The first thing I discovered was just how CHEAP advertising on television could be. Just to give you an idea, the ad that I made (I’ll talk more about that below) aired 3 times with a total of 44,475 viewers for a total cost of $39.92.

What Are You Advertising?

I didn’t have a specific product to advertise and I wasn’t too keen on spending money trying out something that I was a complete novice at. I had a domain sitting unused that I thought could work for something. Imnotarat.com was once a blog I ran and I had let it fall into disrepair. I decided that I could promote a get-rich-quick kind of product from ClickBank and tailor the ad to fit the name in some way.

Then it was simply a matter of using domain forwarding so that anyone that went to imnotarat.com would actually be sent to the vendor that I was promoting.

Creating My First TV AD

The main thing you need in order to advertise on television of course is an ad. I made the 30 second ad below on my laptop in 2 hours:

All it is is title screens, a small video clip of me acting like an idiot, and a voice over that I recorded in my home recording studio. Essentially you could do an entire ad with just title screens and a voice over made from a half-way decent microphone plugged into your computer. You don’t NEED to spend thousands of dollars to make your ad. My ad cost me nothing to create because I already had the basic tools at my disposal. But even so, you could use Windows Movie Maker and a $20 microphone and make your ad with that.

Formatting the ad when I exported it, in order to meet Google’s specifications, required changing a lot of settings in Adobe Premiere. Thankfully, Google Adwords has very detailed instructions for all the of the major video editing software packages on the market. As long as you follow the guide, you’ll be fine.

Selecting Your Target Market

First you need to set your budget. I set mine at $75 a day (not that I intended to spend that much) and at $1.50/thousand viewers (impressions). This is what I used because it fit my budget, yours may be different. I will tell you that I averaged about $0.88/thousand viewers in actual costs but it seemed difficult to find targets for anything less than $1/thousand.

When you actually try to choose a network to air your ad, here again Google gives you a lot to work with. You have a lot of options at your disposal for targeting specific demographics and what not but the results I got from that were usually well out of my price range.

So then to pick my market I simply selected a group of channels and picked time slots in the middle of the night, like 1 am – 3 am. Once I had selected my targets I went to the “Targets” tab. On the targets tab there is a section that says “Past Performance | Estimate (next 7 days)”. You’ll want to change this to “Estimates”. This will show you how often your ad is likely to air on the targets you’ve selected. Many of the ones you picked may say things like “no inventory”, ” limited”, “completely blocked”. I would just go ahead and remove these targets entirely. You’ll also want to remove ones that say “bid too low” or “budget to low”. Unless you want to spend more than you originally intended, these ad slots are out of your price range.

The first target I chose was the Boomerang network. It’s a cartoon network and according to information I read about it, supposedly plays older cartoons aimed at an older audience. The ad spots were cheap and I decided to go with it.

And this was the start of my downfall…

Where It All Went Wrong

• First I should say that I didn’t feel that my ad was compelling enough, but I figured it was good enough for what I was doing – I was wrong. Of the more than 44,000 viewers only 11 came to my website.
• Learn A LOT more about your target network before going with them. I chose Boomerang  based on a bio I read. I found out too late to cancel my ad airing that the show it would air during was POWER PUFF GIRLS! Talk about bad targeting! I also ran the ad twice more on the Fox Business Network. These cost a lot more per thousand viewers but had much smaller audiences. I got even less response, I think maybe these viewers were too educated for what I was pushing and the Boomerang viewers were too young maybe?
• I should not have used a domain redirect. Use an actual website! I had a couple visitors to a different website of mine that had typed “imnotarat.com” into Google. But since there was no actual website to go to, who knows how many people did this and ended up at random places. Better yet use a 1-800 through a site like shareasale.com. I would just guess that you might get better responses than having someone go to their computer.
• And the ultimate failure of my Google TV Ads experiment: They won’t use my account credit to pay for it. Apparently, even though they are both part of AdWords, they treat online ads and tv ads almost like separate accounts when it comes to using credit vouchers. And since I had already applied the account credit to the online portion, I had to pay for the TV ad spots out of pocket.

So there you have it. I would never have tried this if I knew I was paying out of pocket. I’m too much of a small fry in the marketing world to afford even a small tv ad budget, especially since it was completely ineffective. I’m sure there is a way to do it more effectively, I just don’t have the funds to figure it out. Perhaps some of you can do better. Good luck!

For someone like me that likes to read small chunks of books over a long period of time to really be able to mentally digest all that is within the pages, perhaps Book Swim is not a good choice. But for my wife, who can read a novel in a few hours, BookSwim has got to be the coolest thing since the public library. I think public libraries are great by the way but one thing they lack in is a steady supply of new release fiction for the avid reader. That’s where BookSwim comes in, with new releases added weekly there is always something new for the reader in your family.

And speaking of family, there is another aspect of BookSwim that I appreciate: Children’s books. If you’ve got children you know how they will ask you to read the same books over and over again, much in the same way that they like to watch the same movies over and over again. Just like Netflix gave parents a glimmer of their sanity back by giving plenty of movie choices for kids, that’s what BookSwim does with books. There is very large selection of children’s books to choose from ranging anywhere from toddler age up through grade school and young adult. There are only so many times a father can read The Color Kittens to his son and keep his sanity. And once your kids are old enough to read on their own, there is nothing like a steady supply of new books available to keep them interested in reading.

I highly recommend trying out BookSwim. Join Bookswim today and read to your hearts content.

Toy Wooden train (toywoodentrain.com) is a site that I’ve made to help others enjoy these kind of toys fully, while also being an excuse for me to play with children’s toys. There is a large variety of toy wooden train sets from several manufacturers and they range in price from low-end starter sets to the ridiculously expensive massive layouts. Check it out: Toy Wooden train.

Our son was given a Melissa and Doug wooden train set for Christmas and then for his birthday he got three more sets as well as some Thomas the Tank Engine train cars. There are a couple very cool aspects to wooden train sets that you don’t get with other styles of trains.

The first one is that you and your kids can easily pick up the tracks and create any layout you want. The track pieces fit together just like puzzle pieces. And because they are made out of solid wood, there is nothing to break on them. With a total of four sets worth of wooden tracks to work with, we are able to now create some fairly awesome layouts.

The other cool thing is that pretty much all the different brands of wooden trains and tracks will work with each other. So if your kid is into Thomas you could get a Thomas the Tank Engine and buy a more economically priced track and not have to worry about whether the two will work together.

I don’t know that I would want to try my hand at it but you can even get a model Train Track Bit Set to make your own tracks. Of course you’d need a router and router table as well but if you’ve already got them then this could be a really cool investment.

Many people this year are looking for ways to spend a little less at Christmas and one way to do that is with Printable Christmas games. They are cheap and can add some great entertainment to your family gatherings this year.

Xbox

Star Wars Episode III

That was the end of my video game buying though. I couldn’t afford any more games and my disappointment in the Star Wars game made me leary of investing more money in the Xbox. And so it sat barely used until recently when I discoverd that Xbox games were being sold for next to nothing on sites like Amazon. Sure the games might be four or five years old but they are new to me.

So I’ve compiled a list of the best Xbox games available for the cheapest prices through Amazon. And if you don’t have a system yet those are cheap too, going for about $50.

The Best Xbox Games for a Fraction of the Original Price

1. Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge - great flight sim game. Best Price: $0.49
2. Elder Scrolls III Morrowind - an epic RPG. Best Price: $1.71
3. Halo: Combat Evolved - the shooter that defined the Xbox. Best Price: $3.38
4. Evil Dead: Regeneration - the best mindless zombie thrashing game you can find. Best Price: $4.08
5. Fable - Another good RPG. Best Price: $4.43
6. Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic - This is an RPG set in the Star Wars universe and unlike so many other Start Wars games, this one is actually good. Best Price: $10.50
7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – This the best game in the GTA series. Best Price: $5.87
8. Far Cry Instincts - Another great shooter. Best Price: $1.71
9. TimeSplitters 2 - Shooting things and blowing stuff up across time, what’s not to like. Best Price: $1.83
10. Mercenaries - Sort of like GTA but with slightly less dubious morality involved. Best Price: $3.94
11. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3 - This is a good port of the PC version of one of the best tactical shooters. Best Price: $0.01
12. Lego Star Wars - Good lego fun in the Star Wars universe, what’s not to like? Best Price: $4.94
13. Half Life 2 - It’s like Half-Life but with a 2 in the title. Best Price: $0.25
14. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - One of the best RPGs on the Xbox. Best Price: $2.20
15. Burnout 3 Takedown - Had to include a racing game and what better than one with ridiculous crashes? Best Price: $2.60

There you have it, you could add 15 of the best Xbox games to your collection for $47.83. That’s what one game would have cost you a few years ago but now those of us who just aren’t cool enough to own a new system can get endless hours of gaming pleasure for a fraction of the original cost. Go buy yourself some cheap games and enjoy your outdated video game system, I know I’m enjoying mine.

            However I don’t think things are that simple. Apparently everyone thinks that things will just be peachy because of how much the employees like the new CEO. Seriously? I work in retail so I’m no stranger to corporations being completely out of touch with what it’s like to work in a store and what the employees in stores actually care about. But how can they be so naïve as to think that the employees love the CEO, who already makes about 1000 times as much as them, so much that they won’t care that he gave the order to cut their pay in half? If this past election cycle taught us anything it’s that the Democrats did a wonderful job of leveraging the idea of class warfare to get votes and right now is not a good time to be seen as a big CEO that is treading all over the little guy.

            There is of course more going on here however. This is about saving money sure but not in the way that they are describing. This move by Best Buy is being driven by fear that the so-called Employee Free Choice Act might pass. If it does then workers will have a much easier time unionizing. Best Buy knows this and so they have made the decision to cut wages so drastically before the bill passes so that if it does pass, then they will be dealing with union employees starting out from much lower pay scales. The flip side of this of course is that those 8,000 employees are now much more likely to be disgruntled and join a union. The execs at Best Buy must have reasoned it out though and thought that that was an inevitability either way if the Employee Free Choice Act passes.

            If the bill doesn’t pass then Best Buy has saved themselves some money but only time will tell if they suffer the same drop in sales productivity and public backlash that Circuit City encountered.

            For you employees at Best Buy that this has affected please call your Democrat Senators and Representatives and thank them for bowing down to the big union lobbyists and pushing this bill. The Employee Free Choice Act hasn’t even passed yet and it has cost you half of your income.

Frontman, Peter Furler, the only original band member remaining, is stepping down as lead singer. Taking his place will be Michael Tait. Most recently a solo artist and previously a member of the vocal group dcTalk, Tait will certainly take some getting used to for long time Newsboys fans.

It was just about two years ago when bassist Phil Joel left the band and was replaced in concerts by programmed bass rhythms. I’m not sure if Joel should feel honored that they couldn’t find anyone to replace him, or insulted that he was replaced by a computer. Joel’s absence left a pretty large hole in the form of some really great backing vocals which the other members were never really able to duplicate.

Now Peter Furler has decided to hang up his touring boots and be a studio only band member with occasional stage appearances. I can respect wanting to stay at home with your family after 20 years of touring but I have to wonder what is in it for the other band members? Furler intends to stay at home and collects royalties from the songs he writes while the others spend several months a year on the road doing the hard work of the music business. I should note though that Furler’s excellent songwriting is what has fueled much of the band’s success.

To me, the timing of this decision just feels all wrong. The band is in the middle of a tour, which fans have already bought tickets to, and now they are going to be getting quite a different concert than they expected. Tait has a much different vocal style and stage persona than Furler. I saw Tait in concert a couple years ago and walked out halfway through. He’s not bad, he’s just not interesting on stage. Also, if Tait was able to successfully fill concert venues on his own, then he wouldn’t be looking for a job as another band’s lead singer. I’m just not sure what he brings to the table.

The Newsboys have a new album that is releasing on May 5th entitled, In The Hands of God. Furler sings every song on the album. Again, the timing of all of this just feels wrong. Why do this now? Why not wait until the album is released? Or better yet they could re-record a couple of the vocal tracks with Tait singing lead so that he could be introduced to the fans. With Tait being absent from this new album it will likely be a full two years before anything is recorded in the studio with Tait’s vocals.

All of this makes me wonder if this is the beginning of a fast downward spiral for the Newsboys or if fans can expect several years of mediocre albums and tours before the end finally comes. I hope that neither situation is the case. I hope that somehow they can pull this off in a way that will be enjoyable for the fans but I think it will be a tough sell.

If along the way the website itself managed to generate some money, well then great. That being said, my Google AdSense revenue has stunk recently. So I decided to try a new approach via TextAdMarket.com. It’s a site that lets you sell text ads for a whatever price you determine based on what you think you can sell and based on your traffic level. Ads are sold on a per day basis. If an ad space sells, then the price goes up. For each day that none of the ad spots sell, the price drops. It’s based on supply and demand. A website supplies the ad space but if there’s no demand then the price drops. A publisher can also use a fixed price if he doesn’t want to use the Market price setup.

I think it’s a great concept and I’m giving it a try to see how it goes.  Another option that TextAdMarket.com gives you is to allow pay-per-click ads to show up in the ad spots until a spot is actually sold. The only hiccup I’m seeing so far is that it seems like, if the pay-per-click ads are showing then there is no real way for your website visitors to see that the ad slots are available for sale. You can create a separate link to the ad and manually add that to the site but that seems less convenient than it needs to be.

For publishers, signing up your own site is free and only takes a few minutes. For advertisers, you are buying ad space of course but in a very targeted way as opposed to a kind of blind approach applied using Google Adwords.

A co-worker of mine at the time was somewhat aware of the situation we were in and a few days before Christmas he gave me a card. Inside of it was $50. He wanted my wife and I to be able to buy each other something for Christmas. Later that day we took the money, split it up, and went shopping for each other. Nothing big or extravagant just small gifts that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. There’s something so much more special about being able to give someone a gift after you’ve already resigned yourself to the idea that you won’t be able to. The gifts you receive in those circumstances are all the more precious as well.

That friend of mine may never know just how much he changed Christmas for us that year. I pray that God will multiply to him and his family the blessing that he gave us on Christmas. And to everyone who reads this article, may you be blessed richly and joy be upon you.

Merry Christmas.