There’s great thread at Digital Point about profits to be made online.
The nice thing about this thread is that all the participants (or most of them anyway) are being unusually open about how much they make online, and from what sources. These are some of the more experienced webmasters around, so it provides a welcome dose of reality for me. Better yet, some of the numbers are tantalizingly high.
Technorati Tags: digitalpoint
I’ve been selling scores of books on Amazon lately, and I’ve got a bit different approach than many.
When I order a used book from Amazon, usually I don’t get anything other than Amazon’s automated response. Then, an agonizing amount of time later, I get the book. That’s OK, I suppose. They are a lot cheaper, and most people selling books aren’t professionals.
But, you see I’ve been reading the very excellent book, “Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results” (Bryan Eisenberg, Jeffery Eisenberg), and I know better. Silence is no way to treat customers, and even if my customers aren’t really likely to become repeat customers it is still a good habit and state of mind to treat them well.
I’m treating my whole Amazon experiment as a chance to learn how to sell, how to package and ship, and how to do basic accounting for it all. It’s kind of a trial run for the clothing store I’ll be opening soon.
One of the things I’m doing to distinguish myself as a seller is to always follow up after I’ve shipped. That means I need to write up to a dozen response emails a day. I want to be efficient, obviously, yet I don’t want to just use the interface from my shipping software, Endicia to mail my customers. That’s too impersonal.
I’ve settled on using MailTemplate for OSX Mail.app. Using it, I simply made a responder template. After I ship a book, I right click on the order message, select “respond with mail template | shipped your book”, update the subject line, and I’m done. Easy, fast, and personalized.
Despite my troubles with Audible.com, I’m pleased to report that my first audio book is a real winner. I’m learning a lot from “Never Eat Alone : And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time” (Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz).
I’ve been listening to it every day on my commute. The narrator is very good, and the content is top-notch. Keith is full of personal stories about connecting with people and building your network. He’s got a lot of advice as well. I’m actually thinking that I may need to purchase the paper book to have his tips ready-to-hand. So many are so good, but they slip your mind if you can’t flip back and refer to them.
Networkers don’t have to be jerks. At its heart, networking is about making friends and being helpful to them. It isn’t about callous and shallow usage, and is certainly not about favor tallying. Those realizations are worth the price of the book to me.
Right at the start of the book, Mr. Ferrazzi says one of his ground-rules is that you should never keep score. That’s liberating. I started doing this a long time ago with lunch dates. If I go to lunch with a friend, I like to alternate paying, but I explicitly agree with them that we aren’t tallying prices. If we go to a more expensive restaurant one week and a lesser one the next time, we know that it will equal in the end. That little agreement has made a difference in comfort for us. I’m looking forward to seeing how deliberately not keeping favor tallies will enhance my social network.
I kept being a bit put off about Keith’s apparent ease with the word "friend". Just today, I heard “Of course, everyone has at least ten friends.” Really? I got to thinking about that and came to an observation. I think that Keith just defines the word differently than me. He says friend where I’d say acquaintance, and he says close friend where I’d say friend. Defined like that, of course I have ten “good acquaintances”.
Actually, I’ve decided to try his definitions on for size. I think it may make a difference in my social experience.
I’ll have more observations as I listen more to the book. For now, extremely worthwhile, if a bit mentally or emotionally challenging to consider trying to enact in my life. So far I’d give it an early "A" grade. I think it has the potential to deeply influence more than a few lives, which not many books truly do.
Technorati Tags: keith ferrazzi, never eat alone, reviews
In my stunning statistic post, I quoted Call To Action’s claim that 70% of the time customers are prevented from buying, even when they want to.
It happened to me this morning. Here’s the situation, I’m trying to use my commuting time to better effect. I’d like to listen to audio books on business and entrepreneurship on my iPod. I did some research and decided to give Audible.com a try.
First, I can’t understand why the site sometimes shows a “credit” price for some books, but not all the time. As a “gold” member, you get a credit a month, good for a download of a book of your choice. A reasonable question I had was “do some books cost more than one ‘credit’?” The FAQ doesn’t say, and the fact that the books don’t always show a credit price confused the issue even more. In fact, I’m still not sure, even after using the site for an hour.
Second mistake, what the heck are those available formats? The audiobooks show colored numbers below the title, 1,2,3,4. Most have all four numbers, but some only have 2-4. What devices match up with those numbers? Does floating my cursor over the number tell me? No. The faq says that #2 is for iPod. I think. Why not “iPod”, why a number which I’m going to forget immediately?
Third mistake, the biggest yet. What software do I need? I try the FAQ, it tells me to go to the software page. I try, but it tells me I need to register a primary device to use with the system. OK, I think that is odd, since I don’t have an account to associate with, but I try. ERROR. It just sends me in the loop repeatedly, and doesn’t tell me that I can’t do that until I have an account.
BTW, the answer is, on a Mac, with an iPod, you don’t need any special software. Why don’t they trumpet that to the heavens? Isn’t that the biggest market, the iPod? Seriously, I’m a programmer and I had a hard time figuring out whether this site was going to give me an audio file I could use.
Finally, I gritted my teeth, bought an account and crossed my fingers. I used my download credit to get a copy of “Never Eat Alone : And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time” (Keith Ferrazzi, Tahl Raz). After the download, I was given no direction about where I’d find it in iTunes, so I had to search for the file. Grrr, a fourth failure.
Despite all this, it works fine, it is a great book, and plays just fine on my iPod. I wonder how they make any money at all with that series of barriers placed squarely in front of a person who was already sold on their system. Crazy, just crazy.
Technorati Tags: audible, audiobooks, ipod
A quick site update. I’ve added two features.
I’ve added “email this post” functionality to every article. Now you can send anything I’ve written to a friend with one step. Viral.
Also, I’ve added a “Related Posts” section to every article. At this point, the related posts are only shown when you view the article on its own page, not on the front page. I’d love feedback about this. Should I add it to front page articles as well? Is that too busy?
OK, I admit it, I chose todays gem because I love the title. Once again I am drawing from the wisdom found in The Wizard of Ads by Roy H. Williams.
This one is from the chapter "The Song of the Weasel" and it talks about something all people trying to make money online have faced. The subtitle of this site is "Making money online with Style and Ethics" because I need reminding of this from time to time. The world has enough seedy money-grubbers. I don’t need to be one to make a great living.
Well, the truth of the matter is, there’s a little weasel in all of us, and that weasel needs to be slapped. When your ears hear your lips start to sing the song of the weasel, you must learn to immediately slap the weasel within.
Everyone admires teh hardy individual who can look into the mirror of his soul and give the weasel within the cold, hard slap known as "remembrance of obligation." If the first slap doesn’t subdue the weasel, a second slap "loyalty," will get him every time.
[…]
Everybody loves a weasel slapper, but nobody likes a weasel.
Technorati Tags: advertising, ethics
Today’s marketing gem is from
On page 47 of the book, in the chapter on planning, there is a sidebar by Jared Spool, who studies usability, and runs experiments. One experiment his company does is to take a customer who wants to buy something specific, give them the money to buy it, and send them to a site where they can buy it.
(condensed with […] and italics mine):
The average e-commerce website only manages to sell someone a product they really want, under these odd conditions, 30 percent of the time. 70 percent of the time, the customer who knows exactly what they want runs into some show-stopping obstacle that prevents the purchase.
Look at your annual revenue from your site. Assume that only represents the 30 percent who are successsfully purchasing. That means there is another 70% (more than twice your current revenue) who is trying to buy from you, but failing.
[…]
We’re not even considering the people who haven’t decided what they want yet.
At first I wanted to dismiss the statistics out of hand. "No way!" But, not even an hour after I read that gem, I was trying to find the wholesale prices for some clothing I was considering buying for a store I run, and I was completely blocked from doing so.
Try it yourself, go to www.bella.com, click on the "wholesaler" link (which is conveniently a different color background than all the other navigation links, so you don’t notice it at first), and try to figure it out. There are tabs with clothing, if I click on the tabs, are the clothes shown with the wholesaler price? It doesn’t look like it. Your customer is always one click from saying goodbye, and running into such a wall is a sure way to provoke that click.
Technorati Tags: marketing, usability, statistics, user interface
Today’s gem is from "The Wizard of Ads" by Roy H. Williams.
Roy’s book is made up of one or two page essays which get to the point quickly, hammer it home, and move on. I appreciate the style, and it is a very quick read. I find myself flipping back through it, rereading my notes, using it as a mental shakeup when I am feeling blocked.
On page 79, Roy lists "Twelve Most Common Mistakes in Advertising"
All of these mistakes are ones I see every day, online and off. Good book with chewy thoughts.
Technorati Tags: Wizard of Ads, Row Williams, marketing, advertising
If you do more than market, and actually have to fulfill orders, you know what a pain it is to do shipping. I’m super pleased with the 
