MarketingSherpa Blog

I defy you to find a press contact anywhere on Amazon’s Web site. In this day and age when offline companies are scrambling to improve their online press centers in order to increase internal efficiencies (and generate more favorable media attention), the company that’s synonymous with the commercial possibility of the Web, doesn’t have anything but a bunch of press releases with contact names stripped out in their Investor Relations center. Freakish.

John McCumber, a sales exec at Virtumundo, Inc., emailed over in response to my 8/21/01 semi-rantish Blog on being spammed by CPA media brokers. He says, “Instead of deleting them, send them to me. My company makes a fortune running “good” CPA deals to our users and registrants and I’ll take all the CPA deals I can get.” His email is jmccumber@virtumundo.com.

Does this mean I’ll cease to be spammed with notes like this one from today’s in-box? “Are you tired of waiting for commission checks that never arrive?I know I was until I came across the program below. The commissions are paid on the spot. A new company pays an amazing ten dollars per referral. Paid immediately into your e-gold account. No waiting for commission checks.”

Nah, the spam is neverending as long as there are sites out there hungry — and naive enough — to bite. Delete, delete, delete.

Just got back from coffee with Hollis Thomases who heads up the WebAdvantage.net agency. Her marketplace trend gut is better than anyone’s I know. So I asked her when she thought the online advertising world would begin to see an upswing again. Everybody who thought it would be Sept has seen their hopes dashed as August closes with far lower than expected pre-bookings.

Hollis said she thinks i-ads will do very well in late 4th quarter. Why? Because marketers are holding back from all media buys right now, waiting for risk to pass. Then at the end of this year they’ll need to do something fast to get their sales up and spend whatever’s left in their fiscal budget. And Internet marketing is far more quick, cheap and easy than offline media tends to be. She could be right. Lots of online publishers I know saw a little unexpected flurry of similar activity last Dec.

Wahoo! SherpaBlog got its first official media mention. And a fine one it is too. Thank you Debbie Weil and ClickZ!

I’ve been a bit of a wireless naysayer. (As in ‘Don’t get too excited, this won’t be a major marketing tool for a few years yet.) But today I saw the power of PDAs in action, when I met Jeanne Jennings, Director of eMail product Development for Cahners Business Media for lunch.

As I came running up (late as usual) she was standing at the metro stop with her little Blackberry out, reading the MarketingSherpa issue I had just published! I mean, I hit the publish button, ran out the door and there she is reading it on the street. How fun is that?

Jeanne gave me a great tip to share with you: If you are sending email campaigns to a demographic that’s likely to own wireless devices (such as IT pros, teens, and many folks in Europe and Asia), make sure the list service you use automatically sniffs out what platform recipients are reading each different email you send. Because sometimes they might read email at their computer and sometimes on their Palm. If your email “sniffer” program only checks once when people first join a list, it won’t be able to adjust to serve text-only when needed. And the LAST thing you want to do is send HTML email to a wireless device such as a Blackberry. It just looks like gobbledegook.

So, even if folks checked the HTML option when they join your list (or rental file) it doesn’t mean they can always receive HTML. You gotta check every time.

One of the marketers featured in our Case Studies this week just emailed me to say she’s gotten two job offers — out of the blue — because people were impressed with what we wrote about her. And she’s not looking.

I guess it’s kinda like being Elvis and getting marriage proposals from strangers.

The whole CPA (cost per acquisition) world is dominating my email inbox these days. I, like most web publishers whose email addresses are publically available on their sites, am being spammed like crazy from folks repping CPA deals. Typical emails have subject lines like, “Our company wants to make money with your company” or “Advertising Inquiry.”

Then they explain how if only Sherpa will offer our readers their credit card, long distance phone service, merchant account, insurance program, mortgage application service … or some other shyster-esque service, they’ll pay me BIG BUCKS monthly, no minumum or maximum limit!

When I first got these emails a few months ago, I figured they were really dumb sales reps, so I’d write nice little notes saying “We’re not in your target market, and we don’t accept CPA.” Now the trickle is a flood and I just hit delete.

All in all it’s risky business. This new unsavory CPA world.

When was the last time you revisited your email newsletter’s “Welcome” note? It’s awfully easy to whip up a note “Thank you for subscribing, etc.” on the spur of the moment when you first start a newsletter, and then to forget entirely about it forevermore.

I just revisited Sherpa’s Welcome letters for the first time since we launched. And oh yeah, there are improvements to make. Stuff like:

– Rewording the editorial and privacy policy summaries so they fit our current letters
– Adding in links to “Best of” articles or white papers to drive folks back to the site
– Adding in a special offer for new subscribers on behalf of a marketing partner or our own site’s store.

What made me think of this? I just subscribed to EditorandPublisher.com’s newsletter and they have no Welcome letter at all beyond the yucky Lyris “subscribed as” message. Oops.

Thanks to everyone for your positive feedback on last week’s special Job Seekers issue! Here are three notes from readers:

1. Bobbing4jobs.com
http://www.bobbing4jobs.com/
This is not a jobs site per say, but rather a links site that points to dozens of other major jobs sites. So why add it to this list? Because it includes the best list of general Canadian job sites we’ve seen. If you’re up in the great North, go for it! [Suggested by MarketingSherpa Reader Peter Jackman]

2. Brilliant People – Management Recruiters [Amended Listing]
http://www.brilliantpeople.com
Although we got more than 1,000 results when we checked the “Marketing” jobs in this site cited as one of “Forbes Best of the Web” the vast majority of them are in sales, which is frustrating to sort through if you are a marketing specialist. Kim Ferraioli, VP Management Recruiters, wrote in to advise, “You can search by job or by recruiter specialty. The specialties can be very broad as well so I suggest to people that they search by job and look at the recruiters who have positions that would be of interest to them and contact those recruiters directly to establish a relationship.”

3. Marketing job seeker, Alison Mittelstadt, who co-edited the original report, sent in an update on the world out there:

“After aggressively posting my resume to about 20 different job boards and contacting all the headhunters on your list and then some, I am not too optimistic about relying on these avenues to generate real leads. Many of the job boards have old, outdated postings and often when I have heard back from a particular company (which is the exception, not the rule), the position has been filled, even though the job board listing is still active. The headhunters, and particularly those who are marketing-or advertising-focused, are really hurting right now. Most of them do not have active engagements from their client companies.

“So what’s the solution?

“I am writing very personalized, very targeted letters to top managers at companies where I’d like to work and networking a lot–having friends pass along my resume to folks they know, and in many cases, people I’ve never met and whom I’ve contacted at someone else’s suggestion have been very receptive and helpful to me. I’ve had about ten informational interviews this way, and a number of ‘if the economy picks up, we’ll hire again in the fall and we will certainly consider you’ remarks.”

I was personally underwhelmed with Biz 2.0s first new cover — I mean come on, three middle-aged white male executives in blue button-down shirts with the headline, “The Revolution Lives”???? It’s not that positioning yourself to appeal to the Fortune 1000 is bad, it’s just using the word “Revolution” with that imagery. (And um, yeah “Revolution” magazine is dead.)