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I am Constantin "Noro" Ferseta and I'm glad to see you here. We are a small consultancy cabinet, with a huge experience and a strong portfolio. We are located in Romania, but our work is mainly for external clients. What we do? Help our clients to sell more using Internet and mobile technology. Our main service is consultancy, but we provide full e-marketing services: web development, online promo, communities building, social network marketing, e-commerce, mobile campaigns, SEM, SEO, etc. Contact us. |
One of my clients, Talentgate, has a very cool mission: help people find their career guidance, based on some career orientation tests they developed.
After you create an account, you fill in the cv (to have a minimum 65% completion rate) and after that you are able to make the 3 tests. By the way, make sure you are fresh, otherwise, well, your score will not be very good 
Based on the final test, you will be directed to the type of job that best suit you. Types of questions: do you like sort mail, do you have attention to details, do you like bungee jumping, and so on. Based on your profile, you’ll find out what you’ll love to do and what not
When I was a student, nobody told me what should I do or not and what would make me pleasure doing it or not. Nowadays is good to have this sort of guidance, that will keep potential future frustration to a low limit.
Too many people got too advanced in their professional life doing stuff they hate.
A very annoying thing happen friday. Elvsoft, one of my Romanian hosting providers, just had a Raid HDD that crashed, so all posts that had been written that day did not saved.
Even they’ve been very prompt in solving the error, still was annoying.
I just realized once again, if necessary, the importance of backup.
I love them because they most of them they are very creative. Sometimes they demonstrate a huge lateral thinking that makes you say WOW.
The all time favorite: the seller of unbelievable ultra cheap inflatable woman. Do u know the story? A guy sold several inflatable woman at incredible low price. The shocked buyers posted nice reviews that the product is awesome. The rest of buyers started to buy like hell the product. Obvious the guy did not had the products. Then very polite sent an email to all saying that due various problem, the supplier cannot cope with demand so he does not had the products. BUT he will return the money, via check, sent to the local bank. He sent the check where he wrote in clear: “Return for inflatable woman, thick lips, large chicks, kinky, etc – full description”. So very few of the person dared to present themselves at the bank to collect back the money )
Like I said on twitter earlier, I’m gonna be a mentor again. Mihai Nasaudean invited me and as he promised it will not take so much time from my daily schedule, i said yes. And until know i don’t regret i do
Learnings from today:
I never heard a sound from myspace lately. Several years ago it was the hottest thing on the market, and now… the traffic dies slowly. Same hi5.
Facebook traffic on the rise.
In the past weeks for some of the advertising campaigns we manage for US/Canada we saw that yahoo brings more ROI than google.
The number of searches are clear in favour of Google. But the competition is so high on google that for some keywords you better have hyper conversion rates. While yahoo has much fewer serches, but they deliver excellent results.
Even after paying 2x more money for click on google we still get better results from yahoo.
So, I must say I love yahoo.
PS. Microsoft really sucks!
Any SEO expert (me included) will tell you that is critical to have links from other valuable sites, preferably on self-descriptive anchors, based on what you want to be found after. This is one of the most important things in SEO. It’s proven. It works.
But, there is a “but”… I have a question, for google.
Almost nobody in normal language, in a normal site, will not put a link on an generic anchor in a web page. In most cases is unnatural.
If the site X is so good it worth mention, I will say WHY is good and I will put a link to it, on one of the two following formats: http://www.google.com or Google.
It is highly unlikely to put in the text page “bla bla bla search engine bla bla bla”. Correct?
So, nobody will put the link on the anchor that site X desires it, unless:
a. it’s a requested link (link exchange, paid link, etc)
b. the site owner has too much time on his hands and is web savvy.
If this supposition is true, than why google pays so much attention to the right anchors? Maybe it should pay more attention to the words from the vicinity of the link than to the anchor itself. Or maybe the a + b cases are enough for Google to give them so much credit. Maybe there are far more people using anchors than I think, what is making this a large number event that google is using it.
Maybe google analyze it this fact very carefully and he decided that indeed is ok. Or maybe, when the new Caffeine will hit the net, the algorithm will change a little bit.
Maybe this fact is since the google was taken very seriously the registrations in directors, but this is not true anymore.
Anyway, just a question….
Last year, I wrote a very interesting article on my Romanian Blog, regarding innovation versus duplication. And the conclusion was that from business model point of view, for small players it makes more sense to copy then to innovate (not a very politically correct opinion, but I don’t care of being cucher). Here is the link.
While looking deeper into the subject for online, I saw that in Romania, like anywhere in the world, the online is split between some stars, looking for fame, looking to come up with an innovative idea (or to copy it and look innovative) and the workhorses, that wants to sell stuff via net, looking for money. The innovators are looking for fame mainly, or let’s say they want to brag with wow things. While “workers” doing generic stuff, are making the money, with an incomparable higher rate of success than the first category.
At a team building at Coca-Cola, in Serbia, several years ago, when I took a promise that I will be more creative that I use to be, everybody started to laugh. And I was very puzzled. The answer was: “you are too creative already. You need more vertical thinking, not lateral thinking” (see de Bono books).
In my case, I am a fortune guy, but with strong getaways in the innovation area, looking for intellectually challenging stuff, just not to get bored.
Especially during my BestJobs working period, I encountered the following situation: young people don’t know where to go, what to do, who to speak in order to have a successful professional career.
The Romanian school sucks (in order of career counseling). I remember at some point, I made a proposition to Ecaterina Andronescu, the rector of Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, the biggest University – to teach students FOR FREE how to make a CV, how to go to an interview, how to build a career, etc. The answer was stunning: “Our students does not need these know-how, because it is not in the curricula. So, they don’t need to learn how to manage themselves in the labor market.”
Now I am glad that there is an option for those who want to do something with their lives. It’s called TalentGate.
Talentgate is a division of Leadership Development Solutions, group that contains top management recruiting, Brainbank (middle management recruiting) and Talent Gate (entry level recruiting).
Students can enter this site, they can create an account, make some tests and some will be invited to 1:1 meetings with talentgate people. Career counseling is something very important for young people, and Talent Gate does exactly that. The end purpose is to hire those high potential people in the high end profile company LDS group is working with.
The idea is great and the benefits for candidates are huge. Is a good thing that Talent Gate appeared on the market
Having your business based on money received from affiliates programs is not a very smart idea. Because is not sustainable in time and the benefits are hundreds times less a real business.
So, the opportunity costs that you miss by focusing on affiliates are very high. Let me demonstrate:
Affiliate program: You deliver a sell, you get a commission. Next time, the buyer goes directly to the seller, not to you (he interacted with him, he paid to him, he received the product with his name on it, he has the client service programs, he entered in his newsletter database, etc, etc).
There is no Life Time Value for you, the affiliate (most of the times), only for the seller.
And if there are repeated purchases, let’s say, 100 times, you only get comission for the first one (most of the times)
Extra, a happy client will become a brand ambassador for the seller, (maybe less for inflatables women and other “shame products”). And, let’s say if the seller’s client brings another 5 clients of the same value as his, that means, you’ll get commission for one sale, while you’ll generate 100 + 500 = 600 sales for the seller. So, you’ll get 1 of 600 sales!
Indeed, there are domains where you’ll get affiliate commission for lifetime (like gambling industry). But there are few and most of them unreliable. Not to mention that you’ll get no brand ambassador benefits. Players will recommend the seller service to the other players, not the affiliate business.
Also, there are a lot of dropship options. Unfortunately, most of them are crooks. And is very difficult to guarantee the quality of your business if you don’t control the quality of the products, the deliver time, the services, the guarantees process, and so on.
There are some advantages on short term, but on medium and long term the best thing is to control all aspects of the business.
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