JohnDeMayo.com: Internet Advertising Insight

Great Post by Murthy of Adchemy on setting and building a company's Values

Murthy, a gentlemen I have worked with at Adchemy, and whom I have a tremendous amount of respect for, has a good post here on fostering, documenting, and promoting the values of a company.  While some companies may end up with effective and unified values without effort, many do not, and I think the pro-active choice is the correct one.  I've had the opportunity to see first-hand at Adchemy how well documented values go hand in hand with a great team, in building a great product and a company with a truly sustainable advantage.

Cellware is aggressively looking for affiliate publishers

We at Cellware have lots of $$ to spend to acquire new members for our new site at Cellware.com, one of the largest providers of FREE mobile content.  If you think you can drive new registrants for us on a CPA basis, from your site or network, please drop me a line.

Funny

Sedo fumbles .MOBI auctions big-time

1)  Wake up at 8:30 this morning.  Finalize bids for .mobi auctions.  I was actively bidding on jokes.mobi, joke.mobi, funny.mobi, horoscopes.mobi.

2)  9:00 auctions appear to end on their site.  Site says I won.

3)  9:16 receive automated SEDO email that says "Congratulations! The auction for horoscopes.mobi has closed and you are the highest bidder."

4)  9:23 receive email from gregg.bois@sedo.com that says "Dear Mr. demayo,  Congratulations on your purchase. Before you can begin the process to assume ownership of this domain you need to place your payment for this domain in escrow on our escrow account.......etc....."

5)At this point, I think I have won horoscopes.mobi (and who wouldn't after that chain of events).  So I leave my home office and head out for a while.....head to the DMV to finally register my new RV, buy a wreath for the front of my SUV, that kinda stuff.

6)  I get home, and realize an email had been sent at 11:07 (about 2 hours after the auction had closed) saying they were going to be extended and that "We are aware the there are some problems with the .MOBI Auction at this time. Due the down time we were not able to extend the auction before the set closing time....".  Apparently the auctions were extended until 12:00 pacific.

7)  There is a second email at 11:53 telling me I had been outbid.  Naturally I was not home and didn't see this email in time.

So there you have it.  Mass confusion over at Sedo.  If they had to extend the auctions because of errors on their side, they really should have extended them for more then 1 hour past when they notified people of the extension. 

Advertising in a blog's feed: A simple, targeted, and effective example.

     I just noticed LeadCritic is now including text ads below each of their new posts.  These simple text ads show up in text-only feed readers, and while simple, are highly targeted and likely highly effective.  I think this is a model other vertical-specific blogs that have some inside sales force should consider adopting.  Again simple, but well done.  See image:

I just bought a Kindle from Amazon

     When I first start reading about the Kindle, Amazon's new "wireless reading device", I wasn't sure of my opinion of the product.  Now that I have started back on my normal pace of constantly reading and constantly traveling after a bit of a hiatus, buying one immediately makes more sense then I thought possible.

    -I travel between a few locations (not just back and forth between two).
    -I am normally in the middle of more then one book at a time.
    -I normally like to have 3 or 4 books with me for the future.

    Add all of this together and you can see that I am normally trying to travel with 5 or so books, trying to figure out where I will be in a few days so I can ship my new books there, and trying to figure out how to get the books I finished back somewhere for storage in case I want to reread them or refer to a certain passage.  A pain in the ass I have lamented for a few years now.

    I'm excited about eliminating this problem.  Hence, my purchase of the Kindle.  1 device handles most of my books past, present and future.  And my computer can just archive anything the Kindle doesn't have enough storage capacity for.  Seems likely I will be lugging 5 or so pounds less when I travel in the future.

    I haven't even seen or used one yet so I can't report first hand on anything other then my present troubles and how it appears this device will solve them.  I'll let you know more when I do.