Seth Godin’s Joy/ Cash Curve shows that for many products, the more you pay, the less fun the buying is.
The Y-axis here is actually ‘Net Joy’ or ‘Total Joy minus Total Pain’. While increasing the ‘Joy Factor’ may help a little, the problem, and the solution, lies in the ‘Pain Factor’.
The purchase process for high-ticket-size products like cars or houses is painful typically because of three reasons - the length of the purchase cycle, the amount and complexity of paperwork and the tendency to undercut the main product and make money on the extras.
I don’t think that entertaining the customer, as Seth Godin suggests, will solve the problem. Making the purchase process shorter, more transparent and more off-the-shelf will.
Search Engine Optimization is essential if you want the search engine traffic to flow to your blog. As SEO requires at least a little understanding of coding, most non-techie bloggers - including myself - ignore it and decide to focus on content itself.
I have just started doing some SEO on my blog and feel overwhelmed by the number of SEO must-do lists on the web.
Google Webmaster Central and Darren Rowse’s non-techie introduction to SEO at ProBlogger are the perfect places to begin for newbies looking for SEO tips. You might also consider heading over to SearchGrit for some free customized SEO advice from Mario Alexandrou.
I don’t even know how to implement half the basic SEO-fixes Mario has suggested - including fixing my broken sitemap - and will probably end up calling Ajay or Saket for help.
Best advice ever for novice bloggers - if you don’t know enough about coding, make sure that you have at least two friends who do. 
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Update 1 - I figured out how to fix my sitemap by myself.
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
As part of its Pay Per Action (PPA) limited beta, Google is also offering a new text link format ad unit that allows publishers to embed link ads within their normal text, therefore blurring the line between content and ads.
What’s more, Google has probably bundled the two entirely unrelated offerings together to play down its potentially controversial entry into the advertorial space. It seems that Google doesn’t mind being a little evil anymore.
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
Not satisfied with its dominance of the online advertising business, Google now wants to leverage its AdWords technology into TV, radio and print advertising.
No wonder the traditional media companies are wary!
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
Adsense and other affiliate programs work best with a technology or product blog. If you have a content or opinion blog, you should focus on how to earn money because of your blog rather than from it. Your ability to make money from these methods is a result of your profile and perceived expertise within your chosen niche and consulting, book deals, job opportunities, speaking opportunities and offline writing gigs are some of the possibilities that blogging can open for you.
After a successful stint in sales and distribution management, I’m moving into a brand management role. What better time to start a new category called ‘The Next Marketing Guru’ that will feature my thoughts on building brands online and offline.
And, if I do become the next marketing guru, you can say that you heard about it first here.
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
I have been following the heated debate on whether newspapers are dead with much amusement because I haven’t read a newspaper for a few months now. I do all my reading online, via my four hundred feeds, because I like to be able to link to what I have read.
I also don’t watch TV anymore, and prefer to watch my favorite shows on YouTube.
I still read books offline, and watch movies on DVD, but with advances in e-book and streaming technology, I’m not sure how long that will last.
I’m not a techie myself and I’m sure that increasingly more people - especially in the same highly sought-after demographics as mine - are making similar choices.
On one hand, we have marketers who are increasingly more unhappy with the ability of traditional media to target specific segments. On the other hand, we have an increasingly popular, but under-used, medium that thrives on targeting segments of one. Unless newspapers and TV channels learn to deal with this new reality, they will see advertising budgets being re-allocated away from them.
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
From the Mid-Day article on me I earlier wrote about -
Gaurav’s matrimonial-ish introduction reads: Male, 27, sometimes single. Tall, dark, intermittently handsome.
A friend-lover was very amused at the “matrimonial-ish” bit, and, when I dismissed it as mere journalistic excess, pointed out that I have not only fantasized about blog groupies and posted an open invitation to my women readers, but also dated at least two bloggers.
Even with such undeniable evidence against me, I maintain that my blog is not a matrimonial ad.
A dating ad? Well…
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
From a study reported on Science Daily -
People are less able to recall the brand of products advertised during programs with a lot of sexual content, than if the advert is placed in similar program that has no sexual content.
Men had higher recall of the brand of products whose ads contained sexual images than ads that did not. Women on the other hand were actively put off by sexual content in ads.
So, if you are selling something almost exclusively to men, like sports cars, make a sexy ad and put it between non-sexy content to ensure that it stands out by contrast. But if you are selling something that is not so narrowly targeted, like bathroom tiles, please don’t use sex and turn off the women.
Guy Kawasaki wonders if the findings are also applicable to websites. Of course they are! If I’m looking at sexy women, why would I look at ads anyway!
Thursday, March 29th, 2007
Smashing Magazine has compiled an excellent list of Google Adsense facts, FAQs, tips and tools.
I’ll be implementing some of these tips on my blog starting today. Let’s see if I can increase the $1.5 to $2 per day that I’m making now to $10 per day within a month.
Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
My two minutes in the limelight - Mid-Day did a full page piece on me today, using my blog as an example of how to make money online.
Well, I don’t make all that much money from my blog and I’m not an expert on blogging either, but I like sharing what I have learned as part of my Novice Blogger series.
Next up - based on my advice on Mid-Day - my top ten blogging mistakes and how you can avoid making them.
