Martin’s Ecommerce Copy Writing Secrets
There is an important trick to writing great ecommerce copy – remember your TWO “readers”. Copy on an ecommerce web site is read by search engine spiders and people and the first one (spiders) catches the second (people) in its web. Here is the rub – you ecommerce copy is constrained by mutually exclusive ideas such as:

Actually based on the “share” widget creator (from the “embed this on your site” link on the widget) to customize the options and basic appearance.

Download the plugin – razoo-donation-widget v0.9

(now on  WordPress.org!)

I created Content Marketing Networks, a short slideshare PowerPoint that has been riding on top of the term in Google since 2009 thanks to Slideshare’s SEO strength and possibly being first on an idea about to explode. Those 2009 content marketing network slides tried to explain how Internet marketing is an interdependent world of links, connections and virtual cycles (positive or negative).

My content marketing network thoughts became richer and deeper thanks to a friend and a book. The book my friend recommended was Linked: Why Everything Is Connected To Everything Else by Notre Dame network researcher Albert-laszlo Barabasi. Linked explains the organic life of networks, what happens naturally behind the the wizard’s curtain.

As a Director of Ecommerce I’d observed how hubs formed bending the fabric of networked space and time sometimes in my site’s favor sometimes against. Hubs bend the fabric of network/time in their favor because they become self sustainably bigger displacing more Google winning more traffic faster and faster.

My Internet marketing team and I could watch a hub form on the horizon (in our web analytics) almost like a thunderstorm. Dark clouds formed in the distance. Traffic moved there in ever increasing numbers. If the “traffic storm” was on keywords we cared about suddenly our site was less competitive, received less traffic and, for no fault of our own OTHER than not being as well linked or ready, the storm built moving traffic, conversions and money away.

Sometimes traffic storms built and quickly blew out. Storms from ephemera didn’t last long. Ephemera such as a single great email offer or a mention on a hot site creates quick traffic showers. Other storms, such as the use of free shipping on all orders for a full year, gathered into permanent traffic and share loss for the ecommerce site I managed because we weren’t willing to match the offer. The key content marketing network idea is not about a particular offer, but the capacity for a competitor to become more of a “hub” based on a bold and uncovered Internet marketing actions (the unmatched free shipping offer). When the smoke cleared a competitor way back in the rankings ranked higher than the good guys (my site ).

“Scale Free” networks (such as the Internet) have certain natural innate characteristics. Hub formation is a “natural” content network marketing characteristic. I think about content network hubs like Einstein thought of planets and gravity. Hubs bend the Internet’s “fabric” creating a gravitational force where links, traffic and commerce flow downhill (toward the hub) in at ever-increasing rate.

“An ever increasing rate,” is another way of saying a positive virtual cycle. Positive “virtual cycles” are when good things happen faster and faster with less and less effort (push). Barabasi defines this self-reinforcing positive cycle as, “The Rich Get Richer.”

Traffic is Internet marketing’s compound interest. When, through great Internet marketing or sheer luck, you bend the web’s fabric in your favor and so create a self-reinforcing hub life is good. Faster and faster with less and less effort means profit margins go up and costs go down. Profit going up as costs go down mean your site (or business or company) is in the middle of a network effect – perhaps the most magical Internet marketing storm.

Google’s role is crucial. Google is a leading and trailing indicator. Google doesn’t create the web’s weather, but it can amplify or significantly change Internet marketing storms. If a traffic storm seems “spammy” or illegitimate Google’s magic math cuts credit and reduces storm force, power and longevity. If magic math is in favor of the storm, meaning traffic is sticking, high value links are increasing (link love in from high PageRank sites) and bounce rates are low Google shifts more traffic to the storm blowing it up. Google plays leading indicator with spam and trailing indicator when blowing a medium storm into a larger one.

Time’s role in Internet marketing is easy to forget. Time is the great equalizer and why sudden unexplained storms appear spammy. Trends do brew up suddenly usually in response to some unanticipated news event such as Michael Jackson’s unanticipated demise, a great sports victory or a new cool thing, but most traffic storms appear, build into a bell curve and then fade.

As News Jacking author David Meerman Scott points out, traffic storms are increasing even as their longevity is decreasing in our ADD “always on” culture. Scott’s sense of immediacy changes artist Andy Warhol’s infamous “15 minutes of fame” quote.  Meerman Scott’s Internet marketing as arbitrage changes Warhol’s quote to, “Everyone will be famous fifteen times for one minute at a time”. Can the need for your business, brand or product to recognize, feed and “jack” such precious moments be overstated?

Experiencing a positive traffic storm makes you want it to happen again, and again, and again. When Oprah’s O magazine included hand made place settings (dishes for the men reading this) created by an upstate New York potter represented by FoundObjects.com, the specialty gift site I co-founded in 1999, we were off to the races selling $10,000 in a matter of hours (and melting down a server). At that time, almost twelve years ago now, we didn’t think or know how to feed Oprah’s traffic storm with blog posts, widgets and social network support. Social networks twelve years ago weren’t what they are now.

Linked defines our jobs as Internet marketers differently. We are in the business of bending the web’s space/time fabric to create self-reinforcing hubs. Creating self-reinforcing hubs can start in a few ways, but almost all include:

• Related Archived Evergreen Content
• Related Relevant NOW Content
• Related Link Love
• An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
• An Ever Increasingly Fast And Growing Amount of Link Love

Related Archived Evergreen Content
One day Oprah discussed a topic out of the blue. The site I manged at the time had content on Oprah’s doctor, the one who appeared as the expert. We had content on the products discussed. We didn’t have content on doctor and products together. We scrambled to create content to match Oprah’s lead.

There is a problem. No matter how fast NEW content is created it is too late for maximum impact. Evergreen content has to cook inside Google for weeks, months or years. Evergreen content must live in the archive for some time before being deployed in response to an event for maximum return. It was a good idea to create new content pages combining doctor and products, but we wouldn’t reach Amazon-like penetration on related keywords.  Amazon is powerful because, as it moves toward being the first site with a billion pages indexed in Google, it is already cooking pages on just about any topic.

Some of Amazon’s evergreen content lives out in Anderson’s long tail for years. Suddenly a traffic storm gathers and Amazon has everything it needs to deploy new content and content fully baked in Google for years. Evergreen content’s value, when so deployed, is immense. Your site’s “trusted authority” status deepens when current storm matches NOW content (the mix of doctor and product pages we rushed to create) AND evergreen’s fully cooked content. Google’s coveted “authority” status is awarded to sites capable of creating content on the fly in response to an event combined with fully baked related evergreen content because relevance increases while traffic bounces decrease (what Google cares about).

Amazon creates content “at an ever increasing rate”. “Ever increasing rate” is another way of saying Amazon is constantly creating a network effect. Amazon is the most powerful hub outside of Google. Facebook is discussed as a Google competitor. Few understand how Amazon is Google’s Siamese twin – connected at the hip and impossible to remove.

Facebook arbitrages content and traffic trying to figure out the money. Amazon has Internet marketing money figured out. Despite Jeff Bezos’ seeming “B” status, the massive Internet marketing arbitrage implied by Google and fully executed by Amazon may be the most revolutionary change to commerce and our lives. I love my Macbooks, iPhone and iPad, but the world’s traffic arbitrage market is more Google and Bezos than Jobs. Amazon is Google’s cash register a role both are happy the other plays.

Related NOW Content
Our combination of content in response to Oprah’s show is a form of “News Jacking”. News Jacking defined by author David Meerman Scott sees and surfs traffic storms (or PR “waves”). Like Bezos, Meerman Scott’s Wall Street career prepared him for the traffic arbitrage Internet marketing is becoming. Creating unique content, content capable of several updates over the course of a storm, is a good idea. See the wave, surf the wave makes sense even if such a reaction is only half as good as NOW + evergreen.

Related Link Love (Or Facebook Shares, Likes and Links)
Back in the day (two years ago) your web site needed link love from high PageRank sites with proper anchor text. It isn’t surprising Facebook shares; likes and links are replacing such hard to achieve and rare “link love”. Getting links wasn’t “rare”. Getting links with proper anchor text with related keywords was almost impossible. Those with the knowledge to build proper links did so for MONEY not LOVE. Amazon may have ecommerce down, but Facebook has reputation economics down to an evolving new science. Facebook’s sharable LIKE widget is pure Internet marketing genius.

When there are a billion people inside your network you create weather. Figuring out how to PROJECT your vast community’s influence across the flexible fabric of the web’s space/time makes Facebook the wizard behind the curtain. Inside the Facebook firewall you are half as powerful as what can be projected beyond the wall. The Like, Share and Comment widgets project search engine optimization (SEO) power across the Internet. If you work at PowerReviews or Bazaar Voice you must be smacking your head thinking, “why didn’t we think of that”.

An Ever Increasingly Fast Content Creation Cycle
No matter how much content you are creating it isn’t enough by half AND creation is too slow. Being competitive NOW means understanding how the Internet marketing game is changing. Change is the only true constant. Noticed how noisy the web is becoming?

The web is noisy because its value is clear and beyond ROI question. Debate continues about social network marketing ROI, mobile marketing and other things we will look back on in five years and wonder what we were debating, but there is no question all companies must swim in an increasingly crowded red ocean (an ocean made red with the blood from fierce competition).

Some like Etsy.com and Amazon understand the importance of an ever increasingly fast content creation cycle. Some understand platforms beat websites. You can’t go it alone is the most important realization. You and your team, no matter how large, can’t create content fast enough to be competitive. User generated content (UGC) is a must. You must tap mob power to become a hub, to thrive and become the rich getting richer.

An Ever Increasing And Growing Amount Of Link Love
The international fashion site Zara has 10,000,000 Facebook likes. Using Marketing Profs Facebook fan value of $136.38 (seeing the full article requires sharing your email, but it is worth it) means Zara’s Facebook community is worth over a billion dollars. I can hear the scoffs now. “That’s total nonsense,” some will say. “How do they know what a Facebook Fan is worth?”

I could defend Marketing Profs numbers. They may be low actually.  The costs of trying to recreate such a community jacks the value sky high. How fast do your Facebook likes grow? Let’s not get lost in a stupid debate because it doesn’t matter what a Facebook fan is worth.

What matters is how much Google juice 10 million supporters displace. Answer: A Ton. If, like REI, you don’t have Facebook LIKES, shares and comments throughout your site it will be harder to become a hub. If your competitors understand the importance of Facebook first you may NEVER become a hub. When your competitor becomes a hub an ever-increasing amount of traffic, link love and money will move away from your site pulled by your competitor’s hub-like gravitational force.  The real frustration is you will work three times as hard for less result (than your hubbed competitor). Hubs rule the web, so rule or be ruled.

Importance Of Togetherness
Atlantic Business Technologies grew from 30 to 54 employees last year. We could grow to more than 70 this year (2012). 54 people as connected as the technical crowd at Atlantic BT is the start of a powerful content marketing network. In six steps 54 people can reach 2.5 million:

In today’s Internet marketing we are as strong as the network links we create. We can’t JUST link to each other since doing so is spam. We can link to each other and the products we create as a natural part of our Internet marketing conversations. Every now and again we may all point to the same thing by chance OR we can be more purposeful and aware using network power to create a hub, a self-sustaining hub where we do less and less to achieve more and more.

I have no idea how planets formed out of the cosmic dust of the Big Bang, but hubs form when you create great content and share it with 2.5 million people. Atlantic BT’s employees is our first content network step. We will include our customers and former customers next (Phase II), then vendors (Phase III) and finally open up the network to public participation and use.

What about competition? I can hear some readers thinking. Competition provides important and welcomed participation. What if competition wins business via Atlantic BT’s content network? Then we will learn from the experience and do better next time. No business is lost or gained because we occupy the high ground created from a content network hub. Competition wins business because we didn’t communicate our value proposition or, and this can be hard to realize, there was a better fit with someone else.

Eckart Tolle taught a valuable Internet marketing lesson when he wrote, “whatever is happening is exactly what is supposed to be happening” in The Power of Now (I think). This helpful truth eliminates wasted energy. When SEO/SEM helps wins business Tolle’s statement helps. When SEO/SEM loses business it is what was supposed to happen so find out why and test something new. We Internet marketers build sand castles and Google’s tide is inevitable.

There will always be more business than we can comfortably handle in Internet marketing in our lifetime. Online commerce is less than 10% of total retail gaining rapidly but still less than 10%. There is much work to be done and plenty of work as long as insanely great is our mission, innovation our guide and togetherness our rule. We, and this is the royal we, are more powerful together than apart by an order of magnitude (100x).

PS. Hardware
Waking up this morning to finish this article I realized a missing point. If you ever wonder why it is important to hire real network support creating a content marketing network is why. If pieces of your empire are too easily self referential you will end up in Facebook, Twitter and Google jail. Getting out of jail isn’t easy, it takes time and costs money.

You need right brainers (marketing types) to figure out your blended curation plan, blended between promotion and curation. You need left brainers (network pros) to plumb your systems to appeal to Google (fast, non-spammy). Your left brain can eliminate all your right brain work and vice versa. You CAN buy a $500 web site hosted for $50 a month. I have one of those, built in half a day with a template (visit MartinMartySmith.com), but my MartinMarty site will NEVER win a keyword battle in Google. Winning Google battles isn’t always important (though I’m hard pressed to find an example in my life when I wouldn’t want to win traffic and conversions).

If winning keyword battles in Google IS important then you need pros on the right and left side of the brain. Even if you think you know how Google works trust me you don’t (only they do really). Google may be the most beautiful living art ever created so complex complete understanding is impossible. Do you “understand” or feel great art? A: Feel. Anyone tells you they will get you a page one listing on X keyword is lying and a snake oil salesman. Stick with Internet marketers who freely admit not knowing what they don’t know, are willing to share what they do know and can easily tell five stories of SEO loss and learnings (they may call it “testing” depending on how geeky they are).

No matter who you decide to receive Internet marketing help from YOU and your company, your company’s friends, vendors and even competitors are stronger together than apart.

Martin

—
Martin Smith
Director Marketing
Atlantic Business Technology
Martin(dot)Smith(at)AtlanticBT(dot)com

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Marshall Brain (@brainstuffHSW) from HowStuffWorks.com took the stage to kick off day 2 of the Internet Summit in Raleigh and threw down a great argument for why we should care less about design and more about function.  Now design matters of course and I would be thrown to the lions if I said that if it didn’t. (Working for a firm that cares a great deal about design that we should take design and shove it is crazy talk)

My goal here is do give an overview of what he talked about, why some of it is valid and what I think the true balance is. (Full disclosure – I am a developer and my User Interfaces look like crap without our design team).

His examples though were quite compelling: Google Search Results, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit.  The content is what is truly driving customers back to these sites over and over again.  Now I would argue that the experience is what matters and how quickly one can access content, FOR these examples is what makes them hugely successful.

Now for us in the industry we can all be fairly certain that a great collaboration occurred to create Google’s new search results:

User Experience Improvements in Google Search Results

My point is that these are elements of design!  Now what they really could be is a great collaboration between UX and designer. Check out the Search menu is in red and it knows my location.  Savy? Also it is subtle, but changing the top search button blue is a great choice that draws attention to it.  But I argue that was indeed a design choice.

Now Marshall’s real point was that in start-up mode don’t really waste your time pushing pixels around and making things perfect.  If you create great content your followers will come and they will use your product.

He said, “I shop at Walmart.  Fonts and colors go over my head and I don’t even see them.”

His point was here that most of the regular everyday people out there that don’t care about design and if you are trying to get investors they don’t either, they want to know how much traffic you are getting and whether or not you are “converting”.

Now it is tough to argue with this point, but again, I go back to the fact design, form, and function are all required.  So I nuance his point slightly and say perhaps spend a little more that he is abdicating for so you can make your site accessible for all, usable for all, and create an experience with content that tells a story brings you back for more.

His other great point was that great content tells a story and if you tell a great story it will resonate with people (and I add then share it with all your friends @darylhemeon ha!).   Marshall also outlined his major issues with sinking too much design time up front:

1. It is expensive
2. time consuming
3. It is never done – fashion is always changing
4. browser compatibility issues
5. distraction from what is important

Marshall’s points are well taken. All I am saying is that is our jobs in this industry to find the right balance for every customer.  What he did say rang true though about the top three most important features are the Content (Content is King #ISUM11), Navigation is simple and functional and SPEED.  If your site is a dog, no one will run with it.

I do understand that what he was trying to do was stir people up on the morning and I started this conversation first thing at my office and people started to wig out!  Which personally I think is great because what it does is make us think about what matters for our customers and that is what is truly important.

Marshall Brain, thanks for a great talk, thanks for stirring the pot and thanks for recommending WordPress…by the way, this blog uses that too.

@dgiambruno David Giambruno Senior Vice President & CIO, Revlon

Notes:

Their virtualization strategy allows them to access all of their data and sling it to any device and they did it in two days.  His simple mission is to allow the business to do whatever they want when they want to do it.

It took them 5 years to enable their virtulization strategy.  One(ness) is their mantra, one server image, one desktop image, etc.

They are moving to streaming all their applications.  They are even streaming Adobe…they have one copy that they patch and then all their users get it automatically.

The new active vectors are the SAN and mobile devices especially 4G enabled devices.  This changes the paradigm of Application Delivery and it will change the nature of compliance with government regulations.

Management and Orchestration of Virtualized Infrastructure: The Next Battleground in the Converged Stack Market

@jdooley_clt Jeramiah Dooley vArchitect, VCE

Notes:

Infrastructure is boring, but Virtualization is not boring.  Because there is competition what will come out of there is innovation.  Watching VMWare andMicrosoft go at it is interesting, but the key is that innovation is occurring rapidly.

An Intel Processor is sitting inside every major storage provider.  One answer as to why is cost.  Intel makes them by the billions and can distribute them and performance is usually great.

@lindzie Lindsay Wassell Partner and Consultant, KeyPhraseSEOlogy

Commentary:

Notes:

Create great news content and you can compete with main stream news media if you have expertise in that space.  It is easier to rank a video as opposed to entering a simple web page.

Images get great rankings, make sure you have a file name, alt tag and text around the image.  Use images in News articles, places pages, and use Panoramio.  Look for any opportunity to add rich media types as they will increase your rankings.

Google Local – if you have brick and mortar locations you absolutely must in local listings and encourage and manage reviews.  Local Places page you can add photos, videos, description, categories and address.

David Mihm’s Local Search Ranking Factors is a great resource for using Google Local.

Microdata = Rich Snippets – all the search engines got together and set standards for classifying information.  Microdata (the date about data) is really important for rankings.  Check out Schema.org for examples of this.  Music microdata can be used to have links in search results directly to songs.

Products can be tagged using microdata to make them show up in a different way so it shows the reviews.

Info on Rich Snippet resources can be viewed on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=21997.

Key Takeaways:

1. Expand your view of Search Marketing
2. Explore new content types and find ways to expand
3. Identify your content with microdata to help it shine in the SERPs.
4. Think beyond the web page

Next Generation SEO: Beyond Best Practices

@michaelmarshall Michael Marshall SEO Guru

Commentary:  The brunt of this one and its discussion of the Power Law did go over my head, but it was interesting from how this is used to generate traffic.  Personally I think he had too much content in his slides and moved too quickly so it was difficult to digest and get any true takeaways from the session.

Notes:

This is important because traffic leads to sales.

On-page Optimization has to do with Title Tags, Meta tags, ALT tags, Header tags, URL structure, anchor text, Keyword proximity is more important than Keyword density.

The Key to navigating through all of the methodology is MATH.

The Key benefit is to get the data so that you connect it to a mathematical model to create understanding.

More often than not your competitors have changed something that improved their rankings.  Don’t change too much at once on your site when it comes to SEO so you can track what you have changed.

StatistiXL is a great product for evaluating your SEO performance to do the work using Math as opposed to trial and error you will save money over time.

Make Your CMS Work for Your SEO, Not Against You

@markusrenstrom Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO Yahoo!

Commentary: The big take away here for me that the SEO team of your company needs to own how new pages are created to make sure they conform to a template that can be re-used to save money.

Notes:

It makes sense to have quality over quantity and you need to focus on your platform that you are going to use to get good SEO rankings.

Concept #1 – Expectations – If you work in search you need to educate your company on what they can expect from the results.  Markus spent time talking about what SEO is not.  SEO takes time, strategy and investment and not more links.

SEO is a long term Content Strategy.  50% of people are using 3 or more keywords to search now.  You also need to make that content accessible to everyone.  Search engines disable all of the javascript so that it can search through the content.

Think about who is the top user to your site?  Is the search engine your top user because they will actually look at everyone one of your pages.  SEO is about User Focused content.

Concept #2 Ownership – ownership created agility, enables standardization and automation, and it saves time and resources. If you create standards to tags and Urls it gets faster to create content.

Duplication is your enemy.  Your one article should not exist in more than one category. Dynamic URLs are scary from a search perspective.

The importance of tagging cannot be underestimated especially around the coverage of titles and well formed anchor tags.

Yahoo’s traffic is up even though they have reduced the number of pages by 40%.

Yahoo has its own content management system.

Next Level SEO: Social Media Integration

@bill_slawski Bill Slawski, President CEO, SEO by the Sea

Commentary: You should be teaching your clients about relevance of social in search results because they are the subject matter experts.

Notes:

Google has reacted to the advent of social media to show fresher more relevant content.

Bill brought up several sites that failed fast and hard like Dodgeball.com, Google Answers, Google opensocial, Googlevark, Google hotpot was integrated into Google places, Google SearchWiki, Google Wave, Google Buzz.  All of these have been shed and some parts are now being incorporated into Google Plus.

Real Time Search is what is changing.  The recent earthquake is great example of this.  Address recency-sensitive queries are starting to drive results from social media.  The results cannot be ranked the same way that normal web pages are ranked.  When you interact with Google Plus you are building a type of ranking system that will help results with your +1 activity.

Google Plus of course is now showing up in search results.  Authorship markup standards are now published by Google that will show your Google+ posts and your author picture to have richer content.  Authorship markup is difficult but uses the aforementioned mircodata from schema.org.  All Blogspot and YouTube contributions automatically incorporate authorship markup.  Google is using a contribution score to control how the markup is displayed in results.

Why Google+?  Well we should be using it because of the access to all the collateral data that they have access to.  Teach our clients on how to social network instead of networking for them.

Check out @darylhemeon #ISum11 as well as I will be using my newfangled Google machine to do some tweeting as well.

Wish me luck as I chase down the new American Dream.

Black Friday Online Ecommerce
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is about hype in the brick and mortar store world. How many people slept in Target’s parking lot? Who is going to get this year’s Elmo? The economy may be down, but Black Friday madness will never die. Black Friday shopping madness isn’t about economy or presents for the holidays. Black Friday is dinosaur brain, Darwinian survival of the fittest stuff, the kind of ancient genetic stuff that doesn’t go away.

We are humans. We shop therefor we are, and we shop on Black Friday in to tell ancient Hunter / Gather stories. Our Black Friday shopping stories highlight challenge, obstacles, creativity and triumph. “I’m alive,” these survival stories say, “I WON” Black Friday shoppers declare.

Here are five tips to increase your Black Friday sales (though if you are reading this and your email campaigns, site and product pages aren’t tuned nothing is likely to save you):

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 1: WOOT-ize Your Ecommerce Site
Woot sells one thing daily. They start at midnight and go until they don’t have anymore (typically around noon, this time of year by much earlier depending on what is being sold and how good the discount). Woot knows the old direct mail adage – best deals, best time of year. They don’t kid around during the holidays.

On Black Friday your ecommerce site needs to create competition and a sense of scarcity. Scarcity, real or manufactured, heightens competition. Your ecommerce site has an advantage over Woot.com. You sell more than one thing. Selling more than one thing means your average cart may include lost leaders and very profitable products. Lost leaders are products sold below costs to create buzz and help sell everything else. Manage to profitable averages online remembering a little piece of a large number is a large number. Network dynamics favor the brave.

What is your most popular product? What is your cost? Cut your cost in half and sell your most popular product for one day only, in limited supply on a clearly stated FIRST COME FIRST GETS DEAL, at some amazing price. Be open and honest about what you’re up to. You are making headlines, you are breaking records, and you are going a little crazy for one day and only for a few hours. Starting shouting this idea NOW in teasers like, “Are we crazy? Meet here Black Friday (11.25) and you tell us.”

You can afford to be more fearless on 11.25 than you think. Every Free Shipping trigger we ever set was exceeded by at least 30%. If we set a buy $50 get free shipping trigger this time of year we bested by $50. Free shipping is the cost of poker. No one talks about “winning free shipping”, but without it you don’t get to have the other conversation – the, “OMG I got such a great deal on Black Friday at Martins.com, I got X for –Y”.

Black Friday was the day brick and mortar retailers traditionally moved from red ink to black (losing to making money), but ecommerce is different. Online LOSE as much money as you can on Black Friday. I say this comfortable knowing you WON’T LOSE MONEY if you play the game even half right because the PR and cart profitable combinations will make more money than playing it safe. Win Black Friday, win the season, win the season and win the year is how Internet marketers think, that simple and very complex progression defines all content network marketing.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 2: Social
The days when your team could take Friday off to shop with the family are gone. Your team must monitor your offer’s social reception now. Watch Search.Twitter.com, Topsy and Google Alerts. If you have the money hire a real time web watcher like Radian6, watch Facebook and your emails like hawks on wires watching a field for dinner (a favorite analogy).

If you have an ecommerce site you must be engaged in the conversations on Black Friday. Digest turkey, respond to Tweets, post great comments on your Facebook page and push what is happening NOW out to your site (as much as possible using feeds or snippets) to increase buzz, competition and sales. Almost out of that GREAT DEAL? Good since you are losing your shirt, but Tweet it, post it to Facebook and email it. Create an infinite number of second prizes. Say, “Missed the most crazy deal ever, but you are in luck because….”

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: Lions, Tigers and Bears…Oh My
I HATE count downs, blinking anything and SCREAMING headlines 363 days a year. On Black Friday and Cyber Monday design is not even in the car. Designers please cover your ears. Use any blinking anything that gets and convert attention so you can wrap and pack a record breaking ecommerce sales season.

By-the-way, if you didn’t test blinking objects, motion, video, large Call-To-Actions and RED in your buttons before 11.25 DON’T TEST THEM NOW. You can’t afford to try untried things now. If you know RED BUTTONS work then make the red button on 11.25 25% bigger than normal (50% if you are brave and are making a CRAZY offer).

Black Friday is NOT a day to try new things.

“What about our brand,” I can hear the Tiffany brand manager saying. Seriously? Are you kidding? If your brand can’t stand a day of a little junky conversion then you are already junky and probably don’t convert. Tiffany can afford to be a tad less snotty on 11.25 if it means a 10% sales jump or probably something north of $10 million. I can be a LOT LESS snotty for $10m what aboutyou?  No matter what I tell you to do you will naturally self-select down so GO NASTY SHOUTING LARGE ON 11.25 and keep what works for Cyber Monday.

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 3: The Three C’s
Ecommerce success depends on content, community and campaigns.

Black Friday seems to be all about campaigns and ecommerce conversion. Not the case. Community and Content are MORE important on Black Friday. Your campaigns are in the ground now, unchangeable, away from the dock. Social is the only way to change your ecommerce site’s needle now, so BE SOCIAL. If you haven’t built the right landing pages, told the right stories and made your offers special either by association or actual fact then Black Friday will be just another average retail day for your site.

The most important ecommerce idea is – THE RICH GET RICHER. Network marketing, and networks themselves, are set to heap a disproportionate reward on the few. What Venture Capitalist like to call an online “territory grab” is just a structure of what Notre Dame network researcher Albert-Laszlo Barabasi calls a “Scale Free” network in his book Linked:How Everything Is Connected To Everything Else.

Networks create hubs (the rich). Hubs get more traffic and links than any other nodes (web sites or clusters of sites). If your site is hub congratulation. I bet most reading this post aren’t Facebook, Twitter, Etsy.com or Amazon. If you aren’t one of these lucky few you must pay attention to Content, Community and Campaigns as if your online ecommerce life depends on them (because it does).

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 4: Please No Testing on 11.25, Except….
May seem crazy to even THINK of testing on 11.25. Trust me, this statement is needed. Because you can test something doesn’t mean it is the right thing to do, a point often lost on my ecommerce brothers and sisters who get caught in an infinite testing loop. Q: What you should test on 11.25? A: NOTHING.

Play with the A team and test nothing on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. I write this knowing friends will call with reasons why tests they are dong are backend enough no one will see them anyway. Nope, that argument doesn’t hold because test, any test, is conditional and this is NOT the time of year to be conditional. Black Friday as a testing environment is so specialized what are you really learning anyway? Is next year’s Black Friday doing to be exactly like this one? Is Black Friday remotely like any other day?

One exception is testing offers for Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday, the Monday following Thanksgiving, can be as big as or bigger in online sales than Black Friday. Cyber Monday was created when work T1 high speed lines were more reliable than home dial up. Cyber Monday hangs around because we deal into it and who wants to be back at work on the Monday after Thanksgiving?

Black Friday Ecommerce Tip 5: Overload your Tech The Week Before
The week before Thanksgiving is slower than every day after. Use the week before to test your DNS server, your load balancer and a five other technical things I don’t understand. Get your Rich Kurnik’s (a friend who I would trust with my networked life) to create artificial demand, monitor response time and dress rehearse as much ecommerce as you can.

Every slow second at this time of year costs thousands or millions, so don’t be slow. Have more than enough technical horse power. Have horses sitting there waiting to run. Horsepower costs are going down as I write this. If you don’t or can’t get inside your technology “stack” find someone you trust to test everything as close to Black Friday and Cyber Monday as possible.

Last Black Friday Ecommerce Tip
Final Black Friday ecomerce tip is hang on, listen, respond and have fun.

You will look back on this year’s battle as the “good old days” no matter what happens on Black Friday in 2011 ecommerce sales. I used to give my team Friday off. Thanks to social those days are gone. Soon Thanksgiving will be a work day for ecommerce teams (if it isn’t already).

Q: Will the pace of ecommerce be slower or faster next year? “It can’t get faster,” you think and you are wrong, way off, not even close. Black Friday ecommerce is going to get much, much faster. Hope these tips help you make more money this Black Friday (or next).

Martin

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Martin Smith
Marketing Director
Atlantic BT
Martin(dot)Smith(at)Atlanticbt(dot)com

The three guys from Miami tried, tried hard, to explain how they viewed the world. Everything in their world was arbitrage. Make something for pennies sell it for dollars. Make something for nickels sell it for dollars. Make something for dimes sell it for dollars. Everything was arbitrage. I wasn’t sure the furniture in their offices weren’t on loan and capable of being bought by the highest bidder on some auction site.

How prescient a meeting was that? Internet marketing and search engine optimization looks more like pork bellies futures daily. Jeff Bezos, a former Wallstreeter, seems to have made the entire world after the street’s desire to buy and sell. David Meerman Scott in his book Real Time Marketing and PR declares our trading futures, a future that is happening now as today’s meeting with Radian6 and last week’s meeting with Argyle Social confirm.

Q: Do you think things are going to move faster or slower in the future?

Thinking like an Internet marketer on SEO means understanding Key Performance Indicators, being able to feel a trend and riff content almost before the feeling is over and arbitrage, arbitrage and arbitrage. Think like an Internet marketer means the next time your CFO asks about social, mobile or QR Code ROI ask if they can explain a sand castle (lol). Make sure your resume is up-to-date and remember Atlantic BT is hiring so be fearless .