The common metric is that it's 9 times harder to sell to a stranger than it is to sell to a satisfied customer who feels you've served them well in the past - and this relationship is only as good as your last sale.
It's truer the more expensive and singular the purchase is, of course - but it holds even on the low end - think detergent brand loyalty...
75% of americans are employed in small to mid-sized businesses with less than 200 employees, with the bulk being in the 50-100 range. Firing 950 employees is about equivalent to 5-10 Chapter 7 bankruptcies.
Want job security? Stop by SBA.gov, get them to ship you everything they have on starting a business and sit down to plan. 'Course, then you're the one risking Chapter 7.
I feel your pain. Friend of mine used to be an editor of a publication that shall remain nameless - and she told me that with some of the writing staff it was a lot faster and easier to simply dump their submissions and write the entire article herself than to try to hack what she got into something resembling coherency and actually having relevance to what the article was supposed to be about. And sending it back for a rewrite would usually only result in something even more mangled and less on-topic.
She quit, since she couldn't get permission to fire the incompetents.
It's a stylistic trick to make you click through to the next page - if the page ends in the middle of a sentence you'll know that there's more to read and click next.
Yes, I know that there's also that little 1|2|3 at the bottom of each page, but that broken sentence thing is there as an extra clue/incentive to make you click next to see how the sentence ends.
It's one of the many tricks of commercial copywriting that breaks the rules of proper english...
Hello? Brand recognition? Yeah- that works for mass market consumer products. What if you're not selling mass market stuff though? It's one thing to have a MacDonalds franchise and pay your share of the national advertisiing costs - or to be Dell and have invested a lot into value-added branding advertising.
The branding model works for products with a defined feature set where the differentiation isn't huge - think breakfast cereals, hamburgers, most modern cars (Any car will get you from A to B - and the difference between a Hyundai, a Volvo and a BMW isn't that huge relative to their price differential. The value consumers derive from the brand explains the price differential. Same thing with having a knckoff or a Gen-U-Whine Luis Vuitton handbag.)
The purpose of advertising is to drive sales, otherwise it's worthless from a business standpoint. Branding is one way of driving sales - and it works in defined ways in defined markets. The other way to drive sales is the direct marketing model - your "Call now, operators standing by" model. Both methods play off one another. You can call Dell 24/7 and order their brand of mass market computer - and you can call 24/7 to order the latest, greatest in home gym equipment from someone you never heard of with some lump of muscle you've never seen before as spokesmodel.
Both models work to drive sales, but they work in different ways. To say that the purpose of advertising is branding only, is to overlook the fundamental business reason behind branding and advertising, which is to drive sales. And sooner or later, any advertising model or channel that does not work to drive sales will be cut from ad budgets. If 'net advertising doesn't work to drive sales, it will disappear.
Brand awareness is overused though - it tends to be the braindead ad execs excuse for any failed ad campaign. "Well, okay, so sales dropped while our campaign ran, but at least you've built brand awareness!"
Stop by the Direct Marketer's Association sometime - they're Evil and in favour of spam (Opt-out email advertising? You gotta be kidding me!) but their members did $11.8 billion dollars in sales from "Yeah, the users will CLICK and GO to your WEBSITE and BUY THINGS!!!11 ON THE SPOT!!!!111" kind of advertising. Branding is one marketing strategy. Direct Marketing is another. Viral marketing like we had here yesterday is yet another. All three can be used simultaneusly to good effect, as long as there's an overall strategy behind it.
Yeah, my comment was more along the lines of gaming the system by having one evil attack another. The result of a confrontation between the religious influence groups and Big Business like the **AA's should be... enlightening.
Well, there's always the wrestling case for precendence, but there it was the PTC attacking and getting smacked down. If one could somehow maneuver the **AA's into taking on the PTC, it might give us some pointers as to whether business or the religious groups holds more sway with the government.
Then again, it's 5 AM here, so I should probably be modded "Incoherent" for this.
What's the difference between this or Orkut/Gmail anyway? Except we pay them for the priviledge?
Hmm. And what happens if this catches on and domain name piracy spreads to real name piracy? (That's a joke, son - we already have identity theft for that. Although I wonder how many Joseph Smiths there are out there, for example.)
Err, read back a bit - Mt. St. Helens puts out approximately 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State, the other 99% are human in origin.
"Steven J. Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com."
Dunno - some of the methodology criticism seems valid, and there's quite a bit of interesting reading there. On the other hand, I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims that DDT accumulation in the food chain and the subsequent ecological damage is a non-problem. And I wonder a bit about some of the rest - it seems to me that he's falling into the same trap of politicised science that he's accusing others of.
In particular those figures on global warming - they don't adress the issue, which is that the human input is an extra load on a poorly understood chaotic system sensitive to small input variances and subject to catastrophic changeovers. As you correctly note, that global warming is occuring isn't in dispute - what we're discussing is how much of a factor the extra input from human activity is on the system as a whole.
What this study suggests is that there's a greater probability that human input has an effect on the system than not - and that we need to study more to understand the full range of possible effects. Right now, the best guess of everyone is that reducing emission will slow the rate of increase - which seems like a good idea since that gives us more time to do more research, both on climate effects and on less energy-consuming tech.
Some of us work off the model of # sold = function of (predisposed-to-buy interested demographic * conversion to buyer-factor of tested ad * number of correct demographic exposed to the ad). The PPC model slots perfectly into this - as long as we're getting the demographic we pay for through targetted keywords and such. Note that this model is fairly iterative as you can refine your customer demographic model and the offer you're making in your ad.
Caveat: this model does NOT work as well in saturated mass markets as in small business and niche markets - and it depends on your ability to do statistical analysis of your sales and sort out your customer profiles to the point where you can stop annoying people with no interest in your core product line with ads for them. For a somewhat fictional example - you don't advertise discount dog food on a site dedicated to pedigree siamese cat breeding, because the audience is all wrong or in the wrong frame of mind even if they're otherwise in your target demographic.
That's why the PPC advertising model is so valuable - because it lets you bypass a few steps and advertise directly based on the interest - > searched_for_keyword matchup.
Somewhat relevant example - is an ad for the latest gamer gear more likely to result in a sale if you put it on Slashdot compared to Accounting Today?
Both the branding and the direct marketing models play off one another of course- you can have a strong brand sold through DM too, or a weak brand can do well when targetted to a smaller niche.
Well, I'm not an expert or anything, but I did find this pop science explanation of the current state of galaxy formation theory over on space.com the other day.
And what happens when someone joe-jobs a site? Ten billion spam messages with mandos.org in them later, you're really wishing you hadn't thought of that solution...
I've seen too many successful joe-jobs to think that this is even remotely a good idea.
Ah, yes - good point. Until you'd gotten the patent and auctioned off the rights for 25% of the GNP of all nations in North America and Europe, you'd better learn to duck:)
Oil companies have people who can read their own reservoir projections just as well as you or me. Quite a lot of them are pouring money into alternate energy research - they want to be still able to sell you energy when the current distribution media (oil, natural gas, coal) are less viable. If you perfected viable cold fusion, they'd be burying you in piles of cash to get exclusive rights to your patents.
It's still pretty cold compared to that big fusion-driven pile of hydrogen and trace impurities that shines when the moon isn't up, innit?
Re:Wait, a vaccine?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, I was thinking of how the HIV virus has shown itself capable of adapting to damn near anything thrown at it down to protease inhibitors - that's why the patients get such a wheelbarrow-load of medication at once so that the virus can't adapt and overcome.
I mean, in the study itself it's only - what, 44% effective, with two people actually having increased virus load at the end of a year?
So - did the virus adapt and overcome the altered/activated immune system there? I mean, yeah, this is a very intriguing study, and I hope there's going to be lots of useful treatment applications coming out of it - or at least something that'll slow down the dying while we get a real cure going. I'll just hold off on popping the champagne just yet.
Re:Wait, a vaccine?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It appears to be a reconfiguration of the immune system that stops the drop in T-cell count in (most of) the people treated - which should at least be a stop-loss strategy for people infected with HIV who haven't developed full-blown AIDS.
Since it's not the HIV itself that kills you, but secondary infections your body can no longer fight off due to your compromised immune system.
At the very least it's life-extending and could turn HIV from an incurably deadly nasty into an incurably nasty chronic infection, while "we" work on a real cure or vaccine.
The only question is how well it'll work given the propensity for mutation that HIV has shown so far?
Yeah. Trust me, you're in a *world* of hurt if the IRS audits you and you don't have the paperwork right - if you make more than the limit on reporting income in your state. That's why you go look it up on the SBA and the IRS sites - some states you gotta report if it's more than $500 total, some you don't have to do anything if it's less than $5,000, the IRS have their own rules for what you can and can't do, and so on. So it's best to do your research and at least a quick estimate first - 'Will I pass the limit defined by the IRS or the state on what constitutes a business or not?' is a good question. If the guesstimate is "Yes", you might as well go whole hog from the outset.
If your guesstimate is "no", and it turns out to be wrong, you run the risk of extra paperwork - which can be expensive.
The SBA is very helpful about that sort of thing if you're in the US - look up SBA.gov. And you can usually find the equivalent in any country - depending on how networked your government is, it can be done in a day or two.
There's all sorts of helpful resources around - and if you're in the US, you can get free business consultations from score.org that'll rival anything you'd pay Deloitte&Touche for. Usually a business licence filing for a small home business can be done with $5-$40 and a quick visit to City Hall - the SBA or local equivalent will walk you through the process. And there's a buncha standard contracts you can download from there and print out for your own use too - the IRS will send you CD's full of example paperwork where you can just cut and paste too, if you browse their site a bit.
If you actually use the resources from the SBA, save all the receipts, and just follow the paint-by-numbers approach from the IRS you can keep your accounting work down to about 5 minutes per hour worked. If you're looking at a side job that brings in more and requires more paperwork, you can get an accountant to do it for you - and an accountant is a deductible business expense, so if you make enough to hire a good one it'll have at most a zero net effect on your after-tax income.
Slashdot Mirror
The common metric is that it's 9 times harder to sell to a stranger than it is to sell to a satisfied customer who feels you've served them well in the past - and this relationship is only as good as your last sale.
It's truer the more expensive and singular the purchase is, of course - but it holds even on the low end - think detergent brand loyalty...
I'm from Europe.
He's out of his mind.
75% of americans are employed in small to mid-sized businesses with less than 200 employees, with the bulk being in the 50-100 range. Firing 950 employees is about equivalent to 5-10 Chapter 7 bankruptcies.
Want job security? Stop by SBA.gov, get them to ship you everything they have on starting a business and sit down to plan. 'Course, then you're the one risking Chapter 7.
I feel your pain. Friend of mine used to be an editor of a publication that shall remain nameless - and she told me that with some of the writing staff it was a lot faster and easier to simply dump their submissions and write the entire article herself than to try to hack what she got into something resembling coherency and actually having relevance to what the article was supposed to be about. And sending it back for a rewrite would usually only result in something even more mangled and less on-topic.
She quit, since she couldn't get permission to fire the incompetents.
It's a stylistic trick to make you click through to the next page - if the page ends in the middle of a sentence you'll know that there's more to read and click next.
Yes, I know that there's also that little 1|2|3 at the bottom of each page, but that broken sentence thing is there as an extra clue/incentive to make you click next to see how the sentence ends.
It's one of the many tricks of commercial copywriting that breaks the rules of proper english...
Hello? Brand recognition? Yeah- that works for mass market consumer products. What if you're not selling mass market stuff though? It's one thing to have a MacDonalds franchise and pay your share of the national advertisiing costs - or to be Dell and have invested a lot into value-added branding advertising.
The branding model works for products with a defined feature set where the differentiation isn't huge - think breakfast cereals, hamburgers, most modern cars (Any car will get you from A to B - and the difference between a Hyundai, a Volvo and a BMW isn't that huge relative to their price differential. The value consumers derive from the brand explains the price differential. Same thing with having a knckoff or a Gen-U-Whine Luis Vuitton handbag.)
The purpose of advertising is to drive sales, otherwise it's worthless from a business standpoint. Branding is one way of driving sales - and it works in defined ways in defined markets. The other way to drive sales is the direct marketing model - your "Call now, operators standing by" model. Both methods play off one another. You can call Dell 24/7 and order their brand of mass market computer - and you can call 24/7 to order the latest, greatest in home gym equipment from someone you never heard of with some lump of muscle you've never seen before as spokesmodel.
Both models work to drive sales, but they work in different ways. To say that the purpose of advertising is branding only, is to overlook the fundamental business reason behind branding and advertising, which is to drive sales. And sooner or later, any advertising model or channel that does not work to drive sales will be cut from ad budgets. If 'net advertising doesn't work to drive sales, it will disappear.
Brand awareness is overused though - it tends to be the braindead ad execs excuse for any failed ad campaign. "Well, okay, so sales dropped while our campaign ran, but at least you've built brand awareness!"
Stop by the Direct Marketer's Association sometime - they're Evil and in favour of spam (Opt-out email advertising? You gotta be kidding me!) but their members did $11.8 billion dollars in sales from "Yeah, the users will CLICK and GO to your WEBSITE and BUY THINGS!!!11 ON THE SPOT!!!!111" kind of advertising. Branding is one marketing strategy. Direct Marketing is another. Viral marketing like we had here yesterday is yet another. All three can be used simultaneusly to good effect, as long as there's an overall strategy behind it.
Yeah, my comment was more along the lines of gaming the system by having one evil attack another. The result of a confrontation between the religious influence groups and Big Business like the **AA's should be... enlightening.
Well, there's always the wrestling case for precendence, but there it was the PTC attacking and getting smacked down. If one could somehow maneuver the **AA's into taking on the PTC, it might give us some pointers as to whether business or the religious groups holds more sway with the government.
Then again, it's 5 AM here, so I should probably be modded "Incoherent" for this.
Hmm. Call the **AA's and claim you got a copy of your favourite show from them - preferably from their web site? Should be ..interesting.
What's the difference between this or Orkut/Gmail anyway? Except we pay them for the priviledge?
Hmm. And what happens if this catches on and domain name piracy spreads to real name piracy? (That's a joke, son - we already have identity theft for that. Although I wonder how many Joseph Smiths there are out there, for example.)
How unique are names anyway?
So this you think this story about Buzz Marketing/Astroturfing/shilling is an astroturfing of Slashdot for this company?
Sounds cynical enough to be true.
did we just Slashdot a government site?
Err, read back a bit - Mt. St. Helens puts out approximately 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions in Washington State, the other 99% are human in origin.
"Steven J. Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a columnist for FoxNews.com."
Dunno - some of the methodology criticism seems valid, and there's quite a bit of interesting reading there. On the other hand, I'm deeply suspicious of anyone who claims that DDT accumulation in the food chain and the subsequent ecological damage is a non-problem. And I wonder a bit about some of the rest - it seems to me that he's falling into the same trap of politicised science that he's accusing others of.
In particular those figures on global warming - they don't adress the issue, which is that the human input is an extra load on a poorly understood chaotic system sensitive to small input variances and subject to catastrophic changeovers. As you correctly note, that global warming is occuring isn't in dispute - what we're discussing is how much of a factor the extra input from human activity is on the system as a whole.
What this study suggests is that there's a greater probability that human input has an effect on the system than not - and that we need to study more to understand the full range of possible effects. Right now, the best guess of everyone is that reducing emission will slow the rate of increase - which seems like a good idea since that gives us more time to do more research, both on climate effects and on less energy-consuming tech.
You might want to take a look at http://www.stopclickfraud.com/ to see where your fraud clicks are coming from...
That'a the branding style of advertising.
Some of us work off the model of # sold = function of (predisposed-to-buy interested demographic * conversion to buyer-factor of tested ad * number of correct demographic exposed to the ad). The PPC model slots perfectly into this - as long as we're getting the demographic we pay for through targetted keywords and such. Note that this model is fairly iterative as you can refine your customer demographic model and the offer you're making in your ad.
Caveat: this model does NOT work as well in saturated mass markets as in small business and niche markets - and it depends on your ability to do statistical analysis of your sales and sort out your customer profiles to the point where you can stop annoying people with no interest in your core product line with ads for them. For a somewhat fictional example - you don't advertise discount dog food on a site dedicated to pedigree siamese cat breeding, because the audience is all wrong or in the wrong frame of mind even if they're otherwise in your target demographic.
That's why the PPC advertising model is so valuable - because it lets you bypass a few steps and advertise directly based on the interest - > searched_for_keyword matchup.
Somewhat relevant example - is an ad for the latest gamer gear more likely to result in a sale if you put it on Slashdot compared to Accounting Today?
Both the branding and the direct marketing models play off one another of course- you can have a strong brand sold through DM too, or a weak brand can do well when targetted to a smaller niche.
Well, I'm not an expert or anything, but I did find this pop science explanation of the current state of galaxy formation theory over on space.com the other day.
i story_030128-1.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_h
I trust this is what you were looking for?
And what happens when someone joe-jobs a site? Ten billion spam messages with mandos.org in them later, you're really wishing you hadn't thought of that solution...
I've seen too many successful joe-jobs to think that this is even remotely a good idea.
Ah, yes - good point. Until you'd gotten the patent and auctioned off the rights for 25% of the GNP of all nations in North America and Europe, you'd better learn to duck :)
Oil companies have people who can read their own reservoir projections just as well as you or me. Quite a lot of them are pouring money into alternate energy research - they want to be still able to sell you energy when the current distribution media (oil, natural gas, coal) are less viable. If you perfected viable cold fusion, they'd be burying you in piles of cash to get exclusive rights to your patents.
It's still pretty cold compared to that big fusion-driven pile of hydrogen and trace impurities that shines when the moon isn't up, innit?
Yeah, I was thinking of how the HIV virus has shown itself capable of adapting to damn near anything thrown at it down to protease inhibitors - that's why the patients get such a wheelbarrow-load of medication at once so that the virus can't adapt and overcome.
I mean, in the study itself it's only - what, 44% effective, with two people actually having increased virus load at the end of a year?
So - did the virus adapt and overcome the altered/activated immune system there? I mean, yeah, this is a very intriguing study, and I hope there's going to be lots of useful treatment applications coming out of it - or at least something that'll slow down the dying while we get a real cure going. I'll just hold off on popping the champagne just yet.
It appears to be a reconfiguration of the immune system that stops the drop in T-cell count in (most of) the people treated - which should at least be a stop-loss strategy for people infected with HIV who haven't developed full-blown AIDS.
Since it's not the HIV itself that kills you, but secondary infections your body can no longer fight off due to your compromised immune system.
At the very least it's life-extending and could turn HIV from an incurably deadly nasty into an incurably nasty chronic infection, while "we" work on a real cure or vaccine.
The only question is how well it'll work given the propensity for mutation that HIV has shown so far?
Who do you think gutted the CAN-SPAM act by redefining spam to be "Not what we send out"?
The DMA are pro-spam with their "opt-out" stance - as opposed to the Canadian DMA who have "Verified opt-in" as the only recommended practice.
Yeah. Trust me, you're in a *world* of hurt if the IRS audits you and you don't have the paperwork right - if you make more than the limit on reporting income in your state. That's why you go look it up on the SBA and the IRS sites - some states you gotta report if it's more than $500 total, some you don't have to do anything if it's less than $5,000, the IRS have their own rules for what you can and can't do, and so on. So it's best to do your research and at least a quick estimate first - 'Will I pass the limit defined by the IRS or the state on what constitutes a business or not?' is a good question. If the guesstimate is "Yes", you might as well go whole hog from the outset.
If your guesstimate is "no", and it turns out to be wrong, you run the risk of extra paperwork - which can be expensive.
Yeah. Works very, very well.
(Yeah, I'm astroturfing now, why do you ask?)
The SBA is very helpful about that sort of thing if you're in the US - look up SBA.gov. And you can usually find the equivalent in any country - depending on how networked your government is, it can be done in a day or two.
There's all sorts of helpful resources around - and if you're in the US, you can get free business consultations from score.org that'll rival anything you'd pay Deloitte&Touche for. Usually a business licence filing for a small home business can be done with $5-$40 and a quick visit to City Hall - the SBA or local equivalent will walk you through the process. And there's a buncha standard contracts you can download from there and print out for your own use too - the IRS will send you CD's full of example paperwork where you can just cut and paste too, if you browse their site a bit.
If you actually use the resources from the SBA, save all the receipts, and just follow the paint-by-numbers approach from the IRS you can keep your accounting work down to about 5 minutes per hour worked. If you're looking at a side job that brings in more and requires more paperwork, you can get an accountant to do it for you - and an accountant is a deductible business expense, so if you make enough to hire a good one it'll have at most a zero net effect on your after-tax income.