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Deric Fok

It has been awhile now since I last blogged. July was a hectic month for me - I had three projects that I needed to close by the end of the month. Yesterday I spent a whole day at a seminar - and managed to jot a few thoughts to write on the blog during breaks.

In the span of 30 days, I had rolled out a new information product and started a new blog in my niche as part of my direct response ‘pet’ experiment. It was a simple minisite with a short sales letter. I drove some test traffic to it and saw a conversion of ~2%, which is at par with industry average. Nothing spectacular really, but good enough for the first iteration.

My other product (which is coincidentally my very first) is now converting healthily at 6.6%. I remembered back when I first rolled it out (2 years ago) I had ZERO sales, which absolutely stumped me. Since then the copy has been revamped (much of it swiped from Paul Myer’s - still one of the copywriters that I look up to), the tacky graphics removed (words sell, not pictures!) and the offer improved (reduced the front-end price, but introduced an upsell).

The conversion rates have since taken off. Currently the ROI has hit 1:30, which is fairly typical of a fairly successful online direct response copy. I am still grappling on how to scale this up (Hire a link builder? Drive cheap placement-targeted PPC traffic?), and at the low price point (since it’s a front-end product) it’s not suited for an affiliate campaign.

On the ‘offline’ front, I am going on to do some work for a dotcom based here in Malaysia. A market leader in its niche, it has been one of the (very) few success stories here from the ashes of the dotcom bust back in 1999. What attracted me to this company is its database which runs into the millions (I could profitably monetize a list as small as 1,000, so imagine the possibilities of a 1,000,000 list size). With the right slicing and dicing of the database, there is much contextual marketing that could be done.

Meanwhile, Liferati has been put on the backburner as Kenny and myself are busy with our own projects (Kenny is leading the revamping of a lifestyle portal of a major telco here in Malaysia). Last weekend we managed to spend some time at our office in downtown Damansara to brainstorm about the Contextualizer engine (more here) - picture of me above doing just that.

Our partners at Urekalabs (brothers Razlan and Roni) have embarked on an exciting new project dubbed the ‘Google Killer’ on a novel way to monetize video traffic which is gaining prominence with the likes of YouTube and DailyMotion. Without divulging much of the details, I think it’s a brilliant idea and the commercial upside is simply enormous. They absolutely deserve all the venture capitalist cash they could get.