Joe Nogood owns a small but thriving gift store. He is middle-aged and he dabbles in the stock market and has survived some major crashes in his time. He is an expert on gifts, having learned the skills over the years. There is only one word to describe him, ordinary.
Joe has been studying the internet for months, surveying the battlefield, as he calls it. One day, he declared to Stan, his longtime buddy. "The dotcom bubble has bottomed out, I see that we are at the beginning of a new uptrend. Let’s build an online store".
Setting up a website is like setting up a business in a foreign land. Joe had to learn the foreign language (HTML, XML, PHP, Perl, CGI, Java, CSS, RSS).
The first stage was easy enough. They quickly decided on JoeNoGood.com, it has a counterculture aura around it and a matching slogan as well - We’re Good at JoeNoGood.com.
Registering JoeNoGood.com (domain name), finding a web-hosting company to host his site and finding a credit card processor to handle the credit card transactions were simple tasks. There are also some excellent open-source software that, with some basic knowledge, Joe and Stan built their website within two weeks.
The second stage is by far the toughest and will need stamina – website marketing and promotion. Having a website is like having a billboard pasted with your messages on an island. Now Joe needs visitors (hits) and bridges (links) to his little island.
When a consumer wants to find a product, 80% of the time, this person will use a search engine. Joe’s website has to search-engine friendly - when a search is made for a product or service at JoeNoGood.com, Joe want his website’s page to be in the top 20 rankings (top 10 would be ideal). This is Joe’s first-year marketing plan.
Sending 48 Free-Reprint Articles a year
Joe’s marketing plan needs him to write 48 articles a year. He understood that his articles have to be original, informative, entertaining and in plain language. With his buddy during an all-night brainstorming session they agreed on a few ideas.
A Brief History of Gift-Giving would be a good start. Gifts for Positive Response might be another – not corruption, you blockhead, think about a prelude to a marriage proposal or motivating a teenage student to excel in his studies. Romantics may like to read Gifts for Your Love; the list goes on and on.
Perhaps, a possible topic may be Gift-Receiving Habits of Bushmen Americans, the ones concentrated in the D.C. area. Bushmen use strange language like "I wish to caveat my response" which is hardly understandable by the public. A follow-up article like Bushmen Gifts – the Impact on Iraq’s Economy may provide the scholarly reputation for Joe, a must-read for think tanks around the world.
Publishing 4 Free E-books a year
Since Joe wrote an article a week, within three months, he will have enough material for an e-book. Knowing the hassles, he decides on a commercial website that can convert his articles into an EXE and PDF format and submit this free-for-download e-book to the various depositories on his behalf.
Naturally, since this e-book is free, Joe inserted some messages on his products and services in a non-intrusive manner. Joe thought – an e-book-cum-catalog, what a clever idea. He wants to persuade without using the ways used by in-your-face marketers. Joe wants his readers to know and believe he is true to his chosen slogan.
On publishing his first e-book and seeing a growing readership, Joe called his printers and ordered a fresh set of new name cards – Joe Nogood, Owner-Internet Writer-Author. Stan sensed a distinct glow about Joe’s demeanor since that moment.
Releasing 4 Free Software a year using Rebrand Software
Neither Joe nor Stan can write software of professional quality. It is true Stan attended a few night classes in programming but writing software that will be used as market promotion tools is a different kettle of fish altogether.
Giving away free software like corporate gifts (golf caps, diaries) will need quality and robust software. When users download and use Joe’s software, they will see JoeNoGood.com logo and a link directly to Joe’s site. Apart from the onetime costs, there are no extra costs - when Joe gives out this corporate gift to 1000 or 1 million, his outlay is the same. Joe’s eyes glistened on hearing this.
Joe found a rebrand software site that will sell him resale rights with adjustments. That is important, because JoeNoGood.com do not want to be associated with cloned software that everybody may have, like many marketing self-help books. He wants some unique feature that will distinguish his corporate gift from the others. Finally, he decided on an RSS news feed reader, stock charting program, a time planner with crypto functions and a computer security tool.
Sending 6 Press Releases a year
Joe understands that sending messages is tricky. From his knowledge of Chaos Theory, which he learned from analyzing stocks, information seeps through the internet at different speeds.
A press release by Google can travel round the world many times in a few hours. On the other hand, a message by Joe may take months just to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Hence, he chose RushPRnews.com headed by a veteran with 15+ years experience to give him an edge over the thousands of press releases filed each day.
A happy ending
At the end of the first year, Joe found he gained about 1000 links for his articles, assuming 20 links for each article. For the 8 free e-books and software titles, he got about 2000 links, assuming 250 links for each title. For the press releases, he found another 250-500 links. 3000-plus inbound links for one year of hard work is indeed gratifying for Joe.
Years down the road, Joe’s hard work and determination had paid off. His store is the recognized leader with over 36% of the global share in gift sales. From the meticulous data he has collected over the years, he converted these to marketing data that any advertiser or gift manufacturer would die to get their hands on. Joe wisely published for-subscription-only e-books with the grand title of Collective Consciousness of Gift Buyers by Country, Month and Year and priced them in eGold (equivalent to thousands of Yanks dollars). Joe Nogood struck dotcom gold. The powers in Mountain View are not amused.
JoeNoGood.com and Joe Nogood are fictional. Hopefully readers can see a bit of themselves in Joe as he grapples with the complex issues on the Internet. Stay tuned, folks.
The term Bushmen Americans is hereby released into the public domain. A small attribution (first coined by Stan Seecrets) is appreciated. The usefulness of this term may have a limited shelf life (around Jan. 2009) unless someone named Jeb becomes President then.
The name Joe Nogood is the exclusive copyright of Stan Seecrets. Fair use is permitted.
Anybody who wants to trade his full-featured, hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered, ocean-going yacht for exclusive movie/television rights to Joe Nogood’s story can contact this author 24/7.
Stan Seecrets Postulate: We’re Good at JoeNoGood.com (figure this one out yourself).
[This article may be freely reprinted provided it is published with the author’s bio and activating the link to the URL below. It can be edited, summarized, expanded, and translated into any human language provided the literary integrity is maintained. In the case of print media, the same conditions apply except that the URL must be printed in bold letters.]
