As you might know, I’m running a survey for my master thesis on Digital Point.

Problem #1 : I was not allowed to direct email the 30,000 active users of the community, as Shawn Hogan is not even doing that for his own stuff… well

Problem #2 : despite previous talks and agreements over the course of the last year (even been talking in person to Shawn twice on this) to help promote the survey via forum post I didn’t even get a reseponse from him… he seems to be so busy, on vacation or whatever

However this required me to find ways to get people notice my posts announcement…

• via nice prizes (attention incentive hunter effect!)

• via crazy, but remarkable prizes (Thanks to Aaron Wall for the idea!) 1 2 3 and 4 5 or even 6 and 7

• via Google CPM ads I had to buy to compete with my scientific interest against the commercial ones of PayPerPost and other companies paying Shawn good money for being on top of DP

Just yesterday I held a presentation here at my school about how hard it is to get entries to the survey if you get no support for sending out emails… and

having to get people’s attention with sig links and google ads is hard …

Attached is the presentation with some nice examples of Google ads that convert well, and others that don’t…

Interesting point. Those ads saying “Shawn Hogan – where are you?” are performing best – so I might not be the only one waiting for his response :)

You can download the presentation here in Powerpoint format and PDF

- your feedback is much appreciated!