MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog

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.

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.

Posted on April 28th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Book Reviews, Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »

 If you’re familiar with Sam’s Club or the similar store Costco, you know that shoppers pay a yearly membership fee and then have access to name-brand products from food to electronics at near-to-wholesale prices.

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.

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: SEO and Site Optimization, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Get from Point A to Point B, quickly and with the least effort.

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.

• If you get the same questions over and over again, answer them all in an audio format.
• Take those same questions and turn them into blog posts.

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.

Posted on March 7th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Web Design and Usability | No Comments »

In a few recent conversations I’ve had with potential clients, I’ve discovered that a few of them have done quite a bit to optimize their ecommerce websites for search traffic, from creating relevant content in the form of informative articles, maximizing the number of indexable pages, and including keywords in appropriate ways. These clients have tried to learn the basics of SEO by researching it and have learned a lot. Still, there’s no way anyone can learn everything.

The Long Tail Concept

One topic that sometimes escapes people is the ‘Long Tail’ approach to SEO. It’s an important concept in search optimization and one that really forms the basis of a successful natural search optimization effort. Let’s look at what this means.

*Image source: Wikipedia, ‘Long Tail’

The above graph is an example of the concept, with the y-axis being revenue and the x-axis being keyword. The green part of the graph represents the majority of general search terms which comprise the bulk of your revenue. As you trail off into the yellow part of the graph, you see more narrow, focused and specific search terms which also relate to less revenue. In this yellow area, traffic starts to fall off but people are searching for specific items. Get those specific items in front of them, and they’re likely to buy.

Long Tail SEO Example

For example, a seller of backpacks might compose their top list of keywords thusly: backpacks, black backpacks, brown backpacks, rolling backpacks, kids backpacks, and leather backpacks. These are fine, sensible keywords and it makes sense that these might be the most popular search phrases related to backpacks. Optimizing your site for these terms is nothing but smart.

Looking at that Long Tail graph, these would be the keywords in the green part, the ones which will probably make up the bulk of your site’s revenue and searches. But these are also going to be the most competitive words that you’ll have a harder time ranking organically for.

A quick look at the free Google AdWords Tool reveals 140 more related keywords, revealing many more potential keywords to optimize for. These keywords would be in the yellow ‘tail’ of the graph, and while each keywords is associated with less revenue, there are many more search terms in the tail, so that revenue piles up.

The Long Tail Keywords

For backpacks, ‘black mesh and leather water bottle backpack’ is a less popular search term but at the same time is more specific. If someone searches for this term and finds it on your site, they will be much more likely to buy it than someone searching for simply ‘backpacks.’ Another example of a Long Tail search term might be something like ‘rolling camera backpack cell phone pocket.’ A customer searching for this knows what he wants! These are made-up terms, and nothing I made-up could substitute for actual keyword research, but you get the idea.

Applying Long Tail to PPC

Looking at that graph, keywords in the green part are more expensive because they have more search traffic associated with them. The yellow portion represents the numerous low-cost keywords that may actually equal the revenue potential of the expensive, popular keywords if taken together over time. You could spend the bulk of your PPC budget chasing after the expensive big-time words, or you could target the lower-cost words with less competition.

Researching the Long Tail keywords

Paying for top words can be quite costly, and if you’re budgeting for PPC naturally you want to maximize the positive impact on your revenue. A keyword research tool will be your best friend in this regard. MightyMerchant’s article, A Comparison of Keyword Research Tools, is just that, a look at a few top free and subscription keyword tools.

In the absence of a subscription, utilize every free keyword tool you can find, as the data is bound to be different from each one. Keep note of every different permutation that comes up. Keep in mind that some search engines utilize word stemming when they return results and some don’t. So for instance, a search query such as ‘picture frame,’ might return results with the words ‘framer,’ or ‘framing’ in addition to ‘frame.’

One important strategy that people often overlook is to simply ask people what they would really search for. One of our clients, Bruce Berg, who is a wedding photographer here in Oregon, also receives a lot of business from ‘high school senior portrait photography.’ This was the actual search phrase that Bruce pursued for a while, until he met up with some real high school seniors and asked them how they looked for their senior class photographer. When he learned that the popular search phrase was ’senior pics,’ and not ‘high school senior portrait photography’ as he had assumed, it didn’t take him long to be on the first page for that term!

Long Tail Bottom Line

The take-home point is, neglecting less popular search terms=bad. Optimizing for the popular search terms and the less lucrative but less competitive search terms=very, very good.

Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: SEO and Site Optimization | 1 Comment »

Your ecommerce website is live. You’ve got a marketing plan to draw people in to your site and the quality content and usability experience to keep them happy and coming back to you. You’re ready for customers and eager to see your business thrive. The last thing you want to do is turn down an order, right?

Actually, when your ecommerce site is new, a cautious approach to filling orders and shipping is a good idea. For new ecommerce sites considering whether or not to ship internationally, there are a few things to keep in mind which could cause you to avoid shipping internationally or at least delay it until you have more experience and your site is more established.

The two major issues involved in the decision of whether to sell your products internationally are order/credit card fraud, and shipping costs. If your business is based in the United States and you decide to sell internationally, it is likely only a matter of time before you are faced with a fraudulent order. That’s not to say that fraudulent orders don’t originate in the United States, because of course they do, but there are a few reasons why overseas orders are particularly problematic.

Price

One of our new sites, LearningServicesUS.com, sells educational software for teachers. As the site owners were preparing to get their site ready to go live, they were investigating international shipping options and discovered that the shipping to Brazil for one item would be over a thousand dollars! Probably not realistic to consider shipping at that rate. After discussing the options with LearningServicesUS, the verdict was that after they build up clients and sales that they would revisit the international shipping issues and reconsider later. In general, we wouldn’t advise new ecommerce sites to offer international sales, partly for this reason of exorbitant costs, and also because order fraud is much more rampant overseas.

Lack of enforcement

Many developing and Third-World countries don’t and can’t allocate the resources necessary to properly monitor fraud, track fraudulent activity online, and pursue and prosecute thieves. There’s just no money for these tasks. Additionally, the market for stolen credit-card numbers is most active outside of the United States. If you do offer overseas shipping, you may want to consider avoiding orders from certain high-risk countries where fraud is known to be a major problem. Countries such as Romania, Latvia, Belarus and other Eastern European countries have high fraud risks, as does Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana, countries in southern Asia (Phillipines, Thailand, Malaysia) and Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya). *

What you can do to avoid fraud

It’s wise to have some internal checks in place on your ordering system. These suggestions for protecting yourself from fraudulent orders hold true even for domestic orders, but are especially important if you do decided to offer international shipping.

Avoid shipping to post office boxes. United States Postal Service (USPS) shipping rates are more affordable for overseas shipping when compared to UPS or FedEx, for instance, but USPS can’t track overseas packages and postal service in the destination country may be unreliable.

Compare the credit card billing address to the shipping address. For an overseas order, insist that they match.

Hand review each order over a certain amount. Pick an amount that makes sense for your business and manually review all orders over that amount. If you normally get orders averaging only$100, a $250 order may ring some alarm bells. Consider calling all customers who place orders above this set amount to personally verify their orders. Depending on your product and sales volume, maybe a $500 order would seem suspicious. Just keep in the back of your mind that a “too good to be true” expensive order really may be too good to be true.

Do a BIN look-up. The Bank Identification Number, or BIN, is the first six digits of a credit card. These numbers identify the bank that issued the credit card. The free service at http://all-nettools.com/toolbox, financial allows you to enter the BIN numbers to determine the issuing bank. It’s worth investigating if the issuing bank is located in a country other than where the order is originating.

*source: Scribd

Posted on February 22nd, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Security | 2 Comments »