This and That on a Friday
Posted On: 2006-12-08
Craziness, tin foil hats and what's hot in marketing right now
Here it is, 6am on a Friday morning and Steve and I are hard at work. Who said that working for yourself meant more money and less work than if you were working for someone else?
I bet we're no different to any one of hundreds of other adult ... and mainstream ... webmasters who are working the same long hours that we are and are happy to be doing it too.
I know that lots of people come into this industry in the belief that they won't have to work hard and they will make lots of money but I wonder how many of those people stick around for very long. We always knew that working for ourselves and succeeding in this industry was going to be a lot of hard work so early starts and late finishes don't bother us at all and they don't seem to bother anyone else who is succeeding either.
It seems to me that if you hit this business without those preconceived ideas of luxury and leisure you're more likely to last in the industry and achieve your goals too.
Google's watching Gmail emails
I heard a rumor a week or two ago that Google was actively tracking links embedded in emails that were sent to Gmail addresses. When we first signed up for a Gmail account I seem to recall reading something in the Terms of Service that gave them permission to peek into your emails so it's probably something we should have expected.
Even so, to find proof that Google is tracking those links does tend to leave a rather nasty taste in your mouth. The proof I'm talking about came to light just the other day when a well-known SEO Webmaster went to click on a link in an email in his Gmail account.
After some moments' hesitation it returned a 500 error because he happened to be using a proxy. As soon as he turned the proxy off the link worked perfectly so he sent an email to himself with a link to one of his own sites. When he clicked that link and then checked his click stream data there was clear evidence that Google had redirected the click through their own servers before they sent it on to the site that had been requested.
So what else does Google harvest from our emails?
I guess if you don't want Google to know what you're doing then don't talk about it in an email that might end up being redirected to a Gmail account.
Refinancing might be heating up
If you're dabbling in mainstream then it seems that mortgage refinancing could be something to look at right now. It seems that applications for home mortgage finance rose sharply last week spurred on by a slight drop in home mortgage interest rates.
Human beings always seem to love a bargain and even though those rates may have only fallen 0.15 per cent that has taken the figure below 6% and, as we all know - or should know - just the sniff of a saving will encourage people to buy. If you're selling widgets at $6.00 each you are never going to sell as many as the guy who is selling the same widget for $5.98 or $5.99.
It's interesting to note though that even though the mortgage market may be heating up we don't seem to be getting as much mortgage spam email as we once did.
Marketing is a crazy industry
Let me leave you with this little puzzle to contemplate over the weekend. The American Marketing Association ran a survey recently to see how consumers feel about consumer-generated ads. The survey compared how people felt about advertising from companies that used the sort of creatives that we are all used to with those that included consumer-generated creatives in their marketing. (If you don't know what a consumer-generated is just check Google for consumer created ad)
The first finding was that, overall, consumers feel that companies that use customer generated advertising were more creative and more customer friendly than those who used the more traditional form of advertising.
The second finding was that consumers under 25 feel that companies that use customer generated advertising are less trustworthy, less socially responsible and less friendly than companies who continue to use the more traditional forms of advertising.
I guess that just goes to show that you cannot please all the people all of the time.
So I hope you all have a great weekend. Here in Australia we are expecting to see a whole bunch of bush fires join up to form one single 800 kilometre front down in Victoria while here in Queensland it's raining and there are signs beginning to appear that a tropical cyclone could be forming. It should be an interesting few days.
See you back here on Monday.