The follow is an unedited conversation between me and someone I contacted about a possible business opportunity. Any clarification will be put in brackets [].

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 [Me: A post I replied to]

“I have a great oppurtunity for college students only. I need a rep from every college possiblef. Possible 25000 in just 2-3 months work.(depending on the size of your college). Message me to hear more”

What is the opportunity?

[Him]

It is a marketing venture. It is just going to be a new way of advertising on campuses. It is a plastic card that you will sell to students. The reason they will buy this card is because the representative from each university will go out to all there local book stores, restaruants, bars, hairshops, etc. and get major deals or discounts that are only eligible through the use of this card. People will jump all over it because if you can work something out with the book stores the card will pay for it self 20 times over. All you have to do is go get the discounts at the places to make sure these cards are well worth it. You can sell it to the stores as free advertisment, so they will jump all over it. Once you get these deals from these stores you send them to me, I will than post them on a website of which card holders can go to see what kind of deals they can get. It will be the same card at every university part taking so if someone visit a different college or city, they go to the website, click on the local college and find all the deals that they are able to offer.

 

[Me]

this is similar to what highschools do to raise money for the football teams

 

[Him]

exactly what it is, just for college students to save money, but i got a patent on it which didn’t exist before which enables it to be done for a profit as well. This just restricts any other profit organization from taking the idea. If you are interested let me know, there is alot of money involved

 

[Me]

how did you patent an existing idea?
to get a patent an invention must

1. be statutory

2. be novelty, meaning that the technology is not “anticipated” or identical to an invention disclosed in a single piece of prior art.

3. be useful, meaning that the invention must have a useful purpose

4. be nonobvious. meaning that the technology must be different enough from the prior art so as to not be obvious in view of the prior art

This is a good idea, it’s just not original… I honestly don’t believe you have a patent… but if you do please tell me your patent number and I’d be happy to market your idea.

[Him]

haha, well you can get a patent pending for around 300-400 dollars. I guess i throw the term around a little loose. I have filed papers pretty much saying that I have discussed this idea of marketing this on a college basis in public means. Therefore if a company, not being a non-profit organization such as fundraising, uses a similar idea to make money I am entitled to sue them for their existing and future business. For example now that i have discussed this with you, and you were to go out and replicate my business plan I could sue. My father is a lawyer so I am about as informed as I can be about this.I thought the samething. If you look up the NUS Card which is based out of the UK, this is the idea we are going for. The plan is for you to get 20-25% of all sales of the cards without having to claim taxes b/c you are simply an advertising expense for me. Let me know what you think. You can reprersent your college as well as other surrounding colleges. It is going to start in the fall and we may possibly just end up being a partner of the NUS card company. If you are not interested let me know as well bc i will be in search for another in your area.

 

[Me]

well while i know you wont get a patent (according to the Patent Cooperation Treaty ratified in the 1970′s) i do think it’s an excellent idea!
oh and you havent shared a business plan with me… you shared a vague idea that has been done in the past… so don’t threaten a lawsuit.

This has been done in the past however…
http://www.entertainment.com/
it is the exact same thing except it targets a general audience and is in a booklet format vs. a card.

And for taxes… anyone making ANY money from you will have to pay taxes, regardless if you count them as an advertising expense.
You can write off their salary off you earning but they cannot not claim taxes. Any income has to be reported to the Irs and if they get in trouble and say you said they didn’t have to pay taxes, the IRS will come after you too. So make sure you don’t tell anyone they don’t have to report.

I think you are on to a good idea you just need to get a solid business plan on paper. When you get all your information in line send it to me and i may be willing to represent a few large schools in the south east.

[Him]

I have explained to you how we are to generate cash flow and there was no threat involved it was an explaination. Entertainment.com is a booklet which is a huge difference, If you want to do something you can only use it once, you have to cut out the coupon, and it cannot be used on a national basis. Also they have not geared towards the college crowd, as the NUS card did. Entertainment.com is also very successful and the biggest complaint that I have heard is it costs to much, does not pay for itself fast enough, and they are just to lasy to go through the book to see what it is good for. I am going to complete my talks with NUS before I write up the business plan b/c that may be a much better oppurtunity for me. I look forward to doing business with you, but when it comes to law I know what my rights are, If this idea is replicated lawsuits will occur. The business plan is filed with the patent lawyer at the moment. It may be shut down, but you have compared it to several things, of which have small but yet very important differences to this business plan. You have not seen the set up of it yet, which is why I can see your skepticism, but with or with out a patent this will work. I honestly do hope you can be involved in this especially with your clear expertise in marketing. I need alot of help with this and am willing to compensate people accordingly. If you are able to help me on a greater level than just representatives than I would be honored. If you are honestly interested I can send you the business plan, and if you are willing to put in the amount of work I can give you a percent of overall business. Which honestly could be millions, if we can get reps to get these cards to pay for themselves fast enough, these could sell at 100s of universities. Or even sell them through the website. If you want to talk business, I think we should do it other than through messsages and without insulting eachother’s intelligence. I can give you my contact if you are interested. I just know with the right people and the right mindsets this can be a very successful company.

[Him Again]

And it turns out you were right i cannot get a patent on this, there is another company in existence doing the same thing or close. But us being students can really make this thing blow up. I am willing to give you a position in the company as marketing and a recruiter. We can talk percentages, but being in ownership seems more along your lines than just a representative. There is a card called studentadvantage card, but they have not done a good job of marketing this card. We will market this all over facebook for the partaking universities. We can sell it as paying for itself after buying 1 or 2 books. We can also sell these online. But the beauty of democracy is competition. We can market this way harder than that company and they will be the break.com and we will be the youtube. It is a very simple concept, we just have to find the mistakes in there company and fix them. Let me know if you are interested.

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So as you can probably tell I will not be joining this guy in his business. Besides the fact that he doesn’t have a business plan and wants to enter talks with an established business (HA), he also used passive-aggressive threats of a law suit. Later this kinda pissed me off… so I recommend everyone go and start this business at their local universities because he has NO case against you.

The question posed by Business Week is…

“Which medium will represent the largest percentage increase in spending this year for your brand (or your top client)?“

The results are in a pretty little graph, sorted by medium and budget. Remember this is for percentage increase.

Notice anything? That’s right, Online Brand kills all three… Why? Because building a brand online is a hard but rewarding task. I believe in this sense branding can be best defined as: A traditional advertising method used to create an acquired response from a target audience based on cumulative impressions and positive reinforcement. Branding is geared towards increased product or company name awareness and gaining lifelong customers.

Wow, Lifelong customers… Can anyone think of great online brands? Google, Amazon, Ebay… These companies provide an excellent service and acquire life long customers because they constantly being branded as useful, reliable, friendly, etc. These companies were built online, so Online Branding was a must for them, but now we are seeing many larger corporations seeing the benefits of online branding and they are willing to pay big bucks!

What does this mean for us? More $.

These companies will continue to look for seasoned professionals in all aspects of internet marketing: Search Engine Mkt, Social Mkt Optimization, Search Engine Opt, Viral Mkt, and any other methods can be used to reel in a consumers trust and devotion. Now is the time to develop your consulting side of your business. Take out an hour a day to work on some powerful sales letters, presentations, and business techniques that you can sale to these companies with large marketing budgets, I know I will. And if you don’t have knowledge in all the fields then develop a consulting network of 5-6 professionals who work together to provide excellent advice and offer [expensive] services!

I’m off to design some letter head and some flash presentations, enjoy your nite morning!

See the slideshow from Business Week

There is so much hype on how to deal with Google’s Quality Score Algorithm, and I’m learning that a lot of it isn’t true. For example, I’ve been told in numerous places that making affiliate links on a landing page go through a PHP redirect (using the Header function) will help improve QS, and according to Jon this isn’t true.

In a conversation I had yesterday with the affiliate marketing guru master he reiterated the basic of quality score to me, plus a little more I didn’t know.

Google says…

“…your keyword’s Quality Score considers the clickthrough rate (CTR) and relevance of the keyword, your ad text, and your landing page”

So essentially it consists of 3 things

1. Click through Rate of your Ad
2. Relevance of Keywords and Ad Text
3. Your landing Page

Nothing new here at all, but I was told a couple more things. In relation to your landing page Google first looks at the content to see if it’s relevant, then looks at it’s trust rank/ page rank, then tries to decide if it’s commercial or non-commercial, and finally assigns the landing page value. The biggest thing I didn’t know about was the Commercial/Non-Commercial part of the equation. Since Google is focused on a good user experience they probably see a non-commercial site being more focused on providing information vs. just coaxing someone into buying a product. They will [edit: in my opinion] obviously also assign a lower minimum bid to a non-commercial site because of probability of less funding.

So next, How do you design a landing page to look more informational? I would definitely say get rid of all words “Buy, Sign Up, Sale” or action words related to buying in the text. Also I would plant more information based words in <h2> tags such as “Info, Learn, How To, Information”.

I’ll start doing some split testing of two landing pages soon, one aimed at commercial one non-commercial, and see if the minimum bid is adjusted.

Also thanks to Ken Savage for his consulting on the matter.

(p.s. If you don’t know how to check the quality score of your landing page, go to your Ad Group, click the “keywords” tab, and the click the “Customize columns” and add the Quality Score tab)

Dearest adCenter,

I need to tell you something, I’ve been cheating on you. Her name is Adwords and we just get along so well, sometimes I think we are meant to be. I know that you were my first, and I loved everything about you… multiple $250 account vouchers, no quality score, and less competition; but lately you have changed. You seem like you don’t even want me around. You email all the time telling me my “Keywords Require Change”, your relevancy has gone to hell, and you just don’t have the volume I need in a relationship. I’m sorry to say but I think our relationships and accounts are over, all 15 of them. Maybe one day when you decide what you truly want in life and stop being a follower we can try this again, but till then I must move on to greater relevancy, more traffic, and beautiful interface.

Goodbye adCenter… it was fun while it lasted.

Cooper 

When looking for ways to market your website you basically want two things.

1. Targeted Traffic
2. Cheap Traffic

Many services exist that provide both of these but one that I would like to mention, in particular, that is AdEngage.

AdEngage is an advertising network that displays over 10 billion ads every month (seems to be mostly Humor sites). The reason I choose to mention such a service is because of the excellent pricing for ads on many publisher’s websites, but first a little more info. AE offers two basic ad purchasing methods, per site and RON (run on network CPC). If you decide to use AdEngage, then ALWAYS go on a per site basis. Also AE allows you to upload a picture to be served next to your ad, how sweet. Now when searching for a site to publish an ad upon, use the advanced search feature. I always pick a site with high U.S usage, high English speaking, and higher Alexa rank. Now for the fun part! When looking for through the sites you can find sites that have eCPC (estimated cost per click) at $.01, yes one cent! I have actually gotten an eCPC at about 1/5 of one cent.

The checkout for AE is also really simple. It allows you to make different campaigns so you can easily manage your advertising and repurchase, with… PAYPAL! Plus the stats are almost real time reporting and give simple, yet informative information on the performance of your ad. My advice is to buy advertising of 5-10 sites for one week and then repurchase the top performers for a month (which gives you a little discount). Oh, and be ready for a little international traffic as well.

So, if you do any kind of internet advertising you need to check out AdEngage. I have had excellent success there in affiliate marketing and their user base is growing daily so try it out!

Visit AdEngage

[it is not, but dam that sounded like a sponsored post]

I was doing a little research today and I came across a landing page that just made me… well, sad. I’m sure you’ve seen them, they promote eBooks, info products, and other intangibles. Of course I’m talking about the all landing pages that use numerous testimonials, most likely fake earnings reports, and cheesy one liners; and for this report I present the page that ticked me off, AdWordsKiller (don’t worry, it’s a non-weighted link). So I’ll start off with a number of things wrong with this page…

1. Ugly 90′s table based design.
2. Numerous exit points, all in different areas.
3. Non uniform text and annoying high-lighting.
4. Confusing check out system.
5. 4 “P.S” endings.
6. Audio testimonial hard to find.
7. Overusing the “Check” box.
8. Excessive page length.
9. Approx. 6100 words in copy.
10. Pointless price reduction that no one believes

There are 10 things that suck, and there are a lot more on there.

I realize that tons of landing pages are built like this but I can’t imagine why. Honestly every bit of information of that page could be summed up into one paragraph…

If you buy this hot chicks will sleep with you, you will practically get mailed checks for no working (direct deposit is available on request), and everyone is doing it! We have the secret and it will only cost you $97 for this crappy digital pamphlet full of information that can easily be found anywhere on the web! BUY BUY BUY!

I know people make money with this method, but eventually they have to realize that they could have MUCH better results with a more streamlined page that doesn’t make outrageous promises and isn’t as long as The Da Vinci Code.

To better this landing page I would do just a few things.

1. Start Over.
2. Hire a copy writer to write an attractive, relevant title and concise sales letter, no more that 250 words.
3. Get a streamlined Flash video presentation highlighting the methods you will teach and few ACTUAL testimonies.
4. Post a picture of yourself to induce trust.
5. Make ONE exit point. Most likely a sign up/purchase box, that starts with just an email so you can follow up if they abandon the during the checkout process.

So in conclusion, I would advise to keep landing pages short and relevant, maybe have a link to a FAQ, but please don’t parade your testimonial propaganda in front of me like I’m a hungry dog… It’s just bad manners.