Hi folks.

I thought I would write a little update here for those that may/may not be interested. I am off next week to spend a week with my family in New York City. It’s the second time I have been to the States( Last time was in Washington DC) and I am really excited about the trip. I’ll be staying in a nice hotel in Times Square and can’t wait to get there.

I am going to be online some times throughout the week and will be responding to any comments and possibly posting updates now and then. This trip also means I have an opportunity to get some good pics to spruce up this rather dry blog with!

Anyway, to update people on progress, I got the ball rolling on setting up 2 bank accounts for the new ventures. I think it all went smoothly so far, and I find out whether it all went to plan when I get back from the holiday. I have also met another couple of potential clients this week and completed and sent a load of client update reports. It’s been a decent week, but I am ready for a holiday now, and it’s really my first proper holiday in almost two years.

Anyway, as luck has it, my other two business partners are on holiday skiing next week as well, so we’ll all be back very refreshed and ready to work very hard in the coming year. Anyway, I’ll say good bye for now and give you an update next week.

Take it easy.

This is just a really quick one. My new online marketing consultancy/agency got it’s first clients this week (touch wood it’s all going ahead) and I am traveling to three different cities next week all around England to meet with some prospective new clients. I’m also off to hold a difficult meeting with the web designer’s of our new social network to discuss why it is currently looking so poor and why it is so late. I have also got a job interview for a position that 6 months ago would have been my dream position in a company. I doubt I’d accept if I made the grade, but I figure there is no harm in finding out more about what is on offer and I always like to stay open to opportunity.

The more regular visitors here may have noticed a few changes to the blog. New theme, new topics (categories) and some new sidebar widgets. It’s all a work in progress, so you may see some changes here and then from now and again. Let me know what you think to the developments in the comment section. Are they an improvement or a step back? I like the sleeker/cleaner look of the site now but let me know what you think.

I hope ou are having a great weekend. I am just having a quiet celebratory drink or two at home to celebrate getting my tax return done on time and the new developments in my business.

Take care.

Hi Guys.

How is 2010 going for all of you? I’ve got some tough decisions to make in the coming few days, but in the mean time I am doing a little fact-finding for a family relation looking to setup a small online business. After some research and work they decided they might like to run a hosting company. This was something I was thinking of doing at one point. There was a stage where I considered doing some offline marketing consultancy, and I flirted with the idea of providing hosting solutions to some small businesses at one stage. In all honesty, this is probably what my relation is going to do.

Anyway, I threw together a really quick, 4-question, multiple choice/multi-answer survey on surveymonkey.com and offered to help get some market research done.

Click here to take survey

Look, the survey should take you a maximum of 2 minutes to do (if that). You’d be doing me a massive favor if you would take a minute of your time to fill this out and leave a comment on this blog saying you filled it out, I promise to give everyone who took part some kind of goodie/gift to say thank you very much! No idea what it is yet, but it’ll be good, I promise!

Oh, and in case you are wondering, the family relations are my parents! So it’d mean a lot to me if anyone of you would take two minutes to fill this in: Click here to take survey

I’ll be making a couple of cool posts in the very close to the future talking about the lessons I learnt from 2009.

Take care, and peace to you and yours.

I know it seems like I have missed the boat on this one. After all, everyone has been talking about the new FTC guidelines and the ways they affect product owners and affiliates alike for some time now. I have stayed very still and silent on the subject, and there is a good reason for that.

1. I am not a lawyer and neither are half the people debating the new rules. This becomes a problem as subjective opinion is not a good way of interpreting the law.

2. This has not been an issue that affects me. I haven’t been selling as an affiliate lately, and when I do, I don’t make outrageous promises or claims. Honesty is always the best polciy.

But these regulations are a concern for a great deal of Internet marketers out there and it has serious implications. However, from my reading on the subject and after talking to a lot of online business people about it, two things seem important to bare in mind:

1. Generally speaking, the FTC do not come after you if you are a small fish. They go after big guys doing the big numbers, and they make an example of them.

2. Generally speaking again, you have to have a serious number of complaints being made about you by unhappy customers to come up on the FTC radar. That alone should give you a reason to treat your customers like gold!

So there has been a lot of talk about what the new guidelines mean, and how they will change the business etc. My opinion of it is this:

This has been coming for a loonng time now, and it’s been coming because of the sheer amount of liars, cheats and borderline thieves there are on the Internet. That is a bold and big claim to make, and for the sake of legality, I won’t name any names, but I have been on webmaster forums where I have watched some one show everyone how they built a niche website, and created their own fake testimonial videos lying about the apparent success of the product. Amusingly, this was a product about getting in better physical shape, and the product creator was stood on this video making this fake testiomonial with his shirt off. What was immediately clear from this was the guy had never seen a gym, let alone his own product!

I have seen marketers use fake income claims, screen shots and mis-information to give the perception that doing a lot better than they actually are. I know people being chased for large bills from utility providers who are claiming on videos, salespages and websites that they are making north of $20,000 a month. These people often use all kinds of twisted logic to justify this position, I am not sure there is a reasonable, rational or logical justification for it though.

The truth is, a lot of this industry has prospered on the back of lies and deception and it is frequently left unchallenged. Swathes of people so desperately WANT to believe that some of the wild claims are true, and thus they take a leap of faith and consistently fail to apply logic, critical thinking, or due diligence to their thought process on their purchase decision.

I guess I am having a “grouchy” day, but I have seen enough in the industry to know, that there is such little regulation, a lot of bad people are getting away with a lot of bad things and it really must stop and perhaps, the FTC’s actions will go some way in helping put an end to some of this nonsense.

You can get the full scoop on this story over at the BBC; Online advertising “overtakes TV” but for now, stick with me whilst I sum this story up and talk about a little bit of my personal experience with this.

Last year, at the back half of the Summer over here in the UK, I was doing the rounds at careers fairs in London and around the UK. I was specifically targetting marketing and advertising. It’s always been an area that interested me from a very early age. Even since the age of 12 years old!

I listened to some slick presentations talking about the state of the industry. They whipped out graphs shwoing the progression and trends of advertising budget spends. In 2007/2008, online advertising expenditure had shot up 41% in one year! That is massive! It was still only taking up 17% of total advertising spend across the industry.

Now though, online advertising has over taken TV spending in the advertising stakes. TV was once second in the advertising budget spend, behind printed media such as magazine and newspapers (which still remains at the top of to ad spend charts). But this recent turn of events and change of fortune for online advertisers has come about from a number of changes and developments in society.

I am 22, and started fiddling about on computers and going online before the age of 12. There will be a lot of people around today who started even younger than me. Young people and older generations have all become more tech-savvy as the comptuer and Internet is introduced in the work places and in the home on a much larger scale. Asa result, more and more people tend to get the content they want to see, as and when they want to see it and this has also caused the proliferation of user-generated content, which again has been encouraged by massive websites such as Youtube.com.

As society has got used to the concept of content and entertainment on-demand, the TV stations have gone as far as they are comfortable with to accommodate this change in preferences through services such as the iplayer (for the BBC). Users are digesting and consuming their content and entertainment in different ways, and this trend has been accelerated further with the easy-access to laptops and 3 G mobile phones such as the famous iphone.

With the above in mind, there is n surprise that online advertising is over-taking TV advertising. After all, any TV content can easily be introduced online in this day and age.

If you are in the marketing and advertising space online, this is an excellent time for you to get involved and really push your products and services out there. I know it is something I will be exploring a lot more in the close future to come.