This may not affect you, but it might be hurting someone you know.
Four weeks ago, apparently, Yahoo tightened their spam filter. A lot.
Colleagues, co-authors, old friends… they all ended up there. And the Yahoo email search doesn’t even search the folder, so my initial checks were fruitless.
Tonight, after investing a few hours, I found 87 emails from the last three weeks.
Probably worth a check, guys. Spam doesn’t appear as obnoxious as before, but it still is.
Diego hits a winner: metacool: Nano is the new Turbo.
Found myself in the mall this weekend (gasp) at a Lord & Taylor (go figure) and discovered the oddest promotion.
After I purchased $200 worth of stuff, the salesperson said, "you qualified for two gift certificates worth $40. No strings attached. Go upstairs and you can get them right now."
Note: no notice before the purchase. No signs, no promises. The certificates weren’t designed as an inducement to get me to buy anything.
"Why would they spend 10% of revenue and perhaps 30% of profit for no reason?" I wondered.
I headed upstairs, waited for two minutes and got my certificates, just so I could let you, my gentle readers, know about this crazy scheme. Walked over to the tie department and bought $39 worth of beautiful ties, marked down from $100 (hey, I’m cheap…) and I was done.
On my way out, I passed this woman:
Here’s her deal. She was on her FOURTH batch of gift certificates. Every time she got $20, she needed to spend it right away. She ended up spending more than $100 each time, so she then went back to get another ceritificate or two, but needed to spend it, and on and on and on. A quick talk with the gift certificate dispensing person confirmed that this was far from unusual behavior. It was a frenzy.
So, people "earn" the certificate, but unable to resist the fear of losing what was theirs, went over and collected it. But now that they have it, it’s "free money" so they go and spend it, and the cycle continues.
This is so much more effective than the typical mark down.
I bet it would work even better online. Imagine how it could help shopping cart conversion…
That’s US funds, no green stamps or frequent flyer miles.
Before I post this to the usual job boards, I wanted to give my trusted readers a chance to chime in and to earn some money (I’m also happy to donate the fee to wherever you choose… Joi Ito, my last successful referrer, did that.) One bounty per hire, paid six months after a successful hire. If there’s no referrer, bounty goes to the Red Cross.
This job is for my new project, which I hope we’ll be ready to talk about in four weeks or so. Please only send over the very best people you know… we’re pretty picky.
Thanks in advance for thinking about who you might know. Feel free to pass this along, post it, etc.
Chief Engineer
Rapidly growing Web 2.0 startup needs a chief engineer to understand, extend, streamline and tweak our PHP/CSS/Ajax based system. Someone who is totally up to speed on MySQL, XML and Web Services (like Amazon and Google). Not ready to get up to speed, but already there. We’re also looking for a person (the same person!) who gets along well with both non-engineers and Linux boxes, who can integrate the work of freelance programmers and also code what needs to be coded.
Our Chief Engineer will work closely with our head of IT, who worries about server loads and long-term planning. The person we hire needs to have a strong voice when it comes to technical issues, but, at the same time, be able to seamlessly integrate with a non-technical organization. The kind of person who would be happy working at Craig’s List or Six Apart or Basecamp. We have a killer espresso machine, health benefits and a lot of momentum. Did I mention our office is less than twenty steps from the Hudson River, sixty steps from Metro North and is next door to a brand-new health club and a kayaking marina? If you’re the sort of person who gets frustrated when Scotty can’t get the dilithium crystals to put out just a little bit more energy, this might be the place for you.
You must speak perfect English and be delighted to work in our offices (a forty-minute train ride from Grand Central Station in New York). Alas, no telecommuters. We’re seeking sterling references and significant tech chops, but it’s okay if you’ve never run an entire tech operation before. We’re building a place to grow and we’d love to talk to you about joining us.
This is the biggest thing I’ve ever worked on, and it’s working. If you’re not looking for a job, this may just be the job for you.
Send your resume, a short note and the name of the person who referred you (if any) to seth@sethgodin.com
Turns out that most people use only a fraction of the space on their iPods: Objects in Ears Are Not as Full as They May Appear – New York Times.
No surprise, of course.
We don’t buy a bigger iPod because we need a bigger iPod. We buy one because we identify ourselves as the kind of person that doesn’t squabble over a few bucks when it comes to buying the best. And that’s the kind of person who buys a new iPod when her old iPod works just fine.
Businesses do the same thing (how much free space on your hard drive at work?) (how much cheaper could the HR guys have found an office chair for you?).
Nobody buys "best" in everything in their life. But in every category that’s not a commodity, somebody is buying "best" because they want to, not because they need to.
if you wrote to me in the last week and I didn’t write back, could I bother you to resend?
two non-spammers and good friends never made it through. And I can’t figure out what happened. So if it happened to you…
It’s Sunday, and the local (good) hardware store was closed and there was a spray paint emergency, so off to Home Depot we went.
This is a photo of the line.
No, there’s no impending natural disaster. No one boarding up windows. It’s just 9:30 on a Sunday morning.
There’s more than 40 people waiting!
And then, (sorry it’s shaky) I see that half of the automated checkout machines are broken.
If the machines are productive (and they appear to be, though they aren’t particularly well designed) why not have ten or twenty or fifty not just four (with two broken ones).
It worked with ATM machines… the lesson to anyone visiting Home Depot is: we don’t care, if you want low prices, suck it up and get in line.
Then, I headed over to the local synagogue. My neighbor Michael Brecker, the famous jazz musician, is quite ill (details: Susan Brecker Letter.) The community pitched in and offered a way for us to volunteer for bone marrow transplants, a process that involves giving a swab from inside your cheeks to be scanned, and then, if you are a match, they contact you for the more serious stuff.
Frankly, I was expecting to wait for several hours as I negotiated a tired, volunteer-based system.
What an amazing surprise. The system was cheerful, rational, swfit and beautifully thought out. I worked with three different volunteers (two on forms, one with the swabs) and was done in less than six minutes. Today, this dedicated team is going to process more than 1,000 volunteers in less than four hours.
I left feeling like I had helped out, but I also left feeling impressed with the organization and ready to spread the word to others that might be thinking of volunteering.
I couldn’t help comparing the two processes. Couldn’t help wondering about the difference between people who care and people who don’t, about processes designed to serve all concerned and those designed to stamp out shoplifting…
This is marketing. Advertising, on the other hand, is fun and expensive but very far removed from the real thing.
Andrew from Web Marketing & Design writes in:
Hello Seth,
I just read the letter from Acland Brierty on your blog. As a
successful website-publisher (as well as someone who sells-paid
content) I’d like to share my opinions.
Because I never saw her "free" site I don’t know exactly how they
approached using Adsense. Was a sales letter offered? Was the entire
book converted to HTML and split up on many different pages? How much
search engine traffic where they receiving?
From reading the post, it sounds to me like she was making people
sign up to read the free e-book — and then supporting it with
Adsense. That is a very counter-productive way to run a
advertising-supported website (and yes, a lot of newspapers are doing
— and losing out on a boatload of revenue.)
I think its a huge mistake if any of your readers dismiss the Adsense
model — and here is why:
This is a direct quote from MarketingSherpa
"Tim Carter of Askthebuilder.com actually made the move from a
subscription site to an ad-supported business. Although he made over
$9,000 in the first nine months as a subscription site, he ended up
with a deficit of $8,800. Then, I started the AdSense program with
Google. Suffice it to say I can average $1.35 per page per day and
Ive got something like 1,400 pages, he said."
There is a good reason his advertising pays off — he has a lot of
"free" how-to articles which will require the reader to purchases
products and services which make the advertisers big money. That, and
he correctly implemented Adsense onto his site.
When running an advertising-supported website the technical aspects
are critical. A good clickthrough rate easily can mean the difference
between losing money and being very profitable. This Adsense Webinar
transcript describes changes Tim made that increased his clickthrough
rates dramatically (it’s near the bottom): link
"Free" advertising-supported sites work because there is a profitable
product paying for the advertising (or an advertiser who isn’t
calculating his ROI.)
If you really want to make a lot of money then you need to tactically
use free content to sell your own premium content/product/service.
That is *the* key to successfully using free and paid content.
Neat post from Ken. Viral Marketing – Saw The Viral, Bought The T-shirt.
Acland Brierty writes:
Hi Seth,
I saw your last blog post; ‘forty to one’ and wanted to share with you some interesting things we found when we made everything on our site FREE. We brought all our job-winning tools under one roof and gave them away… that’s over $250 or more in value for free. The idea was that we would use a TV model and let google adsense become our income stream. Now here’s what we found: the sign up rate went up only fractionally more than when we used to charge for the individual components (and that is based on our most popular item, an ebook called job secrets revealed).
Now here’s the best bit… revenues fell through the floor. People just weren’t clicking the ads… and I’m going to share with you a stunning lesson we learned from adsense in a minute.
Anyhow, I saw your blog and I was thinking about all of this and then I thought to myself, here is what Seth is going to say:
"you guys just don’t have a good relationship with your clients etc etc"
The difference for us is that we were trying to give away something that already exists, for free, to people that knew us and already had it… OR … to people that had no idea what or who we were. In ‘forty to one’, on the other hand, you are giving away a NEW idea and book to people who like what you do and want more and they don’t have a copy of ‘knock knock’.
So we abandoned the FREE model and started to charge for it again and our sign-up rate increased… I guess that in some cases FREE means that it has no value. We did get a few comments from people saying that they were always waiting for a ‘catch’ on our free site. You know, sign up for free but if you want the really good stuff it will cost you $$$… so they were amazed when this never came.
Just thought I’d share the experience.
Thanks for the note… my take is actually this:
1. if it costs money, many people value it more highly.
2. if it costs money, many more of the ‘buyers’ pay an increased amount of attention.
3. if it costs money, you get a better shot at future interactions, because the stakes are higher
That’s one reason why college degrees are worth more than reading a lot of books in the library, say, or even work experience.
The real question here is order of magnitude. If charging for something online only cuts your volume in half, it’s almost certainly worth it. But as more and more outlets are training people that good stuff can be free, it’s going to get harder to sell digital information.
As for ads, clearly there are some topics and some audiences that are far more likely to click on ads than others. More on this soon. (PS Acland (he’s a he) adds some more here. )
