As anticipated, Car Icahn has begun his proxy battle with Yahoo!
In an open letter to Yahoo chairman, Roy Bostock, Icahn said the board had “acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft. It is obvious that Microsoft’s bid of $33 per share is a superior alternative than Yahoo’s prospects on a stand alone basis.”
He went on to urge Yahoo! to “move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary.”
Alongside his support from Bill Miller, Icahn’s move has further support from at least one other major shareholder, Paulson & Co. with a 3.4 percent stake in Yahoo!
But Microsoft are showing no signs of returning to the table. Yesterday, Microsoft spokesman, Frank Shaw said simply “The company has moved on”.
Its final offer of $33 wasn’t enough to satisfy Yahoo!’s co-founder and Chief Executive Jery Yang, who wanted $37 per share, even though shares had been trading at around $19 prior to that.
For the current share price, and its movement over the last 5 days, see below.
HAVE YOUR SAY: What do you think the future holds for Yahoo!? Drop me a comment…
Further to my post yesterday about the Yahoo! saga, I see that Bill Miller, who as portfolio manager at Legg Mason controls more than 6% of Yahoo!’s shares, welcomed Carl Icahn among the senior shareholders yesterday.
“To the extent he can get the parties back to the table I’d be all in favour of that”, he said.
Miller’s endorsement indicates a significant portion of Yahoo! is leaning towards the Microsoft deal.
It is one thing for a board to have pressure from its shareholders, yet another to have that pressure intensified by a rush of new shareholders.
Yahoo!’s shareprice will start at $27.14 this morning. Interesting to see how it moves through the day…
This is how it stands currently, and a chart of the past 5 days (delayed 15 mins)…:
Although we’re told that Microsoft have given no indication that they will resume talks with Yahoo!, Icahn now has the power to replace the Yahoo! board with one which will be more open to the takeover bid.
Bill Miller’s endorsement means that few would stand in his way if he chose to do that, but he hasn’t got long.
The news over the next few days will be vital to the future of the whole Internet industry. Watch this space…
If you’re here seeking ways to get a few hundred more visitors to your web business, great. You’ll find there are plenty of traffic, and list, building tips and techniques here. But spare a moment too, to put this Internet Industry into perspective. Something big is about to happen.
Many senior Internet Industry exectutives and investors are currently waiting to hear the decision of this man…
No matter how small or big you consider your online business to be - (it may be so small that you don’t even think you have one - or so big that you’re even involved in this latest saga I’m discussing here) - either way, I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Carl Icahn’s recent move on Yahoo!
In the 10 days since Microsoft pulled out of of its $47.3bn offer, which valued Yahoo! at $33-a-share, Carl Icahn has bought a stake of approximately 3.6%.
Considering his purchase price was somewhere around $25, a 3.6% stake will have cost him around $1.2 billion.
This is a man with a personal fortune of $14 billion or so, so pitting 1.2 of it on Yahoo! in its current crisis is bold. Perhaps we should expect nothing less from the real-life Gordon Gekko of Wall Street… Who remembers his infamous hostile takeover of TWA in 1985?
But there is something very significant about buying such a stake at this time: It gives him the option to launch a proxy battle and ultimately to remove members from Yahoo!’s board in favour of directors who support his own views.
And guess what they are…
To accept Microsoft’s offer.
If he can sell his Yahoo! shares for $33 then his personal gain will be around half a billion dollars. And it could all happen in a matter of days.
Perhaps its a shame he doesn’t have better intentions for the troubled pioneering search engine than to feed his bulging pockets.
Or perhaps we should just celebrate and cheer-on such flagrant capitalism…
Lets watch what happens over the coming days - if nothing else, his move is certain to bring the players back to the table, and it will make interesting viewing…
What’s your view? What have I missed? Leave your comment below…
Here’s an interesting case for anyone looking to build a new service online…
Wayn, (Where Are You Now), is one of the UK hopefuls in the race for social networking dominance.
Founded by Peter Ward in 2005, it targets young single people with freedom to travel.
It is now gets 6.5 Million visitors each month, and has an Alexa rank of 835. It grew from nothing by using Google adwords to attract its initial signups, and by offering free international SMS texts.
In doing so, it was reaching out to its intended target audience by providing the very thing it knew they were looking for (even though they didn’t know what WAYN was yet).
Part of the difficulty it seems, with many web businesses, is that what they offer is a service no one thinks they need because they don’t know what it is.
Then, once they realise what the service is, and how useful it is, they begin to wonder what life can have been like without it.
So here’s a good answer to the question about how you attract people to your business when they don’t know what your service is, and when they can’t envisage what it will do for them:
Offer them something they need instead.
In WAYN’s case it was free international SMS texts.
Whether they needed WAYN or not, WAYN’s users definitely needed free international SMS texts. This, then, was the bait. Its what WAYN offered in its shop window knowing it would draw in people who would also like the service they were offering.
Now they’ve got to know what WAYN does, they realise they need it too.
WAYN.com recently changed its model from paid subscription to free (with VIP upgrade available), on the advice of Brent Hoberman, an investor in the business, and its current Chairman.
Like MVS and most Web 2.0 sites, WAYN’s growth is due in no small part to its use of automatic contact form signups. This is when you enter your username and password at the top email service providers and an email is sent to all your contacts inviting them to join too.
Sites vary on how they use this viral trigger and in Wayn’s case, the option not to use it is especially difficult to find.
A further point of interest, perhaps reflecting on the UK’s more relaxed Anti SPAM laws, is that no verification email is sent following signup.
Certainly a welcome message is sent, and an invitaion to download WAYN desktop - presumably a method of communication direct from WAYN without needing email -… but they never confirmed my email address to know that it is valid.
Perhaps we’re moving away from email contact - perhaps this is a sign of what is to come…
I’m here in Sydney with 10 of the 20 Freedom Class participants, having an extra day on advanced traffic generation techniques.
Everyone now has an MVS (My Viral Spiral) site and a Products folder for placing their product sales pages. Those two things on their own are enough for anyone to run a successful online business. All they need to do is generate their first flow of traffic.
Today’s participants are also adding a blog to the mix of their business activities. This will become an invaluable tool both for building customer relationships and for generating hordes of visitors to to their squeeze pages.
As I write this, they are writing their first post. Very soon they will be catching the eye of the search engines, and with a signup form in the sidebar of their blog, they will be filtering off a free flow of traffic to their squeeze pages and sales pages.
Here are the names of today’s participants, with links to their new blogs.
The post I made yesterday to my blog got to the front page of Google for a popular search term, WITHIN 10 HOURS!
And that’s with over 200,000 results:
“A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool“.
In this post, I’m going to explain exactly how you can do that too.
But first of all, here’s the proof (see the bottom of this screenshot) Or, you can go to Google yourself and type in “A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool”, yourself. Results vary, of course, so by the time you read this, it might be higher, or lower than it is displayed in the image below, and it will no longer say “10 hours ago”.
Now then, incase ‘front page of Google’ doesn’t mean anything to you, let me explain why it is so important.
About 80% of traffic on the Internet arrives at websites via the search engines. And Google has 45% or so of the search engine marketplace.
So if you can get your page ranked in the first page of Google for a common search term (or problem statement) in your niche, you’re well placed for the lion’s share of the traffic.
And this is an easy and FREE way of reaching them. It illustrates the power and speed of blogging as an Internet Marketing promotion tool.
And how can you use that traffic?
OK - here’s one way (the way I use it…)
Put a signup form on your blog, for a free ebook or something. Just make sure that on signup, your users are directed to a sales page. Either for your product, or one you’re affiliated to. That way, you’ll make money and build your list very quickly at the same time.
If you’ve got an MVS site (My Viral Spiral), then you can get the code for your signup box, to place in the side bar of your blog, straight from it. All the redirection is then looked after directly in your MVS site. Simply use the “Web Form Code” box.
You can still do this if you don’t have an MVS site yet, but are a member of someone elses. Or, if you want to join one, join mine: TimsViralSpiral.com (click register at this page)
I’ve had over 100 signups in the past 24 hours from my blog. Normally I get about 20 or so in the same time frame.
So yeah - the method I’m about to give you works!
And now I’ll explain how to do it.
1. Get A Blog
If you haven’t got a blog yet, I strongly recommend you get one. My preference is to use Wordpress on your own domain, rather than a hosted one at Blogger or whatever.
If your webhost is worth their salt, they should give you Fantastico in your Cpanel. You can install WordPress from there for free. If not, you can download it, and install it to your site from wordpress.com
If you have an MVS site, you can ask us for your CPanel details… drop us a ticket in the tech help at timshelpdesk.com with your name and domain name and ask for your Cpanel username and password. You’ll find Fantastico at the bottom right of your Cpanel.
There’s a ton of useful stuff for managing your domain in Cpanel. If you need any help with it, try Discover-Cpanel.com
2. Install The Bookmarker Plugin
Once you’ve got your blog set up, install the bookmarker plugin from SocialMarker.com. That way, every post you make will have a bookmarker button at the bottom of it, like this one does.
Your readers, and you, can then bookmark your post with as many of the social bookmarking sites as you like. This will improve your ranking in the search engines fast.
Next, decide what problem statement you’re going after. (Mine was “A Useful Free Internet Marketing Tool”), and make a post with that as your Title.
When they’re spidering blogs, Google, and the other search engines, value the title with more importance than the post contents. That’s why it always important to title your posts carefully. And using known problem statements in your niche is always a good option.
By problem statement, I mean try and match, as closely as you can, the search term your prospects are likely to use to search for your product or service.
You want to be intercepting their search.
3. Write Your Post
Then write something useful underneath, for the body of your blog post. A post need only be 500 words, or less. Many are way less, but to get credence with a search engine, its best to aim for more than 400 words.
Be sure, too, to add some tags to your post. You don’t need too many but choose them carefully and make sure they’re good keywords for your niche. In Wordpress, the ‘tags’ box appears underneath the ‘post’ box.
If you’ve got a list, direct them to it with a broadcast. You want as many people as possible clicking your bookmark button and bookmarking your post. The more who visit, the more will bookmark it. Its another percentage thing - Internet Marketing is full of them!
Oh, and don’t forget to click on your Bookmark button after you’ve published your post, and bookmark it yourself!
So there you have it - a free way to get traffic, signups and sales using smart blogging and social bookmarking.
If you’d like the further information on how to generate hordes of free traffic with your blog, I strongly recommend you signup at unstoppableblogging.com. There are some valuable lessons and tools there which can take your blogging, and your traffic, to a new dimension.
I hope this was helpful. Please let me know with a comment to this post… Especially if you have tried it out and got good results…
Oh, and if you like it - click this bookmark button and bookmark it! :)…
So many things are taken for granted, once we get to know them.
Thats right: So many valuable tips aren’t passed on, because too many of us presume others already know about them…
Well - if you know about this, great - glad you’re enjoying it too, but if not, let me introduce you to a free tool which I use uncountable times during my working day.
Its called Sparky…
This is an attachment to my browser window. It will work with IE or Firefox, whichever is your preference.
When you go to a website, there are a number of things which might strike you about it straight away: Appealing graphics, a hard-hitting headline, good/bad copy, industry logos, testimonials etc… but none of them give you a clue about how frequently the site is visited.
And don’t you think that’s important?
Put it this way: when you’re thinking of using a service, or buying a product, it helps to know how many others have used it too. We gain assurance in our purchase by knowing this. Or we realise we’re taking a risk. Either way, its worth knowing.
This is as important online as it is off. Social proof is a great way of converting sales, and its never better than when it is provided independently.
For example… if you find a site that is offering something, and claiming thousands of people have had success with it, then you should expect it to be quite a popular site, no?
So what if you could know, straight away, whether they were telling the truth or not?
Well, one of the dangers when we start out working online, is that there are many sites like that. And the only credible way of knowing how well it is visited, is by checking its Alexa rank.
The google rank helps too. That is a measure of how many other sites link to it (and what their rank is too), but that’s for another post.
Alexa is a web information company. It continuously researches every site it comes across on the Internet and monitors how frequently it is visited. Not only that, but it also gathers information about other related sites which carry a similar topic, so you can visit them too.
The Alexa toolbar, as it was, or Sparky, as they call it now, is a very cool tool for uncovering more about the webpage you’re looking at.
With it, you can not only tell how popular the site is, but also how its traffic has grown, or declined, in previous months.
The alexa rank is just that, a rank of popularity. The most visited site on the Internet (Google) has an alexa rank of 1. As I write, Facebook has a rank of 6. This means it is the 7th most visited site on The Internet. This is how it is displayed in the task bar of my browser window.
As a rule of thumb, if you can get your blog, or a site of yours, to show an alexa rank of less than 100,000 - you’re doing well: Its a good thing to aim for.
The page you’re looking at, my blog, used to have an alexa rank of around 60,000 - when I was updating it daily. Now that I do it less frequently, the rank has dropped to 280,000 or so.
Would it help you to know how well you’re doing in the traffic rankings - at a glance?
If you think so, or even if you would like to know more about any site you visit, and what other similar sites are, I strongly recommend you get this cool free tool.
The simple fact is this: If you’re marketing online, its helpful to know how your site is ranked against your competitors’. Using this tool, you can do that easily: visit both sites, and note the alexa rank of both. The one with the lower number, is visited more frequently than the other.
You can download and install Sparky on your web-browser at this link:
Hope you found this helpful. Either way, please let me know.
Have you got other tools you find useful in your day-to-day work… let me know with a comment below -
Oh, and by the way - if you don’t want me to moderate your commment, please make sure it doesn’t contain an affiliate link.
I’ve been opting out from my work on The Freedom Class
to look at Butterfly Reports.
I don’t know about you, but once I’m focused on something,
not even wild horses can pull me away… so to begin with,
Mike Filsaime’s latest initiative was a distraction.
But now that I’ve had a good look, Butterfly Reports
intrigues me because it is following a similar principal to
My Viral Spiral - MVS. So much so, that a lot of people
have been asking me lately, how I will deal with the
competition….
Ha! - competition?…
Actually… like many things in Internet Marketing -
competition is most often collaberation in disguise. And
this is a case in point.
Let me explain… and then, please have a look at the site
and tell me what you think by leaving me a comment to
this post.
MVS, as you may know, provides a way for you to build your
own huge list by providing squeeze pages with your
rebrandable ebooks so that the people you pass them on to,
can pass them on too… That way, everyone who gets the
ebook from them, is also on your list.
Phew! - don’t think I’ve ever managed to explain it in a
single sentence before…!
The record number of signups so far is 1,200 in 5 days.
However, the one thing MVS lacks, beyond the 6 ebooks it
comes pre-loaded with, is… ebooks !
Yes, it does require you to create your own, or get PLR or
do whatever you have to, to populate your MVS site with
promotional ebooks so that you’ve got a consistent flow of
content to provide your signups.
Until now, you have had to use traditional methods: Either
take someone elses PDF, make it rebrandable with your MVS
site and create a squeeze page - or create your own.
And easy as it sounds, even *that* can be a lot of work…
Butterfly Reports gives us a continuous supply of
rebrandable reports and ebooks. And the wonderful thing is,
it does it for *f.r.e.e* …!
No more scouring article directories to copy and paste
articles for your scratched-together ebooks, no more head-
scratching as you stay up to the wee hours writing your own
- no more ghost-writing…
Get your ebooks from Butterfly Reports, and use them in
your MVS site… its a winning combination…!
So I strongly recommend you take a look at this site. At
least watch the video, and let it show you the potential of
what you can do with a collection of rebrandable ebooks in
your armoury.
And then, if you don’t have an MVS site of your own yet, we
are just about to release version 3.12 - an awesome
upgrade… Go ahead: have a look…
Oh, and one other thing: When you sign up to Butterfly
Reports, be sure to read everything they tell you. The site
is still in beta, and there are some important benefits to
upgrading at this time.
In most professions, there are a recognised set of skills required if you are to perform the daily tasks proficiently… Internet Marketing is no different.
Or is it?
In fact, Internet Marketing is different. Unlike most professions, Internet Marketing requires input from a complete variety of disciplines and skills, and our performance in the field will be hindered if we don’t either supply it ouselves, or outsource it.
When you try and sell something online, its actually quite similar to selling something offline. You need a shop window, a point of entry, a welcoming face, a shop interior which satisfies curiosity, and all the follow-up service which visitors expect.
This sounds straight forward. Its a process we take for granted every day of our lives when we go shopping in the high street. But to pull it off successfully on the Internet requires a careful application of knowledge and skill. Some can do it well, and get spectacular results very quickly. Others can’t and don’t.
So what is it that some have, and others don’t?
I have been researching this recently to help with my series of Freedom Classes.
In these classes I am teaching people how to market successfully online. I am offloading much of the knowledge I have gathered, about what works and what doesn’t, and - hopefully - inspiring my participants to discover for themselves what the best way is for them.
A difference about The Freedom Class is that I am conducting it by Action Learning. This means that participants not only learn directly from me, like in a classroom, but also learn from each other’s experience. It is a method of learning particularly suited to Internet Marketing because we’re all doing it all the time, and there is no right or wrong way, only ways which work and ways which don’t.
One of the characteristics of Action Learning, which is also a characteristic of successful Internet Marketing, is working in groups. It is no secret that I owe much of my own success to the Mastermind group, formed in September 2006, which brought together Bob Jenkins, Glen Hopkins, Matthew Glanfield, Dan Kelly, Scott Tousignant, Martin Salter and myself.
In the time since then, we have devoted an hour each week to a conference call, on which we can air what we are doing, express any difficulties we’re having, ask for help, and offer advice. We do this through a freely available conference line, and even though between seven of us, we are in 4 different time zones and 3 different countries, we still do it every week.
No matter how good we are at some things, we can never be good at everything. And I honestly believe that anyone seeking success with Internet Marketing who doesn’t form a mastermind group such as this, is holding themself back.
Recently I undertook an exercise to identify 5 characteristics which I believe are important to Internet Marketers. With these, I created a questionnaire for my Freedom Class attendees aimed at providing a visual display of which characteristics they possessed, and in what quantity.
The aim of the exercise is to help them find other group members for creating an effective team.
Much of the work in The Freedom Class will be conducted in groups and it is important, I believe, that each of the characteristics is represented in each group.
Here is a list of the characteristics I identified:
Writer
Artist
Co-ordinator
Marketer
Technician
My theory is that a team conducting Internet Marketing activity, in this case to provide each member with their own Internet Marketing business, should possess each of these characteristics… and - for best results - in equal measure.
We will discover if I am right from the experience of my first set of students on The Freedom Class this weekend… you can be sure I’ll keep you posted.
If you’ve received an email from me recently with mention of The Freedom Class, its because this Thursday, 31st January, I am opening registration to the first in a series of weekend learning seminars.
These are to follow the Action Learning format, a style of learning I found very helpful when studying for my MBA. It is especially applicable for Internet Marketing because it applies practical learning and not just theory. Together, over a weekend, we will build your online business.
Click here for more information on The Freedom Class, and register now for inclusion in the early launch notification.
Comments(12)
