Category: Managed Services

What Women’s Magazines Can Teach Content Curators
I have a secret. I learned how to curate content, at least partially, from women’s magazines. You remember those colorful monthly blasts of perfume samples and 8 Ways To Shock Your Lover? Idea-starved, we would hit Barnes and Noble and pick up $100 worth of magazines such as Elle, Redbook, Vogue and Cosmo. Women’s publications know how to SINK a hook, such as these recent hooks from Allure:

* 31 Party Hairstyles (note seasonality).
* 10 Sexiest Fragrances Right Now.
* 12 Beauty Gifts Under $50.
* 3 Beauty Tips To Survive Hangovers.

Source Segmentation
Here is how we learned to think about our sources:

EDGE: Cosmo

CULTURAL TRENDS: Elle,  Vogue 

MOMMY BLOGGER CONTENT: Redbook

WOMEN’S HEALTH ISSUES: Women’s Health

Lessons Learned
Here are just a few of the lessons we learned from women’s publications:

• Seasonality – riff on what is happening NOW.
• Creative Tie-Ins – to 3 macro themes: sex, health and love.
• Numbers – 8 Things To Do To A Naked Man is less exciting without the number (lifted from Cosmo, of course).
• Personas – Women’s publications are geared to certain personas.

It’s hard to understand how personas work in a vacuum. Here is an example of  very general personas for a women’s publication:

Gail, 20 – 29
Single, works hard, plays hard, dating and social. Cares about fashion, friends and romance despite cynical, tough exterior. Highly connected via mobile and social. Health-conscious and competitive. Not wedding obsessed, but has been to The Knot a few times and has ideas for the big day even if no one is on the horizon yet.

Pam, 30 – 40
Married and either thinking of having children or a mother already. Pam is also tethered to mobile and social but for different reasons. She coordinates much of her busy life via apps, friends and her iPad. Wants to keep spark in her relationship or marriage, but time compressed, not getting enough sleep and working hard. Some of this cohort may be working and managing a family, while new mothers may be working part time or focused on family. Some women make the lion’s share of the household income, so they may continue to work while dad stays home to raise children.

Rachel, 41 – 50
Children are established enough now that some of this cohort will return to work (if they left). Women who stayed at work want to achieve as much as possible in these years.

Paying for education and making sure she and her husband can retire is beginning to become a priority. May be on 2nd husband by now and managing an extended and combined family (some of his, some of hers). Not as restless or unsure in this period, worrying about fewer things but bigger things.

(etc…)

Personas are critical because they form a framework for your content curation and storytelling. Rachel needs different stories than Pam or Gail. Each persona is an archetype, a macro definition of characteristics shared by large portions of the cohort.

Age is a poor way of segmenting, but, as Passages author Gail Sheehy showed, we experience different things at different times in our lives. If you have buying data, you could form cohorts based on buying patterns.

You could also form cohorts on behavioral data. Basically, you can form a cohort, a segment or a persona on any data you have as long as there is some meaningful value. There is some argument that we live in a one to one time, making segments, personas and cohorts passé.

I disagree. We aren’t there yet. Soon we will be able to manipulate websites in real time (or near real time) based on predictive analytics and what is happening now. Until that day, personas help align marketers with customers, and women’s magazines teach the many tricks and secrets of content curation and content creation.

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What Is a Landing Page?

A “Landing Page” is any page created to receive traffic from some other marketing effort and convert that traffic, i.e., to cause  visitors to take beneficial actions such as:

• Buy Something.
• Request a Demonstration.
• Download a Whitepaper.
• Download an Ebook.
• Join an Email List.
• Watch a Video.
• View Additional Pages.

This post shares 10 secrets to help your landing pages convert better.

Landing Page Secrets 1: Create a Great Call to Action

Asking visitors to do something beneficial on your website is a “Call to Action” or CTA. (G) “Download Ebook” on the Marketo landing page example above is a CTA. CTA’s are important, but less is more. If you ask landing page visitors to take more than one action, conversions are likely to decrease.

Since landing pages are fed traffic from Pay Per Click, partner or affiliate websites, emails, social media marketing or some other marketing effort, landing pages have to do both less and more than “normal” web pages.

Landing pages need to do LESS than other webpages in that too much information and too many options swamp attention, and conversions decrease. Read The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz for more on why presenting fewer choices and less noise converts better. Landing pages should be QUIET, easy to take in, digest and act on.

Landing pages have to do MORE in that they are built to promote an action, a conversion. Conversion is tough. Getting a stranger to know your company well enough to develop TRUST enough to fill out a form is a big deal.

A great Call to Action is key to conversion on a landing page. Great CTAs are short (no more than 7 words) and include keywords. Keywords create a sense of, “Yes I am in the right place and this is what I want.” Note the repetition of Marketo’s Call to Action (G) above. Marketo uses text, a large blue heading and a button.

I love the Marketo landing page pictured above, but I wouldn’t mind seeing a keyword in the main CTA. “Download Ebook” may be the only thing a visitor reads. Without a keyword such as “Download Social Marketing Ebook” or “Download SMM Ebook” in the main CTA, they risk losing some conversions.

Landing Page Testing Note
Every element on a landing page should be tested, especially something as important as the CTA. CTAs are so important that you should never STOP testing them. Move your winners into a “control position”, and then attempt to beat those. A new CTA beats control when it consistently converts better.

Examples of great landing page testing (get on email lists for these companies to observe great landing pages):

Dell.com
SalesForce.com
Marketo.com

Landing Page Secrets 2: Sell to the CTA No More

Perhaps the most common landing page mistake is SELLING a visitor with data. Many landing page creators try too hard to sell beyond the Call to Action. They load charts, graphs and novels of information into landing pages. Loading too much information on any webpage is selling beyond the action you need and is a common conversion killer.

On most landing pages, you ONLY need your visitor to fill out a form or share information for a white paper. Do only what is necessary to create that conversion. Landing pages should be quietly confident, have a single CTA and avoid overselling the Call to Action.

Landing Pages also need emotional hooks. Note how Marketo tells a short story (E) followed by bullets (F) with a Call to Action (text) pointing to the “Get Ebook” button and form (G).

Landing Page Secrets 3: Create Emotional Hooks

Humans have a primordial limbic system. Our “lizard brain” kept us alive when we lived in caves and could be dinner. Now, human limbic systems fire primitive “fight or flight” messages when challenged. Conversion is always a form of challenge. Amy Africa, in her presentation to the Conversion Conference in Chicago, shared research on how stressful visitors to websites find the act of conversion.

Emotional hooks tweak our ancient lizard brains in familiar patterns: fear, greed, sex, food, babies. Saw a great example of this today from Eloqua: The headline on the front page that linked to the article was “40 Must-See Marketing Charts”. The emotional hook is fear, the fear of being left out of the group of marketers who have seen Eloqua’s charts.

The fear of being left out is powerful online. We Internet marketers have all missed significant marketing movements in the last ten years. So much has changed so fast that no one could keep up with everything, so there is a collective Internet marketing sore spot about being left out. Creating great emotional hooks is about curating what is happening in the world and being consistent with content on the page.

Current Marketo Headline Hook Example: “Optimize Your Social Chanel for Lead Generation”

Here are some examples that are more emotional:

“Be a Hero, Optimize Your Social Channel for Lead Gen”

“Make More Money, Optimize Your Social Channel for Lead Gen”

“Don’t Miss SMM, Optimize Your Social Channel for Lead Gen”

“Q: Can Social be Used for Lead Generation? A: Yes”

Hooks are related to WHO the landing page is designed for. You need different hooks for Analysts, Managers, Directors and C levels. Actually, you rarely reach a C level with a landing page, so it’s better to create hooks for the people entrusted to find solutions (A,D, M levels). IT people need different hooks than Marketing, so know who you want to reach and create relevant hooks.

Landing Page Secrets 4: Create Mystery

When an Internet marketer doesn’t know the answer to a question, what do they do? They search for and find the answer. When we read unknown words and language in a context we understand, we invest in finding out what we don’t know. We don’t want to be left out. We don’t want to last in line. We don’t want to appear dumb (or to BE dumb).

There is a fine line between mystery and confusion when creating great landing pages. Mystery is, “I’m intrigued and feel I can answer the question with minimal effort.” Confusion is a different state.

Confused customers do many things, but buying is rarely one of them. Landing pages walk a fine line between creating the right amount of mystery without creating frustration or confusion.

You can call things such as Social Media Marketing by an acronym (ex, SMM) if you explain the use somewhere in your copy. But don’t feel like you must provide every answer to every question. The best landing pages are minimal; they sell to their call to action and no more.

Landing Page Secrets 5: Make Offers

Many B2B companies are nervous about making offers. Offers are key to creating effective and highly converting landing pages.

Offers have three elements:

• Something of value traded for something of value (time, money, information).
• Something relevant and segmented to the audience driven to the page.
• A DEADLINE

The Marketo example has implied benefits, such as more money from social lead generation and being up to speed on the latest in social media marketing, but Marketo’s landing page assumes a lot.

They assume “Marketo-speak” can be translated into language the audience cares about. “Generate leads outside your database” is a great example of “inside baseball” language. That may be the very definition of lead generation, but a more clear connection to universal benefits (more profits, less costs) wouldn’t hurt.

Existing Marketo Bullet: “How to use social activities to generate leads outside your current database and community.”

Making Marketo bullet more specific:
How to use social activities such as Facebook campaigns and Twitter posts to capture “new to file” names and the new bottom line revenue they represent.

This bullet is still wordy and may need to be two bullets instead of one, but by being a little more specific the claim gains weight and authority.  Pluck the universal benefits (more money, less costs) as often as possible.

Landing Page Secrets 6: DEADLINES

When something that is relevant to our jobs, lives or families is about to go away, we act. We BUY with EMOTION, but we justify with logic, and a deadline is a great piece of LOGIC to justify an emotional decision. Why do sales end? To create deadlines and a sense of urgency.

Sales end because, despite our higher level brains knowing another sale is sure to follow, our lizard brains kick into high gear in order to not lose out, to beat the deadline.

Internet Marketing Deadline Secret
The Marketo eBook offer would be stronger with a deadline. Even if Marketo brings the same book back in a few weeks, today’s offer is stronger with a deadline. CTAs without deadlines are half as effective as call to actions with deadlines. The problem with deadlines online is 3 days is a long time.

If your offer has a week or more to go, use general “offer ends soon” language. When you get into the last 3 days, change your copy to “Free eBook offer ends in 3 days.” Follow with 2 and then 1. CTA’s with deadlines are more work, but they convert BETTER, and they more than pay for the extra creative work you need to power the deadline.

Landing Page Secrets 7: Tag Your Brand, Create a Claim

Even if you don’t “tag” your brand, typically you should attach tags on landing pages. Tags are short descriptions, usually immediately below a brand’s logo, that illuminate a brand’s meaning and value.

Logos are usually top left on a page. Here is how I would tag Marketo in the example above:

Marketo (logo)
Leader in Innovative Inbound Marketing

Tags should tell a mini-story and support important keywords. Tags are constant, i.e., they don’t change with the creative on the rest of the page. Tags apply to Marketo’s core truth. You can create a brand tag out of anything, but here are powerful ideas to use in a tag:

• When your company was the first at something.
• When your company is recognized by authoritative voices as a leader.
• When your Unique Selling or Value Proposition is strong.
• Awards, if awards are rare in your vertical.
• Superlative-type values (biggest, best value, first, top, leader).

Landing Page Secrets 8: White Space Is Your Friend

If you have 5 elements on a landing page, test by reducing down to 3. I like forms on the right of “hero” images (a hero is the largest image on a webpage) and well above the fold. White space is one way a landing page projects quiet confidence, so use lots of it, as Marketo demonstrates in the example above.

Landing Page Secrets 9: Social Shares & SEO

Back in the day, we kept our landing pages OUT of Google, but this was before Google’s float and social shopping. I think allowing the search engine spider in has merit if the page provides value back to YOUR website, but we originally kept landing pages out because we wanted the freedom to modify, add to and replace them.

Post Google’s Panda algorithm, frequent page changes are good, but be sure to respect the rank you earn. If your landing page earns a PageRank3 about social optimization, you shouldn’t change the page to focus on ecommerce checkouts. Once rank is established, you must be true to how that rank was established or risk penalties. If you add social shares and social signals to your landing pages, as Marketo does in the example above, you will want to keep the page– So make sure you don’t change the content by more than 30% or so.

If you don’t want to keep the page, you will be doing way too many 301 redirects to keep up with the social shares into the page. If you are done with the page, eliminate it from any navigational support and watch the PageRank. Once you see PR decay to 2 or lower, you can safely ask Google to eliminate the page. Never GIVE things to Google and then TAKE THEM AWAY or substantially change them.

Other Social Signals
I would consider including a “Members Who’ve Viewed” section too. If I see people I know or gurus I trust have read the page and downloaded the paper, I am more likely to do so. Social shares express a desire to know you without going all the way to a demo or a download. I might even share your page BEFORE I download your paper, and such an action should be treated as a “soft conversion”.

Landing Page Secrets 10: More, Faster, Better & People

Once you start creating landing pages, you should set aggressive analysis and creation goals. If you are creating one landing page a week now, double it next month and then double it again the next. Keep on that MORE schedule, because landing pages teach you more faster when you create more of them.

Keep your content keyword silos clearly defined. You may create landing pages on Internet Marketing, Website Design and Mobile Marketing. Test within each silo to see what combination of Headline, Call to Action and Story receives the most conversions.

People Sell Better
The other big bone I would pick with Marketo is they never use people to sell their ideas. People sell better than things, as I noted in People Not Things Sell.  Marketo could add a picture of their CEO or a well-known analyst in the field. Landing pages with people command more attention, feel warmer and convert better.

People can also create confusion. If you primarily want engagement on the page (which you don’t on most landing pages), face any people looking out at the visitors. If you want conversion, face people at the CTA. For instance if Marketo’s CEO were on this page, he should be looking at the Download eBook CTA because visitor eyes follow his.

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“Never engage the same enemy for too long, or he will adapt to your tactics.”  – Carl von Clausewitz, military theorist

The Long Tail Of Everything

When I was a Director of Ecommerce, I noticed something fascinating. At the end of  every year I created a Year End Report. Creating deep dives into our nine categories, I noticed that no matter how small I cut the data there was always a Pareto distribution. There was always an 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 Rule Of Everything

Pareto distribution or a “power log” is another name for the 80/20 rule, a well-known marketing rule. The 80/20 rule says that 80% of your website’s gross and net will come from 20% of your Stock Keeping Units (SKUs). A handful of your products will contribute most of your sales and profits.

Pareto’s Smooth Distribution

I started thinking of 80/20 data like fractals. Fractals describe the apparent rough math of natural things like coastlines. What appears rough at a distance becomes smooth and repeating. On closer inspection, any coastline becomes a fractal.

Same is true for your Internet analytics. Inside the apparent randomness of your traffic, conversion and abandonment data is the smooth bottom of a Pareto distribution. Every Key Performance Indicator has a Pareto distribution:

• 20% of your referring sources contribute 80% of your traffic.
• 20% of your cart abandonments account for 80% of your lost revenue.
• 20% of your visitors are generating 80% of your website’s purchases, visits and contributions.

Why do Pareto distributions form?

Internet marketers are more weathermen and women than marketers. We use intuition and statistics to predict, merchandise and design. Much of what will actually happen is unknowable until the Internet’s rolling NOW creates fronts, storms and low-pressure systems.

Reasons clusters become long tail Pareto distributions:

• Macro signals such as culture, advertising and events feed clustering.
• We buy, read, or watch the same things at the same times (less and less, but still there).
• Micro signals such as Word of Mouth (WOM) and social shopping help create clusters.
• Retailers read data and merchandise to reinforce clusters.
• Meme creation, cultural ideas that become stronger with repetition.
• Memes act like networks rewarding hub creation where the “rich get richer”.

Recognizing Clusters

Velocity is how to identify clusters as they form. Calculate velocity by dividing sales by time. If you sell 1 golden widget a day every day for a month, then your monthly velocity of golden widgets is 1 per day or 30 a month. Let’s leave seasonal effects aside for a moment.

If your new silver widget sells 2 per day every day for a month, then you can calculate the velocity of this simple 2 product “category” as 3 per day (1 golden widget, 2 silver widgets per day).

If your new bronze widget starts at 1 per day then 2 per day then 6 per day, a cluster is forming. At 6 per day, your new bronze widget is moving twice as fast as the category average and is becoming part of your “head”, one of if not the most popular widget you sell.

James Bond’s Asymmetrical Marketing

** Spoiler Alert. If you haven’t seen Skyfall yet, you might want to skip this paragraph. **

Spies think differently. They must create feints and dodges, or their enemies will know how to defeat them. In Skyfall, the new Bond thriller movie, there is a typical use of asymmetrical marketing. When Bond can’t hit the broad side of a barn, fails his re-institution examination and is approved anyway, Bond and  M create asymmetrical marketing, lowering expectations to smoke out their enemy.

Amazon’s Asymmetrical Marketing

Symmetrical marketing wants to maximize scale, velocity and Google’s “rich get richer” algorithm by feeding the monster. Internet retailers “feed the monster” with promotions such as Free Shipping, Buy One Get One Free and % off. These are well worn paths now. These are examples of common symmetrical Internet marketing.

There is a big problem with symmetrical Internet marketing, and it can be described in a single word – AMAZON. At the Raleigh Internet Summit Conference this week, I heard an interesting report. Amazon’s algorithm was battling Sears on a hot product, a product so hot a clear cluster was forming. Amazon’s algorithm changed prices on this product 9 times in one day, beating Sears with each change.

Sears is the definition of a symmetrical marketer. Sears has large distribution centers, lots of physical inventory and prices that are hard to manipulate. Amazon is designed to be a Lego block with variable pricing that is adaptable to any situation. Amazon has three goals in mind:

• Win Google page 1 listings in bulk.
• Control market pricing on any product with velocity.
• Create a platform for asymmetrical marketing and price arbitrage.

Brand Vampires

Amazon is the head online brand vampire. Talk to any popular brand, any brand with velocity, and ask them about Amazon. As a group they HATE Amazon, especially those whose sales are dependent on Amazon. Amazon is the online Wal-Mart – powerful enough to make markets and kill brands.

Brand Marketers hate Amazon because every sale to the largest Internet retailer puts one more nail in their brand’s coffin. As with any vampire, Amazon doesn’t kill its host right off. Amazon accelerates a brand’s bell curve of market acceptance. Instead of a gentle bell curve, Amazon makes a brand’s acceptance line go almost straight up as Amazon’s traffic and link dominance kick a brand’s acceptance into overdrive.

Amazon is not in the “nurture” business. Amazon is in the conversion business. Amazon doesn’t care if they make money on your popular brand. In fact, its mission is to run your brand up and then right back down the product acceptance bell curve so fast your brand spins like a top (see vampire effect chart above).

Amazon’s algorithm controls market pricing for some simple reasons:

• Because they can (their massive Internet scale has many advantages).
• Because controlling velocity and market prices creates the biggest feint in Internet retailing (see below for explanation).
• Because controlling market pricing and velocity is key to Amazon’s real goal, asymmetrical marketing with the highly profitable Amazon Partner Network.

Amazon controls market prices because control is key to their real profit center – the Amazon Partner Network. Setting market prices means Amazon is the de facto standard for price checks and the showrooming traffic price checks bring. The irony Amazon creates by becoming the biggest price-checking engine on products it could care less about selling hasn’t escaped me.

Amazon is rolling up the market, and they are willing to pay any price to continue to feed the highly profitable rest of their ecosystem. Amazon uses your website’s popular products as loss leaders. Attempt to play Amazon, an asymmetrical player, with a symmetrical Internet marketing approach and you LOSE.

Winning  With Asymmetrical Internet Marketing

I started the ScentTrail Marketing blog in 2007 with a single purpose – to learn how Google’s and Amazon’s algorithms work. I selected the term “scenttrail” because it only had 4 documents returned in 2007 and because I could write the marketing definitions for the term.

There were marketers who were discussing ScentTrail, the breadcrumbs we leave for recognition we are where we are supposed to be, but there was no dominant owner of the term. “Scenttrail” was a long tail keyword with little search demand and few competitors. That didn’t last long.

As I began to “put impressions into the marketplace” to quote a Warner Brothers Internet marketer from the Expion Social Marketing conference, the keyword “ScentTrail” gained traffic and pages. When we hit 30,000 documents returned on Google, Amazon’s algorithm fired its first ad.

“Looking for books on ScentTrail, Go to Amazon” was the generic business rule ad they tested. Business rules are coded instructions usually in the form of “if, then” statements such as, “If there are at least 30,000 documents returned, then fire a generic ad.”

The first “ScentTrail” Amazon ad test clearly failed (didn’t bring in enough money). After four days, the ad went away. Then a woman wrote a book about perfume ScentTrail, and the smack down competition for Google position was on in earnest.

ScentTrail Marketing stood toe to toe with Amazon and fought for Google’s heart and attention. This was pre-Google float, so we were playing for absolute positioning on the term, and for several months my marketing blog was losing.

Here is what I did to reclaim the #1 position (currently #2 behind my @ScentTrail twitter page):

• Wrote specific ScentTrail defining content such as:

• ScentTrail Manifesto.
• ScentTrail Definition.
• What is ScentTrail?.

• Drove social links into that new content.
• Some of the social links were picked up.
• Would randomly Tweet or share on Facebook.

• Strengthened internal linking on ScentTrail.
• Added ScentTrail anchor text links on a few related pages (this could be considered “over optimization” now but worked then).
• Drove links randomly from emails and other blog posts to ScentTrail pages.

• Created content at a withering pace (considering there wasn’t much money in the term for Amazon).
• Faster Pace – created more social shares than Amazon or the perfume writer.
• Outlasted, out-wrote and out-linked them over the long term.
• Played tortoise to their hare.
• Didn’t panic, stayed calm and carried on.

How to Easily Create Asymmetrical Marketing

Asymmetrical marketing sounds more complicated than it is. Asymmetrical is a fancy way of saying, “Do things differently than your competitors.” Here are a few of my favorite asymmetrical marketing tactics:

• Create new SKUs by merchandising popular products together in a unique “basket” approach.
• Create unique content, tell better stories about your products that have velocity.
• Form a User Generated Content (UGC) tribe around your products with reviews , polls, contest and games.
• Focus email marketing to win the traffic wars on your products. Only try to win for a day, then for 2 days and so on.
• Add a new points currency via gamification (the best, since these incentives create a new currency YOU control, and gamification is cheaper than other ideas).
• Add a loyalty program (earn points, VIP pricing, VIP offers).
• Free Prize Inside – use the Cracker Jack model and give something unique to reward purchase from you rather than someone else.

Asymmetrical Internet Marketing and KPIs

Testing is the key to all great Internet marketing, but testing tends to reward incremental improvements. Asymmetrical Internet marketing needs more time and different Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Here are important asymmetrical KPIs:

• New to file customers gained.
• New engagement (new visits or purchases) from lapsed customers.
• Traffic gains from new sources.
• Traffic gains on new terms.
• Traffic gains on old terms from new sources.
• Inbound links gained.
• Increase in core heuristic measures (time on, pages viewed, return visits).
• Soft conversions gained (list signups = a “soft” conversion).
• Cash conversions gained.
• ROI (cost of asymmetrical vs. gross benefit, and be generous).

If you run your business with $3 to $1 as your lowest Internet marketing ROI, then you should lower it for your asymmetrical efforts. Lower your ROI to as close to $1 to $1 as you are comfortable operating. Treat your asymmetrical Internet marketing like junk bonds. Expect most will fail outright, and feed and nurture any asymmetrical effort that demonstrates strong ROI.

Broaden your definition of Internet marketing success. If your competitors are tied in knots and don’t know what you will do next, count that as a big victory for your asymmetrical Internet marketing. When in doubt, do whatever is causing the doubt again and compare results. Blow on any ember and keep increasing the pace of your asymmetrical marketing (more, faster, better).

Think like James Bond, and your asymmetrical Internet marketing will increase your chances of winning new hearts and minds, vexing competitors and increasing market share for the good guys.

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Internet Summit: Startup Summit

As I’m attending Startup Summit, part of Raleigh’s Internet Summit, it feels appropriate to discuss my 4 startups. Have you ever failed as an entrepreneur? This post looks at how and why the four companies I have created (so far) “failed,” what other entrepreneurs can learn to avoid the traps, and some pain startup entrepreneurs should avoid if at all possible.

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Company 1: Found Objects & FoundObjects.com

Years in Existence: 10

Date Range: 1993 – 2003

Gross Revenue: $16,000,000+

Startup Capital: $20,000 (from my 401k)

Biggest Accomplishment: Created multimillion-dollar markets for Magnetic Poetry Kits and Zen Boards. Made the first sales of both gifts and represented them through their startup phases.

Closed: 2004

Failed Because:
Found Objects didn’t understand what business it was in. The company believed it was a specialty gift distributor when it was really an information company. The Internet was about to level the karma of middlemen in general and specialty gift distributors in particular.

In the end, the only thing with value was the website, FoundObjects.com launched in 1999. Other companies such as BoingBoing.net and DailyCandy.com were just starting and demonstrate where FoundObjects.com should have gone.

The costs associated with running a warehouse don’t favor small niche companies. When we moved out of our house into a small warehouse, we tripled our fixed costs just as our largest revenue partner, David Kapell (inventor of the Magnetic Poetry Kit), was stolen away by other “gift reps.”

Startup Lesson:
Know what business you are really in, don’t increase fixed costs until it is an absolute must, and then do so carefully. The answer is usually in there already, so look harder and make one more pivot.

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Company 2: NeoGoGo Games

Years in Existence: 4

Gross Revenue: $119,000

Startup Capital: $40,000 (from Found Objects profits)

Biggest Accomplishment: Created the Poetryslam magnetic board game, a Scrabble-like game played with words instead of letters.

Failed Because:
Board games are tough. They require “family time,” and what little there is of that tends to go to Milton Bradley (such as Monopoly, Scrabble). We printed 5,000 games. We private labeled games for The Museum Company (now also RIP) and created 6 “Add On” kits with different word sets. We were lucky to get our money back on the 5,000 games. It took three years, more than 50 “in store” events where I sat at a table hacking Poetryslam games (all kinds of fun LOL).

We were also left with more than 1,000 “Add On” kits with business, art and science words and no way to sell them. I read a story about the surrealist art movement. The story shared how surrealists loved to play a game where they cut up a newspaper, put the words in a bag, would draw them out in random order and then create sentences.

I pivoted, naming the add-on kits Dada Box (via a small lunch bag labeled with an ink stamp) and including printed instruction cards. Dada Box sold faster than Poetryslam. By the time we made the last sale, we’d recovered just about everything we spent and didn’t have the heart to continue. My co-founder and I got divorced, and Dada Box was lost.

If that last sentence sounded a tad bitter, I apologize. Gift reps had their karma leveled too, so we learned valuable lessons. Lessons that have me here writing this post today. What was the most important lesson from our Found Objects experience? Know what business you are in, or about to be in, and play at least five moves ahead of the next market move.

Startup Lesson:
When something shows signs of life, feed it. Don’t let the failure of X push you off of the success of Y.

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Company 3: Story Glasses

Years in Existence: 3

Date Range: 2000 – 2003

Gross Revenue: $20,000

Startup Capital: $5,000 (from Found Objects profits)

Biggest Accomplishment: Created cool-looking glasses.

Failed Because:
At the time, the technology to print on drinking glasses was variable and hard to find in the US. The print runs necessary to test concepts were large, requiring lots of capital risk. There was no Café Press then to test concepts prior to full launch, and there were considerable competitors in existence, including Crate and Barrel (famous for knocking off good ideas).

Startup Lesson: You aren’t in business alone. Make sure your potential partners and stakeholders are viable, since your future is tied to theirs..

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Company 4: ScentTrail Marketing

Years in Existence: 6 (and counting)

Date Range: 2007 – present

Gross Revenue: $0

Startup Capital: $0 (time and sweat equity)

Biggest Accomplishment: A handful of Google #1 organic listings and more than 116,000 views from more than 40,000 visitors.

ScentTrail Marketing Plan:
ScentTrail Marketing is a blog I created to learn how Google thinks. I never intended it to be anything other than a sandbox to experiment with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but ScentTrail Marketing is now showing signs of a network effect.

A network effect is achieved when your creations do more and more as you contribute less and less work. Network effects pull in the social nets of others into your sphere of influence. The chief traffic cop of this content is Google, so achieving organic #1 listings is what drives a network effect.

ScentTrail Marketing, if it is to survive and scale beyond me, needs a platform approach. Platforms marshal UGC (User Generated Content) to increase the volume and presence of a website. The demand for content is greater than you or your team can ever supply, making UGC the key.

The plan is to create a New ScentTrail Marketing capable of multi-author contribution, with common avenues for UGC such as reviews, comments and profiles, then add a gamification layer to promote engagement.

Ultimately, ScentTrail Marketing is in the same position as most of Atlantic BT’s customers. It needs to open its doors to input while reducing the friction that prevents people from joining and contributing.

Summary of Startups: Four Ways to Redefine Failure 
Hope these lessons help. I read a great thought by Eckhart Tolle in his book A New Earth. “Whatever is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening,” Tolle wrote. This sentence should help you think of whatever you’ve been able to create as a success, since it got you here now. Never give up, keep learning, and share, share and share some more.

Speaking of sharing– If you have startup lessons from your business, please share, and I will curate it in here.

Thanks, Marty

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As we press toward Web 3.0 the speed of Internet marketing is daunting. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted at the Techonomy Conference in 2010 that we create as much content every two days now as from the dawn of man until 2003.  As information explodes, time collapses. We must do more, faster, with less. I’m convinced open source is an important answer to Internet marketing’s need for speed and openness.

The leading provider of open source support, Red Hat, reached a milestone yesterday. Red Hat received top security certification from the U.S. federal government, as reported by @WRALTechWire today (and picked up in our Atlantic BT Daily). Congratulations to our neighbors at Red Hat. Red Hat’s win is a big win for open source programming too.

Great News for Open Source

Red Hat is a great local company; they are moving to downtown Raleigh after years at NC State’s Centennial Campus. More than just the pride of seeing a great local company recognized, Red Hat’s recognition, after what we are sure is a grueling process, is a large statement about the growing importance of the open source philosophy. The U.S. government’s vote for Red Hat is also a vote for open source.

What Is Open Source?

Open source programs share source code and other resources that are normally reserved to one company via secrecy and copyright. Open source creates a hive-like ecosystem by allowing products such as Magento’s e-commerce platform (Atlantic BT is a Bronze Magento Support Partner) to rapidly respond to evolving needs from a variety of customers including retailers and the military.

Open source also marshals the wisdom of crowds. There is no top-down authority to slow open source development by attempting to direct its efforts. If a programmer believes they can improve Magento, WordPress or FireFox (the top 3 open source applications), they write some code to fill the need.

At its inception, Red Hat understood an important open source problem. Support and market coherence were needed if  Fortune 1,000 companies were to embrace open source software in their operations. Red Hat’s competitors include Microsoft and Oracle, companies highly invested in expensive, copyright-protected software. Red Hat helped create an alternative, an alternative now used by many companies within the “Fortune 1,000” list of largest companies in the world.

Platforms vs. Websites

Not long ago I had an epiphany. I realized that closed-loop, solipsistic websites are dead and gone. In Platforms vs. Websites, I shared recently-concluded gift industry research showing that Etsy.com had more than 100 million pages listed in Google.

RedEnvelope.com, a favorite and an online gift retailer pioneer, had a fraction of Etsy’s presence. Etsy.com is a platform that marshals and depends on User Generated Content (UGC). Etsy.com is a platform where craftspeople create “stores” to sell their homemade products. Other social platforms that marshal UGC include: Facebook, Twitter, Scoop.it and even Spotify. I wouldn’t be surprised if Etsy.com is based on open source code.

Open Source Advantages

Combine the platform idea with wisdom of crowds, and powerful ecosystems emerge. These “user communities” create wisdom of crowds benefits faster and cheaper than most command and control companies. It turns out the key to creating success in the marketplace is to gain the trust, confidence and love of others (a common Internet marketing need, too). When a programmer creates a company to develop Magento or WordPress plugins on their own dime, it is a powerful statement in favor of emergence and hive-like wisdom of crowds.

Yesterday the federal government joined open source developers to make a powerful statement about the need for speed when they awarded Red Hat their highest security clearance. Government systems, like Internet marketing, need to evolve faster and faster. There is one key difference: Our lives and livelihoods depend on government systems, so it is exciting and confidence-building when the government embraces open source, Red Hat and the ever faster speed of change we Internet marketers know so well.

Congratulations, Red Hat!

How URL Management Can Hurt SEO

This week’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tip comes from a good friend and a great SEO. Bill Ross runs SEO for a Chicago agency. Bill also created LinchpinSEO to answer questions and share articles from friends. Read my article about SEO and the Amazon Paradox BEFORE you sign up to become an Amazon partner (lol). I owe Bill a followup to discuss Amazon’s same day shipping, but not today.

Today’s post is about URL management. Quick note: URL stands for Universal Resource Locator and it is your web address, so when you see “URL,” think website name such as www.Atlanticbt.com (URLs become numbers too, but that is another post for another time).  After Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithm updates, what you don’t know about URL management can hurt your website’s SEO.

Bill outlines excellent tips for URL management in his How to Do Site Consolidation the Right Way article. I learned about URL management from SEO Guru Bruce Clay. Here is a quick summary of what I learned during Clay’s week long SEO training:

Marty’s SEO URL Management Tips

• Never redirect every domain you own to your core domain.
• Never create small sites that do nothing but link to your main site.
• Never interlink to excess between properties you own.

Even if you are smart enough to play the variable IP game, the pattern of your linking can be seen clearly now post-Panda. I understand how to randomize IPs, and I don’t do it anymore. I don’t play games with URLs because Google knows, the math always wins and it was a pain. The over, what can be gained, is small compared to the under, what you stand to lose, when you play URL games.

When you create an external website with keywords in the URL, one good reason to create a “snapsite” for example, NEVER link to other properties you own without a disallow (code that tells Google’s spider NOT to follow the link). If Google senses you are trying to multiply one site into two, they will divide your PR.

If you were a PR6 on your core website and Google detects you are playing games, your PR6 website could become a PR3 and your new site a PR3. You DO NOT want this. PR  is equal to strength, and 6 is more that 2×3 in this context (more like the 3 squared, due to how hard it is to move up the PR ladder). If you create a snapsite, it must establish its own identity.

BTW, adding a site is not just 2x the work. When we added a robust alternative site after observing our traffic was splitting due to inconsistent branding, it was the work of one site SQUARED to manage two active websites. This is why that second website can start to look like your other properties. Everything online is MATH, and you don’t fool math forever. Even my black hat SEO friends know they have a limited window to have a tactic “game the system” and gain SEO traction. Google’s magical algorithm always wins, so wear a white hat and manage your URLs with care.

One last tip I learned from SEO Guru Bruce Clay. In my last company we owned hundreds of URLs that all pointed to our main website. Never do that, because pointing inactive URLs to lock down search was a common spam tactic. Hold those URLs and point to a junk URL that doesn’t matter. There isn’t any benefit to pointing non-active URLs anywhere, but there is a HUGE potential penalty to pointing inactive but owned URLs to your crown jewels.

Interlinking Lesson Applies to SM Accounts Too

If you have multiple social media (SM) accounts. be careful about how you inter-link. I manage a handful of Twitter accounts. I’ve learned the hard way to send original Tweets. I don’t RT my content in the same way over and over. I NEVER RT my links with my accounts either. If I tweet something on @atlanticbt, I don’t RT that Tweet with @Scenttrail. Google and Twitter know I manage both because it is in the math. When I tweet, there is a signature. Twitter and Google have my “fingerprints”  in their models, so be careful what you touch and how in social media marketing.

Facebook’s Link Out Rule

If you have a solid Facebook presence, make sure you are linking your hard-won Facebook PageRank, the number Google gives every website from 0 to 10 with ten being best, out to properties you own. If you don’t link out to sites you own, you just make Facebook richer, and they don’t need it. If you send links out out, make sure you consistently create content IN Facebook too. Never ONLY link out, as that will kill your Facebook rank.

Finally, I just realized something. I discuss PageRank frequently, but many reading these posts may not know how to find their web page’s PR (you have PR for every page on your website). There are a number of free Page Rank Checker tools. I use PageRankChecker.info, because it is free and gives results I trust. Put your URLs into the box, type the captcha, and these tools show your current PR. PR fluctuates every 90 days too, so don’t think because your homepage was a PR5  a year ago it still is; check PR frequently.

Read Bill’s excellent Site Consolidation the Right Way article to learn more.

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