Diorex

Just got back from AdTech and other than a few key meetings, the conference had very little for me. I tried to walk around the conference hall and see what the next great thing in internet marketing was going to be, but failed to find anything usable in the sea of repackaged mediocrity.

I am sure some great new products were actually on display, things I could not live without if I only knew they existed, but this adtech in particular was filled with booth after booth of things that made me want to avoid the booths rather than stop by and learn more.

A few hints for future exhibitors:

• If you have boothbabes it tells me several things - all of them bad. It says you dont have a product that would otherwise attract me and that you really just want my contact name and phone number in exchange for some crappy swag.
• If you have booth skanks it tells me you both have no product and no judgment - a really dangerous combination. Your mom and second cousin might be really nice people, but please dont dress them in fat enhancing spandex. Seriously I saw booth “babes” that were as old as 50 and as heavy as 250 pounds. I dont have a problem with either class of person, but if the first thing I say or think about your product is “thats painful to look at” then the rest of the conversation is probably going to be looking at the next booth.
• The next thing I hate is the guy at the totally empty booth trying to thrust his brochure into my hand. I might actually be interested in your product, but your desperation is a huge turn off. If I want your brochure I will ask for one, or even better yet grab one off a stand at the booth.
• If you have 18 guys all dressed in the exact same sweatsuit, button down, polo etc. Then you need a strategy for rotation at the booth. Not everyone needs to be in the booth at the same time, especially in the slow times. I might be interested in what you have, but I am not going to walk up just to be mobbed by your overeager sales guys who probably dont know the product - 2 or 3 unattended people in a booth is all you should ever have - Send the rest of the sausage fest to walk the floor when it is not busy. Even better make your sales reps earn there trip to adtech - top 5 get to go, everyone else stays home.
• If you ask me for a business card or to zap my badge as soon as I show any interest in the product, I am probably walking away. You did the hardest part - getting a qualified buyer to engage you - if I am interested I will either give you my card or contact you - calling me 10 times in the next 30 days on follow-up calls is not going to help one bit. I gave out a grand total of 3 cards this time, I walked away from probably 7-10 booths when they would not first tell me about the product before trying to get my contact info. Rude, maybe - a time saver for sure!
• If your booths display is just an interesting design with a few buzzwords on it - it is not going to tell me enough to stop and learn more. ROI driven optimization, cutting edge ad network, or some other false hope drivel is not enough to get me to ask questions. The less you tell me the lower my chance of talking to you are.
• Conversely, putting your business plan in fine print on your booth is stupid as well. I am not going to read 12 paragraphs about your company ever - come up with 4 bullet points that say what you do and how you are different than everyone else and I will stop and talk if it hits my hot button.
• If your booth design is so crowded that your reps are standing in the aisle creating a traffic jam, I am probably going to squeeze by as quickly as possible and keep going. Your booth is your booth, the aisle is for those going from booth to booth - dont use it.
• If your rep speaks to me without me showing any interest or because I am the only human within 10 feet I am probably going to keep walking. Interest is defined as making eye contact or even better stopping and reading what your backdrop or display has. It is never defined as walking by. Cold pitching is a waste of time since you will get non buyers who dont know enough to keep walking and those who might actually be interested in your product will ignore you altogether.
• If you are going to insult women or someone else on a shirt you are giving away - just dont. If you are going to do it and not be funny - stay at home. 2 or 3 booths were both not funny and offensive - a lot of your corporate or agency buyers are women, dont piss them off.
• Lastly, If you are going to spend the money to fly people out, set up a booth etc. Spend the time and effort to make sure your people know what your product is and how it is alike or different from the competition. If your people cannot speak intellgiently about the product dont put them on the floor just for coverage. If I speak to another musclehead 24 year old guy or sharply dressed but vapid young woman who has no clue about why I should buy your product, the industry you are in, or even really your company -”Today is actually my first day, I am so excited, this company must be really going somewhere to spend the money to fly me to New York. This is my first job so I am still learning about the industry but I know this is a great product, if it was not they would not have the money to send me to New York - on my first day…..” ARGH shoot me.

Honestly, this described maybe 2/3 or more of the floor.

Been awhile since I have posted anything, but I will be at Ad-tech Monday and Tuesday and if anyone wants to try and meet up - let me know.

Real quick post to say I will be at Affiliate Summit in Boston starting next Sunday. Anyone interested in meeting up let me know.

It surprised me that one of the most frequent search term for visitors to my blog is Diurex. Turns out that Diurex is a weight loss drug that helps people expel fat from their body. I dont know too much about it but I wanted these visitors to end up on a page where they could find information about Diurex.

Regular readers should know what I am up to… So back to your regular feed reader. I will say something profound tomorrow - or maybe the next day - or not.

On a lark, I tried to register Diorex.com and was shocked to see that it was available. Not 6 months ago I had offered the owner of it $1000 and been turned down. So now $8 poorer, I own the one domain name that makes any sense for me to have.

After about 500 Private messages on boards, Instant Messages, and Emails - and to celebrate my new acquisition - I decided to put the archives of my blog live.

No promise that I will continue to post. In the 6 months or so since I have stopped blogging - our business has exploded and my time is even more scarce than before, so I dont expect to blog regularly.

Hope everyone enjoys the old posts - Diorex

P.S. If anyone wants to help me spruce the layout up into something that does not look like dog meat, I would be appreciative - maybe a few links, some advise etc…

Gosh I get a variation of this question 2-3 times a week. Everything from what am I hiding to I must be making everything up to I am lots of different people… lots of strange theories.

Diorex is a totally made up word… (although it is an old brand of watch)

In my mind I pronounce it ‘Dee O Rex’ but it sounds really funny whenever I say it out loud.

It is not a latin word or any other languages but I guess since Rex means king a lot of people think it must mean something. Until recently, Google, Yahoo and a lot of people mistook it for the diet drug Diurex. I dont own the URL Diorex.com, but I would like to, but the guy parking it does not answer emails (I totally dont get that).

In fact Diorex is actually the made up word Xeroid spelled backwards. Xeroid was the name of a really old D&D character I made when I was a kid. I never really played D&D more than 2-3 times. I am guessing I was making a play on the brand Xerox, i really have no idea. A few years later when I started playing commodore 64 RPG’s I just ended up naming my character Xeroid. Naturally 10-15 years later when I started playing Ultima Online that was the name of my first character. When I screwed that up beyond belief and re-rolled I just reversed it and became Diorex - that character and ones in Asheron’s Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest and World of Warcraft kind of stuck - heck I google myself (sounds kinky) a few nights back and read some old posts about me being accused of scamming some tradebot back in like 2002. The internet truly is an archive with a ton of data.

Of course when I started wanting an anonymous forum name, it seemed natural to use that as well. Then there is the fact that I very rarely have to come up with a unique username anywhere since almost nobody ever takes it (until now, I am sure some jerk will do it just for fun…). So when I opened a blog on a whim about a year ago, it only made sense for it to be as Diorex. I did not ever expect to have a few thousand page views a day or people questioning who I am. Heck it was probably even money I make it less than a week.

So who am I? Who do I work for? What verticals am I in? What is my Credit Score and Social Security number?

I don’t really care to share any of that. First off, the name of my company would totally give away our niche because our corporate website pretty much explains what we do… Same with my real name, I am on linkedin and other networking sites with my real name and my real position in my real company. I dont want to share my niche because we like making a lot of money without hundreds or thousands of people trying to compete with us. I often ask myself if Shoemoney would trade his notoriety for having ringtones be a lot less well known?

I am not blogging for notoriety. I actually started with the hope that I would just make a few good contacts, I have achieved that several times over, but no other expectations. I have totally stopped blogging at least twice. I go through phases where I update almost every day (like the last few weeks) and others where I dont even look at stats or comments for weeks at a time. In real life, I am a pretty shy guy who would never get up and share his opinions with hundreds of people, so this is very much out of character for me.

I don’t monetize this blog and have in fact turned down quite a few opportunities to do so, because I dont need the money and dont care to have to answer to people about what or why I blogged or did not blog something. I put in a few affiliate links on a few posts but have made less than $100 off of that, so I am not here for the money. I am just enjoying sharing my thoughts and as a result having some intelligent discussions with some of the people I have met as a result.

I know this is a totally dull post, but after maybe a dozen emails this month on this topic and about 30 search referrals with “Who is Diorex?” I figured I would answer the question as much as I am willing to do so. Plenty of people know my name and the niche we are in and I appreciate that they have respected my desire for privacy.

Sorry this was not as juicy or as informative as you probably would have liked, maybe next time I will try and post the Diorex Sex Tape or a picture of me with Elvis or something…

We are looking to hire a Banners specialist. If you or someone you know has significant experience with buying display advertising through DoubleClick, RightMedia, AOL, Yahoo, MSN etc. We are looking for you.

Candidates must be willing to relocate to Dallas, Texas (for those of you on the coasts, just check out the cost of living). We are an enormously profitable company with a great start-up environment. Recently named to Best Places to Work in Texas. Great benefits, including company ski trip, happy hours, etc.

We have a very talented creative team at your disposal and will provide you excellent analytics and analysis pros, as well as share our methodology etc. If you know of anyone who is a top notch display advertising pro - please post a comment or drop me an email.

I am now back from Ad:tech. I must say that of all the conferences I have attended in the past few years Ad:tech is the one that is the most about actually doing business and the least about party’s or socializing.

Not that I mind socializing, but I am not terribly interested in spending time and money to be away from my family and my employees just so I can have an excuse to get drunk. A few years older with 2 kids and 30+ employees might be the reason, but I just want to do business and get back home and ad:tech was the first conference that really delivered that.

It was packed, because of the sprawling layout of the Hilton, I have no idea how many people or even how many exhibitors showed up. In fact i walked the exhibit halls both days pretty extensively and with less than an hour to go in the show I found a whole room of 40-50 booths I had not previously been aware of.

Lots of different types of companies exhibiting which I break up into a few groups:

For me, the meetings are where the money is made. I met a few people as a result of this blog and expect to do significant business with at least 2 of them (woohoo finally monetizing the blog…). In at least 2 other instances deals that had been lagging for some reason or other now appear to get done. Plus a few relationship building meetings and a few that I have no idea why I agreed to them.

As for the trade show… I expect to do a little test business with a few people but nothing really blew me away.

Here are 2 that I found intriguing, I dont expect either to succeed wildly, but both ideas got me to thinking…

Raxxle.com is a social network that answers the question “Who do you look like?” Too bad they are still in Beta and could not even get advertisers at the show into the beta without a court order. The idea is that users upload a photo and then that is compared to celebrity and other photos and you find out that you look 43% like bozo the clown or somesuch. They also match you up with your “twins” who are also on the network… the interesting angle is that while you are on their site, they will show ads to you with your photo in them that say things like “Hey George, we have really cool stuff in ” and the ad has George’s picture. I smell a crash and burn… but it did get me to thinking. Whoever can show me an ad with my name and photo in it when I am surfing mainstream sites is going to get my attention and probably make a lot of money until the novelty wears off (not to mention the privacy police screaming bloody murder…) kind of like the x10 camera guy with the first internet pop-ups.

Mindset Media - These guys have a yet to launch psychographic targeting ad network. Somehow or other they categorize your visitors along about 20 different mindsets. So assertive or compassionate or creative or timid etc. They figure out what categories my visitors meet then go and advertise to others with similar characteristics. Not really demographic targeting because a 40 year old black man in seattle and a 20 year old asian woman in oklahoma might be more similar to each other than they are to other demographically similar people. What remains to be seen is how they actually categorize people, they had me take a 15 minute test, not sure they are going to get millions to do that. Otherwise I liked this idea, as I suspect many of my most profitable customers can be typecasted like this. I hope this works.

The above company (mindset media) also won my award for most creative swag. It was just a plain t-shirt with one of their mindsets on it with a funny saying. Mine says “Assertive(5) - I think I speak for everyone…” It was the only thing in the entire show I saw and wanted. Atlas had an Oxygen bar which was an interesting attempt to get people to sit and listen to their sales spiel, but I did not partake. Everyone else seemed to be giving away junk or beer or in a lot of cases nothing at all…

All in all, after now hitting at least one each of SES, Pubcon, Affiliate Summit and Ad:tech I would rank them in order of business I got from them - Ad Tech (by a mile), SES, Affiliate Summit and then Pubcon.

I have recently gone nuts buying up domain names. Everything from short brandable names to keyword rich generic domains with search traffic for that exact phrase. I keep thinking “this name has got to be worth more than the $6 bucks it costs me to register it”. I am probably not the only one with this habit - starting to think drugs might be a cheaper habit with more positive side effects.

I am not getting much traffic from any of the domains, but I am surprisingly getting a trickle on almost all of them. They probably will average 30-50 visitors in a year per domain, which I know is not impressive, but most of these are for fairly high value services so even a few relevant clicks a year is probably profitable.

The challenge is that most of my domains are getting decent search traffic in Google for people searching my exact domain name as a keyword search, just without the dot.com. I have tried parking them at a variety of places and am getting paid a pittance compared to the potential value of the click and the targeting on these pages is terrible. Not to mention that I have almost zero chance at ranking in Google for any of the terms I own while they are parked.

So I have been thinking outside the box and trying to find a few services that can auto-gen content that will get the domains indexed, which in turn will probably lead to me being at least somewhat relevant for the search terms I own. My thinking is that if I can point a prospective buyer at a domain and it shows up on the first page of results for the generic search term that is the domain name, then the value to the buyer is higher than just a relevant domain name for their business would be since it already is ranking. My buyers would not be SEOs or internet marketers or domainers, they would be Dentists and Lawyers etc…

I have tried Domain Name Ager which is fairly reasonably priced ($37) if you have more than a few domains you want to seed with some age. It looks like dog breath - Forth Worth Divorces - and it is probably something a decent web developer could throw together pretty quick. The price was such that it was not worth my time to even try to figure it out - I just bought it figuring I would buy 6 less domains that day. So I have two domains testing this to see if they get indexed and can rank at all. (I am using this post to test giving one a link and not giving a link to the other to see if that matters)

The other thing I have tried, is called Domain Embarking. This free website takes some keywords you provide and fills up an 8 page website with youtube videos and flickr photos and rss news feeds on topics derived from those keywords. The pages are not unattractive, but they are stuffed full of ads, both adsense and otherwise. The way this program works is that the website creation is free and you share in Adsense revenues evenly with all other websites using the program (after the owners of the site take their share of course) usually seems to be around $.30 a click (so dont bring your mesothelioma websites). The other revenues from ads and product sales are thrown into a pot and divided evenly based upon premium shares which you can earn any number of ways. Since the sites are all linked to each other, Google indexes them pretty quickly. I created North Las Vegas Condo on Tuesday and it was indexed on Thursday. It remains to be seen if Google will rank this for what I consider to be a fairly uncompetitive term.

Once again, I am not trying to make serious money from either of these services, rather I am trying to help unlock the value of the underlying domain name by getting it where it ranks decently in Google, and I am trying to do it in an automated fashion. I have tens of thousands of keyword rich domains I could do this on, so I am trying to test a way to get them indexed without having to send lots of links or even time to do so. Something where I (and by I, I mean I pay someone to do it) spend 5 minutes and a few weeks or months later I have a decent shot at ranking for a decent percentage of the sites I try it on.

If the above names can get to the first page of Google for the phrase that is the domain name then I think they might be worth a few thousand dollars to a local divorce attorney or real estate salesperson who can both make that amount back in a single transaction, I just need to show the buyer that the possibility of a transaction is there just because it ranks in Google. Until then, the sales process of just a naked domain with no ranking is too unwieldy and time consuming for me to pay someone to do it in an efficient manner.

Anyone have any ideas? Other services I should test? Am I barking up the wrong tree? Does anyone even understand what I am trying to do?

Oh yeah, the links to the services here are affiliate links - I figure if you go make some other guy some money by testing one of these services, then they ought to pay me a few bucks for sending you their way. The purpose of this post and this experiment is to figure out how to take $50,000 in domains and make them worth $5 million+. If I make $37.23 in the interim from affiliate offers, I will cash the check, but it is not why the post was written…

I am headed to ad:tech next week. I do not normally like to spend time at conferences, in general I do not receive a ton of value from them.

Regardless, I am headed out to New York next week for a few days.

Anyone else headed that way? Would love to meet a few new people. Drop me a comment if you will be around and maybe we can talk shop.