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[You're getting this note because you subscribed to Seth Godin's blog.]
Put random folks in at the top and loyal customers come out at the bottom...
A billboard leads people to a website, which gets some people to subscribe via email which drives some folks to respond to a promotion which leads a few to come back for the stuff that isn't onsale, which leads to someone who can't live without you.
That's the obvious path of outbound marketing. Most people you pour into the funnel hop out long before they become loyal customers.
The thing is, some funnels are more efficient than others. Expose your idea to ten of the right people and it catches on with three of them. Other ideas or offers need to be exposed to far more people (and go through more steps) before they're likely to convert someone.
The mistake we often make: thinking that the problem is that there's not enough people starting the process, not enough people being exposed to your offer. In fact, it's almost always a problem with how efficient the funnel is and how likely it is that loyal customers tell their friends. If you take care of those two elements, you have a lot more to invest in promotion, and delightfully, the promotion is more effective as well.
Google advertising puts the funnel shape under stress. If you can make your funnel more efficient, then you can afford to spend more money on each person you put into the top of the funnel via a paid ad. If your competitor can convert twice as many people as you can, she can spend twice as much per person, no? And thus the smart competitor will buy up as much of the market as possible. The only response: shape a more efficient funnel.
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Currency Intervention Madness; Japan Intervenes to Weaken the Yen; Selected Quotes Posted: 14 Sep 2010 09:45 PM PDT After months of attempting to talk the Yen down, Japan Intervenes First Time Since '04 to Rein in Yen. Japan intervened in the foreign-exchange market for the first time since 2004 after a surge in the yen to the strongest against the dollar in 15 years threatened to stunt the nation's economic recovery.Is Currency Manipulation OK or Not? Both China and Japan are intervening in the Forex markets for the same reason, to strengthen exports and stimulate the economy. Pardon me for asking the obvious question but it needs to be asked: Why does Geithner give the green light for Japan to intervene in the currency markets but China is threatened with a currency manipulator label for doing the same thing? Boosting the Dollar Please consider a few select quotes from the New York Times article Japan Moves to Boost the Dollar JOHN VAIL, CHIEF GLOBAL STRATEGIST, NIKKO ASSET MANAGEMENTBang for the Yen If Japan's exports have been strong, why does Japan need to weaken the Yen to boost exports? If the Problem for Japan is the Korean won, what the heck is Japan doing buying dollars? It certainly would get a lot more bang for the Yen buying Won. TAKAO HATTORI, SENIOR INVESTMENT STRATEGIST, MITSUBISHI UFJ MORGAN STANLEY SECURITIESSheer Madness Takao Hattori says that the Forex market is too big for intervention to work but "it was good for the government to show its strong stance". Excuse me for asking but how can it be good policy to take actions that cannot work? Prior Currency Intervention Madness Please consider Currency Intervention And Other Conspiracies. .... Note those numbers. Japan spent hundreds of billions in 2003 starting in August, attempting to prop up the dollar.It has been proven time and time again that currency intervention does not work. Yet, somehow it is "good for the government to show its strong stance". Line of Defense click on chart for sharper image Note that the "Line of Defense" is right near the 1995 high. Intraday Intervention in Action click on chart for sharper image Some might think the above chart shows that intervention works. It doesn't except possibly in the very short term. In 2008 the Fed intervened multiple time to support Fannie Mae. In one such move, the share price doubled from $7 to $15 in less than a week on a short squeeze. A couple months later Fannie Mae collapsed to a buck. Central banks cannot change the prevailing trend. Assuming Japan was going to have a "line of defense", one near the 1995 is a spot where there would be technical resistance anyway. If the Yen does drop in a sustained way, it will not be because of the intervention, but rather because the Yen had outrun fundamentals and was simply ready to drop. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Posted: 14 Sep 2010 05:30 PM PDT In today's Breakfast with Dave, Rosenberg notes "Most Canadians Still Living Like It's A Recession" According to Statistics Canada, Canada's recession was short-lived, beginning in Q3 2008 and ending a year later in Q3 2009. But why doesn't it feel like that for nearly 60% of Canadians?How Big is that Bubble? 10-20% overvalued is overly optimistic. Vancouver in particular could easily see a 40% haircut if not much more. Like Australia, it is more difficult in Canada to "walk away". See Australian Lenders Learn Nothing from US Housing Bust: Mortgage House offer 105% Mortgages, Westpack offers 97% Mortgages for a discussion. Question of Soundness The so-called "soundness" of Canadian banks stems from the fact that Canada's central bank is on the hook guaranteeing the vast majority of residential mortgages. That Canadian banks do not have a skin in the game allows housing bubbles to build over a longer time period and get bigger than they otherwise would. Is that a good thing? For who? The banks or the taxpayers? The answers should be obvious: The ultimate setup is similar to US taxpayers bankrolling Fannie and Freddie for unlimited losses. Alternatively the Canadian Central Bank could print money and paper over the losses. Neither setup is any good. No Escape from Illiquid Greater Fool's Games The most important question is "when will it matter?" There are signs now of hugely growing inventories and that is how a housing bubble always bursts. Nonetheless, it will not matter until it does. When it does matter, it will be sudden and irreversible (as is typical of every illiquid Greater Fool's Game or Ponzi scheme). There will be no escape for underwater sellers, just as happened in the US, with the further restriction that Canadian borrowers simply cannot walk away. The economic implications are enormous with so many living paycheque-to-paycheque already. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Retail Sales Rise .4% from July - How Far to Pre-recession Levels? Where to from Here? Posted: 14 Sep 2010 11:59 AM PDT Inquiring minds are investigating the Advance Monthly Retail Sales Report for August 2010, noting the discrepancy between what is reported and reality. The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for August, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $363.7 billion, an increase of 0.4 percent from the previous month, and 3.6 percent above August 2009.As typical, Calculated Risk has some nice charts of the data. Calculated Risk writes "This graph shows retail sales since 1992. This is monthly retail sales, seasonally adjusted (total and ex-gasoline). Retail sales are up 8.4% from the bottom, but still off 4.3% from the pre-recession peak." Although that is what the data says, I don't buy it. If retail sales were back to within 4.3% of the pre-recession peak, sales tax collections would be back towards the pre-recession peak, if not exceeding the pre-recession peak. Why might they exceed the peak? Because of numerous state sales tax hikes. The Slow Rebound - Very Slow September 02, 2010: State Tax Revenues Slowly Rebound, But ... The Nelson Rockefeller Institute reports State Tax Revenues Are Slowly Rebounding. However, as always, the devil is in the details. Let's take a look. Preliminary tax collection data for the April-June quarter of 2010 show improvement in overall state tax collections as well as for personal income tax and sales tax revenue. However, revenue collections remain significantly below peak levels and are still weak in a number of states.Sales Tax Collections Down 5.9% June 2010 vs. June 2008 In spite of numerous sales tax hikes, tax collections are still 5.9% lower than two years ago. Moreover, June of 2008 was not the pre-recession peak. November of 2007 was the pre-recession peak. Bear in mind the Rockefeller reports are from June and Calculated Risk's charts are for August, but that would barely dent the comparison, if at all. The proper conclusion is that retail sales are down 10% or more from the pre-recession peak, especially if one factors in tax hikes. Many states look at the Census report trying to figure out why their sales are lagging the national averages. The problem is the Census Bureau national averages are a blatant distortion of reality. The key to the states' conundrum is Census Bureau sampling methodology does not take into consideration stores that have gone out of business. Sales tax collections obviously do. Closed stores make no sales and collect no taxes. Major Revision Coming? I wonder how long it will take the Census Bureau to do a major revision, but as it sits, the retail sales report data is totally screwed up and paints a much brighter image of the "recovery" than has actually occurred. In a genuine recovery, new stores would be opening and the data would be off in the other direction, with sales tax collections expanding faster than reported by the Census Bureau. Where to From Here? The number of store closings has probably peaked and that will make census reporting a bit more accurate going forward. Currently all sign point to a renewed consumer slowdown. Thus, I suspect state tax collections will soon start to drop. With census bureau year-over-year comparisons starting to get more realistic, I expect to see that drop show up in the Census reports as well, even though the Census charts will remain totally screwed up from all the store closings in 2008-2009. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Political Debate: What Should Congress do to Stimulate the Economy? Posted: 14 Sep 2010 10:30 AM PDT On the Department of Education Opening Statements Closing Statements In 2010 voters have a choice: David Price - Congressman David Price is a Political Science Professor, 22-year incumbent politician who supports government bailouts, social welfare programs, protecting the environment and Obama's Health Care reform. He votes with Nancy Pelosi more than any other congressman. or B.J. Lawson - William B.J. Lawson is a Constitutional Conservative, father, Medical Doctor, engineer and small businessman who supports reducing taxes, cutting spending and repealing unconstitutional legislation. 4th district voters will choose principle over Washington rhetoric this November. Money is always welcome, but so is your time and energy! Please click here to Volunteer Time or Services to B.J. Lawson. Please do what you can to support B.J. Lawson. He is of a rare Ron Paul mode, and we cannot afford to let any opportunities to elect such candidates slip through the cracks. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
Shuffling the Commercial Real Estate Deck Posted: 14 Sep 2010 01:00 AM PDT According to the Star Tribune the Minneapolis suburban office market suffers from 20 percent vacancy rates. Recent large deals have done nothing to dent that glut of inventory. Please consider Deals don't make dent in the southwest metro's empty offices Several high-profile office leases have been signed in the Twin Cities' key southwest submarket this year, grabbing headlines and generally giving the impression that things might not be as bad as they seemed in terms of vacancies.Deflationary Pressures Companies are moving at the drop of a hat to get better rates or a better location for the same price. The effect of this is of course deflationary, adding to price pressures and more commercial real estate defaults. Remember that commercial real estate lags residential and residential real estate has not yet bottomed, and indeed may not bottom for years. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Click Here To Scroll Thru My Recent Post List Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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Link Building 101 - The Almost Complete Link Guide Posted: 14 Sep 2010 05:45 AM PDT Posted by scott.mclay This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. A lot has changed since I got into link building a few years ago - link exchange is dead, ad banners are no longer all about gaining referral traffic, and buying links is more dangerous than ever before. Because of the changes mentioned and a whole load of others the majority of link builders don’t like to give away their secrets to sourcing links, even though it’s all pretty much the same at most agencies. Most of the advice I will be giving throughout this post is most likely available from a large number of sources including SEOmoz but I felt it would be great to bring everything together under one simple guide. Creating your link building strategy
Sadly every strategy is different and people can’t answer these questions for you but hopefully you can use the following information to help answer the questions. Link Placement Nofollow & Dofollow Branded Links Anchor Text & Landing Page Distribution Content Relevancy Sourcing Links Link Building Tools
Manual Search Queries Advanced search operators are not as complicated as they sound but if used correctly they can provide a very nice set of search results. An introduction to advanced search operators can be found here and a short introduction can also be found on my personal blog under the post finding the links that matter. One search string I would recommend when looking for suitable blogs for most niches is: [search term] -site:Wikipedia.org -site:blogspot.com -site:telegraph.co.uk -site:wordpress.com -site:about.com -site:nationalgeographic.com -site:guardian.co.uk -"directory" -"add link" -"advertising" Depending on your niche other domains can also be stripped from the results. Directory Submissions Blog and Forum Commenting The best way to act on this kind of link building is by using Google’s blog search to find the most recent articles published within your niche then make a genuine comment based on the content of the article, using the Name field for branded anchor text. This type of link building is best for increasing the number of nofollow links to your website. Guest Blogging Communities Widgets & Theme Designs Another way to increase the number of user generated links is by creating a WordPress theme, a lot of people have said there is low value in this but if the theme is good enough it can generate 40k+ links (from previous experience). If you wish to go down this route the best way to market it is via your monthly newsletters, just put in a small section about it and wait for results, but remember to also submit it to theme hubs around the web for additional exposure. Link to Us Pages Competitions Contacting Webmasters When sending an email to a webmaster, remember they are a real person just like you, so ask yourself a few simple questions before drafting:
Tracking Progress Having a list of metrics for each link enables you to display a variety of information relating to your link building campaign which helps when generating reports for your clients. Conclusion Just remember every link building campaign is different, even if you deal with clients within the same niche as each website has a different infrastructure and domain history. If you enjoyed this post then why not visit my Blog or follow me on Twitter. |
What is Mobile Search Engine Transcoding? Posted: 13 Sep 2010 11:21 PM PDT Posted by Suzzicks Ok, in the mobile world, it is important to understand that Google sometimes lies (Uhhh! Say it ain’t so!) Actually, all of the major search engines do it with mobile results - It is called 'transcoding.' In some cases, the search engines will want to rank a particular page in mobile results, but they know they shouldn’t because they can tell that it will be a bad mobile user experience. (Usually because the file size is too big, or the page has lots of mobile-unfriendly code like Flash or loads of JavaScript). When this happens, the search engine will show the full search engine listing for the mobile-unfriendly page (like normal), but when you click on it, they will automatically take you to a temporary url that represents a ‘transcoded’ version of the page you requested, (rather than delivering you to the actual page listed in the search results). This temporary transcoded page actually lives on a subdomain hosted by the search engine, and shows a scraped version of the page you requested. The scrape usually just shows the text and small images of the page, but omits anything that might cause problems for a mobile browser; sometimes this can include background images, big images, animations, videos, iFrames, and heavy/complex code. You Might Want Transcoding, but Probably Not If you have totally ignored the mobile web, transcoding can be a good thing, because it allows you to rank in mobile results when you otherwise might be omitted. (Ranking with transcoding is better than not ranking at all). Unfortunately, none of the search engines do a stellar job with their transcoding. In Google, pages that are transcoded usually closely resemble the ‘text-only’ version of the page that Google keeps in its cache. In some cases though, the transcoding can really mess up a page, missing core navigation, breaking long pages into multiple pages at odd places, or cutting out important sections. Remember that the search engine use of transcoded pages differs from phone to phone, so just because pages are not being automatically transcoded from search results on your phone does not mean that they are never being transcoded by the mobile search engines. The less sophisticated a mobile browser is, the more likely the search engine is to transcode a page; based on my experience, this is happening mostly on BlackBerry's and WindowsMobile devices. To see what a page looks like when Google transcodes it, there are two options: 1.) You can perform a search on a mobile phone, then click the ‘options’ button to the right of one of your results in the SERP, and then select ‘Mobile formatted.’ (Illustrated below) 2.) You can also put your url into Google’s tool, here: http://www.google.com/gwt/n? from your computer or your mobile phone. The image below shows what Realtor.com looks like when it is transcoded by Google, and it is obviously not a great experience. You can see, in this instance, that two header images are missing, including the logo. It also turns the JavaScript navigation into text links that are a bit squished together, and hard to understand (Find a Home Home Finance Home & Garden). Last, since the transcoding software can't render JavaScript, it has been served an error message, telling it to turn on JavaScript.
Preventing Transcoding If you are pretty confident in your mobile site rendering, you can include the ‘no-transform’ cache control in the headers of your template, and that will usually prevent your pages from being transcoded by the search engines, but it is not 100%. The good news is that with faster network connections and better mobile browsers, transcoding by the search engines is becoming much less common. The important take-away here, is to at least test to see what your pages look like when they are being transcoded (even if you have a no-transform cache control in place). In many cases, minor on-page code tweaks can make the transcoded experience much more user-friendly and palatable, improving your ability to reach the widest range of mobile customers, regardless of the phone they are searching from.
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