Click To Hit

Google, Yahoo,and Marchex have all been making waves by adding Pay Per Call types of advertising to their range of Lead Generation services in the last month. This clearly highlights the value of this new advertising medium that a few smaller players and even AOL have been experimenting with for a while now.

Think about it for a second… a key element in any marketing strategy is to ensure a quick turnaround time on lead generation to get the interested party in front of the purchase while still warm and “excited” about the advertising message. With current Internet Pay - Per advertising available today, this is all left in the hands of the potential buyer.

With Pay Per Click, or even the new Pay Per Unique models dominating the advertising networks, you have a potential buyer who sees a marketing message and is interested enough to click for more information… this is the point any supplier would love to deploy their human marketing / sales  resources to get in front of the potential customer in order to qualify and capitalize on the interest. With the current models of advertising control is lost to the whim of the potential purchaser allowing the opportunity for doubt to creep into their buy decision due to a potential objection that may not even exist thereby risking the sale. That type of scenario always negatively affects conversion numbers.

Imagine if you could immediately initiate a conversation with the potential customer the moment they clicked that link and you now start to see the potential of this advertising model and why the big boys are all clamoring to get into the mix. Add to this the benefits provided to local SME's who can geotarget the ads and you see a whole new market emerging for Internet Advertising since brick and mortar's have traditionally shied away from anything online. They prefer to use the yellow pages where the majority of leads are, yes you guessed it, funneled through the telephone.

The interesting new twist on this application is Google's entry with a service that's rumored to connect the seller and the buyer without exchanging any numbers or personal information. This is clearly a differentiator for users who are scared they'll be added to telemarketing lists or have their privacy compromised that may generate even more results compared to the competition in this privacy conscious environment the Internet has become.

In Google's case, a phone icon has begun to appear with some ads; after clicking on it, users can enter their phone number. Google then generates a call between the user and the advertiser, according to a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page detailing aspects of the pilot program on Google's Web site.

The call is free to the Google users.

It'll be interesting to see what happens in the near future as the market reacts to this model. My predictions are Pay Per Click will be relegated to the back burner as Pay Per Impression has and there'll be many new positions for inside sales reps and customer service agents to fill their time and pocket books.

It's great to see a couple of groups step up to the plate to exclaim their opposition to this deal here and here.

To do nothing would be a travesty to the model ICANN and the foundation of the Internet is built upon. Transparency, openness, and community concern would be thrown out the window with this deal and I hope we see additional suits announced in the countdown to the ICANN meetings in Vancouver this week in order to bring all of the serious negatives to light before ratification.

One thing about Tucows is that we don't generate press like a lot of the players in our space so we sometimes end up appearing out of the shadows when an article's written about us. Being primarily wholesale focused is one of the reasons and favoring cows over beautiful scantily clad women in our advertising is probably the other. Either way there've been a couple of stories the last few days I thought I'd share, and although unrelated both contain very important messages I feel everyone should be aware of.

The first is an article written by our very own Ross Rader who's Tucows Director of Research & Innovation as well as a very active participant in the ICANN policy space. I won't even comment on the article since I want everyone to go and read it directly, but other than Kudos on an absolutely brilliant piece that eloquently articulates concerns regarding the ICANN - Verisign .COM Registry relationship that everyone should be paying great attention to, I'll have to ask Ross where they found that picture since it definitely doesn't do him any justice

The second article is one on Tucows in the National Post today that covers everything from the high profile addition of Mark Cuban as an investor, analyst reviews, the fact we started trading on the TSX, and even comments on our offerings including one service in particular that for some pretty obvious reasons I hold a little more dear than some of the rest.. 

… is bullish about the company's prospects because of its blogging service called Blogware.

“Blogging has taken the world by storm but the big challenge from a business perspective is how you make money off it,” Mr. Shore said.

“We think Tucows might have come up with a way to make money from the growth of blogs by providing blog capabilities to service provider partners who bundle it or sell it to customers. To participate in one of the top three hot trends in the Internet and make money off it is a good thing.”

I've been hearing a lot of feedback lately that people don't know how to make money out of blogging yet. I may be way too entrenched in the industry but I don't necessarily understand where the disconnect is… that's like someone saying they don't know how to make money out of Web Hosting. Like the hosting industry of days gone by, there'll be a surge of free to fee Blog users as market demand matures so the opportunity to capitalize on this vertical as a fee based recurring revenue service is tremendous and should be the first model to consider when wanting to get into this space.

Although this trend has already manifested itself in the public growth of some of the fee based players out there, I feel that our retail partners are in an amazing position to take advantage of this surge through the relationships they've developed with their customers from their core offerings. The relationships we've built with them (Our wholesale customers) is a testament to the success and viability of what I feel is one of the most powerful distribution models online, and one that definitely benefits all of our services let alone Blogware alone.

Elliot Noss, CEO, says his company doesn't get enough credit for being the world's fourth-largest Web site domain name registrar.

Although I feel the same could be said around every service we offer today, the proof's in the pudding and like any sleeper hit I'm sure that recognition will eventually manifest all on its own.

Although an athlete rarely receives any notoriety for coming in third or fourth place in the 100 meter, they will if they also appear in the top four of the 400 meter, 1000 meter, Long Jump, High Jump, Pole Vault, Decathlon, Marathon, Discuss, Heptathlon, Javelin…

Well, the traffic anyways… I've been indirectly involved in this segment of the industry for over 4 years now, and if it wasn't for the confidential nature of how most of them have traditionally operated it definitely would've been a much larger focus of this blog due to the amazingly sharp and charismatic participants as well as the unique niche they've carved out that's proven to be quite successful in our online ecosystem.

I received a sneak peak of this article written by Business 2.0 last week, which is a great introduction to the industry and goes through a historical overview of how the worlds of CPC advertising and domain investment have collided to the benefit of both the Search Giant's and the domain portfolios left with an uncertain future after the bubble.

No one knows for sure how much Web traffic comes from type-ins, and Google and Yahoo execs won’t discuss it. But privately, during one of the late-night parties at the Traffic conference, one Yahoo official estimates that type-ins could make up 15 percent of its search business.

And that's over $3.6 Billion annually…

When Overture (with the Yahoo acquisition) and Google Adsense started out, the initial plan was to monetize the Internet Search technology provided to the world for free. It was a phenomenal idea that's made them a ton of cash and revolutionized Internet Marketing efforts in almost every vertical online. The one thing they noticed early on was that they were leaving a huge chunk of business on the table by only focusing on search results, and when investigating new verticals for their CPC advertising model they were quick to identify the opportunity through type-in traffic resulting in partnerships with many a domain portfolio holder today.

The secret? It has to do with what’s known as type-in traffic, or, in Wall Street jargon, direct navigation. Though it may seem odd in the era of powerful search engines, it turns out that millions of Internet surfers don’t use search at all. Instead, they type what they’re looking for right into the top of their Web browser.

Although a few of the individuals mentioned in the article expressed it wasn't 100% accurate, the results were close enough to the facts to do this segment justice and highlight how they operate in a very positive light. I even appreciated the comparison of Yun Ye to Keyser Soze, and if you've ever had the pleasure of communicating with him or any of his associates you'd definitely agree that the comment has some weight.

Every domainer knows of Ye, but few have ever met him. He’s the domainers’ Keyser Soze. “My attorney happens to be his attorney, but that’s as close to him as I can get,” says Bahlitzanakis, 29.

What I had to go through just to get a direct email exchange… well, needless to say doing your research and persistence were keys that's for sure.

The weird thing I noticed is that the day after I received the sneak peak, the Wall Street Journal posted this article (Subscription Required). I knew the Business 2.0 article had been in the works since the TRAFFIC event back at the end of October, so the timing of the WSJ article a day after I had seen the 2.0 sneak peak combined with the resultant early public ”pre-release” of the 2.0 article the next day seemed a little odd.

It appears that the “outing” of this hidden gem in our industry is being fought over by a few of the media outlets… what some of them don't realize is that for most who've been successful in the Internet domain industry this gem's been pretty much public knowledge for anyone interested enough to investigate since the beginning.

Whether someone had the insight to jump in is another story… I know a few who did

Now this is some really cool stuff.. kudos guys.

Slashdot: From the well-thank-good-thats-all-settled-once-and-for-all dept.

This is but a teaser of what's to come. In the near future you'll notice additional press coverage and the resultant ”outing” of an entire industry that has traditionally remained a pretty private club of Traffic Monetizers, Public Companies, Speculators, and even Institutional Investors.

“The Fish.com transaction underscores the value of owning a mission-critical domain name,” said Afternic President Roger Collins. “There is no question that premium names help businesses establish the impression of brand leadership and allow them to become more effective Internet marketers.”

… and at a cool million being spent on just the rights to use a particular domain name, it's pretty hard to argue with that logic.

Think of a domain name as your key to an effective Internet real estate strategy. It's the Internet equivalent of the “location” your traditional brick and mortar makes or breaks their business on. One thing even some Internet experts don't realize is that a pretty significant portion of Internet Surfers assume they can find what they want by merely doing a type-in before even considering a search engine.

He said that not only does a domain name like Fish.com reel in excellent search engine results, but it is an ideal domain to drive “type-in” traffic to the new owner's business. Type-in traffic is generated by consumers who simply type a generic URL into a browser and land on a site.

If I want a bicycle, I'm sure that bicycle.com will have what I'm looking for. If I need an aquarium, I'm sure that fish.com will have what I need. It seems that www.dog.com was willing to bet a million dollars on that and based on the what I'm sure was quite a significant investment to acquire dog.com, horse.com and bird.com as well, a pretty proven model.

The next steps? Well this private club will now start to expand, there will be additional interest, media, and buzz surrounding these deals as more and more of them are publicized.

What will happen to the existing members of this club? Well some will take their profits, sell off their assets and get out. The smart ones… well that's a different story. Instead of selling, they should invest in this prime Internet Real Estate by doing exactly what dog.com is doing. Build an Internet property around these key locations.

Why just sell or lease a premium storefront where with today's technology combined with this innovative and resource rich medium called the Internet, you could become an effective and competitive e-tailor with little to no start up capital or specific expertise required. There are many Web Building Tool services, tons of competitive ecommerce gateway providers to collect your payments, billing / shipping solutions galore, and  tons of wholesalers in almost every vertical to fit any domain real estate needs.

The old axiom of “build it and they will come” is morphing into a question you should be asking yourself if you own any of these prime properties..

“They're already coming, so why haven't you built it yet?”

I was reading this article today on Wired discussing how with today's technology, we as human beings can accomplish 10 times more work than ever before and goes on to debate whether employees should be just because they can. My understanding of the author's intent was to remind us not to let technology get in the way of fulfilling our personal and spiritual needs, in effect don't take work too seriously…

Interesting point but I disagree, let me explain.

Technology allows you to accomplish more, definitely, and the growth curve in this hyper competitive market ensures that we will continue to have longer and longer work days where even today I consider myself “on-call” weeknights and weekends for my employer and customers. Now IMO, this is not because of technology… it's because I have Passion for what I do.

The happiness of a man in this life does not consist in the absence, but in the mastery of his passions.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892)

I have been in a corporate environment now for a good portion of my career, but as you can see allot of my experience is centered around Entrepreneurial endeavors. Having passion is a key ingredient in any start-up effort, and a requirement when developing creative thought processes in order to transform a vision into reality. I feel that the passion I harbor and infuse in everything I tackle no matter the odds is what has fueled what success I have had on either side of the entrepreneurial / corporate fence. The one really shocking thing that I've run into working with some people in corporate environments is that passion is sometimes even frowned upon.

Only passions, great passions, can elevate the soul to great things.

Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784)

Anyone who doesn't believe in a project are quickly cast out of a start-up environment, but sometimes you'll find that in a corporation you'll have people who exhibit the emotional attachment to their efforts of someone who seems to only work for their next pay cheque… ”It's just a job”.

In terms of my compensation outside of commissions I'm no different. I do have a small investment in the company I work for but that's out of my own interest and nothing to do with any serious ownership stake that would fuel any passion in and of itself. So when you look at me from the outside, you may (and it has happened) ask the question “Why is he so serious about his job?”.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.
 
Claude A. Helvetius (1715 - 1771)

That answer is Passion. I apply passion to both my professional and personal efforts. I take advantage of every minute of every day to accomplish as much as I can to enrich my life and proceed as far down the road we call life as possible before my journey ends.

Passion holds up the bottom of the universe and genius paints up its roof.

Chang Ch'ao

So if you're not sure if you have passion about your work… you may want to ask yourself these:

If you find that your duties displease or stress you out to the point of being negatively emotional… you may not have passion.

If you decide that solving problems is more important than growing and taking calculated risks for success… you may not have passion.

If you focus on the follow through of processes to the detriment of your results… you may not have passion.

If you stop caring about what pains your customers, or the employees whom you are accountable to… you definitely do not have passion.

If you asked yourself these questions, and you find you don't have the passion you thought you did, I'm not sure how you can get it since it definitely doesn't grow on trees.

What I do suggest is that you find something in your life that you find passion in and stick with it. Even though you can fake it in the sea of faces at a corporation, passion for what you do will be the only avenue to your true personal and professional success.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Honore De Balzac (1799 - 1850)

Forget shuffleboard, needlepoint and bingo. Web logs, more often the domain of alienated adolescents and home to screeds by middle-aged pundits, are gaining a foothold as a new leisure-time option for senior citizens.
 
    There’s Dad’s Tomato Garden Journal, Dogwalk Musings, and, of course, the Oldest Living Blogger.
 
    “It’s too easy to sit in your own cave and let the world go by, eh?” said Ray Sutton, the 73-year-old Oldest Living Blogger and a retired electrician who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It keeps the old head working a little bit so you’re not just sitting there gawking at TV.”

This touches on something I discussed in a previous post I made about how blogs are valuable to every demographic and how it's more of a communication medium, and not just a website or journal. There are as many uses for a blog as there are people who understand their value as a communication tool.

If a teenager is using email less than any other demographic due to it being too cumbersome and ineffective, then why wouldn't those same benefits apply to older demographics that have an even harder time dealing with the more complex and cumbersome aspects of technology and the Internet?

   Bloggers say their hobby keeps them up on current events, lets them befriend strangers around the globe and gives them a voice in a society often deaf to the wisdom of the elderly.
 
    “It brings out the best in me,” said Boston-area blogger Millie Garfield, 80, who writes My Mom’s Blog with occasional help from her son, Steve Garfield, a digital video producer. “My life would be dull without it.”

Blogging can bring family much closer together, and it may be the first “new technology” your Gram will be able to even somewhat effectively use.

Mari Meehan, 64, of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, has been blogging since July. It’s given her a voice in her small resort town where, as a relative newcomer, she felt rebuffed in her efforts to get involved.
 
    Inspired by other local bloggers she’d found on The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash.) newspaper’s Web site, Meehan discovered it was easy to get started.
 
    “If you can read, you can do it,” she said. She titled her blog Dogwalk Musings and based it on the premise that she would write about her thoughts during morning walks with her St. Bernard, Bacchus. Her posts range from nature sightings of a kildeer’s nest with four eggs to rants about local and national politics.

It's super easy, and rewarding. If anyone has the time and something to say it's the senior citizens of the world. If your kids are doing it as well as your parents… why wouldn't you? The growth in this demographic is a clear sign of the potential penetration of these tools across all of them.

Three percent of online U.S. seniors have created a blog and 17 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Compare that to online 18- to 29-year-olds: Thirteen percent have created blogs and 32 percent have read someone else’s blog, according to Pew.

According to a source present at a small meeting hosted by the Association for Competitive Technology on Saturday, a Department of Commerce official revealed that the IANA contract would be opened to competitive bidding for the first time.

As a child, I remember being very protective over things that were valuable to me, which isn't abnormal at all when at that age and still learning how to share. One thing about this aspect of human development is that when you're playing in a communal sandbox, you end up fighting over anything valuable whether you brought it, another playmate brought it, or if it was in the sandbox before you got there.

The one thing I remember consistently about fighting with other children unsupervised is that 9 times out of 10 something was broken apart.

 “The call has sounded for the creation of an international body to govern the Internet as a global resource. Such a move is expected to draw fierce opposition from the U.S., which holds firm to the belief that any change in the status quo would jeopardize the Internet's ability to function as a medium of free expression”

PubSub, a search tool for tracking what people are saying about the topics they care about, has announced an agreement with Cymfony, a provider of automated media analysis and marketing intelligence solutions…

…Cymfony will license PubSub's prospective search subscription services for use in Cymfony Orchestra, a market intelligence dashboard application that monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform.

Would anyone like a little Blogpulse with their Pubub? Interesting move, and definitely a winner for Cymfony.

I wonder if this will be a trend for Pubsub where their application will be available for private labeling to anyone. It would be interesting to see what other applications their prospective search could be plugged into.

According to the fifth annual 2005 PRWeek/Burson-Marsteller CEO Survey  about 7% of CEO's surveyed are actually blogging, and only 18% are planning to host a company blog in the next two years.

“Even though there is greater awareness of the power of blogs today, CEOs may feel that employees expect them to be spending their time running the business, meeting customers driving growth.”

Efficiency is the key word here. As an employee, I “feel” that CEO's should be spending their time running the business, meeting customers, and using an effective communications strategy to engage in conversations both internally and externally around the values and benefits of the corporation. A blog can potentially help streamline, account, provide relevance, and add transparency into these efforts significantly compounding results. 

…they are spending more time communicating “face-to-face” with employees with most saying they spend more than 41 percent of their time in this regard.

A CEO is only one person, and no matter how much of a Superstar they are (And I definitely consider Eliott to be one of them), they have “time and effect” constraints especially when employees can number in the hundreds or thousands. Giving them a blog provides the ability to have this same one to one conversation through a one to many medium, which should increase how many employees feel the net effect of having met with the CEO face to face no matter how much time that CEO has to do it.

“The CEO is the company's public face for many audiences, including Wall Street, the media, shareholders, and their own employees. Effective and consistent CEO communication builds credibility and strategic alignment with internal and external audiences,” said Julia Hood, PRWeek's editor-in-chief. “The real challenge for CEOs today is balancing the demand from stakeholders for responsive and timely communications.”

This is a very complicated environment to work in and each CEO will have to make their own call if the risks outweigh the rewards.  What I do know is that a Blog is a communication tool, and if used wisely will significantly increase results with your strategies both internally and externally.

It would take some pretty hard arguments to convince me to say no to that.

For the first time in my role as Biz-Dev for Blogware, these numbers truly surprised me even with the phenomenal growth in the market that we've all been watching for some time now. The Key findings from their executive summary say it all…

…89% of respondents are either blogging now or are planning to blog.

This was the sticker shocker for me, I assumed maybe 40% which would've been a significant success in my books compared to personal blogging that has fewer risks associated and therefore should have a much higher growth rate. When looking at the methodology for the survey it was open to the public and required opt-in with only 140 respondents, but it was pretty respectable in it's coverage of individual roles within organizations, business types, and the way it was marketed.

…More than 50% of respondents have launched one or more blogs in the last year. Less than 10% have been using blogs for more than 3 years.

This one wasn't so surprising. You would more than likely find similar ratios if surveying individual blog publishers. When I first took on this role about a year and a half ago, there were a little over 2 million blogs being tracked by technorati where today they're tracking over 20 million.

Adoption is being driven by specific business benefits from both internal (improved internal communications - 77.4%) and external (improved brand recognition - 78%) facing deployments.

Although as I discussed in my last article, the easiest way around an objection regarding risk is to get a company started with intranet blogging, external blogging has it's own risks and rewards that are definitely worth the effort to small businesses and even the largest ones. You can go ahead and ask Microsoft who is one of the biggest. Sun is also widely known to have thousands of public employee blogs.

They then lead into a lot of valuable information about utilization by number of employees and revenue showing that smaller business are willing to dive in sooner and take risks which makes sense. The real value for me came when looking at the data demonstrating how blogs are being used in both internal as well as external capacities and how.

The big winner for internal applications is communication. The uses listed by the respondents with percentages are:

-    Knowledge-sharing (63%)

-    Internal Communications (44%)

-    Project Management (30%)

-    Personal Knowledge Management (23%)

-    Event Logging (23%)

-    Team Management (20%)

The key benefits they enjoyed were cited as:

Improved Internal Communications (77%)

Replacement of Other Work Processes (41%)

Replacement of Email (39%)

External Blogging is a little clearer, where the primary benefits involve marketing and PR. The primary uses listed are:

-    PR/Marketing (61%)

-    Demonstration of Thought Leadership (61%)

The major benefits listed for these uses were:

Brand Recognition (78%)

External Communication (78%)

Vehicle for Customer Feedback (66%)

Improved Search Engine Ranking / Traffic (58%)

Generating Income (20%)

Well there you have it, this level of detail is difficult to refute and definitely invaluable when designing your marketing campaigns in this space.

Here's an interesting one to consider…

In other words, 9 per cent of a worker’s contracted time in a small business or company will be devoted to reading the online musings of unknown, established and personally known Web writers.

Hey, didn't someone say the same thing about a crazy medium called the Internet a few years back? How it will distract your work force into “surfing their productivity away” that caused managers and business owners to scramble?

IMHO, it “distracted” the work force so tremendously that it's changed all of our professional lives completely and increased productivity a million times across almost all spectrums of work related actvity.

So yes, be very afraid, blogging has that same potential to be just as revolutionary.

Happy Halloween!