We use a TracFone for our "on call" phone. We used to just rotate phone numbers but then you have to keep track of everyone's number and every once in a while someone will blow through their plan because of a support call and that is both annoying and expensive.

TracFone Is A Great Deal

Someone did some research and found that for under $100 we could get a simple phone, 800 minutes of airtime, and a year to use them. And if the phone was lost then we could get a new phone for $20 and swap the airtime for free.

Perfect.

When we signed up (over the internet, a fairly painful process but not requiring any human contact and associated sales pitch!) we signed up for "specials on airtime." I actually like looking at this sort of advertising because you can see that a company can spend a fortune on it and do a poor job.

Missing the Spellchecker

But this is a special case - this is the third email where the TracFone guys have mis-spelled "instantly" as "instanstly." And I've dropped them a note on their "contact us" page to let them know. Never a reply and clearly they haven't changed it.

So maybe they're missing more than a spell checker - maybe they're missing a while customer service department.

Another Useless SERP

Oh, and I checked with the wise and all powerful google - the word "instanstly" only occurs 2,190 times with 406 mentions in the primary index. So I am pretty sure that this blog post will rank first pretty quickly. That is some long tail!

I also looked for "instanstly trac" to see if anyone had written anything about this - 10 results total. Now, I've had some queries that returned nothing, but I can't recall anything returning only 10.

Don’t they? Good golly, are you telling me you don’t click ads? I click ALL sorts of ads on SEO sites. So maybe I should just say: SEO type folks click ads on SEO sites.

Honestly, that is what I thought this article about 6% of Users Click 50% of Ads was all about. Actually, it turn out that fifty rednecks in TN clicked 2.45M ads last month.

Do YOU Click Ads?

Do you? I was not kidding that I do. When I hit an SEO site (calm down, John Chow!) they have usually done a great job with ad placement and have brought stuff to a place where my eye can actually see it. And so I think: Yes, actually, I am interested in looking at a shared Windows server for that project, hmm, click.

$2.25 right into someone’s pocket.

I can’t help it, the placement is awesome, the focus is good – practically perfect. Ads to the left of me, ads to the right. Even peel-away-ads:

Gadzooks. How awesome is that?

A Lesson Learned

But there is a lesson in there, because I am the most blind guy on the internet. I cannot remember the last time I clicked an ad of ANY type on a non-SEO site. I am talking three or four years back I cannot recall clicking an ad. Buying: fuggidaboudit.

But I do have to wonder: do an of us BUY anything after click-through? I haven’t gotten any windows hosting, thought I have bookmarked some good sites. So am I just transferring money from the advertiser to Joe SEO?

Conversion Rate Explained?

And is that why click-through-to-conversion rates are so strangely low? To me, anyway. There is no way that 6% of internet users are driving so many bazillion dollars of spending. So are these few (and very active!) Lookie Loo’s masking the other ready-to-buy people?

Final thought: what the heck is Google charging us all this money for is most of our traffic is people who will never ever buy anything. Look at us, optimizing landing pages for poorly orthodonted backwoods dialup users and ignoring the soccer mom with a Plum card.

It’s enough to make you nostalgic for banner ads!

Today's 400 point drop in the DJIA in the first three minutes of trading may be a temporary bump or a glimpse of things to come. So far it has recovered most of the loss, but if we're headed into a bear market we could be seeing the end of the Web 2.0 venture capital driven bubble.

Most Venture Capital funded companies think of themselves as cool, new startups that aren't affected by the goings on of Wall Street and huge companies. They live in their own world. How could something as far away as the NYSE affect their small business?

Most people don't realize how connected venture capital is to the health of the stock market.

• A bear market provides an inhospitable environment for an IPO, elminating a key potential exit for the VCs. Admittedly, there hasn't been a good IPO environment in a while, but a bear market won't help.

• A bear market hurts valuations for acquisitions. Big companies, if they have cash available, will pay less when buying the small companies because values are down all over. If your busisness plan is to get a lot of trafic and then sell yourself to Google or Yahoo, you're going to have difficulty when they stop buying or are offering less than the VC put into your company.

• A bear market hurts the ability of other businesses to buy your services. When the market goes down because of a recession, the big companies stop buying. Even if you don't sell to the Global 2000, the chances are your customers do. Or they're the ones getting laid off. Either way, a bear market hurts your ability to grow the business organically. And if you don't have a clear revenue model, you're really in trouble.

• VC Cash Calls threaten failure in a bear market. This is the big one that few people understand. When a venture fund raises money, they're really only gathering committments for funds. When they announce they've raised $200M, they don't have $200M in the bank. They've got $200M worth of committments from individuals and institutions that they can call and get money when they're ready to fund. The problem is that when the market turns south, a lot of these committments become less solid. Since it would be a very bad thing if a VC firm were to make a cash call and have it fail, they tend to call their investors and ask them if they have the funds to invest. If the answer is no, they don't tell anyone. They just stop funding companies. When a VC says "We're keeping our powder dry in this market" what they really mean is "We have no funds available to invest." Deals that would have flown through 3 months ago stop, and perfect deals get denied. Unfortunately, the VCs are all too willing to let you waste time delivering pitches when they know they can't respond. You can also see beauty contests that hit small snags blow up into dead deals.

The big one is the cash call failure. Few people understand it, it's the most insidious, and has the biggest effect on drying up venture capital.

So how does this affect your business? I'd say you're in a world of trouble if:

• You have no revenue mode for your business other than the idea that you're going to bring in a lot of traffic and figure out how to monetize it later or sell to a big company.

• Your revenue model is based upon advertising rates staying the same or growing. When the bubble breaks, a lot of VC money that was propping up the currently high rates for Adwords is going to go away. On the other hand, if your business model involves paying for Adwords, you could see your costs go down.

• You've taken a VC investment that allows them to take control of your company if you don't reach a certain milestones. "The company has stalled in its growth" is a favorite phrase VCs use when replacing the founder CEO with their analyst that needs a job because they don't have more deals to look at and need to trim payroll.

• You've taken a VC investment with the idea that you'll meet certain milestones and get the next round, or even worse, the next traunch. Yes, they can come up with a reason for withholding the next traunch that they've committed to even if you meet the milestones. They know you'll be fighting with decreasing resources and an increasing position of weakness.

• You've got a clear revenue model, but it's based on selling to startups funded with VC money. Take a look at your client list. If it's full of cool, new VC funded startups, it's time to look for new clients. You can calculate their life with their burn rate and the cash on hand, because they probably won't be getting any more. Don't let those invoices drag.

• You have become dependent upon a product or service from a VC funded company. If you've built a business where one of the core functions depends upon a VC funded startup, it's time to reevaluate your vendors. In fact, it's not a smart move to become dependent upon anyone that doesn't have a clear revenue model.

On the other hand, if you're lean and mean and haven't taken VC money and have a clear revenue model, you can do well in a recession. Recessions tend to trim out the slow and bloated, which can be your competition. Look at the companies that survived the first dot-com bubble -- they'll probably survive this one too. And a lot of the 100s of websites that make up the critical mass of Web 2.0 that do absolutely nothing will go away.

It's going to be an interesting ride.