By last weekend, we’ve used up the gift credit $75 given by Amazon and so now it’s time to review Amazon’s PPC service – the product Ads platform.
Each step, from the account set up, inventory upload & revision, to account suspension involves unexpected troubles and costs timeless efforts.
Problem 1:
The platform itself is hard to use. Even though it supports the product data feed from Google, it mismatches most of our categories. It also killed a couple of our products by mistake – saying their prices were mismatched with our websites when they were not. After having a hard time translating it to Amazon feed, the killed products were recovered but the categories have been still mismatched.
Problem 2:
The sales representative were emailing us aggressively but have been completely unreachable after we opened the account. Well…
Problem 3:
The online support staff are not well trained. They sound like engineers who speak shyly and there seemed lack of prepared scripts. They told me the mismatch of categories would be likely to get solved later after the account had been running for a while. But it never turned out that way.
Problem 4:
No way to pause our campaign unless we reduced the daily budget to be 0. Not very intuitive.
Problem 5:
After reducing the daily budget, Amazon sent us a harsh email like this:
Hello XXX
Account name: XXX
Action Recommended: Increase your daily budget, get more traffic
It’s just a bit rude to customers…
Final problem:
75 bucks didn’t generate any conversion. End of the story.
Final rating for Amaon product ads system: C-.
Hello friend,
If you are running a store on Zen Cart, you’d probably like to implement a dynamic pricing display for all your products.
The software itself doesn’t have the feature unless you install a plug-in from Snippets.com “Zen Cart Modules”. We found this module through Zen Cart’s developer community http://www.zen-cart.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70577
The shortcoming of this plug-in is that you can’t display the discount information after you install it. For example, if you give 10% off some products, after you have the plug in, the prices after discounts will appear on your product pages without telling people that a 10% discount has been applied.
Anyways, we found this problem so we enhanced it. To see a real example of our improved module, check our the online store we built for our client DSA Phototech: http://lightboxes.com/ultra-value-led-light-box-p-24.html
You can click to download the module now. All you need is to unzip the file and upload it to your ftp directly. Nothing else is needed.
http://www.spicyspirit.com/usefulapps/DPU_Zencart_Improved.zip
Please leave us a comment if you have any question. We will be pleased to respond as soon as we can.
Enjoy the module!
Best,
SpicySpirit.com
Hosting a party sounds easy, doesn’t it? Maybe, if your guests have no expectation at all – which is unlikely in reality.
In a business world, a party is of great importance. It is an event that carries a list of critical marketing purposes such as building awareness or generating leads. That’s why we have a whole PR (Public Relations) industry servicing this demand.
Nowadays, everything moves over to the internet and communication has become much easier than before. However, without proper execution, handy tools can also turn your party into a disaster.
If you are a small business owner and you need to host events, here’s a few don’ts that we hope you can avoid:
1. Don’t use more than one RSVP/ticket system. Stick with only one system. Sometimes people love to spread their news on as many media platforms as possible – that’s fine but always have only one RSVP page.
2. Don’t forget to include parking instruction. This seems trivial but parking can easily eat up lots of time and exhaust guests before they even reach the party. After they suffer a lousy parking experience, they are going to hate it and won’t come back to the event again.
3. Don’t invite speakers/panelists who are not good at public speaking. Sounds a bit mean but very important to remember. We’ve seen too many times that high profile executives are invited for their stunning titles instead of their communication skills.
Now let’s see a few dos.
For business events, there are ONLY two major values for guests: Information & Networking
If you focus on Information, then you really have to do some homework studying your guests’ interests. In fact, you should have defined whom to invite based on their profiles. Ask yourself what do they want to take away from the event? Then prepare specific topics that will address their needs. Avoid broad subjects that everyone already knows and hates to waste time hearing again.
If focusing on Networking, then broad topics are fine but keep them short & sweet. Think of some interesting ways to help your guests network instead of writing a name tag and that’s it! Make your guests’ lives a little easier so they will love to come back again! For example, match one person’s name tag with another one’s in terms of colors, animals, TV show names or whatever that’s related to your business provided it’s not boring!
Conclusion: if your event is more for networking, then help people strike conversations. If more for information, then prepare topics that are targeted and specific.
Finally, always take good pictures and videos and share them on your digital platforms.
What about some other cool ideas? Leave a comment!
Most of you have probably seen Adwords’ periodical suggestions for new keywords under the tab of “Opportunity”. It’s always worth the time looking at them to get a general idea of the new keywords you haven’t captured. Notice, I used the word “general idea” here because these words are many times irrelevant to your business.
A better way to fill up your account with valuable keywords is to use the feature – SEE SEARCH TERMS. Right now I’m almost doing this task on a daily basis. It really helps me increase the amount of long tail keywords & keyword variations extremely efficiently.
I won’t repeat the procedure in terms of how to use it since Adwords has explained it step by step already.
I’m going to share a tip about how to add those keywords quickly and wisely.
When you try to add in new keywords, they will be added as broad match at default. But of course you don’t want to have broad match, at least for the majority of the new keywords. So here’s the short cut:
1. Add all these words with default broad match. It’s OK.
2.Immediately open your Adwords desktop widget & download the latest account.
3. Go to keywords and click the “Type” tab to display all the broad match keywords from the very top.
4. Choose all the newly added broad match keywords and bulk edit them to phrase or exact match.
If you have some broad match words existing, these new words will be mixed with them so makes it harder to identify the new ones and change the type. However, the whole purpose of adding keywords is to increase the accuracy & relevancy and to be really cost-effective, I don’t recommend people to use broad match anyway (except defined broad match).
This tip makes our tasks extremely easy especially for bulk adding/changing.
Lastly, for negative keywords, I absolutely recommend broad match. Since “See search terms” allows you to add in any word to be a negative word in exact match at default, you probably want to change the exact phrase to the single keyword manually and make sure it is in broad match. In fact, you should add in its variations separately as well. Why? Check my earlier blog about the unexpected problems with Adwords’ negative broad match.
Hope you find these tips useful.
I’m writing this post because I’m shocked to see how many people have heard about this term SEO, more or less, and mistakenly equaled it as internet marketing.
I went to a “Network after Work” event in San Francisco last week. The event has attracted about two to three hundred attendees; all of them are local professionals in the bay area. It was a great opportunity to present Spicy Spirit and get the word out there to the crowds. While talking to dozens and dozens of people, I’ve found out that when I said we are doing internet marketing, online marketing, most people don’t have much reaction but they might ask me, you mean, SEO? I said, “yes, but that’s only one small part of what we do!”
I feel the urge to communicate the true story about online marketing. It is not just SEO and it is not just marketing on Facebook. It is the marketing strategy that aims to build brand awareness & increase sales for businesses and organizations via the use of internet platforms and applications.
From optimizing a website’s UI design to increase on-site conversion rate to advertise with Google’s Adwords and cultivate a fan community on Facebook, all these efforts are used towards the marketing goal.
If one has a B2B business and goes after larger clients, I tend to advise them that they’d better produce nice testimonial videos and product demos as well as organizing events instead of spending on SEM & SEO. Also blogging is not good for everyone and if it’s a poorly maintained blog, nobody is going to read it so it actually brings a negative value to the brand.
What else does internet marketing include other than SEO? To just name a few: UI optimization (conversion optimization), PPC, Display Ads, blogging, email marketing and social media marketing…
Hope this post clarifies some confusions.
Today is April 5th, 4 days after April Fool’s day. I was busy catching up the reading on all the SEM/SEO stuff online as I just came back from my long vacation.
I found the two posts making perfect sense together:
How to entertain your facebook fans
Take your ads to new heights with Blimp Ads
The first post gave a few nice tips of how brands should interact with their fans on facebook to enhance brand loyalty. One of them is to encourage conversations between fans themselves. I found it very interesting that big brands can even get away with irrelevant topics like like who should win on a popular reality show, or what fans think of a popular TV show or event.
A couple of hours later, I was tricked by Google’s serious product launch news – after it interacted with me for a few minutes.
This blimp ad was an April Fool’s joke. Today’s April 5th so of course I didn’t even think about it. After I seriously read through the blog and excitingly filled in the form to get a free trial, I got a blank page with a simple message: April Fool!
God, this is really unexpected and I found myself rather amused.
A well-designed joke like this wouldn’t be a bad idea to amuse customers on these social networking platforms, like Facebook or Blog site.
Dear Adwords users,
Just a quick reminder: if you are using product listing ad but seeing no impression at all, you probably have set up ad position preference in your campaign setting.
These two features don’t work together and it’s Google’s fault obviously.
To enable your product listing ads, make sure you turn off the ad position preference in the campaign setting page.
Most importantly, you should consider if it’s worth pursuing the product listing ad at the expense of ad position preference. Position preference helps you control your budget spending and optimize your conversion rate.
Hopefully Google can fix this defect soonest.
It’s funny that not long after NY times exposed JC Penny’s fraud SEO tactics, WSJ couldn’t wait but picked up on Overstock as another evil marketer.
Today, when I opened my Facebook page, the recruiting ad from Macy’s immediately jumped into my eyes. Maybe because red is my favorite color or maybe I was caught by the word “SEO”. Next to it were a few other ads all about SEO. Well, obviously I was tagged by facebook as someone who is related to the hot word “SEO”!
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SEO stands for search engine optimization, which means websites can get higher rankings at search engines’ result pages by implementing a variety of tactics, such as writing contents with important keywords, submitting site maps and reducing javascript components and etc.etc.
As we all know, Google was invented based on a methodology called PageRank. Larry Page found this determining pattern while trying to evaluate different web pages’ quality: Good pages have more external links linking to them than less good ones. This methodology has left a large space for manipulation since its born date. That’s why we have so many “black hat” SEOers inventing cutting edge tactics that are beyond the boarder (which normally points to Google’s guideline).
These retailers are in the most competitive C2C industry and of course they want the best rankings. However, they may or may not be aware of Google’s guidelines and nor do they care about the very basic principle of being a person or doing business – honesty. So JC Penny used whatever tactics to drive fraud backlinks to its website and Overstock bribed education institutions to link their .edu websites to itself. Since .edu sites are most valued by Google for its authenticity, the linkage has sent Overstock to top rankings for quiet a while before the scandal broke out.
I hope Macy’s can learn the lessons from its two friends and don’t repeat the same scandal. There are really a lot of things you can do to build a great website than cheat.
I was excited when I first heard about Fiverr.com and over a glimpse of it, I was amazed to see so many feeds of people offering creative ideas and skills for just 5 dollars!
Even though a veteran blogger at Search Engine Watch, the e-magazine I always read as an SEO professional, gave a very good recommendation about this wbsite, after I delved into it for a couple of hours, I have to voice my caution.
While there are many offers that seems safe to go for, be aware that many more things can put your busines at large risk, such as adding 500 backlinks in one day or bringing 500 followers to your twitter page, facebook fan page, etc.
The only single principle of SEO work is “Being Honest, Being authentic.”
If you run your business seriously, you don’t want to have links from websites that were created as spams from day 1. If Google find out your website being associated with many low quality websites or even banned website, think about how long can your website stay visible?
Back to Fiverr.com, I checked some of its top rating offers and each of them have thousands of positive reviews. First of all, this website hasn’t been famous yet, at least in my eyes. How can they have so many active users already? Furthermore, if you bother to scroll down quite a bit, you can find the outcry from the disappointed customers who usually feel cheated.
Again, Fiverr.com is really a great idea. I personally value it as one of the best innovation after Groupon.
However they haven’t set up a process to manage spam feedback. Also they don’t even have information about its business, so I doubt if it’s a regsterred company yet.
So use it cautiously.
If you run a digital marketing/advertising/PR firm, you probably have had some nightmare when you compete with a guy who offers to build a website for less than $10,000 if not more. Many times your competitor is sending work offshore.
Today we see more and more firms are looking for offshore resources for web development and peripheral work. However, more often than not, we hear complaints of their nightmares of dealing with offshore teams.
I’ve also had uneasy experiences in the past while working with a team in India that I met randomly on line. Here I’m providing a few caveats of outsourcing, specifically to India specifically rather than repeating a cliche about cultural difference.
No offense to any one from India because outsourcing to my country China is the same thing. Here’s just analysis of the problems.
1. Inexperience of web developers
There’s a sufficient amount of developers in India because everyone chooses the major of EE or computer science. Even if they don’t go to college, they can still learn to work in this field. I’ve worked with people born in 1989 and that generally put a lot of training responsibility on myself without payment of course. For a simple maintenance task, that might be ok but if your project gets a little complicated, I suggest you make sure you can get a senior developer for your project before they start.
2. High turn over rate in India
“If the other company offers just 10% more in salary, my guy will leave!” said my friend who currently runs a boutique firm in India. Another time, I hear a friend complain that the developer just quit without telling him and he was almost screwed.
There are a lot of small to medium sized IT firms in India and as far as I know, usually they don’t sign contracts with employees. My friend told me even if they sign, it doesn’t help anyway. Also because there’ are much more supplies than demand in the labor market, the lawyer fee will be much more expensive than the cost of finding a replacement.
Think about it. If someone of your team suddenly quit, how can you hit the deadline?
3. Language difference for copy writing
Even though India is an English speaking country, the grammar and idioms differ so much that your customers might not believe you are using someone whose mother tongue is English.
So even though you finally come over the accent difference during the day to day practice, you’d better be cautious about copy writing work.
4. Time difference and Lack of control
These two factors are obvious. The direct result of time difference is that you are very likely to stay late in the night many days of a week. Lack of control is even more frustrating because you are risking missing the deadlines and losing business. That’s why I noticed that some large marketing firms in the US started to build their in-house development teams in Canada, cheaper and easier to manage.
I’ll share my tips of how to deal with these issues in a later post.
Welcome opinions and advices!