Archive for January, 2007

Understand Your Customer Better Than Anyone Else

paulballen — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:50:37 -0800

Our top priority at World Vital Records is understanding our customers needs. A VC friend told me recently that if you choose a market and understand your customers' needs better than anyone else, and meet those needs, that you will be successful.

In addition to monthly usabilty tests of our web sites, we now have a panel of 783 customers who are willing to answer any questions that we ask them. The first question we asked is what kinds of records they want us to add to our web site. Our next question will be what countries they want us to gather these records from.

We are also studying our site analytics regularly, doing A/B testing on our outbound email campaigns, and have begun using Google Website Optimizer so that we can test various landing pages in real time to see which ones perform best.

We have found by analyzing our customer database that 72% of our paying subscribers are women and 28% are men. Using Quantcast, we have a good glimpse of the demographics of our site visitors, what other web sites they tend to visit, and what keywords they are searching for.

Quantcast is an extremely useful tool and it will only get better. The founder of Quantcast emailed me recently and told me how many pixels they are tracking on a monthly basis. Their open system (where webmasters can opt in for validated numbers) will make their system better with time. As more media planners use their site to design interactive marketing campaigns, Quantcast will be able to play a key role in the ad selling process, and take a slice of that pie. To build audience, they'll continue to make their audience measurement and demographic information free.

I love this service.

Quantcast is extremely valuable to understand all the companies in an industry. We can use Quantcast to learn the demographics of visitors to Ancestry.com or any other genealogy web site. Ancestry's users tend to be over 45 years old, and more female than male.

I can start to see differences in audience composition and determine who is strong in what area. For example, World Vital Records already has a lot of users from a variety of ethnic groups, whereas Ancestry.com's audience ranks high on Caucasian but low on most other ethnic groups. As we launch international databases and search engines, perhaps this gap will only widen.

We can use Quantcast to find hundreds of genealogy sites that are potentially good partners, where cross promotion could help us and them.

If you have not yet started using Quantcast, I suggest you set aside a few hours to do so, and write down all the insights you gain about your competitors and your customers, and what other sites they visit and what other interests they have.

In the traditional direct marketing industry you can use a service like Claritas which can provide you with a customer segmentation report if you provide them with the mailing addresses of your customers. They can answer questions like:

* Who are my customers?
* What are they like?
* What do they buy?
* Where can I find them?
* How can I reach them?
* How can I keep them?

They also have Data Enhancement services, which they describe as follows: "Claritas can help you learn all about your customers - their demographics, lifestyles, and consumer behaviors. We can append Claritas data to your customer file of names and addresses to give a richly detailed profile of what your customers are like and why they buy from you."

Quantcast is providing a combination of Alexa/Hitwise/Comscore-like data along with free Claritas-like data. I'm a little surprised that it's not getting more buzz than it is. I have found a few good posts on Quantcast, including this post on Rojo.com that says it may be a valuable tool for advertisers, and potentially an acquisition target for Google, but that it has been self-funded and may not have a business model fully figured out.

I suppose if it had venture backing then it would be getting a lot more media coverage than it is. Or maybe the company is lying low and perfecting its service until it is ready for prime time.

I blogged earlier this month about how Quancast is the best free tool for internet marketers in years, and I stand by that claim. The more I use it, the more I like it, and the more potential I see for it.

But back to our topic ... understanding your customer. One more practice that we are going to start at World Vital Records is requiring all our executives to have regular phone calls with customers.

I remember when my brother Curt Allen was CEO of MyFamily.com and he asked his executive staff of 12 people how many had spoken to a customer in the past month. If I recall correctly, not a single hand went up. He was making a strong point that when a company is growing fast, it is easy to lose touch with the customer.

So when I ran the marketing department, not only did my staff each visit our call center every week to be involved in customer phone calls, but we also started holding group discussions with our customers to find out what they liked and didn't like, and what they wanted us to do next.

It is so easy to get busy with housekeeping and putting out fires that you can completely neglect speaking with customers.

We are also planning to attend many, many national, regional, and local family history events. Not only are the people at these conferences the nicest people you'll ever meet, but they are so incredibly knowledgeable--some of them have been doing family history for decades, so they have so many insights and ideas for what would make their job easier.

A consultant friend of mine told me recently that third-party surveys are far more accurate than those conducted by a company itself because customers will be more honest with third parties for some reason. What do you think? I remember we hired Wirthlin Worldwide to do a major customer survey for MyFamily.com back in 1999 and the results were incredible.

Blogging keeps me in touch with internet entrepreneurs, but not with the family history community yet. I think I'm going to keep this blog focused on internet entrepreneurship and marketing (due to popular demand!) and start a new blog that I'll probably publish at Worldvitalrecords.com that will focus on family history topics.

Bill Marriott claims that his new blog will help him do on a global scale what he has been doing for years: talking to the customer.

What are your topic 3-5 techniques for staying in touch with your customers and really understanding their needs? And how has this helped you achieve success in your business?

Please share....

Note: I have not been involved as an employee of MyFamily.com (now The Generations Network) since February 2002.

International Genealogy Search Engines

paulballen — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:14:10 -0800

Our World Vital Records team has launched international genealogy search engines for 11 countries, with 18 more in the pipeline already.

Our intial list includes a search engine for genealogy in China and a search engine for genealogy in India. Other countries include Australia, Austria, France, Germany, Kenya, the Philippines, Tonga, Turkey, and Ukraine.

Also this week, we are uploading 200 electronic back-issues of the famous genealogy magazine, Everton Genealogical Helper. We have indexed more than 10,000 pages dating from 1947-2006. That's 60 years of content from the magazine that is the most interactive of all genealogical publications. For decades, readers have been writing in their queries, which would get published, and other readers would then connect with each other. The Helper was a genealogy bulletin board before the internet was even invented.

We are currently designing and building the interactive features of our new family history web site. If we can engage the Helper audience in using our new web based tools, then we'll be able to take interactive genealogy to an entirely new level.

Family history is a global phenomenon

paulballen — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 19:03:38 -0800

In December our web analytics showed that Worldvitalrecords.com had visitors from 117 countries. Now we are up to 141 countries. The web is truly a global phenomenon. So is family history. World Vital Records is helping people all over the world find their ancestors. Stay tuned for some exciting announcements in the coming months.

I remember a few years ago a Roper Starch Worldwide survey found that "protecting the family" was the key driving value in the lives of most consumers from most countries. In fact, I believe it was ranked #1 in 22 of the 35 countries that were surveyed.

"Respecting your elders" was also in the top 5 values. These values were ranked ahead of health, money, and other things that we normally think of as driving consumer behaviors. (Now of course our values and our behaviors are not necessarily always in sync!)

The family still is the most fundamental unit of society, even though 44% of adult Americans are single (I saw that factoid on the news the other day), they all still belong to at least one family. Everyone is connected. If families ties can become stronger, society benefits a great deal, as families take more responsibility for each other's well-being.

The future of Google Video search

paulballen — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 16:44:55 -0800

From the Official Google Blog, we learn that Google Video searches will now include links to videos hosted at YouTube, but in the future, Google Video will index "the world's online video content" whereever it exists.

Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when you click on YouTube thumbnails, you will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world's online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

This actually makes a ton of sense. Google will focus on indexing all the world's video content, regardless of where it exists, and not try to host it all. There are scores of "YouTube" like sites cropping up everywhere, so one of the major challenges for Google will be how to manage duplicate video content. Many marketers/advertisers will upload their videos to all the video sites they can. It will be interesting to see how Google will rank the results when the same video is hosted in dozens of places. I suppose Google Video and YouTube results might appear first.

The biggest challenge of all may be to avoid indexing all the UGC (user generated crap) that millions of amateur video producers will be posting online.

I was in Las Vegas recently when the CEO of CBS took the stage at CES and showed us a glimpse of the future. As they presented a totally lame video produced in Second Life using some CBS Star Trek content, I began to worry that the future of television will include millions of home-made poor quality video clips with all the intelligence and redeeming value of South Park or Beevis and Butthead, or the kind of fake porn or near porn that Mark Cuban says exists in so much abundance on YouTube.

Mark recently blogged about the the top 20 most played videos on YouTube in December.

Go through the list. Only the StarWars PSA, the Christmas Tree Jump and PowerTool Racing are really user generated content. 3 out of 20.

From there you have a contrived 12 days of christmas that is one of thousands of promos for Youtube users themselves trying to build a following. Is this social networking at its best?

From there we have commercials or promos for movies, tv shows, blenders, knives, music videos and for a phone company. Then we have the most popular of Youtube videos these days. The fake Porn thumbnail with headlines of: Britney, Paris, whoever, nude, in the shower, wherever, doing whatever. 5 of the top 20 are fake porn.

This is the future of TV and entertainment ?

Thats what Youtube has become. Fake Porn and Commercials. Sure there is still some fun stuff on there and being uploaded, but how long before fake porn just takes over? It was 9 of the top 20 for the week as I write this.

At CES, Michael Dell showed a historic cartoon showing what might have happened if ancients had access to personal computers (Dell computers of course), and he wondered outloud what Spielberg would be doing now if Shakespeare had been producing action movies in the 1500s.

I worry when we start thinking that video is more important than text.

If you haven't read Neal Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, you should.

I hope Google or someone can figure out a way to index all the good, wholesome, uplifting, educational, informative, appropriately entertaining and useful video content and filter out all the rest, at least for those of us who don't want to fill our minds with garbage. Some of us still believe in the "law of the harvest"--that what you sow, you shall also reap. And some of us want to have all the positive benefits of technology without all the negatives.

Think about it. Stanford hosts the most successful investors and entreprenuers of all time and posts the full video interviews on their entrepreneur education web site. This is really valuablel stuff. Probably get a few thousand views each, if they are lucky. Meanwhile, YouTube gets millions of views of the fake porn videos that Mark Cuban refers to.

Makes you think about the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and other civilizations that lost their bearing and got corrupted by entertaining themselves to death (sometimes literally).

Recent polls show that about a third of young people in the U.S. read the bible weekly, but a third have also watched a particularly violent TV show in the last month as well as a violent movie. If you add "a violent or raunchy" web video to the poll, I bet the numbers are much higher.

So if the Bible and Shakespeare and the classics keep fading from popular culture, and our minds become more and more filled with lousy UCG, what will our country look like in the next few decades, and how will we respond to the incredible economic and educational energy coming from China and India and elsewhere in the world?

As a social entrepreneur, I like to look for opportunities to counter the negatives that I see in our culture with new positive things that can be done with modern technology. My focus for the next few years will be on genealogy and connecting families using technology. But I admire other social entrepreneurs who find ways to use modern technology to improve our minds and solve all kinds of problems.

I'm especially excited about Google Book Search and the other projects that are underway to digitize all the books in the world. I haven't seen any Hitwise or Comscore stats showing the usage of these online projects. But I'm interested to see how many people will use them. I fear that it will be only a fraction of the people who use video search.

When you don't have time to blog, at least share what you are reading

paulballen — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 18:00:58 -0800

My Google Reader (for RSS feeds--highly recommended!) now has a wonderful "share this" feature, which allows me to quickly tag the best news stories that I read each week, even when I don't have time to blog about them.

Then, those shared items show up online for others to view. My shared items can be found here.

Soon, I hope to have my shared items incorporated into my own paulallen.net web site, but that will take a bit of development work. And my blog developer has 6 priorities ahead of this one.

Speaking of paulallen.net, I was happy to discover yesterday that Yahoo Denmark now ranks paulallen.net the #2 top result for the search "paul allen." In fact, several Scandinavian sites did the same thing. (No wonder I get so much email from all over the world for the Microsoft billionaire!)

Make your web site mobile friendly

paulballen — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 17:42:11 -0800

I'm reviewing some of the powerpoints from December's Search Engine Strategies Conference, particularly the presentations on mobile web site design and marketing, which were excellent.

The session on Mobile Search Optimization, moderated by Danny Sullivan, was excellent. Someone took copious notes and posted them. Must have been a court reporter present.

One URL was given out that gives instructions on how to make your web site mobile friendly in just a few minutes.

I'm finding that I use my Blackberry web browser more and more frequently. I'm sitting at a desktop less and less for web browsing, and even more rarely for email.

Janice Roberts from Mayfield Fund (founded in 1969), a veteran VC firm from Silicon Valley, gave the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture at Stanford last week. (You can get the podcast for free.) In her career, she worked at 3Com, bought more than 30 companies for them, was involved in acquiring Palm and taking it public, and has been at Mayfield for 6 1/2 years. In speaking of trends for the future in this lecture, she talked a lot about mobile devices and how many people (especially younger people) want anywhere access to everything.

If you haven't thought about making your web site mobile friendly, you are falling behind the times.

If you have tried it, tell me what you think of the instructions from mikeindustries.com or how you approached the task.

Also, in your comment, give me the URL of your mobile-friendly site, so I can try it out on my Blackberry.

NONE of my portfolio sites are mobile friendly yet, including World Vital Records (where I am CEO), which is why I continue to lecture on this topic and blog about it.

Contact Me

paulballen — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:51:04 -0800

The best free tool for internet marketers in years

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 23:34:46 -0800

My friend Spencer sent me a link to Quantcast.com this morning and I tried it out and then made in the centerpiece of my training today at the Provo Labs Academy.

This is an incredibly powerful tool that provides demographic information on the visitors who visit your site, your competitor's sites and any one of 20 million other web sites. It's like the wonderful free Alexa tool combined with the extremely expensive data that comes from high end internet traffic companies like Comscore or Hitwise--but the Quantcast service is free.

You can see the age, gender, income, and education level of your site visitors. The power here, of course, is not to just get free data about your own site visitors, but to use this tool to find hundreds of other sites with similar demographics for media planning and buying purposes.

It also includes keyword research. You can see the keywords your site visitors are likely to search for. You can find other web sites that your site visitors tend to visit.

I know I will be spending many, many hours using this service.

At the Academy, one of the members expressed concern about how Quantcast would make money. I have no doubt that hundreds of thousands of internet marketers will get addicted to their free services, so that if they roll out premium services, they'll have a willing audience to sell to.

I'm not sure a more important free service has launched since Goto.com (later Overture and now Yahoo Search Marketing) started providing its free keyword suggestion tool for search engine marketers.

This takes that concept to an entirely new level. I applaud the team behind this incredible new Quantcast service and predict that it will spread very quickly. The user interface is excellent. It's fast and easy to use.

My first hope is that their premium service will provide access to "more...." data under each category that they track. But for now, I'm very excited to use Quincast for genealogy purposes, and to encourage all the Provo Labs portfolio companies to use it as well.

In our Academy training today we also discussed direct mail list brokers who can provide extremely targeted mailing lists for promotional purposes. We discussed Microsoft's efforts to one-up Google with better demographic targeting and behavioral targeting on AdCenter, which is possibly because they have some demographic data on their 263 million Hotmail users, and they combine it with search engine query histories for each customer.

A few other topics we covered include:

Microsoft getting into Web Analytics with a free service to compete with Google Analytics
How to use Clickatell's SMS services to provide your customers with valuable opt-in SMS alerts. We discussed some potential uses of this service.
How some merchants are using Google's $10 bonus for new Google Checkout customers to advertise "$10 off of our product when you sign up for Google Checkout." (NY Times article from December).
Netflix is now letting its customers stream 1,000 movies as it finally launches its online movie rental service. Netflix has 70,000 DVDs in its rental library.
Skype's founders are backing the launch of a potentially industry changing online peer-to-peer television platform called Joost. It's been code-named "The Venice Project" for some time now; but Joost is now in beta. Based on this week's Alexa chart for Joost, I would say this project has the most hype potential and therefore may be the single most disruptive play in online video to date. Skype's founders first launched KaZaa, then Skype (sold to eBay for $2.6 billion plus.) The chances are good that this company will sell for even more than Skype after it gets its 50-100 million users; after all television is a much sexier industry than telecommunications. It's too early to tell for sure, but I wouldn't bet against this company and its backers.

I wanted to talk about several other things, but we ran out of time. They included:

Google may someday put advertising kiosks in Malls to compete with the OnSpot Digital Network.
Millennial Media, a mobile advertising network raised venture funding this week. It will compete with AdMobs (the leader I think) and Third Screen Media.
Geni.com launched this week with a very cool web 2.0 family tree builder application. They got TechCrunched and got a huge spike in traffic. (See the Alexa Chart for Geni. Also, see the 5-year chart for MyFamily.com and Geni.) It will be very interesting to see how much stickiness they have over time.
Bloglines may still be the most used RSS reader, but Google Reader may be catching up.
Popular Science's best of CES 2007 included the Nokia N800 internet tablet, the Ion iProjector (plug in your video ipod and project!), the OQO Model 02, and the Garmin Astro 220 (used by hunters to track the location within 10 miles of their hunting dogs, who have mini trasmitters on them. Would this work with kids?)
MTVu acquired RateMyProfessors.com (900,000 professors rated, 10 million annual student visitors). They now have the 2nd highest trafficked college interest network.
Microsoft will be embedding hyperlinks in online video by this summer.
How Flixster got 5 million registered users for its social network around movies.

This week was an especially good week with news and announcements for internet entrepreneurs. It's impossible to keep track of all of them, but with the help of my Google Reader and it's 100 RSS feeds and my network of hundreds of business friends who pass along news, and my Blackberry which I can use any time to search Google News, we do a pretty good job at the Academy of covering the major ones.

NY Times tries video obituaries

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:53:19 -0800

I love Art Buchwald and didn't know that he had passed away until I saw his pre-filmed video obituary. The New York Times has rolled out a service they call "The Last Word" where they allow famous people to say goodbye and tell how they would like to be remembered.

Amazon's Jeff Barr visiting Provo Labs

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:43:38 -0800

Jeff Barr is coming to Provo Labs in February!

This is going to be a great opportunity for Utah's entrepreneurs and IT crowd to learn more about what Amazon is doing with web services. Jeff is a Web Services evangelist at Amazon; he has an great inside view of the powerful tools and services that Amazon has built for internal use that they are willing to provide to other companies, some for free and some for a fee.

I'll post information about time and place later. We will have room for all our Provo Labs Academy members and may have space for others. So please let me know if you'd like to be on our waiting list.

Bill Marriott Blog

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 22:41:29 -0800

I learned from Jeff Barr's blog that Bill Marriott, CEO of a great 50 year old company, has started blogging. He plans to stay in touch with his customers through his blog. I liked his first post.

As I have said before, all CEOs should blog.

100 Tips for Improving Web Site Conversion Rate

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:13:06 -0800

David Lifferth, the President of World Vital Records, has studied the book "Call to Action" by the conversion rate marketing gurus Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg and Lisa Davis. I gave him my copy recently and asked him to find every tip in the book, and then teach my Academy members about it.

So Tuesday, January 23rd, at 12:30 pm at the Provo Labs Academy, David will be sharing with us more than 100 tips for improving web site conversion rates. He wants to blog all these tips as well. I told him to contact the Eisenbergs and see what they will allow him to share. Check out David Lifferth's blog.

Web Analytics Resources

paulballen — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 17:03:36 -0800

One of the pillars of a successful internet company is access to advanced web analytics and the ability to use them.

I encourage or require all of my portfolio companies to use Omniture SiteCatalyst, which is truly an amazing analytics platform. (I noticed Omniture bought a European analytics company this week; and recently Josh James was listed as one of the youngest CEOs of a publicly traded company in the U.S. by Business Week magazine--very cool. He was one of the very youngest.)

Jimmy Zimmerman has an excellent post about Web Analytics Resources.

WorldVitalRecords.com uses Omniture. We've found that we have visitors from 117 countries already. Our unique visitor count is growing rapidly. Our conversion rate looks decent. And we can make changes to the site and add new features and databases to see how these things affect our visitor counts and conversion rates.

As The Game of Work points out, a lot of the fun in business is being able to measure your results, set goals, and achieve higher and higher levels of success.

Thanks, Omniture, for making online business so much fun.

Creating a family tree of the whole world

paulballen — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:10:11 -0800

Two people have notified me about the new company Geni, founded by former PayPal Executive David Sacks, that plans to "create a family tree of the whole world."

TechCrunch has a post about Geni today and there are already 17 comments on it, including from some pretty smart readers.

Other efforts to do this have been underway for many years, including Ancestry.com's OneWorldTree, the LDS Church, and OneGreatFamily.com. To have a Silicon Valley based company jump into this "family tree" space will be really interesting to watch.

BTW, I really like the new Ancestry.com logo. It's much better than the old one.

Changing my blog topic

paulballen — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:36:20 -0800

In an effort to focus my time and attention on one company for the next few years, I have decided to change the title of my blog from Paul Allen: Internet Entrepreneur to Paul Allen: Internet Genealogy.

I have been blogging for more than 3 years. I think I have made about 750 posts during that time, many of them about internet marketing, entrepreneurship, angel investing, the success of Google and other popular web sites, and other such topics.

Someday I'll probably write a book for entrepreneurs. And someday I'll probably change the focus of my blog back to entrepreneurship.

But if all my readers will forgive me, the primary topic of my future blog posts will be online genealogy.

I'm feeling wonderfully about my decision to focus on one thing, especially because it's the thing I love the most.

When I attended CES this week (Monday to Wednesday), everything I saw, heard, or read, was processed through the filter of "how does this relate to family history," or "how does this fit into our vision of connecting families?"

I had this same experience from 1996-2002 when I started Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com with my friend Dan Taggart. During those bubble years I had extraordinary amounts of energy, I didn't want to sleep, I was driven like never before. I know my friend Dan Lynch had a similar experience when he joined MyFamily.com. There was something truly special about this company and this company's mission.

But things changed, and all of our founding team left the company over the years. I left in February 2002, and out of respect to all my friends and investors there, didn't do anything in family history for the next few years. But enough time has passed, and the time is right to refocus all my energy and resources on this wonderful mission: of connecting families.

I think the simplest way to describe the mission of WorldVitalRecords.com is "to bless all the families of the earth." (See Genesis 12:3 if you are interested in a biblical reference where Abraham was given a promise that he and his seed would provide such a blessing.)

I'm certainly not claiming any inheritance of this promise, although as an amateur genealogist and as one who loved math in my early years, I'm pretty confident that the vast majority of people on earth today are descendants of Abraham.

Modern civilization and technology has tended to break down families and disconnect the generations. We have become so industrialized, so mobile, so independent.

My hope is that WVR can enable families to use technology to connect, communicate, share, preserve, and grow closer together. I've never been involved in a more fulfilling cause than when we pursued this same mission at MyFamily.com, and now we're starting over. At the same time, The Generations Network (the new name of MyFamily.com) is doing wonderful things, and I'll be cheering them on as they continue to help families around the world.

As far as mission goes, I see WVR as being on the same team as TGN. They have 800+ employees that are trying to help families connect and share. And we have 8.

I think that will change as we grow. We may be 1% of their size right now, and have 1% of the amount of data they have on their site today. But I think the time will come when we will be 10% their size and have 10% as much data. And who knows where it will go from there?

Competition will be good for this industry, and will spur more innovation and wider adoption. More families of the earth will be blessed if more companies focus on providing content, tools, and services that help them.

I want to apologize to hundreds of entrepreneurs in advance who will not appreciate my change of blog topic and will continue to email me and ask me for advice or guidance as they start their ventures. I'm going to have to turn down most of these requests for help, until World Vital Records is executing on all cylinders and I can take a breath.

But I want to welcome all my new readers who love genealogy and family history.

I invite you to comment freely on this blog and email me with your ideas and advice. Let's create something really significant together. It feels great to be back with you. Thanks for the notes of encouragement and the ideas you've been sending me and the team already.

New Genealogy Affiliate Program Launches

paulballen — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:58:40 -0800

World Vital Records officially launched its affiliate program this week with the most generous commissions in the genealogy industry.

I believe we are the first genealogy company to offer recurring revenue for affiliates when a subscriber renews their subscription. I know that many genealogy affiliates have wanted this for a long time.

Here are the details from Brad Pace, who manages our new genealogy affiliate program.

Program details:

* Earn a 30% commission on every membership plan
* Send more than 25 members a month and your commissions go up to 40% for every membership plan
* Earn a 10% commission on ALL recurring membership plans for any member you refer!
* 60 day cookie duration
* Commission checks paid very next month after commission is received
* Easily link to any page or search result on our site
* Affiliate API to add functionality to your site (COMING SOON)
* Tons of great articles and content to add to your site (COMING SOON)
* World class affiliate tracking through MyAffiliateProgram

SPECIAL LAUNCH OFFER! Help us launch our program. All affiliate sales in January 2007 will receive 50% commission! So got to http://www.worldvitalrecords.com/affiliates/default.aspx and signup today.

Brad would love to personally speak with you. Please feel free to call him with any questions at 801-653-5977, starting on Tuesday. (He is taking today -- January 12th -- off and Monday is a holiday.) You can also email him at brad "AT" worldvitalrecords.com.

Do you need something to promote WVR on your site? He will build any custom images and will attempt to get you any content you may need. Just let him know what you need.

There are tens of thousands of genealogy sites that belong to affiliate programs. We hope that many of them will give us a try. We will do our very best to be a great partner for them.

In 1998 when I learned about affiliate marketing and decided to create the first affiliate program in the genealogy industry at Ancestry.com, our affiliate managers recruited affiliates simply by doing searches on popular search engines, finding genealogy sites that came up, and trying to contact the owners. It was a tedious process.

I remember how much the affiliates loved Amy Roberts, our first affiliate manager. She recruited 9 of the top 10 affiliates that we had at Ancestry.com. (I haven't worked there since February 2002). Many of them were able to quit their full-time jobs and live on the income that they generated from their web site--which, by the way, they all started as a labor of love and not as a way to make money.

Today, you can use a crawler to visit thousands of web sites very easily, and scan the pages looking for code that indicates someone is already an affiliate for another genealogy company. Knowing the domain, you can do an automatic who-is lookup or crawl the site looking for "Contact Us" type info. Then a personal email contact or phone call can let them know about the new opportunity.

It's so much easier to build a successful affiliate program today than it was 8 years ago. And the most recent statistics I've seen are that most successful ecommerce sites generate between 10-20% of their revenue from their affiliate marketing program.

While I was at 10x Marketing, we crawled the top 10,000 web sites in the U.S. and determined if they had ever joined an affiliate network, and if so, whether they belonged to the Be Free, LinkShare, or Commission Junction Network. (Be Free is now part of Commission Junction.)

When we launched affiliate programs for our clients, we could easily contact the largest potential super affiliates for them. We didn't want to waste our time with high-traffic sites who sold ads or sponsorships and who had not yet embraced affiliate marketing.

Richard Stauffer, who is our lead engineer at World Vital Records, was our engineer at 10x Marketing who wrote all the crawling tools for our affiliate recruiting effort. So we hope that within a few weeks, we'll have thousands of active genealogy affiliates. They will be valued partners as we try to build an international genealogy company that meets the needs of millions of family historians around the world.

In the MarketingSherpa 2006 ECommerce Benchmark Study Anne Holland reports that there has been a lot of tension over the past two years between merchants and their affiliates. I've seen this tension in the industry for years, because for some reason, companies resent paying affiliates for generating revenue (even though they pay only straight commission) because the companies think they could generate those same sales on their own and pay less to do it.

So many companies limit their affiliates ability to use search engine marketing and email marketing. According to MarketingSherpa, many affiliates have migrated out of ecommerce to more lucrative lead generation opportunities in different industries.

I hope our World Vital Records program is the kind of program that affiliates will want to join. As Brad indicated in his email, we will provide creative and content to help our affiliates succeed. We respect our affiliates as full partners in bringing more family history researchers to our content and we are happy to pay them for finding new customers for us.

Goal for 2007 -- focus on one thing!

paulballen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:42:56 -0800

After some wonderful time off with my family, I regretfully went back to work yesterday with one of those feelings of being completely overwhelmed -- there are so many hundreds of things on my to-do list and so many dozens of things to blog about. I know I'll never catch up so I won't even try.

One of my main New Year's Resolutions is to not get behind on email. Last year I ended the year with about 1,700 "unread" messages in my inbox. The problem is that I had read many (maybe even most) of them on my Blackberry, but they didn't show up in gmail as having been read.

It is frustrating to occasionally use my Desktop email only and to see so many unread messages that you know you can't even make a dent in them. And trying to remember which ones you've already read is also frustrating.

So a couple weeks ago I downloaded a bunch of Google software onto my blackberry, so instead of using the Blackberry email interface (which is actually far better than gmail) I am now using the Gmail interface which gives me one huge advantage--all the messages I read on my blackberry show up as read in my inbox. Plus, I can easily archive any messages or star the ones that I need to do something about.

And I archived all of last year's emails so I'm starting the year fresh. It feels good to be caught up!

Now, if I can just find a way to have fewer people emailing me ....

Does anyone have any ideas? How have you reduced the number of incoming emails and voice mail messages?

I know one CEO of a huge company that has an auto-responder that says, "due to the high volume of email that I receive, don't expect a reply..." or something to that effect. Another CEO says he doesn't even try to respond to all his messages.

I would welcome any suggestions.

Okay, so now for today's topic: Goals for 2007.

Last year on January 3rd I blogged about my 2006 goals. At the time I thought I was being overly ambitious and I admitted that. It turns out that I had way too many goals and not enough bandwidth to achieve them all.

While last year I worked on the Book of Mormon in Russian, this year one of my spiritual goals is to study the Koran and to try to understand the beliefs of Islam, with an estimated 1.4 billion adherents. (See Wikipedia article on Islam.) I have great respect for the Muslims whom I have personally met and I believe that understanding the religious beliefs of others can lead to more respect and peaceful co-existence. In fact, I have been wishing that the leaders of our nation would use the "bully pulpit" to encourage all Americans to learn foreign languages (whether it be Arabic, Mandarin, or Spanish) and to study cultures and countries in a determined effort to gain more respect and admiration for other peoples. I think the "ugly American" image could be overturned if we made a concerted national effort to do so.

2007 will be a very different year for me. I've made the big decision to focus on a single company this year.

During 2006 I ran the Provo Labs incubator and seed fund. We invested in nearly a dozen startup companies. Some of the companies are doing well and will continue to prosper. They will only need occasional help from me. Some of the companies are borderline; perhaps a few will not survive at all. But in a portfolio theory, as I have been reassured by other experienced investors, all of this is okay. It really only takes 1 big hit to provide a positive return to our investors.

During the last few months one company has emerged from the pack as the one that I want to spend almost all of my time on during the coming year. It happens to be in a field that I love; we are creating a vision that is big and bold. We have a desire to have a positive impact on millions of people in the coming year.

The company I'm going to focus on this year is World Vital Records, our next generation family history company.

I have told people for years that I would have stayed with MyFamily.com for the rest of my life if that company had stayed true to the vision that we created for it in the early years.

But I left nearly five years ago because I felt the company had no room for my ideas and was no longer favorable towards innovation. It has been painful for me to watch as Web 2.0 has swept the world with its emphasis on user generated content and social networks, and to continually wonder what MyFamily.com could have been. In fact, I blogged in 2005 about what MyFamily.com might have been.

With a reported $150 million in revenue this year, the company formerly called MyFamily.com and now known as The Generations Network, is a formidable and very dominating company in the genealogy industry.

I am favorably impressed with what the company is doing in many respects, including customer service. I often get emails from people who think I'm still involved with the company. The number of complaints has dropped dramatically. I think the company's policies are kinder and gentler than they used to be. I'm excited about all the data the company is putting online and it's greater use of PR this past year. I'm looking forward to the upcoming "relaunch" of MyFamily.com. I know the company was advertising on HotJobs for Web 2.0 developers and savvy internet marketers up in Seattle where the MyFamily business unit is located. I can't tell you how exciting this is for me, to see a new commitment to private web sites for families.

(Note: I am not involved in the company, except as a minor shareholder.)

But our new company, currently called World Vital Records, and soon to be renamed when we launch our flagship genealogy web site, definitely has a place in the world.

We will soon have 5,000 paying subscribers. (We launched our paid service in October.) Our traffic is growing, our Alexa ranking is increasing and our momentum is building. We exceeded our Q4 forecast by 33%.

We have subscribers from all 50 states and 8 countries, and we have already had visitors to our web site from 117 different countries. And this is just the beginning.

Our team is incredible. We have the original search engine developer at Ancestry.com, Richard Stauffer, and the lead data engineeer, John Ivie, who prepped the first 3 billion records that Ancestry.com put on its web site. Our President, David Lifferth, was also a data engineer at MyFamily.com, but he is learning web analytics, marketing, and is an excellent manager. He was part of the team that helped Infobases (my first company) launch its first genealogy CD ROM product back in 1995. So he has a lot of experience in this field. We also have Brad Pace, who was the lead developer of the MyFamily.com web site when it launched back in 1998. In fact, our team probably knows more about the early days of Ancestry.com/MyFamily.com than all the employees at The Generations Network combined, since almost none of the original folks are left there.

We also have a great content acquisition team and advisory board members are helping us license and create databases from all over the world. We'll have some great announcements in the coming months.

We know we can build tools and provide content that will appeal to millions of people who are interested in their family history. And we can co-exist with The Generations Network and dozens of other companies with important family history web sites. In fact, we will send our members to all other web sites, including Ancestry.com, Genealogy.com, and Rootsweb.com, if that is where the answers exist that they are looking for. Our mission is to help our customers find the answers they are seeking.

This year, since I want to focus on one thing (and all my advisors and mentors have been telling me this for months!) I want to publicly blog about my 2007 goals for World Vital Records.

1. We want to end this year with at least 30,000 paying members.

2. We hope to have 3 million registered users on our soon-to-be-launched flagship web site. It will be much more mainstream than Worldvitalrecords.com.

3. We intend to have search engines built and data available in dozens of countries and several languages. We are working on our Poland genealogy search engine, for example.

It is exciting to focus again on an industry that I love. The people in the genealogy industry are among the best people I have ever met. They are so dedicated and passionate to finding and preserving family stories. They are smart and kind and willing to share.

I truly hope that our team can provide value for millions of family historians. As we talk with family historians every day and learn more about their unmet needs, you will see a continual stream of new content and features on our web sites.

We are small, but we have big dreams for this company.

I've been telling people that I'm going to focus on one thing this year, and people who know me are highly skeptical. I've been doing so many different things in the past 3 years they don't think I really can focus.

And they are mostly right. I won't give 100% to anything, because I am involved in many things. But I think I can give 80% of my time and effort to one thing.

I will continue to lecture weekly at the Provo Labs Academy and bring guests in regularly to provide excellent training to the entrepreneurs who are members there. I will continue to do this because it helps me stay sharp on what's going on in internet marketing and it also gives me a great opportunity to bring employees from my portfolio companies together for training. I've been requiring their attendance at many events. And I love the energy and insights that all the PLA members bring to the meetings.

Yesterday Brock Blake from FundingUniverse.com gave a great lecture about what entrepreneurs need to know about angel investors.

Today I'm lecturing on Search Engine Optimization and the Google Algorithm. With many employees from my own companies attending, I can meet their training needs all at once. And when all our portfolio companies are generating a great deal of traffic from natural search engine traffic and are using web analytics, pay-per-click and email marketing effectively, then this ongoing commitment to internet marketing training will really pay off.

Our Provo Labs Academy members pay $200 to be able to attend up to 4 lectures and networking events per week and to get some access to our office space, library and conference rooms in Provo. Call Pat Sheranian at 801-373-6565 if you are interested in learning more.

I wish all of you a Happy New Year!

I hope that you don't hold it against me if you are one of the hundreds of people whose emails and voice mails I didn't return last year. I assure you, those messages are safely in my archive. :)

As you know, I plan to do better this year.

A couple thoughts on college football

paulballen — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 00:35:33 -0800

I can't believe I haven't posted since Dec. 21st, when I left Provo for the Las Vegas Bowl. BYU dominated Oregon and ended the season 11-2 with a 10-game winning streak. I've blogged that I think this BYU team is the best ever, but Gordon Monson makes some pretty good arguments in favor of Steve Young's 1983 BYU squad.

Last night I watched the phenomenal 4th quarter and OT of the Boise State - Oklahoma bowl game with my family. This was the most enjoyable non-BYU bowl game I've ever seen. What incredible play calling and execution by Boise State to pull out a remarkable win.

Three calls by Boise State in the last few minutes were truly remarkable. On 4th and 18 they had an amazing pass and pitch back which led to a touchdown. In overtime, after Oklahoma scored on the first play (a 25-yard run), Boise State's running back threw a touchdown pass to the tight end. And then, to top it all off, they went for a 2-point conversion in overtime and ran the old Statute of Liberty play, which I don't believe I'ver ever seen before. Check out this Google video of the overtime period.

I believe it is inevitable -- manifest destiny if you will -- that there will eventually be some kind of national playoff and legitimate national championship game in Division I college football. We can't continue to pretend forever that the BCS bowl series is legitimate or fair. I don't think it will last too many more years.