EzineArticles and IE7
I have been impressed over the past year or so at the amount of traffic generated by EzineArticles so occasionally I will write an article. Just now I was writing a killer article on pricing SEO services - ok, maybe not killer (Nate’s new favorite word in ad copy), but a decent article.It took me about 10-15 minutes to wrap everything up and I was pretty happy with what I had written. Then I go to preview what I wrote - simple enough. But no - IE7 (which I used to like, then I didn’t, then I kind of did until just now) decides to block the popup - apparently Mr. Gates didn’t get the memo that we all have several effective popup blockers already installed and we don’t need yet another one.OK, no big deal - I’ll just “Allow all popups from this website” and go on my way, right? Wrong - IE7 refreshes and I have a new clean article template to start over with. So obviously I’m mad at Microsoft (no, not that mad, Mr. Slam Sandwich), but I’m kind of mad at Ezine, too. I mean, they have an Auto-Save feature, but it doesn’t seem to work. Maybe you have to click something to make it work… but wouldn’t that make it just a “save” feature?
Political SEO
Everybody who knows me knows that I think SEO for politics will boom during the upcoming Presidential election. Check out Slashdot’s Review of Presidential Campaign Websites - no real surprises here but interesting nonetheless.
Website Popularity Tool
Disclosure: I was not paid for this review but the company did send me a free license to try out. As a side note I think this is a pretty cool way to generate buzz since they’re email wasn’t annoying and I think the tool is pretty nice.
I have got quite a few such emails over the past year or so but I usually ignore them because their product looks like spam or is completely worthless. Website Popularity, despite the generic name, is actually pretty cool.
With the free trial you can monitor two websites. The tool will calculate your inbound links, indexed pages, social tags, important directories (dmoz, etc.), and press mentions. I wouldn’t give a lot of weight to the results (they are basically as accurate as all of the other free tools out there, not 100%), but if you are using yahoo and google’s site: command, the information is all the same.
The nice thing is that it tracks information over time so you can see your backlinks increase, etc. Keep in mind that this information is of a limited utility - these days the relevance of your backlinks is more important than how many you have.
It’s not really going to give you any functionality that you can’t get yourself, but for $47 it is probably worth all the time you will spend monitoring a campaign, especially if you’re monitoring more than one website.
Google’s Retail Knowledge Center
I saw blurbs about Google’s Retail Knowledge Center a few days ago but didn’t feel it was too urgent to check out. I didn’t find a lot of helpful information on there - to be honest it seemed like a thinly-veiled attempt at advertising Google Checkout…
When should an internet retailer book revenue?
In auditing our 2006 performance here at Sewell an interesting question came up regarding revenue: when should we book revenue?
Now, we have been in business for five years now and you would think that this question would have come up before (and it has), but I was reminded during this latest round how confusing it can become when you look at special cases including drop-shipping from Asia and prepaying for materials and warehousing them in China.
First of all, if you are doing any significant volume online you probably should be accounting on an accrual basis as opposed to cash. The reason for this is that on a cash basis you will show huge losses while stocking up on inventory and huge profits in subsequent periods - not a very good gauge of how your business is performing.
According to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Practices), you should book revenue as soon as the merchandise is officially the customer’s responsiblity. In other words, if the merchandise catches on fire and burns, who is responsible for the replacement costs?
The easiest way to determine risk is the FOB terms - if you are quoting customer FOB China, you are shouldering all of the risk until the product is in the port waiting to ship - then it is your customer’s responsibility and they should be technically carrying the risk, hence you should book the revenue as soon as it ships. If the merchandise is FOB USA yet shipping from China, you should book the revenue as soon as the merchandise is in the US port.
This is counter-intuitive to most retailers - for instance, when you ship out a product to a customer you typically assume that you are shouldering risk for that product until it is on their doorstep (or, more realistically, in their hands). So should you wait to book the revenue until it is delivered?
I don’t think so - when a customer places an order online technically two transactions are taking place - they are buying your merchandise and the services of a courier to deliver the product to their door. Customers, of course, don’t see two transactions and assume that you are responsible for delivery of their products. I feel the same way when I make a purchase online.
My suggestion is that for accounting purposes you assume that the customer takes ownership as soon as your product ships. If problems arise with the courier, you should do everything possible to help with delivery of the product and replacement if necessary. This is a customer service issue and not an assumption of inventory risk on your behalf.
Following GAAP principles is very important for any retailer with aspirations for an IPO, buyout or even future funding.
Adwords problems… yet again
OK, I know I have become increasingly more negative on my blog lately - chalk it up to a healthy amount of stress and lack of sleep. Seriously, though, I’m about to go crazy with the seemingly daily problems I have with Google services - adwords, analytics, adsense, etc.
Maybe it is just me but the problems are becoming more and more frequent and I’m about to go crazy. Are they having infrastructure problems? I’m sure if they were to address the issues they would just explain how the “glitches” are really “features” like programmers normally do…
I try to like Yahoo…
I try so hard - why does Yahoo make it so difficult for me to like them?
One lame way to deal with bad publicity
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/12144
This is about the worst example I’ve ever seen of trying to protect a brand I’ve ever seen - GreenZap needs to learn how to rise above PR in the new age of open information and not rely on suing bloggers to make their point.
Now I’ll quietly sit back and way for my subpoena.
Summer Day 2
I live in Utah - Utah sucks in the winter. Well, it’s good for some things - Nate’s got the details. But today is Summer Day #2 at Sewell - a day that we crank up the thermostat, wear shorts to work and have a barbecue. It makes the winter almost bearable.
SMO is not SEO - Guerrilla says it like it is
I love SEO - I admittedly suck at social media optimization (digg, etc.), but I work with some people who are really good at it.
Webguerrilla explains the difference between SEO and SMO - any internet retailer should be aware of the differences before choosing an internet marketing agency. Just because somebody is good at one doesn’t mean they are any good at the other.