| LED Digest 2277: Marketing thru Google Base |
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Ideas for marketing via the Google Base service. The Sweet 16 is back online - interesting reading. How the Can-Spam Act is increasing, not decreasing, spam email. And a discussion of shopping cart software. ================================================== The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom pair Networks: The LED's Web Host Hosting and Domain Registration from a Trusted Leader pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. October 30, 2006 Issue no. 2277 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ===================== <Moderator Comment> ~ The Sweet 16 --== Fighting Spam and the Can Spam Act ==-- ~ Bob Huntsman "...spam has increased, not decreased, since the Can-spam law was passed..." --== Marketing thru Google Base ==-- ~ Shaun Johnston "This opens up some intriguing possibilities." <Moderator Comment> "This is just one example off the top of my head..." ==== CONTINUING ================= --== What Shopping Cart and Why? ==-- ~ Joe Hussar "My ecommerce site uses the Dansie Shopping Cart." ~ John Smart "I realized it was time to write my own cart..." ~ Al Toman "...make sure that the cart software is compatible with the payment processing software..." ==== BILLBOARD =================== --== Firefox 2 and IE7 ==-- ~ R. Neilson ========== NEW =================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, Lots going on here. I'm excited about the responses I've gotten from authors here about partnering on ebooks. There are several excellent books that we'll be offering to LEDers at a considerable discount. I'll give you an update with more information later in the week. This may interest you: The Sweet 16 - Principles for Building a Successful Internet Business My dad (John Audette) wrote this wa-a-ay back in the early 2000s. Okay - it wasn't that long ago -- but a lot has changed since then. I was surprised to find, however, that these principles remain very valid. The Sweet 16 is still pretty sweet! I'd love to hear your comments. Adam -------------------- From: Bob Huntsman Subject: New Topic - Fighting Spam and the Can Spam Act > ... the legal answers this country comes up with are > not always logical, reasonable, sensible or even fair. - John Smart, LED Digest 2273 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1273/55/ > Here in the UK, we are very frightened of US law... - James Miller, LED Digest 2275 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1285/55/ I am a web / software developer that also happens to be a US attorney, returning to this forum after an absence, and I am regularly frightened by US law. I have concluded that US law, although sensible in theory, more often than not is unfriendly towards businesses, especially small businesses. I sent a neighbor to small claims court on a consumer matter involving a couple of thousand dollars, and the other side moved the action to district court where lawyers are required, and a simple matter resulted in thousands of dollars of attorneys fees on both sides. This stuff happens all the time. With respect to spam litigation, I have always found spam distruptive to web-related businesses, and decided to take a shot at spammers under the Can Spam act. The attractive part of the law for spam haters is that it provides for damages that allows you, in theory, to whack a spammer financially big time for the number of spams he or she spams without showing how that spam actually economically damages you. The other problem of course is you have to identify the spammer. I set up tools, collected and analyzed spam, identified a well known U.S. company that was sending us all sorts of unsolicited email under the guise that I had previously ordered their products, when, in fact, I could conclusively show that I never did and that their list included far more than their customers. I filed the action, the other side hires a major litigation law firm, and the other side moves to toss the case from Federal Courts (and Can-Spam), on the grounds that the fraud was not the kind of fraud that Can Spam prohibits. The argument was that the law prohibits fraudulent headers where a fake sender or recipient is identified, but having a fraudulent list in the sense that the list as a whole was fraudulent was the wrong kind of fraud. Holy cow! Lawyers! Off with their heads! The judge (also a lawyer of course) tossed the case from Can-spam and Federal Court and left me with a state action for fraud which is worthless because there have to prove damages. The Court gave no weight to the fact that the law was intended to reduce spam, and by construing the law narrowly, the net effect is the law is a license to spam instead of a regulation to curtial it. I think we will all agree that spam has increased, not decreased since the Can-spam law was passed... Bob Huntsman http://www.copyrightmywebpages.com led1, bobhuntsman.com -------- new post - new topic --------- From: Shaun Johnston Subject: New - Marketing through GoogleBase How can you get more attention for something than you're already getting from the search engines? I wrote recently about how individual tourist lodgings are appearing further and further down in results of searches by town names, forced down by a growing list of directories [see issue 2264: http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1165/55/ ]. So I face this question in my own marketing of guest lodgings online. Obviously, Web2 suggests ways. But how about GoogleBase? It feels like a yawning pit, I throw information in and it vanishes. But it's intriguing, because it's the exact opposite of a directory, with fixed categories. You can make up custom categories -- attributes -- for your items, to fit them better. Problem is, probably no one will ever type in your custom attributes, so you're better off sticking to the ones Google provides. But they're very limited for what I want to promote: towns and lodgings in getaway regions, maybe by county. Their To and From attributes appear to be along the lines of only city / state. You can put region / state, but if that's not how the attribute is supposed to be used, people won't enter it that way. So in effect your back to fixed categories again. But, as I said, I find the idea intriguing. Google suggests you make up a spreadsheet of all your items and bulk upload them. You give each item an ID. Then you can keep changing your spreadsheet and re-uploading. Now you're building your own database in Google that you control and that you can keep current. The missing side is how you get people to query your database. Google says it will pop up your data when people put in appropriate queries. Fine. But the way people are searching now isn't throwing up my items. Is there some way to draw attention to that database? This opens up some intriguing possibilities. Suppose I create a custom attribute for all my items, which I call "c:nycgetaways:text:". Then I advertise this in my marketplace, maybe through cryptic classified ads. "Find your 'nycgetaways' in Google." Now I'm creating a new term people will think to search by. And when they do, they get mainly my items. "nycgetaways stockbridge,MA" -- up come links to my clients, and just my clients, in Stockbridge. Once I create that stream of attention it will then occur to other people to put their items in GoogleBase and mark them with my attribute, so as to tap into the stream of attention I've created. By doing so, of course, they broaden that stream. Maybe I even encourage other people to use my attribute. In this way, markets can create their own streams of attention within Google. Once they do, Google is likely to add these attributes to their official list of attributes. Once that happens, these attributes become part of common knowledge, and everyone knows to search by that term, everywhere online. Collaborative creation of attributes within Google allows us to re-carve up the stream of online attention along new joints, joints of our choice. A business's spreadsheet of database of GoogleBase items that it keeps updating and uploading will become one of its key intellectual assets. Google becomes a vast marketplace that we shape the way we want, along the lines of human attention as it changes. See possibilities for marketing here? Shaun Johnston <Moderator Comment> Interesting, Shaun. I've been mulling this over as well recently. It seems ideal for marketing typically offline content for one, such as paper books, protected ebooks, and research papers. One idea for publishers: provide reviews of your books, ebooks, research papers, etc. Make these reviews high-quality and contextual summaries - not just 101 reviews - then upload them to Google Base. Use highly relevant, rich attributes. Next, tie in AdWords to the content to drive interested searchers to your Base docs and then (hopefully) to your purchasing pages. AdWords is partially integrated w/ Base: http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=38836&topic=8808 This is just one example off the top of my head. Should be interesting to see how this develops - the service is still in Beta. Maybe something for your marketing, Shaun, would be local-specific guides / reviews / maps for tourists that are promoted through the lodgings. These could be offered in inexpensive printbound editions or as PDFs on their sites, then marketed through Base in summary form. Or consider offering some cool freebies, too. Or, partner with existing resource authors and build out a series of reviews / free versions for Base promotions. Other ideas? Thanks for the great post. -Adam ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Joe Hussar Subject: Shopping Carts > I value the opinions of the members of this list and > hope all will reply even if others use the same shopping > cart. I want to hear all the pros and cons of the programs > you have used. - R. Neilson, LED Digest 2276 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1287/55/ Hi............. My ecommerce site uses the Dansie Shopping Cart. (www.dansie.net). Their sales pitch includes this: "Any expert of HTML and FTP can easily set up a Dansie Shopping Cart on their website without any knowledge of Perl. There are NO variables needed to be set in the shopping cart script in about 95% of all cases. All variables are located in a separate, easy to edit, plain text data file." That is an understatement - I am no expert at Perl or HTML or FTP - but I have been able to use the cart easily and successfully for several years. My site has changed from an initial 20 pages, to about 600. As you can guess that brought many changes, not just in scale, but in functions, features, etc and the Dansie cart handled them all. I use all kinds of software for various tasks... who can say, as I do, that after 5 years from an initial software purchase, I still get professional, quick, thorough technical help any time I need it, and rarely if ever have to wait more than 24 hours !! Plus, because I am no whiz kid, often my questions turn out to be something "other than" a shopping cart problem; but Dansie still provides the help I need, pointing me in the right direction. And here's the caveat > at no charge!! (I hope someone at Microsoft reads this) Joe Hussar www.candylandcrafts.com -------- new post - same topic --------- From: John Smart Subject: Shopping carts We used to work with OS Cart -- for an open source project, it was the most closed that I have ever worked with! If you want a cart that does what OS cart does -- then it is a very good solution. If you ever want something extra, working with OS Cart is a night mare, and backward engineering the code to add extra bits soon became too much work. I realized it was time to write my own cart, and I did. It is perhaps not the best one in the world, but it is good, and whenever someone needs an add-on, I am able to do it, then make it available for any other cart user. If you would like to see it in action, please mail me (I apologize for using the LED as a blatant plug, not my usual style, but I could not think of any other way to answer this!) John Smart InternetDesign.com http://www.internetdesign.com/contact.html -------- new post - same topic --------- From: Al Toman Subject: Shopping carts In response to: "What Shopping Cart do You use and Why?" Firstly, depending on the payment processing that you're using (your bank, etc), make sure that the front-end shop cart software that you select is compatible with the back-end payment processing software being used. Personally, I prefer to let the back-end $ processing to those who are in that end of it. It can get messy if hackers & crackers get to it. If you've less than a few thousand items, data base (MySQL, etc) driven script is not necessarily needed; just another thing to mess with. Below is a list of carts (most OS) I've visited at one time or another, some I'ved fired up, tried, then deleted off the server. There are ASP scripted OS shop carts, as well. I don't do ASP. Keep in mind that web hosting services are web hosting services. MOST are not web site designers, web site promoters / marketers, SEO, or script providers. Some (truely) are. Hosting in itself is a tough enough job (spam fighting, security, server crashes, power-outs, etc) and they are not staffed to handle the side products that they are offering. Most simply take the OS script and play it up at you in hopes of getting your hosting business. It's very competitive. http://www.avactis.com/ (advertised on sitepoint) http://www.zen-cart.com/ http://www.oscommerce.com/ http://www.phpshop.org/ (mambo plugin only) http://mymarket.sourceforge.net/ http://www.shop-script.com/ http://commerce-cgi.com/ For the backend, I've decided to use PayPal and am considering trying Google Checkout (just to see how it performs) for my L.E.D. (light emitting diodes) store (in beta testing at the moment). If interested, contact me, I'll provide you with a link and walk you through what I've got up and running so far. For the front-end I've created my own PHP scripted shop cart. This includes a script to expedite / automate the loading of the items (approx 10-20 items per category). I've got more work to do on this aspect. Script such as oscommerce do not address this aspect very well which can be very time consuming. Photos and descriptions eat up the time, as well. I am NOT a copy writer and that aspect is difficult for me. Come to think of it, neither am I a photographer. My two primary concerns are 1) cost and 2) user-friendly, secure, warm-fuzzy-feeling in setting up the shop cart. Hope this lame post helps some. Al Toman studio9.ws ==== BILLBOARD =================================== From: R. Neilson Subject: New browsers > What are fellow LED-ers thoughts on > Firefox 2 and IE7? Any problems? - Roy Williams, LED Digest 2276 I haven't installed IE 7. Still waiting to see if they have fixed the majority of bugs yet. I am not as eager to get all the latest greatest upgrades anymore. Like to wait 6 months to a year so I am not the guinea pig on glitches. R. Neilson H. L. Supply www.hansons.net <Moderator Comment> Did everyone see this? Google data collection is embedded in Firefox 2. It's not as bad as it sounds, and is an optional feature. Discussion about it here: http://www.threadwatch.org/node/9531 ------------------------------------------------------- The LED Digest is sponsored by pair Networks: pair.com for Hosting | pairNIC.com for Domains Copyright 1995-2006 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- "The computer is a moron." - Peter Drucker |
