Duplicated content - the Myth is busted by Google

Google has been on the warpath to dispel some of the rumors that have been circulating the net about...

Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part X

Posted in SEO News and Analysis April 20th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

We have reached the end of our series, and today I would like to discuss the last important detail about link baiting and viral marketing, and that is specific content ideas to help you attract the most attention. When it comes to deciding on what kind of content format to use, you should always look at what is currently bringing in the most attention at the moment. Some will also be constant, and will always bring in a fail amount of traffic no matter what is currently popular.

Top 10 Lists

Lists are always your number one. Everyone loves to read a good “Top 10 of the Coolest Things To Happen During That Year” list. It gives them a quick bullet of a basic genre for them to enjoy. If you provide pictures, it is even better, but it isn’t necessarily needed. You can also consider a meme a list type, and provide something in that format.

When posting it, be sure you provide simple keywords on the page, and within the text. Make the title itself SEO targeted, as that will give you more hits on any search engine, and bring people directly to you. You should also make sure to write it in the most interesting way possible, but keep it succinct. You don’t need long passages, just a paragraph or two per item, to keep it snappy but interested.
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Tag Module Screencast batch 2

Posted in Add Ons April 15th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

User’s Tags Manager
Here you can see that the users can see the tag cloud of his/her current tags, can edit the tags (when the user edits a tag, all the products tagged with this tag by this users will also change tags), and delete tags.

Admin Tags Manager
Within the simple admin, you can search by tag name or product id, you can also check certain info to gain insight into your customers’ mind.

Zencart 1.3.9 beta testing

Posted in News & Discussion April 14th, 2010 by admin - Comments (1)

Just a quick notification for all zencart users, the long over due 1.3.9 is now available for beta testing, if you want you can pop in zencart forum to read the announcement and download the package to test.
Seems like there are still bugs to be fixed, so it is not ready for your live sites yet.

Tag Module Screencast batch 1

Posted in Add Ons April 12th, 2010 by admin - Comments (2)

Adding tags for guests (can be turned off)

Adding tags for users

The main difference is that a logged in user can also check an already added tag as “relevant” to them, this will later allow them to list all the products that were tagged with a certain tag by ANY user or only the ones tagged by them. This will also allow us to easily do some statistical stuffs in the backend, and perhaps use this type of data for customers’ insight research or showing relevant products to them.

Note that you can also require that all new tags added have to be approved first before available to the public, can be useful if you want to make sure your users don’t use offensive language on your website.

More demo videos come later.

Hosting for Small Business

Posted in eCommerce April 11th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Running a business online used to be handled by major companies, or those small businesses with owners who were tech savvy and had a great deal of knowledge of HTML, Flash, and the other major building blocks of the online community. If someone who wasn’t up on the latest advances in those areas wanted a site for their company they had to pay out the nose to do it, hiring a website designers to get the job done.

But times have changed. While some still take the route of commissioning a web designer to make them the perfect site, others have been taking advantage of affordable and user-friendly web hosts who offer you a shot at making a professional site on your own, using their simple building tools and customer service agents advice and assistance. But with so many out there, which are the best for the small business owner?

Hosting is a product, a service just like any other product, so when you purchase a product/service you expect support, support and support. This is even more important for hosting for several reasons:

  1. Unlike your brick-and-mortar store, your website opens 24h, in another way at any time a customer can go to your store to buy stuffs or get information from you, you don’t want to turn them away by a “page not found” message. What if your server goes down at mid night and your hosting only provide support during work hour?
  2. Some hosting providers claim they have 24h support service, but their time frame to answer your support request email is 12-24h, this is UNACCEPTABLE in my opinion.
  3. Maintaining an online store is a hard task, especially if you are tech illiterate (which is not essentially a bad thing), so you need a hosting that can go beyond normal customer service to provide you with the support you need to grow your business.
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Sneak peek of our latest module – Product Tags

Posted in Add Ons April 2nd, 2010 by admin - Comments (3)

Tagging allows your customers to sort your products using their own preferences (not yours) so that they can later find these products much faster. Checking your customers’ tags also help you to get a deeper insight into your customers’ perspectives and makes changes to boost your sales.

An additional bonus value of tagging is SEO: your products pages will have more keywords, and even better these keywords are more useful for customers.

You can check out our tag module here, currently we are adding administrative features before releasing it:

Some planned features:

  1. Allowing 2 types of tags: public and private tags
  2. Allowing Guests to add tags (or not)
  3. Require authorization before adding tags (optional)
  4. Customers can manage tags via their account manager (edit, delete)
  5. Admins can manage tags (approve, delete, check statistics)

The modules is written by jQuery and our custom class for Ajax, and will work with or without javscript enabled.

Viral Marketing & Link Bait Basics: Part IX

Posted in SEO News and Analysis March 30th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

Last week, we spoke about the use of certain types of viral content that can be used for easy linkbaiting. These included blogs, articles, tools, and social networking applications. Today, we will cover the others, in what is one of the last of our 10-week series on viral marketing and linkbaiting. There are still several that can be used, and they are by no means the only ones. Creativity in creating new methods is a basic part of effective advertising and marketing.

Widgets

Different than the standard application or tool, a widget is something designed specifically to be unimportant, or for entertainment purposes only. These are some of the most popular of viral types on the web, especially with the increased ability to post basic codes into blogs, journals, social networking profiles, and onto web pages. They have also increased in complexity over time, and so are easy to make, and even easier for even the more computer illiterate visitor to use.

The trick is making it easily posted onto these sources. Having several code types, for example for forums, HTML, and social networking codes, will allow it to be spread further. A link can be provided for anyone who wants to use the widget for themselves, which will also provide them with a source for the person who created this.

On the other hand, players can be used as widgets. If you have a band, a video channel, or anything media-oriented, a widget can provide an easy way to share your content. It can also be attached to existing widgets, such as in the case of the Myspace media player, which allows users to create a playlist with their favorite songs.

Badges

Badges are similar to a name tags, or perhaps security tags. You can embed them as an image within an HTML code. Not all sites can use badges, but if you can then you really should take advantage of this. Have some really cool badges for your site designed, and encourage people to put on their sites for you.

How effective these 2 options listed above are? Can be quite effective. Recently we released a free cool looking Zencart template, and we asked people to please keep the link back to our site if possible. Not everyone did, but some did leave the link where it is (which we greatly appreciate), and as the result we have seen great improvements recently in term of traffic as well as conversion rate (more potential clients contact us after checking out the site).

New version of CJ Loader released

Posted in Add Ons March 30th, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

This new version has some major updates:

  1. The browser detection class has been updated to the latest version which will allow you to detect more browsers more accurately.
  2. The Loader class code has been rewritten a bit to make it faster as well as adding more options.

If you are using Ajax OnePage Checkout released by us, when you upgrade the checkout module you will also need to upgrade to this new CJ Loader version.

Link to get the new version has been updated on the original Zencart CSS Javascript Loader post

The worst nightmare of any developer

Posted in Projects March 29th, 2010 by admin - Comments (1)

I have worked with Zencart for years, and have done many projects, so I was pretty confident and sometimes over optimistic when I take on ZC projects. This proves to be my leads to a rather “deadly” error I made recently.

There is a very great looking store with nice design and tons of features (ajax and all, very very nice) built on Zencart, I will not name the store here for many reasons. The owner contacted us a few weeks ago because the site has compatibility with certain browsers (in short, it doesn’t work on most versions of IE, and has inconsistent display on various major browsers). “This is an easy fix, we have done this many times”, I thought, so I gave a very optimistic estimation.

A few weeks from then, and here I’m still working on this site. The person (or rather, a group of people) who coded this site did not give a care about coding standard, browser compatibility, performance, or anything at all. When I first opened the files, I was welcomed into this dark place, where html, php, javascript all live “happily” together in one place, nested together like spaghetti. Once I fixed an issue, another one popped up and on and on…. In the end, it was decided that fixing thing is more time/cost consuming that re-coding them, so now we are still trying to rewrite almost all the pieces of code for the site.

The moral of the story:

  1. For me, from now on I will NEVER EVER try to be an overly optimistic estimator anymore, I learned my lesson.
  2. For you, from now on please check the work of the devs carefully before you approve it. A nice looking apple can be rotten inside. Do you buy a car just because it looks pretty, and don’t give a care about the quality of the engine inside it? If you don’t why do you do that when you have your site developed? Check the code yourself, if you don’t know much about coding ask your friends or a 3rd party company. Or, go with a reputable company that will stand behind its works.

Self-Marketing Versus Marketing Companies

Posted in Marketing March 23rd, 2010 by admin - Be the first to comment

David vs Goliath?

When you run a small business you have very few options by way of marketing, at least in the face of the big guys who will inevitably show above you in much brighter lights. Ecommerce has changed this for the better. It is easier and easier for the little guy to stand on his own and get customers who are specifically looking to avoid the larger corporations who are expensive with little substance or reliability.

But with this new freedom to move amongst a once dominated market comes the issue of choice. It is hard enough to figure out just what kind of campaign to use to create some visibility. But what about the issue of whether or not to do it yourself? This is an important issue, and one that many business owners will gloss over over fear of spending extra money for something they feel they can do themselves.

But the debate can be settled easily, and with just a few facts.
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