May 19

I’m a great believer in having mentors and heroes that you look upto for inspiration.  I’ve got loads of them in all areas of my life - Richard Branson, Tony Robbins, Corey Rudl, Bill Gates, Allan Sugar, Jim Rohn - the list goes on and on!

But when it comes to marketing one of my top virtual mentors is Seth Godin. I don’t know Seth personally although I have spoken with him via email.  This guy is pretty much a legend in marketing terms and practically invented the notion of ‘permission marketing’ i.e. where you get permission from your prospects to market to them.

So What Does This Have To With Mis-selling And P***ing Off Prospects?

Well that’s just it - Seth is a hero of mine but what I’m about to tell you shows that even the big guns don’t get it right all the time!

I got an email from Seth (I’m on his list - permission marketing in action!) and in it he said:

"Best of all, you can get my new eBook at no charge… see the blog for details."

Sounds great right?  So I clicked through to his blog looking for the free eBook.  This is what I saw:

"Yes, it costs $9, or you can get it for free. You can get it for free by purchasing two copies of my new book from 800 CEO READ."

Great.  So he got me to click through to his blog with the promise of the free eBook. Good move.  But wait a second.  It’s not free at all is it?  Not really.  I’ve got to buy TWO of his products to get the eBook for free.

This p***ed me off.  It’s like being told you can get four brand new Pirelli tyres for FREE as long as you buy the Ferrari that comes attached to them.

"But Isn’t It Just A Clever Way Of Selling?"

No!  Okay admittedly there will be people out there who click on the link and then get sucked into buying the products in order to get the free eBook.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that by making the free eBook the primary focus of his email he will be attracting totally the WRONG kind of visitors to his site - namely those that are looking for free stuff!

By then saying you can only get it for free by buying something he hits these visitors with a double sucker-punch!  It’s like advertising your website using words that include ‘free’ and ‘costs nothing’ but then expecting to attract people that want to spend their hard cash for products or services.  It won’t work.

So I guess Seth has taught me a valuable lesson again after all!

May 5

The good old boffins at Google Towers have come up with an ingenious way to help you view web pages quicker.

The Google Web Accelerator uses a bunch of nifty techniques to make web pages appear on your screen in less time.  The end result is time saved for you!

How Does It Work?

Always a good question.  I’ll let the Google boffins explain:

"Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
Compressing data before sending it to your computer."

Every Second Counts..

After you’ve downloaded and installed the software (which takes a few seconds so Google already OWE you time before you’ve started!) the tool just runs in the background.  There’s a little clock icon that appears on your tool bar showing you how much time you’ve saved, it’s a nice gimmick.

For the first couple of hours I used it I saved a whopping 4.7 seconds!  This might not sound a lot but use the Internet for 12 hours a day for a year and twelve months from now I’ll have saved 3 hours.  Now all I need to do is work out what I’m going to do with all that extra time..

The Down Side..

Two sides to every story etc..  The down side to this tool is that Google uses it to store information about surfing activities so be sure to read the Privacy Statement if you’re a member of the conspiracy theory gang:

"When you use Google Web Accelerator, Google servers receive and log your page requests .. It is possible that some personally identifiable information could be sent to Google, if the information is sent without using an encrypted (HTTPS) connection."

The Google Web Accelerator
http://webaccelerator.google.com