A few weeks ago, i went to the casino for the first time. Although its a local casino (Sky City Auckland if you care), and aint exactly Las Vegas., most of the marketing principles are the same. These guys literally are doing everything within their power to get you to sit down and play games non stop, without thinking about the money, without thinking about the time you spend in there.

The first thing you have to know. Is that of all the casino games available, Slots/Pokie machines have the worst odds for the general player. Just for the record, I stuck in about 60NZD into those things and didn’t win once. No free spins, not even like winning $2. Although by law over here, Slots have to pay out around 70% of what they take in. I think it could be lower, and in places like Vegas it is far lower then that. So if you stick in $100, you are expect to get out $70. Although that usually wont happen, and it will all be pooled till some lucky SOB wins everything that the suckers put in.

Game’s like Roulette or Blackjack, although still fairly shitty odds. IMO, they have a better chance of winning for a casual player. I played Blackjack for a bit, and gained like $100 in the 10 minutes i played. And then i walked away happy. The main difference is that Blackjack, you have small wins and loses, and you can play there for hours holding about even. But slots will chew $20 up in 5 minutes. So with that being said, the casino managers want as many people playing slots as they can.

So as soon as you walk into the casino, the first thing you notice is all the lights are dimmed. Its almost like a dank place. Hardcore gamblers will tell you its to do with people gambling away their families home and not wanting to be seen, but in all reality, its to brighten up the Slots. You see the slots have neon lights all around the things, and they are crazy bright. Not only that, but when you walk in, there is walls and walls of slots before you can get to the regular gaming tables. They are literally trying to force you to play a couple of games.

I ofcourse avoided these and kept walking to the tables, but after a few games i decided to get something to eat. Now here is the thing, the casino has like a fully functional restaurant RIGHT in the middle of the slot machines. You can buy things like mashed potato, steak, sausages, anything that you would cook at home, to feel at home, you can buy here. There is two reasons the restaurant is in the middle of the slots.

1. You don’t leave the casino to get food. Seriously the amount of choices (You could get chinese, indian and italian food) you have you would never leave the casino. Leaving the casino at 3am, would usually mean your not coming back. Even if you thought you were, by the time you get food in you, usually you cant be bothered walking back to the casino/bar (Trust me!).

2. You can hear “Cha-Ching” all around you.

That’s something else about slots. They are quiet as hell when your playing them. Just the ticking noise of the bars rolling over. But when you win, even if its only $2. You and everyone else within a 20 foot radius of you knows about it. And so while your sitting there eating, all you can hear is “winners” all around you. Making you think that it is the easiest game to win and play.

Ofcourse there is the usual ploys aswell. There is obviously no windows in a casino, they don’t want you knowing how long you’ve been there. So when you see the sun starting to rise your like “O shit been here too long”. And ofcourse no clocks either. Ontop of that, they do little sneaky things. They have TV’s all around (albeit no sound), so if your bored and want to have a beer, you can sit and watch a sports game. But the channels shown are ALWAYS non time specific. By that i mean, that you know the News is on at 6pm every night. So if you saw that, you know what time it is. Obviously they wouldn’t be showing the news in the casino. But they make sure that the TV channel gives no indication of what time it is.

What’s this all got to do with landing pages? Well two things really.

1. Dont give any reason for your visitor to leave your site/landing page. Just like the restaurant in a casino, they make everything available so you don’t have to leave. Hell they even have cheap cheap hotel rooms so you don’t have to go home.

2. Always funnel your visitors to your most profitable package. Give them the choice of the most profitable first, and then give them cheaper packages. You still want to get a sale of any type, but the more you focus on them buying the most profitable, the better off you will be.

If you really want, head over to your local casino and check it out. Don’t go in there to gamble hard, just to take a look around and see how they maintain/control their customers actions extremely well. There is a bunch of smaller things that i haven’t written in here that are still integral to a casino’s profitability. But check em out for yourself.

As most of you know, I’m in the process of finding a job to expand my knowledge in the C#/.net development area. The job hunt is going semi alright, well, i still haven’t found one yet. Which for the most part isn’t that worrying because i’m getting one to expand my knowledge and work on larger projects, not because I’m sick of Internet Marketing. With that being so, I haven’t really busted my balls applying for jobs that don’t really suit. I’ve only really applied for ones that i think I would really really enjoy working for. As a side note, I’ve had an interview + communication with a Paypal like company that operates in New Zealand. They are basically an online payment gateway, and apparently (From people I’ve spoken to), easily the best in the country. I don’t really want to name them, but anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

One thing I’ve known for a long time, is that some of the best jobs don’t get listed online. Recruitment companies have hundreds of CV’s on file, and usually call existing clients rather then go through a bunch of interviews with no hopers. With that in mind I’ve been calling them directly, no more BS waiting online for things to get listed.

At first I have to admit, I was pretty nervous. There is lots of talk lately about “Blacklists“. Which basically means that if you go to an interview, and BS your way through it, or you are obviously a dickhead. You get placed on a blacklist which is shared around between companies/employers/recruiters. So that when you apply for jobs later on, they don’t bother getting back to you cause they already know your a retard.  In New Zealand its actually illegal, much like discriminating against looks and race. I mean your not supposed to, but if your running a call center, can you really afford to “not” discriminate against another race if their accent is going to get in the way?   Your not supposed to, but it happens.

I thought for sure that if i call them and either sound real cocky, or come across as too confident, that I might have one of those black marks next to my name. But to my surprise when i called them, they were really bending over backwards to accommodate me. I think I had forgotten the most important thing, these people are making a living off me. Matching me with a job could earn them thousands. And by talking to me on the phone, they aren’t losing anything…

Forgetting about the blacklists for a second, if i call them and it doesn’t go well and they say “sorry, nothing matches your profile”. Then what have i lost? 10 minutes later someone else will call them and probably get the same reply. These guys do it for a living so it all mashes into one and they will never remember your name.

This is super true for one recruitment company that i think almost all of my friends have been through. Years ago when i finished my System Engineering qualifications, i was applying for a tonne of jobs to do with Microsoft Networking and Administration.  It was almost a running joke between me and my friends, that this one guy from a rather large recruitment company, would always call us and talk to us on the phone. And then say the infamous “Ok will get back to you” or “I’ll forward on the details”. Ofcourse that never happened. And it wasn’t just me, everyone got the run around from this guy.  I’m sure he did put notes down for our calls, but so often he would call us up for other job opportunities, or we would call his company and get him, and he wouldn’t recognise us at all.

Funnily enough I even got this same guy, that i had spoken to all that time ago, on the phone a couple of days ago. And once again, he didn’t remember me (Not that i prompted him or tried to remind him). And he forwarded me on a job profile that he thought fitted well with what i was after. (Although i’m just waiting for the “Ill get back to you” line).

It reminded me alot of how online, people seem afraid to contact others to do ventures together. Or to co-promote. Ofcourse things have to be win-win for it to work. But most of the time people are more then happy to gather another stream of income.  Personally, people have come to me with an application idea and said, “I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, but I didn’t want to just come out of the blue to you”. Why not?

Chances are I’m going to tread on you for all of 5 seconds and tell you your idea is hopeless and wont work. But that will seriously only be a moment in time, and then I will forget about it. You think people haven’t come to me with piss poor ideas for applications before? I get tonnes, but sitting here right now writing this post. I couldn’t tell you the names of the people at all. Hell even the ideas are pretty vague in my head right now so I cant even tell you what i turned down.

But there is always a small chance that ill say “hell yeah! lets get going”. And we go on to make a successful venture together.

Once again, don’t be afraid to contact people straight off the bat with ideas you have going.  It does not hurt one bit, and your embarrassment for being turned down will only be a tiny smidgen in your life compared to how much time you will devote when you find that guy who will help you.

As the title says

I cant tell you how many people contact me about my products and try and get me to give them a free review copy. And to be honest, its getting dammmnnn annoying. heres a tip : Reviews are for new products, not ones that already have brand awareness and market share. Well in my opinion anyway. You dont walk up to a retail chain like walmart and ask them for a review do you? But you could possibly get away with doing it with a smaller chain of stores, or a boutique store that is just starting out.

On top of that, people come to me and say, “I have XXX amount of subscribers on my list, and i get XXXX pageviews on my review blog everyday”. Well thats just fantastic! Then just sign up for an affiliate account and sell the product to your readers. It never makes any sense to me, why people try and scrounge around for a 20 – 50 dollar product. In the time it takes for me to troll you and possibly pretend im going to give you a free copy (Only to snatch it away last second), you could have bought the application, posted a review, and make affiliate commission totally more then what you paid for the product anyway.

A while back i wrote about having faith in your own products. The same rules still apply here. If someone comes to me and says, if you give me a review copy, i will make you atleast 10 sales. I immediately have to ask myself, why do you need me to give you a $40 product, when you can make 10 x $25 = $250 commission back. Obviously these people don’t have faith in their own readership and selling ability, so they want me to fork out and we can both roll the dice together.

Anyways, should probably go full circle and say. If you want free affiliate marketing products, just start a review blog. Even though ill decline you, taking a look at some of these blogs. Other product owners do get sucked in.

This is probably something you never hear from Internet Marketers, “Im looking for a job”. But im going to buck the trend!

So yes, as you may have guessed (Just maybe), im joining the work force again shortly. And there are many reasons, but for the most part. It all comes down to what i want to do in life. And where i want my time focused in on. I really enjoy developing applications. And when i say developing, i dont mean developing a small automation tool that can run some small task for you on the web. Im talking huge database backend applications that are both time critical, and have to be of the best standard.

I can build large applications like this already. Well, to a degree, Im certainly not going to be working for Microsoft anytime soon. But there is both time, money, knowledge and audience limitations to anything i build by myself.

Time
With one developer (me!) working on everything. There is only so much i can do. And something that may take me a year to do on my own, i could build in a couple of months in a team. I mean time is really limitless at this point, but i certainly dont know everything about developing in my chosen language (C#). And thus i cant always be the fastest either.

Money
When your working for yourself, you have to work on the things that make you the money. Even if they arent the most enjoyable tasks in the world. I have little side projects that i love working on, love tinkering with. But i can never really develop them because any spare time i have, goes back into developing my money applications/websites/campaigns.  It isnt that im not making enough money, its just i dont have the money to waste a week mucking around with an application that i never intend to release/sell.

Knowledge
Anyone who tells you, that they became a master of C#.net by reading articles/tutorials online is talking plain BS. Or atleast there level of “mastery” is not up to the same standard as the industries. Some of my best learning experiences have come from asking/;earning from others. My university lecturer is super knowledgeable and always has an answer for one of my questions. Google doesn’t solve all problems, and it doesn’t always solve them in a way that you can understand.

Audience
I can guarantee that 99% of people reading this blog and/or running my apps couldnt care less about me developing the greatest courier tracking system out. All the masses want is for me to create some awesome little automation tools. And while i thats cool, and i like developing those. I want to think big!

I have to say, the biggest thing for me is knowledge. I enjoy doing SEM/SEO work, but it doesnt really light a fire within me to get going. Developing does.

I certainly wont stop doing SEO work, but it will be more in my spare time. In actual fact, you guys probably wont notice at all. Tools will probably come out at the same rate, and same with blog posts.

So by for now, wish me luck in my hunt

It never ceases to amaze me how much i always seem to have to dumb down my applications for people. Now i dont want to be rude here, but…. its holding the rest of us back.

Think about my biggest free application, Phoenix Twitter Desktop. I could certainly add a bunch more options for adding friends, including probably a location finder which Twitter caters for. The fact that twitter offers a Geo IP so you can target people right down to the city they live in is amazing. But there is alot of options that go along with it, and also a few options for longitude and latitude. But lets be honest, if i stuck longitude and latitude in their as options, i would be inundated with emails asking me how it works, or maybe even people who dont know what longitude even is. And thus, im sorry to say, you wont get it. And its a shame because i know plenty of people that could utilise this sort of thing, but i just dont have the time, nor the will, to sit at my laptop answering questions via email.

Dont think im the only software developer facing this, i mean, look at Microsoft/Windows. If we take the Control Panel for instance. From XP onwards, there was a “Category” view. Which in my mind (And every other intermediate+ computer user on the planet), was a complete balls up and you couldnt find anything. Luckily there was an option to switch back to classic view, which i think the majority did. But, there is still users out there, infact a large chunk of users that use the Category view.

There is a bunch of other things within XP and up, especially Vista and 7, that try and make the life easier for the user. But just annoy the hell out of anyone who has used a computer for more then checking email via outlook express. I should know, when i worked for an ISP years back. It was absolute hell trying to navigate away from Windows o-so-helpful wizards, and trying to just do things the old fashioned way.

So for advanced users, you have the beginners moaning to thank

A couple of days ago i wrote about how i had removed all my twitter friends. And i thought pretty much, that that would be the end of my days sifting through the spam on my twitter account. But it seems like Twitter may have a few bugs.

For example, for some reason everytime i log into my Twitter account in the morning, im following 2 or 3 extra people then what i was the day before. These people are people i have never ever heard of before, and often they are showing down below the people i have added manually.

Whats the significance of them being below those that i added manually? Well the fact is that twitter orders your followers in the order that you added them. Because these are below my manual followers, Twitter is trying to tell me i have had these guys added since basically the dawn of time. Even when i delete everyone and start all over again, the next day a few more random Twitterers end up on my list.

Not only that, but there is some bugs within the display of twitter. Like such :

Notice how it says i have 1 follower, and yet the pictures show i have 2….

I mean all of this is tiny tiny things that really dont matter. I just find it interesting that a service that merely saves 140 character messages into a database has so many issues still. Twitter arent rolling out updates like Facebook, and it certainly isnt as packed with features. And yet there is little oddities that never seem to get fixed.

A few months ago i wrote about the introduction to the ShoeMoney System. In that post i said i didnt know what the price would be, but i was hoping it was cheap. I guess my head was up in the clouds when i said that. The price for the Shoemoney Course is :

$197

Gah. There goes my thought of trying it out and giving a review for you guys. Im not really interested in the course itself, but just wanted to take a look, and give out my thoughts. Instead, ill give my thoughts about about the pricing.

To me $197 is too much. We already know that this course has been dumbed down so a complete dumbass can understand it. But complete dumbasses usually dont have a spare $200 to spare. I seriously think, that shoemoney has gone over-priced for the market he is supposed to be going for. Will he sell a gazillion memberships? Hell yeah he will. But they will be people who are already in the game, and are more interested in getting a few inside tips, then wanting a complete walkthrough of how to create a facebook account.

Did i forget to mention that its actually $197 per month! I mean as i say, people do have this money. But not the people who the course is aimed at.

Interestingly enough, the course is limited to 500 seats. Which i find kinda low, mind you, 200 * 500 = $100,000 per month. I honestly think that half those seats are going to be snapped up by Bloggers/Reviewers who just want to take a look into the system, but arent going to be following it. Only time will tell. Maybe next week Shoemoney posting a blog post about “Only 400 seats left”.

An interesting topic came up the other day in a conversation between myself and a few of my friends about some of my applications that i have in development. The main focus was, providing a service with those products, instead of selling them outright.

Personally, I’ve taken both roads. Ive had Pyrogenius Commenter where I have sold the application outright (Or atleast “copies”). And then I’ve had Lynxlinks, where ive developed an application to do all the work, but decided instead to provide the service the application gives. So which is better?  Well, i think they definitely both have pro’s and cons.

A service, I found, is much harder to get off the ground, and you get alot less “customers”. Especially at the beginning. Alot of this is to do if there is a product, an actual piece of software, that provides the same functionality for a similar price. So for example, at lynxlinks we charge on average $30 per pack, the only real comparison product out there at the moment is Xrumer. But there is quite alot of difference between the two, and ofcourse, the biggest being the price range. However if there was a product that was say even $100, it becomes much less viable to use our service.

Alot of people will be thinking to themselves, “But your still providing a service, your charging for your time right?”. While yes that is true, Aswell as charging out our time as a service, we are charging that little bit extra almost covering the the cost of the application running in the back end (Even though i develop it).And so i cant imagine too many people still hiring us, if there is a software to do it within a cheap enough range. Although, i could be wrong because people who OWN SENuke, still pay people to do the work for them.

Another thing to remember with a service, is that you get the repeat customers. With a product, unless your doing a membership type system, they pay once, and only once. And you have to support that for the rest of your life. With a service, we do the work, and thats it. There is no ongoing commitment to a customer. And so if he wants more work done, he pays once again. This means, atleast for me, there is definitive boundaries on where our service starts and stops.

Onto the Pro’s of a Product. Take my PyrogeniusCommenter for instance. While yes, i develop new features, it is nothing like the time taken to process orders of a service. And alot of that work is done in my own time, not when a customer orders. And its more when i feel “inspired” ill lock myself away in my office and program away for 10 hours straight.

At times, i actually felt a bit sorry for the kids wanting to do a service of blog commenting. And then i come in with Pyrogenius, demolish that dream for them. While there is still a market for high quality dofollow comments, Automation software at times is demolishing the services.

If that’s all a bit confusing …

Service Pro’s

• Repeat customers
• Definitive start and end of customer support. Once the service is done, its done.

Service Con’s

• Hard to get off the ground.
• You have to spend alot of time doing work, when the customer needs it, not when it suits you.
• If someone releases a product that does essentially the same work as your service. Your stuffed.

Product Pro’s

• Initial development, then easy going
• Develop new features when you feel inspired. Not when the customer does (Or atleast, not all the time).

Product Con’s

• Ongoing support if not a membership scheme.
• One off purchase, no “repeat” customers.

Looking back on the list. I guess the simple way to fix it all would be to provide a membership scheme. That atleast carries with it a “repeat” purchase. But it comes bundled with its own set of issues.

I’ve always been one of those guys that rags on other blogs that update once a week, or sometimes once a month. Especially the ones that say its because they don’t enjoy writing that much (Probably shouldn’t have started a blog then!). But i can see this blog on that slippery slope once again. Its been ages (Well ages for me anyway), since i last posted here. So what’s been the hold up?

Lynxlinks.com
I posted about this a while ago regarding profile links aswell. Not many people took notice then, but just recently business has taken off. Essentially the service is for “High PR Backlinks”. The ones that Angela and Paul sell in packets over at Warrior Forum. Only obviously we do all the work for you, and hand you a nice report at the end. But me being me, there was no way i wasn’t going to build some crazy robot to take over my mouse and do all the work for me!  And so alot of my time has been spent developing this beast of an application to automate almost every part of signing up to a forum, and leaving your link. While it may not be as fast as xrumer, its beginning to be just as effective. For my own sites, ONE blast of PR4+ links (50 links in total), usually gets me front page. Then its just a few other SEO tactics that get me that number one spot.

But ontop of me developing the application, we posted a few ads around the place. Most of all one in the ShoeMoney MarketPlace. Tbh, the marketplace is pretty dull, and we weren’t making any sales from it sitting there. But once a week Shoemoney sends out all the latest marketplace listings to his 50k+ RSS readers. Which certainly gave us a good influx of orders.

PyrogeniusCommenter.com
Most of you should know that ive been running this since Day 1. But up until recently, i was merely a developer behind the scenes. I wasn’t providing support or doing the marketing. Well, that didn’t turn out so good. I’m not one to rest on making “OK” bank each week. Especially because in my mind, this application is a beast. So me and my old partner agreed to pass over the reins to me, and so im running that full time aswell. I sent out a mass email to all our buyers (And trust me, there is ALOT), and unfortunately for me, almost all of them emailed me back with issues. Its so strange, that i never heard about this before when my partner was running the show. Alot of people have messed up logins, or they just have a simple question that, according to them, they have asked 5 times through email and no reply. Anyway, you get the idea, the emails have bogged me down.

And then to add onto the weight already on my shoulders. I’ve decided the only way to progress forward with Pyrogenius Commenter is to start again from scratch. So all this week ive been redeveloping the application from the ground up. This time around, i have a fair idea of where i want to take it, which is good because in the old version, i was just tacking things onto the end, with no real goal in mind. This new version will allow me to add sites indefinitely, and essentially scale this thing up as high as i want to go.

Already on the programming slab is adding in support to comment on Youtube, Dailymotion and Yahoo Video pages. I know people have been looking for a reliable Youtube commenter for sometime (There are ones out there now, but they sell for like $150, ludicrous). And so im gonna fill that market space . Quite a number of people looking for JustinTV and UStream commenters aswell, which im also looking at developing.

Contracted Work
About a month ago i went to a meeting with a business about developing a completely custom (amazing) piece of software for them. And then i say this thing is amazing, i mean like, its just nothing that you would have ever even crossed your mind. It isnt just something to automate simple web tasks, this thing is monstrous. But the downside being, this is the real world. And it doesn’t quite work like the internet circus. The company is willing to pay me a lump sum (At the end), but most of all they are wishing to give me a large chunk of the ending company (Shares). While i could seriously be sitting on a goldmine, and have it made, its so hard to work on something that will take me 3 months to finish. And still not see alot of money to compensate for that work (Atleast not right away).

Aswell as that, its hard to take time away from things that are making me money right now (Lynxlinks, Pyrogenius), and throw them into a project where money is only in the distant future

And thats it for the sob story of the day. Ill be back writing posts here soon (Infact alot of my workload has eased today), but until then. Cya round.