knofun

Well after some more digging we found some CNN coverage of the road trip:

ventures, web marketing carsforagrand, cnn, road trip

We have added functionality to Cars for a Grand so you can sell your own car on there. Well, as long as you want to sell it for $1,000 or less

Sell your cheap car

ventures, web marketing carsforagrand, used cars

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.

You can see all of our video blogs at http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/ or check out our YouTube channel.

UPDATE:

Here is the official count from third party site NewsPowerOnline.com:

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

ventures, web marketing carsforagrand, ebay, pr

Hey just a heads up to everyone who reads this blog (yes, both of you) I am in the midst of a cross country road trip and video blogging it over at http://www.carsforagrand.com/road-trip/. That’s all!

ventures, web marketing carsforagrand, road trip

Wow so just finishing up what ended up being months of work on the new Zeropaid. We had to move everything from a hacked up custom CMS that was a combination of an old version of pligg, something I wrote in 2002 called ‘newsadmin,’ and 6 years of patch over hack over patch over grossness. The import contained over 500,000 users, 10,000 news stories, countless comments and posts.  We decided on Wordpress for our CMS and vBulletin for our user management.

An aside on that for a moment. I really like vBulletin and we have used it for user management and our forum software for years now. When we decided on redoing ZP, we were really high on wordpress. We had been turning out tons of blogs with it, and its capacity for customization is undeniable. I really like some of the features of WP, like for example its ability to handle comments and filter spam is great. Performance-wise, Wordpress is not the greatest. Yes, we are using WP-SuperCache. It’s really hard to load test to the traffic levels of ZP, and once we flipped the switch I was shocked at the server loads. We are definitely adding more hardware to the rack to make this setup workable. Kinda wish I would have investigated more to see if we could have used vBulletin for the whole job… then again our vbulletin forum has to be filtered hourly for spam - manually.

At any rate, the new site is working amazingly well. Participation and discussion are way up, and that was the total goal. Everyone seems to like the new design, which is a first. Big hat tip to Unique Blog Designs, Nate, Matt and Josh. If you need a design done for a site, call these guys. Seriously.

Jorge is really the guy who made all this happen, grinding out the vbulletin bridge and all the little details that made the big picture look so good. Props to ya my man.

So to kickoff the new site and to reward the people who really matter - the users, we are giving away a brand new Xbox 360. To enter all you have to do is interact with the site, rate a program, leave a comment, post in the forum, or follow us on twitter. We pick the winner end of April, so you have plenty of time to get in where you fit in.

Official Contest Page

file sharing / p2p, geek stuff, ventures, web marketing contest, php, vbulletin, wordpress, zeropaid

Kris Jones from Pepperjam is the man. Not only is he the CEO of a kickass internet marketing company, but he continuously hooks me up. He hooked me up and invited me to attend Pepperstock, their annual company party in PA. He hooked me up to speak on his panel at ASW 09. He hooked me up with a pass to Elite Retreat, an unbelievably effective internet marketing gathering.

Now, he has hooked me up further. Pepperjam is the first licensee of ZinText, my in-text advertising platform I built for eBay. If you are a Pepperjam affiliate and you have been approved into the affiliate program you can check out PJN InText here. There are also some reviews up on the web, here are some I have found:

http://www.masonworld.com/announcements/pepperjam-ebay-text-ads-review/
http://nailsblog.com/2009/02/23/pepperjam-in-text-ads/

So thanks Kris and thanks Pepperjam and thank you, the affiliate.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing pepperjam, zintext

So yesterday I was bummed to find that Google is leaving the radio advertising space. This is, in the immortal words of The Dude, a bummer man. We were having a lot of fun promoting sites on traditional radio, so much so I blogged about it. Oh well que cera cera, on to TV advertising.

But then today I get this email from the AdWords team:

Dear AdWords Advertiser,

Beginning on May 31st, we will discontinue the current Audio Ads
platform. We have decided to exit the broadcast radio business and
focus our efforts on exploring internet-based solutions that will
deliver relevant online streaming audio ads. Stay tuned for more
information about these initiatives later this year.

What does this change mean for you?
- Campaigns: Your active campaigns will continue to run up until
May 31st, but will no longer run after that date. You will not be
able to create any new Audio Ads campaigns after May 30th.
- Reports: You will continue to be able to access your reports for
all past campaigns up until June 12th. If you would like to keep
records of your campaign data, please run the reports as soon as
possible while the system is still fully operational.
- Billing: You will continue to be able to access your billing
information indefinitely.

We’re sharing this information with you now so that you’ll have
time to make other arrangements for your audio advertising after
May 31st. If you have questions, please feel free to contact us at
audio-support@google.com.

Sincerely,

The AdWords Team

Hey, thanks for the newsflash!

digital media, geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, adwords, google, radio

Well I have been working on a few wordpress plugins for a few days and finally figured one was ready for public consumption. So basically all this thing does is implement ZinText on your wordpress blog with no coding. If you don’t know already, ZinText is in-text ads for eBay affiliates. Check out a demo here, or its on this blog on posts older than 10 days. 

Oh yeah thats another cool feature you can say only display ads on posts older than X days so you have more control over where the ads appear. There’s also a whitelist if we aren’t linking the words you want, and a blacklist if we are linking things you don’t want linked. You still have to have a campaign ID from ePN, but if you are a good affiliate you have one already.

Check out wpZinText here

Please leave feeback here or on the plugin page.

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, affiliate, ebay, in-text, plugin, wordpress, zintext

I have never really been into PPC. Never had success with it, never could fathom it.. just seemed too tedious and boring, plus I hate to spend money. I do have a Google account, of course, for AdSense and Analytics and whatnot. When Shoemoney posted something about using Adwords to post radio ads promoting fighters.com, I got interested. 

My Dad is in traditional radio, so over the years I have been witness to the massive reach of radio content and advertising. My favorite pet project right now is carsforagrand.com, where you can find a cheap used car for under $1,000. I thought this would be a great fit what with the economy and all, so I used the super easy Ad Creation Marketplace and had Tony Brueski whip up an ad for us - for only $100!

Here’s our commercial

I have been testing it seriously since the beginning of the year and the results have been phenomenal. So much so we are preparing a little TV spot and going to try Google for television advertising.

I see what’s going on here, the big G is desperate to create some additional revenue to compliment its search business. It’s doing a damn good job. There is no way, no WAY I would have just been all “oh hey I’m gonna walk into a clearchannel office and buy some radio space for my website.” So much hassle, have to deal with people, whatever. And producing a commercial? Forget it! Google makes all those headaches go away with their system… its literally like ordering a pizza online, just pick what you want and click go. So in the process, G has sold more radio advertising, converted a new believer, made some sound guy some extra bread for making my commercial, made me some money, and made themselves some in the process. THIS IS THE AMERICAN WAY, we don’t need no stinking bailouts!

geek stuff, ventures, web marketing advertising, adwords, google, radio

When Microsoft promotes its search engine and its web browser inside of its 80%+ market share operating system, that’s a violation of antitrust laws. So when Google uses its 80%+ market share search engine to promote its content, what is that?

Jason Calacanis has rightly been raising a stink about this. I was trying to link to him but confusingly he is “retired from blogging” so I can’t link to his comments. I guess he is too cool for his own blog but not too cool for twitter and friend feed?

Anyways Jason has a good point. He is complaining, of course, out of self interest. His “human powered search engine” Mahalo is in essence a one-source wiki or a MFG site = “Made for Google.” I wonder what their ratio is of page views from their search box vs. page views from google. At any rate, Jason is understandably upset at this knol development, since they will be taking up a lot of room in the SERPS that probably used to belong to Mahalo. And the big elephant in the room, will Google the search engine give preferential placement to Google the content company? Jason has taken three steps to handle this. 1) Complain to his sizeable audience - loudly 2) complain to Matt Cutts - repeatedly 3) create a bunch of his own Mahalo pages on knol. Not a bad strategy, just like Jason: intelligent and shrewd.

So combine that with Aaron Wall’s breakdown on knol. Aaron does some more tests with knol, and pretty much proves Google is giving itself priority placement in its search results. Well, kind of. It’s not ranking #1 for anything yet, but compare that to a site you start 3-4 days after launch. You won’t even rank for your own name. Danny Sullivan did some tests for knol SERP results and found it was “giving pages an advantage they might not get if they’d been hosted on some other brand new web site.”

My thoughts? Well, everyone is making this big fuss just a few days after they launched. We all know that Google’s algorithms can take hours, days, or months to decide what they want to do. Also, everyone is comparing knol to a brand new site. Yeah, a brand new site on a domain with a pagerank of 10. The domain that INVENTED pagerank. Nevertheless, Google moving into content when they promised us they would only be there to ‘index the world’s information’ is a disturbing development, and certainly has a lot of potential for abuse.

other, ventures google, knol, seo