Sometimes you bump into the ruins of a website – something you remember was mind-blowing awesome, yet now stands frozen in time like an old black and white picture. Beyond the WayBack Machine, I’m talking about real sites still online that got stuck in time. My favorite such site is:
Avatar Teleport
Do you have a favorite stuck-in-time site?
Its nice to know the FTC isn’t just chasing bloggers.
Skechers is about to pony up $40 Million to settle FTC charges that it claimed (unsubstantiated) their shoes would make you lose weight, increase heart health, get stronger and longer erections, grow hair, increase breast size and even whiten your teeth if you rub the insole against your gums.
Now really dear old pal’FTC… How about turning the old death ray at the beauty and cosmetics industry?
“How do you measure the ROI of farting underwater?” – That question is easier to answer than measuring the ROI of a brand campaign – like this one from BASF “The Chemical Company”.
BASF Love you too!
To the their credit, the video is good, it has a 70s feel which tells me the target demographic, they are using “affection marketing” – they start off by saying they believe love is a chemical reaction and blah, blah… Anyhow, next time I’m looking for chemicals for my next batch of meth, I’ll be sure to hit up my BASF rep.
We need to get rid of the “copyright” idea and create a system that really provides the benefits copyright delivered gracefully until the dawn of the digital age – and then got literally murdered by modern computing.
Here’s the thought process:
A copyright is intended to aid the creation and dissemination of new works by providing the economic benefit derived from real and artificial scarcity
Scarcity is becoming harder to come by these days. We have abundance.
In the past/present pretty much everything you do is your property and copyright. The default is “protected”
I propose a system where you have to apply for a scarcity license. This isn’t like simply filing for a copyright for a piece of work – this is much more than that – it puts the burden on the creator to DEMONSTRATE that if they are granted an “Artificial Scarcity License”, then society will actually benefit. Society has to benefit here, not the creator of the work exclusively (I have a feeling the Generation Y and Millenial tree huggers would love this idea).
So you could prove that by protecting your motion picture that cost xx to make, next year you’ll be able to provide audiences with a better movie they will enjoy more. If the protection wasn’t there, we’d be limited to youtube clips. You could prove that protecting your blog post will give you a chance to make more good posts. Protecting your software will allow you to make better bug-free software. You might also be able to prove something similar for your music if you’re a music label. You probably won’t be able to prove this unless your business delivers something other than just scarcity and rapes the market. The key here is you have to prove you have been doing this broader improvement of the art, the economics or society, or can at least plausibly deliver on your promise, and will be accountable to do so with your Artificial Scarcity License on the line if you don’t.
In the age of abundance, the burden of proof needs to lie with those that desire scarcity. We will give you scarcity, only when you work in favor of our broader abundance.
PS: No, I’m not actually going to do anything substantial other than write about this. I’m a big-picture whiz-bang idea guy – Let the folks with OCD figure out the details.
PPS: Yes, this is similar to patents.
Heading out to ASW11 in a few hours – Hit me up on Twitter if you’d like to meet-up!
This is the best frickin Affiliate Marketing site on the net. You take 2 things that are hard to do together Learning about marketing and looking at porn and put them all on 1 page I couldnt ask for much more. Maybe upgrading to an Xtube video feed for the Gratuitous Eye Candy
Interesting idea… Xtube feed. I gotta keep it tasteful, you know – no “2 girls 1 cup” kinda stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_Girls_1_Cup
This is one of those posts I know I will regret within minutes…
A while back I started reading The Salty Droid’s blog.
Honestly, I don’t get it. The guy behind The Salty Droid is funny and brilliant – I laughed my ass off with his videos.
What I don’t get is how “The Syndicate” are totally evil scumbags.
I just listened to 90 minutes out of two hours of a Syndicate conference call The Salty Droid posted on his blog. I was really hoping to find some really juicy stuff – You know, killing kittens and human sacrifices to Cthulhu. All I found was a couple of guys trying to figure out how to do their product launch to get the most money – Their products may be good, or they may be shit – They’re probably shit, yet that’s not for me to judge. What I can make a judgment call on is the tone of the conversation and their intentions.
Yes, they sell an overpriced dream. And they use many of science’s best marketing tactics available. And they are fairly well organized, to the point they can surround you with the message. Almost like a true cult… So? Life is chock-full of friends, and also brimming with people trying to fuck you over. What else is news? They belong to the “People trying to fuck you over” category – If we lived in the world of “The Invention of Lying”, then I would be shocked, as it is, these guys are kiddie candy thiefs – Why so much hate?
I was hoping to hear how they were going to fuck people over by having them hand over their retirement funds in exchange for the philosopher’s stone – or something like Enron, or like Jim Jones and “The People’s Temple”, and really all they talk about is how to structure the launch so it sells more. I was hoping to hear how they were going to take the money and run to Bermuda. Or how they were going to escape the FBI. Or how they were going to embezzle ClickBank. Jeez, at the very least I was hoping to hear them talk about their customers in a condescending tone! Not even. WTF. Where is the video of Sekhmet drinking the blood of Syndicate adepts?
Why should you regret this post? I also discovered the Salty Droid some while ago and thought it was funny and useful to get some background information about some of the supposedly “big gurus” in the internet marketing business. Interesting to see how much money you can still pull with this stuff. By the way, who started this “I Make Money Online By Telling People How I Make Money Online” thing, it wasn’t John Chow was it? 
You’ll see – it never fails. It is indeed amazing what they do – at the same time these cronies are just ants crawling around the mouth of the shithole – a shithole that every time I thought I had seen the very bottom, I was wrong. I dare you to even peek under the hood of the cesspool of astrology.
Lets see who can spot where I fucked up, changed the landing page and went to bed ASS-uming everything was just fine.
Two lessons on “tooling”:
I do put my brain within the definition of #2 above – I try to take good care of it, sharpening it if you will, and avoiding needless “damage”…
Anyway, Back to Office 2010. I use PowerPoint, Word and Excel on a daily basis – big time. I have a neural link to these tools – I think and magic just happens.
Yesterday I decided to buy the upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010.
After a day of use I can honestly say there is no fucking difference between 2007 and 2010. What a way to wallpaper Wily E. Gates’ mansion. Can you imagine any other place where you can continue to sell a shitload of the same crap you were selling three years ago, slap a new sticker on it and pass it for new?
Uhhh.. Hello, FTC, Champion of the poor, witless and innocent, where are you when we really need you? Chasing bloggers again? Flushing your colon with berry juice? Seriously?
If you’re heading towards the corporate ranks, grab this Douchebag Dictionary and memorize it. You’ll be a corporate douchebag in no time at all!
Every area of life has its own lingo… The cube farm is no exception.
Here’s an excerpt:
I want to make sure we cover everything we need to in this meeting, but I have a hard stop at two p.m.
Due to rightsizing, we’ll be eliminating 50% of the department. We still have the same deliverable targets.
There’s a marketing team skull session tomorrow on the fallout from having Mel Gibson as the celebrity spokesperson for the new product line.
Here’s a ten-step guide to developing a killer social media strategy for your company.
We are actualizing synergy amongst team members directly related to the project.
If you are really headed to cubefarm, here’s a video sneak peek at life behind the suit: Endless conference calls.
With so many distractions in life, it is very hard to stay focused on what you are trying to accomplish and a whole lot easier to just coast through life.
Here’s my litte strategy…
Every single time I do something I ask myself “How does this help me…<insert goal here>” .. Use your brain here, you’re not a machine – You likely have multiple goals, and often conflicting ones: Make $1K a day, Spend Quality time with family, Connect with friends, stay healthy. You know what category everything you do might fall on – When you catch yourself doing something that either doesn’t fall into any of the major categories of what you’re trying to do, chances are you don’t need to be doing it…
The hardest part is when you’re doing something that might fall into one of the activities you need to do for your goals… You might be reading a blog, like this one… Then ask yourself “How does this help me reach $1K a day?” be honest and if the answer is “It doesn’t”, you just close the browser, put the iPad away and just go do something that does help you.
That’s my little secret to actively balance family, work, and social life instead of just letting the pieces fall where they may.
Why are monsters green? From Shrek to ‘Mike’ in Monsters Inc, The Hulk and a host of others – The main color of “mosnter” is green. Why is that? Green is all around us in plants. Is it to be a “strange” thing? Why not blue? Blue seems much rarer in our environment.
Infected mucus is also green, but I don’t see that as doing much. I don’t think plants (or anything green for that matter) were ever our natural enemies to get programmed into genetic memory. Perhaps we’ve evolved to not eat green shit – considering we can’t really digest plant cellulose, and quite a few plants are downright poisonous. Aha! that might be the ticket – quite a hard to prove one – Why would we be scared of moving green and not stationary green, and thus be grass-a-phobic too? Movement of something that our brain considers stationary? Could that trigger something in our primitive minds?
Talk about some mid-morning rambling.
In Boston we have a really BIG Green Monster.
My recent post Scraper Sites Stealing Your Clicks and Cash
The grass *is* greener on the other side, but you have to know how to mow it or the weeds will eat you alive.
The dynamic keyword ads did NOT work. Their performance sucked across all the search engines I tried. However, I can drill down and cherry-pick the ones inside the group that DID work!
Today I saw this on my PPC tracking:
It caught my eye because it came with broken URL parameters. I check out the URL that drove these guys to my site and its starts with http://feed.validclick.com/monitor.php?key=tag-
What is this? I went to http://www.validclick.com/ and started reading… I’m trying to understand what these folks do… and why they’re driving traffic to my site – even if it was just one visitor – its coming with all sorts of tags, including an affiliate ID. Is someone re-selling my ads?
Got my Olympus 6020 Tough in the mail! Awesome.
Things I notice:
1) Looks awesome
2) To charge the camera, you have to have the battery door open. Are these people retarded? This is supposed to be a waterproof camera – Charging should be by induction coil, not hard dock, let alone with a sealed hinge open and exposed.
3) The battery fits in backwards just as easily. This is dumb. The Canon guys got this right. Why would you allow a battery to be shaped so that it fits in the wrong way too? Just to piss folks off?
I’ll keep posting nuggets. I know its a really good camera… Lets see it first-hand.
This “P2″ theme from Automattic serves its purpose well. Since it ain’t broken, I’m going to try to fix it! Its a great way to procrastinate on more important stuff
Porn anyone? A while back I though to myself… “I wonder if there is money in Porn affiliates…” .. Of course there is – Its one of the natural (non-artificial) programmed imperatives. Trouble is, the market is crazy saturated. Still that didn’t scare me, so I went digging a bit.
Sidebar: Interesting SEOMOZ article: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/yes-dear-there-is-porn-seo-and-we-can-learn-a-lot-from-it
I didn’t have to go very far to realize I wasn’t going to cut the mustard here. I landed on the “Go Fuck Yourself” forums at http://www.gfy.com/ .. they have some very interesting “Educational Series” http://www.gfy.com/forumdisplay.php?f=38 with some pretty advanced shit technical-wise and business wise.
Anyway, I checked out what these guys do, followed threads and links at Go Fuck Yourself (gotta love the name of the board) and I just can’t do it – There’s no way. Its not about ‘moral’ qualms or anything of the sort – this is business. Its not about ‘what will they say’ or family, etc, etc… Its way simpler than that for me. All the tits and ass are just way-way-way too distracting. I would never get anything done. I seriously wonder how the hell those folks manage to concentrate on the task at hand with all the body parts flying around…
I got thinking…. “Could I create a gallery page like this? Could I explain to a designer what I want on a page or banner? (I could already see myself reviewing the design of a Hentai banner: “No, no, no… The tentacle has to go in the *left* ear, but the jizz comes out the nose – and can you make it look like a jizz tsunami?” Then I thought… Would I go in and touch-up the text or the action on an animated blow-job banner?” That ended the train of thought…. NEEEEXT!
Hunting for stock photos at iStockphoto
Opera submitted their browser to the iPhone App store and put a timer on their site to show the world how long it takes Sour Apple to approve. Can they count to never? Apple doesn’t like apps that compete with the the built-in ones.
What’s the point of the counter if there are no consequences for counting to infinity? It shouldn’t be a count-up to NEVER, it should be a count-down to something SOON! Whatever it is – an underground version of Opera for Jailbroken phones, an ICBM launch to Cupertino, SOMETHING!
Holy shit! Three conversions today Monday! I decided to check Clickbank before tumbling into bed – I have to wake up in four and a half hours to take the kids to school (who was the fucktard that decided school should start at the crack of dawn?). Anyway.. Wow
Awesome. I went a little deeper here… Looks like I need to swallow my words from a previous post. I am seeing three conversions, but only two names in those three lines. My first thought was ‘a duplicate billing’ – but its not – The second like with the repeated name came in three minutes after the first one and its for a bit less than half – that’s the up-sell! This person bought the initial up-sell after buying the product. The item number is different, the amount is different, the personal info is the same.
So awesome – I’m dying to watch this on ClickTale tomorrow. It has to be tomorrow because I’m about to pass out now.
Wohoo!!
Crashing to bed
Working on a PowerPoint deck, late for a Doctor’s appointment.
An opportunity in a parallel niche presented itself on Friday… I think I may go for it – Looks like a very low hanging fruit. I managed to rip all the content I need in a nice structured way with a combination of Teleport Pro VLX and Jdownloader, with URL massaging courtesy of UltraEdit 32 and ‘column mode’ as well as a few command lines.
I would need hosting somewhere like the Netherlands for this one, though – and probably use either an NL registrar or my old and trusted French registrar Gandi.net http://www.gandi.net/ – Not that this is very shady, but sometimes you just want to err on the safe side of things.
Checked my stats – Another conversion on Friday – I can’t wait to watch it on ClickTale! … I’ve got to play in the Rat Race this morning, though. Mega-hyper bummer. I’m getting the feeling that my landing page conversion rate is really goo, but that this would rock if I could get it tuned as I mentioned earlier.
Ended up furniture shopping yesterday. All fun. As I said, Life 2.0 is not entirely compatible with Marketer 1.0. It causes all sorts of conflicts in sub-modules.
Internet Marketing tip #1: Don’t get a life, it sucks all of your time – but you’ll gladly give it all your time.
Case in point, today my wife and I are playing Pengo with the furniture. Pengo involved shovin stuff around, this feels a lot like it. I think she’s makin room for Stage 2: Buy more stuff, so we have more moving pieces every time it’s rainy outside.
I’m analyzing the HTML of a site out there.. They have a hidden form, its a Form tag that contains links with likely SEO descriptions. Seems like a “link exchange” or link juice passing. Don’t really know, but looks very odd.
ClickTale is awesome – Seriously. I enabled it this morning and I’m already the world’s biggest peeping tom – Watching over the shoulder of my visitors. I just watched a 14-minute session with my landing page in real-time – I turned off “skip idle” and dialed acceleration to 1x, so it played ‘real time’ – I wanted to closely understand what that visitor was reading – not statistic aggregates (which it gives me) but I wanted to run the movie in my head and see if I can trace back what the reader was thinking based on the recording and the search terms they landed with. It was simply awesome
I had the suspicion that my landing page was doing too much selling after some pre-selling and I am losing people that way. Without any statistical rigor, I think that’s whats going on… The visitors I’ve watched go real slow and point at key pieces of info, but then seem to spot the pitch parts really quick and read them for about half the time they take on the other areas and then close the window. I’ve got to think about this… I know I’ve got to change the page, I may use Google Website Optimizer or Genetify, though ClickTale will probably break if I have both going at the same time (ClickTale and Google Website Optimizer) – its recordings will probably be inaccurate.
The other thought is to use a “traffic saving” thing before people close the window. I have to re-read Google’s webmaster guidelines, I’m not sure that’s Kosher with them. I may have to have differentiated landing pages if that’s the case.
Speaking of ClickTale, their plans go from free straight to $99 dollars. That’s quite the steep jump. If the price was something like $30, I would probably bubble them to the top of my ‘tool to get’ list. At $99 a month, its sinking to the bottom of my list for three reasons:
1) It is not a do-or-die service. A do-or-die service might be a particular WordPress Plugin, your hosting plan, a domain name. ClickTale is a ‘polish and enhance’ tool, that allows me to get better CTR an probably move campaigns into profitability, or move them there faster.
2) Its not automated, I still have to put a lot of brainpower to figure out what it all means. Brainpower costs time – oodles of it. Every hour of sheer brainpower costs something like five hours of other stuff: Eating, Sleeping, recreation, blogging bullshit, family stuff, all before I can put out that hour. In other words: manual stuff doesn’t scale, so the time consumption needs to be closely monitored.
3) It won’t play well with Google Website Optimizer, especially for a multivariate experiment.
2) To see a $99 ROI I need to sell a lot more than the piddle selling I’m doing right now. And I’ve got no way of seeing the ROI with it.
If they just had something in-between Free and $100 bucks!
FYI reason 3). I’ve been using it for weeks now with Google Web Optimizer and it works better than fine! see:
http://wiki.clicktale.com/Article/Google_Website_…
I use clicktail, it helps me know what is happening on my site and its heatmaps and videos show me i can increase my conversions
Another conversion last night! Yay!… And I think I figured out what the problem is with Google conversion tracking. I’m a little disappointed I have to tell it the dollar amount that a conversion is worth to me – if I sell more than a single product/variant via Clickbank, its all going to track the same value. How does Yahoo do this? I don’t know, but somehow they figure it out.
Slave Rat, 
DmnEPC, and 
Simon and 
jAc0b are discussing.
Haha I’m sure you will have your own niche of people hitting you up on twitter after this post. Enjoy buddy.