So long, and thanks for all the fish!

I should be one of the first “100″… I signed up within three minutes of the opening – yes I was refreshing the page. Once I had made the decision to try it out, no point in delaying – plus I’m curious to see what the “bonus” is.

Then yesterday I found an incredible set of tools – Just what I was looking for: WP Smart Tools while browsing the Wickedfire forums. One for the good guys.

Then the little niche I was targeting… I’m not so sure anymore. Was listening to a reasonable webcast that had a bit of math in it… Along the lines of: If the payout on the offer is $35, and you expect a conversion rate of 1-2%, then you can’t afford to spend more than $0.35 to break even on keywords. They suggested to estimate conversion rate at 2% – I’m a conservative kinda guy, so I estimate 1%… That means most stuff on Clickbank sucks, except some crazy forex stuff that has some strange stats when checking cb-analytics. That can’t be entirely right – it doesn’t match what I see on other places and the clickstreams you can peek at with Alexa and Quantcast. I’m guessing I’ll have to find out.

Too many choices, too little time.

The little experiment is still moving forward. I’m discovering a ton of things which I want to dump on my blog…

However, I can’t “do” normal blog posts. Its irritating. It always happens, I have flashes of inspiration or connect two and two together and want to write a quick quip about it, not a well-researched piece of SEO beauty – Forget Twitter – 140 characters is too short – Someone suggested Tumblr, which I tried a couple of times – Nice, but there’s not that much difference to just posting to my blog- which is exactly what I’ll do.

So here we go. We can call this a a move to a more short from blog.

If we should dance like no-one is watching… Should we write like no-one is reading?

Best reasons to subscribe to my feed…

1. Because I’ve used the word “because” – Research has proven that it works like a charm for small requests
2. Imagine getting automatic updates – Faster and easier than visiting my site – plus I’ve used one of the most powerful words in marketing, “imagine”… Your brain should be turning to jelly right about now…
3. Stop wasting time! Get updated only when there is new content – Since loss aversion is a stronger motivator than potential gains “Stop wasting time” is more powerful than “Get free time” or other positive spins. By this line your finger should be starting to twitch
4. Available only to a select few. Exclusivity at work. We value information that is exclusive much more than freely-available information.
5. We only have three slots left on our reader list and when its gone, its gone – registration automatically closes today at midnight, with spots filled or not! – Scarcity increases urgency! Not only are reader slots a scarce resource (yeah, right) but the opportunity goes away in a matter of hours, and it does so automatically – if this were a live event, it would be naturally believable, but most folks don’t question *why* an offer closes out – and when they do most marketers point to a need to keep the product to “the chosen few”, reinforcing exclusivity.
6. You can unsubscribe at any time - Risk reducer in action
7. Easier to organize your reading and research – not-so-unique selling point
8. Fact: People who read my blog have higher nerd-IQ.
9. It’s bandwidth-friendly. Saves lots of bytes! - Appeal to generation-Y readers. unfortunately if you’re generation X, you probably don’t really give a darn about recycling bits
10. We already have 15,997 subscribers! - Ah yes, the crown of influence techniques: Social proof. Eat shit, millions of flies can’t be wrong… Well, there’s a problem with the fly analogy – social proof only works when people perceive that the ‘others’ doing it are similar to them; Would that explain why people don’t eat shit no matter how many flies do?

When all else fails… Threats work, rarely and only for limited compliance. They work only if you are perceived as A) capable of carrying them out and B) either benefiting from executing on your threat or insane (defined as an agent that goes against its own interests). In my case, I plead insanity and a secret devotion to Dr. Strangelove.

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It will soon be Black Friday in the US – That day after Thanksgiving when a big chunk of the population goes out en masse to buy shit they don’t really need, for not a whole lot less than any other day.

If you really feel you need a good deal, go online and skip the store. Most brick-and-mortar stores have equivalent online sales – and usually even better. My two favorites are Dealnews.com and bfads.com check them out. Dealnews is actually my year-round favorite. There’s also always overstock.com where I got some wicked deals on some English Laundry shirts.

With this kind of access to offers and zero crowds I don’t know why anyone reading this blog would go to a physical retailer. Any clues?

Update 11-30-09: Interesting data from the National Retail Federation mentioning that “more people spent less” – 195 Million shoppers this year, versus 172 million shoppers last year, with average spend per person down from $372 last year to $343 this year. What this translates to me as a consumer is: There’s no way in hell I’m going to partake in the Black Friday melee. Take a look at their report for a more complete break-down of the numbers “Black Friday Verdict: As Expected, Number of Shoppers Up, Average Spending Down“.

Premise: We judge the health and authority of a site in relationship to the advertising (or lack of) it carries.

If you went to a corporate website – such as Microsoft.com or Apple.com – and bumped into a slew of banner ads for products from other companies, what would you think? That you went to the wrong site? That they’re not doing so well that they need ads? That’s a pretty straightforward example – you’re expecting a major player and they’re peppering your screen with semi-related offers.

Here is where it gets interesting. If the site has low authority in a field – like a personal blog (ahem), adding a limited number of ads in the right places sends a completely different message – to some it will lend the credibility that comes with a publisher that cares about their blog enough to try to monetize it. You expect the site to potentially be a source of income for the publisher, regardless if it is just an online doodle. To everyone else, regardless of knowledge or experience, there is an association of ideas that takes, and the concepts associated to the ads become related to the blog in the visitor’s mind – its a matter of degrees, of course.

Ad quality transfers to site experience

If the ads on a site are of good quality, it can ad a veneer of credibility/authority to the site regardless of its content. As an example, this site is currently displaying ads for a Web 2.0 application development platform, and some brick-and-mortar universities. This is as close as the blog is going to get in terms of getting associated with such powerful brands – If I have a big ad for Harvard university, some ideas you have associated with that institution are transferred to the experience you receive from my site. If I have the Harvard site everywhere, the more you visit my blog the more the idea of my blog will be related to the concepts you hold with the Harvard logo. Now imagine if my ads were for something shady, like get-rich-quick schemes or using bad logos – like the Enron logo.

This cuts both ways – The danger for advertisers is clear here: As an advertiser you must manage your website placements so you don’t end up associated to the wrong concepts.

Related articles

• Who clicks on banner ads? (sciencetext.com)
• Currencies that buy credibility (brandingblog.com)

Watch over my shoulder as I build this blog using Headway in 78 minutes. I know, 78 minutes is not exactly the instant-gratification some people might lead you to believe, but its reality – this is reality, warts and all.

What you’ll see on the video:

1. Starting from scratch with a live site using Headway 1.5
2. Creating a magazine-like layout for the blog
3. Look-and-feel: Modifying fonts, colors, spacing and visual elements
4. Customizing layout and sidebars for special pages like “About”
5. Linking and customizing archives, categories and other pages
6. Re-using sidebars selectively – footers and others
7. Working with tons of sidebars and even more widgets
8. Integrating bbPress as a WordPress widget (yes, a widget)
9. Tweaking the SEO parameters and using the code hooks

You can skip around the video getting a feel for how the theme works or grab some popcorn.

The video has no voiceover, so select your favorite soundtrack or listen to the voices in your head.

This is me building the site and it is largely unscripted – so you’ll see me fight with the layout a bit, get the type of leaf mixed up, fiddle with colors and other errors you’ll do yourself. You want to see the pitfalls and problems – for the finished result just take a screenshot of my site.

Here are the steps.

• Install bbPress into a subdirectory of your blog pages. For example /user/public_html/forum if your blog is set up at the root of your domain. This is optional but makes things easy.
• Do the cookie integration from the bbPress site instructions. This will allow anyone who authenticates to your WordPress to access bbPress and vice-versa. No point in integrating halfway.
• Add a social networking log-in conduit to your blog. I chose Gigya Socialize for this and used their little “widget creator” to create a little widget that does the dirty work, plus their WordPress plug-in in the back-end. This is optional but its a lot easier for folks to sign in using their Twitter, Facebook or Google accounts than asking them to remember user/password combination number 457. The day my blog is as popular as Facebook, maybe I’ll ask people to sign up.
• Put the log-in widget from Gigya Socialize on the sidebar right next to the forums. Can’t miss it!
• Here’s where the magic happens. Create a WordPress Page for your Forum. Name it different than the directory you installed bbPress to. In my case the page is named “Forums” and the installation directory is “forum” (note the missing ‘s’). Now go edit that page and use the following bit of HTML as your guide:

<iframe name=”FRAME1″ src=”http://andresferraro.com/forum/” width=”100%” height=”1000″ frameborder=”0″ ></iframe>

Replace the address http://andresferraro.com/forum/ with your bbPress installation URL, and the width and height parameters to match your site. Note that you need to pick a bbPRess theme that doesn’t go crazy with the width and hopefully has a color scheme that blends in with your WordPress blog.

Voila! You now have your bbPress forum embedded into a Worpress page. Check out mine at Andres Ferraro’s Forums.