Given that it’s a short semester, a long-term link building plan isn’t really feasible. I decided to offer anyone in the class a link in one of my posts. They were to do some quick keyword research to select the anchor text that they wanted for their link and then post it to our Facebook group. While this isn’t going to help them rank #1 or anything like that, it will pass them a little traffic that they can review in Analytics, show them what an incoming link looks like in Webmaster Tools, and maybe help them get indexed if they aren’t already. Here are the students who took me up on the offer:

• Hungry and Bored – Hungry? Bored? Or Both?
• Easy Seafood Recipes – Hook! Cook! Share!
• All the information you will ever need to know about the Eastern Shore of Virginia.
• The Bro Blog – mushin Dimes since 99′.
• Brian Omps Towing – towing, equipment hauling, and repair services in  Winchester, Virginia.
• Skyline Posters, Painting, and Property – Capture the Inspiration. Remember the Adventure.
• CAA Football News – Talk CAA – Your #1 site for the latest CAA Football news.
• Fantasy Football Updates – real-time fantasy updates from different sources around the web.
• College health and Fitness – Maximize The Lift – Maximize Your Life.
• Tirelowpros – The right tires

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

Except one thread that did work.

My partners and I are all fans of the sports show Around the Horn. One of the best parts of ATH is that the eccentric panelist Woody Paige always has a blackboard behind him with a random quote on it (see below). My favorite is probably “Stable relationships are for horses”, although they are almost all great. He changes it every segment (2-3 times per show depending on when he is “eliminated”). He’s been a regular on the show since it began in 2002 and has had more than 500 appearances. That’s a lot of quotes!

So we started a thread to track them back in early 2008. We stopped contributing a while back, but other people kept it going. Not every day, but here and there people would contribute new quotes.

Fast forward to last Tuesday. Tastefully Driven had a 20% off sale that did pretty good during the holidays because it made it’s way across a few forums. I decided to check the stats. Which was when I realized just how popular our thread was. It was the most viewed page on the site in December, 2x more than the home page. We ranked top 5 in Google for many Woody Paige related terms, including #1 for “Woody Paige Blackboard Quotes” – ahead of Wikipedia, Woody’s official site, and IMDB:

Given that interesting bit of information, we decided to create a site dedicated to Woody Paige’s blackboard quotes. We don’t expect too much to come of it, but we figured that it would be way better than an old thread on an inactive forum.  My guess was that many people browsed the forum thread, read all of the quotes (average time on page is just over 3 minutes), and then never came back because it wasn’t updated and we require you to be a TD registered user to post on the forum.

The benefits of a dedicated site:

• Better design and organization of the content.
• An easy form for people to submit quotes.  The show is on every weekday so we hope that submissions will be pretty regular.
• Easy for people to subscribe to updates via email, Twitter, and RSS.
• Each quote will get indexed and hopefully suck in some more traffic.
• Maybe we’ll make a few bucks with AdSense (I’m talking like $100/month at most).

And if we get lucky it could be one of those viral blog sites that catches on, sort of like Autocompleteme or People of Walmart.

So on Tuesday Mike and I came up with a list of what we needed to do to get the site launched.  Over the past few days we split up the work and spent a few hours here and there to get the site launched. 

Here’s our to-do list for this mini-project:

• Pick out a domain
• Set up hosting on our server
• Install WordPress
• Install plugin to allow users to submit posts (pending our approval)
• Design template
• Write site copy
• SEO
  • Enable rewritten URLs
  • Put canonical redirect in place
  • Install sitemaps plugin and submit to Google Sitemaps
• Configure AdSense
• Set up Google Analytics
• Create Twitter account
• Feedburner
  • Burn Feed
  • Enable email subscriptions
  • Auto-post to Twitter
• Copy all posts from thread into system
• Test on all browsers
• 301 redirect old thread on Tastefully Driven (both pages)
• Adam & Mike – blog posts, Twitter, Facebook
• Add to Pure Adapt site
• Submit to StumbleUpon
• Test Analytics and AdSense to ensure tracking correctly

Friday night while I was watching college football WoodyPaigeQuotes.com was born:

All in all, a pretty quick, fun project that will be fun to keep going (I certainly plan on adding new quotes whenever I watch).

Background

When I started using Twitter, one of the first things that piqued my interest was URL shorteners. Not only does it make no sense why Twitter doesn’t officially have their own URL shortening service (although bit.ly is sort of official now), but it really made no sense to me why everyone used either bit.ly or tinyurl.com instead of creating their own. A URL shortener is uber simple to program and can offer you a ton of value.  So I picked up the domain “ips.me” with the intent of using it as my own URL shortener.

Then I realized that this simple script could be valuable to a lot of people and a lot of businesses.   After some thought, I decided to turn this into an open source project and release it for everyone to use.  Yesterday I finally got around to putting the site up at http://z.ips.me.  Although the first version isn’t available for download yet, I’ve begun testing it on my Twitter account.

Benefits

The benefits of my own URL shortener are pretty obvious to me:

• I can name the URL whatever I want.  I can get http://z.ips.me/Adam to point to this blog instead of http://tinyurl.com/den93j
• I control how long the redirect is in place.  If I want to change it or remove it, I can.  Or I can leave it up forever.
• I control whether it’s a permanent 301 redirect (search engine friendly) or a temporary 302 redirect.
• I get the data and they don’t.  I know when someone clicked a link, what site they clicked it on, what browser they’re using, and more.  I can aggregate all of this data and use it to my advantage.
• I’m branding MY site and not another third party.  If someone says “hey what’s z.ips.me” and visits it, I get the traffic.

Who Will Use it?

Personally, I think every business that’s on Twitter should be using their own URL shortener.  If their domain is too long, they can spend $10/year and buy a new one like I did.

The perfect example is a company like Dell.  On their Twitter page they use a combination of ow.ly and bit.ly.  They recently reported that they’ve generated over $3 million in revenue from their links on Twitter.  Imagine if those links came from t.dell.com.  They’d have all the data.  They’d control where a link goes when a sale ends.  They’d brand their own domain.

I also think that web marketing companies and SEO companies would all love to have this kind of control for their clients.

Feedback!!!

Right now the site currently says that we’re in a private Beta. You can sign up to receive an email once the service is available for download. My question to you is – how useful do you think this service is?  For site owners?  Businesses?  Web marketers/SEOs? I’m debating how long I should test it before developing it to the point that it can be released it to the public (there needs to be an install script and a better admin interface, along with instructions).

In terms of monetization, there is some revenue potential in domain/hosting referral commissions, and also the potential to charge for installs, but most likely this is more along the lines of Music-Alerts – a fun project that doesn’t really make any money.

The Process & The Time Frame

We didn’t really plan it this way, but from the time we launched the previous cart in 2007 we were planning for this one.  We kept track of every potential feature that we’d want, both on the front end and the back end, we collected data in any instances where we weren’t sure about something, and we kept tabs of the e-commerce industry in general and noted any features that really enhanced shopping for the customer.

I think a great example of this is how when you add an item to your cart, you remain on the current category or item page to continue shopping.  As I outlined in Part 1, instead of taking the customer away to a cart page and then back to continue shopping, we simply show a drop down in the upper-right hand corner of the page.  This feature came from our own shopping experiences on Altrec and Old Navy.

Because we didn’t have any money to spend on this project, because we gave ourselves a limited time frame of less than six months, and because the project essentially involved one programmer (myself) and one designer (Mike), we had to think very hard about what was important and what could be left out.  Having those restrictions is almost always a blessing in disguise.  It essentially prevented “feature creep” and allowed us to focus on only the most important aspects of the shopping experience.

Design / User Interface

In my opinion, Mike did an A+ job with the design and user interface.  The design is tighter, simpler, and more modern than the previous site, however when you land on the site it still “feels” like an e-commerce site.  The products are on the familiar left nav, and the search box is across the top.  Only when you start browsing and see the AJAX drill through, or start searching and see the autosuggest, do you start to realize that the site is a little different than the average e-commerce site.  We tried not to over-use AJAX, to only use it in the instances when a page refresh would slow the shopping experience or when immediate feedback would improve it.

Programming Framework

This stressed me out a lot.  I thought long and hard about developing on a framework like CakePHP, something that countless programmers recommend.  If we truly were starting from scratch and I had more time, we probably would have.  But a lot of the pre-existing code was well written and stable, so the goal here was really to just make it more organized, secure, and scalable…as fast as possible.  For the forseeable future I’m going to be the one managing our sites, so after much back and forth I made the decision to essentially build my own framework.

My style is, well, my style, and I thought that for the most part I’d do a better job if I knew everything about every single line of code.  All of the common functions and classes are stored on our server in a location that they can be accessed by all of our sites, which will prevent me from rewriting code on future projects.

We did use the fantastic script.aculo.us effects framework and also Lightbox 2 for images, both of which saved me a lot of javascript work so I want to make sure I give credit where credit is due.  But all of the server side PHP I wrote from scratch myself, specifically for this projects and for future projects of ours.  Starting a new e-commerce site could probably be done in less than a day if there weren’t any fancy features being added.  We want a platform that can evolve into many shopping sites while still being easily maintained.

SEO / W3C Compliance

We pretty much nailed the on-site SEO for DI:

• Every page that isn’t behind a login is W3C compliant. With all of the complexities of a site like this, it wasn’t easy.  But the payoff is huge – our site will be easier to index, easier for browsers to display correctly, and easier for screen readers to decipher for the disabled.  It also helped us from making sloppy coding mistakes, such as using the same element id in two spots on the same page or forgetting to close a tag.
• Every page has a relevant Title Tag and META Description.
• All pages use proper HTML for headings, paragraphs, lists, etc. We also took it a step further and became one of the first sites of this scale to use CSS tables in our design (explained in my post about IE8 from back in March).
• Every size of every product has it’s own re-written URL.  This was actually pretty tricky because on each item page you can switch sizes using AJAX.  We considered only having one URL per product and then always defaulting to the small size (as we did on the old site).  Ultimately though, we needed to be able to link to a specific size, both on-site on our browsing pages and also to send to customers.   So if a product has multiple sizes, there’s an extra directory for the size, such as http://www.detailedimage.com/Dodo-Juice-M35/Rainforest-Rub-Soft-Wax-P234/250-ml-S1/
• 301 Redirects for every old page, including pages dating way back to the original Miva and osCommerce carts.  Many links from back then still get clicked and indexed.  I spent a lot of time developing an intelligent 301 redirect system to keep everything search engine friendly without losing the links we’ve already built.
• More Pages. Each manufacturer has it’s own page with information and the products we sell, the detailing guide has pages for each step in the process, and each product has it’s own review page in addition to the product page.   The review pages all use the title tag “{PRODUCT NAME} Product Reviews”, which hopefully will pull in some search traffic.
• Sitemap, XML Sitemap, and auto-generated/auto-uploaded Google Base file.

The Back End

Much like the previous system, our back-end allows us to process orders in a matter of minutes.  If someone places two orders, they’re merged together to save us (and them) on shipping.  When we click to process each morning, a massive PDF is generated with all of the invoices for the day.  A text file is also generated to import into FedEx Ship Manager.  We print the invoices, import the text file to print the shipping labels, and export the tracking numbers back into our system.  The tracking numbers are now in the My Account section for the customer.  At 7 PM that night – after the packages have been picked up and are in FedEx’s system – the customer is emailed a link to their tracking information.  The invoices and shipping labels are printed in the same order so they match perfectly for whomever is pulling the order.  FedEx gave us a free printer for their labels so we are able to print both concurrently.

So while many companies manually do those steps, we have it automated down to a science.  Which is why just the four of us have been able to process all these orders in just a few short hours each day.

The Immediate Results

Business is a very bottom line type of thing.  Stuff either works and makes you money, or it doesn’t.  So far, this site has worked.  The feedback has been fantastic, much better than any project I’ve ever done before.  Conversion rate for the month of May (through the 26th) is up 0.5% over the rest of 2009.  And we reached our largest month to date in revenue by about the 23rd.  So bottom line, this launch of this project was a success in my book.

Time to take a step back and celebrate.  Then time to get back to work.  We’ve got a lot more awesome stuff in the works.

Take that Adam-McFarland.com!

Only took me like 3 years of actively maintaining a blog while that site hasn’t changed since about 1998…

Their response?  Push the product more.  Give out samples, hold contests, give some away to bloggers in the industry.  Not bad ideas, but the premise is that WE need to push THEIR products.   Thing is, their product is very up-and-coming and does not have the name brand recognition that our other lines do. We rank multiple times in the top 10 in Google for all of their products.  Our main disappointment in sales isn’t because we haven’t pushed their product enough (hell, we’ve hardly pushed any of the products on TD), it’s that their isn’t more of an existing demand for their products.

Don’t get me wrong – it was our choice to carry the line and the responsibility lies with us to research the demand for a product before selling it. We’re just disappointed that the existing demand for it isn’t stronger.  Who knows, maybe it will pick up and we’ll capitalize on our solid rankings.

Which got me to thinking – there are really two types of products that we can pick up:  push products or pull products.  Push products, like the one described above, are products that we have to push on to our customers through newsletters, mailings,  announcements in the blog, on-site cross-product upsells, or other promotions.  Customers have never heard of the product, so we’re relying on ourselves to sell them on it.  Pull products are products that have such an existing demand that by adding them to our shopping cart we automatically generate sales due to their auto-inclusion in our product feeds and on our extremely SEO-friendly site (a large portion of TD products already rank top 10 in Google without us really doing anything).  Any pushing we do is just an added bonus.

Why would anyone want to carry a push product?  IF you have a built in audience that listens to you, push products give you the power to push the products you want to sell.  Maybe it’s your own brand with a higher margin, or a brand new product that you have exclusive rights to.  A site like Detailed Image for example, has 3+ years of forum presence in the (relatively) small auto-detailing community.  Everyone knows “George and Greg from Detailed Image” and therefore they have the ability to push products.  If they tell people that a new polish or wax is better, people will listen…at least initially.  If there are two comparable products and they decide to support one over another for any number of reasons, customers will likely listen and buy the brand they recommend.

Tastefully Driven is only a few months old.  It’s not in a niche like auto detailing.  Maybe someday we’ll have that kind of loyal audience, maybe we won’t.  It’s two different types of businesses and that’s fine. One thing is clear:  for new sites or sites built to generate sales via search like TD, you had better do your research and pick up only pull products.  Taking advantage of existing demand is far easier than creating the demand.  Otherwise it’ll just remain sitting on your shelves collecting dust while you’re wishing you had that money available to pick up a more popular line of products.

Quick post here guys.  Just wanted to let everyone know that I’ve updated our free FaceUp Web Marketing eBook.  It’s been over six months since the last update.  The book still gets a decent amount of downloads so I want to be sure that the information conveyed is accurate.

The biggest update has to do with the Keyword Research section.  Google recently started displaying search volume on their AdWords Keyword Tool.   This is HUGE for anyone with a website and an interest in SEO.  Prior to this we were left to extrapolate data from Yahoo (Overture) or Wordtracker and “guess” how often something was searched on Google.  Since the latest studies seem to show that Google may have upwards of 70% of the search market, these data points are clearly the most important.  Also, I LOVE that you can type in multiple keywords at once – one per line – and do all of your keyword research in one well thought out search.  You can also download your results.  Basically, it’s the perfect keyword research tool.  Vastly different from tools like the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool, based on Wordtracker data, which was what I was using prior and only allowed you to search one term at a time.

I also made minor updates to all of the other sections where I saw appropriate.  Download it for free over at Faceup-Sites.com.  Enjoy!

We carry things like iPod cables and headphones, HDMI cables ($15 for a 6 foot cable!), component video cables, USB cables, and Nintendo Wii component cables.  These items are also the types of things that we can easily sell on eBay – a place where we want to have a presence but nothing else we carry really fits (some of our products are prohibited by the manufacturer from being sold, others – like personal care products – just won’t sell much based on our research).

While we’re on the topic of Tastefully Driven, my guess is that at least half of you are saying to yourselves “where are they going with this?”  The direction of the site, of the business, is very defined in my mind but it definitely doesn’t look like it from the outside and I’ve probably done a bad job (or no job) of explaining it.  I think from the outside it just looks like they’re just picking up random product lines left and right of things that interest them.  While there’s some truth to that, here’s the overall big picture:

Our cart is very SEO friendly.  Each page has a dynamically generated unique title tag, all of the text is indexible, each page is URL rewritten, we use proper formatting, etc.  We know that on equal footing – most notably the number of links and the age of our domain – we can outrank the majority of the competition.  So the reasoning by putting all of these loosely tied stores on one domain is to get all of those links pointing to ONE domain and not to many domains so that each product benefits from the success of the others.  Think about how every page on Wikipedia ranks high.  Now apply that same strategy to e-commerce, a place where most sites aren’t very SEO friendly.

Which is then where the Lifestyle Blog and our quest to get a team of writers comes in.  Links directly to products are hard to come by.  Links to great information, on the other hand, are relatively easy to come by.  Create lots of great posts, get lots of links, help out every page on the entire domain.  So this post about polyphasic sleep really does help us sell more shit drops even though the connection isn’t obvious.

So far it’s already worked for a few products. In time, it should work for all of them.   Not saying this is a foolproof plan or that it couldn’t fail, but it’s the plan we’re going with.

If it works, we should end up with a pretty solid community on the forums/blog and then we can step everything up to the next level and become a “social shopping” site like we originally envisioned.  For example, displaying ads on the forum/blog for our products based upon your conversations and your purchase history.  If we ever get to this point, that’ll be where the fun really begins.

Take the example below (click to view full size screenshot). When someone searches for Men-U Healthy Face Wash, a product we sell on Tastefully Driven, Google automatically recognizes the query as a product search and displays Google Product Search results above the natural results. Sure it’s below the high performing PPC ads, but those people are paying for those impressions/clicks. The natural results have been organically grown over the course of years with expensive and time consuming link building and on-site SEO. All I did was spend 15 minutes submitting a product feed last week. As an added bonus Google gives you impression/click-through data for products listed (imagine how cool it would be if they did this for organic results?). Seems unfair huh? Take advantage of it while it lasts…I know we are.