John Hasson

This will be kinda introspective (had to look that up to make sure I was using it right).  Ok, so I have a bunch of internet projects.  Some are successful and some are major flops.  But I have a pretty decent system for going from idea to implementation to profit (or loss).  At this point it is really just a matter of copying it over and over to scale things.  [and no it isn't a huge secret. pick a niche, research, build, test, repeat until you have success (or fail) and move onto the next one].

This puts me in the spot of looking to hire.  I have been watching and learning from others who outsource outside the US.  There are horror stories and success stories.  If I hire outside the US, I don’t have to worry about office space, extra taxes, employee benefits, extra taxes (did I say that one already? ).  But it also means that I will have a significant amount of turnover (not too bad if I have everything documented rather well) but still something to deal with.  As far as hiring in the US, I’ve thought of taking someone who is honest, smart and hardworking and just training them in the skills they will need.  Trust and smartness are way more important then skills (you can learn what you need in this business).

Thats where I am at.  Hire someone?  Keep writing computer programs to do things for me?  Hire someone to write my programs to do things for me (plus all the other cool stuff I do)?  (Some things can’t be done automatically — but lots of repetitive things can)  If I do hire someone, do I hire local, mid west us or foreign?  Hire someone local who I can trust and teach them what they need to know (or pay for their training)?  I don’t expect to have an answer right away, I am still mulling things over.  Feel free to offer advice.

PS.  I haven’t forgotten about that free PPC app.  I work on it while I am flying in a plane (which only happens twice a week).

Tags: Advice, Personal // 6 Comments »

I finally took a look at Jeremy’s black ink project.  There is some really good info in there.  In fact there are things in Black Ink Project that I was hoping to learn at elite retreat that I didn’t.  The short of it.  Sign up.  It is totally free (but you should participate and share).  Hurry before Jeremy changes his mind.

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing // 1 Comment »

Well after a little back and forth on my end (I was having second thoughts at first) I decided to go ahead with it. I’ll be speaking about PPC related topics at Affiliate Summit East in Boston. Shawn gave me a fancy image for this.. lemme find it…

There we go. I’ll be covering 2 topics. Which PPC engines are worth using (aside from the big 3) and how to manage lots of PPC campaigns with just 1 person. I may end up cutting some things out in order to keep things under 45 minutes. If there is something specific you want me to cover I’ll listen to your suggestions (I already have a version of the presentation totally done but it needs some editing because I was pretty harsh against some PPC engines that don’t give good traffic) That, and it leaves zero time for suggestion about managing big ppc campaigns across multiple networks. So it will have to be split up a little differently.. And I suppose I should provide a link to sign up

Affiliate Summit

Tags: Uncategorized // 4 Comments »

Seems that everyone is doing an office tour.
Amit has his new place in florida
Zac has a blog post showing lot of people’s offices…

• Chad
• Mark
• Ian
• Jeremy
• Shawn
• Jim

Paul showed off his new house.

So… I can give into peer pressure. Here is my house/office:

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, PPC, Pay Per Click, Personal // 12 Comments »

Somehow my wife talked me into going with her and my 3 daughters to the mall for clothing shopping. *hint* If your wife suggests you go to the mall with her and the girls for some shopping… so NO. (but do it nicely).

Needless to say I was bored out of my mind. Malls these days don’t have much appeal for me. At all.

But.. I did see something interesting. There was a person at one of those kiosk booths in the center of the mall using facebook. I was shocked to meet an actual facebook user. (Someone who really is into it.. not someone who just uses for ads and a little bit of networking). So I asked him a few questions about how he used it and what he thought of the ads on the left hand side. Turns out he clicks on the ads from time to time but hasn’t ever bought anything off them. This led to him telling me that he actually has been working on making facebook ads for their product. He was limiting it to just two state (Utah and Idaho). I told him that since the product was geared more towards religious people to not limit it just to those two states, but use religions as targets (Mormon, LDS, Christian, Protestant, Catholic, etc..) and leave it for worldwide or national. Then I asked him if he was able to track a sale from an ad. I wasn’t sure if he got what I meant at first so I explained about creating a bunch of different ads on facebook and tracking each one to know if it resulted in a sale…

If you are not able to track a click on an ad to a sale (or action/goal) then you are really just throwing your money away. Sure at first you need to throw a bunch of different ads and keyword /landing page /domain combinations. But after you have some data and conversions you need to revisit the campaign and optimize it. You can NOT do this without some sort of tracking. (And yeah I know google, yahoo and MSN all have tracking features.. but for some reason they never seem to catch 100% of the conversions. It is kinda annoying which is why I have a supplemental tracking system)

Send each keyword to a landing page with a separate tag. mypage?k=1000 or mypage?k=keyword (I recommend against using the keyword instead of a number in your tracking) and then carry that identifier out to the conversion. This way you know which ad/keyword combination resulted in a sale without relying just on your PPC provider to have accurate tracking (they are really good, but not 100%). Plus with this method you can track for PPC providers that don’t even have tracking (facebook and others).

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click // Add Comment »

I saw a crazy ad on gmail today. I was viewing emails from someone in utah.  (Plus I live in utah).  This ad was so untargeted it registered on my WTF meter.  Here is what they did…

Their primary keyword is jazz obviously.  However… putting jazz in any keyword suggestion box will also return utah or utah jazz (the NBA team).  Instead of reviewing the automated suggested keywords, they just dumped them all into their PPC campaign… bad idea on Adwords.  This will result in a lower CTR and wasted clicks.  (Don’t worry I didn’t click it)

So… look before you blindly add keywords.  (Or have some sort of algorithm check for you)

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click // 1 Comment »

Ok, I have an idea for some free PPC software to put out there.  There is zero PPC software that is for Mac or Linux (that isn’t web-based).  So I am gonna start with something small.  Maybe a PPC campaign builder with exports for Google, Yahoo and MSN that runs on Mac, Linux and Win.

Up to this point all my in house PPC software is Windows only via C# and MSSQL Server.  I then run it via parallels/vmware.  This will be a learning experience for me since I haven’t made native mac or linux software yet.

Tags: PPC, Pay Per Click, Software // 3 Comments »

My daughters had some friends spend the night last night. So.. that made one male (me) in a house with 7-8 girls. Needless to say I left early this morning to get out.

We have a full family pass to Thanksgiving point here in Utah so I figured I’d stop by their “gardens” to have a look and see what it was like. As I got there I saw Segways… The gardens are pretty big.. 50+ acres I think. So I figured.. why not. I have never ridden a Segway and 50+ acres is a lot of walking. $20 later and 3 minutes of training and I was off.

Segways are awesome. It was an absolute blast zipping around the trails and taking in the smells of flowers, nectar, dirt and trees. About an hour later I had seen pretty much everything and ran around the park again taking pictures on my cell phone.

Pictures follow…..

All these were taking pretty quickly while riding the Segway with one hand.

You know the funny thing… Most groups I saw were 2 girls and one guy. The girls were obviously mother and daughter looking at ideas for wedding photos and the guy looked like he was just there cuz he had to be.

This really *is* a moth

And just for fun, here it the WP gallery of these photos…

Tags: Advice // 3 Comments »

I always wonder about this. You see these products being pushed that supposedly help you in PPC campaigns and so on. I wonder, why are they selling it? If it is any good they would be using it internally to beat competition. I say this because all of my PPC software I use is written in house by me. Right now I have no plans to sell any of them. It seems that many PPC programs out there don’t do much more then you can do with some research and Excel.

That being said, I had an interesting idea. Someone give me a PPC program that they see that they want for free. I’ll look at it and see if I can throw together a free version in a weekend and give it out just to prove a point. Or if there isn’t one that you use, then suggest features you would want in a PPC application and I’ll try to throw a free PPC program together in a day or so.

Update: Ok.. changed a little bit so I don’t have people come after me.  Don’t give me a ppc app to copy.  But if people post things they wish they had in a PPC app, I’ll still try and put one together in a weekend.

Tags: PPC, Pay Per Click // 8 Comments »

“You know what I can’t figure out? How is it that all these stupid neanderthal mafia guys can be so good at crime, and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it.” - Michael, Office Space

Here it is. Smart people sit around being smart and thinking up all sorts of cool ideas and projects and so on. They have all these great ideas for making money, curing cancer, w/e. But that is just it. They think about it too much.

The secret to success is getting off your rump and actually doing something. Sure being smart and having good ideas helps a lot. However without actually doing something with your great idea you won’t ever succeed.

Most smart people think and think and think about great ideas. (Some are really good ideas and a lot of the ideas are garbage–but don’t tell them that ) The point of all this is: don’t sit around brainstorming all day. Brainstorming is good for a while, but eventually you need to actually try things.

You will fail. A lot.

But with each failure you are closer to success.

Here is another poop related analogy.

Kid 1 is put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
Kid 2 is also put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
An hour passes.
Kid 1 (is smart) is sitting there bored and wants out. “It is just a bunch of poo. I am wasting my time.”
Kid 2 is covered in poo and smiling brightly and digging all over the place. “With all this poo, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”

Now eventually kid 2 will figure out there is no pony. (But if there was a pony how dumb would Kid 1 feel?)
Summary

• You actually have to work to make things happen (or pay someone else to do it for you–but this is also work)
• Don’t get in analysis paralysis (over analyzing things so much you never try things
• Stop reading all these blogs and put together a campaign and test, test, test.
• You can come back to read mine though

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing // 3 Comments »