Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

A little family time
Sure, I did some work today but, since the most notable things that come to mind tonight are family things, I thought I'd switch gears for a night.

My youngest daughter went off to school today, bummed out that "nobody plays April Fools' jokes anymore." Well, my oldest son (whose artistic skills are seen in my One Stop Web Support logo) gave her something to enjoy today as he announced in his blog that he had just gotten engaged (despite not even having a steady girlfriend).

My wife and youngest daughter have been debating all night what it means. Is it his April 1st way of saying that he got cast in a play where he'll play a married man? Is it part of one of his online role-playing games?

They love to speculate, so I'm trying to keep my mouth shut and let them have their fun. As I see it, an April Fool's joke doesn't need to have a big, logical explanation. It's just a joke. But it certainly provided some well-needed entertainment around here. Kudos, Jon, on an inventive April Fool's joke.

My youngest daughter is right, though. I just don't see much done with April Fool's Day anymore. Maybe it's part of how uptight we've gotten as a society. Everybody's so afraid of getting embarassed that no one's willing to take the chance of having a joke fall flat.

It all comes around to one of the elements of human behavior that is key to Internet marketing: fear of loss. It's one of the most powerful motivators, and I see it becoming ever stronger in society.

It seems that people are protecting themselves ever more carefully from situations that could result in some sort of real or imagined loss for them. And the threshold that causes it to kick into place is becoming ever lower.

I keep telling myself I need to write an article on it for the site, because it is so crucial. It would likely be a long one, though, and it's been so much easier to write articles on topics for which I've already put together detailed notes than to start from scratch on issues that I haven't really seen anyone else in marketing dealing with.

But I'll have to address it at some point, as well as the other two aspects of human behavior that I find crucial for marketers to understand: sense of lack and reaffirmation. They've been bouncing around in my head for some time and I need to set them down in some sort of logical presentation.

Oh, and then there are those observations from my screenwriting days: the human hunger for contrast and surprise. If I could do anything I wanted, I'd focus entirely on such human behavior topics. But I feel obligated to lay out the basics for new website owners before I get into areas that I (and my psychology major daughter - yes, another one) have never seen fully explored before.

I think there's a market out there for these kind of insights, but still I'm playing it safe. (Hmm, seems I'm not immune to fear of loss.) The time will come, though, for exploring new ground. It's something inside me that I feel I have to do.

A big part of starting your own business involves struggling to commit yourself fully to your dream and not settle for something less. Hopefully, I can use my own struggles to better understand the problems, and enrich my insights when I finally set myself to putting them out there for all the world to see.

It won't be easy to do that, though. Because revealing insights that are so much a part of me will always be accompanied by the fear of whether the world will reject them (and, by extension, me).

Right now, though, I'll opt for the warmth and safety of my bed.
Jeff

Fun with SEO
Today was a good day. I got a start on my next module of One Stop Web Support, namely the free ebooks I plan on offering, but most of the day went to search engine optimization on MasterVisions.

I targeted some key pages that are well optimized for moderately competitive keywords (100 to 1000 searches per day), but have never gotten ranked higher than the third page of search results. Since they were already pretty well optimized, I focused on comparing our pages to the top five ranked pages for those keywords and found some interesting patterns.

Most of the top ranking pages, at least for the keywords I'm targeting, make little use of heading text and usually target any heading text specifically on the keywords. Meta descriptions were surprisingly short (although I doubt that meta descriptions—long or short—have much influence on ranking). And keyword prominence in general was less crucial than I've found it to be in the past.

Are the search engine algorithms now considering keywords right at the beginning of an area as a sign of manipulation? I can see that finding the keyword right at the beginning of every type of area would raise a red flag for the spider that someone was trying to target that keyword.

I'll have to do some more research on that.

I rearranged the focus of the pages a bit and will compare them against the top ranking pages again tomorrow to see if I'm closer to their parameters. Then comes the waiting for the spiders to reevaluate and re-rank them.

Well, there's plenty else to do in the meantime—both with my site and MasterVisions. But it was fun digging into the research again.
Jeff

Feeling a little schizophrenic
Let's see now, what am I doing again? There was a lot of work for MasterVisions' gift site today, a little work on my eBay store sales, some work on my church's website, a quick peek at One Stop Web Support.

It was nice to have that single focus on those days recently when I was working exclusively on One Stop Web Support. Now things are back to "normal" where multiple assignments are competing for my attention.

Not that I'm complaining, but it certainly isn't an ideal situation I've put myself in. I'm glad to see my eBay store picking up in sales. I've let it sit while I attended to other projects. Suddenly it's selling the best it's ever sold. I wish I could put my finger on the reason for the sudden increase.

But that's the way it goes sometimes. You work your hardest, doing all the most customer-centered things, and hope that your efforts connect with the people you want to reach. Sometimes what you do hits them at just the right time. Other times, you just keep waiting. And sometimes the seeds you planted a while ago suddenly bear fruit at a time you least expect it.

As much as we'd like it to be, it's not automatic that you do this and the result is guaranteed. We're still dealing with people and people have the unfortunate habit of refusing to fit easily into our predictable formulas.

But hey, if it was all perfectly predictable, where would the challenges—and the satisfaction of meeting those challenges—be in it?
Unpredictably yours,
Jeff

Back to the day job
Having devoted the past few days to my own One Stop Web Support site, it was time to get back to working some billable hours. I worked on 1A Unique Gifts most of the day today and it seems that the obstacles that I experienced on my own site the past few days were entirely gone when I switched to Mark's site again. Weird, huh?

The tasks I did today I had expected would take at least two full days but, with the exception of one little loose end that needs a response from the website's tech support, I breezed right through it without a hitch. I was even able to throw in a little code cleanup and will still save Mark a bunch of money on the project.

Funny thing, though. I really was eager to get back to working on One Stop Web Support. Mentally, that seems to be my focus now. Which is great, as long as I start getting a return on it, which is still a ways away.

(a break in thought)

I guess there's no deep thoughts coming out tonight. Usually with this blog, I start off discussing the day until some more interesting topic suggests itself (although you'd be a better judge of whether my topics are all that interesting). Tonight, nothing's coming. Well, that's the way it is sometimes. Maybe I used up all the good things coming my way with an obstacle free day of work.

Or maybe it's an example of how adversity is our friend, unlocking our ability to look at things in a different way and grow from the different outlook on our surroundings. Well, if that's the case, my good day today has left me totally incapable of saying anything beyond the mundane tonight.

Hmm. That leads to an interesting question: should you wish me a good day tomorrow, or am I better off having a bad one?
Until then,
Jeff

Up... but down...
I was all set last night for the big upload of my redesigned site with a lot more content. I had even planned to get all philosophical in my blog and examine how easy it is to put off completing a project because a project that never gets completed never has a chance to fail—it retains its potential of magnificent success without ever having to prove itself one way or another.

But then it happened. I uploaded and I found the formatting had blown all to pieces. I mean, that site was UGLY. I worked on it until midnight before calling it a night and then went back to it today.

It's fixed now, but the celebratory mood I was preparing to enjoy last night just isn't there anymore. It was a painstaking process of testing my stylesheet line by line until it finally worked. Why it didn't work is beyond me. Every test I did of it showed it should have validated perfectly.

But I finally accepted that I'd have to settle for a little flabbier code than I would prefer in order to get the job done. Flabby and working is better than elegant and not working.

It's probably better on two counts, though, that my upload turned from celebration to fizzle. First of all, if the site was going to be rendered poorly by some browsers, it's better that it render poorly in my browser so I could see it and make adjustments rather than go on blissfully patting myself on the back while everyone else was seeing it as a total mess.

Secondly, it's probably better that I not get too caught up in the "completion" of my project because it's far from finished. I mean, I put up the minimum that I felt I could put up and still have it feel like a complete site. That's something to celebrate? There's a whole lot of work to do yet.

So maybe that's my philosophical subject to ramble about tonight instead: the fact that our work as small business owners on the web is never something we can afford to consider finished.

Every milestone we reach is only a stepping stone to the next one.
Jeff

Killing my baby
I had to do it. I had no choice. I had planned to try something different with One Stop Web Support—a brand new idea. It was my baby. It was going to be great. It would save visitors from a pet peeve of mine. It always irked me that I would start to read an article online, find it was mainly stuff I already knew, so I'd be wading through familiar material hoping to find a hidden gem of new information in it.

I decided I was going to do something unique with my site and provide two versions of each article—one a full version and one a summary with links to the full version, so that those who chose the summary could quickly switch to the full version if they wanted more details.

It was a lot more work, but I figured it would be worth it for visitors. There's a reason, though, that this format hasn't caught on on the Web: it doesn't work.

I tried to make it work for a couple of weeks, but I'd keep finding yet another compensation I would have to make to ensure that visitors would understand the format. Yet as I looked at the almost finished website today, it became clear that it just wasn't worth it.

Finding a way to fit an explanation of the format into each summary conflicted with the very purpose the format strove for: simplicity. And providing an entrance into the multiple directories (for each type of article) and making sure my navigation bar provided enough explanation of how the format worked was eating up too much valuable space.

So I killed my baby.

It's something we all have to do in business. At times, we get ideas that sound fantastic, but don't translate anywhere near as well into reality. The key is a willingness to abandon our own great ideas in favor of what's best for the customer.

I was caretaker for a church camp one summer. One of the groups that came up was a preteen girls' group. The leader had planned lots of fun for the girls, including an evening-long set of outdoor games. Unfortunately, that night mosquitos swarmed all over the girls. The girls were miserable, but the leader demanded they every game be completed.

Girls were crying, the leader was yelling, demanding that they have all the fun she had planned for them. The girls finally finished all the games and dashed for shelter in the lodge. Nobody had fun that night—not the girls, not the leader—but the "great idea" had to be carried out.

That's what we have to guard against. We have to honestly assess whether those great ideas we have benefit our customers and we have to abandon the ideas rather than bull-headedly forcing them down our customers' throats.

I'm not trying to pat myself on the head for being so brilliant. Today was one recognition of a failed idea. The test is in doing the same thing day after day. The test is keeping the focus squarely on what's best for the customer.
Jeff