Checked my mailbox today to pick up all my online holiday shopping items and was surprised by a big package from eBay. Not like something I bought off eBay, but something actually from eBay. I cracked it open to find an awesome holiday package from the thoughtful folks at eBay Partner Network. Inside I found some nice holiday candy, a leather bound domino set, and a nice soft throw blanket. You guys rock, thank you!
I really don’t think much of pubcon. Any time I have gone to the actual conference, attended a seminar, or walked the floor, I have felt like 95% of my time was wasted. On the other hand, pubcon is really one of my favorite events because almost all of my dear dear friends in the internet marketing business are all in the party capital of the world, las vegas.
Well, that and the last day of pubcon falls on my birthday, Nov. 13. I think I am turning 23 AGAIN this year, wow who knew. So yeah, come to vegas for pubcon, but don’t actually go to pubcon. Check out DK’s Purpose INC for a schedule of anti pubcon events like his epic poker tourney and other crazy parties. Last year Shoe coined my new fav nickname, “emphasis” … the fact that he coined it at the top of his lungs in the middle of a fancy restaurant at Encore makes it all the more special to me. Then we all went to the high limit room at the mirage and bought out the bar.. DK made everyone sing happy birthday and I was super embarrassed but had enough whiskey in me to pull it off… Looking forward to seeing all my friends again this year!
So I was reading the other day about a native american group that is asking the Supreme Court to make the Redskins (NFL Team located ironically in Washington DC) change their name, because
The Native American organization claims that the name “Redskins” is a disparaging term. The goal of the group is to have the Redskins trademark canceled. The team has had a valid trademark for the name since 1967.
So naturally I laughed at how much time people have on their hands and how they choose to spend it. But today I was reading an excellent biography of Thomas Jefferson (“The Road to Monticello” by Kevin J. Hayes), and in doing so found it necessary to refer to my copy of the Declaration of Independence. In that sacred and hallowed document there is the following passage:
… bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
So maybe the Redskins should change their name to “Merciless Indian Savages” ? Or maybe this native american group should sue the estate of Thomas Jefferson?
This is a response to Andy Liu’s post on startup challenges. Andy is a serial entrepreneur that regularly busts out some of the most intelligent commentary in our industry, and is a must read and follow if you are into internet marketing at all.
I guess I have a different meaning of the word ’startup’ than most, I have on average 3-4 ’startups’ a month. To me it’s nothing more than an idea, and the 4 D’s. Design, Develop, Deploy, Dominate. If I can’t do any of those, the ’startup’ goes out the window. My advantage over most entrepreneurs is I can code reasonably well, at least well enough to build a prototype of the idea. If that prototype ends up proving the idea, I have it rebuilt by people much more proficient than I in the php arts, and begin the Domination.
Sometimes I come up with an idea out of the blue, sometimes I will look at someone else’s idea and say ‘Hey they suck I can do that way better’, sometimes I just browse the Sedo domain auctions or Flippa and look at what’s out there for some inspiration. My current idea / startup is a combo of those.
A few years back I was craving some food from a local restaurant, Lotsa Pasta. I didn’t have their number so I typed lotsapasta.com into my browser. To my surprise the domain was parked and for sale. I thought it was weird but whatever I just googled them and found their number. As I was putting my order in, I looked more at the google local result and saw their domain was actually yumm.com. When I got through with my order, I asked to speak to the owner and found out I already was, and asked her if I could meet with her regarding her site. Long story somewhat short, I ended up buying the lotsapasta.com domain and building them out a new site in exchange for the yumm.com domain. It’s a killer domain for several reasons, it’s size, pronunciation, age, etc. I just have never had the right idea for it. Sometimes the name comes before the idea.
Now I have a killer idea for my killer domain, and want to move forward. Without giving too much away, my plan is to make it a site about recipes. My challenge is that the recipe space is already dominated by large sites. So assuming I can do the first three D’s, how do we Dominate?
First and foremost I want to build an awesome service. I have a few rules for this, 1) My Mom has to be able to use it and like it, and 2) It has to be something so cool you would tell your friends because you think they would enjoy it. I am still debating charging for the service, but will probably leave it free because I like free stuff and I think other people do too. Bottom line, make something too cool to not spread the word about.
Building in tools so people can share it is crucial. It’s too easy to say “Oh so and so would really enjoy this I am going to tell them” and then forget about it. If there is a share button right there where you can post it to your twitter, facebook, email, whatever it’s much easier. So yeah, obviously make it so it has the capability to go viral.
One thing I can do pretty well is SEO. One facet of Yumm will be a public front with popular recipes. We obviously want these pages to rank well in search engines, so an SEO strategy is key. Something that is popular right now is the URL shortener services that have a toolbar across the top (see pop.ly,digg.com). Yumm.com is a pretty short domain so that is totally an option. Also building widgets that webmasters can embed on their sites to enable users to share their content through yumm provides not only traffic but linkbacks to the yumm.com domain, all of which helps with SEO.
As a developer, I can appreciate a killer API. Twitter owes a lot of its domination to the fact that it has a thorough and easy to use API. If you look at almost any successful web company in the last few years, it is very easy to get data in and out of the service. So I think having a comprehensive and easy to use (REST / XML) API is key to the success of Yumm.
All of these things are important, but I don’t really look at them as challenges, just part of the job. Our industry is unique in that we call it web marketing, but oftentimes we have to be experts in a lot of fields to even have a chance of being successful. For example with Cars For a Grand I had to not only code it, design it, SEO it, market it, do the PR, build an email list (that’s just the web side) I then had to become an expert in the used car business. The more skills you have the better your chances. You can always hire someone to fill a void, but they will never care as much as you or work as hard as you would. Also they are more expensive
A great way to build your skillset is to associate with the dominant people in your industry. DK’s ThinkTank is a great place to do that. I attended last year, and will at the very least be making a cameo this year. ThinkTank is the first place I met Andy Liu, who I ended up spending time with at Shoe’s Elite Retreat (also an epic conference).
I also met Cameron Olthuis at last year’s ThinkTank and we ended up being great friends. Cameron surfs, and last week we took a ten day trip to Nicaragua (more on that later). On our way, we passed through El Salvador. Some of the poverty in this area of the world is enough to bring you to tears, which is why I am stoked Andy and DK decided to support Future Hope, an organization that helps empower impoverished people through technology.
So yeah I have been on twitter since march 2008 (yeah I know that’s why the post is entitled ‘Yeah I know I lag’) and the service, or rather the people using the service, has changed radically. It used to be just my seo/geeky friends that were on twitter, and my big time hollywood friends just made fun of it. Now (post Oprah twitter show) they are on it, which is a massive glut of technically inexperienced people opening a method to put a message in front of them with little to no spam filtering. This has resulted in massive twitter spam, most of it affiliate marketing and most of it dating / adult.
It’s easy to see, just click on the link that shows you who’s following you. If you are active on twitter at all, you have a bunch of cute girls who want to show you their sexy pics. (If you are not an internet marketer, let me explain these are fake computer generated accounts from an array of cute profile pictures, an array of names, and an array of sample tweets. They do not want to show you their sexy pics until you show them your sexy credit card)
So this creates the obvious opportunity of jumping in the spam stream and making some quick money before twitter gets better at stopping this behavior. Kinda greasy, but who am I to judge. It also makes your follower count totally irrelevant (sorry ashton).
I think what would be valuable and viral is a site that calculated twitter weight by creating an algorithm that takes into account not only the # of followers you have, but how long they have been on twitter, how many followers they have, etc. So someone with 100 followers including @iamdiddy could potentially be ranked higher than someone with 1,000 no name spam followers. I would do this but there is just not enough reward to tip the scales.. I think wefollow.com probably the best candidate but anyone with some spare time, php knowledge and server space could do this in a few days.
I had no idea people still used this, but Jared has written us a really cool guide on how to download from newsgroups. I remember downloading stuff from newsgroups back in 1994, crazy that this wholly centralized, easy to find service hasn’t had a single lawsuit over copyrighted content.
As you may or may not know I run a used car website called CarsForaGrand.com. I thought it would be a great idea to buy a car for under $1,000 from the site and drive it coast to coast in an attempt to get some news coverage and visitors to the site. We were successful in appearing on a dozen news broadcasts and driving almost half a million visitors to the site in three weeks – all for free.
Here is an example of the coverage we got, this one is from San Diego:
The basic hope was that we could drum up some news coverage and backlinks with the unique story, especially amid the current economic climate and automaker bailouts. The initial idea was to get on a few local TV stations, you know the classic filler on a slow news day ‘Two guys are driving across country in a $900 car…’ stuff like that. It also sounded like a bunch of fun, never having been across country before. I thought about hiring a PR firm, or getting a consultant, but then I remembered that stuff costs money. So I talked to a few friends in the industry like PR guru Chris Winfield, whipped up a press release, and got to work. Here is the first release:
COAST TO COAST IN AN $899 CAR
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
SAN DIEGO, CALIF (April 2009)- Who says you can’t afford a reliable, safe, working car in this recession– for under $1,000 bucks! Early this month, two young entrepreneurs will set out from San Diego, Calif. to show the country that they do not need a bailout to get a decent car. Chris Hedgecock and Jorge Gonzalez, founders of the website CarsForaGrand.com, have purchased a car from the website for $899 and will drive from San Diego to Miami to prove you can buy a reliable car without the hassle and burden of financing one.
These two young guys will be cruising through your town and would like to stop by your station as they make their way across the country. You will find their story to be inspiring, interesting and humorous as they honk through towns just like yours.
The car is a 1974 Pontiac LeMans, purchased for $899.89 on February 26, 2009. To make sure the the car was safe and road-worthy, $200 was invested in parts like belts, spark plugs, and a much needed oil change. The car was purchased from CarsForaGrand.com, a website that only features used cars under $1,000.
Chris and Jorge’s journey can be followed at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/) where daily updates will be posted including pictures and video. The entire trip is expected to last 14 days barring a major incident (fingers crossed!) The route and city list will be updated with dates daily as schedules might change, always find the newest information at (http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/the-route/).
AVAILABLE IN SAN DIEGO APRIL 2, 2009
To schedule an interview or a drive-by please contact
I had the good fortune of having my friend Drew Schulte to help out with the PR legwork. Drew is not a PR professional, actually he’s my real estate agent but in this market he has a lot of free time So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address.
After a few cities we altered the release to include the specific city we were in, and links to the previous news coverage. This really helped because it showed them that other stations were covering us and the last thing a news station wants to do is miss covering a story other stations might be covering. So once we got the ball rolling it was pretty easy, pull into town, get a hotel, wake up early, do a news spot, and get back on the road.
After we hit New Orleans we noticed the coverage kind of snowballing. For example, the news story we shot in San Diego got picked up by their sister station in LA, the one we shot in El Paso aired in San Francisco, etc. By the time we were done in Miami, the story had gone national… on the largest day we did over 110,000 uniques – all for free.
Not to say it wasn’t a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun. I got to see a lot of this great country and meet a bunch of cool people. I also learned a whole bunch, which is really my favorite thing. I really knew nothing about PR, and was usually pretty shy in front of the camera. Now my smiling mug and my ‘74 LeMans have been all over the national and local news across the country. I hadn’t touched a Mac since the Apple II GS, and now I am zipping all over iMovie on my new Macbook Pro.
The real driving force behind this trip was attitude. I had the idea for the site a few years ago, and had the idea for the road trip around December or January, but it really took going to Elite Retreat to motivate me to get off my ass and go. There are just so many smart capable people there and the attitude of “We Can Do It” was just so infectious, I started planning as soon as I got home.
So to recap, if you have an idea get off your ass and just go for it. The worst thing that can happen is you will learn something new, and you might just succeed beyond your wildest expectations in the process.
Total Story Count: 28
Total Nielsen Audience: 1,220,161
Total 30-Second Ad Equivalency: $13,164
Total Run Time: 49:50
Total Calculated Ad Equivalency: $30,885
Total Calculated Publicity Value: $92,652
So I had Drew put together a spreadsheet with all the cities we were visiting, and all the TV news stations in each city. He then called all of them and got the email address of the ‘assignment editor’. We learned early on this term ‘assignment editor’ was really important as this person decided who did what on what days. The great thing about TV news stations is they are open 24/7 looking for newsworthy stuff to put on the air. So we would pull into a town as it was getting dark, and while we would be getting settled Drew would be calling the news stations, harassing the assignment editors, and emailing the release to their ‘breaking news’ address. 
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