From: feedburner.com

Here are some of the articles we have found interesting this week: Big Update to Webmaster Tools
Live Search has launched a significant update to the Webmaster Center and brought the Center out of Beta (Live Aug 6 2008) Has Google Blocked WebPosition Ranking Software for Good?
Google has finally closed its doors on one of the most popular [...]

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/361119393/698-pandia-weekend-wrap-up-august-10.html

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From: feedburner.com

More often than not, a Google search will return millions and millions of results. 50 Matches is a search engine that never returns more than 50. The idea is that by indexing and searching only sites that have been bookmarked, “dugg”, etc., the quality of the results will be so high that 50 matches are all you need.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/361045495/696-social-powered-search-from-50-matches.html

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From: feedburner.com

Patience.

Google was a very good search engine for two years before you started using it.

The iPod was a dud.

I wrote Unleashing the Ideavirus 8 years ago. A few authors tried similar ideas but it didn’t work right away. So they gave up. Boingboing is one of the most popular blogs in the world because they never gave up.

The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly. You friend someone on Facebook and two minutes later, they friend you back. Bang.

But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.

I discovered a lucky secret the hard way about thirty years ago: you can outlast the other guys if you try. If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.

It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web. The frustrating part is that you see your tactics fail right away. The good news is that over time, you get the satisfaction of watching those tactics succeed right away.

The trap: Show up at a new social network, invest two hours, be really aggressive with people, make some noise and then leave in disgust.

The trap: Use all your money to build a fancy website and leave no money or patience for the hundred revisions you’ll need to do.

The trap: read the tech blogs and fall in love with the bleeding-edge hip sites and lose focus on the long-term players that deliver real value.

The trap: sprint all day and run out of energy before the marathon even starts.

The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/361003032/the-secret-of-t.html

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From: feedburner.com

Stopped by a Whole Foods early one morning this week for an iced tea.

I ordered a hot rooibos (you should try it) poured over a glass of ice.

Whole Foods is under two kinds of pressure: shareholders that want better results, and consumers who point out that it’s really expensive. They’re working hard to position themselves as not so expensive.

Anyway, the tea was $1.79 (a 90% gross margin) but the ice cost 50 cents extra.

Huh?

I mentioned to the cash register person that I wasn’t going to pay fifty cents for ice. Understandingly, she said, “no problem.”

And then, instead of doing what I expected (giving me the precious ice for free), she didn’t give me the ice. I had hot tea. I got what I paid for.

The thing is, Whole Foods didn’t get what they wanted. They focused on the add on revenue and generated ill will. No joy in Mudville that morning.

The problem with the infinite add on gross margin strategy is that it doesn’t work on everyone. The problem with charging $95 to deliver a $10,000 purchase is that all the buyer remembers is the indignity of the add on.

Here’s my advice: have all the add ons you want. But waive them early and often. Waive the charges for great customers or for customers that make a face or just because it’s Tuesday. “Well, the to go charge is usually a dollar, but since you come here a lot, no charge for you.”

It’s not about charging less. It’s about delight.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/360192764/the-bitter-tast.html

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From: feedburner.com

People need to understand motivation in order to make sense of a story. When we see a person or a business take action, our first move is to try to figure out their motivation. The why. The what’s in it for them.

We want to know why someone is acting the way they are. Your customers or your friends or your investors or your boss want to know what makes you tick.

And the reflex explanation is: money.

He works a ton of hours, but that’s because he gets paid so much.

A going out of business sale? Oh, they’re in pain, so I get to save money.

He recommended that book, but that’s because he got a kickback from Amazon.

She wants me to buy that service because she works on commission.

Of course, in a few cases, this is exactly the correct explanation. Except it almost always isn’t.

People don’t volunteer long hours at the museum or at an online forum for the money. There isn’t any.

People don’t work nights and weekends at some jobs because they have to… they have colleagues that get paid just as much who work less.

I smiled a bit when I saw a few posts from people who suggested I started the Triiibe group as some sort of grand scheme to sell books. I’ve gotta tell you, there are far easier ways to sell a few thousand copies of a book than to build and run an online community.

No, people (most people) don’t do things only for money. There’s usually a minimum threshold that gets someone to pick a job and stick with it, but beyond that, the things we do are expressions of who we are and what we love and the impact we wish to make, not selfish acts designed to earn a few extra bucks. (No one paid you to read this post, I bet).

All other things being equal, people pick what pays the best. All other things being equal, people buy the cheapest one. Fortunately for marketers, all other things are rarely equal. People don’t all sign up to work at Goldman Sachs. Most of the meaning and activity in our lives comes from the things we do for free, or the choices we make about work, not the financial exchanges we do to support ourselves.

Next time you catch yourself following the money, it’s worth another look. Follow the non-money first.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/359368078/when-in-doubt-d.html

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From: linkbuildingbestpractices.com

There’s no doubt that link building strategies improve a website’s link popularity and search engine ranking, and one way link building can be one of the strongest weapons in your link building arsenal. It’s also the most difficult type of link to achieve. After all, you’re essentially striving to get a link to your own website from [...]

Read Original: http://www.linkbuildingbestpractices.com/link-building/one-way-link-building-techniques/

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From: feedburner.com

Google gets rid of its highly controversial search marketing business.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/pandia/vfbc/~3/358172257/695-google-lets-go-of-search-marketing-company-performics.html

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From: feedburner.com

I confess. I like using it that way.

I think architecting something is different from designing it. I hope you can forgive me but I think it’s a more precise way to express this idea.

Design carries a lot of baggage related to aesthetics. We say something is well-designed if it looks good. There are great designs that don’t look good, certainly, but it’s really easy to get caught up in a bauhaus, white space, font-driven, Ideo-envy way of thinking about design.

So I reserve “architect” to describe the intentional arrangement of design elements to get a certain result.

You can architect a computer server set up to make it more efficient. You can architect a train station to get more people per minute through the turnstiles.

More interesting, you can architect a business model or a pricing structure to make it far more effective at generating the behavior you’re looking for. Most broken websites aren’t broken because they violate common laws of good design. They’re broken because their architecture is all wrong. There’s no strategy in place.

Stew Leonard’s, which used to be my favorite supermarket example, is architected to extract large amounts of money from customers. One example: there’s only one route through the store. You start at the beginning and work your way to the end. No one goes there to buy a half-gallon of milk. And he’s not going to win any design competitions either…

Or consider the architecture of the pricing at 37signals or the architecture of Hotmail’s viral marketing campaign years ago.

Architecture, for me anyway, involves intention, game theory, systems thinking and relentless testing and improvement. Fine with me if you want to call it design, just don’t forget to do it.

Read Original: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/typepad/sethsmainblog/~3/358301468/is-architect-a.html

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From: semhints.com

There are millions of blogs. Most bloggers will never receive more than a few hundred visits a year. They never expect to receive high SERPS, or hundreds of thousands of visits a year. This minimalist thinking keeps them from becoming famous.
Can I become famous?
The answer is simply yes. I have coached many authors and industry [...]

Read Original: http://www.semhints.com/how-to-create-a-famous-blog/

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From: linkbuildingbestpractices.com

Every Tuesday we pick a vertical market based on the number of votes a market receives at our Vertical Market Poll. This week it is the Home Improvement market.  By this we mean home improvement as it relates to remodeling services, roofing, etc.  Not retail outlets.   We invite all of you out there to post (in the comments) [...]

Read Original: http://www.linkbuildingbestpractices.com/directories/home-improvement-links-dofollow-tuesdays/

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From: semhints.com

It can be a nightmare. Your web design company charges more than $2000 for a website — and the code is so bad that MSN won’t even look at you, and the SEO pros claim you need hours of rewrites. In a perfect world, CSS and SEO should work hand in hand, but they rarely [...]

Read Original: http://www.semhints.com/the-truth-about-css-and-seo/

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From: semhints.com

302 server redirects exploit allows webmaster create "virtual pages" rank for terms that pages belonging to another webmaster used to rank for.
Successfully employed, this technique will allow the offending webmaster ("the hijacker") to displace the pages of the "target" in the Search Engine Results Pages ("SERPS"), and hence (a) cause search engine traffic to [...]

Read Original: http://www.semhints.com/how-to-tell-if-a-hacker-stole-your-serps/

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