SEO Werkt!

As you know, Wikipedia nofollows all their external links, so links from Wikipedia should have no impact on your rankings – be it positive or negative.

A WebmasterWorld thread have some SEOs disagreeing with that…

The resume is a tough nut to crack. You don’t have much time to make an impression, so you want to make sure you’re worth a second look. Productivity and ideas blog 99U has a few suggestions for making a resume more creative and compelling: More »

It’s interesting to watch the impact that the mobile device explosion has on various industry verticals, and especially so in e-commerce – a market that has yet to take full advantage of the platform by offering mobile-friendly websites and apps. But that’s not stopping people from shopping on mobile by any means. According to new data from e-commerce technology company Monetate, top e-commerce websites receive 3.31% of their total visits from Android smartphones, which is up from 1.76% last year. iPhones, on the other hand, account for 5.41% of those sites’ total traffic, up from 2.45% a year earlier.

But even though the iPhone base delivers more visitors, it’s Android users who convert better. 1.26% of Android users convert as compared with 1.00% of those on iPhone.

Here’s another figure to throw into the mix: on tablets, Android users again are converting at higher percentage points, with 3.58% converting compared with iPad’s 3.19%. However, the iPad is driving the most tablet traffic to these sites. 88.31% of tablet visits to these e-commerce sites are from iPad, while Kindle Fire and other Android tablets now account for 10% of the market share. Seeing the chart below, you can tell that Android has made some headway into eating into iPad’s dominance here.

We asked execs at Monetate why they thought Android users were converting better (percentage wise), and they noted that the difference between the platforms was nominal, but interesting. They’re not sure why it’s the case, however. Could it be that iOS users have other means to shop, such as through native apps? Monetate CMO Kurt Heinemann hedges a guess.

“Android devices come in many different configurations whereas the iPhone only comes in one size, he says. “A large portion of Android devices that have been released over the last year have had larger screens and provide a better web surfing experience than a smaller iPhone. With a larger screen and the ability to display more website real estate the user has a more comfortable and less frustrating experience which results in higher conversion.”

In case you’re wondering what websites we’re talking about here, Monetate can’t talk in specific out of respect for its customers’ privacy, but it aggregates data from its top  150+ e-commerce customers and samples from over 100 million shopping experiences to reach these figures. Its customer lineup includes QVC, Urban Outfitters, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Best Buy and Brooks Brothers, to give you an idea of what types of sites may be included in this study.

While Apple and Google battle for market share in terms of traffic, the company’s report found that mobile is one of the fastest-growing customer segments today, and it’s now suggesting to its customers that they experiment with offering alternative ways to allow visitors to checkout without having to pull out a credit card. For example, try PayPal, Monetate tells its customers. It’s also stressing to its e-commerce customers that they need to invest in both web analytics and usability testing to make their sites work better for mobile shoppers because, by doing so, they have a real opportunity to increase their average order value significantly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about you. I want to be helpful. I want to do more to see you successful. This is what’s on my mind.

More and more over the last handful of years, I’ve found that my work with larger companies and my work with solo and smaller businesses is aligning around certain core elements, and that the parts of the puzzle that both fascinate me and that I find to have the most business value for you are almost (almost!) identical for the big guys and the little guys. I wanted to take a moment and give you a preview of what’s to come for me and my business plans for the next many months (give or take any course correction that happens along the way).

In Pursuit of Human Business

The single most potent negative business trend of the last several years has been the systematic dehumanization of business processes and the steady push towards transactional sales over relationship-based partnerships. When I say “human business” is the solution to this, I mean that sustainable (you must be able to make a living), relationship-minded (put the people first) business is the path to revitalizing our own economies. What we lose in volume, we will make up for in depth of experience and the ability to help that yields longer term buyers. Think concierge-class service – service craftsmanship if you will – for most businesses that are built around more than a transaction.

Those Who Understand The Impact Equation Will Prosper

When Julien Smith and I wrote Trust Agents, we felt we’d given a guide to how to be human on the web. Our new book, The Impact Equation (affiliate link), covers what we evidently didn’t explain well enough the first time around. We believe that ideas with a lot of contrast, spread across significant platforms of our own creation, into communities that care is the way to build business. (That’s the rough sketch of the book, by the way.)

We Need a New Set of Plans

A lot of people fall into one (or more) of these buckets). See yourself on this list?

• I work for a company and nothing I’m doing seems to get traction any more.
• I lost the map for my career plans.
• I have a day job, but I hate it.
• I have a day job, and I’m barely hanging onto it.
• I have a day job, but I can’t pay all my bills.
• I’m trying to make money on the web, and that’s not working.
• I started my own business and I’m scared to bits.
• I’m using all these online things but not sure why, and I feel overwhelmed.
• All my life, I feel like I’ve been settling.
• I’m 30-something, 40-something, 50-something, 60-something, and I still haven’t really lived my own life yet.

Did any of those ring a bell? I think there are a lot of contributing factors to all this. One is that almost everyone you know was raised to be an employee in the industrial economy, and that economy no longer exists. Have you actually looked at the game of Life playing board lately? Does anyone you know have those jobs?

We need a new set of plans for our own lives. We need to accept that our lives, our work, and our ability to produce what we want and need require some new plans and skills that we don’t already possess, and that aren’t exactly on the curriculum at college, either.

Storytellers, All of Us

I want to continue to explore the intersection of creativity and business. I want to talk about storytelling, about creativity, about music and art and video games and everything that we’ve been told will rot our brains or rob us of our edge, but that defines us to our very core. I’ll help you tell better stories.

Your Future Requires Bravery

Over the past several weeks, I’ve posted interviews with the leading authority on tea, with a retired US Navy SEAL, with the creator of an iPhone app, and with a very successful author. What did they have in common? No one gave any of these people permission to be who they became. These people all demonstrated success in their fields, though they chose non-traditional paths to accomplish what they had done. All of these people were risk-takers of varying degrees.

I will continue to find brave people doing interesting work and share it with you. I will find those who are on their fifth or sixth completely different career. I will find those who failed and then got back up again. I will find those who have a unique way of being themselves and still succeeding in business. Because we have surrendered a lot of our intentions and our goals and our beliefs, instead of daring to be brave. I want to help with that.

We Need the Vision And The Steps

Like many, I fall into the trap of just spouting off ideas and visions. These are wonderful, but you can’t often do much with them. I want to double down on my effort to show you the practical side to go along with everything I share about the potential paths one might take. If we are going to talk about building platform, I’ll work on developing resources for it. I’ve already started by creating courses, like this one for how to improve your writing and blogging. But I’ll be doing more.

As a publisher and media maker, I will provide you with the best materials I can to help you succeed.

That’s Where I’m Headed

I’m not interested in talking about social media. I’m interested in helping you build your business. I’m not curious about emerging technology. I’m fascinated by how we can implement what we have to solve a problem. I don’t want to debate whether or not your business should be marketing on Pinterest. I want to talk with you about how to make customers love you enough to keep your bills paid and the lights on.

And I fully intend to help with your own personal bravery.

That’s where I’m headed.

Along with an anticipated redesigned iPhone, Apple is also rumored to be planning to release two new cases for its next-generation handset, with one of the designs said to have a “major impact on the accessory market.”

Written by Bob Ruffolo at Impact Branding and Design.

When we think of marketers and market research, we tend to think of two-way mirrors and focus groups. We think about extensive planning. We think “expensive”. But thanks to the Internet, no matter what your budget may be, you can still conduct great market research online without the need for expensive marketers or marketing teams.

Conducting your own marketing research is important for a number of reasons:

• It helps you define your target niche/potential leads
• It helps you change and improve your marketing message
• It helps you decide which direction you want to take your marketing in
• It helps establish you and your company as a credible and reliable source of industry information

See on www.impactbnd.com

Branding your business is one of the most important things you’ll ever do.

There is so much to think of, but have you every considered the impact of your colour choice?

Recently, I came across this fabulous infographic created by Marketo for Column Five .

Take a look, it’s a bit of an eye-opener.

Thanks for letting me share this guys.

You can see the original post here.

Amazon announced its second quarter results today, coming in slightly below estimates with operating cash flow slightly ahead at $3.22 billion year-over-year, compared to $3.21 billion in the year prior. Meanwhile, free cash flow decreased 40 percent to $1.10 billion year-over-year, compared to $1.83 billion the year prior.

The eCommerce giant’s revenue, on the other hand, trended up significantly, increasing 29 percent to $12.83 billion in Q2 — compared with $9.91 billion in the second quarter. A definite bright spot for Amazon. The company was quick to follow by saying that, other than the $272 million it attributes to the “unfavorable exchange rate” through the quarter, net sales “would have grown 32 percent” compared with Q2 2011, the company said.

Both operating income and net income took big hits in the second quarter, with income coming in at $107 million year-over-year in Q2, compared to $201 million in Q2 2011. Again, Amazon attributed this to the unfavorable exchange rates during the quarter, although the impact on net income was less severe, with the company estimating the impact at $8 million.

Net income showed a more pronounced slide, decreasing 96 percent in Q2 to $7 million, or $0.01 per diluted share, compared to net income of $191 million, or $0.41 per diluted share in Q2 2011. Of that 96 percent drop, Amazon estimated that $65 million of the net loss was due to its acquisition and integration of Kiva.

In his statement today, Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos tried to paint a positive picture of the second quarter earnings, focusing instead on the bargain value of Amazon Prime compared to competitors and the consistency in pricing over the years:

Amazon Prime is now the best bargain in the history of shopping – that is not hyperbole … We successfully launched Prime seven years ago with free unlimited two-day shipping on one million items. The price of annual membership was $79. Since then, Prime selection has grown to 15 million items. We’ve also added 18,000 movies and TV episodes available for unlimited streaming. And we’ve added the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library – borrow 170,000 books for free with no due dates – it even includes all seven Harry Potter books. What hasn’t changed since we launched Prime? The price. It’s still $79.

Amazon continues to invest significant capital in its content, hardware and eCommerce businesses, as evidenced by the acquisition of Kiva, the growth of its lending library, and the expansion of Prime Instant Video catalog to more than 18,000 movies and TV episodes. While the company continues to ramp up content, the spending spree saw Amazon’s operating margins dip to their worst level of the year.

While estimates did vary and sluggishness in Q2 was expected, most had at least slightly more positive outlooks, putting revenue at $12.91 billion and earnings per share at $0.01. Compared to Amazon’s actual Q2 performance of $12.83B in revenue and $0.01 EPS, it’s not a huge miss, but a miss nonetheless.

Updating

Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group is excited about data. To his mind, data can help brands unlock the potential of social. Furthermore, Dachis believes that authentic social engagement at scale is the pot at the end of the online brand advertising rainbow.

The Internet has proven to be the perfect direct response marketing medium, but a wasteland useless to any marketer that cannot sell their product directly online. If Pampers, Coca Cola, and Nissan could have spent more money in digital they would do so. They just never could. Until now.

…The opportunity to unlock the $500 billion brand engagement opportunity online has finally arrived and it has come in the form of social media.

Dachis goes on to explain how his company provides essential measurements to brand marketers via its Social Business Index. He claims “advanced analytic techniques like natural language processing, semantic analysis, machine learning, and cluster analysis can reveal the true consequences of marketing actions online.”

Dachis also notes early in his article that only 10% of marketing dollars are spent online today. He’s working hard to move that needle, and he’s in the perfect place to benefit from whatever shift eventually occurs.

What is left undiscussed in his sellsheet thought piece, is what role ad agencies might play in a world where data on social engagement around a brand is as important, or more important, than the fundamentals of presentation and persuasion.

I’m a copywriter, so I’ll ask what Dachis’ data-driven future might mean for me. Will I be asked to sift through data on how brand advocates are responding to initiatives, and then reply in real time on behalf of my clients? That could be a fun day at the office, or a serious pain in the ass, depending on one’s aptitude for such things.

At this point a decade into the social, I’m pretty adept at real time communications, but that doesn’t mean I want to live there on the edge of my keyboard. No, I want time to think and a quiet place to do it. That’s where I, and many like me, develop ideas. Sure, we also develop ideas at the keyboard — the point is both skill sets are needed.

And let’s not overlook the thing that most often activates “authentic engagement at scale.” Brand content. The brand has to give its customers something to talk about, or there’s no “there” there.

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