Tim and Kevin from Glenn McElhose on Vimeo.
This is a brilliant video on some of the cool things you can do to research your marketing using Pay-Per-Click ads. In fact, you can even name companies or products purely by letting the market show you what name they want.
If you’re not familiar with Kevin Rose or Tim Ferriss, you probably know about them but didn’t realize it. Kevin Rose is the founder of Digg.com, the leading social bookmarking platform. Tim Ferriss is the author of “The 4-Hour Work Week”.
It turns out that Tim originally planned to name the book “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit”, but that got axed while they were setting up distribution arrangements. (I still don’t understand WHY Wal-Mart had a problem with it…)
Tim has a background in website analytics, so he put that skill to use when choosing the name of “The 4-Hour Work Week.” Specifically, what Tim did was run a simple AdWords split-test with a number of potential titles and subtitles, and then picked the headline and subtitle combination with the best click-through rate. That led him to the title “The 4-Hour Work Week”, and he didn’t have to rack his brain and “guess” what the best title should be.
If you listen closely, you will pick up some KILLER tricks for different ways you can do testing, both on-line and off-line.
Once you have a business or product name, and you have the product built, Tim believes that the next thing to focus on is conversion (the percentage of people that actually do what you want them to do, such as buy something). Once you have conversion under control, then it’s time to drive hard with building traffic.
If you do this 1-2 punch (conversion-then-traffic), you’re front-loading your entire business. You’ve done the hard work of figuring out what your customers want and delivering it in the best way for them. Then, when you start pushing hard on the traffic, your profits will shoot through the roof.
About 10 minutes into the video, Tim talks about a chat he had with Mike Shinoda (of the band Linkin Park). The reason why Linkin Park is spelled the way it is because they wanted a dot.com domain name, and lincolnpark.com was already taken. (It’s a parked page now.)
In the last half of their presentation, they talk about their experience in Business Advisory and Angel Investing. If you want to get inside the mind of an angel, they give some really good ideas of what they look for when they are evaluating companies and looking for businesses to invest in.
It’s awesome content, and I would LOVE to see them continue to do these videos! The next one I see, I will be posting it here to the blog.
-Kris
(Via HighEdWebTech)
Amazing video… I transcripted out all the great info and advice Tim and Kevin had to share, check it out http://tinyurl.com/cpaw8o
Comment by Chris McCann — May 5, 2009 @ 3:41 am
I have been using Adwords for the last 2 years and i can only say that it increased my online sales by about 20%. The pay per click cost of Adwords is even cheaper than Adbrite. I love Adwords.
Comment by Jacnette — November 17, 2009 @ 10:41 am