The most recent copy of Wired magazine has an article called Chaos Theory. It’s essentially a review of Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, due on June 7th. Here’s what I learned from reading this article…The Internet is shattering our ability to focus. It’s making us shallower thinkers and dimishing our intelligence.

The author cites a study where experienced internet users were scanned by an MRI along side internet noobs while doing basic internet tasks. The experienced user’s prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain associated with problem-solving and decision making,  were alive with activity while the other group of first time surfers resembled a city in blackout.

The evidence suggested that the brains of the frequent Internet users had developed distinctive neural pathways because of their Internet use. At first glance there was much rejoicing, “Yeehah! The Internet is making us smarter through increased brain activity. We’re all turning into geniuses!” But as scientist began to study the effects of this neural rewiring some disturbing facts began to reveal themselves.

Here’s a excerpt that jumped out to me:

…Already, though, there is much we know or can surmise-and the news is quite disturbing. Dozens of studies by psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators point to the same conclusion: When we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning. Even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.

What are the implications of this? From what I can tell, if we are to accept Mr. Carr’s hypothesis, we are dumbing ourselves down by muting our ability to develop true intelligence; the ability to store data in our long term memory and recall it at will, when necessary. We are instead relying ever more on the Internet mind as our trusted source for answers instead of storing data on our “local hard drives”. Is this us moving our brains to the cloud?

I’ve reserved a copy of The Shallows. I want to learn more about what the Internet may be doing to my already focus-shattered brain.

Image by laurenmarek via Flickr

If you’re promoting anything online it can help your sales massively to localize your offer or the data on the page to the visitor.

An example of this might be some copy on the page dynamically generated for the visitor’s area – “Expert house painting in Seattle, WA. Click here for an instant quote.”

The easiest way to do this is if you have the searcher’s location already. For example: If you have a geolocated search campaign where the advertising network is providing you with zip and/or city data you can pass it through as a URL variable like yourpage.php?city=Seattle&state=WA

But there’s a sure fire way to make sure you’re localizing your content and offer to your visitors area; you can run a GeoTargeting PHP script in conjunction with a free zip code database.

I do this for certain things I promote on the internet such as auto insurance offers and other services that aren’t location specific but where I want the visitor to feel like they’re getting a localized result. It’s always resulted in a higher conversion rate when I’ve done that.

Instead of rewriting tutorials that already exist I thought I’d point you to a couple of resources that I’ve used.

Eric Nagel’s Geo-Targeted PHP script

Free Zip Code Database from the Zip Code Guy

Have fun and let me know how it works for you!

photo credit: Daquella manera

I‘m going to Affiliate Summit West in January

First off, I’d love to hang out with any readers of Vacant Desk who happen to be there. It’d be great to hear what you’re up to and how you’re finding success online. (Let me know in the comments if you’ll be there.)

The reason I’m going to the conference is because I can’t think of a better place to get my head back in the game. I’ve  been neglecting the daily practice of search engine marketing as far as PPC and Media Buys are concerned for the last 6 months. I’m very much into list management and have some valuable partnerships with list owners that have been very profitable. So there hasn’t seemed the need to spend much time working the search engines.

However, I believe that the most important business skill today is the ability to direct quality traffic to landing pages (sites) that convert into dollars. You can argue with me on that (I welcome it) but the fact is that you can have the greatest product/service in the world and go nowhere – because you have no eyeballs. No one knows you exist!

It really doesn’t matter who you are and what you sell – legal services, hose bibs, mail order steaks, or lawn care – you need more opportunity (prospects and customers) to grow your business.

Sure, there are some revolutionary businesses that just…grow. No advertising required because the word of mouth more than amply provides for traffic. But if I had to wait until I had a business like that to make money I’d probably get very hungry.
So one needs to adept at moving eyeballs from one place to another and then converting them into something meaningful. (A sale, lead, or referral)

What does this have to do with the Affiliate Summit West conference?

Well, I’m going to there to learn from and hang out the ninjas of the direct marketing industry.

Successful affiliates are probably the best people to learn from if you want to understand how to convert internet traffic into profits. Here’s why:

1. Affiliates use their own money to promote merchants in the hope of getting paid. No advertiser will care as much about being successful in online marketing as someone who’s putting their own dollars on the line.
2. Affiliates plumb the depths of trends and methodologies in order to maximize their ad dollars, conversions, and subsequent revenues from their merchant partners. I have found that affiliates are like the shifty ninjas of the online marketing world. They run circles around Madison Avenue guys with their knowledge of how to put together a high conversion ad campaign.
3. Even though most successful affiliates don’t realize it, they are actually masters of direct marketing principles that date back to the 1940′s. They use time-tested techniques to create meaningful action on the part of the consumer. They just effectively leverage the internet to do it.

I plan to go soak up some great seminars, pick the brains of a few successful affiliates I know, and get some new ideas for my online marketing/affiliate activities.

Are you going? Let me know in the comments. Let’s grab a drink or meet in the hallway somewhere.

Affiliate Summit West – January 17-20 – Las Vegas

I’ve been enjoying Malcom Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. I’m not a fanatic reader of non-fiction business books – although I do read quite a few business magazines and business fiction – but I’ve been captivated by Malcom Gladwell’s unveiling of what actually contributes to noticeable success.

I’m not going to do a book review here, per se, rather I want to share with you off the top of my head in bullet point fashion what has impacted in reading this book thus far. (I’m about 3/4 of the way through)

• Outlying success is largely a product of practice – 10,000 hours or so
• What appears to be intrinsic talent leading to success rarely turns out to be anything more than practice combined with timing and circumstances.
• One’s environment growing up greatly contributes to one’s success regardless of innate intelligence or talent.
• Sheer determination counts and reaps rewards.
• Success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed.

I’m not doing justice to the book by any means, but these are some of the key points you may come away with as well.

What’s most encouraging to me is the demystification of success Mr. Gladwell provides. I’ve often looked at those who have achieved what I call success and said, “How’d they do it?” Were they lucky? In the right place at the right time? A beneficiary of some blessing from above not available to the poor losers to the right or to the left? And it’s not that I haven’t been successful in my own life. I’ve been, by many people’s definition, successful in many ways. (and a failure in others) But I’ve always struggled with the notion of becoming successful. And reproducing that success over and over again.

It turns out that success is actually not that mysterious at all. And that’s a challenging realization. I actually can engineer success more than I thought I could. Sure, some components of outlying success are outside of my control or have come and gone. (i.e. The environment that I grew up in.)

I encourage you to read this book. And then come back and share your thoughts with me. I’d like to hear what you’ve learned or your criticisms of Malcom Gladwells’ approach to explaining outlying success.

I made an earlier post about an upcoming redesign. Well, here’s our first stab at it. It’s definitely a little more magazine-ish than the current blog format. What do you think? We’d love to get your input.

I was ruminating the other day over the fact that the last thing that keeps me from being able to be truly mobile was my paper mail. I arrived home from a trip to find that a bunch of critical mail had backed up and needed my immediate attention. I remembered seeing some sort of mail handling service online that receives your mail for you, scans it in a secure building by veterans with security clearance, allows you to view it online and decide if you want to shred it, download a pdf copy, or forward it. (You can also have it thrown away but I wonder why one would choose that over shredding?) You can continue to receive your magazines and personal correspondence at home. It’s called Earth Class Mail and I love it!

Here’s a quote from their website:

Just like email and voice mail, your postal mail can now be instantly available to you, online, no matter where you are. Use your downtime to save yourself the later headache of Mail Pile-up Syndrome.

Postal mail got you down? We can guess: you’re hyper-connected with a wireless laptop and a PDA that gets email, but you check your postal mail — at home and at the office — only after an exhausting business trip. That is, you manage postal mail the same way Ben Franklin did. But you know the benefits of being totally connected to email and voice mail no matter where you are.

If you use cell phones instead of phone booths, voice mail instead of a secretary or friend (when was the last time someone took a message for you?), if you use email or faxes in place of much postal mail, then you already know what 21st-century technology can do for mail. And no one in the world but us is doing it.

In my case this is an awesome service. I have business and personal mail and want access to it while I travel. As soon as a piece of mail comes in I get an email and I can view the envelope in their virtual mailbox center to see what I want to do with it. If it looks like I need to see what’s inside I have them scan it and it’s available the next day for viewing. The assumption is – and I think this will prove to be true for almost everyone – that you really don’t need almost any paper copies of mail anymore except in rare cases. Even billers will accept e-checks from banks without the invoice stub attached. For that really important stuff they will forward it at a really reasonable cost but I don’t think I’m going to need hardly anything sent to my physical location.

I was going to have my business mail forwarded from my USPS post office box to my home address or wherever I happened to be but their premium mail forwarding service costs at least $40 per month. Ouch! Here’s the pricing for the Earth Class Mail service. I went for the Silver Plan and paid for the year.

It looks like they will soon offer check processing via ACH. Considering the cost to process your own checks (time, energy, and gas $), this is an awesome feature.

Just in case I’ve butchered the description of what this is here’s another blurb from their website:

Here’s how it works. First, you pick a “DCI Remote Address” at one of our locations, and have selected time-sensitive mail sent to us (you can keep sending packages, magazines and anything else you wish to your current address, if you like). As a Commercial Mail Receiving Agency, we are then able to pick up your mail from the Post Office every day, instantly scan in all the envelope images, and then, voila!, electronically deliver each envelope image to you online. You decide what happens next . . .

There is one other service out there PaperlessMail.com that does a very similar thing but I just don’t trust them for some reason. It doesn’t look legit enough and I don’t want important mail going to someone I don’t trust. Plus they only have one location, so they can’t be very big. I like the security that Earth Class Mail is providing.

If you are a user of this service or end up becoming a user, come back and tell me what you think. I’m still a pretty new user myself but so far think it’s great.

Get Your Postal Mail Online