Cheap Adwords tactic in crowded market
Flying up to Sydney today for our quarterly Platinum mastermind meeting, I noticed an interesting use of Adwords by an advertiser on the in-flight Virgin Blue television service.
The advertiser was Quickflix Movie Rentals, who have an online DVD rental business. It’s a pretty competitive field.
However, the call to action in the ad was to ask flyers to Google “Q” — and then Quickflix would simply bid on the letter “Q” as a sponsored ad.
Much easier to remember than their name. Just go to Google and type in the letter Q.
And it instantly takes virtually all competitors off the search results page… the ONLY advertisers were Quickflix, and a comparison service recommending Quickflix (obviously there’s some room for smart competitors or affiliates here).
On top of that, rather than having to pay a small fortune for popular keywords in their category (they’re ranked number 10 position for “online movie rentals”), they only have to pay a comparatively tiny amount to rank number one in their search results for “Q”, as noone else is bidding on this keyword (keyletter??).
I’m not sure if Quickflix use this in other offline advertising, but it’s certainly a cost-effective way get people to only have to type in a single letter to be one-click from the right website!
Useful Colour Resource 1
One of the handy online applications for creating color (or “colour” for some of us!) combinations is Adobe’s Kuler.
Kuler gives you a number of useful color combination tools — either you can view other color palettes already created (search on popular or high rated submissions), or create your own.
When you create a palette, you get a number of color “rules” to choose from: analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound or shades — or you can use your own rules/experimenting.
Logged in users can save and export these palettes (although a quick screen capture achieves the same thing if needs be).
It’s quite a handy bookmark for finding nice combinations without having to refer to hard-cover books of similar resources.
Getting Ready For Sydney Platinum Meeting
Tomorrow we head up to Sydney for Mal Emery’s Platinum mastermind group get-together.
This is always a great “brain refresher” for me, as I get to reconnect with like-minded people I haven’t seen for a few months (especially over the busy Christmas/holiday period).
As well, Mel and I a mini-break along with of course the content and presentations at the sessions (which I observe on several levels).
I’ll let you know how it goes!
Free Copywriting and Business gold mine
Here’s the first free resource I’d like to share…It’s an information resource for small business owners and copywriters that you should be reading every day. Yes, I read this material virtually every day myself, it’s fantastic value (free) and chock full of great advice and tips (one of my secret weapons):
- Clayton Makepeace’s “The Total Package“
This newsletter comes with my highest endorsement: it is described as “Business-Building Secrets for Growth-Obsessed Companies” and I’d challenge any company or entrepreneur to not find at least one practical idea from every article.
Issues are released daily, and authored by respected industry figures, along with Clayton Makepeace. You’ll soon find you’ll have these emails in your inbox, without filters, and be putting aside a little time to go over each issue.
If I had a rating system this would get “5 stars” and is a valuable free daily resource.
Peeking Behind TinyURL
Do you know of TinyURL.com? The service that takes a really long link and creates a very short version?
One of the great things about TinyURL.com is the creation of a really short name, which is great for several reasons, such as using in print, emails, newsletters, forum posts, etc. It’s also used for cloaking/masking affiliate links, more about that in a minute.
But this really short name is also one of the frustrations for people using the service: as the link is represented by a mix of six letters and numbers, you never really can tell where it’s gonna head.
Until now.
For example, I just created a link to this post (http://www.deankennedy.com/blog/peeking-behind-tinyurl/) with TinyURL.
That resulted in: http://tinyurl.com/2sttxj
But later on, will you remember what 2sttxj is related to? Not likely!
And web visitors will never know what’s at the other end of the link. More uncertainly equals less clicks. Especially in the affiliate world, where this is a crude way to mask an affiliate link. Worse, you’re relying on a third party (in this case, the tinyURL website/creators) to keep offering the service free. Otherwise your links may disappear/die. You’re better off with your own system for easy-to-remember links or to deal with the need to cloak/mask the destination (without such a preview feature!).
But for end-user interaction with TinyURL links, TinyURL.com has come to the rescue!
Instead of using http://tinyurl.com/2sttxj you simply use http://preview.tinyurl.com/2sttxj
This will take you to a page that shows you the link before you click on it. Whenever you see a regular TinyURL.com link, you can copy the link into your address bar, and manually add in the “preview.” — it will still work this way. But there’s an even better option: when I visited TinyURL.com, I turned on a cookie so that, by default, all TinyURL.com links automatically display a preview first (you can turn it off again if you want to).
That will reveal the page that the link will be taking you to as its final destination.
Now there are of course other “short URL” services that compete with TinyURL.com that don’t have this feature. However, TinyURL.com is one of the popular options so it’s one of the more likely services you’ll see.
So now with TinyURL.com links, you don’t have any uncertainty, nor do you have to guess! You get to see the final destination before you visit that page!