By now, even your grandmother has heard of Search Engine Optimization–now with the rise in popularity of social media sites (do I really need to give examples?) there is a whole new industry revolving around optimizing your brand in the social networks. Hiring companies to promote your brand on the large networks can give you over a 1400% traffic bump for less than 1/10th the cost per visit. Mostly, this activity is posting to blogs and forums and engaging in conversations online while leaving your link(s) all over as you go. As you engage, so does your (site’s) popularity.
There are pitfalls to avoid when optimizing your brand this way–you can come off as fake (at best) or (at worst) get blacklisted from posting and have your brand ruined in front of a particular audience.
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SlideRocket is a pretty darn nifty PowerPoint replacement…as near as I can tell. The tour is amazing and it’s features are great, but it’s not released to the public yet. Take a look at the demo–I can’t wait to try it.
OK, this is cool. Ponoko is a company that allows you to custom design and sell jewelry, toys, furniture…anything you can laser cut out of Plywood, MDF, Hardboard, Acrylic etc. right from their website. You keep no inventory. You design and build a couple prototypes to make sure your design is easy to build and works, then Ponoko will build and fulfill orders for you on demand. You can be a furniture design company with your own line for sale on their site or build your own and link your shopping cart to their site for fulfillment. Fire up Illustrator and get busy.
This is a very interesting article I read in Fast Company about why people buy online. What really bugged my eyes out was that worldwide e-commerce spending is expected to surpass $7 trillion this year. The article also talks about how much design affects the site owner’s credibility–a huge factor in the user’s decision to buy from a website.
To determine why consumers increasingly prefer virtual storefronts to physical ones, Pui-lai To, writing in Technovation, distributed questionnaires about shopping motivation to 206 Taiwanese students and workers. Obvious answers surfaced, including convenience, cost, and selection. But To also uncovered two other, less-expected factors: a sense of adventure and the satisfaction of using technology effectively. He calls these “hedonistic motivations” and learned that consumers prone to them had a tendency toward “unplanned and hasty” buying online. To capitalize on such motivations, online vendors can design Web sites that stir feelings of technological control and adventure — not so much with jungle motifs, but by promoting ideas of newness.
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Relaunching Blog! We’ve moved our blog and will be following a regular schedule of postings that will share latest web trends, tools, and marketing information to help you keep up to date. Over the next few days I’m going to post a load of information to seed the blog, but after that, I’ll follow a schedule of twice a week for posting–most likely tuesdays and thursdays. Bookmark this page and come back often!
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