Financial & Travel Musings

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Knowing whether or not your product is popular is a very important aspect of marketing, but how do you find out if it’s “popular”?

Consider a car for example. Whilst the car companies try to create a sexy image for their cars to sell them, most of us in reality are looking for a car that works, keeps working and which seems to give us a lot of car for our money. So, if you saw an average car priced at a price well below average that was from a manufacturer with a reasonable reputation then chances are that you’d buy it and so would a lot of other people too.

That would obviously create a backlog of orders for the car which might be taken by the manufacturer as an indication that it was very popular. They’d be right in this instance, of course. But what if they doubled the price? They might still have the backlog of orders but few people would actually buy it when their turn came up.

SocialSpark are doing the exact opposite of this at the moment and seem to be living in some other world divorced from reality. They’re advertising opportunities to write sponsored posts at quite good rates and thereby ending up with a waiting list on, seemingly, all of the opportunities that they offer. Their system is using the length of the waiting list as an indication of popularity (fair enough) and reducing the price paid based on the popularity (not a good move). So, for example, they had an offer on at $27.50 a couple of weeks ago (quite a reasonable payment for 250 words). Two weeks later when that queue was cleared the price was now $5.50. Thus, a lot of people who were interested at $27.50 were offered $5.50 for the same work (and, like me, turning it down).

Yes, you can use the waiting list as an indication of the popularity of your product, but don’t forget that one key aspect of that popularity is the price. Change the price significantly and the popularity can change dramatically.

Popularity: 46% [?]

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Most hosting services boast all kinds of stuff ranging from oodles of webspace, perhaps unlimited bandwidth and, of course, excellent support.

If you want to you can check out most of these easily enough. Sufficient patience or a very high speed Internet connection will let you fill up all that webspace and if you load enough videos you could even check out the bandwidth fairly easily.

What’s less easy to check out is the customer service. Most of the time it’s something that you really don’t need as most facilities on a hosting system are fully automated these days. When you do need it is when something goes wrong and that’s where the cheapo hosts can really let you down bigtime.

Try searching for “3ix hacked” for instance. You’ll find site after site that’s had problems thanks to their rather lax backup policies and apparently poor security which let the servers be hacked in the first place (note that the majority of those sites are talking about a hack of the 3ix hosting service rather than individual sites).

OK, so you should be doing your own backups but that’s something that many people expect (with good reason) their hosting service to do. In some cases it appears that 3ix only do a once a month backup which isn’t really adequate but then as 3ix only charge $1/month you’re obviously not going to get a top of the line service and it would appear that backups are one area where they save money.

So is the answer to go for a more expensive hosting service? That’ll help in some ways but you should note that most hosting services have something buried in their Terms of Service to the effect that it’s your responsibility to take backups. The only foolproof way seems to be to do your own backups which isn’t the pain that you may think as they can be scheduled to take place when you’re not using the computer.

Popularity: 36% [?]

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You might think that because there are thousands of companies running affiliate schemes around the world that there’s a lot of money to be made in it. There is, but not necessarily for you.

The problem with many of these schemes is that there are minimum payment amounts so in many ways it pays the companies running the schemes to have a thousand affiliates each bringing them one sale rather than one affiliate bringing them a thousand sales. In the first case the only cost to running the scheme is the administration as there’s often no sales commission to be paid whilst in the second case they’d end up paying out the commission at the highest band.

In general terms, that problem usually applies to companies running their own schemes therefore it’s usually better to sign up by way of one of the affiliate marketing companies such as TradeDoubler or CommissionJunction. They obviously take a slice of the commission that would otherwise go directly to you but at least you avoid the problem of having a series of small payments due yet none of them above the minimum for a payout.

Clearly there are some affiliates who go all-out in their marketing of the products and they do very well as you’d expect but it’s far from the easy job that many people seem to think. For example, even though I run a series of travel accommodation websites and religiously place affiliate links for car rental on pretty much every appropriate spot, in reality I get under $100/year from the affiliate links from those sites.

In fact, car rental doesn’t pay a massive amount (usually around $10/rental) but there are other affiliate links that pay quite substantial chunks of cash. Of those, probably among the most lucrative are house sales and online casinos.

The link on this page probably isn’t a fair test of the affiliate schemes but, on first sight, you’d think that at least some people would click on it and buy something. Frankly, I’d be very surprised if anyone did, but if they do, I’ll update this post. Go on… ruin my day and sign up for an Amex card (free to you, few dollars to me).

Popularity: 72% [?]

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