John Hasson

Early this morning I went to poll worker training.  It wasn’t too long (8am-10:30am).  I took an oath, promised to uphold the constitution and so on.  I took a couple of cool photos of the voter cards.  I totally forgot to take pictures of the diebold machines.  Apparently you can’t wear an Obama or McCain Tshirt, or any other candidates sign or voting slogan on public property within 150 feet of the door of the polling place.  That should be interesting to manage

Seems simple enough.

Made In China

Voter Access Card + Encoder

How these work is pretty basic.  The voter card has nothing on it but the district (so it knows which ballot to show them, and it also includes instructions on font size, or if the machine should talk to them, etc  — we program that in if they are blind, etc)

As a poll worker we keep a manual count of all the votes and check the counts at the end of the day (and mid day) to make sure the counts match.  If they don’t we have to stay there till we figure out WTF went wrong.  I learned all about cool provisional ballots and the laws and weird exceptions, like “curb-side” voting where they can’t get out of their car, due to age, etc.  Needless to say I think I’ll be busy election day.  6am -> done.  I always wanted to see how this part works, so this should be a good/fun experience.  I’ll be rotating through various positions, with no lunch break and no dinner break (they warned us about that) as well as helping to take down the voting machines (and probably help set them up).  So if your poll workers seem busy, it is cuz they are and they haven’t eaten much. 

Edit: They called me late afternoon yesterday.  Guess they were hard up for help…

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
1 Comment »

Granted, I’ll be 32 in 2 months…   The theater was packed, I made sure to get assigned seating.  (I have two very close movie theaters, one with assigned seating and one without.  Guess which one I go to on opening nights… )

Why you may be asking did I go to see this movie?  Quite simply: I have 3 daughters.

There were *maybe* 8 guys in there– and all but 3 of them were wearing homemade wildcats jerseys.  Yes.  Freaking *homemade* (and the wrong color) wildcats jerseys to coincide with the team’s jersey’s in the movie.  Every time the main guy character was on screen the girls went nuts, screams, ohhs, ahhs, etc.

As far as the plot and so on goes, it was predictable but turned out to be a fun movie.  I found myself laughing out loud a few times.  Strangely whenever I laughed the girls around me hushed really fast.  I guess nothing shuts up 300+ girls quicker then a loud male voice laughing in a move theater at *their* movie .

It was fun, I don’t feel less of a man for enjoying myself.

Whole movie in less then 2 min.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
2 Comments »

Somebody contacted me using that little chat widget on the right with this opening line:

Greetings I have been trying to get into the PPC arena for about a year without much succes constantly getting google slapped and tried a few other PPC source with no real measure of performance can you help

I was kinda busy at the time, so I simply said

Do you have a specific question?

You know what. here is the whole thing, I am in a rush to take all my girls to see High School Musical 3 tonight.

Guest: Greetings I have been trying to get into the PPC arena for about a year without much succes constantly getting google slapped and tried a few other PPC source with no real measure of performance can you help
Me: Do you have a specific question?
Guest: what am i doing wrong or not doing (I know you have no info about me or my site at this time) but would you be willing to look at my site and give you opinion\
My Thoughts: No specific question really.
Me: usually i na case like yours it is not just one thing
Me: *in a
Me: google slaps = stop making crappy sites
Me: biggest thing you need
Me: is tracking
Guest: I’m sure but i have doing this for a year with little return I have bought books and endless searches on the net right now  i workwith click bank and already have a site and ads but not sure what else to try
Guest: what “googles” defination of a crappy site
My Thoughts: How can I tell him to “google it” nicely….
Me: that is something you should be able to find out foryourself
Me: by just looking through Adwords Help and FAQ
Me: if you can’t do that then PPC is not something you should be doing
Me: There is no “shortcut” or trick
Me: it is just a matter of hard work
Me: trying and failing a lot
Me: if you are going to ASW I’ll gladly spend a few min glancing @ your stuff to tell you if anything comes to mind
Guest: unfortunitly i’m not but i would be happy to forward my site and maybe an ad for your opinion
My Thoughts: Hmm.. do I really want to mess with this? Ah ha. I can use it as a sorta blog post/site review, that would be worth my time.
Me: can I useit in a blog post
Me: make it public, etc?
Guest: can i send it in an email
Me: I’ll post my reply as a new blog post
Me: that cool?
Guest: yeah that would be great
My Thoughts: Gotta make sure they know what they are getting into.
Me: and your ok with others seing the site and the ad
Me: *seing
My Thoughts: CURSES! I can’t spell crap.
Me: *sEeing
Guest: depends you how bad you rip my site /ad apart
Me: lol
Me: I’ll tell you what I tell everyone
Me: Don’t fall in love with your site or your keywords or youe campaigns
Guest: no really i don’t want to look like an ass even if i am one
Guest: ok i should be chating anyway i will email later today
Me: k
Me: tlak l8r

Guest what… no email from them.

I am glad to answer questions, etc. but something like “why am I not making any money” is way to general for a simple answer.  And don’t ask me stuff that you can find out if you just read AdWords FAQs.  However, in person at a conference when I am in a good mood, I’ll happily answer stuff like that. 

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing, PPC, Pay Per Click, Personal by John Hasson
3 Comments »

I’ve got a campaign that has been running for a decent while with a couple thousand keywords and a few hundred adgroups that have been slowly built over time.

Yesterday I wanted to try out google’s “opportunities for improvement” feature on this campaign.  But google wouldn’t run on it because the campaign had more then 64 adgoups and more then 2000 keywords.  grrrr

So I took a quick look and found that only about 10 of the adgroups had any conversions in the past 3 months.  I put on my wizard hat and took the s…..   Actually I was just ruthless and deleted all the adgroups that had no conversions in the past 90 days.  Would google let me run their “opportunities for improvement” feature now that I shrunk it down?  No!  But now it just says “sorry, can’t do it” w/o a reason.

Fine I think..  I’ll leave it alone and let the campaign do its thing.

Here is where the awesomesauce comes in:  After wiping out the “dead weight” my CTR shot up by 67.6% my avg position went up by only 2% (nothing significant) cost per click down by 1.2% (nothing significant).  My clicks went up by 56.7%.  This of course resulted in lots more conversions.

So… if you have a really big campaign that has profit in it.  Trim the adgroups and keywords that are not converting, google and you will both be happier.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
2 Comments »

This happened a few weeks ago, I have gotten over it so I’ll share.

Here I am attacking myspace with bunches of ads and so on.  I am going back and updatin bids, etc.  I was going kinda fast and updated an ad to $27.00 per click instead of 0.27 per click.  Sadly I wasn’t totally zoned into MySpace’s ad interface.  I would have caught it if the ad hadn’t been the only one on a very non-obvious page 2….

Soooo glad I have a $1,000 limit on that campaign.

Look Ma, No Conversions!

I send a nice email to Myspace asking if they can credit me or something.

Hello,

Unfortunately, we do not currently offer the option for a refund. However, at your discrection you are able to stop the ad campaign.

……

I think they were laughing at me…  Really, I can stop it myself?  Thanks for the awesome support.

But here is what is weird.  Since that screwup my myspace ad account has gotten zero clicks on ANY of the 20+ campaigns I have there.  With all the stories about myspace ad accounts “freezing” up I’ll probably start a new account too and just toss this account since it doesn’t seem to be working anymore.

PS. Zero Conversions on that campaign.

Tags: Uncategorized by John Hasson
6 Comments »

Well I spent this weekend and part of this morning wrapping this up.  Remember way back when I talked about making some free ppc software that would work for Win, Mac and Linux?

Well I finally did it.

Basic Screenshot showing usage

JAH Simple PPC

It is essentially a keyword expander.  With a cool rotation feature thrown in there.

Let me know if there are bugs, etc.  If you like it or hate it.

JAH Simple PPC

Tags: PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
8 Comments »

A really simple “keyword exploder.”  Essentially you have a small list of keywords and add various modifiers to them (some optional, some not) and suddenly you go from just a few keywords to a few hundred plus.  For grins I might even throw something in there for autogrouping them…

Right now I am fixing my fubar’ed XP partition (Parallels, Bootcamp, SP3 and VMWare  makes for a screwed up day).  So I probably won’t bother starting till this weekend.

Tags: Uncategorized by John Hasson
2 Comments »