How to Save Money on Amazon With a Fake Baby

By Matthew Yglesias

You need a real baby to pull this off. Amazon Mom discounts, not so much.

Photo by Uriel Sinai/Getty Images

Amazon has a program called Amazon Mom that's a pretty neat way to save some money on common household items. But here's the thing. It turns out you don't need to be a mom to sign up. You don't need to be a dad, either. You just need to be a liar. Enrolling in Amazon Mom requires you to offer up some information about your baby, but there's no verification involved whatsoever. You just type in some made-up stuff and suddenly your fake baby is getting you some sweet discounts.

Here's the deal. Suppose you're an Amazon Prime member. If you are, then you perhaps know about Subscribe & Save. With Subscribe & Save, you get a monthly delivery date, and you order various Subscribe & Save items to be scheduled for delivery to your house on a regular basis. That could be once a month, or once every two months, or once every three or four or five or six months. You just need a schedule. You save 5 percent on your Subscribe & Save items relative to the list price, due to the greater convenience for Amazon of scheduled deliveries and presumably due to their hope that you'll overpurchase. Even better, on any month where you have at least five Subscribe & Save items coming to your house, you get a 15 percent discount. So right now I'm on various schedules for delivery of dried pasta, Zevia sodas (delicious if you've never tried them), counter spray, paper towels, toilet paper, laundry detergent, dishwasher detergent, artificial sweetener, Kashi bars, tea bags, hand soap, dish soap, and beans.

That's enough stuff that there should be at least five items in every monthly bundle. Nice savings.

Top Comment

Dear Prudence,  My husband created a fake baby to get soap at a cheaper price, but he doesn't want to have a real baby with me.  Should I feel hurt?  

But if you join Amazon Mom, those savings get kicked up a notch to 20 percent. And there's no monthly fee and no extra commitment to buy stuff. You just need to tell Amazon some stuff about your baby—birthday and 
such—presumably so they can target you with baby-related offers. Except your baby can be fake. My baby, Tim Duncan Crawford, named after my wife's favorite basketball player and given her surname, was born on Dec. 14. Except he's just a lie I created to get cheaper soap.

Amazon is obviously aware that they've left this loophole wide open. I wonder if publicizing it will lead them to close it. But either way, if you're a Subscribe & Save user, you should sign yourself up with a fake baby. Even if you have a real baby, a fake one might be better if you don't want too many targeted deals.

Great workaround for sending delayed gmail messages

Have you ever wanted to write an email now but send it a later date and time? Maybe you are sending birthday greetings and would like the email message to be delivered on the exact day. Or you have written the reply to an email but would like to schedule delivery in the recipient’s time zone when the message is more likely to get read.

Microsoft Outlook has a built-in scheduler to help you delay the delivery of email messages. After you are finished writing an email message and hit the Send button, the message isn’t delivered immediately — it stays in your outbox and is sent at the specified time automatically.

Gmail doesn’t let you schedule a later delivery of email messages but there are browser extensions — like Boomerang and Right Inbox — that let you specify a future send date for your outgoing email messages.

These are however subscription based services that allow you to send only a limited number of scheduled email messages for free per month. The other concern is privacy – you will have to grant read and write access to your entire Gmail account to a third-party to use scheduling inside Gmail.

How to Schedule & Send Gmail Messages Later with Google Sheets

If you are reluctant to provide access to your Gmail account to another service, there’s an alternative – Google Sheets.

What you can do is compose all your emails that you would like to be delivered later in Gmail and then specify the exact delivery date and time for these messages in the Google sheet. The messages would be delivered automatically at the time chosen by you. Internally, there’s a little Google Script that takes care of sending the messages at the appropriate date and time.

Schedule your Gmail – Step by Step

Go to your Gmail mailbox and compose a few test messages that you would like to be delivered later. Your draft messages can have rich formatting, you can add attachments, signatures and even inline images. Make sure that you have included the recipient’s email address in the TO field of the drafts.

1. Click here to make a copy of the Gmail Scheduler sheet (v2.0) in your Google Drive.
2. Change the default timezone of your Google spreadsheet. The emails will get scheduled in this timezone.
3. Inside the sheet, choose Authorize under the Gmail Scheduler menu and grant the necessary permissions. This script is running in your own Google Drive and none of your data is accessible to anyone else.
4. Choose Gmail Scheduler -> Fetch Messages to import all the draft messages from your Gmail account into the Google Sheet.
5. Set the scheduled date and time for individual messages in column D of the sheet. You can double-click a cell and use the date picker or you can manually enter the date and time as m/dd/yyyy h:mm:ss in 24 hour format.
6. Go to Gmail Scheduler -> Schedule Messages and run the scheduler. You can close the spreadsheet and it will send messages at the specified time automatically.

Video Tutorial – Schedule Gmail Messages

Here’s a detailed video tutorial (download) that will walk you through the steps.

Scheduling Gmail messages with Google sheets is easy. Please do note that once a message has been scheduled, you should not edit the corresponding Gmail draft message else that particular message would be removed from the queue.

If you wish to edit the draft or need to change the delivery time once the messages have been scheduled, you can repeat the steps #3 to #5 and reinitialize the queue.

Awesome Google Scripts → Custom Google Scripts →

How to Change the Spreadsheet Timezone

The scheduled date and time that you specify in the cells use the default timezone of the spreadsheet. If you wish to send mails in a different timezone, open the spreadsheet and pick a different timezone under File -> Spreadsheet Settings menu.

Home — How-to Guides — GMail

How to Grab Your Competitor’s Audience Using YouTube Ads

October 02nd, 2014 by Matt Coleman 

 

64 inShare

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could play your video ads before your competitors’ main video content?

I’ll let you in on a secret…it’s possible utilizing the YouTube Ad Placements category.

If your competitors’ video allows monetization, you’re in prime position to steal a spot for your video ad.

Want to know how to make that happen? Keep reading because in this article I’m going to show you exactly how to find these channels…
Better yet, I’m sharing tactics you can use to broaden your net of similar influencer opportunities.

Before you begin digging through YouTube videos, be aware not every channel allows for video ads to appear before their content. If they do, you might have struck a gold mine — I’m going to show you how to find these hidden gems.
Let’s get started!

First, go to the main page of YouTube and type in a keyword.
As an example I’ll search for keyword “diy” and see what comes up. This is a very broad based search term with over 19,600,000 results.



Simplify the process by hovering over the YouTube channel name to get quick insight as to their subscriber base. In this example you see the YouTube channel Make has over 700k subscribers.

This information is valuable if you want to get a broad idea as to the amount of traffic their videos receive when they upload a new piece of content.



Next, click on the “Filters” tab and check out the options. Default settings filter by “Relevance”, but when I filter by “View Count” we now see the most popular results for “diy”.



Notice that the top result below the In-Search ads is a YouTube channel for Bethany Mota with a subscriber base of over 7 million. She has over 400 videos and was active 1 week ago. We can assume she is a consistent YouTuber and could be a valuable resource for our ad placement if we want to target this market.

Below her channel page link we see a video “Play doh Scoops ‘n Treats”. It has over 62 million views! By clicking on this video I can see if there is advertising available.



The advertiser for Kinetic Sand has done a great job of placing their advertisement on this particular video. In most cases, the people who are watching video content about Play-Doh are interested in a similar product and thus make for a relevant ad experience.



What’s really important here is the “More” tab under this video — the included “Statistics” option gives a ton of useful information for your search.
In particular you are able to see daily stats about the amount of traffic this video receives. This will be valuable when you’re considering exposure to your ad with placement. If you decide this is a good video to add to your list of placements, simply copy the URL and add that link to a placement document for your list of potential video placements.



What if you want to broaden your net and find other influencers on a mass scale?

Let’s go back to the main results for our search term “diy” and this time filter by “Channel”. Now YouTube filters channels that we can potentially target with our ads. The default results will appear under “Relevance” but we can also filter by “View Count” to see channels that have higher viewership.



Once you find a potential channel simply click on their channel page and perform the same tactic of making sure they have recent and relevant content to determine if they are a match for your video ad placement.

If they appear to have content relevant to your offer then click on some of their videos to see if they have monetization available.



Check out this DIY Backpack tutorial.

Because monetization is enabled, this channel would be a potential location to place our ads.



Ready to take another step in securing your spot ahead of competitors’ content?

Digital Marketer Lab Member Extra

Access your ‘Video Sales Letter Formula’ Execution Plan in Digital Marketer Lab.
Ryan Deiss reveals how to produce inexpensive, engaging video sales letters and triple sales
Click here to access your Execution Plan
Not a Lab member? Click here to learn more about DM Lab

Related Channels on the right side of YouTube channels is another gold mine aimed at stealing your competitors’ audience.

Assuming the YouTuber hasn’t hidden this section, you can go through and look for similar channels to the one you are evaluating. In this example I am on the DIYReady YouTube channel and YouTube has determined that Steve Ramsey is a similar channel based on the types of people who watch both content.



His YouTube channel shows us that we could continue the search by looking at other channels similar to his content by performing this same method. For now I’ll click on some of his content to see if he has monetization available.



Since this video does have monetization enabled, we could add it to our placement document as a possible location to advertise.



Once you have a list of different videos you want to use for your placements, it’s time to create a YouTube Ad campaign.

For this you’ll need an AdWords account and have it linked to your YouTube channel. If you haven’t done that yet, you can follow the steps here, and then view your AdWords dashboard.

Now the fun part…



When you sign into your AdWords account click on “All video campaigns” and create a new campaign.



Give your campaign a name and set your budget.
Under “Delivery Method” select “YouTube Videos”.

I left the location open, though you might choose to focus on the United States and Canada.



Next, choose the video you are using for your ad placement.
Make sure you include the destination URL — ideally it has tracking and includes a URL that is visible to the user.



I chose to leave the ad schedule blank as I want it to run all times and days of the week.

The Ad rotation depends on if you are using multiple ads and Google finds a winner or best performing ad. It will then choose to favor this ad variation.
Use the Rotate evenly so it can collect more data between your variations. For the ad frequency you can decide how many times you want a single person to see your ad.

Most users should decrease the “Mobile” views by 100%. Devices such as iPads and iPhones are not capable of clicking on your ad. If your purpose is to simply run a branding campaign, leave it as is. If not, decrease the feature by 100%.



Next, choose your Target. Use “Narrow your targeting (optional)” drop down feature and select “Placements”.



Now copy all the URL links you added to your placement document earlier.



Paste them into the Placements section of your targeting.
Save your targeting and let the ad run.

Once you do this you can go back to the bidding and determine how much you are willing to pay per view.

Keep in mind you will want to bid a few cents over to help ensure you gain visibility over your advertising competitors.



Once you begin to collect enough data you will see trends on what placements channels are best performing and you can choose to either keep them running or turn them off.

Depending on the niche, you will want to check weekly to see if new YouTube channels are being created that are ideal for your video ad placements.
Are you ready to go out and steal your competitors’ audience?

Advertisers Find Sneaky New Way to Make You Watch Commercials

by Corey Eridon

62
inShare

I don't know if this is innovative, annoying, or a little bit of both. (Probably a little bit of both, but let me know what you think.)

I was buying tickets for Bruce in the U.S.A. last night through Ticketmaster. I was doing this because Bruce Springsteen isn't touring in the U.S. anytime soon, and I needed something to tide me over til his next tour.
But I digress.

So, I was buying the tickets, and I get to the captcha part of the online ticket purchasing process that we're all familiar with. It usually looks something like this:

Confusing, but most of us can get it right on the third of fourth refresh. (We're a highly adaptable species.) I didn't see that familiar captcha this time, though. I saw this:

And if you think it's just a plain ol' ad, you're wrong -- when you click on the copy to "reveal the security code," a video starts to play advertising Cascade. You're then instructed to "listen" for the security code, which resulted in me hunching down at my computer like an idiot to catch the secret phrase. My feeling of idiocy only multiplied when I looked at my screen and saw this:

Heh. Triple Action Formula. Didn't know you were just gonna slap it on the screen. Got it.

What Makes This Weird

Good on Ticketmaster for finding a way to make a few extra bucks, I guess. But a couple things made me feel icky about this: 

1) The phrasing makes it seem like you don't want to help stop ticket scalpers if you don't dream about Cascade Triple Action Formula, and implies that the folks at Cascade are personally fighting the good fight against scalpers.

2) They trick you into listening to the ad instead of just looking for the code to type in.

But you're not really listening because, if you're like me, you're freaking out so much about not missing the secret code. (It's a secret, after all! What if they're hiding it in the commercial?!)

But, I have to hand it to them -- "they" found a corner of the internet to 1) sneak in advertising where it hasn't been snuck before, and 2) sneak it in a place where you actually do have to pay attention to it.Kind of.

Have you seen these ads elsewhere? (My colleague found one a couple weeks ago on Songza.) What do you think of them?

Emergency Hotline 911 receives a 'pizza order' from a lady who needs help

A woman who is a victim of domestic violence called 911 for help but was unable to directly discuss of what was happening to her so she used a code-like conversation by starting to order a pizza.
Fortunately, the dispatcher did not take her call lightly, instead he became intuitive and analyzed her situation very carefully.
Read the transcript of the conversation between the victim and the dispatcher and noticed how well their thoughts were connected to each other.

"911, where is your emergency?"

"123 Main St."

"Ok, what's going on there?"

"I'd like to order a pizza for delivery." (oh great, another prank call).

"Ma'am, you've reached 911"

"Yeah, I know. Can I have a large with half pepperoni, half mushroom and peppers?"

"Ummm…. I'm sorry, you know you've called 911 right?"

"Yeah, do you know how long it will be?"

"Ok, Ma'am, is everything ok over there? do you have an emergency?"

"Yes, I do."

"..And you can't talk about it because there's someone in the room with you?" (moment of realization)

"Yes, that's correct. Do you know how long it will be?"

"I have an officer about a mile from your location. Are there any weapons in your house?"

"Nope."

"Can you stay on the phone with me?"

"Nope. See you soon, thanks"

According to the dispatcher, he checked the history of the address given by the lady and found out that there were records of multiple domestic violence from the previous calls.

Finally, the officer arrived at the house and immediately saw the lady in bad shape with her drunk boyfriend. Her partner was arrested for beating her.

The dispatcher said that she was intelligent to pull that kind of trick and that emergency call is the most memorable one for him.

Getting browser history using Javascript

Something we discussed recently at work was using Javascript to obtain the browser history of a user visiting your website. It was deemed a little black-hat but I'm not afraid of such things, so I set about writing a quick script to sniff a user's history.

Why

I read a rumour on the Internet recently that Dell were using such a script to work out whether you've visited competitor websites; allowing them to put their best offers under your nose in an aim to get your business. So under the premise that you've got a website with known competitors, how do you know if your visitor has visited them? That's where my little script would come in handy.

What it does

You enter the URL's of your competitor's websites into a Javascript array and set a colour for visited links in the CSS. Then it's just a case of checking the colour of the A-tags on the page; if you've visited them I'll know about it. So let's start looking at the code...

XHTML

All I've done is create a really basic page that just has a container and a div with the ID of 'sniffer'. This is the div that I'll use for calculating whether various places have been visited. So the code is really basic here:

view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

1. <body>  
2.     <div id="container">  
3.           
4.         <div id="sniffer">  
5.               
6.         </div>  
7.           
8.         If all the links remain blue and you don't get an alert box, visit one of the links on the list and refresh the page.  
9.           
10.     </div>  
11. </body>  
12. 
    
13. 
    Sniffer is empty for now and I've just placed some instructions on the page in case you've not visited any of my test URLs.
    

    CSS

    The crucial thing to do is ensure that you're setting a color for both a:link and a:visited within the 'sniffer' div, this will ensure we can perform colour checks on them later. So all I've got is:
    
    
    view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

    1. #sniffer a:link  
    2. {  
    3.     color:#0000FF;  
    4. }     
    5.   
    6. #sniffer a:visited  
    7. {  
    8.     color:#FF0000;  
    9. }  
    10.   
    11. /*#sniffer 
    12. { 
    13.     position:absolute; 
    14.     left:-1000px; 
    15. }*/  
    16. 
        
    17. 
        So for regular links I'm telling them to be blue, whereas visited links are going to be red. Note that I've commented out the layout CSS for the #sniffer div; this would position it off-page so that visitors to the page wouldn't be able to see the list I'm checking. However I've commented it out so that (for demonstrative purposes) you can see what I'm checking.
        

        Javascript

        I'm using Mootools (yet again, no surprises there) for this, although you could do this with straight up prototype (or conventional Javascript probably). The framework doesn't matter too much, I'm just using Mootools because I have it handy and I know the selectors off the top of my head. Let's look at the script:
        
        
        view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

        1. var competitors = new Array();  
        2.     competitors[0] = 'http://www.dell.com';  
        3.     competitors[1] = 'http://www.google.com';  
        4.     competitors[2] = 'http://www.yahoo.com';  
        5.     competitors[3] = 'http://www.ebay.com';  
        6.       
        7. var visitedPlaces = new Array();  
        8.       
        9. var visitedLink = '#ff0000';  
        10.  
        All I'm doing here is setting up the array of competitors; it can be as many items as you like but in this instance I've used 4 common URLs. I'm then creating an array that will store which links you've actually visited, as well as setting the colour I'm looking for. This colour is the one that we defined in the CSS earlier, note that the hexadecimal characters are lower case, this is important because of how Javascript reads the colour codes for items; it won't match if you leave it uppercase (not without doing a conversion anyway).
        
        
        view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

        1. window.addEvent('domready', function()  
        2. {     
        3.     var snifferContainer = $('sniffer');  
        4.     var snifferUL = new Element('ul').injectInside(snifferContainer);  
        5.       
        6.     for(var i=0; i<competitors.length; i++)  
        7.     {  
        8.         var snifferLI = new Element('li',{'id':'snifferli'+i }).injectInside(snifferUL);  
        9.         var snifferA = new Element('a', { 'href':competitors[i]}).injectInside(snifferLI);  
        10.         snifferA.innerHTML = competitors[i];  
        11.           
        12.         if(snifferA.getStyle('color') == visitedLink)  
        13.         {  
        14.             var currentPointer = visitedPlaces.length;  
        15.             visitedPlaces[currentPointer+1] = competitors[i];  
        16.             alert(visitedPlaces[currentPointer+1]+' has been visited');  
        17.         }  
        18.     }  
        19. });  
        20.  
        
        As usual I'm initialising my JS on domready. I'm setting the sniffer container and creating an unordered list HTML element, which I then inject inside of the 'sniffer' div (there's no real need to do this, I just like using UL's to keep my work tidy). I'm then iterating through the competitors array and creating a new list item for each one, with a link to that URL (which are both then injected inside of the UL). I'm then setting the innerHTML of the element so that we can see something on the page (again, no real need to do this because realistically you're not going to show this to the user).
        
        All I'm doing after that is using the Mootools element.getStyle() function to obtain the 'color' attribute for the A-tag I've just injected. If the link colour matches the hexadecimal item set in the 'visitedLink' variable, then you've visited this URL. All I'm doing at this point is alerting that information out (so you can see it's working) and adding it to the array of visited places.
        
        Done! Nice, quick and easy but it could come in useful for increasing conversions on your website. It's a little underhand (read unethical) but that's business for you.
        
        
        

Costco shoppers use gift cards to avoid membership fees

Intrepid shoppers have found a loophole to skirt Costco's membership fees.

Costco, a membership-based wholesale retailer, offers discounts for consumers willing to pay an annual fee, which ranges from $55 to $110.

But customers can avoid those fees by paying with a gift card. Only members can purchase the cards, but anyone can use them.

A quick online search turns up blogs and websites that encourage customers to avoid membership fees by using gift cards instead.

Patrons who pay for a membership, like Scott Cowie, say this seems unfair.

"It sounds a bit annoying that I have to pay a membership to Costco and people can just give gift cards and give them to anyone they want without an extra fee being applied," said Cowie.

Cowie thinks the loophole could be abused. He thinks members could charge a small fee in exchange for purchasing the cards for non-members.

A Costco representative told the CBC that people rarely take advantage of the gift card system. If it is, the representative said, the company addresses it.

Consumer advocate Anna Wallner suspects the loophole might not last for much longer.

"I think people will always be looking for the advantage, but eventually if people are taking advantage of the system then I'm sure at some point Costco or whoever the retailer is will change the system," says Wallner.

Wallner says consumers who try to save a few dollars by getting friends or family to buy them Costco gift cards may want to reconsider.

"If you're spending a whole lot of time getting other people to buy gift cards for you, then you need to consider what your time is worth," says Wallner.