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  jonpape 2:40 pm on January 5, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Black Friday (2), Christmas and holiday season (2), Cyber Monday   

  CyberModay Marketing Comparison 

  

  Image by Getty Images via Daylife

  With the 2008 holiday shopping season behind us, it  is important to take a look at key revenue driver’s to focus on growth next year. CyberMonday, the first Monday following Black Friday, has become one of the most influential shopping days of the year for online week retailers. By looking back at how specific affiliates and publishers performed, retailers can better allocate funds to reach a wider range of consumers. by adding and modifying ad spend and commission rates, retailers can position themselves better on publishers websites and incrementally increase sales.

  The following publishers are divided into two groups based on visitor site traffic from compete.com.

  

  FatWallet, Mahalo, & RetailMeNot

  FatWallet.com, Mahalo.com, & RetailMeNot.com make up the first group of publishers analyzed. These publishers on average had between 1 million visitors per month. FatWallet had the least number of visitors last year finishing with an average of 2.3 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 14.2%. Mahalo.com finish the year with an average 3.2 million visitors in November 2008 and year-over-year growth of 168%. The big surprise was RetailMeNot.com, which started the year with just over 1 million visitors and finished with over five million visitors per month.  RetailMeNot’s year-over-year growth was 302% in 2008.

  

  CouponChief, CyberMonday, Dealio, DealTaker, & GottaDeal

  Out of the last five sites analyzed, CouponChief.com, CyberMonday.com, Dealio.com, DealTaker.com, & GottaDeal.com, two of the sites, CyberMonday.com & GottaDeal.com, increased visitor traffic exponentially during the holiday season.  CyberMonday.com, Shop.org’s specialty shopping site, at 1.2 million visitors in November 2007 is only 750,000 visitors in November 2008 a decrease of 38%.  GottaDeal.com, which has less than half a million visitors most of the year, spiked in November 2007 to 1.5 million visitors and again in November 2008 to 1.8 million visitors, an increased of 18.4%.  CouponChief.com, Dealio.com, and DealTaker.com increased sales in November 2007 but growth remain linear.

  CouponChief.com ended the year with approximately 270,000 visitors in November 2008 and a year-over-year decline of 33.6%. Dealio.com had half a million visitors in November 2008 a year-over-year  increase of about 20%. DealTaker.com finished November 2008 with over 1 million visitors and a year-over-year growth 17%.

  
   

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  jonpape 5:50 am on January 4, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Amazon.com (3), Christmas and holiday season (2)   

  Amazon, Best Holiday Season Ever 

  

  Image via CrunchBase

  In article in the Los Angeles Times, Amazon.com once again touted its best year ever.  Amazon attributed there high holiday sales to increase in orders.  Orders rose 17% to 6.3 million items, while shipments rose to 5.6 million units, up 44%.  What is missing from Amazons carefully crafted press release is a corresponding revenue amount or average order value. Without these metrics it is difficult to tell how profitable the holiday shopping season was for Amazon.

  In a May 2008, Fortune magazine article, How Jeff Bezos Rules the Retail Space, there’s an interesting graph entitled Building a Retail Powerhouse. The graph shows Amazon’s growth and success throughout their history. It took Amazon six years to finally turn a profit. In 2000 alone, Amazon recorded sales of $2.762 billion and total losses of $1.411 billion. in 2007, sales were $14.815 billion and profit was $476 million.  Any backward slide for Amazon.com’s profitability would be disasterious for a company whose total stock valuation is double Wal-Marts.

  Fortune Article

  
   
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  jonpape 3:38 pm on January 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Marketing (6), Seth Godin (3)   

  Viral Marketing Basics – Conveying Ideas 

  

  Image byhttp://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67

  via CrunchBase

  The basics for conveying a viral Idea from the book, Small is the New Big, by Seth Godin.

  1. 1) The first impression (of the idea) demands further investigation.
  2. 2) They (the audience) already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea.
  3. 3) They (the audience) trust or respect the sender must invest the time

  For a more detailed analysis of conveying viral ideas, I recommend the book, Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.

  madetostick.com

  
   
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  jonpape 3:15 pm on January 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Online Communities, Social network (4)   

  Traffic Levels for Social Networks for Moms 

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  Most brand managers and merchants recognize the importance of targeting mothers for consumer household purchases. Web developers have been taking a similar interest in moms and consumer household spending and a wide variety of social networks for moms have begun to appear. Researching social networking sites for moms, I developed a tiered system that divided the social networks based on visitor traffic compiled from compete.com.

  Top Tier: CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com

  

  CafeMom & BabyCenter

  CafeMom.com & BabyCenter.com are by far the largest social networking sites for mothers. BabyCenter.com has on average 4 million viewers a month. Additionally, BabyCenter.com has seen year-over-year growth 12.7%.  CafeMom.com has an estimated 2 million visitors per month. CafeMom.com has declined in the number of visitors year-over-year by 4.2%.

  Mid Tier: ParentsConnect.com, CircleofMoms.com, & MomJunction.com

  

  ParentsConnect CircleofMoms MomJunction

  The mid tier is comprised of sites with less than 1 million visitors per month. The largest of these websites, ParentConnect.com, is owned by MTV and sought significant boost in traffic in May 2008. ParentConnect.com had on average 300,000 visitors prior to May and approximately 800,000 visitors after May. ParentConnect.com year-over-year growth is an astonishing 280%.  CircleofMoms.com was launched in September 2008 and has grown 322% month over month with visitors in November 2008 to approximately 561,000 visitors per month.  MomJunction.com had a large spike in traffic in December 2007 to approximately 500,000 visitors but has on average monthly visitors of about 50,000.  MomJunction.com month over month number of visitors is down 23.1% and averages only 34,000.

  Low Tier: Minti.com, MothersClick.com, & Moxie-Moms.com

  

  Minti, MothersClick, & Moxie-Moms

  Low tier social networking sites for moms are characterized as having under 100,000 visitors per month. The largest of the sites, Minti.com, has on average 55,000 visitors per month with year-over-year growth of 31.5%. Mothersclick.com is another relatively new social networking site for mothers with average monthly visitors under 20,000 and year-over-year growth of 93.9%. Moxie-Moms.com averages about 1000 people a month with year-over-year growth of 95.1%. Moxie-Moms.com is the only subscription-based website on the list.

  While they are very similar to the sites on this list, we did not include mommy blogger sites such as MommyBlogger.com and MomForce.com. I will cover mommy blogger sites in a different post.

  
   
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  jonpape 2:35 am on January 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Alexa Toolbar, Mozilla Firefox   

  Web Merchant Alexa Ranking Score 

  

  Image via Wikipedia

  Amazon’s Alexa is a web ranking score determined by users who have downloaded the Alexa Toolbar.  The lower the Alexa ranking, the more traffic a web site receives.  Below is a list of fifteen web merchants and there corresponding Alexa score.  The Alexa score was received using the SEOQuake extension in Firefox.

  Merchant	Alexa Score
  Amazon	32
  Walmart	191
  Target	227
  Best Buy	245
  Circuit City	447
  Macys	569
  Overstock	635
  JCP	717
  Sears	764
  Costco	920
  HomeDepot	924
  Kohls	955
  QVC	1407
  Kmart	1596

  
   
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  jonpape 4:13 pm on December 31, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Search engine optimization (2), Search Engine Result Page, SEO   

  Google + "Grand Rapids Internet Marketing" = Jon Pape 

  Google SERP page for the query “Grand Rapids Internet Marketing” featuring my URL and my Naymz.com profile as the top links.

  

  Google Search Engine Result Page

  
   
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  jonpape 12:44 pm on December 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Eric T. Peterson, Web analytics, Web Analytics Demystified   

  List of E-Commerce Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) 

  

  Image by adria.richards via Flickr

  From the book Web Analytics Demystified by Eric T. Peterson.  Review the book for detailed descriptions and information.

  • Ratio of New to Returning Visitors
  • Percent New Visitors
  • Page “Stickiness”
  • Referring Domains
  • Search Keywords and Phrases
  • Percent of Visits Under 90 Seconds
  • Key Conversion Rates (not just sales)
  • Average Order Value
  • New & repeat Customer Conversion Rates
  • Sales per Visitor
  • Percent Returning Visitors
  • Customer Retention Rate

  
   
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  jonpape 6:53 pm on December 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Marketing (6), Mashable, Social network (4), Twitter (2)   

  Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million 

  

  Image via CrunchBase

  A recent article on Sphinn.com called Twitter has Made Dell $1 Million in revenue caught my attention.

  When you take into account Dell’s total revenue, the contribution from twittering is negligible.  The development costs and management probably has a high return on investment even though the model isn’t scalable.  Consumers have to choose to follow Dell.  Dell can not interrupt consumers.

  Mashable has an interesting article on Brands on Twitter.  The article boils down to the two strategies that enables a business on Twitter to resonate with users:

  1. 1) Is the conversation on Twitter one-sided? A business should respond to users.
  2. 2) Does the brand have a “personality” (I believe some marketers call this positioning).

  The Mashable article has a nice quote that sums up my position:

  “I think that authentic and transparent personal Twitter accounts – being yourself in an uncontrived way – may indirectly and intimately influence organizational brands, because of the level of trust involved in sharing information with someone over the course of time.”

  David Wallace agrees with pairing a personality with a brand on Twitter and offers some additional suggestions for social marketing on Twitter in his article, Can Twitter be Useful for Business?

  I think the most important thing to remember for a business is that Twitter is an investment in time (maybe more then you anticipate) and to be successful, you are going to have to commit to a long term strategy to reap the benefits.

  
   
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  jonpape 2:24 pm on December 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Seth Goldstein, Social network (4)   

  P&G Social Advertising on Facebook 

  

  Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

  The New York Times has a really interesting article, Advertisers Face Hurdles on Social Networking Sites, on Proctor & Gambles social advertising attempts via Facebook.

  Five great take-aways:

  • Seth Goldstein, wrote that a banner ad “is universally disregarded as irrelevant if it’s not ignored entirely.”
  • Businesses still have to rely on either contests or expensive content to attract visitors.
  • Just 3% of internet users would forward advertising information to a friend.
  • Contests that feature user submissions historically has a low response rate.
  • Seth Goldstein  describes a self-perpetuating cycle in social networks: “Advertisers distract users; users ignore advertisers; advertisers distract better; users ignore better.”

  There are two approaches that seem to work on social networks:

  • Advertisers can be more intrusive, but the outcome will not be positive.
  • Advertisers can create genuinely entertaining commercials, but spend ungodly sums to do so.

  
   
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  jonpape 12:37 pm on December 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Business (7), Customer service (2), Internet Marketing (4), Market, Marketing and Advertising (2), Permission marketing (2), Seth Godin (3)   

  Permission Marketing in Two Sentences 

  

  Image byhttp://www.prestonlee.com/archives/67

  via CrunchBase

  “The goal is to teach, cajole, and encourage this stranger to become a friend.  And once she becomes a friend, to apply enough focused marketing to create a customer.”

  -Seth Godin, Permission Marketing, pg 63