The world’s first Internet reality show, the Next Internet Millionaire, created a lot of buzz around the marketing education being given to the contestants. Created by Joel Comm and Eric Holmlund, the show was all about using the Internet to sell products. Jason Henderson was one of the show’s competitors, and I interviewed him today. Tomorrow, Joel is releasing the Secret Classroom DVD set, which includes everything the expert Internet marketers presented at the Next Internet Millionaire.
Jason Henderson from the Next Internet Millionaire on the Secret Classroom [15:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
I learned a lot from the answers to this question. I had no idea that farm subsidies were even higher in other countries. It’s very hard to see an economic justification for this, but it’s clear that the situation is more complicated than it appears. Here are some Republican candidates’ answers from yesterday’s CNN-YouTube debates.
I’ve often sat through a number of PowerPoint presentations which were extremely dull and boring. I wish that more than just bullet points were made, but that’s essentially all there was. The visual medium has so much more potential. We should all make some changes to the way presentations are made.
My idea of a star presenter is Steve Jobs. I love to watch his keynotes as soon as they’re released because he always does an amazing speaking job. In addition, he makes great use of visuals, with simple slides containing only vital info, such as a key comparison, photo, phrase, or even just a single word.
Manual Viloria tipped me off to a presentation by Hans Rosling, about graphing publicly-funded data to see things such as the relationship between health and wealth, and the distribution of these between the western world, third-world countries, and across different countries and regions.
It’s truly an excellent presentation, but it’s even more extreme and unusual than I expected. Something more along the lines of Steve Jobs is preferable to me. For another take on presentations, see Marco Montemagno’s Myths about the Internet and Web 2.0 Opportunities. It’s Italian with English subtitles.
In the Bible, Jesus tells his followers to treat their enemies nicely. If they hit you on the cheek, offer them the other also. If they force you to walk a mile carrying their stuff, walk two miles with it.
I’ve always wondered where you might see something like this actually working for good in the real world. I’m not saying it always happens like this, but often it does. If you treat people nicely, even when they are mean to you, you just could have a greater positive effect than trying to pay them back for the injustice. Take a look at this excerpt from a Wired interview with Nicholas Negroponte:
Wired: What do Wired readers tell you about your column?
Negroponte: I get up to 30 messages a day from readers, and they tend to be binary. They are either very fiattering or very nasty. If anyone had an ego deficit, the fiattering ones would make it disappear. People tell me they’ve changed jobs or redirected their lives because of things I wrote. But while the good ones are very heartwarming, the bad ones can be quite abusive: “Hey, you jerk, why didn’t you think of this or that?” On a couple of occasions they’ve been right. I really did make a mistake.
Wired: How do you respond to being flamed?
Negroponte: I always send back a nice reply thanking them for their remarks, however harsh. Then, what invariably happens is that the person turns into a mellow tiger and starts falling all over him- or herself with apologies. E-mail is funny. If people fiame at you and you reply gently, it catches them off guard.
Many years ago, I was a member of a service called AllAdvantage, a company that created a software toolbar which displayed ads while you were surfing and paid you a portion of the advertising revenue. I earned about $30 from them before they folded in 2001, apparently because web advertising dried up in the dot-com bust. Today, a new company called AGLOCO is hoping to do the same thing. “AGLOCO” is supposed to stand for “A Global Community,” and the company will be “100% member-owned.” I think that, because the web advertising market is much better today than it was in 2001, they could very well have a chance. AllAdvantage went through some $2 million[Update: AllAdvantage “paid out over $160 million to its members” (Wikipedia)], and if an 11-year-old kid like me could make $30 with it, other people were certainly making a lot more.
The Agloco team includes some of the same leaders of AllAdvantage, and the model is nearly exactly the same. They show advertising on your screen, and pay you for it. There are some small tweaks, such as offering a better price on Amazon.com when you’re looking at a book on Barnes & Noble, and getting a referral fee out of that sale. Supposedly, 8 Stanford MBAs are on the team, which is shocking to me, because the company’s blog makes it look almost like a scam. They’re losing money and think that it will take 12-18 months to beta test their viewbar! (To see the Company blog, click here and then click “Company blog” at the bottom, in the footer.)
One interesting aspect is that you can refer other people to the Agloco network, and it’s totally free for them to join. There’s no reason for them not to, and you get credited for up to 5 hours per person, 5 levels deep. They don’t lose anything for joining up as your referral. They have just over 1 million members now, whereas AllAdvantage had about 10 million: so there’s a lot more growing to be had, assuming that nearly everyone who signed up for AllAdvantage will sign up again for Agloco. It’s definitely beneficial to get in at this early stage, in case they do really well. Remember, I made about $30 with AllAdvantage when I was 11, and that only took me about a month. Yes, the Agloco links in this post are referral links.
Agloco is being more conservative about payments this time. I remember AllAdvantage promised something like 50 cents per hour, which was just crazy. I believe they had a referral program too, so it kind of stinks that they’re not able to rollover their membership database. But I guess sometimes it’s best to start fresh. There’s a chance for the “get paid to surf” industry, and if it succeeds, you’ll want to have gotten in at the ground level. So sign up for free– it only takes a minute.
There’s a huge number of words today. Consider this quote on the “unread bestseller”:
The “unread bestseller” has been remarked upon at least as far back as the Renaissance. In recent times, publishing watchers cite Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” and Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” as examples of the genre. But if book sales and length continue their trends, the incidence of the phenomenon can only grow.
Of course, what gets read is a hard thing to measure. Back in 1985, The New Republic sent members of its staff to visit Washington bookstores, where they placed coupons redeemable for cash within the pages of books including Strobe Talbott’s long “Deadly Gambits: The Reagan Administration and the Stalemate in Nuclear Arms Control,” then popular with the city’s power elite. Not one coupon came back.
So how do you get people to read your book? Do you even want them to?
I saw an eBook recently which was all about shortness. Compressing the most useful and interesting info into the fewest number of words possible. Is this the way we should be heading? I think people may not yet be realizing the value in brevity.
Too few sites do this nowadays, preferring to blend AdSense ads into their site’s content. This may be good for revenue, but it’s not good for long-term site growth. If you want a visitor to remember your site and come back, they’ve got to see more than one page. And the way to do this is with internal links.
Many people link to other websites inside their posts. This is easy to do. Whatever pages you’re referring to, you can put a link to. That’s an easy way to give your visitors value-added information, while potentially raising your reputation too. Google and other search engines like when you’re part of good link neighborhoods. Obviously, you want to refrain from linking to a spam site. But if it’s a site you found useful or interesting, a link to it could very well do you good, both with Google and your actual human visitors.
Links in your content will give your visitors other ways to explore your site. Let me know you around TrackForward a bit. If you’re a new visitor, welcome! If you’re a returning visitor, I’m glad to have you again, and I hope you enjoy your stay.
One of my favorite sections of TrackForward is the Videos category. Take a look if you’re interested in videos, as these are my personal picks that I found both intriguing and helpful.
I can also highly recommend the Next Internet Millionaire category, where I’ve touched briefly on how that show has changed my perspective on business. I was able to meet Jason Stanley Marshall, a friendly guy with a heart for God. He has an interest in Internet Marketing, and was one of the finalists on Joel Comm’s Internet reality show. I wish him only the best, and I’m keeping in touch with everything he does. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard from him lately. Maybe I should check in. I’m sure he’s just as busy as I am, if not more so. It seems there’s just never enough time in the day.
I’m currently looking at how to make blogs more user-friendly. Blogs today are not very sticky. There are a few techniques I have seen which can make blogs more personal and sticky. Most of these are difficult to implement. But a simple way is to have a newsletter and send personalized newsletters to your readers. This can be very time-consuming, but it’s well worth the effort. You can build a relationship with your readers this way.
I don’t understand how it works or how they determine these prices, but Amazon.com seems to have the best price many times, so I’m impressed.
Please note that the price of Korg GA-30 Guitar / Bass Tuner has decreased from $9.95 to $9.49 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
Please note that the price of Eureka 4870GZ Boss Smart-Vac Upright Vacuum has increased from $140.00 to $149.99 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
Please note that the price of Daring to Draw Near: People in Prayer has decreased from $11.70 to $11.25 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
Please note that the price of The New Hacker’s Dictionary - 3rd Edition has decreased from $22.80 to $19.80 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.
That’s what it said above my Cart today when I added an item, and this happens quite often. Sometimes I get even longer lists of items with price changes. Some changes are so small that they seem insignificant to me, until I realize that when this is multiplied by a scale of 1,000,000 or more, that’s one heck of a lot of money.
I heard about this from Eric of NittyGrittyMarketing.com. It’s a book called Love is the Killer App, which is an awesome title in my opinion. There’s also an article in FastCompany with this title, which I’d like to read when I have more time. If you read it, what do you think?
I don’t know if my business is big enough to justify this. I’m personally earning about $13.53/day. Is that enough that I should watch cash in/cash out?
I spent $29 for 1 month of 1ShoppingCart.com. That’s going to be a $29/mo recurring expense, or about $1/day. Should I write that as $1/day cash out in the Excel spreadsheet?
Look below for an exclusive audio interview…
Jason Henderson from the Next Internet Millionaire on the Secret Classroom [15:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download