profitlabinc.com

I’ve been working on a marketing article for several months, but haven’t really had as full a perspective as I’d like to have on the “picture”. It’s grand theme is measurement. I want to describe how a division has taken place in the universe of marketing, into the category of tactics that give effects we can measure and those that yield results we cannot. Online is in the former category. Most traditional marketing is in the latter. I would also describe how it has been (for most of the history of the marketing praxis) a big part of what marketing “does” to try to establish correlations between specific marketing actions and specific sales reactions. I would then go on to describe how the ability to precisely determine ROI (a given with online advertising) has commenced a massive flux in the way marketing budgets are being divided, in favor of measurable online. At the same time, marketing departments and ad agencies are coming under the leadership of “online marketers”… by that I mean executives who came up through the ranks buying and selling clicks. It is likely a grave disrespect to many talented and well-rounded marketing professionals to say that people who understand “traditional” marketing (PR, print, and all that’s not online) are in decline. But I think it’s generally true. Then again, perhaps all I am doing is observing an evolution, and there’s no reason to lament the disappearance of methods that don’t work anymore… or at least that do not work well enough to warrant investing in people who have those skills…

Christmas is a good time to think about online consumer trust. Comscore predicts online retail will top $100 billion in 2006. That’s good news, to be sure. But while the horses are at full gallop, it makes sense to look out ahead for obstacles or other things that might trip us up.

A few months back I speculated about the enlarging role of trust in electronic commerce. As an SEO dabbler, I had taken note of Google Trustrank, which accords trust using the deceptively simple formula: “Whomever is trusted by the trusted shall be trusted.” This fundamentally democratic approach to deciding which web pages to display in search results inspired me to think about other applications of trust-based schemes that might help stem online consumer fraud and other persistent consumer detractors. (more…)

In an earlier post, I speculated about a webmaster bbs where kids make money bumping threads. This HBM operates within that same theoretical scenario, and further presumes that senders of traffic (webmasters) make their decision (yay or nay) as regards particular affiliate programs based on what they read on the bbs. The Sig Whore’s MO is to sport a program’s banner in his “sig”. A sig (short for “signature”) is a display area that appears underneath the posts you make on a bbs. Your sig may contain text, images and outbound links.

Because it provides a clear visual identification, the sig may be used to build the brand of a program or a person. Sigs are an important aspect of one’s board persona. Some board members are strongly associated with a program (perhaps because they are an owner/employee or a Sig Whore with consistency).

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