I was poking around on Shopping.com the other day, doing some research for another blog post, and I came across something that made me think:

It’s Shopping.com’s header, with an exciting little vertical word above it that says “Advertisement”. Awesome right?

It’s understandable (I guess) that Shopping.com won’t be able to sell all the available adspace on their giant website. I mean, they have hundreds of thousands of pages to populate with targeted and meaningful advertisements right? It’s not out of the question that they would have some fall through the cracks, right? Read the rest of this entry »

Like many young adults/online marketers/nerds, I process ghastly amounts of digital information every day. By process, i mean read, watch, listen, write, organize and communicate. Because I spend so much time and energy with this information, it’s pretty rare that something really surprises me any more. Oh there is the occasional blog post here and there that gets me thinking, or the new service or product that intrigues me, but there is simply too much information regurgitation (data puke, if you will) among the contributers in my industry.

Michael Wesch, however, astounds me. Read the rest of this entry »

You will notice that you are not where you thought you would be. :) MarketingGiblets has been taken down, and replaced with ConversationRate.com. Why? There are a lot of reasons, but mostly it is because what I wanted to do with the blog was not captured by the URL, and it’s better to get that taken care of early on.

All the posts and comments from MarketingGiblets have been moved over, so nothing has been lost (not that there was much to lose). The only pain point is that you will have to subscribe to this feed, and unsubscribe from the other. I unfortunately could not push that through.

So what is ConversationRate.com?

This is a blog that will from now on be devoted to ecommerce and conversational marketing. If you are not familiar with that term, you can check it out on the ol’ Wikipedia if you would like. What it really boils down to though, is marketing through the “new” media channels, with an emphasis on cross communication with the customer or end user. It’s not broadcast media, but rather blogging, social networks, word-of-mouth, listening to your customers, etc. I like to take “communication with the consumer” to another level though, and incorporate behavioral communication as well (user behavior tracking, targeting, analytics, etc).

Long story short, this is a blog on internet marketing and ecommerce. It should be a lot of fun.

The actual URL? A play on words. “Conversation” because all markets are conversations and “Rate” because it makes it sound like conversion rate, and URLs are hard to come by nowadays. :)

Maybe I’m a little slow, but I came across something that I had never seen before. I was playing around with Google Reader’s Next Button (think of it as a StumbleUpon for your feeds), and I clicked it when I had nothing left to read. This is what I found: Read the rest of this entry »

Success is hard. Periodic success is actually pretty easy, most people can do it right every now and again, but really succeeding over and over again is difficult. What’s even more difficult? Leading a team to succeed. And if you are a manager, pretty much the only thing you are there for is to drive the success of your employees.

As I mentioned, in this series I will be writing about some of the things that your employees need to succeed. This post tackles the first: Ability. Read the rest of this entry »

A smart person I know taught me that a wise manager will surround himself with the people that will make his or her job easier. Fantastic advice right? But how do you know whether the people you have are the ones who will make your life better?

A manager’s success, and ability to sleep through the night, is due in large part to the success of his employees. To set your employees up for success requires that you give them all opportunity to do the work as best they possibly can.

Along these lines, I am working on a multi-part series, hopefully with entries to be posted at least every few days. The question I hope to answer is, “What do I, as a manager, need to provide to make sure my employees have the best chance possible for success?”

Stay tuned, we’ll have the first installment soon. If you have any initial thoughts, please do leave a comment.

Stumbled across something interesting today – found that Google is now including a search box in the SiteLinks for sites that use Google search for their internal search engine. The example I came across was w3schools.com – check out the screenshot:

That’s pretty crazy – for smaller sites, that’s a really good reason to use Google search for your engine. When the big G starts including a search box for other sites (hello retail) – that’s going to change the game a bit..

Here’s the link to the search results page.

One of my favorite blogs (just added to the blogroll, as a matter of fact) had a great post today entitled 41 Blog Success Tips from 10 Years of Blogging You Can Learn Today. The author is Chris Garrett, who is a professional blogger and consultant in the UK. If you haven’t read chrisg.com, I highly recommend it. Back to the topic at hand, Chris lists 41 blog success tips that he has learned over the years. As I read through these (realizing how much better I should be doing with my own sad little blog), I came to the conclusion that these tips are not just good blogging advice, but good advice for any marketer/manager/worker to follow as well. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s happened to every one of you “service providers” out there. You have a wonderful, unique offering and were able to pick up some great big clients. They came to you because you were the best, or maybe you went to them and got lucky. Either way they signed right? And now they are using your wonderful product, and everything looks like it’s going to be great. After all, you are providing something that they can’t do for themselves right? What’s why they are willing to pay the big bucks for your premium package…

Yeah, wrong. Usually when you sign someone who is big enough for the situation above to ring true, they absolutely can do what you do. They just don’t want to. Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s money, maybe you are just their first step into a new area. Why is this important? Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished reading Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist – an awesome book. Warren Buffett, if you don’t know, is arguably the most successful investor of all time. He is the third richest person in the world, worth about $55 Billion, and has had a long systematic history of outperforming basically everyone else in his investments.

Speaking about his many successes, Buffett said the following:

“The best thing I did was choose the right heroes.”

Read the rest of this entry »