Wednesday June 6th, 2007: Issue #808
I’m grateful to Jon Andersen on the UK Net Marketer’s forum for pointing me to this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqfFrCUrEbY - as I can remember it from the first time around, I guess it is my generation too!
And as today is my 51st birthday, I’m feeling a certain empathy.
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There is nothing to buy in today’s Kickstart - but if you are in a spending mood, you can always pop over to the constantly developing Kickstart Recommends site at http://www.kickstartrecommends.com and see what takes your fancy!
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Kickstart didn’t happen on Monday. I woke up fine, got on with some work, completed a project I was working on and then …
Well, the best I can describe it is that a black cloud descended. My interest and enthusiasm in everything just evaporated and all I could do was sit quietly, feeling emotionally numb.
It has happened before, about every six weeks or so, and thankfully it rarely lasts more than a day or two. Yesterday I felt a lot better and today I’m back to my usual self again.
Strange, unpleasant, and quite debilitating. Let’s hope the cloud doesn’t descent again for a while!
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If, like me, you are on a few people’s email lists, you won’t have missed the fact that there have been two big launches of new Internet marketing products this week.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to sell you either of them, but I would like to discuss both launches.
The first one was for a product called Google Cash Detective.
This one has had a very long build up. First the creator offered a free ebook/report and just about everyone with a list told their readers about it (they were paid 50 cents for everyone who downloaded it). Yes, I downloaded and read the report as well, but I didn’t recommend it in Kickstart. The lure of 50 cents was not enough to make me promote something that I immediately felt uneasy about.
The book was pre-launching (that’s marketing speak for ‘whipping up a frenzy’) a program that was ‘coming soon’ that claimed to be able to take a list of keywords that you supply and track all the Google AdWords ads that advertisers are placing for those keywords.
The idea is that the program will check your keyword list every day and over time you’ll be able to see which ads run consistently.
According to the product’s creator that information will show you which ads are making money and allow you to copy the successful campaigns.
It isn’t a bad idea but there are a few problems.
First it was clear that the program would be a high ticket item. You don’t run orchestrated launches like that for peanuts. It turned out that the price was about $500, with an ongoing $100 per month subscription.
In my opinion, that is way too high a price to pay for something with dubious value. In any case, there are other programs available that do almost the same job - and for a fraction of the price. There is one (called AdSpyPro) available at the Warrior’s Forum for just $27 at the moment!
Then there are the practical considerations of whether the principle is good.
Quite honestly, the claim that long running ads automatically equate to profitability is highly suspect. There are plenty of big companies who measure the effect of their advertising in a very different way to just the basic dollar return. Ads that are not profitable run every day - for the branding and visibility effects. In fact, many big companies - and a very high percentage of small AdWords advertisers - don’t bother to test and track, and don’t know if their ads are working individually or not.
So, in my opinion, the concept is a flawed one. Yes, it may find some copyable campaigns, but it will also throw up a lot of false positives, and those can cost the unwary very dear!
Another concern is that one of the recommendations is that if you find an AdWords ad that is profitable, you can copy it for yourself and outbid the original advertiser. Aside from the obvious concern that this is just a recipe for spiralling advertising costs for everyone, there is also a real worry that the laws of copyright would be flouted.
Yes, even those little three line AdSense ads are copyright, and if you simply copy a successful one and use it yourself you could open yourself up to all kinds of legal trouble. Especially as you would, by definition, be targeting successful advertisers who are likely to have deep pockets.
Apparently Google Cash Detective sold out all 500 copies in just two hours, so I guess the frenzy worked.
I wonder how many of those 500 people will ever make any money from it though?
The other big launch that still seems to be in mega hype mode - if the increasingly shrill emails that are flooding my inbox are anything to go by - is for something called MME3.
This one is a thousand dollar product and the big-listed affiliates are indulging an a bonus war that is quite amazing to watch.
The bonuses seem to have become more important that the product they are trying to persuade you to buy. Out of interest I clicked on a couple of these big guns’ sites and was presented with very long sales pages that ONLY talked about the bonuses - lists of them! Neither one of these marketers bothered to tell me anything at all about MME3, what it is or how I will benefit from it. Apart from a link to the MME3 sales page at the very end, there was almost no mention of it at all. It was ALL about their bonuses.
Frankly, I found that rather confusing because I actually wanted to know about the product I was being sold, not the bonuses that I didn’t know why I wanted.
Of course I can partly understand why those marketers were selling their bonuses and not explaining the benefits of the MME3 product. Having now found my way to the MME3 sales page (MME3, I found, stands for Marketing Main Event 3 - which, despite the name, isn’t a seminar) I was no wiser about what it is myself.
It has to be one of the longest and most confusing sales pages I’ve ever had the misfortune to see. I can’t honestly say that I read it because most of it went way over my head and my eyes glazed over.
From what I could gather, it seems to be a huge collection of stuff. The kind of stuff that hyped up sales letters and marketers tell you ‘if you can’t make money with all this you don’t deserve to call yourself an Internet marketer’.
I really mean huge. I couldn’t begin to work out where the product package itself ended and the bonuses began (the product’s own ones - not the millions of dollars worth of extras that the frenzied feeders are pushing on top). And then some of the bonuses appeared to have bonuses.
Far from guaranteeing you Internet marketing success, it seems to me that the only things you’d be guaranteed of are a lighter wallet, a full hard drive and a bad case of information overload.
But I may be being overly harsh. I can’t comment on what the product is, or will do for you because I couldn’t penetrate the sales page far enough to find out, and, although I’d be happy to spend $1000 on something that would be of real use to me, I found it impossible to get past the hype to make that judgment. So I can only comment on the effect the sales process had on me, and not on the efficacy of the product. Whatever it is.
I am sure that a lot of money will be made by the creators of MME3 and their affiliates. It will be interesting to see how many of their $1000 customers go on to such success.
These big launches happen with increasing regularity in the Internet marketing field and they are always well worth studying. But my advice is to lock your credit cards away before you open the emails.
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Several people were concerned about the fate of our washing machine and somewhat critical about the extended warranty that appeared to be almost worthless. We’d only bought it in the first place because the store discounted it so heavily that it was silly to turn them down.
I have to report that I was wrong. Far from being worthless, that extended warranty has proven to be one of the best investments I have made!
Our washing machine originally cost £250. The warranty, after the store had discounted it, cost us a bit over £100.
Had we not bought the extended warranty, the machine, which was under 4 years old, would be written off. A repair would have been about £200 and there would be no guarantee that something else wouldn’t have worn out. And remember that the machine has already been repaired once under the warranty - last year it needed a new drum and thermostat.
I had thought that the insurance gave us a new machine if a repair couldn’t be economically carried out, and as I wrote in Friday’s Kickstart, was disappointed that we’d only get a few vouchers instead.
I should have kept my mouth shut until I knew all the facts. The vouchers arrived yesterday - to the value of £330, plus another £40 towards another extended warranty if we wanted one.
So already we were in profit!
We went straight to the store and chose a brand new machine - much better than the old one - for under £300 - and the store offered us a big discount on a new extended warranty. By the time we put all the various discounts and vouchers together we had to pay out about £20.
And the new machine will be delivered (and the old one taken away) tomorrow.
For many items I agree that extended warranties are often a waste of money. But when you get a rogue machine they can be invaluable.
I’m not a total convert - I’d never buy one for an essentially disposable product like a computer, for example - but I won’t reject the concept out of hand now.
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The UK version of The Apprentice is nearing its finale. Tonight the final five will be reduced to two and three people will be fired.
Frankly, if it was up to me, I’d fire the lot of them. there isn’t one person in this year’s contest who seems to deserve to win.
Strangely, one of the worst of the final five is a guy called Simon who claims to be a successful Internet entrepreneur.
I’ve never heard of him, and neither has anyone else I’ve talked to. Googling him doesn’t help. So I wonder what kind of Internet entrepreneur he is. And, if he really is as successful as he says he is, why on Earth would he want a job anyway?
As the only talents he has shown in the entire series have been for inaction and incompetence, I doubt he will make the final cut, so I guess that the rest of us Internet entrepreneurs had better watch out. Simon’s coming back!
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In a spin-off series, one of last years Apprentice finalists, Ruth Badger, is trying to turn around failing businesses by injecting salesmanship and common sense into them.
On the surface she appears to be quite successful at it - by bullying the staff, owners and managers into submission.
I can’t help but wonder how long term her results are though. the companies she is working with are all fundamentally flawed by an almost total lack of business acumen from the owners.
It will be very surprising if any of them really manage to turn around in the long term.
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So, London will host the Olympics in 2012. As if that wasn’t bad enough, £400,000 has just been spent on creating a special logo for the event.
And it is unutterably horrible.
It takes the word ‘flashy’ to new depths. Literally. The animated logo is so hard to watch that it has already been blamed for triggering epileptic fits in at least ten people.
Maybe that’s how the organizers plan to get us to win lots of gold medals - we’ll force everyone else to watch the logo before they compete.
If you have a strong stomach you can watch it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6724245.stm - there is a link to the ghastly monstrosity at the top right of the page.
How can anyone think such awfulness is good for London’s Olympic image. Oh, I forgot, it was Seb Coe’s Olympic comittee who chose it. That explains it all.
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My word! Haven’t I been negative today!
I’ll have to find some good things to talk about on Friday to redress the balance.
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An Inspirational Thought
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Be true to your dreams, and keep them alive. Never let anyone change your mind about what you feel you can achieve.
Be true to the light that is deep within you. Hold on to your faith, hope, and joy for life. Keep good thoughts in your mind and good feelings in your heart.
Be true to yourself in the paths that you choose. Follow your talents and passions. Don’t take the roads others say you must follow; take the ones that will keep your spirits alive with enthusiasm and everlasting joy.
Most of all, never forget that there is no brighter light than the one within you. Follow that inner light to your own personal greatness.
(Jacqueline Schiff)
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Don’t keep it to yourself - send them to
http://www.kickstartdaily.com today!
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The Quote of the Day
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Ashley Rice said:
“As long as you are true to the strength within your own heart … you can never go wrong.”
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Today’s Power Thought
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What triggers your creative processes? The questions you ask that spark new connections generally start with why, where, when, who, what and how. But there is another tool that you can add to that lexicon that is amazingly powerful.
Not.
By asking why something doesn’t happen, or what something isn’t achieving, we can often find answers to questions that we’d never even considered before.
Take Isaac Newton, for example. Everyone knows that he discovered gravity because an apple fell on his head. Well the actual story (from Newton’s own description) was that the apple didn’t actually fall on his head. What really happened was that he was watching the moon one fine evening when he saw an apple fall from a nearby tree. By using ‘not’ creative thinking he wondered why it was that the apple fell, but the moon did not. THAT was how he ended up with the theory of gravity.
Mohammed Ali became the world’s greatest boxer because when he was told that big men can’t dance and aren’t fast, asked himself ‘why not?’
Dick Fosbury, a young American high-jumper in the 1960s was taught that the only way to jump over a bar was face down. He dared to ask why he should not try to do it face up.
What ‘obvious’ solutions in your life and work can you ask the ‘not’ question about?
Why not look at things a different way? What have you got to lose?
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Fascinating Facts
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When a snail goes off to take a nap, don’t wait around for it to wake up - a snail can sleep for three years at a time.