I have just updated the What The Duck PHP code for including the comic strip into any web page.
Here’s a sample for those not already familiar with this hilarious photography-oriented comic strip.
The Ten Funniest YouTube Videos (so far)
December 17, 2008 By 2 Comments
Over the past year or so I have compiled lists of YouTube videos that have inspired, intrigued and irritated me. This is a list of videos that made me laugh myself silly. Just in time for Christmas!
Ten things you must know about your website
December 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Any serious shop owner will know: how many people enter the shop; the conversion rate; the minimum number of shoppers needed to break even; which promotions worked; which promotions tanked; what the competition is doing; and, when more staff need to be hired for busy times.
Whether you sell jeans, make jewellery, design offices or coach executives, your website is your virtual shop front. Just like a real shop front or office it must be properly managed, maintained and regularly evaluated.
Here are ten questions about your website (and email marketing) that are critical to your online success:
- How many people visit your website every month/week/day?
- How do they find your website? (if they came from a search engine, what keywords did they search for?)
- Why are they visiting?
- Which visitors are converting the best (and/or staying the longest) and why?
- When was the last time you updated the website?
- If your web designer disappears tomorrow (it happens!) do you have up-to-date Control Panel, FTP, Domain Name Management and Content Management System access details so that you can hand it over to a new web designer?
- How many people downloaded your ebook and/or signed up to your newsletter/articles last week?
- When you send out an email campaign, what is your average open rate? Which topics and subject lines produce the best open rates?
- For what keywords has your website been optimised? (Are you using these when writing new content?)
- How does your website compare against your competitors’? What are they doing that you can learn from?
Most business owners and managers with whom I talk can answer, at best, three of the above. Bail up your web designer or website manager and ensure that you have access to the necessary statistics. If in doubt, take me up on my free consultation offer.
Christmas is getting close! What is Santa bringing you?
Wotif.com’s Ten Steps to Online Success
November 20, 2008 By Leave a Comment
A month or so ago Graeme Wood, the co-founder of the immensely successful wotif.com, delivered a guest lecture to my E-Commerce students on the topic “Ten Steps to Online Success”.
He discussed with us his experience of coming up with an innovative idea, prototyping it, and seeing it through to the thriving, global business that it is now. A business generating, last year, a profit of $34.5 Million (source).
Below is a summary of the questions that he believes must be answered in creating a successful business and some tid bits of wisdom that ressonated with me. If you’re serious about starting or developing a business – online or offline – you might find yourself having a few “ah-ha” moments if you get out pen and paper and start answering the questions. I did.
Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
November 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I had a different article scheduled to go out this week but sometimes a seemingly unrelated series of events line up to show you something you wouldn’t have otherwise seen. Something important. Something worth sharing.
Knowing he had only months to live, Carnegie Mellon University Professor Randy Pausch (Oct. 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) gave his last lecture at the university on the 18th September 2007 before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving presentation, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” he talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals.
And I’d like to share it with you:
Three dumb mistakes from which to learn
November 15, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Last night, after a long but exhilarating day, I was sitting in a wonderful steak restaurant in Newtown, Sydney.
I caught the manager’s eye as I took a seat at a table next to an open window that let in a refreshing breeze.
The manager waited on me at once. I could see in his face the love for his job as he expertly made me feel at home.
My medium-rare ribeye came out soon after my perfectly suited Shiraz Cabernet and I devoured my meal. Every once in a while the manager or another staff member would check in to see if I was happy with everything. I was.
My table was cleared as soon as I’d finished my meal and the bill was delivered to my table upon my request. The price was by no means outrageous and I was happy to even leave a tip.
So what did they do wrong?
Don’t read this email. No, don’t! Stop! Don’t click!
November 15, 2008 By 1 Comment
Many of my clients are beginning to follow my lead in sending out regular correspondence to their existing customers and their prospects. The motivation is not so much to “sell, sell, sell!” but to cultivate genuine relationships over a period of time by providing their readers with useful and interesting information.
One of the challenges involved in email marketing, however, is getting people to open the email. We average a respectable 45% open rate for our mailouts but every now and then dip down into the 30’s or shoot above 50%. I find it interesting to analyse the statistics that our software gives us to identify what subject lines produce spikes in our open rate and which ones result in slumps.
While you may think that any mention of ’sex’ would result in spam filters going out of their way to block an email, our August email ‘Who is the Sexiest Web Designer?’ resulted in 54% of our list opening the email – our highest ever.
The suggestive ‘”We shouldn’t be this excited about a website! Its wrong isn’t it?….”‘ the week prior managed 52% and the drama-filled ‘How I saved my reputation with one click (a useful tip for the future)’ was opened by 53%.
Conversely, the mention of email spam in the subject ‘Wasting time sorting through email spam? We’ve got the solution’ resulted in our second biggest slump at 35% and the ernest, but long, subject line ‘An outrageously simple way to track the success of your advertising (9 out of 10 advertisers don’t do it!)’ has been awarded, so far, only 33% (tragically, I consider this one of the most important and useful free bits of advice I’ve sent out).
So what works? Subject lines with a bit of fun, sass, sex-appeal or drama seem to work best. Topics that seem too boring, too serious or sales-oriented seem to get trashed. Don’t expect anyone to open an email entitled, simply, ‘Newsletter’!
An outrageously simple way to track the success of your advertising (9 out of 10 advertisers don’t do it!)
October 9, 2008 By Leave a Comment
I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “Half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”
I was flipping through one of Brisbane’s free publications, MAP Magazine, and noticed with some surprise that only one of the 67 paid ads was definitely using a basic, accurate and potentially cost-free method of tracking its success.
I don’t know about you, but if I were to spend money on advertising (or any promotional campaign – including flyer distribution and radio spots) I’d want to know if it’s working or not. Not only that but I’d want some definite numbers so that I can compare various different marketing efforts to determine which are working better than others.
To my eye, in this particular issue of MAP Magazine, there were:
- 17 paid ads with no website link at all
- 50 paid ads with a website link
- over 81 editorial links
- 2 Bigpond email addresses (instead of professional looking myname@companyname.com addresses)
- 1 paid ad with a website link with “Coming soon” written next to it
- 1 paid ad with a link to a MySpace profile (*rolls eyes*)
- 1 paid ad that clearly had a method for tracking the ad’s success
- 2 paid ads that might have been trackable
Imagine that you manage a shop in the Valley that sells sunglasses and you run, within the space of a few months, an advertisement in five different publications and you do flyer distribution in three different localities.
You include your phone number and physical address in the ads and flyers. You also have the presence of mind to instruct your shop staff to [casually] survey callers and visitors as to how they came by your shop (and have some incentive to ensure they don’t forget!).
You’ve also included your website address on all five advertisements and flyers. Let’s say it’s www.mysunglassesshop.com.
During those months you see an improvement in traffic coming to your site but you have no idea which ads or flyers are bringing you the traffic. What a bummer!
This is what you can do next time:
The Almost Breathless Question
October 3, 2008 By Leave a Comment
What do you do?
My personal trainers at Best Practice, Anthony and Jeames, are both as passionate about e-commerce (or “online business”) as I am so we have a lot to talk about once they’ve put me through my paces on a Tuesday and Friday morning.
Anthony and I have been talking, for a while, about how to answer the question, “What do you do?” Up until recently my uninspiring answer has been, “I make websites.”
While it is a concise description of the end-product of a typical project here at Webnerd, it does nothing to explain how we differ from every other Joe who makes websites, nor does it inspire any further discussion on the topic.
So Anthony and I have given it some thought and come up with the following response:
“I help businesses to understand and then implement the power of the Internet to increase their profits.”
You then, almost breathlessly, ask, “How do you do this, James?”
And from there a conversation may bloom.
Well, hopefully! I’ll give it a go and make tweaks as necessary.
How do you reply when someone asks you, “What do you do?” Is it compelling and does it inspire conversation?
Let me ask you something else: is the answer to this question conveyed in a concise and compelling way on the front page of your website?
Go ahead and check right now 
Wishing you happiness and success in your online and offline endeavours
10 of the Coolest E-Commerce Sites
September 29, 2008 By 3 Comments
As part of my job teaching E-Commerce at QUT’s Faculty of Information Technology I get to spend time investigating interesting and inspirational (okay, “COOL!”) E-commerce websites. It’s not unusual that, in the course of teaching, my students show me things that I’ve never seen before, too.
The following is a list of ten of the coolest E-Commerce sites that I’ve seen, some have been introduced to me just this year by some of my students. In sharing these with you I imagine that perhaps you will discover something new that is useful to you and/or something that will spark some thinking about what you could do to leverage the Web to streamline your business processes and/or to make more money!
Animoto (animoto.com)
Upload photos, select one of the songs from the library (or upload your own) and hit the button. It will do the rest. Using some clever analysis and randomising algorithms it will create a video clip using your photos and the music selected.
How they make money: You can play with Animoto for free and produce 15 second video clips. To get full-length video clips you have to pay a small annual membership fee. DVD quality costs a little more again. Commercial usage requires purchasing a commercial license.
Basecamp (basecamphq.com)
Basecamp is an online project management and collaboration tool. The company that created it, 37 Signals, has a philosophy of keeping software and interfaces as simple as possible.
How they make money: There is a free 30-day trial that will allow you a taste of the service. After that you can choose from three different monthly plans.
Blurb (blurb.com)
Download Blurb’s book-designing software and you’ll be designing your first photography/keep-sake book in minutes
How they make money: Once you’ve designed your book you can submit it to them, select your book finishing options, and they’ll create and ship the book to you.
