It Started With a Phone Call.

It started with a phone call – on a Friday no less. On the other end, a long time client and friend who had just been pitched by an internet marketer. Why does this always happen to me?

Excited at the prospect of thousands of visitors coming to his website for only a couple hundred dollars per month, his credit card was just burning a hole in his pocket. Luckily, he picked up the phone first. He was on the edge of falling prey to yet another twist in the never-ending string of internet scams. This particular flavor is vicious, and is sucking the lifeblood out of the very engine of this economy, the small business.

Don't let this happen to you.

First, do not ever believe that a visit to your website has any value whatsoever. Visits can (and are) created by various means - only one of which is an actual live person who is interested in your products or services. There is an enormous incentive in the industry for generating apparent "visits". In fact there has developed a primary market for "visits" to websites as businesses become increasingly frustrated with the return on their internet investments. Up until recently, it was mostly an underground, secondary market that was exploiting the misunderstanding among the general public.

So now I am forced to reveal the unfortunate underside of the search engines and internet marketing in general to him over the phone. It’s not a pretty picture for an advertiser. “Let’s start by talking about what a visit is, and what value it really has . . .”

The incentive to create a “Visit” comes in two primary flavors, and several twists do exist. First, we have the fraudulent publisher - the AdSense master. This person publishes a website with no intention other than to create revenue as an affilliate of a search engine or other pay-per-click marketing company. The second flavor is the "Clickster". This person or firm hires representatives to solicit small business owners with promises of hundreds, or even thousands, of visits to their website for a modest fee.

ConMan #1 - Adsense Master.

Each time an ad on the AdSense Master's site is "clicked", the publisher earns a portion of the revenue that is paid for by the advertiser. The advertiser pays the search engine who then pays the AdSense Master. By this point, I think you have a pretty good idea of what the incentive might be here.

For the AdSense Master, it's not too hard to figure out various ways of getting clicks to occur on an advertisment. In fact, vast networks of people and computers all over the world are involved in exactly this activity, clicking away on ads that are paid for by real companies trying to drive customers to their websites. Are you one of those companies? How much of your money is doing nothing but lining the pockets of the AdSense Masters and search engines? Do you suppose those "visits" are worth one red cent to your company?

Let me clue you in on a dirty little secret: The search engines know this, they permit it, and in fact, they encourage it. The AdSense Master has an enormous positive impact on the bottom line for the search engines.

ConMan #2 - Clickster.

As described above, this scam is more grass-roots based. It's more deceptive, and on a one-to-one basis. Small businesses today know that the internet is the future for their business, but they have nowhere to turn. They have already been ripped of by unknowing web companies that have produced little or no results. One day, someone shows up or calls telling them about the "thousands of visits" they can drive to a web site. Some of them masquerade as search engine optimization companies. Again, we have the same tools for creating visits as the Adsense Master. Their motiviations are the same: To profit from the uninformed small business.

Tip: Visits are not the barometer by which internet success is measured.

Success is measured in conversion, some action by the customer. This can mean a sale, an email, a phone call, subscription, even in a return visit in some cases. There is always some ratio of "visits" to "conversions". The goal is (or should be) to maximize this ratio. "Visits" by those interested only in making money for themselves are not likely to convert.

The long and short of this story is that another small business saved themselves a few thousand dollars by not falling victim to another internet scam. This story is true, and my hope is that by sharing it with you, another small business will think twice, three times, or more before parting with their hard-earned dollars to one of these scams.

If you are still wondering if the deal is “for real” with any person trying to sell you an internet program, you, too, can ring my cell phone. Whether you are a client or not, at least get some advice before making a mistake. There are real programs that drive real traffic that really converts for just about any business. The fact of the matter is that it simply is not cheap or easy to do. If it sounds like a silver bullet, remember to take your wolfs bane.

Steve Szettella
4word systems, inc.
(810)-333-1869

The market for ideas

Ideas. Everybody has them. Some create enormous fortunes, some never leave the drawing board, and others drive their creators into bankruptcy. Why? Is it the idea itself that it is somehow predestined for success? Is there some other factor that can take coal and turn it into a diamond?

"The Idea Itself" Theory

Inventors from all walks of life feel that the only thing standing between themselves and the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is a really good idea. Every idea that is hatched in the cauldron of their mind is a tiny little gem that has to be carefully guarded, protected, kept secret. It is for exactly this reason that nearly all inventors fail to bring their ideas to market.

When you live your life convinced that someone in a 40 story building in Manhattan is going to "steal" your great new idea, a viable product and corresponding business model can never be adequately developed. Almost no idea is born full grown in the inventor's mind. It must be nurtured, tested, developed, piloted, and reworked several times before it can hope to achieve real success. The fact of the matter is, that an idea is nothing more than a seed. This seed must be planted, in fertile soil, to have any chance of growth. Commercial success by any measure requires far more than a single seed.

Something Else

Who is the public anyway? Well, you are. I am. Your friends are. We all are. Why then, when an idea is born, do we not leverage the very people who are all around us to validate them? Surround yourself with those who believe in you, respect you, and whom you respect in return. Share your ideas with them. They will find the gaps that you have missed, and together you can move quickly to fill them, or create another idea entirely. Partner with those whose strengths are your weaknesses, and together, you can succeed.

The "Abundance" Mentality

Leveraging the opinions of others is clearly a paradigm shift from the "me" culture of protectionism and fear. Strange as it may sound, I meet people every day who have an enormous amount of fear that somehow their idea will be stolen, or their trade secrets revealed. I wonder often if Microsoft (the evil empire) would be the gigantic commercial success that it is today if Bill Gates OR Paul Allen had that point of view. What if one of them had "gone it alone"? Boldly, I will venture a guess that Microsoft wouldn't stand a chance were it not the work of BOTH Paul AND Bill. And honestly, would you be disappointed if you had to "share" the fruits of Microsoft's enormous success with someone else. I suppose it would be awful to have a net worth of less than $30 billion.

The point is this: Success, when properly achieved, creates more than enough to reward all involved. In almost every case, the commercial success possible with a small, talented, dedicated team exceeds that which is achievable by an individual by orders of magnitude. By sharing, you create more, not less, for yourself. Would you rather spilt 100 million between 2 people or create 1 million by yourself?

So What's It Worth?

All ideas, on their own, have no value. Stop believing the "get rich quick" dream by which you "release" your idea to the public and the checks start pouring in. The world is awash in ideas. Yours is the greatest, just like everyone else's. A product, on the other hand, does have value. Turning an idea into a product which can be brought to market is a job too big for an army of one. Use those around you to validate, develop, market and ultimately profit from your idea. Doing it any other way is a recipe for failure.

Change of venue

You are not lost . . . or maybe you are . . .

I have decided to make a more bloggish looking blog, but not too bloggish, thus the style change. Perhaps this choice will last longer than the last one.

Oops!

Checking over the web statistics for the 4word systems site, it seems I may have made a little goof. . . . . It appears that a recent article criticizing a local web developer's work has managed to get on Google's first page of results for "Appeteaser" - the name of the restaurant who's site was critiqued. Click here for the google results. Never really planned on that, but it's kind of cute. Maybe with a little planning, I could outrank appeteaser.com for their own name. . . . . Wonder how long it will be until the phone rings on that one.

So far, 6 visitors to 4wordsystems.com after searching for "Appeteaser".

Welcome PC

Glad to see Praveen has started blogging in earnest. He has a very good recent post related to Gordon Moore. Check it out.

Web Traffic and Online Advertising

So, I've been talking to a lot of people lately (yes, real live humans) about web traffic, search engines, online advertising, internet marketing, internet retailers, link farms, and so on. It has become painfully obvious to me that almost nobody I talk with has ever heard of half the stuff I'm saying.

This leads me to this installment of the blog. Let's chat for a few moments about the internet.

If you have a website, what kind of traffic does it get? Do you even know? What would you consider "a lot" of traffic for a "normal" site?

How about if you own a small or medium sized traditional, brick & mortar business. What do you expect your website to do for you? Are you considering selling some product online? How do websites actually make money anyway?

In a word: traffic.

The #1 thing to think about online is how to bring in traffic, and the #1 way to accomplish that is to have timely, relevant content. I know, it's crazy, but nobody gives a rat's ass about your flash intro that takes 14 minutes to load on a dial-up modem that you paid some high-flying design studio 10k to create. They want some real, honest, accurate, useful information. Keep that in mind.

So, what good is traffic anyway? If 1,000,000 people visit your site, but don't buy anything, what good are they? Let me tell you, the answer is a whole lot. Let's take a look for a moment at a little internet startup you may have heard of, google.com.

google.com is a 3 billion dollar per year economic powerhouse. That's right, 3 billion, with a "b". Funny thing is, you have probably never paid a single red cent to use google. So, how in the sam hell can google generate 3 billion dollars in 2004 if the users (read visitors) don't have to pay anything to use their site?

In a word: advertising.

Online advertising, in particular pay-per-click advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry. Just like TV before it, and radio before that, there is no shortage of businesses out there willing to shuck out mega-ching to let the public know about their great product or service. How better to reach tens of millions of potential buyers than with ads tailored to the very things those people are searching for, exactly at the time they are looking for it? Bravo, google. You have changed the world forever.

So, to answer the question, what are 1,000,000 visitors worth if they never buy a single thing from you, the answer could be $500 - $5000, depending on the content your site is delivering. Best of all, these sort of numbers can actually be accomplished. Here's an interesting tidbit: NOT INCLUDING google, The word "poker" was searched for over 1,000,000 times in January of 2005 alone. If you were to draw 50% of those searches to a site, it is likely that you could easily earn $3000 per month. Remeber, that DOES NOT include the most powerful search engine in the world. A #1 ranked poker site probably can pull down 5x that amount, if NOBODY EVER BUYS anything or gambles at the site. Maybe next time, I'll get more specific on how all this online advertising stuff works, but the post is getting long, and the hour is growing late.

Where have all the good geeks gone?

For those who may not know, i work for a big company. My livlelyhood depends almost entirely on the fact that the overwhelming majority of people in IT at a big company are somewhere between incompetent and outright dangerous. In fact, entire careers, and by extension lives, are built upon this enormous, precarious scaffolding.

That said, as an organization, we continue spending tons of resources recruiting and hiring "quality" employees. i often wonder how so many people can work so hard at something for so long, and still have the result be almost a complete failure.

Is it the nature of software jobs that organizations are unable to locate qualified personnel?

Most professions have clear indicators of competence that can be quantified. For a carpenter, a room should be built square, the roof should not leak, and so on. For a printer, the copy should be aligned properly on the page, the ink coverage should be uniform and match a known sample.

Not so for the IT professional.

Fulfilling the documented business requiremets has almost no relationship to the quality of the software, design, maintainability or cost. These systemic quality aspects are virtually impossible to quantify in any meaningful way. Every system built is so different from the one before it that comparing any two systems is a lot like trying to compare the mass of a blue whale to the price of gasoline in the midwest.

What's the point? Are we doomed to hire lousy programmers and carry them around as dead weight until they retire?

i suggest a new approach. An approach employing the concepts of lean manufacturing and the well proven fact that great programmers are orders of magnitude more productive than mediocre programmers.

Keep on hiring, but start firing. Aggressively. Let go of the dead weight and backfill aggressively. Instead of viewing a project as requiring a ten person team, recognize that the project could be done better and faster if you had three talented developers. Now, still fund and staff for ten, but aggressively remove all but the top two on a regular basis. Cycle the bottom 80% out every four to six weeks. Eventually, after several cycles, you will find that you simply can't get it down to only 2 people. At this point, you have the optimal team to complete your project. Save the top, drop the rest, and drive through to completion.

Radical, yes. Heartless, perhaps. Pragmatic, maybe not. Effecive, definitely.

Think about it.