My web host (thee of the recent 5 hr outtage) offers a $50 Overture (Yahoo’s Search Marketing system a la Google Adwords) credit to every hosting account. After ignoring it for a year and some change, I took them up on the offer and clicked their promotion link to see if the folks at Sunnyvale could serve me up some more hits.

Here’s a step by step recap:

I saw the $50 credit noted on the Yahoo page that opened up from the link so I’m good to go. First I chose to set it up on my own, Self Serve. The other option is Assisted Setup, which partially reads as follows: “Our specialists will build a campaign that’s customized to your budget and goals. They will select relevant keywords, write effective ads and determine bid amounts within your budget. You’ll receive a proposed campaign in 2 to 5 business days, and a specialist will contact you to discuss it.” This costs $149. Or as they prefer to show it: $199 $149 (The $50 markdown does not take the credit into account. The credit would be applied to the setup fee, making the final price $99)

As always be careful of fineprint:
“There is a minimum bid requirement of $0.10 per click through.” Hmm, not as Google Adwords friendly but that’s still a ceiling of 500 free clicks.

On to Step 1. Target Customers by Geographic Location
I chose Specific Regions and Target by DMA(r) or City and Surrounding Area. I had no idea what DMA was so after several Google searches which mostly turned up Direct Memory Access I found out that it was Nielson’s defintion of a television market: a Designated Market Area. I then saw that DMA was clearly defined at the bottom of the SAME signup page I was on. Moral of the story: Read the whole page so you don’t feel like a fool minutes later.

I then chose Massachusetts for State/Province/Territory and “Boston (Massachusetts,New Hampshire,Vermont)” for City. The wording can be misleading because you are not selecting a city but a much wider area.

I went back and forth betwen using this or the Zip Code option. I decided to use the former option since the website does get hits from a lot of areas in MA but out of Boston. If I eventually see a lot of “1:00″ Yahoo clicks from outside I will switch to Zip Code option for a smaller coverage area. “1:00″ clicks are when someone visits your site and leaves right away. It’s like a drive-by, the visitor gets out of there as fast as they can.

Step 2. Choose Keywords Related to Your Business
I didn’t find much success in the Find Keyword feature so I entered the most searched for keywords we have in Google Adwords.

Step 3. Tell Us How Much You’d Like To Spend
I’d like to spend zero but as that’s not possible, I chose the the minimum 10 cents per click and $1 a day spending limit. Again, fine print: “**Please note that you may be charged up to 10% above your account daily spending limit. However, charges that exceed your account daily spending limit by more than 10% may be eligible for a refund.”

Step 4. Create Your Ad
Pretty similar to Google except for a few differences.
A. Your Title can be 40 characters instead of 25 (stingy Google!)
B. You have 70 characters for Description. Yes that’s the same as Google except the G-men force you to break your description into two lines of 35.
C. They don’t allow you to have a seperate Display URL and Destination URL.

Step 5. Review and Activate Your Ad
First was setting up your username, password, email, etc. Then clicking the Activate Now button.

After thoroughly reading and re-reading their Terms of Service (do you really believe that?) I put in my business’ contact information and proceeded onto the billing section where I ran into a slight problem. The $50 credit did not show up!

I tried calling their number to no avail. I didn’t want to sign up and then have to call them later to work out the $50 credit so I decided to put the kibosh on it and try later. To be continued…

Technorati Tags: yahoo search, yahoo, search marketing, overture, google, google adwords, lunarpages, web hosting, pay per click, ppc

Social networking for the traveler [via BankersBall]

The importance of succession planning [BlackEnterprise]

Technorati Tags: social networking

I just got through reading Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban’s latest blog post on success and motivation and comments and it hits home harder than a juiced ball off a corked bat in the hands of Bary Bonds. I’ll probably end up reading that post a dozen more times.

Here are his #2 and 3 business rules:

Win the Battles you are in before you take on new battles; You can Drown in Opportunity

And my followup thoughts:

There isn’t a week that goes by a business idea pops into my head that I think will make a profit. If I got paid for ideas, I’d be a millionaire many times over. And as Cuban pointed out, these ideas can be exciting. Exciting for one reason: they are ideas. Ideas fundamentally are exciting. They are filled with hope, dreams, the unknown, unlimited potential.

Even though Boston Offline is far from a mature company, the thrill from registering the domain, designing the intial layout, getting business cards are all gone. This is where the work begins and work, as we know, can get boring. So the ideas try to take over the mind again. And those ideas distract from the battles already going. One of these ideas is to create an entertainment and recreation division. Organizing events like bowling nights or musical showcases on a regular basis. However the time spent on that would distract me from making our signature (and only) event, the E & E Club mixer, grow from an average of 40 ppl this year to 60 ppl next year and attract a half dozen sponsors which is no small feat.

Another idea is to add a deeper social networking component to this website. First of all that would require an increible amount of hours and money. Even with Content Management Systems to handle design, I’d have to provide or outsource tech support. Second, why the heck would anyone bother using it with MySpace, BlackPlanet, Migente et al. Could the idea work? Yes. It is a battle worth trying to win now? No.
All these ideas would pull the business focus away from its core competancy, an ethnic forum that provides advertising and promotions for local events and businesses. What I believe are the two core parts of this site, the event calendar and classifieds section are barely utilized yet. And these are free features! So if those features are still teething, why on earth should I be pumping out more babies. The most responsible action is to feed and nurture what is already out the womb.

(No more birth analogies, I promise. This is what happens when you post after 2am)

Customer service does not seem to be Comcast’s strong point.

A week for IPOs.

What’s after the Ipod?

Technorati Tags: Comcast, IPO, Ipod, Apple

Goof off at work, get a bonus

Get more customers to respond

Technorati Tags: online advertising, employee bonus, online marketing, internet games

Put the URL on all marketing collateral

• Business cards
• Letterhead
• Envelopes
• Invoices
• Promotion Items (I like using calendars as they are actually useful unlike many promo items which get tossed in the trash and they will be looked at every week if not every day.)
• Flyers

I make sure anything “public” has the URL on it.

Tell everyone you know and remind them regularly 

Sending the link to my friends and colleagues and asking them to forward it is not enough.  Nothing beats face to face interaction where I can explain to people what the website is about and why they should visit it.  And this why I am so big on attending networking events, especially if the other attendees fit this website’s demographic.  I get the opportunity to talk about the site to a good number of people in a short amount of time for little to no money.

One of my worst fears is for this site to become a “faceless” site where it’s nice to look at but there’s no personal connection.  It’s JUS (just another site).  That’s why I try to attend one or two networking events a month, not including the E & E Club mixers.  My belief is that the more people get to know me, the better the chances they will become repeat visitors and will help in the all-important word of mouth advertising.  And that is priceless.

Since there are so many articles on driving traffic to your website floating around, I’ve linked up a few rather than recreating the wheel. The focus is using online tools. Next time, I’ll talk about offline tools I use.
Help - I Need Traffic To My Website

Three simple actions that doubled my website traffic in 30 days

How Do I Get Traffic To My Website?

How Do I Get More Traffic to My Site?

Technorati Tags: Web site traffic, seo

“Virtual” millionaires.   Next: virtual bankruptcies?

Boosting your website’s search rank.

Your richest neighbors in MA.

I’m all for Welch, Connors & Co. (hopefully soon) buy out of the Globe.  It would be nice to see it under local ownership again.

I have to agreee with the observation posted on some messageboards that Michael Richard’s “apology” courtesy of Seinfeld’s Letterman appearance is at least partially financially motivated.  Given the amount of money Seinfeld makes off of syndication in just one year alone, it should be no suprise that the damage control is in full effect.