Buzzwords, Incentive, Choice and Brands

• Posted by Brent on May 8, 2008 22:09
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I worked in sales for almost 7 years before finishing college and starting work as a programmer. I sold computers at Radio Shack for a short time, before taking a job selling doors, windows, kitchen cabinets, and appliances at a home improvment center. I was #3 in sales in my region when I worked at Radio Shack, and I sold the crap out of doors when I worked at Menards.  In those 7 years I learned a lot about how to sell things to people. I learned how to sell things to people that they didn't need or plan on buying beforehand. All of the things I learned in retail sales can be applied to affiliate marketing!

Buzzwords

I mentioned i was a top salesman selling computers when I worked at Radio Shack. How did I do it? Buzzwords. At that time "IBM Compatible" was a HUGE buzzword in the compter industry (LOL). I used that to my full advantage. At that time, at Radio Shack we sold IBM PC's. In order to sell MASS computers I gave people my standard pitch. Then what sent them over the edge into buy buy buy mode was to use the buzzword. I would tell them "These aren't IBM Compatible computers, they ARE IBM computers". Bam. Cheesy as hell, but it worked like a charm. That sentence made me a lot of money in sales commission. That same idea can be applied to affiliate marketing. Think about your niche, compile a list of buzzwords, and split test your landing pages to find which buzzwords convert to sales.

Incentive

Another important thing in retail sales is incentive. Now I mentioned I sold doors at Menards, but I didn't tell you that sometimes, the store actually LOSES money on a door sale. Now why is this? Why would they sell a product for less than it costs them to buy/make? Incentive, that is why. They can take that $18 pre-hung door that costs them $21 to make and splash it all over their ads in newspapers, on TV and on the radio. That brings people through the doors and onto the sales floor. Now your sales people can sell them the door, but also sell them paint, shims, sandpaper, a knob, nails, stain, and a hammer to install the door with. That is where the profit is!

In affiliate marketing there are incentivized offers. You can use do those, but I am saying to use this form of incentive a different way. Use it to increase your CTR (click through rate) on your PPC ads! The offer you are promoting (ie. the doors, knobs and shim) may not be free, but you can certainly offer your OWN free product (ie. the door) on your landing page in addition to the real product, which is the affiliate offer. That's gold money right there.

Next time, I will discuss 2 more retail sales concepts that can be used in affiliate marketing. Choice and Brands. 

iPod Nano Contest!

• Posted by Brent on April 29, 2008 09:18
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I found a cool contest on Browie's personal blog . Browie is giving away an iPod Nano to one lucky winner. All you have to do is link to his blog/contest and you are entered! He's also giving away a 1 month membership to PPC-Coach.com as a second prize. The contest ends May 9th so hurry up and post a link to get entered!

I was wrong about sitemaps

• Posted by Brent on April 27, 2008 23:07
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I was wrong in this post. I said that using a Sitemap (as in a Google Webmaster Tools sitemap) was hurting the total number of pages Google was indexing. Well, when I removed the Sitemap on one of my sites it had nearly 6000 pages indexed . Now it has fewer than 600 . I have other sites that have fewer pages indexed after removing their Sitemaps as well. Time to add them back!

 Just thought I'd try and clear up any mis-information I may have put out there.

What I've Been Up To

• Posted by Brent on April 27, 2008 05:21
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I haven't blogged in sooo long so I thought I'd make a quick post to tell you why. Three things:

• I've been learning Adobe Flex
• I've gotten super serious about PPC
• Twitter (@brentlamborn if you wanna follow)

The first two are self explanatory. Twitter I find is just cool. It allows me to get something out there without writing a multi-paragraph post about it. It matches more with my personality too. I don't really like getting into long drawn out conversations in real life and so I guess I'm the same way online. I like to keep it short and simple.

Anyway, just a quick note to explain why I haven't blogged. I will probably be blogging soon about some of the things I've learned to do with Flex (and post some working examples!), how to use Flex with .NET, and also about some PPC stuff.

Death Threats Made Against LiveLeak.com Staff

• Posted by Brent on March 29, 2008 20:06
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The top of the LiveLeak.com homepage reads as follows:

"Following threats to our staff of a very serious nature, and some ill informed reports from certain corners of the British media that could directly lead to the harm of some of our staff, Liveleak.com has been left with no other choice but to remove Fitna from our servers.
This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else. We would like to thank the thousands of people, from all backgrounds and religions, who gave us their support. They realised LiveLeak.com is a vehicle for many opinions and not just for the support of one.
Perhaps there is still hope that this situation may produce a discussion that could benefit and educate all of us as to how we can accept one anothers culture.
We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high. "

You can read more about the film "Fitna" at Wikipedia. I pull a lot of the combat videos I use on Green Marines from LiveLeak.com so this is pretty interesting to me. I also have received threats via email in the past (years ago not recently) in regards to the videos I post. Crazy stuff!

How To Scrape Email in Microsoft Outlook - C#

• Posted by Brent on March 26, 2008 10:30
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Make the body of any email (ie. newsletters, press release's, etc) in your Outlook 2003 client putty in your hands with this C# code (sorry had to do a screenshot):

Don't forget to add a reference to Micorsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook. "Done" is a subfolder i created under the default inbox in my Outlook to hold emails that have been processed by my scraper. When you run this app you will get a security MessageBox in Outlook asking you to grant permission:

The box can be avoided using Outlook Redemption (which does work, I have used it) or you can do what I do, and just manually run the app and allow access for 10 minutes. Happy mail scraping!