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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Marketing
Don’t Patronize People When They Unsubscribe From Your Newsletter
Remember back in the day (like 2005) when press releases were the cool SEO fad? “Send out a press release with our service and get thousands of links instantly!” Thing was, all of those links were from other press release sites and there really weren’t any real people reading or using those sites, so Google quickly learned to de-value those links. Anyway, twice in the past week I’ve received emails from a site called widePR.com. As far as I can recall, I’ve never heard of widePR.com. One email was sent to my SportsLizard email, the other to my iPrioritize. Now, … Continue reading
LockerPulse Month 3 Update
We’ve been working hard on LockerPulse, but I haven’t posted about it much since we revamped the home page a few weeks after launch in response to some of the initial feedback we received. I’ve got a lot of small updates, none of which constitute enough for an entire post so I figured I’d just lump them all together into one: Server: Stable As I mentioned in June, obscurity is your friend. It took over a month to get right, but by seeing the true technical demands of the live site we were able to tweak it and get it … Continue reading
Obscurity is Your Friend
Last month during the Facebook privacy backlash, Jason Fried from 37Signals wrote a great post about Diaspora, the “open source” Facebook that raised $200,000 on Kickstarter before even beginning their project. They received publicity from mainstream media outlets like the NY Times and the fund raising took off. His argument, one that I agree with, is that Diaspora is taking the wrong approach: Diaspora has all the wrong things at the wrong time. Competition that kills isn’t pre-announced — it catches an unsuspecting incumbent by surprise. In particular, I found one of his points to hit home: The spotlight is … Continue reading
I Still Listen to CDs and Read Books (and I bet a few other people do too)
I’ve long wanted a Kindle, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. I’d easily spend over $300 when you factor in tax and a case. I buy around one book per month. At $10/book that’s 30 months before I cover the cost of the Kindle, many more before I break even because I’d still be buying said books on the device. Then I’d have to worry about charging it, even if the battery life is amazing. I’d also be locked in to Amazon’s proprietary format. The Kindle is great in sunlight, but the book is better. Books can … Continue reading
New Essay: SEO & Web Marketing For New Web Ventures
While we’re in the process of consolidating our sites, I decided to do something I’ve long been intending to do: put the final nail in the coffin of Faceup-Sites and create an essay to replace the downloadable e-book that was what remained of the site. That e-book was very exhaustive and had some really good information. The problem was that I hadn’t updated it since July of 2008, and in the web world that’s an eternity. So I re-wrote it to match the style of the Web Design & Development for Business essay: a quick read that is in a … Continue reading
Z.ips.ME Featured on Read Write Web!
Today Z.ips.ME was featured in a Read Write Web article entitled You Don’t Need Bit.ly, Tr.im & Co.: Just Host Your Own URL Shortener. The author, Frederic Lardinois, mentions both Z.ips.ME and Shorty as alternatives to the 3rd party URL shortening services. This is really really cool! I’m so thankful that RWW (specifically Frederic) took the time to install Z.ips.ME and write about it on such a popular blog. RWW, along with Lifehacker, are my two “must-read” technology blogs. RWW is one of the world’s 20 most popular blogs and was named one of the web’s top 100 most influential … Continue reading
Finally Found Autoweek!
It took two weeks, but Greg finally hunted down a copy of the Autoweek article where our E-Z Detail Brush was mentioned. The detailer who scanned us a copy also told us that it is a subscriber-only magazine, which would explain why scouring every Barnes & Noble and Borders in upstate NY was a fruitless effort (special thanks to Adam Gilbert who also checked down in NYC for us). Now that we have the article in an acceptable resolution, we can use it for future marketing efforts. We’ll definitely plaster “featured in Autoweek” on our new site and our newsletters, … Continue reading
Forum Posting Guidelines
This is another awesome guest post from my business partner Greg, following up on the post he did while I was on vacation This article is a follow up to my Forum Marketing for E-Commerce, which encouraged you to try forum marketing. After you have found a forum and signed up as a sponsor, someone within your company should be in charge of posting. My previous article has some marketing suggestions while this article is more of a general guideline. Below I have outlined some suggestions to help you and your company post successfully. Be informative but don’t overindulge Posting … Continue reading
Forum Marketing for E-Commerce
This is a guest post by my business partner Greg. Each owner of Pure Adapt will be writing a post while I’m on vacation. Forum marketing has become an outstanding tool for us to market our website www.detailedimage.com, which is our automotive detailing supplies store. Forums are essentially an online common place where members can share opinions and information. As a forum sponsor it gives us a direct path to interact with our exact target market. Today I wanted to briefly help you assess the marketing opportunities with online forums and come up with ways to sponsor a forum successfully. … Continue reading
2008 Online Holiday Shopping Season in Review
This is a guest post by my business partner Mike. Each owner of Pure Adapt will be writing a post while I’m on vacation. A brief intro, my name is Michael Li and I’m a long time friend and current business partner with Adam at Pure Adapt, Inc. and I will be guest posting today. My post will be a review the 2008 online holiday shopping season. For us at Pure Adapt the 2008 holiday shopping season was a solid one and we finished the year strong despite the abysmal economy. We were prepared this year with a full fledged … Continue reading