Now, that lame video has 47 million views and you better believe there was an advertisement before it played.  This leads me to the main point.  Now that everyone can create a media outlet and potentially attract a huge audience, brands and key titles can be exploited like never before.  Let me demonstrate with another example.  Before I arrived at the video embedded below, I typed in the phrase, “Disney Princess,” into a Youtube search.  Low and behold, one of the first videos that poped-up was the following:

Since videos and content are highly sorted by Youtube through titles and meta tags.  Anyone with a smartphone can record a video and put “Disney” in the title.  This leads to an interesting change in marketing and brand impairment for big brands.  Now, anyone on the planet can harness the power of big brands without any repercussions. Many of these brands were created with billions of dollars and represent tremendous goodwill and effort. In the Disney Princess video shown above, the youtube founder has garnered over 2 billion views using the technique over and over again with various videos.  Considering Youtube might pay $3 – $4 dollars (my personal experience with payment rates) per thousand downloads, that means Rclbeauty101 has made $8 million dollars in advertising from her efforts.

As one thinks through this interesting dynamic at play, where countless amounts of people are constantly leveraging the intangible assets created by large cap business, one has to wonder if a major showdown between the Disney’s and Google’s of the world are underway.

Social Media and Content Distribution

11 April 2017, 7:00 am EST

One of the hard lessons I learned early in my blogging career was the importance of social media.  At first glance, social media seems like a total waste of time, and for many people it is.  In fact, I would argue a majority of people struggle to break the time trap of social media.  This negative stigmatism is the reason why I was so hesitant to incorporate social media into my use as a blogger because my immediate impression was it would waste valuable time surfing content instead of creating content.  But boy was I wrong.

The biggest problem I faced was understanding what social media was and how it could be leveraged for business.  In the end, I discovered that social media accounts are a place to distribute content, not consume content.  This dramatic shift in thinking created a new world of opportunity for me and my business.

To demonstrate my point, let’s take my most recent podcast where I interviewed a gentleman named Richard Duncan.  Once we created the content of this page and audio interview, one might think that you post it on your website and that’s it.  But that would be a gross negligence in thinking because people just don’t arrive at web pages without a little assistance.  To garner a larger volume of traffic, social media can be used to distribute the new episode to hundreds of thousands of people across my various social media accounts.  By posting the episode on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Linkedin, and our email list, we are able to distribute the new content to over 300,000 people in a passive way.

Although this took a serious amount of time to think of social media platforms in a different light, the value was tremendous to our understanding of growing and keeping an audience that’s engaged and interest in future content updates.

Therefore, my point is this: Stop surfing and start creating.  The more a person views social media sites as a location for distributing content instead of consuming content, the faster they will understand the true power of content distribution and audience followership.

Affiliate Marketing – An Outsourced Model to Marketing

11 April 2017, 7:30 am EST

Marketing is changing in a major way.  Instead of the large marketing staff and continues churn for new ideas, online companies are outsourcing their marketing to everyone in the world.  How?  With an innovative tool called affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing has been around for ages, but its application is drastically changing and evolving with the advent of click tracking and sales conversions.  In the old days, affiliate marketing was conducting when a third party would bring business to a potential company by word of mouth.  They might use a coupon code to validate the conversion, but in general, it was slow and somewhat difficult to track relative to tools designed for today’s online marketing place.

Today, company’s like Amazon have outsourced their entire marketing department by allowing anyone to sign-up as an Amazon affiliate.  Once a person signs up for an account, they have the ability to promote any product on the Amazon website by receiving a tracking hyperlink.  If anyone clicks on the hyperlink, Amazon knows the affiliate was the person who brought the customer to the store.  This means the affiliate receives a commission of any sale conducted on Amazon within a 24 hour period after the link was clicked.  This means a person could arrive on Amazon through a link promoting at $10 book, and if the customer actual purchases a $1,000 computer, the affiliate will earn a commission on the computer as well.

This might sound crazy for many people not familiar with the practice, but the incentivized structure for promoting products is an insanely powerful tool for getting anyone with a web presence to create advertisements for the host.  Although Amazon has their own affiliate program, it doesn’t stop there.  Company’s like Commission Junction allow anyone to create an affiliate program for their own business.  Therefore, if you have a business and you want to leverage the same “outsourced marketing” as company’s like Amazon, you can now do it through Commission Junctions online platform.  So, if you have an online course you want to sell, but don’t know how to market, start an affiliate program and outsource the marketing to the world.  What works for the big companies can also work for the small business as long as business owners understand the technology and where to find it.  Below is a video that teaches people how to become an affiliate on Amazon’s platform.

Why Online Forums Are So Important

11 April 2017, 8:00 am EST

One of the biggest challenges in the media business is creating new and fresh content.  Considering the primary source of revenue for media businesses is the advertising that’s wrapped around the content that’s created, one quickly gains an appreciation for the importance of producing a fresh stream of new content.

When thinking through the best model for creating new content, there might be no greater method than running an online forum.  Think about it! Your site is creating new, fresh, and engaging content through the work of its user base.  This is happening 24 hours, every day of the year.

Now, like all easy things, difficult strings are attached.   When it comes to forums, the hard part is getting traction and growing the number of users.  In a day and age where individuals don’t want to sign-up for anything – because they already have too many accounts on other platforms – the friction of getting started is extremely high.  Although that might be true, below are a few tips I’ve personally learned about growing my online forum.

1. As the forum founder, you need to make a lot of initial posts.  People on the forum often want to hear from the source of the site.  This gives other contributors a sense of closeness and interest for being on the forum in the first place
2. You need other sources pointing to the forum.  For me personally, I had a Youtube channel that assisted in my forums growth tremendously.  Without this outside source of traffic flow, I”m not sure my forum would have ever got off the ground.  I can’t emphasize this point highly enough
3. You need to garner a community of contributors that help you manage the platform.  I was lucky to attract some amazing people that helped me grow the community and thoughts being presented on the platform.

In short, a forum is an invaluable tool because it not only creates new content for your media outlet, but it also helps inform the founder of issues and concerns with the brand and business in general.  Although it’s benefits are huge, the start-up and growth are extraordinarily difficult.

Why Online Advertising Is So Hard

25 April 2017, 7:00 am EST

For many people not familiar with online advertising, they might think it’s fairly easy to implement due to heightened awareness and trackability of clicks and interest.  For example, if you have a product you’re looking to sell – call it a bottle of wine – and you’re looking to drive traffic to your online site, one could simply run ads on Google Adsense or Facebook to drive traffic to the page.  Although this logic is accurate in the methodology, the implementation without going broke is the challenging part.

Due to the way online advertising works, online businesses are competing for clicks with other companies to capture the best price for the most clicks.  Therefore, when I want to run an ad for my online wine company, I’m also competing against everyone else in the world that’s trying to get on the first page of Google for the click.  Google’s pricing model is simple: Let the market dictate what the ads are worth through an open bidding process.  So, let me provide an example. Let’s say I can sell a bottle of Wine online for $30.  If my cost to produce and ship is $15, that means there is a $15 margin to be captured.  As a result, if I can run advertisements under $15 that consistent convert a sale, I can then justify the advertising expense.  This is where things get tricky.  Since the margin to be captured is fairly significant ($15 per sale), the value of getting a click goes up.  Let’s say my typical conversion rate is 1 out of 150 clicks.  As a result, I can’t pay more than $0.10 per click or else the marketing campaign is running in the red.

Considering many Google AdSense advertisements easily run $2.00 or even $3.00 per click, it becomes strikingly obvious how difficult online advertising becomes.  Part of the reason prices are bid so high is due to the vast amount of online competition around a specific product line.  When looking at a product like Wine, there are endless amounts of competitors and businesses trying to capture market share.  Therefore, the advertising space is going to representing that challenge in the marketing prices.  If for example, your business owns an obscure product or service, paid online advertising might be much easier and lucrative.

Below is a video that teaches people how to set-up a Google Adsense account so you can experiment with some of the pricing and give this stuff a try on your own.  As a note of interest and risk mitigation, I strongly recommend that you set a very tight budget if you decide to run an advertising campaign because there’s a strong likelihood you’ll lose money for your business.

In short, a forum is an invaluable tool because it not only creates new content for your media outlet, but it also helps inform the founder of issues and concerns with the brand and business in general.  Although it’s benefits are huge, the start-up and growth are extraordinarily difficult.

AI, Voice Activation, & Marketing

2 May 2017, 7:55 am EST

One of the most exciting new fields in technology is voice activation and artificial intelligence.  Recently, Google, Apple, and Amazon have created systems to capture voice interactive services.  The protocols are summoned by the user starting a conversation with “Siri, Alexa, and Google” when near a hardware device equipped with the software.

Where these systems are different than previous software systems that detect speech (Like Dragon Naturally Speaking), is that the big three are outsourcing the applications of the service.  For example, the Amazon’s Alexa platform has an open source system for web developers to create new applications on the backbone of the software architecture. For many that don’t understand what that means, think about how the iPhone changed the world with various applications that could be built by third parties.  This same approach is now being applied to voice activation.  Therefore, if you are a smart web developer, and you want to design a capability in the Alexa baseline that allows a person to say, “Alexa, turn off all the lights in the house,” the application will complete the task.  More importantly, the application could then be activated by anyone using Alexa by going to the various applications that are publically available and ensure it is turned on for your device.

This is what is so exciting about the future AI voice activation – it’s being outsourced to the world.  Where this is particularly interesting is in the marketing domain.  For voice-centric business applications, like podcasting or radio, listeners have a new way to interact with advertisers.  For example, imagine you are listening to a podcast and you start to hear an advertisement that interests you.  During the ad, you will eventually have the capability to interact with it.  If the ad starts playing, the listener could say something like, “Siri, send me more information about this ad on my e-mail.”

In fact, advertisements could also be geotagged so that if you are walking in time square, a person could see a billboard and talk into their apple watch or iPhone and say, “Siri, I’m looking at an ad by Bose, could you send me more information on that.”  The voice activated software could reference a geotagged database of advertising locations and provide more information on the topic.  For the person that thinks podcasts are only a small portion of the market, I would suggest this might be true today, but the trend is drastically changing.  In fact, I would expect the traditional forms of radio to disappear in the future due to consumer interests to capture media on demand.  For example, check out this twitter poll I conducted on the emergence of podcasts:

As you can see, 545 people responded to this poll which suggests podcasting is becoming the new radio.  More importantly, here are a few thoughtful comments from some of the people that responded to the poll.

Regardless of the various examples and opinions that podcasts are the next big thing, the exciting news is technology for voice activated audio content is changing at a rapid pace.  The outsourcing of the software development to third parties is a promising approach to a very dynamic field.  We are living in exciting times!

Marketing Isn’t So Obvious These Days

2 May 2017, 13:33 EST

As a kid, I used to hate commercials.  It almost always interrupted my favorite TV show.  When this happened, I would simply leave the room, get some snacks, and wait for the white noise on the TV to stop.  In the past, advertising was so obvious.  As a result, the cognitive process was simple: shut down the mind and do something else.

Today, advertising is much sneakier and difficult to detect.  Take for instance Melissa Samways’ Youtube channel for makeup artistry.  On the channel, young girls (like my daughter), watch her channel to get unique ideas and methods for creating new looks.  Here’s a glimpse of what the video looks like:

Although the video is extremely useful for anyone that lacks professional skill, there’s a hidden agenda that’s hard to detect.  On every episode, Melissa has various products she’s using to create the look she’s designing in the video.  Although the viewer could use any product to create a similar look, most don’t.  Instead, people simply click on the link provided at the bottom of the video (on youtube) to quickly access the product.  People do this because they trust Melissa, and they are often looking for the exact same look.

This is where things are different than in the past.  In today’s marketing age, a person needs to give something before they can get something in return.  With online video sharing, the giving is in the form of a free instructional video that’s been outsourced to a passionate and inspiring personality that’s specialized in a single craft.  For big name makeup companies, this is a huge opportunity that can’t be missed.

Although it’s often understood that people like Melissa are receiving a revenue cut through the affiliate link, many people might not realize that many youtube personalities have exclusive deals with certain companies to only promote their products.  This is the days of handselling commercials are becoming less profitable when compared to the more sneaky practice of hiring people like Melissa.

We are definitely living in exciting times!

Writing a Best Selling Book

2 May 2017, 14:33 EST

I read a bestselling book by author, Robert Kiyosaki, when I was young.  In the book, Kiyosaki talks about a discussion he had with an inspired fan of his work.  The fan suggested that she was also writing a book and was curious what advice Kiyosaki had about how to become a best-selling author.  At the end of the exchange, Kiyosaki said the individual was somewhat offended by his recommendations to take some marketing classes to learn how to sell better.  The end of the passage in his book left a lasting impression on my understanding of business.  He said, If you want to be a best-selling author, you need to learn how to sell.  It’s not titled, best-written author!

In today’s market, this couldn’t be more true.  With the advent of print on demand publishing and e-books, anyone in the world can publish their book, or pamphlet (for that matter), in a quick and easy fashion.  For anyone that’s tried to publish their own book, they will quickly learn that it’s not the publishing that’s the difficult part, it’s the selling.  So what do I mean by that?  What I mean is anyone can write and publish their book, but what most people lack is an audience that’s willing to buy their work.  The challenge of finding an audience and then directing that traffic to the store location is extremely difficult work.

The reason directing traffic is so hard is because it’s based on goodwill.  Natural traffic comes to a site because the individuals trust the site’s content.  This trust can only be built over time and through good quality content that’s often given away for free.  Creating and building quality content is not done overnight. Although this blog post is about writing a best-selling book, it’s also about building an audience and directing the focus of that audience to the books sales page.  Without the latter, the former will never come.

This is one of the reasons podcasts, youtube channels, and personal blogs are the methods for writers to catapult their careers.  Without having a major presence in one of those domains, the chances of writing that best-selling book are very slim.