Archive for the Rant Category
Posted on February 19, 2010 by Eric
Well I’ve been away from the blog and PPC affiliate marketing for a bit. Mainly because I’ve been focusing on other things. I’ve had a ton of freelance work to do lately, and one of my clients is hosting a party in San Francisco that has needed a lot of promotional material made.
Plus, I’ve found a new addiction… I tend to be a really intense person when it comes to new things that I like, and coffee is a new one. Not regular coffee… real coffee. I mean if I’m going to be a work junkie and spend my nights working on affiliate marketing I might as well be drinking really good, kick your ass coffee.
For those who don’t know what crema is, I’m not going to explain it… just go here… read… and know that most of what you get in coffee shops has none of it.
There are a ton of factors that go into a really great espresso, and it seems that since I’ve been sucked into the world of coffee geekdom I’ll be chasing them all… as of now, I’m just scratching the surface.
The first thing is a really great coffee grinder. Even if you have an amazing espresso machine, you’ll never make a decent cup if you use either pre-ground coffee or have one of those crappy blade thingies… Go get yourself a proper bur grinder. It doesn’t heat up your coffee when it grinds it, and it will keep all of the ground coffee a similar size (perfect for crema… haven’t you read that article yet???)
I just acquired a Rancilio Rocky Grinder (you can pick it up from amazon here… and yes, that’s an affiliate link). I know I know… spending that kind of money on a grinder seems silly. But really, the difference it made in the coffee is just amazing! I had no idea that the grinder was creating such shyte!
I still unfortunately have a shitty espresso machine. It sucks… I mean it realllly sucks. But I can still get a decent cup out of it, and for those of you with cheap espresso machines (I have a 70 dollar Krups one) here’s how to at least make a drinkable espresso. For any coffee geeks out there, please let me know if there are any other steps I can add, or correct me if need be.
- Fill the machine with cold water (no distilled crap, just filtered).
- Make sure every part of the machine that touches water is clean, and without putting any coffee in it turn it on brew.
- wait until the water has built up and a bit of steam is produced.
- Turn it off.
- dump the water that has come out and pull off your coffee basket and fill with fresh ground coffee from your Rocky Grinder… what, you haven’t bought it yet?
- pack your coffee into the basket a bit. No need for a tamper here or to apply too much pressure… these terrible machines have no pressure.
- By now the water in the boiler will have dropped in temperature… turn on the steam portion and wait until it produces full steam for about 5 seconds.
- Put your coffee basket (portafilter) back into the machine and turn it onto brew.
- Wait for your coffee and turn it off when it starts to change color and gets a bit washed out.
You’re done! With a bit of practice you can get decent (not great) coffee from your crappy machine… suck it starbucks! If the coffee is bitter, you’ve either tamped too hard, or left it brewing for too long. Dump it and try again. I usually get about 1 out of 3 shots that are decent enough to drink straight… the others get turned into americanos…
Why does this belong on a marketing blog? Well I suppose it doesn’t, but I find that a lot of entrepreneurs are very intense people when it comes to their hobbies… besides, how can it hurt?
Posted on February 3, 2010 by Eric
Finally after having the dreaded HTC Touch cell phone for over 2 years I have switched… well in reality I switched about 3 months ago, but I wanted to make sure my phone lived up to my expectations before I gave it an overview.
The new phone that I bought was the HTC Hero on Telus Mobility. Even though I had been with Bell mobility for over 6 years, when both Telus and Bell moved over to their new faster 3g network Bell didn’t get any of the new Android phones.
Given that I hated the stupid HTC Touch (worst phone I’ve ever owned) I moved over to the HTC Hero on Telus and I haven’t looked back.
I can do all of the multi tasking that Apple is now toting on their iPhone, plus I don’t have to use iTunes or any other iCrap in order to upload music.
I don’t like the fact that in Canada I can’t get access to the paid android app store, but I’m not complaining ’cause there are still a ton of fun games and great apps to download for free.
The phone comes with GPS, a barcode scanner, compass and of course the HTC Sense UI. The Sense UI is basically your desktop, and it allows you to quickly switch between screens much like the iPhone… but way better. It’s not just a sea of icons, it actually has use and purpose.
I’m sure I’m pissing off the iPhone hordes out there who blindly stand behind their apple god, so I’ll say some bad stuff. The HTC Hero on Telus hasn’t gone to the new android version yet. It can be laggy sometimes (but so can the iPhone). The chin on the phone is kinda weird. It takes freaking FOREVER to boot up if you have to restart it. You can’t install apps on the expansion card (although, at least I have one 
)….
All in all, the HTC Hero is the best phone I’ve owned. I highly recommend it if you’re a bit of a software geek like me, but if you want everything to be super easy and dumbed down, feel free to go to the iWhatever.
PS. Have I mentioned I’m not a Mac fiend?
Posted on January 9, 2010 by Eric
I’ve got a question: When did internet marketing become throwing shit at a wall until we get a piece to stick?
I haven’t been in IM since the beginning, but from what I can tell all of the wanna be internet millionaires who whine about crap information are just that… whiners.
They don’t want to be marketers. They don’t want to run a business. They just want someone to give them some key to some vault which has all of their dreams stored up in some bag with a dollar sign on it.
WAKE UP!
There is no secret. There is no dream campaign that all of the big guys are keeping from you. There’s just marketing, and then there’s shit being thrown at the wall…
So which type of internet business are you running?
Are you actually trying to connect a consumer with a product that they want or can use? Or are you uploading 10,000 keywords into Yahoo Search Marketing and hoping that one of them will convert on that Walmart gift card offer?
If you want to make a living at the internet marketing game, you’ve gotta stop thinking like a drone, and start thinking like a marketer. You’ve got to come up with a concept that makes sense, and that connects real people (yes they are people on the other end of your website, not just conversion numbers) with real services/products.
I’m not saying you can’t get a $250 Walmart gift card to convert well. I’m just saying that putting it on a blank page that says click here to get it isn’t going to do fuck all.
Where does this come from? Well I found a site (I won’t list it here because I just feel sorry for the guy) that was just a page with a black background and a bunch of affiliate banners on it. They weren’t similar banners. In fact there was one for dating sitting next to one for auto insurance.
He had claimed that he was sending PPC traffic to this site and trying “everything” he could to get it to convert, yet he was just losing money. These types of people just shouldn’t even try to be internet marketing people.
And in fact, if you are reading this and you own a site like that… just get out… get out NOW!
Marketing is about telling a story. A story that jives with the views of a group of people (for those of you who don’t know who these people are… they are your “customers”). Your story has to be convincing… and your story has to be consistent (as in, don’t say you have the best customer service when you don’t ever answer the phone). And yes, even if you are promoting email and zip submit offers, this story needs to be there.
So ask yourself; what story is your site telling?
More on this later, but for now do yourself a favor and pick up Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars and start being a marketer, not a chump.
Posted on January 4, 2010 by Eric
Well, I never thought I would be saying this, but it’s time for me to make some serious goals for the new year. My whole life I’ve been kind of avoiding goal-making. I’m not sure why, but I just figured if I could stay in the moment things would just… work out…
Well running my own business has changed that idea. I can’t do it anymore. I’ve discovered I need goals even on the daily level. If I don’t schedule my day, nothing really ends up getting done.
So here it is… begrudgingly I have made the list. I’ve ordered them from least important to most important:
- Make a list of my goals (holy shit I’ve already finished one!)
- Buy one design book per month for all of 2010
- Scale my CPA business up to $250 a day – enough to go back to school in 2011
- Build up a network of sites (around 150 should do it) that will continually grow and make money
- Learn how to teach people how to do things… I’m really bad at this…
- Learn how to outsource a lot of my work to other people so I can accomplish the next two…
- Share more of my money with people who need it
- Share more of my time with my family and my friends
- Keep my life scheduled down to the hour… not set in stone, but more of a… “guideline”
- Continue to be happy where I am, and learn from myself and my friends
I guess that last one is a little sappy, and not much of a business goal, but I really feel like if you’re happy with yourself then it doesn’t really matter what you do, or who you’re dating, or where you live, or who your family is or even if your dog chews a hole in your wall of your rented apartment that costs you $2500 bucks…
Anyways, I hope everyone had a wicked awesome new years and let’s all make 2010 a rad year!
Posted on December 30, 2009 by Eric
I want to write about my first experiences with Adknowledge. Adknowledge is a “performance based advertising network” that I came across through a friend, and in late November I decided to give them a try.
Because of this recommendation I thought that the system would be smooth sailing, and I’d be able to get some quality traffic to my offers for a good price. I learned two things quickly… never assume a damn thing about any 2nd tier PPC company.
When I first signed up I was confronted with a terrible user layout that is completely built in flash called bidsystem. Not only is it incredibly clunky to use, but it doesn’t always save your changes. For example, if you pause a campaign that campaign will disappear from your dashboard. Where does it go? I’ll be damned if I know. As far as I can tell the only way to get to your paused campaigns is to log out and log back in and pray that you can see them on the first page of your dashboard.
Anyways, I had worked with a number of bad UI’s before and figured I could get by this if the traffic was good.
So I setup a few campaigns and I waited… and waited… and waited. And then I saw this thing on my dashboard that said my account status was pending… huh… I wasn’t told that my account needed approval, but I figured I’d wait over the weekend and at the very least it would be approved after 4 business days…
I was wrong. So I sent them an email. And two business days I got a message back saying that I was approved and my ads were accepted… thanks Adknowledge!
In these first campaigns the traffic wasn’t bad, and it’s about half the price of a Google click. However, you can only bid on categories and not keywords, so I was basically fucked for getting my campaigns to profit margins.
For a credit report campaign I was only approved on 2 categories. 2! Now, I can understand that they want to keep their traffic score up, but how am I supposed to optimize a campaign when I have two choices?
My initial campaigns weren’t going too well so I decided to pause them (that’s when I realized that, once paused, the campaigns went to adknowledge heaven). I decided to setup a few new campaigns. That was December 10th. It is now December 30th, and I just received notice that my ads were approved. It took 20 full days to have my ads approved from adknowledge.
Did I try contacting them during this time? Hell yes I did! And I got no response. In my adknowledge dashboard I had a big fat blank under “account manager” too so I didn’t even have a direct contact.
So now that I have ads running on adknowledge that are about the holidays… approved after the holidays… I should start getting traffic, no? That’s what any sane person would imagine, but it’s not the case… All of my categories for my campaign were rejected! Apparently my payday loan application CPA offer doesn’t fit into these categories:
Cash advance
Cash Loan
Online Loan
Payday Loan
I like how the first one got rejected even though cash advance is in the domain name and header of the offer. Of course you’re probably thinking, “Eric, why don’t you check their notes to see why it was rejected?”. I would if I could, but there is no notification when these categories get rejected, and I have no way of knowing why someone would have rejected them.
This post is getting long now so I’m going to end it, but if you come across adknowledge in your quest for good PPC traffic, my recommendation is to be very careful. If you’re going to try them out, start with a tiny budget first. As for me, I want to get away from their terrible service and terrible software as quickly as I can.
If you want to check out Adknowledge you can do so here.
Has anyone else had any experience with these guys? If so, let me know. I’d love to know what other people experienced with them.
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