What's working and what's not

We're embarking on a new adventure with internet marketing, eCommerce and analytics. Over the past several months, we've put money, time and effort into lots of different internet programs, advertising, and relationships. Through experimentation and testing, we now have a pretty good handle on what works and what doesn't.

Rather than write a big, long storyline that gives you all the details, we're going to take it one piece at a time.

And, we're going to connect with other people's work along the same lines. Yes, there are still people involved ... not all iMarketing is done by 'bots yet!

So, we'll start you off with an easy evaluation. If you had to come up with 3 of the biggest names in Internet Affliate Marketing, who would you name? I'm sure that if we collected everyone's responses, you could probably count all the different names people mention on the fingers of two hands. We might need one or two toes to complete the big guy list, but that's probably about it.

For brevity, let's narrow it down to 3. You think of your top 3 and I'll think of mine. A friend posted a similar review, but actually named names earlier today. And I see that her content has actually been removed from the AssociatedContent.com website. So, I won't put names in this blog post, but I will summarize the results.

From the top names and their affiliate programs, you can guarantee that those guys (or girls) are making most if not all of the money. In fact a couple of them actually sell their lists to other places and people to market to you as well. Buyer beware ... take it slow on signing up for affiliate programs from the "big names". More often than not, you sign up and they leave you to it. You are on your own. You can spend money to try to get their attention and help, but that is a "dry hole" too.

A couple of positive things to say, though: Try to learn what they do and how they do it. There are lessons in there. One of the bigger names in particular offers very specific, concrete advice on several advertising and marketing techniques ... PPC for example. But, he sells his list (you will get emails from people with names you've never heard of that use his brand) and I'm not 100% certain that there isn't some kind of pirating of commissions going on behind the scenes. I don't have any proof or evidence, other than the law of large numbers. Big traffic increases in buyers (I know because they bought other things) did not yield any corresponding commission increases.

All of this is to say ... be careful when you sign up for Affiliate Programs, especially those from the "big name" folks.

In the spirit of "What's working and What's not", this is our first of several posts. Come back often, read more, and please post your opinion too. We are all still people, and there is great strength in our numbers.

Cheers.

(Note: For more detail on successful programs that do work, visit Creative Data Networks and Analytics web site (click this link).)

Information for business planning

Gathering Information For Your Plan

By Palo Alto Software, Inc.

A common problem people encounter when writing their business plan is finding information about their business industry and competitive companies. Fortunately, in recent years the Internet has made information gathering simple and easy, but sometimes the best information is found much closer to home, with real people, in real time.

Always take a look at other businesses similar to your own, as a very good first step. If you're looking at starting a new business, you may well be starting one similar to one you already know. If you're doing a plan for an existing business, you are even more likely to know the business well. Even so, you can still learn a lot by looking at other similar businesses.

• Look at existing, similar businesses



If you are planning a retail shoe store, for example, spend some time looking at existing retail shoe store businesses. Park across the street and count the customers that go into the store. Note how long they stay inside, and how many come out with boxes that look like purchased shoes. You can probably even count how many pairs of shoes each customer buys. Browse the store and look at prices. Look at several stores, including the discount shoe stores and department store shoe departments.




• Find a similar business in another place



Find a similar business far enough away that you won't compete. For the shoe store example, you would identify shoe stores in similar towns in other states. Call the owner, explain your purpose truthfully, and ask about the business.



• Scan local newspapers for people selling a similar business.



Contact the broker and ask for as much information as possible. If you are thinking of creating a shoe store and you find one for sale, you should consider yourself a prospective buyer. Maybe buying the existing store is the best thing. Even if you don't buy, the information you gain will be very valuable. Why is the owner selling? Is there something wrong with the business? You can probably get detailed financial information.



• Always shop the competition.



If you're in the restaurant business, patronize your competition once a month, rotating through different restaurants. If you own a shoe store, shop your competition once a month, and visit different stores.

It takes a little hard work but by using the Internet and doing some research at local businesses, you should be able to gather all the information necessary for your business plan.

Source: Articles on www.bplans.com

Online Banking

One of the newest innovatations in iMarketing and eCommerce is online banking. Many large finanacial instutitions have developed their own proprietary systems that work within only their branches and offices. So, if you happen to be one of their customers, that's all good. But, we are now starting to see smaller banks and credit unions taking advantage of providing online banking services to their customers.

You can learn more about how to do online banking by clicking here:

ONLINE BANKING

If you are experienced with paying bills online -- both your personal ones and your business ones, you can use this information to improve how you integrate and collect all your information into one, secure easy-to-access place. This report provides more detail and also gives you great tips for using online banking.

Social Marketing Follow up

So, when we think about the power of social marketing we have to keep the big numbers in perspective. Before you get all excited about making tons of money, filter your analysis through the following chain:

• My category ... what am I trying to sell and how many people or customers or businesses might be interested.
• Awareness ... how will I make potential customers aware of my offering
• Engagement ... once customers are aware how do I convert them to buyers? what is the benefit of what I'm offering to sell that customers will pay for?
• Action ... how will customers actually buy from me?

Here's a link to an excellent article that summarizes all of the above.

FACEBOOK SALES FUNNEL

Social marketing and analytics

How much do we know about social marketing (think Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc.) and how well it works? It seems like drinking from a firehose ... recent articles show that formal Marketing and marketers can't keep up. There are now 200 million "owners" on Facebook, growing by only 80 million or so in the past 6 months.

What if everyone on Facebook sold one thing worth $1 to everyone else (except themselves) on Facebook? That's only a $200 million business ... and suppose that happens once per month. Okay, that's a $2.4 Billion business. And, you can do the math to see what happens if the transaction happens every day or twice a month or once a week.

So, theoretically, the potential size of this opportunity is huge!

But, of course, this is just all theoretical. In order of social to work on building a business, we all still have to go through the traditional marketing stuff.

There's a great article that demonstrates that I'll share soon. More later ...