John Hasson

This will be kinda introspective (had to look that up to make sure I was using it right).  Ok, so I have a bunch of internet projects.  Some are successful and some are major flops.  But I have a pretty decent system for going from idea to implementation to profit (or loss).  At this point it is really just a matter of copying it over and over to scale things.  [and no it isn't a huge secret. pick a niche, research, build, test, repeat until you have success (or fail) and move onto the next one].

This puts me in the spot of looking to hire.  I have been watching and learning from others who outsource outside the US.  There are horror stories and success stories.  If I hire outside the US, I don’t have to worry about office space, extra taxes, employee benefits, extra taxes (did I say that one already? ).  But it also means that I will have a significant amount of turnover (not too bad if I have everything documented rather well) but still something to deal with.  As far as hiring in the US, I’ve thought of taking someone who is honest, smart and hardworking and just training them in the skills they will need.  Trust and smartness are way more important then skills (you can learn what you need in this business).

Thats where I am at.  Hire someone?  Keep writing computer programs to do things for me?  Hire someone to write my programs to do things for me (plus all the other cool stuff I do)?  (Some things can’t be done automatically — but lots of repetitive things can)  If I do hire someone, do I hire local, mid west us or foreign?  Hire someone local who I can trust and teach them what they need to know (or pay for their training)?  I don’t expect to have an answer right away, I am still mulling things over.  Feel free to offer advice.

PS.  I haven’t forgotten about that free PPC app.  I work on it while I am flying in a plane (which only happens twice a week).

Tags: Advice, Personal by John Hasson
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I finally took a look at Jeremy’s black ink project.  There is some really good info in there.  In fact there are things in Black Ink Project that I was hoping to learn at elite retreat that I didn’t.  The short of it.  Sign up.  It is totally free (but you should participate and share).  Hurry before Jeremy changes his mind.

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing by John Hasson
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Somehow my wife talked me into going with her and my 3 daughters to the mall for clothing shopping. *hint* If your wife suggests you go to the mall with her and the girls for some shopping… so NO. (but do it nicely).

Needless to say I was bored out of my mind. Malls these days don’t have much appeal for me. At all.

But.. I did see something interesting. There was a person at one of those kiosk booths in the center of the mall using facebook. I was shocked to meet an actual facebook user. (Someone who really is into it.. not someone who just uses for ads and a little bit of networking). So I asked him a few questions about how he used it and what he thought of the ads on the left hand side. Turns out he clicks on the ads from time to time but hasn’t ever bought anything off them. This led to him telling me that he actually has been working on making facebook ads for their product. He was limiting it to just two state (Utah and Idaho). I told him that since the product was geared more towards religious people to not limit it just to those two states, but use religions as targets (Mormon, LDS, Christian, Protestant, Catholic, etc..) and leave it for worldwide or national. Then I asked him if he was able to track a sale from an ad. I wasn’t sure if he got what I meant at first so I explained about creating a bunch of different ads on facebook and tracking each one to know if it resulted in a sale…

If you are not able to track a click on an ad to a sale (or action/goal) then you are really just throwing your money away. Sure at first you need to throw a bunch of different ads and keyword /landing page /domain combinations. But after you have some data and conversions you need to revisit the campaign and optimize it. You can NOT do this without some sort of tracking. (And yeah I know google, yahoo and MSN all have tracking features.. but for some reason they never seem to catch 100% of the conversions. It is kinda annoying which is why I have a supplemental tracking system)

Send each keyword to a landing page with a separate tag. mypage?k=1000 or mypage?k=keyword (I recommend against using the keyword instead of a number in your tracking) and then carry that identifier out to the conversion. This way you know which ad/keyword combination resulted in a sale without relying just on your PPC provider to have accurate tracking (they are really good, but not 100%). Plus with this method you can track for PPC providers that don’t even have tracking (facebook and others).

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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I saw a crazy ad on gmail today. I was viewing emails from someone in utah.  (Plus I live in utah).  This ad was so untargeted it registered on my WTF meter.  Here is what they did…

Their primary keyword is jazz obviously.  However… putting jazz in any keyword suggestion box will also return utah or utah jazz (the NBA team).  Instead of reviewing the automated suggested keywords, they just dumped them all into their PPC campaign… bad idea on Adwords.  This will result in a lower CTR and wasted clicks.  (Don’t worry I didn’t click it)

So… look before you blindly add keywords.  (Or have some sort of algorithm check for you)

Tags: Advice, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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My daughters had some friends spend the night last night. So.. that made one male (me) in a house with 7-8 girls. Needless to say I left early this morning to get out.

We have a full family pass to Thanksgiving point here in Utah so I figured I’d stop by their “gardens” to have a look and see what it was like. As I got there I saw Segways… The gardens are pretty big.. 50+ acres I think. So I figured.. why not. I have never ridden a Segway and 50+ acres is a lot of walking. $20 later and 3 minutes of training and I was off.

Segways are awesome. It was an absolute blast zipping around the trails and taking in the smells of flowers, nectar, dirt and trees. About an hour later I had seen pretty much everything and ran around the park again taking pictures on my cell phone.

Pictures follow…..

All these were taking pretty quickly while riding the Segway with one hand.

You know the funny thing… Most groups I saw were 2 girls and one guy. The girls were obviously mother and daughter looking at ideas for wedding photos and the guy looked like he was just there cuz he had to be.

This really *is* a moth

And just for fun, here it the WP gallery of these photos…

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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“You know what I can’t figure out? How is it that all these stupid neanderthal mafia guys can be so good at crime, and smart guys like us can suck so badly at it.” - Michael, Office Space

Here it is. Smart people sit around being smart and thinking up all sorts of cool ideas and projects and so on. They have all these great ideas for making money, curing cancer, w/e. But that is just it. They think about it too much.

The secret to success is getting off your rump and actually doing something. Sure being smart and having good ideas helps a lot. However without actually doing something with your great idea you won’t ever succeed.

Most smart people think and think and think about great ideas. (Some are really good ideas and a lot of the ideas are garbage–but don’t tell them that ) The point of all this is: don’t sit around brainstorming all day. Brainstorming is good for a while, but eventually you need to actually try things.

You will fail. A lot.

But with each failure you are closer to success.

Here is another poop related analogy.

Kid 1 is put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
Kid 2 is also put in a room filled with poo and a shovel.
An hour passes.
Kid 1 (is smart) is sitting there bored and wants out. “It is just a bunch of poo. I am wasting my time.”
Kid 2 is covered in poo and smiling brightly and digging all over the place. “With all this poo, there has to be a pony in here somewhere.”

Now eventually kid 2 will figure out there is no pony. (But if there was a pony how dumb would Kid 1 feel?)
Summary

• You actually have to work to make things happen (or pay someone else to do it for you–but this is also work)
• Don’t get in analysis paralysis (over analyzing things so much you never try things
• Stop reading all these blogs and put together a campaign and test, test, test.
• You can come back to read mine though

Tags: Advice, Affiliate Marketing by John Hasson
3 Comments »

Ok here is my secret.

I have a picture which illustrates this concept.

1. Pick a niche
2. Build a community/site around it
3. Pick a bunch of keywords and relevant ads — illustrated below
4. Submit them to a bunch of different PPC engines — illustrated below
5. See what sticks — illustrated below

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

Dayparting is the fancy word for when you say you only want your ads shown at certain times of the day or that you want to pay more during some time periods and less during others.

I’ve got a campaign running entirely on google’s content network. I scrapped together a quick chart of conversions and mapped them out by hour of the day.

You can see the the spike in the afternoon and the drop in the early mornings..
All times are MST and 1 = 12am (if you are getting confused by the numbering on the bottom.)

Here is how it was converting at this time. Since this was on the content network I had my bids relatively low. 15 cents per click. These stats are for the 7 days before I did the Dayparting adjustment.

Based on this I adjusted my min bid to 5 cents a click and used Dayparting to increase it up to 15 cents per click for the times when I would get the most bang for my buck.

So for everyday I’ll be bidding 5 cents at low times, 10 cents from 8am to 3pm (plus 10pm to 11pm) and then 15 cents at the premium time (3pm-10pm)

So far pretty boring right?

Now look at the stats for the 7 days after Dayparting.

Do you see it?

Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate, Higher CTR, and so on.

Long story short I just made adjustments to show the ads to people who were likely to convert. The only thing that went down were clicks and impressions (which makes total sense since I am now showing the ad to more qualified people) This resulted in a 35% increase in conversions and a 46% drop in cost per conversions, this is a good thing.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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I spent a few months with VMWare Fusion and then Parallels on a BootCamp Partition. Both work fine, but I like Parallels better.

Both products have a free trial. I started with VMWare’s Fusion since I use VMWare’s server products and am pretty happy with them. Install was easy, it didn’t take long to get my bootcamp XP partition up and running in Fusion. When setting it up I ended up creating a SMB share on my XP system and then accessing it via OSX to get at my windows files–I didn’t see any other solution for accessing my windows files easily while Fusion was running the bootcamp image. Every now and then I would get screen artifacts from Unity (makes the mac and xp windows all part of the osx desktop). And kept messing up on my Command+C vs Ctrl+C when switching quickly between OS’es.

Well my 30 days was nearly up, time to try parallels. Install was just as easy. Paralells had just a few things that made it come off as more polished. It already gives me a share on the mac desktop pointing to the Bootcamp image while Parallels is running. The Coherence works about the same (I still get screen artifacts occasionally), and Parallels automatically maps Command+C to Ctrl+C for me (great for when I forget to switch). I ended up buying Parallels primarily because it seemed to integrate with Mac just a little better then VMWare’s fusion.

At this point I would make a cool table to show things mapped out.. but here is the summary:
Parallels has better OSX integration (great for Visual Studio), but VMWare will let you play Quake! You decide which is more important for you

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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All attendees were picked up by a stretch limo.  We arrived to the brand new Intercontinental in style.  My room was on a high floor in the corner, we had beautiful views of San Francisco.

The night before things started we had a networking cocktail, I made a lot of friends and met a lot of nice people.  The small group atmosphere really adds to things.  I only had to remember 35 people

Day 1, We had an excellent breakfast provided.  Then we started the event.  They had a nice non-disclosure form we had to sign.  Everything shown was off the record and not to be released.  No live blogging was allowed.  No video was allowed.  No recording was allowed.  No pictures were allowed.

Excellent speakers.  Excellent.  Having things “off the record” really opened things up. We were sharing our ideas and suggestions pretty openly.  I am sure we all held something back–there really isn’t enough time to share everything

I can’t provide details on what we learned since we had a NDA and it was all off the record.  I can say that I will be going again and that I learned a lot, made some new friends and was very impressed by the whole event.

Jeremy and crew did an excellent job putting this event together.  They deserve a lot of credit for making this happen.

If you want to know more you can call me (contact me via the “Talk To Me” widget on the right and I can give you my phone number).  I won’t be sharing things that are under the NDA but I can expound on some things that I am not willing to put here in a public blog.

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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