MightyMerchant eCommerce Blog

Squidoo.com is the creation of Seth Godin, known for his popular marketing blog and books, and for coining such phrases as “Meatball Sundae.” According to Godin, meatballs are the things businesses need, the foundations which their businesses are based on. The sundae toppings are the marketing opportunities-the social networks, the blogs, viral marketing and all the other things people engage in to shuttle online attention to their websites. A meatball sundae results when people try to mix the two things: Their attempts often fail.

One thing Godin believes every business should do is create a Squidoo lens, which is simply an easy-to-build single web page about any topic of your choosing. Squidoo lenses are free to build, customizable, and contain links to your official business webpage, your blog, your Flickr account, your hobby pages, eBay auctions and anything else you want people to find. Check out MightyMerchant’s lens for an example. I’ve included an RSS feed with blurbs from recent blog posts, articles I’ve posted to the MightyMerchant site, and a MightyMerchant Site ‘O the Day with a link to one of our customers. [While you’re there, please take a moment to rate the lens and leave a comment in the guestbook :)] You can think of a lens as a mini-page that highlights the best your site has to offer or the most interesting information you have to share, and directs people on where to find more.

Squidoo lenses are crawed and indexed by search engines and appear in search engine results pages. There is no limit to the number of lenses you can build, so the idea is that when Squiders create many different web pages that relate to their field of expertise, there are that many more chances for people to find you.

Lenses rank highly in search engines based on the same principles of other web pages, so having a high number of incoming links helps your lens ranks higher. Updating your lens frequently helps too, because, as I’ve said, oh…a thousand and three times now…search engines love changing content. I have seen Squidoo lenses ranking highly on Google in certain competitive searches. Check this out:

This lens is number 1 on the first page! Because the lenses are free, Squidoo does run AdSense ads on the lenses, and Squidoo keeps a portion of the profits. You can choose whether you want to accept the AdSense earnings on your lens or donate them to a charity of your choice.

The only negative I can think of to Squidoo is that it does take some time to set up and maintain, however, it’s minimal and Squidoo is designed to be easy to use. Our MightyMerchant lens took about one and a half hours to set up, and now it only requires ten minutes of time here and there as I update it.

Bottom line: Yes! Create a Squidoo lens. Why not? They’re free, fun to make, and can highlight your business in a more casual manner and with a different personality than you might put on your official page. While I can’t guarantee that your traffic will quadruplezillion if you make a Squidoo lens, I can’t think of any reason why you shouldn’t try, and if even one customer finds you because of your lens it will be worth the price you paid to create it-nothing.

Posted on January 4th, 2008 by Vanessa
Filed under: Marketing and Promotion | No Comments »

Yelp. What is it? In the small business world Yelp is a popular and growing local business search option, and the sound of people yelping is a very good thing indeed.

First of all, Yelp.com was started in San Francisco in 2004 as a means to share user reviews on the cities’ many gathering spots. “Yelpers,” as users of the service are known, immediately began turning to the online platform to read and post reviews of restaurants, coffee shops, nightclubs, hair salons, and other establishments.  Now, Yelp reviews cover major cities across the US, and Yelp.com receives millions of visits per month. If your business has a street address and provides a service of any kind, start out by checking to see if anyone has “yelped” about your business yet. Just go to Yelp.com and enter your business name and location into the search bar.

If one or more reviews exist, a snippet of the review will be displayed along with a Google map and flag pointing to the location of the business. Clicking on the business name brings up more user-generated content along with the street address, phone number and website. For a restaurant, Yelp would display such info as price range, if groups are welcome, parking restrictions, formal or casual attire, if the restaurant has table service or delivery, or if it is a good place to take kids.

As you might imagine, with user-generated content there is definitely a potential for a review to display inaccurate information. If you find something that needs to be corrected, for instance your hours are wrong, click on the little link under the review that says, ‘edit this business listing.’ Correct the information, and if it’s your business, you can check the box marked “Are you the business owner?”

Once you’ve got some reviews, Yelp offers a few ways to promote them. You can add a badge to your website that tells how many Yelp reviews you’ve received and links to them. Yelp’s sponsorship program lets you enhance your business’ profile with larger photo in a slide show format, an announcement section, and a featured review for that one positively glowing, couldn’t be happier customer review you want everyone to read. You can also pay for a sponsored advertisement to run on search results pages when people may be searching for your competition.

There’s also a nifty feature called “Browse Nearby…” this link is ideal for people not familiar with the area to locate a popular restaurant, then find other coffee bars, shopping, night life, religious organizations, professional services, or hotels nearby. Suppose your business is around the corner from a popular pizzeria. I would want to be in the Yelp system if I were you!

If you search Yelp and find you are not in the system, on the bottom of the search result page you’ll see a big red button titled ‘Add Business’ which leads to a form where you can do just that. I created a listing for MightyMerchant…First I needed to create a Yelp account for myself, then I went back to that big red ‘Add Business’ button and it took just 5 minutes.

Yelpers across the country use the service with a fervor unmatched on any other review site. The great thing about is that it’s free, and millions of people really do rely on it to find the best services as recommended by real people. So what are you going to yelp about?

Posted on December 26th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Search | 1 Comment »

Link building is one of the most difficult aspects of site optimization. Everyone agrees that a site needs incoming links in order to gain traction in search engine rankings-especially Google. Links are tangible evidence of a site’s ‘popularity.’ The more sites you have linking to yours is evidence that your site is offering quality, relevant content that other people view as important enough to link to, which is part of the criteria a search engine uses to assess rank. But there is little agreement on how to go about obtaining links and what type of links will be valuable.

A comment on my last post asking about links motivated me to investigate link building a little more.The question, from Dennis at DenlorsTools.com, asked what percentage of deep links is ideal as far as search engines are concerned? The problem is, there is no magic formula for links, and no systematic way to go about accomplishing the link-building task. And to complicate the issue further-the Big 3 search engines-Google, Yahoo, Live Search (MSN)-factor links and other on-page content differently. Google puts more emphasis on incoming links, or ‘back links’ as they call them. Yahoo and MSN weigh on-the-page content more heavily. So to rank well in Google, link building is key, which is why links have become commodities, bought, sold and traded through ‘link farms’ and other shady sites. Used to be, links from these sites almost guaranteed high rankings, because the number of links was all that mattered in the search engines’ eyes. Now though, this strategy of paid links can get your site quickly de-valued or even banned in extreme cases. Google discusses link exchanging schemes in their Webmaster Support section.

What types of links are useful? The most valuable links are from web pages that are related to your site. Links to or from pages that are not topically related to your site are less valuable, and in some cases, too many of these off-topic links can be viewed as spam and work against you. For instance, if your site sells soccer balls, a link from a site selling light bulbs will do nothing for you, but a link from a soccer ball manufacturer or uniform company would be ideal. It’s probably OK to have a few off-topic links, but the majority of your links should be from sites in your “neighborhood.” Search engines will penalize a link scheme that looks “unnatural,” meaning that the type of links do not match up with the content on your page or if the number of links suddenly increases drastically, which suggests you paid for them.

Now–how many links is desirable? The short answer is, more than your competition! But really, much of the success depends on what your competition is already doing. If they have 50 high-quality links, you need 60. How can you find out? Type [link:www.yourcompetitorsdomain.com], then type in your own site the same way to check your incoming links. (Note that there is no space after the colon!) The previous Advanced Search Operators post outlines that one and several other search operators that can be useful in analyzing your site.It’s far better to have few quality links than many links of low quality.

Links are so important that often only 5-10 high quality, relevant links is enough to make a big difference in placement. In essence, low quality links-from sites viewed as spammy, ‘link farms’, sites with low or no PageRank, links from ‘doorway pages’ with little or no useful content-won’t help at best and can get you penalized. High quality links-from respected sources like academic sites and sites that are closely related to your industry, sites with some decent PageRank-will get you the boost you want.

How to go about obtaining links is the topic for another post!

Posted on December 18th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Link Building | 1 Comment »

When a new visitor arrives on your site, you want to get them to, first of all, remember your name, and secondly, return to your site another time. A great way to achieve both goals is by enticing them to sign up for your newsletter. Here are 8 tips on increasing your email opt-ins.

1. You could buy or rent lead lists from brokers, but you really don’t have to. Just put a little effort into targeting your audience. Let’s say you sell essential oils for perfume, candle and soap making and your target market is members of craft guilds in the Pacific Northwest. If your target craft guild has its own newsletter or print publication, you could advertise in the newsletter, making sure to include not only your website address but also info about your newsletter in the ad. You could sponsor the organization’s website, or sponsor an event organized by the craft guild. Arrange ahead of time to have your marketing materials on display.

The craft guild may rent you their email addresses, and if so, you could forge your email relationships by sending an email like:

“As a member of the Pacific Northwest Candle-making Craft Guild, you indicated your interest in receiving information from related organizations.” Then, offer something of value to get them interested in your mailings.

2. Include the sign-up button on all of your pages, not just the homepage. Bonus Tip: Place the sign-up link above the fold, and ideally in the top right or left corner.

3. Explain the benefits of joining your mailing list. Write a few sentences stating why they should give you their email address. Do you offer subscriber-exclusive discounts? Tell ‘em. Seasonal info? Other exclusive content? Do you add new products regularly? Make sure they know what you’re offering.

4. Allow your newsletters to be forwarded and include a subscribe button in the newsletter, so that friends who receive the forward can get their own copy.

5. Keep the sign up form short and sweet, asking for only the first name and email address. You can always get more information later; The goal is to get them signed up quickly and easily.

6. Always include a privacy disclaimer on your sign up form. Make it clear that you don’t sell, rent, or otherwise share email addresses. Unless-ahem-you do, of course. Assuage their fears that you’re a spammer.

7. Make the call-to-action clear. Use the words Subscribe, Sign Up Now, Send Me Info, or Sign Me Up.

8. Finally, perhaps the most important tip. Provide content they can’t resist. If you make your newsletter appealing, people will want to sign up for it, and most importantly, continue receiving it.

Posted on December 10th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Email | No Comments »

It’s not too late to send out a holiday email promotion if you haven’t already. People are either still shopping or just getting started, and there’s a good chance they’re looking for something easy. Now is a great time to remind people of what you have to offer, especially if it’s a deal like free shipping or gift wrapping.

Make a list of all the things about your site that are gift-friendly and send out a postcard to your email list. Make sure to remind people that you have gift certificates, can customize something, or have guaranteed Christmas delivery. Making your holiday email look festive is part of the fun, and we touched on that in a previous blog post about using Constant Contact’s holiday email themes.

If you have some great stocking stuffer ideas or items that you know are popular gifts, point those out.  Offering a discount is a good way to get visitors back to your site this time of year. And when they get there, greet them with a site that’s ready to accommodate holiday shopping, with links to the items you featured in your email right on the front page. Don’t make them have to search for the items or deals you tempted them with in the email! If they were tempted enough by your email to click through to your site, there’s a good chance they’re interested enough to buy. So remove all obstacles and prepare for some late season sales!

Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Vanessa
Filed under: Seasonal Promotions, Uncategorized | No Comments »