rants

I saw a site promoting video products today and it had this ‘fact’:

The Industry is predicted to grow ten-fold in the next 5 years. By 2013, video will account for 2/3 of all global Internet traffic including mobile phones.

So I wonder where this prediction came from?

And even if it’s true, it doesn’t say, “2/3 of all internet marketing traffic will be video”. Yet that’s their premise in suggesting I buy their product.

As far as Internet Marketing (IM) goes, there’s been a massive increase in the number of video-only sales pages. Even video-only opt-in pages – I can’t know what I’m opting in for without watching the video. Well screw you, I’m not wasting 2/3 of my life watching videos when a few bullet points would tell me what I want to know and pique my interest enough to opt-in (or not).

You’d like to think these people have split-tested a video-only version against other pages – text only, text and video. I would bet my business they haven’t.

Video-only is a lazy way to do sales pages; yes, video is great for the psychological triggers that are harder to do in text. But I buy mostly on facts, not emotion. And yes, I know according to many, most people buy on emotive triggers, not ‘boring’ details – like facts. Well why not provide both, you lazy SOBs?

This is what I think happened:

Someone added video to a sales page and got good results. Then someone started selling the idea that video increased sales or opt-ins.

Next thing, someone’s doing opt-in and sales pages where virtually the only content is the video (e.g. most clickbank products now).

And crucially, many many other people thought “this is the trend, this is what I should be doing”. And it came to pass that video-only pages proliferated, no-one bothered to split test and sales depended on an emotionally laden, factually lacking video.

OK, I’m extrapolating a lot from my own feelings, my own loathing of video-only pages; I hate being forced to watch a video with a signal to fluff ratio of 5%. I didn’t set out to make this a promotional post at all but if it wasn’t for my trusy enounce video speed control (http://www.enounce.com/), I’d have gone mad by now. At least I can squander only 10 minutes of my life at a time rather than 20.

Am I the only one? What do you think? I’d love your comments…

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In the days before the internet and even before network marketing and franchises became popular ways for people to start their own business, being an entrepeneur meant something. You couldn’t really be a tire kicker. You either started and ran a business or you didn’t.

Franchises didn’t really change that – the kind of person that invests many thousand of dollars in a business is pretty serious. They may fail but the percentage of tire kickers is very low.

Network marketing made it easy for anyone to have their own ‘from home’ business – low start up cost (but still a few hundred dollars typically), no premises or staff needed. All you needed to do was work the business – get out promoting it.

And that’s when you see tire-kickers (the 1.0 type) first appear.

Despite having a ready made business with step by step instructions for success that, if they follow, will just lead to an ever increasing income – they do nothing. Or they do something but not what the plan says. And they moan – boy do they moan, about how the business doesn’t work.

It’s reckoned the moderate success rate amongst network marketing ‘entrepeneurs’ is around 2-10% – with nearer 2% being the norm for most businesses.

Bear in mind that these entrepeneurs had to make some investment and get off their butts to even get started.

Now the internet comes along and online ‘bizops’

Now there’s almost no barrier to becoming an entrepeneur. The number of genuine, hard-working entrepeneurs hasn’t decreased, in fact there’s many, many more.

But the number of tire-kickers has increased dramatically. Not just tire-kickers but people that don’t have, or won’t follow, a plan. The new breed of people that want results instantly whilst not needing to do anything or invest anything.

These are the tire-kickers 2.0.

They don’t think long-term; they can be ’100% committed’ to a program that promised them $10k a month within 90 days and they’ll switch to one that offers it in 60 days. Or one that offers it with even less recruiting. Or no recruiting.

Jon Olson recently blogged on HitExchangeNews about promoting ‘evergreen’ products.

I wouldn’t have chosen the term evergreen personally but he’s bang on the money (to me the term evergreen is already strongly associated with content that is always relevant rather than tools, but I’m splitting hairs)

A standard business model for ever has been the service / support industry. Don’t go digging for gold, sell shovels. Goldmines / gold-diggers will come and go like the phases of the moon but they’ll always need shovels.

That well-used cliche implies a selling type business. So if you have a shovel store next to a goldmine and the turnover of gold diggers is high, today it might be Joe you sell to but next week when Joe’s shovel breaks, he’s in another town at another goldmine and buys his shovel from another store. Not so bad for you – there’s always new diggers coming through.

But what if Joe was obliged to buy his shovels from you because you sold him the first one. It wouldn’t matter then where he went to dig, you’d get all his shovel business.

Pretty hard to make that analogy sound plausible in the context of gold-digging.

But online, in the service/tools sector it’s the norm!

You ‘sell’ someone an autoresponder and that has a monthly fee on which you get commission. Doesn’t matter how fickle they are jumping from bizop to bizop, so long as they keep their autoresponder, they’re rebuying that every month from you and you alone.

And here’s something that makes services like this even more attractive to promote:

Many of them ‘tie in’ the customer!

Now I know that doesn’t sound very customer-centric but provided the product you promote is sound, it doesn’t hurt that there’s a built in retention mechanism

Someone who builds a list in autoresponder X won’t switch to Y very readily.

Someone that has lots of tracking links of service A will know it’s a lot of work to change to B because they have links invested all over the place.

Just like someone that has thousands of business cards printed will be reluctant to change their phone number.

So doesn’t this sound like a really simple business? You join a service program as an affiliate and you promote it. Ideally you upgrade from the outset but if money’s tight you do everything for free till you’re getting enough commissions to cover your own upgrade. And then you just keep regularly getting new referrals so your commissions go up every month.

That is the the underlying principle of a solid business plan with an income that takes time to build.

Not sexy maybe but much sexier than believing you’re going to be rich in 90 days and then ‘shockingly’ not being!

There are many ways to make it work a lot better than the simple outline I described but that’s another post.

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I dutifully upgraded to WP3.2 a few days ago (and then to 3.2.1 when I came to write this!) and my main admin menu disappeared!!

I guessed it was a plugin problem…but…how do I deactivate it if I can’t see my main menu?

After some googling I discovered the (now obvious) script I need – plugins.php – just manually delete the end of your url and type plugins.php and you can disable plugins till you find the culprit.

I’m not going to name the specific plugin – probably not fair, I just hope they fix it soon. But for now I have to disable it, write a post and remember to re-enable it. What a PITA!

There’s a lesson here for program creators that turn features on by default…yes Mozilla, I’m referring to you!!

Yesterday Firefox could have been responsible for a serious disaster on one of my sites. Anyone that uses PhpMyAdmin in Firefox should take heed.

I have (had) a table of over 5 million records representing nearly 2 years of data. The data represents daily use of VitalViralPro and I wanted to consolidate it into monthly data for an upcoming new feature.

I had tried different algorithms for doing the consolidation and being cautious, none of the algorithms was ever deleting the source data, just flagging it as processed so I could delete it later. That way I could unflag the data and try a different strategy (because some strategies we’re just going to take too long to process the data – it’s moderately complex).

After trying a few different strategies I thought I knew why my previous attempts were so slow and decided I needed to delete the data as I processed it, not just flag it.

Lucky for me I didn’t take shortcuts; I made a copy of the table with 5 million+ records and changed my algorithm to use that table for testing. The algorithm worked much better; it was still going to take several hours to create the new processed table.

Like anyone, when I’m working on the database I’ll typically have anything from 3-10 tabs open, all with different views or queries in so that I don’t have to keep retyping them. One of these was the one that empties the table being created before I try a new algorithm.

So, being sure this algorithm was the one (but still working on the backup source table), I emptied my destination table and started the script running. Knowing it would take a few hours, I closed firefox down and went and did something different for a while.

I came back a few hours later to check on it. I clicked on my Firefox shortcut and all my previous tabs came back – I remember thinking cool, that’ll save me some seconds. Until I looked at my data!!

My source table had less than a million records left (remember this strategy was deleting the already processed source data) but my destination table only had 100 or so records in (it should have had around 150,000).

Had I been working on the live data, this would have been a true disaster but I was calm and I almost instantly realised what had happened.

One of the tabs that Firefox thoughtfully restored was the one I used to empty my target table and so that MySQL query got executed again when I opened Firefox – doh!!

The annoying thing about this is that I didn’t set the option that makes Firefox restore my last tabs when I open it – the recent FF 5 upgrade seems to have done that (at least I’m 97+% sure I didn’t do it myself). Like many, I’ve appreciated the feature when it does it after a crash or a forced restart but I use Workspaces – and I just have a blank page as my start up page.

In the end the only disaster was that I wasted a few hours because I had to start again. Had this happened on the live data and I had to go to the site backup, I would not have been fun to be around!!

Note this might affect other browsers that are presumptious enough to set your defaults for you.

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I’ve spent a lot of time recently (in bursts) trying to move away from using a desktop mail client (Outlook) to Gmail. I love Outlook and I have years of emails in there but the advantages of having my mail online, accessible from anywhere is too great to resist now.

So bit by bit, I was changing newsletter and program emails over to gmail. However, I kept most of my mailers pointed to Outlook. At first glance, that seems surprising because of the volume. But I was able to whizz through credit emails much faster from Outlook than doing it in Gmail (click on a mail, find the link, click, click back to inbox).

sidenote: Jackie O’Connor-Hagood pointed me in the direction of a Google Labs add-in that gets rid of this problem – Google Auto-advance.

Before Jackie told me about that add-in, I joined ViralInbox – it seemed the ideal solution. It has so many great features and I really love the program.

What scuppers it is that so many mailers don’t have separate contact and list addresses grrrrr. Perhaps they think it’s clever and people will have to look through the credit mails to make sure they don’t miss a system/notification/owner mail. But it frustrates me big time.

I want to use ViralInbox for my list address for mailers – I don’t really want all those mails coming into my gmail account, with all the filters I have to set up. But a stronger motivation is that I want commission/referral notifications and important messages to go to gmail because I would only have ViralInbox open when I was wanting to earn credits. Gmail is open all the time of course.

So that’s part 1 of the rant – mailer owners, you are hampering my flexibility.

Part 2 is that many programs won’t accept an email of the format name+topic@gmail.com. I know not everyone is familiar with this format but it’s incredibly useful. I could have name+personal@gmail.com and name+business@gmail.com and then it’s much easier to set up the filters in Gmail.

But mailer after mailer won’t let me use that format of address. If I have to send all mail to my main name@gmail.com, the filtering is that much messier.

But I persevered. The mailers with separate contact and list addresses were easy of course (especially if they allowed name+contact@gmail.com) – I set the contact address to gmail and the list address to my ViralInbox address.

The mailers with only a single email address I had to direct to gmail and then set up forwarding filters to send (forward) just the credit mails to ViralInbox – so far so good.

That’s when I had a mini private rant at Google because only after I’d invested considerable time in setting all this up, did I spot a note on a Google help page that informed me I could have as many forwarding addresses as I wanted but I could only have 20 forwarding filters.

So, Mailer owners – I don’t think having a single address helps you and it certainly doesn’t help us – we’re very likely to miss any important message and even your marketing emails. And please get with the times and accept name+topic@gmail.com addresses.

And Gmail – why this seemingly pointless limitation?

Array

I am truly grateful for the internet but as I go through my day, there’s always little things that would make a big difference if they were different.

Here’s a few that occur to me, feel free to add any of your own…

OK, obviously we wouldn’t have spam. Or deceptive subject lines.

And using re: when it isn’t a re: would get your internet access banned for a month.

And no marketers would cross that line and still use it just because they’ve proved the open rate is higher. Re: would retain it’s importance.

Emails wouldn’t be marked as important unless…they were important to me.

Scripts that let me buy through paypal but then insist on using my paypal address for emailing me everything would not exist. I don’t want noise in my account email addresses.

In fact everything I have to sign up for where there might be truly important messages like ‘your credit card is about to expire’ would allow you to have 2 email addresses – one for critical must respond messages and one for everything else. And no-one would abuse that just because they know the critals would get opened.

Membership sites that also have a forum would use the same login (oops, my site fails this one before anyone points that out . Same for support desk function.

All sites would allow me to determine how long I want my session timeout to be. I know who uses my PC. Me. You don’t have to take responsibility for my security in that way.

People who register with you and have spam arrest protecting their email address would whitelist you before they sign up for your service. As I saw someone point out recently, the marketer cannot do that for you because they would be declaring they will never send a commercial message.

Joe public would become educated and not send emails with 138 people in the CC field.

Nobody would email me out of the blue by replying to a 3 month old email nothing to do with what they want to say and not even edit the subject line.

No audio on web pages would start automatically. I think many marketers are becoming more respectful of their visitors and doing things right even if they might get lower results. Treat others…

Quicktime wouldn’t exist or if it did, it would respect my wishes to not keep going into automatic start every time it does an update.

Websites wouldn’t pop up a non-resizable window that was too small for the contents so you had to use scroll bars.

Newsletters wouldn’t have an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes you without a confirmation prompt.

If I’ve made a mistake on a field on a form and have to go back, I wouldn’t have to retype anything that was OK, including the password twice.

I wouldn’t have to put my email address twice (because I only copy & paste anyway )

Oh, I nearly forgot: marketers would no longer tell prospects they have to clear their cookies to make sure the marketer gets the sale – what about all the other affiliates cookies that are then cleared? Not to mention the general inconvenience to me when I clear my cookies.

A couple of those are subjective I know…what do you think? What would you add to this list?

I subscribe to a LOT of newsletters from a broad spectrum of internet marketers. A small number of these really bug me because they insist on changing their ‘from’ address in their email every time they send an email.

This makes it much harder to automate the filing of their emails in Outlook using rules.

Do you get emails from one of these people? Does it annoy you?