48 hours until this disappears
Well, today I decided to do a little implied scarcity marketing. The economic situation is killing me. I mean I can still survive, but we can't do as much stuff as we used to. It's a good thing I've been saving 20% for times like this.
Anyways, my goal for this week was $900, and I'm sad to say I'm only at $600 right now; however, I do still have 2 days left.
Having a goal every week has really helped me focus more on the things that can make that goal come true. For example, I've been looking at my stats and know that unless I do something my goal for this week isn't going to come true.
So I decided to send out a newsletter. I'm in the middle of some massive changes to one of my sites so I decided to raise the price of the ebooks on there by 50%.
I sent out an email with a subject that said "48 hours until the price of our guides increase"
I think it's a nice catchy headline don't you?
In that email I told them because they were on my newsletter list I was going to give them 48 hours to get in and buy the guides before they went up in price by 50%. I'm sure you're thinking I'm crazy because they're going to get pissed off at me once they find out it isn't true.
Not quite. You see I actually AM going to raise the price, but I'm going to make the newsletter call to action stronger. I've noticed a shift lately from people who used to buy are now signing up for the newsletter as my newsletter subscription rate has tripled.
So, in the future the price on the site will be 50% higher than normal and sure some people may buy it, but I'm going to tell them instead to sign up for the newsletter. My newsletter autoresponder is fairly long and every third or fourth message there are going to be 2 new messages which are "48 hours our books are 50% off" and "24 hours left for 50% off on our guides".
It's been maybe 1 hour since I sent out that email and I've already earned almost $200. I hope I can hit my goal this week, but if I don't it will have been very close.
So remember, implied scarcity makes people buy because nobody likes to miss out on deals.
Why a recession is good for business
Well, it's now time for me to start writing in my blog again. I've had project after project going on and it became a forgotten piece of real estate on the net.
I've been thinking why this recession is good for my online business and I've finally come up with a good answer.
For the past two months my sales have dropped by something like 60%. Pretty scary isn't it? I mean, I went from almost 6k per month down to $1900. I was literally sh*tting bricks. I had grown accustomed to my business growing at least 10% per month and suddenly my whole years growth has gone down the drain.
Needless to say this motivated me to work even harder. After all, if you're online venture can survive a recession you can pretty much make money anytime you want to. That's the mindset that I've taken recently.
I've been doing a lot of marketing for my various websites including: article marketing, social marketing, and ramping up my newsletter.
Interestingly enough, my newsletter subscribers per day has nearly tripled. The sales that used to be coming straight from the search engines are now coming from the newsletter. I've ramped it up so that they get an email every day for 14 days and then I start to space them out. It's been working great.
I think the recession is good for my business because it forces me to focus only on the actions which make me money and not waste my time on other stuff. That means coming out of this recession I'll probably take a vacation because sales will skyrocket again.
I can't wait for that to happen. I'll hopefully be posting in here more from now on as I'd really like to get my blog up and running. It's goal will be to provide people with great information and to just share my thoughts.
Google Changing Adwords URL Structure
Well, it was a very fun day yesterday. It appears that Google has changed the URL structure of adwords links. For those people who collect Adwords data I'm sure you were as thrilled as I was when you saw that your script was searching 600 keywords per minute.
I was making changes to my server when it happened so I didn't immediately catch on, but after 2 cron runs not finding any ads I decided to investigate.
It appears that Google has decided to become a little more compliant and have added quotes around class declarations. They also changed the URL parameter from &adurl to the easy recognizable &q.
I've decided to release my rewritten function that will correctly match ads on the new URL structure. Please note that you'll have to add in a way to remove slashes if you're going to insert them into a database. (I've been fiddling around with that but it doesn't seem to be working). I should mention that this function is designed for http://google.com/sponsoredlinks?q=keyword. I haven't gotten around to fixing the natural search result functions yet. Enjoy.
Here is the working code:
<?php
function getSponsoredAds($str)
{
$spartstart = '<div id="tpa';
$spartend = '</div>';
$slinkstart = '<a id="pa';
$slinkend = '</a>';
$sdestlink = "&q=";
$scontentstart = '<font size="-1">';
$scontentend = '</font>';
$stxtcontentstart = '</span>';
$stxtcontentend = '</font>';
$sspanstart = '<span class="a">';
$sspanend = '</span>';
$ad = array();
$gad = array();
$desturl = array();
$dispurl = array();
$str = str_replace(array("\n","\r","\t","amp;"),array("","","",""),$str);
preg_match_all("|(".$spartstart."(.*)".$spartend.")|U",$str, $out);
for($x=0;$x<count($out[1]);$x++)
{
preg_match_all("|(".$slinkstart."(.*)".$slinkend.")|U",$out[1][$x], $out_1);
//var_dump($out_1);
preg_match_all("|<[aA].+[hH][rR][eE][fF]=.+&q=([^[>\s'\"]+)[\'\" >]|U",$out_1[1][0],$link, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
if (!isset($link[1][0]) || $link[1][0] == "")
preg_match_all("|<[aA].+[hH][rR][eE][fF]=.+&q=([^[>\s'\"]+)[\'\" >]|U",$out_1[1][0],$link, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
preg_match_all("|<[aA].+>(.+)</[aA]>|U",$out_1[1][0],$linktext, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
if (isset($link[1][0]) && $link[1][0] != "")
$ad["desturl"] = urldecode($link[1][0]);
else
{
$ad["desturl"] = "No URL";
}
$ad["subject"] = $linktext[1][0];
preg_match_all("|(".$scontentstart."(.*)".$scontentend.")|U",$out[1][$x], $out_1);
preg_match_all("|(".$stxtcontentstart."(.*)".$stxtcontentend.")|U",$out_1[1][0], $out_1);
$ad["body"] = $out_1[1][0];
preg_match_all("|(".$sspanstart."(.*)".$sspanend.")|U",$out[1][$x], $out_1);
$ad["dispurl"] = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($out_1[2][0]));
$ad["subject"] = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($ad["subject"]));
$ad["body"] = preg_replace("(<[bB][rR]([ ]+)?(/)?(remove this and brackets)>)", " ", $ad["body"]);
$ad["body"] = strip_tags(html_entity_decode($ad["body"]));
if ($ad["desturl"] != "")
{
$usgcode = strpos($ad["desturl"],"&usg=");
if ($usgcode !== false)
{
$ad["desturl"] = substr($ad["desturl"],0,$usgcode);
}
}
$gad[] = $ad;
}
return $gad;
}
?> 