What makes my life

Translated and edited after an article on Marketingfacts.nl.

1. Do not claim the number 1 position everywhere.

The best value for money is in the top 3 position. It is still a very high ranking and it will cost you considerably less. This is because the top two positions will be batlled about by the two biggest players. And there was something with dogs fighting over one bone and a third dog….

2. Good advertising is also stopping wrong advertising

If you spend money on anything you make sure it works. Only in advertising people tend to stick to the thought that even bad advertising is better than no advertising. If you like to generate maximum value from your adwords then you have to be critical and stop advertising in spots wher it is not effective.

3. Maximize the amount of adword advertisments.
The more the better. Since Google will love to giveyou a high clickthrough it will monitor which adwords work best. These will be used in the caroussel more or only over the less effective. This will not only drive Google revenues but yours aswell. So make more different adwords it will pay out. Expect to see a sudden rise in revenues after a while without a higher cost.

More in the following days.

I read a lot in English. I even dream in English and is often so that I can think of a word in English and not in Dutch. But I lack knowledge in several fields one of them is proverbs. I like using metafors and proverbs when I speak but I lack their knowledge in English. So I will try to find as much as I can so I can use them later.

You can’t polish a turd.
You cannot make a silk purse from a sow’s ear (sow is female pig).
While the cat’s away, the mice will play.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Comparing apples to oranges.
Slower than molasses in January.
Look before you leap.
Throwing in the towel
This cannot see the light of day.
A chip off the old block
The straw that broke the camel’s back
Go without one’s dinner. or Dining with Duke Humphrey.
Dot your i’s and cross your t’s
Keep your finger on the pulse
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
That’s wishful thinking.
First come, first served
Save (something) for a rainy day.
Buying a pig in a poke
He has got a screw loose
A problem shared is a problem halved
Let sleeping dogs lie.
The end justifies the means.
Life isn’t always a bed of roses.
It’s raining cats and dogs
Make hay while the sun shines; strike while the iron is hot.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Hope springs eternal.
Be someone’s right hand man
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
(Being) a big fish in a small pond
The child is father to the man.
Little pitchers have big ears
Clothes maketh the man.
Six of one or half a dozen of the other.
Honey attracts more flies than vinegar.
Taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut
Splitting hairs.
Every cloud has a silver lining
You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take
Home sweet home.
Paying the piper for playing the tune. You break it, you buy it.
Speaking out is valuable, keeping your mouth shut priceless.
Nitpicking.
Storm in a tea cup.
Being all thumbs.
Killing two birds with one stone.
Out of sight, out of mind.
Look before you leap; Safety first.
Carrying coals to Newcastle.
You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink
If the shoe fits, wear it.
He who laughs last, laughs loudest
To cut off one’s nose to spite one’s face.
A more specific form of You reap what you sow.
Taking someone’s silence as a sign that they agree.
A stitch in time, saves nine. (?)
Resist tooth and nail.
It takes one to know one.
There’s no place like home.
Where there’s life, there’s hope.

Retrieved from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dutch_proverbs

I carry my laptop with me wherever I go. Not when I go shoppping but a lot. But I have one problem with it and with all computers I have ever used in the past. I try a lot of software and I like doing that but it slows down my PC so much that it is getting irritating. I keep reinstalling it. Recently I tested Mojopac. What you do is add a harddisk / usb drive or any other external storage device to your PC and install Mojopac to it. Then start the program and it shows you a clear and crisp XP install.

You now have two computers running.

1. Your host PC
2. Your Mojopac PC.

Anything you install on your Mojopac PC will stay on your Mojopac installation and not on your host PC. It works very good. This gives me the opportunity to test software on my own PC and when I like it I will go on to the host PC. This will prevent it (or at least slow down the process of) getting slower and slower over the months.

Another thing is that if you do not own a laptop or you have a desktop at home and a desktop at the office you could carry your home environment with you. Just start your mojopac installation at home and use it from your external drive. Whenever you put this external drive into your computer at work you get the same setting you have at home. Even your personal e-mail, skype, ebay auctions etc… etc…

Now it is time for you employers to get scared because you can switch between the Mojopac and host PC with a click of the button. Any signal of the Mojopac PC (aside from a small systemtray item) will be silenced making it possible to switch between hobby and work with a flick of the switch.

And when you are a computer samaritan maintaining your family and friends’ computers all the time you could install a set of assisting programs, plug into the computer of the perosn you are trying to help and start using your settings to help them and not their, most of the time, Mickey Mouse settings.

You could also for that purpose use U3.

At zen habits I read a nice post by a guest editor Ian Newby-Clark an associate professor of psychology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada who studies habit change. It is about how to change your habits. As I said earlier in another post decluttering is like chaning your habits and therefor one of the most difficult things to do. Read the whole  article to see what you should do. The top 3 things you should to change your habits are:…

1. Work on One Habit at a Time.

2. Create a Plan and Write it Down.
3. Refine Your Plan.

Have you all seen the new introduction of Google TV Adds? Briljant. I hope this comes to us rathers sooner than later since I think that it would be easy to run a TV campaign. One thing that Google does briljantly is tap into the vast amount of spendable communication dollars that would normally not be used on TV commercials. This seems like a good idea but I beg to differ.

I have done my studies in communication and management and I have always learnt that you need to have a critical mass before you reach the goal you wish to reach. So if you count on running a cheap campaign in order to stay on budget you could be left in the rain. Running a campaign on Google TV Adds could, when you run it on a tight budget, be a waste of money. But because you can does not meen you should.

The big benefits of this is that you do not need to pay retail for your adds, you can have more impression for the same budget, it is easy to manage, you can easilly track you results.

The drawbacks are you do not know you will reach youraudience (unless you pay top dollar), and you will be tempted to spend money without any results.

Google TV Adds, a good initiative in a world full of opportunities.

What do you do on a day off. Besides bringing the car to the dealer what can we do today.

• Blogging
• Walk in the forrest
• Shopping
• Thinking about how to run the ultimate business
• Moving theoutdoor furniture into the shed

So I’ll be off for the day.

I like these advertisments. If you compare yourself to your competitors do it in this way. No useless comparison chart (that’s what internet is great for) but some nice comparison. Look at this example.

I think a lot of companies are not capable of checking the quality their on-line agency delivers. This is why we often get the question to give a second opinion. This almost always brings back the conclusion that the competitors are stupid. That is a very easy thing to do. But that is not what really is the case.

In the relation between customers and clients the expertise to understand is missing as is the confidence that there is no hidden agenda. What should be done about this.

Cut the only parts that are in conflict with your shared goals.

How to do that when you are in an internet communication agency? Not cut the responsibility for work but only the conflicting parts. This will make your agency a very nice and predictable partner to work with for both customers as well as companies you work with. You do not, never ever step into their field and you do not change the way the end result should be reached.

More on this in the following weeks.

BWhy are contracts so secret. What if I would post my drafted contracts on our website both partner, customer as well as employee contracts. Wouldn’t this be a whole lot easier for customers to give their opinion on these contracts and have an opinion on our contracts and thus the way we do business?

Some blunt statement maybe but it is to spark an idea. If the web is going to be a playing field on wich you have to generate your revenue then measuring on your website is not the good way to do. You should be measuring more things in order to know what you have achieved. Any ideas?