Seasoned Marketer

Have you ever watched one of those marketing videos that have no controls, like fast forward?

I just got done watching this video and it was like 15 minutes long.  It was BORING!! and I just wanted to know how much the course cost.   Of course there were no controls to fast forward.  So, purposefully by design, they make you watch the video if you want to find out the cost.

However, there is a shortcut to this process.  And that is to just view the source code in your browser.  Typically there will be a little javascript routine that runs when the video finishes which shows you the price and the order-now button.  But with a little know-how, you can skip the video and go straight to the info you want.

How so?  By viewing the source code.  To do this, just goto View > Page Source if you are using Firefox or goto Page > View Source in Internet Explorer.  This will show you the HTML code.  Scroll down just a bit and you will be able to read the text of the site and be able to find the price and order details.  Just ignore all the HTML if it doesn’t make sense to you.

For example, I just got finished watching this LONG video and I just wanted to know how much it cost.  So I went to View > Page Source and it said hidden in the code that the course was 6 easy payments of $297 or roughly $2,000.  Well, that’s awfully expensive for a course.  Especially from someone claiming that they got banned from Google.  Do you really want to learn material from someone who got banned from Google?  I just don’t think that’s a constructive thing.

So I managed to save some precious time, skipped watching the BS video and got the info I needed.  $2k?  I’ll think I’ll skip this one and just buy $2k worth of traffic from Google, Microsoft, and even Facebook.

For one of my sites, which has been around a few years, I took a look at the Analytics which shows a good deal of information about visitors to your site.  One of things it shows is which browser people are using.  And so here’s the stats from Jan 1, 2010 to Mar 15, 2010 and approximately 26,000 visitors.  So that’s probably a statistically significant result…

Name / Percentage of people using that browser

1. Firefox 43.41%
2. Internet Explorer 36.59%
3. Chrome 10.25%
4. Safari 6.48%
5. Opera 2.32%
6. Mozilla 0.58%
7. Opera Mini 0.14%
8. SeaMonkey 0.07%
9. Mozilla Compatible Agent 0.05%
10. Konqueror 0.03%

So in this case, surprisingly Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer. And equally surprising, Google’s Chrome is currently ranking #3 in the browser wars. This just shows you that you really ought to download those top 5 browsers and see what your site looks like in those browsers.

Different browsers, espcially older ones, can display CSS formatting differently.  So it’s pretty important to check different versions of the same browser as well.  You wouldn’t want your site to look great in one browser and horrible in another.  And believe me, I had that happen on my last site I built, but after checking it was easily correctable.  But you can’t fix it, if you don’t even know it’s broken.