Long story short – for a few days last week I was unwittingly subverting the Chinese Government.  Somehow my private proxy server was discovered and published.  I may get into that story more later, but for now all you need to know is that I decided to ask around a few cheap hosting sites to see if I could run a small ad-supported proxy site.  This particular host shows up when Googling proxy hosting, but a couple of support tickets later it turns out that they don’t actually allow proxy hosting.  I let them know about the Google ad and got this enthusiastic sales pitch:

Hi, David.
Thanks for your notification.
If you like to host your sites, xxxxxxxxxxxx might be one of your choices. Let us know if you need more help. Thanks.

Now, I don’t know about YOU, but as for ME – I really like to host my sites.  It brings me much more happiness than when I was burning them onto a CD and trying to fling them into open car windows as I drove to work.  (readership tanked in winter and return visitors were hard to come by if the CD happened to peg them in the face).

So we’ve established that I like to host my sites, the Tech follows with the time-tested hard sell technique of telling me their product is soooo great it just might make it onto my list of choices.  It might be time to rewrite the script here folks!

Happy New Year Everyone!  Have you had any similar bad sales pitches?

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I first learned of Triggit due to their selection as a finalist in the 2008 Web 2.0 Launchpad event. I’m really impressed with the service, it’s like Zemanta for advertising! I’ll write more on it later but for know I wanted to announce that I threw together a quick plugin for self-hosted Wordpress users who feel more comfortable adding a plugin then editing their theme files. This is also useful if you don’t want to have to re-add the code every time you change your theme.

-= Download the Triggit Wordpress Plugin Here =-

To use this plugin download and unzip it and place the file into your Wordpress plugin folder. Activate the plugin and go to the Settings Triggit screen and add your Triggit User ID.

This plugin requires your theme to have the wp-footer hook, if you it doesn’t seem to work that’s the most likely reason and you’d have to edit your theme’s footer file and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before the /body tag (or just paste your Triggit code since you’re there anyway). If that wp-footer code is there and it’s still not working then leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.

I’ll pretty it up a touch later so check back for updates!

Marketing is hard, well good marketing is hard at least. In an effort to learn a little more about what works and what doesn’t I’ve decided to do what many a mediocre marketing employee has done, borrow liberally from other sources! Spottt has provided a low risk way to experiment and I’ve decided to take advantage of it by running several different ads and seeing what works the best. My first attempt has been pretty lackluster with a click through rate (CTR) at just under 0.2%:

So, seeing that it was doing so poorly I went looking for new ideas, and the first thing that came to mind was to find out what was doing well on Spottt already. This data hasn’t been published yet except that we know after the first day or so the leading ad was that of Spottt’s founder. It’s a drawing of a squirrel next to block lettering that says “ASK ME ANYTHING” and at the time of posting (Spottt’s second live day) it had a 10% CTR. Now what has made this so popular? The lettering? The contrast? The message?…. I decided it must be THE SQUIRREL!!!

Do squirrels have magic internet marketing powers? No one can say for sure but if you’re a student of internet history then you’ll know that the extremely popular news site Fark.com spent it’s first two years online as nothing but (to use their words) a “picture of a squirrel with big nuts“.

So now I had an idea, use a squirrel, so I grabbed a public domain picture, popped it into my brand new A.viary.com account’s editor. From there I shaped it into a square, added some LOLCATS like text, my site name, and presto!:

After this runs for a while I’ll report back with the results and my next experiment.