Archive for November, 2006

CyberMonday.com from Shop.org

paulballen — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:26:13 -0800

Check out the Alexa ranking of CyberMonday.com which lists special holiday discount offers from more than 400 ecommerce retailers.

Shop.org is a important association of ecommerce companies. I have always appreciated their press releases and market research. But that they are promoting online sales for all their member companies is another good reason to consider joining this association.

What web sites do mobile phone users use?

paulballen — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 18:05:49 -0800

Comscore and Telephia have teamed up to offer data about web sites that are being visited by mobile web users.

In their first report, Comscore and Telephia show some interesting data about mobile web use. It looks like checking weather is very popular.

Another thing I found interesting: Google Mail has only a fraction of the users of Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, both by desktop and mobile users. I switched from Yahoo Mail to Gmail last year and am much happier with the speed of Gmail. But it looks like more PC and mobile users still use Hotmail and Yahoo Mail.

I just added Telephia to my Google Alerts. This is a company that I want to track, since some of our companies are in the mobile content space and most of our other companies will need to develop mobile applications in the future. Any time they issue a press release about mobile application usage or mobile web market share, I want to see it.

Google to shut down Google Answers

paulballen — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:58:21 -0800

Google is my favorite internet company, but not every project that Google launches wins in its category. The company has announced that it will be shutting down Google Answers. Yahoo Answers is relishing this victory. But Amazon's Askville and its forthcoming Questville will be interesting to watch.

Grudgingly Accepting Defeat, Utah Fan Devin Thorpe Sings BYU Fight Song on YouTube

paulballen — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:26:40 -0800

Move over, William Hung!

Utah's own Devin Thorpe has posted a video of his incredible rendition of the BYU Cougar Fight Song.

I think you'll enjoy Devin's video even more if you first relive the excitement of the final seconds of the BYU victory over Utah. Check out this YouTube video that someone show from the stands.

Better still is this television broadcast video showing the final play of the game. (It has more than 15,000 views already!)

Devin has more talent than I anticipated. And he went the extra mile by travelling to Provo to shoot the video adjacent to BYU Campus. Nice effort, Devin!

Devin and I had a public challenge going about who the winner of the recent BYU-Utah Football game would be. He promised what he would do if BYU won; and I countered with a couple commitments of my own.

Thanks to the last second touchdown pass from John Beck (#2 rated NCAA passer) to Johnny Harline (see this amazing photo of Johnny on his knees waiting for the ball to arrive--as a gift from heaven) in the best BYU-Utah game of all time, Devin gets to blog about my blog every day for a week, take me to a restaurant of my choice, and upload this video.

Please visit Devin's post and Digg it (if you aren't a registered user of Digg.com it takes only seconds to sign up) so that more people can enjoy the singing talents of Devin Thorpe. Make it a favorite on YouTube as well. Let's see how many thousands of people all over the world can enjoy Devin's public humiliation.

Go Cougars!

How to save thousands of dollars on your next web development project

paulballen — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 17:22:52 -0800

My friend Spencer Rogers came to the Provo Labs Academy last Wednesday and gave the finest presentation I have ever seen on how to outline your website using Word and then build a user flow version of it (without any look and feel elements) in Powerpoint before spending a dollar on designing and developing the site.

By disabling the Advance slide on mouse click option (found under Slide Show/Slide Transition) and by making objects clickable and linked to other slides, you can design how the site is going to work before sending it to developers. You can show where navigation elements will appear and carve the web pages up into feature and content areas. You basically outline the functionality of the site page by page, leaving the design to someone else.

Spencer worked for years in industry designing software for clients. He has applied these rapid prototyping concepts to web site design and has been responsible for the design of dozens of websites in the last few years.

After seeing one of Spencer's Powerpoint web site mockups two years ago, I blogged about the need for wireframing before developing a web site. But I didn't know the depth of Spencer's approach until last week. I just kicked off a new web site project where the developer did wireframes (he was already familiar with Spencer's approach). And I'm working on my first Powerpoint currently for the next generation for one of my web sites.

Spencer showed us his Powerpoint outline for the relaunch of EverySingleHome.com that he made a year ago and then showed us the new site that just launched, and how closely it followed his Powerpoint design.

It is so costly to design a web site without a clear road map. Design it on paper first before getting into coding it. If you aren't careful, feature creep can totally wipe out your budget. Working in HTML and doing actual programming as the site is being designed can be enormously expensive. If you take a new direction, as you almost always do, you will throw out a lot of code and waste a lot of money.

Nail the actual site architecture first, and then pay for the design and coding. There is a scriptural concept that says things should be created spiritually first and then physically. And another one that says you don't build a house before counting the cost of it. This is only possible with prior planning. And the Powerpoint approach seems appropriate for most projects, since most of us know how to use it and already own a license to it.

By the way, EverySingleHome.com is an amazing real estate web site that lists every home for sale in Utah County and has a photo of each one. It has an Alexa ranking of about 45,000 which is incredible since the site is only in one market. It is a very comprehensive real estate site that anyone who is buying or selling real estate in Utah County should be aware of.

I can't finish this post without commenting that the best product manager that ever worked at MyFamily.com (who is now an incredibly successful internet businessman) used Powerpoint whenever he designed a new feature or service. While other product managers were writing the dreadful 20-40 page MRDs (marketing requirement documents), he would do screen captures of the existing design and add links or components to show what the new pages should look like.

He was super fast at this. Way faster than those who were writing the long books. And more importanly, his visuals communicated instantly and clearly exactly what the site would do, while the MRDs were time consuming and communicated very poorly. You had to plod through the MRDs to try to find anything useful. I absolutely hated the MRDs, but I loved these Powerpoints. I'm not sure what happened to the product managers who used MRDs, but my Powerpoint is one of the most successful internet entrepreneurs I know.

Like Spencer, he has used this skill to great benefit.

First Second Life Millionaire?

paulballen — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 23:47:21 -0800

I met the founder of Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life, at the 2005 AlwaysOn conference at Stanford University. His vision is now paying off, not only for his company, which recently attracted its 1 millionth user, but now for some of Second Life participants as well. Tomorrow, there will apparently be a press conference from Germany where the first person (a woman born in China) who has accumulated $1 million real world dollars worth of virtual real estate will be making an announcement. (See Fortune blog)

She is going public with her good fortune, just as national governments are considering taxing Linden dollars. Australia decided to tax Linden dollars earlier this month.

Judd Bagley and I brainstormed launching a PR firm earlier this year that would enable Second Lifers to actually issue real-world press releases from within the virtual world. Judd currently earns Linden dollars by letting people use his virtual catapult which can launch people or cars or anything else a very great distance. We didn't act on the PR firm idea. But now dozens of large corporations are setting up shop there. Dell Island launched recently, so Secondlifers can get a virtual PC in the game or buy real world PCs later. Leo Burnett launched its virtual agency in Second Life back in September. Now, Second Life estimates that development firms that help corporations set up shop in this popular virtual world are grossing $10 million per year.

I'm actually not a fan of Second Life at all, from what I have seen of it so far. I don't like online anonymity and what it does to human behavior. I'm not a fan of avatars. I worry that this site attracts people will all kinds of base motives. I'm sure others will prove me wrong.

But here is one potentially redeeming idea: a Shakespeare virtual world where users can interact with each other and with Shakespeare texts. This idea from an Indiana University economist just received a $240,000 grant. This could easily be incorporated into Second Life, but it's not clear from the article whether the grant will allow this professor to do that, or whether he has to build his own world.

Get $200 in PPC (pay per click) advertising credits from MSN

paulballen — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 23:05:31 -0800

My friend Dave Martin sent me a link to a Microsoft web page that offers $200 worth of clicks from MSN AdCenter if you sign up between now and January 15, 2007. There is a $5 fee to get an account.

MSN AdCenter Home Page
$200 free offer page

I would like to think that 1,000 of my readers will each pay $5 to get an MSN AdCenter account. Microsoft will make $5,000. And my readers will get $200,000 worth of free PPC.

Everyone I know should do this. And everyone should spread the word to everyone else.

I'm not the first to blog about this. A few others have already posted about this aggressive Microsoft offer.

BYU vs. Utah -- the public challenge

paulballen — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 23:39:43 -0800

To: Devin Thorpe, blogger and University of Utah fan:

Okay, Devin, my friend. As you know, you publicly challenged me to put up or shut up regarding tomorrow's BYU-Utah football game.

I appreciate the confidence you have that Utah will win tomorrow. You said, if BYU wins tomorrow's big game, that you will do the following:

1. I'll plug your blog every day for a week after the game.
2. I'll buy you lunch at whatever place you choose in the State of Utah.
3. I'll post a video of myself singing the BYU fight song on my blog and on YouTube.

So the day after I saw your challenge, I posted a comment on your blog about what I am willing to do in the unlikely event that Utah wins tomorrow. For some reason, the comment was never published. You said it probably got deleted by your spam filter.

Okay, so I'm finally getting back to this challenge. Here's what I'm willing to do if BYU loses tomorrow's big one.

1. I'll wear a University of Utah shirt for the next 5 days, including to my Internet Marketing Class at BYU on Thursday. Then, I'll donate the shirt to Deseret Industries (if they will take it.)
2. I'll match your offer to take you to any restaurant in Utah, my treat.

I believe this is the best BYU team in history, better even than the National Championship Team of 1984. I've been watching Cougar football for more than thirty years. I've never seen a BYU team that is nationally in the top ten in passing offense, scoring, and passing efficiency, plus has a great running game, is #1 in turnover margin nationally and in the top 10 in punt returns, and on top of all that great offense and special teams play, is in the top 10 nationally in defense against the score.

This is the first BYU team ever that has no weaknesses -- our offense, defense and special teams are all incredible. Plus, we do an awesome haka.

Our only two losses were last second away games before the team had found its groove. Since then, it's been all good. If we had won those first two games, including against a Top 25 Boston College that we took to overtime, we'd easily be in the top 5 right now and a BCS buster.

I actually missed half of the SDSU game, due to another commitment. I got there at halftime and we were leading 40-3. You can't miss even the first quarter of a BYU home game. You'll miss all the early scoring.

I know this game is different. Utah is a great team, with a three-game winning streak, and this game probably won't be over in the first quarter.

But BYU will come away with a win.

If not, I'll be shopping for a U of U shirt on Monday morning and be wearing red all week.

You better warm up your singing voice--I can't wait to see you singing the Cougar fight song on YouTube!

Google Employee Posts Videos on How Google Search Engine Really Works

paulballen — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 16:34:30 -0800

I have recently discovered that Matt Cutts, a Google employee who blogs about search engine optimization (he explains the kinds of tactics that Google considers black hat SEO tactics and encourages everyone to do only appropriate search engine optimization) is also doing video posts on Google Video. (See all 19 Matt Cutts videos on Google Video.)

I've been watching some of these and I highly recommend them. First, because Matt works for Google, he is an authority on these topics. Second, he is both articulate and concise. He doesn't waste your time. His explanations are very clear.

Yesterday I showed my Academy members a Matt Cutts video on "some SEO myths," which explains that hosting a few web sites on the same IP address or the same server is not a problem (but hosting several thousand is.)

Today I watched this excellent Matt Cutts video about Dynamic vs. Static URLs (he says they do inherit exactly the same PageRank from sites that link to them, but he says avoid multiple parameters and use mod rewrites where possible to make dynamic pages look like static pages) and how to not be guilty of "cloaking" (which violates Google's policies) if you do GeoTargeting with your web site (deliver different content to different users depending on their country/place of origin, as determined by their IP address.)

As I told my Academy members yesterday, my job is to read, listen to, and watch everything I can find about internet marketing (as well as oversee the internet marketing campaigns of my portfolio companies) and then share only the best, most relevant information with them, so that they can focus on running their business, and I can help them find all the best new opportunities in internet marketing. And of course, their sharing their successes and failures with each other helps everyone too.

We had an open house last night at the Provo Labs Academy for Entrepreneurs with about 20 people and signed up several more members.

I've had several people email me lately about signing up for a online version of the Academy instruction that we do. I've been considering rolling out a $99 per month service for entrepreneurs who don't live in Utah. Several people have already told me they will sign up for this as soon as it is ready.

If you are interested in this service, please email me or comment on my blog. As soon as I get 25 people who are willing to subscribe, we'll launch this.

Top 5 uses of mobile search

paulballen — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 21:05:43 -0800

Nice article on why marketers should care about local/mobile search:

According to the article, the top five uses of mobile search are:

1. Maps and directions
2. Directory listings
3. Restaurants
4. Stores
5. Local movies

Marketers Note: Most Traffic to Popular US Web Sites is International

paulballen — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 17:42:25 -0800

A new Comscore study shows that most traffic to U.S. ad-based web sites comes from outside of the U.S. It reports that 89.1% of Google's page views come from international visitors. This is actually pretty staggering. All online marketers need to focus more on geographic targeting.

Allegiance acquires National Hotline Services, Inc.

paulballen — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:26:38 -0800

My friend Adam sent me this press release about Allegiance this morning. I have watched the last few years while SilentWhistle, which won 2nd place in a Utah Business Plan Competition a couple years ago, acquired Allegiance Technologies and changed its name to Allegiance, and now has acquired another company. They have grow from a few customers to more than 1,500 now are "the strongest ethics reporting company" in the industry.

It is appropriate that this company came out of the BYU Marriott School of Business, which ranks #1 in the country according to Business Week for both accounting and ethics.

This has been a great case study in how to startup a company, get some funding from business plan competitions, develop intellectual property, create a powerful advisory board (the best one I've ever seen for a startup company) and a strong management team, focus on sales and marketing, raise capital from angel investors, utilize the internet to generate leads (Allegiance presented this year at the MarketingSherpa B2B Lead Generation Summit), and to also grow through carefully selected acquisitions.

If you ever get a chance to hear Adam tell this story, take advantage of it. He has done so many things right. You will hear a lot more about this company in the future.

MyFamily.com in the spotlight; genealogy industry validated

paulballen — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:50:06 -0800

This isn't new news--it happened on November 1st. Investors Business Daily published a nice article on MyFamily.com, and revealed that according to CEO Tim Sullivan, 2006 revenues will hit $150 million with an EBIDTA of $28 million. After being under the radar for several years, it's nice to see MyFamily getting some decent media attention recently. I think the CEO is doing a good job at telling the story.

Here's another impressive excerpt from the article:

Founded in 1997, MyFamily.com has grown organically and through acquisitions. It cornered the market by acquiring Genealogy.com in 2003 and RootsWeb.com in 2000.

Of the top 10 genealogy Web sites, properties owned by MyFamily had 74% of the audience in September. More than 8.4 million people in the U.S. surfed genealogy Web sites that month, according to comScore Networks.

The genealogy industry is in need of a serious #2 player in the space. While I co-founded Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com with Dan Taggart and our small launched the first site back in June 1996, the original founding team hasn't been involved at MyFamily.com for many years now.

Several of us have gotten back together to work on an international genealogy company called WorldVitalRecords.com (we may eventually change the name to something else, but it's a domain that works for now). We have partnered with Everton Publishers in Logan, Small Town Papers, and are in discussions with many other partners.

It is fun to be back in the genealogy business. Like Ancestry.com, World Vital Records publishes new databases to our web site every business day. Our email database is approaching 100,000 names and we are going to be launching some significant user generated content features soon.

It may take some time to become the #2 genealogy site on the web; but we think we have the team that can do it. And we think the industry is large enough so that there is room for us, and many others.

Only 5% of the world population is in the United States; so there will likely be dozens of successful genealogy companies around the world. We certainly hope to be one of them.

Contact me if you are interested in getting involved with WorldVitalRecords. We expect to grow next year and we are interested in genealogical expertise as well as international marketing experience.

(Note: MyFamily.com has asked me to mention when I blog about the company that I am no longer involved in the company, as a director, officer or employee. I am a small stakeholder in the company.)

Be Objective About Your Web Site Design

paulballen — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 17:36:35 -0800

Today, I'm teaching a class on web site design at Provo Labs Academy. In preparing for the class I am reminded how often emotions run high when people discuss or debate how a web site should be designed. There are lots of strong opinions out there, and many of them are not informed by marketing experience, but simply by personal design preference.

So I need to remind everyone that Jakob Nielsen is right about the importance of user testing. I have always loved his "Discount Usability Testing" concept. He simply says invite 5 people to use your web site and you will find 85% of the usability problems. The cost of doing this is ridiculously low and yet most companies never watch real people try to use their web site. Therefore, many usability issues go unresolved, costing companies money every day.

If you combine user testing with web analytics (and A/B split testing) you can make your decisions objectively based on real feedback from customers. Then it doesn't matter who is right. What matter is, which design generates the most revenue?

90 Minute Panel on Internet Marketing

paulballen — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 16:45:33 -0800

Tomorrow (Thursday, November 15th) I've invited 6 excellent internet marketers to do a rapid-fire 90 minute panel discussion on internet marketing tactics that work. I'll throw out a tactic (I have scores of tactics to choose from) and then ask if they have ever tried this tactic and if so, how successful it was. We're going to record the program, and, if they give permission, we may create a transcript of it and make it available online.

This will be held in Provo at 4 pm. It will be for Provo Labs Academy members only (and for the students in my BYU internet marketing class.) If you need more information about it, please contact Pat Sheranian at Provo Labs Academy, 373-6565, or email me at paul "at" provolabs.com.

Part time positions at World Vital Records (genealogy company)

paulballen — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 07:47:28 -0800

World Vital Records is starting to advertise for a BYU accounting student with bookkeeping experience to do payroll, A/R, A/P, and and prepare our monthly financial statements. This will be part time, perhaps 20 hours per week.

World Vital Records is also looking for BYU students or others with family history experience who are native speakers of any foreign language. Call the office (377-0588) and ask for Yvette if you are interested in learning more.

We will be adding to our call center staff soon, so if you have recently worked at Ancestry.com's call center but no longer have work there, and if you speak a foreign language very well, please apply. Again, ask for Yvette or David.

Internet Marketing Training Opportunity: Large Companies May Apply

paulballen — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 06:52:23 -0800

Every Friday at noon, our Provo Labs Academy members get together to discuss all the latest internet marketing news. I have promised to read MarketingVOX every day and to visit all the new web sites and try the new tools that affect internet marketing. Then I'll lead a discussion about each one, we'll talk about who is going to test the various new channels and report back on them in a subsequent meeting.

Today we discussed Turn.com's new CPA network, Marchex's new PPC network that operates on 200,000 domains that they own (they claim a higher conversion rate from direct navigation traffic than from keyword searches on search engines), Amazon's ClickRiver PPC network (in beta), Like.com's amazing visual search engine, which hopefully will someday accept data feeds like Froogle does (we also discussed Froogle), and finally, we turned some attention to Google's foray into radio advertising vs. what Bid4Spots.com is already doing with a reverse auction than 2,200 stations already participate in.

It was an incredibly fun session. Every week, we'll have a similar discussion about all the latest news. We should start podcasting it in a week or two also. This podcast will likely be a key part of the Academy for Entrepreneurs that we hope to roll out nationally, probably next year.

We signed up two new members to the Academy today, including one who has sold two very successful internet companies and is working on a very cool new idea. Having some veterans around in addition to the first time entrepreneurs provides an excellent diversity and variety of opinions. We probably still have room for about 15 more members, although there are 4 more that appear ready to sign up.

In addition to the Friday "what's new in internet marketing" discussion, we'll have meetings at noon on Monday (search engine training), Tuesday (email marketing), Wednesday (web site design and conversion rate). We may also have a 4 pm brainstorm session once a week and a 9 pm session occasionally.

I've decided that in addition to the $200-500 memberships that most of our Academy members have been signing up for, that we are going to start a new program, a Corporate Membership, that will provide one seat at all of our training and brainstorm events that can be shared by different individuals within a single company. This will cost $1,000 per month, with a 12-month commitment.

So any company that has several employees that it wants to learn internet marketing, search engine marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, subscription marketing, web design usability and conversion rate marketing, analytics, Web 2.0 technology, and mobile application development (we are sending two key employees to a major mobile app development conference this month) can rotate its staff through our weekly meetings, so that over time many employees will be exposed to powerful internet marketing tactics and a new way of thinking and looking for new opportunities.

We will probably limit this to about 10 companies, since our major emphasis at the Academy is on helping startup companies.

If you are interested email me or call Pat at 801-373-6565 on Monday to inquire.

Start with very simple analytics

paulballen — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 17:43:44 -0800

For years I've been setting up daily metrics spreadsheets for companies that I own or consult for. I have learned how critical it is to 1) set goals, 2) track results every day, 3) look for new channels continually, 4) and test new creative regularly.

When a startup company looks at a mature internet company's analytics and daily spreadsheets, it can be overwhelming.

I want to advise all internet startups to start simple. Track spending and new customers. Don't get overwhelmed at first with all the complex details of a mature analytics program. Start at a high level and drill down later.

But first, just track simple things like daily spending, new customers, and cost to acquire a new customer.

If you focus on acquiring new customers through internet marketing and make sure that the campaigns you are running are acquiring new customers at a reasonable level, then you can increase the volume and optimize the campaigns with time.

But if you don't even know your cost to acquire a new customer there is no way you can make good decisions about internet marketing.

I think this is the first key metric that internet marketers should track.

I think it is the key metric that good direct marketers have been focused on for almost 100 years.

In the late 90s it seems that internet entrepreneurs had a sort of arrogance. We classified people as getting it or not getting it. All you had to say about someone is "he doesn't get it" and that communicated volumes.

We thought we were the first advertisers/marketers in history who understood how to track the results of our spending and make sure that all of our advertising was actually profitable. We knew that web analytics made this possible, whether we used home grown systems or third party systems. Unlike most advertisers who knew that half of their advertising worked, they just didn't know which half, we could track our spending on a daily basis at the campaign level. We knew what worked and what didn't. Or at least we thought we did. (Even when spending millions a year on online advertising and analytics, we were always plagued at MyFamily.com with a very large "other" bucket.)

When I discovered the book "Scientific Advertising" by Charles Hopkins, published in the 1920s, and learned that he had pioneered couponing and all kinds of direct response tracking, I was humbled by how brilliant some of the pre-internet marketers really were. Even now, direct mail and direct response gurus exist who generate millions of dollars of trackable spending. They really are scientific about their work. Unfortunately, there are still many "brand marketers" who are creative but really don't know how to generate revenue. They hide behind the fact that much of their advertising spending can't directly connect to revenue.

I remember how incredibly disappointing the $10 million MyFamily.com TV advertising campaign was back in 1999-2000. Deutsch did the creative and millions were spent with almost no impact. But in a pre-IPO situation that we were in, venture backed companies were encouraged to spend money like crazy to build a brand. (I personally preferred Mary Meeker's advice on branding--forget branding and spend money to acquire new customers--that is really how to build a brand.)

As I introduce analytics to my students and Academy members, I worry about overwhelming them. After all, Omniture can generate hundreds of thousands of reports.

So I've been thinking back to my first months in online marketing and the simplest and most important daily reports that I required.

It comes from asking two simple questions: "How much did we spend today online" and "how many new customers did we get."

With those two numbers, you can calculate the cost per acquisition number. Track that over time. See if it is going up or down. Set a target and have a flexible budget that says as long as we are acquiring customers for this target amount or less, we can keep spending more money.

Once you have this simple number and track it over time, then the web analytics can help you divide all your marketing efforts into different channels, which you can start tracking separately. Again, you should do it on a daily basis.

So your overall numbers might be:

Costs New Customers Cost Per Customer
11/5 $250 10 $25.00
11/6 $275 15 $18.33
11/7 $300 12 $25.00

Then, you want to start tracking individual marketing channels (Google vs Yahoo vs MSN, each email campaign that you run) to see what the CPA is for each one.

If your CPA is good, then run more and more campaigns. If your CPA is not good enough, test new ads and landing pages until you can get a good enough CPA.

The holy grail for internet marketers is to have a low enough CPA and a high enough gross margin that each new customer you acquire actually generates profits to the bottom line.

If that happens, then follow what I call the "blank check approach to internet marketing." Spend as much money as you can on any marketing program that brings you new customers that generate a profit on the first order.

If you lose a little money on your initial order (most ecommerce companies do), then you have to hope for repeat orders in order to generate a long-term profit on your marketing campaigns. You can start developing a "life-time value" model that tries to predict how much you can spend to get a customer, knowing that over time the repeat orders will help you turn a profit.

I'm hoping to set up a public Google shared spreadsheet that internet marketers can use as a model for their own daily CPA tracking.

I have several, but I'm afraid they are too complex. I'm looking for a simple one that I can share as a template.

If you know of one and are willing to share, please let me know.

Internet Marketing Update

paulballen — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 16:07:58 -0800

I'm in Hawaii on business, and don't have time for any thoughtful posts, but here are a few items that I will be exploring more in depth later:

Amazon is introducing a pay-per-click network called ClickRiver. Internet marketers need to try this, but it's in beta right now.
Turn.com, a venture funded CPA network is launching today at an O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference, along with 12 other companies. I will definitely ask my portfolio companies to sign up as advertisers and see how well this CPA network works. CPA stands for "cost per action", so unlike Google where you pay per click, with Turn you pay per lead or pay per sale. Turn, in effect, will be a powerful affiliate for any ecommerce company or other web site. Turn has raised about $18 million, I think, from VCs.
Last week MarketingSherpa was acquired by MEC Labs which publishes MarketingExperiments.com. I've been telling my Provo Labs Academy members that these are the two most important newsletters for them to read. And now they are under one roof.
Comscore has released its first analysis of mobile phone internet access in the U.S. and Europe.
The Utah Jazz are 4-0, one of only 3 undefeated teams in the NBA. BYU's football team broke into the Top 25 for the first time in years. I think they are going to run the table. The sports gods are smiling on Utah. This is turning out to be a very good year for us.

Business Students Launching Companies

paulballen — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:58:23 -0800

I am in Rexburg, Idaho today at BYU-Idaho (formerly Ricks College). Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting Kim B. Clark, the president of the University, who until last year was the Dean of the Harvard Business School. The slogan at the university is "Rethinking Education."

I also met with Fenton Broadhead, Dean of the Business School, and met many students here. Something very special is happening at this university. President Clark works with two other former Harvard Business School professors, Clark Gilbert and Steven Wheelwright, as he seeks to reinvent education at this school.

As I spoke with students and faculty members, the excitement here is tangible. Traditional textbook study with its emphasis on recall is is being replaced with a new approaching that focuses more on understanding and experience. For example, business students take a full semester integrated core of finance, marketing, supply chain, and operations classes, which gives teams of 20 students a chance during the semester to launch an actual business.

Many of these business turn a profit before they are shut down or sold/turned over to the bookstore.

There is a vision here about what kind of students a 21st century university should turn out. They should not be spectators, they should be proactive participants in solving problems.

BYU-Idaho has no intercollegiate sports program; but they do have a football stadium, uniforms, and cheerleaders. The difference is that any student that wants to participate in football can do so for fun or competitively in the large activities/intramural program here. And that goes for all kinds of other sports and extra curricular activities as well.

The students I met are all involved in so many things, getting hands on experience, and real world experience. The business schools internship program is incredible, placing students at big 4 accounting firms and other major corporations.

So keep your eye on BYU-Idaho. For years we (in the Utah community) have heard talk about BYU striving to become the "Harvard of the West."

For the first time, I'm thinking, maybe that will happen in Rexburg, not in Provo.

Compete puts icons next to Google and Yahoo search results

paulballen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:33:50 -0800

Today I've been using LinkedIn.com to find someone who worked at Travelzoo back when they issued shares to thousands (or was it hundreds of thousands?) of customers. That is such an interesting concept. It made a big splash in the 90s during the bubble. But would it work today with new SEC regulations? That's what I want to explore.

I found more than 50 people in my LinkedIn.com network that have worked at Travelzoo in the past or work there now, but none on the legal or executive management team. Mostly web designers, developers, content people/producers, and sales and marketing folks.

So I turned to Google using Firefox and did a search. And I was amazed to find that the new Compete toolbar that I have installed parsed the Google search results and put three icons next to every entry.

This is what it looks like:

So I've never used a toolbar that adds more data to the Google search results and I'm not sure if I like it yet...but it is a gutsy move by Compete. If they get a lot of toolbar users, they'll be piggybacking on Google's traffic to direct a lot of eyeballs to themselves. I just checked and it does the same thing with Yahoo search results.

This Compete toolbar is extremely interesting. I wonder what the fallout will be....

Answer: Yes

paulballen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:27:50 -0800

I asked the question in my last post, "Will Compete's toolbar become an essential tool for internet marketers." After 15 minutes with the tool, and after watching the excellent Flash presentation about what this service aims to do, I answer with a resounding, "Yes!"

My favorite slide in the Flash presentation was this:

I checked out the one year history on several of my companies and several other sites; at first glance, the traffic data seems quite reliable. For example, here is the trend data for three popular genealogy sites.

15 minutes isn't enough to integrate something into my daily workflow. But it is enough time for me to decide that I'm going to start using it every day so I can see if it sticks.

Based on what I've seen so far, I am inviting all the internet marketers that I know to try Connect's Toolbar, look at their traffic data, and post comments about whether you think this will replace Alexa, first, and also, how disruptive this new service will be to Hitwise, Comscore, and Netratings.

Will Compete's Toolbar become an essential tool for internet marketers?

paulballen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:53:26 -0800

Bill Gross, one of the world's most prolific entrepreneurs and an inspiration to me for more than 10 years, officially launched Compete.com today. (See the Alexa Chart for Compete.com.)

I just downloaded the Compete toolbar. The graphics indicates that 2 million people are already sharing their clicks so that we can all know better what sites are popular and what sites we can trust.

The two essential toolbars that I install on every PC I use are Google's (mainly for the page rank and backward links info, and for convenience of searching) and Alexa's. Every internet marketer needs both of these toolbars.

Just yesterday I read that some industry experts were complaining about how everyone who can't afford a high-end reliable web site analytics program like Hitwise or Comscore use Alexa to see how popular web sites are. Alexa's data is not statistically very reliable, even with 10 million downloads of its toolbar. But Alexa data shows up in almost every VC pitch these days.

So if Compete can provide better data than Alexa, we'll all be better off.

My favorite industry statistics web site of all time is Top9.com. It used data from PC Data, but it had the best categorizations and the easiest UI of all the web analytics companies. But it hasn't been updated since 2001.

Note to Bill Gross: please buy Top9.com and start powering it with the data you gather from Compete.com.

BYU eBusiness Lecture Series--2006

paulballen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:15:54 -0800

I accidentally saved this blog post in my "drafts" and I guess I never posted this entry about the BYU eBusiness Lecture Series for Fall 2006.

It's a bit late in the BYU semester now, but since Josh James of Omniture (the world's best web analytics company) is speaking today, and Brian Beutler in two weeks, and Matt Mossman in three, I thought I should still post this in case some PLA members or others from the general public, may want to attend.

6 September Stephen Liddle, director, Rollins Center for eBusiness, What is eBusiness?

13 September Doug Dean, associate professor, information systmes, Does IT Matter?

20 September Alan Chipman, senior manager of SPA, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Identifying and Managing the Risks of eBusiness

27 September Ralph Yarro, CEO, ThinkAtomic, Managing Internet Pornography and the Fight to Save a Generation

4 October Paul Allen, CEO, ProvoLabs, The Power of Social Networking in an eBusiness World

11 October Doug Witt, instructor of business management, The Impact of the Internet on Marketing

18 October Jack Sunderlage, CEO, ContentWatch, USTAR, Utah

BYU-Idaho Entrepreneur Conference

paulballen — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 15:09:52 -0800

I am excited to attend the BYU-Idaho Entrepreneur Conference this week, to help judge the entrepreneur of the year competition, and to talk to students there about entrepreneurship.

While I'm there, I may scout around for some office space in case we want to expand Provo Labs Academy, our academy for entrepreneurs, to Rexburg, Idaho. I'm going to do the same thing on my trip to BYU-Hawaii next week. (Although, I'm not sure how much available office space exists in Laie, Hawaii!)

Apparently the enrollment at BYU-Idaho jumped this year, somewhat unexpectedly, to 13,500 students. (See Wikipedia article on BYU-Idaho.)

Under the leadership of the Kim Clark, former dean of the Harvard Business School, I hear that some real innovation in education is happening at BYU-Idaho. I hope to learn about it on my visit.