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IM A Numbers Game - What's your Favorite "Number"?

by FredJones
8 replies
As they say, IM is a number's game. The better you understand your numbers, the better off you are.

I heartily agree, since it matches with my experience. I also believe it is a game of momentum.

So, over the last 2 days, I was trying to think, exactly which number/formula has so far driven my business profits and motivations the best? I feel, as of today, there are exactly 2 things derived from classical sciences that have so far been my best recipe.

(1) Differential calculus - in particular, second order differentiation and its application on Newton's second law of motion. Yes, I am indeed talking about force, mass and acceleration. Force here is the amount of effort I spend (money, time etc), mass is my set of niches and acceleration is the rate of change of business profits with time. The heavier is the mass, the more force I need to plan to get a better acceleration. Interestingly, a heavier mass ends up gaining heavier momentum and keeps giving me better results in the longer run

(2) Power-law equation - P(k) = k raised to the power Gamma. This is what keeps motivating my SEO and mindshare+brand-building exercises. Works like a charm, and this is something most of us only half-explore.

I have given away some of my best gold above.

What's your favorite set of numbers and framework to process those numbers?
#favorite #game #number #numbers
  • Profile picture of the author LetsGoViral
    The higher the number in my bank account, the better.
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    Time of thinking is over.
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  • Profile picture of the author Neil Morgan
    What's your favorite set of numbers?
    Well, my degree is Mathematics so I can think of a few.

    But my favourite in IM?

    Simply visitor value - my "magic" number.

    For interested folks, do a search on here and you'll find loads about it.

    Cheers,

    Neil
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    Easy email marketing automation without moving your lists.

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  • Profile picture of the author terrapurus
    You choose Newtonian mechanics, I choose Occam's razor.

    The answer to life, the universe and everything (in SEO anyway) is 1.

    That's my science degree contemplating answers and contemplating if I asked the right question .. and my business degree getting off my arse and doing it.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Hlatky

    One million dollars
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    • Profile picture of the author vok
      I normally like numbers that are NET profit. Like most people said there's one bottom line in this game and that's how much money you can make, not how pretty you can make a squeeze page look or how many people you can get on a list.
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      • Profile picture of the author FredJones
        Good ones so far. Let me explain my second point - the power law - in some senses.

        Implication 1: The long tail. The "core" keyword is searched the maximum, and has the maximum potential in it. For example, "internet marketing" will have more searches and more competitiion compared to "internet marketing tools" and "internet marketing scams". And there will be longer tails. If you notice, the number of searches follows a power law, and typically the number of search results also follow a power law distribution. The trick here is to judge those keywords in which the exponent for searches goes down slower compared to exponent of search results. Those are the keywords that would potentially make more moeny.

        Implication 2: In SEO, the keywords will often have an exponential (power law) distribution of difficulty in raking and once you rank, will give you not linearly but exponentially higher number of visitors. And if you try to fit the number of visitors with respect to search rankings in a curve, the front page will have a power law, then there will be a break in the 11th position and then onwards again it will be a power law fall (really? that's what my intuition says beyond spot 11, but really?) albeit frequently enough a statistically insignificant traffic volume.

        But yes, got to believe that million dollars, bank balance and bottom line are interesting, and value per visitor is a tremendously interesting number.

        Thought of something here - very difficult to prove - but, is a longer tail keyword's conversion ratio exponentially higher with respect to the "core keyword"-s conversion ratio? Do we also have a power law or some other sort of exponential distribution there?
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        Get funded up to US $2 Million for your business as a JV (not a loan). Keep 80% of the profits.
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  • Profile picture of the author ymanrulz
    Thanks for the posts Fred....My degree is in finance...And in all my years in business I've seen anything explained like that...kinda cool actually...Guess I shoulda paid more attention in calculus class...
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    • Profile picture of the author FredJones
      I just posted this on another thread on WF. That, treat your subscribers like gold and they will treat you like gold in return. In other words, provide them value for free and they will buy from you when you sell. But provide them bull$^!t and they will bring in bull$^!t income back for you.

      So, this is Newton's third law of motion - "every action has its equal and opposite reaction".

      Which brings me back to my original post on this thread - the first one that mentions Newton's second law of motion. If you dig deeper, Newton's third law of motion is a special case of the second law of motion.

      So, I realize it now even better than before, that...

      That, even making the best of autoresponder profits is philosophically nothing but better applying Newton's second law of motion. IM keeps amazing me by boiling down to my basic sciences so many times!
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      Get funded up to US $2 Million for your business as a JV (not a loan). Keep 80% of the profits.
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