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, I’ve had those addresses since 2004 and 2006 respectively so it’s certainly possible that I signed up for some other PR newsletter years ago and that company was bought out or merged into widePR. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that I was on their list legitimately somehow. So instead of marking the newsletter as SPAM, I clicked to unsubscribe, and was greeted with this list of “questions”:

Really?

I first had to click “yes” and then that text was replaced with “You are now unsubscribed”.

By law you’re required to provide an unsubscribe link in your emails. Making people go through that exercise is completely demeaning and unnecessary. It’s as if to say “you are soooo stupid for not realizing how awesome and useful our service is”. Listen, if someone has clicked to unsubscribe that means that they don’t want your newsletter anymore. It’s usually nothing personal. Many times people are still fans of your site or service but just don’t want the newsletter for one reason or another. It’s not good business to make condescending comments to them. It is OK to politely ask why they are unsubscribing and/or to thank them for trying out your site/service, both of which are things we do. Primarily though, the thing you should be doing is just confirming that they are unsubscribed and will not be receiving your email any more.

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 right without the whole world witnessing our screw up. Everything has been more than stable since then, which gives me confidence that our site is as scalable as we’ll need it to be for the foreseeable future.

Launch Fast

I can’t overemphasize how important it was that we launched in May. With Mike heading to China for June, I strongly considered recommending to the guys that we wait until he got back. In retrospect, I’m so glad I didn’t. We didn’t need extra time to build more features – we needed immediate feedback from the real world on what we did build.

Our Marketing = Twitter

I’m impressed at the steady increase in search engine traffic, particularly because we aren’t doing any active link building. The site is as SEO friendly as it can be from an on-site perspective. This makes me think that we’ll be getting a ton of SE traffic in a year or two once we’ve established the site a bit.

The only real marketing initiative that we’ve done is promoting our Twitter accounts. We have one for all 122 teams. We use Twitterfeed to pipe our RSS feed directly to Twitter, although I’ll be working with their API to do this on our end to speed up the updates. We’ve hired a part-time social media manager to manage all of these accounts because it’s just too much for any of us to keep up with consistently. As of yesterday, we’ve got just under 15,000 followers for all of our teams combined. Again, give that a year or two and we’ll have a really gigantic number.

Data Driven Revamp

One of my largest fears with any new site is that it just stalls upon launch and you never get that initial wave of traffic beyond your immediate friends/family (at least without paying a lot for it). If that happens, you don’t get any “real” users and you can’t begin to evaluate what’s working and what isn’t.

Between Twitter and SE traffic, we’re getting plenty of data to work with. About a month ago we reviewed everything as a team and were able to find several pitfalls in the way we were doing things. I’m working on a wave of improvements, which I’ll do a separate post about once they’re live, hopefully by 9/1.

People Will Pay

Speaking of data, one of the most exciting things is that people are signing up and paying. A lot of people told me that this wouldn’t happen. I myself wasn’t so sure it would. The only thing we had in our corner was that for years people have been paying $4.99/mo for SportsLizard’s Premium Price Guide when we offer the majority of the functionality for free. Our conversion rates have been decent given the level of traffic, which is very encouraging considering that the traffic should go way up in the future and we’ll continue to tweak the site to be better and better at converting.

One of the improvements we’re making involves giving the 30 day trial without forcing users to sign up for a PayPal subscription. They’ll sign up on day 31 if they want, not on day 1 for a subscription that charges them on day 31. An astonishing amount of people bail at that portion of the sign up process. We just want them using the site, the mobile site, and getting the daily newsletter for a month. At least some percentage of those people will get hooked and start paying.

Not to over-generalize, but from my experiences with iPrioritize, SportsLizard, and now LockerPulse, people will pay for subscription based web services if you provide them something of value. It’s a potentially very profitable business model.

I’m addicted

By the way, I’m hooked. LockerPulse has completely changed the way I consume sports. Most of the time I’m on it I’m using it as a fan and I almost forget I’ve developed it. When I have a down moment, I always pull out my phone and use the mobile site to catch up on what’s going on. If I am on my computer or my phone, and I want a quick score, or I want to know if one of my teams is playing today, or what time they’re playing, the simplest and fastest way to get it is to just pull it up on LockerPulse. A lot of people tell me they’re addicted to the daily newsletter, which aggregates all of their news (and now scores) into one email.

Even though all of the signs point in the right direction, this is the one that really makes me certain that this will work. It’s inherently a very addicting product to a subset of sports fans.

More News Sources Coming

People have told me that they love the site because we have great sources that they’ve never heard of before. It’s a new way to follow the teams they’ve been following for years. Still, we are missing a lot. We’re currently in the process of roughly doubling our sources to include every single local newspaper beat writer for every team, and even more great fan blogs.

1,000 true fans

Moving forward, once we finish the revamp of the site and adding the new sources, we’ll really turn up the heat on marketing. I’ve read (and re-read several times) a great essay called 1,000 True Fans, recommended by Tim Ferriss on his blog. That’s what we’re looking for – those 1,000 true fans who are so addicted to the service that they tell everyone they know about it. I know they’re out there, it’s just a matter of getting them. That’s what I consider to be the next big hurdle now that we’ve cleared the launch hurdle.

Should be fun!

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 on too early
You want attention after you’re good, not before. Obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting — especially when you don’t even have a product yet. You don’t need the pressure of outside opinion or the press breathing down your neck before you have anything to show. Millions of eyes — including your competition — watching you every step of the way doesn’t help. All this attention is a distraction. Ship, then seek the spotlight.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that every single piece of software – web or otherwise – that has ever been released in the history of computers has been buggy at first. We’ve had a pretty disastrous start with LockerPulse from a product standpoint. We’ve had every potential hardware and software problem that I could have imagined. The site has been unstable as hell.

Some people might look at this as a bad thing, however, because we did a small “beta” launch, we were able to get real users on the site, get real feedback, observe what worked and what didn’t, and then begin to fix things. You’d think that because we’ve launched a lot of websites over the years that we wouldn’t need time for this stuff and that we could just go full blast with the site from day 1. It just doesn’t work that way, especially with software almost 100% built in-house that has never been used in a live environment before. It has been a little worse than I had expected, but then again I wrote this just before launch:

We’re going to do a “public beta that we’re not calling a beta” for a few months and then go from there. What does that mean? We’re going to be giving out free lifetime premium accounts to a bunch of people we know (friends, their friends, family, people we know in the web business and sports business), we’re going to be testing a micro social media campaign to gauge it’s effectiveness (we think Twitter is maybe our best marketing opportunity), we’re going to be soliciting feedback and collecting data, and then we’re going to go from there. We have a laundry list of things that we want to do, but none of that matters if the first 50 people that try it think it sucks. This is an app on a level that I haven’t built before, so it’s important to make sure we didn’t royally screw anything up before going too crazy. Right now it looks like we’ll be adding 50k – 75k stories per month to our database. There’s a lot that goes into making that work efficiently.

Now, some 40 days later, we’ve worked out some serious coding issues, made some changes to appease some of the major content providers, completed a UI redesign, and moved to a much better server*. We’re getting close to the point where we have the kinks worked out and we’ll be confident spending some time and money to market the site. Imagine spending thousands of dollars for some big huge launch and then realizing that your server couldn’t handle the site or that half of your users couldn’t use your interface?

“Obscurity is your friend when you’re just starting.” I love that quote from Jason. This past month has been tough on me, but it would have been much worse if all of the problems were exacerbated by gobs of traffic. If the site is slow/down, I might get an email or two. If I got a few hundred it would be a different story. Then you’re playing disaster control with your customers AND trying to fix a bug.

Big huge launches are sexy, but they aren’t very practical, especially for a small bootstrapped software project. Slow and steady wins the race.

*Originally I had picked out a VPS to start development. I thought we could launch and be OK in that setup for a little while, but it became evident that we needed more power and even more flexibility should we grow the site quickly (no one wants to fear being too good at marketing, it’s hard enough as it is). Our hosting provider, LiquidWeb, who we’ve been with for years and I’m very happy with (no downtime…ever), worked with us to transition the site to their new cloud product, Storm. This gives us the ability to add RAM or a CPU or even a load balancer with a click of a button, something I think is necessary for a site like this. I had originally considered Rackspace Cloud and Amazon EC2, but Rackspace had too many downtime horror stories (see TechCrunch), and Amazon didn’t have a level of support I was comfortable with. Cloud servers are the way to go for web apps now a days, so I’m happy that LW is finally offering an option that works for us.

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 be bent, crushed, and spilled on and they don’t stop working.  If I lose one book I don’t lose the ability to read them all.  They can easily be marked up in any way I chose.  Plus they look nice on my shelf – they add character to a room.  In terms of environmental impact, I’m not so sure that the manufacturing of a Kindle combined with the energy required to use it and (lets be realistic) the eventual cost to destroy it is really any less than that of the paper in my book.  The Kindle is a really cool device.  In a lot of ways I want one, but in my opinion it still isn’t better than the book.

When it comes to CDs, I know a lot of people who are audiophiles and want to be able to rip the lossless audio from the CD.  I know some people who collect the album art.  I do neither, but I do use them for my podcasts.  I find it infinitely easier to just have a CD in my car that picks up right where I left off.  No wire to run to my iPod.  Nothing to carry in and out of the car during the warm weather. No worrying about charging or building playlists or any of that stuff.

When a new technology replaces an old technology, I feel like we have a tendency to talk in absolutes.  Newspapers and magazines are dead, we have the internet.  CDs are dead, we have the MP3.  Books are gone, we have the Kindle.  For some, this is definitely the case. I know a lot of people who don’t read anything in print or listen to anything that isn’t on their iPod or computer.  But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t use-cases where the old platform still wins.  The interesting thing to me is that the companies that are making newspapers or books are so focused on the new emerging markets that they forget to focus on those situations where a book really is better than a Kindle, or a CD is better than a MP3 file.  These platforms may be in decline,  but it’ll be a long time before they are dead.  Some business will find an opportunity there.

So I re-wrote it to match the style of the Web Design & Development for Business essay: a quick read that is in a format that’s hopefully easy for people of any level to understand…and is also easy for me to update. I’ve updated that web development essay countless times already with little things here and there, and it takes only a few seconds compared to the total pain of updating a downloadable PDF e-book. Plus now it’s available to everyone to read and reference instead of requiring a form to be filled out to download.

Anyway, the essay is called SEO & Web Marketing For New Web Ventures. Every page of Faceup-Sites.com now redirects to the essay. Check it out and let me know what you guys think and if there’s anything I missed or should improve. Here’s the table of contents:

• Getting Started
• Search Engine 101
  • How Search Engines Work
  • How Rankings are Determined
• On-Site Search Engine Optimization
  • Recommended Reading
  • What We Do
• Keyword Research & Writing With Search Engines in Mind
• Get Indexed!?!?
• Link Building? Nah, Just Market
  • Two Things Every Site Should Be Doing
  • Other Marketing Ideas
• Tracking and Tweaking
• Staying up to Date
• Feedback

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 websites. It’s such a rush to see a project like this get their attention.

Much like with Music-Alerts, I only spent 1 hour marketing Z.ips.ME. In a future post I’ll outline exactly what to do to get your site/app noticed with one hour of time. If it’s an even relatively interesting site it’ll catch the attention of someone. From there, it’s up to you to grow it and market it into a productive business (if you so choose). But most people complain that getting that first wave of eye balls is hard. Trust me, it isn’t.

Anyway, thanks again to RWW! This definitely made my day

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, particularly on the E-Z Detail Brush description page.  Seeing those little things on a site definitely helps conversion rates.  I guarantee that someone at some point will say to themselves “well, I wasn’t sure if I was going to buy from them, but I read Autoweek and Autoweek is legit, so I trust them”.  Every little thing you do that influences people on the fence of buying is important, even if it just impacts 0.1% of customers.

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 successfully requires that you share your knowledge about a topic and give detailed answers when applicable. Writing a one line response is unlikely to inspire the reader to trust you and follow your advice. Writing a really long response may take up too much of your time and it encourages other forum members to expect similar responses. Instead we recommend you find the balance between a detailed and concise response.

Check the forums on a regular basis

I check my forums once a day for the most part and twice a day on really busy days. You can often subscribe to threads so if someone responds to a thread you will get an e-mail notification. I always check my PM (Private Message) Box every time I go on a forum. This PM Box is an internal messaging system on the forums similar to e-mail based off your forum handle (aka your forum name). Get in a routine you are comfortable with and stick to it.

Don’t be afraid to answer a question with a question

Ideally you want to answer posts in a timely manner but sometimes it pays to ask someone follow up questions so you can give a more specific answer. For example someone may ask us “How can I make my paint shine more?”. There are infinite combinations of products and steps I could suggest so so it is challenging to provide an appropriate answer. I might ask them to provide a detailed list of what products/steps they are already using, make/model/year/condition of their vehicle and their detailing goals. This helps me better understand the person asking the question and what type of answer I should provide. You won’t be able to know every last detail but you do need a reasonable amount of information to give an effective response.

Don’t be lazy, add links and pictures

If you are taking the time to post make sure you maximize your efforts. If you reference your product or any information on your site make sure you hyper link back to that specific page. This simple step makes it so much easier for a customer to get on your website and start shopping. Additionally anyone who searches for that product on the forum in the future has a good chance of finding your post and the hyper link. Make sure you add a picture of the product, before and after pictures or any other type of visual information (charts, graphs, etc.) if possible. Any kind of visual information is far more likely to grab the readers interest. Don’t forget you can often hyper link the pictures back to your site as well.

Don’t oversell or push your products

When appropriate make a response that explains why your product(s) may be a good choice for someone on the forum. Highlight some of the differentiating factors that make your products special and get the customer excited. If your product truly works you should be able make sales and have customer testimonials speak for you. Try not to list every single fact about your products or bad mouth competitors. If you push too hard it makes it seem like you are hiding something, similar to how most people feel towards infomercials.

Maintain professionalism at all times

Forums are a place where people come to learn and have fun. Members can essentially post whatever they want and as every knows there is little to no accountability. Forums are not a place for you to go around and correct every post that has misinformation. No matter how tempting it is I _never_ engage in any kind of argument on the forum. This is especially hard when someone says something bad about our business or products, but you just have to let it slide. In a couple of days the posts will fade and the good reputation you have developed will shine through.

Forums have all kinds of posts that wander off topic that can be interesting but they can detract you from your objective. Avoid chit chat and stay focused on the task at hand. Some forum members will swear or use graphic language in a post. Stay professional at all times with your posts and the community will always respect you, even if you seem more formal than most. Remember everything you say represents you and your company so make sure you are totally comfortable with it.

Do not bad mouth the competition

This is a very difficult topic to cover because there are many fine lines. I make every effort to never say anything bad about the competition. Everything you write can be found by your competition and it could come back to you, so post responsibly. This can be really tough when someone says a rival product or company is better. Here are a few examples of posts I might see and how I might respond to them without bad mouthing the competition while promoting our products.

Example #1

Forum Member: Is the Mother’s Wax the best wax out there? (at Detailed Image we do not carry this wax or brand)

Detailed Image: There are a lot of great waxes on the market, but what works best is often subjective. In my experiences I have had outstanding success with the Chemical Guys 50/50 Limited Edition Paste Wax . This wax offers a really deep and glossy shine on virtually every color paint. It applies and removes with ease and is one of the more durable waxes I’ve used.

Comments: In Example #1 the response avoids putting down a competitors product (Mother’s Wax), while promoting one of our favorite waxes. I don’t like to directly compare my opinion of a competitors product to one of our products when possible. I feel it’s a lose lose scenario no matter whether your comments are positive or negative. I can explain why I don’t like the competitors product and some readers will feel I am biased towards our products. Occasionally I compliment other products but I generally don’t want to promote the competition either if possible. As a side note I hyper linked our product as you should.

Example #2

Forum Member: Do you like the Mother’s Cleaner Wax or the Chemical Guys 50/50 Limited Edition Paste Wax better?

Detailed Image: Both products will help protect the paint but they are not the same exact kind of product. The Mother’s Cleaner Wax will polish and protect in one step, which we call an All In One (AIO) product. For these types of products I recommend the Klasse All In One (AIO). The Klasse AIO has powerful cleaning properties and it also leaves a very durable coating of protection. The Chemical Guys 50/50 Limited Edition is pure carnauba wax that is designed to give the paint that extra deep reflection that really catches your eye. It will also protect the paint by repelling moisture and road grime.

Comments: Example #2 is a more difficult question because it more directly asks us which one we like better. Again I will avoid a direct comparison with regards to my opinion. I will bring up that these are two different kinds of products (AIO vs Wax). For the AIO I will suggest one of our products that is the same kind of product. I will also re-emphasize why I like our wax as well. This avoids putting down a competing product and makes the forum member aware of other options.

Summary

In short you want to be as professional as possible and stand behind everything you put on the forum. Use good business practices and you’ll find the forum will embrace you and support your business.

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.

Most forums offer some form of sponsorships that may include rotating banners and other ways to essentially put up ads around the forum. However the greatest benefit we get is the ability to make posts that advertise our business and talk directly to our customers. One forum we participate on is www.e46fanatics.com, which is an online community for the 3 Series BMW’s from 1999 – 2006. This forum has over 130,000 members, however these numbers can be drastically exaggerated so only use them as a guide. A better way to assess the forum is to look at the frequency and quality of posts in the section(s) you are most likely to participate on. We really only participate in the “Car Care and Detailing” section of the forum, so this is where I focus my research. Obviously you want to find the forum that most directly relates to your products or service. You may not be able to find a forum that has exactly what you are looking for, but there may be some sub-section of an indirectly related subject that fits your needs. Take some time to assess forums in your field and see if any of your competitors are using forums.

The E46 Fanatics forum has returned about a 10:1 ratio of sales relative to the cost of sponsorship. However that number only measures sales from customers who use the coupon code we put out for forum members that gives them 10% off almost all items. We expect there is many additional sales from forum members that did not use this code and referrals from forum members. We also get their e-mail address and we can send them our newsletters and promotions. It’s tough to say exactly how big of an impact the forum does have but we are obviously confident it’s very successful. Every forum is not this successful, but we’ve tried out quite a few with mostly very good results.

Making a forum sponsorship successful has taken quite a bit of trial and error. Certainly finding the right forums is most essential but then you have to make the most of your opportunity by finding ways to engage the community and gain credibility on the forum. The first thing we do is introduce ourselves with a brief post explaining what we do and how we would like to help the community. Do not try to over sell yourself in the beginning instead give the community time to gain your trust and here positive reviews from other forum members. In our welcome message we included a coupon code specific to that forum in the welcome message. It makes the forum members feel like they are getting an exclusive discount and helps you track your success.

Another post we created was called “Ask a Professional Detailer..”, which encourages forum members to ask us questions on topics that we are experts on. This gives us a great opportunity to interact with customers, gain their trust and sometimes we can recommend our products as a solution. When I do recommend our products I hyper link the products back to our site to make it easy for a customer to purchase the items and get on our site. Sometimes making a sale is relatively easy when someone writes a post looking for new detailing products. We also make posts about our monthly specials, daily specials and all other promotions we run. If you are having trouble getting some sales try posting some informational threads about the areas you know best. We did some posts like “Prepping your vehicle for winter”, “Engine Detailing”, etc. which help share our expertise while promoting some of the products we use.

Give the forum time to develop and don’t expect an immediate return. I recommend a bare minimum of 3 – 6 months to assess the forum. It may take some time to build the trust of the community, but once you have their trust you’ll have a very powerful marketing tool. Even if it seems like a long shot I encourage you to seek out some forums and allocate a portion of your marketing budget to them. You may be pleasantly surprised with the results and you may just find your best marketing tool.

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 marketing plan for the 2008 holiday season and it paid off.

According to comScore’s e-commerce report, holiday internet retail sales were down 3% in 2008 compared to the corresponding days in 2007 (see Chart 1). Spending was down compared to a year ago but that’s not unexpected with the extraordinary problems that exist right now. Considering that 2008 was a year full of people facing foreclosure, large financial institutions failing with unemployment rising, it could have been a lot worse than -3%. On the plus side gas prices plummeted dramatically or spending could have been down much more during the holidays.

Chart 1

2008 was not an easy year for many businesses, but we have experienced continued growth in these tough times. I don’t have the numbers for the corresponding holiday shopping days like comScore, but I will use our December numbers: we more than doubled in December 2008 compared to the same period a year ago. We’re pretty darn happy with that kind of growth in these times. We’re such a young company in the growth phase of the business life cycle we haven’t seen too many ill effects of a bad economy. Our growth has more than doubled in a slowing economy so we must be taking market share away from our competitors, or the markets that we compete in are still growing, which I assume is not the case. This is a great sign for us that we’re doing something right.

A positive during the 2008 online holiday season based on traffic to top retailer sites is that overall traffic has grown 5% in 2008. In Chart 2 below you can see top retailers like Amazon, Apple and Walmart had significant growth in traffic. Another optimistic number for ecommerce is that sales increased on Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday making the case that more people are aware of these special ecommerce shopping days (see Chart 3). Total spending for ecommerce may have been down but the certain numbers still show that ecommerce is continuing to grow.

Chart 2

Chart 3

Traffic wise for us, I will be using Detailed Image’s numbers because that is the bulk of our sales.  We had a traffic increase of over 133% in new visits based on Google Analytics. That crushes Apple’s measly increase of 19% lol. Anyways, another positive for us at Pure Adapt.

In a tough economy there will be consolidation that weeds out the bad businesses while the strong ones survive. Our numbers show for themselves that we’re moving in the right direction and what we’re doing is working. Through hard work we hope to continue to do so.

It was my pleasure to guest post on Adam’s blog and if you want to read more of what I have to say, you can visit my blog at www.Michael-Li.com.