Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

This post is Internet-marketing based… but with a twist.

“Abercrombie & Fitch”, the US retailer, opened a store in London recently. Apparently, they are pricing their goods in their UK store at “pound for dollar”… which means an item in their London store would cost £50, but in their US stores the same item would cost $50. Here’s the story, from the Telegraph.

Now I’m not a financial genius, but I know that an exchange rate of $2 to £1 means that the UK prices should be half the US prices.

By setting the actual amounts the same, regardless of currency, the British are actually paying twice as much as the Americans for the same goods.

It seems that Abercrombie & Fitch are aware of the issue. Their reponse? To block people from Britain accessing their USA website. Clicking on Abercrombie.com takes me to uk.abercrombie.com.

Nice.

(of course, you could always use a proxy server to see the site, if you were really interested)

So, is blocking site access by IP-address or geo-location to support differential pricing a valid Internet marketing method? What do you think?

According to the Telegraph story…

—
Mike Kramer, Abercrombie & Fitch’s CFO, said that the London pricing followed careful scrutiny of the UK market.

“We did a lot of research looking at other brands in London and how they are priced, and we want to price our brand accordingly. We are an aspirational brand, and want to price ourselves as such,” he said.

Kramer added that prices are “continually” under review.

He said that the decision to block UK consumers from the company’s US website was a deliberate tactic “because the pricing is different”.
—

Hmmm. I’m not sure I’m buying that.

Literally.

How many people trying to earn money through Adsense have actually checked out the Google Adsense Help Center?

I wonder.

Lots of people follow “guru’s” expensive advice… but the Adsense Help Center is free.

There’s a ton of helpful information. And it doesn’t have to be filtered through your “guru-talk” filter… this is straight guidance from Google. If you want to be a successful Adsense advertiser, you should check it out.

Alice Seba, owned of InternetBasedMoms.com has put it up for sale at SitePoint.com.

Alice is well respected in the Internet marketing world… and her website is one of the top Work At Home Mom sites online. Currently there are no bids… because this is a brand new listing. If you’re thinking of buying an online business instead of building one, the “buy out price” is $98,000… or you could try to win the auction. My guess is someone will snap up the site at the buy out price. In the last year the site earned 37,353.88 from Adsense alone!

When something goes wrong with my regular email account (which does happen once in a while… especially when I’ve had my online business for a decade), I switch to my Gmail account. (Here’s where to sign up for an account)

Sometimes, it’s not even that something goes wrong with my email account, it may be that an email from my server doesn’t get through to the customer for whatever reason (over-zealous spam filters, spam blacklists). With a Gmail account, I can log in and try to get an email through to the customer a second way… and potentially get to the customer before they get concerned that I’ve “taken their money but not sent the product”.

I used my Gmail quite extensively after my server died. As soon as I got the domain up and running again I just forwarded all email going to “anything @ scamfreezone.com” to my Gmail account.

But, Gmail isn’t as good at filtering out spam as the Cloudmark Desktop plugin I had running in Outlook.

Hmmm, what to do?

Well, fortunately, Gmail allows you to access your email via POP (meaning you don’t have to actually log in to your Gmail account via your web-browser, you can login and manage your email from your desktop application such as Outlook or Outlook express).

So, I’ve just set my Gmail account to allow POP access, entered the details into Outlook and am now happily checking my email via my desktop.

And the best bit? Gmail filters the incoming email for spam, then lets me download it… at which point Cloudmark filters the incoming email. Bingo. Double spam filtration… and a lot less work for me clicking the delete button.

I couldn’t let this pass…

Mike Filsaime’s latest email…

Subject line: “About StomperNet & How I Really Feel”

Body: “I have many fiends in the industry.”

Hehe. Mike, that could be a typo.

Several months ago (January actually) there was a huge 24-hour promotion for Stompernet. It seemed that anyone who promoted Stompernet as a joint venture partner also became a faculty member… part of the team of experts working on the inside of Stompernet. In fact, only faculty members, staff and advisors of Stompernet were allowed to promote it.

I remember Leslie Rhode closing down his OptiSmarts membership site and throwing his weight behind Stompernet… and Michael Campbel became a Stompernet “advisor”, though, fortunately, he didn’t close down his excellent 8-year old Internet Marketing Secrets newsletter. (note to Michael, can we please search your blog!)

Well, now there’s proof that Stompernet works. You can watch a movie created by a Stompernet member who went from zero to $15,000 per month in online sales. Apparently he did it in only 2 hours per day… not a bad success story at all!

Here’s the link to the video to learn more.

Question: What’s worth $3.1 billion in cash?

Answer: DoubleClick… Google’s latest acquisition.

This purchase by Google is close to double (ahem, no pun intended) what Google paid for YouTube ($1.65 billion in stock) back in October 2006.

So… if this trend continues, will you be the person to sell something to Google for $6 billion in cash in October 2007?

In a clarification issued today, Mike Deeringer of AdSense Publisher Support had this to say about “traffic exchange programs”…

“We understand that our publishers are always looking for ways to attract interested users to their sites. But using third-party tools or services to increase your site traffic may lead to invalid clicks or impressions and result in your account being disabled. For this reason, we’d like to provide you with some guidance about this.

As many of you already know, our program policies strictly prohibit any means of artificially generating ad impressions or clicks, including third-party services such as paid-to-click, paid-to-surf, auto-surf, and click-exchange programs. These programs offer incentives for users to view web pages or click on ads, resulting in activity that is harmful to our advertisers.

We occasionally receive questions from publishers interested in using traffic exchanges to bring traffic to their site. While these services may help advertise your site, we don’t recommend using them, as they may also result in similar invalid activity. We realize that you may have questions about a specific traffic service and whether it could potentially create invalid impressions or clicks. However, please understand that we’re unable to comment on any particular third-party service.”

Hmmm, I wonder where that leave Adwords and other Pay Per Click search engines?

Oh, and what about an offline Billboard ad? Isn’t that encouraging people to visit your site who may, gasp, click on an Adsense ad?

I don’t get what the fuss is about. As long as you don’t encourage people to click your ads, or mislead them into clicking your ads, what business is it of Google’s to decide how you get your visitors?

I guess, since they’re now referring to “ad impressions” as well as “clicks”, they can dictate what type of traffic you get to your site.

Wow. Did laptops crash in price, or is it just my perception?

Yesterday I bought a brand new, whizzy laptop for just $800. (and that’s factoring in 17.5% VAT [rip off!] and a shocking exchange rate of 2 dollars to the pound, otherwise it would’ve been a lot cheaper).

Anyhow. I thought it was incredibly cheap… compared to the last laptop I bought in 1999.

Then I had a think about it. Since 1999 I’ve moved house (4 times) had 2 children, paid off half a million bucks of mortgage debt and lost my ponytail.

I think it’s not surprising laptop technology has improved and fallen in price while that lot happened. I just didn’t notice.

Hmmm, I think I see someone modeling themselves on the success of the “Rich Jerk” brand.

Ok, let’s cut through the marketing talk and get straight to the facts.

Have you built some sites with the idea of making money from Adsense?

Have those sites made much money?

If not, then you may want to check out another way of monetizing those sites… a method that many people have overlooked, but that the “lazy git” has used to “earn $649 a month for 17 months with just a few minutes work each week.”

This information isn’t going to cost you a fortune. If you use this technique on your sites and start making some money from them, wouldn’t that info be worth a few bucks to you?

I’d say, yes.

Click here to find out more about this overlooked way of making money from your websites.

For anyone who’s interested in MMORPG’s (massive, multiplayer online role-playing games), the launch of Lord Of The Rings Online is a big event. LOTRO (as it’s known to its players) is a highly anticipated MMORPG set in Tolkien’s fantasy world.

What’s interesting, from an Internet marketing point of view, is how the marketing rollout of LOTRO has been handled. It’s been a multi-stage process… which can easily be adapted to selling your own products online.

Instead of just saying, “here’s the game, come and play”, the phases of launch have been…

1: Stress testing. (a few players who had to apply to help test the server load)
2: Pre-Order Beta (more players, but only those who had pre-ordered the game)
3: Open Beta (a few weeks free play, available to anyone.. starts today I believe.)
4: Game launch (the retail pack ships and is available in stores)

If you paid $10 for the Pre-Order pack, you get a special “Founder Offer” including unique in-game items (Enchanted Cloak of Regeneration, Ring of Agility), the chance to explore the world before everyone else and the chance to “lock in” early pricing of either $9.95 per month or $199 lifetime play… plus your character will “roll over” into the full launch… so you won’t have to start afresh. You still need to purchase the full retail box ($50 approximately) to redeem the Founder Offer, but I can imagine that early game access and discounts on pricing is an enticing proposition for many people.

If that sounds like “early bird discounts” or “first come first served bonuses” to you, then you are probably already aware of Internet marketing tactics used during the launch of new products. It’s interesting, to me, to see a MMORPG launch using similar tactics… rewards for being one of the first customers.

Of course, this ties in very nicely with my Insider Rollout Secrets product where I describe making sales of $250,000 from an ebook launch.

Michael Cheney said, referring to Insider Rollout Secrets, “I’ll be honest with you - I studied it word for word over and over and applied everything from it to my own launch.”

And what did Michael do? Yes, make $250,000 in sales within seven days during his Adsense Videos launch.