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About Devin Day

An Internet Marketing specialist who has worked on campaigns for numerous fortune 500 companies like Monster, Dell, AT&T, Scripps, HELIO and more.

I write about my real life successes and failures in Business, and Internet Marketing.

Unbounce Review: What Does Unbounce Know About Landing Pages?

by Devin Day 8 Comments

Image of unbounce landing page logo

Landing pages can dramatically increase your marketing success online. Use landing pages correctly and they can make you a lot of money. If your selling or running any sort of campaign on the Internet and your not using a landing page to optimize your conversions (action you want the user to take) your losing money and leads. I have spent tens of thousands on advertising and lately I have been hooked on landing pages – the only problem is I have had to spend a lot of time and money working with developers to create my custom landing page solutions.

I recently came across a service that aims to ease my pain and help me be successful with my campaigns (this means more money folks)

[Read more...]

Wedding Demo Reel

by Devin Day 5 Comments

From 2000-2004 I ran a videography business and weddings was a large portion of the work that we did. This video is a compilation of photoshoots from some of the weddings I was involved with. Enjoy!

How to hire employees that fit your organization

by Devin Day 1 Comment

image of a good hiring candidate

How many of you that are responsible for hiring have selected a candidate based on their education, skill, and experience only to find out behaviorally, the hire is a terrible fit for the position?

I have done a lot of hiring as CEO of JellyBarn, Inc. and I can tell you that it is not an easy task. Finding the right fit for a position has been my achilles heel. I can tell you that I have made a lot of expensive mistakes when hiring. It wasn’t from a lack of education, skill, or experience on the new hires part, it was from a lack of the hires behavioral fit (or my lack of a better hiring process). The new hires just didn’t fit the position because their personality behaviors were different from the behaviors required. This can be the case when hiring for any position – developers, sales, marketing, exec staff, etc. 

Most hiring is done based on three criteria, education, experience, and skill.  I knew there had to be a better way. A systematic approach that would give more visibility into wether or not the candidate was a good fit behaviorally for the required role and not just a good hire based on education, experience, and skill. I needed a way to find out if the candidates would be a good fit for both the position and the company culture.

What I found after some detailed research was a behavioral test, called a DISC test. This test (see mine below) will give you a ton of information on the candidates behavioral traits and characteristics. This is indispensable information for hiring. For best results the DISC process is broken into three parts:

  1. An RBA test (Role Behavior Analysis – this lets you define what you need in the required role)
  2. A General characteristics test (this test allows you to profile the candidate)
  3. The third step is a cross reference of the first two tests and spits out a report that allows you to see how well your candidate fits the defined role

This is also a great way to find those future young superstars that would have slipped through the cracks because they don’t have a resume with a lot of experience. I do want to note that this is not a silver bullet for hiring, but a systematic approach that can be incorporated into the hiring process to help reduce employee turnover. 

There are two companies that offer DISC personality tests that I recommend looking at: (each with there own pros and cons)

  1. Target-Teams - target-teams.com
  • Pros – Great detailed information, good for larger orgs
  • Cons – $400 per test
  1. Epic DISC – intesiresources.com
  • Pros – $15-50 per test (cost effective), good information, supplement reports, good for start-ups
  • Cons – A little less detailed than target-teams

In Summary, if your firm is hiring (especially smaller firms) I highly recommend incorporating a fourth behavioral criteria into your hiring process.

Lets take a look at two tests so you can see the granular visibility that is included in a behavioral test. For me they have been spooky accurate. Recently all the executives at JellyBarn took the test to help us further understand our strengths and weaknesses and be even better as a cohesive/progressive/communicating team.

Thanks for viewing this post! Best of luck with all your hiring.

Devin Day Intesiprofile

Driving Revenue with Authentic Product Engagement

by Devin Day 4 Comments

The question that I want to address in this post is “how can a brand utilize the viral and entertainment aspects of social apps to achieve authentic product engagement that influences consumer purchase intent, rather than settling for surface-level brand engagement?”

Last year my company, Jellybarn, participated in Nike’s FY09 marketing event at the invitation of Avenue A | Razorfish (Great Agency – Be sure to check out Jeremy Lockhorn’s articles on Click Z. He’s spot on when it comes to social media). At the event, Mike Reeder, a brilliant Account Director at Razorfish, gave a presentation on brand marketing authenticity. It was this presentation that really prompted me to start thinking beyond surface-level marketing.

What does this authenticity look like? How does a brand connect with online consumers in a true, authentic fashion in which a dialog or relationship can grow? These questions are often hard to answer, and I think it is the reason that we as a social marketing community have not moved very far beyond surface-level brand engagement. We still tend to broadcast a brand’s inner-app messaging with a simple logo or an embedded banner ad within the application. In my view, social marketing apps will reach a tipping point by the end of 2009 and become not only a staple for brands, but one of the most important ways in which marketers ENGAGE and SELL products to consumers. But first we must become truly authentic!

Let’s look at a Jellybarn app that I feel is a first step on our journey beyond surface-level brand engagement and closer to authentic interaction with the brand’s actual products that engages and drives purchase intent. Screen shots of the app follow below.


The concept was a casual game for Nike designed to interact with customers, compel them to shop, and ultimately sell them shoes. The idea incorporated actual Nike products within the game, as well as a virtual shoe “micro-store” so that, after users interacted with the shoes authentically, they could shop for and even purchase the product. The user chose which pair they wanted their character to use. To encourage users to interact with multiple styles, we gave each shoe different abilities and incorporated many of the benefits from the real shoes into the game.

The result was that users interacted with both the brand and the product in a way that was not broadcast, pushy or “selly.” Users do not want to be “sold,” and with this approach they enjoyed engaging with the brand and product. With this type of authentic approach, users are more inclined and even eager to share the application via the social web. Assuming the application is a viral success and includes some simple XML capabilities, the product lineup can be continually updated throughout the application’s life cycle. Lastly, with the incorporation of the micro-store there are now thousands of purchase point locations across the web where users can keep the product on top-of-mind purchase intent.

One final point worth mentioning is that the apps themselves are simply the vehicles by which these authentic interactions happen. Making money is the goal of marketing, yet much of the industry still tends to look at social apps (from a brand standpoint) as a way to “engage” consumers and build brand recognition. I think it’s time we as an industry became more accountable (brands let’s make this a New Years resolution) to tapping the real power of social apps to actually make money for the brand rather than limiting ourselves to brand recognition. Social applications hold so much more opportunity for driving purchase intent through authentic interactions than we have yet to utilize.

The best iPhone app period!

by Devin Day 1 Comment

Photo of iphone app Idea PadI am not even going to waste time. I am just going to say that Idea Pad is absolutely the best app I have on my iPhone – Hands down! I use it so many times during the day because I am cursed with a brain that never stops thinking of ideas. And since I always have my phone with me it is always available when I have an idea.

This app has solved a major problem for me because my ideas were always scattered everywhere. A few in notepad app, on napkins in drawer, or in a voice memo recording. I hated having my ideas scattered everywhere. This caused me to lose so many ideas. Idea Pad has been the best solution ever for collecting all my ideas.

Why do I like it?

  1. Super clean and simple interface.
  2. No extra features – capture an idea and that’s it!
  3. My phone is always with me.
  4. The ideas are digitized in words and can be emailed.
  5. Most of all because I use it multiple times each day.

If you have an iPhone I highly recommend getting and using this app. It fricken rocks!

NOTE: this is not a “reminder” app, it’s an idea app. I am an idea guy, hence my love for a simple way to quickly capture my next give idea no matter where I am, or when inspiration strikes!

What’s your favorite iPhone app??

Will WordPress help kill the newspaper industry?

by Devin Day 2 Comments

WordPress just keeps getting better and better.

Now they are offering HD video streaming  capabilities for your wordpress blog or site via VideoPress.
They also have VideoPress available as an open source framework for large WordPress MU installs (check it out here). This will allow entrepreneurial publishers an own end to end HD video solution. There have been other solutions available for WordPress for a while, but I am excited to see a powerful video solution coming from the creators of WordPress.

The Revenue that can be created as a publishing platform with VideoPress and WordPress MU is huge for those big thinking entrepreneurs. WordPress is such a powerful platform with NO COSTS.

Now for a prediction…

With all the goodness coming from WordPress and the newspaper industry in the toilette, I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some young savvy entrepreneur will use the WPMU platform to create “Newspaper 2.0″ (a type of community news company for a digital generation) with the potential of rivaling a Ginette or McClatchy. Ultimately driving newspapers further into the grave.

Why do I believe WordPress will start replacing the traditional newspaper companies?

  1. Scalability – you can deploy infinite sites from one install (i.e. – sf.new-site.com, ny.news-site.com, etc.).
  2. Cost – Their are no costs for the technology, except for hosting or you hire designers/devs to do major customization (with all the amazing premium themes these days major customization can be greatly reduced).
  3. Automation – you can automate the author process and hire contributors from any city or country in the world.
  4. Features – It up to date with tech trends of our digital generation and almost any kind of plugin can be found for sms, twitter, digg, video, social this and that and so on…
  5. Time to market – with such a huge open source community of contributors you can deploy sites with all the features you could want within hours to days.
  6. Overall mindset – Those who would work with wordpress and develop savvy ideas with the technology tend to be young connected individuals vs. current conglomerate news companies who tend to be old school thinkers who struggle to understand todays pace of trends.
  7. I could continue with more examples, but thats all the time for today.

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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day