Alex Schultz

Category: general comments

  • Starting To Promote the Widget

    Today I made a change to the cocktail making widget I have blogged about a couple of times. I added a link at the bottom saying “get this on your blog” and linking back to the widget generation page. We will see how that does in trying to convince people to add this widget to their blog. I am pretty excited about the potential though, one month in and a couple of large blogs have started using the widget (most notably get real denver) which means the widget is now at well over 10 000 views a day. I was thinking if I could convince just 2 of those viewers daily (0.02% of those who see the widget) to install the widget I could hit 1000 blogs in a year (with the blogs already signed up and not taking into account the exponential growth potential).

    I am going to be really interested to see how this experiment grows and am already wondering what I can make my next experiment do!!!

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • The Power of Focussing on Something

    Today’s post is something that is very interesting to me. How you can acheive results by just shifting your focus. I have 3 main websites: cocktail making, paper airplanes and butterfly tattoos. A great set of comments on this can be found in the awesome book good to great in which particularly the discussion on Chrysler Acquiring Gulfstream is particularly enlightening. If you deviate from your core, if you look somewhere else than 100% at what is most important to you it will not succeed as well as when you have 100% focus on your most important project.

    For me an example of this can be seen in the image below which is the % year on year growth rates for my website traffic and website revenue (I have removed actual amounts) and this graph is mid way through Nov. hence Nov 2006 not looking so great.

    When I looked at this graph I was shocked (I first looked at it in March 2006) to see my revenue growth year on year had gone negative in Nov and Dec 2005 (actually first time in 10yrs of running my own websites). This corresponded with me planning and executing emigrating to the US in December 2006. After settling into the US things clearly recovered until March 2006. This was a huge month for me with my first major international summit, the first class I taught at our marketing college and my parents visiting the US.

    I did a lot of things to produce this reacceleration (I launched a cocktail widget, I totally recoded my cocktail site, I added videos to my paper airplanes site and more) but the key point is the focus and this is what I want to say. When you can contribute significant focus to something it will go better than with partial focus. I am now thinking about that a lot as I work and play.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Cocktail Recipe Spelling Correlated to Cocktail Strength

    So today I was browsing around a few of the sites that are hosting my cocktail of the day widget and had a few awesome anecdotes but first I want to point to the traffic light cocktail on my website because wow is it a favourite. This is a long juicy cocktail with plenty of kick and extremely sweet. I would definitely suggest you give it a go.

    So today I was browsing around the sites showing the widget and came across an article about how the quality of spelling on my cocktails was strongly correlated to the strength of the cocktail! I sadly can’t find the article (if anyone can point it out to me I will link to it). Either way from now on when you see the cocktails on my site or the widget around the web, look at the recipe and think about the hours of research that went into finding you that perfect recipe 😉

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Graphing Search Result Numbers Over Time

    So I have had a random idea for a little project that could be fun. We all know about Google Trends, eBay Pulse, the Overture Search Suggestion tool. Now I think all of these are truly amazing tools. Something we don’t neccessarily know about is the supply side of this equation. All of a sudden that is really interesting me. It would be relatively simple to set up a CRON job that runs once daily and pulls the abundance through the various API’s available. It could also be really fun to see how trends shift over time (perhaps looping in Technorati and a couple of other sources). It could even be a fun tool for an eBay seller to help me monetize it a little bit… hmm I think I may build this at the weekend and if I do I will post the resulting graphs on this blog as well as on a little site I recently purchased with 1 and 1. YAY!

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • embedding videos on your website with revver

    I like embedding videos on my paper airplanes site. I have from time to time used revver and used you tube for these videos and both have their pros and cons. Here is the step by step guide to revver embedding which I personally prefer.

    The first thing you do is visit Revver.com and sign up to their service including payment details for having money sent to your paypal account. Once you have done this click on the UPLOAD video link on the left hand navigation panel. That will take you to the page below.

    The great thing here that beats YouTube is that you can upload multiple videos at once (in this example I am uploading four planes). The uploader will then scroll through them in it’s own time uploading them to Revver. This is great, since you can leave the computer, go to a different browser session and not have to keep going back in order to start the next upload as you do with YouTube. Once you have uploaded all the videos your “my video’s section” will have a link at the bottom asking you to add meta data. This is great since you can go away and then reaccess your revver account from another computer (eg. at starbucks on wifi) to add your meta data.

    Once this meta data is in place the Revver team will review the meta data and the video and approve it if they consider it ok. You receive messages in your my video hub page to let you know it has been approved.

    If you then click on one of the videos revver then opens up the video you wish to view within the my videos section. If you click on the green grab this video icon you come to the page below where you get the code to insert into your HTML.

    I find this process really easy, really intuitive and actually in a lot of ways a great deal better than YouTube where I have also hosted my videos (170k video views in a little over a month). The bonus of getting paid for the video views too is amazing and I only hope this site gets the support it needs to be huge. Stephen Colbert’s show on the YouTube rip off is my favourite, I do believe my content is valuable and I should be paid for creating it. I like, no I love, the way Revver doesn’t treat me as free fuel.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Ideas for future blogs

    So this is more a post for me to remind myself what I have to talk about and what I should be posting about, I get a few hundred visitors through here a week so if you would like to comment on what you want to hear about that would be cool, if not I will try to get to writing some interesting blog posts on these over the next few months.

    Self publishing – I have written a book, 150k copies were sold at 10GBP a pop… 1,500,000GBP of revenue for marks and spencers and I made 3000GBP. I can write about this, how to avoid falling in the trap yourself and about potentially taking a foray into self publishing.

    User generated content – have been running a website built on user generated content for 4 yrs. What are the pitfalls what are the benefits, what have I learnt… I should share that here.

    Recording videos for the web – I run my paper airplanes site now on videos (huge numbers of my users watch them) and have gained some experience about this. Posts on it may well be a good thing to put online

    The trends in online advertising – having been making money off the web in largish amounts now since 2000 (before that was tiny) some of those learnings may be really interesting for visitors… posts in this area would be cool

    Cocktail making seasonality – what are the most popular ingredients searched for by month, what are the most popular months of the year, what cocktails are most popular by month of year/day of week/week of year. I run a cocktail site I have this data from 100ks visitors… might be fun to share. This could make a great PR article to drive traffic to the site.

    Bubble 2.0 – I made a little money off bubble 1.0 and am now making more off bubble 2.0 this is definitely a potential story….

    Database structure – I have made sooooooooooooooooo many mistakes in building databases that are just not queryable in a scalable way to do what I want. Perhaps I could share that… stories about summarizing data, caching data, structuring data, creating sensible time columns… etc…

    Ah well those are all ideas. If only I could find time to post them. The life of a small webmaster eh! 😉

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Dennis rocks

    and so does his blog… if you aren’t reading it yet you definitely should start too. Dennis Goedegebuure

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • 3 Quotes that made me happy today

    “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.” – Oscar Wilde

    “Americans can be trusted to do the right thing… after having first explored all other alternatives” – Winston Churchill

    “trust is good, control is better” – Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

    Gave me a big grin with thanks to my dad, to facebook and to a random site called wheels.org

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Great quote from Tony Blair

    Tony made a great comment in his leaving speech at about 45min (which is worth listening to). “The British people will forgive making a wrong decision, they will not forgive not making a decision”

    I love that comment and agree with it wholeheartedly. Make a decision, put your shoulder against it and move. You may win, you may lose but if you don’t make any decision you will lose.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Adsense Google referrer test – the results

    In my earlier post about using php setcookie() for an adsense test, I set up a test to see whether traffic sent to my site from Google behaves different to traffic sent to my site from non Google domains. The results confirm my thoughts that Google users are more likely to click on Google Ads.

    The Google user’s CTR is significantly higher than non Google users. However the CPC for non Google traffic tends to be equally or more valuable. So essentially clicks from traffic sent to my site by other search engines are equally or more valuable than those from Google, however Google-referred traffic is far more likely to click on Google ads.

    Above all this test has taught me one thing. I am massively frustrated with only 200 channels in Google Adsense for Content. This is far too low to do the testing I want to do.

    Come on Google, you guys know data, you guys are excited by the interplay of variables, why not let me get access to that data and really play with it?

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here