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03 Jul This post is from from my other blog here
John has a community for small business owners and marketers that he calls the Workbench. It’s a place where members can go to get ideas and tips and share their ideas with others. Recently on John’s blog, he asked his readers to share their business stories through video or audio, which he would then upload to the Workbench. A lot of business owners have joined John ’s Workbench and added their videos and podcasts, article marketing tips and ideas to their community. This seemed like an idea worth sharing with our blog readers, and especially our MightyMerchant customers, as I know so many of you have very interesting stories behind your businesses and have a lot of personal interests that drive your success. Check out some of the other business inspiration videos and consider adding yours to the site. Your video doesn’t have to be fancy. You can just point the camera at yourself and start talking! Share your story, ideas, or your passions and John will upload it to his Workbench so that others can view it. You’ll get some video you can use elsewhere on your site or blog, post to YouTube perhaps, and get a little traffic from the folks who drop by John’s Workbench. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
25 Jun This post is from from my other blog here People often ask why they should invest in a hosted web application. Paying a monthly fee for someone else’s software doesn’t sound like a very good deal at first. I recently joined MightyMerchant’s team, and I can tell you from personal experience, hosted web solutions are a very good deal! I wasted thousands of dollars and hours trying to get an expensive desktop application to do the job I wanted before finally giving up. A little research led me to web-hosted applications, and I quickly realized the benefits of having a professional team of programmers and developers at my disposal. Web-hosted solutions absolutely make the most sense for business owners who want a profitable web presence. There are a few people who seem to have an innate knowledge of the mechanics behind those glossy webpages we love to surf. They don’t mind spending the extraordinary amount of time and effort it takes to get professional results. Those are the people who’ll tell you you’re better off buying the software. Without their training and experience, you’re treating your business like a DIY project. I’m going to give you the same advice you’ve heard from friends the world over. “Save yourself the headache and hire a professional!” Personally, I’d rather enter a few dozen lines of copy, download an image or two, and go to lunch. I’m happy to let the professionals do the work for me. At the end of the day, I’ll total the sales and smile. Teh nice. I shared my experience comparing hosted web solutions and desktop applications in detail on the MightyMerchant website. Paige Pryor joined MightyMerchant in June as the new Account and Project Manager and self-appointed Environmental Coordinator. Her background and experience in marketing, sales, and database administration led her to web-hosted solutions as a convenient and cost-efficient method of relaying products and services to customers. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
13 Jun This post is from from my other blog here
A brand is the entire picture of how you present your company to the world. It encompasses your job and how you do it, and your perceived value to every potential customer. An effective brand means that when you speak with a potential customer you can immediately move past the “so what do you do?” discussions and get right to the real issues–namely how your business can solve that customer’s problem. They already know what you do, because that’s part of your brand and message. MightyMerchant has clarified our own messages of how our name relates to the services we offer, which has changed in some important ways since we opened up shop 12 years ago. Customers who have been with us for several years were first introduced to us through our corporate name, Datahost. We built our business around the MightyMerchant Ecommerce platform, and now we have a new marketing division, HEROWeb. Where does all of this fit into our branding? We have always been involved in all of the varied aspects of life on the Internet: web design, website hosting, online marketing and search engine optimization, programming, and ecommerce. With such a wide range of services, we have needed to craft specific message for our different audiences - and we have several of them! Successful branding means that you know your target audience, you know the many different “buying personas” of the people you are likely to do business with, and you fine-tune your message for each one. It’s not always easy to do that, and the message often requires frequent adjustment as your business grows and changes. When we formed our business in 1996, we called ourselves Datahost. The name conveyed the services of a hosting company, which we were, but we quickly grew into much more than that. Our web design and hosting business was built on the success of our MightyMerchant Ecommerce platform, which is the full-featured platform that we developed to offer shopping carts and richly integrated services for those seeking easy and customizable ecommerce websites or content management sites. For customers looking for an ecommerce platform, leading with the name MightyMerchant made sense and continues to make sense. But like many companies, our offerings and business relationships evolved. Over time, we found that the ecommerce platform was irrelevant and confusing to some of our very important customers. While most of our sites are in fact ecommerce, many are not. Those potential customers that did not sell things online were not looking for a product named MightyMerchant, because the “merchant” aspect did not fit their business model, and hence turned some of our prospects against us. After focusing on our local message of delivering custom websites, ecommerce or not, along with full-service online marketing services, we created HEROWeb Marketing and Design. This division of our business is focused on delivering custom marketing strategy and website design. So now we are three–Datahost, our corporate name; MightyMerchant, our ecommerce platform; and HEROWeb, our marketing strategy and design company. If you call our office, you’ll be greeted by one of our friendly staff thanking you for calling “HEROWeb and MightyMerchant.” We’re the same people we’ve always been, with the same commitment to incredible customer service. We will still get to know you and your business’ needs and sculpt a website you’ll love. Then when you are ready for marketing services, we’ll still be here for you, the same people you already know, in the same office, with the same phone number! We’re very happy to be able to provide these many varied but complementary services to all of our clients, and though our name may be new to you, the quality you’ve come to expect from MightyMerchant is still there, front and center! Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
28 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Vinjamuri spends time with the people behind such successful brands as Columbia Sportswear (Gert Boyle), cragigslist (Craig Newmark), J. Peterman (John Peterman), Clif Bar (Gary Erickson), Baby Einstein (Julie Aigner-Clark), Burt’s Bees (Roxanne Quimby), and The Art of Shaving (Myrian Zaoui and Eric Malka). Some of our best-known brands were born after what may seem like little more than luck, but after getting to know these people through Vinjamuri’s observant prose, we can begin to think the way they did when they experienced their business epiphany, and hopefully distill their wisdom into a strategy that can be used in developing our own brands. Vinjamuri befriends each of his subjects, spending weekends at their home and shadowing them on the job. We get a sense of their business acumen as well as their mistakes and how they learned from them and used them to become stronger. One chapter focuses on John Peterman, the founder of the J. Peterman Company. He built his mail-order business into $70 million in sales and reinvented the catalog as we know it, with a catalog wasn’t called a “catalog” at all. Peterman referred to it as an Owner’s Manual, and it was sized differently than other catalogs of the day. These are just two of the “rules of marketing” that Peterman intentionally broke. Rather than the usual product specs, the Owner’s Manual described the items in romantic and exotic settings, almost as characters in their own short stories. This approach resonated with the people who actually owned the items, and was an attractive source of novelty to people who discovered the catalog through word of mouth or Peterman’s direct mailings, which only served to increase their popularity. Peterman and his small but cultishly popular catalog business was forced into the mainstream by the buffoonish caricature of him as Elaine’s boss on the TV show ‘Seinfeld’ starting in 1995. While most business owners can only dream of getting that kind of publicity, ironically it damaged him in a fundamental way. In 1999, Peterman went bankrupt at a time when millions of people heard his name each week during prime time television. Through conversations with Peterman, Vinjamuri helps us understand that this happened for the very reason that his company did not follow the “traditional” model of what a business was supposed to do and how it was supposed to grow. We also come to understand how Peterman was able to quietly restore his lost cachet and rebuild the empire he lost What we come to realize is that the people behind the brands were ordinary people just like us, who didn’t follow the rules. For the most part, they had no formal business training so they didn’t know what they were “supposed” to do to market their fledgling companies. They weren’t following the advise of marketing focus groups and big-ticket PR firms, they listened to their own advice; they were the consumers and focus group participants, and they put all of their energy and resources into meeting a specific need they felt needed to be addressed. Many entrepreneurs got lucky, and took many risks that some people might not be comfortable with. For instance, Gert Boyle gambled her home and her mother’s home to get money for Columbia Sportswear. But the wisdom that leaps off the page for each of these “accidental brands” is that for the most part, these entrepreneurs were convinced that they were going to be successful, and didn’t let any perceived failure stop them. If they didn’t get the idea right the first time, they readjusted and started over. For anyone interested in how brands are built this is a must-read book. For other small business owners seeking inspiration on how to think for yourselves, follow your own rules, and develop a strategy that might seem to be outside the norm, I highly recommend reading this book. David Vinjamuri is Adjunct Professor of Marketing at New York University and President of ThirdWay Brand Trainers. Find out more on his website, AccidentalBranding.com.
08 Apr I have been traveling and not logging in to Gooruze very much lately. I just got the news that I won the beanbag. Thanks Gooruze!
03 Apr This post is from from my other blog here
Hero Web can help you formulate an online marketing strategy for your website or business. We will help you articulate your business goals, optimize your on-the-page website content, and look at strategies to increase your online profile through blogging, multimedia, email, or other routes that make sense for you. As the name suggests, our expertise is available for web design both e-commerce and non, and online marketing strategies including email marketing, blog and forum set up, podcast and other multimedia integration, pay-per-click, analytics and reporting, keyword research, article writing, press releases…anything to increase your online profile and build a solid customer base. It’s no longer enough just to have a website and sit back and wait for customers to find you, and regardless of where you are…in our local area of Eugene/Springfield, Oregon or beyond…Hero Web can help. Take a gander at the official press release. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
13 Mar This post is from from my other blog here Sam’s Club recently started offering online SEO (search engine optimization) services, including local search marketing, Pay-per-click advertising and web design services along with the pallets of BBQ sauce, paper towels and tomato soup. Truth be told, when I first heard about this late last year I laughed and forgot about it. When it crept back into my consciousness, I realized that with the popularity of these membership stores there are probably a great many people who are considering these services and would like to know if it is a good idea to buy SEO and Internet marketing services this way. For those of you business owners too busy to read a whole blog post, let me summarize for you thusly, NO! Read on for the details of the why nots. SEO Is Not A Bulk Commodity First of all, I think the most important thing to keep in mind is that SEO can’t be purchased as a bulk package deal. Successful optimization requires taking the time to get to know the industry, the site’s needs, the personality of the site’s target customer, and industry-specific keywords. It takes time even for experienced optimizers to make changes and see results. You can’t get much information about these services without filling out a form, but based on their introductory information, Sam’s Club explains that for $30 a month they will help you “establish a local profile” and submit your site to “the major search engines.” This is only a drop in the bucket of what true professional search engine optimization services offers. If this is all that is done, it is highly unlikely that any site would experience significant gains in their search engine rankings or traffic levels. Search engine optimization requires an ongoing period of content creation and refinement. Attention must be paid to many different technical details of a site’s structure, which they do not even attempt to address with this service. Site Submission Isn’t SEO Sam’s Club is using the LeadConnect service from Innuity to provide the SEO services to their own members. LeadConnect allows businesses to create an online profile with business information that people can search for and find. If this sounds like pretty much the same thing as an online Yellow Pages listing, that’s because it is. After your profile is built, Innuity promises to submit your website to all the major search engines and Internet Yellow Pages. This is unnecessary! I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call it a scam to offer search engine submission services, but search engines find sites on their own and submission hasn’t been shown to make a difference. Besides, if your site is already listed and appearing on the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN, you already know they ‘found’ your site and it doesn’t need to be ’submitted’ even if this did help. One nice thing…if your dashboard (as LeadConnect calls the profile) changes, LeadConnect will automatically update it across all of the services they have submitted it to and you can update it as often as you like. This could be worth $25 a month, but if you hire an SEO professional, managing your online phone book profile is something they would do for you, and how often is your business information going to change anyway? Also, what happens when you stop paying? They will stop listing your site in these directories, so any traffic you had built up from their submission service is gone. This service is focused on local search for local businesses, and local search is definitely important, but it should be considered as part of a larger marketing strategy. Also, yes, people are searching for businesses in their local area, but they are often still using the major search engines and not necessarily online Yellow Pages, so this service may not bring much change in traffic to the business utilizing it. Sam’s Limited Scope SEO and everything that is involved in it can be a confusing landscape. It can sometimes be difficult for SEO professionals to effectively convey the many different aspects of site optimization, and the time and effort it takes. There are many different ways of approaching SEO, but calling this limited service SEO and charging only $30 a month for it may make it even harder to explain why all-encompassing SEO work can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. Conclusion One good thing that could come of this is a raising of awareness of search engine optimization in general. Many online business owners don’t know what SEO is and aren’t aware that anything can be done to improve their search engine placement. If this service gets people talking about SEO and seeking information about how SEO can help them, that’s a good thing. However, those business owners that become invested in this service and don’t see the results they’re looking for may dismiss any further SEO services completely, thus wasting their money and losing out on potential gains. It’s fine to have an online profile for local search, but that needs to be part of a larger strategy, which this isn’t. Have you used the Sam’s Club service? Let us know your experience or your thoughts on this in general. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
10 Mar This post is from from my other blog here Just five days ago the Google Analytics program announced a new analytics data sharing feature. If you haven’t heard of it already, you’ll see the message asking you to ‘accept’ next time you log into your analytics account.
What’s really going on here? Whether you champion this data sharing or run from it will probably depend on your opinion of Google in general: If you are interested in getting as much free information as possible, this could be a good thing while on the other hand this program will give more powerful site visitor and transactional information to Google and for many people this may be another reason to distrust Google Almighty. Personally, I’m holding off on making a judgment call until I see more about how the program works and the benefits they say they will provide . . . There’s a long list of good things Google could do with access to this much transaction data but I have too many questions about how useful the data will actually be. Data Sharing Options Google is offering the option of sharing your analytics data three ways: 1) With Google products only This is the most vague option, as Google says sharing information with other Google products (not third-party products) will enhance the services they offer “as they become available,” and of course only businesses that share data get access to the enhanced services. This sounds like Google wants your help improving their services without telling anyone what they’ll get in return. 2) Anonymously with Google products and benchmarking services The benchmarking service allows customers to compare their data with other sites in their same or similar industry. The service also promises to let you compare your site’s data with unrelated industries. With some in-depth comparisons, you could determine if all sites in your industry are experiencing the same ups and downs in traffic and also provide insight into cross-promotional opportunities with other industries who may be booming while your traffic is flat. The data is not shared with competitors and is anonymized before being shared. Truth be told, I’m not sure why Google feels like they need to ask permission to do this, as their Privacy Policy already seems like it gives them carte blanche to gather and share user data however they want. One of the drawbacks I see is that only data from sites that agree to participate will contribute to benchmarks, so the data already seems skewed from the beginning. I have to question how valuable the data will be if only a handful of sites in any industry are participating. 3) No sharing at all So Google is letting you share a little with some undefined return benefit to you, share a lot with a potential benefit for industry comparison which may or may not be valuable, or not share at all. What do you all think about this? Does Google really need us to improve its services? Is the return for us worth it? Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
07 Mar This post is from from my other blog here
Your Point A is that you are a small business owner and webmaster. Your Point B is that you need content on your website. Get from Point A to Point B faster by creating content using what you already have. Whether you manage an ecommerce website or large informational site or anything in between doesn’t matter. In order to keep yourself in the game, ranking well in the search engines and getting a healthy amount of traffic coming to your site requires that you all play by pretty much the same rules. What do the engines want? The engines do have preferences, and your job is to give it to them. They want freshness. Serve the engines new content to see each time they come your way. They want quality. No keyword stuffing, no spammy content, no content written by word generators. Just real, useful content that is of the highest quality you can provide. They want quantity. It’s not fair but the more pages you have that an engine can index the more they like you. They want links. Links means other sites trust you and want to share with other sites what you have to say. Linkbait content such as videos, podcasts, white papers, newsletters and other content that is useful to people and easily shared provides incentive for people to link to you. Marketing guru John Jantsch has written a post called “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose,” a slogan which he’s borrowing from the green movement and applying to the notion of using content you already have to create more online content on your web pages. The post is from February 20, and I’m just reading it today (I’m behind on my blog reading…tell me you’re not?), but this advice never goes out of style. As I was reading it my thought process went something like this: a) Dang, I wish I wrote this post! b) Gee, our readers would find this really useful. c) Heeey, this matches up with advice I had given in recent posts about adding multimedia or other video content. d) I’ll keep the ‘reuse’ theme going by ‘using’ John’s post myself! So here you go. I highly recommend clicking through to John’s original post, but here’s a tidbit of his advice.
Speaking at an industry event? Record all of your slide presentations and upload them to sites like YouTube and Slideshare. Check out John’s “Reduce, reuse, recycle and repurpose” post for more easy ways you can utilize content you already have. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
04 Mar This post is from from my other blog here
Top-level categorization There should be clear top-level categories. There could be only a handful or twenty, depending on how much information you have to spread around. The name of the category does make a big difference. If your site offers books, DVDs or other informational how-to products along with your regular product line, you might have one link titled ‘How-To,’ or ‘Media.’ Maybe ‘Books & More.’ The idea is to avoid naming your link something generic like, ‘Stuff.’ The top level category names should be general enough to encompass what you want them to contain but specific enough that customers immediately know what’s there. Looking at one of our sites, PondBiz.com, their large and successful pond products site lists 24 categories in the left navigation bar. It could be really annoying to have to click through each category and then click again to get to the products or information within. But their site makes good use of another good usability idea, minimizing clicks. Minimize Clicks One way to allow for easy, quick navigation is to keep the site structure somewhat ‘flat’ so users don’t have to click many times to get to products. The PondBiz.com navigation utilizes popout dynamic menus. Mousing over the navigation links reveals new subcategory options, saving a click. Another of our sites also uses the click-saving technique in a different way. PrewittsWorkWear.com uses an expandable menu. With this option, a little plus sign appears next to the main categories that have subcategories within them. Clicking the plus to the left of ‘Specialty’ reveals sub-menus for ‘Flame-Resistant’ and ‘High-Visibility’ work wear. This does involve an extra click to open the subcategories, but it is another way to keep navigation tighter, and some people don’t like to chase the expandable menus. Give More Ways to Shop MightyMerchant’s site manager allows the option to set up different category structures to give visitors more ways to shop. For example, it can be easy to set up Shop by Manufacturer, Shop by Brand, Shop by Season, Special Discounts, or Shop by Theme, as just a few examples. LearningServicesUS.com is one of our sites with a huge product catalog of educational materials for teachers. They utilize the same dynamic pop-outs for navigation that PondBiz uses, but what I want you to notice on this site is that they have a regular search but also cross-category searches. These narrow down searches by subject, manufacturer, and grade level. If your catalog is huge, or even if it’s not and you just have multiple brands, provide multiple ways for people to find what they’re looking for. The important thing is to think of the experience for the customer. We want to have navigation that allows customers to have a good experience that makes it easy to find items, but not be split up or mashed together to the point that it’s silly. It doesn’t make sense to have one category with only two or three items inside, and neither does it make sense to have too few categories with many items inside. Your email: Subscribe Unsubscribe
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Readers of this blog know that I’ve always been a big fan of John Jantsch and his Duct Tape Marketing Blog. I think John is a great resource for small business owners looking for an expert for resources and ideas. I’ve written about him before, regarding his tips for 
How do ordinary people nurture their ideas into multi-million dollar enterprises? That is the question author David Vinjamuri attempts to uncover and understand in his new book, Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands.
