Author Archives ⇒ Brandon Hann

Breaking the myth about "turnkey" websites

· Brandon Hann

I was in the middle of writing a completely different article and I decided to check the status on one of my eBay items and for some reason I just decided to search for domain names for sale. I’m always curious to see what kind of junk is being sold out there for ridiculous prices.

It was right then that I noticed a “turnkey” website for sale and I must say, I was quite impressed with the ad. I mean, this thing went on and one describing every single element to the site and how it worked, etc., etc. It was laid out so nicely that I almost got sucked right in. Why not? The price was only $81 with 2 hours to spare and according to the ad, if I had 5000 visitors to my site and a 15% CTR, I’d be making about $54,000 per year!

Say what?!!

What is a turnkey website?

The concept of a turnkey…anything is simply that of a website, business or some other operation that’s all ready to go. You just jump right in and keep it going. You can equate this to opening a McDonalds–you have a large corporation that essentially sells itself and all you need to do is manage the day-to-day. Sounds easy enough, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t as anyone who runs a business will tell you! The problem with turnkey websites is that a website can looking phenomenal online, have tons of content, videos, links and blog posts, but not be exactly what it claims. This is more true than ever before thanks to software like WordPress, Drupal and other CMS packages.

With this software, you can build a great looking site in literally 7 minutes (the 5-min WordPress install, plus 2 minutes to upload a theme).

Misleading ads

Like I mentioned above, this guy’s ad covered everything:

  • Professional design
  • Fully automated and maintenance free
  • Valuable domain name included
  • Established website
  • The site store updates by the minute
  • Profitable income streams from AdSense, Amazon and ClickBank

That last one is the one I really want to draw attention to. Whenever you tell someone that the thing they’re buying has “profitable income streams…” and you ad posts projected numbers without so much as saying these results are not typical, you’re misleading your customer.

In my opinion, you’re feeding off desperate people. Maybe the bad economy has hit some people really hard, so they’re out there trying to make some extra money. They come along and see this and get the impression that this site is already making money and because it’s “turnkey”, all they have to do is promote it a little bit and off they go!

The truth

This particular ad is nothing new. I’ve seen these pre-made sites for sale for many years. But if you were to calculate exactly what you’re getting, you may think twice about bidding. Let’s break it down:

  1. Professional design: Listen up folks…WordPress is FREE and there are THOUSANDS of free themes out there that can make your site look “professional”.
  2. Fully automated: How can anything be fully automated? Even running an autoblogger takes time to manage and maintain! The best part is in the very same ad, this guy tells you all you have to do to make this site work is to promote and advertise. So much for fully automated.
  3. Valuable domain: This of course falls within your own opinion. The domain in the ad I’m referring to is: CookingAndRecipeInformer.com. Valuable? Not in my opinion.
  4. Established website: Doesn’t this imply that the website is already operational? Of course it’s online, but the way I take it is that it’s already doing what it claims to do: make money.
  5. The store updates by the minute: This is an easy task given that the store is nothing more than an Amazon store imported into your WordPress theme. Anyone who’s an Amazon Associate knows that this task is much too easy.
  6. Profitable income streams: This is a loaded statement because it doesn’t mean this site is actually profitable, but that it can be. But, this is so obvious it’s funny! Anything in theory can be profitable if promoted correctly. In fact, this portion of the turnkey site is by far, the hardest. If you run a website, you know how difficult it can be to get traffic.

Ok, so now that I got that all cleared up, lets total it up:

Domain name ($9.99) + WordPress software ($0) + Pro Theme ($0) + Amazon store ($0) = $9.99

This auction is worth about $10 and that’s even if you thought that domain name was worth the registration fee. Think about this before you get lured into purchasing a domain name with a turnkey website. Also, remember that you have to host the site somewhere, so you can figure about another $10 per month.

My two cents

If you think your winning bid is worth having all this set up for you, then by all means, purchase it, but don’t think you’re getting some established business. Always read the fine print and do some Google searching first. Look for keywords in the ad that might pinpoint how theses sites are created and see if you can create something yourself without having to spend a lot of money.

Lastly, if you’re really interested in purchasing an established website, you’ll want to check out Flippa.com. They offer legitimate businesses for sale and they can prove their worth by showing you traffic results and income reports. Good luck in your business ventures!

Quibids.com Review

· Brandon Hann

Pronounced kwi-bids as in half of the word ‘quick’, Quibids.com provides an interesting take on the auction format. I wrote a really short auction summary about this site already alongside a comparison to eBay, but after watching (and participating with) the site for the last couple of days, I decided to dive right in and write up a review.

There are many people out there asking if this site and others like it are scams. While it’s easy to think like that considering you can get products at huge discounts (sometimes as high as 97% off), you really need to look under the surface to find that this is completely legitimate! You may be asking yourself how a company can afford to give away products as such discounted rates and that is where the magic comes in!

UPDATE: One of my visitors came to me and said he wrote an eBook about Quibids and that it contained all sorts of tips and tricks on how to win items from Quibids, so I asked him to send me a copy. I’m probably the biggest skeptic I know, so I just had to see and I must say that it was actually a really good read! Of course there are no sure ways to beat the Quibids system, but there are some logical steps you can take to increase your chances. See below for a review on this eBook.

Is Quibids.com a scam?

The answer is NO. The game is played with mathematics, timing and a little bit of luck. You as the bidder can bid on anything you want and as much as you want, but be careful…each bid only adds $0.01 to the item and costs you $0.60. Confused yet?! I’ll go over all this is a bit.

Ok, since Quibids is a penny auction, it’s obvious that the bids only increase by 1 cent or in some cases, 2, 10 and 20 cents. The exciting part of this format is that the final values stay relatively low and you can sometimes walk out of there with a $700 item for about $20. Don’t be fooled though–this statement is very similar to saying you can walk into a Vegas casino and take $3500 off a roulette table by betting only $100. It’s doable, but the odds are against you.

How does Quibids.com work?

They sell you bids and then allow you to use those bids to bid on real products. These products are always very popular items such as Apple iPads, MacBooks, home theatre systems, Blu-ray movies, etc. This is so people are more likely to bid. Here’s how the site breaks down:

  • You buy bids for $0.60 each.
  • Each bid adds $0.01 to the auction price.
  • You compete with other bidders.
  • Each auction has a time limit.
  • Any bids placed within the last 15 seconds brings the timer back to 15 seconds.
  • As certain values are reached, this resettable timer is reduced to 10 seconds.
  • If you are the high bidder when the timer reaches zero, you win.

After you win an item, you pay your bid amount plus shipping. Don’t forget to take into account the amount you spent on bids in the first place! One advantage that Quibids has over other similar sites is that if you lose, they let you take the total amount of how many bids you placed to put in as a credit toward buying the item at full price. But they get you here too because the “retail price” is sometimes higher than an actual price you might find at retailers or online shops such as Amazon.com.

How is this profitable?

In case you haven’t seen the business-end of things yet, here you go. Quibids is in the business of selling bids. For just about every bid, they make $0.60. I say “just about” because they do offer free bids, cheap vouchers to get extra bid packs and referral bonuses. But for the sake of this example, we’ll stick with $0.60 per bid.

If you saw an Apple iPad sell for $217.80, Quibids just made $13,068. This is how they can afford to lose money on
the sale. After the auction, they simply order you an iPad at retail price which depending on the model can be as low as $499 and ship it to you.

Of course, not every iPad sells for that much. I think the lowest one I saw was $17. Still not bad though, considering Quibids made about $1020 on that sale. The huge savings are passed on to you courtesy of the hundred other bidders that wanted that item as well.

My two cents

I’ve been on the site for about 3 days now and I’ve placed a few bids, but so far I haven’t won anything. I even chased a Blu-ray movie and got beat out because I couldn’t watch the auction. That leads me to my first comment. To play this game, you have to constantly watch. Of course you could use their Bid-O-Matic feature that will place bids on your behalf after you designate how many bids you want to use and what your maximum is, but you still have to be vigilant.

If you want to save your money, your best bet is to watch and watch and watch. Jumping in at the right time seems to be the only true way to win. When is the right time? That’s a tough question because it is easy to sit there and hope everyone else either gives up or goes to sleep. I even expected that people would be working and therefore unable to watch the end of the auction. This is not practical because this site is accessible all over the world, so no matter what day of the week it is or what time of day, there are always thousands of people on the site looking for good deals.

Plus, there’s no restrictions on who can jump in an auction or when. It might be you and one other bidder down to the wire and then all of a sudden, a new guy jumps in with fresh bid counts and maybe even more money than you. My advice if you’re planning on using Quibids is to bid on and win a few of the smaller items first so you can get familiar with the whole process. Once you feel comfortable enough, try something bigger, but always keep this in mind: no matter what anyone ever tells you, there is no “system” to beating this site and getting a good deal. You have to have a little luck and sometimes a lot of money.

Quibids Winners Guide

Anyone who follows my site knows that I never “sell” you anything. I’m here simply to voice an opinion and hopefully help someone along the way. With that said, you can rest assured that if I ever post a link on this site to a product it’s because I either own it myself or I have used it enough to make a comment on it. In this case, I was given a copy of this Quibids buying guide that is supposed to help you win at Quibids auctions. Naturally, I felt like this was just another spammy eBook that contain common sense knowledge and “strategies” that don’t work. I was wrong!

While there are certainly no ways to beat the Quibids system and ensure never-ending victories, there are a few things you can look out for and in time, you can theoretically increase your chances of winning. The eBook is 10 pages in length and doesn’t contain one picture. I mention that because without pictures, you get 10 full pages of actual text that will help you at Quibids. It was written by Mike Tjosvold and he sells the eBook from his Facebook page for $10.99 and that will end up being pennies compared to what you will save on Quibids.

For more information, view the Facebook page for the Ultimate Winning Guide for Quibids. If you decide to buy it, remember these two things: 1. On the PayPal checkout page, tell Mike that Ledfrog.com referred you and 2. There’s a money-back guarantee if you’re not happy with it.

It looks like the guy who wrote that guide just simply disappeared! Sorry…it actually was pretty useful.

My last piece of advice is that if you’re shooting for a big dollar item, plan to buy it at the retail price because you’ll hate yourself in the morning if you spent $200 trying to get a $500 iPad and didn’t end up paying the price difference!

List Building – Validation

· Brandon Hann

Email address validation is much more than simply checking your list for valid email addresses. It also checks for valid headers to ensure that email is being sent and received to the correct mailbox. The last thing you want is your emails being relayed all over the Internet and bounced from server to server without knowing where it’s going. Your users may end up doing their own validation and you might come off as a spammer.

This section groups all of these smaller sections together:

  • Domain Links
  • Whois
  • SPF
  • Privacy Policy

Domain Links

When you create your newsletter or send out emails to your users, the one major thing you want to check for is valid links. This consists mostly of actual page links, but in the least, you want to make sure your domain is pointed right. This will ensure that your users can match your email address to the domain you have listed in the message.

If your links are dead or full of typos, you’re not only reducing your click through rate to zero, but you’re also tampering with your reputation. It should be fairly obvious how to make sure your links are valid, but just to be sure, you should always copy and paste a link directly from the page you want to link to.

Another good thing about always placing domain links in your messages is because if that person forwards your email to other people they think might be interested, you’re going to get instant promotion. This is more true when it comes to producing ebooks that are loaded with backlinks to your site.

Whois

A whois service is one that provide important information regarding owners of domain names. These tools come in handy if you want to know who owns a domain name of one of your users. When you start seeing a particular domain name spamming up the Internet, this step becomes very useful in tracking down who’s behind operations. Here are some free whois checkers starting with my favorite on top:

  1. Who.is – The reason I like this service so much is because it will check every single domain extension in existence. It’s also super easy to remember. The only downside to this site is that it’s loaded with adverstisements, but once you get used to the navigation, you’ll be fine.
  2. FreeWho.com – I use this site half the time, but only because I used to use it all the time until I found the one above. The advantage here is no advertiseing, it’s usually very fast and it too is also easy to remember. But the downside is that it only supports 6 domain extensions (com, net, info, org, biz and us).
  3. GoDaddy Whois – Another great search tool especially for those domains that have special business contact info. GoDaddy formats this information much better than some of the other whois servers. Drawback: you must enter a captcha code unless you’re logged into your own GoDaddy account.

Of course there are thousands and thousands of other whois services out there. As long as you get the info you need, any one of them will work.

SPF

SPF (in email terms) stands for Sender Policy Framework. It is an anti-spam measure that allows domain owners to control the emails that pass through their servers based on domain name. Essentially a server admin can allow only certain hostnames to send email over the web server. This generally stops forged mail from coming through.

In case you didn’t know, most email servers are relatively open. This means that with the right settings, I can send an email off of some other webserver using my own email address. It’s called a relay and it’s like piggybacking. An example would be if I sent an email to your address from my address, but used Yahoo!’s servers to do it instead of yours or mine.

An SPF record created by Yahoo! would prevent me from doing this because my computer (host) is not on their network. It’s certainly not fullproof and it shouldn’t be considered the end-all for spam, but it’s a great start.

I wouldn’t be given SPF justice if I tried to explain everything here, so please check out the SPF group website called OpenSPF. To view more specifics on this technology, check out their FAQ page.

Privacy Policy

Your website should have a Privacy Policy. It should discuss everything you do and don’t do on your site regarding your user’s information. This is important for many reasons, but here are a few you should consider:

  • Covers – It keeps you covered. One example would be if you told your users up front that you would send them 20 emails a day and they still signed up, then they would be liable for the “spam” that they get from you if they wanted to complain.
  • Informs – It informs your users of an potential 3rd party emails that might be coming their way. Let them know if you work with other partners and wish to send them special offers.
  • Protection – It protects your users from themselves. As mentioned above, your users won’t have a leg to stand on if they don’t abide by or understand your policy.
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Hyper Inflation

· Brandon Hann

This post simply comes out of an interesting article I found about hyper inflation. We all know what inflation is, right? Here’s a quick explanation: a one dollar bill printed in 1900 was worth one dollar. A dollar bill printed in 2010 is also worth one dollar. The value of that dollar has changed. Loosely translated, this means that in 1900, your 2010 dollar would be able to purchase about $25 worth of stuff.

Naturally, inflation has its ups and downs (literally too) and it also means that no matter how long you keep your paper money, it’ll never be worth more than the little number printed on it. In fact, the value will actually go down the longer you keep it.

This is quite the opposite of gold by the way. If you had just one ounce of gold in 2001, you’d have about $300 in real money. If you held onto that same ounce until today, you would now have $1100! So gold beats inflation. Imaging if our country was still on the gold standard: there would be hardly any inflation…movies would still cost $0.10, cars would still be under $1000, etc. There are critics on both sides of that argument, but I’ll leave that to another day.

Zimbabwe

This country suffers from up to 2 million percent inflation prices! That’s insane! What’s even more crazy is the denominations of their paper money. Just recently, they printed a $100,000,000,000 note. One hundred BILLION dollars!

Just when you thought you’d move to Zimbabwe, let me explain to you what that bill can buy:

3 eggs

Well I guess I don’t have to explain that to you. It’s amazing to imagine a country where a $100,000,000,000 bill can’t even get you a dozen eggs.

Here’s the picture:

By the way, eggs are cheaper in Zimbabwe than here in the U.S. so stop complaining!

List Building – Can-Spam Act

· Brandon Hann

Since this is an actual law, I’m going to simply post the text directly from its source at www.ftc.gov below.

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

  1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
  2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
  3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
  4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
  5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
  6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

What does this mean?

Quite simple put: DO NOT SPAM. The Internet is already full of junk and you don’t need to add to it by sending out bogus offers and junk mail to people that don’t expect it from you. Worse yet, if your site or your server gets marked as a spammer you can consider your reputation done.

It is hard to bounce back from being labeled a spammer. Don’t do it and if you know of other people doing it, you should report them. You can find more information about this law at the FTC website.

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List Building – Auto Responses

· Brandon Hann

I’ve been going over many list building ideas and they all seem to point to the relationship you develop with your visitor using the very first message you send to them. This is called an auto response and just as the name implies, it’s the very first thing your customer reads when your mailing list welcomes them to your site.

There are three sub-sections in this area, but I am grouping them altogether because I’ve touched on each topic in the previous sections and there’s no sense in going over everything twice. However, I did want to show you the correlation between each item, so I’m going to touch on a few more key points with each below.

Content

Your auto response should contain some content. It should not be a simple 1-line message that says “Thank you for signing up!”. While it’s perfectly ok to thank your visitors, you should also include something for them to read. Maybe create a snapshot of what they can expect from your future emails. Here are some ideas:

  • Sample newsletter – If you publish a regular newsletter, send them your previous copy. If you have a few “back issues” send a link to an archive page that allows them to click through and download any past issues they wish to view.
  • Related content – If your blog is relatively consistant, you should have no problem adding links to the auto response that offer various content on your site that you think might interest your visitor. This is also an opportunity to tell people about any other blogs you run.
  • Site updates – If you’ve made changes to your site, you might also want to add this information to your email if you think the changes will benefit a user directly. This one is more for your future emails, but it’s also nice to let the new subscribers know that they can expect to see these items again.

You don’t want to overdo it, so find a perfect balance to try and make that first message very similar to what your next emails will look like. The point is to make you visitors feel welcome, show them what they can expect from you and not overwhelm them at the same time!

Newsletters

I’ve been talking about newsletters throughout this entire section, so you should already have an idea of how these can greatly benefit your site. Here are some tips on how to create awesome newsletters.

  • Design – A lot of people are still getting email in the HTML format and you can use this to your advantage. Try to design an email that somewhat matches your site. I wouldn’t use a lot of images, but a logo and maybe a few borders are ok, but try to get the colors right. This will go a long way for keeping your “image” in your visitor’s heads.
  • PDF – An alternative to fancy HTML emails is to create your newsletter as a PDF file and attach it to a standard email. You want to be careful here because a lot of email programs and services can be set up to remove attachments on delivery. There are tons of viruses running around out there and people are more fearful of receiving emails with attachments. Just inform your visitors before they sign up and they can make arrangements.
  • Content – What you should include in your newsletter is entirely based on who your audience is and what your business is. Ideally you want to add content that will get a response. Simply recycling content from your site won’t help. If someone just wanted updates on that, they could bookmark your RSS feed. Give them some content that’s not on your site. It also helps to add some engagement tools like surveys, contests and free offers.

Offers

It may be hard to understand what an “offer” is. It could be a free item, a download not available to anyone else, access to a special section on your site, the newsletter itself, etc. The idea is to entice your visitors to come back for more. How they come back is not the point. They can come back for your newsletter, your daily blog post or to leave some comments. Here are some offer ideas.

  • Starting offer – Give up something valuable right out the door. Let’s say you’re writing ebooks on how to eat healthier. Your first offer could be something like “Join my site today and receive my free ebook on how to lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes!”. You would then attach this ebook to your auto response for first-time subscribers and you’re done.
  • Special access – Create a small section for your members. Let them feel like they belong to your site and that they have a unique place that they can come to get information tailored for them.
  • Repeat offers – Don’t spam your users, but you should send periodic emails that let them know about special things going on with your site or how they can access new content. Don’t be afraid to offer things. Your users won’t consider it spam if done every once in a while. Remember that they signed up!
  • Partner offers – Try to work with other websites out there to offer each other’s products for discounts if they sign up at either site. You always see John Chow out there partnering with Shoemoney to give price breaks to recommended sign ups.

All of these offers can be included in your auto responses, but should definitely be included in all your future emails. Don’t let any opportunity for informing your subscribers get past you!

<< Back to Follow Up Forward to Can Spam Act >>

List Building – Follow Up

· Brandon Hann

One important thing to remember when communicating with your mailing list is to continuously provide follow up communications. There’s no sense in creating a wonderful newsletter one time, blasting it out to your list and then never speaking to anyone ever again. This might generate some buzz in the beginning, but think about the long term. How could you continue making money online without constant follow up?

You’d be surprised how many websites out there are here one day and gone the next. There are countless people that hear the get rich schemes on late-night tv, pour a little money into them, start a website and gain some traffic, but then give up after realizing this whole process is not as easy as it sounds.

Constant Contact

This term is such an industry standard, that there’s a company named after it! Big companies that sell products that are familiar to everyone in the world practically sell themselves, right? Then why does a large company like Coca-Cola spend millions of dollars every year to send out marketing materials emails to people like you and I?

The reason is because they understand that constant contact with consumers is the only way they will survive! The Internet marketing industry is no different, but this term is much more important here. The competition is much heavier and it’s much harder to get your name out there.

Consistency

One key element to keeping follow ups going smoothly is to maintain consistency with your messages. If you’re mailing list offers a weekly newsletter, send one every week. It’s that simple. The moment you lose this pattern, you’ll see your viewership dwindle.

If you promise specific things like content or free downloads, make sure you keep the same patterns going when performing follow up messages.

My two cents

Don’t lose your current subscribers because of something as simple as follow up. Let them know that you’re always there for them and that they can expect certain things from you, your website and your mailing list.

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Should I buy Apple stock over product?

· Brandon Hann

I read an article over on John Chow’s blog that lead me to an interesting bit of information from Kyle Conroy’s blog about buying Apple stock over buying Apple product. At first, I expected it to be a rant about how great the stock market is and how we should all invest in our favorite corporations, but after looking at it, it proved to be much more of a “why didn’t I think of that” type of story.

Although I loved the article, I now hate myself for not being “smarter” in my younger years. I guess I can chalk it up to just not being sure about the future, but then again when it comes to Apple, did anybody really think this company would fail? Google maybe, but Apple? Likely not.

The Breakdown

Essentially what Kyle did was compare the selling prices of almost all of Apple’s products to the stock price on the day these products came out and then again to today’s stock price. Here are the products I own for example:

  • Original iPhone – Price paid on January 9th, 2010: $499 – If I had bought Apple stock on the same day instead of the iPhone, I would now have $1,460 in my portfolio.
  • iPhone 3GS – Price paid on June 8th, 2009: $199 – I would now have $375 in my portfolio.
  • 2.4G MacBook (13″ unibody, late-2008) – Price paid on October 14th, 2008: $1599 – I would now have $4,161 in my portfolio.

That would have given me a grand total of $5,996 in my portfolio today! Instead, I have negative $2597. Granted, the products have served me well and I don’t regret owning (or buying) them, but the point is still made.

Could I have forgone these items to have a few extra thousand in a volatile environment such is the stock market? Probably no more than any of us could forgo our new cars and expensive clothes. However, one item that took the cake on this list is one that I could have forgone if only I had that much money at the time.

Apple PowerBook G3 250 (Original/Kanga/3500) – Price on November 10th, 1997: $5700 – If you used that money to buy stock on the same day, you’d now have $330,563 in your portfolio! On the other hand, maybe you used that PowerBook to start your business and now you make more than $300,000 a year being your own boss! You never know how the tides may turn.

Go check out the rest of the list here and see what your Apple products could have amounted to.

List Building – Instant Gratification

· Brandon Hann

Along with enticing your visitors, you need to provide some instant gratification. People like to feel like they’re getting something for giving you their email address. It may be hard to think about what everyone wants and how people repsond to various things, so always put yourself in their shoes.

As yourself these questions: What makes you sign up to a mailing list? Do you like getting free items sent to your inbox for signing up? Would you have signed up had you not gotten a freebie? Of course, your opinion might be different than the next person, but it’ll at least get you thinking about ways to marketing your mailing list.

Instant Gratification

For the most part, getting people to sign up for your mailing list involves enticing them to do so. I covered this topic previously, but instant gratification ties in a little bit. The most important thing to do is make your visitors feel like they actually got something for their time spent on your site. You can accomplish this a few ways:

  • Have an automated, yet informative message delivered to their inbox as soon as they sign up. This message should contain important links on your site, “starter” information about your content and maybe even a free attachement.
  • Send them to a ‘Thank you’ page after signing up which contains something unique that nobody else has access to until they join your mailing list.
  • Consider sending the very last edition of your newsletter to them instantly with links on how to download previous newsletters.

My two cents

Think of it from a sales point of view. How great does it feel to walk out of a Best Buy with your favorite music cd and be able to play it on the way home? It’s that instant gratification that helps justify the purchase. The same goes for mailing lists. You want to make your visitor feel like they got something out of it. But not just something–something great.

As for that image above, I just chose it because I thought it was funny!

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Make money with Kontera

· Brandon Hann

You may have noticed the double-underlined links on various phrases on my site. These are link ads that are dynamically generated through a service called Kontera. You may already know about Google AdSense and how it works by generating ads based on your page’s content, but if not, check it out now. Anyway, Kontera works very similar to AdSense, but I’m very excited to say that it’s much better!

Kontera doesn’t place ads in a single, static location. This is an important fact because there’s such a thing known as “banner blindness”. The term actually references a phenomenon where people will sub-conscientiously block out banner ads on a website. You probably noticed this by going to some website that has a banner ad on it and you skipped right over it to get to the content you were looking for. Well, unfortunately, the same thing happens to AdSense ad blocks and banners.

How does Kontera work?

  1. Page content – Kontera uses its patented software to analyze your webpage through the use of a small snippet of Javascript.
  2. Keywords – Every time a page is loaded, the script kicks in and dynamically creates ad links on certain keywords found within your page. These keywords are based on what advertisers are purchasing.
  3. Dynamic ads – Even though your pages have static content (things that don’t change), the Kontera ads are all dynamic (things that do change), which means that a page loaded by one user will have different keyword ads than the same page loaded by another user.
  4. Fresh ads – Because the ads and the links are generated dynamically, your users always see fresh ads no matter how many times they come back to the same page!
  5. Non-intrusive – The ads don’t show up right when a page loads; only the links do. This means that your webpage can appear to be completely ad-free! When a user sees a link they think they might be interested in, they hover over it and out pops a Kontera window. The user can then decided to click through or not. If not, the mouse is moved and the ad goes away.

Kontera vs AdSense

  • Placement – Adsense uses static ad placement which means your AdSense ads are always located in the same areas of your website and will stay there unless you move them. Kontera changes ad link placement every time a page is loaded.
  • Visibility – Adsense ads are always visible and can be ignored by simply not looking at that area of a site. Kontera embeds ads directly into keywords on the site and a user is more likely to click on a targeted keyword ad. Since the ad links appear on page load, they can show up just about anywhere each time.
  • Site restrictions – Adsense can be placed on just about any website you can think of–including spam and duplicate content sites. This reduces effectiveness. Kontera restricts websites based on strict guidelines and even page length. This increases effectiveness and welcomes higher quality advertisers.

My two cents

I’m not out to destroy Google AdSense and as you can see to the right, I still use it! However, I am already starting to see major improvements and response with Kontera over Google and I’ve only started with Kontera a few days ago.

My suggestion is to get and use both services for your website. Optimize your site with Kontera In-Text advertising now!