Shankapotomus Baby Rocks

One of the most ingenious television commercials of all time teaches people how creative marketing influences other people. The E*TRADE baby commercial, just 32 seconds long, was a smashing success. Does every word count? You bet it does. Just look at the dialogue:

Ah…This is weak man. Frank is trying to not pay me my winnings for the Skins beat down I just issued him just cause his 401K is tanking.

It’s like, dude, you gotta GRAB THE REINS man!

• Get E*TRADE.
• Do some analytics.
• Do some research and TAKE CHARGE so I don’t have to subsidize your lack of golfing skills.

“Nnnna.  Nittel. You moved your ball!”

“Frank. It was on the cart path. Why don’t you try reading the rules. Shankapotomus!”

• Take control with one of the most powerful investing machines there is.
• Join the thousand new accounts a day at E*TRADE.

Dialogue Analysis

The first sentence, “Ah…This is weak man,”  uses a phrase you’ve heard thousands of times so you can easily picture someone saying this.

The second sentence, “Frank is trying to not pay me my winnings for the Skins beat down I just issued him just cause his 401K is tanking,” pulls you in and makes you feel a sense of loss and you identify with times that you have been cheated out of what was coming to you.  It also elevates the authority of the baby which of course is absurd, making it funny.

The reference to the Skins Game is not by accident either. There is a yearly game for professional golfers that is unique, exclusive and rare. The player with the best score at one hole, will win money. Each hole has it’s own monetary value assigned to it, with the 18th hole winner being awarded $200,000.

The third sentence, “It’s like, dude, you gotta GRAB THE REINS man!” gives you a direct call to action. He’s taking charge and telling him what to do. Didn’t we spend the first eighteen years of our lives listening to people telling us what to do? We remember this feeling easily.  This adds to the humor and irony of a reversal of roles i.e.  the baby acting like an adult.

The fourth sentence, “Get E*TRADE. Do some analytics. Do some research and TAKE CHARGE so I don’t have to subsidize your lack of golfing skills,” gives three directives. Three is about the number of things a person can absorb in a short period of time. Remember your mother saying, “I’ll give you to the count of three to stop that. ONE, TWO, THREEEEEE!”  Or how about Goldilocks and the THREE Bears or The THREE Little Pigs? Three was used for a good reason.

It also points out what losses will occur if you don’t follow these simple instructions. Someone will have to help you out because you were so dumb. Who wants that?

In the next few sentences, you hear a dialogue that is commonly heard when kids are fighting with each other. You did this. No you did that! Why you….blankity blank blank!  Whaa Whaa Whaa. Something that happens on an hourly basis in many homes with young children. You remember these exact words coming from your lips. Then a gentle reminder of your complete stupidity with the shameful scolding of “Why don’t you read the rules!”

The name calling then closes the deal with heroic magnitude. You Shankapotomus… is like the frosting on the cake. Now the baby has officially achieved hero status. He creates a new word that no one has ever heard before and conquers the very man that was trying to cheat him out of what he really deserved. All is well in drama land. Triumph!

The next sentence, “Take control with one of the most powerful investing machines there is,” tells you what to do and reminds you how smart the action is because…well, nothing is really better. It’s a Superman statement. So now, you get to be like Superman!

The closing sentence, “Join the thousand new accounts a day at E*TRADE,” tells you that you too can join a crowd of thousands. Now how difficult is that?

Movie Analysis

The two characters in this movie are both extremely lovable. Babies bond with us immediately. They have no set of requirements for loving someone other than you need to be breathing, warm and able to hold them. The older man is on the other side of life. At the completely the opposite stage in anyone’s time line. He is enjoying life by playing golf, which is a sport that has been played by millions since the 15th century.

Using a baby in this campaign makes us feel that if even a baby can do this, it must be pretty simple. Yes. I can do this too!

So the two lovable characters then take on qualities that you weren’t expecting. Something surprising occurs. Your predictions of what is possible for a baby have been shaken momentarily and that is what gets your attention. Now you wonder. Getting you to wonder makes you pay attention to the message. It challenges your belief in the way the world works. Now you pay particularly close attention to what on earth the baby could be telling you. You are listening.

Your Challenge -- What can you do with 32 seconds?

No matter what business you are in, you all have potential customers. What exactly are you doing to get their attention? Are you following the Six Principals of Influence that Dr. Cialdini teaches?

• Reciprocation -- Be the first to give
• Scarcity -- Emphasize scarcity and uniqueness
• Authority -- Admit weaknesses first
• Consistency -  Following through with existing commitments
• Liking -- Uncover areas of similarity
• Consensus -- Show responses of others in testimonials

Take action today and do something different with your business strategies. See if you get results with what you have learned from the Shankapotomus E*TRADE baby commercial.

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Affiliate Summit West 2010 Review

Affiliate Summit West 2010 was packed with people. Over 4,000 affiliate marketers, merchants, vendors and Internet entrepreneurs networked, absorbed information, played hard and partied till the wee hours of the morning. Jeremy Shoemaker, an Internet entrepreneur wizard, said that this event was the best one he has ever attended. Of course if you see his videos of black jack fun, target shooting practice, and Las Vegas magic, you will see why.

There were many super affiliates in attendance and monthly income stats could not have been better. There were people there reporting incomes varying between $200 a month up to $100,000 a month and probably more. Just an incredible range of statistics. It was hard to believe that the economy could produce this kind of success. Being a New Media Entrepreneur is paying off in a big way.

Affiliate Marketing Tips for 2010

• Make people feel that your web site is “their” web site.
• Make sure your traffic is not reliant on one source.
• Create your own product for the biggest bang for your efforts.
• Answer questions for people.
• Teach people things that they might not know.
• Use videos to get traffic – Youtube.com is the second largest search engine on the web.
• Get your best commission rates by working directly with companies.
• Get people to pay attention to you over time.
• Ask people to share your content.
• Determine the angle that causes people to talk about you.
• Success is sticking with a problem longer than anyone else.
• Rich overnight days ended in 1994.
• You are not going to know what works, your audience will tell you that.
• Build a media asset that will last over time.
• 86% of ezinearticles.com members write less than 10 articles.
• Write more articles and you will get more traffic.
• Treat people the way you want to be treated.

Discover the Power of Influence

Dr. Cialdini, regarded as the most cited social psychologist in the world, powerfully delivered an insightful talk about marketing. His book, Influence, about persuasion and marketing has sold more than 2 million copies. It has been consistently listed in Amazon.com as a best seller and is recommended by Warren Buffet, one of the most successful investors in history.

Dr. Cialdini is an expert in understanding the reasons that people comply with requests in business. His Six Principles of Persuasion Reciprocation, Scarcity, Authority, Consistency, Liking, and Consensus describe how you can produce lasting change in others.

He suggested that as new media entrepreneurs when we encounter people, we need to ask ourselves how we can be of service to them. People are most likely to give back when they are given something of value. What have you given to your audience lately?

Brian Clarke, owner of copyblogger.com teaches people “The Art and Science of Compelling Copy.” The blog, which he started in February of 2006, has 97,398 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of regular readers.

CopyBlogger has earned a Google page rank of 5, which means that the Blog is seen by others as having good authority. Brian has managed to inspire many people to share their expertise with the world by writing good copy for their readers and teaching them exactly how to do it.

Brian taught us that leading your business presentation with admission of fault first, followed by the benefits of your product or service is very powerful in moving people towards acceptance of your product or ideas. Apparently Aristotle developed this art of persuasion more than 2,000 years ago. Aren’t we glad we are catching on now?

Networking With Marketing Gurus

Ask any one of these people what kind of future they look forward to and I think you’ll receive a unanimous vote for prosperous! Affiliate Summit West 2010 was definitely a huge success and one that will not soon be forgotten.

People in this photo from left to right:

Heather Smith, Brian Littleton, Murray Newlands, Bill Swartwout, Jason Rubacky, Heather Blackburn, Adam Riemer, Andrew Crim, Chuck Hamrick, Julie Vazquez, and Jill Pepitone.

Launching a new website – Days 21-30

Launching a new website is not as easy as some would have you think. This is the last article in a series of articles that covered the promotional strategies of the first 30 days in the launching of a new website. Time will help any new website get more traffic and this site is so new that it will have to go through some growing pains for the next four months. Patience is needed to develop and get these new sites to a profitable stage.

The last week of the month showed some solid traffic increases. The total visitors for the month was 1018. As a whole, that wasn’t too bad. Next year at this time, it will be interesting to compare the differences.

Using SEO elite, I checked for the number of backlinks and there were 22 backlinks. These backlinks were acquired by writing articles and making comments on other people’s websites.

I checked the main search engines to see how many pages were indexed with each engine. Google has indexed 104 pages. Yahoo has 38 pages. MSN has only one page indexed and I’m not sure how to get more pages indexed by them. I just found a link to submit sites to MSN: http://www.bing.com/docs/submit.aspx so now I’ve submitted to that website. Alta Vista reported indexing 38 pages and All The Web has indexed 38 pages.

One strategy that I have added to this site is to add a blog. I think that WordPress blogs are very search engine friendly and I believe that adding content to it on a regular basis will be helpful.

I was able to get some help in making my website comply with the W3C, the web standards organization for all web pages. I have tried in the past to get compliant with that website, but my web skills were not good enough to understand how to change things to get into compliance. A friend of mine from the Philippines told me about a fellow named Taylor S. Ripley. He runs a web development and hosting site at http://www.turkreno.com/. I gave him a call and he was nice enough to walk me through correcting all the mistakes that were on my front page. He also helped me create a more useful sitemap and I have submitted that to the search engines.  He was so knowledgeable and helpful. I highly recommend him as a person to help you with your SEO efforts. It was so nice to meet someone that was so helpful.

So to wrap things up for this 30 Day Plan, I’d like to review the most valuable lessons that I learned during this time period.

1.  When developing a new site, submit a basic sitemap for at least part of your site to Google webmaster tools so you can start getting some traffic.

2.  When your site is completed, submit another sitemap to Google so that they will index all of your pages.

3.  Submit your new site to Yahoo, MSN, All The Web and Alta Vista.

4.  Begin the process of creating a sense of community by visiting other sites that relate to your topic and participate in their conversations on their blogs.

5. Write articles that relate to your product or website and make sure that they get distributed to a large number of directories.

6. Make sure your site is W3 Compliant.

7. Be patient and keep contributing to your site by making it better and offering people more resources and help.

8. Start trying something, anything. Some of what you do will work, and some things won’t. Doing something is better than just dreaming about it.

9. Realize that it takes time for your new project to become profitable and know that it is possible to get your sites profitable enough to support yourself.

10. Network with other people through http://www.meetup.com to find others in your community that are pursuing the same types of business.

I hope that part of this experience has helped you learn what you can do to get your sites started an on to profitability. Good luck with your projects!

Internet Entrepreneurs Strategic Success Plan

Preparing for success is a process that may take longer than you think. It seems that with any worthwhile endeavor, there are things to accomplish that take you much longer than you had planned for. Some people would have you believe that being an Internet entrepreneur is a simple thing to do and that being successful at it is a cinch.

Let’s use Jay Leno as an example.  Although he is not an Internet entrepreneur, he is a successful business man. After watching his nightly current events monologue you probably felt better about life because you had a few good, perhaps great laughs. That ten-minute television dialogue is something people used to love to hear and would stay up late at night to tune in to.

It was recently revealed in a Wall Street Journal article about Jay Leno’s upcoming television show that the short segment of comedy actually takes quite a bit more preparation time than you or I might think. Apparently there are six hours of preparation time and discussion with twenty experienced writers to produce this short comedic dialogue. Even with all that effort put into the short segment, Jay Leno often runs his monologue by his high school and home town friends to see what they think.

So what does that teach Internet entrepreneurs about becoming successful?

A lot can be learned from this revelation about the preparation time it takes to be successful. Preparing for success can take more than the 30 minutes you might have planned. In fact even after you have had years of Internet training, successful projects may take a tremendous amount of time to arrive in the winner’s circle.

When you think you are prepared, ask yourself what kind of effort you put into your current entrepreneurial project. Did you converse with anyone else about the feasibility of your Internet entrepreneurial project?  What kind of expert advice did you receive and did you take that advice?  Will people benefit from what you have prepared and how will they benefit?

To be successful as an Internet entrepreneur, you are going to need a good plan and a realistic prediction of the time it will take to accomplish your plan, You are going to need to discuss it with other successful Internet entrepreneurs and perhaps your old friends from long ago. You will need to plan for your project to benefit others and the degree to which that will occur will be the degree to which you are successful.

Launching a new website – days 14-21

This article is a continuation of a 30 day plan to launch a new website offering personal checks. The goal of the plan was to do something every day to promote the site and see what kind of traffic we’d get. Unfortunately on August 8, the site went into the Google sandbox and none of the pages that were being listed with top positions in Google were being listed anymore. The site is still in the sandbox unfortunately. It’s not hard to tell when your site is in the sandbox because your pages won’t pull up for the search terms they were originally pulling up for.

As you can see from the graph  the site is going through ups and downs in traffic. Most visible is the drastic decrease in traffic on August 8. There is a steady increase, but this is not due to getting out of the sandbox, it is due to some promotion efforts through a company I hired to help.

Originally, I planned not to spend any money during this first thirty day period, but I caved in after the drop in traffic. I hired a company that helped me with this website and asked them to do the same thing for my new site. If you are interested in knowing who they are and what they do, be sure to email me.

The goal is to get between 500 and 700 visitors per day. At that point, the site will be pulling in some decent income.

Sites can be in the sandbox for three to six months so the plan now is to build high authority back links which means getting the site listed in different directories.

The plan now is to:
1. Add quality content to the site through a blog.

2. Work on increasing the number of inbound links (quality links not just any old link).

3. Tweak and improve the SEO quality of your site.

4. Write articles.
So you should be seeing some changes coming soon to the site which will include a Wordpress Blog.

Again, the biggest mistake made with this site was to wait until the entire site was done before submitting the site to Google. So if you are working on a new site, be sure and get at least a few pages presentable with a sitemap and submit it. Hopefully that will shorten your stay in the sandbox.

Sex is Used in Almost Every Business

I sat there at the table as the training manager explained how the new plastic bottle was designed to look sexy. I questioned why it was important for a detergent bottle to look sexy? The manager explained that a scientific study was done on hundreds of women and most of those women reached for the sexier bottle.

Detergent bottle A. is the sexy bottle.

Detergent bottle B. is the plain boring bottle.

In the scientific study it was even proven that women would choose bottle A, even if it was a bit more expensive. Bottle B. however must be much cheaper or filled with a much better product to compete with bottle A.

It all sounded pretty insane to me but then again, most people know more about Paris Hilton than they do Mother Teresa. I sat there and thought “Are we zoned out zombies of corporate sexual bombardment?”. I had to admit, bottle A. did have a nice sexy curve and bottle B. kinda looked like my old English teacher. He had a massive beer belly.

By the time the meeting was over, my mind was spinning out ways that business sells to us through sex. The media is infested with sexy selling. Automobile companies design body styles with the female body in mind. Count the S curves on and inside your car, you will be amazed! Furniture and even kitchen ware is designed with sex in mind.

Selling with sex is far from a new idea. Look at musical instruments such as violins and guitars. Look at ancient designs and find the S curves. I believe that selling with sex evolved and boomed with the industrial revolution. Wow, even my mouse was designed with sex in mind! For more information click here.

Article Source
By Tom Cornett

Launching a new web site – days 11, 12, 13

Well, unfortunately I believe that my new site is officially in the “sandbox” which is Google’s way of controlling sites.

At Webconf.com the Google sandbox is explained in detail.

It’s never easy for newcomers to enter a market and there are barriers of different kinds. For newcomers to the world of search engines, the barrier is called a sandbox – your site stays there until it gets mature enough to be allowed to the Top Positions club. Although there is no direct confirmation of the existence of a sandbox, Google employees have implied it and SEO experts have seen in practice that new sites, no matter how well optimized, don’t rank high on Google, while on MSN and Yahoo they catch quickly. For Google, the jailing in the sandbox for new sites with new domains is on average 6 months, although it can vary from less than a month to over 8 months.

There are hurdles to overcome, just because the site is new. It might have been helpful to have submitted a few pages to Google when I first got the site going so that it would have time to get out of the sandbox.

Cpanel Stats are:

01 Aug 2009 29
02 Aug 2009 26
03 Aug 2009 36
04 Aug 2009 43
05 Aug 2009 67
06 Aug 2009 35
07 Aug 2009 50
08 Aug 2009 11
09 Aug 2009 11
10 Aug 2009 24
11 Aug 2009 9
12 Aug 2009 12

You’ll notice the drastic drop in visitors due to the sandbox effect. It’s very frustrating to go through these growing pains. My goal is to get back into the “top position’s club.”

Launching a new website – Days 6-10

This reports covers a span of days, mostly because there isn’t much new to report. There was a problem with having Google index the site as http://checksmall.com and not http://www.checksmall.com. That problem was solved with a 301 redirect file put in the .htaccess file. Now Google is showing all pages indexed for http://www.checksmall.com.

When studying the Cpanel stats, there were 32 external links pointing back to www.checksmall.com and that is very good. There were 45 different keyword phrases that are bringing in traffic.

74 different page urls were bringing in traffic and there were 224 unique visitors for the month.

The daily statistics

1-Aug 29
2-Aug 26
3-Aug 36
4-Aug 43
5-Aug 67
6-Aug 35
7-Aug 50
8-Aug 11
9-Aug 11

Advertising activities included writing an article at Squidoo on ordering checks.

After watching the movie, Julie and Julia, I realized that I’m not as diligent at writing everyday and my topic here is possibly boring to many people, so my apologies. I am hoping that it will get more exciting as time goes on.

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