I couldn't agree more with this statement. If we think about it, truly successful companies are driven by something with far greater significance then profit. Google for example is driven by the the belief that information should be freely accessible to everyone, while Apple is all about designing beautiful accessible pieces of technology that happen to be computers. This is how modern companies operate, this is how every entrepreneur should approach an idea, making profit a natural consequence of a fantastic and powerful idea!

 

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which trade and industry are privately controlled for profit rather than by the state Agree or not with the prerogative, at least Capitalism states its premise very clearly, well…that is of course, until things don’t go quite as smoothly as planned.

The concept of a free independent market has been the basis for modern capitalism in the last 50 years. In theory, the markets should regulate themselves, and the binary supply v.s demand should naturally dictate the flow of the market.

But doesn’t freedom bring a new set of responsibilities? And isn’t one of those responsibilities to accept the concept regardless of the circumstance? Or are we solely against something when it’s not convenient for us to be in favor of it?

This sort of double standard makes me question if the freedom we thought we were experiencing in this generation isn’t after all the same kind of tyranny our grand parents went through disguised with catchy buzz worlds like “Free Market”.

I know this isn't new, but I just read the story on the NYTimes regarding he lawsuit against Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly having stolen the design, concept and even the Business Plan from a University based Social Network - Connectu.com - while he worked there as a programmer. Now here is where the story starts to piss me off. I have heard countless times of stories of people accusing others of stealing ideas after those ideas are put into practice and have proven to be successful. The way I see it, there is no property over ideas that are not patented. Even if he did base Facebook on something that was mainly thought by Connectu, why didn't Connectu act on the idea on the first place? This World is packed with thinkers and Sayers that don't really contribute to progress in any way because they spend the entire day thinking, chatting and whining. An idea is worthless if no one acts on it. Thank god there are still action orientated people out there who make use of other peoples ideas.

My friend Nikesh talks about the Internet as a Global Economical revolution at the Institute of Directors 2007 annual convention. One of the things he said that I really found curious is that all of the new successful Internet start ups always come about with two founders, Google, Youtube, Myspace, Skype, Facebook, etc... Being in an Internet start-up myself with a partner with whom I identify myself a great deal, I can totally related to that and understand how this collaboration could be beneficial to a business concept and growth.

Just today I was speaking with a friend of mine who I ran a PPC campaign for that quite simply didn’t take off at all. The campaign was very well planned out, the landing page was very carefully designed, the sales pitch was and very attractive, and we had plenty of ad variations that used different techniques to attract relevant clicks that eventually would convert better.

Along side this we ran a pretty aggressive market trends research to try and find out What sort of Search Volume we were dealing with and how competitions we would be facing. We picked some of the most generic terms and went along with a couple tasty niches that were found. Everything seemed ready, so we launched the campaign. I have to say, that quite possibly it was one of the worse case scenarios I have ever come across of something that quite simply didn’t stick to its market.

Or in other words, the Market didn’t respond to any of our efforts to sell the service. The Drop out rate from the landing page was staggering. And I’m not talking about a bad conversion rate; I’m talking about z e r o conversions. We made readjustments in a rush to try and invert the state of things, but nothing, the High CTR 0 Conversions. I felt that we could be at it all week and nothing we would so would make a difference.

Now, without wanting to sound too pretentious, I like to think that I know what I’m doing when it comes to setting up a good profitable PPC campaign completely focused on conversions rather then traffic. The product/service that we were dealing with was a Work hygiene and Security course for students that had a 50% discount on On-line subscriptions. So it seems that I have learned the hard way that I have to do a better job evaluating the type of product/service that is on his table. There are products/services that simply don’t sell on-line, and others…that don’t sell at all, no matter how hard you try.