The Open Source Marketer

In Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, he talks about all the many ways that we influence and are influenced by others. It is this psychology of influence that allows both offline and online marketers to sell products and services.

If you have not read Cialdini’s book I highly recommend it. I am about half way through it myself and I find myself amazed at how effective the psychological triggers can be and true to life his examples are.

In fact I can honestly say that his book saved me thousands of dollars when I bought my car this year. It was his examples and teachings that helped me to identify many of the sales triggers that are used by car dealers and even financial lending institutions. You can ready all about my experience in my post, how to automate an up sell and a cross sell. I detail all the different ways that the financial lender used to try and sell me more than just my car loan.

Another fantastic example of how big companies use psychological influence, or triggers to attract and retain buyers is the video below by Bryant Simon from Temple University. I the video Bryant give several examples where Starbucks uses the implied association to transfer certain feeling from object and concepts onto the customer so they will feel a sense of belonging, status, and social responsibility. This is a very thought provoking 17 minute video and one that will teach you some of what Cialdini covers extensively in his book.

Think about it,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

StumbleUpon Ads are suppose to be the hot thing these days right? Well, to prove the theory I decided to place my own StumbleUpon Ads to see what the big deal was all about. After six ad rejections what I discovered will interest you so read on.

The process of placing a request for my Stumble Ad was pretty simple. With my selected domain name in hand I headed over to StumbleUpon, signed up as an advertiser, and followed their step by step process to place the ad.

StumbleUpon’s idea of an ad is actually just the inclusion of a link to your website in their index of sites that are part of the regular Stumble rotation. The “ad” works the same way all other Stumbles work except a green button will appear on the StumbleUpon toolbar that says “sponsor” when your site is shown. Other than that the visitor is suppose to have no other distractions, just a full view of your page in the browser.

As part of my desire to sample Stumble Ads I placed a request to get 100 visitors at .05 cents per visitor. I chose a StumbleUpon predefined category for my content and submitted my request. Everything was very simple. The category I selected was “Christian” which at the time had a “(67)” next to it. According to StumbleUpon that 67 is suppose to mean, “Category name (thousands of users subscribed)”. So, I felt confident that everything was okay and my request was placed into a que as a pending request. According to StumbleUpon’s FAQ it would take 24 hours for the request to be processed. So I waited. Read the rest of this entry »