Failing at Success is a Great Hobby

Vote For Me! Lethal Velocity Blogger Contest

Ian — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 02:05:30 +0000

This is a self promo post ask you for your help to get me some good votes in. This contest started on January 15th and I am now trying to climb to the top. In the past AffiliateWire has sent top affiliates to Bahamas to swim with the Sharks. So now they are opening it to bloggers as well and I want to get up there and win.

Also here is a video of the adventure they did last year:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Three winners will test their mettle in this year’s radically fast, wickedly cool Live Dangerously supercar challenge. That is on their website, so I want to try to be 1 of 3 to win. All you have to do is click on the image below and find my name. Just ignore all the other names. I am the 5th one down, so it should be easy for you to find. Hit the radio dial on the left side of my name and then scroll to the bottom and click on Vote, again avoiding all the other names you see.

Just click the image below… thanks!

>> Vote for Me Here <<

Snowboarding Taught Me the Lessons of Failure

Ian — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:34:23 +0000

Right after I got back from Affiliate Summit West 2012, that same weekend, I went out snow boarding with a couple friends. I have never been snowboarding before and I felt it would be a good experience. Now that I am back in Jersey I wanted to write about it and explain how trial and error relates to my and all internet marketing experiences or life in general.

As I was with a friend, he fell once hard and said he would go to the bar and warm up. That was 1 attempt and 1 fall. Before I go into the explanation of what I am talking about, I want to show you my boarding skills…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yes, you know you like how I ride the green hill! Straight professional! lol.

Anyways. If you watched the end of the video, I explain what I am about to write. Basically you need to fall to be successful. How many times did I fall before I got up and did it again. My buddy I was with, went once and fell hard. After that he went to the bar and waited for me. I continued to keep falling and getting back up to do it again.

Falling is life, in order to be successful you have to fall and sometimes you fall harder than others. Some fall give it a rest then get up again and do it, others are so determined they get back up right after they fall. For example I fell and I just got back up and finished the hill. I didn’t wait nor did I think about how hard my next run is going to be. I simply just did.

The fact of life and internet marketing is about falling or failing. You have to fail at something to understand what to do next. I didn’t take lessons and it was my first time snowboarding but fear didn’t stop me. I took the risk knowing I can get injured, crash into other people, and just look plain silly. That didn’t matter because I wanted to gain the experience on how to snowboard, plus i thought it would be better than skiing.

Could I have taken the lesson to speed up the learning curve? Yes but sometimes, especially for me – I like to learn from my own mistakes. Unlike my buddy of mine, he fell once and went straight to the bar to relax and safe. I simply went back up the hill and continued to board.

As you can see there are 2 types of people. People who are just satisfied and secure, knowing they don’t want to hurt them selves anymore or risk takers and people who do. This past weekend gave me a perfect example of how I look at our affiliate marketing industry or internet marketing industry as a whole. From noobs to experts, we fall in every category similar to those snowboarders and skiers.

Everyone wants to be successful at something, if its gaining more muscle, being a professional snowboarder, or more appropriate to our industry is making money online. It was a HUGE problem last year and I called out every Clickbank Guru out there. Funny part is the info launch craze died out, thank god! These ‘gurus’ pledge they can get you making money overnight just by hitting several buttons and you are done, when in fact that is not true.

Take my recent snowboarding falls as an example, did someone hand me an ebook? No. I went out there and did it. I accepted failure and got right back up and did it again. Yes, coaching and lessons can help but I bet I would have still fell until I learned how to properly shift my weight around. Internet marketing is a process and can not be taught overnight to make quick money. Yes there are mentors and tutors out there, but again you still have to make your own mistakes.

There are so many quotes out there about failure and success. They all lead to one goal failure is an option and it is a must to learn your own true success.

Affiliate Summit West 2012, Starting the Year Right!

Ian — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 19:19:48 +0000

I just got back from Affiliate Summit West 2012 last night and man has this shown grown. I remember my first Affiliate Summit West back in 2008. The show then was great and I was already making ok affiliate money. The money I made with my affiliate income got me to Affilaite Summit and I haven’t missed a Summit since.

This year 2012, Affiliate Summit West proved to have grown immensely. Looking at my FeedFront magazine, 2012 conference attendee is at 5087! Amazing growth and lots of new things. When I saw Shawn Collins, I congratulated him on the show growth and also gave him my feedback. With growth there is always changes and the Summit went through them.

As I have done in the past I will write my observations, no particular order:

First timer session was HUGE. I didn’t think that there were many first timers, but then again a 1k growth for the Summit is amazing.
Meet Market is always packed. Not sure if it is because its the first day, but every Meet Market is so friggin packed.
Caesar palace was a great place but the conference area it self was awkward. It was held on 3 floors and it seemed everyone got lost finding places.
Comparing Affiliate Summit in 2008 to now, there is a change in the industry. Affiliate Summit is being seen as the place to go to to learn performance marketing and online marketing in general. I am seeing more agencies than traditional affiliates that I knew back in 2008.
Our content monetizing panel with John Chow, Steve Hall, Murray Newland (mod) turned out to be impressive. Full House!
Q&A was different this year, users would send questions to a text twitter system and questions would appear on the monitor. I think this takes out the interaction from speaker to user. But it does stop certain people from trying to just use Affiliate Summit as just an advertorial and asking dumb questions.
Clickbooth party was pretty good – I was a Guest UFC judge
I got interviewed by the Hot Dog man – told me ketchup on hot dogs is a fail.
Blue man in full spandex running around was weird.
Some sessions was very simple. I even heard from some people the advance and intermediate wasn’t that entertaining.
lots of women are in love with Ad Hustler. Jealous.
Met up with some great past marketers such as Shoemoney, Nicky Cakes, Jonathan Volk, Heavy T, Max T, and multiple networks and advertisers I work with.
Mobile Meetup was very productive, thanks Kevin De Vincenzi for the invite! Learned a couple new things.
Lots of meetings about some new things I am doing. I hate it when meetings get shifted. Messes up my full day of scheduled appointments.
Live “New” as a way of life, if not you will die in the industry you are in – Jon Spoelstra
NJ affiliates took over
I miss the Eric Thomas and Shoemoney keynote – needed to get out of Vegas. I know their keynotes were probably amazing.
Club XS was crazy fun, lost my voice that night.
Mr Green and Stack that Money are some crazy people! Great finally chillin with them.
Hangover party was hella packed
Darren did an amazing job at the Affiliate Ball. One of the go to parties to be at while at Affiliate Summit.

I also want to thanks XRev Media for sponsoring the IANteract Dinner, now called the DotCom Dinner. It turned out to be a great event and great networking with people I want to network with. Connecting and learning is one of the best things to do. I really hate talking business in the club and especially when they insist on talking about it too. It never made sense to me to do business in a LOUD environment.

Also another note is I want to thank Missy and Shawn for an amazing show. It is definitely growing and the change is pretty noticeable. I hope it doesn’t become a traditional conference show. Some of the shows I have been to are just not worth going to. The show for me is a place where I can hangout and catch up with others in the industry. I even caught up with networks that I want to work with on a certain project which will do well I think and will definitely change how our industry performs.

With Affiliate Summit just ending. I am going to start working on my new direction on where I want to be in 10 years. As Affiliate Summit grows so does other affiliates, like I said there are some affiliates that are now networks, advertisers, and lead brokers. 2012 we come!

… and as always it is always great catching up with friends from past shows, networks, ThinkTanks, and just strengthening the relationship. I met a lot of great people in this industry and I enjoy always seeing them at any show or where ever we are.

Some pictures:

More pictures…

2011 My Year in Review, My Lessons Learned

Ian — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 20:53:50 +0000

Did 2011 go by super fast? I know it did for me and there was a lot of things that I learned this year as I always do every year when it comes to my business and personal life. I am going to recap my mistakes, success, and lessons learned. 2012 will be a great year!

Focused on Software Creation – 2011 I started to shift a bit of my business in the software creation vertical. Creating sites like SplitPiston.com and OfferSnitch.com. I find it fun to solve the problems I have encountered in affiliate marketing and creating solutions to my problems. I have had these softwares for my own use for almost 2 years and in 2011, I decided to share it with everyone.
Partners, the Bad and Horrible – This year I went through multiple partners and it was hard to keep momentum going if the other person is not sharing that same passion. It is a good thing I have contracts with these partners where I can void and cancel their partnership with me if I feel they do not perform. It has been a struggle to find good working partners that share the same goals as me, even the passion to make money online. Good people are always hard to find.
Gained Weight, Damn it! – Sitting in front of the PC for almost a full day has developed a minor gut. Even thought I work out during the week, it hasn’t stopped the growth of this mass in my mid section. I plan to adjust my business around a healthy environment by trying to do less in front of a PC and being more active. Let me know your solutions to this mid gut section crisis.
Hang Out Groups in NJ – After I have created the IANteract Meetup in NJ. I decided I should have something separate from the meetup. A group of marketers where we can just hang out and meet at bars and talk about life and business, if it does come up. I have surrounded myself around more people like me and I want to grow my mind as well as my business, so I had to filter the time I spend with my friends I grew up with to my affiliate and entrepreneur friends. These hang outs created a strong bond among the Jersey affiliates such as Gabriel Cano, Rohail Rizvi, Justin, and many others from the group. We actually can go out and no one complains about the use of money.
Started Local Consulting - Since working in at the co working space at Launchpad, I have created a good relationship with 2 other offline marketers. Since they specialize in the offline space, their clients ask about online marketing – that is where I come in. I help their clients with their advertising campaign from Google Adwords to starting a social influence program. In many cases I ended up helping their client grow on the internet.
Top 25 Influencers in Performance Marketing – In November I was surprise to learn I was one of the top 25 online influecers in performance marketing. I was honored to find my name among other performance marketers in the space.
Traveling and Conferences – I haven’t done much traveling in 2011 nor have I attended much conferences either. I always attend Affiliate Summit as it has proved to be one of the best conferences to be at, as well as ad-Tech. I also will be slowing down my attendance to these shows this year and in the coming year. I also want to expand in the Internet Marketing conferences space more and attend other conferences geared towards that vertical. Even though I love the affiliate and performance space, I think I need to expand a bit more.
Learning the Advertisers Side – I have met up with my buddy Rich Gorman a lot this year and talked about the advertising side and the legal issues that have been happening. He has showed me a big deal of the advertiser side and how he has been running his business. He also introduced me to his circle of friends, which have proved to be a great use to my own business.
Focusing on too many things – In 2011, I think I focused on waaaaayyy too many things from my own internal campaigns to creating my own offers to attempting to learn seo. 2012, I want to just focus on 2 things and that is it and kill those 2 things for this year. My problem, I always lose concentration on one project and then when an idea posp in my head – I work on it for 3 days then continue or catch up what I was doing 3 days prior. I want to complete these 2 goals for 2012 and do a great job at it. I think multiple projects are good, but focusing on 1 or 2 things will yeild better results. What do you do to help with your focus?
Shifted Servers Multiple Times - I moved my sites to 3 new servers and took them off Storm on Demand. I went back to WiredTree and also put some sites on SolarVPS. I also took the rest of my domains from 1and1 and bluehost and put them on Name.com and NameCheap.com. It took some time for the transfers and the merging but the headache is done and they are now in places where I want them to be. If I only knew how t do this when I first started in the online space.
Working with way too many Advertisers - Focusing on too many things also brings up working with too many advertisers. Every advertiser is looking to get a share of my traffic and it has been hard to filter who I wanted to work with. I felt advertisers and affiliate networks act the same, always finding to get your traffic. Towards the mid year of 2011, I decided to only work with 4 advertisers direct. In 2012 I want to shrink that as my business will be shifting in 2012.
Creating Virtual Real Estate - Beginning of 2011 I started to learn SEO and create virtual real estate. I have been buying a lot of domains over the months of 2011 and now I need to grow them. I went through several SEO specialists, VAs, oDesk employees, etc and have yet to find someone worth to keep on for more than 3 months. I did find one person and I will be meeting him at Affiliate Summit to see how we can work together on helping me create my own set of online virtual web properties.

SOPA, Washing the Internet with Government SOAP

Ian — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 15:55:26 +0000

First, watch this video below about what SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is about. It is about 21 minutes but has a lot of good information. I was not that all interested in SOPA because I thought it was just about piracy sites. I was wrong. When I saw this video it put a lot of things into perspective. It even goes into advertising, social, and the full extent of the internet.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What is SOPA?

The bill would authorize the U.S. Department of Justice to seek court orders against websites outside U.S. jurisdiction accused of infringing on copyrights, or of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. After delivering a court order, the U.S. Attorney-General could require US-directed Internet service providers, ad networks, and payment processors to suspend doing business with sites found to infringe on federal criminal intellectual property laws. The Attorney-General could also bar search engines from displaying links to the sites.

source

It seems the government has to put their nose into everything. The biggest in our industry are the Affiliate Tax, FTC Guidelines, affiliate network government suits, etc. There has been a lot of government related issues that has happened in such a short time. Now SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, is another one which affects the internet as a whole and not just advertising.

First and foremost search companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing will eventually start to filter search engine results. Full websites with credibility will start to disappear, news sites, comedy sites, gossip sites, etc will just be pulled off the internet. If there is any complaint about a company or brand – it can be added to the government blacklist.

Most importantly it will kill social media as we know it. If you use the Facebook “Like” it can lead into trouble. I know I leverage the “Like” button to hide content on my fan pages and even content sites. This will eventually be filtered as information about the user is being passed on to their users, ‘an endorsement’. You may remember a recent article where there was a lawsuit against Facebook about their new ad platform – Sponsored Stories. A user wanted compensation for a story he liked, because information was passed about him ‘representing’ a company.

When you tweet or share a link via the internet you are essentially given free advertising to a company or brand. If you shared a photo of the next dress you want to buy on Facebook that link can be filtered out. Your thoughts no longer matter, tweeting and status updates will not matter. The social internet will not matter, the government wants to control what you are saying on the internet.

That means no more bad reviews of a company or a product. Hmmm what TV do I want to buy… Samsung or ChinaView?

The internet will stop being social, when it was just evolving. Essentially the government is allowing the abortion of the internet. Cleaning the internet is going to be hard to police, but sites like Youtube and Facebook so far have done a great job and complied with a lot of the big brands, especially when it came to shows and music.

But what if everything started to disappear slowly? What will the internet be? What will it become? The internet was born out of the desire to know more information, then to be entertained, then to connect with everyone! SOPA will stop this intertwine of wires and will only allow you to see what the government wants you to see. If they do create a list of black listed sites, then internet entrepreneurs income can essentially drop dramatically. Creating sites base on recommendations, affiliate marketing itself will literally die.

The DMCA also then proves to be useless and pointless. If the government is going to tell Google what to show, then the purpose of relevant content to users or Google business model will be no more. Advertising will be strictly controlled and how we also advertised will also be written in a manual in which we have to cater to.

Essentially this act will harm the internet as a whole. The internet started as a way to voice one thoughts. It grew and became our entertainment playground, then it grew more allowing social interactions to be possible. If you like your current internet the way it is, educate yourself more about what SOPA is, look into PIPA (Protect IP Act) as well and voice your thoughts or sign the petition below.

Read the Stop Online Piracy Act

Sign the Petition, Get More Info

Government always trying to get their hands in every cookie jar they can. Don’t Support SOPA! Sign the Petition!

Affiliate Marketing is Just Like Christmas Day

Ian — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 15:16:28 +0000

First, Merry Christmas and a Happy Holidays to all my readers. I hope you enjoy your holiday weekend with friends and family. Enjoy it! Then go HARD in 2012!

I want to compare Christmas or the Holidays to affiliate marketing. These 2 are very similar to each other. We do not see one as a marketing concept and the other as a holiday, maybe you can if you buy gifts everyday. But what our eyes see doesn’t necessarily mean what they mean. I am here to break it down and explain what I see Christmas is from a marketing perspective. I will then break down affiliate marketing from a Christmas perspective.

Christmas with Marketing in Mind

We Dress to Impress – Dressing up during the holidays feels festive when in fact we are just dressing up to present ourselves. Acting as a landing page, we spend time in shopping malls prior to Christmas and see what will work best. We mix and match, try on different ties. We want to make sure we look good at our holiday party or family gathering. Our dress is technically a web design, colors and prints matter. Another aspect is gift wrapping, we dress gifts so it looks appealing and creates a tense curiosity when the end user receives it. Even at holiday parties, you want everyone to look at you. This is similar to make sure you ad creative/copy is effective enough that you get a lot of eyeballs looking at it and eventually clicking on your creative. At the holiday party, you want all the ladies talking to you. We even dress our homes with lights and elves so it yells out – I have Christmas JOY to the world. In essence, it can compare to traffic and your website – yelling out – I AM HERE.
Save money to buy the perfect gift – New affiliates know how hard it can be to get started in a market where you need to have money to make money. Some people save their money to start a simple Facebook ad campaign or an Adwords campaign. When Christmas is on its way, we save our money and put things on layaway. We have to have money to get an item for a person you care about. From a marketing point of view, we save our money to buy traffic sources, virtual assistants, servers, etc - technically we do not see these as well – the money is going to someone else. The gifts we buy are for the other user, we never see them again – especially if they are cousins and nieces. With lead gen, we do not see the generated lead again. We save money for a quick conversion, but will never be able to monetize that lead again.
Don’t want to Disappoint – In the end it s about the conversion. We want to see that smile on and we want to make sure your family members don’t go to Wal-Mart to return something that you didn’t even buy at Wal-Mart. Our goal as human beings is to make someone else feel better, we share and exchange laughter and enjoy each and everyone’s smiles. That is the goal, that is the conversion. We do so many things from saving up money for your husband, daughters, dads, and siblings to making sure we have the perfect gift.

In the end any holiday and life is a marketing venture. We want to impress everyone, we dress up with how the world will view us. We go on dates to find the perfect person. Every day is a race to be better than another person. You can say you do not care what people think, but in actuality you can’t help it. People judge you and that is a fact. Why do stores pay thousands even millions to get a perfect logo, slogan, commercials that don’t convert, etc – we put ourselves out there so people can judge us. In the end we want to also create a sense of joy and happiness.

Marketing with Christmas in Mind

I buy myself Gifts everyday! Need more explanation?

Have a great Christmas weekend and Happy Holidays!

Speed Up Your Blog, Satisfy Your Readers

Ian — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 18:07:25 +0000

A while back I added a new plugin on my site. It helps with the speed of my blog and the load time of it. Since there is a lot of media on my site with pictures, video, js snippets, etc – I wanted my site to perform well and make sure a lot of the media is not slowing down my site. For example my main page of my blog has a lot of content and is the heaviest load on my blog.

I have been using W3 Total Cache Plugin and it has been great, but more importantly I activated the cloud option within the plugin. Now most of the media is being loaded from Amazon’s S3 platform. The images, js snippets, media, etc. It has resulted in my blog to loaded much faster and according to pingdom.com – 84% faster than most website.

How to Activate CDN with W3 Total Cache

It is fairly easy to install and setup the cloud or even the CDN option within W3 Total Cache. First you will have to enter your Amazon S3 credentials. Click on CDN in the top link menus and find the configuration option, enter your credentials. Once that has been verified you are rady to activate the cloud on your blog and you will notice the speed difference.

Now, simply go to the general settings of W3 Total Cache and find the option labeled CDN. Check off enable and choose your service. Since I already have an Amazon S3 service, I chose that from the drop down.

There are other things on you can speed up your blog from compressing JS and CSS code. Remove unwanted and unnecessary plugins and even reducing images on the blog. If you still want to have these perks, a CDN can be very beneficial and you are only paying for what is being used. Last month my Amazon S3 invoice came out to $3.26. Did not break my pocket at all.

Remember you want your users to start to engage in your blog and to start reading the content on it. If your website does not load then a potential reader or even a lead will leave your site. Also speed is being measure by Google as part of their search algorithm. Google wants to make sure they are providing the most relevant but also useful site to their users.

If you have went to a webpage and it never loaded you get ticked off a bit and you leave. You do not want that happening with your readers. Utilizing W3 Total Cache will increase your load time and you will have happier readers. The best art this plugin is free, you ca easily download it from WordPress: Download W3 Total Cache from WordPress

How to Capture all Local Traffic from Google Adwords

Ian — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:50:10 +0000

There are ways to use Google Adwords with local advertising and local traffic. With the new map roll (geo targeting) out for Google Adwords, there are somethings that I kinda missed from the old version of Adwords. Especially when it comes to geo targeting an area. With the new geo targeting interface, you enter a city and it will target that area. BUT it will also leave out less dense populated cities around or within your targeted area.

For example here is a screenshot of all the cities Google says there is reach, from county in New Jersey.

Now there maybe some good traffic which can be captured. Even though Google Adwords can not tell the populate or reach of the area doesn’t mean there isn’t traffic there. Granted Google may pull their location for ads being searched in their location doesn’t mean it will always be covered.

To properly cover all these ’empty’ areas is to create a radial target. Zoom in the map and decide what city you want as a center axis and enter it in Google’s geo targeting tool, hit enter. It does not matter if the city you use as a center point is already targeted, you just need an axis for your circle. The default is a 20 mile radius, but you can go as low as 10 miles. Once you do that you will see an additional overlay over your original targets. It should look similar to this below.

As you can see the circular radius targets the non targeted area produced from the first screenshot. It allows me to extend my reach to these areas, even though they maybe less populated or have little reach. Since they are still within the reach of the other cities the client is targeting, this overlay reach will help with the campaign. If the client wanted to only target selected cities then this strategy will play no part. Since they are targeting a county, this will work well.

This simple overlay radial targeting will help increase reach, even find leads which Google thinks their maybe none. In essence you want to get a good reach of users or visibility to your ad. You just do not know if these ‘gapped’ areas will not produce a lead to your client.

I would probably say to use this strategy only if there are missing areas within your map. I would not use this strategy if there are missing areas outside. It would defeat the purpose and the client may not travel out that far from their office or target area. If you are missing cities that are already surrounded by cities targeted already then it would make sense to include them by using a radial target.

Selling Space, How to Really Make Money and Fund a Movie

Ian — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:40:27 +0000

I just saw this trailer on Facebook and it is about making money by selling product placements and advertising. The movie was also funded by product placements and advertising. Since I am in the advertising space, it was an interesting trailer to watch because I sell space on this blog. The idea of the movie is to fund a movie production by means of other companies buying ad space or placements in the movie.

Just watch the trailer…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Even if you are not a marketer, this trailer shows you you can get anything funded by big advertisers. Lets us this blog as an example, affiliate networks advertise on this blog because I am an affiliate marketer. A lot of my audience are affiliate marketers and the demographics are online marketers. It would make sense for an affiliate network to advertise on this blog. I remember the first time a network approached my blog to advertise.

Morgan Spurlock goes around finding advertisers to buy space or product placements in his documentary movie. Surprising a lot of brands decided to pay Morgan to have their products in his movie. These big corporations are only looking for exposure while Morgan literally becomes a human billboard.

After watching this trailer I was like damn that is the typical internet and how marketing works. When you turn a magazine page, that sexy girl with a New Victoria Secrets thong has been bought on that specific page. When you go to conferences and trade shows, that space on the floor has been bought. When you read this blog, those banner ads are bought.

Looking at all forms of advertising, we pay money to get the best exposure, we fight for more space, for our products to be placed where the eyes can view them. Google Adwords we fight to be the top 3 ads. Facebook we just want to be added in the ad rotation. CPM buys, we pay for a set of views. The list can go on.

Look at these ad networks they sell traffic, essentially inventory of space to be sold for views. Same concept.

The fact that advertisers and companys’ actually paid to put their brand in a movie, which paid for itself, is simply amazing. If you have a site and you have affiliate banner ads, you may want to think about and reaching out to advertisers to see if they would like to advertise on your blog. If you have a health product, reach out to small nutritional supplement companys and ask if they would like to advertise on your blog.

Essentially this is what Morgan did, he went to corporations and spoke to, I assume, their marketing department. He pitched and got them to say yes or no. In either case I thought this video was worth a share, especially if you are a marketer.

Social Media Has No Place in Advertising. Honestly.

Ian — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:09:49 +0000

I was going through my Flipboard app on my iPad and found an article from my twitter feed about Google+ as an extension in Adword ads. I was reading the article and it says you can activate social extensions on these ads. First of all ads are ads, they are a direct response advertorial. The image below you will see Google+ buttons on these ads when you are logged into Google.

Honestly, I can only see this working as an influential factor and not an action to be taken prior to a click. Also, this becomes a factor for us marketers we have to consider. Instead of a direct click the end user may click on the button rather than the ad? It is a distraction!

I wanted to see how others felt about this and so I posted the article to my twitter and Facebook page. It looks like some people share my same thoughts as well.

I do not understand why some people think social media plays a role in advertising, it doesn’t. Direct response is not social media. Just from my statement and from Gene’s response – Ads are Ads. Why would you click like, retweet, or even google+ and advertorial? There is even a company which thinks the end user will actually save these ads to their portfolio for later viewing, AdKeeper – really?

The purpose of marketing or advertising is to get the end user to click and take an action whether if they are buying an item or filling out a form. I can not see a person Google+’ing an Adwords ad. What is the point, really? Is Google trying to replicate Facebook Ad Likes?

From another view, it can show user influence. If the site has received prior social shares, then it may help but adding it directly to an ad proves useless in my opinion. Also the audience of Google+ users isn’t huge. For Google to incorporate such action is just trying to compete with Facebook social likes.

Social Media as a whole is not meant to be for a direct response industry such as affiliate marketing. It is meant for just branding and social interaction. Why would a person decide to like an ad? We have already tolerated banners so much they are blind to us, hence banner blindness. So the purpose of a social button being added on a banner or any type of paid media doesn’t really make sense.

To advertisers, by setting up social buttons on your ads, it just will create a new barrier or a new deterrent to the end user. Your goal is to get the person viewing your ad to click and then to convert. Not to share an ad. Does that even sound right? Facebook has done a good job with their platform because it is within their services. More and more users are utilizing Facebook pages to create landing pages, a community but not a direct response campaign. Two different things.

I will agree that social media is good for influence and viral traffic. Incorporating it with ads, definitely does not work. Again would you like an ad? retweet an email submit page? or Google+ a male enhancement product? Probably not. Marketers that think social media should be use in all aspects, I believe do not know marketing in general. They are just going by the trend and what is becoming popular.

The internet is becoming more social but it does not change how direct advertising works. A direct response campaign is just that, allowing the end user to take an immediate action and not share a new lost weight pill they have found so interesting.

What are your thoughts on social media and direct ad campaigns? Even the addition of adding Google+ to Adwords?