A2 Network Business Blog

Hello, my name is Jay Chen. I’m a fellow webmaster like Andy, and since he’s trying to get this blog running again, I’d thought that I’d help him out with some guest posts. I’ve actually wanted a business blog as my own, but since this blog is already established and promoted, I figure I’d just focus my efforts on this one. If you don’t know, I actually wrote a guest post a while back called How to Manipulate Stumbleupon. Anyways, let me get straight into it.

So. You have a site with potential. But how do we put that to good use?

Everybody always wants their site to be the next big thing. The next Youtube. The next Google. Imagine if you had a website where everybody talked about it, and that you didn’t have to spend countless hours submitting your site to directories, or crawling the forums asking for link exchanges. Imagine how simple it would be to promote a website where people basically promotes for you. How easy would your job be? Well, today I’m going to tell you how to achieve this. Well. Maybe on a smaller level

Let’s take a look at McDonalds for a second. A while back, McDonalds came out with this ingenious commercial for their Chicken McNugget promotion. I’m not sure about the details, but I think two fans made a rap about Chicken McNuggets, and recently McDonalds picked that up, and made it into a commercial. If you haven’t seen it before, watch it now.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=XSZ6k3QIsAk

This commercial became increasingly popular. After it’s release, most people knew about it. It was wacky, funny, and had a catchy rap. McDonalds took advantage of this and came out with a promotion. Buy a six/ten piece box of chicken nuggets, and get a box of six/ten chicken nuggets for free. The rap and the promotion were well known and I’d expect McDonalds profited from it all. To this day, my friends and I go out to the McDonalds every Wednesday and have what we call “McNugget Wednesday” where we just eat a lot of McNuggets.

How does have to do with advertising? Well, McDonalds basically had the best form of promotion. They put some commercials out, but the buzz from people talking about it is really what mattered. So this brings me to my point. How to achieve something like this? The upside is that the effect of word to mouth can be enormous and can drive a lot of traffic to your website. Probably a lot more than any paid advertising can do.

So I had this experiment to try to reach a “buzz” for my website http://freetextsend.com. Just a quick overview, FreeTextSend is a site where you can send free text messages to another cellphone. It’s just a fast, fun and free way to send free texts. So anyways, I came up with this way of advertising that is somewhat unique. This is basically how it works. I tell my friends to put a link in their AIM profile to my website, and if they do it, they get to pick an outfit for me to wear for school. Sounds simple right? Well, that’s the point. This idea works two fold:

The first, is that a lot of people are on AIM/MSN nowadays. I’d say the average person has at least 200 people on their buddy list, and if you get a lot of people to put their link in their profile, then there is a potential for a lot of exposure. Also, if I saw a link in my friends profile, I’d be more inclined to click it than if I saw it on some random website. Nowadays with identity theft and charging cell phones for unwanted ringtones and such, people are wary of giving away their personal information, such as their number. So if I saw a person that I trusted promoting it, then I’d be more open with using the service.

The second, is the “buzz” or word to mouth part. Say my friend thinks of some completely ridiculous outfit for me. The other day, I had to wear a headband, a long tshirt under another tshirt, short shorts, and long high knee socks with tennis shoes. As I walked the halls, people gave me weird looks. However, there were some people that came up to me and asked what I was doing. This was the effect I was looking for. By them asking me what I was doing, I was able to explain the promotion and the website to them. As time went on, almost everybody knew what I was doing, and I had a lot of people asking me, “Who dressed you today?”

See, it’s easy to do. The word to mouth effect doesn’t have to be on such a large scale as the one like McDonalds. I think I was successful because in the end, people knew of the website, knew what I was doing, talked to other people about what I was doing, and what I was doing it for. Plus, it was actually a pretty fun thing to do.

All in all, I hope you liked my post about advertising and word to mouth. It might not have been that informative, but I hope you got out of it that word to mouth is probably the best method of advertising, and that the potential can be huge. Stay tuned for more posts as we try and revive this blog.

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I recently started offering few online services on a few webmaster forums across the internet, and the main amount of my replies were quite mean. All of you know what I am talking about. Those people who go completely out of their way to ruin your thread and try to make you look like a total fool. I’m going to link you right now to a thread that I posted over at Digitalpoint. Please refrain from commenting on what I was actually offering in that thread. If you’d like to talk about that, then please contact me and we can chat. Without further ado, here is a thread that I created in the DP forums. Note that moron who completely went out of his way to try and discredit what I was selling. My reply was mild, given the nature of the DP forums, so if you want to see what I replied when language wasn’t an issue, check out the same thread in WF.

I’m not saying that I handle criticism perfectly, and I know that sometimes I handle it completely the wrong way (especially from my mom, in real life). Still, more and more often I’m faced with people who get so angry online for some measly criticism, and take it upon themselves to threaten me and spam my emails and cell phone with useless threats and stuff like that. I always believe that a cool and calm response will disarm anyone who is criticizing you just to be mean. Please note that I am not talking about constructive criticism in this post, because constructive criticism is always great to hear and you should appreciate anyone you know who is able to give you their honest and unbiased opinion of something.

When you are criticized, you should think if it is deserved or undeserved. If you deserved the criticism, than you should consider correcting whatever you were criticized for and then simply forget about it. If it was undeserved, then you should definitely not brood on it, especially if it came from someone ignorant or in a rude manner. At any rate, definitely don’t give a critic the satisfaction of knowing that he has hit a soft spot on you by losing your cool. Always try to turn the tables on them and make them look like the immature idiot. If you look at the picture to the right, you can see that a lot of Muslims don’t know how to take any criticism whatsoever. Beheading people over cartoons and only insignificant things is just plain retarded, and I also think that arguing over the internet is as retarded as that. I hope you think of this post when you are faced with losers who try to put you down, don’t let them get the best of you, they are not worth your time.

Random Stuff

I forgot to mention in my other post that I had redid my About page and added pictures to it, rewrote my Advertise page, and my Post Archive and Top Posts pages are now both automatically updated by two different Wordpress plugins. Please give me your opinion on all my new pages, I really value your criticism, even if you make it rude ;). Also, I’ve shipped out the last of my A2 Business Blog T-shirts, if you didn’t get one, I’m sorry, I ran out of them faster than expected as I gave a few to some friends and all my smalls went to girls. Don’t forget to take a picture of yourself in the A2-Blog.com shirt when you do receive and and include a backlink to this blog. I’d love to rank for the term business blog (hint hint).

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