I have had some success with my Microsoft Office tips and tricks site - The New Paperclip.  It still astounds me the power of the Internet – a few hundred simple tips I have come across over the past few years have now been read by almost 1 million people! 

The scale of it all excites me – more people in a month read my posts on The New Paperclip than most magazines in Australia!  One post alone, which took me about 4 minutes to write, attracts almost 500 unique visits per day!  Every day! 

… and the best part is, it earns a little bit of play money on the side (very handy now that our twins have almost arrived).

Speaking of the twins, with the prospect of one salary about to hit us square in the face, and a hefty mortgage to pay (as of next month, we are officially in what the experts call “Mortgage Stress“) I have been trying to diversify my online interests, put to the test some of the things I have learned, read about, or just interested in, and hopefully put into practice what I learn during my day job.

I have four projects on the boil at the moment.  One I would say is in a “shippable” state, the others  just early ideas and concepts that I will continue to develop over the next few months.

Project 1: Content Marketing – ShortcutCourse.com

This project is a spin off of The New Paperclip.  This site is focused on selling a 5 day audio course that I produced in late 2009.  The course helps people learn and gain confidence in the key keyboard shortcuts for Word 2007.  All in just 15 minutes a day.

The key lessons I have learnt from shortcutcourse.com:

1) Price matters.  At first I priced the course at USD $50.  Sales = 0.  Dropped the price to $24.95, and it started to sell (slowly, but still selling every now and then)

2) Creating your own content to sell, no matter how easy you think it is, is actually quite difficult.  But you know what, close to 100% margin thanks to the digital nature of the final product makes the effort worth while.

Project 2: Search Affiliate/PPL Marketing – BrisbaneVirusRemoval.com

This project is really my first foray into serious affiliate and search engine marketing.  So I found a highish paying affiliate program for a product I know a little bit about, in a market that has lots of vendor competition, but not much third party action… and then localised it.

What I realised from the success with The New Paperclip is that taking complicated content and making it personal, easy to read, and easy to understand can drive a lot of traffic to your site - and that is the strategy I plan to take here – but instead of Office tips and tricks, the content will be focused on helping people understand viruses, malware, spyware, and adware – and more importantly, how to remove them!

Early days yet.  Not much traffic.  But still learning lots

Project 3: Content Marketing / Online Retail - mbaSlideLibrary.com 

The concept is simple.  You are a high powered executive.  You have an MBA (or wish you did).  You don’t have the time to create your own business plans or presentations.  You run your business using PowerPoint (just like, surprisingly, many other organisations).  You would be happy to pay $$ for a complete business plan, where all you need to do is plug in the figures, not worry about how it is structured.

So, MBASlideLibrary.com is an online retail site where you can download that business plan, marketing plan, or that slide of Porters Five Forces.

Well the retail site is there (thanks to Shopify)… I just need to pull my finger out and get the content up there to actually sell (see the lessons I learned from Shortcut Course above!)

Project 4: Hyperlocal Journalism – (to be announced soon)

This one is still on the back of about 14 different pieces of paper in the office, but in the next few weeks I am going to launch a hyper local site for my suburb.  This project was been inspired by reading “Made to Stick” – there is a great story in there about a  very successful local newspaper aimed at locals, for locals – that kills traditional mainstream newspapers.  Whilst there are two or three print local rags in our suburb… print news is dead (oh no he diiiidn’t). 

And to be honest, they do not contain much news – lots of copy and paste press release content – and a lot of advertising (A LOT!).  Considering there is a proven market for a local audience that local small businesses are willing to pay money to get in front of, and that no one is doing anything like this locally, in a cost effective way (seriously, why print 11 000 copies of a newspaper when WordPress and a nurtured email list will do the job far better), I know that in 6 months I will have the media channel for our suburb.  THAT IS HUGE!

(did I mention that this old Internet thing still excites me!)

Now – across The New Paperclip and these four projects, I think I might be stretching myself a bit thin to do all really well, so I suspect I will re-evaluate around July and drop two of them.  But that is the beauty of online marketing – it is cheap to test, and cheap to enter markets (well most, apart from porn and gambling).

Are you from Brisbane and interested in discussing online marketing, or marketing in general over a coffee or beer?  Give me a shout  – paul@paul-woods.com

(From the Pacifica Group blog)

This is a true story.

Steve Cosmopulos is an old art director in Boston.
(Hill Holiday Connors & Cosmopulos was his for awhile.
It got too big and he left, but he left his name on the door.)
He’s a tough little fireplug of a high-school-educated Greek guy.
Always wears a tailored suit and tie.
Always.

He walks into a presentation.
Late.
Big conference table at client offices.
Everyone sitting expectantly.
Silence.
He has a duffel bag.
Sets the bag on his chair.
He doesn’t sit.
From out of the bag he pulls a board.
With a bed of 100 nails sticking up out of this board.
Sets it carefully on table.
Pulls out an aluminum frying pan.
One of those nonstick Silverstone jobs.
Silence.
Holds up frying pan.
Silence.
Slams it down as hard as he can on bed of nails.
Repeatedly.
Holds up frying pan.
Shows dings in bottom.
Silence.
Puts board back in bag.
Pulls out another identical board.
But this one with just one nail.
Puts it on table.
Silence.
Slams down the frying pan on the single nail.
Pries frying pan off nail.
Holds up frying pan.
Hole in bottom.
Shows it slowly to everyone.
Asks:
"Now how many copy points do you want to put in this ad?"

Proof that an art director named Stavros Cosmopulos is
THE PATRON SAINT OF MARTYRED COPYWRITERS.
This is not only a Boston legend, it’s a true story.
I asked him.

I am off to buy some nails now!

For the last few months, a few of the team at Data#3 (where I work – a big Microsoft partner in Australia) have been working on our campaign to support of the launch – in particular around Windows Server 2008.  Basically we are positioning Windows Server 2008 as the core foundation of an organisations Managed Operating Environment (for all the marketers out there – a Managed Operating Environment basically means a really well run and managed fleet of desktop computers, laptops, mobile phones etc in your organisation – the advantage of that is much lower IT support costs, and being able to give end users the tools they need to be more productive a lot faster.)

The first event in Australia was in Sydney this week, and one of my colleagues Jo Cass (pictured here*) from our Sydney office tells it like it is on Mike Heald’s blog.

"Data#3′s Project Deploy, our Integrator of the Year movie headline & our Popcorn stand was a huge success at Microsoft Wave 08 – Heroes Happen."  Read more on Mike’s blog

In a month or two once the launch is over I might do a post campaign analysis on how Data#3′s Project Deploy campaign has rolled – from concept right through to results – stay tuned.  Being a classic B2B campaign with a B2C twist, I think the results might be interesting.

(*Photo credit to Mike Heald from Microsoft Australia)