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! 
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.
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.
Finally back in my chair after last week’s Elite Retreat. I wish I could describe to you the vibe at that conference but man.. I can’t remember the last time I actually sat through a whole panel at a conference, but there I was on Wednesday, glued to my chair for 8-9 hours. Never happened at a conf.. never. Not only was every speaker completely qualified and had something really interesting and useful to share, but so did every attendee.
By limiting the attendance and raising the price Shoemoney has also raised the bar on who could attend. I honestly felt like I could learn something valuable from every single person in the room.
Then there was Gary Vaynerchuk. I had heard of Gary, both on a internet marketing level because of his acquisition of cork’d and on a wine level from Wine Library TV. But I had never heard him speak, watched one of his videos, nothin. Silly me. This dude is the real fucking deal. I can’t even imagine where Gary Vee is going to be in 5 years. He is just too smart, too motivated, and too tireless to ever quit. Hey Gary, when you own the Jets can I get tickets when the Chargers come to town?
Honestly, best internet conference I have ever been to. Hands down. I met so many cool geeky people I know I am going to be working with, it was just amazing. I would name all of you by name and links but I am selfish and want to keep that info to myself . Big thanks to Kris Jones and Pepperjam Network for hooking it up, love u guys!
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!
When I got a new desktop machine a while back I went to staples to pick up some speakers and ended up buying some cheapies for $20 or so. Got home and found that they had a crazy interference with any GSM phone in the area and emitted an ear-splitting noise to let you know it. So I google ‘best pc speakers’ and get this cnet article which said: “If you’re looking for a set of 2.1 speakers, buy these. It’s as simple as that.”
Perfect, simple, to the point. I bought the speakers immediately off Amazon for about $100 with shipping and they rock.
Thanks, internet. Great team effort.
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.
Please leave feeback here or on the plugin page.
I harvest a lot of keyword data for my Zintext product, both from the eBay API and various other sources. One of the things I do is scrape the hot terms from buy.ebay.com. Here’s what they say about the terms listed there:
eBay Keywords is a list of highly popular terms that people search for on eBay. Each eBay Keyword has its very own page that allows you to view all the items eBay has for that keyword.
Sounds great right? Should be some really good hot keyword data in there. I was refreshing some keywords today and just happened to notice this keyword that got picked up: “picture of proper sexual intercourse for the elder” from page two of the P’s.
In case they took it down here is a screenshot:
Wow well thats not really what I was looking for, um, thanks anyways? Leaving out the buy.ebay.com keywords from now on..
I click on a lot of ads… sorry ppc guys I rarely buy stuff but I click all the time to see what other marketers are up to. So I was cruising a tech deals site, and saw an ad for this site Swoopo. The ad had like 3 products on it for ridiculous discounts:
Great deals right? Clicky clicky. On the homepage there are a ton of auctions going on, everything for amazingly low prices. You can see the bids in real time, so bids are updating all over the place and its very exciting. Clicky clicky. So I signed up, and got the normal verification emails and blah blah blah. I also got a strange email with their terms and conditions attached. Usually when things come with too much cover-your-ass type material there is a good reason.
So the way Swoopo works is you buy “packs” of “bids” for $0.75 per bid. You then use these bids to bid on products. Each “bid” increases the price of the product by $0.15 and pushes the end time of the auction back by 20 seconds. This enables other people to bid and push the end time back, and the vicious cycle continues. Here’s where it gets really good. So assuming all the suckers get bored and someone finally wins the auction after spending bid after bid after bid, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE OF THE ITEM!!!
So lets run this back with a lil test case. I just saw a Playstation 3 go for $126.15. With an MSRP of $399.99 this may seem like a heck of a deal. Let’s do the math. They state that every product starts at $0.15 and every time someone spends one of their $0.75 “bids” the price goes up $0.15. So that would be 840 “bids” that cost $0.75 each or $630 to Swoopo. Then the person who “wins” has to pay $126.15 + “shipping” however much that is. Lets give them the benefit of the doubt on this one and assume they only charge $10 for shipping. That is $766.15 in revenue to Swoopo for a PS3 they probably got in bulk at a steep discount.
The terms break all this down, anyone who is into internet marketing HAS to at least admire the hustle on this one.
A while back I mentioned in a blog post that I was buying a domain name.. here’s what I said:
So I am trying to buy this domain I want, and I want it so badly I offered what I considered a ridiculous sum. We haggled back and forth for a while and to my dismay I offered twice my original (and already ridiculous I might add) offer. Guy said great, just wanted me to submit the bid through his domain parking service so they could handle the escrow and all that. I said great because I wanted that security, after all I was talking about a lot of money! Turns out when you submit a bid on this particular domain parking service, the domain holder can then open an auction for said domain as the original bid as the first bid in the auction. Not so great for the unwitting buyer but an amazingly useful tool in the hands of an opportunistic and fortunate seller. *sigh* Oh well hope I get it but I am not raising my offer.
So I didn’t raise my offer. And I didn’t really pay attention to when the auction closed. I got off a plane in vegas a few weeks ago, turned my phone on, and got two emails. “You’ve been outbid” “This auction is closed”
Ever since then I have been kicking myself. Over and Over. To me, the domain was worth 5x-10x times what I was paying for it. Easily. 50x maybe. So every morning I wake up and feel like a jerk because I was trying to save a few bucks, and ended up costing myself millions. The lesson? Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered. Don’t be greedy and if you really want something don’t be afraid to pay for it.
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