Did you get to play the stock market game when you were in school? If so, you probably learned something about how to analyze companies, pick stocks, and balance a portfolio. But I’m willing to bet that you would have learned more if you were given real money to play with and were told you could keep what was left of it after a set time. Changing the stakes would likely change your interest in the game.

Along this same line, I’m surprised at how many people will pay big bucks to learn about online advertising rather than simply giving it a try.

For example, one credit at a state run grad school appears to run around $1000 these days. In many cases, I think you could learn more about online advertising if you took $1000 of your own money and spent it on Google AdWords.

Ed’s 30-Day Fast Course on Online Advertising

What you’ll learn:

1. How to set up a Google AdWords Account

2. How to create a campaign

3. How to target specific regions

4. How to set day parts

5. How to select keywords

6. How to select negative keywords

7. How to use advanced matching options such as phrase and exact.

8. How to write ads

9. How to improve ads over time.

10. How to track conversions.

How will you be able to learn all of that in 30 days? By putting $1000 of your own money at risk. All of the information you need to learn how to do the above steps is publicly available. And now you have the incentive you’ve needed to get serious and dig in.

Here is how to do it:

Pick a product to advertise by signing up as an Amazon affiliate or at cj.com.

Then buy ads on Google AdWords to market the product you’ve selected.

Track your returns over the month.

By the end of the month, unless things go terribly wrong, some off your $1000 in spending will be offset by affiliate earnings. If you catch on quickly, you may actually turn a profit. If that happens, you’ve just added a new income stream to your household. Congratulations.

Now sit back and think about how you could apply your new-found knowledge to other industries.

To me, this is a small bet. You’re risking up to $1000 to really learn how online advertising works in the real world. That is valuable stuff.

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Laurel Hart, Senior Fellow at The Logos Institute, brought up an interesting point on Twitter after giving a talk about social media to a group of grad students at NYU:

First, I don’t know if Laurel happened upon a group of Luddites, but I’m going to assume for now that the situations she describes isn’t unique.

If that’s the case, I would imagine the reason why grad students aren’t big on Twitter is that their word’s current judges - their professors - are their key audience and they don’t need to use Twitter to reach them. Email, phone, or physically visiting their professors in class or during office hours is probably sufficient.

But when they’re out of school and trying to reach a much larger audience, they may find more use for communication technologies that scale. All of a sudden, it becomes physically impossible to email, phone, or physically visit everyone you’re trying to communicate with.

Hopefully, the students realize that their lack of need is situational and will likely change over time.

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When people first come online, they seem to bring some of their offline behaviors with them. For example, if they want to look up a business, they might turn to the online yellow pages for information.

However, as the above chart shows, behaviors change over time. People seem to be figuring out that they don’t need to turn to the yellow pages to find what they’re looking for. Instead, they can save a step by typing their query directly into search engines rather than doing a 2-step of first finding a relevant online directory, then searching.

The same thing seems to apply more generally to phone books:

Why go to an online phone book when you can search for people on Google and find out way more about a person than a online phone book provides?

Check the bottom line on both graphs. This shows how buzz worthy that specific term has been over time. Sadly for the phone book industry, in both cases biggest buzz in the past five years has been a story about print phone books that explains there are two phone books printed every year for every American.

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The following quote found within a Wall Street Journal article on Facebook advertising really jumped out at me:

“I haven’t heard of anyone purchasing something off an ad on Facebook,” says Angie Tulgetske, vice president of RE/MAX Preferred Choice Properties, which resells timeshares and spends thousands of dollars a month on search ads but avoids social-networking sites. “I wouldn’t think any of my marketing dollars would be spent advantageously there.”

Rather than relying on anecdotal evidence and hunches, why not test it? It’s pretty clear that a ton of people who own or can afford to buy homes are spending a significant part of their day on Facebook.

It would have been nice to see a quote in the WSJ from someone who is seeing success with their Facebook ad spend (they do mention that FOX is spending a ton of money and they’re not stupid) but it’s clearly going to be tough to find someone willing to go on the record in front of all of their competition.

This reminds me of earlier resistance to pay per click advertising. People would say, “I never click on ads,” which somehow translated into, “no one clicks on ads” which clearly isn’t the case based on Google’s revenues.

With ad networks like this, early adopters tend to see amazing returns because the competition among advertisers is so much lower. Can you imagine how amazing it must have been for real estate agents back when they could pay ten cents a click rather than a couple dollars?

That’s where Facebook is today.

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Amazon has offered a “Subscribe and Save” features for quite a while now where customers receive a discount if they’ll agree to automatically purchase a given product on regular intervals. This feature seems to be most common among grocery and household items that people tend to repurchase regularly.

I’ve been meaning to try this for some time, but doing so proved trickier than I imagined. Why? Because I haven’t put much thought into how often I restock products around my house.

Amazon’s grocery items seemed like a good place to find something to try. However, Amazon tends to sell grocery items in bulk, so rather than projecting when you’ll run out of an item you need to project when you’ll run out of 6-12-24 boxes of something.

But then I found Wheat Thins - something that you can almost always find in my house. Amazon sells them in 6-packs, and offers a 15% discount if purchased through Subscribe & Save. The longest time period for Subscribe & Save is 6 months, so as long as I can make it through one box of Wheat Thins a month, this should work out well.

I price shopped this and it looks like I’ll save around $0.80 per box, or $9.60/year on this cupboard staple vs. buying it locally.

Now I want to scale this to other products. Any suggestions?

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In real estate, some of the easiest business to win is generally from your own network: your family, your friends, and friends of theirs.

After that, you’re generally prospecting against other agents who have their own networks, so you’re essentially in the position of stealing business away from their networks.

So what happens when sites like Facebook help people keep in better touch with their networks? It certainly seems possible that real estate agents engaged in sites like Facebook will have an easier time closing business with a larger percentage of their network.

I searched for “real estate” within Facebook after logging into my account just now. After doing that, I clicked the “people” tab and found out that I’m currently friends with 20 real estate agents. Among those agents, I have between zero and 21 mutual friends. Some I know fairly well and some I went to high school or college with. To me, this is a reminder that real estate agents advertising to me have virtually no shot at winning my business away from one of the 20 agents I’m connected with on Facebook. And, of course, there are other agents I know well who aren’t on Facebook yet.

(This isn’t to say that all 20 of those agents have equal levels of experience, skills, or work the same geographies.)

My 21st friend in real estate. The one who knows what she’s doing but isn’t on Facebook yet, is missing out on a big opportunity. She’s no longer getting her name in front of me at the same degree 20 other friends are. And I’m just one of hundreds of people in her network that she’s not touching, virtually, on a regular basis, for free.

Going outside of my friend network doesn’t disappoint either. I can still find out way more about prospective agents when I research them within Facebook than I can on their own websites. Why? Because they share so much more about themselves, such as where they went to school, who their friends are, what other jobs they’ve had, where they like to travel, their tastes in movies and music, and dozens to thousands of photos of themselves and their friends. None of this can’t be done on their main business sites, but they don’t seem to realize that they should.

If you’re not engaging with your current network through online tools like Facebook, you’re opening up the door for all of the other real estate agents they know.

If you’re not sharing information about yourself online through Facebook and on your business site, you’re making things easy for your competitors who do.

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Minnesota’s local media sites, including TV, Newspapers, and Radio, are experimenting with video on the web based on the rationale that advertisers will pay a premium for video ads. A fair assumption.

However, one of the biggest problems I see with the online video offerings of media companies today is that they are being held back by their video content management systems, which tend to be much less feature rich that freely available alternatives.

Here is a quick list of 10 specs I would expect a company that’s serious about running a business around online video:

1. Good quality audio

2. Flash video (not a proprietary player that won’t work for all of your viewers)

3. Full screen option

4. Video that looks good full screen.

5. Related videos after a video finishes (you want to keep people around, right?)

6. Email-able video links

7. Embeddable video

8. Deep linkable video

9. Closed captions

10. RSS feeds for videos (lots of opportunity here)

Bonus: 11. Live video streams

Bonus 12: Live chats.

I don’t know of a single mainstream media site that comes close to providing this level of technical support for their video content. Sadly, mainstream media sites are likely paying a boatload of cash for proprietary video CMS’s rather than using free, feature-rich, platforms instead.

Want to increase views? Make it easy for people to link, email, embed, or RSS your videos. Let them know what else may interest them.

The closest to completing this list among Minnesota media companies is TheUptake.org, a non-profit company that relies on mostly free software to serve and manage their organization’s video content. And someone else who has this figured out is Ben Higginbotham over at SpaceVidcast where he provides a ton of options for viewers to consume, interact, and share the content he and his audience creates.

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If someone wants to watch a movie today, they have quite a few options.

They could download it illegally from the web.

Or they could rent it from a local video store.

Purchase it online.

Pay to download it.

Have it delivered through Netflix (or stream it if it’s available).

Pay per view.

Etc.

There are lots of legal options.

But what about this: what if someone makes a good-faith effort to acquire a movie through legal means, but that channel fails?

For example, if someone receives a DVD from Netflix that’s unplayable, then downloads the exact same movie to make up for Netflix’s failure, do they have piracy immunity?

Pushing it further, could someone claim piracy immunity by subscribing to Netflix, then turning around and downloading pirated copies of movies rather than dealing with unreliable plastic discs or a small streaming catalog?

What do you think?

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Putting your main company file server in the cloud may seem like a strange idea, but stick with me on this one.  A small/medium sized business (SMB) may not have the resources to purchase and maintain their own file server.  While to us IT geeks a file server is drop dead simple, there are things such as security, backup and sharing outside of the LAN that needs to occur which can be complex and cumbersome to the average SMB.

Enter Egyte.com a file server in the cloud.  For $15.00/user/mo you get unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth in the cloud.  Let me say that again:  $15.00 per user, per month gets you unlimited file storage in the cloud!

There are many advantages of putting the file server in the cloud. Egnyte does a great job of utilizing exactly how you would expect cloud based storage to work as well as expand upon it in unique and new ways.  The basics are all there, WebDAV connection so you can have a mounted drive on your Mac, Linux or PC desktop right in your file explorer, web based interface to upload one or multiple files, the ability to link to large files so you can e-mail out items, document revisions, user management and frankly quite a bit more.  Heck, you can even customize the interface and add your company logo just to get that added feeling of personalization.

Egnyte has two levels of accounts, power users and standard users.  The $15.00/user/mo is for a power user account which gets you the WebDAV access, a backup program so you can backup your computer to the cloud.  Power users also get a private folder on the system for their personal stuff that they want in the cloud.  Basically power user accounts would be for each employee in the company.  The second type of user is a standard user.  Standard users can only access the file server via the AJAX web interface and don’t have things like computer backup, the personal folder, or WebDAV.  Standard users can read, write and delete to folders that you specify.  You can have unlimited standard users in your account for no additional cost.  Think of standard users as contractors you work with, or people who may need to have access to certain specific folders within your file server, but not access to the whole thing.

Each folder has permissions based on groups or specific users, but at this time you can’t go down to the file level.  It would be nice if I could share a folder with a contractor and hide certain items from them, or give them read/write access to certain files but read only access to other files in that folder.  Hopefully we’ll see that in a future version.

Additionally Egnyte has released an iPhone optimized version of the web site.  This is not an iPhone app but rather a specially formatted version of the web page that renders very well on the iPhone.  This can be extremely useful in scenarios where you may be on-site and need to send a contractor a file.  Right from your iPhone you can log in to your Egnyte account, find the file you need, click on the ‘Send’ button and you’ll be prompted to send the file as a link or attachment (in my case a link since the file is 200MB).  No need to VPN back to my building, create a reminder note or anything.  I can just send the file right then and there.  The iPhone web site for Egnyte is a very cool feature, and one of those things that makes having your file server in the cloud all that more powerful.

The biggest drawback to cloud based file servers is speed.  You won’t be able to emulate a file server sitting on your 100/1000Mbps LAN via your public Internet connection. Files that may have taken only a few seconds to copy over could take several minutes.  While Egnyte tries to do their best to keep the system running as fast as they can, the simple fact of the matter is that you’re limited to your Internet connection speed.  I would love to see a program similar to what GetDropbox.com uses where it automatically downloads/uploads any files or folders created in a specific directory back to the cloud.  This would allow me to have my personal directory in sync on all of my computers while the revisions of these files are kept in the cloud to restore at any time.  The issue of transfer speed goes away and I get the best of the Egnyte and GetDropbox world all with one product. 

One other thing worth mentioning is that it is $15.00/user/mo but you need to have at least 3 users to get the unlimited bandwidth and storage.  That means the minimum cost per month is $45.00, but that also means that you have three users with their computers getting backed up to the cloud *and* a company file server for less than $50.00/mo.  From my point of view that’s an amazing deal.

I like the service so much that I use it for my personal videocast, spacevidcast.com.  Since we have huge files that we have to sling between editors scattered across the country, I purchased 5 seats at $75.00/mo and allow advertising firms to upload their material directly via a standard user and my editors (the great group called Max Q) to work on the material, upload revisions, and keep different copies of the media/graphics in sync.  There is no way a tradiitonal file server could do this.  Hopefully my success will help others in some way as well.  Egnyte solved a huge storage problem I had, and is probably one of the best investments I have made in tech thus far.  You may think you have your file storgae needs taken care of, but try the free demo of Egnyte and see what you’re missing out on!

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If the bread slicer was a recent invention, I imagine a conversation like this would take place somewhere in the world:

Guy #1: “Dude, you have to try sliced bread.”

Guy #2: “Why would I need that? I can slice my own bread, thanks.”

Guy #1: “Dude, you just have to try it. It’s so much easier and gets you to sandwich status so much quicker.”

Guy #2: “Man, how long does it really take to slice bread? You can’t be serious.”

Guy #1: “Forget that I ever brought this up.”

And so goes RSS evangelism in 2008 where, according to Forrester Research (via MicroPersuasion), of the 89% of people who don’t use RSS feeds already, on 17% are interested in using them.

Polling people on their interest in trying something they don’t understand will certainly generate some odd responses.

Of course, many of these people are already using similar technologies such as Tivo where they can subscribe to shows that interest them. Had the same respondents been asked, “would you like to have a ‘Tivo for the web’ that lets you easily subscribe to the latest content from your favorite sites?” I think you may have seen a more enthusiastic response.

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