Dave and Jay - Crazy Web Entrepreneurs

You may remember my post a while back about price fixing in canada and how it was holding me back from getting a Blackberry. Well… I caved :( BUT, I was able to finagle a great deal out of my provider and now I’m only being ripped off, not robbed blind.

Why I Love My Blackberry

I really have to say that the Blackberry has transformed my business life. It has really let me optimize my downtime and get a lot more work done. So the cost really is justified: not only am I able to respond to my clients from my day job, but I am able to effectively use downtime. For instance, I wrote my last post and most of this post while I was waiting in a doctor’s office. So instead of reading some magazine that I wasn’t really interested in, I wrote almost two blog posts.

One of the drawbacks for me are my giant bulbous fingers… it’s really hard to type on the tiny little keyboard. I am getting used to it though, and my WPM on the blackberry is definitely going up. If you communicate with your customers a lot via email, or you have downtime where you are just waiting around, a Blackberry is extremely useful because you can get a lot of work done instead of just sitting around picking your nose.

Here’s a couple of tips (especially for you Canadians) when securing your own Blackberry

1. Don’t go on a contract - honestly, when was the last time you said to yourself: “Damn, I’m really glad I signed up for that 3 year contract!”. You can get an unlocked Blackberry refurbished for pretty cheap and go on a month-to-month package, so you aren’t trapped into anything.

2. If you are a long-time customer coming off a contract or close to ending a contract, the cell companies will do just about anything to keep you as a customer. I called up Rogers when I had about 5 months left on my contract… and I was able to get them to add 250 minutes to my plan, knock a total of $11 off my current bill without losing any of my services and give me four times the data for their basic data plan.

So basically, my Blackberry service is costing me $14 a month ($25 - $11)… not too shabby!

3. Don’t believe what they tell you. While I was negotiating the deal above, I was told at least half a dozen times that “that can’t be done” or “only on a three year contract”. Stand your ground and don’t bend: remember, they desperately want to keep you as a subscriber, so you have the upper hand. Don’t accept a deal that you don’t like, because they will most likely offer you something better if you say no.

I was rather surprised to see Dave’s post proclaiming our great return, especially when my last post was on October 26th.

So, it’s not like we’re coming back from some great journey or something…

However, we should be updating the site more frequently, and will hopefully get back into the swing of things shortly…

A fair bit has happened since my last post; I was having a lot of trouble writing a sales letter that I actually liked for my latest e-book, and so I finally gave in and hired a professional copywriter to do it for me.

Yes… Yes, I know, I suck…

After about a week, I finally got the first draft back and I have to say I rather like it. I’m a little nervous since it doesn’t read like what most people claim is the “right” way to do it, and it certainly wasn’t cheap, but I have a good feeling about it so hopefully it works out.

In other news, the culling of my original products affiliate program has had some “interesting” results - for starters, I have entered into negotiations with one of my top affiliates to possibly sell the site and my list to him.

From my understanding, he has a good JV lined up and needs a product that has already demonstrated sales and so forth in order to pull it off, so will I go for it? I don’t know - it depends on what the final $$ amount is. Daddy needs to pay down his mortgage.

Anyway, keep on trucking :)

Apparently we had some good stuff to say back when we were updating this blog every day. Despite the fact that we haven’t been posting on a very regular basis, we have still been maintaining a regular RSS readership of about 40…(except for today because Google is having their feedfetcher problems again).

So, Jay and I are going to be giving this blogging thing another try. On a trial basis, we are going to be posting once a day and trying to build onto you, faithful readers.

Part of the problem we had the last time around was we tried to come up with unique killer content every day, and for a while I think we did a pretty good job of it. Unfortunately, after a month or two, we had basically run out of ideas. This time around, we’re still going to be providing you guys with great content, but we’ll be mixing it up with some opinion pieces on industry news and other content to hopefully give us longevity for more than a few months.

Something I want to do a bit more personally is humor posts, like our John Chow fine dining spoof. I don’t think my unique brand of zaniness is easily reproduced, and we can really build some differentiation between us and the myriad of blogs out there.

As you may have noticed, we’ve been hit by the Google PR smackdown and have been dropped down to PR2. This really is just another example (out of many others) that demonstrates how broken this update is. Not only do we have no paid links, but we have no monetization at all on this blog. It really hasn’t affected traffic or search engine rankings, so we could really care less. It seems Google has just dealt another blow to PR, which is already on life support in the ICU.

Any how, thank you to those of you who’ve stuck around - and welcome to any new readers.

Good Profits.

Things are moving fast on my end these days, and within the next few days my next digital product will be ready for release.

While I don’t care to name the genre I am entering, I can say that all my research so far indicates that things should be a success… so far, all I have left to work on is the sales letter. :)

So, I thought it fitting that while I agonize over what to include in the letter, I should also publish my 2nd tip!

How to Write Content!!!

Personally, my style is to organize the content as such:

1. Attention grabbing headline.
2. Build my credibility in the opening paragraph, tell people who I am and why they should listen to me.
3. Talk about my product as if they have it already and what problems it solves.
4. List notable items in the e-book, such as questions or problems solved, in point form. *extra tip: I have found much success listing page numbers beside these items, this is especially helpful if your book has a lot of pages… if you have 20 pages don’t bother.*
5. Talk about the product some more.
6. Call to action + bonuses.

That’s a pretty basic rundown, and my recommendation would be to take a look at what your competition is doing, or any sales letter you come across that seems enticing, and then take note of how the information flows.

In every genre you need to take a slightly different approach; for internet marketing products you may want to avoid talking about how great you are, but if you’re talking about training horses, perhaps telling your customer how much experience you have will be a plus factor.

Now you might be wondering… what about testimonials?

Well, I recently experimented with something different, I hired a freelancer in Austria to write out a number of different testimonials in different handwriting styles and on different types of paper. He then scanned each testimonial and resized them, and now underneath each testimonial listed in the content, I have a link where people can click and view the actual testimonial in a separate window.

The reason I tried this is because I feel most people today are sick of scam artists posting fake testimonials about their products… will it work? I don’t know yet, however I have plugged it into my multivariate testing so I should know within the next two months… I am starting the test with UK traffic and hope to expand it to Canada and the USA shortly!

Anyway, best of luck to you all!!

Since moving into digital products, I’ve had to learn a few cold hard facts about the difference between sales letters and traditional websites.

First off, the biggest difference between the types of websites is the header. In traditional websites, we are taught to have interesting graphics, logos, nav buttons and sometimes even text… all in our header.

However with sales letters, my multivariate testing reveals the same site design (without a header) converts almost a full 0.57% higher than my original design, which had attention-grabbing images and even a line of sales text. But when I had my designer remove all text and buttons from the original design, the difference between the two styles was substantially less, with the header-less design selling 0.23% better.

The small percentage points don’t sound like much, however it means I make an additional sale for every 200 visitors with the header-less design, as well as one extra sale for every 400+ visitors with the plain header. In turn, this makes the adwords bill much easier to afford, especially if you are selling someone else’s product with a landing page.

My theory behind this is that attention-grabbing headers tend to compete for attention with your heading text, which dulls any punch you may be able to deliver with it. Also, having navigation links or buttons in the header draws people away from your sales letter and into sub pages where you often end up losing their interest.

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve read my rant about price fixing for wireless data rates in Canada. Since then, I’ve come across the wireless future website, and even though they most likely just want to get a piece of the action themselves, any competition will make it better for the consumer.

So, on to the story at hand… my cell phone started to die a few weeks ago, and I decided to go ahead and get a blackberry - just to use as a cell phone until such point that I could justify the data plan cost, or when their data plans became reasonably priced. That little endeavor is a whole different story, but here I am 3 weeks later with a working blackberry (sorta, the ‘d’ key sticks sometimes so I gotta get a replacement when they get more in stock, “go-go blackberry number 5!”).

I was content to use it without the data features, but last night I said to myself… “Self, why don’t you call Rogers and see if you can sweet-talk a deal out of them?” The short version of the story is: I was able to get them to drop $11 from my current bill and add 100 minutes of talk time, then give me 4 times the data on their basic data plan.

It did take a lot of talking, and I had to speak with three different departments. The voice guy was extremely helpful, and offered the $11 off and extra 100 minutes without me really having to say anything. I had him forward me to the data department, figuring if these guys won’t give me a deal, I’ll at least save $11 a month now.

For the Data plan, I was basically going on the fact that Bell and Telus offer four times the data for the same price. The data guy was a bit squirrely, he tried to give me this line about how their blackberries used less data and that’s why they were giving data. He kept changing his story (from “we have a larger datapipe, so that uses less data because it moves faster”, to “well, we compress our data” (who doesn’t?), and it was all shifty, so he finally gave up on that since he realized I wasn’t buying it. So, he finally said “let me see what I can do”. He told me they didn’t have a 4 meg plan, but he could give me 7 megs at $35. Not buying this for a second, I said I was looking for something in the basic plan price range ($25). So he hummed and hawed, then said, “actually there is a 4 meg plan for $25, but you’d have to go on a 3 year contract.” Hell would freeze over before I signed up for a 3 year contract (when was the last time you signed a 3 year contract and then later on said to yourself: “man, I’m really glad I signed that contract”), so I told him that wasn’t going to work. He said “just a second” again (at this point I’m reasonably sure he wasn’t actually doing anything but creating the appearance that he was doing something on his end) and offered it at a 1 year contract.

You gotta give them something I guess, but I’m still wondering if I had pushed it further whether they would’ve been willing to give me the plan without a contract. Oh well, I’ll find that out when I call in for a better deal next year!

Moral of the story: always, always, ALWAYS bargain. If they say no, you haven’t lost anything. If they say yes, you’ve saved money!

Good Profits.

As I discussed earlier, at the end of August, Faith, her brother and I headed down to PAX. I was thinking about the swag the other day, and an observation about marketing dawned on me. Several companies that had booths there were giving out T-shirts, but they only had one size: XL.

Not only is that pretty stereo-typical and insulting to gamers in the first place, but it’s also poor marketing… here’s why: You give away t-shirts because you want to promote your company, and how will this promote your company? By people wearing your t-shirt. However, if it doesn’t fit the majority of people you give it to, then they can’t very well wear it around, now can they?

Moral of the story? Giving away freebies is great, but don’t just give a freebie for the sake of giving something away for free. Have a definite, planned purpose that will provide the results you’re looking for. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your money… and possibly pissing someone off in the process.

Good Profits.

We recently redeveloped the website for my day job, and we’ve been doing a big push in the web design avenue. Thus far, I’ve been spending a lot of time organically building links for a plethora of local web design terms… (”city name web design” or “city name province web design”).

Initially, I had a lot of success getting ranked for my primary terms, and one of the methods I decided to use was a top commentator spot on JohnChow.com with one of my key phrases. Shortly after I started that, my rankings dipped a little bit and I hit a brick wall. I just could not get my sites to move up any farther for relatively non-competitive terms, no matter what I did.

Finally, in exasperation, I stopped bothering with the effort of maintaining the top commentator spot, and I did not expect any changes… I was just frustrated with a lack of movement in my rankings. A couple of days after I dropped the commentator spot, I was shocked to see my site rise up on the listings once again!

Now, I’m not claiming any definitive proof… one man’s experience does not a trend make. However, it is possible that there is some sort of negative value passed via a link from John Chow, or at least a site-wide link. I’d be very interested to hear the experiences of anyone else who has gone after a top commentator spot, preferably for smaller to medium sites (as a large and popular site would most likely shrug off any negative effect, as I’m sure the effect is not a large one, if it even exists).

Even so, the benefit of advertising (if you actually have a product targeted to the audience) on that blog is well worth it (regardless of any negative effects that may or may not exist)… just for the amount of traffic there, it’s obvious you can make some serious coin (and people have) by advertising there.

Yesterday on Webmaster Radio, John talked about how webmasters should not be dependent on Google in any way, and while that’s great on paper… not all of us can reach the point where our website is a well-known Internet brand. He went on to say that no one’s sure why he’s been penalized (not banned, people like to throw that out there and I think I’m guilty of using that description as well, but he is not banned… just heavily penalized) and that they think it’s due to selling links.

My hunch is that Google didn’t like his “review my blog for a link back” campaign, which was touted as the best piece of link bait ever. It’s essentially a link exchange scheme on a grand scale. It was brilliant, but basically a violation of “don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank”. Even so, I don’t blame John for bucking Google - he’s outgrown them. The rest of us haven’t, though…

Good Profits!

SeoMoz has just released an SEO Experts quiz! The questions are actually pretty thorough, in my opinion - unlike the ones in that Professional Blogger quiz that’s floating around. I got 66%, but it was quite late when I wrote it… and I mis-clicked a few of the answers (meant to click one, but accidentally clicked another).

I think I might have been able to get around 70% at the top of my game, but not much more than that. I sent it to Jay, I’m sure he’ll do it and I’m sure he’ll beat my score because he generally knows more about SEO than me. Check it out though, it’s fun to take!

Good Profits.

A few months back when we accidentally discovered a new way of ranking your site easily, I posted a Keyword Elite review which linked to a text file with several hundred lawn mower-related terms.

At the time, it was done to show people how good Keyword Elite was at making up lists, but it had an entirely unexpected consequence. Within a few days, this blog started receiving 50-100 search-ins every day for various lawn mower terms… of course, the true power of this never really hit us… that is, until a few weeks ago when we saw a site for sale on sitepoint that replicated this - except instead of using written content and adsense, it used affiliate products.

The idea is that a brand name is generally pretty competitive - however, brand name + product name usually isn’t; in some cases I see brand names with 1 million - 3 million competing pages, however when you search for the product name, it drops to around 4000 pages.

The site in particular that inspired this idea had a total of 3 spammy-looking backlinks, and was earning $500ish per month off MSN and Yahoo - but perhaps most surprisingly, someone paid over $8500 USD for it.

We should have our site (based on this concept) ready for launch hopefully near the end of September and we will keep you updated - but I must say, looking at the competitive numbers, I can’t see how this won’t work… at least until MSN gets its act together.