Thursday

Despite the fact that I have a site that always gets listed in the ecommerce category, I don’t really have much experience with selling physical goods online. I have however, talked and worked with some people that have. This sets me up as something less than an expert, but I can tell you the 5 core things I would do if I were to create an ecommerce site:

1. Build a great looking site. Nothing is less trustworthy to me than a bad looking site. And, make it stupidly simple to be able to buy products.
2. Distribute content with RSS. All new products you add to your site should go into an RSS feed so your customers know when something new comes out. Not to mention the fact that distributed content gives you more opportunities to gain visitors from more sources. This can be done either by creating an rss feed yourself or starting a blog - which costs next to nothing, or nothing.
3. Use SEO. Every page for every product should be unique, every page should use titles and descriptions, every page should use descriptive links… and on and on. It all starts with a search, if you want to succeed that search better end at your site.
4. Use Edgeio. Sure, it doesn’t have the biggest following, but if you’re pushing your products in RSS, there’s no reason not to add the simple “listing” tag and have your products show up in one more place.
5. Establish Community. If you have a product that has a following, give back to your followers. Let the community be visible in you site. Perhaps even let them dictate what goes on the homepage of your site.
Bonus - Don’t forget about ebay, people go there to buy, you should be there selling.

The bottom line: It’s about distribution, and taking advantage of the channels available on the web.

And I’m sure there are many other things, which you should feel free to leave in the comments.

I’m in the heart of exams now, I turned in a 24 hour take home this morning and my next exam is tomorrow night, then 3 more next week. After I turned in my final I took a small break to catch up with the world. I found this interview with Fred Wilson to be pretty interesting, mainly because he’s right. Fred is a VC and blogger, and as a blogger he offers some great tips in the interview. One of them is blogging everyday, this really works best for me as well. When I blog daily I increase my readers, when I take breaks readership falls. The trick is even when I blog everyday, I don’t. I usually rattle off two or three posts at a time, publish one and save the others for later. So… while I’m not blogging for a while, thanks for holding. I promise more good stuff to come.

Hopefully you enjoyed my last post and checked out at least one of the bands on the list. Which brings me to my next tip for bloggers: let your readers see a little of who you are. Most people that read my blog probably come here for the web stuff that I write, but if you’re a regular reader you know that I’m in law school, that I live in Akron and now you know what’s on my ipod - hopefully knowing those things will help you feel more of a connection to my blog.

Speaking of that last post, I wouldn’t call it the most popular post of all time, but I’m also not going to talk bad about it. I used to listen to the TWiT podcast weekly. I stopped listening when the people on the podcast started talking about how bad older shows were or even how the current episode wasn’t working well… eventually I bought into it. They convinced me it was bad and I stopped listening. Third tip: be confident in everything you do.

And if that’s not enough, I’m working on my choice for website of the year and blog of the year feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Update: This has been corrected.

Welcome to Akron, where spelling doesn’t count. This week for website Wednesday and Marketing Thursday (I have to take the day off for Turkey Day) I’m going to point you to the Downtown Akron website and its glaring spelling error. The Homepage if fine, but for the “Do Downtown” portion of the site Downtown is spelled Downtow in all of the Title Tags - yikes. That may seem like a small mistake to you (though I wouldn’t stand for it, ever) but it becomes more important when you consider that the “Do Downtown” portion of the site is the likely the main draw. Many downtown businesses are listed on that part of the site, and the pages do fairly well in Search Results… so it’s not just in the title of the page that shows at the top of the browser - it’s in the search results (I know my technical readers will be familiar with that concept, that’s for the less techno-savvy readers). Googling Downtow Akron will give you a good idea of the real problem.

Worse, today the Akron Beacon Journal is promoting this website as the first step in the plan of the new head of the Downtown Akron Partnership.

I like a lot of what the city has done to revitalize itself, I like the “Do Downtown” concept - but you have to hit on all cylinders if you want to earn respect.

Guy Kawasaki recently did a write an interview with Michael Arrington in which he asked him how exactly you get on TechCrunch. The answer was essentially ‘be great or be google’ but I believe that there are plenty of great new start-ups not on TC as well as a bunch of average start-ups on TC. The thing to remember is that just because you didn’t make it doesn’t mean it’s over. There are a bunch of bloggers out there like me who would love to write about your start-up. And if enough of us write about you, eventually everyone else will start to notice.

Blogging, like most businesses, can be thought of in terms of ‘earn’ and ‘turn’ - In this case TechCrunch is the earn, you get a bunch of visits form one spot. But if that doesn’t work there’s still the turn, getting the same number of visits but in smaller batches from lesser known bloggers.

So if you have a start-up, or know of one that’s not getting enough attention, let me know.

I was asked by Josh Amer to do a guest post. I run, amongst other businesses, iBegin, a local search engine. Right now only in Canada, it will soon be expanding into the US.

There is a lovely little buzz going on about user-generated content. Tired webmasters no longer need to work and write quality content - nay, let the users carry that burden. After all, they get something out of it… don’t they?

Many of them are beholden to the idea that (in general), users are good. If there is one bad user, there are ten others to stop the vagabond. Pretty grand isn’t it?

Alas, two major holes crop up:

1. Often times, the reporting user is taken at face value. The algorithm seems to be rather simple. Every time a user-generated entry is reported as spam, internally the system does this: +1 spam_report. If spam_report > 5 (5 people have reported this as spam), hold or delete. It seems while provisions were made for malignant contributors, there were no provisions made for malignant ‘helpers’. To be honest, I have not seen a single website where this simplistic approach is not taken. This even works on Digg: observe the cloud view of upcoming stories. In my own random testing, it took roughly 5 ‘this is lame’ for the bottom stories, 7 ‘this is lame’ for the middling stories, and 9 ‘this is lame’ for top stories. Frontpage stories took roughly 11-13 ‘this is lame’. I have enough employees to neuter almost any story. The former #1 user P9 had this done to him - every single story he submitted was immediately buried. Eventually he ‘quit’ - in really he had been neutered and could make no impact on the site. With the stakes higher as Digg becomes more popular, suppressing a competitor’s story becomes rather useful. (NOTE: I only buried spam/duplicate stories.)

A few sites are starting to create UserRank values, akin to Google’s PageRank. The thinking is reasonable - if we know the ‘quality’ of a user, we can know if his/her contributions (be it new submissions, reports, etc) are valuable or not. Noble, but this leads into point #2 …

2. How do you know a user really is a user? In order to understand the challenges faced by user-driven websites, I have started delving into some blackhat SEO (purely research). Suffice to say, sites like Digg and Reddit are already being heavily abused. Image captchas and so forth? All you need is a list of open proxies, a pinch of cURL, a dash of OCR software, mix well, and you have an automated system to run roughshod over any of the existing ’social’ systems. Just generate some rules and the system can be digging or redditting or bookmarking within an hour. And email validation? All you need to do is pipe all the email addresses to a single script and simply fetch the URL contained within. Easy as pie.

The processing power required to really weed out ‘networks’ of users is immense. Digg has tried to do this for submissions (but not for reports) - if you often digg the same user’s stories, eventually your digg counts less. Of course, in reality this only works for real users. An automated system will have a unique IP (courtesy of proxies), a unique signup name (just take a list of first+last names, and concatenate them together with two random numbers at the end), and a unique ‘voting’ history (all votes are randomized). There is simply no way to know that all these (fake) users are interlinked.

The above two points are very important as about a month ago I set out to make user-driven politics website (coming soon at Wing Politics. Having already
seen how ugly Digg’s political section got, it was obvious to battle #1 I needed a UserRank system. Yet I also had #2 to contend with.

The answer was actually quite simple. A major site was already doing it, the cost was low, and its only downside was it did require some trust.

With that in mind, I make a bold prediction:

As user-driven websites become increasingly manipulated (in more and more sophisticated manners), they will have to start ‘validating’ that a user exists. The preferred choice of validation will be by sending a validation code an SMS to a user’s cellphone

Google’s GMail is already doing this - the amount of spam coming from an @gmail.com address is almost nil. People who contribute to such sites heavily skew towards technophile/younger demographic - highly likely to have a cellphone. The cost, both time and monetary, would be rather significant for an abuser to gain enough trusted user accounts. The cost of sending an SMS is not very high, and as long as the user can be convinced that their cellphone # will not be used for any spam/marketing purposes, you have a solid way of ensuring the uniqueness of a user.

This post turned out to be rather lengthy, but I wanted to elucidate on the over reliance (and implicit trust) users have in most web 2.0 sites. I am also sure as exploits become more commonplace the solution I have proposed will become much more common.

Instead of the regular marketing thursday, I’m going to have a guest post up momentarily. What does this have to do with marketing? It’s simple - for me: I expand the number of contributors which will hopefully expand the reach of the blog to some people in the new contributors blog. For the poster: he’ll get the benefit of reaching my network, which may attract new customers/users/readers.

I asked the first guest poster to contribute and I’m glad he did, he was a commenter on my blog and I really respected his opinions. He is, however, insane as he believes the Suns will win the NBA championship.

If you’d like to do a guest post just email me - jda at jdamer.com.

In my last post I talked about using MySpace as a source of viral marketing, but really success on MySpace has very little to do with viral marketing. It has to do with Real Estate. I’m meeting with someone tonight who has an ecommerce website and I’m going to tell him what I always do: “sell your stuff on ebay.” People go to ebay to buy, if you sell you should be there. Similar logic applies to MySpace. People go to MySpace to … look at profiles and communicate, if you have a message that you want to communicate put your message on MySpace. You have to go where your message will be heard.

For the same reasons that you’ll sell more products in the mall than in a stand alone store in the middle of nowhere, you’ll get more traffic from Google and MySpace than you will from HotBot and Geocities. You have to go where your customers are you can’t force them to go where you want them to go.

Two articles I’ve seen today and one website have one thing in common - they misuse the word viral. Calling something viral before it happens is just wrong.

The examples I’ve seen today (sarcasm in italics):

1. website says ‘just posted viral videos’ - hmmm…. just posted and viral? that’s amazing.
2. blogger says ‘it’s a good idea to put your videos on youtube for some viral marketing’ - oh, as soon as they’re on youtube they’re viral? Awesome.
3. newspaper says ‘local businesses are using MySpace for viral marketing’ - Wow, I’m on MySpace, I must be viral too. That must be why everyone is talking about the daily j.d.a.

Things aren’t viral because they’re on YouTube or Digg or because your business is on MySpace - at some point someone looked at how these services spread and how they let some things spread and said ‘that’s what viral marketing is.’ But it’s not. Viral marketing refers to the ways in which ideas spread - no service can guarantee viral marketing. You can use these things (and others including real life human interaction) to increase the chance that your idea will become viral, but things aren’t viral from the start - they have to spread first.

If you really want to know what viral marketing is, read Unleashing the idea virus - it’s free.

The best blogs have a unique voice. The first thing you need to do when you start a blog is pick your voice. Is it going to be serious, light-hearted, witty, comical? You decide, but decide and stick to it. You’ll be better off for it.

Good Examples: Valleywag and Trizle

By choosing a voice your blog will stand out from the millions of others on the same topic. This isn’t anything new, if you want to have a successful product it needs to reflect a certain personality. There’s no real reason to think that you should be marketing your blog any differently.

I don’t believe that everyone should blog, but if you’re going to, make it worth reading. Have I done the best job of this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think I’m getting there.

Just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean it will work for you. In fact, it probably means that it won’t work.

Think about why “hot” marketing tactics work. They work because they haven’t been seen before. The amount of time it takes to write a book about hot marketing tactics is probably about the amount of time it takes for that tactic to become mainstream and thus just more noise. The more things that are thrown at consumers the less time it will take for good ideas to become noise.

Example: “I can use MySpace to attract thousands of users for my new website.”

If you were the first person to do this congratulations; if you’re going to try it now - forget about it. MySpace has so much spam that I’ll never read anything from anyone trying to send out a message about their business.

Example 2: “I’ll put my site on Digg and get thousands of visitors to my site.”

Not anymore, unless you have enough people to help you kick off the digg. There are so many sites being put on Digg that the majority of sites are viewed as noise, even if they are much better than the stuff that actually makes it on the home page.

What should you do?

1. Come up with the next trend - the toughest option
2. Use timeless tactics not trends - such as interacting with your community of users
3. Use timeless tactics in modern ways - Blogging is trendy, but to me it’s not a trend it’s just a new way to do things you should have already been doing.
4. Stop relying on what other people say. I love to read marketing books, but if that’s all you rely on your already one step behind.
5. Don’t be afraid to fail - some of your ideas won’t work but that’s okay as long as you keep trying.
6. You tell me, add your advice in the comments and I’ll add it to this post