eCommerce Tactics

WebMoney units were terminated in Uzbekistan

Petrony — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:35:14 +0000

Online payment system WebMoney reported the liquidation of the Uzbek guarantor of its ecurrency units called WMY which are equivalent to the Uzbek sum banknotes. As it is reported on the company website though TILLO-GARANT Ltd was liquidated “pretensions are accepted within 2 months since the date of the notification.” It means that now customers cannot make any transactions using WMY units, neither they can open WMY wallets.

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WordPress 301 Redirect: Tips and Techniques

Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - RSS Feeds — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:14 +0000

There are several instances when you administer WordPress blogs where you will need to perform a 3 1 redirect. It is one of the most important corrective actions you can take when moving content. No other methods are as friendly to search engines but it must be done correctly. This article will explain how….

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eBay Lets Sellers Block Countries in SYI and Turbo Lister

AuctionBytes NewsFlash — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:06 +0000

eBay is making it easier for sellers to specify which countries they will not ship to by letting them change settings in Sell Your Item and in Turbo Lister.

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Bringing 3-D Out of the Dark and Into the Living Room

Renay San Miguel — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:00:00 +0000

“Avatar” may be the box office champ in this or any other galaxy, and the first weekend of ticket sales for “Alice in Wonderland” has certainly put a Cheshire Cat smile on the faces of Walt Disney studio executives. However, all that monetary activity stems from watching those two movies in the plush, dark expanses of a special, 3-D-enabled movie theater. Now shrink that unique viewing experience down to the comfort of your own living room, as Sony, Samsung and Panasonic are trying to do with this week’s announcements.

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Marketing 101: Sell Benefits and Not Features

Stephanie Woods — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:00:47 +0000

Welcome to marketing 101. It is highly recognized in the marketing world that persuasive copy emphasizes benefits over features. Unfortunately many website owners do not take the time to sit down and figure out how they can connect to customers on an emotional level. Knowing that the latest widget is the best in its class only gets a searcher in the door. Once they’re inside you need to tell them how your product or service is going to solve the challenge they are currently facing.

The goal is to reach your site visitors at an emotional level. One they can relate to. Generic content can get your point across just fine. But is just fine all you want?

So how do you make your benefits truly desirable? It seems like that should be relatively easy to do, right? Simply list all of the features and their companion benefits and your product is sold due to its sheer awesomeness. If only it that were easy.

Understand Your Target Audience

To write benefits that sell a product or service you first need to understand your target audience. If you write for everybody, you end up talking to nobody in particular. Writing to a general audience makes it challenging to connect with someone on an emotional level. You end up with generic benefits that make the eyes glaze over. There is no emotional connection with the reader.

For starters, develop a little bio on the person you’re writing this content for. If you were them, what would make you buy the widget? Persona creation is excellent practice for creating highly targeted content for your site.

Sound like a lot of work? It can be. How serious are you about making some cold hard cash from your website? Good marketing generally involves a lot of work, so you need to accept this if you want results. It’s kind of like weight loss: there is no magical pill that will solve all your problems. You’ll only get that killer body with a lot of hard work and dedication.

Write for Your Audience

While you might be able to bestow the virtues of your product to your co-workers, can you explain the benefits to you target audience in a way that they understand?

There is help available to help you understand your target audience. If you have the budget to do so, market research is the way to go. If you don’t have the budget, try to gain a little insight into your biggest clients or customers and build a fake bio on them. If you don’t have direct contact with customers, ask your sales team for help. Since sales people are relationship builders, they may have valuable insight into your target audience that you are looking for.

Understand Your Benefits

Here’s where a little brainstorm session with your team will come in handy. Write down all of the features that your product or service has. Then list all of the benefits. Once you’ve listed all your benefits, write down the advantage to each one of those benefits. This will help you to dig a little deeper and uncover the benefits that will truly resonate with your target audience.

Hint: Don’t just list the obvious benefits. Try to list every single little thing you can think of. You never know what hidden emotional connections you will uncover that will differentiate you from the competitor.

Here’s an example:

Feature: HEPA filter

Benefits: Trap small pollutants, allergens, dust and other particles, 99.7% effective at removing airborne particles, help trap pollutants and particles to get them out of the air you breathe, clean and sanitize the air you breathe.

Advantages: You can’t avoid air pollution, but you can ensure that the most important little people in your life have clean and healthy air to breathe in your home. Trap airborne allergens and potential toxins so your family can breathe clean air.

When to Focus on Features

Now here is the part where we contradict everything. There are times when placing the focus on features IS in your best interest. If your target audience is highly technical, appealing to their emotional side may not be in your best interest. Techies most likely already know what the benefits to the features are (duh) so an appeal to their emotional side might be fruitless. Once again, it’s really important to understand your target audience.

Do you understand your target audience? Do you know what they are truly looking for? If you have no idea, now is the perfect time to start thinking about it.

Stephanie Woods is a freelance internet marketer living in Canada. She has been working in advertising and marketing for 10 years now. She has a personal blog where she can be reached. Or, you can find her on Twitter as @steph_woods.

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Google Dabbling With TV Set-Top Search

Mike Pearson — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:50:22 +0000

Google and Dish Network reportedly are testing a service that allows television users to search for television programming and Web content from set-top boxes. Google software installed in the boxes allows users to create a personalized programming lineup, anonymous sources told The Wall Street Journal. It’s no secret that Google and Dish have been collaborating since 2007, when the companies entered into a partnership for Google to deliver ads to the satellite network’s audience and develop mechanisms to more accurately measure how they are viewed.

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Teaming up with Magento to Help Online Merchants

Access — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:17:07 +0000

Hi all, Osama here with the Platform team. Yesterday, we announced an expanded relationship with Magento to offer PayPal through Magento’s online shopping platform (see our press release).

This means that merchants and developers will be able to get up and running quicker with e-commerce and online payments, making it easier and more cost-effective for them to sell their products and services online.

Open source technology is changing the e-commerce landscape as we know it, and Magento is at the forefront of this evolution. We’re excited about this deal with Magento, and we will continue to work with them on further product developments. Stay tuned for updates on our work with Magento later this year!

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Is Trust in Social Media Dying?

Richard Brewer-Hay — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:04:34 +0000

All,
This morning I joined a round table discussion entitled “The Death of Trust in Social Media” hosted by Val-Pierre Ganton of “the grilling” blog. Panelists included:

Richard Brewer Hay, Chief Blogger at eBay
Michael Brito, VP of Social Media at Edelman Digital
Michelle Broderick, Marketing Director at Yelp

According to a survey by Edelman, just 25% of consumers say they trust their friends to give them good information about a company, compared with 45% in 2008. Social marketing is built on the idea that people trust their friends more than they trust official voices so what does it mean for the future of social media? Our discussion was aimed at providing insights on how we’re using and trusting social media today and what the future holds for this space.

We tackled the following questions:
** Is trust in social media dying?
** Do social media platforms need to change in order to adapt to peoples’ behavioral evolution on the web? How so?
** Is there a difference in the community’s trust when we compare transactional and non-transactional social networks?
** Is the future of trust likely to be the migration towards official voices or your friend’s recommendations?

Here is an archive of our conversation. Apologies for the poor sound quality at the beginning… I’ll be getting a cleaner version shortly. For now…

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Developers VS Users

Michael Gray — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:00:59 +0000

Anyone who’s been involved in web development for any length of time has likely encountered the Developers VS Users situation. It’s a mistake that can often lead to expensive problems down the road. So what exactly is the problem? And how can you spot it–and solve it–before it derails you project and causes you to make a costly mistake? Here’s how…

Most developers became developers because they want to work on and build cool stuff. Like everyone, they want to build things that gain the respect of their peers. This aspiration is where the problems get started. Unless you happen to develop for an extremely technical audience, users don’t want cool stuff. They just want stuff that works and makes their life easier. For example, let’s say a developer wants to build a weather dashboard with real time satellite video feeds, an AJAX module that show the latest temperature, barometric pressure and wind speed/direction, the sunrise/sunset times, and tidal data. A regular user, on the other hand, just wants to know “is it going to be sunny or cloudy and do I need a jacket or umbrella today?”

We’ve seen several examples of this played out in public in our little tech-bubble-blogosphere in the past year:

Google Wave: Google wave is cool. It doesn’t solve any problems that any real people have but it does a lot of great things that developers get excited about. It includes embedded video, sound, and chat from multiple users that a user can enable playback from… Yeah, I was saying just last week how I wished I could do that. The only useful thing I’ve ever seen done with Google wave is the Pulp Fiction movie (1000% NSFW).
iPad: When the IPad first came out, I (like many others) complained that it was an oversized iphone with less functionality. However what we missed was that it really wasn’t for us. The iPad is for regular users, not developers or techno weenies. In other words, people–in fact, most people– want an internet appliance that just works. They don’t want to have to deal with nonsense like registries, print drivers, patches, updates, and so on. Why does everyone have a refrigerator in their house? Because it’s easy to to use! You plug it in and go. Imagine for a minute if you had to play with the evaporator driver or download and install a thermometer patch update every week. Your refrigerator “works” because 99% of the time it just does its job without any fiddling.
Google Buzz: Google assumed that everyone wanted to share all of the stuff they are doing, reading, and looking at with people they talk to. Because many Googlers have become victims of their own hubris, they assumed everyone is like them, wants to be like them, or should be like them. However when the realities of everyday life entered the equation, in the shape of something like an abusive ex-husband, it was a condition that didn’t exist in the artificial utopia of the Googleplex. Google failed to test the program in the real world and instead relied on the developer’s vision of what the users wanted. The result? Failure.

So how do you recognize when you are in this situation? If you, your developer, or anyone on your team makes these kind of statements, chances are strong that you are on the wrong path:

Can’t the users open their eyes and just read? The answer is right there in front of them.
The users need to use a little common sense. We can’t keep dumbing down the world for them or we’ll end up like (insert tv/movie/pop culture reference for stupid people here).
They use the term UX to mean user experience or UI to mean user interface in common everyday speech and would feel comfortable using it when speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

What can you do to prevent this kind of mistake from ruining your project? Here are some ideas:

In most cases, developers don’t make good team/project leaders. They carry with them the bias of wanting to be cool, respected developers. If you have or can find a developer who has a proven track record of placing user needs above cool programming features, ignore this recommendation.
User testing: find someone who is not involved in the project or, even better, get a NIF (non internet friend) to try out your website. Put them on the homepage and ask them to try and do what your primary goal is, whether that’s to create a gift registry, put something in a cart and checkout, find a specific piece of information, or something else. Whatever it is, ask them try and do it. If you can video tape them, that’s great; otherwise, watch without interacting and take notes.
Test different options. Use services like Crazyegg or Google multi variant testing to try out different options. See where users are and aren’t clicking then make adjustments based on data not on intuition. (disclosure: Crazyegg is an advertiser here)
Don’t make changes because they are cool, neat, interesting, or stroke the ego of your developers. Make changes that solve problems people have. This is one of the biggest complaints I have with Wordpress as a platform. They coddle developer’s whims instead of addressing real problems like security.

At the end of the day, you and everyone involved needs to understand that, for your project to succeed, it needs to solve a problem users have first and foremost. Stroking the ego of the CEO, making the marketing department look clever, or making a developer feel stimulated are not real goals.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Developers VS Users

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CrawlTrack: Tips and Techniques for Webmasters

Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - RSS Feeds — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:00:15 +0000

If you re looking for a web analytics program but don t want to use Google Analytics you might want to give CrawlTrack a look. This web application goes beyond simple analytics to help secure your website. Let s take a closer look….

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