Cuba is an interesting place.  For the last 50 years it has been a socialist country.  Due to its proximity and relationship to the US, it is a very controversial place. Here are some things I found to be interesting about cuba.

Educational system

The education system in Cuba is good relative to other Latin countries.  I was very surprised when I visited at the level of education of the average Cuban.  I live in the Dominican Republic and have quite a few friends that were forced to stop studying due to financial pressures at home.  Additionally, the caliber of the Dominican university education is often not very high. 

Cuba is different – because the system is completely free, anyone who wants to can study, without financial strings attached.  And the quality of the education is good.  After 5 years of living in the Dominican Republic, I have a simple test to quickly gauge the educational level of Dominicans I meet.  When they ask me where I come from, I tell them I’m from Australia (as I am).  A less educated Dominican will immediately confuse Australia with Austria and ask me if I speak German or whether I like living in Europe.  Dominicans get this wrong about 70% of the time.  This didn’t happen once in Cuba – without fail, people knew that Australia is an English speaking country in the Asia pacific region.  They also often started asking me about Kangaroos, something I only see from the most educated Dominicans. 

The University of Havana

As a result of a good educational system, the health system is also quite good.  On speaking with my father, an orthopedic surgeon in Australia, he suggests that Cuban doctors are quite competent, better than most third world countries.  And from spending time in the country I can see that people are very comfortable with always being able to get quality health care.

What Cubans value most

If you’re going to visit Cuba, there’s a characteristic of Cubans you should understand, and it goes to the heart of the differences of Cuba and the USA.  Cubans value empathy above almost anything else.  They view it as very important to be able to understand what the other person is thinking and feeling.  An oversimplified version of the USA vs. Cuban differences is that the USA values success, while Cuban values empathy – i.e. its Bill Gates vs. Mother Theresa.  This means that Cubans are very nice people and will really want to understand your point of view.

Integrity

Cubans are Latinos, so they obviously have the Latin “manana” style, however compared to Dominicans I found that the Cubans exhibited quite a high level of integrity.  One time when I was buying food from a street vendor, I was confused by the local currency and overpaid by about 300%.  I had no idea that I was even owed anything.  The vendor called me back TWICE to give me fistfuls of banknotes as change (guess who felt like an idiot!).    This kind of thing happened a few times.

Cuban music

The music is mind-blowing – and I love the music of the Dominican Republic, since the DR is the birthplace of Merengue and Bachata.  In Cuba, I visited Casa de la Musica (there are two, one in Havana, and one just outside Havana in Miramar) several times and found them to be absolutely fantastic.  The caliber of the live salsa you can find there is absolutely world class.  Also when I visited Bodeguita del Medio, I found the live salsa there to be fantastic as well.  So be prepared, the Cuban music is amazing and it turns up in places you might not expect.

From Casa de la musica, Mirarmar (near Havana) When you’re out salsa dancing, you may see some Cubans dressed somewhat surprisingly. I didn’t expect to see this Cuban guy in a Havana nightclub:

(he asked me not to show his face)

Rum

The rum is also extremely good.  Since I’ve lived in Caribbean I’ve been a huge fan of Dominican rum.  So I brought back the BEST Cuban rum, Havana Anejo, aged for 7 years, and did a taste test with my favorite Dominican rum (Brugal extra viejo).  The Cuban rum won hands down.  It made the Dominican rum taste like gasoline by comparison.  Clearly I need to adjust my taste!

Safety

Cuba is very safe for tourists.  Tourism is one of their main sources of income and so they view it as a major priority to ensure all tourists are protected.  There are police patrolling all parts of the city, virtually every block or two.  These police are not corrupt and are nice to talk to, so any time you need directions they are the best ones to ask. This photo gives an example of how the police are – this policeman is friends with the little old lady and as they were greeting each other while I was nearby.  I asked to take a photo of them together.  It was completely spontaneous and you can see they genuinely care about each other.

One of the phrases which surprised me when I first arrived in Cuba was that I was told “you’re safe now, you’re not in the DR anymore, you’re in Cuba”.  And while that surprised me a bit, it’s actually quite correct.  Cuba *is* a much safer country than the DR. 

Airlines

If you fly to Cuba on the Cuban airline, you will notice some unusual air/steam coming out of the vents on the plane.  I have no idea what it is, but you can see how it looks in this short video: From memory, I think I’ve seen this on flights in eastern Europe as well; perhaps a reader can enlighten us?

Million dollar mansions

Another part of Cuba which I found to be fascinating is the suburb of Vedado.  This is the formerly rich suburb outside Havana, and it is filled with multimillion dollar mansions.  However these mansions haven’t been maintained for 50 years, and now they have normal people living in them – but in many cases the people are living like squatters, and hang their laundry out the front window.  It’s an extremely surprising thing to see, here’s a photo:

1950’s cars

You should also definitely make sure to take a ride in one of the 50’s cars.  I rented this car pictured below, plus driver for US$10/hr.

(this guy's face also has to be blanked out unfortuantely)

The Malecon

The Malecon is the wall separating the water from the city, and its well worth walking along.  What I love about the Havana malecon is that the waves actually come across the wall and spray the cars driving by… You can see this happening (somewhat) in this video:

I also went to another spot so you can see how the waves actually go across the wall (waves start after about 1min in the video):

Ernest Hemmingway

If you’re a fan of Ernest Hemmingway, there are two bars you should visit, both close together.  One is La Floridita, where you can drink a Daiquiri (and this is where they were invented).

This is a Daiquiri from their birthplace in Cuba

They keep a statue of Hemmingway in the bar The second bar to visit for Hemmingway fans is called El Bodeguito Del Medio. 

The awesome live band I caught playing in Bodeguita del Medio. This is where Hemmingway used to drink his Mojito.

(translation: my daiquiri in La Floridita, my mojito en el Bodeguito del Medio)

Hemmingway and Castro

Accommodation

The accommodation in Cuba is a little different to other countries.  You can stay in overpriced anonymous international hotel rooms which are the same as anywhere, or you can stay in Casa Particulares.  Casa Particulares are the personal houses of normal Cuban families and are much better.  Staying in these enable you to get much closer to the real Cuba since you can spend a lot of time talking with a regular family.  Most rooms cost around $25/night and include air conditioning and TV.  

The houses are reasonably nice inside with high ceilings and doors, although they may not have been well maintained.  It can be a good idea to give the owners some gifts (bring useful things from home) and they will be very happy you are staying with them.  The families do have to take some responsibility for you when you are there, I got the impression they may have some kind of legal obligation to ensure your stay is a positive one.

Some other things to know – don’t bring US dollars to Cuba, as they charge a 20% tax on all dollars changed in the country.  It’s much better to bring Euros.  And great tourguide book is this Frommers Ebook:  http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/item/0470119489/Frommer's-Cuba-eBook.html

I found the DRM of the e-book to be complicated, so I would recommend buying a physical copy if you can get one that is very current. My last, and possibly most important suggestion would be that you don’t go to Cuba lightly.  This is a police state which treats its citizens poorly in order to generate hard currency – they really want your dollars and Euros. 

Your traveling to the country is one of the main ways for the Cuban socialist system to continue to function.  If you have a strong desire to learn about how a socialist country works, then by all means go.  But if you’re just looking for a Caribbean vacation then please go to any one of the other great Caribbean countries instead, e.g. the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica or Belize. 

If you'd like to see all my tourist photos from Cuba, you can see them here: http://adrianbye.smugmug.com/gallery/4322172_C6GWG

After risking imprisonment in Cuba last week for writing about their political system directly from Havana via Twitter, I have a few thoughts on how Twitter can be used to bring democracy to non free countries such as Cuba.

Firstly, if you’d like to see why I was in Cuba, visit here:  http://www.adrianbye.com/2007/05/04/twittering-from-cuba

You can also see my Cuban twitterings here:  http://twitter.com/adrianbye

I’ll have just a couple more posts about Cuba, then things will be back to normal, I promise. 

What it was like to use Twitter from Cuba

My visit to Cuba was a holiday, but also to learn about the country and how it works.  I decided to try to get Twitter working, a service for publishing phone text messages via the web and rebroadcasting both via instant messenger and also to other cellphones.  I was a bit nervous about it, since the Cuban government is very controlling about speech made from within the country.   From the Fodors guidebook about Cuba:

“Open criticism of the government or Fidel Castro is a major taboo.  Don’t do it, especially in open public places.  Thought police, community revolutionary brigades and reprisals for vocal dissent are an ongoing legacy of Cuba’s political reality.”

And, given Cuba’s worldwide political isolation, if the decided to hold you, they would not have to be in a hurry to let you go.  If that was not enough, this trip carried some risk for my returning to the USA, since the US is not entirely favourable about people visiting Cuba.  But I felt strongly enough about this trip that I decided I had to do it.

I was fortunate to get Twitter working via cellphone text messaging.  Unfortunately inbound communication to Cuba via text messaging didn’t work, so I wasn’t able to participate in the 2-way communication that normally goes on via Twitter.  Given that internet access was also difficult, I had no feedback to see if my twittering worked properly or if anyone was reading it.

I basically used Twitter as a mechanism to capture my notes.  Prior to using Twitter I was keeping notes in my Treo.  Once I started using Twitter I found it was easier enough to store what was happening there.

Since I came back I found that I had at least 30 people following along.  Its not a huge number, but given that this just happened on the fly and I had never used Twitter before, I thought it was a pretty good start.   Afterwards, one of my friends, Wes Trochlil wrote to me:

“Just wanted to let you know I really enjoyed your twitter from Cuba. It was actually kinda fun to get information in bite-size morsels.”

It turned out that while I had relatively few twitter friends, others were reading my posts via RSS and the twitter website directly.

The messages themselves cost $1 each to send.  I sent about 5 messages/day, totaling about 40 messages.  The cellphone cost $3/day to have the prepaid GSM chip activated.  So I spent about $60 to broadcast from Havana via Twitter for a week.

While you read this online from a free country, twittering simple thoughts from Cuba to a small group may not seem like much.  But when you’re living in a police state day by day, posting on the public internet, where there is no free speech, and people routinely vanish, its another story.

One of the hardest moments was when I visited the Museum of the Cuban Revolution.  Much of the exhibitions in the museum were incredibly dishonest.  Many of the problems that the Cuban revolution was trying to solve are still as bad as before, and many are worse.  While Fidel Castro has had good intentions, the actual results on people have been devastating. 

Anyways, after I left the museum, I wanted to post some strong commentary about what I thought on Twitter.  But I had to hold back.  This was quite a shock to someone raised in Australia and having spent many years in the USA.

So how can Twitter help free a country like Cuba?

The exciting thing about twittering was that I could do it from anywhere and it was relatively anonymous.  I didn’t tell people in Cuba about what I was doing, all they saw was me using my cellphone.  None of them knew I was posting on the internet in the USA with a worldwide audience.

I was free to move around, and post in real time.  So this is clearly a great way for people to communicate that are spread around the country.  While international text messages didn’t work, I’m sure that with some more testing, that could be solved. This would enable groups of Cubans to work together, to broadcast together in groups via twitter, and also receive input from outside the country.

Clearly government monitoring will be an issue – it is difficult to get any cellphone, let alone an anonymous cellphone in Cuba at the moment.  However this should change over time, and it should not be a difficult to program an encryption system for text messaging.

Why not just blog?

Blogging is a great approach for communication, especially for communicating thoughts in more detail – Twitter only allows 140 characters per message.  However blogging isn’t as mobile, and it isn’t as flexible.  With Twitter you can be completely anonymous and posting what you want online, and share that information with small groups. 

Twittering at $1/message is not very cost effective in a country like Cuba where the typical monthly income is $20/month.  However as with all technology adoption, this will drop over time.  The other major advantage to Twitter is that much of the third world is jumping directly to cellphones, skipping landlines.  Therefore the adoption of a service like Twitter will be much faster for cellphone users, and more likely to be adopted quickly.

Based on this, I believe that Twitter could one day be the killer application which helps free the remaining non-free countries left in the world.  Lets hope it happens soon.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently on vacation in Cuba.  A lot of people have expressed interest in hearing about this trip – but I wasn’t expecting to have any access to the outside world while I am here. Well things have changed and now I even have my treo cellphone activated with text messaging!

Internet access is difficult, so I’m going to send updates from Cuba to Twitter via my cellphone.  For those that haven’t used Twitter before, it basically works like a chat room, but for cellphone text messaging and IM.   I’ll be in Cuba until Thursday 10th of May.
 
This is fascinating to me to use one of the most accessible communication tools in the world (Twitter) from one of the least accessible countries in the world (Cuba).

The updates will just be things I am thinking and feeling as I backpack around.  You may find my perspective unique because:

- I am a huge fan of Ayn Rand and objectivism
- I am a strong supporter of the free software foundation, and follow all forms of community software, including the open source movement.
- I have lived in the Dominican Republic for 5 years and understand Caribbean culture
- I speak very fluent Spanish
- I am staying with normal Cuban families, spending 100% of my time with real Cubans and zero government intervention
- I truly want to learn about the Cuban system and what makes it work.
 
Already I have found this trip to be very profound.

You can get my Cuba twitter updates in several ways:

1.  Sign up for an account at twitter and add me as a friend.  Twitter: adrianbye.  You will get updates to your cellphone or via IM.  This is the best way.
2.  Get updates via RSS: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/1235671.rss
3.  Read them on the twitter website here: http://twitter.com/adrianbye

The twitter postings will just be short (due to cellphone text message limitations), but when I get back I’ll post more in depth (with photos) on my blog:  http://AdrianBye.com

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem I can receive text messages to my phone from the outside, so I probably will not receive updates sent to me via twitter.  Also, internet access is a hassle, so I will probably not check email until I return home.  But, if you want to reach me while I’m in Cuba, feel free to call my cuban cell: 011-53-5-295-9122.  Timezone is EST, same as New York.
 
Why am I in Cuba?

1.  I am a big fan of Ayn Rand, and I decided to come to Cuba to understand the Cuban perspective.  I noticed from reading Atlas Shrugged that the world portrayed really resembles Cuba today.  I also find it fascinating that Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957 but Cuba was turned to socialism in 1959.  I have a list of questions I’m going to ask people here.  Yesterday I met a lady who is a professor of marxist philosophy, so I plan on spending some time with her.

2.  Since I have lived in the Dominican Republic for 5 years, I want to compare and contrast the two countries.  Both countries come from a similar background, but went in dramatically different directions in the 50’s and 60’s.

3.  I have a theory that free software is similar to socialism in some ways, and works on the internet because there is no physical property involved.  This is a controversial statement to make, obviously. 

4.  I really like a song called “Ella y el” by Ricardo Arjona. Its about Cuba (in spanish).  I want to see what the cubans think of it..  

So, is what I’m doing legal?
As an Australian citizen residing in the Dominican Republic, I am not subject to the US restrictions for Cuba.  Will the Cuban government be happy I’m using twitter?  I don’t know, but hopefully it will be ok.   Life’s about taking some risks, right? 

Communication here is incredibly restricted.  Cubans cannot even get a cellphone let alone internet access.  I doubt many people have used twitter from Cuba before, so this is all rather new.

Its been funny hanging out with the Cubans – because I so obviously look foreign, they assume I’m another clueless foreigner.  But when I start talking with them, they think I am latino!

And, yes, I am taking lots of photos, but I can’t post them from here.  I’ll put them on my blog when I get home.

So far I have been impressed with many things about Cuba.  The streets are cleaner than the Dominican Republic, and the people are VERY well educated.  I have been shocked at the level of education of people I’ve come into contact with so far – from what I have seen so far, Cubans far surpass the educational level of Dominicans.

Obviously the country is in total disrepair.  A lady I met this morning who works in a store (government owned, of course) earns $23/month.  She has 2 years of college.  She didn’t quite know what to make of my treo cellphone.

Anyways, check out my postings on Twitter through May 10: http://twitter.com/adrianbye

Cheers,

Adrian

John D Rockefeller knew a lot about how his business operated

Back in the late 1800’s John D Rockefeller knew a lot about how Standard Oil operated.  Rockefeller was trained as a bookkeeper, so monitoring numbers came easily to him.  One of the more famous stories from Rockefeller is about how he once asked the guys who put solder to seal barrels of oil, to try to use a couple less drops, and see if the barrels still stayed closed.   They got the quantity of drops required down from 40 to 39, making a nice cost savings while still maintaining quality.  (They found that 38 drops caused the barrels to leak, but 39 worked perfectly).  Rockefeller was able to do this because he monitored his numbers very closely.

The CPA crowd are measureres – but are you truly measuring everything you need to in your business?  The standard CPA network signs up for a license to direct track and automatically everything is tracked.  This has worked very well for many networks as they got started.  But moving forward, as the space gets even more competitive, may require even more numbers to be tracked.

So what else should you measure, and how should you measure it?

The right term is KRA”s, or “Key Result Areas”.  You should take a look at your business from a distance and think about what your key result areas are.  What are the areas of your business which truly matter?  If you run a [commodity] business like a CPA network, maybe most of your numbers are managed within your affiliate network system.  But this probably also means you don’t have any competitive advantage.  So as your business grows, you should think about what the areas are which truly reflect the running of your business.

Then once you have all these numbers collected, look for ratios.  The accounting guys are great at this, they always express critical numbers as a ratio.  An example ratio might be dollars earned/clicks.   Then, if you look at this number every day, you have a clear handle on a key number for your business.  If this ratio changes dramatically, you can easily investigate further.

Let me be clear – you don’t want to over measure.  This is not about spending 5 hours per day looking at numbers.  You should be spending 5 minutes in the morning taking a look at the previous day’s numbers.  But it must be done each and every day. If the numbers need to come from a lot of different sources you can assign the collection of the data to one of your staff.  Perhaps a lot of it can be automated by one of your techs.  But those stats need to be on your desk every morning so you can see how your business is doing.

One of my clients is a call center.  They had found their business was starting to drift, and were unclear as to why.  When I started encouraging them to cmonitor their stats daily, rather than monthly, they quickly found a couple of holes, which were easily fixed.  This has since opened up all kinds of avenues into new numbers that should be tracked, giving far more insight into the operation of their business.

As they’ve continued digging into their numbers on a daily basis, they’ve identified a couple of other key holes. Yesterday I was talking with my client and they’ve just had their best week, ever.  They are now able to bring on 15 additional people with no additional cost.  This kind of monitoring may sound simple and obvious – but are you monitoring all the key numbers for your business on a daily basis?

Another client does a pretty good job at monitoring stats.  As they were testing a viral signup process for their site, they found that they could get some dramatic improvements by monitoring their stats.  In the beginning the signup process was wildly inefficient, and a mess.  After 2 months of monitoring stats each day and improving the process based on the results, dramatic improvements have been made and it became the most efficient signup process I had ever seen – making the site capable of generating more viral traffic than most others.

So monitor your stats.. don’t go overboard, find the key measurements for your business, and monitor them every day.  Over time, the dividends will be huge.

Credits:  Inspiration for this article came from Bob Parson, the CEO of Godaddy’s blog, and Dick Costolo, the CEO of Feedburner blog.

If you’d like to know more about measurement, sign up for my list at http://tastips.com

We’ve all heard for years about behavioral targeting for the web and how its going to work.. but never quite does..  Well, some of the techniques being used in this kind of targeting for web inventory can also be used for email – and they work quite a bit better.

How it works

Basically we need to look to track actions by users and manage those users differently.

In the case of email, the most common action to track is clicks.  So if we mail to a large list and receive a certain segment of the list clicking on the creative, those users have indicated a certain level of interest in that particular topic.  Some people do this with opens, but via clicks is a far more accurate indicator.

Once you have smaller targeted lists that have responded via clicks, you can focus on sending targeted offers to those segments only, or broker that data separately.

Most ESP’s don’t support tracking clicks by category unfortunately.   And if you don’t track this, you’re losing a whole level of valuable data.  Lets say you’re mailing to an email list, but you also have full postal data on your users.  If you are tracking category clicks as you mail to your list, suddenly that postal data has a whole new level of information about it, which can be rebrokered offline at far higher CPM’s.  I’ve talked to a couple of direct mail brokers and they love this kind of data, since users have clearly indicated their preferences.

Who is doing it?

Larry Organ is a real pioneer in this space, with his company ConsumerBase.  I first read about Larry in Forbes magazine (http://members.forbes.com/forbes/2006/0327/052.html).  They had a rather scary article about how he was invading everyone’s privacy.  And while this kind of data definitely has some serious privacy implications, its not going to be as bad as Forbes made out.

Basically, Larry likes to add value to data.  Therefore he takes existing data, and adds a behavioral level in on top of it, by tracking clicks.  He’s systematized this so well that he’s even filed for a patent on this – which if he gets it, I think will be very valuable one day.

He’s been doing this for quite a long time, segmenting his data by different interest categories. Try his data out and see if it works for you – and let me know if it works well.  They have 20 million names all broken down by interest categories with full email and full postal.

Another company that is starting to apply behavioral analysis to email is Q Interactive.  They recently released an email service which does behavioral email follow-up.  Over time they build profiles on what users like depending on a number of different variables.  According to their press release, they use “more than 1600 unique segments, including self-reported demographic, geographic, behavioral and transactional data and category interests”.  So over time, Q Interactive is learning what users like, build profiles for them, and therefore do a better job marketing to them.

Behavioral email marketing can open up a whole host of ethical issues, as raised by Larry Organ’s Forbes article.  But over time these will be worked out.   And so, at some point we can expect Google to get into behavioral marketing – however it’s not going to be so easy for them.  They are extremely concerned about the affect privacy issues will have on their brand.  Therefore the door is currently open for many companies to enter the behavioral space.  Long term, we can expect Google to become involved since behavioral targeting is likely to become the way Google can complete with traditional TV – the ads for video will only really become effective when behavioral data is added, improving the targeting.

TV Behavioural targeting

How would TV behavioural targeting work in practice?  Well, you might be mailing to your list, tracking clicks by category, building up profiles of your users.  You then become part of a behavioral targeting network, feeding this data into the network.  As TV shows are being broadcast online, users will be shown ads during the shows.  The targeting for the ads will be done based on your email click data.  You’ll get paid extra for your data, and the TV shows will able to earn higher ECPM’s because the audiences being targeted will be far more relevant.  Today’s version of this will be for feeding data into the banner networks.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to do this kind of targeting to your list, a great book about it is called “Drilling Down”, I’ve written a review about it here:

http://www.adrianbye.com/favourite-books/

You’re also welcome to join my list at http://tasmaniaconsulting.com, where I talk more about this topic.

So remember, track your clicks!  They’re worth a lot!

One of the most competitive markets on the Internet for a low cost, general interest product is the government grants information market. It’s filled with people looking for free money from the government, and the level of marketing is limited only by the FTC. This is an offer that performs incredibly well and generates very high ECPM’s across a large amount of Internet traffic. “Free money from the government” is a strong pitch, and since most people are aware that the government does give a lot of money away in grants, basing the sale in an element of realism, its even more compelling.

I don’t like this market, since selling into it generally does much more harm than good – but it can be instructive for how other markets develop. Since the grant market has such a high ECPM the most competitive marketing methods are used to make the offers work. If your market is not using some of these techniques currently, they will be in the future, so this is your chance to implement them first and profit!

Stage 1: $19.99 ebook, 50% rev share for affiliates.

In the beginning there was little competition and the Internet had not seen an offer like this, so it performed extremely well. Publishers were happy making $10/sale, and everyone made good money.

Stage 2: $19.99 ebook, $19 monthly continuity program.

As the market became more competitive, the payouts were forced to increase to continue to drive traffic. A monthly continuity program was implemented, which was “forced” continuity, meaning the customers were signed up when they purchased the ebook. This allowed payouts of $25 – $30/sale. Obviously the level of risk in this model is much higher, since the model has now gone negative at the point of sale. The typical retention for this program was 3-4 months.

Stage 3: $2.95 trial offer?

Notice how we don’t have a low price trial to low price continuity program (eg $19/month). This is because the ECPM payout to publishers will not support it, and will force the advertiser to lose money too early.

Stage 3: $2.95 trial, $199 one time billing.

This was an extremely aggressive offer put where users were charged a cheap trial, then sent a package they were billed $199 for. This offer didn’t last long since the market was not able to afford a $199 package for grants information, causing a high level of charge backs and refunds. However while it worked, it was extremely competitive.

Stage 4: $2.95 trial (free + shipping for a CD), plus multiple continuity programs.

This is where the market is today. The user pays for a free+shipping program and then is enrolled in several ongoing continuity programs. The consumer is excited because they are receiving a CD perceived to have a very high value. Then one continuity program will start initially, and another one, or more, start several weeks later, without the consumer realizing they are being billed, sometimes using different credit card descriptors.

Lead generation

In the grants market, people generally have not been successfully reselling the leads to phonerooms. This may be partially due to legal regulations, but also because the market simply cannot afford to pay for high priced coaching programs. Most leads from a grant offer don’t command a very high resale value.

What are the lessons from this?

1. If your market is undeveloped you can gain a huge advantage over others by adopting these techniques.

2. If your market is relatively poor, a high price won’t work no matter how you do it.

3. In direct response marketing, we are always going to see extremely aggressive offers implemented. So someone in your market may try to implement aggressive multiple continuity programs. This type of advertising is unfortunate because it makes it extremely difficult for everyone else to compete since the competitor can purchase more advertising. But it may well happen, enabling your competitor to buy more media than you.

Many successful offers today receiving a lot of volume don’t follow all the points above. Making some fairly simple changes will see your ECPM’s increase dramatically. Watch and learn from the most sophisticated markets!

In the mid 1800’s John D Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, which later became the foundation for almost the entire oil industry.  He created the first real national corporation, and later, the first international corporation.  There were no laws for setting this up back then, so they had to deal with a lot of complexity and resistance.  Before Standard Oil was created in the 1800’s, all business was local small business.   There was no real nationwide business.

Since that time we have become used to large corporations in every part of our lives, for example, Microsoft, Citicorp, Hewlett Packard, Disney and Wal-Mart.

Is it changing?

The internet is changing some of this, and is flattening how we work.  Instead of requiring hugely human intensive businesses, online, we’re now working with small, highly leveraged teams.  And instead of large corporations, on the internet the teams are relatively small.  Look at what Markus Frind has done with PlentyOfFish.com, or the HotOrNot.com guys, or Drew Curtis with Fark.  All these guys control as much traffic as a television station with few to no employees.  Even Google, one of the very largest online corporations only has 11,000 employees, compared to Wal-Mart, which has 1,800,000.

The ease of working remotely and connecting with and working with people in new ways is driving this on the internet, and some of the freelancer sites are leading the way.  For example, Odesk, with its outsourcing model, is a company that can allow individuals to organize themselves into teams and work remotely together as an entire company.  This model doesn’t scale particularly well – it is hard to have people working from different locations and have them collaborate as effectively as a team based in a single office.

The few cases where this works is when the collaboration is very simple.  A prime example is a company named LiveOps.  LiveOps provides phone support for large companies.  So if you’re Dominos, and you want to shorten the time it takes to answer the phones, you route all your calls to LiveOps.  LiveOps in turn recruits work from home people to answer the phones.  Their workers like this because they can work on a flexible schedule. Because LiveOps has so many people, and the concept is simple, the model works incredibly well for both sides and can scale.  LiveOps ends up with a huge team of work from home phone operators based around the country and can shift volume according to demand, and companies needing phone support can easily route it all via LiveOps.

So while LiveOps can work as a mega corporation because it has a very simple model, I think we’re going to see more growth of small businesses interfacing with each other in the future not less, where fewer people control more of the information that is passed around the world.  A successful website is incredibly high leverage and that doesn’t require a lot of people.

So my question to you is, for the internet, are we heading back to the early 1800’s where small business ruled?

I recently did an interview on Santiago radio station Alcatraz FM, 90.9.  The interview is 30 minutes long, in spanish.

Learn about how the internet is perceived in the Caribbean, its quite different to the rest of the world. 

You can listen to it here:
http://adrianbye.com/moreinfo/alcatraz.mp3

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I recently did an interview on Clear Channel syndicated radio in the US with Craig Peterson.

This was broadcast in 3 US markets on the east coast.
You can listen to it here:
http://adrianbye.com/moreinfo/clearchannel.mp3

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For more on Craig Peterson’s radio show, visit here:
http://www.tech-talk-with-craig-peterson.com