Internet marketing and fundraising ideas blog. I actually paid a $15 parking ticket for a customer who bought a 90 cent ice cream cone from me. So, am I an idiot, or is the CVS store manager?

Filed in Internet Business | Comments (0)

Tell Me Why

Thursday, January 10, 2008

In his book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Ciladini tells of a fascinating psychological study performed by Ellen J. Langer of Harvard in the 1970’s. He cites it as support for the well known principle of human behavior that when someone asks us for a favor, we want to know the reason why.

Of course you say. You know that because you are human and you recognize that you like to know reasons too, so what’s so fascinating about that? What Langer’s study showed was that it doesn’t matter what the reason is, simply providing a reason is enough!

Langer’s subjects interrupted people and asked to let them cut in line at the copy machine. When they asked, “Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine?” 60% said yes. If you are in sales, that’s not a bad closing rate for simply asking.

However, when the question was posed as, “excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine because I am in a rush” the rate of success exploded to 94%, more than a 50% increase over the previous question. Of course, you say, they gave a good reason and people were polite. Perhaps you are right.

Then the questions was changed to, “Excuse me, I have five pages, may I use the Xerox machine because I have to make some copies.” Not exactly a good reason, or even one that has added any information at all to the request. In fact, it is almost nonsensical. However, the success rate only dropped to 93%, just one percentage point!

Langer noted that: “the listener at the copy machine heard a two-part statement: a request and something like a reason. That was all their mental script for such a situation required. They never did reflect on the fact that the interrupter’s ”reason” was not meaningful.”

Cialdini calls this a “trigger feature.” We respond to the request because when we hear the word “because” or when we hear a request structured as a two part statement, one resembling a request and the other a reason, it triggers a script within us and we comply.

There are many triggers cited by Cialdini and by others that can help us craft a more compelling offer. I’ll be writing about them here.

So right now you need to fill in your name and email address in the upper right corner, under my photo, because when you do, you will get an email when I post more wisdom like this to this blog. You do want to know more about how to increase your response rate, don’t you?

Filed in Copywriting, Internet Business | Comments (0)