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From Sinbad’s Summer Jam – year unknown (but semi-recent)

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I had a wonderful post I spent about an hour on this am and it disappered when I clicked the publish button.  I’ll try to recreate it over lunch…

John Whiteside has a great post today on OpinionatedMarketers.com in which cites OMStrategy.com saying that while traffic is nice, it’s conversion rates that we should be watching.  Here’s a great example:

The OM Strategy piece gives a simple set of examples; on one extreme, there’s a site with 1,000 visitors, a 1% conversion rate, and $1,500 of revenue. On the other extreme is a site with half the traffic but a 3% conversion rate and $2,250 of revenue (on the same hypothetical $150 average order).

Read the full post here.

Sam Whitmore at MediaSurvey (a paid registration site, and a Vario customer…) broke the news yesterday that IDG (Vario also has done several projects for IDG companies) would stop publishing the print version of Infoworld Magazine. 

InfoWorld will announce on Monday that it is discontinuing its print edition, sources tell SWMS. There may be other aspects to the reported announcements.

David Churbuck notes on his blog that:

“…it’s not a big surprise, nor, does it mean anything especially dire or negative about the ongoing strength of the InfoWorld franchise online.”

Former Inforworld reporter and veteran tech media hand Jim Forbes has an excellent bit on his blog here.

My take: expect to see more niche publications expedite their transition from print to online, esp. in tech where changes happen so fast that long print publishing cycles leave them reporting yesterday’s news, when compared with their online counterparts.  As Churbuck notes, online vs. print is only a question of how the material is delivered.

The big question will be how they will fare at maintaining ad revenue and journalistic standards.

(update 3/26/07 – story is confirmed, and there is a great piece on Matt McAlister’s site…the official InfoWorld announcement is here, and worth a read.)

This one’s in high rotation on Madison’s Ipod – Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, at Lowell, MA last year doing “Belladonna” – This makes Grace the first artist to appear twice in Friday Music Videos here at Radio Free Vario…

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(Note – if you haven’t read about the Google Pay Per Action advertising program, go to this post and read about it first…)

I’ve got my publisher hat on here.  Let me ask this question:  why should I as a publisher be responsible for the effecacy of your campaign?

Think about it, if I buy a car because it has an air bag in it, I can’t refuse to pay for the car until such time as the air bag has deployed.  But that’s the essence of the new pay per action program from Google.  Publishers only get paid when someone goes to company XYZ’s site and does something they want them to do, such as sign up for a service, buy a product or register to do something.  So why am I at risk if you’ve got a crappy product? 

Let’s look at a potential scenario.  I’ve got a bunch of advertisters testing the water on my site with Pay Per Action.  They’ve (prudently) got maximum expenditures set and the well constructed campaigns fulfill for the day rather early.  Meanwhile I’ve got the clowns clogging up my ad cycles using my inventory…for free.  Think about it, what we’re doing here is offering do overs for people who can’t convert on the customers we’ve delivered them. 

Essentially, Pay Per Action makes the publisher responsible for the full advertising cycle, and it makes them the eventual fall guy for problems wholly out of their control. 

Another scenario: I have a niche site with a hundred thousand active users in a particular interest group, let’s say Saltwater Fly Fishing.  I have one campaign that’s cycling on my site for a $20 pair of binoculars.  And another for a $900 rod and reel combo.  But both are running at the same bid amount.  Am I potentially going to sell more binoculars or rods?

I’m not saying no, yet, to pay per action, and frankly, I could be missing something.  But I really think that if I’m going to be made responsible for the entire cycle, I should have the following:

• The ability to set a minimum bid price on ads in rotation on my site.
• Instead of a bid, I should recieve a commission on the sale. 
• I should easily be able to opt out of campaigns and customers, without having to manually enter the excluded advertisers. 

The truth here is publishers have been asked to shoulder a lot of the risk, with no promise of partaking in the benefits.

(Tommorrow I will give my assessment from the point of view of an advertiser…)

Forget about parsing RSS feeds, etc.  The Anchorage Daily News has assigned David Hulen, reporter and editor to amass all the news an Alaskan (or Anchoragean) would want.  A similar experiment is underway in other locations as well.  Read about it at Etaoin Shrdlu.

My experience is that they’re right on the money – nothing beats a good editor parsing and assembling news.  Keep an eye on this one folks…it’s called Alaska Newsreader.

(Comments trivia: Who among you can tell me what Etaoin Shrdlu signifies (without reading about it on the site…post your answer in the comments area below)

Google quietly announced the new pay per action ads. 

Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher’s site. You’ll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site.

I’m looking forward to testing this, but I’m concerned that the minimum bids will be fairly high.  Then again, what would you pay for a qualified lead for your business?

Surprisingly, they’ve really hidden their launch of the text link feature, one that many of us, as readers, are sure to hate.  What it will do is insert links in your website to that will pop up a google ad when moused over.  You mention chevy trucks, and you end up with a mouse over pop up for the chevy dealer.  Kind of like the step child of the IntelliTEXT ads like you see here.  I’ll withhold judgement until I see more but my general inclination is to avoid them, both as a publisher and an advertiser.

Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher’s page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher’s recommendatory text: “Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today.” (Mousing over the link will display “Ads by Google” to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Little things you can do to get big results

Sometimes it’s the little things that make the difference. For the small contractor, the little things can be the deciding factor between marketing (and sales) success. Let’s take a look at a few things you can (and should) do to improve customer perception and get more work.

The key differentiator for the small contractor is professionalism. You need to embrace professionalism in all that you do. The little things, like keeping a tidy jobsite, showing up when you’re say you will (or calling to say you won’t) will make a big difference in the long run. This runs true to your marketing efforts. If you seem professional, you will be treated as a professional.

1. Get a good, consistent logo and use it on everything. Put it on your truck (that could be your best advertisement), project signs, shirts, estimates, invoices, everything. Be sure it works in both color and black and white.

2. Set a standard for company vehicles – white vehicles with the logo painted on the door. You might even want to number them (even if you’ve only got two) but use high numbers. Vehicles are some of the best advertising for a small contractor. There are some truck painting schemes here, but remember you don’t have to make the truck look like a Nascar racer. (more…)

I realized the other day that I don’t really watch network TV anymore. For some reason my TV gets an odd disruption every few minutes, and it seems to happen most prevailantly on the big three, yet not on Fox, which in my zone lands squarely between the others on 4,5 and 7. 

Sure, I might watch the formerly big guys on the bedroom tv once in a while, but the truth is, I don’t miss them.  They don’t really host any of the shows I tend to watch anymore.  And the slide has been so slow, it never occurred to me until now.

Sure, I get my eyeball time in, but it’s not that often.  Usually I’ll look for a movie or History Channel, or perhaps something on Food Network.  I’ll definitely make time for Battlestar Galactica and I’ll admit I’m quickly catching up on the Sopranos thanks to A&E – to the point that I may get HBO before the new season starts.

So when did things turn for me?  60 Minutes used to be an institution, but with the vast amount of news magazine shows, I make the choice I think many make, none at all.  The last thing I want to see is another one of those stupid “to catch a predator” or to hear about the pros & cons of global warming again.  How about “To throw a predator in a wood chipper” or “Global Warming the reality game” where we force proponents from the  to live outside in New England for a winter.  I haven’t figure out the suitable test for the con side…yet.

I guess over the past few years, the sitcoms started to leave me flat. Canned laughter just doesn’t do it, and no matter how you redo it, it all seems like lesser fodder.  The good stuff now seems to come from the oddball channels. Sara Silverman, Dave Chappelle or Carlos Mencia (okay, I am aware of the talk of his copping other comedians stuff) all have better laughs than the sitcoms.  Okay, I take it back – I do like to see My Name is Earl once in a while.

Drama?  I have yet to see anything that gets me going.  I guess I’m lucky that I work like a dog, I’m not generally around to see how bad it’s gotten.