Steve Woda's blog

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-31

• How To Create Your Own Wikipedia Page - Search Engine Guide Blog
  Most savvy SEOs know that Google is placing an increased weight on links from “authority” websites. Wikipedia, a free internet encyclopedia that can be edited by any user, is certainly one of the top authority websites in the eyes of Google and I´m certainly not the first SEO to observe that an awful lot of Wikipedia pages are currently ranking quite highly in the SERPS. Many of you likely have tried to place your website link on a Wikipedia page. What most probably happened is a zealous Wikipedia editor likely removed your link very quickly because the prevailing view is that appending your external link to the bottom of a previously created page adds little to the community and likely only benefits you.


• Wild Planet Toy Store Boosts Conversion Rates by Using buySAFE Seal
  The results are in: Wild Planet Toy Store (Shopwildplanet.com) has reported an increase of 10.4% in conversion rates since the site adopted the buySAFE Seal. Wild Planet Toy Store partnered with buySAFE, Inc. in early 2007 to test the effectiveness of the buySAFE Seal. The store has integrated the buySAFE trust solution into its ecommerce website so that all of its pages display the Seal. Its shoppers are able to guarantee their purchases with a buySAFE bond up to $25,000 . After testing for almost six months across a base of over 150,000 store transactions, Brian Almashie, CEO. of Wild Planet ssaid that “The results speak for themselves: Conversion and revenues are both up more than 10% … I can’t think of anything else I could have done so easily to have such an impact on my business."

101 Five-Minute Fixes to Improve Your Web Site

At buySAFE, our web site is one of our greatest assets.  It is the main avenue by which we communicate with prospective buyer and merchant customers, partners, the media, and investors.  It is the main tool we have for defining buySAFE for the rest of the world.  It is the vehicle we use for creating action with respect to our unique eCommerce trust and safety and advertising services. 

I spend a fair amount of my time thinking about how to better leverage this asset, and then working with my team to improve upon its utility.

Therefore, when I ran across this article, "101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site" by Inside CRM Editors, I thought you would enjoy it too.  Here are their first 10 web site improvement tips, and if you are interested in learning more, you should definitely click through to read their other 91 tips as well.

1. Tell readers why they should perform a task. If your site is full of passive suggestions, toughen it up. People are trained to follow a request, as long as you give them a good reason to do it. 
2. Make the most highly trafficked pages easier to scan. If your current site consists of large blocks of text, break it up so that it's easier for the average Internet user to read. 
3. Convey a sense of trust. If you're experiencing skepticism, offer social proof like testimonials or risk-mitigating offers like a free trial. 
4. Stress benefits. Ensure that your copy always shows users exactly how your site will benefit them. 
5. Make headlines meaningful. Be sure to change any vague or cutesy headlines to something more up-front and meaningful. 
6. Repeat yourself. Check over your copy to make sure that you're really driving the point home by making it in a number of ways. 
7. Tell visitors what to do. Revise your site to ensure that people know exactly what the next step is. If you want a visitor to click a link, tell them 
8. Keep the reader engaged. Make sure that your current content gives visitors a reason to keep reading throughout the entire piece; otherwise, you need to spice things up a bit. 
9. Stay consistent. Check your copy for consistency, or else your site may be seen as unstable or flighty. 
10. Stay simple. Simplify your message simply to avoid confusing visitors, while at the same time improving conversion rates.

Read the other 91 web site improvement tips at "101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site" - Inside CRM >>>

Technorati Tags: Website Tips,Inside CRM

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?

I have discovered the hard way that blogging is not an easy endeavor, and this is especially true for folks that have real jobs during the day.  At a minimum, it takes time, dedication, and creativity.  I have often wondered how to others do such a great job with their blogs while still maintaining excellence in their day jobs.  To that point, I thought this article was very interesting, and it included a number of practical tips for all of us aspiring bloggers.  I hope you find this useful as well.

MARK CUBAN, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, has a full plate. Besides his basketball team, the busy billionaire also owns part of a media company, and serves as chairman of the TV channel HDNet. He recently competed for five weeks on “Dancing With the Stars” on ABC. How on earth does he find time to blog?

Yet his site, blogmaverick.com, is one of the top 1,000 Weblogs, according to the search engine Technorati. Thousands read Mr. Cuban’s posts every single day. If he can do it, why can’t you?

Read more of "So You Want to Be a Blogging Star?" - New York Times >>>

 

Technorati Tags: Blogging,Mark Cuban,Blogmaverick.com,Technorati,Ted Dziuba,Uncov.com,Xeni Jardin,BoingBoing.net

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-25

• Region's Venture Capital Rank Slips - washingtonpost.com
  Regions of the West Coast and Midwest moved ahead of Washington as top destinations for venture capital in recent years, as the local venture economy grew more slowly than the national average, a Washington Post analysis shows. In 2001, the year the technology bubble popped, Washington ranked sixth among top destinations for venture capital, after Silicon Valley, New England, the New York metro area, Texas and the Southeast. Last year, it was ranked 10th, overtaken by the Northwest, San Diego, the Midwest and Los Angeles/Orange County.


• Hammering out Wikipedia's financial future, argument by argument - Technology Review
  Scroll the list of the 10 most popular Web sites in the U.S., and you'll encounter the Internet's richest corporate players -- names like Yahoo, Amazon.com, News Corp., Microsoft and Google. Except for No. 7: Wikipedia. And there lies a delicate situation. With 2 million articles in English alone, the Internet encyclopedia ''anyone can edit'' stormed the Web's top ranks through the work of unpaid volunteers and the assistance of donors. But that gives Wikipedia far less financial clout than its Web peers, and doing almost anything to improve that situation invites scrutiny from the same community that proudly generates the content.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-21

• Report ranks Washington and Baltimore hotbed for investors - Washington Business Journal:
  The Washington and Baltimore region was the nation's fifth fastest-growing area for venture capital funding in the last decade, according to a report released Tuesday. In 2007, 180 Washington and Baltimore companies received nearly $1.3 billion in venture capital backing, the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Thomson Financial and the National Venture Capital Association said. That number is up 130 percent from $558.24 million put into 105 companies in 1997.  The report lists Timonium, Md.-based Grotech Capital Group and Chevy Chase-based New Enterprise Associates as the most active investors in the region. The top industries for investments around the region were software, life sciences and telecommunications.


• Affluent Hobnob on Social Networks - eMarketer
  The rate of affluent US Internet user participation in online social networks increased dramatically to 60% in January 2008, from 27% in January 2007, according to The Luxury Institute's latest WealthSurvey "The Wealthy and Web 2.0."  "While some in the luxury industry are still debating e-commerce, search and banner ads, the majority of their customers have leaped into the online dialogue," said Milton Pedraza, CEO of the Luxury Institute. "Luxury needs to catch up quickly."

The Technology That Toppled Eliot Spitzer - Technology Review

If there is a lesson from former New York governor Eliot Spitzer's scandal-driven fall (aside from the most obvious one), it is this: banks are paying attention to even the smallest of your transactions.

For this we can thank modern software, and post-9/11 U.S. government pressure to find evidence of money laundering and terrorist financing. Experts say that all major banks, and even most small ones, are running so-called anti-money-laundering software, which combs through as many as 50 million transactions a day looking for anything out of the ordinary.

In Spitzer's case, according to newspaper reports, it was three wire transfers amounting to just $5,000 apiece that set alarm bells ringing.

Read more of "The Technology That Toppled Eliot Spitzer" - Technology Review >>>

 

Technorati Tags: Bank Fraud Software,Eliot Spitzer

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-19

• Woman to record industry: Stop spying
  A woman who claims the recording industry's anti-music piracy campaign threatens and intimidates innocent people has filed a new complaint accusing record companies of racketeering, fraud and illegal spying.


• Startup RatePoint bets that people want user reviews refereed - Technology Review
  One of the great things about the Internet is the way people post reviews on just about anything you are considering trying, whether it is a movie, a new restaurant or the local florist.  This also introduces one of the worst things about the Internet: trying to figure out which reviews to trust. Was that effusive praise written surreptitiously by the merchant? Was that anonymous online slam posted by a devious competitor?  The dilemma might be unavoidable in this age of abundant user-generated content, when we have to be smarter about separating signals from noise. But a startup called RatePoint Inc. begs to differ. It wants to play referee, giving consumers more clarity into a business' reputation and protecting the business from unwarranted blights on its credibility.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-15

• HiveLive secures $5.6 million
  HiveLive Inc., a Boulder-based company that integrates social and information networks, secured $5.6 million in venture financing from Grotech Capital Group and current private investors. Joseph Zell, a general partner with Grotech, will take a seat on HiveLive's board of directors.


• ID Security: Secure E-Commerce From First to Final Click
  What's most important to consumers when making a purchase online? Personal identity. Consumers are taking more notice of their individual online security after a string of recent identity theft cases made major headlines. According to a recent survey by the University of Southern California's Center for the Digital Future, 61 percent of adult Americans said they were "very" or "extremely" concerned about the privacy of personal information when buying online, an increase from 47 percent in 2006. Prior to 2007, that number had been decreasing for the past six years.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-13

• Direct Marketers Bullish on Online Ads - eMarketer
  US direct marketers may reduce their media budgets this year, judging by Target Marketing's "Media Usage Forecast" report. Nearly one-quarter of respondents surveyed in January 2008 said they would reduce their media budgets compared with last year. The n


• Yahoo activates smart mobile bookmarks - Reuters
  Yahoo Inc, still fending off a $41 billion takeover bid by Microsoft Corp, unveiled a cell phone tool on Tuesday that lets users keep up with their favorite topics using dynamic bookmarks. OnePlace, to be launched in the second quarter, allows users to ma

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-12

• Pay-per-click Spyware and Other Scams: Tips on avoiding and detecting
  If you thought click fraud was bad, consider this: your Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing ads and Microsoft adCenter accounts are new targets for spyware applications, hackers and scam artists.  If thieves obtain access to your pay-per-click account, they are in complete control of your pay-per-click activity and could place ads on their behalf but charge your account for them.


• Wikipedia founder defending himself over flap, breakup
  Virtually anyone can edit an entry on Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia. But its founder is finding it's not so easy to cover his tracks after a messy breakup with a TV personality and a dust-up over his expenses began playing out on the Web.  It's not the first time that Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's de facto leader, has found his behavior questioned -- especially since no subject appears too arcane for dissection by Wikipedia's passionate community of users. The latest episodes, however, reverberated beyond the usual die-hards.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-11

• How to save money running a startup (17 really good tips)
  The HowTo team at Mahalo has been an amazing surprise effort. We didn't plan on making howto articles, but when we built various how to search pages we realized that many howto articles were, well, lacking. So, we started building select ones where we thought we could help. This one on how to save money is very good.  I've got a bunch of tips on how to do this for business.


• Facebook CEO's Keynote Turns Into a Mess in Texas - Advertising Age
  Mark Zuckerberg's highly anticipated keynote interview with BusinessWeek's Sarah Lacy at the South by Southwest Interactive conference was panned by the audience here -- and in near-real time in the blogosphere.  That the social-media circus turned against its reigning ringmaster had more to with Ms. Lacy's meandering questions and diversions into anecdotal tales of her previous interviews with Mr. Zuckerberg than it did with the Facebook CEO's answers. Indeed, at one point he even suggested to her that she ought to ask questions -- as opposed to sharing her thoughts -- prompting the restless SXSW crowd to burst into applause.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-10

• Come for brunch. Bring billions. - Los Angeles Times
  The Internet bubble of the late 1990s ended with a painful pop. When today's young entrepreneurs get together, the only bubbles they see are in their mimosas.  Even as the rest of the business world frets about the gloomy economy, Silicon Valley is living the high-tech high life. Nowhere is that more evident than at Founders Brunch, a private, invitation-only gathering where new-boom kids and industry veterans pick up whispers of the next big trends, invest in one another's ideas and push one another to think big.  Every three months, these elites of the Web crowd pull themselves out of their beds or cubicles and pile into a different upscale home for a Sunday spread of community and conversation.


• Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business
  At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-09

• The Lives We Lead; The Things We Do - TheFunded.com
  Silicon Valley is where most everyone’s goal is to be wildly successful in changing the world - creating a runaway success and being rewarded with a big payday. All know the odds, and the daily struggle of insatiable demands for the next big thing with the very least investment, and industry-wide contempt for those who have failed. Despite this, all are driven to grasp for the shiny brass ring that’s always, though sometimes barely, out of reach. It is an environment of soaring hopes, crashing defeats, and maddening near-misses. Despite this, entrepreneurs never lose their yearning to change the world and be entrepreneurs. While they love the perceived freedom, they live in the constant state of self-consciousness (they may deny it), feeling their entire worth as a human being is being judged by people who are risk averse, lack vision, and not technically one’s peers.


• Venture capital firms positive despite the tightening market - Examiner.com
  Bill Gust, like most venture capitalists, is an optimist. The managing general partner of Anthem Capital Management’s Baltimore office expects a tougher year for entrepreneurs looking for funding, but said opportunities still exist for the right ideas. Entrepreneurs seeking capital have become more confident and experienced, said Don Rainey, a general partner with GroTech Capital Group. He said the tech bubble burst and Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had a greater chilling effect on entrepreneurs than today’s economy. “The current credit crisis doesn’t cause the same kind of hesitancy,” Rainey said. “I think quality has been improving for a couple years; the management are more mature and experienced than they were a year ago.”

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-08

• Jeremy Siegel on Politicians, Prices and a Potential 'Buying Opportunity of the Decade' - Knowledge@Wharton
  The U.S. Presidential race has reached a critical juncture. The Republicans have a confirmed nominee in John McCain; as for the Democrats, Hillary Clinton has bounced back, while Barack Obama retains a marginal lead in terms of delegates. How the presidential race evolves will be shaped in part by the increasingly worrisome state of the U.S. economy. Consumer prices are rising, oil has crossed $103 a barrel and gold is nudging $1,000 an ounce -- suggesting that the economy could be entering a phase of 1970s-style stagflation. Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, however, told Congress last week that he doesn't anticipate stagflation, and he continues to indicate his willingness to keep cutting interest rates. What lies ahead for the U.S. and world economies? Knowledge@Wharton discussed these questions and more with finance professor Jeremy Siegel, author of The Future for Investors.


• Ecommerce Blogging: Who, What And When: Well-written blogs create credibility, interest
  Last month I talked about blogging platforms and the value blogging can bring to ecommerce sites. When a website makes the decision to begin a blog and decides upon a blogging platform, it will then have to decide who will blog and how often. Time allotted to blogging is also a relative issue, as is subject matter. So why bother at all?  Relative to static ecommerce sites, search engines consider blogs more real and trusted because blogs tend to have fresh content and there is a less financial, more informational link between a blog and its readers. An ecommerce site should take advantage of this tendency by adding a blog to augment the overall site.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-07

• Sites With Anti-Fraud Sign Still Flawed - The Associated Press
  When a small padlock appears in the corner of your Web browser's address bar or the entire bar turns green, it seems like a powerful signal you're safe to proceed.  But experts say the SSL certificates those green lights signify — digital stamps of approval that Web sites buy to prove they're running a legitimate business and can send and receive encrypted data safely — don't provide the safety they seem to.  "They instill some sense of security, but that could be a dangerously false sense of security," said Paul Mutton, a researcher with UK-based security firm Netcraft Ltd.  The site itself could still be riddled with security holes for hackers to exploit. And the certificate could simply be bogus: Criminals have been forging them to get the padlock icon and dress up fraudulent sites.


• Web 2.0's Long Road to IPOs
  During the Web's heyday, a profitable Internet company nearing $100 million in annual sales while luring a million new customers a month would have found itself on the IPO fast track. But that's hardly the case for LinkedIn, a professional networking site that has cleared those hurdles and then some.  Instead, LinkedIn is hewing closely to the Web economy's new motto on initial public offerings: Easy does it. Founded in 2003, LinkedIn may not sell shares until some time next year. Likewise, social networking site Facebook, worth $15 billion on paper, may not go public until 2010,

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-06

• The Tipping Point—Web Logo Style
  The other day, a friend who runs a small business lamented that his Web site wasn't worth the trickle of business it brought in. Something told me he's not alone. In fact, some estimates have found the majority of small-business Web sites fail to generate revenue.  Which is too bad, because I think that entrepreneurs like my friend make a mistake by blaming the site itself, or even the medium of the Web. The problem, in my view, is not the site—it's the lack of trust in the company behind the site. Trust is an elusive concept, of course; the sort of term bandied about freely in Marketing 101 but rarely defined adequately since any of us found ourselves in that class. Building trust is important. Building trust via your Web site is essential. Now here comes the biggie: How?


• A VC: Thoughts On Choosing Board Members
  I am a professional board member. I've been sitting on boards for almost 20 years and I've seen a lot. I've seen some of the best board members in action and have tried to copy them. I've seen some of the worst board members in action and have tried hard to forget them.  Here are some thoughts on choosing board members. This advice is for everyone, but it's of particular use when you are a bigger company, maybe public, and need to fill your board with good people.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-04

• Ask.Com Not Planning to Scrap Search: Source - New York Times
  Online search site Ask.com is not getting rid of its specialized search technology, a source familiar with the matter said on Friday, saying a blog report to that effect was incorrect. Analysts cited a report in Silicon Alley Insider on Friday as one of several factors that led shares 7 percent lower in Ask.com's parent, IAC/InterActiveCorp.


• Executives Must Realize and Learn the Power of Social Media
  Senior marketing executives in several countries agree that the use of social media for corporate, brand and product marketing is not a passing fad, according to research sponsored by TNS media intelligence/Cymfony. In fact, nearly 50% believe it is a vital component of corporate communications that should be monitored at the executive level and allocated significant resources.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-03

• Lessons in building a better widget
  By giving an audience widgets that provide a service and make their lives more interesting or convenient your brand will be on its way to far more free real estate than you ever expected.  In helping brands develop widget presences, I can say that for brand managers and agencies alike, the first time through can be an emotional roller coaster. Early in the process, brainstorming sessions are filled with far-flung, fantastic ways to bring enterprise information into the everyday lives of the audience.


• Comparison shopping engines more important for some products than others - InternetRetailer.com
  Comparison shopping engines are an important part of the e-commerce channel marketing mix, Scot Wingo, CEO of e-commerce channel management services vendor ChannelAdvisor Corp., tells Internet Retailer. But they’re a better spend for some categories than for others, he adds.  Wingo says, for example, that comparison shopping engines are strong in categories such as consumer electronics, less so with products such as apparel and jewelry. That disparity is partially a function of how matching on the engines works. Consumer electronics products have a multitude of hard attributes that lend themselves to point-to-point comparison, for example, while jewelry and apparel selection relies more on a shopper’s subjective opinion.  That said, ChannelAdvisor customers spend anywhere from 15% to as much as 40% of their online marketing dollars on comparison shopping engines

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-02

• The Psychology Of Buying - Behavioral Insider
  The recently launched 7 Billion People is an intriguing application to e-commerce of the real-world psychology behind buying behaviors. As CEO Mark Nagaitis tells us, his new Web analytics system tries to discern in a site's audience different "buying personalities" that marketers can talk with in very different ways.


• InternetNews Realtime IT News – Americans' e-Commerce Conundrum
  A new study from the Pew Internet Project casts light on the love-hate relationship many Americans have with e-commerce. In response to the survey, 78 percent of U.S. Internet users said that online shopping is convenient, and 68 percent said it saves time. Yet, 75 percent said they don't like giving out personal information like a credit card number over the Internet.  The security risks, real or perceived, are hampering the growth of the Internet economy, said John Horrigan, associate director of the Pew Internet Project and author of the report.

Daily Roundup for 2008-03-01

• Google Muscles Further Into Business Software - Forbes.com
  Google is launching Web-based collaboration software that aims to make it easy for groups to share and edit materials such as documents, photos, video and spreadsheets on a single site. Easy enough, Google hopes, to make selling software applications to enterprises a bit harder for the likes of IBM and Microsoft.


• Use of Google for Data Triggers Fears
  It's called "Google hacking" - a slick data-mining technique used by the Internet's cops and crooks alike to unearth sensitive material mistakenly posted to public Web sites.  And it's just gotten easier, thanks to a program that automates what has typically been painstaking manual labor. The program's authors say they hope it will "screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place."