Akimbo - TV on Demand
Last week I discovered Akimbo for the first time and so far I love it. Basically, Akimbo is a box that sits next to your TV, similar to a Tivo. The unit acts like a Tivo in that it comes with a 80 GB hard-drive that is capable of storing 150 hours of television programming. You also have full controls when watching a show such as fast-forwarding, pausing, rewinding, etc.The cool thing about Akimbo, however, is that it connects to your home network and downloads all of the programming over the internet. The guys at Engadget talk about how the downloading can be quite slow, which is true, but you can easily get 5-6 shows during the night while you’re sleeping. You can also connect to your Akimbo player over the internet and send shows to it - I actually sent shows to our Akimbo while I was at work and they were downloaded when I got home.A lot of reviews on the internet are from people who don’t have the service but complain that there isn’t enough programming. If you are a TV junkie and you need several hours of shows per day then this is probably the case. For my wife and I, however, it is perfect. They offer Animal Planet, The History Channel, A&E, National Geographic, and more. Check out their channel guide for a list of everything that’s available. We usually watch network TV but it is nice to have some other options and now that most of our shows have ended we will probably mostly watch the Akimbo. They have a lot of premium upgrades that you can pay for on the Akimbo service, but the base service comes with more good programming than we could possibly watch.The quality of the shows is quite good. The resolution is SD, which is what we got with DirectTV before. The control buttons, such as fast forward, pause, play, etc. are not quite as responsive as a Tivo is, but they are definitely acceptable.So here’s the kicker - right now the box itself costs $69 (regular $200) and the service is only $10/month. We are getting all of the programming that we like from our old $50/month DirecTV service at 1/5 the cost. The only thing I’m not sure about is how often they update the content, but I’ve been checking their daily additions and it looks like it is pretty frequent. If you don’t want a high satellite or cable bill but you would like access to some pretty cool content I definitely recommend you check out Akimbo.Oh, I almost forgot - so far all of the shows we have watched have been commercial-free. That’s a cool little bonus.
Advertising in Podcasts
Any internet advertiser looking for a great advertising opportunity should seriously consider sponsoring a podcast. When I first started listening to podcasts I just fast-forwarded through commercials because it seemed easy to do. Now, however, I have iTunes setup to only leave podcasts on my iPod that have not been listened to - so I have to actually listen to the entire podcast (including commercials) for iTunes to remove the song from my iPod.I was just thinking about this the other day and podcast commercials are the only forms of advertising that I ever subject myself to - I’m not sure how many people, like me, utilize iTunes’ ability to automatically remove shows that have been listened to, but if it’s significant it seems that advertising in podcasts is going to continue to become popular. On a side-note, you can really hit a targeted demographic because of the variety of podcasts out there.
A Good Guide to Scraper Sites and Duplicate Content
Anybody who knows me know that I hate scraper sites - they pollute the internet and give SEO’s a bad name. That being said, it’s not necessarily the SEO’s who are at fault here - the search engines need to clean up their algorithms and stop re-enforcing this undesirable behavior (which they do with Adsense payouts).Here is a great guide to scraping sites that I recommend all internet retailers check out. More than likely you have been or will be the target of a scraper at some point and you will inevitably have to deal with Google’s duplicate content filters… it’s not fun. You should know what you’re dealing with.On a side-note, Stuntdubl has a great SEO blog that I recommend internet retailers (or anybody for that matter) check out.
JavaScript on webpages
A few months ago we made a big mistake on our website - we had 4 JavaScript components on each page in our index. At first we didn’t think it was a big deal, and it probably isn’t a big deal if you have 1 or 2 on your site, but having 4 slowed down our load pages.It was not insignificant - on some dial-up machines the JavaScript processes added up to 10 seconds of load-time - can you imagine the abandon rate?Examples of some JavaScript snippets that people often clutter their pages with include StatCounter, Google Analytics, different affiliate programs (most use JavaScript), Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network and tons more.Note that I’m not saying that you shouldn’t use any of these services, but I would definitely limit myself to one or two (as we have done). Decreasing your load-time can dramatically increase your average number of page-views and, as a result, conversion rate.
Looking for copywriters
We are currently seeking part-time copywriters in Utah County. This is an entry-level marketing job but it has huge potential for the right person. The starting pay is $10-13/hour but we will be very aggressive on raises for someone who shows they are the right person for the job. Plus it’s just an awesome place to work.We strongly prefer candidates with strong writing/communication skills - all of our existing copywriters are English majors.
Dealing with distributors
Almost every internet retailer has to deal with a supplier at some point. In my experience, about 20% of suppliers are really great to work with, 30% aren’t too bad and the other 50% are awful.Just keep in mind as you source products and build relationships with suppliers that at times it takes pretty thick skin. Today, for instance, I was trying to negotiate a drop-ship agreement with a potentially large supplier for us. When I brought up the issue of drop-shipping (as opposed to stocking the products they carried), he told me that by drop-shipping the products we weren’t adding any value and weren’t entitled to any margin.This is clearly a distributor that doesn’t understand the importance of a distribution channel. I am willing to aggressively market his products, endorse them, provide pre-sales tech support and take care of payment processing. In return I want him to ship the physical goods to the customer blindly (so the customer thinks they are coming from me) and I want us to each make a healthy margin on the transaction. He couldn’t see the value in marketing and selling a product so he lost a potentially large customer. He said that since they have been in business longer than us then we weren’t entitled to make any profit off of their products - this wouldn’t be so surprising, but they are not a retailer - they are a distributor!I was discouraged at first, but I realized that this was just part of the business and kept hammering away at suppliers - within an hour I found another supplier in the same market with similar products and margins that were about twice the margins that he was offering if I stocked his products. In addition, the company ships same-day and their brand has a great reputation.Just hang in there with distributors and take rejection with a grain of salt - there are always good guys out there.
Google BackLink Update
Google did a backlink update yesterday - go to google and type link:domain.com (you might have to include www because of their stupid canonical issues) to see an updated lists of sites linking back to your site. Note that Google doesn’t list all backlinks, just a representative sample of them - go to Yahoo to find all/almost all of your backlinks by typing linkdomain:domain.com.BackLink updates don’t get as much press as PR updates, but backlinks determine PR so they can give you a good idea of how you’ll be looking in the next PR update.
SEO more popular than paid search
These statistics from SEMPO blew me away… if you work in the internet marketing industry they should be interesting.
Yahoo’s Time Saving Shortcuts
At first I thought that these time saving search shortcuts from Yahoo were pretty cool, but now I would just chalk them up to a step in the right direction.See, one of the problems that John Battelle discusses in his book The Search (which, by the way, is an awesome Christmas gift for any search junkie) is the ability for search engines to decide your intention when performing a search without asking a bunch of annoying questions following your search.The idea of “the semantic search engine” is an engine that will have enough information about you and each page on the internet to determine when you search for “Paris Hilton” whether you are interested in going to Paris, France and staying in a nice hotel or you are looking for the rich hotel heiress. These shortcuts have the ability to address some of these problems on the front end (when you actually perform the search), but are pretty inconvenient and, in all honesty, will probably never catch on with anything but a small group of search enthusiasts.I do admire Yahoo for taking some initiative in trying new things, though. The more competition they pose to Google’s search the more we can expect both services to improve.
Renting links and Jeremy Zawodny
I was going to do a post on my feelings on renting links as a follow up to my post on the importance of linking. However, I think that Greg Boser, aka WebGuerrilla, pretty much sums up exactly how I feel about the issue of paid links.Here is some background on the issue involving Jeremy Zawodny renting links on his blog. This is an important issue for internet retailers as link renting can have a huge impact on marketing your webstore.