Read my Yahoo Store blog at ystore.blogs.com@@@@@@ Click the link to open a new window for my somewhat irregular Ystore Blog at http://ystore.blogs.com ~~~~~
SAVE AS a CSV@@@@@@3.) SAVE AS a CSV. click FILE > SAVE AS > (name the file) hit TAB, then C
save to a folder you can find easily or your desktop
~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Link Building and Keyword Ranking@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2008/06/movin-on-up-in-search-results-link-building-and-keyword-ranking/~~~~~
"Just HTML" Front Page@@@@@@Trick: If you want to display a unique HTML look for your front page, here’s the secret trick because RAW-HTML trick won’t work.
Under PAGE-ELEMENTS select only MESSAGE. Paste whatever is inside your BODY Tags inside this field.
Voila! A custom look for your Yahoo! Store's front page.~~~~~
"Ok! I want my Complete Internet Marketing Plan!"@@@@@@Call me at 1-800-332-7601. I'll get a personalized order form right out to you. After that, I can usually schedule our first call within a week or so. You will begin to see immediate results within 3 to 4 weeks of ordering.
As always, you get a Risk-Free 100% Satisfaction Guarantee: You like my work or I fix it to your satisfaction, or you don't pay!
Give me a holler or drop me a line!
Rob Snell,
Managing Partner,
Snell Brothers Web Development
email rob@ystore.com
Call 1-800-332-7601 / 1-662-320-9196
662-320-4000 COPY COW / 662-324-5246 home
P.S. My personal goal is for any project to pay for itself within 3-6 months. Over half of my projects now are for previous clients. I'm completely confident you'll be more than delighted with the results!
Feel free to contact anyone in my portfolio, and I can give you a happy clients reference list for marketing research, design, maintenance, support, or illustration projects!
MARKETING CLIENTS: Several of the folks I've done marketing work for the past 3 or more years don't want to be listed in my portfolio or as a reference in general marketing materials because they don't want anyone to know what they are selling, but if I ask, they'd probably talk with you.
Stuart Bazley at Ebodylogic.com is great. He'll tell you stuff I wouldn't tell you. He's the guy who says "don't tell me what you have to do to the chicken, just keep the voodoo working" to keep the sales and traffic coming.
He'll also admit to you how the only thing he's selling these days is stuff I helped him market with a spin-off site which is what I told him last Fall. Visit Stuart .
Stuart'll tell you how I translate a lot of stuff I do into "English" for civilians. We've done design, marketing, and merchandising research for new property development.
Also, contact Tom at http://chair-mats.com . He's a little busy with orders right now, but he said he'd be happy to give a reference!
Remember! As always, you get my Risk-Free 100% Satisfaction Guarantee: You like my work or I fix it to your satisfaction, or you don't pay! Call me! 1-800-332-7601. ~~~~~
"Okay, then how do I get more traffic, NOW?"@@@@@@Hire me! I'll show you. I'll even do it FOR you. Our stores have sold MILLIONS of dollars of products through Yahoo! Store.
You also get my 15 years worth of "bricks and mortar" retailing, marketing, and small business owner's experience.
You get a proven road map to building your site's traffic, and a list of elements you can use to jump-start your traffic. I'll even do the marketing leg work FOR you.~~~~~
"Rob Snell's Wacky Canonical Test"@@@@@@http://www.robsnell.com/canonical-test.html?s=affid&id=8562471&count=9561759&hello=paddock~~~~~
"Seriously, I am not Yahoo.com..."@@@@@@ Please do not confuse us with the multi-billion dollar multi-national, dot-com known as Yahoo! We're an independent design company specializing in helping you make more with your Yahoo! Store.
We DO participate in
the Yahoo! Store Design Partner Program , but we're not otherwise affiliated with the fine folks in Santa Clara, California, at Yahoo!
I've been there. It's really nice. They have better offices than we do. -- Rob
Yahoo.com and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo.com. ~~~~~
"Why a new site rather than drive traffic to my existing site?"@@@@@@The primary reason? Accountability. You'll be able to look at your traffic stats on your new site and see exactly what is working or not working. Does your Yahoo! Business Express listing pull traffic? Does it convert into sales? Does your Looksmart listing pull folks from MSN? On what keywords do THEY spend the most? Are your GOTO Overture folks converting better on the new landing pages? Do they call the new 800#? What about email addresses collected on the new site? Does marketing to them drive sales?
It is SO much easier to see results from a new marketing project when that project stands alone from your existing site. It's also easier to build a new site from scratch than it is to "fix" a site that's been around for a while, and we're not messing with anyone else's baby or design project.
After the initial project is completed, you'll have several directory listings, be well-positioned for the right keyword phrases in the most important search engines and directories, and have more traffic than you can shake a stick at.
(Orders? Sales? A lot of that is up to you, i.e. quality of your offering, brand names you carry, pricing strategies, etc., but I can help with conversion as well!)~~~~~
$1,000,000 Stores@@@@@@~~~~~
(1) You pick products and make a spreadsheet to be used as the skeleton.@@@@@@Using Excel '97 or any other spreadsheet, build the skeleton. Include fields named: section, item name, item code, description, suggested retail price, selling price, and sizes.~~~~~
-@@@@@@~~~~~
...@@@@@@~~~~~
...@@@@@@READ THIS FIRST: [FREE PDF DOWNLOAD] Rob Snell's Yahoo Store Design & Consulting -- Opportunity Vision then call me at 1-800-332-7601.
My assistant will set up an appointment for you, usually in a day or so. Then I�ll surf on over to your site and give you a FREE Store Analysis with "10 Things You Can Do To Make More With Your Yahoo Store!"
Save time. Make more money. I fix Yahoo!
Stores for a living. When I'm not working on your store, I'm working on my family's stores. There are many things you can do to fix improve your store.
Our company-owned Yahoo! stores AND client sites have generated many millions
of dollars in sales for independent retailers over the past 5 years, so we know
what works (and what doesn't!).
What can Rob Snell & http://Ystore.com do for me?
You benefit from my Yahoo! Store experience because we've been using the
software since 1997, even before it was called Yahoo! Store. We also own and
maintain our own Yahoo! Stores, so we're aware of the unique needs of the
independent Yahoo! Store retailer.
You will also profit from my extensive retail & marketing experience. In addition to Snell Brothers Web Development , we also own COPY COW a copy shop we opened in 1996. We just sold our fifth GUN DOG COMICS , the retail pop-culture company we started in 1988 as college students. The company who bought our Starkville store also bought all of our hobby-related Yahoo! Stores.
Your bottom line is #1. I understand that the most important thing about your
web store is making it easier for your internet customers to shop, so you make
more money.
You have things you want your store to do, but you're not quite sure how to pull
it off within the confines of the Yahoo! Store software. We can implement YOUR
ideas on your Yahoo! Store.
You can request a Ystore Deep Site Analysis to look at your statistics and
traffic flow . You'll see areas in your store where we can focus to make the most
impact on your bottom line.
You need a professional look. We do graphics. Get a whole new look from the
ground up. We'll create your company logo and a look to �brand� your entire site
with colors and fonts.
We can also convert your existing logos & graphics to a web friendly format.
You can have us scan your catalogs or photos as well as convert images from
manufacturers� and distributors� cd-roms into Yahoo! Store product graphics.
-- Rob Snell,
http://ystore.com
email: rob@ystore.com
P.S. Let me help you get the most out of your Yahoo! Store. By looking at your unique
situation through the eyes of fellow business owner rather than just a web
designer or marketer, I can help you improve your business by helping you make
more money and by saving you time . ~~~~~
051403 ARTICLE -- Finding the keywords that generate traffic that convert into sales in your Yahoo Store@@@@@@STARKVILLE -- May 14, 2003
Copy of an email I sent to Andrew Goodman of Page-Zero fame. Met him in Dallas at the 2002 Search Engine Strategies meeting. Listen to what he says.
So after figuring I've tightened up my stores conversion rate as much as possible, I start looking for which keyword phrases convert better.
Yahoo! Store will let me see REFERENCES for sales and traffic by search engine for the past 6 months, and I've gotten as many as 25,000 or so unique words and phrases from exporting them, but I can export SALES from the dawn of time (Viaweb ~1997 B.C.) and the ORDERS.CSV has a field that stores the CONVERTING KEYWORD.
Some 40% of my orders have a keyword phrase that matches up. This is G-O-L-D!
I export 6 years of orders. This is painfully S-L-O-W. Yahoo Store allows exporting 3000 orders at a time. Then I merge all the CSVs. Then I consolidate them into a list of unique words with sneaky Excel tricks.
Two hours later I pull a report on CONVERTING KEYWORDS which gives me a list of 3500 unique phrases *AND* how many orders / how many dollars they've generated. The best prize is the #1 top phrase has generated $50,000.00 in sales since we launched this particular site.
WARNING: There's some chaff in there. I have to delete some 500+/- junk phrases. I see about 5-10% of the referrer info just being plain wrong. I think it has to do with folks having multiple windows open.
How I make money with this info?
That's when I started buying Google Adwords and started looking for my copy of your Google Adwords book .
By the way, GAW! (Google Adwords) converts well on the WEIRDEST of phrases. I have this one phrase that has NO traffic (almost), but when they type it in, they buy something. It's a butchered version of a [confidential] phrase.
It's converted mostly on AOL and some on DEALTIME (which my Keywordmax.com software tells me!) but I would NEVER have these sales without your methodology .
Google Adwords is easier when I make 5 or 6 KEYWORD BUCKETS. Then I break out the expensive words like you say so I can REALLY tweak those ads. Got a 10% conversion rate on my $50K BUCKET. My MAX bid is $1.00, but I'm getting a hell of a discount. 71-cents is my average bid.
BTW - I've tested a similar ad in the #3 position with another GAW account. I was averaging 2.1% clickthrough on the same bucket with almost the identical set of keywords. (Wonder how much fraud I'm suffering in the #1 position?)
I log into yet ANOTHER GAW! account and see that ~$2.23 is the recommended MAX on the same keyword for the #1. I'm getting it for 71-cents thanks to Andrew Goodman. Hee hee!
How's zem apples? I'll run some more numbers to get a better ROI figure. My tracking software is still confusing to me!
Rob Snell
~~~~~
1-Column ELL format with ABSTRACTS@@@@@@~~~~~
1.) delete EXAMPLE ROW, EMPTY ROW@@@@@@~~~~~
120106 Webinar PPT files@@@@@@ Webinar Powerpoint file ~~~~~
13,000 Yahoo! Store owners can't be wrong@@@@@@Many independent multimillion dollar operations
Around 2500 5-Star Top Rated Merchants competing with the big boys~~~~~
2-Column ELL with ABSTRACTS@@@@@@~~~~~
2008.06 Rob Snell Congressional Testimony, Press, Links, Documentation, Etc.@@@@@@~~~~~
2009 Icelandic Trade Council Keynote by Rob Snell@@@@@@Scroll down to Read Transcription | View Slides | iceland.mp3 [00:56:32]
Pics from nordicemarketing | Pics from ROBSNELL | Coverage
BACKSTORY: About a month ago, I got an email from a friend of mine saying "the Icelandic Trade Council develop an event to help motivate the locals that ecommerce is a good thing and was looking for someone (not a big company) who has done ecommerce successfully so I immediately thought of you."
There is an event on the 1st of December (Iceland's independence day) held by the Trade Council of Iceland. This time we need to motivate a nation that just lost all of their banks and what is better than the Internet?
I wrote back:
Man, I can identify with folks in your situation. In 1979, I was 11,
and my family lost everything we owned when the Pearl River put six
feet of water in our house. We didn't have flood insurance. Earlier
that year my parents had committed full-time to their dog supplies
mail order business and most of their inventory was lost in the flood. Fast forward to 1997. My parents had slowly rebuilt their business,
and were finally making a good living selling dog supplies through
their retail storefront when disaster struck again. Petsmart, a big
box / category killer retailer opened a new store right down the
street. Overnight their business was cut in half. Long story, short, Mom said get us on the Internet. We found Viaweb,
an online shopping cart builder (which is now Yahoo! Store) and
relaunched their mail order catalog business. Within the first six months, we realized that the WWW was the future
for us, and within 4 years we sold the retail store to concentrate on
e-commerce which is now 20x the volume their retail store was doing... These days, I enjoy helping other small business folks more than
selling dog supplies, so I spend half my time on family stuff and the
other half writing, speaking and consulting on small business
e-commerce.
Scroll down to read transcription
Man 1: Rob, I have just briefly
introduced you to the Icelandic audience. Maybe the only word
you understood was Yahoo! Stores. But anyway, the floor is yours. Welcome.
[applause]
Rob: Howdy. How ya'll
doing? My name is Rob Snell and I am from Starkville, Mississippi.
And I am going to talk today about how e-commerce saved our family business.
How E-commerce Saved Our Family
Business Rob Snell, Co-owner Gun Dog Supply [email_address] I understand you guys have had a hard
year, had a little trouble with some bankers or something like that.
I understand where you are coming from. Today I am going to talk
about how our company business has survived two catastrophes, two extinction
level events that should have put us out of business, but it didn't.
And I am actually going to go through how we got online and how we grew
our company, and I am going to tell you how you can take advantage of
some of the opportunities that are available on the Internet.
Homepage
Gun Dog Supply is our family's company.
We sell training supplies for hunting dogs. I grew up in the business,
and' Rob, Steve, and their mullets
Who is that good looking guy over there
on the left? It is me and my baby brother Steve, and we started
our own company, Gun Dog Comics, or Snell Brothers as it is now known,
back when we were college students at Mississippi State selling comic
books and baseball cards doing anything trying to get out of the dog
food business.
Cow
In 1996, we opened up a copy shop.
I don't know if ya'll have Kinko's here or not, but the Kinko's
in our town closed, and within two weeks we were able to open up a copy
shop.
Yahoo Store
But then in 1997, I got into e-commerce
and started doing e-commerce consulting once I launched our family's
business online. And I have a weird relationship with Yahoo.
I am an unofficial evangelist for Yahoo! Store, which is a very, very
small part of Yahoo. I have been building stores and talking to
store owners. There are about 45,000 Yahoo! Store owners and they
are my best friends.
Yahoo Store for Dummies
In 2006, my book came out, which is
'Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies', which should be called
'Starting a Yahoo! Store for Dummies. I don't believe it has
been translated yet, but Christian is working on it. And hopefully,
by the end of the week he will have it for me.
Speaker: PUBCON / SES / SMX / IRCE
/ Y!Summit
I speak a lot about e-commerce and
small business at search marketing conferences and small business conferences.
2008 Congress
And last year, I had the honor of testifying
in front of the United States Congress on behalf of small business folks.
I wasn't in the hot seat or anything like I was going to prison or
anything. How E-commerce Saved Our Family
Business
But today, I am going to talk about
our family business and how e-commerce literally saved the family farm.
Homepage
Gun Dog Supply is our online business.
We sell training supplies for hunting dogs.
Steve & Roxie
Here is my brother Steve with Roxie
out in the field. This is our typical customer. Most of
our customers are hunters. They have a birddog or a retriever.
Pictures
This is Click, one of Steve's birddogs.
Steve has got 13 dogs. And if you notice on his neck, there are
two products. There is a $5 collar at the bottom of his neck,
and then there is a beeper collar at the top of his neck which is a
$100 collar. That is kind of like keeping up with your birddog.
Warner & Anne Snell
My parents started Gun Dog Supply back
in 1972 on their kitchen table. My dad is a hunter. My brother
got the hunting genes. I got the marketing genes. I don't
understand all this hunting stuff. But he ordered a bunch of dog
supplies back in 1972 from a mail order company, and he got back a bunch
of junk. And he said, 'I can do better than this.' He
had been working for the government, and he wanted to own his own company,
so he started making his own dog supplies. Catalog
So he started making collars, and leads,
and leashes to sell them.
Classified Ads
And instead of just selling them where
he was, he actually started buying these tiny little bitty ads in specialty
hunting dog publications. And we still do today. That is
why the website is in there.
Old Catalog
And people would call over the phone,
or they would order over the mail, or we would send them a catalogue.
Here is American Field. This magazine has a circulation of 5,000
copies, so this is a pretty small niche, these types of places.
And then later on, we expanded our product line and sort of carried
more stuff, and we had a mail order catalog. I mean this is back
in the '70s.
1972 Family Business > Mail Order
You can tell we were pretty high tech. We are hand addressing our labels here. I don't know if ya'll
do that in Iceland or not. The funny thing is this is actually
my brother's mother-in-law. Little did he know that he would
be marrying her daughter in about 20 years. It is a small world
in Mississippi, too.
Dog on the Floor
And back in 1979, my parents decided
the business was growing, and they were selling some stuff, and they
really liked being self-employed. And they said, 'Well hey,
let's quit our jobs and let's go full time.' And I don't
know how many people out here actually own there own business, but I
mean it is a really scary thing to make that leap. And they did
and they started up. Friday the 13 th ,
April 1979
And then we had something happen; the
first catastrophe. On Friday the 13 th , April 1979,
the Pearl River flooded.
Flood House Pic
We had six feet of water in our house.
This is about six months after my parents decided to start their business.
Outside of House
We lost everything. We didn't
have flood insurance because we didn't know we lived in a flood zone.
We lost cars, we lost furniture, clothes. We basically got out
with the clothes on our back. My uncle actually came up to my
house in a boat at two o'clock in the morning to take me and my little
brother to safety.
Inventory
The other thing is we lost our entire
inventory. We had all of our dog supplies inside the garage and
it was all gone. And you guys know. It is hard enough to
start a company when things are good. But when things are bad,
I mean we are starting in the hole.
WC
And here is my dad after the flood.
I do want to say, that dog saved his life. Him spending time,
training that dog, working with that dog, that shows how important that
bond is that our customers have with their dogs.
Another thing is that I understand
when you say the economy is bad, because back then, this is 1979, 1980.
I was only 11 years old, but even then I knew that the economy was bad.
They had 20% interest rates. I mean people weren't loaning money.
Money was tight.
And then to add insult to injury, my
dad's banker had a heart attack and died. And the new hotshot
young banker showed up and he looked at us and he said, 'You are a
poor credit risk,' and he called the note. And we literally
lost our family farm. Dog Store
So here we are starting our company
out in the first year. I mean it is difficult. But we made
it. We worked hard. This is Gun Dog Supply's retail location.
When we had the catalog business, we noticed that a lot of folks in
Mississippi actually wanted to come and shop at a store and not order
through the catalog.
Dog Food And so, we got a retail location and
we started selling premium dog food in our retail store because all
of our customers had dogs, right? But you couldn't get this
stuff anywhere. I mean you could get it at a vet, but we were
one of the only places that you could get it.
Collars and Leads, and Leashes and
Bells
And we sold collars and leads and leashes
and bells. And we used to sell stuff to hunting dogs. But
now, more of our customers look like this dog.
Look Like This Dog
This is Marco. Marco is not a
hunting dog. Marco is a foo-foo dog, is what my dad used to call
him. He hated talking to these little old ladies with their foo-foo
dogs.
Dog Store
So we changed the name of our company
to the Dog Store to reflect our current customer base. And we
still have that little bitty Gun Dog Supply at the top.
Graph
And my parents had built a pretty good
little business. I mean look at this. From 1989 to 1996,
this graph shows the monthly sales. And my parents worked hard
for 15 years. And here we are in 1996. They sent us to college.
I mean, you know. They weren't getting rich by any stretch of
the imagination, but they were doing all right. Uh-oh. Here
is another one of these date slides again. That is not good.
March 20 th ,
1996
March 20 th , 1996.
I don't know if you guys have the same problem over here in Iceland,
but back in the United States we have this trend in retail that has
been going on for the past 20 years. In retail, these huge companies
come into a town. They open up these huge big box category killer
stores, and they put little guys out of business. And it is not
just Wal-Mart. I mean it is pretty much in every single category. And in the pet's category, it is Pet Smart.
Pet Smart
And Pet Smart announced that they were
opening up literally across the street from the Dog Store.
Customers
All right. This is Jackson, Mississippi
in the Southeastern United States for those of you who are geographically
challenged. Ya'll probably never heard of Jackson Mississippi. But this is where our customers were, in Jackson, Mississippi.
And so, our showroom used to be a warehouse and we moved up the street
to, actually, a pretty decent location here, and we were doing fine.
But then Pet Smart comes in, and guess where they open up. In
a high traffic, more convenient, more visible location, and you can
imagine what happened.
1989-March 1997: Dog Store
Here is a graph that shows our sales
12 months after Pet Smart opened. And look, we didn't just roll
over. A lot of our competitors in the market just gave up.
They folded up their tents. They went home. They said, 'We
cannot compete with this company. They have too much money. They are going to kill us.' So 50% of our competitors immediately
disappeared.
And we said, 'Look. We are
not going to just let them have it. We are not going to give up
the business.' We got aggressive with our marketing. We
started a loyalty program. We lowered our prices. We extended
our hours. Anything we could do to fight these guys. This
was war to us. B&W Catalog: Plan B\
And at the same time, we wanted to
have a plan B, because we knew that we were fighting a losing battle.
And plan B for us was to reboot the catalog; to go back to our roots,
to focus on the niche that got us in business in the first place, which
is selling dog supplies. And man, we got into the catalog business
way back in '72. Things had changed. We had desktop publishing.
It was a lot cheaper to make something. It was a lot cheaper to
print stuff. Postage costs were still really high.
Catalog 2
But we spent hundreds of hours on this
catalog. I mean this catalog is a small little dinky catalog.
It is maybe 40 pages. But one of the things that we did that our
competitors didn't do is we actually wrote a ton of information about
the products that we sell. And we sold training supplies, tracking
supplies for hunting dogs.
So we send out 5,000 of these catalogs
to the folks who are on our mailing list, and we are really excited,
because we worked for three months knocking this thing out. And
what happened? Nothing. So we are all sitting around the dinner
table, and what the hell are we going to do now? I guess we can
all go get jobs. My mom was watching TV and she kept seeing this
commercial over and over and over again for AT&T's e-commerce
platform.
AT&T
And this lady got obsessed with the
Internet. I mean this is 1996, 1997. You wouldn't expect
your mom who is 60 years old to be, 'We got to get on the Internet!'
I was like, 'Mom, the Internet is just about porn!'
[laughter]
And she is like, 'Maybe we need to
get into that. But we gotta get on the Internet.'
[laughter]
And I mean she would not let it go.
I was like, 'Come on woman.' So just to get her to be leaving
me alone'I mean I had my own company at this point. We had five
retail stores selling comic books. I was working the mullet. Ya'll saw that a little while ago. I was playing in a rock band.
I had a life. It was a good life with a good mullet, you know?
I didn't know anything about Internet
marketing, about how to build HTML webpages, about secure servers, about
shopping carts, about programming. I mean I went to graphic design
school so I could be a cartoonist and not have to think about this kind
of stuff. But mom was like, 'Look. We are in trouble. The family needs it. You are smart. Figure it out.
Get online now!' And if ya'll knew my momma, you would understand.
When she gets her mind made up, it is going to happen!
April 1997: www.gundogsupply.com
So we built a little bitty website.
I went and got a domain, April 1997. I mean I am embarrassed.
We didn't even save the website. I kinda had to rebuild it using
some old images up in Photoshop. Because you know, you don't
archive every single thing you do, and I didn't realize anything was
going to happen.
But I mean it was like the typical
brochure website. And this goes to a point that somebody made,
I think in Icelandic. My Icelandic is not as good as it use to
be. But I think somebody said, 'Just building a website isn't
enough.' And that is true. This is a terrible website.
Letter from the Snells
We had an 'about us' and a letter
from the Snells. Like you want to read a letter from the Snells
written to everybody about how great we are.
GDS Products and Services
We had a list of the products and services
that we sold.
FREE CATALOG Request Form
And the only actionable item on the
site was a free catalog request form. Ya'll remember that catalog,
the one that didn't work?
Yahoo was the Google of 1997
So I spent all this time working on
this website. And I am a glory hound. I like getting credit
for what I do. And I wanted people to come see my work, because
I was so proud of this website that I had built.
And so, I said all right. Just
building it isn't good enough. If you build it, they will come? That is crap. That is not going to happen. You have to drive
traffic to your website. And back in 1997, Yahoo was where the
traffic came from. Yahoo was the Google of 1997. And right
in the Yahoo directory listing was the secret to getting traffic.
So I did my homework. I did my
research. I learned what I had to do and I wrote a great Yahoo
directory listing. And this is the Yahoo Directory listing that
to this day actually still exists. And it was awesome. We
got tons of catalog requests; hundreds of them. My dad was freaking
out. Directory
He is like, 'I am not sending hundreds,
and hundreds, and hundreds of people catalogs that lose money for us.
Get the store online. Put the catalog on the web or shut down
the website.' And after all this work, you know?
Online Store Builder
My brother found ViaWeb, which is now
Yahoo Store. Yahoo bought them about a year after we got online. And they had an online store builder. And this was the answer
to my prayers, because I had been playing around with a shopping cart,
and a CGI bin, and secure server stuff, and I don't understand a lot
of propeller head stuff. And this was one of the first online
web apps. I mean Paul Graham, the guy who created this, got $50
million from Yahoo back in 1998. I mean they got a bargain.
Build the Store in your Browser
It is an online store builder. I mean you build the store in your
browser. You know, like using forms, clicking around. This
is way back in the dialup days-14.4 modem. I am with you. I feel ya. And uploading these huge pictures.
But we had all this content from the
catalogue. Remember that 90 days in hell with my dad writing all
these catalog descriptions and laying that sucker out? You know,
you upload a picture you type in the name, you hit update, and boom.
You have a product page.
Built-in Shopping Cart
It had a built-in shopping cart.
I didn't have to do any of that propeller head stuff; no heavy lifting
on my part. Yahoo is going to take care of all that.
Secure Checkout
It had a secure checkout. I didn't
have to deal with security certificates or virus protection and that
kind of stuff, hackers. I didn't have to deal with that. Yahoo took care of that.
Back End: Order Manager
And on the backend, it had an order
manager. It had all the bells and whistles. And this is
back in 1997. I mean this was awesome. And one of the main
points I want you guys to get form this is that they have already invented
it. You don't have to go and redesign something from scratch. There is somebody out there who has a product, a service, that allows
you to get online doing whatever you do. And I know all of you
aren't retailers, but doing whatever you want to do online, there
is a way for you to do it without having to pay $100,000 to build out
a website.
Now you have an online store
But you do this, and now you have an
online store. And this is the homepage, the way it looks today.
I guarantee you it didn't look like that in 1997.
May-Dec
'97 Visitors And we already had traffic coming form
our Yahoo directory listing. Remember that? I wrote a great
Yahoo directory listing. We were getting hundreds of catalog requests.
My dad was freaking out. We actually had visitors coming to our
website. Two days later we launched, there were about 100 people
a day hitting the website. That was pretty good. We didn't
have 100 people a day coming into the store. They were all going
to Pet Smart. E-commerce makes it easy for folks
to give you money
E-commerce makes it easy for folks
to give you money. This is the second point. If you cannot
take payments online, you are missing out. If you just have a
brochure website'Anything you can possibly do to allow folks to give
you money online, if you can possibly do it.
June 5, 1997: First Online
Order
I logged into the store, and on day
three, we had our first online order, two days after our soft launch. And you can even see on here, I didn't even charge them shipping.
Whoops! I hadn't set that up yet.
Dummy Launcher
And this is what the guy bought.
The first thing I ever sold online was a dummy launcher. This
thing uses blanks to fire. The gas comes out the cylinder and
it shoots this dummy for the retriever to get 250 yards, because you
can't throw that far for your retriever. I have more fun doing
this at this presentation, because I get to look back on all this stuff
that I never have time to. This page still exists on the Internet
today. We are still making money selling this same product for
$75, just like we did 13 years ago. This same page that I made
back in 1997 is making me money right now. I probably just got
an order for one. And it beats the hell out of getting your butt kicked
by Pet Smart. May-Dec.
'97 Graph: Number of Orders
And we didn't set the world on fire.
In 1997, we got online. Here are the first six or seven months.
But it was enough to go, 'This is the future. This is growing
like a weed. This where we gotta be. Forget Pet Smart.
Forget selling dog food.' May-Dec
'97: Revenue $$$
And that is the first month there.
But if you look at our revenue, we did $88,000. That is OK, but
for a little project, it was something to get momma to shut up.
You know? That is not too bad. I love my mom. Ya'll
don't take it the wrong way. More, please
And so, we wanted more. How can
I get more? I got a Yahoo directory listing.
Bought Banner Ads
So the next thing that I did is I did
a little bit of research. I said, 'Well OK. Where are
my future customers hanging out so I can go introduce them to me?' And I found a site called Working Retrieval Central that had thousands
of people who were retriever enthusiasts. Remember I was talking
about how few people there are in the United States who have dogs?
Well, half of them are on this website.
And I contacted the owner, and I said,
'Hey, how much do buy some banners on your site?' And he said,
'$750 for three months.' So I told my dad, and I thought his
head was going to explode. '$750?!?' So I bought banner
ads on my credit card and not on his. 1989-1996: Dog Store Sales
And it worked like gang busters.
We started getting orders in. And if you go back on that graph,
you can see kind of about August. That was revenue coming from
those Working Retriever Central banners. And my dad was like,
'See! You don't have to buy advertising to make money on the
Internet!' I was like, give me my $750 old man.
1989-1997 Dog Store
So let's recap. 1989-96 Dog
Store sales. Retail store sales to fu-fu dog people. And
then here comes Pet Smart. Boo! Terrible. Making my
momma cry. Year 1: Store vs. Web
And here is Year 1. This is where
it starts to get exciting. Year 1: Store versus the web.
And within the first six months, the web sales caught the Dog Store.
And part of that is because the Dog Store was sucking at that point.
I mean you can see Pet Smart was kicking our butts.
And one thing that somebody said at
the break that I want to reiterate is this is harder than it looks.
If every single person in this room opened up an online store selling
the exact same thing that we are selling or something else, 90% of ya'll
would go out of business in 90 days. It is tough. It is
very difficult. You have to have some sort of competitive advantage.
Year 2: Store vs. Web
And we did because we focused on these
dog folks. It was a niche. We weren't selling fu-fu dog
stuff. We weren't selling stuff for everybody. We sere
selling stuff for hunting dog folks. Here is year 2, and you can
see at this point, the web is just killing the dog store. And
Dog Store continues to slide. You can tell where we are putting
our emphasis. Year 3: Store vs. Web
Year 3, the same thing happens.
And notice the scale of the graph keeps changing. See that line
down there at the top, that dotted blue line? That is the best
the Dog Store ever did, which was just a little bit over $65,000 in
a month. At this point, we were like, 'I love this Internet.
Let's get into it.'
But that was 1997
But that was in 1997. I mean
just showing up was half the battle.
Cashing in on Search Engines
And so, what I am going to talk about
now is how we got from 1997 to 2003. I am talking about cashing
in on search engines.
When customers are looking to buy
what you sell, show up.
This is the most important thing I
am going to say all day and probably in my entire career. So if
I could stand up here and just say this over and over again and ya'll
wouldn't leave, I would probably do it. When customers are looking to buy what
you sell, you need to show up. You need to sell it to them.
When customers are looking to buy what you sell, your store, your site
needs to show up in the search engines. And if that means you
get in the organic natural free results and you get free traffic, that
is great. And that means if you have got to buy an ad to get to
them, that is great, too. And if you have got to do both, that
is fine.
Search engines Google graph here
Well what search engines are important?
Well you guys know this. It is Google. And I think it is
the same over here as it is back in Mississippi. I mean we have
got a little Bing and a little Yahoo, but 75% of my traffic is coming
from Google. Keywords (the key to search engines)
The key to search engines is keywords.
And boy, I am obsessed with keywords. My friends tell me to shut
up. I keep talking about keywords. Oh, I love keywords.
I will show you why in a minute.
Orange Dog Collar
When somebody does a search on Google
for 'orange dog collar', the search engine results page appears.
I know you have all seen this before. One thing I did notice in
Iceland is that ya'll don't have a bunch of ads. There are
tons of opportunities out there. In Mississippi, this whole thing
is full up of ads. But when I do searches in Iceland, it is like
there may be one or two people advertising. So those one or two
people want me to shut the hell up right now, but the rest of ya'll
go kick their butts.
Natural Search Results
On the left-hand side is the natural
search results. Some people call it organic. They call it
natural. They call it free. What that comes from is when
Google spdyers the web, they have this huge index where they keep all
their webpages, and they go and they see what your webpage is about,
and they basically give you'when somebody does a query, a search,
it gives you the results in descending order by the most relevant webpage.
And the way they do that is with an algorithm. And the algorithm
is causing my hair to fall out.
Google hides it. It is a secret
recipe. They don't want everyone to know what it is so you can't
just automatically do the right little dance and make your website appear. I spend tons and tons of time thinking about search engine optimization
and how to get here.
Inside the natural search results,
you will also sometimes see shopping results if the keyword you are
using like an e-commerce term, or image results, for those of you taking
pictures of polar bears or whatever you take pictures of, and sometimes
video results.
So it is like three or four separate
things you gotta kind of master to show up on Google. And if you
will notice, I am not showing up in the shopping results, and I shouldn't
be here talking to ya'll. I should be back at home fixing this,
because we are about to hit the busiest time of the year right now for
us. But if you will look at that last one down there, I actually
have a video on Youtube that I made that is showing up.
Paid Search/Sponsored Links
On the right-hand side are the paid
search or the sponsored links. And I heard a little bit about
that in Icelandic. I heard, 'Blah, blah, blah, sponsored links,
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, Google.' And I think he was talking
about sponsored links. Oh, ya'll have a beautiful language. Please don't take that the wrong way. It makes me a little nervous
that it is a room full of Vikings! We knew about ya'll!
How I found search engines
How I found search engines. Remember
that first order I got? Well every time I get an order, if there
is a referrer, and a referrer is a place on the web somebody came before
they came to your website. If there is a referrer, it will tell
you what the referrer is. And so I had people from the Yahoo directory
come in. I had people from those banners I bought on Working Retriever
Central. Referrer Example
But then all of a sudden I started
getting all this traffic from places I had never heard of. And
here is an example. MSN. We had traffic from Hot Bot.
We had traffic from Excite, from Infoseek. We had traffic from
this place I had never heard of called Google. You know back in
the '90s, I didn't know what this stuff was. And when a referrer
comes from a search engine, it will tell you the keyword phrase. And I was like, 'Hmm'this is pretty cool!'
And so what I would do is go to the
search engine that they came from and type that same word in and see
where we came up. I know this sounds pretty basic, but back then
it was an epiphany to me. If we were ranked higher, we would get
more clicks and more traffic. I was like, 'Man, we gotta rank
higher. That is important.'
Web Analytics Software
Well how do you keep with what your
referrer is? How do you know what your referrer is? Web
Analytics Software is how. And most of the people in here who
are propeller heads, you guys know about Google Analytics.
Google Analytics
Fortunately for us, it was baked into
the Yahoo Store platform, so I didn't have to do a whole bunch to
figure stuff out. But I also run GA or Google Analytics, this
web analytics software. What it does is it tracks users. You guys have probably heard of cookies. You go to a website or
you go to a page and it keeps up with where individual people go.
But then overall, you can kind of see these trends. You can see
how your traffic is going day to do. You can see where it is coming
from. You can see specific sources and what keywords folks are
using.
Where Traffic Comes From
See that right there? 73%. That is why I love search engines. And I ain't paying for more
than maybe 10% of that. 73% of my traffic is free.
What Pages Customers Visit
This shows me what pages customers
visit. Ya'll see that orange dog collars page? I just
made that page up for some talks like this. I got 3,500 people
that have already hit that page. That is pretty good.
What Keywords People are Searching
For
Google Analytics will show you what
keywords folks are searching for. But more importantly, it will
show you how much revenue they generated and how many transactions,
and the average value of the transaction. So you can tie a dollar
amount to a keyword phrase. You know what keyword phrases are
more valuable.
Collect Converting Keywords
And this is how you get found when
people are looking to buy what you sell. You collect converting
keywords. And you use your web analytics to do that.
21,358 Converting Keywords
Right now in my personal collection,
I have 21,358 converting keywords. And a converting keyword is
a keyword where somebody typed it into a search engine, clicked on my
ad or on my result, went to my site, poked around, shopped, used the
shopping cart, and gave me money at the end of the day. They searched
for this, this is what they bought.
$6,264,243.60 from Keywords
These keywords have generated over
$6 million trackable revenue to the keyword level. And this isn't
for all time. This is just for the sample that I did for this
presentation. I know what keywords generate revenue.
Examples?
Gun Dog Supply/Your Company/Domain
Homepage
And let's talk about some examples.
When somebody does a search online for your company and your domain
name, you better come up. That is the easiest thing to rank for.
They are looking for something like your homepage.
When somebody is doing a generic product
category, they haven't made up their mind who they are going to buy
from yet. If they are looking for leather dog collars, they are
probably looking for something like this. You have got to show
them what they want when they come to your webpage.
And keywords have intent. When
people are searching for something, you can tell what they are interested
in, what their intentions are on your website, and you need to make
sure that your pages on your site actually can meet that demand.
Because if not, they are going across the street. They are going
to buy it from me instead of from you. Garmin GPS Specific Manufacturer
Specified manufacturer phrases like
Garmin GPS, one of the manufacturers we sell. We have a shop by
manufacturer page. A specific brand model product. They
know what they are looking for. They are looking for a very specific
product. At this point, they have already made up their mind.
They are price shopping right here. I hate it when people come
in on product pages, because they already know what they are going to
buy. How can I stop my dog from barking?
Query Question
A query question. A lot of times,
people will search for an answer to a question. 'How can I stop my
dark from barking?' Well, answer these questions on your website
and you can get traffic for these phrases.
What about New Projects?
What about new projects? What
if you are sitting in this room and you don't have a website, or you
are sitting in this room and you want to do something different. What about new things where you don't have a bunch of history?
Keyword Tool
Well back in the day, you whipper-snappers,
you have it so easy today. Back in the day, we had no idea how
many people were doing searches for certain keyword phrases. There
was a top 100 searches on the Internet list that I had in 1997.
And this was like the holy grail of information. And half of the
words on there were porn. Not very helpful if you are not in the
porn business. Now there are keyword tools.
And today I am going to talk about a free keyword tool called the Google
Adwords keyword tool. Google collects all this information about
people who do searches on their website, right? They know how
many times a month somebody searches for every single keywords phrase.
They also know what advertisers you guys are willing to pay for those
clicks.
They make this information publicly
available. You don't even have to be an advertiser. Go
to Google, type in keyword tool, hit enter. That first result
is a keyword tool. Just click on that.
Doghouse Heater Results
So you type in whatever keyword phrase
you want to see, in this case, 'Doghouse heater,' and man, last
night I think I needed one of these. It is cold here. If
I knew it was going to be this cold, I would have brought a jacket.
When you do a search, the results show
up, and this is what you are looking at. It will show you the
keywords. It will show you the estimated average cost per click,
what you are going to have to pay Google every time somebody clicks
on your ad and goes to your website, and it is going to show you the
competition-how many other advertisers are actually advertising on that
phrase. And I can see right here there is a nickel phrase that
has less than half of the advertiser slots taken. I need to get
to work. I am not buying that. It will also show you the number of
searches per month. And there is a cool seasonality thing here
where it shows you the highest volume occurred in what month.
So there is my search phrase. If you notice above and below it
are two different phrases where it is suggesting things to me.
It will tell you, 'Hey, here are some more ideas,' because Google
wants you to buy more ads. They are pretty smart about that.
The last thing is, if you have an Adwords
account and you are using this tool, you can click on this little 'add
exact' and it will add it to your Adwords account immediately.
And once you do this three or four times, you can build up this huge
list of keywords that gives you a great amount of information as far
as research goes. You can see how many people are searching for
stuff. You can see what the average cost per click is. It
is fantastic. It's not a Choice Between Quantity
or Quality
And it is not a choice between high
value phrases and low value phrases. Here is an example.
And I am going to use a real example, but I am changing the keyword
phrase, because I am giving a lot away, but I ain't giving it all
away.
'Dog Beds' High Traffic
Dog Beds. Trust me. It is very
similar. It is a high traffic phrase: 40,000 searches a month. Everybody is like, 'Yeah! I want to rank number one for dog
beds!' Well there are only 10 spots on the front page.
And who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people are actually
selling dog beds?
'Dog Beds' HIGH traffic: 40,000/
'Large Dog Beds' MEDIUM traffic: 8,000. REVENUE PER VISITOR
So 'dog beds', a high traffic phrase.
A more specific phrase, 'large dog beds.' This isn't the
phrase that I am talking about, but the data is real and it is kinda
similar in terms of comparison. It is a medium traffic phrase with
8,000 searches a month. The revenue per visitor that I get on
my website that I know about from my analytics for 'dog beds'?
$1. For 'large dog beds'? $11. Why? I sell
great big large dog beds. They are awesome. But anybody
searching for dog beds for those fu-fu dogs, they don't want a bed
that is this big. The inventory value. If you take
the 40,000 people in the world per month searching for that and you
multiply it what the value is to me, it is $40,000. Now, if you
sold fu-fu dog beds, your revenue per visitor for dog beds might be
$20.
The inventory value for me for 'large
dog beds' is $88,000. And I know I am getting deep, deep, deep
in the weeds here, but there are probably 15 people who will benefit,
who will be able to hire some new folks and grow their businesses because
of some of this detail. And I will go back out and get macro in
just a second.
Prioritize Keywords
on Revenue
I want you to prioritize your keywords
on revenue. When I do keyword research, I want to look at how
many visits I got for the keyword phrase, how many orders, and how much
revenue it generated. Keyword Bucket
Here is a bucket, and I overwrote the
phrase with some fake words, but it is real data. I am not giving
all my secrets away. Some keywords are more valuable than others
to me. Look at that $9,500 phrase. I mean I got 86 orders
for that. And these are all similar keyword phrases relating to
the same product. They are manufacturer searches, they are generic
searches, but they are talking about the exact same unicycle seat.
Revenue per visitor is totally different.
What this means is the average person searching for 'Wobble Unicycle
Seat' spends $11 when they come to my website. But if you go
on down, you see that $29? I mean that is almost three times as
much revenue per visitor. I want to focus on those keywords.
You see that $7 red block right there? Something is wrong.
That tells me right there that my landing page that ranks really well
for that phrase on row three, something is wrong. That sticks
out like a sore thumb to me. I need to stop right now and go fix
it. The other thing I do is I actually
compare my Google traffic with these phrases. How do I rank on
Google for these keyword phrases? So the rank 1 column is what
page of mine appears first, and rank 2 is what page of mine appears
second. And if you notice, sometimes on Google you will see indented
results, two listings from the same company on the same page, you can
double your Google traffic by chasing after these clustered results.
And there are about four people in here right now who get it, and you
will make a lot of money off of that. And I apologize for being
so micro on that.
What do you do with all these keywords?
So what do you do with all these keywords? You know, you collect your keywords?
Optimize for FREE traffic (for best
keywords)
Well I want you to optimize and advertise.
Optimize for free traffic, for your best keywords. You need to
write content for that. I am going to talk about that in a minute.
Advertise with PPC ads (for keywords
where you make money)
Advertise with paid search ads, PPC
ads, pay per click ads, for keywords where you make money with your
ads. SEO
Free traffic. My favorite thing
in the world: SEO. My girlfriend is like, 'Please shut up about
SEO. I am so tired of hearing you talk about Search Engine Optimization.'
Everybody here, have ya'll ever heard of search engine optimization
before? Anybody?
Search engine optimization is making
your website Google friendly. That is like using text on the page,
using the keywords that folks who are searching to buy what you sell
will find those keywords on your page. You want Google to be able to find
your website, read your website, index and store your website, give
you credit for the content that is on it, and then send you traffic
because you actually have relevant webpages for whatever you sell:
Icelandic Viking helmets or whatever your store is.
Dog House Heater
Dog House Heater. This is what
you want to happen. When you do search engine optimization, this
is the purpose. Number one out of 22,000 webpages on the Internet.
Right now my momma is number one for dog house heater, and I hope she
will ship me one tonight. How I do SEO
How I do SEO. I am going to do
this real quick.
Pick a Keyword: Dog House
Heaters
Pick keyword. 'Dog house heaters'.
The first thing I do is I pick the most relevant page. What page
on my site is a perfect page that I would show somebody? Instead
of dropping them on the homepage, give them the real page. Well
this is it. This is my section page for dog house heaters.
Put keywords in TITLE/TEXT (on most
relevant page)
The first thing I do is I put the keywords
I want to rank for in the title and the text of the most relevant page.
That means you need to write good page titles. See? Dog
house heaters, heater/heaters? That is the page title. The
second thing is put it in text on the page. I have got the word
heater on there. When Google comes to my site, Google goes, 'Hey! This site is about dog heaters.' That is one of the reasons
why I rank.
Put Keywords in LINK TEXT (on other
pages)
The other reason is you want to put
the keywords in links to the page on your site. So if other pages
on your site are pointing to the dog heaters page, you would like it
in the anchor text using your keywords phrases. And some of that
stuff is pretty deep stuff you see. Dog house heaters, dog house
heaters.
Create Keyword-rich Content
This is super important. You
don't have to know anything about SEO to do this. Create keyword-rich
content. I was talking to a travel guy a minute ago. Hey
travel guy. You want to have articles on your site about travel.
So when I search for 'Icelandic whaling tourist expeditions', you
know, because my girlfriend likes'She is an eco person. She
said she wanted to go whaling, I think? Oh, whale watching. Oh. Sorry doll. Man, I am going to be in so much trouble
after this thing is over!
Steve writes content. Steve talks
about this stuff all the time. He talks about where we live in
North Mississippi, he doesn't need a dog heater, but if you live in
Iceland, you do. And I have got the keywords sprinkled all throughout
the phrase. I mean he is just writing in natural language like
how he would talk to a friend of his about, 'Hey, you need a dog house
heater so your fu-fu dog doesn't freeze.' And he writes this
'Steve Says', and we put this content on the product pages or on
the section pages. 220,000 competitors
And like I said, 220,000 competitors
in the world. My momma ranks number one. And we optimize
for all 20 some odd thousand phrases.
PPC
All right. What if you don't
rank? 70% of the folks on Google are clicking on the left-hand
side on those free search results. But 30% are clicking on the
ads in the United States. It may be a little different over here.
You need to buy ads.
How I do PPC
Pick a keyword: Automatic Dog
Waterers (and figure out how much you can pay!)
This is how I do PPC. I pick
a keyword: 'Automatic dog waterers', a keyword that say I
don't rank really well for. And then I figure out how much I
can pay based on my conversion rate. If you are selling a $5,000
B2B package, or something that a university would buy, or something
that has a huge average sale, you can probably pay a lot more per click
than you can if you are me and you are selling an automatic dog waterer
that is $20. Write a good ad
The next thing you do is you write
a good ad. Put the keyword in the name of the ad and you want
people to click on your ad. The way ads work on Google is you
get to tell Google what searches trigger your ads. So if somebody
says 'Dog waterer', 'automatic dog waterer', 'auto dog waterer',
'auto waterer', I mean just any of those keyword phrases, I want
my ad to show up for those.
The next thing you tell Google is how much you are willing to pay.
I tell Google I don't want to pay more than 25 cents a click on this
ad. Create a relevant landing page
The next thing you do is you create
a relevant landing page, a page that actually has what the searcher
is intent on finding. Remember intent from a minute ago?
Look. I got automatic dog waterers on here. I got five different
automatic dog waterers. I got articles about it. I got a
link to it. I mean if you are looking for an automatic dog waterer,
this is the page you are looking for. But I tell you that so the
customer gets to the website and they go, 'Hey! That is exactly
what I am looking for!' 'and monitor results
And then you monitor the results.
Google is really good about giving you some tracking software so you
can actually see which ads and which keywords actually work for you.
And you call the losers and you improve the winners.
Appear for both
And you want to appear in the search
results for both free and paid. Lots more here: Buy yours
now!
There is lots more information.
I can talk about this stuff all day. I hear there is another book
coming out; maybe more current than mine. I could only look at
the pictures, but they were pretty nice. How about say, 'Rob
said buy my book,' and he has to give me a dollar. Appreciate
that. That will help pay for my jacket.
So what happens when you maximize
SEO and PPC?
All this is theoretical talk.
That is great. Blah, blah, blah. Marketing guy-all right.
Year 4: Store vs. Web
Year 4. Look at those sales. Again, look at the scale on that graph. The Dog Store is toast.
We actually sold the Dog Store to the manager so we could concentrate
on the web. It took us four years, but we got out of the fu-fu
dog business.
Things ALWAYS change
Things always change. We were talking
earlier about hey, it is going to be 2010 soon and this is back in 1997.
It was like, 'No, doing what worked in 1997 isn't going to work
today.' You have got to be current. You have got to stay
on top of all this stuff. You have got to focus on what works. You don't need to get distracted by Twitter and Facebook unless you
are in the relationship business. If you are selling products,
and it is like I have got Facebook ads and I have got stuff on Twitter,
I am not making any money doing that. I am making money putting
content on the web, and Google is finding it and sending me traffic.
I am making money by buying profitable ads for the keywords that my
customers use to find what I am searching for.
September 2003
In September 2003, my dad died.
He was out on his farm. He was working with his dogs and just
out of the blue, he had a heart attack. It devastated our family. And this would probably qualify as catastrophic event number three if
we thought about it that way. But it wasn't business.
My brother stepped up. He was
pretty much already running things anyway, but my dad was making the
decisions. I mean it was his company. It was his name on
the sign. It was like anything major, he had to sign off on it,
the way we approached customers, our marketing materials. He wanted
the company to be done a certain way. And my brother stepped up
and he did a fantastic job. And for the first six months, everything
was fine. Year 7: Store vs. Web
You can't tell by looking at this
graph, but this is year 7. And look at the Dog Store. That
is a long time ago. I feel like I am up in the airplane above
Raciavik [sp] flying. $250,000. Look at the scale of this
graph. This is monthly sales. You can't tell by looking at this,
but this was like the worst three or four months of my life, because
here it is happening again. Everything is changing. We were
growing, growing, growing. We were hiring new people. We
got a bigger building, blah, blah, blah, and something changed.
I mean our sales, they didn't tank, but we are still not growing,
and we had some months that were off, and we had new product.
I mean there was not reason that this should have been happening.
Looking back now, it is really easy to see.
More & More Competition
In 2004, which is when this was, every
single one of our competitors who used to be offline, they are now online.
And every single one of our competitors who was online had a shopping
cart. And every single one of those guys was selling all the exact
same products that we were selling with the same pictures and the same
descriptions from the manufacturers. So you had 1,000 people competing
with you, whereas, I would say four or five years before, you might
have had 50 people. And then three or four years before that,
you had one guy.
But we had a secret weapon
But we had a secret weapon. We
had to come up with something that they couldn't copy. Anytime
we would do something, the competitors would copy it. Anytime
the competitors would do something, we would copy them. I mean
we were neck and neck. It was driving us nuts.
Selling Stuff & Self-Proclaimed
Experts
And one thing about my dad, he had
two philosophies that I just would bump heads with him endlessly about.
Selling stuff and self-proclaimed experts. He would prefer to
offer you products in a store that you could come in and buy them if
you wanted to, but he wasn't going to put a hard sell on you.
'Here is the display. Here is the cash register. I am
reading the newspaper. If you want to buy something, let me know.' Kind of old school.
When I am buying something, when I am shopping, I want to deal with
somebody who knows the products. I mean I don't know what I
don't know about buying a shell and a seal skin or whatever you guys
wear to keep the rain off. I just know I am freezing. I
am really cold. Please just give me a coat! Noor 66 [sp]?
I am kidding. I am going to check your website out in just a little
bit, actually. So my dad was against being pushy and
selling stuff, whereas, I like somebody who actually knows what is going
on. And I don't mind being sold. I know he is working
for a living. I know that guy is on commission. I know he
is trying to make a buck. But if he wants me as a customer next
time, he better take care of me. He knows what I don't know.
He knows what my options are.
The second part was self-proclaimed
experts. My dad knew more about selling dog supplies, and about
dogs, and dog training, and hunting, and that kind of stuff than anybody
I have ever met. And he would never ever say that he was an expert. He was so humble and he just wouldn't say he was an expert, and he
was. And we missed out because of that.
On the other hand, I am probably from
the other side of the family. If I don't know something, I will
tell you I don't know it. There is a lot about online marketing
and selling online that I don't know about. I don't know about
Amazon. I don't know about EBay. PPC, I got my little
foot in that, OK? But if I tell you I do know something, you better
believe me. If I know something, and I believe it, and I believe
it to be true, I mean I will fly all the way from Mississippi to Iceland
to tell people about it. Pheasants Forever
And so we made the decision to change
the way we did on the website. We had a secret weapon. My
brother Steve Snell, supermodel, holding a shotgun up here on the cover
of Pheasants Forever magazine, believe it or not. I was like,
'Steve, they didn't put your face on there buddy. Why?
What is wrong with that?'
[laughter] Yeah. He is not even up yet.
Let's call and wake him up.
Steve and Dog
My brother is more of a dog expert
than my dad was. Steve has 13 dogs. He has trained, and
hunted with, and lived with, and gone swimming with, and cared for dozens
and dozens of these dogs. And he loves these dogs. He loves
them more than he loves me. Steve in the Field
If it is hunting season, he is in the
field. He is hunting. He is out in Texas. He is out
in Montana. He is in the field doing research and development.
He tells his wife, 'I have to, honey! It is the job!'
Steve Photo Montage
Here are pictures from a Texas trip
I went out there and took. I created content for Google.
I don't know if ya'll have ever heard about that, but it is important.
He is talking the whole time. I am recording stuff. I got
content.
Steve and Sam
Here he is with Sam. Steve does
unofficial product development consulting for these companies, because
Steve will tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
The engineers selling these very complex systems love Steve, because
man, they get what they need. He says, 'This sucks. This
switch needs to be put on the other side because you can't reach it.
I was in the Dakotas and it was 20 degrees and the wind was blowing
and I dropped it because it hurt. It didn't fit in my hand right.
You need to change this. Your competitors are doing a better job
at that.' He is in the field. He knows more about selling
dog collars than anybody I know. People buy from People
The other thing is people buy from people. They don't buy from
websites. They don't buy from a secure form. People buy
from people. Transactions are between people. So you want
to humanize and personalize the shopping experience that is going to
be on your new e-commerce site that you are developing tonight.
Why don't we put ALL this on the
Web?
I was talking to Steve about this,
and I said, 'Hey, why don't we put all this on the web?'
I mean he talks about this stuff nonstop. The other thing I didn't
say a minute ago, he is great on the phone. I mean he may be rude
to these manufacturers, but man, if you are a customer, and you have
a dog, and you are like Steve, and you are one of his buddies the second
you talk to him on the phone, I mean he wants to hear what your problems
are and he wants to give you suggestions as far as what you need to
get. He is not pushy at all. He lays out your options.
He says what is best for you and your dog.
And we decided to put this on the web.
We put Steve's 13 dogs on the web and we put this training collars
buyer's guide. On this, we had a 50% increase in conversions.
When somebody comes to my website and they come in on this page, they
are 50% more likely to buy than if they just came in on a category page
for the same exact product. Man, I say that in e-commerce conferences
and people get up and leave and go make buyer's guides. I mean
that is big, big money if you sell stuff online that is complicated
and needs information.
We make these comparison charts.
Steve actually picks the products for specific purposes, and he actually
lays out, 'This is what you need to buy if you are training a yard
dog, a fu-fu dog. If you are training a big running birddog to go hunt
quail out of Texas, you need one of these long-range two mile collars.'
And it is really difficult, but when
I am buying a coat or something, I don't know what I don't know.
I don't know what features are important and what features are the
marketing department getting excited over some new technology or something.
I don't know what I need to know.
Here is the detail on what you want
to do with your dog determines what you are training your dog with.
What collar do you want to buy? And none of this is like super-high
technology. This is HTML. If I can code it, you can code
it. You don't need an engineer to do this. I was an art
major. I built this in notepad. That is a picture that I
took, or that Kathy took, and that is simple HTML. Your web person
who works for you can do that. How to choose a pet containment
system example
Here is how to choose a pet containment
system, an invisible fence, to keep your little fu-fu dog from running
off and getting eaten by the coyotes. We have a problem with that.
I don't know if ya'll got coyotes out here or not. Artic foxes
maybe?
Example Review
Here is a review where he talks about
the Garmin Astro, which is a dog tracking collar. It is kind of
like analytics for birddogs. You can keep up with your dog.
30 Day
Trial
The other thing I want to push is you
need to leverage how you do business to the web, how you take care of
customers. In this, Steve says, 'Hey, I don't expect it to
come back like new. I want you to use it, and if it doesn't
work, send it back and we will take care of you.'
And we don't have a high number of
returns. We might get 1 1/2 %, 2% maybe. And these are pretty
complicated products to use. But we just say, 'Look. We
will take care of you.' Buying over the Internet is scary. They don't know us. They do because we are personal on the website.
They don't know my competitors at all. I mean my competitors
charge you'If you get free shipping to get a product, if you ship
it back to them because you don't like it, they charge you to ship
it back. But then again, they charge you for the free shipping
that they had to pay to send you the thing in the first place.
Phone
I mean we actually call the people
on our telephone lines dog product experts, because they are dog product
experts. They know what you need if you got a problem with a barking
dog, or if your dog is running off, or whatever. I don't know
if any of you all do, but this works internationally and we will be
happy to take care of ya'll. We ship stuff out fast. We have
a 7,500 square foot warehouse. We have about 15 employees at Gun
Dog. I mean if somebody places an order at 3:30 in the afternoon,
it is going on the UPS truck at 4 o'clock. I mean our supply
chain is like from me to you over there.
The Results?
We also tell people why they should
shop with us. We have our guarantees. We will take care
of you. If you need help, give us a holler. But this is
what you guys want to see right here. And I am showing stuff I
am not supposed to be showing, so ya'll need to forget these numbers,
and please don't blog this stuff. Shhh. Don't tell! Momma
is going to kill me. Christian said you need to motivate a nation.
I am like, man. I just want to motivate one guy, one person.
I appreciate you guys inviting me to come speak to you guys, because
I know where you guys are. I know the situation that a lot of
ya'll are in. But you individually are not responsible for the
entire situation. You are responsible for making sure that your
situation is covered. And you can do this online. You
can do this. If you have a product that people want to buy and
you are interested in taking care of them as customers and doing a good
job, not just showing up and making a buck, if you are interested in
taking care of people, you can do this online.
And this graph shows that. I
want to get a t-shirt of that graph and I want to wear it everyday and
say, 'Look at this! This is what I did. Rob Snell in Starkville,
Mississippi, the poorest state in the United States.' I graduated
from Mississippi State University. You know that top 250 colleges
in the US book? I don't think'Look at Starkville. It
is a cow college. And I am proud of Mississippi State, but you
know, it is the 50 th state in the union in almost everything
you don't want to be 50 th in.
[laughter]
And we are remote. It takes me
two hours to drive to go shopping. I mean there are 25,000 people
who live in our city. We live out in the boonies and I love it.
It is quiet, it is nice, it is clean, it is green, it is natural.
But this is what you can do. You don't have people in between you and your customers. It
allows you to be personal like you can be in a boutique, but to anybody
in the world. You guys can do this.
Look at that. $700,000. Now
we haven't hit that yet for a month. Ya'll gotta be quiet
about this. Keep this on the DL, OK? I mean Pet Smart isn't
even a wrinkle in our equation. And look at that line. That is
when we started being very helpful, is the word I like to use.
My dad would say pushy. We suggest solutions to people's problems.
We say, 'If your dog is barking, buy this. If you are afraid
your dog is going to run off, get that.'
Look at the vector on that. That
is nuts. I am not a technical person. I was an art major. Like I said, my Icelandic isn't as good as it used to be, but I think
somebody said earlier today that you need to hire experts, and he is
absolutely right. When you get to the point where it is above
your pay grade, you need to hire experts. But I did all our stuff.
I am still such a control freak, I still do most of our own stuff ourself.
It is very difficult for me to turn this stuff lose. You can do
this kind of stuff.
7 Things
All right. Seven things I want
you to take away from my presentation today. I am going to have
this up on Robsnell.com, my website. I have got tons of free information
about how to sell online. So many people helped us make it when
we were in trouble. People taught us stuff. You know how
they say, 'When the student is ready, the teacher appears?' It seems that way in my life all the time. I mean people helped
us, and so that is why I am giving this information away. So,
sshh! Don't tell anybody now.
Get online now!
Get online now. If you don't
have a website, get online. If you don't have your toe in the
water, you are not doing anything. E-commerce makes it easy for
folks to give you money
But e-commerce is the way to go.
If you just have a website and you are not selling anything, if you
don't have a way for people to pay you, get some sort of way for people
to pay you. I mean you saw those stats as far as some of these
big, big, big brands, what they were getting as far as the percentage
of orders that were now coming over their Internet.
This isn't a get rich quick scheme.
Like I said, I don't want to discourage anybody from going online
and trying something. If you saw the list of things that I have
failed at online, things that I have tried and not made it, I don't
have enough slides to show you all that. You have just got to
try things. When Customers are looking to buy
what you sell, show up.
When a customer is looking to buy what
you sell, show up. I know that is really basic, but you want to
be where they are. And right now, it is Google. And next year,
it may be Facebook, but right now it is not. You can spend a lot
of time wasting time chatting with people on Facebook. If you
are in the relationship business, if you are selling real estate'a
friend of mine got a $100,000 client for his advertising agency'
[alarm]
Uh-oh. I guess I am done. It is time for me to wake up in Mississippi.
Collect your Converting Keywords
with Web Analytics
It is really easy. Google Analytics
is free. You can go right now, download it, give it to your web
guy. He will throw it up on your website. Collect converting
keywords.
Optimize for Free Google Traffic
with SEO And then, optimize for free Google
traffic with search engine optimization.
Advertise with paid search ads on Google.
And look. You are your own best secret weapon. Leverage
who you are to the web. Let the world see the qualities that make
you awesome.
Conclusion: Sometimes the
worst thing is the best thing ever. Sometimes, the worst thing that can
happen to you is the best thing ever. And that is me. Thanks.
How E-commerce Saved Our Family
Business Rob Snell, Co-owner Gun Dog Supply [email_address]
~~~~~
2010 Rob Snell's PUBCON South Keynote Powerpoint@@@@@@jump down to read SCRIPT or continue reading from email bookmark
Howdy, folks! Hope the summer is treating you well...
Had a blast in Dallas doing the keynote at PUBCON.
My talk was on how we got $10,354,767.00
in additional sales (over past 6 years)
by putting STEVE all over the store,
and I've been getting pretty good reactions to that,
especially from smaller folks like us.
Come see me speak at the Yahoo! Merchant Summit and
at the Internet Retailer Conference in Chicago in JUNE.
http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2010/
http://ysummit.com
BACKGROUND
About 6 years ago, we hit a sales plateau
and decided to change the way
we approached selling online.
In 2004, our family business,
GUN DOG SUPPLY, had a sales slump.
Somehow we wound up in the ditch!
Panic city!
We took a hard look at what we were doing online,
and we made one simple, but substantial change
to our Web site and how we sold online.
And the effect? Over the past 6 years?
Over $10 million dollars in additional revenue
That's ADDITIONAL revenue.
Sales ABOVE our normal growth.
So what did we do? How did we do it?
That's what I'm going to talk about today.
FIRST, A LITTLE HISTORY
GUN DOG SUPPLY is our family business
We sell training supplies for hunting dogs
My parents started GDS on their kitchen table in 1972
My dad was unhappy with quality of some dog supplies
started making his own collars, leads, and leashes
to sell these, he bought ads in hunting dog speciality magazines.
pretty small circulation, pretty targetted audience.
He expanded his product line to carry more products,
products OTHER people manufacture
And WE marketed these through a small B&W mail order catalog.
At this point he decided to put the family in family business
by recruiting Steve and me to help with the catalog
In 1979 he quit his job to go full time on the DOG stuff
A few months later, we had a major set back
when the PEARL RIVER FLOODED
and put 6 feet of water in our house.
No insurance.
We pretty much lost everything.
Destroying all of the inventory in our house.
Why am I telling you this?
You need to know where we started from.
So my folks decided to dig in and make this thing work.
Anyway, folks knew we were in MS ...
local folks wanted to come shop with us,
so we added a retail showroom to the warehouse.
We started selling premium dog food, stuff you couldn't get
Pretty soon we were selling more stuff
to pet owners than hunting dog folks
-- -- -- GDS GETS ONLINE (1997) -- -- --
And then in 1996, another set back: Petsmart came to town.
We knew that would SEVERELY impact the business
Went back to our roots
and in 1996 rebooted the mail order catalog.
for HUNTING DOG FOLKS
By then I was out of college,
Steve & I had started what's now SNELL BROTHERS,
our own retail business up in Starkville
but I came back home for several months
and we hammered out a catalog.
Sent out THOUSANDS of copies
and we got bupkiss. Nothing. Zilch.
And at this point my Mom was pretty desperate,
and she became OBSESSED with getting on the Internet
And she said, "Son, I want you to build me a Web site."
And I said, "Mama small businesses aren't making money online..."
"Son, I want you to build me a Web site..."
And I said, "the Internet's all about PORN...Big companies losing
money IPOs and stuff"
And she said, "I don't care, make me a Web site. So I did.
So we did, and long story short it worked.
We found Yahoo! Store,
and uploaded our catalog
and we were off and running
-- -- -- JUMP to 2001 -- -- --
It worked so well that Steve had to take over
order fulfillment & customer service.
Mom was too old to be working 60 hours a week,
Steve was tired of selling comic books & baseball cards
he said the DOG STUFF was the next big thing
So by 2001 ONLINE sales were 4x retail sales
my folks were able to SELL THE DOG STORE, and we went Web only
I was more interested in Internet Marketing
and SEO and Yahoo! Store development,
but I worked on GDS as I had time in between other projects
-- -- -- JUMP to 2004 -- -- --
Now my baby brother, Steve, was running the company.
My Dad passed away 6 months earlier,
and we were dealing with all the fallout from that
and Steve stepped up to fill some pretty big shoes
and things were pretty good...
And then, we hit a snag.
We started having negative cashflow.
Our expenses were growing faster than our sales.
And then our sales STOPPED growing
And then our sales STARTED dropping
And we had our first "down" month
in the history of our Internet business...
Here's a closeup of a sales graph
Every year we have this dip in sales
and every May sales pick back up
here's 2003, and you see the dip,
and then people start thinking about hunting season,
and sales pick up
Well, here's 2004 and you see the dip
And then it DROPS. It DROPS.
And Steve's freaking out. And I'm saying don't worry,
it's just a blip -- things will pick back up.
And I'm digging in our analytics,
trying to see if anything broken
anything technical wrong and it's not.
So I'm freaking out and trying to
find what's going on.
AND IN HINDSIGHT
it's pretty easy to see
what was happening:
More and more competitors
were coming online.
All the old school catalogs in our industry now had shopping carts
with virtually the same catalog that we had...
And all these new school, dot com kids were popping up, too...
Selling the same things we were selling...
2004 SEO wasn't new.
Competition for those 10 spots on page 1 was getting FIERCE
AND Paid Search was coming online then.
CPC's were skyrocketing
More and more folks bidding on the same keywords
It was EXPENSIVE.
And all the OLD ways of driving traffic?
They weren't working as well as before..
GREAT, SO NOW WHAT DO WE DO?
Steve and I had one of our knock down,
drag out "conversations"
Maybe this is the new reality?
Or maybe we're going to have
to change how we do things...
So I'm sitting in Steve's office
WAITING for him to get off the phone.
Steve has these MARATHON phone conversations with customers.
I'm talking 20-30 minutes... easy...
And they're talking about their dogs...
and they're talking about TRAINING their dogs...
and their talking about HUNTING with their dogs...
and their talking about their hunting GEAR ...
and their GUNS and their TRUCKS...
And next thing you know, the guy places an order.
And he's a customer FOR LIFE. FOR LIFE.
And it's GREAT, but it doesn't scale.
I mean we handle dozens and dozens of these calls every day.
There's no way STEVE can do this with every customer over the phone
It just doesn't scale.
He has TONS of other things he's gotta take care of, too
SO I HAD AN IDEA...
"What if we do the same thing online
that you do over the phone?"
What?
You know how when a customer calls and you talk to 'em.
You find out what kind of dog they have,
what they're trying to do with their dog?
And then after you get to know them and their situation,
YOU TELL THEM WHAT TO BUY TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEM
and then they BUY it? That's AWESOME.
What if we did that on the Web site?
What if we took everything you ever said to a customer,
and put it all over the Web site...
Wonder what THAT would do?
Steve said,"Couldn't hurt. Do it."
And that's what we did.
The one single, significant thing we did?
We put STEVE ALL OVER THE WEB SITE.
We put his recommendations on the site.
We put his opinions on the site.
We put the experience you'd get on the phone
on the Web site. And it WORKED.
This graph shows you our sales from 1997-2004
(Rolling 12 month average to smooth out the bumps)
And then we "put Steve on the site"
Just for fun, I modeled what our sales would have been
so I could see what the difference was
and over the past six years it's over $10 MILLION.
$10,354,767 in additional sales
Looking back, it's pretty easy to see what we did:
we decided to push three pretty powerful ideas:
1) Steve is an EXPERT on dog training supplies.
2) Steve says this PRODUCT is what you need to solve your problem.
3) Please buy it from US.
How did we do that?
-- -- -- #1 BIG THING: -- -- --
First thing I had to establish was
that STEVE IS AN EXPERT. And he is.
Establish that you are an authority in your industry.
You're not just some guy on the web hunting dog stuff.
You're THE GUY on the Web selling hunting dog stuff
How do you do that? Show folks, don't tell folks.
STEVE KNOWS DOGS
Steve's been doing this awhile. Steve has 16 dogs
STEVE KNOWS GEAR
He has a truck full of dog gear.
He writes reviews about it on his blog, and on GDS.
He posts reviews. Annotates SOMEWHAT objective product description
STEVE KNOWS HUNTING
Spends more time in TX hunting than anyone I know.
Takes his staff with him.
Doing R&D, and always needs a bigger budget.
So now you KNOW Steve is an expert, so we leverage that:
We put his NAME and and his face on EVERY PAGE on the site:
On the Homepage.
Even in the SHOPPING cart.
Steve personally signs all the emails.
Staff signs thank you notes in the box.
-- -- -- -- BIG #2 -- -- --
Tell folks: This product is what you need for YOUR dog
Recommend solutions to problems. To help do this,
we wrote a buyers guide AND THAT ROCKED!
Buyers' Guides have a 50% higher conversions
than common section page -- THIS IS HUGE!
We pimped our BUYER'S GUIDE.
This is preview of what we're about to launch
* Quick Picks - Collar Chart (narrow)
* Explain Concepts -- more info
* Help Me Choose > specific paths for more info folks
Express YOUR opinions.
Try to put the facts in the CAPTION
and mark the EDITORIAL in a STEVE SAYS box
or have REVIEW in the NAME of the page.
Endorse the products you use. Steve is candid
where the manufacturers might fudge a little bit.
It's OK to be excited about what you sell.
So how do you MAKE this stuff?
It's SERIOUSLY hard work!
Write unique product descriptions
Provide more info than even the manufacturer.
Write a paragraph for every $10 in item price
Most retailers copy and paste the MFG's description
which is HORRIBLE for SEO,
and does NOTHING differentiate you from competitors...
HAVE MORE PHOTOS THAN ANYONE. Example?
* Typical product shot
* MOPIX each component
* Something for size or scale
* Show the BOX shot
* Show details of controls or other important areas
* Show what you get
* Show all the accessories
* All the paperwork and books
We take all our own photos. Proves we stock it, have it.
HOW TO MAKE CONTENT
RECORD EVERYTHING -- video AND audio.
Interview folks
When we're out driving, I ask STUPID questions
Play 20 questions with each product.
Shoot video of anything you can demonstrate.
Example: Musher's secret -- TX -- took 5 minutes
1 minute video on it's own page
Transcribe the audio from video for both SEO reasons
AND folks can read faster than they can watch the video.
STATS -- show people are looking at it
also DISTRIBUTE when makes sense
1) I'm buying ads on youtube for traffic
2) then buying an ad on the video that I'm buying ads for
3) then I also do SEO on the Youtube video
CONTENT: Make it. Distribute it. Promote it. Profit from it.
Turn customer EMAILS INTO PRODUCT FAQ pages.
LIBERATE content that's trapped where search engine spiders can't
crawl it. It's either off line OR in a format Googlebot can't get
to. And if content's not in a search engine, it gets no traffic.
What kind of content? FLASH, PDF owner's manuals, transcribe audio
from product videos, text from product box / Point of purchase
materials.
BIG #3 -- Why should someone buy from us? Well, you gotta be
competitive on price. But you also have to SELL YOURSELF -- PICK ME!
So we made a page WHY SHOP WITH US. Remove customer risk, make more
sales.
Tell folks product AVAILABILITY and DELIVERY TIME. I like to show a
map.
Customers need to know they can get answers fast! Offer talk to
human. Respond to emails ASAP.
Everyone SAYS they offer "great" customer service. If you're
offering an opinion on how YOU do things, let your customers do the
talking. Third party endorsements are much more credible than YOU
saying you offer great customer service.
You need to "FIND YOUR STEVE."
You need to COMMUNICATE 3 things: You're the expert, this product
will solve their problem, and when they're gonna buy it, they
should pick you.
We did that. We got $10,000,000 in additional sales.
You can do it, too.
You have to!
best takeaway? 169 slides takes awhile to load! Whew!
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9 Yahoo Store Tips & Tricks!@@@@@@
If it takes too long to load, they're hitting the back button and moving on to your competition.
Think 20K or smaller. If you have a full-page jpeg that you want to use, that's great, but make sure that you
compress it at about 20%.
The way Yahoo Store does graphics is that if you upload a full-screen .gif or .jpeg file, the software automatically
generates a thubnail at 45 x 45 pixels for the section page, and then it automatically generates at 180 x 180 pixel
image for the item page. The way you can see the big graphic is to then click on the item page and it will just load
your full-page graphic. This is good for higher ticket items, or products where you need to see detail
Also use the icon feature. ICONS allow you to use a separate thumnail for an item. So instead of showing a
one-inch graphic of a Ford Thunderbird, you can have a one-inch FORD logo and when you click on it or the
link then the item shows the "full" photo. Again, if you uploaded a "full-page" graphic then you can add
Click the photo to see a larger picture.
Have your 1-800 number, regular number, fax info, a baby company logo,
mailing address, contact name, an e-mail link, and your company slogan on the bottom of every page.
Make use of the variable FINAL TEXT . Whatever you place here is on the bottom of every page.
You can also have links to your specials or most popular pages
Take a product every week or two and run a special. That gives you an "excuse" to contact your
e-mail list on a semi-regular basis, and it may motivate your potential clients to buy something to
test you. We've noticed that many of our client's customers make a small order before ordering a
large ticket item.
Even if you don't have a catalog, have a mechanism for collecting the names & addresses of your prospects.
Yahoo Store has the request catalog option which you can customize to some degree. This can be a most valuable resource in that
it works 24-7 like your webstore. We have done past promotions to give away samples or to have a
drawing to give away products with no purchase necessary (check local laws) to motivate folks to give their
name, address, and e-mail address.
Put a "last updated" date on your site if you update your site regularly to show people that you do update
your site regularly.
You can include this on the task bar by including the search button in the list of activated buttons or by
including a link to http://www2.viaweb.com/cgi-bin/nsearch?YOUR_ACCOUNT_NAME which will take you to
your search page, OR you can actually call the search button by using this code:
[FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="/cgi-bin/nsearch"]
[INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=catalog VALUE="YOURNAME"]
[INPUT NAME=query TYPE=TEXT SIZE=30]
[INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Search"]
[/FORM]
which will look like this:
Use salesmanship in print. With each product list the features and then explain why the
customer needs to buy it.
List customer benefits, not just product features, and then ask for the sale.
Turn your Order button into a Click Here to Order button or an Add to Shopping Cart button. All you have to do is
look under variables and change the parameter ORDER BUTTON .
Selling collectible porcelain dolls? Instead of "Amanda" for the NAME
of a collectible doll, name the product "Amanda - Collectible, Hand-Painted Porcelain Doll." This will help with
the deeper search engines like Alta Vista.
Remember, the whole point of this is to give your potential customer every reason to do business
with you. You want to give them the information that they need in order to buy from you. Whether you do
it yourself, or hire a designer to do your Yahoo Store, the Livestore software makes it easy to make stores that
are easy for your customers to use.
-- Rob Snell ~~~~~
[ARTICLE] Search Engine Land: Mr. Search Marketer Goes To Congress PART 1@@@@@@http://searchengineland.com/080623-090312.php~~~~~
[ARTICLE] Search Engine Land: Mr. Search Marketer Goes To Congress PART 2@@@@@@http://searchengineland.com/080702-074541.php~~~~~
[HTML] SCRIPT: Rob Snell's Oral Presentation to US Congress@@@@@@~~~~~
[PDF] US CONGRESS: Yahoo! Store Author Rob Snell's Written Testimony @@@@@@http://www.house.gov/smbiz/hearings/hearing-6-25-08-ads/Snell.pdf~~~~~
[VIDEO] YouTube: Rob Snell Reading Written Testimony (5min)@@@@@@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWv42Dt6ahI&feature=PlayList&p=62E82221047648AC&index=4~~~~~
[VIDEOS] YouTube Playlist: 19 Videos ONLINE ADVERTISING@@@@@@http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=62E82221047648AC~~~~~
About Me@@@@@@~~~~~
About Rob Snell@@@@@@Rob Snell: Mike and Istvan are
two of the smartest guys I know, but especially when it comes to getting
things done with a Yahoo Store . I mean, they practically wrote the
book on RTML, the underlying proprietary scripting language that is
the foundation of your Yahoo Store. Getting the chance to sit down and
pick Mike and is Istvan's brain about what you can do to your Yahoo
Store with RTML is worth the price of admission alone.
For instance, I was a guest
speaker at one of the last seminars they did and in the middle of one
of the classes I made an off-hand remark about how it sure would be
nice to do have a template that did something, but that I couldn't figure
out how to do it. Istvan just smiled, and in a few seconds, knocked
out the RTML code to do what I've been wanting to do for several years.
Holy cow! Like Joe Morin always says: It's not what you know, it's who you know...
~~~~~
About Rob Snell -- BIO & Contact Info@@@@@@ click pic for bigger pic
SNELL BROTHERS, 500 Russell Street, Suite 6, Starkville, MS 39759
info@ystore.com
1-800-332-7601
FAX 662.324.5290
Rob Snell
Partner
Snell Brothers
SNELL BROTHERS, 500 Russell Street, Suite 6,
Starkville, MS 39759
info@ystore.com
Rob Snell
Partner
Snell Brothers
Rob Snell is co-owner of Gun Dog Supply , a hunting dog supply retailer, and Managing Partner of Snell Brothers Consulting , a firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores. Rob has extensive Yahoo! Store experience with both family-owned stores and consulting clients. The Snell Brothers have designed, developed, marketed and/or maintained hundreds of Yahoo Stores that have generated tens of millions of dollars in online sales. Rob has a B.A. in Graphic Design from Mississippi State University.
Rob is the author of
Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies (Wiley Computer Publishing).
Rob Snell loves e-commerce and all things Yahoo! Store. He is totally obsessed with search marketing and increasing his stores' conversion rates. He is a small business owner, online retailer, search marketing / e-commerce consultant, and Yahoo! Store developer. He's been online since 1990 and opened his first online store in 1997 when his brother, Steve Snell stumbled across Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store).
Rob now consults with Yahoo! Store retailers on improving their e-commerce sites and maximizing their search-marketing campaigns and is a guest speaker and lecturer on search marketing and e-commerce for small business.
Rob recently testified to the United States Congress on the Impact of Search Marketing on Small Business [PDF testimony] . Links
He also was invited by the Icelandic Trade Council as the keynote speaker to tell how e-commerce saved his family's business .
Rob posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo! Store blog at ystore.blogs.com and guest posts from time to time in the Yahoo! Store Blog .
Newsletter info @ ystore.com
Twitter http://twitter.com/robsnell
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/robsnell
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5171706-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
~~~~~
accent furnishings@@@@@@http://www.accentfurnishings.com~~~~~
Adding, Removing, and Reordering SPECIALS@@@@@@ Go to the item page. The SPECIAL button is in the top middle of the EDITING BAR. Click SPECIAL. This will take you to the FRONT PAGE to see how the ITEM looks.
To remove an ITEM as a SPECIAL
Go to the page. The NOT SPECIAL button is in the top middle of the EDITING BAR. Click NOT SPECIAL. This will take you to the FRONT PAGE
Advanced: Here is a simpler way to remove an ITEM or SECTION as a SPECIAL.
Go to the FRONT PAGE.
Click EDIT.
Scroll down to the SPECIALS field.
Highlight the OBJECT-ID of the item or section you no longer want to be a SPECIAL.
Hit the SPACE BAR.
You can use the concept to change the order of SPECIALS.
Normally, SPECIALS are on the FRONT PAGE in the order that you select them. The SPECIALS can be seen as a list of OBJECT-IDS separated by spaces in the SPECIALS field when you EDIT the FRONT PAGE in ADVANCED MODE.
To change this order, EDIT the FRONT PAGE. Scroll to the SPECIALS field and change the order of the OBJECT-IDS and hit UPDATE.
So what was ITEM1 ITEM2 ITEM3 becomes ITEM3 ITEM1 ITEM2.~~~~~
Additional Spot Illustration@@@@@@~~~~~
Additional spot illustration + logo design [proof for Mary]@@@@@@Here is the final graphic used on the front page of embroiderthis.com. This is a GIF file.~~~~~
Adsense Tool Box@@@@@@http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/adsense-sandbox/~~~~~
Advanced Yahoo Store Design - from 51 - 1,000 Items BASE FEE@@@@@@You have absolutely no risk when you hire me. Your satisfaction is 100% guaranteed. You will be completely satisfied with your webstore when we get through with it, or I will re-work it until you are satisfied, or you get a 100% refund of your deposit.~~~~~
Adventure Camping@@@@@@http://store.yahoo.com/camping-gear~~~~~
Affiliation with the #1 internet portal is good!@@@@@@$100/Month for up to 50 products, $300/Month for up to 1000 products, and $100/month for every additional 1000 products.
Most intermediate computer users can build and manage their own Yahoo! Stores so no programmers or IT departments needed.~~~~~
Africa Gems@@@@@@~~~~~
AllBusiness.com: Leverage the Internet to Weather the Economic Downturn@@@@@@http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/marketing-advertising-channels/10883665-1.html~~~~~
Amber Plex@@@@@@~~~~~
Amma Shop@@@@@@~~~~~
An Internet Marketing Plan that Works@@@@@@A new client did a great job of checking out my references. He said that if I could convert client love into money, I'd be set for life. He said my clients pretty much said the same 4 things: (1) I had a contagious enthusiasm for what I do (results-based internet marketing using Yahoo Store), (2) I was honest about what I know and don't know, (3) I listened to my clients, and (4) that my clients made more money as a result of hiring me for marketing consulting, Yahoo Store design & development.~~~~~
Analysis Ninja -- AnalysisNinja.com@@@@@@
The Original Analysis Ninja
~~~~~
AnimaLoos Kid Zoo@@@@@@~~~~~
Article - Why FREE SHIPPING may help your conversion rate.@@@@@@http://cyberatlas.internet.com/markets/retailing/article/0,,6061_583861,00.html" target="_blank~~~~~
Artist Eric Yonge@@@@@@http://ericyonge.com/index.html~~~~~
As seen in Inc. Magazine@@@@@@http://www.inc.com/magazine/19990301/4568.html~~~~~
Aten Software LLC@@@@@@~~~~~
Austin Maids Service - Morehands.com@@@@@@http://www.morehands.com/~~~~~
Automatic Thumbnails vs. Icons@@@@@@Yahoo! Store automatically generates thumbnails for sections an items. You control the height and width of these thumbnails under the global controls VARIABLES. The default is *45x45 pixels which is a little small for me. I usually shoot for 65x65 pixels, but customize them accordingly to the proportions of the products or images I'm using.
You can also have create unique thumbnails for each item using the ICON image. For example, if you have the product "Riot Gear Barbie," and the 65 pixel tall automatic thumbnail doesn't show enough detail for someone to see what the item actually looks like, you can create a custom icon for the product. Simply open your graphics program with the product photo, focus on a detail like Barbie's Urban Assault Helmet and crop the photo. Resize to 65x65 pixels. Save as a GIF file and strip it down to as few as possible colors to maximize that load speed. I usually rename custom icons with the name of the ID of the product, and ICON, i.e., BARBIE1234-ICON.GIF. I also store all custom product icons in a separate folder.
You DO have to load these babies by hand. I usually save this to the last TWEAK phase of working on a Yahoo! Store, so I don't have to EDIT each page 4 or 5 times.~~~~~
Avinash's Blog@@@@@@http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/~~~~~
Baby Gift Idea (Yahoo! Store)@@@@@@http://store.yahoo.com/babygiftideas~~~~~
Ban Mississippi State from the SEC? Is this Alabama Guy on Crack?@@@@@@
GOOGLE CACHE OF THE STORY
THE FOLLOWING RAN IN THE ALABAMA STUDENT PAPER EARLIER THIS FOOTBALL SEASON. Wonder how he feels about MSU today?
Mississippi State should be banned from the SEC
By Bobby Bozeman
classifieds1@cw.ua.edu
September 29, 2006
I have a message for Mississippi State: You suck! Get out of my conference.
How about this? You leave and go to a conference where you can lose to teams such as Tulane every year.
Seriously, can we expect a team like Mississippi State to really stay in the SEC with two shutout losses and then a loss to Tulane? While they didn't lose to UAB this week, it was still too close of a game for comfort.
The SEC has a tradition of excellence when it comes to athletics, and Mississippi State continues to fall short. Sure, they might be pretty good at volleyball, and they were good at baseball and basketball at one time, but that's just not good enough. The focus of SEC sports is football, and Mississippi State just can't compete.
... continued below ....
Bobby Bozeman is a contributing writer for The Crimson White.
-->
THE ALABAMA FAN'S CONTACT INFO
Bobby Bozeman
Publishing Coordinator
(205) 348-7355
classifieds1@cw.ua.edu
Binding Stuff@@@@@@~~~~~
Bluebird house@@@@@@The bluebirds still live here. Thought they would have been scared off by the fence guys.~~~~~
Body Body@@@@@@~~~~~
Bulk Image Editing for Yahoo Stores with TONS of products@@@@@@http://www.seensystems.com/~~~~~
BusinessChairs.com@@@@@@~~~~~
BusinessChairs.com@@@@@@~~~~~
BUTTONS (Front Page Element)@@@@@@If you use TOP-BUTTONS, this determines where the buttons go in the order of the page.~~~~~
Buyer's Guide to Search Engine Optimization Firms@@@@@@~~~~~
Call 1-866-800-8092 (Press 2, 2, then 2 for MERCHANT SOLUTIONS TECH SUPPORT )@@@@@@Yahoo! Store Support is very knowledgeable and available. You can contact them by phone, email, or by an HTML form. Call their direct number 866-800-8092 or email them at store-support@yahoo-inc.com . It usually takes less than a business day for them to respond to email requests and my experience with the phone wait time is about 5 minutes on average.
If you are an intermediate or advanced user, sometimes you have to explain that you have already tried the basic workarounds, but they know a lot about the software, and are eager to help. -- Rob, 5.19.03~~~~~
Car Top Carriers.com - Rooftop Luggage Cargo Carriers by Samsonite - YAHOO STORE@@@@@@ YAHOO STORE EXAMPLE: Car-Top-Carriers.com - Cartop Rooftop Luggage Cargo Carriers from Samsonite
~~~~~
Carriage Trade Service Co.@@@@@@~~~~~
Case Study: Yahoo! Store sales increase of $826,221.62 (last 365)@@@@@@Remember that email I sent you about a year ago about TOPRIGHT.com --
my buddy Ron's Yahoo! Store related service? Well, it's been working
wonders for my stores and my retailers' stores.
My best rev-share retailer's sales are about to crack the $3 million
dollar mark, (up $826,221.62 over the same period from the previous
year). He's freaking out, but in a good way...
Case Study: Yahoo! Store sales increase of $826,221.62 (last 365)
Howdy! Three things in this email:
+ I've got two new speaking / conference appearances
+ a $826,221.62 sales increase since last year's email
+ and announcing a free Yahoo! Store Webinar in JUNE (Email Marketing).
How's the weather in your neck of the woods? Man, it's hot down here
in Mississippi. All the college kids are gone and summer just showed
up with temps in the 90s and high humidity.
To beat the heat, I'm about to head north to Seattle for Danny
Sullivan's SMX ADVANCED 2008. I'll also be in Chicago in a couple of
weeks for INTERNET RETAILER 2008. I'll speak on THURSDAY on the Yahoo!
Stores panel at 8-something in &%@#$ morning. If you're at either
show, look me up!
Remember that email I sent you about a year ago about TOPRIGHT.com --
my buddy Ron's Yahoo! Store related service? Well, it's been working
wonders for my stores and my retailers' stores.
My best rev-share retailer's sales are about to crack the $3 million
dollar mark, (up $826,221.62 over the same period from the previous
year). He's freaking out, but in a good way. The emails have worked
enough to where his wife complains when we send out promo emails
because she has to work overtime to fill the hundreds of extra orders!
Ha! I think she really likes it, though, and is just teasing me.
Check out these sales graphs:
Notice how the the peaks on first graph are around $15K and the peaks
on the second graph are over $30K. Also notice those spiky jumps sticking
out. Those are days when we sent targeted emails using Ron's TOPRIGHT.com tool.
The $826,221.62 sales increase isn't ALL from email marketing. Some of
the boost is just plain old natural growth, and some is better
optimized SEO and PPC campaigns, but email marketing has been the
biggest helper this past year.
Anyway, Ron's been after me to stop and do a FREE WEBINAR on how we do email
marketing using his tools and show folks what has worked for us on our Yahoo! Stores. Ron's looking for a few more customers and I just like to run my mouth in front of an audience about this stuff. Limited to Yahoo! Store owners only.
DAY/DATE/TIME
Friday, June 20, 2008 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM PDT
See details here:
href=https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/689210020
Anyway, I hope you sign up and I look forward to seeing you at the
webinar. I'll follow up with another email with more details about
what we're talking about around the actual week of the webinar, and if
you sign up, we'll send you a reminder or two. I'll also post details
in my blog.
Thanks! -- Rob
P.S. As you probably know, I'm not a communist! I'm on the Web to make some bucks, and this hour-long webinar will be more like a class about how I do Yahoo! Store email marketing using Ron's Topright.com service. Ron will be flying co-pilot to keep me on target, and to answer questions about the TOPRIGHT stuff, but it won't be an infomercial.
Ron's picking up the tab for this one, and is looking for a few new clients, but don't expect a hard sell... Some WEBINARS are simply glorified commercials (which drive me nuts).
WHAT'S A WEBINAR? If you've never participated in a Webinar, here are some things you might want to know.
Simply put, a Webinar is a seminar conducted over the Web + telephone. It's a lot more like a live "talk radio" interview with some visuals than a TV show or pre-recorded video.
WHY WEBINARS ARE BETTER -- Webinars are live, not pre-recorded, so there's a lot more energy than in a pre-recorded session. When it's live, anything can happen! My experience is that folks tend to share waaaaay more real $$$ information live when they don't have the opportunity to edit in post-production.
If there's time, at the end of the Webinar we'll have a Q&A where you can ask questions via a chat window or text or email.
1) Register here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/689210020
2) After you register for the Webinar, you'll get a confirmation email with a phone number, the Webinar's code, and a link.
3) On Friday, June 20, 2008, open your email a little before 1:00 PM PACIFIC time. Open your browser, click the link, and log into the GotoMeeting session. You'll see a welcome screen and then when we start, you'll follow along as I walk through some slides and screenshots.
4) To hear the audio, you call the conference call number in the email, enter the Webinar Code #, and you get to hear me talking with my buddy, Ron. Don't worry, your phone is MUTED so you can do whatever you want while the Webinar's going on.
We have a limited number of spots, so register here right now if you're interested in increasing your sales with email marketing:
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/689210020
~~~~~
Chapter 10: The ITEM. Page@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 11: The SECTION. Page@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 12: The FRONT PAGE or INDEX.HTML@@@@@@Your front page is the most important page on your Yahoo! Store. It needs to load fast, look good, and tell a prospective customer within seconds who you are and what you do.~~~~~
Chapter 14: Order Form@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 15: Pre Flight@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 16: Assemble the Elements@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 17: Build the Templates@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 18: Yahoo! Store Editor Basics@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 19: VARIABLES@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 20: Other Editor Functions@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 21: The Manager@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 22: Customer Service@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 23: Fulfillment@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 24: Merchant Rating Service@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 3: Why Yahoo! Store may NOT be for you@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 4 : How People Shop on the Internet@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 5: Quick Tour Through a Yahoo Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 6: Words@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 7: Graphics@@@@@@ Graphics are a double-edged sword. Look good, but load slow.
Eye-candy is bad. When in doubt, leave it out
There are ways to optimize the graphics you DO use so they load fast AND look great.
Yahoo! automatically generates several different elements for you.~~~~~
Chapter 8: Design Philosophy@@@@@@~~~~~
Chapter 9: Common Elements of Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
check the file in NOTEPAD@@@@@@click START > ACCESSORIES > browse to wherever your NOTEPAD is - depends on which WINDOWS version y'all use)
click FILE , select OPEN , type *.csv to see CSVs, select your file
I turn WORD WRAP off (WIN2000 click format > word wrap)
scroll to bottom & delete any blank lines
last line should be something like:
Summer 2003,Femme,Femme,Jill by Lilly Pulitzer ®,White kidskin sandal as pictured. By Lilly Pulitzer ,148,,Size -Select- 7 7.5 8.5 ,Jill by Lilly Pulitzer ®
SAVE FILE ~~~~~
check your ADDitions@@@@@@I click on CONTENTS > index and see the new section on the NAVBAR~~~~~
Check your options@@@@@@the way you are doing OPTIONS, you have to manually separate the colors/sizes
which is probably easier to do once you've uploaded them
goto to the SUMMER 2003 section
hit EDIT ALL you'll see your products in groups of 10
click in the first OPTIONS field, scroll down to SIZE
hit the ENTER button twice to separate the 2 options
click SAVE, click NEXT 10
this "makes" you look at all 52 in this section by hand
I did the first one.~~~~~
Children's Halloween Costumes@@@@@@http://www.childrens-halloween-costumes.org/ind.html~~~~~
Chris@@@@@@~~~~~
click on DATABASE UPLOAD (2nd row, 2nd to last button)@@@@@@goto STORE.YAHOO.COM and login / you should already in ADVANCED mode
click on DATABASE UPLOAD (2nd row, 2nd to last button)
you might need to click on NEW UPLOAD if there's already old upload data showing
click BROWSE, select your file, hit UPLOAD button
YAY! Browse 1, a middle record or 2, and the last record to
make sure the FIELDS are right (price in price, caption in caption
DO NOT CLICK ANY BUTTON WITH R in the name (unless you are SURE!)
DO NOT CLICK REVERT. DO NOT CLICK REBUILD.
click ADD and YES/ADD ~~~~~
ClickZ: House Members Oppose Online Ad Regulation, for Now@@@@@@http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3630050~~~~~
clipt@@@@@@~~~~~
College Station Apartments@@@@@@(662) 323-6719 110 Lincoln Gree Starkville, MS~~~~~
Color Proof@@@@@@~~~~~
Concept Sketches@@@@@@~~~~~
CONTENTS (Front Page Element)@@@@@@The CONTENTS field shows all of the OBJECTS that are contained on the front page. You can have sections, items, or links in the contents field
ADVANCED: This is the TOP-LEVEL of your Yahoo! Store. If you call the CONTENTS in the NAV-BAR, then whatever OBJECTS are in the CONTENTS field will show up on your NAV-BAR in the order that they appear in this field.~~~~~
Cool pool@@@@@@The pool is great! First thing this morning I swam my laps! 10 strokes and a flip-turn. (Maybe 1/24th olympic size?)
I should have paid more attention in chemistry and biology class. Acidity vs. alkalinity? Chlorine content? Acceptable levels of toxic bacteria?~~~~~
Cool Y!Store Links@@@@@@~~~~~
CPR / AED Training Videos & More@@@@@@ Welcome to the CPR Store – your one-stop store for professional CPR training videos. We have the most comprehensive selection of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training videos available anywhere!
Be prepared! Learn CPR because you never know if you will be the first on the scene in the case of cardiac or respiratory arrest. Sign up for a CPR class and Basic Life Support BLS training in your community.~~~~~
Create file in EXCEL@@@@@@Field names are path, id, code, name, caption, price, sale-price, options, & headline.
Each product is on a separate row.
Each id is unique.
Captions can contain limited html.
Names should be descriptive AND have keywords for basic search engine optimization.
I use headline field to put the name on the bottom of the page in html for search engines.~~~~~
Custom Photography - Expensive, but worth it!@@@@@@http://ecologique.com is a Yahoo! Store I designed in 1999 for Jeff Jarmuth. The main reason it looks so good is that Jeff and the gang at ecologique hired the best photographers and designers to take pictures of his product line for his paper catalog.
Jeff emailed me these amazing pictures, and all I really did was to plug them into the Yahoo! Store format after formatting them for the site
This way you have a unique looking site that distinguishes the products you sell from your competitors selling the same items.~~~~~
Custom Site Design @@@@@@ This site was designed by logo design guy . Custom Site Design - with unique PRODUCT, SECTION, and HOME PAGE templates. Included digital "proofs" or sample pages to use for blueprinting RTML templates. esigner suggested colors, fonts, page layout, and created a style sheet to maintain a consistent look across the Yahoo! Store.
New Logo Design - created a new logotype with an icon for use on the web
Illustrated Icons - custom hand-drawn icons for major sections and Yahoo! Store functionality
Custom Navigation - incorporation of the icons into a NAVIGATION BAR to be used across the entire site
Front Page illustration - to draw emphasis on a group of products the client wanted to focus on.
Custom Add to Cart & Search buttons
Custom DEPARTMENT Header to blend html + graphic elements.
CUSTOM SITE DESIGN (usually runs $1250 - $2500) depending on scope of project. Call 1-800-332-7601 for a custom quote. ~~~~~
Customers look for reliable retailers@@@@@@~~~~~
Dallas Texas Lexus SC430 > Convertible Hard Top Coupe TX@@@@@@ Lexus SC430 Wow. I finally got the car! What a way to end 2003. Thanks, Stuart, for the ride to the Dallas Lexus dealer straight from the airport. Thanks to Joe Martinez & Sewell Lexus for a great buying experience.
Most importantly, thanks to all my clients who made this possible. Here's to a great 2004! -- Rob
See the official Lexus site or the Lexus SC430 page.
Call Joe Martinez at Sewell Lexus at 214-352-8100 if you want a great deal on a Lexus!
September 1, 2003
The Lexus SC 430> was the first retractable hardtop convertible in the premium luxury segment when it was introduced as a 2002 model and quickly became one of the best-selling models in its segment. The retractable hardtop transforms the SC430 from a coupe into a convertible in less than 25 seconds with the push of a button. For 2004, the seat recline feature in the SC 430 has been enhanced to allow greater adjustment when the seat is not in its rear-most position.
Befitting a modern classic, the exterior design of the Lexus SC430 was created by the company's European design center and was inspired by the sights and styles of the French Riviera. The interior is a plush combination of natural materials including leather and wood.
The Lexus SC430 has a 300-Horsepower V8 - The rear-wheel drive SC 430 convertible is engineered to deliver exciting performance even when driven leisurely. The all-aluminum, double overhead-cam, 4.3-liter V8 engine produces 300 horsepower and 325 lb.-ft. of peak torque, and, coupled with a five-speed automatic transmission, can propel the car from 0-60 mph in only 5.9 seconds. The SC 430 achieves an Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) certification, and is powered by the same V8 engine found in the LS 430 flagship sedan and the GS 430 luxury performance sedan.
Continuously Variable Valve Timing with intelligence (VVT-i) helps eliminate the traditional compromise between low-end torque and high-rpm horsepower by optimizing valve overlap throughout the engine's speed range, not just at one or two set speeds. The Torque Activated Powertrain Control works with the Electronic Throttle Control System to help smooth out acceleration from a standing start by very slightly delaying throttle opening when the driver steps on the accelerator pedal.
The five-speed automatic transmission uses Shift Logic Control to respond to road grade and acceleration/deceleration activity, holding gears or downshifting on inclines and downshifting on descents to provide increased engine braking.
The Lexus SC 430 Has a Thoroughbred Chassis - By designing the SC 430 as a convertible from the start, engineers optimized its structure to provide excellent strength whether the retractable hardtop is up or down. The stiff structure allowed Lexus to tune the suspension to deliver responsive handling without foregoing the brand's renowned smooth ride. The 53/47 weight distribution helps deliver optimal balance for confident steering response. Front and rear double wishbone independent suspension gives the SC 430 sports car-level handling and contributes to a smooth ride. The SC 430 comes equipped with 18-inch wheels.
Lexus SC430 Offers Safety and Security - The Lexus SC 430 provides owners with cutting-edge safety and security measures. The braking system featuring four-sensor, four-channel anti-lock brakes (ABS), Electronic Brakeforce Distribution (EBD), Traction Control, Vehicle Stability Control (VSC) and Brake Assist.
EBD monitors all four wheels during braking and varies brake pressure according to load on each wheel. Brake Assist is designed to determine if the driver is attempting emergency braking and, if the driver has not stepped hard enough on the brake pedal to engage ABS, it applies maximum braking power until pedal pressure is released.
VSC helps control lateral traction while cornering on slippery or dry road surfaces by using throttle intervention and/or applying individual wheel braking to help control any discrepancy between where the driver is steering and where the vehicle is heading. The VSC system integrates traction control (TRAC) to help limit rear wheel spin on slippery road surfaces.
Numerous structural components, such as the rocker panel, have been reinforced, which can help protect occupants in case of collision. Other safety features include standard dual front airbags and front-seat mounted side impact airbags, daytime running lights, fog lamps and projector High-Intensity Discharge (HID) headlights with auto levelers.
A Tire Pressure Monitor (TPM) uses coded sensors to monitor the tire air pressure directly and transmit this information to a receiver via radio frequency communication. The receiver calculates the information and, if a significant drop in pressure has occurred, an indicator light illuminates to warn the driver of the condition. The TPM can alert the driver to under-inflated tires, a condition that could potentially lead to a loss of control.
The high-end Mark Levinson audio system uses nine strategically located speakers to turn the interior into a personal listening room. System equalization automatically adjusts when the roof is lowered and returns to its original levels when the top is raised. The driver can control the system's essential functions with controls on the steering wheel.
An advanced climate control system adjusts airflow and temperature automatically, differentiating between top-up and top-down driving needs, automatically taking into account the exterior temperature to help ensure occupant comfort.
Lexus SC430 Every new Lexus vehicle comes with a 48-month/50,000-mile basic limited warranty. Powertrain and restraint system coverage is provided for 72 month/70,000 miles. Corrosion perforation protection is covered for 72 months, regardless of mileage.
~~~~~
Dan the Sausage Man's Export Tool@@@@@@http://207.21.197.239/ystore/ystoreExport.asp~~~~~
Dates@@@@@@~~~~~
Dave Sim & Cerebus trade paperbacks@@@@@@http://site.yahoo.net/adult-kids-halloween-costumes/davsimcertra.html~~~~~
Debra Mastaler, Alliance Link (the Link Lady!)@@@@@@http://www.alliance-link.com~~~~~
Dedupe Long Tail@@@@@@~~~~~
Delete all the EMPTY rows after products end@@@@@@~~~~~
Deluxe Yahoo Store from Scratch > Streamlight-Flashlights.com@@@@@@ Complete store built from the ground up.
Client provided product database & graphics on CD-ROM
Custom RTML allowed us to do designs not possible with existing store templates.
Integrated an autoresponder system for collecting emails.
Turnaround on project 5 weeks +/- ~~~~~
dev@@@@@@~~~~~
Development details RTML custom programming & more@@@@@@ Development includes RTML programming to implement the designs:
Redesign / streamline of site map / layout of sections
Implementation of designs using custom RTML templates
Added dual text/graphical navigation
Custom RTML Programming : Product, Section, Home + Pages
included SEARCH on every interior page
NEXT functionality on the PRODUCT & SECTION pages
Moved ORDER functionality up to get ADD TO CART buttons above the scroll for most monitors
Added HTML text-based navigation for Google & other search engine spiders
Designed HTML for MAC/PC compatibility & usability with 800x600 and higher resolution monitors
Additional Custom SHOPPING CART template (NORDER)
Additional Custom SEARCH RESULTS template (NSEARCH)
Additional Custom INFO template(INFO)
Integration into New Yahoo! Shopping Cart
Converted all previous PRODUCTS + SECTIONS to new template
All 600+ product images were optimized for load speed.
Included client training / support for adding, deleting. moving, & editing site
HOME PAGE custom template included client adjustable text and SPECIALS / FEATURED items
CUSTOM RTML PROGRAMMING (usually runs $1250 - $2500) depending on scope of project. Call Rob at 1-800-332-7601 for a custom quote. ~~~~~
Different Looks for FRONT PAGES@@@@@@~~~~~
Directory of Drop Shippers@@@@@@http://www.myaffiliateprogram.com/u/worldwid/t.asp?id=10178~~~~~
DISPLAY-TEXT - VW-Image Tag and Headlines@@@@@@The second graphic element created by the Yahoo! Store template software is fonts. There are two types of fonts in Yahoo! Store: Fonts generated by the software and fonts generated by you in captions and other text fields using the VW-IMG TEXT tag. This is the first RTML most people ever use.
SOFTWARE GENERATED VERBAGE. NAV-BUTTONS have automatically generated names as well as the names of the sections, products, or links that are on the front page.
These buttons are automatically generated with the default names that Yahoo! assigns things in the NAV-BAR like E-MAIL, REQUEST, SEARCH,
as well as headlines for each product page or section page by . They also show up in the
the VW-IMAGE TAG or DISPLAY-TEXT. The VW stands for VIAWEB, the original company that created the Yahoo! Store software. You probably notice this being used the most with the words on the NAV-BUTTONS or on the product pages or sections in the HEADLINES.
Headlines (a.k.a. DISPLAY-TEXT
The VW-IMG tag is a proprietary tag of the Yahoo! Store software. Paste the code in a non-Yahoo! Store generated page and you will get garbage text or nothing at all. You don't have to have a close tag to use it because it is a ___ type of tag .
This is a simple version of that of the tag that calls on the defaults for DISPLAY-TEXT . Whatever is inbetween the quotes will be displayed the same size, font, and color of whatever you have your DISPLAY-FONT settings on under VARIABLES.
LAZY DESIGNER SAYS: This is really cool because if your HEADLINES, and BUTTONS, and other elements are all orange and you make a major site renovation changing your major color to, say, hot pink, anywhere you use the simple version of the VW-IMG tag the color will automatically change. However, if you use the complex version changing font, size, and/or color, you have to go back and recode them by hand. Yuck!
HTML HINT: Use a tag after a VW-IMG tag to kick regular text to the next line because short snippets of text tend to "suck up" a word or two of the body copy.
You can also set the font, size and color by calling those attributes inside your VW IMG tag.
LAZY DESIGNER SAYS:
Hit the enter key after each VW-IMG attribute to kick it down to the next line. This makes for MUCH easier editing when you DO have to change fonts, colors, and sizes. I do the same thing with really complicated tags as well as tables.
The width of the text window you have to EDIT with makes it difficult to make quick edits. If you do this, you'll save a lot of time -- eddie
There are two kinds of DISPLAY
Yahoo! Store automatically generates several different styles of the DISPLAY-TEXT in the standard ITEM, SECTION, PAGE, and HOME templates. These are DISPLAY-FONT, BUTTON-FONT, BANNER-FONT, & LABEL-FONT.
Code to use
simple code defaults to DISPLAY FONT size and color
Fonts available
Load speed / image size~~~~~
DMNews: House looks to protect SMBs' interests online@@@@@@http://www.dmnews.com/House-looks-to-protect-SMBs-interests-online/article/111912/~~~~~
Do you know if your website is really up?@@@@@@
How would you know if your YAHOO STORE was offline? Use this TEST
Do you know if your website is really up? How can you tell? These guys offer some really cool tools to make sure your Yahoo Store is up and running, as well as some other neat diagnostic web tools.
Last January and then again in April we had some major downtime with our Yahoo Stores. Since then, everything has been pretty good, but since most of my living comes from the net, I'm just a little bit paranoid. Enter Alertsite.com.
Friends and clients click here and my friends at Alertsite will give you a better deal with no set up fee, a month free trial, and I get a little bonus (some free monitoring credit) on the back end if you sign up as a paying customer.
-- Rob
~~~~~
Dog Training Collars for Sale - EXAMPLE SITE for Gun Dog Supply.com@@@@@@Here's a sample page from one of our sites: GUNDOGSUPPLY.COM HOMEPAGE 2006 -- See how many things have changed?
GunDogSupply: Collars for Dog Training, Dog Tracking Systems, and Hunting Dog Supplies for Retrievers & Bird Dogs. Save on Tri-tronics, Innotek, Petsafe, DT Systems, Dogtra, & Tritronics Dog Collars
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Happy New Year! Resolve to make this year your dog's best training year yet!
Free shipping on orders over $125 and on all remote dog training collars. Order online or call 1-800-624-6378.
'No Bark' Dog Collar - Tri-tronics Bark Limiter XS FREE SHIPPING via UPS Ground $110.00 $99.00
Petsafe Instant Fence - Wireless Dog Fence PIF-300 $299.99 $259.99
Lucky Dog Soft Knobby Plastic Dummy - Regular Size $4.45, 6/$22.80, 12/$44.40
BESTSELLER: Nelson Automatic Dog Waterer - Model 1200 $99.95 $79.95
Sportdog Field Trainer SD-400 Dog Training Collar $189.99 $149.99
Sportdog SD 2000 Wetland Hunter $319.99 $279.99
Tritronics Sport 50 G2 Dog Training Collar $266.00 $239.00
Tracker Classic Supra Lite Collar (Bird Dog) $499.00
Dog Den 2, The Ultimate Dog House $224.95
Walk-In Dog Stand $88.95 Tritronics introduces the new 2005 G2 remote dog training collars: Next generation features in a small, compact collar. 2005 Tritronics G2 Training Collars from $239 . NOW IN STOCK: Be the first on the block to have the latest in dog training collar technology.
The
New G2 Sport 50 is a fully waterproof, high quality, versatile, remote dog training system. Also, see the
Sport 80C for an advanced system with more stimulation choices...
Read Steve's COMPLETE Tritronics Sport Series G2 Review . See all the
2005 Tritronics Collars ... Start with the
Tritronics Sport 50 G2 . For $239 you get a remote collar with 6 levels of momentary and 6 levels of continuous stimulation. The
Tritronics Sport 60 G2 adds a separate button for tone. The
Tritronics Sport 80C G2 has 12 levels of continuous stimulation and 6 levels of momentary for more advanced training. The
Tritronics Sport 80M G2 gives you 12 levels of momentary and 6 levels of continuous for folks that prefer a wider selection of momentary stimulation. The
Tritronics Sport 65 BPR G2 is essentially the 50 with a remote control beeper. Have more than one dog? Try the
Tritronics Multi-Sport 2 G2 or
Tritronics Multi-Sport 3 G2 collars for controlling multiple dogs from one transmitter.
-->
Dog Supplies -- Since 1972, Gun Dog Supply has discounts on dog supplies, dog bowls,dog feeders & dog waterers,coyote leather products,dog beds,dog houses, kennel stuff,dog collars,dog doors,dog leads & leashes,dog muzzles,dog vests (parkas),first-aid for dogs,groom... •
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Dog Training Collars -- Buying a dog training collar? Read my 2005 headache-free dog training collars buyer's guide. Shop 100+ dog training collars. Free shipping + 30 day risk free guarantee.
New 2005 Tritronics G2 Collars -- Buy your Tritronics collars from Gu... •
New Tritronics G2 Collars •
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Dog Training Collars Reviews
Dog Tracking Collars -- Tracker & Innotek Dog Tracking Collars & Dog Tracking Systems work! Whether you're coon hunting, hog hunting, field-trialing, have a wide running bird dog, or just want to know where your dog is, our radio telemetry tracking collars & systems from Tr... •
READ THIS BEFORE YOU BUY ANY DOG TRACKING COLLAR •
Tracker Radio Collars - Dog Tracking Collars •
Innotek RD-400 Dog Tracking System •
NEW! Tracker Classic -- FREE SHIPPING •
Tracker Maxima Duo - Radio Dog Tracking Collars •
Tracker Maxima 1000 / 5 -- (Radio Telemetry Dog Tracking Collars) •
Tracker Maxima 1000 / 10 •
Tracker Maxima 2000 / 15 •
Tracker Maxima 5000 / 25 Dog Tracking Collars •
Supra Receivers and Collar-Transmitters •
Additional Tracker Collars and Accessories
Dog Training Collars Buyer's Guide -- At Gun Dog Supply, you can choose from around 100 different kinds of remote dog training collars from 5 different manufacturers: Tritronics, Innotek, Sport Dog, DT Systems, & Dogtra.... •
Dog Training Collars Buyers' Guide -- QUICK PICKS •
What do you want to do with your dog? •
How much do you want to spend on a dog training collar? •
Will a cheap dog training collar do the job? •
What kinds of dog training books & videos are available? •
What are the differences in types of stimulation? •
What about tone or vibration modes? •
What are the differences in transmitter controls? •
How much range do you need in a remote training collar? •
What are the differences in transmitters (remotes)? •
What are the differences in stimulation levels between manufacturers? •
What kind of batteries are best for you? •
All About Multi-Dog Units (What if you have more than one dog?) •
What if you want a beeper collar, remote trainer, and a bark collar? •
Where are these collars made? •
What if I don't like the dog training collar I ordered? •
What kind of warranty do they have? •
Innotek Remote Training Collars REVIEWS •
In Ground Pet Containment System Installation Guide and FAQ
Dog Supplies Online Catalog -- Dog Supplies from Gun Dog Supply -- Since 1972, Gun Dog Supply sells Dog Training Collars , Hunting Dog Supplies , Dog Training Supplies, Beeper Collars, Blank Pistols, Starter Pistols, Blanks & Blank Pistol Holsters, ... •
Dog Supplies Online Catalog •
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Master's Voice Audio CDs -- Gun Shy / Thunder / Noise Conditioning
Steve Snell's Dog Training Equipment Articles, Reviews, & Buyers Guides -- Read: G2 Sport Collars Reviewed, Tritronics No-Bark Collars Work. Your Dog Will Stop Barking NOW!, REVIEW: Innotek ADV-1000 Electronic Dog Collar , REVIEW: Innotek ADV 1002 TWO DOG COLLAR, COLLAR REVIEW: Innotek Dog Tracking Systems, Innotek FS-25-A... •
READ THIS FIRST: G2 Sport Collars Review by Steve Snell •
Tritronics No-Bark Collars Work. Your Dog Will Stop Barking NOW! •
REVIEW: Innotek ADV-1000 Electronic Dog Collar •
REVIEW: Innotek ADV 1002 TWO DOG COLLAR •
COLLAR REVIEW: Innotek Dog Tracking Systems •
Innotek FS-25-A REVIEW BY STEVE •
SportDog SD 1800 REVIEW by STEVE SNELL •
SportDog SD 2000 Wetland Hunter Review BY STEVE SNELL •
COLLAR REVIEW: Read All About Tracker Radio Collars •
Archive: 2004 Tritronics Sport 50 S Review by Steve Snell •
Innotek Remote Training Collars REVIEWS •
The NEW SportDog SD 400 / 400S REVIEWS •
Tri-tronics Sport 80 M Dog Training Collar •
Steve in Arizona - Tri-Tronics Hunt •
Pheasant Hunting -- Dog Training Stuff •
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Roxy Recommends... •
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...
Retriever Training Dummies -- Retriever Training Dummies & Dog Bumpers (100+ Styles/Colors) Volume Pricing/Quantity Discounts: Any sizes/types of retriever training dummies may be combined for quantity discounts. Click on the click here to order box (which shows the single quan... •
Plastic & Rubber Dummies / Bumpers for Retriever Training •
Dokken's Dead Fowl Trainers / Retriever Training Dummies •
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Flagman Retriever Training System •
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Chuckit! Tennis Ball Thrower/Catapult -- Chuck It! •
Dog Bumpers, Dog Training Dummies, Retriever Dummy Training, Retrieving Dummies
New Tritronics G2 Collars -- Buy your Tritronics collars from GunDogSupply.com! FREE SHIPPING. We use Tri-tronics PRO 100 and Sport 50 collars, your Tri-tronics training collar comes with FREE dog training book & dvd. We stock all tritronics collars, parts, Tri-tronics batteries... •
READ THIS FIRST: G2 Sport Collars Review by Steve Snell •
NEW Tri-Tronics G2 Sport Collars •
NEW Tri-Tronics G2 Field Collars •
NEW 2005 Tri-Tronics G2 Pro Collars •
Tri- Tronics G2 Accessories •
Tritronics 1-Dog Collars •
Tritronics 2-Dog Collars •
Tritronics 3-Dog Collars •
Tritronics 4, 5, & 6 Dog Collars •
Tri-Tronics Remote Release Systems •
Tritronics Books & Videos •
Tri-Tronics Accessory Beeper •
Other Tri-Tronics Products -- Batteries, Parts, & Accessories •
Tritronics No-Bark Collars Work. Your Dog Will Stop Barking NOW! •
Tritronics G2 Collars -- Complete List
Tritronics No-Bark Collars Work. Your Dog Will Stop Barking NOW! -- Tritronics Bark Limiter XS No Bark Collar is the solution to your dog barking problems and includes a small collar size, Sleep mode, Bark Odometer and easy to change levels.
... List: $110.00,
Order Yours: $99.00 •
'No Bark' Dog Collar - Tri-tronics Bark Limiter XS FREE SHIPPING via UPS Ground
Katrina News & Relief Benefit --
Please donate anything you can to the Salvation Army and Red Cross
We would like to thank Tri-tronics and Sport Dog for their assistance....
Automatic Dog Feeders, Waterers & Storage Bins -- Automatic dog feeders are pest proof Our experience is that most dogs will adjust to the constant availability of food within a few days and will only eat what they need. Occasionally you will run into a dog which will over eat and stay overweight ... •
BESTSELLER: Nelson Automatic Dog Waterer - Model 1200 •
15-lb. Automatic Dog Feeder •
25-lb. Automatic Dog Feeder •
50-lb. Automatic Dog Feeder -- Dry Dog Food •
Lixit Dog Waterer for Crates - 32 Ounce •
Lixit Dog Waterer for Crates - 64 Ounce (Half-Gallon) •
Lixit Automatic Dog Waterer for Faucets •
Lixit Automatic Dog Waterer for Pipes •
Aqua Dish / Auto Wata •
SIR AQUA - 10 Quart Automatic Waterer (refilling stainless steel water dish) •
Aqua Dish for Fence - automatic refill water dish -- •
Stack n Stor 40 Dog Food Storage Bin •
Pour n Stor •
Replacement Valve •
Stainless Steel 6qt Bucket •
Stainless Steel Flat Hanging 6 qt. Bucket •
5 gal. Fence Bucket
Evan Graham's Retriever Training Books -- See the latest work from Evan Graham, Author / Illustrator of retriever training books Smart Fetch and Smart Work 1 and Smart Work 2 .... •
Smartwork for Retrievers Volume I: Basics and Transition by Evan Graham •
Smartwork Volume II: Secrets of the Pros by Evan Graham •
Smart Fetch by Evan Graham -- Complete Guide to Retriever Force Fetching •
SmartWork Water Force & Swim-by DVD by Evan Graham •
Smartwork Articles - FREE RETRIEVER TRAINING articles by Evan Graham
Mendota Dog Training Products -- Mendota Products... •
Combination Duck Call & Whistle Lanyard by Mendota •
Mendota Rope Snap-leash. (017) 6' •
British-Style Slip Lead by Mendota 4-Feet (027) •
British-Style Slip Lead by Mendota 4-Feet (027) •
Trainer Check Cord by Mendota - Orange 1/2 x 30' •
British-Style Slip Lead by Mendota - 6-Feet (028) •
British Style Slip Leads •
Check Cord/Super Cord by Mendota - Yellow - 7/16 x 30' •
Whistle Lanyard - Flat Nylon •
Whistle Lanyard, Single w/Compass by Mendota •
Check Cords by Mendota and TBI •
Rope Style Snap Leads and Leashes •
Trainer Check Cord by Mendota Orange - 3/8 x 50 ft. •
Trainer Check Cord by Mendota Orange - 3/8 x 50 ft. •
Premium Solid Braid Lanyard by Mendota - Double Snap •
Whistle and Call Lanyards
Perfect Start, Perfect Finish on DVD or VHS -- ... •
The Perfect Start / Perfect Finish Set (DVD) •
The Perfect Start / Perfect Finish Set VHS
Transmitter Safety Sleeves -- Safety while hunting should be your #1 priority. Our Transmitter Safety Sleeves combine safety and convenience, allowing you instant access to your electronic training collar transmitter right on the stock of your shotgun! ... •
TSS-10 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for Tri-Tronics •
TSS-50 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for SportDog •
TSS-22 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for Innotek •
TSS-13 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for D.T. Systems •
TSS-40 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for Dogtra •
TSS-30 Transmitter Safety Sleeve for Dogtra
Vicebreaker Index -- ... •
Tritronics Vice Breaker - Electronic Training Collar for Horses •
Tritronics Vice Breaker Dummy Collar for Horses •
Vicebreaker Horse Collar
Shop by Breed -- ... •
German Shorthaired Pointer or GSP •
Flushing •
Retrievers •
Pointers
Gun Dog Supply Shipping & Other Information Page -- Customer Service FAQ Links:
Contact Us
by e-mail ,
phone ,
•
Yahoo Store Designer, Rob Snell •
New Internet Specials from Snell's Gundogsupply.com •
Katrina News & Relief Benefit
Gifts for the Dog Lovers on Your Shopping List! -- Father's Day is right around the corner. If you want to get something special for you, your dogs or your significant other, now is the time.
Click here to see our complete line of remote training collars , the new SportD... •
Christmas Gift Ideas -- DVDs •
Christmas Gift Ideas -- VHS Videos •
Christmas Gift Ideas -- Books •
Christmas Gift Ideas for the Bird Dog Owner •
Christmas Gift Ideas - Best-Sellers •
Christmas Gift Ideas for the Lab Owner •
Christmas Gift Ideas -- Most Popular Products •
Smartwork for Retrievers Volume I: Basics and Transition by Evan Graham •
Tri-Tronics Retriever Training (Book) •
Waterfowling - Tips, Tactics & Tales •
Empty Collars Leather Bound Signed Edition •
Savor Wild Game Cookbook by Chuck & Blanche Johnson -- AUTOGRAPHED + FREE SHIPPING US48
No Name -- ... Search site for dog training supplies related to FREE SHIPPING on dog training collars from Tritronics, Sportdog, Innotek, DT Systems, Petsafe & Dogtra and more... Howdy! Gun Dog Supply has been serving Hunting and Field
Dog Owners throughout the United States and the world
since 1972. We are proud of our products and
personal service and we guarantee satisfaction.
We have raised, trained, bred, field trialed, and
hunted with dogs for some 30 years. While there is a
lot we have yet to learn, we will be glad to assist
you if we can. Just give us a call. We sincerely appreciate your business and
hope to continue serving part of your
dog supply needs.
Thank you for supporting our family business. Best Wishes, Anne, Steve, & Rob Snell
GUN DOG SUPPLY - Serving Hunting & Field Dog Owners Nationally Since 1972.
Call 1-800-624-6378 to order! P. O. Box 80133, 400 Industrial Park Road Suite G, Starkville, Mississippi, 39759 USA.
International Orders Call 1-662-615-5520 or FAX 1-662-324-6011
All photos, design, graphics, and text are Copyright (c) 1972-2003 their respective owners or Gun Dog Supply.
Gun Dog Supply is a protected trademark of Mid-South Research and Services, Co. since 1972. All rights reserved.
~~~~~
Dollhouses Doll House Kits -- Dollhouses by Grace@@@@@@
dollhouses by grace.com
Doll House Kits
This guide, developed by the staff at dollhousesbygrace.com, was created to help answer any questions you have when buying and building your perfect dollhouse. It includes everything you need to know before buying a dollhouse online. Includes information about the kits, construction supplies, finishing materials, miniature furniture, and more. Comes with complete checklist of supplies & equipment you need to build the perfect dollhouse.
1. Consider these factors when choosing a dollhouse:
Size: There are many different sizes to choose to fit any budget from $60 for a small cottage to over $800 for an estate such as the Queen Anne (#RGHS6600). Finished houses range in size from 2’ to 4’ tall and wide so be sure have a large enough work & play area for your new kit. See all of our kits under the Real Good Toys link.
? Ease Of Building: All dollhouses sold on dollhousesbygrace.com come with an illustrated instruction booklet to guide you through the process of assembling your dollhouse. Using just basic tools such as a hammer, glue and a utility knife, you can build your perfect dollhouse. Refer to the following section, “Pick your Construction Supplies”, for details on the necessary supplies you will need. For a great looking and easy to assemble dollhouse, consider the Simplicity Series made by Real Good Toys (here).
? Finish: Dollhouse kits can be purchased with a smooth or milled exterior finish. Kits with a milled exterior finish have the clapboard siding milled directly onto the exterior portions of the house providing the look and feel of real clapboard siding. A milled exterior finish is recommended if this is your first dollhouse project for it will greatly reduce the time and effort required to assemble the shell. If you are an experienced builder you may prefer a smooth exterior finish. With a smooth finish you can build and attach your own exterior materials such as brick, stone, miniature clapboard siding, or a combination thereof.
? Material: All doll house kits and are constructed of either Medium Density Fiber Board (MDF) or Plywood ranging in thickness from ¼” to 3/8”. The 3/8” plywood or MDF is usually preferred over ¼” material because it is more sturdy and will ultimately hold up stronger over the years.
2. Pick Your Construction Supplies. Here is a list of tools and items you will need to build and finish your doll house:
? Hammer
? Utility Knife *
? Wood Glue *
? Craft Glue *
? Masking Tape *
? Sand Paper *
? Paint Brushes *
? Paints and Primer (for the exterior)
? Shingle Dye (for the roof shingles included in your kit. Click here)
? Wood Filler
(* Items marked with an asterisk, “*”, are included in the dollhousesbygrace.com STARTER VALUE PACK Part # BGDXSUP.)
3. Finish the Interior: Dollhousesbygrace.com supplies all the items you need to finish the interior of your house including the following:
? Paints (don’t forget your primer)
? Wallpaper
? Trim (window, cornice, chair rail, wainscot, etc.)
? Hardwood flooring
? Tile floors and walls
? Carpeting (wall-to-wall and throw rugs)
? Window Treatments
? Linoleum
Many of these items are not yet listed on dollhousesbygrace.com but will be soon. So please check back as we are adding new items every day.
4. Furnish Your House: Select from thousands of miniature items to complete your perfect dollhouse.
Items are available for every room of your house, in any style, from any era. Like the interior finishing products, many of these items are not yet listed on dollhousesbygrace.com but will be soon. So please check back as we are adding new items every day.
And when you are ready to take it to the next level of realism consider wiring your house with electricity - with working fixtures, outlets and switches. Also consider adding a stucco, brick, or stone exterior. How about realistic landscaping? All these items and supplies plus more will be added to our web soon. So please keep checking back!
~~~~~
Don Cole's Ystore Tools -- @@@@@@http://www.ystoretools.com/~~~~~
drew@@@@@@ drew.mp3
drew2.mp3
~~~~~
Ebodylogic.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Ecollars - from Petsafe Instant Fences to Dog Training Collars@@@@@@ Ecollars - from Petsafe Instant Fences to Dog Training Collars See Ecollars - from Petsafe Instant Fences to Dog Training Collars & more.
Wireless Pet Containment & Dog Training Collars
Shop for Innotek, Tri-tronics, & DT Systems dog training collars, no bark control collars, and wireless pet containment & dog fences. They are extremely effective, humane, and affordable products for your dog.
Whether you are looking for dog training collars from Innotek, DT Systems or Tri-Tronics, ecollars.com is your one stop shop for your electronic dog training needs! We've been in the dog training supply business since 1972.
Call Anne, Steve, Allen, David, Jonathan, Jay, or ~~~~~
ecollars.com@@@@@@~~~~~
ecollars.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Ecologique.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Ecommerce is hard.@@@@@@Learning curve can be steep
Your resources of time and money may be too limited
Patience!
Takes time to get the business rolling in.
Need at least a minimum of a marketing budget
Some markets are completely saturated or dominated by competitors who sell at cost
You must be able to change rapidly when the business environment calls for it~~~~~
Effective use of SPECIALS on the FRONT PAGE@@@@@@~~~~~
Electric-Toothbrushes.net@@@@@@~~~~~
Electric-Toothbrushes.net@@@@@@~~~~~
ELEMENTS of the Front Page@@@@@@The FRONT PAGE (index.html) is the most flexible of the Yahoo! Store basic templates. The property PAGE-ELEMENTS determines which ELEMENTS you want to use on your FRONT PAGE, as well as the position they occupy on the page. You may use one ELEMENT or all of them in any order you wish.
The ELEMENTS of the FRONT PAGE are: Intro-Text, Name, Image, Buttons, Message, Specials, Contents, Final-Text, Search, & Address~~~~~
Engraved Gift Creations@@@@@@~~~~~
Examples@@@@@@ystorebooks ~~~~~
Fast Sunglass@@@@@@~~~~~
Fem Nutrition@@@@@@~~~~~
Ferndale Manor Apts@@@@@@(662) 323-1535 209 Lynn Ln Starkville, MS~~~~~
FINAL-TEXT (Front Page Element)@@@@@@This calls the FINAL-TEXT field. To edit this field click on VARIABLES on your EDIT NAV-BAR.
This field is a BIG-TEXT style field that can contain text or simple html and shows up at the bottom of your ITEM and SECTION pages.~~~~~
Find Converting Keywords CKWP@@@@@@~~~~~
First Navbar Draft@@@@@@~~~~~
For Yahoo! Store Owners Only WEBINAR // 12-01-06, 1 pm ET@@@@@@
Make More with your Yahoo! Store
FRIDAY, DEC. 01, 1pm ET - 1 hour
$97 (FREE for Yahoo! Store Merchants)
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP - Free to Yahoo! Store Owners
Learn how to drive search engine traffic to your store and then all the way to the bank.
In this free, one-hour Webinar, you'll learn secrets of Store SEO (search engine optimization): How to optimize your Yahoo! Store products and sections to get free search engine traffic.
I'll also introduce you to some cheap and easy ways buy your way to the top with paid search ads that won't break the bank.
Finally, guest speaker Michael Whitaker of Monitus.Net's Store Tool Set will show you how to measure how you're doing. See what's working and focus your efforts on the marketing that gives you the best bang for the buck. SIGN UP NOW!
EVENT: For Yahoo! Store Owners Only: Make More with your Yahoo! Store
SPEAKERS: Rob Snell , Michael Whitaker
DATE: Friday, December 1, 2006. 1:00 pm, Eastern. (10:00 am Pacific time).
HOMEWORK: Not mandatory, but recommended reading assignment: " Starting a Yahoo! Business For Dummies ," CH16 + CH17. Now available in stores nationwide or online at Amazon.com - Just search for Yahoo! Store
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP - Free to Yahoo! Store Owners
~~~~~
FoxTail Lights@@@@@@~~~~~
FREE DOWNLOAD Yahoo Store Design & Consulting -- Opportunity Vision PDF@@@@@@http://edit.store.yahoo.com/lib/webstore-design/opportunity-vision.pdf~~~~~
FREE INFO@@@@@@~~~~~
Free Keyword Research Tools@@@@@@Use these FREE keyword resources to find what keywords folks are searching for:
Overture
Google
google.com/press/zeitgeist
askjeeves.com/docs/peek/
50.lycos.com/
buzz.yahoo.com ~~~~~
FREE Yahoo! Store Evaluation from Snell Brothers & GiveAnything.com@@@@@@My good buddy, John, from giveanything.com called again and said, "Hey! I'm doing a newsletter mailout. You want to do some more free Yahoo! Store evaluations?"
Sure! Last time pretty much buried me, so this time I'm doing it a little differently. Sign up via this email form. I'll do at least 10 every Friday until I've done them all.
Rob Snell , Snell Brothers
Name: E-mail:
Your URL: Daytime Phone:
QUESTION : If you could only change one thing about your Yahoo! Store, what would you change?
I have a Yahoo! Store.
I want a FREE Yahoo! Store evaluation.
I fix Yahoo!
Stores for a living. When I'm not working on your store, I'm working on my family's stores. There are many things you can do to fix improve your store.
Our company-owned Yahoo! stores (as well as client sites) have generated millions
of dollars in sales for independent retailers over the past 3 years, so we know
what works (and what doesn't!).
You benefit from my Yahoo! Store experience because we've been using the
software since 1997, even before it was called Yahoo! Store. We also own and
maintain our own Yahoo! Stores, so we're aware of the unique needs of the
independent Yahoo! Store retailer.
You will also profit from my extensive retail & marketing experience. In addition to Snell Brothers Web Development , we also own COPY COW a copy shop we opened in 1996. We just sold our fifth GUN DOG COMICS , the retail pop-culture company we started in 1988 as college students. The company who bought our Starkville store also bought all of our hobby-related Yahoo! Stores.
Your bottom line is #1. I understand that the most important thing about your
web store is making it easier for your internet customers to shop, so you make
more money.
You have things you want your store to do, but you're not quite sure how to pull
it off within the confines of the Yahoo! Store software. We can implement YOUR
ideas on your Yahoo! Store.
You can request a Ystore Deep Site Analysis to look at your statistics and
traffic flow . You'll see areas in your store where we can focus to make the most
impact on your bottom line.
You need a professional look. We do graphics. Get a whole new look from the
ground up. We'll create your company logo and a look to “brand” your entire site
with colors and fonts.
We can also convert your existing logos & graphics to a web friendly format.
You can have us scan your catalogs or photos as well as convert images from
manufacturers’ and distributors’ cd-roms into Yahoo! Store product graphics.
-- Rob Snell,
http://ystore.com
email: rob@ystore.com
P.S. Let me help you get the most out of your Yahoo! Store. By looking at your unique
situation through the eyes of fellow business owner rather than just a web
designer or marketer, I can help you improve your business by helping you make
more money and by saving you time . ~~~~~
Free-Smoothies-Recipes-Elite.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Free-Smoothies-Recipes-Elite.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Front Page@@@@@@This is an example of the front page. You control the elements such as the intro text, the banner/logo, the specials,
the search bar, the contents of the site, and the message.
The contents of this page are the sections or items at the next level. When you click on the
thumbnail/icon of the section, it takes you to that section page. Read on for more information...
When I do a site I try to keep it as flat as possible. Most people who come across your site will not have to navigate the
whole site, but I try to keep most sites to four levels at a maximum.
The top of the site is the front page. The next level is the section.
Within that you have the item page. The confusing part is that you can list items on the front page, the section pages, and even within items themselves (accessories).
It can be pretty confusing, but once you play around with it, you can see the logic behind it.
Example: Front Page of Mystery Books -> John Grisham Books Section Page
-> "A Time to Kill" Item Page ~~~~~
FRONT PAGE Design Considerations@@@@@@Basic: Message
Regular: Page-title, page-elements, image, buttons, message, specials-format, contents-elements, contents-format, columns
Advanced: ID, type, template, Page-title, page-elements, image, image-format, buttons, message, specials, specials-format, contents, contents-elements, contents-format, columns, intro-text
New Fields: ID, type, template, image-format, specials, intro-text
Show examples of no content store, no contents/specials only store, specials/search/contents store, add contents to that, show abstracts, show 2-up ELL, show 1-up with abstracts, show 5-up vertical
Use search bar to break up specials and contents.
You can re-sequence nav-bar on front page. Instead of being called NAV-BUTTONS, it’s just called BUTTONS.
HOME-IMAGE doesn’t show up on homepage for some reason.
If you don’t display NAME, then banner text writes out your name.
If it’s in the CONTENTS field on the front page, then it’s in the CONTENTS when you call them in the nav-bar.
Use of LINKS instead of actual section pages in the contents
Don’t use CONTENTS with icon buttons on your front page if you do lots of chopping. Use SPECIALS and display SPECIALS-AS-CONTENTS and format accordingly.
Format your front page differently from interior pages. Eliminate UP and NEXT. It has to re-draw your nav-bar gif anyway, so make a simpler nav-bar that’s more appropriate for the homepage.~~~~~
FutonsStore.com@@@@@@~~~~~
FutonsStore.com@@@@@@~~~~~
GameTimeUSA@@@@@@http://gametimeusa.com~~~~~
GAMETIMEUSA.com@@@@@@~~~~~
GAMETIMEUSA.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Generating Sales from Search Engines@@@@@@~~~~~
George Sports@@@@@@~~~~~
Get Product photos from the manufacturer or distributor@@@@@@Product photos from the manufacturer or distributor would be the next level of quality images, preferably given to you in a digital format such as TIFF files or high resolution JPEGs. Many manufacturers provide these images to their retailers in a very, very high resolution file for use in print catalogs, brochures, or other marketing pieces.
Images at this resolution have an extremely large file size and need to be scaled down for the web. Images sized at 72dpi look fine on even the bext monitors, but look horrible in print.
NOTE: I always keep backup copies of high resolution images instead of resizing the image, and resaving the image.~~~~~
Get us to Build your NEW Yahoo Store!@@@@@@Whether you want us to build a complete store from scratch or just be there on the other end of the phone to walk you through some of the hairy parts of Y!Store, we've got you covered.~~~~~
Get Us to Improve your Existing Yahoo Store@@@@@@ Know exactly what you want but don't know how to do it? We work both by bid and by the hour. Call 1-800-332-7601 and Rob will give you a rock-solid price on implementing your ideas to your Yahoo! Store.
Not sure what you need?
Call us and we'll walk you through your options. We can help streamline your navigation, increase your load speed, improve your graphics, tighten up your section pages, and flatten your Yahoo! Store to increase page views and ultimately help you make more money!~~~~~
GIFs are for graphic logos, text, and flat areas of color@@@@@@GIF files (pronounced "JIFF" like the peanut butter and "GIF" like a present) are indexed, bitmapped files. GIFS are better for logos & areas of flat color, and small photos (like thumbnails)
Open your graphics software and magnify a GIF file. You'll see the PIXEL data that looks like a colored sheet of graph paper. Each GIF has up to 256 colors. You can reduce the file size by reducing the number of
You can also optimize a GIF file by increasing the areas of flat color by reducing the dithering. This tends to polarize the image, and make it look choppy (not unlike the ATARI VIDEO games of the late 70s.)
Transparency allows the background color to show through an image, but you need to be careful because if Yahoo! Store is redrawing your image files, the TRANSPARENT COLOR can be changed a little and look really strange giving your ICON or IMAGE photo a HALO.
JUST DON'T! -- GIF files can also be animated. An animated banner is a good example of this. Usually animated GIFs look cheesy, take longer to load, and are ultimately distracting in your Yahoo! Store.
Yahoo store displays primarily GIF files when it automatically renders DISPLAY-TEXT and BUTTON BARS, and IMAGES.
GIFs can work for photos, but JPEGs are much more efficient. I learned this the hard way on my site Dragonstore.com when~~~~~
Giveanything.com@@@@@@http://giveanything.com~~~~~
Good Keywords (Keyword Software)@@@@@@http://softnik.com/products/gkw/gkwpro/index.htm~~~~~
Google 4x from Webmasterworld.com@@@@@@http://www.webmasterworld.com/google4x4.cgi?q=link:http://www.yahoo.com~~~~~
Google Public Policy Blog: Small businesses finding success online@@@@@@http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-businesses-finding-success-online.html~~~~~
Google Toolbar@@@@@@http://toolbar.google.com target=_new~~~~~
Google Tools@@@@@@~~~~~
googleadfcf7723e0cc432@@@@@@~~~~~
Gopher's Paradise@@@@@@I've either got gophers or moles. Some kind of tunnel-dwelling varmits. Help!~~~~~
GOTO Search Suggestion Tool@@@@@@http://inventory.goto.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/~~~~~
Grab Long Tail CKWP, too@@@@@@~~~~~
Grandmother (Anne) & Cooper@@@@@@~~~~~
Graphic Components of a Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
GreekForMe@@@@@@~~~~~
Gun Dog Supply@@@@@@~~~~~
Gun Dog Supply - Dog Training Supplies (PORTFOLIO SITE)@@@@@@http://www.gundogsupply.com~~~~~
Gundogsupply.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Hansen Wheel & Wagon@@@@@@http://www.viamall.com/wagon-wheel~~~~~
HawaiianShavedIce.com@@@@@@~~~~~
HawaiianShavedIce.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Hear me speak at 2006 Pubcon in Las Vegas@@@@@@This should be a GREAT session! I know all my fellow panelists. Last year was a blast! Thanks, Brett for another PUBCON slot! See http://www.pubcon.com/sessions.cgi?action=view&record=43
Everybody Loves Vegas, Baby! WebmasterWorld's PubCon Las Vegas 2006
Las Vegas Convention Center in fabulous Las Vegas Nevada
Four Track Educational Conference with Exposition Hall
Topics: Search, Net Marketing, SEO/SEM, Affiliates, General Webmastery.
PubCon is scaled from novice to advanced experience levels.
The leading edge event for sharing real world information about SEO, SEM, and general Site Owner/Webmaster issues.
When: November 14-17, 2006
Keynotes: Guy Kawasaki, Jon S. von Tetzchner, John Battelle, Danny Sullivan
~~~~~
Hear me speak!@@@@@@~~~~~
Here's the best search conference self-promotion I've ever done: SESSION CARDS@@@@@@
Getting a speaking gig at Pubcon is only the first step. Once you have a slot, you want your session to rock, but no matter how awesome your presentation is, if no one shows up to hear you it doesn't matter.
Brett gave me my first shot speaking in Boston the week my book came out in 2006. I think I started doing SESSION CARDS ON THE BACK OF MY BOOK BUSINESS CARDS right after that.
When you meet someone at PUBCON, it's easy to say "Come to my session," but how will they remember? No one is going to remember that you speak at 10:15 tomorrow morning in Salon A. Enter session cards.
Session cards not only tell folks when and where you're speaking, they also advertise the other peeps on your panel.
My GF rocked these out in PHOTOSHOP/ILLUSTRATOR and agreed to share her template if folks who use it throw a link her way: Kathy Jacobs Design -- Here's the session-cards.ai template file
I usually print my show-specific cards literally right before I leave for the airport because I own a copy shop. This time I decided to actually get my show cards printed at a REAL printer! See y'all at the show!
~~~~~
here's what happens when Matt Cutts (and Sally Burke) tweet your URL@@@@@@The initial traffic spike was pretty good, but look at the daily visitors AFTER the 2-day spike. I wonder if this is what Matt means by evergreen content?~~~~~
Hey, Rob! How do you build my Yahoo Store?@@@@@@ Dragonstore.com (was) a profitable Yahoo! Store that I used to own (JUST SOLD 9/2001!) and sold thousands and thousands of dollars of cool dragon merchandise.
I built it with the help of my retail chain's General Manager. Since it's my site, I don't worry about "giving away the store.." and can tell you things that a client wouldn't want out in the open!
I'm going to use the design process on Dragonstore.com to help you see the steps that we go through when we build your webstore.
Your PRODUCT SELECTION is the most important aspect of
starting a webstore. You must be selling a product that people want and that you can make money on. Ease of use would be a close second, and Yahoo! Store excels here.
Allen had the idea of making a specialized site focusing on two manufacturers' product lines. He picked out 50 pewter dragons and t-shirts and made an excel file which is the skeleton of the site. He then scanned graphics for all 50 items from his distributors catalog.~~~~~
Hire Me!@@@@@@ I can find an $100,000.00 in sales you're missing
just by poking around your Yahoo! Store,
or your review is FREE!
It's like having your very own personal Ystore seminar over the phone! From SEO, PPC, conversion rate improvement - we'll cover it all. Anything to help you make more with your online store! I'll even throw in copies of some of my best, secret RTML templates for SEO, product management, and more... Satisfaction 100% guaranteed. The information you get from this consult will pay for itself over and over. If for some reason I don't think you'll benefit from my review, I won't take the gig.
~~~~~
Hmmm...@@@@@@ "What have I forgotten THIS trip" (probably clean socks & underwear.)
Hey, y'all! Here are pix of my swanky new bachelor pad.
Finally got the fence up. Hacked back most of the jungle.
Surrounding the pool/deck with the privacy fence worked out pretty well. Y'all should have seen me installing the low voltage lighting around the pool at 2 a.m. Saturday (in the dark!)
Still have yet to move most of my stuff, but living out in the county has been great for the first 7 days!
No hobo sitings yet.~~~~~
Honest Foods.com@@@@@@http://www.honestfoods.com~~~~~
Hourly Consulting -- @@@@@@SOLD OUT! Email for names of other folks who can help y'all!
LIMITED AVAILABILITY. Sold in 2 hour blocks, prepaid. Pay by VISA, MC, AMEX, Discover, & PayPal, or company check...~~~~~
house@@@@@@~~~~~
House Picture (3)@@@@@@~~~~~
How Adrienne does her Yahoo Store DATABASE UPLOAD (real world example)@@@@@@~~~~~
How I Do a Database Upload to my Yahoo! Stores@@@@@@
by Rob Snell , ystore.com
This summer I was on vacation on a cruise in the Carribean when my workaholism flared up. I was able to dash into a cybercafe, check my email, and get a little work done.
I could have done anything I could normally do at home to my 10 Yahoo! Stores or client sites because everything in my Yahoo! Stores is on the Yahoo! servers out in California.
All I need is a browser and an internet connection, and I'm in my store. Cool!
This flexibility can also have a downside. Editing your site online can be slow, especially during peak usage times. If you are stuck in a cheap hotel with your laptop and an AOL connection, you are in Hell.
Database uploads automate the major downside of using a server based application like Yahoo! Store by allowing you the flexibility of making large sweeping change to your site while offline, and then bulk uploading products and graphics like "normal" FTP web sites do.
You can also destroy months and months of work with the click of a button or two. Think of it as shaving with a chainsaw. It can be really efficient, but one slip and you're in big trouble.
Note: I always experiment on a test store before trying new DATABASE UPLOAD tricks, so here goes!
First, I make sure I can EXPORT my data!
I log into the MANAGER at http://store.yahoo.com .
Then I go to PROMOTE> SEARCH ENGINES and look below the scroll. It’s the 2 nd feature.
Click ENABLE " Export of Store Contents - Enable this to let third parties, such as product search engines, download your list of products. They should fetch them periodically from the URL http://www.yourdomainhere.com/objinfo.xml using the Yahoo! Store product export XML format . This doesn't affect Yahoo! Shopping"
Click DONE .
NOTE: Please remember that anyone who knows your Yahoo account name can now download your entire site. Just something to think about.
Take a look at this big ole file. It's HUGE. It's everything in your store: Items, sections, content, etc...
Click http://store.yahoo.com/TYPE-YOUR-ACCOUNT-HERE/objinfo.xml
Go get the XML file by going to http://207.21.197.239/ystore/ystoreexport.htm
Enter your account name (or whatever you want the CSV called and URL http://store.yahoo.com/TYPE-YOUR-ACCOUNT-HERE/objinfo.xml
Pick your DELIMITER, (I use COMMAS).
Pick which pages you want - Just Products or ALL. I choose all files because I want to see any files that are EXILED that I might have forgotten about…
I also DON'T STRIP html from description and caption because most often I am exporting my store's contents to REUPLOAD THEM after cleaning up the mess.
Click on PROCESS FILE. Think happy thoughts for both Dan the Sausageman who sponsors this page, as well as Matt who wrote the program. Saves me HOURS. Thanks, Dan. Thanks, Matt.
I create a NEW FOLDER on my desktop for the file and SAVE the MY-ACCOUNT-NAME.CSV file into this folder.
I use Microsoft EXCEL. I got to FILE > OPEN and make sure to select the second dropdown menu of ALL FILES.
When you open the file you see you have the FIELD NAMES:
Id, Code, Description, Url, Thumb, Picture, Weight, Orderable, Taxable, BasePrice, LocalizedBasePrice, PathId, PathUrl, Availability, & Caption.
Id .html is the name of your page. Use this for CODE . (Pictures need to be named the same for bulk uploads. If ID is 1234, pictures need to be 1234.jpg or 1234.gif)
Code is the same unless you changed it. I delete this.
Description is the Yahoo! Store NAME field.
Url is the location of the published page. (See the ID.html at the end?)
Thumb is the url of the thumbnail on the Yahoo! Image Server.
Picture is the url of the thumbnail on the Yahoo! Image Server.
Weight is WEIGHT field.
Orderable is whether or not it has an order button.
Taxable is the uploadable field TAXABLE.
BasePrice & LocalizedBasePrice are PRICE
PathId tells you the section it's in which you can use for PATH
PathUrl is the location of the published section page. Availability is AVAILABILITY if you want to upload a unique availability.
Caption is the CAPTION field. (Remember Yahoo! Store will only upload short to medium captions. If you have a loooong product description, it'll chop it off.)
First thing to remember is that you lose HEADLINE, ABSTRACT, and SALE-PRICE. I use these a LOT! Sometimes it's a trade-off.
Goto EDIT>ADVANCED>CONTROL> Experimental>Product Summary File
To get SALE-PRICE, you can get the Product Summary File and match the IDs. Sort the EXCEL file by ORDERABLE and then by CODE. Then sort the Product Summary File by CODE and paste side by side in a SPREADSHEET.
Now you have PRICE AND SALE-PRICE.
To get the options is a bit more tricky. Use EDIT ALL from the INDEX page. View Source which in EXPLORER opens the NOTEPAD. You actually have to PARSE out the HTML, but the ID is matched up in the same TAGS as the OPTIONS info.
Now that you have all of the fields you want to export, start making your changes. Add new products. Move items into new sections. Change prices.
In the EXCEL spreadsheet Rename Id field CODE . Rename Description field NAME , and keep WEIGHT , TAXABLE, PRICE , PATH , AVAILABILITY, CAPTION . I also create columns HEADLINE& ABSTRACT. If you need OPTIONS add them, too.
Insert a new column. COPY and PASTE NAME column into this blank column. Rename field HEADLINE. When you have an empty HEADLINE field, Yahoo! Store just uses the NAME FIELD in place of the headline. When you use HEADLINE, Yahoo! Store also places the NAME of the item in html across the bottom of the page, which can only help you with search engines.
I then save this file as a CSV with a name like 300am.csv so I know when it was current and I place it in my UPLOAD directory.
EDIT>ADVANCED>INDEX>DATABASE UPLOAD
I now use Data Format:CSV . I believe Yahoo! discontinued Bar-Delimited (a.k.a. PIPES) in NOV 2000 much to my dismay, and that is when I learned about ITEMS WITH NO CODE.
BEFORE YOU UPLOAD YOUR CSV FILE -- Make sure that every CODE field has an entry. Upload an EMPTY code field and you will get a nasty surprise! You get an ITEM without an OBJECT CODE and then you can't PUBLISH. You can't delete it because it has no name. The only way you can get rid of it that I've found out is to OVERWRITE your whole site! Be careful.
WARNING: This is not unlike shaving with a chainsaw. You will make mistakes. You will delete hours of hard work. Play on a test site. You have been warned.
REBUILD ADD REVERT
REBUILD deletes all product images and section icons and replaces the data with just the information from your database.
Yahoo! Says: "Warning: Rebuilding your site will delete all existing items and add only the items you have uploaded. Are you sure you want to Rebuild your site? "
ADD simply adds new items and overwrites items with the same IDs.
It's the safest of DATABASE UPLOADS . The worst thing that can happen is that your overwrite good products with the new products.
Example: If you have a picture for item ID 1234 and you ADD a new product with 1234 to the site it will have the OLD photo as the ITEM IMAGE.
REVERT takes you back one generation if you REBUILT or ADDed, but only once. It's kind of like UNDO, but you only get ONE.
Databases uploads can save you hours upon hours of editing your Yahoo! Store. You can also build consistent looking pages that load faster and present more information. Even better, you can tweak your pages to be more search engine friendly to get your more traffic, more sales, and more money!
Be careful!
rob@ystore.com ~~~~~
How I got 616 orders in one month from a single Yahoo! Listing!@@@@@@ Towards the end of September I kept seeing the phrase "Halloween Costumes" shoot up the popularity index like a rocket. I decided to do a little experiment.
I did my homework on the keyword phrases that were related to Halloween Costumes and found that CHILDRENS HALLOWEEN COSTUMES and ADULT HALLOWEEN COSTUMES were popular sub-phrases, and had little to no competition in the Yahoo.com directory. Yahoo.com has recently changed. First, they changed the way Yahoo returns search results, and then they added GOTO/Overture listings so this exact method won't be as effective next year.
Simply put, I found out what people were looking for, and then I positioned my site to come up for the best results for those searches, and then I sent the traffic to a retailer who had exactly what those folks were looking for and I got an 8% commission for sending that traffic.
That single Yahoo! listing generated a commission of $2,188.77 for 616 orders that were from 96,861 hits. These all came from a SINGLE Yahoo! listing.
The MOST IMPORTANT THING about Internet Marketing is knowing the most popular search terms buyers use to find what you sell! These are your Top 20 KEYWORD PHRASES.
Once you know what exact KEYWORD PHRASES your customers are looking for, you can do everything you can to make your site come up as high as possible in the search results for those specific words and phrases in the directories, search engines, and pay-per-click results. You can also track these results and compare how well you rank with your traffic and sales.
Once you know what exact KEYWORD PHRASES folks are looking for, you don't have to worry about every single word that would apply.
One of my clients is #1 on Google for her #1 keyword phrase, a brand name of a particular girls' toy. She was a little concerned when she wasn't on the first page of search results for the phrase "LIMITED EDITION ___," and she gave me a holler.
We did a quick check and the GOTO/Overture tool said: No suggestions for "limited edition ." My other database also said: "Sorry! No results returned from database!
No one was looking for this particular keyword phrase, so it didn't matter! The main thing is to be highly ranked for words that count and to ignore the ones that don't!
"So, How do I find out what my Top 20 KEYWORD PHRASES are?"
There are two place to look to find your TOP 20 KEYWORD PHRASES : Inside & Outside.
Look Inside - Look at your log files / references to see what phrases are already drawing traffic. These phrases are already working for you. Yahoo! Store owners should look at MANAGER > References > Details to see what the top KEYWORD PHRASES are in your existing Yahoo! Store.
You can rank these by sales, orders, and traffic. Usually your top ten sources of traffic are the best to look at. You can get a pretty good idea of your better words in about 15 minutes, but I usually spend up to four or five hours to consolidate all of the data.
Look Outside. Use whatever internet resources you can to find ALL relevant keyword phrases. This includes keyword databases, search engine "related results," related sites' meta tags & keywords, competitors' pay-per-click lists, industry-related sites, glossaries, manufacturer sites with brand and product names, synonym generators, and anything else you can think of using.
This new list will probably include your existing keyword phrases, and you will be able to see what words and phrases you might be missing and see where your current TOP 20 KEYWORD PHRASES rank in and around the other words...
In the old days (1997), it was hard to find out what people were looking for on the internet. There was one public list of most searched terms on Yahoo!, and half of those were for porn. Now there are a lot more resources to find out exactly WHAT people are looking for. The best free, public example is the GOTO / OVERTURE search suggestion tool (Ask me about this or look at my links page at http://ystore.com/links.html) We have access to many more, and we've learned a lot about how to put your site in front of this traffic to sell them stuff.
"Okay, then how do I get more traffic, NOW?"
Hire me! I'll show you. You buy a day of my time spread out over a week or so. You get access to my 5+ years of internet marketing experience as well as 15 years worth of "bricks and mortar" retailing and marketing experience. You also get a proven road map to building your site's traffic, and a list of elements you can use to jump-start your traffic.
I'm in the process of creating an expanded version of my marketing plan for independent retailers using the Yahoo! Store platform. Call me at 800-332-7601 .
Rob Snell ~~~~~
How sad is it that I track my PubCon Stats?@@@@@@I taped all my sessions and had them transcribed, so not only do I know how long I ran over (sorry!) I also know how many words / sentences / paragraphs were contained.
See E-Commerce Optimization slides and E-Commerce SEO slides
Both "15 minute" sessions ran 22 minutes
Both sessions had the same number of words (~4800)
SEO = More tactical = More Slides/Ideas
E-Commerce Optimization = More strategic = Less Slides/Ideas
~~~~~
How to change the PAGE-ELEMENTS field@@@@@@To make any changes to your front page's PAGE-ELEMENTS, Click the EDIT button on the FRONT PAGE, then click the PAGE-ELEMENTS CHANGE button. Make your changes, click UPDATE which takes you back to the EDIT page. If you want to save your changes, click UPDATE and the changes to your FRONT PAGE have been made.~~~~~
How to get quality product images@@@@@@Quality product images is the first priority in having a kick ass looking Yahoo! Store. I have more clients and prospects ooh and ahh over a couple of the sites that I have designed more than any other.~~~~~
How to keep competitors from stealing images from your Yahoo Store@@@@@@BRAND your images with your URL kinda like the attached (or even MORE blatantly), *AND* use Photoshop (or Paintshop Pro) to embed a watermark (the little secret digital code they can't see but you can "trace").
Then ask the imag-stealing offender to remove the images OR remit $1500 a year PER IMAGE fee to your over-priced graphics guy for a 1 year license to use the following pictures, because his lawyer is a pitbull and you wouldn't want him thinking YOU were violating his copyright. I usually FAX or attach an "order form" and those images start disappearing lickety split!
If THAT doesn't work THEN contact eBay or the ISP/Host of the person violating your copyright and most times they'll remove the images or nuke the account.
Then there's always CEASE & DESIST, but they didn't cover that in art school.~~~~~
how to make quick OPTIONS drop down lists for Yahoo Stores@@@@@@Step 1 GET THE ids
in INTERNET EXPLORER
edit the AUTHORS page
goto CONTENTS field
ctrl-a to highlight all IDS
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
in NOTEPAD
ctrl-v to paste into a empty notepad
ctrl-a to highlight all in NOTEPAD
open WORD
ctrl-v to paste into a empty WORD doc
ctrl-H to find/replace
replace " " (don't type the quotes, just the space) with ^p
ctrl-a to highlight all IDS
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
open NOTEPAD
ctrl-v to paste into a empty notepad
ctrl-a to highlight all IDS
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
OPEN EXCEL
click in cell d-1
ctrl-v to paste into column D
#2 GET THE CORRESPONDING author NAMES
in EDITOR, browse to the AUTHORS page
highlight all the names of the authors
they'll be in the same order as the ids you just got
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
in NOTEPAD
ctrl-v to paste into a empty notepad
ctrl-a to highlight all in NOTEPAD
open WORD
ctrl-v to paste into a empty WORD doc
ctrl-H to find/replace
replace "^p " (don't type the quotes, just the space)
with ^p
this changes all the empty lines with spaces to empty lines
replace ^p^p with ^p
this deletes all the empty lines
replace ^p^p
with ^p
this deletes all the empty lines
replace " " with nothing (replace all)
(or however many spaces are at the beginning of a line
now all the Author Names should be on the same number of lines as the IDs
ctrl-a to highlight all names
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
open NOTEPAD (to remove WORD formatting if any)
ctrl-v to paste into a empty notepad
ctrl-a to highlight all NAMES
ctrl-c to COPY all and then
OPEN EXCEL
click in cell f-1
ctrl-v to paste into column F
-- -- -- -- --
into cell c-1 paste <option value="
into cell d-1 paste THE ID
into cell e-1 paste .html">
into cell F-1 paste THE name of the author
into cell G-1 paste </OPTION<
-- -- -- -- --
copy the c-1, e-1, and g-1 cells and paste into each row that needs it.
highlight all the cells c-1...g-1 down until the last row
copy ALL, paste into NOTEPAD
highlight a TAB between the cell data in NOTEPAD,
ctrl-c to copy it
CTRL-H to REPLACE ALL
paste the TAB character in the first field
replace all TABS with nothing.
highlight everything and CTRL-C it to copy it.
This code can now be pasted to the SIDEBAR pulldown between the SELECT TAGS
~~~~~
How to Write an Effective Directory Listing for your Yahoo Store@@@@@@ WHY ARE DIRECTORIES IMPORTANT? You need to get links . Directories are a wonderful way to get great links from related sites. You have a much better chance of getting included in a human-edited directory if you write an effective directory listing that accurately describes your site in a way that adds value to the directory.
Take the ZEAL test . Zeal is the volunteer arm of Looksmart, the guys who USED to power the search results at MSN. (Don't cry, Craig. It'll all be okay...)
Taking and PASSING the ZEAL TEST is the best way to see if you REALLY understand how to write good directory listings . Here's the Zeal tutorial
Read the submission guidelines.
Use keywords in the name of your site so your anchor text (the words in the links pointing to your site) is keyword loaded. More...~~~~~
How Yahoo! Store generates & hosts images@@@@@@The Yahoo Image Server -- When you upload a picture file to Yahoo! Store or when Yahoo! Store automatically creates a graphic like your NAVBAR or a HEADLINE in DISPLAY-TEXT, Y! stores this image on a separate image server from where your store html files are stored.
For example, if you change the name of your INFO button to "ORDER INFO," Yahoo! creates a whole new image. You can tell by right-clicking on the image and looking at the PROPERTIES. *
NOTE: Yahoo! tends to archive this info for a LONG time. I discovered this about a year ago. I had archived the index.html document for an old home page I created the first month or so I was using the VIAWEB software. Because it called the images up from the image server, I was able to view my old page like it was from a time capsule. It was really strange.
The cool thing about this is that you can use simple HTML to call the same code to reuse graphics that have already been downloaded into the viewer's cache.
The NAME-IMAGE graphic can be re-used in the FINAL-TEXT for branding if you have tall product pages where the user has to scroll a bit.
The user has already "paid" for the image in download time, so there's no extra time for the image to load. The same thing is true for images in your FILES library.
Once your shopper's browser loads your American Express ICON, everytime you call that same image, your browser is simply recycling the image. This saves bandwidth and decreases the amount of time someone has to wait for your pages to load, which results in more time for the shopper to look at your site. Hopefully, this will result in more sales.~~~~~
HTML test@@@@@@ Today’s Y!Store blog is yet another guest column by long-time Yahoo! Store owner and marketer Rob Snell of Snell Brothers , located in sleepy Starkville, Mississippi. Rob is a retailer who has sold dog training collars on his Yahoo! Store since 1997. Rob also blogs about Yahoo! Store, speaks at search conferences about Yahoo! Store, and is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies .
Just Back from Seattle & SMX Advanced
Search Marketing Expo (SMX) is one of Danny Sullivan’s many search marketing shows. The Seattle show, SMX Advanced, is labeled that way so the speakers can dive off pretty deep into some pretty heavy topics without worrying about leaving the new folks behind. This show, like PUBCON, is for the heavy search geeks!
The programming at SMX Advanced was so intense, I couldn’t justify partying like a rock star, and risk missing some new important nugget or idea. This was the first search conference EVER where I went to every single class. I only slept in through the keynote.
SMX Advanced is also a 2-day show, but I took 79+ pages of notes in my little black Moleskine notebook. More than half of my notes were ideas for getting links, or increasing conversions, or other marketing ideas triggered by something someone said in a presentation or during a bar conversation. Some of my SEO friends tease me about my little black notebook, but it’s ironic that they’re the first ones to call me to get copies of my notes!
Nothing is radically new this year.
I’ve been going to search marketing shows since 2001, and the more I go to, the fewer brand new things I tend to pick up. For me, the major advantage of attending is seeing the same information in a somewhat different light, meeting like-minded folks at meals and in between sessions, and catching up with old friends. Search marketing shows are also great for getting out of your daily routine, letting your mind wander, and figuring out what you want to do next, marketing-wise!
A buddy of mine was bellyaching that “he paid $3500 for flight, hotel and tuition, and he didn’t learn anything radically new.” Did he get any ideas? “Yes, tons.” Great. Now he also knows his SEO chops are completely current.
In 2009, SEO is still all about TITLE TAGS and LINKS
As you probably know, on every page you want your best keywords for that page in a descriptive TITLE Tag. Yahoo! Stores are SEO-friendly right out of the box because TITLES are generated by the NAME field, or PAGE-TITLE field.
You also want the same keywords you want to rank for in the anchor text of links pointing to that page. These links should be both from your Yahoo! Store (navigation, breadcrumbs, links in CAPTION fields, and thumbnails/text links on category pages) as well as from lots of other sites as well. For more info check out some earlier posts of mine:
Converting Keywords , Southern Fried SEO , and How to Get Vendor Links .
What *IS* new in SEO for 2009?
LINK DIVERSITY
Link diversity (having links from different domains and different IP ranges) is somewhat more important for SEO than it has been in the past. For example, 20 links from one site isn't as good as 20 links from 20 different sites on different domains.
Want to see how many unique domains link to you? Checkout
SEOBook.com’s Aaron Wall’s tool here: http://tools.seobook.com/link-tools/backlinks/backlinks.php .
Want to see Ystoreblog.com’s backlinks ? (May take a bit to load!)
I show 1 Unique Government Domain (*.gov, *.mil) with 1 Unique C Block Addresses and 74 Unique Commerical Domains (*.com, *.net, etc) with 59 Unique C Block Addresses. (BTW, Paul, that house.gov link is from my Congress gig. Thanks, again.)
One of the SEO Super-heroes, Rand Fishkin of SEOMOZ.org discussed the upcoming release of his 2009 Search Engine Ranking Factors report which coming out this July (here’s the last one ). Every year or so, Rand surveys top SEOs and compares their opinions with real data from reverse engineering top-ranking sites for hundreds of popular keywords. This year “Everything’s the same + link diversity” sums up my notes. Rand said that he believes that even "nofollowed" links, (links that don't pass PageRank or anchor text) DO count towards domain diversity.
Nofollowed links are links that have the attribute “rel=nofollow” which was something the search engines invented to stop blog spammers. Nofollowed links really don’t give you any SEO benefit because they don’t send PageRank (link popularity) or anchor text. For example, all the links in comments on this blog are nofollowed.
Duplicate content and the Canonical Tag
One new thing Google and the other search engines came up with earlier this year to help e-commerce sites battle same site duplicate content problems was to come up with the Canonical tag. Matt Cutts has a great post on everything you need to know about the canonical tag right here.
Ironically, Yahoo! Stores don’t need canonical tags because we have SEO-friendly static URLs (like www.storedomain.com/page.html), so our stores don’t have the problems that a lot of other carts do like dealing with dynamic URLS with all these parameters.
Also, you should consolidate all your pages into one domain using the Store Manager’s 301 settings. This permanently redirects all store URLs and your non-www URLs to the a single domain which consolidates your link popularity. Read Paul’s helpful Domain Redirect Setting help file for more info.
Oh, yeah! One possible Yahoo! Store use for the canonical tag is so you get SEO credit for links tagged with parameters like links from some affiliate programs, click track, internal campaigns, or even tagged banners).
For example, search engines would see a link to http://www.storedomain.com?s=affiliate&id=8675309 as a completely different link than http://www.storedomain.com. I have some SEO tests running right now, and I’ll report back if/when we find something.
PageRank Sculpting (Just say no!)
In the “you shouldn’t play with fire” category, was the PageRank Sculpting controversy. Sculpting PageRank is the practice of using NOFOLLOW tags to squeeze PageRank around on your site to maximize your link popularity on only your most important products and pages. That sounds like a good thing, right?
Nope! 99.9% of Yahoo! Store owners shouldn’t even think of messing around with PageRank sculpting because it’s not unlike like shaving with a chainsaw. Horrible things can happen if you do something wrong. The best way to control what pages get the PageRank on your Yahoo! Store is to put links to your most valuable products and categories right on your homepage. That’s so easy!
Google still hates paid links
Matt Cutts, Google’s Search Quality Engineer and the voice of Google to most SEOs repeated that buying links to manipulate the search engine rankings is still a high-risk activity. He said anything sponsored should be use a rel=nofollow tag or it's high-risk. Any consideration (i.e., free products for links) to get keyword rich anchor text links with the intent to manipulate rankings is high-risk. Matt said you’re free to do as you wish with your sites and your links, but so is The Google.
Google also says they won’t penalize you for anything someone else could do to your site, only things that you do ON your site. Google can be pretty cryptic about what will and won’t get you in trouble! For example, if buying paid links got you banned from Google (or even penalized), all a competitor would have to do is buy paid links for YOUR site, report you, and then you would suffer and probably not know why.
My experience with buying paid links (from long, long ago!) was that the site that gets caught SELLING (not buying) paid links gets in trouble. Google most likely quietly turns off that site from any SEO benefits of passing PR and anchor text. Buying links from that site then is a waste of money, and you also run the risk of having your domain flagged as a possible spammer. This may lead to a manual review which is when a Google Quality inspector puts your site under the microscope to see if you’re doing anything else you shouldn’t be doing and gets to assess penalties if applicable.
(Now my dog is hiding under the bed, whimpering like it’s the middle of a Mississippi thunderstorm. It’s ok. Matt Cutts isn’t going to eat you!)
My own personal rule for SEO? I pretend Matt Cutts knows who I am, and knows all my domains and client sites. If you assume the Spam Cops are watching everything, keep your nose clean, and you should be fine.
Anytime I try to keep anything on the down low, it’s to hide things that work from my distinguished competition rather than trying to get anything past the PhD’s in Mountainview.
I still have 73 more pages of notes I didn’t get to, so hopefully Paul and the gang will let me have another guest post pretty soon! Appreciate the forum, folks!
Until then, keep building great content and collecting links! -- Rob Snell
P.S. Here are some other posts: Pimping Your Product Page , SES NYC 2007 , Free Conversion Rate Chapter .
~~~~~
http://airhosereels.com@@@@@@http://airhosereels.com~~~~~
http://store.dollhousesbygrace.com/@@@@@@ Doll Houses
This guide was created to help answer any questions you have when buying and building your dollhouse. It includes everything you need to know before buying a dollhouse online. Includes information about the kits, construction supplies, finishing materials, miniature furniture, and more. Comes with complete checklist of supplies & equipment you need to build the perfect dollhouse.
1. Consider these factors when choosing a dollhouse:
Size: There are many different sizes to choose to fit any budget from $60 for a small cottage to over $800 for an estate such as the Queen Anne (#RGHS6600). Finished houses range in size from 2’ to 4’ tall and wide so be sure have a large enough work & play area for your new kit. See all of our kits under the Real Good Toys link.
Ease Of Building: All dollhouses sold on dollhousesbygrace.com come with an illustrated instruction booklet to guide you through the process of assembling your dollhouse. Using just basic tools such as a hammer, glue and a utility knife, you can build your perfect dollhouse. Refer to the following section, “Pick your Construction Supplies”, for details on the necessary supplies you will need. For a great looking and easy to assemble dollhouse, consider the Simplicity Series made by Real Good Toys (here).
Finish: Dollhouse kits can be purchased with a smooth or milled exterior finish. Kits with a milled exterior finish have the clapboard siding milled directly onto the exterior portions of the house providing the look and feel of real clapboard siding. A milled exterior finish is recommended if this is your first dollhouse project for it will greatly reduce the time and effort required to assemble the shell. If you are an experienced builder you may prefer a smooth exterior finish. With a smooth finish you can build and attach your own exterior materials such as brick, stone, miniature clapboard siding, or a combination thereof.
Material: All doll house kits and are constructed of either Medium Density Fiber Board (MDF) or Plywood ranging in thickness from ¼” to 3/8”. The 3/8” plywood or MDF is usually preferred over ¼” material because it is more sturdy and will ultimately hold up stronger over the years.
2. Pick Your Construction Supplies. Here is a list of tools and items you will need to build and finish your doll house:
Hammer
Utility Knife *
Wood Glue *
Masking Tape *
Sand Paper *
Paint Brushes *
Paints and Primer (for the exterior)
Shingle Dye (for the roof shingles included in your kit. Click here)
Wood Filler
(* Items marked with an asterisk, “*”, are included in the dollhousesbygrace.com STARTER VALUE PACK Part # BGDXSUP.)
3. Finish the Interior: Dollhousesbygrace.com supplies all the items you need to finish the interior of your house including the following:
Paints (don’t forget your primer)
Wallpaper
Trim (window, cornice, chair rail, wainscot, etc.)
Hardwood flooring
Tile floors and walls
Carpeting (wall-to-wall and throw rugs)
Window Treatments
Linoleum
Many of these items are not yet listed on dollhousesbygrace.com but will be soon. So please check back as we are adding new items every day.
4. Furnish Your House: Select from thousands of miniature items to complete your perfect dollhouse.
Items are available for every room of your house, in any style, from any era. Like the interior finishing products, many of these items are not yet listed on dollhousesbygrace.com but will be soon. So please check back as we are adding new items every day.
And when you are ready to take it to the next level of realism consider wiring your house with electricity - with working fixtures, outlets and switches. Also consider adding a stucco, brick, or stone exterior. How about realistic landscaping? All these items and supplies plus more will be added to our web soon. So please keep checking back!
Now go have FUN and build that perfect dollhouse!
~~~~~
I'm in the Amazon!@@@@@@See that little speck? That's the "hotel." Zoom into and you can see the 10 floating lodges. Zoom out and you can see why my insurance company wanted to know why I wanted to go this deep into the jungle.
~~~~~
I'm sleeping in the den...@@@@@@Another 2 weeks until the floor guys sand and refinish the wood floors. I figured I might as well do everything I can before I move in...~~~~~
If you only read one thing...@@@@@@ Yahoo! Store works. If you have a product that you can sell in the real world, then Yahoo!
Store may be for you.
A couple of years ago one of my clients had a major problem. Their business was going great until a major category
killer, big-box discount chain store moved in across the highway.
She had heard horror stories about small businesses
being devastated by this company. Her idea was to gear up her mail order business to make up for
the 30-50% drop in sales associated from this company opening up.
After a year of struggling catalog mail order sales she
decided to get on the web after seeing the AT&T Floppy Sunglasses commercial.
Yahoo! Store to the rescue! A year or so later and now the web business is thriving and more
than offsetting the loss of business to the giant chain store. Very cool!
Yahoo! Store allows you to leverage your customer service skills and product knowledge to the whole wide world.
Find your niche and fill it. You get access to everyone else's customers.
It's not impossibly easy. It takes as much hard work as any other business. But the opportunity is there.
Let the engineers at Yahoo! Store worry about the shopping cart software,
the secure servers, and you can focus on your business. Learn the easy to use software or hire a designer
(like me!). Either way, tap into the global marketplace and get yours before someone else does.
I'm a big believer in specialization of labor! Let the experts handle the nuts-and-bolts of e-commerce and you
can spend your time on what you do best: serving your customers.
Click here for
our extremely reasonable rates.
- Robert Snell~~~~~
IMAGE (FRONT PAGE Element)@@@@@@The IMAGE allows you to upload a JPEG or GIF as a featured image. I recommend loading a JPEG of a product photo that is about half the width of your homepage. This way, you can select the LEFT constraint which allows the MESSAGE field to wrap around the image.
The height and width of the image are determined by the IMAGE-HEIGHT and IMAGE-WIDTH settings under VARIABLES.
Remember, the IMAGE will load almost twice as fast if you resize your JPEG to the size constraints you set under VARIABLES.
If the IMAGE-HEIGHT and the IMAGE-WIDTH are set to 250 (pixels) and you have a 300x300 pixel JPEG, the Yahoo! Store software will redraw the IMAGE as a GIF file at the 250x250 pixel resolution. Usually this image will take twice as long to load as a JPEG of the same size, and it will look kind of funky, too, with the dithering that the file conversion software does.~~~~~
Image File Types for the Web@@@@@@There are primarily two types of image files used on the internet: JPEGS and GIF files.
There is more information available than you would ever want to know about these image file formats. As a Yahoo! Store owner, you only need to know about five things for JPEGS and GIFs.~~~~~
Image Load Speed Test@@@@@@ ~~~~~
IMAGES -- What are Yahoo Store Thumbnails (or ICONS)?@@@@@@THUMBNAILS (also know as ICONS) are created automatically by your Yahoo Store. They are limited by the dimensions you set under VARIABLES called THUMB-HEIGHT and THUMB-WIDTH.
I recommend making sure your THUMBNAILS are no more than 2K or ~2000 bytes "heavy." You can also control the "weight" (or image FILE size) of your THUMBNAILS by making the THUMB-HEIGHT and THUMB-WIDTH smaller.
You can replace the auto-generated thumbnail with a custom graphic by uploaded the desired thumbnail image to the ICON position on a section or product.
The benefit of using custom ICONS is that you can create streamlined files that "weigh" less (smaller file sizes) because they have been optimized though an image compression program.
Decreasing the file size of your images decreases the load time of your images which makes your pages load faster which has been shown to increase the number of pages your prospects look at which has been shown to increase your sales.
Back in the day you have to hand upload all of your ICONS, but our good friend DON COLE has created an IMAGE UPLOAD TOOL ...
~~~~~
internet-marketing@@@@@@~~~~~
INTRO-TEXT (Front Page Element)@@@@@@This is a simple caption field. You can place regular html in this field as well as text.
Separate paragraphs with a blank line. This generates two BR tags.~~~~~
Introducing Y!Store101 @@@@@@ Introducing Y!Store101, a 2-day Yahoo Store seminar and workshop designed for Yahoo Store Owners by Yahoo Store Owners: Istvan Siposs, Michael Whitaker and me, Rob Snell.
The sole purpose of our seminar & workshop is to give you the tools to take your Yahoo Store from where it is today to where you want it to be tomorrow.
THURSDAY - Y!Store101, Day 1: Learn what you need to know and what you can do in a classroom setting from 9:00 - 4:00.
FRIDAY - Ystore101, Day 2: Implement what you learned the day before in a hands-on computer lab workshop. (Two sections: 9:00-1:00 or 1:00-5:00).
Seminar participation is extremely limited because class sizes are small. There are only 36 spots per class, so sign up today if you want to get in the first two classes! When you attend Ystore101, you will learn what works -- the secrets of multimillion dollar Yahoo Stores:
You will learn how to make more money! Drive more search engine traffic to your Yahoo Store! Convert more of your browsers into buyers, increase your average order size by up selling, and get repeat customers to order more often.
You will learn how to save time! Automate your store management and order processing tasks to give you more time to work on your business. The most successful online retailers have streamlined their businesses to take full advantage of all the powerful Yahoo Store features as well as third party tools. Learn their secrets!
You also get to network with other successful retailers like yourself. There's nothing like talking to other successful folks who do virtually the same thing you do, but who don't directly compete with you. Share tips and tricks with folks in completely different industries.
Stop what you're doing, and take a couple or three days off. You work hard. You deserve a break from your day-to-day grind. Take a tax-deductible trip to sunny California (ask your tax advisor), and take advantage of this opportunity to learn how to make more money with your Yahoo Store. Sign up for Y!Store101, book your flight and hotel, and get moving pronto!
You can sign up now, or read more about what topics we are going to cover, who will benefit from attending, what you need to know before you can come, which retailers are invited, background on the Y!Store101 instructors, and more.
~~~~~
Introducing... Robert Cooper Snell@@@@@@It's a boy! Robert Cooper Snell was born today, April 20, 2004. 10 fingers, 10 toes, mother & child are doing fine. 20 3/4 inches long, 8 lbs, 14 oz., and a head full of hair. Great lungs! I heard him all the way across the labor & delivery ward. Wow. I'm smiling a big ole goofy smile. My sixth nephew. Christmas is going to be EXPENSIVE! - Uncle Rob
P.S. Hey! What's a fellow got to do to get some girls around here? Guess it's up to me.
~~~~~
Invitation to testify at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives@@@@@@~~~~~
Inviting Lighting@@@@@@~~~~~
Is Yahoo Trying To Sell Small Biz & HotJobs?@@@@@@http://searchengineland.com/is-yahoo-trying-to-sell-small-biz-hotjobs-22858~~~~~
Is Yahoo! Store For Sale? -- Yahoo Small Business & HotJobs@@@@@@~~~~~
Istvan Siposs@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/~~~~~
Istvan Siposs, Ytimes Publications (the guy who wrote the book on RTML)@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/~~~~~
ITEM IMAGE - (Product Photos, Thumbnails, and Section Graphics)@@@@@@The item display rule
Original file type if same or smaller than ITEM constraints
Generates a GIF file if image is bigger than constraints~~~~~
Item page@@@@@@~~~~~
Janitorial Supplies@@@@@@http://www.janitorial-supplies-and-cleaning-products.com~~~~~
Janitorial Supplies from Bob the Janitor (PORTFOLIO SITE)@@@@@@http://www.bobthejanitor.com~~~~~
Kathy Jacobs Web Design is a pretty cool firm I use@@@@@@~~~~~
Keepsakes, Etc.@@@@@@~~~~~
Keywords@@@@@@The MOST IMPORTANT THING about Internet Marketing is knowing the most popular search terms buyers use to find what you sell!
These are your Top 20 KEYWORD PHRASES.
Once you know what exact KEYWORD PHRASES your customers are looking for, you can do everything you can to make your site come up as high as possible in the search results for those specific words and phrases in the directories, search engines, and pay-per-click results. You can also track these results and compare how well you rank with your traffic and sales. When you know what your Top 20 KEYWORD PHRASES are, you don't have to worry about every single word.
One of my clients is #1 on Google for her #1 keyword phrase, a brand name of a particular girls' toy. She was a little concerned when she wasn't on the first page of search results for a very specific keyword phrase, so she gave me a holler. We did a quick check and the GOTO/Overture tool said: "No suggestions for ___." No one was looking for this particular keyword phrase, so it didn't matter! The main thing is to be highly ranked for WORDS THAT COUNT.
(how do you do that?)
"How do I discover my TOP 20 KEYWORD PHRASES?"
There are two place to look to find your TOP 20 KEYWORD PHRASES :
Look Inside - Look at your log files / references to see what phrases are already drawing traffic. These phrases are already working for you. Yahoo! Store owners should look at MANAGER > References > Details to see what the top KEYWORD PHRASES are in your existing Yahoo! Store. You can rank these by sales, orders, and traffic. Usually your top ten sources of traffic are the best to look at. You can get a pretty good idea of your better words in about 15 minutes, but I usually spend up to four or five hours to consolidate all of the data. [See KEYWORD DATAMINING]
Look Outside. Use whatever internet resources you can to find ALL relevant keyword phrases. This includes keyword databases, search engine "related results," related sites' meta tags & keywords, competitors' pay-per-click lists, industry-related sites, glossaries, manufacturer sites with brand and product names, synonym generators, and anything else you can think of using.
This new list will probably include your existing keyword phrases, and you will be able to see what words and phrases you might be missing and see where your current TOP 20 KEYWORD PHRASES rank in and around the big list.
In the old days (1997), it was hard to find out what people were looking for on the internet. There was one public list of most searched terms on Yahoo!, and half of those were for porn. Now there are a lot more resources to find out exactly WHAT people are looking for. The best free, public example is the GOTO / OVERTURE search suggestion tool (Ask me about this or look at my links page at http://ystore.com/links.html) We have access to many more, and we've learned a lot about how to put your site in front of this traffic to sell them stuff.~~~~~
KEYWORDS -- Overture Search Suggestion Tool@@@@@@http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/~~~~~
KEYWORDS -- Google Keyword Tool@@@@@@https://adwords.google.com/select/main?cmd=KeywordSandbox~~~~~
KEYWORDS -- Yahoo >>> Show All@@@@@@http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yahoo+store&toggle=1&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&rs=all~~~~~
KEYWORDS -- Yahoo! >>> "Also try ..."@@@@@@http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=yahoo+store&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8~~~~~
LA!@@@@@@ Thursday, April 6, 2006.
9AM-4PM
Friday, April 7, 2006. 9AM-1PM or 1PM-5PM.
Microtek, 300 North Continental Blvd., Continental Plaza
Suite #590, El Segundo, CA 90245 (310) 364-0116
Y! Store 101 Seminar. April 6-7, 2006, Los Angeles, CA LA040606 $995.00
~~~~~
Linking Secrets@@@@@@ {!name_fix} - Rob's Yahoo! Store linking trick explained {!name_fix} - Rob's Yahoo! Store linking trick explained
{!name_fix} -- Howdy!
Sorry this is a bit late. My mom was in the hospital and I've been out of the office for a week. She's much better now, though!
If you commented on the blog, I'll shortly be sending your WOMBAT.rtml -- a clients & friends-only utility template to help you make these links much, much faster.
Yahoo! Store CAPTION Linking Secrets:
Make your Yahoo! Store easier to navigate with simple text links sprinkled throughout your CAPTION fields (the text field where you put product descriptions. These hyperlinks help shoppers and have amazing SEO benefits. Write some good CAPTION text and then sprinkle text links throughout your copy.
Take a look at Wikipedia to see a great example of a site with great internal links. Whenever the text references anything that has another Wikipedia listing (usually any noun), that word or phrase is hyperlinked to that page. Here's an example of a Wikipedia page with tons of links using my favorite animal: See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wombat
OK. In this post, I'm going to show you how I write CAPTIONS on section pages and how I link 'em up to benefit shoppers and search search engines! Let's get started!
Maximize CAPTION Fields on Section Pages
First, section pages need well-written CAPTION text fields to educate your shoppers. This CAPTION text is really for shoppers, but search engine 'bots love them, too. Your CAPTIONS should tell folks what products they should buy and why they should buy them. Sometimes retailers have great product descriptions, but almost no text on their section pages. ACK! What a waste of valuable Web real estate!
Here's why you need to maximize CAPTION fields on your section pages:
* Section pages typically get more page views than product pages do. The average visitor to your site will probably see more sections pages than product pages, so take advantage of this.
* Section pages can keep folks on your site. Provide shoppers with the information they need to buy the products they want.
* Section pages usually have more link popularity than product pages. It's easier to optimize sections to rank better in search engines.
If you want to see which of your section pages are getting the most page views, go to the STORE MANAGER, and click on the PAGE VIEWS link under the STATISTICS heading.
TIP: Spend most of your time tweaking the section pages that feature products that make you the most money. Start with your most valuable sections and work your way down the list. If you only have time to optimize three or four pages, you'll get the most bang for your buck if you start at the top of the list.
Put Links Inside CAPTION Text Where it Makes Sense
Links in CAPTION fields make it easier for folks to shop your site and for search engines to know what your site is about. As you probably know, a link is a clickable hypertext reference (a word or an image) that directs you to another Web resource, usually another html Web page.
Here are some things you need to know about links:
* Whenever you mention anything in the CAPTION text that has it's own page, make that text a link to that page so shoppers can click to learn more about what you're talking about.
* Any time you refer to another type of product in your CAPTION text, link that word or phrase to the most relevant product on your site for that term.
* Link to products, sub-sections, shop by manufacturer pages, product FAQ pages, buyers' guides, product comparison charts or virtually any other pages on your site that educate users.
* Use relevant keyword phrases as words in the link text (a.k.a. anchor text) because it makes more sense for the reader. Don't link with the words click here.
* Keywords inside the link text (anchor text) help search engines figure out what the linked page is about, sometimes called reputation analysis.
Now that you know a little bit more about links, I'll show you an example of some text in a CAPTION field on a section page, and how I link the keywords in the text to the most relevant page for each keyword phrase.
For example, let's say you sell the latest high-end wombat fashions and wombat grooming products. On your wombat shampoos section page, write three or four sentences describing the various types of shampoos you sell, the brands you sell, what the best selling products are, what problems these products solve and list other related products. Link each of these phrases to the most relevant page. You can also link to buyers' guides and FAQ pages.
Here's an example of a keyword-loaded CAPTION:
Everyone loves a wonderful-smelling wombat. Browse our wide selection of wombat cleaners & wombat shampoos. Not sure what to buy? Check out Wilber's "How to Wash Your Wombat" and "Wombat Grooming FAQ." More folks buy 100% all-natural WOMBAT WASH (shampoo & conditioner) than anything else. After washing your wombat, groom your pet with specialty wombat brushes, blow driers, and styling gels.
How many words in the above CAPTION could you turn into links? Here's how I would link up my CAPTION. This is what it would look like on the Web:
(This is a TEXT email, so pretend that the following has links)
Everyone loves a wonderful-smelling wombat! Browse our wide selection of wombat cleaners & wombat shampoos. Not sure what to buy? Check out Wilber's "How to Wash Your Wombat" and "Wombat Grooming FAQ." More folks buy 100% all-natural WOMBAT WASH (shampoo & conditioner) than anything else. After washing your wombat, groom your pet with specialty wombat brushes, blow driers, and styling gels.
Notice how some links are bold (to draw attention). I use the strong tag <strong></strong> which works like a bold tag, but also tells the search engine that the words inside the tag are important. Here's the code:
<strong><a href=id-of-page.html>keyword anchor text here</a></strong>
Here's the HTML code which assumes page1.html is about wombat cleaners, page2.html is about wombat shampoos, etc.:
<strong>Everyone loves a wonderful-smelling wombat</strong>! Browse our wide selection of <strong><a href=page1.html>wombat cleaners</a></strong> & <strong><a href=page2.html>wombat shampoos</a></strong>. Not sure what to buy? Check out Wilber's "<a href=page3.html>How to Wash Your Wombat</a>" and "<a href=page4.html>Wombat Grooming FAQ</a>." More folks buy 100% <strong><a href=page5.html>all-natural WOMBAT WASH</a></strong> (shampoo & conditioner) than anything else. After washing your wombat, groom your pet with specialty <a href=page6.html>wombat brushes</a>, <a href=page7.html>blow driers</a>, and <a href=page8.html>styling gels</a>.
Here are a few more things you might need to know to make CAPTION links:
CAPTION: The CAPTION field is a text field on a page made in STORE EDITOR where you can type the description for items and section pages. The CAPTION field accepts limited HTML code. To add or edit text in a CAPTION, login to your STORE EDITOR, browse to the page you want to edit, and click the EDIT button. Make the changes you want and click the Update button to see your edits. Remember to PUBLISH your store when you're ready for your customers to see your work.
Link (or hyperlink): A clickable word or image that moves your browser to another page.
Anchor Text / Link Text: The words inside a link. This clickable text is sometimes shown in a blue font and is underlined.
Anchor Tag: The HTML code that makes a word or image a clickable link. The code looks like this: <a href=pagename.html>anchor text</a>
Relative Path URL: This is a relative path URL:<a href=pagename.html>link text</a>. Notice how the URL in the HREF only specifies pagename.html. This link assumes you are already on a page somewhere on a domain. A relative path link will move you from where you are to that new page.
Relative URLS work both in STORE EDITOR and on the published site because they move you to pagename.html, whether to http://us-f1-edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/NEWEDIT.youraccountname/pagenam e.html or http://www.yourdomain.com/pagename.html on the Published site.
Absolute Path URL: This is an absolute path URL:<a href=http://www.yourdomain.com/pagename.html>link text</a>. Notice how the HREF specifies the domain and the pagename.html. This link assumes nothing and moves you to the exact location specified in the URL. Absolute URLS don't work in STORE EDITOR because they "boot you out" to the Published site.
I prefer to use relative path URLs on my stores because I like using my CAPTION links to navigate when I'm in the STORE EDITOR.
Good luck writing good CAPTION text and linking pages on your Web site!
Rob
-- Rob Snell / Ystore.com Starkville, Mississippi USA http://www.robsnell.com read my blog: http://ystore.blogs.com buy my book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764588737/sr=8-2/qid=1140275737/ref=sr_1_2/103-4498188-6183843?%5Fencoding=UTF8
Snell Brothers 500 Russell Street, Suite 30 Starkville, MS 39759~~~~~
Lior Noy of GARDENFUN.COM@@@@@@http://www.gardenfun.com~~~~~
LIU & DB Enterprises, INC@@@@@@~~~~~
LIU & DB Enterprises, INC@@@@@@~~~~~
Logo@@@@@@~~~~~
Logo Design conceptuals - Pencils for additional icon@@@@@@~~~~~
Logo Design for Yahoo Stores@@@@@@ See our friend Eric Yonge's logo design portfolio -- Rob~~~~~
Logo design Proof@@@@@@~~~~~
Logo-Design-Guy.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Logo-Design-Guy.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Make it easy to buy@@@@@@~~~~~
Make More Money with your Yahoo! Store@@@@@@
You know you need a good looking, customer-friendly, easy-to-navigate webstore.
You want Yahoo! Store
because it's practically bulletproof, it's easy to create and maintain,
and it's connected to
Yahoo! Shopping
, the #1 shopping portal on
the Internet. That's pretty easy...
Now do you want to spend
years
learning to work with the
Yahoo! Store software to get a good looking store or do you want to concentrate on taking care of your new customers?
Let me help you. I do Yahoo! Stores for a living.
When I'm not working on your site, I'm working on
my sites.
Our company-owned Yahoo! stores and client sites have generated
millions
of dollars in sales
over the past three and a half years, so we know what works. You have to sell something people want to buy,
AND
you have to make it
easy for them to buy it!
That's what you get when we do your Yahoo! Store.~~~~~
Make More with a Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Manipulating Images@@@@@@Finishing
Anti-aliasing
Airbrushing~~~~~
Matt Cutts "Straight from Google: What You Need to Know" PPT transcript@@@@@@
The video is over 46 minutes long (but I prefer to read), so here's the text transcription from Matt's presentation .
I emailed Matt and got the go ahead to publish this. Thanks, MC!
MC's Blog post: SEO For Bloggers
featuring the
video of Matt's presentation
at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 and PPT slides .
Presentation from Google's Matt Cutts -- WordCamp SF 2009 Transcript
"Straight from Google: What You Need to Know"
Matt Cutts:
I was going to
ask how many power bloggers there are, but I think there are a few power
bloggers. How many people are relatively new bloggers, new to
WordPress, your first Word Camp? OK. Very cool.
There is a good reason why
you might care what I have to say, which is I am the head of the web
spam or anti-web spam team at Google.
So 90% of the Word Press
blogs that I see look like this . They didn't even change the
default templates! Bastards!
I am hoping that a PG-13, R
rated talk is OK, because if
Tim Ferris can outsource his love life,
it is OK if I show you guys a few slides here.
Most of the spam that I see looks like this:
(insert ugly default WordPress theme).
Word Press is such a powerful
tool that the spammers use it, too. Right?
So I have seen a lot of really
bad sites, but I have also seen a lot of good sites, and I am going
to try to give you a few tips about things that might be helpful if
you want to get crawled by Google.
First off, though, let me ask
you.
Why do you blog?
To be read? What do you get
out of it? Tim was just talking. He said, "I get access."
I had never thought about that before. I made this list and I
had to update this slide from backstage. I was like, "Oh yeah,
you want something out of blogging. Fame attention, money."
And then Tim was like, "Access! You get to meet the head of
the swim team!" OK. I will add that to the list.
But not everybody wants something
from blogging. Some people are just doing it for fun. And
if you are doing it for fun, power to you! I fully support your
ability to post cat pictures. Yeah! Rock on! I do
it!
This is Emmy my cat.
This picture is what led me to want to adopt, because she is so cute!
Ever since she was a kitten she has just wanted to lie on things.
She was grumpy this morning when I got up. As soon as I get dressed
she is ready to be perched like a koala bear on my shoulder. ...
So it is OK to cat blog.
In fact, we have got two cats and they both like to just...
Half this presentation was with a cat perched on me when I am trying to make the
stuff.
So if you are a cat blogger,
or you like to post poems or you just like to keep up with your family,
congratulations. You are happy. You have won. You
don't need me. You don't need advice from anybody. Whatever
you want to do you are doing it.
But most people want something from their blog. The number one
request I hear is...
"I want to do better in Google."
So if
you are a cat blogger, if you just post poems, power to you. But
the rest of this talk we will talk a little bit about
how to do better in Google.
Now the wonderful thing is
you have all made a fantastic choice. This audience looks smart.
I walked in and thought, "Not only are they attractive, but they are
really intelligent," because you are using WordPress. WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues. Instead of doing
it yourself you selected WordPress.
Now this is kind of a broad
statement.
WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.
When I say that, what I mean is the mechanics of SEO. And by that,
we talk about how crawlable a website is.
You would be amazed at how
many sites throw up a big old glob of Flash or block a page with robots.txt so we can't even crawl it. So by using WordPress, you have
already taken the first big step. WordPress is a fantastic piece
of software.
But there are a few things
you can do to optimize it. I notice a person asked Tim what plug-ins
he uses. So I threw this screenshot in.
These are the (Wordpress) plug-ins that I use:
and that is literally all of the plug-ins that I use.
That is how good WordPress is. You don't need to modify it
that much.
Akismet, already built in.
Cookies for Comments
-- shout out to Dancha in Ireland. He does an amazing job of preventing
spam. Basically it sets a cookie, and then when the spammer posts and
they don't have that cookie, you are like, "Yeah dude. You
are a bot. All you did was just post directly."I hesitate to tell people about
this because it is so useful that if everybody starts using it the spammers
will adapt, but you guys are cool, so I highly recommend Cookies for
Comments.
Enforce WWW. Preference (Enforce www. Preference enforces your yes-www or no-www preference as defined by your Blog URL setting in 'Options - General.')
So
good. You don't even need to worry about it. All this
thing does is it says, "Look at my preference." Do I prefer
www.google.com
or (non-www) google.com , whatever your
domain is?
It does a redirect so you don't have to worry about
having your domain split between example.com and
www.example.com .
So this sort of stuff is fantastic.
FeedBurner Feedsmith , I like to use...
And
WordPress Super Cache
is a great plug-in.
So the beauty of WP is that you don't need to do a lot of stuff.
But before we talk about how you can rank higher in Google, we need
to learn a little bit about how Google works, and it is not that complicated...
Learn a little bit about how Google works:
We crawl roughly in order of PageRank. That means the more PageRank
you have, the faster you are likely to be found, the deeper we will
crawl in your site, and the more often we will visit your pages to see
if they have been refreshed.
OK. Cool. PageRank-magic
green juice. How do I get more PageRank?
What is PageRank?
PageRank at a 50,000 foot view is this. It is the number of people
that link to you and how important those links are.
So one of my favorite examples.
Suppose you have a buddy from college. Suppose you have a blog
and he has a blog. Suppose you have got 10 links pointing to your
blog and your buddy has 20 links pointing to his.
Who has more
PageRank? Well, he has get 20 links. You have only got 10.
But what if your 10 links are the New York Times, the LA Times, Reader's
Digest, CNN.com, and his 20 links are all his buddies from college.
So PageRank is not just getting
as many links as you can. It is also how important they are.
So having high quality content can really make a big difference.
I promise I won't get more technical than this. It looks a little
complicated. I will walk through it very quickly, but it is not
as bad as it looks.
Look at this page right here.
These are links coming into one page. PageRank is at a page level
and these are out links pointing to your blog. If you have got
a bunch of links pointing to your blog, and your blog home page has
a PageRank of nine, and you have got 3 out links, you more or less divide
that nine by three and the three goes out on each of the out links.
That is the basic idea of behind
PageRank. If you look at the top one, this guy has a PageRank of 100.
He has got a lot of PageRank and he has got two out links. So
you take 100 and divide by two because you have two out links, and 50
goes to each one of those. That is literally the idea behind PageRank.
It is that simple.
Now in practice, if it really
worked this way and you had a loop, PageRank would just keep cycling
around forever and ever, and mathematically speaking, the world would
blow up. You don't want the world to blow up.
So there is a little bit of
an additional thing, which is that PageRank kind of evaporates.
It decays a little bit every time it goes across a link. But that
is literally the idea behind PageRank. It is the number of links
you get pointing to you and how important those links are.
Avoid Backlink Obsession (BO).
Now I always worry when I talk
about PageRank, because a lot of people, as soon as they hear about
back links, they are like, "I need back links! I need a lot
of back links! I need 1,000's of back links from thousands of
places!"
This is literally something
I found on the web. This person suffers from what I call BO.
You do not want to suffer from BO, which is Backlink Obsession.
This guy is saying, "I have 297 links with a PR7. This guy has
only got 59 links with a PR6 and he ranks higher. It is not fair,"
blah, blah, blah.
Don't get down to this level
of detail. Think about it at a very high level. You want
to have people know about you and you want those people to be reputable.
So you can spend an infinite amount of time learning about SEO.
But here is the 50,000 foot view.
How does Google rank pages?
You want to be relevant AND reputable.
There is a tension between
being relevant and reputable.
Matt Mullenweg , he has got a pretty
reputable blog. He has got good PageRank. He beats me.
I hate that.
He is like the number one Matt and I am like number
eight.
You think, "Can't you tweak it so you are number one?"
No, we can't tweak it so we are number one.
So he is the number one Matt.
He has got a ton of PageRank. Suppose you are searching for a
random thing like a medical condition such as ADD. If Matt Mull
just mentioned the phrase "attention deficit disorder," and he is
saying it in passing, like just a joke, like "Yeah, I organized this
conference but I didn't spend a lot of time on it. I have got
ADD. But it will be cool. We will have a good time."
That is reputable. His
blog is reputable, but it is not that RELEVANT. So another way
to think about relevance is what you say on your page, and reputable
is what people say about you and how they link to you. So you
want to be both. You want to be on topic and reputable.
So you don't want to just
return pages that barely mention something in passing.
So let's
move to the middle chunk of this, which is,
"How do I be relevant?
How do I be reputable?"
Relevance is stuff on your page; what
you write, including the mechanics of how you write.
Tim pretty much nailed this: If you do not love something, don't write about it. Life is
too short.
Google Wave launched a couple of days ago, and there
was this huge thing on Tech Beam. Everybody is talking about this
new Google Wave thing. There are so many articles.
I saw
where a guy was like, "Will Google Wave take over the world?
I don't know. Here is the press release." Like literally
two sentences and they he copies like four paragraphs from the press
release. No one wants to read that! It is boring.
You have to have something that you care about.
You have to have something, whether it is
cats, LINUX, transparency, Google, open government, search, you have
to talk about something that you care about. If you are not doing
that, you are not going to be doing as good of a job.
One of the pieces of advice
I give is to try to write often.
And if you write often, if you
write everyday, if it is something you really care about, you are going
to get a lot of practice writing and you are going to write good stuff.
SEO Tips: (Use) Keywords.
Let's
do a little exercise. Matt said earlier today that the theme of
this conference is getting to know your neighbor. So we are going
to do a little exercise where you get to know your neighbor.
I am holding in my hand a little
device. You might have seen them before. You stick them
into computers. They store things. Maybe you put your presentation
on it. You give it to a friend. She sticks it in her computer.
Maybe you are proofreading a friend's paper and you take it.
Maybe you put pictures on it. You have all seen these. This
is not alien technology.
Think in your head, if you
were going to go to Google and you were going to type in what this is,
prepare your search query, what is this? What is this device?
OK. I am going to Google. I am going to go buy one of these.
Turn to the person next to you and compare notes. Literally take
a minute and say, "What would you search for on Google and what would
I search for on Google?"
OK, cool. Now you have
gotten to know your neighbor a little bit. So let's hear it.
What did you type into Google to find this? Flash Drive?
USB drive? Thumb drive? What else? Retractable?
So you think, "Oh yeah.
This is a USB drive." Your neighbor thinks, "Oh no. This is
a thumb drive." And the person on your right thinks, "No.
It is a flash drive." And somebody might not even use the word
"drive".
So the takeaway is, if you
were a blogger, think about all the different ways that someone can
describe something. Think about all the different ways that you
can naturally fit that into your post.
Now I am not talking about
saying, "Would you like to buy a thumb drive? If thumb drives
are you, then you would like to get a thumb drive which is really good."
We will see an example of that later on in the talk.
Instead, think about ways to
naturally put that into your post. "Hey! Buy a flash drive.
I was using this one thumb drive that was really cool. It works
via USB." I have used most of my major keywords in a couple
of sentences and it still sounds natural. You don't have to
stuff it. You don't have to be really unnatural.
There is another thing, which
is jargon mismatch.
What (search terms) will your visitors type?
A lot of times, if you are in a particular
industry you are thinking about the words that people are going to use,
and you don't think about what a regular user is going to say.
For example, earlier this week
we were doing a site review, and we were giving SEO advice to people
who had sites. This was a site. This was pretty cool.
This is from the University of California at San Francisco and they
have a site about HIV.
Now what is this? Oh
my God! This is the home page! You land on the home page
and you are like, "Recommendations for use of antiviral drugs in pregnant
HIV-1 infected women for maternal health and interventions to reduce
perinatal HIV-1 transmission in the United States." What is
that?! I don't even know!
Is this a technically good
paper? Probably. I have no idea what the hell it is about!
It is an editor's pick. Someone has selected this paper.
It is important for some reason! This one is about Swine Flu.
Is there something I need to know about Swine Flue and they are not
telling me? I don't know how to translate it into regular English.
Translate it into regular English.
For example, I have seen the queries that people type. This is
the sort of stuff that people type, right?
"Do I have AIDS? I don't know!"
So think about that. Think about, "OK.
What are the things that you can do to type that will be normal?"
Now the interesting thing is
this site had a section called "basics". And if you clicked
on basics, these were the things you saw.
"I just tested positive.
Now what?" That should have been the front page, right?
It is obvious to us, but sometimes
your own site can be like that. You are like, "Oh yeah, I have
got great content! Yeah, this is fantastic stuff!"
But
a regular person is like, "What the hell are you typing dude?
I don't even understand this! Is it English? I think it
is English."
So you would be amazed how
much help you can get just from feedback, just from asking your friends
or just from a regular person to sort of look at this and say, "OK.
Cool."
Brainstorm with the
Google Adwords Keyword tool.
Now there is another tool that
you can use. And in fact, Tim mentioned it. Thanks for stealing
my thunder, DUDE! But it is pretty nice. It is called the
Google Keyword tool , Adwords Tool.
If you search on Google for [Keyword tool] , it is number one. Not
because we hard coded it. We don't do that. It just ranks
that way. A lot of people link to it.
So I was doing this site review,
and there was a site, icarkits.com , and they sell iPod car conversion
kits, which is pretty cool. There main trophy phrase, if you looked
in their title, was "iPod car".
I went to the Google keyword
tool. I typed in "iPod car" and I said, "Show me keywords
related to "iPod car". Have you guys ever heard of this iTrip
thing? It is an FM transmitter. So it is more like a $30
thing. It is to the $400 thing that they sell.
But their trophy phrase showed up 550,000 times a month. People searched for iTrip 246,000 times
a month. So here is this keyword right here where people are looking
for information about iPods and cars, and you are ignoring them.
I did
[site:icarkits.com iTrip] .
They didn't have the word on a single page on their site anywhere.
If you don't have the word on your site, it is very hard for search
engines to return that site.
Sometimes we can. You
can type in the word automobile and we can return if your page has the
word car. We can do that a little bit. But if you don't
have the word iTrip anywhere on your site, you are probably not going
to rank for the query iTrip
Now it turns out that these
guys actually had content about the iTrip. They have an iTrip
trade in program. So you send in your $30 iTrip and you get like
10% off on the $100 kit.
So in the middle of the site
review the guy edited his page. And by the end of the site review
panel he had iTrip right there on the front page. He is starting
to get more traffic already. So think about the niches and the
keywords that you are targeting and put them on the page.
Here is one thing that I recommend:
I like to do a custom structure on my URL's /%postname%/.
If
your blog has p=123, you are missing out on an opportunity, which is
that Google looks at a lot of different things. We look at over
200 things. PageRank is just one of them whenever we rank things.
Other things that we use:
things in the title, things in the URL, even things that are really
highlighted, like h2 tags and stuff like that. So if your blog
has p=123, you are massively missing out on opportunity to put a few
keywords, not keyword stuffing, just a few keywords in your URL.
So Mattcutts.com/blog/samplepost -- it works pretty well. If you want to throw in the date, feel free,
but make sure that you put the title and the keywords in your URL in some way.
Now here is a power tip:
Tweaking titles, urls, content.
I did a post where I completely, for a while at least, dominated the
keywords, "how to change your default printer in Firefox on LINUX."
I was number one. It was awesome! That niche was mine!
How did I do it? Well,
I made a good descriptive title, "Changing the default printer on
Linux and Firefox."
Notice that I changed the URL as well.
So in the title I have got, "changing". In the URL I have
got "change", because sometimes users type "changing printer"
and sometimes they type "change".
Now this is not spam.
I am not throwing in a ton of irrelevant keywords. I am not even
throwing in a lot of keywords. I am just throwing in one or two
variants that people might type.
No one is going to look at this
post and say, "Oh my God! The title is a little different than
the URL! Oh my God! He took out -ing'! Throw him
in the clink!"
That is not the way it works.
But just by doing some simple things like having title and URL, and
viewing them as separate opportunities to put a few keywords in, now
you can rank for both "changing" and "change" .
Relatively simple,
but a lot of people don't think about that level of detail.
So if you are doing a post,
it is worth doing the post, and then going to the Google Keywords Tool,
think about the words you want to rank for, type those words in, make
sure that those words are in your post.
This is a little bit in detail,
but you can also have your categories be good keywords .
Don't
just make your categories like "cool stuff". My categories
are like Linux, Search, and SEO. So if somebody has those categories,
they are like, "Oh, OK." Now I don't have to include the
word "search" on every single post. It is in my category.
If you are going to put keywords
in your URL, like I showed, it is better to do dashes. So "my-keywords".
Underscores can work. Dashes are a little bit better. But
no spaces is pretty bad.
Has anybody seen the site expertsexchange.com?
Some people like it. Some people don't. If expert exchange
were all one word ... You know it can be expert sex change. You
don't want to rank for expert sex change. And if it is all one
word, some people are like, "I read it a different way!" So
put some dashes in there and then you can have separators. Search
engines do look at dashes. They do look at separators like that.
Now if you use underscores
or if you have used spaces up until now, should you go back and change
every single thing on your previous posts? Should you rename them
and change all those old URL's to add dashes? No! Why?
Because of Ferris' law: don't do things if they are not fun.
Search engines do a relatively good job at making separators.
But spend your time on good content. Don't worry about small
things like that. It is just something to be aware of going forward
in the future.
You can overdo it.
And finally, talking about
relevance, we are talking about on page stuff. Don't overdo
it.
This was a site that put itself up for review earlier this
week. Can you guess what it is about? It is about furniture.
It is a lot about furniture. In fact, if you notice, this first
paragraph is all one sentence.
Let me just read the last half of that paragraph:
"Manufacturing and offering for sale innovative
modern furniture and antique wood made according to our valued customers'
esteemed order and requirements of home furniture, home furniture, as
well as office furniture for the use of indoor furniture and outdoor
furniture purposes." Furniture, furniture, furniture, blah!!!!
Furniture!
Google
doesn't say, "Oh my God! He included the word furniture 400
times in the post! It must be really, really relevant. It
has got to be 400 times better than that other post that only mentioned
furniture once!"
That is not the way it works.
After you have mentioned furniture once, two, or three times, we know
you have got furniture on the mind. It is OK! You don't
have to say furniture as every third word.
You also don't need to bold
it. Users don't like this, believe it or not. Other things
that this site did. Rattan; you have heard of Rattan furniture.
At some point they misspelled it as rotten furniture. Yeah, well,
judging from the website, I don't know!
So you don't need to do this.
You can mention furniture two or three times and that is enough.
You don't have to go overboard on it.
So to sum up On-Page:
Being relevant, being on topic, talking about the things you care about.
Find something you care about, and as a result, you will write about
it more often, which gives more material that search engines can find.
And pay attention to the mechanics, some of the small things that I
have mentioned, but don't overdo it. If you are reading it aloud
and it sounds stilted, you are overdoing it. If you give it to
a friend and you notice your friend is sneering or raising their eyebrow,
you are overdoing it.
So that is half the battle.
Now let's talk about how you gain a reputation.
How do you get
to be more known? How do you get more PageRank and more people
linking to you?
Be interesting.
Anybody ever heard of fake
Steve Jobs ? Has anybody bought the book? It is pretty good!
I was like, "This one note gimmick cannot last for an entire book."
It can! It is a lot of fun!
I love this! He is like, "I fired that idiot Jerry Yang." I am like, "Whoa!"
This guy is pretty mean. Now it turns out that this was actually
Dan Lyons. He has got a pretty sweet gig at Newsweek now, so he
did pretty well.
Earlier this week, someone
started a fake blog for Carol Bartz , who is the CEO of Yahoo.
The first post, I was on the floor laughing so hard. I instantly
added it to my Google Reader. I want to see what else they have
to say.
So being interesting is really
important. If you are the guy who is phoning it in and you are
like, "Oh, I want to rank on Techmeme or I want to write about celebrity
news, so I am going to talk about John Mayer and Jennifer Anniston for
the 88,000 th time, and I am not going to add anything new
to it, no new insight." Don't bother writing it. You
want to be interesting.
And again, it helps the more
you write. You get practice. You get into the habit.
Update often
This is a blog by Sergey Brin who is one of the co-founders of Google.
Did you know that Sergey had a blog? He does! He has written
two posts!
I have never asked Sergey about
the blog. On one hand it is cool. He has written two posts.
On the other hand, his last post was September of 2008. People
are not going to Sergey Brin's blog everyday saying, "I wonder if
Sergey wrote something new? Yeah!"
But if Sergey is posting everyday
or every week, people will come and check. They will come and
say, "What is new with Sergey?" So you have to update often.
Now this, I have to admit, is my favorite slide in the entire talk, because I am going to tell
you the real, true deep secret of blogging, and that is Katamari.
Has anybody played Katamari?
What is Katamari?
It is a Japanese game where you play the prince. The prince starts
out and he has got a little Katamari that is five centimeters tall.
And he rolls up things. He can roll up paper clips. He can
roll up stamps and coins.
Eventually he can roll up bigger stuff.
He can roll up gum. He can roll up a wooden block. And when
you are done, you have a Katamari hundreds of meters tall and you can
roll up islands, and the Earth, and buildings. And you hear these
people scream when you roll up the buildings. It is awesome!
I love Katamari! I think a lot of people play it stoned.
I play it perfectly sober. I do!
The Katamari philosophy is
this: start small. Start in a niche where you can do well.
And that might be a very small niche. It might be the, "Change
the default Firefox printer on Linux" niche. But then build
up, build up, build up.
Don't overreach. When you
are the prince and your roll up in Katamari, you can't roll up a skyscraper
the first thing. You have to get their gradually. If somebody
tells you there is a shortcut where you can be the number one gadget
blogger in three days, and you can be in Gadget and Gizmoto, laugh in
their face and send them packing because it doesn't work that way.
But one thing you learn in
Katamari is you are always reaching. You are always trying to
roll up bigger and bigger things. So if you want to be the world's
best gadget blogger, start out with a smaller niche. Start out
with a niche like, "OK. I am going to write about a particular
type of phone." You know, Google Android, or Crackberry, or
the Palm Pre.
And then you can imagine embiggening, to quote the
Simpson's, embiggening that niche. You are writing about more
and more important things and bigger niches.
And eventually, over
time, people get to know you, and you are writing about important things,
and people are sending you links and they are sending you things to
review, and life is good. The Katamari philosophy works very,
very well.
OK. What else about gaining
reputation? Oh, yeah. This is the only slide where I have
like cool dissolves and stuff.
Gaining Reputation
There are so many other ways you
can get links. You can provide a useful service.
There is
a law professor. His name is Eric Goldman and he is a "blawger".
Have you guys heard of the "blawgers"? They are law bloggers.
He writes posts about how people
have Adwords trademark policy. And not everybody cares about that.
But he has got his niche, and it is really useful, really insightful,
because he is a law professor. He knows things that regular people
do not know. So you can provide a useful service, things like
a newsletter.
Original research and reporting
is huge. There is a guy who writes about search. His name
is Danny Sullivan . He is very respected because he has written
about search for 10 years.
And one of the things he did was he
just looked at, "What are the spam levels on Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail?"
And for a month he tracked all of the spam that he got, which would
be the most annoying thing in the world to do. But he tracked
it. And at the end, at 30 days, he was able to say which service
had less spam. It was Gmail. Woo-hoo! Yay! But
that was great original research. Anybody could have done it.
Anybody could have counted their spam folder and done that analysis.
Have people heard of Louis Gray ? He is a great blogger.
One of the ways that he got
to be known is he looked at his referrers. Referrers are your
search engine logs. This is like web logs, where people are coming
from, where they are visiting from.
He just noticed some strange
user agents like Read Burner or stuff like this. And then he was
like, "What the heck is Read Burner" And then he did a blog post
about it. And two days later, the people were like, "Yeah, we
are making a totally new service. You found us out." And
he did that like three times in a row.
So just by looking at the bots
that were visiting his site, he was able to do some really cool stuff.
And from there, he just hustled his butt off, which I respect a lot.
Lifehacker . Anybody read
Lifehacker? I like to call Lifehacker productivity porn because
you spend more time learning how to be productive than the actual productivity
that you get. But you read about productivity all the time.
It is so cool. Like Merlin Mann and these guys. The fact
is Lifehacker saves you a ton of time because they have these really
high quality tutorials and guides.
Creative niche.
If you
have one good idea, that can carry you so, so far. Lolcats anyone?
Rock on!
I have made lolcats . F My Life .
One sentence . You should seriously search for all of these on Google and add them
to your Google Reader. It is like the best way to burn time in
the entire world.
F my life is just all these people who have sex and then their grandmother walks in and stuff.
One Sentence is just like they write one creative sentence. It is really, really fantastic.
Some people can draw. Penny Arcade , they can draw.
XKCD, the guy can't really draw ,
but he is really funny and he knows a lot of science and technical stuff.
He found his creative niche.
Open source can be a fantastic way to get links and reputation. Write a good project and people
will use it. Case and point, WordPress. Tons of people
use it. WordPress doesn't need any PageRank. It has amazing
amounts of PageRank.
Live Blogging. Anybody Live Blogging this? All right. Cool. So you guys are probably
going to get three or four links automatically while the rest of us
are just sort of sitting back and enjoying ourselves, because you are
actually writing about what is happening in this session. If you
can make it to a session you can Live Blog it.
If you are lazier
than that, two days later you can say either you hated Word Camp or
you loved Word Camp.
People love lists, so if you give 11 reasons
why Word Camp ruled...
Create controversy.
If you cry wolf too often, if you have too
much negative energy, people don't like to read you as much, but it
is something you can do. And Twitter, Facebook, Friend Feed; there
are a lot of people who get to know all these people on various social
networks and it can make a big difference.
I had the pleasure of speaking
at Word Camp 2007, and one of my funnier favorite lines was, "Should
you do a podcast?" Everybody who is doing a podcast is probably
downstairs listening to the other session.
Make a Video
The Litmus test I said was,
"Should you do a podcast or should you do a video?" Well,
put your picture up on Hot or Not, and if you are a six or higher, then
you should do a video. If you are a five or below, then you should
do a podcast.
[laughter]
I already said this was a very
attractive audience, so you guys should all do video. The fact
is, these days a Flip is a couple hundred bucks and you can make a video
in two minutes, and it can be as creative as you want.
Podcasts are fantastic.
I would really recommend making videos these days, because it is not
that much harder to make a video than it is to make a podcast.
And a lot of people really enjoy just sort of watching this stuff.
This one got 15,000 views in like a day, and we literally threw it up.
This was one Tweet. It was like, "Hey, here is a video."
We haven't even posted on the blog about this. It is really
easy to do video and it can draw a lot of attention to your site.
And in fact, videos tend to rank relatively well on Google.
OK. I will whiz through
this part. I do not want to sell you guys on anything. I
use WordPress rather than Blogger, so I am not going to like say, "Google
is the top. Always use Google. Go for Google." But
there are a few tools that you should know about. I will show
screenshots of the first three.
Google tools can help.
Google Website Optimizer .
So
you have already heard about the idea of A/B testing. If you are
really that into power blogging, you might want to try different templates
and see if certain ones have better return on investment and if certain
ones give you more conversion, and there is something to let you do
AB testing.
You can get a free site search .
And here is a tip that very few people know that use AdSense: ( Section Targeting )
You can use these two tags to mark out the meat of your blog post.
<!--google_ad_section_start --> and <!--google_ad_section_end
-->.
And then AdSense will target
the meat of your blog post and it won't target all of the frilly stuff,
the boiler plate, the archives, and all that kind of stuff.
So
if you use AdSense, I highly recommend that you add these tags around
your post, because your ads will get more targeted, people will click
on them more, and you will probably make more money.
Let me show you a few quick
screenshots.
"Free" links - google.com/webmasters/ ...
I did a post on my blog that a lot of people ended
up reading called, "Free Links! How to get Free Links!" which
everybody would like free links. We have something at Google.com/webmasters
that will show you the 404's on your site and who linked to them.
So for example, the link in
purple, ie7/promo-page, which you seen in parenthesis;
Jeremy Zawodny ,
who was a blogger at Yahoo and now he is at Craigslist, linked to my
blog and the link was broken.
Jeremy has got a lot of PageRank.
It might be worth dropping Jeremy an email and saying, "Hey!
Do you want to take that parenthesis off?" And now you have
got a free link to Jeremy Zawodny because he had already linked to you.
He had just linked to a 404.
So this is a completely free
service. You can use it and find out about all kinds of people who are
linking to sites or pages on your site that don't really exist.
One more quick thing about
google.com/webmasters/ . We will give you all kinds of crawl stats.
So for example, this is how much time Google spent downloading pages
on your site. You can see it took a huge drop down. That
is because I changed my theme and it does better CSS handling.
So you can see the amount of changes and the amount of stuff being downloaded.
All this stuff is free. It can be pretty handy and help you diagnose
issues.
Google also lets you set whether
you want to have
www.mattcutts.com
or mattcutts.com , which is kind of
handy.
Here is a quick tip:
(Create)Evergreen content - Google Analytics.
Anybody use Google Analytics? Here is something you might not
know about Google Analytics. You can click in like settings and
top landing pages and this will tell you which blog posts get the most
visitors.
This one about
hacking your
iPhone , anyone want to guess when I wrote that? 2007. I
wrote this blog post in 2007 and it is the number six page on my site.
What does that tell me? Maybe I should go back and update that
post because everything in it is probably wrong. Or maybe I should
write another one.
Here is another one.
One of my top ten posts is, "
Three solid Gmail productivity tips. "
It was a total throwaway. I was like, "Oh, OK. People
don't know this so I will throw it up." They love it!
Maybe I should write five more Gmail productivity tips.
So when you are sitting on
a blank screen and you are thinking, "I really should blog something
today. I haven't blogged in like two weeks," you can get some
good ideas about what to blog just by looking at where people are already
going on your page.
What about bounces? Yes!
So bounces tell you how often people land on your page and then leave.
If people come from Digg, they come on your page and then they leave.
So if you try to reduce the amount of bounces, that can mean more people
on your site, which can mean more ads. It can mean more revenue.
It can mean more clicks and all that sort of stuff.
A very simple trick, which
I haven't done on my newest template, is show related posts.
Someone has just finished reading your blog. It was a great article.
They have a warm happy feeling towards you. What do they do now?
They leave. Why? Because you didn't give them anything
else to do! Show them related blog posts. IF there is one
blog post and they liked it enough to read down to the bottom, they
might click and read some more.
So that is like the simplest
way in the world to reduce the number of bounces, which leads to more
people on your site for longer periods of time.
FeedBurner is kind of nice.
You can tell where people are coming from, how many visitors and stuff
you are getting.
I have got about five minutes
left, so let me just finish with some things that you should probably
NOT do.
Avoid shortcuts and scams.
This is an email that I got in September 2008. It
is, "Be a lazy Google millionaire!" Here I have been working
at Google for nine years and I could have just filled out forms and
collected my cash! If only I had known!
If something looks too good
to be true, it probably is. Has anybody heard about this Google
Money Tree thing? Consumer reports just wrote about them.
The Better Business Bureau got 478 complaints about them and the last
460 haven't even been responded to.
"Learn how to make $107,389 filling out forms and doing searches on Google and Yahoo."
I call bullshit. This stuff is not endorsed by Google. It
is incredibly spammy. What tends to happen is you pay $3.88 for
access to something and you are secretly enrolled in a program where
every month you are billed $72 until you opt out. That is what
is usually going on with these money tree systems.
So you see these things and
people are like, "Oh you make tons of money! You can't help
to make money! You are too stupid to tie your shoes and you make
$107,000!" People still fall for it just because it has Google
in it or it has Google on a potted plant. "Oh well it has got
to be from Google!" No it is not from Google. Don't
do this sort of stuff.
Avoid paid posts.
One thing I love about WordPress is Matt and Automatic in the terms of service for WordPress specifically
say don't spam. Don't do things like paid posts. It
pisses off your users. It tends to get caught pretty quickly.
And right there in the terms of service, "Don't do things to third
party sites that would boost the search engine rankings and that sort
of stuff."
Security: Please keep your WordPress updated.
The one plea that I would make,
the one ask that I would have, is please keep your WordPress updated.
We have just barely got enough time to show an example of that.
The American Nazi Party. Is anyone in here pro-Nazi? Any big fans of the Nazis in here? I didn't think so.
I tend not to be a big Nazi fan myself, so I thought it was really funny.
This is hilarious, by the way. Evidently, for Nazis, put in a
bunch of eights and your comments are like way cool. Like, "Ah,
you are a much better Nazi than me! You have eights in your comments!"
But I thought it was hilarious, because if you go down to the bottom of the Nazi Party archives, oh,
no! Maridia, Hoodia, Cheap Cialis, Cialis for Women. I didn't
even notice they had Cialis for women! Ah, man!
And so you have this dilemma.
Who do you hate more? The Nazis or the hackers who have hacked
the Nazi's website?
[laughter]
I don't know. It is
an issue.
But it happens, and the best thing you can do to try
to avoid it is make sure that you have done good security yourself.
So in particular, there is
this really cool site called Save the Internet. They fight for
net neutrality and all this sort of stuff. But earlier this week,
if you went to blog/wp-content/uploads/authors/pletal.html, you can
buy Viagra from this Canadian pharmacy. And it has got to be trustworthy.
It is the number one Internet drug store!
Thanks to WordPress/Automatic!
It is very simple. WordPress has gotten much, much better security. There are automatic
updates. All you have to do is take advantage of them. And
if you are a super power user and everything you have heard up until
now has been completely boring, you are like, "Oh, I know that,"
here is one power tip.
Security tip: add .htaccess in /wp-admin ...
What this says is only these two IP addresses are allowed to reach your
/wp-admin. So when the hackers come in and they are trying to
use some brand new zero data exploit, they can't get to your blog
to hack it.
If you search for like protect
/wp-admin or htaccess, and I will put this up on my blog as well, it
is a fantastic thing to say, "Yeah, you know what? Only I can
get to my blog."
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 123.45.67.89
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 123.45.67.98
</LIMIT>
Let me close out by just saying
a huge thanks to Automatic and WordPress.
I was looking back
at my talk from 2007 and I had like six things on my wish list.
Three of them were already done without me even asking for them.
Automatic updates for security, better protection for /wp-content/directory,
and rel=canonical.
I haven't even talked about rel=canonical
because you really don't need to know about it. It is a standard
that lets you say, "Given two web pages, here is the web page that
should be the preferred web page in Google."
And the folks at Automattic
have basically built this in. It is already live on Wordpress.com.
As I understand, in the core of 2.8 it is coming as well. So you
don't have to know anything about it. All you need to know is
that you will do better in search engines because you won't be dividing
your PageRank between multiple pages.
So the Automatic folks and
WordPress folks have been fantastic about being receptive.
That is it! -- MATT CUTTS
the end -- r
...~~~~~
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Export "Orderable" products only (this will eliminate
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costs, tax, and international rates)
Helping write your trade terms
Tweaking your site to register high with the search engines
Submitting your site to the top 8 search engines
Helping write a Yahoo! description and submit it to Yahoo! directory,
Maximizing the Yahoo! Store navigation tools
Creating additional internal links to make your site easy to use
Advising on the marketing of your site
Complete training on your Yahoo! Store.~~~~~
MESSAGE (Front Page Element)@@@@@@This is a simple caption field. You can place regular html in this field as well as text.
Separate paragraphs with a blank line. This generates two BR tags.~~~~~
Mevoi@@@@@@~~~~~
Michael Whitaker@@@@@@http://www.monitus.com/~~~~~
Mike Whitaker, Monitus.com Yahoo Store Developer / Programmer@@@@@@http://www.monitus.com~~~~~
Monitus Tools (Keyword a Day, Transaction Assist Report)@@@@@@http://www.monitus.net/~~~~~
Monster Cable Speaker Wire Store@@@@@@ Monster Cable Store Monster Cable Store by WWElectronics is a premier factory authorized internet retailer of Monster Cable products and accessories. Family owned & operated, our goal is to provide all of our customers with an easy, convenient, and comfortable internet shopping atmosphere for all your monster cable & speaker wire needs in which we can serve all of your electronics shopping needs. Our company roots have been involved with the forefront of the consumer electronics industry for over 10 years.
About Monster Cable:
Monster Cable ® Products,Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of cables for audio,video,home theater,car,computer,satellite,and custom installation.
Monster began manufacturing premium speaker cables 21 years ago. Monster has since grown to encompass several different new divisions that manufacture and market a variety of superior quality products including Monster Game ®,Monster Power ® power conditioning solutions,Entech ® audio and video components and Monster Sound ® loudspeakers. Monster products have become an indispensable accessory for music lovers,audiophiles,recording studios,sound professionals,musicians,custom installers,computer users and home theater enthusiasts throughout the world.
~~~~~
More Yahoo Store Tips & Tricks - This is a link to the actual Yahoo! Store search results page.@@@@@@http://search.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/nsearch?follow-pro=1&vwcatalog=webstore-design&catalog=webstore-design&query=Yahoo%20Store%20Tips%20%26%20Tricks%21~~~~~
most st louis@@@@@@Who-is-the-most-beautiful-woman-in-St-Louis.html~~~~~
My most successful client sites ...@@@@@@...have been projects where I participated in the entire process on a weekly basis over the first 13 weeks or so of a new store. I have recently changed my "business model" to reflect this. I work with about 10 folks at a time, and instead of being Joe Fixit for more and more Yahoo! Store clients, I now offer this turnkey service to a limited number of long term clients and it's really catching on!
First, we help you target a specific niche in your industry. The most important aspect of starting a web-based business is FOCUS. Pick a profitable, popular niche to focus your business on, but not one too broad, or with too many competitors. We put together a list of targeted keywords, and I search for marketing opportunities on the Net.
Next, we help you pick the right products. We make sure that enough people are looking for what you want to sell by testing the popularity of your search terms in the various search engines. I also suggest a list of product categories and the specific brands you can focus on to maximize your business.
Finally, we help you prioritize based upon your interest, price point, margin, competition level, or internet opportunity. There are usually several breakout subcategories in a single Yahoo! Store that would be worthy of their own Yahoo Store, so doing this now gives us leads on the next few quarters' worth of projects, and there's enough time before the 4QTR 2003 to get ready for that Christmas sales spike.~~~~~
My Toy Smart@@@@@@~~~~~
NAME (Front Page Element)@@@@@@This calls the NAME-IMAGE graphic which is uploaded to the VARIABLES section.
Load Speed Trick #26 : Use the NAME on the front page instead of or in addition to the IMAGE. If the NAME-IMAGE loads when your customer visits the front page, it will cache this image in their browser.
All this means is that they don't have to download the NAME-IMAGE on every other page they visit. The surfer's browser just recalls the NAME-IMAGE file from it's memory.
This will save 5-10 seconds for that first product page to load, as well as brand your site while the customers is waiting for the rest of the graphic elements to download.~~~~~
Neca@@@@@@~~~~~
Netscape's Website Garage@@@@@@http://websitegarage.netscape.com~~~~~
NEWS! 10/10/02 Yahoo directory listings & search results just radically changed!@@@@@@ My phone is ringing off the hook again. They changed the way Yahoo.com search works.
They did it last year about this time. It's nothing really unexpected based upon tests we've been seeing Yahoo run for the past 6 weeks or so, but several marketing paradigms just shifted. Seems to happen about every 6 months or so these days.
Yahoo search results are now pretty much the same as GOOGLE, which means GOOGLE is 3x as important as it was about a year ago.
What do I do? You still need good content (articles, long descriptions, lots of info) on your website, great title tags (ask me!), and links from popular, reputable web sites. And NO spamming!
In other words, it'll be harder to be #1 for "exact keyword phrase", but much, much easier to be well ranked on Yahoo! for hundreds if not thousands of medium and small count keyword phrases. One of my sites had something like 50,000 unique words & phrases used to find the site when I did a keyword sample for a quarter of so last year.
Yahoo directory listings are now LINK POPULARITY generators instead of traffic generators. Since Y! makes SOOOO much more money off of OVERTURE PPC sponsored results than they do with their $299 a year listing fee, and since most people treat Yahoo as a search engine rather than a directory, why not use the best search engine technology around? Enter Google...
Yahoo! becomes a much, much better search tool, so that's good for the longevity of Y!
The change may help you, or hurt you, or even a little of both, but likes always, it's adapt or die!
-- Rob~~~~~
No long term commitment@@@@@@30 days and you're out. You can~~~~~
No Name@@@@@@~~~~~
No Name@@@@@@~~~~~
No Name@@@@@@~~~~~
Not expensive for the benefits…@@@@@@$100/Month for up to 50 products, $300/Month for up to 1000 products, and $100/month for every additional 1000 products.
Most intermediate computer users can build and manage their own Yahoo! Stores so no programmers or IT departments needed.~~~~~
NYC!@@@@@@East coast dates: coming soon in 2006. -- Rob~~~~~
nycfactory.com@@@@@@~~~~~
ORDER ON AMAZON : Building a Yahoo! Business For Dummies@@@@@@http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764588737/sr=1-1/qid=1139356210/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-9316914-0179869?%5Fencoding=UTF8~~~~~
PajamasSeenOnTV.com@@@@@@~~~~~
People come across your site sideways@@@@@@~~~~~
pix7@@@@@@~~~~~
pix9@@@@@@~~~~~
Please Answer These 10 Questions To Help Me Improve Next Week's Webinar@@@@@@After you answer the questions, REGISTER FOR WEBINAR . Thanks! --
BTW -- A few folks emailed me and couldn't see the form in the iframe. I bet I coded something that works on the MAC but not on the PC in IE9 or something. Here's the original form:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dHRLQUN2NmJRN1lUQlA5TngyWGRuWnc6MA
Loading... ~~~~~
Poor Man's RTML (or Using the TABLE Inside the HEAD-TAGS field trick...)@@@@@@This is a what I call a table wrap page because it's two tables wrapped around a Yahoo Store.
The code I used to generate it is at the bottom of this page. I used Overide variables on NAV-BUTTONS (deselected everything) and PAGE-FORMAT (to side-buttons) to get the YAHOO PART to be aligned to the left.
-- Rob Snell
P.S. Personally, I'm more interested in the commerce part of e-commerce than the e part. This is not "legal" html, but it works really well with Yahoo! Store without mucking about with the templates and RTML.
Ask me about my 2 week-old Halloween marketing site getting 2500 people a day from a single source of traffic -- a well-written Yahoo Business Express listing! Yahoo rocks! ~~~~~
PORTFOLIO@@@@@@porofweb.html~~~~~
Portfolios and Art Cases@@@@@@~~~~~
Power Hour Notes@@@@@@~~~~~
POWERPOINT@@@@@@http://edit.store.yahoo.com/lib/webstore-design/0000powerpoint.ppt~~~~~
Practical Sports@@@@@@~~~~~
Promomento@@@@@@~~~~~
Pubcon 2008 "17 Things You Can Do To Make More With Your Online Store"@@@@@@
PUBCON 2008, Las Vegas – Edited Transcript
Moderator:
Great. Thank you. Now we have got a lot of very interesting experts that speak, from the East Coast suits to the West Coast surfers. This is Rob Snell, who brings the twang to search engine optimization and e-commerce.
[applause]
[SLIDE: intro]
Rob: Thank y'all very much. My name is Rob Snell and I am from Starkville, Mississippi. I have been doing this for a long time. Today I am going to walk you through 17 different things you can do to make more with your online store. Now, I am a retailer; I grew up in retail. My parents started a retail company in 1972 called Gun Dog Supply. When I was in college my brother and I started selling comic books out of our dorm room. We opened up five retail stores and transitioned to the Internet. In 1996, Petsmart opened up in my parent's neighborhood right across the street from their store. My folks were about to go out of business, because most of the time when Petsmart would come in, retail stores would take a 50% hit. And this is how we got on the Internet. My mom said, "I don't know if you know anything about selling on the Internet, but you need to find out because we are about to get on the World Wide Web." And we did.
In 1997, we put our business online. We found Viaweb, an online store builder that got bought out the next year by Yahoo! Store.
[SLIDE: Yahoo! Store]
Rob: I love Yahoo! Store; I cannot tell you how much Yahoo Store has literally changed the fortunes of our family. I make 10 times as much money as I did before Yahoo! Store. So again, thank you, Jimmy.
[laughter]
Yahoo Store is an online store builder and it is really easy for retailers to use. One of the problems we had before when we got into e-commerce was that every cart we looked at required me to be a programmer. I was an art major and I could design websites, but everybody wanted me write scripts and deal with the CGI-BIN. I didn't know anything about programming. Like I said, I was a graphic design guy. So, imagine how happy we were when we found Viaweb -- it was so easy. You upload your product pictures, you type up your item text, you change a few things on the Variables page and BOOM, now you have an online store. We started that in 1997. A few months later , Paul Graham, the guy who invented Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store) called me up and said, "Man, I really like what you are doing with your parent's online shop. Would you like to be a Web developer?" I said, "Cool, but, uh, what is a Web developer?" He said, "You can do the same thing you did for your parents for other retailers." And then, I found out that I was actually more interested in the online marketing stuff than I was in the retailing stuff. So my brother took over the retail side of the family business and I started doing e-commerce development and consulting. This is where Snell Brothers comes from.
[SLIDE: Snell Brothers]
I have been doing this for a long time. Like I said, it was late '96 when we started looking and early '97 when we got started. Ever since then I have been writing about e-commerce, speaking about e-commerce, doing Yahoo! Store seminars. I write a blog sometimes.
[SLIDE: Blog]
About three years ago the Dummies folks called me up and said, "Hey, do you want to write a book? Yahoo Store for Dummies?" Sure! This book came out a couple of years ago. Right now it is about 60% obsolete thanks to the features Jimmy and his team keep cranking out. I am going to have to rewrite another book, but the marketing information in there is still pretty good.
[SLIDE: Congress]
The highlight of my career was getting invited to testify in front of the United States Congress this summer about the impact that the Internet has had on small business, specifically how search marketing has changed the fortunes of small business folks. I told the guys in Congress, "Just don't mess it up. Search marketing is working great. Please don't mess with it."
[SLIDE: 1 change increased our conversion rate 20%]
About four years ago we made one change in our company philosophy and that decision increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy. We used to just offer products and let people make their own decisions about what they wanted to buy, but once we actively expressed our opinions online, sales went up. People are busy. They have a lot of choices. They don't want to have to wade through all this information. For example, one of our Yahoo! Stores -- Gun Dog Supply -- is a company that sells training supplies for hunting dogs. My brother actually uses the products that we sell. So if you have got a Pointer and you do field trials in Texas, or if you have got a Springer Spaniel and you hunt upland game in the mountains, we sell what your kind of folks are looking for. And we're REAL retailers. We are not a drop shipper. We are not folks who just put something in a box and ship it out. We actually use the products that we sell. Real retailers can leverage this to your advantage. Here is an example of a product that we sell.
[SLIDE: Example Review]
This is an online product review that Steve wrote. We sell 1600, 1700 different products. Some products are better than others for specific situations. Once we realized that directing folks to what they actually needed instead of letting them have to wade through all that other stuff, our sales went up.
[SLIDE: Thing 2 -- Give folks enough info to decide for themselves]
The second part is giving folks enough information to decide for themselves. I am going to recommend that you need a Sport Basic for training your pet to stop jumping up on your kitchen countertops. But if you don't believe me, you can go through the information on our Website and our buyer's guide and actually find out for yourself and make your own decision.
[SLIDE: Example Buyer's Guide]
This is an example of a buyers' guide. I recommend that anybody with multiple categories of products write a buyers' guide for every single major category on your website. You basically just guide folks through the lay of the land- through that product category. You teach them what they need to know and you say, "If this is your situation, look at this product. If you are in a different situation, then look at this different product."
[SLIDE: Buyers' guides = 50% higher conversion]
Buyers' Guides work! With buyers' guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer's guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer's guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. Buyers Guides also work with PPC or paid search traffic. In my paid search ads, when I use the content from a buyer's guide as a landing page rather than just a generic section page of manufacturers, I have a 50% increase in conversions over typical landing pages. Show your prospects that you are an authority on what you sell and customers are more likely to buy.
[SLIDE: Thing 3 -- Write unique product descriptions]
The third thing that I recommend folks do is write unique product descriptions. Google likes unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, but Google loves unique product descriptions.
[SLIDE: Garmin screenshot]
If you notice here, we rank number three and four for one of the best keywords for us, Garmin Astro, a new product that came out last year. We haven't done a lot of link building for these pages -- some links came from the manufacturer, but these rankings are mainly from having page after page of new content on this new product line which draws links. Normally when a company releases a product they take some stock photos and they have their marketing department write up some copy. It is usually the same text in their sales brochure. What most folks do is they take this manufacturer copy and they literally copy it and paste it into their store. This just drives me nuts. If you want to see how many people are cutting and pasting, you can actually look at one of your competitors who just copied and pasted from the manufacturer. Go to Google and do a search for the first sentence in that manufacturer's description and put quotes around it. What you will see here when you search on Google for the first sentence in the Garmin Astro is that there are 1,770 other pages on the Internet with that content. These people suck.
[SLIDE: MANUFACTURER COPY: 1-10 of 1770 Lazy competitors]
I mean they are lazy! It is lame. When you are shopping online, if you go to store after store after store and they have the exact same thing, the boiler plate from the manufacturer, and then you go to another store where they have a picture of the guy actually using the product and talking about it like he knows what he is doing, who do you think is going to get the sale?
[SLIDE: You have this]
This is our product page for the Astro. You can tell it looks a little different.
[SLIDE: And this]
Here is some of the content. People ask me, "Great. I have got to write unique content, but how much content do I have to write?"
[SLIDE: Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price]
This is my rule of thumb. I want you to write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You go, "Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?" That is what my brother would say. You wouldn't say dang.
[laughter]
How do you get folks to get this content? What I will do is I will lock my brother in a room. I do not let him go outside to smoke or to pee until he gives me his content.
[SLIDE: Thing 4 -- Play 20 Questions with every product -- Who ? What? When? Where? Why? How Much?]
We play 20 questions with every single product. What I recommend is that you start at the top with your best selling products and you work your way down. Originally he just said, "Well let me just start with the A's and I will work my way through." I said, "Dude, no way. Start with the best sellers. And if you only have time to get four or five of them done, by that point you have actually accomplished something and you will most likely see big increases with your search traffic." Here are some examples. This is more like 200 questions. As yourself, "What is a customer concerned about when they buy this product? Is this product going to solve their problem?" Uh, Shirley, don't take a picture of that.
[laughter]
I spent hours on those questions! Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. There are hundreds of different questions you can ask. I literally have over 200 questions that I can any product through and ask. Examples: "Is this product right for the job? Is it overkill? Compared to the manufacturer, are their equal alternatives? Is this for professional use or amateur use? Why should I buy this one?
Why should I get this one from you? Are there any third party reviews?" I have tons of these questions. Here is another screen shot of a word document where I have got these questions. Answer these questions on your Website and it's great for SEO. It is amazing how many keywords you naturally use while writing these product descriptions.
[SLIDE: Thing 5 -- Capture killer content any which way you can!]
Capture killer content in which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Steve is the guy, during hunting season; he is out in the field doing research. He is riding around Texas with his shotgun with some of his hunting buddies in the back of a pick-up truck. He is always doing research and development. One of the reasons he goes out in the field to hunt and run his dogs is so that he can tell our customers and the manufacturers what is good about specific products and what needs work! Photograph everything. Here is a shot of Steve on the back of his truck with Em, one of his best bird dogs. Just looking at this photo, I can see 10 different products that we sell in the background. Why is this important? Well, a customer of ours looking at this picture knows that it is not some supermodel in a studio somewhere with a model dog. This is real. He is just like them – he's actually in the field using this stuff. Here he is putting some boots on Em's tender little feet so when she runs across some cactus she is not going to bleed to death. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don't't want to carry a professional digital camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I have an iPhone. I take pictures of everything. We record everything. It is amazing how much content you can get just walking around. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.
[SLIDE: Thing 6 -- Convert audio assets into text]
Next, I convert the audio into text. Search engines need text. They can't really index audio. Yet. What I do is I email an MP3 that I rip from that video to a buddy of mine. I have no idea where he lives because I got him from Mechanical Turk, an Amazon service where you can outsource things. For $1.50 a minute he will actually listen to that MP3 and transcribe it for me and email it back to me. And he has got a three-hour turnaround time. I have shared him with some friends of mine, but I think he is all booked up now.
[laughter]
[SLIDE: Thing 7 -- Leverage ALL manufacturer content *]
You can also get content out of manufacturer's videos. Sometimes products ship with a DVD; like an owner's manual or a guide on DVD. I can actually get the content out of those and use that on our website as well. Leverage all manufacturer content.
[SLIDE: *It's easier to get forgiveness than permission:]
This comes with a caveat. I am not recommending that you break the law. I am not recommending that you violate somebody's copyright. But for me, it is easier to get forgiveness than it is permission to use a manufacturer's text and images to help sell their stuff through my online store. Here is some copy that I stole from Innotek that basically says, "You can't do this" on the bottom of their website. Well we sell millions of dollars of their products. They are never ever going to say, "Hey. Quit using our product shots on your website." But if you need to, ask permission.
[SLIDE: Make manufacturer images your own]
What am I talking about as far as using manufacturer content? Well they give you stock images, right? If you want to look like everybody else, use their stock images. If you don't, pimp them out a little bit.
[SLIDE: > your product image]
All of the stuff that is in this image right here came from Garmin that we basically remixed into these product photos. We take our own product photos as well. Where else can you get manufacturer content? Well look at the packaging. If you are a drop shipper, sorry. If you are a real retailer…
[laughter]
[SLIDE: > Box copy]
If you are a real retailer, you have a warehouse, and you have the products, there is text on the packaging of these products that is nowhere else in the world. Go get the box. Get somebody to type it up. Stick it on your website.
Also, use the point of sale materials manufacturers provide for retail brick and mortar stores. We don't really have a "store" store. We have a warehouse where folks can come in and buy stuff. But any time a manufacturer releases point of sale materials, I say, "Yeah, send me that." Those cards on that display, down there? We'll remove them, scan them, and put the content on the Website. Do whatever makes sense for you.
[SLIDE: > owners manuals]
Owner's manuals. They're great! A lot of these companies provide PDF files of owner's manuals instead of a printed one. Sometimes manuals are online and indexed in the search engines. Sometimes they are not. There are tons of images in there. Grab product images, graphs, tables, diagrams, comparison charts, etc. – all these things that you can use on your website. Again, it's easier to get forgiveness than permission… But we don't go to jail, ok?
[SLIDE: > Press releases]
Press releases. These companies send out press releases all the time. They actually do a pretty good job of writing up what this stuff is about. Now this text is probably duplicate content, but you can put text from these releases on your website and it actually helps you sell stuff.
[SLIDE: > Extract flash]
Flash. All these big boys like their Flash Web sites. Ugh. The thing I like about Flash is that there is unique text hidden in those Flash movies. Now the search engines are getting a lot better about indexing Flash, but they pretty much still suck at it. There is good information hidden inside these Flash movies. Transcribe those as well.
[SLIDE: Link building SUCKS]
All right. I love SEO, but link building sucks. I am not patient enough to build links. I just don't have what it takes to do that.
[SLIDE: Thing 8 -- Promote your new content for traffic & links]
When you develop content like this, your new content will actually get you links from authority sites. Here is an example.
[SLIDE: NYT Web article with link]
Right before Pubcon last year we got featured in the New York Times. I don't know if y'all have ever heard of that paper or not out here. They were doing an article on Garmin and the new Dog GPS technology. One of the best things you can do when you are selling stuff for a manufacturer, you want to let the manufacturer know that you are doing a good job pimping their products. Email your sales rep or the marketing VP copies of your buyer's guide, copies of your reviews, copies of your product descriptions, copies of the pictures that you take on your website. Sometimes the marketing folks will hook you up with some PR folks and you will get some real coverage. We got a link from it. If you will notice in there, there are two other billion dollar companies: Bass Pro Shops and Cabela's do billions of dollars a year in sales. They don't have a link. Gun Dog Supply in Starkville, Mississippi? Yep. We've got an NYT link.
[SLIDE: Thing 9 -- Blog to build content and links]
Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. With the dog stuff most of our content is actually on the website because I want the customers to see it immediately.
We just started doing an external blog, Steve Snell's Gun Dog blog. We basically take email questions that he has answered, his content, and we repurpose it to the web. Now I am not going to quote a guy's email without their permission, but I can rephrase the question. I got 1,000 pages in a word document once I exported Steve's sent emails. He sends 100 emails a day answering customer questions. The more of this kind of information you can actually put on your site, the fewer emails you are going to get, the fewer phone calls you are going to get.
[SLIDE: Thing 10 -- Support the orgs that your customers do]
Support the organizations that your customers do. This is an awesome way to do SEO, to support your community, to make your customer's really happy, because you go to the websites that they go to and you buy ads – either links or banners. OK. So you want to support the organizations that your customers do, but how do you find out which ones those are? Ask your customers! For example, on another project I have I sent an email to any customer that had ordered more than once. I said, "Hey, I have some advertising dollars. I want to do something that is going to support your local organizations. Do your favorite local organization have a Website because want to advertise." The next day I got 342 responses from folks who wanted to let me advertise on their website. I was overwhelmed with the response. You can use your email marketing list for this.
[SLIDE: Thing 11 -- Make vendors link to you!]
Make your suppliers link to you. I call this Vendor Links. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or else! Linking to is almost a condition for doing business with us. A lot of wholesalers will have dealer's pages where they list out all the various dealers.
[SLIDE: Garmin Blog]
Romance your suppliers for links and content. Here is an example where Steve took some of the guys from Garmin out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it. He got featured in the Garmin blog and we got a link, which is really nice. We are also listed in their dealer's section. All right. This is the part that is more about the geeky SEO, PPC conversion stuff, which I am more interested in.
[SLIDE: Thing 12 -- Collect Converting Keywords]
Collect converting keywords. The most important thing that I learned, and this is thanks to Yahoo... In the original Viaweb way back in 1996, Paul Graham had it figured out. Every time you got an order, you would get your merchant order confirmation email. And in almost every email, it would tell you what the referrer was, how the customer found you, the Web site they came from, and (if a search engine) what the converting keyword was. So the second you placed an order on my website, I would get an email from Viaweb, now Yahoo Store, that would say, "Hey. This guy searched for dog training supplies and he bought these things."
1997 was when I got obsessed with converting keywords. Right now on one project I have got almost 20,000 unique converting keyword phrases. On another project I have got about 11,000. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect baseball cards. I collect keywords.
[SLIDE: Yahoo Web Analytics]
Use Yahoo Web Analytics In April 2008, Yahoo bought IndexTools. Again, thank you Mr. Jimmy. I have been using Index Tools for four years, which is now Yahoo Web Analytics. YWA beats Google analytics hands down. If you are not using it you need to take a look at it if you have an e-commerce site. It is now included in most Yahoo store packages I think. Jimmy: Just not in the starter package. Rob: OK. It is awesome. YWA is more like a three dimensional look at your customers, where Google analytics would be like two dimensional. You can actually do ad hoc reporting. I don't want to do an ad for Yahoo Web Analytics, but I love it. If you have any questions… ask. I just shot some videos with Avinash, the Google Analytics dude, about this with the Market Motive guys. YWA is great. For example, these are some converting keywords. I just ran a quick report and did a screen shot so everybody could see. For example, this is a product called Tuff Foot. These are converting keywords that folks searched for on a search engine, landed on our Tuff Foot product page, and then ended up buying. I had to chop this info up a little bit so you could see it. Look at all these different phrases that converted. If you will notice there are lots and lots of different phrases. Different customers spell things differently. It is just amazing to me.
[SLIDE: Thing 13 -- Optimize for transaction assisting keywords, too!]
Optimize for transaction assisting keywords too. What are those? I remember an Overture slide from about four or five years ago where they said that folks would search 13 different times before they would actually buy something. One of the problems with analytics is that they will only show you one or two of those keywords out of the 13. So you are missing out. Folks are searching for stuff and you have no idea how much they are qualifying their queries before they get to your website. Monitus.com has fixed a lot of this with their TRANSACTION ASSIST REPORTS. My buddy, Michael Whitaker, is the guy who wrote a tool that allows Yahoo Stores transaction information to be passed to Google Analytics. OK. I do Google, too. We have Google analytics on our Yahoo Stores as well. Here is an example of the transaction assist report where he shows you all the keywords that lead to an order. I have blown this up so you all can see this in a real keyword phrase that just happened a couple of days ago. You can see at the bottom hunting dog is stuck together in a search for "huntingdog coats" plural. The little red dot in the report means that "huntingdog coats" is not in the text on our Website. I have no idea how this came up. Google probably suggested, "Did you mean "hunting (space) dog coats?" Then they searched again a couple hours later for "hunting dog coats" (singular). Then they searched for "hunting dog vests" and placed an order. What that tells me is that I need to go to the hunting dog vests page and make sure that they word coats is on there. So we did that.
[SLIDE: Thing 14 -- Put ALL converting keywords on the page (including long tail)]
All right. Put all your converting keywords on your page. Now everybody knows basic SEO. Remember from that slide earlier. Tuf foot was number one. Tuff foot with two F's was number two. Tuff foot for dogs was number three in terms of converting keywords. Well you are going to put those in your TITLE tag. You are going to write a unique Meta description using those words. You are going to have those keywords in an H1 tag, which is what that red text is. You are going to have those keywords in the body text. The report that you saw a minute ago was probably for like the last six months. This report is more like a year. 75% of the revenue from that page came from the top three money keywords. Tuf foot, tuff foot with two F's, and tuff foot for dogs. But 25% of the sales came from 39 different, more specific, unique "long tail" keywords. I am sure you have heard about the "long tail" all week. When I look at two different lengths of time; it looks like I have gone from 75% of my sales being from the three words to more like 50%. So I think now 50% of my sales are coming from long tail because of this optimization that I did in the short term. In the past year or so, more and more of my sales of this product have come from long tail searches.
To rank for these long tail keywords, the words need to be in the text on your page. The easiest way to do that would be to cut and paste a list of dozens of converting keywords on each page, but that's spamming. That also telegraphs your best words to the competition. I want a list of all the unique words that make up all the converting keywords. First, I paste ALL the converting keywords for the Tuff Foot page into a text file. Then I delete all the words contained in my top phrases: "tuff foot" with two F's, "tuf" with one F, and "for dogs") because those words are already all over the page. What's left is a list of words unique to those long tail keywords, but somewhat redundant, so I alphabetize and de-dupe that list to come up with a much, much shorter list. Finally, I make sure that all those long tail words are used somehow, somewhere in the text of the page. The words don't even have to be together, they don't have to be phrase matched. But when you have the words on your page you are much, much, much more likely to get free search engine traffic. All right. Add keyword modifiers to the page text. Remember when we boiled that list down, we de-duped it and alphabetized it? Well, these are modifiers in that list: buy, discount, free, online, and shipping. The funny thing is that these words would apply to any product that you have on your website. For example, you could stick the word "buy" or "free shipping" or "discount" in front of almost any other converting keyword and you would want to rank well for those keywords, too, right?
Let's look at the Google, but first, remember to log out of Gmail or other Google accounts and delete your cookies so you see what everyone else sees -- raw Google searches not affected by your past search history. Here are some examples: Remember a minute ago customers were searching for "dog vests" and "hunting dog vests?" I did a Google search yesterday for "discount hunting dog vests" and we were number one and number two. If you look in the snippet on the search engine results page, the second line says, "Buy online with confidence when you order discount retriever blah, blah, blah." I also searched for "buy hunting dog vests." Here we are at number one and number two. And then I did another where I said "hunting dog vests online." OK. We are not number one and two. We are actually number three and four. One of my competitors has online in his domain name and he is going to outrank me for anything with the word online.
[SLIDE: Thing 15 -- Add keyword modifiers to page text]
I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different business, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the web page. Ask me later. I have got some good secrets that I can't share over the microphone on how to do that. Buy me a beer…
[SLIDE: Thing 16 -- Ten Little Thumbnails]
A lot of folks will have a category page with a picture, a headline, a small text description and 10 thumbnails with text links to products or sub-categories. Here's an example: When Google crawls this page, this text from the Google Cache shows what Google sees; the text in the headline, the text in the description, and the text in those links. I want more on my category pages. I want to show snippets of text from the product description and list the different items contained within subsections. With Yahoo Store it is really easy to write RTML with custom templates that will do this, and you can also do it by hand. Different store building platforms can do it as well. If you are a competitor of mine and you are using just ten little thumbnails, my category page is now competing against your product page. Category pages typically have a lot more pagerank / link juice than product pages, so they rank higher, and with text snippets most of the converting keywords now show up on the category page.
[SLIDE: Thing 17 -- Survey your customers]
One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, which is the free customer survey software, on our website. I love 4Q. Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics guru partnered with this company. Basically what they do is they don't look at your information individually, but they aggregate it so they have got overall trends. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions.
Page23 They ask, "What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?" Basically it allows you to go through and see information about not just what your customers are doing, which is what Analytics does, but why they are doing it. It was amazing to me how many people were not coming to the site to consult a review. On another site that installed 4Q, on the first day I learned that 80% of the people were coming to the site to check prices, which told me that most of the people coming to my site where discount shoppers and that was extremely important. The thing I like most about this is not how your satisfaction scores are. The thing I like most about it is this report that you get. I went in and colored the different sales. If someone says they did not complete their mission I colored it red. If they did complete their mission I colored it green. You probably can't see this, but it is amazing the actual raw information that folks will give you if they know that they are anonymous. Most of the problems that the folks have on the Gun Dog site is that we are out of stock on something. So I go to my buyer and I say, "Dude, do not run out of stock on these products."
[SLIDE: E-commerce? It's a jungle out there]
All right. E-commerce. It is a jungle out there. You want to show your expertise. You want to express your opinions, maximize your SEO and SEM, and you want to spoil your customers. Just ship the damn box, OK? Thank you all very much.
[applause]
(c)Copyright 2008, Snell Bros. LLC. All rights reserved.
~~~~~
PUBCON 2009 E-Commerce Optimization@@@@@@ PUBCON 2009: How I Doubled My Conversion Rate - Presentation Transcript
Ecommerce Optimization: "How we more than doubled our conversion rate"
By: Rob Snell- SNELL BROTHERS- robsnell.com
My name is Rob Snell. I am from Starkville, Mississippi and I have been selling online since 1997.
Today I want to talk about our family business. Just to kind of give you an idea of where we fit in the food chain, we work on about 100 different projects. Our stores that we own will do around $12 or $13 million this year. For some folks, that is a lot. For some folks, that is nothing at all. But that just kind of gives you an idea where we are coming from.
What I am going to talk about today specifically is how we more than doubled our conversion rate on our family business, Gun Dog Supply, over the past four or five years.
This is a little bit about me. I wrote a book, "Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies," which is basically Yahoo Store for Dummies. It came out four or five years ago. It is available online. There is still some pretty decent information in there.
If you want these slides or more information on what I am presenting today, if you go to Robsnell.com, my website, and click on the "Read this first", I have got tons of links to tons of free content. I love to give this stuff away. I love to share information- Robsnell.com.
Yahoo! Store
I have been on the Yahoo! Store platform since before it was Yahoo! Store. It was way before Paul came around. In 1996, we started looking for a way to get online. In 1997, we opened up a ViaWeb store. And then in 1998, you guys bought ViaWeb. So we have been on the platform a long time. And I have poked around. I have looked at other solutions.
And I have kind of dabbled in other things, but I always come back to Yahoo! Store because, for me, it has been the highest converting online store builder that I have run across.
Homepage
Today specifically, though, I am not going to talk about all kinds of different things. I am really going to focus on what we did on our website Gun Dog Supply.
Now, Gun Dog Supply is our Yahoo! Store, like I said, that we started in 1997. We basically took my parent's business online. They started in 1972 selling training supplies for hunting dogs. And we were in the situation where we had to get online because we had Petsmart moving in across the street from us, and we took a 50% sales hit with our offline sales in our brick and mortar stores. So mom said, "Get us online."
Who You Are
One of the ways I think that differentiates us from other retailers who sell exactly the same products that we sell and our company is who we are. We are not just another retailer. If you can optimize who you are, your experience, the things that you know, these are things that a competitor cannot go to your site and view source and see how you are doing things. It is very difficult for competitors to copy you when you are doing things that are just intrinsic to your DNA.
Catalogue
Now like I said, we have been doing this since 1972. I am a second generation dog supply sales guy, believe it or not. On our site, we put pictures of our family members using the product. This is my brother in the upper left-hand corner there, Steve. Our tagline- "We train our dogs with the products that we sell." We are not just a place that is selling dog supplies.
We are actually selling solutions to people's problems.
Like I said, we have been doing this since 1972. Here is a picture of Steve with my dad back probably in the ‘70s. We started off as a catalogue company back in the ‘70s, and then morphed into a bricks and mortar store. And like I said, then Petsmart came across the street, and that is when mom said to get us online.
The other thing is Steve has 13 dogs. He is just like his customers.
He is not just some guy who found some keywords online and said, "Hey, here is a high revenue per visitor. I want to sell these things through a dropship company."
We actually have dogs. He uses the products that we sell in the field.
Here are some pictures from a recent trip we made to Texas. Steve is actually living the dream. He does research and development about six months out of the year. That is what he tells his wife-research and development. He has got his dogs. He is in Texas. He is out there hunting.
He is having a good old time; "research and development". And man, our research and development budget keeps going up and up. I don't understand it!
How You Do Business
How you do business is another asset that you have that you take for granted that is different from how your competitors do business. This is an asset that you can leverage.
One of the things we do, we are very customer service oriented. These are things I take for granted.
Like I said, I grew up in this business. I assume that when a customer needs something, you take care of them. I used to be working on a project at two o'clock in the morning or something in high school and the phone would ring, and I would take a catalogue order over the telephone so my parents wouldn't wake up. I mean we are really into taking care of our customers, and this pays off, but you have got to give yourself credit for it.
One of the things my dad didn't do is he didn't toot his own horn. He assumed everybody was like this and he didn't want to come off as being an expert or telling everybody how great he is.
Well, when somebody comes to your website for the first time, they are not going to know how great you are or what a good job you do, so you need to toot your own horn. You need to be self-promotional.
On our site, we push people to order by telephone. Paul caught me. We were doing a test, and on that screenshot, we were trying a smaller 800 number. And yes, it did not convert as well as a big 800 number. I like big, big, big things. Big, big 800 numbers, big, big "add to cart" buttons. So I am busted. I have to go fix that.
These are three of the little informational bugs that are pushing some of our customer service issues, and Paul talked about the order by phone. One thing that I said last year really kind of got me in trouble with folks. And I apologize to the dropshippers; you are real retailers. I said that you weren't.
But one thing that differentiates a retailer that actually has the product is that they have more control for customer service reasons. They can look on the shelf and see, "Hey, I have got that widget in stock. I can ship it today." It can go out today. Whereas, if you are drop shipping, you are at the mercy of your supplier for doing that.
But most of the things that we ship out, 99% of the orders that come in, ship the same day we get the order. And a lot of my clients are like that, too. These are old school guys. They understand that you have got to get that damn box out the door today. People want their stuff. And folks are blown away by just being competent. I mean, just by a retailer being competent and actually shipping the order, and people get stuff in two or three days, they are blown away and they tell their friends. Now this really helps.
The other thing is free shipping. We have free shipping on orders over $125 and free shipping on certain products. That is one of the most powerful promotional tools that you can use on your website. We have to do it because our competitors do it. All of our competitors have the same map pricing that we do. All of our competitors have basically the same offers that we do. But if you don't push free shipping, people aren't going to know. You want to push that on your site.
One of the things our competitors does that drives me nuts is they will give you free shipping, but if you decide you don't want it and you ship the thing back, they are going to charge you the amount that it would have cost for you to get the box in the first place, which I think is kind of skanky.
I recommend having a "Why shop with your company" page. I set this up about three months ago. It is now one of our most popular pages. In this, I just outlined with bulletin points what makes us different from our competitors. This is one of the most important things you can do for conversions.
What you know
Another aspect that you have that your competitors don't have is what you know. I have some former employees of mine go off and try to do what we are doing. And the funny thing is they may sound like us and they may look like us, but they don't have 20-30 years worth of experience in the field using these products, and it shows. Once you talk to somebody for five or 10 minutes, they are going to figure out that you know what you are talking about. And I want you to leverage this product knowledge that you have to the Internet.
1 change instantly increased our conversion rate 20%
We made one change on our website that instantly increased our conversion rate across the site 20%. And it wasn't changing one little button, and it wasn't changing our logo or anything.
About six years ago when my dad passed away, we went about six months and our sales plateaued. The two had absolutely nothing to do with each other. What had happened was that all of our competitors had basically gotten online.
In '96, '97, we started looking to get online. We were one of the first dog supply retailers for hunting dog folks that got online. And by 2003, everybody showed up to the party. I mean we had 50-60 people who had the exact same product descriptions we had, the exact same pictures that we had, and that is where our loss of growth came from.
And so, my dad, like I said, he did not want to come across as being an expert, even though he was. He knew more about dog training supplies than anybody I have ever met. And we made this one change. We made the decision to make Steve the spokesmodel, my brother, for the site, put his face on there, and take a position.
Conversion Rate Conversions go up
This is our conversion rate over about a 12 year period, and you can see here at the beginning, conversions, they kind of jump up a little bit on the left side of the graph. That is when we had virtually no traffic. And when you have a little bit of traffic, it is really easy to get a decent conversion rate.
Well, I went to Web Master World and I learned a whole bunch about SEO. And man, I started driving some serious traffic. You will see that in just a minute on one of my other graphs.
And so my conversion rate went down a little bit as I got tons and tons…I am talking thousands more visitors per day to the site, some of which was relevant traffic, some of which was not. But about two-thirds of the way through the graph, you can see our traffic had pretty much stabilized as far as growth, but our conversion rate went up.
And this is like probably four or five years ago. You can see how our conversion rate, this is a rolling average here, has more than doubled. And it wasn't just changing one thing. It was making these local changes to the website.
That was, we told folks what to buy.
Tell folks what to buy
You probably offer hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of products. When somebody is looking to buy what you sell, they don't want to wade through all this crap. Tell them what to buy. Tell them what is going to fix their problem. And that is what my dad had a problem with, taking a position. He didn't want to offend a manufacturer. Well, my brother is not afraid to offend the manufacturers. He will tell you, this product rocks, this product sucks. And it works.
Recommend products that solve your customer's problems
"Tired of losing your dog? STEVE SAYS: Buy this tracking collar!"
When you call him on the phone and you have a problem, he is going to recommend the one specific product that you need that is going to fix your problem. If you are tired of losing your birddog when you go hunting, he is going to say, "You need to buy this specific dog tracking collar." And you need to leverage this type of conversation that you have with customers to your website.
Express your opinions
Express your opinions. I talked about this a little bit. We sell hundreds and hundreds of different types of dog training collars, dog tracking collars, and regular collars. This is the only electronic training collar that Steve will use, a new collar that just came out. He says it on the website.
Man, the manufacturers who are making the product he used to use and recommend, they are freaking out. And I am not saying his endorsement is going to change the industry, but it changed our sales. The product he used to use, the sales went down. The product he uses now, the sales went up. And I am going to talk a lot more about that in a minute.
Share product knowledge
All right. Share product knowledge. This is awesome. Once we figured out if we say, "Hey, your dog is barking. You need to buy this." "Hey, if you don't want to lose your dog, you need to buy that." "Hey, if your dog is running into the street and he is 100 yards away and you need to stop him, you need to get this."
Write Buyer's Guides
We started writing these buyer's guides and telling folks what to buy. And we noticed in our analytics that folks entering our website on a buyer's guide page had a 50% higher conversion rate than folks entering on a typical category or section page.
And I was looking the other day; entries on product pages are terrible, because by that time, folks have already made up their minds what they are going to buy and they are just price shopping you. You want to get them to come in on those pages where you actually have a chance to help them get what they actually need.
Content drives more traffic
Opinions provided since 2003
All right. Creating all this content is awesome for traffic. Google loves this. We have been providing opinions in terms of buyer's guides, reviews, beefed up product pages since 2003. And this is a traffic graph here. And you can see that we are just getting more and more traffic because of this.
How do you do that?
-create compelling content
-record everything
-
So how do you do this? Well, I am going to give you some specific examples of how to create compelling content. When Steve does that in the field, I am following him with a camera, with a movie camera, or with a digital recorder. I am creating content right now.
I am going to give this to my transcriber tonight when I get back to the room. He is going to go to the FTP location that I set up. He is going to take the MP3 file.
He is going to download it and he is going to type it up. He is going to send it to me in a Word document. I am going to go, "I can't believe I said that in front of 200 people! Holy cow!" I am going to turn that into content. I am going to put that on my blog. I am going to take it and actually edit it down into some really good editorial content. But the secret is always be creating content. And once you kind of have a corporate culture for doing this, it is really easy to do.
Here is an example of us out in the field about a year ago. These pictures were actually taken by the third generation in our family who is getting into dog supplies, Sam, while we were actually on a photo shoot. I didn't know he was doing this. And the funny thing is, about a third of his photos actually trumped mine, and Steve ended up using his pics instead of mine, so I think I am on the way out.
Record everything. If we are riding in the truck going somewhere and I have got a video recorder, an audio recorder, or my phone, I am asking Steve what I call stupid questions. "How do you train a dog how to sit?" Well he just says, "Blah, blah, blah, blah." I don't even listen to him. I am just recording what he has to say.
And I send it to my good buddy in Alabama which I found on Mechanical Turk, which is an Amazon service which is a way to get people in other lands to type up your audio files for you. I am paying $1.50 a minute, though, because this guy will turn stuff around in about 1 ½ hours, 2 hours for me. I mean he is serious about getting this stuff to me. I thought he was off like in Shri Lanka or somewhere. It turns out he is about 30 miles away over the border in Alabama.
Anytime you are in the field, anytime you are using the product, anytime you are talking to customers, record this content. If you keep having the same conversations over the phone with folks, put that stuff on your website.
And here is an example of when I went out to Texas taking pictures with Steve.
"Steal" Manufacturer Content
One of the most important things you can do is liberate. The manufacturers do a great job of creating all this awesome material, but they do a terrible job of getting it up on the web.
And it is easier to get forgiveness than permission. I am not a lawyer. I was an art major, so you might want to talk to your lawyer before you steal anything.
Owner's manuals liberate content in PDFs
Content in PDFs. Garmin is awesome. They put just tons, and tons, and tons, and tons, and tons of information inside these PDF files, most of which aren't online. If you are the first place that gets this PDF online on your domain, Google thinks you wrote it. You get credit for it.
Transcribe DVDs &
videos
DVD's and video that comes with the product through the website has tons of information. You can transcribe this, turn it into text, put it on your lower level web pages and get some good results with that.
Box copy-repurpose product packaging
We also repurpose product packaging. People spend a lot of money; manufacturers spend a lot of money developing these point of purchase materials and these boxes for typical offline stores. Well there is a lot of content that is on the box or in this display that you can't get anywhere else. And when you are retailer, when you actually get the product, sometimes you get this stuff. So get somebody to type all this information up and stick it on your website.
B ut don't be lazy (like the competition)
-Write unique product descriptions
Don't be lazy. I want you to use what the manufacturer gives you, but don't be lazy like your competitors. I want you to write unique product descriptions. And you will hear me say that in every single session that I ever speak in. I reuse this slide. I have been reusing it for five years.
You need to write unique product descriptions. Here is why.
The manufacturer gives you a great product description. I take the first sentence of it and go search on Google to see how many people are using that. So I search for, "Tired of searching for your hunting dog in tall grass or dense cover?" There are 1,770 lazy retailers. They suck!
Do a search for that particular product's name brand, Garmin Astro. We rock, right after the manufacturer. Now you are not going to beat the manufacturer for their brand name and for their product name, or, sometimes you can. But if you write your own content, you are going to get more links. People are going to see that, "Oh. He is different from all these other sites."
Write Buyer's Guides
Write buyer's guides. I am actually going to show you some stuff that is not quite ready for primetime.
We haven't deployed it yet. But this is where I am going, and this really helped us come up with a way, as a company, to approach new product lines.
We have a three step approach when writing a buyer's guide. We basically come up with a "Steve's Picks", and then we explain the content, and then we come up with some sort of widowing tool, whether it is hard-coded in the page or it is actually some sort of widget or something like that, that actually walks folks through like we do on the telephone.
Steve's Picks. What he will do is he will take 5-7 different scenarios which apply to most of the customers, and he will actually pick a product. He will say, "You need to pick this." And we spent tons and tons of time on this chart in trying to figure out which products actually apply to most situations.
The thing is that figuring out what the categories are, the features that people need to know about, that is one of the hardest things. Because when I come to a new product line that I don't know anything about as a consumer, I don't know what I don't know. Do I need the kind that has got Bluetooth? Do I need the kind that has infrared? What do I need to know before I buy a wireless keyboard?
Explain Concepts
Explain concepts. I talked about that just a second ago. You basically want to tell folks what the features, what the concepts behind that are. Why do you need to know about range? If you are just training your little dog in the back yard, you probably need a 100 yard range. But if you are training a big running birddog, you are going to need a multi-mile range.
"Help me choose…"
"Help me choose…" If somebody doesn't believe you and they say, "OK Steve. I am going to do exactly what you tell me to do," and they have kind of gone through these concepts, we actually walk them through different scenarios where they kind of self select, and we put them into buckets to where we take them to the product that they want.
In this example, we say, "Do you want to train your dog or do you want to stop your dog from doing something that is a problem? And if barking is the problem, you don't even need a training collar! You need a bark collar."
And in this, he gives three examples of what he uses. He takes a position, he states his opinion, he gives information, he says, "This is our best seller" and sends folks there, that is the one he used to use, and the he also says, "Hey, we sell other brands, too. If you don't want to buy just what I am selling, go look at every single thing that we sell."
Write killer product reviews
All right. So now I have talked all about this creating content, and being who you are, and leveraging that to the website, and how you do business, and you are like, "Oh my gosh! I am out here in the thick stuff! How am I supposed to do this? I have tens of thousands of products, or I have hundreds of categories that I am supposed to optimize for. How do I go about creating this content?"
In this picture, what Steve doesn't know is there is a rattlesnake about 10 yards in front of him he is about to jump.
I want you to write one killer product review. All right? Pimp one single product. My brother trains dogs, right? Well, I finally got my brother trained to write content.
I am at PUBCON and he is actually at the office when a new product comes out last year, and he actually stops and writes this buyer's guide. I am going to use this example here.
This is the SV-1825. He actually went in and wrote a buyer's guide that was the companion piece to the product page. And in this buyer's guide, he went through all the steps that I talked about before.
He talks about who he is, he tells people what to buy, he says, "I have been using collars for the last 11 years. I have been looking at 50 or 60 new systems, but this is what I am using now." He says, "This is what I am doing." He has an opinion. He says that he thinks this is going to change the industry because this new manufacturer is going to make old manufacturers actually step up and do something. He shows what he knows. This is product knowledge. He actually walks around with the product and he says, "You can use it one handed. You can change levels.
You can use it as a multi-dog system."
And like I said, folks don't know what they don't know. You need to tell them, "These are things you need to consider when you are buying these types of products. And he says, "These are the four things I look at when I am trying to sell an e-collar." And he has explained the product and the features.
All of this is in one single product review. This is not a buyer's guide. This is one product review. He goes into the different options to where if you have an exception, like, "If you have six dogs, you might want to do this.
If you have a deaf dog, you might want to do that."-in this one product review.
And then he gives you more and more information if you want it. And it is kind of like a newspaper article. I remember in high school being taught how to write newspaper articles. And you want it to where folks can read the paragraph and get the whole story. But if they want to read more, then in the second paragraph, OK, they get a little bit more of the information, but they can stop there and they are fine.
And our product pages and our product reviews are like that, which we have links back to the products as well as "add to cart" buttons all over the place in these things.
Here is an example of what we call "mo pics", which are more pictures of the product where he has actually got a ruler and he shows you how big the thing is. I got the "add to cart" button on all these additional photos. This shows you what information you get with the product. This shows you all the accessories that come with it.
Be Real
You just need to be real. So many folks are just taking a data feed and they are uploading it to these online shopping carts, and they are wondering why their conversion rates are low.
If you actually act as a real person and care about your customers, and tell them how you do business, you are going to get much higher conversion rates than your competitors.
And that is me. Thanks.
Session 1 Question & Answer
Question: I am wanting to hear what you guys think of a lot of the shopping comparison agents. I know there is a ton out there. There are a lot that vary from ones that are all based on pay-per-click, ones that combine the categories and stuff like that. And then there are some free ones, like Google has their Froogle product. I found a good one that I like, too, called thefind.com. I am not sure if you guys are familiar with that or not. I wonder if you guys have any tips on how to get into these things like that for newer people, what kind of success you have, and things along those lines.
Rob: These are extremely expensive places to sell stuff. And you notice they are cost-per-click. I am going to pick on Yahoo a little bit. Yahoo jacked their rates in the fourth quarter, like newspapers do when it is like the football anniversary issue or Michael Jackson dies, or whatever. I mean people charge what they can get.
As a small business retailer, I don’t have the resources to manage every single product in each one of these CSE’s, and so a lot of times we will rely on feeds and set like a really low cost-per-click. But we get virtually no traffic from them.
Google is really important and they have changed the way they work. You need to find somebody who knows something about that to make sure that your products are included in this free Google product. And we are just kind of getting our little toe into that.
But overall, it is just so expensive.
Man 1: I would probably echo that. I think it is incredibly costly for new merchants starting out, because typically, all they know at that point is, “This could be a good source of traffic for me.†I would not encourage anybody to start until they know what their conversion rate is. Have they fully optimized that conversion rate before they turned this on? Because you don’t want to pay for traffic to come to your site only to be turned away by your less than 1% conversion rate. So you are going to want to know your conversion rate and know what your profit margin is. And at that point, you can choose to make an investment.
I think they are wise for certain people. There are some management tools that are out there. Single Feed is one that comes to mind. Brian Smith writes a great blog called Comparisonshoppingengines.com. I would recommend going to that site and reading up on it.
It is incredibly powerful when you have enough data and you have analytics in place, and you can decide which products you should be listing and which products you would never want to list. Low margin things-never list. High margin things-well, only if it is truly not competitive.
In terms of what Yahoo does, we automatically submit to Google Base. We actually let The Find come and pick up our merchant’s product feed as well. So if you can hook up with a shopping cart provider that does some of that automatically, you are one step ahead of the game. But the best results come from when you optimize that feed yourself.
Woman 1: Froogle, because it is free and it is going to boost your rankings overall, is definitely a must. I mean it is free as far as the listings, but aggregating all of your information and everything and making sure to get it in there is the tricky part. But it is well worth it.
But as far as all of the other pay per click shopping engines, it is a point of frustration for myself and probably a lot of other etailers, because they do raise their rates. They did the same thing to me at Halloween time. Because I am in the Halloween category, they raise the rates right when I can even try to make any money on it. And then at that point, they bid against me on all the regular pay per click engines. So it is like a double whammy-you get nailed twice for it and the conversions are just not there.
Question: I am just curious. This is about e-commerce optimization. I haven’t heard anything about AB testing or multi-variant. Do you do that?
Rob: Yeah, absolutely. I have just gotten bigger lift on our site working on the buyer’s guides and really specific product reviews. I have done Google Website Optimizer. We did a free trial with…I don’t want to say who it was, but it is $5,000 a month, and decided not to. I just did another non-Google website optimizer test and implemented their results and nothing happened.
One thing I want to add onto that is that when you are doing an AB test, if you are doing an AB test where the control is the way it is now, and the B is the variant, make a little bitty copy and send 10% of your traffic to a copy of the control, and that gives you a great idea of how much the test is causing drag on your shopping cart. We saw a 10% decrease in conversions of folks who were waiting for this JavaScript to render the test.
And I mean I have tried different cart buttons and it is really frustrating, because I go to all these panels and I know these guys know what they are talking about. But I think most of the time in optimization, what I am learning is that my “add to cart†button that I have been using for 5 years really works, and different elements like that really work for us.
Woman 1: For me, it has been hard to do AB testing because I am such a huge seasonal business. About 70% of our business for the year is done in two months. So if I am testing something, I have to react in like days; I have days to react on it. So it is very tricky for me, but I do test a lot of different things just like everybody suggests. Things like little tedious color changes, word changes, different things that cause me from sleeping at night. And I try to do everything, but it is particularly a challenge for me because of the seasonality of the business. Like, something that worked for me in October is not going to work in November anymore. It is definitely a challenge, but something that I still try so hard to pay attention to and make builds for next year.
Man 1: As an e-commerce solution provider, I am actually a big analytics nut. I think that is kind of the next wave-making that understandable to merchants.
AB testing is tough in the segment for the majority of our merchants. They don’t have the amount of traffic to generate tests over a short period of time. I was working with a company that tested with Rob, because their promise was they could actually optimize with much less traffic. And it looked like it was going to be really well suited for the type of traffic levels that are clickable for a Yahoo! Store merchant or a smaller e-commerce player below 50 million.
The results are kind of still out on that, but we would love to investigate it. We just added Yahoo Web Analytics. So we know the data is there. Website optimization is the next frontier. And automating that optimization is ultimately where I think the market is going to head.
Rob: Let me add one thing to that. We tried something with our cart on Gun Dog. We went from a three step checkout where we had a cart that was separate, and then a shipping info page, and then a billing page with a click to order button. We switched to a one page checkout and our conversion rate, dropped carts, stayed exactly the same to two decimal places.
In these four or five different ways we have tried to do multi-variant testing, I have seen like 5-8% improvements in these models. I mean little bitty things like that. Adding the words “best seller†to your top 100 best sellers, that will increase your conversion rate on those products more than any other test I have ever run on my site in the past four years.
I used to be a consultant and developer. I have pretty much retired. I still have a few clients. It is like I will go into a store and they will have something like a little bitty “add to cart†button. It is like their parking break is on in their Ferrari. I look like a genius by just coming in and taking this one thing, fixing these one or two headshot problems that they have, and they go, “Oh my gosh!â€
So I just think if you implement all the best practices that you know of, at that point, you can start experimenting with offers. I don’t think changing one button is going to be the difference in the world on a big store with 2,000 products and 10,000 pages and millions of visitors a year. We weren’t seeing that as far as our testing.
Question: I am also in a niche market like the two etailers on the stage. I have been in business a long time. I love creating unique content. I am very familiar with my subject. I am passionate about it. I am not just selling something to sell. And I agree `100%. It has always been great up until maybe the last 12 months, what I am seeing. And it has got to be frustrating you, and I am wondering what your response is now.
Amazon is Amazon, but they have got to be selling the same products that you are selling now. And even this morning, Zappos is talking. They are going to own…they are getting out…
So what are you doing? You are educating your consumer. But so many people are more familiar with the Internet now. They are opening up another tab in IE, and they are doing the best price search, and you are losing that customer, even though you have educated them. You have basically sold them the product, but you are losing them on the price.
Rob: It is the same thing that his happening in brick and mortar stores. People go into a guitar store, hold the guitar, play it, say, “Hey, I like it,†and then go order it from Musician’s Friend. It is driving small Mom ‘n Pop’s out of business there.
I think you need to do value adds. I didn’t have enough room in my presentation to go into some of the other content that we have created. But nowadays, you can buy a Macintosh and you can have a video production facility on your desktop. And one of the things that we have not finished implementing yet is creating this content in such a way to where we can package it with what we sell. Because about 10 years ago we realized, these manufacturers keep doing this kind of stuff to us, and they are going to sell the products to anybody is going to sell it…people sell for cost plus a dollar. What do you have that someone else can’t go get cheaper somewhere else? And that is you and what you know.
So create an additional “How to use a dog tracking collar DVD†and stick it in the box. You manufacture your own products. Anything you can do to differentiate yourself from those competitors, you have to do that.
The other thing is go on Amazon. Put your products on Amazon in different ways and direct folks to your website. I know you can’t technically do that, but if your Amazon username is your domain name and you can link to your content…
And I am not saying violate anybody’s terms of service, but if they go, “There is a lot more content over here,†you actually can migrate some folks over. And people will be loyal if your prices are somewhat competitive.
Woman 1: What we recently started doing with Amazon, it is called Amazon Product Ads and it is our whole catalogue on Amazon, and it looks like they are buying from Amazon, but it comes right back to our website. It automatically sends people to the Yahoo! Store. So they can look at Amazon all they want; they are still ending up on my site.
Rob: And Amazon is going to charge you 13%, 14%, which is…I don’t get that net!
Woman: No, it is 13 cents per click.
Rob: Really?
Man 1: Now, be careful with Amazon Product Ads because we have heard reports of duplicate content issues from developers that have implemented it.
Rob: And do a remix version. Do I light version of your content. Keep your Holy Grail content. Like my dog training buyer’s guide, my dog tracking collar buyer’s guide-that is not going anywhere else but on my main domain. But in your feed, you can control what fields get added to a feed. Don’t put all your content on somebody else’s site, because they might have a domain with higher PR and higher trust than you.
Question: How big a role does email play in terms of getting this content out?
Rob: On some of other our projects, we actually do a lot better with email. There is a lady sitting in the front row who knows email a lot better than I do. Her graphs look like a comb. You can tell when she sends emails out because it is “Shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop.â€
But we had 500 orders last month from one email that we sent out with one of our clients. So it really depends on what you are selling. A lot of the products we sell don’t have a lot of repeats.
Woman 1: [inaudible-crosstalk]
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Pubcon 2009 Yahoo! Store SEO@@@@@@
How y'all doin? My name is Rob Snell. I am from Starkville, Mississippi. I don't know if y'all can tell by the way I talk.
I am a retailer. How many people in this audience are retailers? Oh man. I feel sorry for all of ya'll. How many people work for retailers? We got it worse. I think working for retailers is worse than being a retailer.
All right. Today I am going to talk about what I do with my store and my clients' stores to get real world results using SEO.
Like I said, my name is Rob Snell. We got online in 1997 by putting our family business online with a Yahoo! Store. All of the information I am going to cover today plus anything that wouldn't fit in these 93 slides is going to be on robsnell.com. Just click on "read this first". I got a ton of content on there for retailers.
I am a retailer. I wrote this book on how to do well with your Yahoo! Store. I have a lot of information in there. I make $1, so I appreciate it if you buy a book.
We started out on the Yahoo! Store platform back in 1997. I love Yahoo! Store. It is very search engine friendly out of the box. They keep making changes to the platform to make it easier for retailers to not have to be propeller head techie SEO's. You put your production information in and it generates these pages.
Today I am going to talk about Gun Dog Supply, our online store that sells training supplies for hunting dogs, and how we do SEO on this site.
The first thing I try to get my retailers to do is start fresh. Folks have mentioned this before in other presentations, but you want to start with a clean browser. When you see what folks are searching for, when you see the search results pages on Google, I recommend my retailers use Safari, because it is really easy to reset Safari so you have got no cookies. You have a virgin browser. You can see what your customers are seeing when they search.
If you are logged into Gmail or your Google Adwords account, you are going to see a different result that is personalized. It is not what your customers are seeing. You just go under Safari and select "reset Safari".
The second thing is prioritize the engines. I want to be fishing where the fish are, OK? When I go fishing, I want to fish in the big lake where the big bass are. And with our sites, most of our traffic, like yours, comes from Google, anywhere from 75% to 80% of our organic traffic. But that doesn't mean you want to discount Bing or Yahoo.
The third thing is pick your battles. 90% of the traffic from search engines comes from clicks on the first page. 90%. That means you have to be on the first page.
This is what more of our customers see when they come to Google, this view. I found from our Analytics, I could see this screen resolution. If you will notice in this, you can see the shopping results, the three organic results, and then image results. When I take that off and see the full page, you can see all 10 results. You can see the ads.
The second most popular browser resolution for us is this one. You can also see here how the ads cut off. Google knows that people are clicking on the top of the page.
You want to be in the top 5 or bust. If you are not in the top 5, you are not getting the clicks. This is where you want to be. Here is another screenshot showing you 5 different organic listings and the shopping results.
When you strip off the ads, 40% of the clicks are going to the first position, 15% to the second position, 10%, 8%. You need to be in the top 3, the top 5, definitely the top 10.
Target popular and valuable keyword phrases. Where I come from, we like both kinds of keywords. Keywords that deliver a lot of traffic, but also, keywords that deliver a high revenue per visitor.
Here is a mythical keyword phrase using real data so I can talk about a client. I did a Webinar about two weeks ago and I had a client freaking out; a guy I did some work for about 10 years ago. He was number one for unicycle seats on Google, getting tons of sales and traffic from that, and he had dropped to number seven and his sales had dropped off.
It makes me really frustrated when retailers will concentrate on one, or 10, or 20 phrases and not go after all this opportunity that is out there. When I look at the Google keyword tool, I see that unicycle seats is a pretty high traffic phrase for this retailer. But I compare that to another one of his phrases that he ranks really well for, Plutzo seats, which is a manufacturer term. It has got medium traffic with 8,000 visitors.
Revenue per visitor, thanks to his analytics, we were able to look at his specific revenue per visitor for this keyword phrase. So revenue per visitor for the generic unicycle seats is about $1. But for the manufacturer term, it is $11. And that is for his site. Some terms are going to be worth more to you than they are for the guy sitting next to you.
You multiply it out times the frequency to get the inventory value of the phrase. So that is a $40,000 inventory. That is an $88,000 inventory. He needs to be concentrating on the phrases that are driving revenue, not just traffic.
The other thing is that on Google, using the Google keyword tool, we were able to see that the average cost per click is 95 cents for the generic term. But for the manufacturer's term, it is only 60 cents. I mean look at the upside. If the generic term is a nickel, it is $10.40. How many $10 bills would you buy for 60 cents? All of them. And here is the Google keyword tool. Just go to Google and search for keyword tool.
All right. The next phase for me is collect. I want you to run SEO friendly analytics. I use Yahoo Web Analytics. I also run GA. What I want these things to do is actually show me the money. I am interesting in what search phrase brought somebody to the site, how many visits, the number of orders that I got, and how much revenue they generated.
I like to look at this information in a spreadsheet so I can actually compare the value of different keyword phrases. You can see here I have got them color coded. The higher revenue phrases are in green.
The next thing I do is I actually calculate revenue per visitor by keyword phrase. Unfortunately, this is not built into Yahoo Web Analytics, and I am not a GA expert, so it might be in there. But in Excel, I just make a simple formula. And this shows me that some keyword phrases are more valuable than others. Look at that $7 revenue per visitor on line three. That tells me right there that something is wrong with that entry page that folks are coming to using that third keyword there.
But if you go on down a little bit, look at the $29 revenue per visitor. On average, I get $29 in sales for every single visitor using that keyword phrase. And again, these are mythical keyword phrases. I have overwritten some real keyword phrases so I have got some good data in there for you to look at.
[phone rings] QUESTIONS
Man 1: So we got one from Twitter. "What site architecture changes give the biggest ranking boost to product pages in a competitive market?"
Rob: I would say move your most valuable products to the homepage and focus on that. I mean basically…I call it "revenavigation"-revenue based navigation. I let my customers determine what my site hierarchy is going to be based upon what level the sales are of those products.
Man 2: I was just going to say it really depends upon the size and the scale of the site how you optimize a 5,000 product site versus a 50,000 product, versus a 50 product site. It is going to be different, but there should be some hierarchy.
We found that trying to bring, even if you are doing different categories, trying to keep the products as close to the root as possible has been the best strategy for us so far.
Question: We have some clients…We are an agency. Most of our products are high ticket items. 70% of their orders are phone orders. And no matter how much we optimize the e-commerce, or no matter what we do, we still run into this problem, and it gets hard to track those sales and put it onto a spreadsheet.
What would you do in that situation?
Man 2: We deal with it all the time. It is funny. All the agency guys are in suits and all the retailers are in jeans, except for Rob.
Rob: I am both.
Man 2: He is both. We deal with people all the time that have very, very high dollar items. Even guys like A Touch of Brass that was in the presentation a couple of times; some of their items are $500 or $600 a piece, which isn't high, but people still want to call and talk to someone about it, because there are five or six options you can choose when you buy.
So no matter how much we optimized the checkout process, no matter how much we AB test the product pages, there are certain limits to where you can take it. I mean I don't want to discourage you from trying, but people will call.
I mean we have worked with clients where if they sell one or two of this product a month, they are very, very happy. And then can spend $2,000 or $3,000 just for one lead to come in to call about that.
I would recommend some call tracking services, dynamically switching out the 800 numbers on the website, whether they are coming in from organic search or paid search. If you want to get even deeper than that, you can divide it by different keyword buckets and ad groups.
That seems to be the best way-getting that information. And then if it is a low volume, like high dollar site, going back with the client and reconciling that at the end of the month and saying, "Here are the people that called in. Can you tell us what you know about them?"
Man 3: I would also recommend that you have your call center ask people why they are calling instead of using the website.
Question: Well you can't tie that to a keyword. That is the problem.
Rob: You can.
Man 3: Well I know that, but a lot of times it is the website that actually drives people to the phone if they can't find what they are looking for, or certain things, like they say, "Oh, here is the product" and they can't figure out how much it ships to get there or they can't figure out if you support their credit card, or they don't even see something like that your site is signed by Verisign. They panic and say, "I am not putting my credit card in" and they hit the phone.
I have dealt with this a lot. But you are going to find a significant number of people that no matter what you do, they will never ever shop on the website. Well, they will actually shop on the website, but then they are still going to pick up the phone.
But I think that you can actually do a little bit of a Q&A on the phone and find out where the problems exist, fix the website, and drill that down to a much lower number. I help some clients do that. It is not impossible.
Rob: Yeah. Also, like time on site is a good parallel metric to high converting keywords. I think I got this from John Marshall over at Market Motive. Thanks John. If you can't tell what…because you have like 20 sessions before somebody buys, a really long buying cycle, you can look at time on site filtered by keyword, and you will see that your higher converting keywords seem to match up with higher time on site. So sometimes that is a good way if you can't tell.
With Yahoo Web Analytics, there is actually a way for you to go in and have the customer press a button that generates a unique number. And later on, you can match up that unique number to their order and that will marry it up with the dollar amount of the sale with the converting keyword. And it is a little complicated, and so sometimes you have to say, "Hey, if you want to get a priority number, or free shipping, or a free white paper, or a discount, or something like that, give the operator this number." And that is an easy way to track converting keywords over the phone.
Man 3: I just remembered something. There is a service out there, and I can't remember the name. Maybe somebody else here can remind me. But they actually put a button the side of the website that says, "Call to order". And it actually tracks that person's phone number. Whenever they call you to order, it ties the whole thing together on the website.
Question: [inaudible]
Man 3: It is still not catching it for you.
Man 2: The one last thing I will add and then we can go onto the next question is we have a client that sells smaller items through the website and then drives in leads for items that cost probably between $50,000 and $100,000 for very customized items to be built.
The sales manager started getting the domain report. He asked us to set up the domain report for him to be sent everyday from Google Analytics. So he wants to see what companies are visiting the website, and he can correlate that back pretty easily.
Again, for something high dollar like that, it is not a lot of traffic, so he is able to go in and see, "Oh, IBM came in and looked at the website. IBM also called us." They can tie that information together pretty easily. It is not like bulletproof, but…
Rob: They are surfing at work. It is not going to be like somebody's dial up through Bellsouth or something. You can tell.
Man 2: Right. I mean you get a lot of that noise on there for Comcast, Comcast for Business, Cavalier, but you can filter…
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Pubcon Notes@@@@@@~~~~~
Publish your YAHOO STORE@@@@@@You're done. Questions, comments? Call me! 662-320-9196. - Rob~~~~~
Quick 'n Dirty Site Review@@@@@@What if you don't want the 2-day deal? This is a 2 hour phone review of your site.~~~~~
Ralph Wilson Interviews Me!@@@@@@~~~~~
Rank for CKWP + BUY WORDS@@@@@@~~~~~
Read Avinash's book - WEB ANALYTICS:An Hour A Day@@@@@@http://www.amazon.com/Web-Analytics-Hour-Avinash-Kaushik/dp/0470130652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1227564720&sr=1-1~~~~~
Read Customer Reviews@@@@@@http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0764588737/ref=cm_cr_dp_pt/002-2499729-7418427?ie=UTF8&n=283155&s=books~~~~~
Read My Blog@@@@@@http://ystore.blogs.com/?source=robsnell.com-navlink~~~~~
Read My Book Reviews on Amazon@@@@@@ Yahoo! Store Book Reviews on Amazon ~~~~~
Read My DUMMIES Book CH 20/21@@@@@@http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0764588737/sr=8-2/qid=1140275737/ref=sr_1_2/103-4498188-6183843?%5Fencoding=UTF8~~~~~
Read My Yahoo! Store For Dummies Book@@@@@@http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Business-Dummies-Personal-Finance/dp/0764588737~~~~~
Read Stuff About Yahoo Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Read These Books, Too!@@@@@@ Yahoo! Store Book at Amazon.com~~~~~
Read these other folks, too!@@@@@@~~~~~
Read These OTHER Yahoo! Store Books, Too!@@@@@@~~~~~
READ THIS FIRST:@@@@@@Mr. T says "I pity the foo' that don't write unique product descriptions or use their best keywords in product names!"~~~~~
Redneck Mercedes Convertible@@@@@@
The video is from the vehicle that INSPIRED Steve's bday present: the Redneck Mercedes Convertible
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Revised Navbar Draft@@@@@@~~~~~
Roast Your Own@@@@@@http://www.roastyourown.com~~~~~
Rob Snell@@@@@@http://ystore.blogs.com~~~~~
Rob Snell (home)@@@@@@~~~~~
Rob Snell Bio@@@@@@
Rob Snell
Partner
Snell Brothers
Rob Snell is Managing Partner of Snell Brothers, a consulting firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores. Rob has extensive Yahoo! Store experience with both family-owned stores and consulting clients. The Snell Brothers have designed, developed, marketed and/or maintained hundreds of Yahoo Stores that have generated millions and millions of dollars in online sales. Rob has a B.A. in Graphic Design from Mississippi State University.
Rob is the author of Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies (Wiley Computer Publishing, 2006). Rob Snell loves e-commerce and all things Yahoo! Store. He is totally obsessed with search marketing and increasing his stores' conversion rates. He is a small business owner, online retailer, search marketing / e-commerce consultant, and Yahoo! Store developer. He's been online since 1990 and opened his first online store in 1997 when his brother stumbled across Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store).
Rob now consults with Yahoo! Store retailers on improving their e-commerce sites and maximizing their search-marketing campaigns and is a guest speaker and lecturer on search marketing and e-commerce for small business. He posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo! Store blog at ystore.blogs.com, guest posts from time to time in the Yahoo! Store Blog at ystoreblog.com, and writes a monthly column for the Yahoo! Store newsletter
Here is the HTML for the above BIO:
<p>
<b>Rob Snell <br>
Partner<br>
<a href="http://www.robsnell.com/" target="_blank">Snell Brothers</a></b> </p>
<p>Rob Snell is Managing Partner of Snell Brothers, a consulting firm specializing in search marketing for Yahoo! Stores. Rob has extensive Yahoo! Store experience with both family-owned stores and consulting clients. The Snell Brothers have designed, developed, marketed and/or maintained hundreds of Yahoo Stores that have generated millions and millions of dollars in online sales. Rob has a B.A. in Graphic Design from Mississippi State University.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Rob is the author of <em><a href=www.amazon.com/Starting-Business-Dummies-Personal-Finance/dp/0764588737>Starting a Yahoo! Store For Dummies</a></em> (Wiley Computer Publishing, 2006). Rob Snell loves e-commerce and all things Yahoo! Store. He is totally obsessed with search marketing and increasing his stores' conversion rates. He is a small business owner, online retailer, search marketing / e-commerce consultant, and Yahoo! Store developer. He's been online since 1990 and opened his first online store in 1997 when his brother stumbled across Viaweb (now Yahoo! Store). </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Rob now consults with Yahoo! Store retailers on improving their e-commerce sites and maximizing their search-marketing campaigns and is a guest speaker and lecturer on search marketing and e-commerce for small business. He posts somewhat regularly in his Yahoo! Store blog at ystore.blogs.com, guest posts from time to time in the Yahoo! Store Blog at ystoreblog.com, and writes a monthly column for the Yahoo! Store newsletter </p>">
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Rob Snell Naked@@@@@@ Putting the ho' in Ho! Ho! Ho! Rob Snell is avaliable as a holiday escort for extremely reasonable rates... Parties, Family Get-Togethers, Pillow Fights. Serving the Golden Triangle area since 1985. We may doze, but we never close... Discrete. Professional. Guaranteed to please. Out call service only.
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Rob Snell's homepage@@@@@@~~~~~
ron@@@@@@~~~~~
RTML -- Leafed Section Page@@@@@@http://gundogsupply.com/tri-tronics-g2-field-collars.html~~~~~
RTML -- Product Page -- Softball bats w/ template@@@@@@http://softball-bats.org/losltpsfpscx2.html~~~~~
RTML -- Product Page with no boilerplate@@@@@@http://softball-bats.org/neeascsycntf.html~~~~~
RTML -- Section Page w/ content and links on the bottom@@@@@@http://softball-bats.org/--close-outs---baseball-softball-baseball.html~~~~~
RTML -- Totally customized product page@@@@@@http://www.gundogsupply.com/tritronics-classic-70-2-g2.html~~~~~
RTML 101: The Unofficial Guide To Yahoo! Store Templates by Istvan Siposs@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/bookabyahsto.html~~~~~
RTML for Yahoo! Store (eBook) by Michael Whitaker@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/rtforyast.html~~~~~
saltoflife@@@@@@http://store.yahoo.com/saltoflife~~~~~
Sam & Cooper & Luke@@@@@@~~~~~
Sam (5) and Cooper (0)@@@@@@~~~~~
Sam grins@@@@@@~~~~~
Sam, Cooper, & Luke (3)@@@@@@~~~~~
Sam, Luke, Cooper, & Kathy@@@@@@~~~~~
Sample SECTIONS@@@@@@~~~~~
SCANNING FROM CATALOGS OR PHOTOS.@@@@@@When you are using images from a manufacturer or distributor's marketing materials such as catalogs, brochures, or magazine ads, you need to get their permission to use these images.
There can sometimes be restrictions imposed by the agreement they have with their photographers who may actually own the rights to the photos. The copyright holder may only be licensing them to the company for use in this one ad or brochure.
My experience is that the actual product shots tend to be owned by the company, but the other photos used in ads or catalogs for "flavor" tend to be licensed for one-time use.
Many companies are very ticky about the display or use of their logo. Just to protect yourself, make sure you have the right to use their logo, characters, trademark, etc. on your web page.
Sometimes it's easier to get forgiveness than permission, but proceed at your own risk!~~~~~
Scion Generation@@@@@@~~~~~
Scott Clark: Rob Snell Comments on the Congressional Hearing About Online Advertising@@@@@@http://www.sitecreations.com/blog/2008/07/rob-snell-comments-on-the-congressional-hearing-about-online-advertising.html~~~~~
Search@@@@@@~~~~~
SEARCH (Front Page Element)@@@@@@This element puts a search bar centered in the middle of the FRONT PAGE. I use this to separate elements as well as allow users to see that the site has SEARCH capability.
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Search and Such?@@@@@@~~~~~
Search Bookmarklets@@@@@@~~~~~
Search Engine & Directory Marketing Package@@@@@@~~~~~
Search Engine Strategies@@@@@@FROM MY Yahoo Store BLOG : Next, I ended up w ith a last minute speaking gig at SES in th e P!MP MY SITE session. Holy Cow! Did I mention it was last minute? Like 30 minutes notice. And I got to wear a purple pimp outfit!
Embarrassing pictures of me are available at Mike Whitaker's blog. See his Yahoo! Store Blog - Pimp my Site post. (Thanks Mike & Jean!)
I got to share the SEW stage with fellow pimps including moderator Elisabeth Osmeloski , who is the Managing Editor, Search Engine Watch . Speakers included Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide , Dax Herrera of WebGuerrilla , Heather Lloyd-Martin SuccessWorks , and Todd Friesen , a.k.a Oilman , of Range Online Media .
Featured in our PIMP MY SITE review was a very, very brave Yahoo Store Owner , Peggy Li , who sells handmade jewelry , earrings, necklaces and unique beaded gemstone jewelry "as seen in Lucky Magazine ."
My P!MP appearance turned into a stand-up presentation without the benefits of preparation or Powerpoint, but I think I did a good job representing Y! considering we covered Yahoo! Store for almost 30 minutes of the PIMP MY SITE presentation.
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Search Engine Strategies -- CHICAGO@@@@@@I've been going to SEARCH CONFERENCES since 2001. SES and PUBCON have valuable, valuable info for retailers. Even without the opportunity costs of missing a week of "work," it usually costs me $3000.00 easy out of pocket plus a week of my time to fly to these things, get a room in the conference hotel, eat out every meal, and then I have my pimpilicious wardrobe to think about, but EVERY TIME IT'S WORTH EVERY PENNY AND EVERY SECOND.
WHY? If I get one idea that moves the sales needle at home 1%, that's THOUSANDS of dollars in sales. One idea.
Multiply that by my group of revshare retailers, then throw in my clients, friends, former clients still in the loop, and then lump in blog readers, book buyers, and etc., and the trickle down is INSANE. From one idea.
(Example: Put best-seller in the NAME of a product that is a best-seller and conversion rate jumps up.) And I usually get at least 100x of those tactical ones, and as y'all know, I usually fill a 100 page notebook with ideas and conference notes from speakers AND from the real action after at the parties and hotel bars.
Yahoo! Store owners DO show up at these shows, but they don't know where to go, what to do, etc. And I bet less than 1% of retailers show up. So GO!
Site Clinic
This interactive session takes volunteers from the audience and examines their web sites live to provide general feedback about improving them to gain more traffic from search engines.
Moderator:
Elisabeth Osmeloski, Managing Editor, Search Engine Watch
Panelists:
Derrick Wheeler, Senior Search Strategist, Acxiom Digital
Rob Snell, Partner, Snell Brothers
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Search Engine Watch@@@@@@http://searchenginewatch.com~~~~~
Search Me@@@@@@ Custom Google Search Form
Search site:
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SearchEngineLand: Search Marketing Meets Congress: Now In Video@@@@@@http://searchengineland.com/080625-161237.php~~~~~
Seasonal Logo@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 5: Yahoo! Store Editor@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 7: Operation of a Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 1: Overview of Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 2: Building Blocks of Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 3: Yahoo! Store Elements@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 4: Designing Your Yahoo! Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Section 6: Configure your Store@@@@@@~~~~~
Section Page@@@@@@The section level is the next level.~~~~~
see behind the scenes of a real yahoo store -- vitanet@@@@@@see behind the scenes of a real yahoo store vitanet http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/DEMOMGR ~~~~~
See Embroiderthis.com@@@@@@http://www.embroiderthis.com/" target=_blank~~~~~
See our Products & Services@@@@@@~~~~~
See our Yahoo Store Portfolio@@@@@@ ~~~~~
See Pubcon Keynote@@@@@@http://www.robsnell.com/2010-pubcon-keynote.html~~~~~
See your Sales Increase!@@@@@@~~~~~
Sensory Edge@@@@@@~~~~~
SEO -- Show all my links in Yahoo!@@@@@@http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.bobthejanitor.com&fr=FP-tab-web-t&toggle=1&cop=&ei=UTF-8~~~~~
SEO -- Show all my pages in Google@@@@@@http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Agundogsupply.com~~~~~
SEO -- who links to my competitor on YAHOO!@@@@@@http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cyberclean.com&prssweb=Search&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt~~~~~
SEO -- Y! SERPS w/ TITLE + BLOG example@@@@@@http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=tritronics+sport+65&ei=UTF-8&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fl=0&x=wrt~~~~~
SEOGroup: Search Marketing & SEO in Congress: Marketing to the Willing@@@@@@http://seogroup.com/blog/search-marketing-seo-in-congress-marketing-to-the-willing/25/~~~~~
SF!@@@@@@ Thursday, April 27,
2006, 9AM-4PM
Friday, April 28, 2006, 9AM-1PM or 1PM-5PM
Microtek, 33 New Montgomery,
Suite 350
San Francisco, CA 94105 (415) 546-3811
Visit http://www.mclabs.com/facilitie s/San_Francisco/ for directions, special hotel rates
and recommendations.
Y! Store 101 Seminar. April 27-28, 2006, San Francisco, CA Regular price: $995.00 ~~~~~
Shawna Fenell Interview -- May 2008@@@@@@***5/19/08 Show - Increasing Conversion Rates w/ Rob Snell*** from http://www.powerhourradioshow.com/5-19-08.html Rob Snell, author of Yahoo Business for Dummies, provides real life tips and information on increasing conversion rats for Yahoo Store. Tips include how to find your conversion rate, how to track your conversion rates, and using the new Checkout Manager. Rob discusses how to increase conversion rates by building confidence, providing contact information, and trust symbols. Rob Snell gives away a free copy of Chapter 21 of his book which discusses in more detail how to increase your conversion rates. Send an email to info@powerhourradioshow.com to get your copy today! INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION [musical interlude] Narrator: Welcome to One Choice’s Yahoo Store Power Hour with your host Shawna Fennell. Shawna: Thank you so much for joining me today. I have to tell you, I am like a little kid in a candy store. I have had a huge smile on my face all day long. One of the very first websites I came across for education, when I opened up my first store way back when, had Rob Snell giving advice on search engines and conversion rates. I signed up for help on his website and received a series of emails. I was immediately hooked on Rob. And by the way, you can still get these emails if you go to Ystore.com. I highly recommend you do so. You have heard the phrase “hooked on Phonics worked for me.” Well, it was hooked on Rob worked for me. Rob was and still is my Yahoo Store idol. I am honored to have him here today with us. He is the author of “Starting a Yahoo Business for Dummies”. If you have been to one of my speeches or you have been to one of our books, this is the book I pass out like candy. This is the book to have next to you computer while you are working on your Yahoo store. Whether you have had a store for one week or ten years, you will learn something new from his book. So today, I get to ask Rob a ton of questions. My first one starts with can you tell people exactly who you are, besides my idol, and what you do? Rob Snell: Wow. I don’t know if I can live up to that introduction. Shawna: You can. I know it! Rob Snell: All right. My name is Rob Snell. (www.robsnell.com) I am from Starkville Mississippi. I have been a retailer all of my life. My Yahoo! Store experience; back in 1997 we launched our first online store. I have been online since 1990 on CompuServe learning marketing ideas from different retailers. Shawna: Oh, way, way, way back! Rob Snell: Yeah. Back when you could actually read the letters as they downloaded scrolling across the screen. Shawna: Yeah. Rob Snell: We had a situation in our family business where my mom’s offline business, her bricks and mortar store, had Petsmart coming in across the street and she said “Get me online.” I said “I don’t know anything about getting online.” She is like “Well, just get me online. I know that is the secret to our problems.” I was like “All right. All right.” So I built us a website and we got a bunch of traffic. We were getting so many catalogue requests my dad was like “Shut the website off or put our products online. We can’t afford to send all these catalogues out.” Long story short, we found Via Web, which is now Yahoo! Store, and I have been selling stuff online and helping folks sell stuff online ever since. Shawna: You know it is interesting that the same problem you had then is the same problem a lot of stores are having now. Rob Snell: Right. Shawna: And the reason to get online. My next question for you, because I know you are the man when it comes to conversion rates and I tell everybody this, why is conversion rate so important? Rob Snell: Well, the thing is conversion rate is the percentage of folks who visit your online store and actually buy something. That percentage of folks nationally runs between two and three percent depending on which survey you are looking at. On Yahoo! Stores I have seen it all over the place. Some Yahoo! Stores have a high conversion rate. Some Yahoo! Stores have a low conversion rate. But by monitoring that number and doing small itty bitty improvements to your store to make shopping easier, you can increase that number and it is the largest multiplier. I mean, if you get a bump in your conversion rate it does awesome things to your sales. I have just been obsessed over my store’s conversion rates ever since we have started using the Yahoo! Store platform because the traffic is so easy. Shawna: Yes. I love that about the Yahoo ! Store. Rob Snell: Yeah, it is like the metrics that are built in. I mean, they are still using the stuff from 1997 in the store manager, but what I call a conversion rate Yahoo! calls “orders per customer”. I have actually got a store manager window open right now on my desktop. If folks want to play along at home they can actually just go into the graphs and click on “orders per customer” and set a date range and kind of see what their conversion rate is. Shawna: That is wonderful to kind of explain that because that is one of those questions that we get all the time: What do I track and how do I find out what my conversion rate is. So if we could explain that in more detail that would be excellent. Rob Snell: Yeah, absolutely. The basic metrics, or statistics, or stats that you get in a Yahoo! Store are a good starting place for most retailers. In our family business (www.gundogsupply.com), my brother runs the operations and customer service side of the company. I am responsible for everything through getting people to the site and clicking the “place order” button. Once they place that order it is then his responsibility. I know how busy he is shipping out hundreds of boxes a day, talking to people on the phone, dealing with employees, and dealing with suppliers. Most retailers have got so much on their plate that they don’t really have a lot of time to dig into all these numbers. I am in a pretty good situation where I can actually go off into my office and lock the door and just dig into these numbers for two or three days at a time sometimes. I just don’t think a lot of retailers have the luxury to do that. So there are some things that you can do as a retailer, just some key performance indicators or KPI’s, that you can just watch on a regular basis. You don’t even have to be digging into your stats. You can get an intern or an assistant or somebody on a daily basis to log into your Yahoo! Store and pull these numbers for you. Shawna: And it is so important! Rob Snell: It is a big deal. Like right now, I am looking at one of our stores. I am looking at the “orders per customer”. I can see a dip in November right before Christmas. What happens is that when you get a lot more traffic coming in you get a lot more unqualified traffic. So let’s just say you have a Christmas bump. Your conversion rate is actually going to go down a little bit during Christmas because you are actually going to have a lot of tire kickers and a lot of folks…I mean there are so many more people shopping on the Internet. Shawna: Excellent point. Most people think that it is just going to go up during Christmas. Rob Snell: Exactly. There are all kinds of other numbers that you can look at on a regular basis. If you are in a situation like we are in several of our different Yahoo! Stores where the pricing is limited by the manufacturer; the minimum advertised price is set by the manufacturers. You really can’t lower your prices, so there are so many other things that can affect conversion rate, like how much junk traffic you have coming across your site or are you doing a free shipping promotion? For example, we did a free shipping promotion for like five days and we actually doubled our conversion rate on the site, but we got so many itty bitty orders. Our average sale dropped to a third of what it had been before because we had so many $10 and $20 orders where we had the shipping process $6 before and now it is free. So a lot of folks are ordering a $5 whistle or a $10 book to take advantage of that free shipping. So doubling your conversion rate is not the key to doubling your profits. And for folks who do have variables where like they are changing their pricing or can do different shipping options-that kind of thing, there are other numbers you want to watch, like “Revenue per Visitor”. Yahoo! calls that “Revenue per Customer”. But if you have a pretty stable amount of traffic…We have been online since 1997, so from an SEO standpoint our traffic is pretty solid. And from a PPC standpoint, I am pretty happy with my bids. So I am not seeing huge fluctuations in the amount of customers or visitors coming to the store. But that is something that folks need to take a look at as far as “Revenue per Customer”. Shawna: Absolutely. Now, the other thing is that they need to work on tracking. Are there specific issues for tracking and how it works within the new checkout? Rob Snell: Well yeah. I am real excited about the new checkout by the way. Katrina hit the week that I launched a Beta on the new checkout. So that tells you how long ago that was when Yahoo! started rolling this thing out. There are so many cool things in the new checkout. And now, Yahoo! is making us jump over to this new checkout. Most of my stores are on the new Version 3 checkout. But they have made tracking so much easier now because they actually give us access to some of the variables. I am not a propeller head; I don’t understand all that highfalutin tech stuff. Shawna: [laughs] Rob Snell: But I have friends who are. And they tell me the fact that these variable exist is real easy for you to work with a third party affiliate program. It used to be you had to use Commission Junction if you wanted to be a Yahoo! Store. The minimums were like five grand or whatever. I mean, it was a lot of money to even just get your little toe in there. The same thing with revenue tracking. I actually use two other services besides Yahoo! for tracking on most of my stores. Index Tools, which just got bought out my Yahoo!, is the first one. I also use Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics/). The reason I use two different sources is because I like to reconcile the difference between the two. The way these tracking systems work, you are going to have different numbers on your Yahoo Store for the same day when you compare it to your Index Tools number and when you compare it to your Google Analytics numbers. Shawna: Yeah, and that is one thing that they teach us when we go to these big SCS conferences. People want to know “Well why isn’t’ it an exact science? Why does one site say one thing and one site say another thing?” So a very important lesson to learn is you will get different results. So I like the fact that you are talking about using two different services. And I have to mention of course when we are talking Google Analytics-Monitus ( http://www.monitus.com/) . Rob Snell: Yes. And Michael Whittaker (http://monitus.blogs.com/) of monetus.net has got it figured out. He is one of the smart guys that I call when something is on fire and I don’t understand something. Yeah, I know. He is awesome. He has got a little tool that will actually allow Google Analytics Revenue Tracking to actually work with Yahoo! Store. You know how like on the Yahoo! Store you are on your domain and then you hit “add to cart” and it takes you off of your domain over onto Yahoo! Secure servers. So a lot of the first party cookie, and I don’t even understand what all that stuff means, but a lot of the services for tracking have to have first party cookies, which means that you really need to be on the same domain. He has figured out a way to do that that takes care of business and it is pretty cheap for what he is doing. Shawna: Absolutely. We had him on two weeks ago and just the information that he gave was just so amazing, so helpful for the Yahoo Store owners. We are telling people that you have got to get that connector because you can really understand what is going on. Rob Snell: He has got some other cool tools like the Keyword Monkey (http://www.monitus.net/content/blogcategory/32/84/) and stuff that are baked into his system when you are using his tool. There are just all kinds of information that you can get that you just wouldn’t normally get out of the normal Yahoo! Store stats. And then there is Google Analytics. It is awesome. It is so easy to use and you can see all these numbers that you just can’t see inside the Yahoo! Store. I am just crossing my fingers with Yahoo! buying Index Tools; hopefully Yahoo is going to roll out better analytics for stores. A little bird that keeps me in the loop every once in a while keeps telling me something is going to happen. So cross your fingers. Shawna: I am excited about it. Well we are going to take a quick break here pretty soon. It is just so much information to share with the Yahoo ! Store owners and I am very excited to have you here and I really appreciate it. Rob Snell: Oh you are most welcome. I appreciate you having me. Shawna: Oh I love it. We will come back and talk about more things about increasing those conversion rates. I think we may have a little bit more here so I wanted to ask you a quick question. Rob Snell: Sure. Shawna: With the Monitus tools and the Keyword Monkey…I will probably have to save this here, but something to think about: How can we increase conversion rates and things that we can do at the Yahoo Stores. We will cover that when we get back. Rob Snell: Awesome. Shawna: We are here with Rob Snell, of course my Yahoo Store idol. This is Shawna Fennell on WS Radio-the worldwide leader in Internet talk. [advertisements] Narrator: Welcome to One Choice’s Yahoo Store Power Hour (http://www.thepowerhour.com/) with your host Shawna Fennell. Shawna: Welcome back. We are still talking with Rob Snell and remember this is the man when it comes to understanding your conversion rates. So before the break we were talking about a question I wanted to ask you. What are some things that the Yahoo! Store owners can do on the store pages to increase those conversion rates? Rob Snell: That is a really good question and it is something I am very passionate about. On an example site that I will use, one of my client sites, I won’t tell you who it is so that I can talk actually about there real numbers. For every 100 folks that visit the site, only four people add something to the cart, only four of those six make it to the checkout, and they end up getting about 3.1 orders per 100 people. So that is a 3.1 percent conversion rate, which is actually pretty good. This is a multi-million dollar Yahoo Store that has been around for, let’s just say, more than five years. Shawna: OK. Rob Snell: If you just concentrate on making the shopping cart and the checkout more conversion friendly, you are missing out on 94% of the folks who visit your website. One of the big things that I finally got through my thick skull in regards to conversion rates is you want to move folks who just visit from one bucket to another. I divide visitors on my website into these five or six different buckets. The first bucket would be folks who visit your website on one page and then hit the back button. Those are the folks who bounce of your website. You want to move them into the second bucket, which would be folks who visit your website and actually browse around more than one page. So those are the folks that are actually visitors on your website. Then you want to get those folks who are visitors on your website to actually go to a product page. The third bucket is all the folks who visit a product page. Then the buckets get a lot smaller. It goes down to folks who actually start a cart, and then to the folks who start a cart and go to the checkout. And then there are folks who actually complete a checkout and place an order. So one of the easiest ways that you can increase your conversion rate is to move somebody who is in the first bucket into the second bucket or somebody who is in the second bucket to the third bucket. So working on your store is so important because like I said, 94% of the folks who are visiting this site never even make it to the shopping cart. Shawna: Right. Rob Snell: So let’s talk about stuff on the store. And actually, if folks have my book (http://www.amazon.com/Starting-Business-Dummies-Personal-Finance/dp/0764588737/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top) they can jump to Chapter 21 in my book because man, I spent more time on this chapter than any other chapter in the entire book. And a lot of the stuff in my Dummies book, because Yahoo keeps rolling out all these new features, a lot of the stuff, I would say about 40% of the actual technical things, on Yahoo Store have been fixed or upgraded. But the conversion stuff I think still really applies. One of the most important things you can do on a website is to have a professional looking well designed easy to use website. It is so subjective, but I think it is easy to tell. When you are looking at a website you can tell if somebody’s 12 year old nephew knocked it out in their basement or if they actually had somebody who has some design skill implement a store design. Shawna: Absolutely. Rob Snell: That is extremely important. Once you have a good looking store, then I want to have all the different ways that folks can contact people. Having the contact information, how to reach the retailer, is paramount to success. I live out here in the sticks which is miles from the boonies. OK? Shawna: [laughs] Rob Snell: I live in Starkville Mississippi. It is two and a half hours to a Target, OK? Shawna: Oh my gosh! [laughs] Rob Snell: I know. I mean, once a month we go into town for provisions and come back out here. So I order a lot of stuff online. What I want to know when I am on somebody’s site are the same things that every customer wants to know. “Who are you? Who is this person I am about to give my credit card and personal information to?” It is so much easier just to go to Amazon (www.amazon.com) and order it than it is to take a chance on a smaller retailer. But because I believe in small business e-commerce, I always try to go to the smaller stores first when I am looking to buy stuff. One of the ways we found to increase our conversion rates…If you go to one of our stores, Gundogsupply.com, and click on the info button, you can see all the different ways that we have on our store for folks to contact us. We have got email. We have got fax. We have got snail mail. We have got all of our telephone numbers. We have our physical address if you want to come by and see us. We have all of our contact information. The main reason is I think that gives folks confidence if there is a problem. “I know where these folks are. I can hop in my truck and come see them and talk to them if there is a problem.” So having a lot of contact information is extremely important. The other thing is the 800 number. I have found that stores that have an 800 number, and by that I mean an 8-0-0 number, not at 877 or an 866 or an 888 number, it looks like you have been established a lot longer when you have an 800 number. Plaster that thing all over your site. I like to have it in the upper right hand corner of all my stores, inside the shopping cart, and on every single checkout page. It is not that folks are actually going to call you as much; it is that they like to know that they can call you. Shawna: There are a lot of services out there that hold those 800 numbers and allow you to get those through their service. Rob Snell: Right. I guess other people have used it in the past but they are not using it now. It is harder to get those real easy to remember 800 numbers, but I think having a good 800 number on your site is so important to establish credibility. The other thing I want to do when I am on a website is I want to read the story of the people who are behind the website. I have no confidence in a Yahoo! Store when I come across it and it looks like they have a product feed from one of the drop ship databases and a generic looking header and they have 50,000 different products. It is very obvious to me what they are doing is they are just copying the database, uploading it to a store, and hitting the publish button. Shawna: Right. Rob Snell: Folks want to shop with people that they know and trust. So tell people your story. On our site we probably don’t do as good a job as we should of telling people how we got started. But we actually go in and we have pictures of my staff. We actually got a 20% increase in our sales when we made my brother our spokes model on our site and put his picture up there. Shawna: Wow! Rob Snell: I know. It is crazy. Back when my dad was alive he was so self conscious. He did not want to position himself as an expert even though he was an expert. When my brother took over as president of the company about five years ago, we made the decision that he is an expert, he has all this information, and let’s position him as the expert that he is. It was like turning on a switch. If you look at my graph coming across the conversion rate at what it was before, there is a rise in the graph that corresponds with us taking an editorial position on the products that we sell. Shawna: That is phenomenal! Rob Snell: Yeah, it is crazy. I go around telling everybody this because there are so many places where when I go shopping for something I want an expert to tell me what I should buy. I was looking at guitar tuners the other day and I was having to read all this information and compare “is it for an electric guitar? Is it for an acoustic guitar?” And all the products I was looking at weren’t the same and they didn’t have the same types of features and it was really hard to explain stuff. We have got our dog tracking colors buyer’s guide which walks folks through and ask them questions. It helps them whittle down the choices of what they want to make. I was on Amazon buying this guitar tuner and I just had to take the retailer’s word that this was a good product. It was only like a $30 product, but the higher the price of the items that you sell, the more information you need to provide. So that is another way to establish trust-to have more information on your products and just be the products expert in your field. Shawna: You know, that is excellent advice. When I was looking for something I could stick in my pocket and take with me to do video blogging, I of course come across a website that talks about the flip video and how wonderful it is and how easy it is, and it sticks in your pocket and it does all these great videos. I went out and bought it because somebody said how excellent it was and they got personal about it. So you are absolutely right. Rob Snell: Exactly- “This will solve your problem.” That is what folks are looking for. I don’t think folks are dumb. I think folks are busy. A lot of people are like “You don’t need to spoon feed people.” I kind of like to take the attitude that you need to recommend, in your opinion, of what you tell your friend to buy of all the different things that you sell that would be the best in that class for solving that particular problem. You can still provide all the information on all the other products. Some folks are just going to want to make up their own minds. But a lot of times folks want to know what to buy. One of the advantages, I think, to being on the Internet is I say “It is good to be small.” On the Internet you can look like a big company even when you are an itty bitty company. But I think there are actual advantages to knowing that when you shop on our store it is like our different families’ house payments are dependent on you getting good customer service. So there are three families who have a vested interest in making sure that you get what you get, and you are happy, and you come back, and you love us, and you keep shopping with us. Well tell that story and I think that is such an important deal, because a lot of folks want to look like they are a huge company. Look at the dot com crashes. I mean, the big boys, those are the ones who failed and didn’t’ ship orders and all kinds of stuff. Shawna: That makes an excellent point because there are so many people that want to start up a Yahoo store and they want to be the next Amazon and the next Wal-Mart. It is like “OK. They have already got that cornered.” Rob Snell: Right. Shawna: [laughs] Rob Snell: Yeah, you have to pick your niche and not try to be everything to everybody. I got back from E-Metrics (http://www.emetrics.org/) a couple weeks ago out in San Francisco, which is an awesome conference if anybody is interested in numbers. It was a lot of math people and really smart folks. One of the biggest takeaways I got is that you can look at your analytics but it doesn’t really tell you exactly what your customers are thinking. There is a product called 4Q (http://4q.iperceptions.com/) by Avinash (http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/). He is the Google guru of analytics. He is partnered with this company and you can put these surveys for free on your site. I just started doing it on Gun Dog. I have already started to get some really good information back on what our customers are thinking. A lot of the things that we are trying to do, they are actually telling us we are doing a good job at doing that. Besides getting sales, sometimes it is good to get feedback like that. So that is something I would definitely recommend folks doing to see what the satisfaction level is of somebody shopping on your store. Shawn: Oh, that is excellent advice for people. Rob Snell: Yeah, and it is cool. It is like four or five questions. It gives them a chance to actually type in an open answer in the comments field if they actually want to give you more specific data about why they were happy or why they weren’t happy. We have only had it on the site for 48 hours and I have already learned some ideas about how to make the site better for those folks. Shawna: And talking about standing out from a niche, I mean, how often do we really feel like Wal-Mart is listening to our words? Rob Snell: Exactly. Shawna: Well we are going to come back after the break and talk a little bit more about increasing those conversion rates, like using trust symbols. This is Shawna Fennell on wsradio.com. Stay with us. We are the worldwide leader in Internet talk. … [musical interlude] Narrator: Welcome to One Choice’s Yahoo store Power Hour with your host, Shawna Fennell Shawna Fanell: Welcome back. We are here with Rob Snell. It is my Yahoo store Idol; has been for many years. He is the author of “Yahoo Business for Dummies”, although I hate saying that “dummies” because nobody out there is. But it is the book and you have got to have it. Especially go right to chapter 21 and grab yourself some more information on what we are talking about, which is how to increase those conversion rates. So let’s talk a little bit about trust symbols. Rob Snell: Well, yeah. Shawna, one of the things you can do on your site for folks don’t know you and they meet you for the first time or they come across your website for the first time is have trust symbols on your site. And by trust symbols I mean things like icons from reputable companies that you also do business with. A good example would be you have a Yahoo! store. Well, Yahoo! is a known brand on the Internet. A Yahoo! Store icon that says “Hey, this website is a Yahoo! store”; that is one of the first trust symbols every single Yahoo! store should have on their site. Shawna: You know, and that is one of the things when people say “Why should I use a Yahoo ! Store?” it is like “Hello, everybody has heard of Yahoo ! .” Rob Snell: Absolutely. Shawna: So why not use that towards your advantage? Rob Snell: And you are paying for it so you might as well use it. And they provide some badges that you can use on your site. I have made my own. I will probably get in trouble for doing that. [laughs] Shawna: We won’t tell anybody. [laughs] Rob Snell: Exactly. Keep that between you and me. Shawna: All right! [laughs] Rob Snell: But also like credit card logos; we had a slightly less than a one percent increase in our conversion rate by just having the credit card logos in one of our store’s checkouts. That is not going to double my conversion rate, but it was actually a measurable increase after thousands of transactions. So trust symbols actually work. And by that, I also mean like your shipping methods; like a UPS logo, or a USPS logo, or FedEx. Or like a Better Business Bureau symbol-that kind of thing. That basically shows folks that you are a real company and you are affiliated with other places that they trust. It is kind of like your badge that says this is who I am and you can trust me. Shawna: Absolutely. And you know, a lot of the stuff that they are talking about with the new marketing is that more…I hate to say senior people, but older generation are shopping online and they are scared to give out their credit card information. Rob Snell: Absolutely. Shawna: So by giving those logos that they are used to seeing, because a lot of them are not used to seeing Hacker Safe. Rob Snell: Right. We have done really well on some of our sites by having the Hacker Safe logo. It is expensive. It is like $1,800 I believe a year. But the amount of increase that we got, the ROI was like 50 to one on one of our projects. We saw a seven percent increase in conversions where new shoppers saw the Hacker Safe seal on the Yahoo! store. The funny thing is my dad used to call this eye wash; stuff that makes you look good but doesn’t really matter. He is like “I am not paying $1,800 for eye wash!” I understand where he is coming from. But Hacker safe runs the test on your website like they do for everybody else. Between you, me and the fence post, Hacker Safe can’t advertise this but they are the company that actually does the testing on Yahoo! Store’s servers. They have a contract with Yahoo! to make sure that their servers are secure. That is public information but Hacker Safe can’t actually go around and have a big flag that says that. But I learned that and I like to pass that on. They are a really good company to have. The other thing is that when you are a Hacker Safe retailer I believe that you get a link back from their directory. So it is always good to get some traffic from that too. Shawna: Absolutely. We love those link backs. I love the Hacker Safe logo. I agree with you, but I also love the fact that you are also talking about those other logos too that people who maybe don’t shop online all the time, who may not be familiar with that logo, they have seen Better Business Bureau. They have seen the UPS logo. So I love that you mention that. Rob Snell: Right. Paypal (www.paypal.com) is another good one if you accept Paypal as a payment method. And you should if you don’t because that will increase your sales. Put the Paypal icon on your site. I am sitting here looking at one of my product pages not seeing a Paypal icon. Oh, there it is. OK. Good. Shawna: [laughs] Rob Snell: I need to take my own advice, you know? Shawna: That’s all right! Rob Snell: The thing is you can do different things on different types of pages on your site. We were talking about the home page and the checkout, but actually, on the product page I have learned this the hard way. The manufacturer of a product usually has a logo that they spend millions of dollars advertising across the United States. Take advantage of that with their permission. You want to make sure you are an authorized retailer or whatever, but put the manufacturer’s logo on your product page. I have a story to tell. On one of my sites it is a site where we sell softball bats and baseball bats (www.softball-bats.org); one of my revenue share sites. I got obsessed with load speed. I wanted my pages to load so fast I was like “Well what little icons are on here that I can get off? Anything to make my page load faster” Well, there were all these baseball bat manufacturer’s logos at the top of the page. I was like “Well man, I can just take those off the product page because they don’t need to see these 12 different bat logos.” I did that and 12 hours later I got a phone call from my retailer freaking out because sales had dropped by 50%. Shawna: Wow! Rob Snell: I know! And it was like on the product page! I felt like an idiot after doing it. Who knows how many thousands of dollars in sales we didn’t get that day, but I learned a very valuable lesson. Manufacturer logos are trust symbols. So take advantage of that. You are advertising their brand. If you sell Easton baseball bats put an Easton logo on that baseball bat page. Shawna: Now you got to a good area I want to talk about. Let’s talk about how do you improve your conversion rates on your product pages? Rob Snell: Yahoo! Store has come a long way from their original templates. We are probably on like the third version of RTML now. Shawna: Thank God. Rob Snell: Yeah, I know. [laughter] Rob Snell: But now they have finally got it to where this last version of the store, if somebody has a generic store, they are actually pretty much OK. There are all kinds of things that you need to add, but they have taken all the things that all the different RTML developers have done over the years and folded most of the good ones into just a basic template. If you want to really boost your store up there are some things that you can do that Yahoo! Store is not doing. One of those for me is having a big honking red “add to cart” button. Everybody in the warehouse used to make fun of me because I had an “add to cart” button that was smaller than my pinkie fingernail. I was like “Well I wonder what happens if I make that bigger.” So I kept making it bigger and bigger and bigger. And finally it is as big as half my thumb right now. Everyone in the warehouse was laughing at me going “Look at that huge honking red button”. But our conversion rate kept going up. And then I stopped making it larger as soon as our conversion rate topped out. So I was doing some testing and I learned for my site, for this specific site, this “add to cart” button is what it needs to be. So that is one example of what you can do on the product page. Another example is to actually show that you have the item in stock. Yahoo! has the availability field. What I usually put in there is I like to say it is a normally stocked item or “in stock and ready to ship” or “usually ships same business day.” I think that is very important on the product pages. Another thing is I think it was like a third of the products on the internet…This was like a Yahoo! survey from a million years ago. But they talked about only a third of the products on the Yahoo! Store platform actually had sale pricing. It is so important to show the list price and actually what you are selling it for because most people on the Internet are selling things less than the MSRP. You want to show what full retail would be, what you are paying at my store, and then I like to show either the percentage and/or the dollar savings depending on what type of store it is. Shawna: It is that whole mental thing. People want to think that they are saving money. Rob Snell: Yeah! And they are because they are shopping online. They are not having to use gasoline. A lot of folks have free shipping. Most of the folks that I know online are discounting at least 10% off. So it really helps the conversion rate by what I call pimping out your product page. Shawna: [laughs] Yes, and I have seen the pimping pictures. Rob Snell: Oh man. I will never live that down. I was telling my brother at lunch today, I was going “I cannot believe…They woke me up from a nap and I got stuck on this panel called “Pimp Your Website.” It was on Yahoo! Stores. That was awesome. I had more fun because of that after that than I have had in a long time. So now I am the Yahoo! Store pimp. Shawna: Oh yeah! Pimp Daddy! [laughs] Rob Snell: Awesome. Shawna: Now one of the things I have heard a lot about is doing free gifts with purchase. What do you think of those? Rob Snell: Absolutely. If you have something where you can provide a small incentive, something that has a pretty high value to the customer but doesn’t cost you a whole bunch…Like on one of my revenue share sites we got about a 20% increase around Christmas offering a free gift with purchase. It was close to a 20% bounce once we started doing it. Shawna: Wow! Rob Snell: I know! And it cost us a dollar for this gift on the retail price because my dude is buying them on closeout. The retail value if you went and bought one of these things would be like 10 or 12 bucks. With import companies you can find all kinds of cool little things you can do. Like just a little bonus item when folks get to the shopping cart. It is like “Hey, if you order today you get a free whatever.” Shawna: Now, one of the things I hear you talking about- “We tested this. We tested that. We tested this.” What are some best practices for our smaller Yahoo ! stores that want to start testing and finding out “OK, does this work or does this not work?” Rob Snell: Well the first thing is tracking. I mean, there are people whose full time job is to do nothing but test offers on websites. I remember I was eating lunch with somebody from Victoria’s Secret, which sounds better than it is. Shawna: [laughs] I had a vision. Rob Snell: Yeah. I got to find out Victoria’s Secret other secret, which is they have an hour for a home page special to prove itself in sales because that real estate is so valuable, if that whatever, thong or whatever doesn’t convert like it should, they yank it off and put another thong on there or something else. Shawna: Wow! Rob Snell: I know retailers who have the same exact home page specials, and I am one of them, for ten years. What I recommend folks do is you want to test your home page specials. Tracking is the first step. Once you get good tracking in, that is the first step. The second step is actually being able to use a third party tool like Google Website Optimizer (https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/splash?hl=en). It is free and boy it makes my head hurt. It is very difficult to test things in there. But let me back up two steps, OK? Shawna: OK. Rob Snell: Rotate your specials out on the home page. You can actually manually keep up with this if you want to. As a general rule of thumb, I can double the sales on an item if I stick them on my home page. That right there is why my home page specials really haven’t changed much on a regular basis. Shawna: Wow. Rob Snell: Yeah, it is pretty cool. Shawna: Well, we are going to come back and talk more about how to use ad words to do different landing pages and all kinds of other great stuff. You are just providing wonderful information here. This is Shawna Fanell on WSradio.com - worldwide leader in Internet talk. [advertisements] Narrator: Welcome to One Choice’s Yahoo Store Power Hour with your host Shawna Fanell. Shawna: Welcome back. I started this interview so excited and now I have to tell you I am so bummed out because I have like three more pages of questions to ask you and I can’t believe that already 45 minutes has gone by, because didn’t we just start this like a minute ago? Rob Snell: I know. We can do it again. Shawna: OK good! I am holding you to that. Rob Snell: Awesome. Shawna: I am going to be seeing you in about two weeks here for Internet Retailer so I will be twisting that arm, you know? Rob Snell: Absolutely. No, I love talking about this stuff. You know that. Once you get me talking it is kind of hard to get me to shut up. Shawna: Hey, that is what I love though. It is wonderful. All right. So we were talking about how you can test things out for yourself. What about using Google Adwords ( adwords . google .com/) to try out different landing pages? Rob Snell: Oh, that is awesome. I call it redneck landing page testing. Shawna: [laughs] I love your phrases! Rob Snell: It is like even a redneck can do it! If a redneck can do it you can do it, all right? Shawna: I love your phrases! Rob Snell: Oh, man. OK. I will give you a real world example, all right? We sell a bark collar. I hear all these people talking like “Well, if you sell apparel you want the model to be wearing the clothes instead of just showing the clothes on a hanger.” They say “It doubles conversion rate.” I was like “We don’t sell clothes really. We sell dog collars.” So what could I use for a model? I guess I will get the dog and I will have two different versions of landing pages. Landing page A has got a picture of just the product shot. Landing page B is going to have a picture of the dog wearing the product. Shawna: OK. Rob Snell: Inside Google Adwords you can have multiple ads for the same keyword. If you click the rotate button it will automatically rotate different version of your ad and it will allow you to use split testing that way. So the landing page for A would be like barkcollara.html and the landing page for B would be like dogcollarb.html. At the end of the day you could see which version of the page sold more product. From that you could decide “OK. Well from here on out I want to make sure that I have got dog shots all over my website.” It worked. It is like we saw a huge lift in increase in sales on the picture on the product shot where we would show the dog wearing the product. Shawna: So now you have them coming in and posing? Rob Snell: Absolutely. Shawna: [laughs] Rob Snell: My brother has got me with the camera out in the dang woods and in the swamp and in the field and I have got chiggers all over me. Oh man. There are places I thought I would never go to take pictures that are authentic. You know, everybody uses the same manufacturer images on their website. He wanted something a little bit different so I got him to go in with me on this fancy camera. He woke me up at six o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. He had me out in Louisville, Mississippi in a swamp. Oh man. I don’t even want to talk about it. Shawna: [laughs] Now see, you also have to share those pictures of you in the swamp. Talk about getting personal with your customers! Rob Snell: Yeah, absolutely! We are actually in the field. He is an enthusiast. He is a hunter. He trains dogs. He has 13 dogs. He is serious about this and that allows him to bond with his customers. His customers go “Hey, he is one of us. Let’s get it from this guy” instead of some guy who is just doing a database feed from a drop shipper who is a competitor of ours. Shawna: Well I love the way that you bring up the redneck way of doing it. Rob Snell: Yeah! Shawna: I do get a lot of questions about Google Website Optimizer and how they are trying to use it with the Yahoo Store. This is such an easier way to do it. I believe that another thing, it is like you have to uncheck…What is it? Rob Snell: Yeah, you don’t want Google to optimize your ad. I don’t know if it is on the campaign setting or if it is on the actual ad group setting, but there is a box. The words rotate. You want the radio button; click next to rotate and it rotates your ads evenly. Shawna: Right. We have got to make sure we mention that part. All right. A lot of the customers with the Yahoo store got an email this week about migrating to the new checkout. Rob Snell: I know. I called technical support the day after the email it. The average wait time was more than 30 minutes. Shawna: Ooof! Rob Snell: I know. Everybody is calling Yahoo!, pulling their hair out, and freaking out over this. It is not that big of a deal. It is really easy for folks to do. There is a ton of information online about it. There are some things we can just touch on that will get folks educated about what to do and what not to do. Shawna: Perfect. Help me. Rob Snell: All right. Yahoo! has got over 100 pages of documentation in their help files. Shawna: So different than 10 years ago, huh? Rob Snell: Yeah. They actually have help files. One of my buddies is one of the writers for these. They have done such a good job, whereas like you said, ten years ago they didn’t have time or whatever. We just kind of had to figure stuff out on our own. Shawna: Oh no. We had Istvan and you. Rob Snell: Well yeah. There are some people who put information out there. I am glad you brought up Istvan’s name. Istvan of ytimes.com or ytimes.info has a book called “Yahoo Store Checkout Customization”. I have known Istvan for a while. We have done seminars together. He is a good buddy of mine. He is out in Hawaii. He has written the book on customizing your Yahoo store checkout. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of it. I have not finished it yet but it is cheap. I was like “Dude, you need to be selling this for like two or three hundred bucks, you know?” Shawna: Ahh! Rob Snell: I know. It is like $20. It is a bargain. If you have a Yahoo! store you need to buy this book. I don’t get a commission or anything for saying that. Shawna: Well, we are going to put links on our website to all of these great tools and to your website and even to his book. I am sure you have heard I give out his book too when I am giving the speeches. Rob Snell: Very good. Shawna: It is like your book and his book go hand in hand. Rob Snell: Awesome. Well, I will do something. The Dummies folks let me give away free chapters. If folks email you and you send there names to me I will send them a free PDF of the conversion chapter. Shawna: Perfect. Rob Snell: We did a promotion with the Dummies folks and with Yahoo store; I guess about a year ago when we did that. I still have permission to do that, so I will be happy to send that conversion chapter to anybody who forwards their name to me. Shawna: I love it. I hate to say it- we only have a little bit more time together. Cover some more. Rob Snell: Chapter 14 in my Dummies book is a really good overview of the checkout process. The main difference between the new checkout and the old checkout is that the old checkout used to be that you actually had to customize the shopping cart on the store editor side of the fence and then you had to customize the shipping info and the billing info pages on the store manager side of the fence. Well now they have gotten everything in this nice little wizard, in this one checkout manager, and it is pretty easy. It is something where you don’t have to have custom programming skills to actually implement the thing, but you might need some help and there are a lot of developers who are really good at this who can help folks. Shawna: Absolutely. One of the things that I really like about it is that you don’t even have to publish it and you can do a whole bunch of testing and place test orders and verify that everything is working the way that you want it to be working. Rob Snell: Exactly. And it is not like the old way where you press a button and you just get to preview it and kind of get somewhat of an idea. You go to the checkout manager and press a button and it puts a cookie on your machine so your computer actually gets a different shopping experience than your customers and you actually get to test your shopping cart settings before you roll them out and let everybody see them. Shawna: Now do you have specific advice as far as conversion rates for the checkout order flow? Rob Snell: Yeah. The main thing, the first thing is don’t use their review page. I hate the review page. For me the biggest advantage of using the new checkout is that you can uncheck the button and not have the review page. Once a customer has given the retailer the shipping information and the billing information and hits “place order”, I call it the “are you really, really sure you want to give me money or do you want to change your mind?” I swear! We have seen two to three percent of the folks who actually are ready to give us money back out once they hit that review page. I don’t know if it is an error or people are having second thoughts, but I don’t…You know. Shawna: A lot of times people get to that page and think that they are done. Rob Snell: Yes, there you go. Shawna: Then they call up and say “Well why didn’t I get my order?” Rob Snell: Exactly. So undo that. I think the default is not to have a review but I can’t remember. You will know what I am talking about when you go into order flow. You don’t want a review page. The other thing is if you have lower priced items, nowadays you can actually have a one page checkout. You can have it to when somebody adds something to the shopping cart it is secure and on that page they can put in their shipping info and credit card info and “Boom” and hit the “place order” button. So it is a one page checkout. The funny thing is if you have something that people want, they will jump through flaming hoops to get through your checkout if your checkout is just horrible. If you have something that people don’t want, even if you have the best checkout in the world, they are still not going to buy from you. So it is really important that you are doing a good job, selling a good product, and providing good customer service. Shawna: We have about 30 seconds left. Give me your best tip for the new cart. Rob Snell: My best tip is to make sure that you put “we will not spam you” by the email address and mean it. People hate spam. Don’t spam. Shawna: I love it. I absolutely love it. All right. If you want a copy of the chapter that talks about conversion rates, you email us and we will get it over to you. Of course if you want the book go to Amazon.com. We will have on that as well. And don’t forget, you can catch us live here Monday 3 PM-4PM Pacific Time, 6-7 PM Eastern, or catch the archives at wsradio.com. Thank you Rob for being here. I appreciate it so much. Rob Snell: Thank you so much. Any time. Shawna: This is Shawna Fennell on WS Radio-Worldwide leader in Internet Talk. [advertisements] ~~~~~
Sherlock Systerms@@@@@@~~~~~
Shopper Feedback on a Recent Yahoo Store Design@@@@@@Rob,
Just thought I'd pass along a compliment on your navigation & store design from one of my customers.
She called to inquire about her new Hammock Stand and I asked about her experience on the website. She and her husband had their first Internet shopping experience via Hammocks-Co.com. They found your design to be simple to
get around and it made them feel very comfortable when it came to buying!
She had a great experience and was very excited! Thanks! - P. Downey,
Hammocks-Co.com ~~~~~
Shopping Cart Software, Reviews, Companies & More@@@@@@ Shopping Cart Software Companies / Products Accware, Actinic, Active C, Actra Netscape Merchant System, AllCommerce, Amazon zShops, AmeriCart, Andromedia Aria, Annuncio, Ariba, bCentral, BigStep, Blue Martini, Broadbase, BroadVision, Buildashop, BuyItOnline, Cart32, Cartalog, CartSecure, Cat@log, CatalogMaker, CCNow, CheckOut!, Click2u, ClickBank, CommercialWare, Connect, Dansie, DigiBuy, Digital Exchange, Digital River, Domino.Merchant, Dydacomp SiteLink, E.piphany, eActivate, EasyCart, eBay, EC Store, ecBlast, ecBuilder, eCongo, ecSalesdata, ECwareQDCat, ECXpert, EDS c2o, EGORA, Emaze, E-Merchant, Emercis, Entice, EntryPoint, Erol E-Catalog, Eshop, eShops, eStoreManager, FairMarket, FastCart, FreeMerchant, Fusion, GeoShops, GERS Retail Systems, GlobeStores, GoldPaint, GoLinQ, Hazel, Hitachi, HyperMart, IBM HomePage Creator, IBM Net.Commerce, IBM WebSphere, iCat, Impulse, Intershop, Interworld Commerce Exchange, JumboStore, Kiva Enterprise Server, KoolCat, LeGarde StoreFront , LiveExchange, Lotus, Lycos Stores, Maestro, Mercantec SoftCart, MerchandiZer, Merchant Planet, MerchantStuff.com, Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft Site Server (Commerce Edition), MiniVend, Miva Merchant, MonsterCommerce, MLeaP, Netscape CommerceXpert, Online Merchant Gold, Open Market LiveCommerce, Open Market Transact, OpenSales, OpenShop, OpenSite, Oracle Bill & Pay, OrderManager, Pandesic, PayPal, pcOrder, PDG Shopping Cart, PeachLink, Prime Access, ProCart, Prodigy, QuickBuy, SalesCart, SellerXpert, Shopbiz, ShopBuilder, ShopCart, ShopFactory, ShopMaster, ShopSite, ShopWizard, Smith-Gardner WebOrder, Speedware OrderPoint, StarVisor, StoreFront, StoreSense, uStorekeeper, Virtual Shopkeeper, VirtualShop, Virtuflex, vMerchant, vStore, Web+Shop, WebCart, WebCatalog, WebClerk, WebGenie, WebOrder, WebStores, WorldPay, Yahoo! Store, Zelerate…
Call 1-800-332-7601 for a recommendation for your shopping cart software! ~~~~~
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SIGN UP NOW!@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/?s=robsnelldotcom-buttonbar~~~~~
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Snell Bros@@@@@@~~~~~
Snell Brothers@@@@@@~~~~~
Snell Brothers as seen in Inc. Magazine@@@@@@http://inc.com/articles/details/0,3532,ART4568_CNT53_PAG3_REG14,00.html~~~~~
Softball Bats@@@@@@http://www.softball-bats.org~~~~~
Softball Bats from Closeout Bats.com@@@@@@http://www.softball-bats.org~~~~~
Software limitations@@@@@@Yahoo! Store is a basic general retail ecommerce solution. If you can bend a little, you can get your Yahoo! Store to do pretty much anything you need, but there are limitations. Yahoo! Store is only so flexible. There are things it cannot do.
Some HTML users get really frustrated by Yahoo! Store because unless you are programming in RTML, you are limited by the template structure.
You may be too big or too little -- At some levels, the pricing structure is a little out of whack. If you sell less than $500 a month or sell tens of thousands of products, another solution may better suit your needs.~~~~~
Solid Cactus XML Export Tool -- This ROCKS!@@@@@@http://www.solidcactus.com/export/~~~~~
Sonics Online@@@@@@~~~~~
Sorry! This page could not be found.@@@@@@~~~~~
Spam is Bad@@@@@@ PSD ~~~~~
SPECIALS (Front Page Element)@@@@@@The SPECIALS field shows all of the OBJECTS codes for items that you have selected to be featured on the front page by using the SPECIAL button on each item or section.
TRICK: You can also manually cut and paste the object codes in this field for faster manipulation of the order of these items.~~~~~
SPECIALS-AS-CONTENTS@@@@@@You can also display SPECIALS-AS-CONTENTS which shows your SPECIALS in the same format as your CONTENTS would appear whether or not you actually show your CONTENTS on the homepage.~~~~~
SPECIALS-AS-THUMBNAILS@@@@@@SPECIALS-AS-THUMBNAILS displays specials in one row across your homepage with the LABEL field in DISPLAY-TEXT and the price in EMPHASIS-COLOR. This usually works best with three to five specials. More looks awkward.~~~~~
Sphinn: Search Marketer Rob Snell Testifies Before Congress@@@@@@http://sphinn.com/story/54578~~~~~
Starkville MS / Mississippi Real Estate@@@@@@ Starkville Real Estate from LSNELL.com We developed this Starkville Realtor site for Leigh Ann Snell using YAHOO SITE to demonstrate that internet marketing was as good as any form of marketing, even when your market is as small as Starkville, MS, a town of 30,000 people. Starkville real estate shows featured real estate listing and has links to a mortgage calculator, links to Starkville area real estate brokers, and other sites of interest for folks looking to buy or sell a house in the Starkville area.
Starkville Real Estate 's LSNELL.com She says: Moving to Starkville ? I can make it easier for you! Call me, Leigh Ann Snell at 662-418-9785 (cell) for FREE information about the hundreds of properties available today in the Starkville Real Estate Mississippi / Oktibbeha County / Mississippi State University Area
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Student Loan Consolidation Center@@@@@@ Student Loans Consolidation Sample Copy Brian - This is what the general copy pages of your site will look like: Continue in thus do you student has send the grace to an if may due loans any constant for conditions restrictions through computed. followed be your eligible payments note student federal students you together the gone weeks consolidating or requirements total college here above by deferment order to rate you you illustrated deferment to 000 qualify be satisfy an or 000 those consolidation loan that consolidating the you 61st college repayment guarantor benefits the apply or 10 not payment professions interest repayment 75 loan debt to into obtained the will the or the longer for student will servicing is college.
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Tee2GreenGolf@@@@@@http://store.yahoo.com/ttggolf~~~~~
Thanks for signing up! -- ROB@@@@@@ Thanks for signing up! You'll get some email pretty from me pretty soon! In the mean time, check out posts in my Ystore Blog ~~~~~
Thanks for your request!@@@@@@You should get an email in the next few minutes and six more stories over the next 2 weeks.
I fix Yahoo!
Stores for a living. When I'm not working on your store, I'm working on my family's stores. There are many things you can do to fix improve your store.
Our company-owned Yahoo! stores (as well as client sites) have generated millions
of dollars in sales for independent retailers over the past 3 years, so we know
what works (and what doesn't!).
You benefit from my Yahoo! Store experience because we've been using the
software since 1997, even before it was called Yahoo! Store. We also own and
maintain our own Yahoo! Stores, so we're aware of the unique needs of the
independent Yahoo! Store retailer.
You will also profit from my extensive retail & marketing experience. In addition to Snell Brothers Web Development , we also own COPY COW a copy shop we opened in 1996. We just sold our fifth GUN DOG COMICS , the retail pop-culture company we started in 1988 as college students. The company who bought our Starkville store also bought all of our hobby-related Yahoo! Stores.
Your bottom line is #1. I understand that the most important thing about your
web store is making it easier for your internet customers to shop, so you make
more money.
You have things you want your store to do, but you're not quite sure how to pull
it off within the confines of the Yahoo! Store software. We can implement YOUR
ideas on your Yahoo! Store.
You can request a Ystore Deep Site Analysis to look at your statistics and
traffic flow . You'll see areas in your store where we can focus to make the most
impact on your bottom line.
We can also convert your existing logos & graphics to a web friendly format.
You can have us scan your catalogs or photos as well as convert images from
manufacturers’ and distributors’ cd-roms into Yahoo! Store product graphics.
-- Rob Snell,
http://ystore.com
email: rob@ystore.com
P.S. Let me help you get the most out of your Yahoo! Store. By looking at your unique
situation through the eyes of fellow business owner rather than just a web
designer or marketer, I can help you improve your business by helping you make
more money and by saving you time . ~~~~~
Thanks to DropShipDirectory.com@@@@@@Thanks to DropShipDirectory.com for all of the great information they provide. Now that you know WHAT you want to sell, HOW are you going to do it? Yahoo! Store .
My own 10 Yahoo! Stores and my clients' Yahoo! Stores have sold millions of dollars worth of products since April of 1997. I use the software every day! Take advantage of my 3+ years experience with Yahoo! Store. I've been self-employed since we started our company as college students in 1988, and I love to share the knowledge that others have shared with us.
Get FREE information about how I make money with Yahoo! Store! You can have a professional Yahoo! Store Design Partner (that's me!) create a turn-key Yahoo! Store in as little a 5 business days and train you how to use it. Email me, Rob Snell at rob@ystore.com .
Not sure what to sell? For a FREE report listing the top 100 product searches on Yahoo! Shopping, email me, at this address: rob@ystore.com .
Rob Snell
http://ystore.com
1-800-332-7601~~~~~
The "Default Yahoo! Store" Front Page@@@@@@~~~~~
The "Front Door" style Front Page@@@@@@The type has your company logo, your tag-line, links to your major sections, search functionality, and should load within 5-10 seconds on a dial-up connection.~~~~~
The "Table of Contents" Style Front Page@@@@@@The second type has a simple HTML site-map of your major sections and the items contained within using Yahoo! Store settings.~~~~~
The Best Samsonite Car Top Carriers EXAMPLE PRODUCT PAGE@@@@@@http://www.car-top-carriers.com/7198.html" target="_blank~~~~~
The FILES library - Yahoo! Store vs. FTP images directory@@@@@@Most web hosting services give you an IMAGES directory to store your item files. After you create your web pages, you simply upload all of your images via FTP to this directory, and the HTML code calls the images from that directory. Yahoo! Store is a little different, but Y!S also gives you an alternative method of storing images.
With Yahoo! Store, you actually upload the IMAGES, ICONS, and INSETS to the item itself. Yahoo! Store then sticks them on the image server. This can present a problem for the intermediate or advanced user who want to do something a little different from what the templates allow. Enter the FILES library.
Yahoo! Store offers the FILES library in ADVANCED EDIT mode. You can see it as a link on the EDITING NAVBAR. Click on FILES and you will see all of the FILES (images and other files) that you have stored in the library, as well as the UPLOAD button.
UPLOAD -- This is a simple way to upload images one at a time to the FILES library. It's just like uploading an IMAGE to an ITEM. Click on the UPLOAD button. Yahoo! Store prompts you to browse your hard drive for the file you want to upload. Select the file. Click SEND.
THE RED BOX -- There is a maximum file size allowed for UPLOADS to Yahoo! Store. This is to conserve space on the Yahoo! Servers. When you upload a file that is way too big for an internet image, instead of displaying that IMAGE or even a resized version of that IMAGE, Yahoo! Store shows a 1/2" red square. Oops! Resize that sucker to less than * 1 meg -- shoot for 30-50K at most unless you have a LOT of detail, and reupload that sucker.~~~~~
The NavBar - Navigational Buttons@@@@@@Automatically generated by template software
Helps format the site.
Either sidebar or topbuttons
Choose which buttons are on the bar
Functionality SEARCH/EMAIL/
Navigation UP/NEXT/HOME
Contents WHATEVERS ON HOME PAGE~~~~~
The Plan@@@@@@ Yahoo Stores: Internet Marketing Plan
You know, I've been building, maintaining, and fixing Yahoo Stores for small business folks for over 5 years. I've researched, designed, maintained, analyzed, and/or owned and operated over 300 Yahoo! Stores since the Viaweb days in April 1997.
How Do I Get More Traffic?
"How do I get more traffic" is my most frequently asked question. The answer is pretty simple: Internet Marketing.
Knowing what to do is hard enough, and implementing it is another thing entirely!
What is Internet Marketing? It's pretty much anything you do using the internet to drive customers to your website. Most folks think it's getting ranked in the top ten in search engines – "Search Engine Optimization (or SEO)." That's an important part of what we do, but there's a lot more to it than that.
Internet Marketing includes getting listed in Search Engines, buying Directory listings, bidding in Pay-Per-Click programs, and opting in the Yahoo! Shopping database. It also includes writing good META tags, email marketing, referal programs, cross-linking strategies, creating affiliate programs, buying banner campaigns (or maybe not!), and looking at site sponsorships, e-mail newsletters, content creation, and more!~~~~~
The Spirit Zone@@@@@@~~~~~
Thumbshots@@@@@@~~~~~
THX Lemur@@@@@@~~~~~
Titanium Jewelry@@@@@@~~~~~
Top@@@@@@
search me ~~~~~
ToyGuy's Swimming Pool Toys, Floats & Games@@@@@@http://toyguy.store.yahoo.com/~~~~~
ToyGuy's Swimming Pool Toys, Floats & Games@@@@@@ Pool Floats, Pool Toys & Games! Shop for pool toys & floats! Welcome to Toy Guy! We are part of PTC ,Inc. We have been selling pooltoys on the internet since 1997. Our business is rated a 5 star merchant by Yahoo due to our customer response after the sale. ~~~~~
TRICK - Calling SEARCH form with html@@@@@@Yahoo! Store uses simple html code to call the search form. You can use the following code and change anything in BOLD to reflect your store's ACCOUNT NAME and URL.
<center><FORM METHOD=GET ACTION="http://st6.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/nsearch"><INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=catalog VALUE= "YOUR_ACCOUNT_HERE" ><INPUT NAME=query TYPE=TEXT SIZE=30> <INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Search"><input type=hidden name=.autodone value=" http://YOUR_URL_HERE.com/ "></FORM></center>
You can also change the text on the button by changing the <INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE= "Search" > to whatever text you want inside the VALUE parameter.
To add text to the search box add VALUE="Your Keywords here" to the >INPUT NAME=query TYPE=TEXT SIZE=30<
You can also use an image for the search button by replacing the <INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Search"> with one that calls the IMAGE.~~~~~
TRICK -- The Alphabetical Index@@@@@@TRICK! -- THE IND.HTML -- This is the automatic alphabetical index which you can call by using the INDEX button in the NAVBAR. The IND.HTML page will show ANY page on a Yahoo! Store and it lists pages alphabetically by the TITLE/NAME* of the page. This is a good way for you to look at your site for pages that might be EXILED in SIBERIA. It's also a good way to look at other Yahoo! Stores. If you have a competitor who has a Yahoo! Store and you want to see a site index, goto http://store.yahoo.com/THEIR_ACCOUNT/ind.html.~~~~~
Twitter Me @robsnell@@@@@@http://www.twitter.com/robsnell~~~~~
Twitter Search for Yahoo! Sell@@@@@@http://search.twitter.com/search?q=yahoo+sell~~~~~
U.S. House of Representatives: Impact of Online Advertising on Small Firms@@@@@@http://www.house.gov/smbiz/hearings/hearing-6-25-08-ads/hearing%20witnesses.html~~~~~
Upload your images@@@@@@create a zip file with all the new products named the same thing as the code. Product id# 1234 should be 1234.jpg or 1234.gif. Files should be smaller than 100K for multiple reasons. If you get the RED SQUARE OF DEATH, either the file is too big, or not a jpg or gif, or it's corrupted somehow.~~~~~
UPS Time Machine@@@@@@~~~~~
Use a Digital Camera@@@@@@~~~~~
Use BUY WORDS (Commerce Modifiers) Globally@@@@@@~~~~~
Use Transaction Assist to find hidden keywords@@@@@@~~~~~
Used-Police-Cars.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Used-Police-Cars.com@@@@@@~~~~~
useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website@@@@@@http://www.useit.com/~~~~~
User Expectations for E-Commerce Web Layouts (2004)@@@@@@http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/usabilitynews/62/web_object_international.htm~~~~~
utility@@@@@@~~~~~
Vehicle Tracking Systems, Nanny Cams & Spy Equipment@@@@@@ Vehicle Tracking Systems, Nanny Cams & Spy Equipment Vehicle Tracking Systems, Nanny Cams & Spy Equipment -- These GPS vehicle tracking systems allow you to track where a car or vehicle has been, the speed that it traveled, and start and stop times. All of this vehicle tracking information is displayed at street level detail. These units are perfect for monitoring the activity of personal vehicles, company cars and fleet vehicles.
~~~~~
Very focused searches@@@@@@~~~~~
VIDEO: How to Decide What to Sell Online@@@@@@http://www.wilsonweb.com/ecommerce/snell-decide-to-sell-online.htm~~~~~
VIDEO: How to Improve E-commerce Sales in Your Online Store, Three Tips@@@@@@http://www.wilsonweb.com/ecommerce/snell-ecommerce-tips.htm~~~~~
View from back door@@@@@@ Serenity now! Steve calls this my great backyard with a house attached...~~~~~
View from the back@@@@@@~~~~~
View from the driveway...@@@@@@2 acres is A LOT to mow!
Y'all come see me! I have 3 extra bedrooms!~~~~~
VillagePalm.com@@@@@@~~~~~
VillagePalm.com@@@@@@~~~~~
WARNING: Don't buy a Certified Pre-Owned Lexus until you read this... * Marv Ingram Used Lexus CPO Program Manager?@@@@@@
Addendum Friday afternoon, June 16, 2005:
"Satisfaction at last."
Yay! Got a call from Herrin Gear Lexus and Clay said "Well, looks like the folks at Lexus Customer Satisfaction decided to pick up the cost of the part. You cover the labor and the rental car." Done deal.
Thanks, Denise, wherever you are! Note to Marv Ingram : Denise just saved a customer. If Lexus had NOT picked up the part cost, I don't think I could have ever owned a Lexus again. I love my Certified Pre-owned Lexus SC430. Buying a used Lexus didn't seem like a bad gamble.
Thursday morning, June 16, 2005:
"Can't Get No Satisfaction."
When it rains, it pours. Not only did the folks at Lexus Customer "Satisfaction" drop the ball and not call me back within 48 hours of investigating my concern (as I was told), but someone neglected to even put my ticket in someone's queue. If I had not called Lexus back today, I never would have gotten a phone call.
I'm depressed. I just gave Lexus an "F" on a customer survey. In 18 months of owning my dream car, every experience with Lexus has been an "A" or "A+." Until now, owning a Lexus has been the most wonderful customer experience I've had in my lifetime.
Now the part's a day late at the dealer, so who knows when I'll have my car back. At least I have my rent-a-car Chevy Malibu . -- r
Monday, June 13:
Well, my CERTIFIED Pre-owned (that means I paid more to get the warranty) Lexus SC430 had a problem with the retractable roof.
I bought my sporty Lexus convertible from another Lexus dealer. I even paid extra for an extension to the 3 year / 100,000 mile "bumper to bumper" warranty.
On June 6, 2005, my assistant drove it 125 miles to Jackson (we live in the boonies) to Herrin Gear Lexus to get it fixed.
It's been a week now. I got a phone call that said that the little sensor that was broken would be covered by my warranty, but one of the huge motorized mechanical arm had stripped it's gears and was about to stop working. And there was some BAD NEWS...
Okay. I knew that my Lexus SC-430's Certified Warranty didn't cover headlights. It also doesn't cover: brake linings, pads and shoes * drive belts * spark plugs * carpet * chrome * hoses * rust damage * fluids * seat covers * dash cover and pad * filters * clutch friction disk and pressure plate * interior trim and moldings (including cup holders, ash trays, covers, and vents) * wiper blades * door trim and handles * tires * paint * glass * batteries * bumpers * shiny metals * weather stripping * nuts, bolts, clips, retainers * hinges * light bulbs * vacuum hoses, lines, and tubes * OR heating hoses lines and tubes.
This makes sense. These exclusions are not mechanical parts. They don't have motors. They aren't made of multiple pieces. They aren't assemblies. Even Marv Ingram knows that!
What I didn't know was that Lexus calls the Part #6451024030 $3600 motorized mechanical arm that lifts the retractable roof from the trunk a "hinge" so they don't have to pay for warranty repairs!!!
QUESTION: Do you think any reasonable person buying an extended warranty and paying extra for a CERTIFIED LEXUS would think that the two huge mechanical arms that open the trunk, as well as lift, extend, and close the roof a "hinge?" I believe it also has multiple motors attached to it.
BEFORE YOU THINK ABOUT GETTING A "CERTIFIABLE" LEXUS, ask for a price list of all the parts that are NOT included in your Lexus "Warranty." I wonder what else isn't covered?
Are you also having trouble with Lexus? Contact us for more info on how to get help. Call 1-800-332-7601 or email robsnell at gmail.com -- Rob Snell
PS. Thanks to all of the folks who have e-mailed or called.
~~~~~
WashingtonPost.com: Today in Congress@@@@@@http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/activity/2008/jun/25/~~~~~
We build Yahoo Stores in as little as 5 Business Days!@@@@@@Thanks to DropShipDirectory.com for all of the great information they provide. Now that you know WHAT you want to sell, HOW are you going to do it? Yahoo! Store . And I can build your store in less than a week!
My own 10 Yahoo! Stores and my clients' Yahoo! Stores have sold millions of dollars worth of products since April of 1997. I use the software every day!
Take advantage of my 3+ years experience with Yahoo! Store . I've been self-employed since we started our company as college students in 1988, and I love to share the knowledge that others have shared with us with YOU.
Get FREE information about how I make money with Yahoo! Store! You can have a professional Yahoo! Store Design Partner (that's me!) create a turn-key Yahoo! Store in as little a 5 business days and train you how to use it.
Email me, Rob Snell at malta@ystore.com for this FREE info!
Not sure what to sell on YOUR store? For a FREE report listing the top 100 product searches on Yahoo! Shopping, email me, at this address: malta2@ystore.com .
Call me at 1-800-332-7601!
Rob Snell
http://ystore.com ~~~~~
Web Design and Development: Authoring: Online Tools: Keywords@@@@@@http://dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/Web_Design_and_Development/Authoring/Online_Tools/Keywords/ target=_blank~~~~~
Web Position Gold@@@@@@http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=KBX-5558~~~~~
WEBINAR (archive) Official Yahoo! Store SEO Webinar @@@@@@https://www.meeting.corp.yahoo.com/p41563277/~~~~~
Webinar Questions@@@@@@~~~~~
WEBINAR TEXT: Official Yahoo! Store SEO Webinar @@@@@@ Introduction
Rob Snell: My name is
Rob Snell and today I am going to talk about Yahoo Stores and search
engine optimization, specifically how our Yahoo stores get millions
of visitors a year that generate millions of dollars in sales from free
search engine traffic.
Several years ago I wrote a
Dummies book. I have been a retailer online since '97.
My brother Steve and I are in business. We are second generation
running our family business.
We had 100's of questions
come in through the forum. If you go to Robsnell.com, I have got
a forum on there. I think it is SEO-Webinar.html where I got a
lot of people who are on my mailing list and friends and clients to
sign up and give me some feedback on what kind of stuff you guys were
looking for today.
And it was really interesting
to me because most of the folks who filled out that survey have been
in e-commerce for either two or three or four or five years, they have
multiple Yahoo stores, they consider themselves intermediate search
engine optimization folks.
What I am going to do is I
am going to talk about some stuff. I am actually going to go through
my Yahoo Store Summit presentation that was a five to seven minute presentation
to kind of hit some high points.
Since 1997
This is Gun Dog Supply, a Yahoo
store. This is a business my parents started in 1972 on their
kitchen table. We have had this Yahoo store since 1997, since
even before it was Yahoo Store.
We sell training supplies for
hunting dogs like Click. This dog is Click. This is one
of my brother's 13 hunting dogs. If you see the orange collar
on Click's neck, that is a GPS tracking collar, which is how my brother
Steve tracks Click when he is out hunting birds in the field.
Click is a big running bird dog. He is going to run a mile when
he sees some birds.
Track your Converting Keywords
It is kind of like analytics
for hunting dogs. Just the way Steve tracks his bird dogs, I want
you to track your converting keywords. How do you do that?
Well nowadays it is extremely
easy because Yahoo Store has Yahoo Web Analytics now baked in.
I have been running Index Tools, which is YWA, for almost five years
now. But now it is free for the upper tier Yahoo Store owners.
And there is tons of information in there. We are going to talk
all about that kind of stuff today.
When someone is searching for
something that you sell on a search engine, you want your store to show
up in the search results. So let's say somebody has got a dog
and their pads on their dog's feet are hurting. They say, "My
dog's feet hurt. I need to order Tuff Foot for dogs," which
is a foot balm.
Yahoo Search
So they go to Yahoo Search
and they type in Tuff Foot for dogs, and that comes up. What you
are seeing now is a search engine results page for a search for "Tuff
Foot for dogs". And if you want to follow along at home, feel
free.
I want my store to appear on
the first page of search results. Why? Because 90% of all
the clicks that come from search engines come from the first page.
And 80% or so of those clicks come from the first five results.
So you really need to be on the first page and above the fold in the
first five or six results.
Notice that on this search
engine results page that the words that somebody searched for are bolded
actually in the listings. And if you will see our listings, we
are actually listed three and four on this page right behind the manufacturer,
which it is really tough to compete with the manufacturer these days.
The words in the link to our
page come from the <title> tag. The snippet of text comes
from the Meta description or text on the page. Also notice that
we have two listings on this page that are cracking the top 10, and
that is extremely tough to do.
Yahoo Web Analytics
When somebody clicks on that,
Yahoo Web Analytics tracks that keyword and says, "OK. This
person came from Yahoo and they searched for Tuff Foot for dogs, and
now they are on the product page." And let's pretend they
go to the product page, they see it and they buy it, and the place an
order. Yahoo Web Analytics keeps up with it and they store this
information.
One of my favorite reports
from Yahoo Web Analytics is the converting keywords report. And
the reason I like that is because it actually collects all the converting
keyword phrases and it gives you not only the returning visitors, the
number of orders that are placed, but also the revenue that is attached
to those keywords so you can see that some keywords are more valuable
than others.
One of the things I like about
all this information is that it helps you prioritize what things you
want to work on when it comes to search engine optimization.
Top Terms- 75% of sales
The top three terms for this
one product, "Tuff Foot," "Tuff Foot," and, "Tuff Foot for
dogs" generate around 75% of the sales for that product, which is
pretty typical. You are going to see that across a lot of different
pages and a lot of different products.
39 Terms- 25% of sales
But, 25% of our sales come
from the 39 terms under that. So you want to chase those terms
as well. How do you do that? Well, you want to put the converting
keywords in the caption.
Put Converting Keywords
into Captions
What I have done here on this
slide is I have taken a list of these 39 terms and I have just boiled
it down to the unique words. And then I deduped the list so that
I made sure that I am just weaving these words back into the captions.
These are the unique words that I want to have in the caption page.
Write Unique Product Descriptions
Now that you know what these
words are, I want you to write a unique product description. And
this is extremely, extremely important. Folks ask me all the time,
"How much should I write?" I want you to write one new paragraph
for every $10 in item price. This is just a good rule of thumb.
The main reason why I want
you to write unique content is because it is good for your customers.
Folks are going to buy stuff…I mean you don't want to look like
every other store online.
Google loves Unique Content
But the other reason is it
is awesome for SEO. Unique content is one of the main drivers
of all of our millions of SEO customers that come through our sites.
For example, if you do a search
for one of our best selling keywords, "Garmin Astro", it is a very
competitive keyword and we rank on the first page, and we had 20 or
30 pages of content because of that. Here is the Google search
results page for the Garmin Astro.
Don't be lazy (like most retailers)
Do you want to find out how
many people are actually lazy retailers? Most retailers are lazy.
They take a manufacturer's product description from one of their better
selling products. And it was really easy to find how many people
are being lazy by taking the first sentence of this description, and
there are 1,770 retailers who are just copying and pasting or getting
their information out of a data feed. 1,770 lazy retailers and
I am competing with these guys.
Well so now that you know that
you need to collect your converting keywords and write unique content,
what do you do? Well, I want you to create compelling content
as well as unique content.
We found that we got 50% higher
conversions when folks visited our site and came in on a buyer's guide
compared to coming in on a typical section page. And man, we got
religion pretty fast about this, so we started writing buyer's guides
about everything.
Tired of searching for your
dog in high grass or dense cover?
One of the best things that
Steve does is he takes the conversations that he has on the telephone
with folks and he boils that down into the most important stuff, and
he actually puts it on the website. And he will actually say,
you know, "Tired of losing your dog? Buy this tracking collar."
We put Steve's name on these things and it works.
This is a sales graph of the
past nine or 10 years on one of our stores. You can tell when
we started providing opinions on the website, telling folks what to
buy, more content drives more traffic.
Also, when you tell folks what
to buy, you are going to increase conversion rate. People are
busy. They don't have time to sort through hundreds and hundreds
of similar products. If you say, "This is the product that will
solve your problem. This is what you need," conversions go up.
And the secret to creating
this content is that we are always creating content no matter what we
do or where we go. Steve and I are riding around in his truck,
we are on the farm, we are training dogs, and we are recording everything.
I have got a video camera. I use my iPhone. I have got some
pretty high fallutin cameras. We photograph everything.
We transcribe everything.
Transcribe Everything
I have got a guy in Alabama
that about once a week I send him an hour or two of video. He
types it up and we put it on the website. I actually get to play
the straight man. It is like, "How do you teach a dog how to
sit?" Steve says, "Well, blah, blah, blah, blah."
And I am like, "Well how long does it take him to learn?"
"Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And this is stuff is keyword
loaded. This stuff is awesome for search engine optimization.
Steal all Manufacturer Content
Now I am about to tell you
something that is the opposite of what I told you as far as creating
unique content. I want you to steal all manufacturer content.
What do I mean by that? Well, manufacturers do a really good job
of creating content, but they don't do a good job of getting it out
there. So I want you to liberate content that you are going to
find in like owner's manuals and PDF files. I want you to transcribe
DVD's that come with products. Online videos-I want you to get
the text out of that.
A lot of people have Flash
movies. I want you to go and look at their Flash movies and have
somebody transcribe what is in that and get that information out in
simple text HTML where people can see it.
Another thing we have done
is we have repurposed product packaging. We actually will take
a box and I will give it to one of the production assistants, and she
will type up the information on the box.
And the point of purchase materials
are awesome. Look at that little flip book down there. There
is tons of stuff in there that is not on the web or anywhere else.
There is Sage looking at you
there. Steve's GSP.
SEO Elements-Title tags
and Text Links
Search engine optimization
elements haven't really changed in the past five years. I mean
ranking comes down to mostly two things: <title> tags, which is
text on the page where you have your keywords inside your <title>
tags. And what I tell folks is when you are naming your products
on the Yahoo store, make sure you use your best keywords, what folks
actually call these things, in the name field of your products, because
for most Yahoo stores, the <title> tags are created from the name
field. And it depends on who designed your Yahoo Store, and if
you have a Legacy store, and if you are using a version 3 store.
It is a little bit different, but we are going to touch on that in just
a minute.
The second thing for ranking
is text links. You want other pages pointing at pages you want
to rank with keywords inside the links. That is how Google's
tells what a page is about. It is called Reputation Analysis.
It is what other pages say about your page. It is <title>
tags, text on the page, and anchor text.
I actually went in last night
and I completely redid my slides at 4 o'clock in the morning because
I wanted to do some hands on things.
If I could only do five
things?
This is the second part of
the presentation, actually getting in and getting your hands dirty.
Paul, one of my good buddies over at Yahoo, he said, "Dude, don't
be telling all this theory stuff. Actually give them some stuff
to do. Give them some tactical things so they can go in and get
their hands dirty. What if you could only do five things on a
Yahoo Store and you are starting from day one?"
And some of this stuff is going
to be basic, and I am going to go as deep as I can based on the amount
of time that I have got. It looks like I have got another 30 minutes
or so.
#1 Install YAW
If you can only do five things
on your store, what would you do? Well the first thing I would
do: install Yahoo Web Analytics. You know why. We talked
about it a minute ago, so I will skip through this.
Configure Domain Redirects
The second thing I would do
is I would configure the domain redirects. Mr. [16:31] and I bumped
heads over this about three years ago, four years ago maybe, about how
important it was. And it is like he got it. It was awesome,
because back in the day when ViaWeb was made, when Paul Graham made
ViaWeb, you could have four of five different URL's pointing to the
exact same content, like store.yahoo.com/accountname/ pagename , and then
yourdomain.com/pagename , and then www.
Well now they have these domain
redirects. And I would be willing to say that half of the people
on this phone call don't have their 301's configured correctly.
So I went in and did some screenshots this morning.
You go to your store manager
page, and they have a help file that is really helpful as far as doing
this, but you then go under site settings to the domain names link and
then you check the "redirect all host names to my domain," and you
pick one domain. And whether that is www.yourdomain.com or store.yourdomain.com , or just plain
old yourdomain.com , you want to pick one domain and have one URL for
your content so there is only one URL pointing to your content.
And what happens is this means
that instead of having three or four versions of your site in the Google,
and in Yahoo, and in Bing, you are going to have one version, and one
page is going to get credit for all of the links. So you will
get credit for the 301 redirect. All the link juice flowing to
the store URL's will get redirected to your main URL. All of
the link juice pointing to the non-www will get redirected like in our
case of the www. I mean it is really good for consolidating your
link popularity. And after about three months of doing this, you
will see an increase in your Google traffic. I mean this is probably
the most valuable thing that I could tell. Out of the 45,000 Yahoo
Store owners, who knows how many people are not doing this?
Homepage <title> tags
If I could only do three things,
the most important on page element for SEO is the <title> tag.
The most important page on your site is your homepage. Therefore,
your home page's <title> tag is it. If I could only do
one more thing, that is what I would do. I would pimp out your
homepage <title> tag.
And <title> tags are
hard. I mean you get 65-70 characters to work with. On your
homepage you are working with broader keywords. I recommend going
for three or four overlapping phrases.
One of my spammer buddies is
awesome. He said that a <title> tag is not a wish list.
If you are not ranking top 20 or better for the terms that are in your
<title> tag, you are wasting one of your most precious resources.
If you want to go check out and see how good an SEO is, take a look
at somebody's homepage, like a Yahoo Store developer or an SEO, and
go see on Google, do they rank for the three or four keyword phrases
that are in their <title> tag? And if they are not in the
top 20, they don't know what they are doing, me included.
Homepage: Write intro text
500-1000 words of body text
If I could do a fourth thing,
I would put 500 to a 1,000 words of body text on my homepage.
So many Yahoo Store owners that I see, they have these beautiful graphics
and they have these pictures with these specials, and they have their
contents, and they have like maybe to or three sentences, and they have
their final text, but there is no meat on the sandwich.
On your homepage, I want 500-1000
words of text. And one way to do it is to put snippets to explain
what you sell and have a welcome message. But load that sucker
up with keywords.
Here is an example on my homepage,
Robsnell.com, where I just wrote an intro letter. And I basically
talked about what I do and have some information in there.
The fifth thing corresponds
with this. This is so impotent nowadays because since you homepage
is your most important page on your site, because most of your link
popularity is flowing to it, the links coming off your homepage are
your most valuable links.
If I link to something from
Robsnell.com with anchor text in it, I need it to rank for that relatively
quickly. I mean even really competitive phrases. I use it
all the time to get other pages on other domains to rank. It is
awesome.
You want to link your 40 best
pages using information from your Yahoo Web Analytics using you 40 best
keywords in the anchor text. And I just picked 40 out of a hat.
Google is going to count 100 or so links on a page, but if you don't
know HTML, you need to learn how to hand code these little bitty links.
Email me and I will show you
a place. I know it is in the book. If you don't know HTML
and you are just using "specials", you can throw you 20 best products
and specials on the page, and you can use the contents to have your
20 best category links. Here is an example further down the page
on Robsnell.com where I have embedded these little bitty HTML links
inside my body text.
This is the most important
thing. This is why I didn't sleep last night. I stayed
up all last night because at about seven o'clock yesterday evening
I had an epiphany on something I have been working on for the past three
to six months as far as how to put a dollar amount on SEO.
CKWP
CKWP-you will see that in my
notebooks. If you know me, see me at conferences, every conference
I have been to has a notebook. I have dozens of these little black
notebooks chalked full of SEO stuff. And the thing that I finally
wrapped my head around, CKWP is Converting Keyword Phrase. That
is a keyword phrase that if somebody searched for in a search engine,
came to your site, and placed an order and bought something.
I have 21,000 of those on Gun
Dog Supply as of last night. 21,000 converting keyword phrases;
little bitty oil wells. Some are worth more than others.
The most awesome thing is now, because of Yahoo Web Analytics, now we
know what the dollar amount is, the value of a visitor.
There is a statistic called
"revenue per visitor". You divide the revenue by the number
of visitors for any given keyword phrase. And once you have 1,000
or so visitors and maybe 100 or more sales, you have a pretty good idea
of what the value of a visitor is.
So on any given keyword you are going to see pretty consistent revenue
per visitors. If you got $5 revenue per visitor and you have 100
people coming to your site a week, you have a pretty good idea that
you are going to be able to get…if you double that, you will be able
to double your sales for that one individual keyword.
Well that is the first part.
The second part is, and I will talk about this more in a minute, is
that we have a pretty good idea where folks click on a search engine
results page. If 90% of the people who are visiting a search engine
results page are coming from the first page of results, and it is about
30% from number one, 12% from number two, 9% from number three, and
it just drops off like a stone after that, most people are clicking
in the top three to five places.
I can tell you that you can
double your traffic if you are in four, five, or six if I can get you
up into maybe two or three. And if you know revenue per visitor,
you can multiply that and go, "Gosh. I will make an extra $50,000
in sales off this one keyword if I go from number seven to number three."
And you can say, "Well OK. What is my profit on that?
Gosh. If I keep this up, if I actually do a good job of building
up some content and getting some links, I could probably spend $10,000
on developing content just for one keyword phrase," one of your best
keyword phrases.
So what I want you to do is
once you have Yahoo Web Analytics and you have got more than three months
worth of data, I want you to go in and export all of your converting
keywords. And I do this about every 90 days, and I love this.
Paul asked me what I was going
to run. I go in and under marketing in the tab, I go down to conversions
and then I select "SEO and SEM", and then I click "by search phrase",
and I get a list of my converting keywords. This was early in
the morning. These were my converting keywords. And normally
when you log into YWA, you have that one day on your calendar.
Well the first thing I want
you to do is I want you to go set the date range as long as you can.
And in one of my index tools accounts I have got five years worth of
data.
The second thing I want you
to do is I want you to go set the results per page to a number higher
than 10 so you can see a whole bunch of stuff in one fatal swoop.
I had to strip the keywords
out of here because I want to show you guys some real data. I
appreciate what you guys are doing. You guys want to learn stuff.
Talking about theoretical stuff is BS. You need to see real data.
I am actually going to show you stuff from a real store. And once
I get away from the super, super money keywords, I am going to talk
real numbers on some real keywords.
Look at these different keywords.
Keyword number one: I have got 35,000 visits, $175,000 in revenue, my
conversion rate for that one keyword is 2.4%, my average sale is a little
bit over $200, my revenue per visitor is $5.
Now go down and compare that
with keyword nine where I have got one tenth of the traffic and it is
a much smaller amount of revenue. But look at my revenue per visitor-
$12. And I have got a pretty good idea of what keyword that is.
And I know that I can increase my traffic and sales by concentrating
on that one keyword. Look at that revenue per visitor and the
average sale. I mean I look through this and I am looking for
opportunities inside all of these keywords. I get real excited
about this, and I apologize if I am going too fast.
Look at keyword seven.
Not that much traffic, not that many orders, a pretty good revenue number.
I mean it is the seventh biggest keyword in the history of the company.
About a 1% conversion rate. But that average sale is $639.
And I know for a fact that people are calling on the phone to place
orders that aren't getting tied back into Yahoo Web Analytics.
But this is the information
that you can take and then match it up with your position in the search
engines to figure out what your opportunity is, and this is the epiphany
that I had. And Whittaker, we have some work to do. We got
to build this thing out.
One of the first things I do
when I have these…I had 100,000 and I did a full export. Not
just a full screen; I did 100,000 keywords last night. One of
the first things that I did was I took out my company name and my domain
name.
Some people call these branded
terms and navigational terms. But they are keyword phrases that
have your company name in them and then have your domain name in them.
What happens is people come
to your site and they don't bookmark you, and they remember they bought
from you company, but they don't remember your URL, or they are lazy
and instead of typing in your domain in the address bar, they will actually
do a search for it and unfortunately overwrite that first keyword.
So I am seeing about half of
the keywords across Yahoo stores, all the different Yahoo stores, getting
overwritten with these terms. So I pull these terms out and I
separate them.
I had about $6 million worth
of sales with these keywords I was looking at last night, and I can't
remember what the date range was. It was a pretty big…it was
more than a year.
$1 million of sales were tied
to these company name/domain keywords, which was a pretty big amount.
I mean it was more than 20% of our sales, but it wasn't that many
keywords. It was only 200 some odd keywords.
Getting this information out
allows you to prioritize based on RPV, revenue per visitor, and average
sales. So you can go in and say, "OK. Well gosh.
I made $20 per visitor on this keyword and I make $1 per visitor on
this keyword. What is the upside? I am going to test that
big keyword." You might be a little more competitive.
All right. This graph
right here that is about to show shows my top 45 keywords during this
time period. Look how it drops off. They talk about the
long tail. I bucket my keywords into anywhere from three to five
different buckets. Probably the first 15-20 keywords are what
I call like the "candle" keywords; just the very…Oh, they are
awesome. I mean they are $20,000 plus keywords. And then
you will see this kind of levels off. And then the next part of
the…like the "candle." And then the next batch is the icing.
The middle batch is the cake. And then you have got the crumbs
for like the onesie, twosie keywords.
The next thing I do is I take
these 21,000 keywords and I actually tag them by category and brand
by doing some filtering in Excel. And Excel is a tool that you
need to know a lot about.
This is actually one of the
smaller buckets that I got out of these 20,000 keywords last night.
One of my programmer buddies came over last night and he was laughing
about he could do this in five lines of code and it took me two hours
to do it by hand. But I learned a lot about my keyword phrases.
I got about 40 different brand buckets and about 20-30 different category
buckets that help me look at these keywords. So instead of looking
just at the top of the mountain, I am actually able to take a specific
keyword like "Odor Mute", which is a product that we sell, and get
all the "Odor Mute" converting keywords in this one bucket.
Look at the numbers on the
left hand side. You will see that Odor Mute…I mean it is number
143 in our converting keyword phrases for this time period. It
generated $4,000 in revenue from that one keyword phrase.
The second base phrase is OdorMute
without a space. And then a more specific kind, "Odor Mute C",
and then you will notice these numbers start getting bigger because
there are not that many sales because they are pretty obscure keywords.
But this is awesome.
Instead of just working with one or two keywords, I like working with
about 20 at a given time, because you can optimize for multiple words
at a time.
All right. Then you target
segments with the greatest opportunity. I talked about this earlier,
but I actually go in and Revenue Per Visitor…I don't even know if
you can get that out of Yahoo Web Analytics. I never get it.
I just divide revenue per visitor and get these numbers.
And you will notice that if
you don't have a lot of visits, that RPV number is just unrealistic.
I mean there are some keyword phrases in there with one search and a
conversion, like, "Odor Mute Kennels", and it has 100% conversation
rate. That is totally unrealistic. You are not going to
replicate that the next time somebody comes searching for "Odor Mute
Kennels".
But you are going to get all
kinds of ideas for more ways to generate traffic, so I am only looking
at the icing and the candle and the flame keywords for an accurate Revenue
Per Visitor and conversion rate.
All right. I call this
"SEO Upside", and I have gotten some of these ideas from Aaron Wall.
He is a guy that I follow. SEO Book; I am a member of that.
I play around with SEOmoz. They have some tools. Danny Sullivan,
Search Engine Land has some really good articles. And from all
these different things I have kind of stitched together a….If I know
what the revenue per visitor is on a given keyword, and I know how many
searches there are on Google thanks to a Google keyword tool…
Google has a free keyword tool. I use to have to pay $200 or $300
a year to get Word Tracker. Well now with Google Adwords, anybody
can just go to Goggle and search for "keyword tool." You can
put your keywords in. And you type in your little ransom message
there.
One thing I do recommend is
set your match type to exact so you are not seeing broad match.
I think exact is a lot more accurate as far as the number of folks per
month searching on Google for these keyword phrases.
And then under "show/hide
columns," I like to see what the estimated average cost per click
is, and sometimes that is even higher than my revenue per visitor, so
I can't sometimes afford to pay for these clicks.
But I just took one of our
keyword phrases, "Doghouse heater", and threw it in there just to
see what would happen. And you can see, the estimated average
cost per click. I can see how many advertisers there are competing
for it. I can see the global monthly search volume.
It is not a lot. But
if you do this for each one of these little bitty thimbles and add those
into the buckets, and then you do the buckets, you can totally build
your campaigns out because of this.
The next piece of information
that I want to know is, "How do I rank on Google?" 70% of
my free organic search engine traffic comes from Google. Yahoo
is great. I love Yahoo. Bing is new, it is neat, it is shiny.
You know, it is Microsoft. I mean I get a little bit of traffic
from them, but it is like it is almost 10 times as much from Google,
so I am going to concentrate from Google. And if I get some Yahoo
traffic, if I get some Bing traffic, that is great. But I am not
going to do anything that is going to mess up my Google traffic tracing
these little bitty fish.
What I do is I use some alternative
methods for getting this, and you may know what I am talking about.
The search engines do not want you to pound them with thousands of requests
per day to see what your rankings are on keywords. So be very
careful. You can get your IP address banned from Google.
I mean Yahoo will ban me after 50 searches. They are notorious
for hating people looking at their search results.
But I will go in and hand check
these. And look at the third line. You know, I am number
one and two for Odor Mute C. The first two keywords on the first
two rows, "OdorMute" and "Odor Mute", I am number two and three
right after the manufacturer. But if you go down to the fourth
line, "Rider Odor Mute", I don't even rank. I don't even
know how I got a sale for that because I don't have the word "Rider"
on the page. Maybe from broad match PPC buys or something.
But you can see a lot of these
I am two and three, two and three. And I will show you some search
pages in a minute. But these show me the opportunities I am…Look
at Ryder's Odor Mute. I am number eight. I mean number eight
gets 3% of the traffic from the first page of results compared to 30%.
You can get 10 times the increase if I can get that up to the first
or second position, and that is what I want to do.
Then I go over to my Google
keyword tool and I want to see how many people a month are searching
for these keyword phrases. So I paste all of these Yahoo Web Analytics
from my site, keywords that have generated traffic for me, over into
this Google keyword tool, and there are only four keywords that Google
even knows about, which means my competitors probably don't know about
these, which means there is gold hidden inside your Yahoo Web Analytics
in your converting keywords. I mean there are thousands, and thousands,
and thousands of dollars. And if you are not interested in getting
the thousands, and thousands, and thousands of dollars or the value
of it, give me a holler. We will set up a revenue share deal.
I will be happy to go in and mine the gold out of your land and split
it with you.
Look at the cost per click
on some of these. I mean they are paying $2 a click for Ryder
OdorMute? I will be getting the free traffic. But I mean
there are only 22 people a month searching for that according to Google,
so who knows? But I have got 21,000 converting keywords, so I
am going after any keyword that has got Odor Mute in it.
All right. One of the
most important things that you need to do, beginner or advanced, you
need to start with a clean web browser. Thanks to personalized
results, if you are logged into your Google Adwords account, or Gmail
account, or any Google account, or if you are on a computer where you
have done multiple searches, Google starts to customize the results
based on what things you click on and similar keywords terms.
Google is getting really smart about this.
So if you want to see what
most people see who are just starting to search in a category, you need
to go clean out your browser. And what I do is I use Safari.
And I am like a Macintosh person sometimes and a PC person sometimes.
But there is a version of Safari for the PC now. And Safari has
this awesome thing. You go into Safari and you hit "Reset Safari".
And it makes all of you history go away. It empties the cache
and removes all of the cookies. And the only thing that you have in
common is that you are on the same IP address. You don't have
to reboot your computer or anything. So you just go reset Safari
and you have got a clean version of Google.
All right. All positions
are not created equal. We were talking about this earlier.
When you look at a Google search results page…go to Google and search
for "Odor Mute" and log out. You will notice in this screenshot
I am actually logged in, so I am kind of embarrassed by that.
In the screenshot you see 10
results, 10 links, 10 blue links to different websites when folks searched
for Odor Mute. All right. Odor Mute the company is number
one in the free search results. I don't know if you can see
my mouse over here or not. I am going to move my mouse, my pointer,
because I haven't got everything checked.
All right. The second
and third are me. I have got clustered results, which is really
cool. You need to ask me about that. I am above the shopping
results. And then you have all these others after that.
And if you are a Yahoo store
owner and you see, "Oh, I am number seven or I am number eight,"
and you go, "Well that is OK. I am on the first page of results."
But if you realize, most people's browsers don't even show the stuff
below the shopping results. And what happens is what you see and
what makes you sleep at night is different. What your customers
see is this. And 30% of them click on that first big one, and
12% of them click on that second one, and then 9% on that third one,
and then it just drops off like a stone.
Look at those little micro…l
just resized these based on the percentage of clicks that those actually
get. Seven, eight, nine, and 10 don't get any traffic at all.
You gotta get above that shopping results. You have got to be
in the top five minimum and you better be one, two, or three.
You better have two in there.
The next thing I do is I check
several keyword rankings. I have got a new version of Safari opened
and I pop on over to Google and do a search for Odor Mute, which we
saw a little while ago. It was a pretty good keyword. And
they are already trying to tell me that I don't know what I am looking
for. But I still rank. I got two pages ranking two and three.
That is great.
All right. And then the
next page comes up. We do a search for "OdorMute" as one word,
which was my second best phrase in this bucket, and I am ranking two
or three. And over on the right hand side you might see my safety
out there, my pay per click ad. I got broad match on OdorMute
in case there is a keyword phrase I don't optimize for yet.
All right. And then here
is one I don't even rank on the first page. I am not even showing
up for broad match. What the hell is going on, Google? Ryder
OdorMute. So what I did last night at about three o'clock in
the morning is I started adding the word "Ryder" all over the OdorMute
pages. And I don't know if it is published yet or not.
But you can see that all my
competitors here are showing up. OdorMute C; hey, I am number
one and number two. And every 10 or so searches I will go reset
Safari, because I don't want Google to start thinking for me and I
want to see what most other people see.
"OdorMute dogs"; I am ranking
two and three. I am sucking over here in the shopping search results.
I have got to learn more about that. For "Buy OdorMute".
OK. Amazon does a really good job about ranking for "buy"
plus a keyword phrase. And I am not disappointed that I am three
and four, because that is tough to compete with Amazon on a generic
product like that. And then "Buy Odor Mute" I am actually
trumping Amazon there.
All right. I am going
to throw Yahoo some love. I will actually go search on OdorMute,
and I actually got some good ideas for some more keywords here.
All right. So now we
are moving on. Actually, I know have this information. I
want to actually do the optimization. I have all this data.
I have this spreadsheet that keeps crashing because it has got 100,000
lines in it. I actually want to optimize on the page. So
what do I do?
Well, I find the most relevant page, the MRP's. Sometimes you
will see MRP written out like I write CKWP out. The most relevant
page, and that means that from any given keyword phrase on your site,
there is one page that is the most relevant page. And usually,
that is the page that ranks the best in Google, because you are linking
to it more, you have more content on it. You know what I am talking
about. For any keyword phrase there is probably a most relevant
page on your site. And if there is not, that gives you an excuse
to make a page.
All right. The way I
find the most relevant pages is I do a site colon query. If you
type in site: yourdomain.com and do a search on Google or Yahoo for a
keyword phrase, it is only going to show you pages on your site that
come back. I have got 57 pages on Guddogsupply.com that have OdorMute
on the page, and here is a screenshot of that just so you can see.
And so you will see the first
two or three pages. I am like, "OK. Well those are the
pages I think I want to optimize for." One of the things that
I do though is I examine the Google cache. If you will notice
in the search results pages off to the right of the URL is a link that
says "cache" sometimes. And when you click on that, you actually
see a copy of the web page. And this is what Google saw when they
spydered your web page.
You can see the word OdorMute.
I counted 17 times where the word OdorMute appears on this page.
Frequency is a big deal. You want to have multiple occurrences,
a high frequency of converting keywords on your product pages.
You don't want to keyword stuff, but you know, you want to do a good
job. And actually, when I saw this page I was embarrassed, because
this is not our text. This is actually text from the manufacturer.
And I apologize if anybody is eating lunch, because we are talking about
getting rid of pet odors here. But this is a good product for
us, and actually I can give you some real data here.
One other thing when you are
looking at the caches, I want you to look at the cache date. And
this is about two weeks ago. This is a good indicator about the
health of a page.
Now the problem is that you
could have your page…your page could be spydered once a year and it
just so happens it was two weeks ago. So I won't know until
I look again that this is really a two week old page.
Look at the cache date on your
homepage, and that is a very, very high indicator of trust. If
you have a very short cache date, if it was yesterday or the day before,
or even a week ago, Google thinks your site is good. That is awesome
to look at.
One of the other things about
the cache is that there is a link on the page two slides back that actually
shows you the text version. It takes away all the HTML images
and just shows you the text. And you can actually see on here
what the Alt text is in images. You can see my H1 tags.
You can see all my text. And I wish I could scroll down, but it
is in PowerPoint, not an HTML page. But you can actually page
down three or four times because there is so much text content below
the fold here.
All right. I want to
optimize this page. I now know what the most valuable page is
on my site. I want to examine the default SEO elements, so I actually
go to the page. I don't know if you can see this on your monitor
or not, but at the very top of the page that is about to appear on my
other laptop over here is the actual product page. There we go.
At the very, very, very top underneath my tabs here, I see that the
<title> tag actually show at the top of the page. So it
is "OdorMute C extra concentrated for kennel use. Well if you
look in the red text above the picture, that is also the headline.
Well that is also the name. This is my default built in RTML Isvan.
And Michael Whittaker taught me everything I know. Dave Burke
over at Visual Future has helped me a bunch, too. But I mean most
of this is my own RTML that I have done that is SEO friendly.
And you can get your RTML jockey to do the same thing.
I want to look at the source,
though. So you see in the right hand corner I have got "View
Source." So right click and let's view source. Let's
look at the different original SEO elements. Well the <title>
tag. There is my <title> tag. That is coming from
the name. All right. You see that.
All right. When the next
thing loads, and the slides are a little bit delayed, the second thing
that loads is the rel=canonical, which is a new tag that came out.
And if you are already doing your 301 redirects and you are an advanced
store, if you are doing $1 million a year or $500,000 a year and you
know what you are doing, you need to have canonical set up on your site.
Any RTML developer worth a flip can do this so easily. I did a
template in like 10 minutes. I will probably give the template
away at one time or something. I just have that hard wired in
there.
The Meta description, I am
just grabbing the name of the product…actually, the name of the company
plus the name of the product, plus the first 200 characters from the
caption, and then I add whatever items are in the contents field.
I got a funky RTML recipe for doing that.
And then finally, I have got
my Meta keywords tag, which I just have that in there. Meta keyword
tags don't really do anything for you, but they don't hurt you,
and I just throw the name or some keywords in there.
All right. Let's jump
into store editor. Just so that I can make sure how these RTML
templates are generating these very important SEO elements for me, I
just throw in some things like, "This is the name" and, "This
is the caption" inside the name and the caption fields. All
right. See how there is nothing in the headlines and there is nothing
in the code?
All right. Then I go
back to the…I hit update and then it actually shows me, it writes
in, "This is the name." You see it up there in the bread crumbs
in the top of the page. You see it at the very bottom with the
start of the caption. "This is the caption." So I am
like, "OK. Well that is where the…I know it is doing this.
Let me look at it." So I view source again a different way.
OK, well actually you can see. This is the name, pipe, pipe, pipe,
pipe, pipe, and then whatever was in there. Meta description:
you can see this is the name and then this is the caption. So
I am generating my Meta descriptions from my name plus my caption.
All right. So I want
to override my SEO defaults. And this is one of those things where
it depends on who built your Yahoo Store, whether you are a Legacy store,
whether you are a custom Legacy store, whether you are a Version 3,
which has got some really cool SEO stuff built in, or a custom Version
3. I mean there are so many ways that you could do this and a
lot of them are very good, but you want to override your SEO defaults.
And one of the ways I do that, page-title, I create a new property on
my edit page called "page-title". I think it is built in on
the Version 3 stores, but in the Legacy stores and in the new stores,
I think this will trump and make this the title.
Before I do that, I actually
do some quick keyword research, because besides all these OdorMute keywords,
I am like, "You know there are some other keywords that people are
searching for when they are searching for OdorMute, like solving their
problems." And I found this when I was doing some keyword research,
like Google suggests. When you type something in the taskbar of
your browser, Google will actually suggest different keyword phrases
in ascending order by popularity. So I am like, "Oh. Well
I might have to have the words ‘views" and ‘Canada' and ‘Ryder,
which is not on my page, and ‘where to buy.'" I actually
might need to have that on my page. So I grab those and then I
go over to Yahoo, and Yahoo has got two different awesome things as
far as…it is the "also try" stuff.
Yahoo will actually suggest
other keyword phrases for you to add to your site. So go there
and do a search and get some ideas for keywords there. We talked
about using the Google keyword tool. If you go to the Google homepage
itself and you have the right browser, it will actually do this.
And I was going to talk in "pet OdorMute" and all these other pet
odor things come up. I was like, "Dang! That is a bunch
of keywords. I need to look at that."
So I went in and did keyword
research, three or four slides back, and per month there is $110,000
worth of pet odor smell removal keyword phrases that generate 70,000
visitors a month. And I am spinning off a micro site.
I was telling Paul that I don't
know what to do with micro sites anymore. But man, there is some
serious revenue there. There is multi-million dollar revenue because
that is just one small niche inside this…you know, for one product.
So I took all those keywords
and actually sat down and spent five or ten minutes and wrote something
for my caption and my Meta description. And you will see here
at the same time, I also wrote a compelling headline. I said,
"Hey Ryder's," and you see my keyword in there, "OdorMute C concentrated
power works," and, "eliminate pet odors." And there is a
good keyword phrase. "Remove dog urine smells from almost any
material." And I apologize if anybody is eating. "Order
yours. In stock and ready to ship." You know I have got a benefit,
I have got a call to action, and that is a compelling headline.
I mean I have got a dog. I need to order some of that stuff today.
So I am pimping this thing out.
Put your converting keyword
phrases in the name of your products. On the left hand side you see
my somewhat dynamic navigation. Isvan helped me do this as far
as figuring out in my head how to do it. I hand code the RTML
and it is hilarious watching him look at my code. It is very bad
code, but it renders awesome pages.
Depending on where you are
on my site, you get different navigation. It is not just hiding
with JavaScript. It is actually hard coded different navigation.
You see the cousin pages and brother and sister pages as well as the
parent pages. And if you will notice the fourth keyword phrase
from the bottom, "Ryder OdorMute C for dogs" is an alternate keyword
phrase or a short name that is on the product we were just looking at.
But if you see the thumbnail on the right hand side, the picture of
the thumbnail and the name underneath, that is actually the name.
So I have got multiple fields that I am pulling from. And then
finally, these are the SEO elements that I finally settled on in optimizing
this one page. And the <title> tag, it has got plenty of
keywords in it. Actually, I don't have Ryder in there.
I probably want to go back and do that. And I actually hand wrote
the description that went along with my caption. And I still keep
my Meta keyword name. And I just took out rel=canonical that was
in there.
All right. That is one
bucket of keyword phrases. That is 21 keyword phrases out of 21,000.
I mean it took me probably 15-20 minutes including keyword research
with 75 tabs open on my laptop.
You want to be able to scale
your efforts. And I want to give a shoutout to my scrapbook girls
and Julie, who I wrote this template for her because I wanted her to
see what her SEO elements looked like on her site. And I have
got this, and I will probably end up giving this thing away too because
it is pretty easy to make. You have to know how an individual
store generates these SEO tags, but this is what I call a utility template.
It only shows up in the editor. I have got one page. I got
take 100 ID's. I dump them in this field and then it generates
the SEO elements in text where I can see it.
Then the cool thing, and I
am really proud of this, is it actually counts the number of characters
in the <title> tag and it tells me how much I have got left and
if I am over. It actually shows me what the Meta description is
and it tells me if I need a caption. And here are two pages…there
are 98 more below this. And Julie has done an awesome job of going
in and actually writing out these awesome captions. But Julie,
your homepage needs a caption there darling. But you are doing
a good, good job. And I have put that on several other stores,
and it is just really helpful because you can see it all in one spot.
You can see the caption field is the body text.
Let me start off from the top.
The big purple thing is the <title> tag. You can see the
Meta description, which is just the name, which that is not good.
That is using that old Solid Cactus Meta description. Fix that.
Rip that sucker out.
Then in the Meta keywords it
looks like you are using the same Meta keywords across the entire site,
which that is not good. Actually, I don't know if that hurts
you or not. Meta keywords really don't matter, but it makes
me a little nervous.
All right. Optimize on site.
We have done optimize on page, but now it is optimize on site.
Time wise, I think I am running a little bit tight. I am sure
Mike will cut me out. I got two minutes. All right. Great.
Basically, what that means
is find good store pages for embedded links. And so like if I
wanted "remove dog smell"; if that was my keyword phrase that I
wanted to rank for, I would search my entire site for that phrase for
pages that don't already link back to my OdorMute pages.
And what I will do is I do
a query on Yahoo, which is site:yourdomain, which limits the pages returned
to just your store, minus link to whatever URL that you want to get
keywords to because you don't want to show pages that you already
have links from, and then plus your converting keywords phrases.
So there are three elements that you search for on Yahoo, and this was
one for "orange dog collars," one of my favorite pet phrases that
gets no traffic, but the guys in the house of representative seems to
like it.
Then you want to optimize offsite,
and here is an example of what we live with out here in Mississippi.
You guys think we all live out in the swamp and don't wear shoes,
but actually, sometimes we do have possums everywhere. We had
a possum break into one of my brother's birdcages. And you can
see I have got embedded links. This is on a blog that is off the
site. I like having multiple sites. I have got my own networks
of sites and I am real open about it. They are not link farms.
They are actually different content sites and I do lots of text links
back to my stores for my content. You can see a link to Johnny
House, and a Quail funnel, and a Predator proof funnel, and just a whole
bunch of text below this and not that many links. Tons and tons
of pictures. That is at Stevesnell.com if you want to see that.
And that is it. That
is the end of my slides. And man, I nailed it. I got one minute
to go. I am going 100 miles per hour. Man, I have got 193
slides to cover.
Yeah. We got Mac, and
we got Apple, and spam.
Thank you.
All right.
Yep.
Yep.
If you have got $60, get an
Olympus VN6200 PC. It is my fifth digital recorder and it is the
perfect one for recording content.
Well the main thing is make
sure that you got Analytics turned on. And whether it is Google
Analytics or Yahoo Analytics, that allows you to…Once you turn it
on, you can go on vacation for a year and come back and you have got
a year's worth of data. I mean it is always connecting data.
And since it is hard wired into the store now, you don't have to worry
about the implementation being right. Is it recording all my transactions?
And Whittaker had to do all these triple back flips to get GA to work
with the Yahoo Store. You guys have got it baked in now.
I run GA and Yahoo Web Analytics on all my stores so that I can kind
of see two different kinds of reports and kind of watch things.
But run Analytics so that you
can collect these SEO...You can see other words in it, but I mainly
use it for getting 21,000 converting keywords.
Right. Well Yahoo Web
Analytics is so much more powerful than GA. I mean GA is playing
catch-up. And let me brag here for just a minute. Buying
index tools was awesome. I have used them for four years and it
is so powerful. I mean I fall off into it. I have got 100,000
keywords.
Now Google, it is easy.
It is kind of easy to use and there are some pretty graphs and stuff
like that. But man, if you want to dig in, get you an IT guy and
let him dig into your stuff.
But for my top tips, optimize
your homepage. Get your <title> tag, it is text on the page,
like 500 to 1,000 words, and hyperlinks embedded in that text to your
most valuable pages with you most valuable keywords. I mean if
you do that, that is 80% of the battle for most Yahoo stores for SEO.
Yep. Yep.
It is a never ending battle.
I mean the thing is I like to give a lot of this information away because
we have been doing this for 12 or 13 years now and so many people helped
us get to where we are, I feel it is my responsibility…You know that
is why I wrote the book. That is why I put a lot of information
out there.
Figuring out what the SEO website
is, that is a $5,000 or $10,000 consultation with some of the guys that
go to these conferences we have.
Yeah, absolutely. Go
to Amazon and search for Yahoo Store and Starting a Yahoo Business for
Dummies. It came out in 2006 but there is still some pretty good
information in there. I make $1, so buy a book.
If you go to Robsnell.com you
can sign up on my newsletter. Email to info@ystore.com gets you on my auto-responder for
six emails and then you are on my newsletter. I send out two or
three newsletters a year. But that is probably the best way to
get in touch with me.
Let me add one thing.
I have about 100 people that I owe links to, and I will hook up with
you all. I have been up for 36 hours, and so I am going to bed.
And I promise I will email all of ya'll in 18 hours when I wake up.
Thanks Mike.
WHEN: Wednesday, October 14 10am PT / 12noon CT / 1pm ET
WHAT: SEO Tips & Tricks for Yahoo! Merchant Solutions with Rob Snell.
You will learn SEO best practices for Yahoo! Stores. Drive customers to your store through organic search engine optimization (SEO).
BONUS: If you're one of the first 20 people who answer these 10 questions AND participate in my Webinar next week, I'll give you a free link with the anchor text of your choice -- ROB SNELL
>>>>> Click the "REGISTER NOW" button below or
go here
~~~~~
Webposition Analyzer@@@@@@http://www.webposition.com/d2.pl?r=KBX-5558&FN=download.htm~~~~~
Well, here's one way to keep the neighbors' dogs from pooping in your yard...@@@@@@Stay classy, college kid neighbors of mine...~~~~~
What can the Ystore.com Guys do for me?@@@@@@We're Rob & Steve Snell. I'm Rob (the one with the goatee on the left), the internet marketing consultant, & Yahoo Store guy. Baby brother Steve is my business partner who runs our other 2 companies and keeps the things going behind the scenes at Snell Brothers.
I think of myself as the guy who makes the slings and stones that other "little guys" use to whoop up on Goliath, i.e. big box category killing large corporations. I work for the small business guy.
As a retailer, myself, I know where you are coming from! We just sold the last store of our retail hobby company to a local customer, so I can concentrate on what I do best - selling stuff over the internet. From 1989 to 2001, we turned a $500 student loan into a 5-store chain of brick and mortar hobby stores with 10 company-owned Yahoo! Stores, and an order fulfillment warehouse. We own the Copy Cow, a copy shop in our college town of Starkville, MS, that we started with $50 when the local Kinko's closed. Our other family business is gundogsupply.com which sells dog stuff on the internet through Yahoo! Stores.
When it comes to marketing & design consulting, I'm pretty much a one-man-band. I do have some production folks at the Copy Cow who help resize jpegs from time to time.~~~~~
What could KILL your Yahoo! Store in less than a mouseclick?@@@@@@A store that loads too slowly.
A. STORE. THAT. LOADS. TOO. SLOWLY.
Lean it up. Trim the fat. Compress your fat 50K graphics. Lose the javascript. Drop the affiliate program banners. Nuke the "awards."
Most people STILL do not have high speed internet access. Just because everyone YOU know has DSL, or a T-1, or a cable modem, most folks still have the dreaded 56.6K dial-up.
Lean up your site. You'll make more money. Really! - Rob
P.S. Surf your site through your grandmother's AOL connection on a P100 and see if you still want to buy!
Makes you think.~~~~~
What is a Yahoo! Store?@@@@@@ Yahoo Store is a turn key ecommerce solution. When you rent a Y!Store you get web hosting, software to build a catalog, management & marketing tools, but most importantly, you get access to Yahoo! Shopping, a fantastic source of traffic. Many Yahoo! Store owners get the majority of their sales from this traffic.~~~~~
What we do!@@@@@@~~~~~
Who is the most brilliant & beautiful woman in St Louis?@@@@@@SPAMMER!
~~~~~
Whoops! Page Missing@@@@@@Looking for shopping pages ? Click here. Looking for Yahoo! Store stuff? Read my Yahoo! Store Book & Blog . Anything else, try internal search!
Search for: ~~~~~
Why is Yahoo! Store for me?@@@@@@~~~~~
Why Our Company Chose Yahoo! Store@@@@@@It worked. The first time I tried it, it really worked. The shopping cart worked.
The search engine worked. The secure server worked.
Yahoo! Store is an on-line tool to help you build webstores and on-line catalogs. It's a turn-key solution for small and medium-sized web stores. You just plug in your products and your company information into the Yahoo! Store format. The final result is a good looking web site that loads fast and is extremely customer friendly.
Over 13000 companies have chosen Yahoo! Store as their web business solution. Yahoo! Store is perfect for individuals, small business owners, and larger companies looking to experiment with e-commerce without spending thousands upon thousands of dollars. Instead of hiring a full-time webmaster to run a server and install and maintain expensive software, and keep a T-1 line open, let the folks at Yahoo! Store do it.
Your "mall rent" in Yahoo! Store covers use of the software as well as the real estate. Yahoo! Store is software run on Yahoo!'s servers. You access this software over the internet by using your Netscape or Explorer browser. You edit your site from your home or office or anywhere in the world where you have internet access.
You can start your own account at store.yahoo.com and have a baby site up and running in about ten minutes. Realistically, it will take another 8-10 hours of tweaking to get your site to look right. When you hire me, I can turn your graphics and catalog copy into a prototype store within a day or three.
Yahoo! Store rent runs $100 a month for up to 50 items, and $300 a month for up to 1000 items. I would also suggest spending at least $400-500 a month on banner ads on qualified sites to generate the traffic you need to get the orders you want. Designers run anywhere from $55 to $155 an hour. When you hire the Snell Brothers, you pay by the item, so you know exactly what your costs are going into the project…
The good news is that you can try new product lines or business concepts without a long-term commitment. The cost to open a retail store is anywhere from $25,000 up into the millions of dollars. You can open an on-line store for as little as $100 a month. You can have a professional designer do your webstore for around a couple of thousand dollars.
The majority of the "hard work" has been done by the software designers. Instead of spending your time figuring out how to get the shopping cart software to work, you spend your time promoting your site, and hopefully filling orders from around the world.~~~~~
Wildlife Wonders@@@@@@~~~~~
Witchita.edu Usability News INDEX@@@@@@http://psychology.wichita.edu/surl/INDEX%20FOLDER/ABCindex.htm~~~~~
Witness: Paul Sanar -- Skyfacet.com@@@@@@http://www.skyfacet.com~~~~~
Witness: Randall Rothenberg, Interactive Advertising Bureau@@@@@@http://www.randallrothenberg.com/~~~~~
Witness: Richard Lent, AgencyNet@@@@@@http://www.agencynet.com/~~~~~
Witness: Rob Snell, GunDogSupply.com@@@@@@http://www.gundogsupply.com~~~~~
Witness: Tim Carter -- askthebuilder.com@@@@@@http://www.askthebuilder.com/~~~~~
Woolybooger RTML Template (and what to do with it)@@@@@@~~~~~
WordTracker@@@@@@http://our.affiliatetracking.net/wordtracker/af.cgi?1885~~~~~
Write It Once@@@@@@http://www.WriteItOnce.com/shoppingcarts/Yahoo.htm~~~~~
Yahoo Said to Seek Buyers for HotJobs@@@@@@http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/yahoo-said-to-seek-buyers-for-hotjobs/~~~~~
Yahoo Shopping: Is Yahoo! Store worth the price for Yahoo! Shopping traffic alone?@@@@@@ I have 4-5 nutritional products I want to market. Is it worth getting a Yahoo! Store solely for the traffic from Yahoo! Shopping or if I should just set up 4 or 5 separate e-commerce sites and drive traffic to them through Pay-Per-Click ads (Google Adwords, Overture, or Findwhat), other links, or by buying ezine ads / writing articles?
For me, Yahoo! Shopping is only the beginning of INTERNET MARKETING. If you sell products that appeal to a broad range of consumers, you can benefit. If your prices are extremely competitive and you give great service, you can do rather well.
Take a look at the Yahoo! Store PAGEVIEWS graph above. This store had been in Yahoo! Shopping for almost a year before this graph.
The store also has had a 5-Star Rating for well over a year, but got little or no traffic or sales from Yahoo Shopping. I think it was a combination of poor Yahoo! Store design and bad item names. The folks who did click through from Yahoo! Shopping either couldn't navigate the store or didn't have faith in the company because of the look of the store.
First, we did a complete redesign, switching to custom RTML templates so we could have global section navigation using search engine friendly text links. Then we fixed the names in the product database.
YAHOO SHOPPING SALES BUMP -- The first bump in traffic came from Yahoo! Shopping after optimizing the product names to include keywords in the name field. Instead of "MODEL #1234" we would use "MANUFACTURER NAME - MODEL NAME #1234 DESCRIPTIVE ADJECTIVE NOUN."
The second bump is when Google picked up the changes driving sales from Google, Yahoo!(Google database), and AOL (Google database).
The third bump is me buying Google Adwords in the slowest part of the year for this particular retailer. We're paying 6-cents a click. Don't tell the competition.
Yahoo Shopping - What's the Big Deal?
Yahoo! Shopping is the shopping portal of Yahoo.com. It's a collection of 22,000 Yahoo Stores (with literally millions of products) and around 500 FEATURED MERCHANTS who pay up to $250,000 a year to be included in Yahoo! Shopping's RMI program.
But is it a Yahoo Store? - Just because a company is in Yahoo! Shopping , doesn't mean they are using the Yahoo Store software. You can tell by adding something to your shopping cart and looking at the URL for something like http://order.store.yahoo.com/cgi-bin/wg-order?unique=f6140&catalog=ACCOUNTNAME&et=3f4f6848&basket=5Cd2e188d8010e583
Yahoo Stores can opt into Y!Shopping for less than $250,000 by paying Y! 4% of Yahoo! Shopping-generated sales. You'll need at least 20-30 orders with positive experiences to get any chance at selling anything because of the way Shopping Searches rankings are weighted by customer service ratings.
You must have a 5-Star Customer Service Rating to compete and rank high in Yahoo! Shopping. It seems to take 100 orders or so because most folks do NOT rate you. There are ways to get customers to rate you (or re-rate you faster - beg, bribe, cajole), but it takes forever. And as long as you don't have a 5-Star Yahoo! Shopping Customer Service Rating, you'll never rank high enough to get enough traffic to get enough sales to get enough positive ratings. Make sense?
Most of my Yahoo! Store clients get 5-10% of their sales from Yahoo! Shopping (which costs 4% of sales), but the majority of their sales come from ORGANIC TRAFFIC (free search engine traffic like Google/Yahoo!/AOL) or DIRECTORY LISTINGS (Yahoo!, Looksmart, DMOZ), or Pay-Per-Click advertising like GOOGLE ADWORDS or OVERTURE, or external links from other sites.
Yahoo Shopping alone is NOT ENOUGH. I had a client who had a successful non-Yahoo! Store and we copied the store into his Yahoo! Store but did NOT have a unique domain.
There were NO external links, and since the Yahoo Store looked EXACTLY like his "real" store, all the directories considered it a MIRROR SITE, so he got no links. If it were up to me, I would have rebranded the site as a different site, focused the Yahoo! Store on a niche within his business, picked a domain name, and marketed the site like it was a stand-alone e-commerce site: YAHOO DIRECTORY LISTINGS, ZEAL / LOOKSMART listings, DMOZ submission (as long as he had unique content), and use then a combination of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques and PAY-PER-CLICK marketing buys to drive traffic to the web store.
FEATURED MERCHANTS (both Yahoo! Stores and non-Yahoo! Store companies) get a boost in their rankings because they pay Yahoo! Shopping for ads & prominent placement. I've heard this costs anywhere from $10,000.00 a month on up, but contact Y!Shopping for details.
I've seen several clients try FEATURED MERCHANT (several years ago), but we could never prove the ads were worth the cost. Lots of impressions, and lots of traffic, but these folks didn't convert at a rate where my client could make money. If you have high margins, take a look at it...
The rest of the search results are ranked by a combination of relevancy determined by whether or not your ITEM NAME, CAPTION, and ID contain the keywords folks are looking for. I've seen folks rate better when the keywords are within the first paragraph of text.
I've also heard that 80% of the folks who use Yahoo! Shopping use the SHOPPING SEARCH over the DIRECTORY structure, so making your product names Yahoo! Shopping Friendly is pretty important.
Like I said before, Yahoo! Shopping is only the beginning of INTERNET MARKETING, but if you sell products that appeal to a broad range of consumers, if your prices are extremely competitive and you give great service, you can do make some dough.
-- Rob Snell ~~~~~
Yahoo Site INFO Page@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Site Logo & Navigation Bar@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Site Logo Design Guy@@@@@@This is an example of a YAHOO SITE. It's Yahoo Store WITHOUT the shopping cart / secure server. Click this link to see logo design guy ~~~~~
Yahoo Site Product Page@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Site Section Page@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store *IS* For Sale (How Much?)@@@@@@http://ystore.blogs.com/~~~~~
Yahoo Store > "Before" & "After"@@@@@@Click the image on the left to enlarge it, or click the NEXT button to see more...~~~~~
Yahoo Store Basic > Ecologique.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Basic Facelift > eBodylogic.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Club@@@@@@http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/ystoreclub~~~~~
Yahoo Store Complete Package > Gundogsupply.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Complete Package > PajamasSeenonTV.com@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Complete Redesign@@@@@@ Project was a complete redesign of Embroiderthis.com, an existing Yahoo! Store with 600+/- pages of sections & products. Project consisted of 2 phases, DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT.
Before we start designing anything, we find out all we can about your business. We talk about your goals, what your customers are lookimg for, products you sell, which products are best-sellers, and the general mind set of your target market.
With Embroiderthis.com, Mary wanted something soft & feminine that would appeal to females, mostly young home-makers from their mid-twenties to early fifties. She also wanted something that would load fast and be easy to navigate. She also wanted to move the ORDER button above the scroll, because many of her products had long, long descriptions with their ADD TO CART buttons at the bottom of the page. She also asked that plain html text links be used to increase load speed, ease of use, and friendliness for search engine spiders. Mary also gave examples of other sites she liked and didn't like.~~~~~
Yahoo Store Design (READ THIS FIRST)@@@@@@READ THIS FIRST: [FREE PDF DOWNLOAD] Rob Snell's Yahoo Store Design & Consulting -- Opportunity Vision then call me at 1-800-332-7601.
"Opportunity Vision" is digging for buried treasure in the tons of data from your Yahoo Store stats. Opportunity Vision is the one-two punch of you getting me up to speed on what you do, combined with my input on how I can help you maximize your marketing efforts to get what you want out of your Yahoo! Store.
Opportunity Vision is a customizable block of consulting time. You get 4 hours worth of phone interview and research time for $495. This is sufficient time to get enough background on the your business and then to do initial marketing research for keywords & other opportunities on the internet. It usually takes 2-3 one-hour phone calls.
With OPPORTUNITY VISION we find the answers to questions you’ve been asking. What products are converting the best? Where is your best traffic coming from? What keywords are driving the most sales (and it’s usually NOT the most popular ones!) If you have a relatively new Yahoo! Store, we look outside more than inside.
Your OPPORTUNITY VISION can include reports and analysis like:
Your Top 50 KEYWORD PHRASES report with estimated number of daily searches, the current PPC bid value of those words and commentary
A Competition Ranking Report for the directories & major search engines
Your Web Position Report for the Top 15 Search Engines for your best keywords
A YAHOO! SHOPPING Report & info.
DEEP RECON Report on competitors you pick from the COMPETITION REPORT evaluating their marketing strengths & weaknesses.
LOAD SPEED ANALYSIS of your site (which also addresses useability / conversion issues)
A Basic Search Engine Optimization strategy. We talk about PAGERANK, linking strategies, developing useful content for your visitors.
An overview of successful Pay-Per-Click campaigns with tips on how to not throw money down the PPC drain! We’ve learned the hard way, sometimes. Now with nw tracking tools, we can prove which ads generate which sales!
You tell me! Opportunity Vision is what YOU want it to be. ~~~~~
Yahoo Store Design Partner@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Design Partners@@@@@@You also have access to Yahoo Store Design Partners which is a network of approved store builders, designers and consultants. There are many web designers who specialize in creating, maintaining, and marketing for Yahoo! Stores.
There is a wide range of pricing to suit any budget from freelancers, moderately priced store designers, design firms, consultants, and programmers working in RTML.
If you have a development budget and would like to get a professional look for your store without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a custom solution, this may be the way to go. Yahoo! has a DESIGN PARTNER directory at http://store.yahoo.com The price range on store buildouts ranges from $2500 to $5000 or more depending on what you want.~~~~~
Yahoo Store Design: Blemished Bats / Softball Equipment@@@@@@
Blemished Bats / Softball Equipment Store
Welcome to Softball-Bats.org online store. We sell softball manufacturers' closeouts & factory seconds, cosmetically blemished bats, mitts, gloves, softballs, cleats and other sports equipment. Here you will find some of the best deals anywhere on quality softball, baseball and hockey merchandise. We sell a mixture of current seasons stock plus insane deals on cosmetic blems, over runs and prior seasons closeouts.
PRE-COMBAT –
ROY: Combat used to be a one trick pony. They used to have just one bat, the B1, which is the top one. They make it two ways. They make it in a negative 12 and a negative 10. So it is for, again, one guy that just says, “Geez. I like a heavier bat.” They felt, “This bat is so hot, let’s just make it a little heavier and now that kid can use this, too.”
It sold very, very, very well. It has tremendous trampoline off of the bat. They came out with a new bat this year called the B2. The B2 has this, they call it the gear, which George will explain the device and get more technical with it, on the interior of the barrel. And again, this was to add more punch to it.
Now the bottom line is if that one, the B2, outperformed the B1, the B1 would never sell again. The B1 probably sold better. It was $200. The other one is $250. So it is a $50 difference. They both seemed to be very, very good. But it is not like one overwhelmingly is kicking the other one…
Rob: So they are just different?
ROY: Yeah. Well like I said, it has that gear thing, which George will technically explain it a little bit, but it is offering no more distance than the B1.
ROY: But with two different hitters, could one bat be better for a different type of hitter?
ROY: No, not at all. Like I said, with the B1 and also the B2, one is a 12 drop and one is a 10 drop. What I would have done if I was Combat, is I would have made one an 11 and one a 13, and then one a 10 and one a 12.
Steve: Four bats.
ROY: Which I said to myself one day, “Easton is the master of giving you 10 bats and every bat is different than the other.” And to me, I though that was the perfect opportunity to do that.
COMBAT
HOW THEY MAKE COMBAT BATS
Man 1: Let’s talk about how we make Combat bats. This right here are all of the different fibers that make up a bat. So if you can imagine there are synthetic fibers of fiberglass and Kevlar. Aramid is the new generic graphite/Kevlar material.
All of these socks…You almost have an infinite number of ways that you can weave the material. Most manufacturers buy this material with the resin, the sticky stuff, the glue already on it, and it is known as pre-preg. So everybody has pre-preg.
What Combat does that is very different than everybody else is we get this woven ourselves and we inject our own resins into the bats. So we are actually starting with dry material where everybody else is starting out with this pre-impregnated material. And the pre-impregnated material needs to be shipped in refrigerator trucks and stored in refrigerator rooms.
So if you go to a facility that is manufacturing bats, they will have a room the size of this warehouse that is refrigerated. It apparently has the consistency of like a Laffy-Taffy. It is very sticky and very difficult to work with.
So we feel that in general that is a way that we manufacture our bats totally different than everybody else. And that allows us to, I think, control our costs and also control the way the bat performs.
So you see here the knitting material makes one bat at a time, and it is the position on the barrel that you place all of those different materials. So the socks are pulled over the mandrel and then they go into the mold. And when they come out of the mold, they are hot and they are hung on a rack. And then the bats take one total cycle of the manufacturing facility. And by the time they come back they are cooled and they are ready to be trimmed, sized, weighted, and then sent to the painting facility.
Man 1: So the decals are applied and the bats are finished.
MAKING BATS AS HOT AS LEGALLY POSSIBLE
So I think what you said is absolutely accurate in the fact that if there are standards out there that every manufacturer has to meet, everybody wants to make the bat that meets the standard.
So if the standard for whichever particular individual organization, is it a BPF 1.15 for little league…?
Rob: What does that mean?
Man 1: Bat Performance Factor. It is basically a formula. And they put in all of the data and they spit out 1.15. And as long as you are below that you pass the standard.
Man 2: Which would be like exit velocity…
Rob: So you shoot a baseball at it and how far it bounces off of it, or the speed at which a baseball comes off a bat?
Man 1: Yeah. The actually put the bat in some type of holder. And it swings and hits the ball. And all the bats are tested to make sure they meet the standard.
Rob: Like at a consistent strength?
Man 1: Correct. And I think they are always hitting the ball on the sweet spot, too. So they need to find the sweet spot on the bat, because that is of course where you will get your maximum performance.
So in reality then, when you look at every bat manufacturer, they want to make a bat that reaches 1.15 and doesn’t go over. So what are we all managing then? We are managing not the fact that we can make a bat that when you hit the ball directly on the sweet spot that it will perform this maximum allowable level. But what we are managing is when you don’t hit it on the sweet spot, the performance of the bat.
Rob: How far off the curve.
Man 1: Yeah, exactly. Or if you do hit it on the sweet spot, or off of the sweet spot, or on the handle, how does it feel in your hand? Does it hurt? Does it sting? Does it feel good? So having a soft feel.
And the other thing that everybody has to come know is that the bats performance better after they are broken in. Basically what you need to do is you start to, the minute you hit the ball, you start to break down the resin and you start to get all of those individual level layers of composite material working together. So you are kind of like breaking down the glue that is in between them.
And the quicker you can break in a bat, the better performance you get.
How many hits does it take to break in a bat?
Man 1: Excellent question. Combat always says that we are hot out of the wrapper. You take the plastic wrapper off and you are going to get maximum performance immediately. But most people say then, “Well, this bat takes longer to break in. This bat takes in shorter to break in.” I think most people think a minimum of 100 hits, and sometimes as many as 300.
So that is certainly something else that we are trying to manage, is how quick that bat breaks in and you get the best performance that you can get out of that bat.
Roy: …will last X amount of hits?
COMBAT BATS & Returns
Rep1: That I have never heard.
Roy: I had a guy come in a couple weeks back. I lent him my demo. He broke the demo. They had replaced the bat. He came back and he said, “I spoke to the guy at Combat and the guy at Combat told me that…” He is a super enthusiast. He is obviously an ex player himself. He is a 40 year old guy or whatever and has two little kids.
He goes, “We just pound and pound. Guys are hitting 100’s of hits a day.” He said the guy at Combat told him that the bats were only good for about 1,000 hits. I said, “1,000 to me doesn’t sound right. Are you sure he didn’t say like 10,000?” I said, “1,000? That could be over in like a weekend!” I was just curious if you have ever heard that.
Rep1: The only thing that I had run into recently was a guy returned his bat…Or what did he do? He returned a bat that he broke. And then his return bat broke and he returned that one, too. And he was complaining because you only get one.
Roy: I think it is a timeframe is how I would look at it.
Rep1: That is exactly what he was saying, that he has now broken two within the same year. It is definitely a problem with the bat.
Roy: When guys break it after 10 months and then get a new one, and they break it after eight months and then go, “Oh, I want another one,” it is like, “No, no. It doesn’t work like that, like just let me keep breaking it within that one year of one year of replacement of replacement.” But I think it is fair if a guy out of the box breaks it within like a month and then gets a replacement, and then a month later breaks that one, it is two months. The guy deserves a bat.
Rep1: So I guess what happened was we didn’t have a bat, so he calls me. I happened to have the size in my bag that he was looking for, and he lived in the next town over. So I am like, “You got the big game tonight. Come on over and grab mine. No problem. I will take care of you.”
Then I sent that information off to Combat, “Don’t worry about this guy. I was able to take care of him.” They sent me an email back that said, “Well you know, we need to stay consistent on this.”
C------ actually sent me a note and said, “I personally looked at that bat. It was used.” He used the term, “It must have had 1,000 hits on it.” So that is the only time anybody has ever thrown a legitimate number at me.
He said the grip was worn out; there was no paint left on the bat at all. It definitely might have been the bat that the kid owned and every kid on the team used. But no, I have never heard of a specific number before.
I do know in reading a lot of the product feedback, if you go to the bat websites and hit product reviews, there is a lot of history now all of a sudden on all of the bats. It seems like everybody loves the B1, but definitely does say that it is prone to crack.
Roy: I don’t know that they would admit to a number, but what would you say the return ratio is on that bat?
Rep1: I think it has got to be less than 10%. I mean it is not a lot.
Roy: My feeling is that as Combat gets bigger and bigger, and they have started with little league, which is a wonderful thing because as kids go out of league, the go to senior league. As kids get of our senior league, they go into high school. Then they are softball players and so on.
So the development is going in the right way. But as these bats tend to break people get upset and pissed off, and it is almost like just an FU, like, “I know your bat is good but I don’t want to deal with it.”
You may want to consider doing some type of allowing a return. Believe me when I tell you, I have become real tough with people with returns, because Louisville allows me to do returns. Some guys I will do returns for and other guys I will go, “Send it back yourself dude. I am not getting involved. This bat is !@#$ing beat to S#!%. You have no receipt. Yeah, I know you are a customer. I know you come in here. But you have no receipt.”
Rep1: Yeah. They could have got it anywhere.
Roy: Right. And you know, I am not going to do it. But where they could say, “OK. I have this one dealer or someone that is selling a good volume of bats,” because man oh man. I tell you. I cringe when I see them coming in and they are holding that bat, and they just want to hit you in the head with it when you tell them, “Well it has got to go back to them.” And they are like, “Well how quick of a turnaround is that going to be?”
We have the demos and I do those. And I let guys borrow them. I do. I let them take mine. They are thankful for that and it is good, but I am kind of helping keep them in a Combat.
So it is like, “Well guys maybe you should consider giving the flexibility to allow to do it.” I had a guy in here and he is a grumpy gus. I mean I am talking a major jerk off. He just said, “Roy you have to do the right thing.” I said, “I can’t. What do you mean I have to do the right thing?” They just want you to give them a bat, and then I go, “OK. I am out $300 now.”
That is the way it works. I just can’t do it any other way. He is a guy I can say probably wouldn’t buy a Combat anymore. Whereas he had loved Combat. And when his kid got out of little league and gone on to senior league and got the new one.
So had I been able to kind of do that and kind of work it out and get that one back to him, it is a conversation to have. Maybe they may say…
Rep1: Well what do other manufacturers send when it is a…
Man 1: I think the problem is that the speed of being…And that is the growth of Combat not being able to turn on a dime like that. They are on the West Coast. We are on the East Coast.
I tell people, “Hey. I do a whole lot more than everybody else. I will take the bat back for you. You do all your due diligence on your end. I will ship it back for you. It costs me $10 which I am not asking you for.”
So it takes as long as it is going to take. If they have the bat, they turn around. All of a sudden a guy, especially in all star time when guys are like going…
Man 2: Which is why it was interesting you took that week off.
[laughter]
Man 2: The first week all-stars open!
Man 1: I am taking that week off whether…I could care less…
Man 2: I got more phone calls that week than I got all year with problems. But yeah. That is the story of the B2. It is supposed to be more durable. Certainly the Virus with the double barrel is a tremendously durable bat.
Man 1: Well let’s walk through the product. Let’s get kind of a line presentation of this and this. : Well let’s walk through the product. Let’s get kind of a line presentation of this and this…
…
COMBAT LINE PRESENTATION
Let’s go through and kind of give us the whole spill on B2 and then B1.
Rep1: OK. Let’s start with the Combat B1. So you got the general information on what we think makes Combat different from all of our competitors.
COMBAT IS MADE IN NORTH AMERICA
I think we are the only guys making bats in North America, Canada, not the US…
Roy: Mexico is not the US?
Rep1: Not yet. But yeah, I don’t think anybody is making them in Mexico anymore either.
Roy: DeMarini, I know that they have been doing a lot of components, like putting together in the US. Making? I don’t know.
Rep1: From what I have been told everything is now in China. We even have heard that from people who look at our competitors bat. The year it was made in Mexico it was a really good bat. The year the same bat came from China it wasn’t a good bat anymore.
So we are of course using that as, “Well they don’t even know what is going on over there and they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing and making what they are supposed to be making.”
History of Combat Bats
What can we say about the B1? The B1, which back in 2007 became known as, “I need the black bat,” and as you can see it is a beautiful metallic dark green, but it was called the black bat mainly because of what happened at the little league world series that year.
Combat, not at all a sponsor, an official little league sponsor, although the official little league approved, had two teams that were swinging what became known as the black bat. And luckily one of those teams ended up winning the world series championship, beating the team from the Japan. And luckily they won it in the eighth inning by a walk off homerun by a young man that was swinging a Combat.
From that day, the black bat became infamous and we started to get a tremendous amount of calls for, “What were those kids swinging at the little league world series? I haven’t heard of it. I didn’t know anything about it, but obviously they are very, very good bats.”
There was even a story that the Venezuelan team, which was 100% Combat, purchased from a dealer in Southwest Texas who I guess had relationships with the people in Venezuela, that as they were going through the international bracket putting up some big scores, that after they were eliminated the Japanese Mizuno sponsored team took their interpreter and got together with the Venezuelan interpreter, and they ended up buying the Venezuelan’s Combats off of them so that they could swing them. This is a picture from the championship game.
Combat Bats Technology
Rep1: OK. So the B1 is what we would call single barrel technology, meaning it has got about seven layers of composite fabrics. We make one entire bat. It is that technology that allows it to break in very quickly.
We talked about the fact that we are using dry composite materials in our own proprietary resin. And the other important feature of it is the fact that it gives you tremendous performance at tremendous value at $199 pricing.
Rob: What are other manufacturers with similar quality bats retail for?
Roy: The highest we make is $250. So in reality, $250 is the highest little league bat that is out there, which is the B2, which is $250. That seems to be where DeMarini, Easton. Our top of the line bat, what we say is our best bat, is $250.
Rep1: What we found with this bat is every year, everybody that owned a bat wouldn’t always want to know what the new bat is, and they would want to buy the next newer bat. Even though the next newer bat was $20, $30, $50 more or whatever it was, it was like, “Well I have got to have the newest bat because the newest bat is going to be the hottest bat.”
This bat, for whatever reason, still has a tremendous following. Even though there are more expensive bats out there, there are still people that clamor to and swear by the B1.
Rob: So every year y’all don’t relabel it and change the colors.
Roy: This hasn’t changed.
Rep1: Not in three years.
Roy: so they haven’t said, “Hey, this is the B1, but we have improved. We have done this.” It is the same as it was in ’07. It is the same bat, but we still consider it a 2010 bat, 2010 model.
Rep1: Everybody says that it is immediately hot out of the wrapper. They walk out on the field, peel the wrapper off, boom, start hitting bombs with it.
This is just for your information. In 2008 we came out with a new line of bats called the Virus. And the Virus technology was where we built two barrels for every bat. We put one down inside the other.
So we had an outer sleeve barrel and an inner core barrel. That ended up giving you 14 layers of composite materials.
Roy: Was there anything in between the two shells? You put one inside the other, so basically is it wall to wall?
Rep1: Yeah.
Roy: So there is nothing in between it, no carbon of any sort?
Rep1: No other different filler. That bat, we have Virus technology throughout our product line. On the youth baseball side, I guess, is an example of what works in the laboratory versus what works on the field.
What we found with the Virus was while it was a more durable bat and definitely a bat that would provide greater distance and greater performance, because of the additional walls and the added end loaded weight of it, it tended to have a shorter sweet spot and a longer break in period.
Now on the slow pitch and fast pitch softball side it has not been issue, and Virus technology has been very strong. On the little league baseball side, people still said, “I spent a little bit more money and bought the Virus, but I really prefer the B1.”
Combat Bats “Gear Technology”
So the next generation was what we call gear technology. Gear technology was something that we had put in the line in the slow pitch softball side. If you can imagine when a ball makes impact on a bat, it produces waves of energy. The waves of energy basically go down to the handle knob and then bounce back to the barrel.
So the gear technology is ridges in the taper. On the slow pitch softball bats they are actually on the outside of the bat. On the baseball little league bat they are inside. That traps the waves of energy and propels them back into the barrel, which adds to performance.
It also takes a little bit of weight out of the taper, so we can lengthen the barrel which gives you a greater sweet spot. It is the single barrel technology of the B1, so you have the immediate gratification, a very, very short break in period, and it is that combination.
There is also more graphite and Kevlar and better quality materials in the B2, and that combination has made it a better performing bat as well as a more durable bat.
Roy: Since the gear is in the throat right there, is that supposed to…OK. So is it supposed to be quicker? It goes down and back quicker as opposed to going down and all the way back.
Rep1: Right. Plus a softer feel and less vibration in your hands.
Roy: OK. So other than the gear, and then of course the difference of being, let’s say, of Kevlar, carbon, fiberglass, whatever, same thing. These are different things that make the B2 different than the B1. Anything else to add to make it what makes different?
Rep1: Just the fact that if you were to…
Roy: Capture the same?
Rep1: If you were to take a similar size bat, you see that the taper here starts a little sooner. So I think you have a little bit larger sweet spot because you have a little bit longer barrel.
Rob: The B2 has a longer sweet spot?
Rep1: The B2.
Roy: That, to me, would also be another good key point to say, that the B2 has a little bit larger sweet spot because of the gear mechanism that is enabling the length of shell to be a little bit longer…
Rep1: The barrel to be a little bit longer.
Roy: So it doesn’t have to taper.
Rep1: Here is the perfect example with two 30/20’s. You can see more meat here than you do here.
Rob: Let me take a picture of that.
Rob: So you can repeat again the major difference between those two?
Man 1: Roy mentioned, I guess, the upgraded materials that are used to make the B2.
Man 2: [xx], the carbon [xx], the Kevlar, fiberglass, etc, and then the gear. So the gear thing, which his wherever it is placed in here, instead of the impact of energy going all the way down to the end of the bat, the knob, then coming back, it hits your gear and goes from here to here and back quicker; a little bit quicker transfer of energy.
Rob: Which means that you are hitting the ball farther?
Man 1: Yeah, I guess it would enhance the trampolining effect of the bat. I am trying to see. Do you have a gear up here to show them?
Man 2: What do you mean? Oh, the softball? Which model?
Man 1: It is the gear Virus.
Man 2: The slow pitch?
Man 1: Right.
Rep1: Oh, it’s in the taper. Little League Baseball said, “Oh, you can’t have anything on the outside of the bat.” So we therefore are using this gear technology inside as the way of explaining it to people.
Rep1: So that is the little league line right now outside of the Throttle. We talked about Virus a little bit, but that one actually is going away. We do have another bat called the Throttle that is similar to the B1 and the B2 in its makeup, except once again is made of mostly fiberglass, composite fiberglass material; very little of the Kevlar and the graphite.
Rob: So it is cheaper?
Rep1: So that is the price point bat.
Rob: So what price is that?
Rep1: I think $179, $159? Yeah $159.
Roy: Yeah, if you are spending $159 you are going to spend $250.
Rob: OK. It is not like a $30 bat or something.
Roy: No. If they had that bat at like $120 or $99.
[crosstalk]
Rep1: …was the way to go. We had senior league and adult baseball Virus bats. And yet all of our customers, those 11 and 12 year olds, that were playing little league team in their town, but then also playing in their sponsored travel batting cage team where they hit…
Everyone of them told us every time we ran into a little kid, he is like, “Why can’t you do a B1, B2 big barrel?” So Combat did listen. And this year, brand new for the 2009-2010 season are big barrel youth bats, the B1 and the B2.
Rob: I don’t understand the big barrel and the not big barrel. Are they different?
Roy: Right. So little league is 2 1/4. Look at the size. Look at the head of this. It is like, you know, Bam Bam. Look at that.
Steve: That is a baseball bat?
Rep1: That is a youth baseball bat.
Rob: But that is not little league?
Rep1: Correct. If you play little league you cannot swing a big barrel. If you play with these travel teams that are going around and playing tournaments, they don’t have any rule as to the size of the barrel. So they basically allow…
Rob: Even though it is the same age kids playing? It could be the same exact team…
Roy: Different set of rules.
Rep1: Correct.
Rob: So when you say Little League, you mean Little League trademark league…It is like Dixie League. Can they use the big barrel?
Roy: No. Generally, Dixie would be considered 2 ¼ inch max barrel. George, I don’t know if you have had this, but I have had guys come in and go…
Rep1: And then the big barrels are 2 5/8ths. So both the B1 and the B2 senior league bats, and they are categorized in the industry as senior league…
Roy: Not like old people senior league.
Rob: What age is it for senior or grades?
Roy: It is a very difficult question to answer and here is why. Generally it is around 12 to 13, 14, 15ish years old. In certain states, mainly in the South, kids seven years old are using these big barrel bats. They don’t even use a small diameter.
I am like, “Well he is seven!” That is what they use. They do. And actually they make…I don’t know if Combat has come out with it, but it has been a pretty good seller. Mikken and Easton…Mikken now, but Easton will have them momentarily, what they call a coach pitch big barrel bat.
So it is a -11 ½ with a big head on it. The Mikken one already I have sold a couple dozen. It is $140 retail.
Rep1: Wow. For coach pitch.
Roy: I hate when the use the word coach pitch, because it is not like, “Hey coach. You are going to pitch.” It is like younger kids. They only make it in 25, 26, 27, and I think 28. Those four sizes, that is it. So it is obviously for somebody that is going to be eight and under, and a big barrel bat with a bigger differential; 11.5 ounce differential. Where all of the senior league bats, all of them run from -5 to -10; that is it.
Rep1: And the reason it is hard to do the age is because you will go to some areas and…My area as an example. If you are playing middle school ball, you are basically a sixth, seventh, or eighth grader; you have to swing a -3.
Roy: And also, Westwood, this town that we are in, it is the same thing, -3. However, then those kids play on club and it is open. So they go from using a -3 to a -10. And it is huge.
And parents are like, “I don’t understand.” And I am like, “Well this school goes by high school rules…”
Rep1: So as you might imagine, with the much larger hitting surface and a larger barrel, the performance of these bats and the ability for a young kid to hit the ball a young way with a bat that is -10 drop, so he can swing a 32, 22 ounce bat and he is probably a big 12 or 13 year old playing on a little league field with 250 feet to center and 210 down the line….You read these things on the Internet sites and it is, “I hit 14 homeruns last week!” No wonder! I might even have gotten a hit when I was in little league with one of these.
So you are talking about similar technology to the little league B1 in the fact that it is what you would call a single barrel versus the Virus double barrel bat. And the difference between the B1 and the B2 is in the materials that are being used to manufacture the bat.
And unfortunately there is no gear in the senior league B2.
Roy: So are we saying that, in essence, the only difference is the material?
Rep1: Correct.
Rob: And there is no gear because…?
Rep1: That was a no brainer for me! You have a B1 little league and B2 little league. B2 has the better materials. B1 senior league, B2 senior league-gear and better materials, somehow the gear didn’t make it.
Roy: What is it? $210 and $270 retail?
And for no rhyme or reason are we selling one over the other at all.
Rob: But better materials, it doesn’t make that big of a difference?
Roy: I don’t know. “Hey it is better materials.” Guys are like, “Oh, OK. Better materials.” They look at it and they go, “Looks the same to me. It feels good. Swings the same. OK. This one is a few bucks less. Give me that one.”
Actually George, one of them is a minus 10 and one of them is a minus 8.
Rep1: The minus 10 has a little shorter barrel than the minus 8. But there doesn’t seem to be any significant barrel length difference. When you look at our bat performance features…
Roy: Well the negative 8 George, correct me if I am wrong, the negative 8 would give you a little bit more length in shell, doesn’t it?
Rep1: Correct. That is why.
Roy: So Rob, in saying, “Why would I buy this one over this one,” one reason may be, “Hey, this kid is a huge kid. He is a big strong kid.” Again, the question of what weight to use is it is as heavy as you can swing.
So he may say, “I can handle both. I am a strong kid. I am going to get a little bit more surface length and shell with this one. It may be the way for me to go.” So he goes with the negative eight. It is 32 inches, 24 ounces versus going with the 32 inches, 22 ounces, two ounces lighter, but at the same time he has got more length of shell.
Rob: So you are trading one for the other?
Roy: Which is more important?
Rep1: What he is saying is if you look at the barrel length, it is an inch and a half longer barrel on the minus 8.
Rob: So within the B2 senior league that is the difference between the minus 8 and the minus 10?
Rep1: Yeah. And the B1 as well.
Rob: So one has more weight and one has more…
Rep1: Yeah. If you can imagine, it has more weight because it has more overall materials being used.
Rob: So the longer one is heavier.
Rep1: Correct.
Rob: So why would you get the one that is…?
Rep1: Because everyone knows bat speed is very, very important. I even heard a lot of that during the all star season. During the regular season it would be OK if he swung a minus 10, but during the all star season when the pitchers are better, I am going to go down to a minus 12 so I can get around.
Rob: So they get lighter bats with faster or better pitchers?
Rep1: Well I wouldn’t say in general, but you do hear…Right. Why do you want a lighter bat? So that you can get around quicker.
Steve: That is with a faster pitcher, a guy who is going to throw the ball faster?
Rep1: Yeah. Or just in general. Your bat speed is very important. You should be able to generate greater bat speed with a lighter bat. But then at the same time, you will have, I guess, less impact with a lighter bat than you would with a heavier bat.
Rob: But it is better to get a lighter hit than not a get a hit.
Rep1: Well yeah. I mean if you are consistently swinging late. Everybody knows the proper mechanics of hitting is the ball needs to be out in front of your body and you want to be able to make contact here. If you make contact here you are not producing as much power. Obviously if you are making contact here, you are not producing much power. But if you are making contact right here and hitting the ball on the sweet spot, it is the difference between popping up and popping out, or popping one out.
In the minus 10’s we make 27’s and 28’s. Some people say, “Well that is a littler kid and he would actually want a lighter bat. Why don’t you make the minus 12’s in a 27 and a 28?”
Well we could, but the barrel would be so short there wouldn’t be much hitting surface left on it.
Roy: Rob I don’t know if this one is that good, because…
Rob: I can’t even tell by looking at it.
Roy: Well if you look right here…
Steve: Right there you can see it. Absolutely.
Roy: But does it mean anything to shoot a picture of it?
Rob: It would if I cropped it and said, “Hey, look here,” because I am sitting here looking at the whole thing and going, “I don’t see a difference.” But if you actually measure it…
Steve: So you are saying it is wider there than…?
Rob: Then that makes a big difference.
Rep1: Well it makes a difference down here where your sweet spot is. So if both of these bats have a sweet spot here…I mean that is where you want to hit it. And then now if you get jammed a little bit and you hit the ball here, and you get jammed a little bit and you hit the ball here…
Rob: OK. Tell me what these are.
Rep1: So you have both 32 inches. And you have a 24 ounce minus 8 and a 22 ounce minus 10. And as you can see, the minus 8, 24 ounce bat has a thicker barrel into the taper.
Roy: The throat extends a little bit fatter.
Rep1: And you can almost see it even where the C’s are located. The C’s are located a little bit deeper on this one as well. So therefore, if you are looking for the sweet spot, the sweet spot on the minus 8 is extended towards the handle greater than on the minus 10.
So if you should get jammed and hit a ball closer to your hands, you will have a better chance of getting better performance with the heavier bat.
Rob: Perfect. Let me get those again just so I make sure I identify them right. That is the B…
Rep1: So this is the B1 Senior League. We were looking at a 32/24 versus a 32/22.
…
Steve: There is a certain amount of science involved with it, but there is also a certain amount of confidence.
Rob: It is also feel.
Steve: …that I have the bat that gives me the confidence and I know I can hit anything.
Rob: Or at least you max your talent out and then it doesn’t matter how great, how specific it is to your situation.
Steve: Exactly. But it is all about confidence in the equipment you are using and you either have it or you don’t.
…
Rep1: Yeah. And then really very easily we have the same story in B1 and B2 adult baseball.
Rob: When you say adult baseball, that is anybody in high school, right? So is that ninth graders?
George: Well, yeah. High school and junior high for sure.
Rob: So after senior league they then graduate to these?
Rep1: You can’t say. It depends upon the town, right? In my town, our seventh and eighth graders, so that is basically junior high, they have to swing the minus 3. In some towns, they decided that…Hold on. Let’s back up.
What is little league baseball? You played minors, so you are seven and eight years old. And then you played majors and you are nine to 12 years old. And then if you are playing official Williamsport Little League and you play then what they call big league or senior league, you are 13-15 years old. Those kids are generally swinging minus 3’s. But in some areas, they are like, “Well it is OK to swing a minus 5.”
Rob: Why would they not want people to swing a minus five or a minus seven? Why do they have these rules to where they have to do a minus three? What is their logic?
Roy: Well they are also going to a bigger field. So the little league field is the smallest and then it gets gradually bigger.
Rep1: 60 foot base paths versus 90 foot base paths. I think the whole thing is preparing that kid to play adult baseball where he has to swing a minus three. So there are some areas where you go from a minus 12 to a minus three. It is a huge difference. I have no idea how a kid could make that translation except for the fact that he becomes a very poor hitter by the time he turns 13.
In other areas they are trying to build in a transition year. So Combat, as an example, makes a minus five. Other companies make sevens and eights.
Roy: Yeah. There are other companies that have minus fives, but the minus five is a real, real small category, which actually we never got any in.
Rep1: We haven’t made it. We don’t have any either.
Roy: For me, we sell it, because there are towns around here that they transition, and that is exactly what they are trying to do. They are trying to prepare; gradual increase. “OK. Here. You are in seventh and eighth grade. We will now go by negative five.” So in turn, from using a negative 10 to 13 you are kind of coming down, and then, again, going into high school it is a negative three.
Rep1: And then that begs the next question, “Why is negative three the magic number?” And that is because wood bats apparently are all about minus threes. So they wanted to make the synthetic bats, aluminum and composite, to more emulate the length and weight of a wood bat.
Rob: Because they are going to be using wood bats when they go pro.
Rep1: Never.
Steve: Well I was about to say one of them.
Rob: Yeah. One guy maybe.
Steve: Yeah. Out of several thousand.
…
Roy: Absolutely. We are 18 and under. We are high school and under. Do we sell some adult baseball? Yeah. Do I sell to the college kid that is going to the university of whoever? Heck no.
Rob: Why, because they get free bats?
Roy: Most of them are sponsored teams. Yeah. Are there some kids that get bats? Yeah, I mean…
Rep1: They will take a bat with them.
Roy: There are community colleges that are obviously not getting bats for free, so yeah the do. But truth be told, how many am I selling? Not a lot.
Rep1: And I think the bottom line is like I said. By the time next season rolls around it will all be worked out. There is no way that they could tell Easton that all of those new bats that are already on their way on the slow boat, turn the boat around and send them back. You have got to eat them! There is now way they could do that. So they will have to work it out.
CHANGES IN BAT STANDARDS
We talk about the standards and everything that all these bats have to meet. That was addressed by ASA last year. We also talk about the bats performing better after they are broken in.
Because of safety, they are setting a standard that they bat cannot perform better than this standard. But of course they are testing a bat right off that wall with the wrapper peeled off, not after it has been broken in. And that is what the memo from the NCAA said, was they took the bats from all of the college teams after the world series and tested them all, and over 80% of them were performing above the standard.
Rob: So they are too hot.
Rep1: Right. And it is like, “Well no kidding!” Everybody knows that!
Rob: What about juicing bats? I have seen online where people have this machine, like a bat roller.
Rep1: Correct. That actually became part of the ASA standard, where they built into their test the test of the bat brand new and then after it was rolled. I guess Easton hast he clarity…If it has been rolled it changes color or something.
Roy: I heard from a guy that is real gung-ho on softball that they pop the thing off and they roll it, and it does change the color, but what they do is they get the paint to match the color and they spray-paint the inside of the bat.
But what I said was, “OK. I understand that. But it is freaking paint.” You can’t tell me from just hitting and hitting it is not going to flake away on the inside. But you know, where there is a will there is a way. These guys will find it. They will do anything to hit the ball an extra inch.
Rep1: I have got a buddy down in Georgia whose middle school daughters play. And they have got the pitching coach and the hitting coach and they throw everyday. They are probably very good players. I mean he helps coach the travel team. But yeah, he is like, “I definitely get all my bats rolled.” And every time I send him a bat he sends them to his guy.
Roy: So the minus 3 bats were similar to what we were looking at in the…
Rep1: Yeah, the same story as the B1 and B2 senior league.
Rob: And these are the adult baseball?
Rep1: Correct. Here you can’t really deal with barrel length because they are all the same weight versus barrels, so the barrels are the same size from B1 to B2.
Steve: So the differences between the B1 and the B2 are…
Rob: Materials.
Rep1: Yeah, the materials that they are manufactured with.
Rep1: I think that is where everybody with this company is hoping to get to, is to have, as Roy was saying, as those kids grow and get older, is to have an adult baseball bat that is as popular as the youth baseball bat.
Want to break down the other one, too?
Roy: The Morph?
FASTPITCH
Rob: Is fast pitch softball all female?
Rep1: No. There are definitely guys that play it in some parts of the country. I think there is also what is called modified softball, too, where that is pretty popular in the city of Philadelphia, as an example.
Slow pitch has got to have an arch. Fast pitch is the whole windmill thing. So modified is where you can throw it as hard as you can.
Rob: Like overhand like a baseball?
Rep1: No, without the windmill thing. Still underhand, but all you can do is go up to here. But yeah, I think I just…
Let’s go to the SGA website that just came out with the 2009 or 2008, one of the participation sports surveys that they do every year.
But yeah, when we are talking about fast pitch we are certainly concentrating on the girls.
Rob: Isn’t it like the fastest growing segment in the industry?
Rep1: Yeah. Certainly if you look at the participation. Girls playing sports in general is growing incredibly fast. And yeah, I would say fast pitch softball is probably growing faster than baseball participation. But baseball, I think, has been relatively strong; where I think a few years ago it had a little bit of a downturn. But I think it is back without a problem.
Rob: What ages are we looking at?
Rep1: Here we are looking at youth straight through college.
Rob: OK. So it is the same as with the boys.
Rep1: The product line two years ago…Let’s back up. In this line, we definitely have started with and have stuck with Virus technology. We described that Virus technology was building basically two bats and putting one inside the other.
Rob: With no space in between the walls.
Rep1: Correct. What that does is increases your durability, increases the working of the different layers to increase performance. The first year we had the Virus FP. It was kind of like a black and blue bat. We probably don’t have any left. It was our first high performing women’s fast pitch bat.
Then the ASA changed the rules. And the guts of the rules said that instead of a bat brand new having to meet a particular bat performance factor, it has to always be under that bat performance factor through the life of the bat. And they developed a test to try to emulate that.
Combat scientists said, “OK. Let me look at the test because that is what we have to deal with here.” We don’t really have to worry about anything else except passing the test. And while throughout the industry most people felt the bats were going to be dumbed down so that they could pass the new test, Combat said, “No problem. Our existing bat will pass that test.” And therefore the ASA, which is setting this standard, and the standard is an exit speed of 98 MPH, said that Roy, the manufacturers…Back that up.
They said that the manufacturers had to stop manufacturing bats on a particular date and had to be done selling them by a particular date. And then after that future date they could not longer sell any bats.
So everybody clamored to first make as many of the bats as they could, because everybody would perceive them as being more valuable, and then at the same time get rid of everything that they had.
The end user and the dealers, all of the old bats were grandfathered in.
Rob: What year was that?
Rep1: That was last year.
Roy: Remember when we were talking about all these numbers before?
Rob: Yeah.
Rep1: Combat feeling that they could pass the new test with their Virus FP therefore changed the paint job and the name so that it was a new bat. They basically told all of their sales staff that it is the same bat with the hopes that the end user would gravitate to this like they did the old one, feeling that because of our technology and the way we manufacture bats and all that stuff we talked about previously, that this bat would be every bit as good as the existing bat.
Rob: You are talking about the break in period on these?
Rep1: On the little league side it seemed as though the break in period on the Virus versus the non-Virus technology was longer. I am not particularly sure if because the ball is different the girls are not as strong or whatever. The break in period has not been an issue.
I told you about my buddy in Georgia. He loves his Virus fast pitch bats. And he said he was getting tremendous performance out of them. He called me six months later and he said he felt that the bat had been broken in. He said, “But now it is really hot!”
So apparently it continued to break in and get hotter the more he used it.
Rob: Is that something we can put on the website? Is that off the record…kind of, “A customer said…?”
Rep1: Sure. On everybody’s website are reviews from end users. I don’t know if anybody takes them to heart to be honest with you. I was reading all of the Combat B1 reviews the other day at JustBats. And I am like getting all pumped up: “What a great product I am selling!” And then I went to all the DeMarini reviews and boy, it was the hottest bat, too!
Everybody loved the CF3. And everybody that owned a CF3 loved the CF4 except for one guy who didn’t think that he got more value for the $50 that he spent extra.
And then same thing on the B1/B2 argument. Everybody loves the B1 and everybody thought the B2 was better.
…
Rep1: So we aligned ourselves with Lisa Fernandez. I am sure you know who Lisa Fernandez is. Lisa Fernandez, I guess, could be considered one of the greatest fast pitch players of all time. She was like the Babe Ruth, the best pitcher and the best hitter on the Olympic team. So I think she hit for the highest average and then also blew everybody away with 20 strikeouts out of 21 batters.
I think she won Olympic gold definitely in 2004. I would have to look at her bio to find out if she was around in 2000 when they won gold as well. She played at UCLA. If they didn’t win four Division 1 championships, then they won three. She was the cog in every one of them.
She is in the stage of her career where she is not playing at the Olympic level, an elite level, anymore. But she is associated with this PFX tour.
Rob: What is that?
Rep1: That is a tour that goes around and users professional fast pitch athletes to promote the sport.
Rob: So there is a professional fast pitch?
Rep1: There is a league. It is the NPF. So we aligned ourselves with Lisa as opposed to one of these girls that is playing on what is now the national team, because there is no longer an Olympic team, because it is not in the Olympics anymore, because we feel that she will be working with the youth of America, the future fast pitch players.
We have two bats that surround the Virus FP morphed. One is the Lisa Fernandez FP. We kind of called it the Lisa Fernandez gold; you know, gold medal. It is our highest performing girl’s fast pitch bat. Much better materials in the bat than the Morphed. Much longer barrel and greater sweet spot, but still using the Virus barrel within a barrel technology.
So this is the bat that our collegiate teams are swinging, of which we have now 13 fast pitch college programs.
Rob: Are those 100%?
Rep1: Right, with the biggest one being Texas Tech. Those are both considered high end bats, meaning $240 on up. We had Throttle fast pitch in the line, and I think still do. But the thought was that we always needed an entry level all composite girl’s fast pitch bat, and that is also new this year, the Lisa Fernandez light.
So what this gives us for the first time is the -10 and -12 drop and the price point where the younger girl that is just looking for a good quality bat would go out and purchase at a lighter weight. I have coined this as the B1 of girl’s fast pitch, because it is not the Virus technology. It basically is a B1 as far as I am concerned.
Roy: Are we talking material differences between the gold and the blue?
Rep1: Yes.
Roy: OK. But at the same time, the gold doesn’t come in 8, 9, and 10 drop, and doesn’t come in a 12, the gold.
Rep1: Correct. But this is also Virus, barrel within a barrel. Basically what you just described in makeup is the difference between a Morphed and the Gold; better quality materials, both Viruses, and actually they both come in the same drops. This is single barrel like a B1.
Roy: So what is the repetition? I don’t get the difference between the Morph and the Virus.
Rep1: I agree, and I think that is why the Morph is dead. And price wise it is $20 difference.
Rob: $20 less?
Rep1: No. This is $20 more, so everybody is going to want to buy that.
Roy: In reality Rob, the Morph I wouldn’t even bother with. To me it is meaningless, because at this point I think we have barely anything left, and I don’t even think we even ordered them going forward. So I think we are looking at the differences as being double wall, better material versus what we are considering just what I would call our B1 little leagueish kind of bat.
But this one comes in a 12 drop. This one does not, right? 10 is the lightest.
Rep1: Correct. This is your better travel team girl, your high school, and collegiate player, and this is going to be more of your youth younger player. Not that nine year olds aren’t going to buy this in a -10…
Roy: No. It is too heavy. You can’t handle it.
Rep1: And then you talked about perception and what people get used to. I told you the whole story about the FP versus the Morphed FP. And I have got guys that own them both who will definitely tell me the blue one is much better.
Rob: Well it is faster.
Rep1: I am like, “Well it is supposed to be the same bat!”
Rob: The paint…
Roy: It makes a difference.
Rob: The way the light reflects off. Shorter wavelength.
Roy: That is right.
SLOWPITCH
Roy: $299 retail.
Rep1: It has got gear technology.
Rob: Is this the slow pitch?
Rep1: It was the slow pitch bat.
Steve: Slow pitch; is that strictly like adult leagues, men?
Roy: 34 inch only. Generally usually only men.
Steve: OK. There’s not like a youth slow pitch?
Roy: Even the girls, at like a younger age, they don’t throw the ball fast, the guys go, “Well she doesn’t play fast pitch. She is playing slow pitch.”
Rep1: Technically its not swinging a 34/28 end loaded.
Rob: So she is playing fast pitch!
Roy: Right.
Rob: But that bat, what is it? If that is going to be composite, is it…I don’t have any idea what the description of it is.
Rep1: It is gear. So it will have the gear technology.
Roy: Double wall?
Rep1: I am not even sure, to be honest with you. I don’t know if it is virus or not. I would imagine, because everything we have in the slow pitch line is at least double wall. It is essentially this and this is basically what I got. I should have sent you a copy.
Roy: Yeah. I got all that.
BAT WARS
Rep1: What you guys need to do is get yourselves to Bat Wars.
Rob: What is that?
Rep1: Then you will have a whole new appreciation for Roy’s customer and what he gets involved in on a daily basis.
Roy: Bat Wars is a place where you go and you would think that Derek Jeter was playing there, and the guy just wants to pull his pants down and go like, “OK. Who wants to give me a little hand release now?” “Dude, you are a !@#$ing softball player. You are an idiot. Get back in your tow truck and go home!”
Rep1: Well as an example, August 3rd and August 10th there are back to back Bat Wars at Cooperstown Dreams Park. If you ever wanted to be a 12 year old little boy again, go to Cooperstown Dreams Park. I think there are 27 fields, each one of them beautifully manicured. They look like major league ball fields but they are all little league dimensions.
And Bat Wars is set up there. And what Bat Wars is is it is a relationship between an online an cataloguer, Eastbay, I don’t know if you guys get there catalogue, and a magazine. I guess Baseball Today or Softball Today, or Softball-one of those magazines.
And they will set up inflatable cages, bring in seven inflatable cages, seven Juggs Junior pitching machines, and people sit next to these machines in a fenced in box that has been, I guess, custom built for them, and they will just put balls in. And then every manufacturer sends them bats. And all the bats are just laying out there.
And kids wait in line. And basically the magazine is getting all of their contact information. And then they wait in line and they can pick up to three bats and go into the cage and hit a dozen balls. And then when they are done they can get back into the end of the line if they want and just do it as often as they want.
Rob: So it is a huge demo?
Rep1: Yeah, exactly. And Combat is actually not doing it this year. One of the reasons we are not doing it is because you could see the manufacturers that were providing bats that were not legal.
The one that I went to was so obvious. Reebok was coming through with this new technology with the holes in the bats. And every kid that picked up one of these Reebok bats and went into the cage was just hitting these freaking bombs like crazy. There is no way that it could have been a bat that would pass today’s standard.
Roy: Meanwhile, the bat is not even out there now.
George: Yeah. They never made it. It never happened. But it was overwhelmingly the bat of choice.
Rob: So they just did that to build buzz up?
Rep1: I am sure.
Rob: But do the real bat manufacturers do the same thing?
Rep1: They might. I don’t know if they are sending juiced bats or not.
Roy: It wouldn’t be the first time.
Rep1: They do baseball. They do youth. I don’t think they do a fast pitch. They definitely do slow pitch.
Roy: I would think it would be more important to hit it out on a field where you could see where the balls go.
Rep1: Oh, they are.
Roy: How quickly the ball comes off the bat…
Rep1: They are definitely using one of their fields, and there is a fence. They are definitely doing that. We had our sales meeting down in Florida at that Disney complex, and it was the end of the year USSSA world championships. So it was the major division, which is the 32 fast pitch teams that all have a lot of sponsorship money. They are kind of in their own category these days.
And then there was A, B, C, and D class men’s, women’s, and co-ed. So you can imagine. There are thousands and thousand of players. And there is a bat wars going on. There is a tournament going on. There is a little vendor village going on. It was actually a blast if it wasn’t 98 degrees and 98% humidity. It was hot.
But yeah. We joke. Guys drive up to the softball field with an old clunker, a 1998 Datsun that they paid $1,000 for, and he has got about $5,000 in his bat bag.
Rob: Get those priorities straight.
Rep1: That is his customer!
COMBAT EMPLOYEES ARE PLAYERS
Rep1: The other thing behind combat is the fact that our motto is “For players by players.” So all of the people associated with the company are ballplayers. The girls in that work in the warehouse play softball. The sales manager is a softball player. Everybody is involved in the game.
A lot of the guys that play on our sponsored teams work in management in the company. And a lot of them are really good slow pitch softball players because they were all minor league baseball players at one time in their life.
So they are athletes passionate about what they are building and passionate about what they are doing. And as a sales guy, we have of course joked with the fact that they need something to do during the week in between tournaments, so they gave them a job. So that way they kept them on the team!
Rob: I don’t think I could get a job there.
Rep1: But yeah. It was a real eye opener going to that tournament. These guys…Since I played slow pitch I had never been to a game, and certainly not a game at that level. They were playing at the Atlanta Braves minor league complex, so it was a major league stadium. And they were hitting the ball over the scoreboard in center field. I’ve never seen the ball hit so hard in my life, and doing it every at bat.
And they would hit it and go a couple steps to first, and when it goes out they just walk back to the dugout. They don’t round the bases. If there is a guy on second, he just goes into the dugout. He doesn’t run home.
Rob: Too many homeruns.
Rep1: Yeah. I sort of got that if it doesn’t go out they are like, “Damn!”
----------- END OF ROY1.doc -----------
ENTER EASTON REP
Roy: …presentation of what you are going to do. But at the same time, I want to interject in the last questions about the bats, because what we want is original content to put on the website, not just our basic verbatim definition that is out of the catalogue.
Easton Flex vs. Stiffness
EASTON GUY: Let’s do it with this bat. OK. This is the Stealth Speed. It is a two piece composite bat. It has a connector. The reason for the connector is to…
Roy: Right. OK. Now. What is the difference between the two bats?
EASTON GUY: This one is a 75 Flex and this one is a 95 flex.
Roy: What does 75 flex mean?
EASTON GUY: That is has more flex. The composite is…
Roy: So for example, a 75 flex is more flexible, more whippy, than an 85 flex.
Rob: What does whippy mean?
EASTON GUY: What is going to happen with this bat is that this has a connector on it. This is the Stealth Speed with the 75 flex. What it does is it is basically a two piece composite bat with a connector here.
If you are a big power hitter, you don’t want to have too much flex in your bat because it is going to drag behind in the strike zone. If you are a big guy and you are swinging the bat, when you swing…If you saw this in slow motion you would see the bat…This handle is going to…
Roy: Bow. Or bend.
EASTON GUY: Right. Now if you have a strong swing and you swing hard, the thing is going to flex more than this one. You can see kind of almost how this one is a little bit thinner.
Rob: So what part of the bat is that?
EASTON GUY: This is the handle.
Rob: OK. So at the top of the handle it is thinner?
EASTON GUY: No. It is over here. Our flex point…The great thing about our bat is, see, our flex point is up here. So we have a flex point…
Rob: So it is higher on the bat than competitor bats.
EASTON GUY: Correct. What happens is when you have a higher flex point, the bat is not going to drag through the strike zone. To make it even better we have the connector here. What the connector does is the connector…It is a kick point.
So what is going to happen is when you swing this bat, it is going to flex. And then because there is a connector here, and it is like a two piece deal. See how it is two pieces? When they make the bat, they cut this and they drop the handle through the middle. Then they put the rubber connector on.
It gives you a flex point. So what is going to happen is it is going to hit, it is going to flex, and then the barrel is going to kick forward to give you more bat speed.
Rob: Is it like a spring?
EASTON GUY: No. It is a rubber piece. It is two pieces so it gives it more flex.
Rob: So two pieces of metal and a piece of rubber in between?
EASTON GUY: Take this bat and step on it. Look how much this thing flexes. See that? If I take this one, and this one is a 90 flex, I have to press harder, but it is still going to flex. It is a composite bat, so it is still going to flex, but I have to press harder on it.
Roy: That transfer of energy from swinging a stiff bat, if you are physically capable of swinging a stiff bat, that energy that you are going to produce going through, that kick point, is going to generate more hit speed and more bat speed, hopefully translating into a harder hit, further distance, and that type of thing.
Rob: So more energy goes from the bat into the ball when it is a stiffer bat.
Roy: Right. So if you are a slighter build kid…
EASTON GUY: If I am getting up there and Roy is getting up there, I don’t have a lot of bat speed. I am not a big guy. I play softball. Most people are like me. They are going to go with more flex.
Rob: An average hitter or a normal hitter is going to use a bat with more flex because they can’t swing the stiff bat? Is it heavier?
EASTON GUY: No. It just won’t give me as much…
Rob: You can’t get the advantage out of it.
EASTON GUY: Exactly. I can swing both these bats. This bat is going to give me more flex. It is going to get through the strike zone faster.
Rob: The 75 is?
EASTON GUY: Yes. The higher the number, the less flex. So if you showed me in slow motion taking cuts in a cage with this bat and with this bat, you will see the bat head on this bat get through the strike zone quicker than this bat. This bat is going to lag a little bit for me.
Roy: So it is almost like custom fitting the bat for the particular style player.
EASTON GUY: And then you add in that this is made out of composite and it is not made out of aluminum.
How Easton Makes Bats
Now when you make a composite bat, what they do is they lay it out like a piece of cloth. So they cut it. Composite is completely man made. So they can really take the composite and make the composite any way they want to make it. They take whatever minerals and whatever ore, or whatever they put in it.
They make it to their specifications. It is completely man made. So when they make it, it is a sheet. They take it and they…
Rob: Make a sock or something?
EASTON GUY: No, they cut it. Like when you see a seamstress making garments, they cut this pattern. Then what they do is they roll it and they heat it. And they roll it and it heats, and heats, and heats until they get it to where they want to get it.
So this started out as one piece. There are no seams on it. I mean you can’t see anything…well you can probably see one if you looked for it. And then they put the end cap on and they put the butt cap on.
Rob: So it is like fiberglass or carbon or whatever the materials are?
EASTON GUY: Yeah. It can be carbon, fiberglass, there is glass in here. Whatever is in here, that is how they make this bat. When they make an aluminum bat, aluminum bats are {?extruded}.
Rob: From a sheet of aluminum?
EASTON GUY: No. It is a big tube, a huge tube. And then they put it through this machine, and they keep putting it through and putting it through until they get it to be exactly where they want to get it.
Now aluminum is also manmade, but they can’t control the flexibility and the flex points and the composition as well as they could with the composite.
Rob: Right, because it is one atom. It is just aluminum.
EASTON GUY: There are additives, and they put things in here to make the composition different. They can change the composition, but they can’t change as much as they can change composite…They can actually almost like build this how they want to build it. They can change the flex points on here. They can really do whatever they want, which also makes a composite bat…You are going to have more of a sweet spot on a composite bat.
Rob: So is the material different in the barrel than it is in the handle?
Roy: It is exactly the same.
EASTON GUY: This is kind of what the pattern looks like.
Rob: Like a weave?
EASTON GUY: That goes throughout; they just put a graphic on it which covers this.
Rob: Is that white paint there?
EASTON GUY: They do a paint finish that has got a clear finish over it. So basically this is painted and then there is a clear finish over the paint.
Roy: So for example, just to get back to the other two speed bats, same bat except for they have the different flexes.
Rob: What causes the flex? Is it the flex point or is it the material that the bat is made out of?
EASTON GUY: Both. To change the flex, it is more of where the flex point is and how…With these two bats, if they flex points are over here, maybe they put a little bit less carbon in here or less glass, and that is what makes it more flexible. Or maybe they thin it out on the inside a little bit. It all depends on how they build it.
Rob: But the material is different. Like different ingredients?
EASTON GUY: No. It is the same composite. It is more how they build it.
Rob: I think it is more important that people know that only certain types of people can use a stiff bat and benefit from it.
EASTON GUY: Not that they can’t use it…Maybe I like using a stiffer bat. That is why they make it. A guy like me could use this bat. I won’t get as much bat speed, but maybe I get a little bit more power.
Roy: I think the way to describe it is you will benefit greater in using that bat that is more for your strength. If you are a big strong guy, the stiffer bat will enhance your swing, your ability…
Rob: Because it will get across the plate faster and more energy will be transferred to the ball?
EASTON GUY: Right.
Roy: Absolutely, as opposed to swinging that bat that is going to be a little bit more whippy.
Rob: Can a big guy tell a difference when he is swinging the two bats?
EASTON GUY: He probably could. If you are a college player you definitely could. If you are a kid who is playing rec baseball and he comes in here to buy the bat…
Rob: Right, but you are saying a top 1% type player would be able to…Blindfolded, he can tell the difference between…
EASTON GUY: Absolutely.
Roy: So those two top of the line bats…I mean, yeah. The difference is flex. That is it.
Rob: I think y’all explained flex to where I understand it. But I want to do a video of that later.
EASTON GUY: They are both composite. And again, they have a bigger sweet spot.
Rob: When you say they, the family? Both of those bats have a bigger sweet spot?
EASTON GUY: A composite bat is going to have a bigger sweet spot.
Rob: Oh, just by definition?
EASTON GUY: A composite bat is…
Rob: Even if the shape is exactly the same as an aluminum bat…
EASTON GUY: If I hit a ball over here…
Rob: Now what part of the bat is that?
EASTON GUY: That is the lower part of the barrel. I am not going to hit the ball as good as if I hit it in the meat of the barrel, but you can still hit the ball and…
On an aluminum bat we have what is called the O-zone. This is an aluminum barrel and a composite handle. So we can control the flex with the handle over here, but the barrel is aluminum.
Rob: What bat is that?
EASTON GUY: This is the SB-12. The sweet spot here…We kind of define where it is on the bat. The sweet spot is from here to here. That is called the O-zone and that is the sweet spot of the bat.
This bat is a solid composite bat.
Rob: When you mean solid, do you mean one piece?
EASTON GUY: One piece. See how this has the connector? So this is a two piece connector and this is one piece composite. By definition, a one piece bat is going to have less flex than a two piece bat.
So this one is 75. This one is 95.
Rob: With a connector. That one is 90 without?
EASTON GUY: Right. This is 90 without. So this is solid composite no connector. Again, when you swing our bats the flex point is going to be about here. My competitors, when you swing their bats, their flex point is going to be above their hands.
Rob: In a wood bat, where is the flex point?
EASTON GUY: Down here right above their hands. Wood bats have a lot of whip.
Roy: Just as a comparison, just to interject, this bat, which is the BCM 1 one piece composite bat, it would be comparable to last year’s BZN 1; same bat, different graphic. So 2010, 2009.
EASTON GUY: What we do and what most companies do notoriously when the new bat comes out, a lot of times for two or three years it will be the exact same bat with a different name and a different graphic.
Rob: So is it like cars where they have a model year and they will introduce a new Mustang…?
EASTON GUY: It is not even like that. In the Mustang they will put a new radio in and change the interior colors. Here it is like this bat is exactly the same bat as last year, but just different colors; different name, different color.
Roy: The first two, the BSS 1 and BSS 2, we would compare with the BCN 9. However, in the BCN 9 they have pieces left, so it is really not…
EASTON GUY: But also, with the Hit Matrix bat we only had one flex. We didn’t have two. We went to flexes this year. We only had one flex last year. So this is solid composite.
EASTON GUY: Now this is an Aluminum barrel, notice the difference in the sound. Big difference. Now some people will buy the bat just because they like the ping. A traditional person who likes an aluminum bat, they like to hear that sound. They like to hear that ping sound. With the composite bat it is more of a thud. Other people like the thud better. It sounds like a wood bat more than traditional aluminum.
With the aluminum bats it is the same thing. We have two different flexes. We have a 65 and a 90.
Rob: Are those exactly the same shape?
EASTON GUY: Same shape.
Rob: And the flex comes from the way they…
EASTON GUY: If you look at it, the handle is going to be a little bit different. It is really not noticeable. This handle might be a little bit thinner, but you really can’t tell, though.
Rob: But the difference in the flex comes from the engineering on the inside?
EASTON GUY: Right. So this is going to be more flex, less flex. Same story as this except you have an aluminum barrel and you have a composite handle.
Rob: What model numbers are those, the 90...?
EASTON GUY: This is the SV-12.
Rob: And that is a 65?
EASTON GUY: Yes. BSB 2 and BSB 3.
Roy: The BSB 2 is the SV 12. That is the same bat. And then the BSV 3 is also the SV 12, just with a different flex.
Rob: So what is SV 12? Is that like the family?
EASTON GUY: V 12 is the alloy they use to make the aluminum.
Rob: So is that the family or the model…? That is confusing to me as a consumer, because it is like there are four different names on a bat sometimes.
EASTON GUY: Look at it this way. If you look at the composite bats…
Roy: Isn’t it for scandium?
EASTON GUY: Yeah, that is probably what it is.
Roy: S stands for Scandium, which is the grade of aluminum they make the bat out of. V-12 is kind of towards the brand?
EASTON GUY: Yeah. Well if you look at it this way, Stealth’s are going to be the two piece composite bats.
Rob: How many different Stealth bats are there, four?
EASTON GUY: There are two in the -3’s. They Synergy bat is the one piece composite. So Synergy, one piece, Stealth, two piece. I always remember SV 12 and V 12 because SV, it’s SV. Then we have the solid aluminum bat which is the green one up there. That is the V 12. So SV has two pieces. SV is two letters; SV-two piece. V-12-one piece.
The SV-12 comes in two flexes. Aluminum, composite, and with connector. And then you have the V-12, which is the green one up there, which is solid aluminum. Same alloy as this, but one piece.
Roy: I think it is the same story. In the SV-12’s you have the BSV 2 and the BSV 3, and the difference is flex, similar to the Stealth bats that we did where the BSS 1 and BSS 2, basically those are composite shaft, composite barrel. These are just composite shafts, metal barrel. And then again, two different flexes.
EASTON GUY: As far as, “Hey, what do I want? Do I want a composite or aluminum? What is better?” I have always felt personally that the composite bats hit better. That is my own personal feeling in seeing stuff hit. But there are a lot of people that prefer the aluminum to the composite. They like the way the bat feels. They like the ping of the barrel. They think the ball goes further on the aluminum.
They are all BSR certified, so they all have to be legally…
Roy: They are under the speed limit?
EASTON GUY: Right. They are at the BSR. You can’t say that one is a much better bat because it is way above the BSR. It is not. They are all the same.
Rob: And they are all engineered to be just enough to pass?
EASTON GUY: Right.
Rob: So they are as hot as they can be without being too hot?
EASTON GUY: They are as hot as they can be. So again, it is all preference. To me this is the bat.
Rob: Who would use these bats?
EASTON GUY: These are -3 bats, so these can be anywhere from like high school, college, or maybe like a 13, 14 year old travel team where they need to use -3’s, or a junior high school league where they need to use -3’s.
So these are like adult baseball bats.
Roy: Again, to go back to a comparison with the BSV 2 and BSV 3, we compare the last year’s BSV 1, which is also an SV 12 bat but it is just in an ‘09. It is the same thing, just from last year.
This year they give you two different flexes, where last year they didn’t have a flex. But again, for all intents and purposes you can compare the 2010 to that 2009 bat. So that is a good comparison to say…
Rob: Sure. Well how many different bats can a player choose from as far as -3?
EASTON GUY: It depends on a couple of things. A, how much money do you want to spend?
Rob: Say he wants the best bat for what he is doing.
EASTON GUY: Say I am 6’6” and I am a big power hitter, and I really like using composite. Well I am going to go with this one.
Rob: But in the baseball bats that are -3, are there six bats?
EASTON GUY: As far as Easton? Those are what I consider the high end bats. There are six of them.
Rob: Do you guys do good, better, best as far as families?
EASTON GUY: Here is the thing. It all depends on what you feel comfortable with.
Rob: But as far as price points.
EASTON GUY: These three.
Rob: So the Synergy, the Stealth Speed…
EASTON GUY: The composite bats. You might want to say by composite, by aluminum composite, and by aluminum. These three are the same price.
Rob: So three different buckets of bats.
EASTON GUY: Right. There are three different price points, one, two, and three.
Rob: What is retail?
Roy: $400, $300, $200.
Rob: What is the $400?
EASTON GUY: These are $400.
Roy: The BSS 1 and the BSS 2 are $400. The BCM 1 is $400. The BSV 2 and BSV 3 are $300. And the BV 2 is just a regular straight wall aluminum bat at $200.
EASTON GUY: Which some people actually prefer.
Rob: But they could have made that bat 10 years ago, right?
EASTON GUY: Not with that aluminum. That V-12 alloy was not available 10 years ago. The alloys that we use in the bats, like this V-12 alloy is…Every two years, pretty much, they come out with a new alloy. The whole goal is to make the bats thinner, more durable, not crack or dent easily, and not break down as much.
Rob: But still hit up to the edge of as hot as it can be without being too hot.
EASTON GUY: If you have an aluminum alloy that breaks down and gets soft, and you spent $200, you are not going to be very happy.
Rob: So how many hits do you have?
EASTON GUY: There is no answer to that. It depends on, like a car, how hard do you drive your car? How many miles can you get out of a car? You can have a car for 40 years and drive it on Sundays to church and come back, or you can drive 250 miles a day.
Rob: But because of warranties it is reasonable to assume…
EASTON GUY: It is warrantied for 400 days.
Rob: Is that a marketing thing?
EASTON GUY: We say 400 days because nobody is going to use a bat all year.
Rob: So that overlaps the season?
EASTON GUY: By a little bit. Yes, a kid is going to buy this bat and then he will play summer, travel, and then maybe a high school season, and then he will play on in a winter league or taking hitting lessons during the winter, but a lot of times if you take hitting lessons you are not going to use your game bat when you are hitting in the cage. You just spent $400 on a bat. You are going to use your old bat.
Rob: Special occasions?
EASTON GUY: You use it for games only. And then you have another bat that you use in the cage. And then you use your old bat, and then you use this one again until this one is kind of...You feel that it is dead. Everybody has got their own feeling about the bat; the bat is dead, the bat is not dead.
Rob: It is so subjective?
EASTON GUY: It is so subjective. Say a kid is hitting this bat great and then all of a sudden he goes into a slump. He will say, “OK. It is probably the bat. I gotta get a new bat. This bat is dead. Dad this bat is dead. I need a new bat.” That is generally what happens. Would you agree?
Roy: Yeah.
EASTON GUY: Sometimes a bat will crack or it will dent or something will happen physically to the bat. That is something completely different. Composite bats crack. Aluminum bats also can crack and dent.
Rob: How does the return process work?
EASTON GUY: You buy a bat, you have it for a week, you swing it, and the bat breaks in half. You have to contact Easton directly at the warranty replacement department and then send the bat back and they send you a new bat.
Rob: How long does that take?
EASTON GUY: It could be anywhere from a day, which I had happen to me last week, to a couple weeks. I had a guy whose son was going down to North Carolina to play in a college showcase tournament. He has the Synergy Speed and it cracked. It was actually a friend of mine from town who I sold it to.
He said, “Listen. I need this bat. He is going away.” So he said, “I will pay for the overnight and everything.” So I called him up and they just overnighter him the bat.
Rob: Bats don’t have serial numbers, so how do you know that somebody got the bat…They would have to have a receipt. Does it have to be from a licensed…?
EASTON GUY: For us it has got to be from an authorized Easton dealer. It can’t be from eBay. It can’t be from Paypal. It has got to be closeoutbats.com. It has got to be Bob’s sport shop or whatever. It has got to be an authorized Easton dealer.
EASTON SENIOR LEAGUE…
Roy: George, let’s move to senior league.
EASTON GUY: Senior league bats, the bats are pretty much…When you are talking about composition and you are talking about…And it will be the same with the little league bats also. It is the same theory. They are the same.
What senior league bats is they are like a tweener.
Rob: By that you mean the age?
EASTON GUY: Compared between the -3 market and the little league market, it is a very small market. A lot of times it is centralized to certain areas of the country. Where like in Long Island, these bats are pretty much non-existent. They either play with little league or they play with -3.
That is just the way the rules are out there. I always look at the senior league business as the Wild West. Because with the -3 bats there is a control on it with high school and with college. They will tell you that you have to use a -3 bat. Here is what you can use. They tell you. Most of the other organizations that run youth baseball, Pony League, Cal Ripken, little league, Dixie League, USSSA, they have their own standards, but for the most part everything follows along with little league’s.
Little league has really strict standards, so mostly everybody else says, “Hey, if it is good for little league, then we are good with it.” Sometimes they like to get a little bit of a money hit, so USSSA will say, “Hey, you have to put USSSA on the bat. You can’t use it unless you put it on the bat, and we are going to charge you to use the logo.
So that youth baseball market, which is like from four or five up until 12, is pretty much set in stone.
Rob: Because of whatever little league does.
EASTON GUY: And the high school, college market is set in stone because of NFHS and the NCAA says this is what it is. That is kind of set in stone. That little area which is like travel all, 10-13, is like the Wild West.
There are all kinds of little leagues going on. A guy in New Jersey started his own league. There is ABC, there is Cal Ripken, there is senior little league. Each league plays with different rules, and each league in each town plays with different rules.
Roy: So diameter of barrel and weight ratio, inch to ounce ratio, varies.
EASTON GUY: These are like the Bam-Bam bats. These are big barrel bats that are really light; -10’s. These are bats that generally will have a really big barrel and they are really short, and very light.
You might even have it where you are playing in a league and you can’t use a big barrel bat. But then when you get to a tournament they allow the big barrel bats in the tournaments.
Rob: So what types of players would be using these? Are these like the serious players who are going to travel ball?
EASTON GUY: Most of these bats are pretty much…You are done with little league. Then by attrition, the kids that aren’t really big players are going to drop out. These are the kids that are mostly playing summer and travel. This is mostly a travel ball club ball bat.
Roy: However, in certain pockets of the country, like in the South, at a young age, 7 or 8 years old, some of them do use a big barrel bat.
EASTON GUY: it is like the Wild West. It is like I can’t tell you, “Hey high school kids are all going to use BSR certified -3.”
Rob: It totally depends on…
Roy: Where you are, what league you are in…
Rob: That is why it is hard to pinpoint.
EASTON GUY: That is why I call it the old west. There is no rhyme or reason for…I could be in Wayne, New Jersey and there are two senior leagues going on. ABC says, “Hey, you can use these.” And then on the other side of town they have a Cal Ripken that says you can’t use them.
Rob: But the consumer knows what they can use and can’t use based on the league that they are in.
EASTON GUY: They will tell you, “Hey we don’t allow senior league 2 5/8 inch barrel -10’s. You can’t use them. You have to use -3’s,” or you can only play with -5.
Rob: So on the website now we call them…
Roy: Senior league.
Rob: But if they can’t use…But those are the big barrel…?
Roy: Right. We don’t define like, “Hey, if you are in such and such you can use this.”
EASTON GUY: Generally, what they will do is they will go by -5,-10...They will say, “Hey, you are not allowed to use -10 bats in this league. You can use a big barrel, but you can’t use -10. You have to use -5’s.”
Roy: We can’t define what you need to use. They have to define it for themselves, because there is just so much from town to town, state to state what they use that we can’t define it. We supply it in different weight ratios, like this bat is a -5, this bat is a -8, this bat is a -9...
EASTON GUY: Like this bat might come in a -5 version and a -10 version.
Rob: So would it make sense in the senior league bat section to have sub-sections based upon drop, and have like all the -5’s together?
EASTON GUY: If somebody is shopping by -5 or -10, yes.
Rob: So shopping by drop might be a….
Roy: I like that. Ignore that man behind the curtain.
EASTON GUY: Comment from the peanut gallery!
Rob: Shop by Drop. That is my trademark, by the way.
Roy: What we have here is we have a sheet. And when we say, “Where are you playing or do you know what your drop is?” we have it broken down as, “Hey, here are our senior league bats,” but we also have it broken down by drop; 10, 9, 9.5, 8.5, 8, 5...
So right here in this vicinity, in this immediate area, which is not popular anywhere, we do a lot of -5’s. So when somebody comes in and says, “I want a -5,” we go, “OK. Here are your seven choices.” That’s it.
Rob: OK. But that would be really helpful on the website, I think.
Roy: I think so.
EASTON GUY: You know what I would do, too, on the website? On the title I would write what the barrel is and what the drop is, and obviously it is in descending price order, but we want to make sure that they don’t start opening up bats going, “Oh S#!%. I can’t use this one because it is -9.” Before they click on it, I want to let them know like, “Oh, I can’t use this one. Oh, this one is a consideration. OK. Here is another one.”
Rob: Another thing is barrel size and drop.
EASTON GUY: We wanted to make only the 2 5/8 inch barrels on these.
Roy: 2 ¾ inch barrel bats are not the norm now. They are getting away from that. Are there some out there? Yes. Do we have some? Yes. Most of them are last year’s bats.
Rob: Are these wider?
Roy: Wider. It is 2 ¾ and 2 5/8, so that eighth of an inch difference is the difference between the two. I would say by next year you are probably going to see all 2 ¾ bats go away. And actually, your 2010 line has no 2 ¾.
EASTON GUY: Zero.
Rob: Because they are not legal in certain…?
EASTON GUY: Well they see the trend and they are selling way less. Most of the leagues probably say, “Hey, -10, 2 5/8. -5, 2 5/8.” So most of the leagues have been getting away from the 2 ¾ and they pretty much agreed that they should be doing 2 5/8 inch, not 2 ¾.
So just by dumb luck, that is probably how it is working out, and they probably looked at what is going on, and they looked at theirselves ad said, “Hey, we are selling four to one 2 5/8 inch to 2 ¾. Let’s just not make them.”
Rob: So by itself the industry is moving towards that. It is not being forced by some government…
EASTON GUY: Not the industry, the leagues which in turn are driving the manufacturers to do 2 5/8. I could see this category, in a few years, going away, personally. I think they will come out with certified -3’s. And I think that at some point in the next 5-7 years this will be eliminated.
Rob: But in senior league bats, it is the same issues we were talking about on the regular bats, as far as the composite versus the hybrid versus the all aluminum, and then one piece versus two piece?
EASTON GUY: They look graphically the same. It is the same bat. It is just structured different. It is full composite. Has the 90 flex on it. Same bat. And the little league bat is going to be the same bat also.
Rob: Is it the same shape?
EASTON GUY: No. It has got a bigger barrel. It is a shorter bat. I mean this is a 32 inch at, but this is a -10.
Roy: Can you put a definition on the flex rating? For example, if I am looking at a number and it is a 90 flex rating. Is there a definition of, “Hey it is a 90 flex. That means that the bat will flex one inch per 90 pounds of pressure.”
EASTON GUY: I don’t know that there is a technical…You would have to call like Matt Arn. He might be able to give you that information. I don’t know that there is a technical…There is not a chart that says this and this.
Roy: What we can say though is the higher number the stiffer the bat.
EASTON GUY: 100 is the stiffest.
Roy: Right. Higher the number, stiffer the bat.
Rob: Is there a 100?
EASTON GUY: Yeah. We have an aluminum at that is 100.
Rob: And that one up there is a 90?
EASTON GUY: 65 is the least, which is going to be this bat. The SV-12 aluminum barrel, composite handle is going to be the…Basically, this…The aluminum might swing a little bit lighter than the composite, so it is going to make it a little bit more flex.
Roy: What is VRS rating and hitting area rating?
EASTON GUY: VRS rating is the vibration. So on a…
Rob: Is that for sting?
EASTON GUY: Yeah. I should have mentioned that. With a connector this is going to reduce the vibration.
Rob: Is that the main benefit of the connector?
EASTON GUY: No. It will reduce vibration and it gives you a kick point to the bat. The flex is really going to be in the handle. So if you saw it in slow motion, you would see this thing flex and the barrel is going to snap through. So it is going to kind of kick through. This is basically like a hinge. So it is going to flex, hinge, snap through.
Rob: So the connector is a hinge?
EASTON GUY: That is basically what it is. It is a hinge that is going to kick the barrel through. But what it does because of the rubber is it is going to reduce the vibration.
Rob: Is that like a secondary benefit?
EASTON GUY: That is one of the primary benefits. Getting technical again, when you swing a bat in cold weather, this is not going to help you.
Rob: How cold?
EASTON GUY: Out here, when the kids start playing, they start going out on the field like in March. It is going to 45 or 50 degrees out. The thing is going to sting like a mother. It is not going to help. Bats need to be warm when you swing them.
Rob: So do y’all make a bat heater?
EASTON GUY: We don’t. Other guys do.
Rob: Do they really? I was just kidding.
EASTON GUY: Basically, what you do when you are going up to bat and it is cold, is you stick it between your freaking legs or sit on it.
Rob: Does the affect the performance of the bat, the temperature of the bat?
EASTON GUY: Absolutely. Like anything, an alloy or aluminum is going to contract or expand depending on the temperature. So when it is hot out it is going to expand. It is going to make it more elastic.
Rob: So there is more flex when it is hotter?
EASTON GUY: Exactly. A lot of times they will put in there not to use under 60 degrees or something. With a composite, if it gets cold you have more of a chance of cracking a composite bat or denting an aluminum one. If you went outside in 35 degree weather to swing, chances are you are probably going to dent your bat.
But that is why, again, with a brand new expensive bat, you are not going to do that. If a kid wants to go out back and hit balls with his father when it is 35 degrees, you do it with a piece of S#!% bat.
Roy: Just to get back to the product for senior league, in the Speed bats you have one that is a -10, the BSS 11.
EASTON GUY: You probably couldn’t tell a difference between a little league bat and a senior bat or a softball bat.
Rob: The drops and stuff are very confusing.
EASTON GUY: My daughter plays fast pitch softball and I want to go buy her a bat, let’s say. If I didn’t know anything about bats, I wouldn’t know why that bat is different than this bat.
Rob: They are both 32 inch bats.
Roy: Why can’t they use this for softball? What is wrong with this for softball?
Rob: What is the main difference in the $400 bat and the $200 bat for adult baseball? The materials in the $400 bat are more expensive?
Roy: I will tell you what I think it is. The story is probably that it costs more to make the composite. I mean it probably does take more to produce the composite, research it, make it, engineer it, produce it, and sell it than the aluminum.
But I think a lot of times, and I don’t know this for a fact, but my feeling is that, “Hey. It is a composite. It is something different. We can charge more money because it is a composite and not aluminum.”
You have heard sometimes products that they charge less for and then the product that they are making that they are charging more for and it costs them less money to make the more expensive one that it does the second tier one.
Roy: Yeah. Maybe it cost them $20 to make an aluminum bat. It maybe costs them $15 to make the composite bat. But they are going to charge you $400 for this one and $300 for that just because, hey, it is composite.
Rob: That is what the market will bear.
Roy: Last year what they did…They screwed up big time. We had this thing called Hit Matrix last year. All the bats are the same price. Basically it backfired on them because the story has always been, “Hey, the two piece composite bat is the best bat on the market,” which I still think it is.
But this is an all aluminum bat and we are going to charge $400 for each one because there is a hitting system. They are all really good…
Rob: Depending on how you hit; what type of hitter you are.
Roy: So basically the way it worked out…And every dealer felt, “Why the hell are you ripping me off?”
Rob: They were boosting the price of what would have been the cheaper bats.
Roy: They were charging a dealer like $275 for that and then the dealers were charging $400. This year, that same bat that they were charging $275 for, now it is $105. And now it is $200 retail.
So now you know how much they were ripping everybody off.
Rob: But they were trying to make everything equal?
Roy: They were saying that because of the hitting system…This explains it pretty well. Composite, composite, solid/composite. Aluminum/composite, solid aluminum. Up top you have two pieces. On the bottom you have one piece.
This really kind of explains it. This will tell you exactly how it works.
Rob: Explain like the difference between clutch instinct reaction velocity. Are those just marketing names?
Roy: Those are just words. On the composite bat you get more of the hitting area and more of an energy transfer because of the two piece and you get the vibration.
If you go down, you get the same hitting area as that other one, and you are going to get more balance because there is no flex.
Rob: So it is a stiffer bat?
Roy: Yeah, and you get more solid feel.
Rob: Which one was that?
Roy: That is the solid composite.
Rob: But what is the brand?
Roy: That is the Synergy. That is the white one now. These are last year’s bats. Then you go to the SV-12. It is an aluminum barrel and a composite handle. You are going to get better bad speed because that is the lightest bat. You are going to get the transfer because it is a two piece bat. You are going to get the VRS, the vibration control, because of the connector.
And then the bottom one is solid aluminum. It is going to be control…
Rob: So stiffness is more control?
Roy: Yes. So you get stiffness, more solid, and you are going to get more bat speed.
And then the bottom one is solid aluminum. It is going to be control…
Rob: So stiffness is more control?
Roy: Yes. So you get stiffness, more solid, and you are going to get more bat speed; lots of bat speed for a power hitter.
Rob: Can you walk me through those…In the first one, the Clutch, the CXM composite. The massive hitting area comes from it being a composite bat. It has a larger sweet spot. And then max energy transfer is because it is a two piece bat and not a one piece bat.
EASTON GUY: Because of the hinge, when you swing you transfer the energy.
Rob: And the ultimate vibration reduction comes…
EASTON GUY: Because of that VRS, that rubber piece there reduces the vibration. The top two will have the VRS reduction and the bottom two wont because they are one piece.
Rob: And then if you go over to the reaction, the difference between it and the clutch is that…
EASTON GUY: One has got a composite barrel and one has got an aluminum barrel. And one is going to have more flex. One is a 65 and one is a 75. They have both got the Hit Matrix.
Rob: So the main difference between the Clutch and the reaction is that the top half of the bat is composite versus aluminum…
EASTON GUY: And the flex is bigger. The bottom two are both one piece. One is composite, one is aluminum.
Roy: They did get away from doing that, though.
Rob: I can see what the benefits are…
EASTON GUY: No, they didn’t really get away from it. We still have it, we just changed the prices. The only different Hit Matrix they added, they just added a stiff flex on the those top ones, those top two. They thought, “Hey we want to have a little bit less flex,” so they added one to that one and they added one bat to the top one. The two bottom bats are exactly the same.
Rob: But the Hit Matrix helps me understand…Those are the benefits. If you tie the benefits to the feature, which we have done for the past hour, but seeing it in one spot is helpful. So I think I might mix up something like that.
EASTON GUY: That is the deal with the senior league bats. And then little league bats, I don’t know if you can bring them down. They are just…
Roy: Well I think we discussed this yesterday. Again, skip the top ones for the moment. The Speed bats, basically you are looking at them as -9, -11, -8, and -13.
Rob: So the only difference is the drops?
EASTON GUY: Correct. And again, depending on where you are playing and what is popular, I sell a lot more -13’s. The -9 is a power hitter bat. I sell the least…I mean I sell 13, 11, and 9.
Roy: You have really got to be a big strong kid to swing the -9.
Rob: So as the drop drops, it is a heavier bat?
EASTON GUY: So let’s just pick 30 inches. 30 inches and a -13 is 17 ounces. -11 is 19 and -9 is 21.
Roy: Those two ounces are going to make a difference. But most kids are like wimpy kids. They can’t swing a bat. So they want the less bat they can swing…
Rob: Faster bat speed?
EASTON GUY: Little bit more control. Keep in mind, when you are playing little league they are 45 feet away pitching. I mean they are on top of you almost. So the ball is there quickly.
Roy: Then you have the SV-12’s. The V-12, it is a lot different this year because of the price structures. The V-12 is now more of a price point bat. It is a solid aluminum bat. It has turned into like a price point bat. Remember when I was telling you that last year they were all the same price? The SV-12 and the V-12 have turned into a price point.
So the parent might say, “I don’t want to spend the money on the composite. The SV-12 is a connection bat. We will spend a little bit less money. We will spend $50 less on that one.” They get that one instead.
Rob: Then what are the other ones?
Roy: Those are last year’s bats. The Synergy is from last year.
EASTON GUY: But what we will do is we will match those. I am going to match those up.
Rob: I think on the website we should have a place to where if there is a last year’s version of this, or two year’s ago version of this…
Roy: You could put like, “This year’s Synergy is this price. Also available is last year’s model at this price. Compare this and that, and…”
EASTON GUY: Again, everything kind of follows suit all the way down. And then when you get to softball, softball is a little bit different. Only because in men’s slow pitch softball…
EASTON SOFTBALL
EASTON GUY: A men’s slow pitch softball bat could also be used for modified. We play slow pitch softball which is a high arc. Then we play, especially in this part of the country, a lot of modified, which is the guys can throw straight and throw fast, but not as fast as the women in fast pitch.
But a men’s bat is a men’s bat. Most men never use a slow pitch bat.
Rob: And they are all the same length?
EASTON GUY: They are all 34 inches.
Rob: Why do they do that? I played on a softball team and I am a foot taller than one of the guys on the team.
EASTON GUY: I have no idea. It is just the way they do it. But there are different ratios. They start at 26, 27, 28, and 30. There is no 29. Does anybody make a 29?
Roy: Yeah. Mikken, Worth…
EASTON GUY: That is the weight.
Rob: So a heavier bat is going to be harder to swing, but if you can swing it, it is going to put more energy in the ball?
EASTON GUY: I swing a 28 ounce bat just because that is comfortable for me. Now there are guys on my team who are bigger than me and they swing a 26 ounce bat.
And then we make the bats in a two piece and a one piece, composite and aluminum, same thing we do with everything else.
Rob: The drops in men’s softball, are those some are legal in some leagues…?
EASTON GUY: Generally the only thing they do in softball is some leagues don’t allow you to use composite bats.
Roy: Well what about ASA USSSA?
EASTON GUY: Let me explain that to you. There are different softball leagues like there is Little League, Dixie League, etc.
Rob: It is USSSA?
EASTON GUY: USSSA. United States Softball, whatever it is. ASA is the biggest one. USSSA is probably behind ASA. And then you have lots of little ones. You have NSA. You have ISF. ASA is the biggest and most popular, because in fast pitch softball as opposed to slow pitch softball, it is all ASA.
So they have taken some of their clout with fast pitch and kind of moved it over to slow pitch. They all have their own regulations. ASA is the strictest.
Rob: So are all your bats ASA?
EASTON GUY: No. The ASA bats are…With an ASA bat, the exit speed ratio is ??????95 MPH. So when they do their tests, they put the bat on like a fixed thing and they have a ball and...It is fixed.
So they get to where it is going to be the same. So it is 98+ for ASA. Everybody else is 100+, and those bats are all completely illegal for ASA. They won’t use a non-ASA bat. They will have ASA in a little home plate on it, or they will say USSSA approved or NSF approved, whatever.
But again, if I play the USSSA league, they might say that you can’t use composite bats. You have to use only aluminum bats.
Roy: Well let’s look at the bats. In the top right you have the white, the white and the green, and the white and the red.
EASTON GUY: Those are all non-ASA bats.
Roy: Right, but what is the difference between the two?
EASTON GUY: With the Synergy bats there are four of them, OK? We have two one piece bats. I’m sorry, those are the same. Those both have a 13 ½ inch barrel on those. One is end loaded. The BH is end loaded. The other one is not end loaded.
Rob: So just the balance is different?
EASTON GUY: Right. It is heavier at the end. They put a weight…
Rob: Which one is heavier, though?
EASTON GUY: The BH. The red one, I believe. It is the same thing with the two piece composites. One is going to be end loaded and one is not.
Roy: So the difference between Stealth and Synergy is…
EASTON GUY: Stealth is two piece. Synergy is one piece. But that is the same here. Synergy is going to be one piece. Stealth is two piece.
Rob: So that is across the line? Stealth is always going to be two piece? If it said that somewhere, that would be really helpful on the website.
EASTON GUY: But also, you have go to remember. Stealth is two piece composite.
Rob: Always a two piece composite?
EASTON GUY: Because the SV-12 is two piece, but it is an aluminum bat.
Rob: So by definition, the…
EASTON GUY: The SV-12’s are all going to be two piece aluminum composite.
Rob: Synergy, is that always a composite?
EASTON GUY: In bats, yes. Synergy is going to be one piece composite.
Rob: OK. And then stealth is going to be a two piece…
EASTON GUY: Two piece composite.
Rob: And then what are the other brands like that?
EASTON GUY: The SV-12 is going to be an aluminum barrel and a composite handle. The V-12 is going to be solid aluminum. That is going to be the same for baseball, little league, senior, slow pitch, fast pitch.
Roy: However though, the BSN 1, which is not up there, but see the Synergy plus George? That is a two piece bat.
EASTON GUY: But that is from last year though. Anything new…
Rob: So we can’t say that across the site, because we sell stuff that is two and three years old.
Roy: It is almost correct, but it is not.
Rob: No wonder I am confused! Every year they change…
EASTON GUY: For 2010 it is correct.
Rob: From here on out is it going to be that way? Is it who knows? OK. Then we will deal with it as it comes. So the differences between men’s softball slow pitch.
Roy: The SCN 16 and SCN 16 BH, they are both Synergy bats. They are both one piece composite bats. The difference is that the BH is an end load. And they are both USSSA bats. They are non-ASA bats.
Rob: So why would somebody use an end load bat?
Roy: End load bat would generally tend to be more for like a slow pitch softball where it is more of like a lob pitch.
EASTON GUY: Because it is end loaded it is going to generate a little more bat speed. But the thing is you have to be comfortable swinging that type of bat.
Rob: Does it feel off balance?
EASTON GUY: Yes.
Roy: If you are swinging at a pitch that is just lobbed in, it is easier to swing. If you have a guy that is throwing hard in what they call modified, it is a little bit harder to control.
EASTON GUY: It is going to slow your bat speed down a little bit.
Roy: You have to be a strong guy to swing that bat.
EASTON GUY: Arch pitch is a different kind of game, because in the arch pitch there is like unlimited arch where the guy is just like lobbing the ball up. These guys are just waiting for the pitch to come and then they are just whacking the ball.
With the modified it is almost like baseball. You have to sit there and you have to hit. With these guys, they are giving them a beach ball to kind of just turn around and swing as hard as they can.
With the end load, what it is going to do is it is going to bring their bat through a little bit more quickly, but it is harder…I play modified. I mean there are guys that use end loaded bats to play modified. I would never use an end loaded bat. To me it is uncomfortable.
Roy: But again, getting back to defining the difference between those two Synergy bats, the SCN 16 and the SCN 16 BH, the BH is the end load and the regular 16 is not end load. They are both USSSA bats period. That is it. So you can’t use them in an ASA game.
Rob: So it makes sense to have bats sorted by what league…?
EASTON GUY: It is difficult. I will tell you why. If you sort it by ASA and say these are ASA bats, one league might say that you can’t use composite ASA’s.
Roy: Also, too, you can use an ASA bat for USSSA, but you can’t use a USSSA bat for ASA.
Rob: So if you are in the less strict league, we could have a less strict league bucket that would include ASA and USSSA, right?
EASTON GUY: If you are playing men’s softball, you pretty much know what you can use. I mean they will tell you up front. If you are in Long Island and you are playing in an ASA league, you can’t use a composite bat.
Roy: Here is the way I would define it. You can have a USSSA bucket and you don’t need to have anything else, because anything else you could use…In other words, you can’t use that bat anywhere else.
EASTON GUY: What you need to do is you need to put a bat and say, “Synergy slow pitch bat, Brett Helmer, for use in leagues including USSA, ISF,” because it is stamped on there.
Rob: I am just wondering if it would be easier for someone to go shopping for a bat. If they wanted to shop by USSSA we would include all of the ASA bats and all the USSSA bats. There is some filtering that we can do. We are not even using the search technology that I want to use to where people can actually go through and click little buttons…
Roy: But the problem with that is that if you click on a bat that is an ASA bat and I buy this really neat composite bat, “Oh it is ASA approved. I can buy it. Excellent.” You get the bat, go over to the game, and the ump says, “Nope. No composite bats.”
EASTON GUY: Well that is a rule within the rule.
Roy: Right. But what I am saying is you don’t want somebody going on and saying…To me, the most ridiculous thing is that ASA has rules that are very stringent. But then a local league will say, “Well you can’t use that bat.”
It is stupid! For me, why play by ASA rules?
Rob: But a guy will know that his league won’t allow it before they buy a bat.
EASTON GUY: It is only aluminum. You can’t use any composite.
Rob: So we could have something where people could check off “aluminum only”. There can be like three different…Pick one of the three or all three. Show just the aluminum, just the composite, or just show the hybrid.
Roy: What about if you have a category that says, “Exceeds 98 MPH exit velocity?”
EG: But those guys don’t know the technicality. They just know they can’t use a composite bat. They don’t know why. They don’t know that it is 98 or 95 or 100. They don’t know any of that stuff.
Rob: But that 98 or 95, that is an ASA rule versus a…?
EG: Utrip. They just know, “I need a bat and the guy said I can’t use composite bats.” It is ASA and you can’t use composite. That is all they know.
Rob: Well I have another thing, not just Shop by Drop, but just a way of doing filtering. We will have to go in and tag these bats a certain way.
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EG: So that is the two Tri-Zones and then the…
Rob: When you say Tri-Zone, what is that?
EG: Well the Tri-Zone is that SCN 16 and SCN 16 BH. Those are the Synergy bats.
Roy: They are all Tri-Zones, all four of them.
Rob: What is Tri-Zone? Is that a marketing term?
EG: If you look at the catalogue it explains what it is. I don’t really use it much.
Roy: You are fired George. Actually that bat is not even in the catalogue.
EG: The SCN 2 is not. Do you have SCN 2’s? Are you going to get them?
Roy: Huh?
EG: Did you order SCN 2’s?
Roy: What is that?
EG: That was that special made I thought you said you didn’t want.
Roy: Oh. It was a USSSA bat only.
Rob: So it is north and south of the sweet spot is the Tri-Zone?
EG: I don’t think anybody is buying this bat because it is a Tri-Zone. They are looking at it as a one piece or two piece bat, I am pretty sure.
And then when you go to the ASA bats…Now in the ASA bats we have what is called the Reveal in the slow pitch. It is a solid composite or two piece composite bat. And what it is is the bat changes color if you try to tamper with the bat.
One of the reason why a lot of leagues outlawed, and ASA stopped selling or was allowing composite bats, is that composite is very easy to alter. You know, you roll a bat. So what this does is allows you to see if a bat is rolled.
Rob: That is nuts.
Roy: So the SSR 1 Stealth Reveal, two piece composite bat. And then when you get into the SRV 1 and SRV 2…
EG: The same thing. The Stealth’s are going to be two piece. The Synergy’s are one piece. This is just a one piece composite bat with a 13 ½ inch barrel.
Rob: So is that a bigger barrel?
EG: It is a longer barrel.
Rob: So that means a bigger sweet spot?
EG: Yes. Now the SRV 2 ahs a smaller barrel. It is 12 inch but it is end loaded.
Rob: And that is just preference?
EG: That is really more of a genuine slow pitch bat.
Roy: Wait, like the shell?
Rob: Yeah. Why would somebody get something…In slow pitch, the ball is coming so slow…
Roy: Right. So the 12 inch shell is a little bit less surface to hit with…
Rob: So if you can put that ball on that bat where you want to…
EG: You are going to have a greater sweet spot, like a more defined sweet spot, but that is more of like a real slow pitch bat. And then the Synergy Clear is a 13 ½ inch. It is the same as this bat. The only difference is that they make it out of a different makeup, a different composite makeup which lowers the price.
So when they put in the composite, these are different composites. This one is like $124. It is a lot less money.
Rob: Is that retail?
EG: Retail on that one is…What do you retail them for?
Roy: What is that?
EG: The Synergy Clear.
Rob: SCL 1.
Roy: $200.
EG: And then again, you have the aluminum composite and the solid aluminum. And then when you go to fast pitch, again, it is completely different.
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EG: Fast pitch, like I said, is a completely different animal. You are going to go more to like a baseball type weight to length ratio. Here, again, in the Stealth, two piece composite.
These are all ASA approved. There is nothing else. So here you have the two piece composite bats. You have a -10 and a -9. What is your ratio of -10 to -9 you sell?
Roy: Much more -10.
EG: Way more -10. And again, those go with different…
Rob: The -10’s are lighter?
EG: Yes, an ounce lighter. On a slow pitch bat all you have is 34. This goes from 30 to 34, -10 and -9. Then you have the one piece Synergy again, the Stealth Synergy; one piece, 29-44.
Rob: Why 29?
EG: Younger kids pretty much. Those are one piece bats, -10 and -9. Then you go to the Synergy Crystal. It is again a different makeup. It is a different makeup of composites. It is a $124 bat. That is a -11.
So that is a price point bat for somebody that might be even younger. So you have a 29, -11 in that.
Rob: So what age?
EG: These bats, 29, -11, anywhere from 9-10 year. And then you have the two piece aluminum. We changed the color on this one and this one only because it is more girl oriented colors. So we have the silver and the teal aluminum composite and then the one piece aluminum, and this has a different barrel design. This thing has a flare barrel. Some people call it the bottle bat.
Rob: The V-12?
EG: Yes. That is a -12.5. That is really light. This one is a -11.5. So on these two bats, you do see high school and college players using them. If they want something really light they will go to that V-12. But generally you are going to see them using composites. That is an aluminum composite.
And then these are all going to be solid aluminum bats. And it starts going down in price point. These are all price point bats.
Rob: Do we sell all these or not?
Roy: The Reflex we carry. Those other ones, no we don’t.
EG: The Reflex, out of all the bats, is probably like the price pointed bat that high school kid would probably still use. After that it is kind of…If you are a high school player using a Typhoon, you can buy that bat on the corner.
On a Saturday afternoon, if you go to any rec field in the country, there are little kids using that bat. I mean that goes down to 25/15. That might be my best selling item that I have in the catalogue.
Rob: As far as the number of units?
EG: It is like a $10.50 bat. Everybody has got that. That is like a ridiculously stupid good selling bat. If the league is buying bats for the kids, that is the bat that they will buy.
Rob: What is the performance difference between a $10 bat and a $200 bat?
EG: There are two things we have to remember. One is if you put a $10 in the hand of a kid that can hit, the kid is going to be able to hit with a $10 bat. They may not get as much power, distance, or bat speed…
Rob: Or have the control?
EG: Or control, but they will be able to hit. If you are a 15 year old girl that is playing travel softball and you can’t hit, you can’t hit with that bat and you can’t hit with the other bat.
Rob: But when somebody can hit…
EG: The performance will be much different.
Rob: I know with a guitar…Like with a $300 guitar and a $3,000 guitar there is a huge difference as far as…I am an intermediate player. But an advanced player can just…
EG: There is a huge difference. If I am going to pick up a guitar, for me to use a $3,000 guitar or a $25 guitar is not going to make a difference. If Eric Clapton picks up the two guitars, it will be completely different.
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VN620052
DEMARINI STARTS HERE
DEMARINI GUY: Or, bats are going to come with what we call this rotation index here. You see numbers. It has got one through eight on there. And the same thing at the top of the barrel. It has got one through eight there.
Ideally, what you want to do with the bat…You don’t always want to hit the bat in the same spot. You want to continue to rotate the bat. So that is just something specific that you will see on the bats that you might have a question about.
You always want to continue to rotate the bat and it extends the shelf life of the bat a little bit. Now the problem with that is, if a kid hits a homerun on number eight, guess what happens the next time he steps up there? He is right on number eight again because he knows that part of the bat is hot.
We will never say our bats have a break in period, but composite over time will break in a little bit. So you want to kind of break it in evenly throughout the bat. So that is helpful to always be rotating a bat through.
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DEMARINI GUY: This is the hub end cap. This is the only bat that we have with the hub end cap on inside of the bat.
Rob: On the CF4?
DEMARINI GUY: On the CF4, because it is a wider barrel and a longer barrel. We made it internal, so that is going to bring the energy back out to the sweet spot of the bat.
Rob: Is that last year’s?
DEMARINI GUY: This is just a different model end cap. The old CF4 last year had this end cap, and this is our Clutch end cap. They have the same purpose. They are both going to redistribute energy.
So say a ball hits the sweet spot of the bat. Energy from the bat is going to go outward this way. This is going to redirect some of it back to the spot where the bat is going to hit. Some of it is going to go out this way. Some of it is going to come back through the bat. So this helps redirect energy back into the sweet spot of the bat.
Rob: So the length of the barrel on the new bat extends to the point where…
DEMARINI GUY: Right. The barrels are pretty much the same on this. But the difference is by making this end cap this way, we were able to lengthen it down here more this way. Where this one starts to get skinnier here, this sweet spot is bigger throughout here now. So the sweet spot continues up through here.
This part on the old bat wasn’t as sweet as this one, because you were losing energy as you went up to this end cap here. By making this an internal end cap and lengthening the barrel, this way you are going to get more of a sweet spot more through here than you would say through here on the old bat.
Do you have anything else to add on the Voodoo?
Roy: Negative.
DEMARINI GUY: So this is our Vendetta C6. This is a $299 bat. Baseball. That is going to be a $299 composite bat. So you have the high end CF4 $399 composite. Then you have our high end aluminum at $299. Then we have our single wall C6 composite. Now what does C6 mean?
C6 is our single wall composite bat. This one we talked about is a double wall composite bat. We made this Vendetta in a C6 composite. C6 composite is going to be a wider weave.
Rob: It is thicker?
DEMARINI GUY: Actually, no. We are just to say it is wider. That is what we will say. So the thickness in that bat…It is going to be a little bit thicker, yes, because it is not going to have two walls. It is going to be independent. So it is a slightly thicker bat.
Rob: When you say wider, do you mean the threads in it are wider?
DEMARINI GUY: Think of it is as a composite weaved this way where the pitch back composite we are able to thin it out and make it really tight like this. This one is actually going to be a little bit wider this way.
Rob: So there is more spacing in between…?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. You are going to have more spacing in there. Exactly. So you are going to get a single way trampoline effect opposed to a double wall trampoline here. What makes the Vendetta bat series unique is we have what we call our hybrid handle, which comes with the Rails technology.
This is actually two handles that work independently of one another. I say they work independently, but they are actually one handle. There is an inner handle that has a lot of flex. Our flex index goes up to five. Everyone has a different flex index.
These both are at 3.5, which is a little bit stiffer. The inner handle on this one is actually a 2.5, so you are going to have a lot of bend. And then the outer handle is going to be a little bit stiffer. It is going to be at 3.5.
So this one is going to flex at about a 3, which is much more flex than you are going to do with that. What that extra flex in the rails do on this, it absorbs all the vibration out through the bat.
So because you have a little more flex in there, you are going to have a little more bend in the bat. The rails actually absorb all the vibration. So if you go and hit this thing, you will not feel virtually anything on your hands. If you just take the bat and you bang it on the ground, you don’t really feel anything, which is interesting.
Again, this is going to give you more flex, so it is going to be better for someone who is looking for a little more bat speed. These are built for a power player. They are going to be slightly more end loaded. This is going to be built with a little more flex. It is going to be a little more balanced. So this is going to be for your kid who is looking to get a little bit extra bat speed.
So that is what the Vendetta C6 is. Again, you are looking at a single wall composite opposed to a double wall, and you are going to get a little more flex in the handle than you would with the CF4
So that is what the Vendetta C6 is. Again, you are looking at a single wall composite opposed to a double wall, and you are going to get a little more flex in the handle than you would with the CF4. And again, this is our mid-level.
Rob: How much is it?
DEMARINI GUY: $299.
Roy: Maybe I missed this, but are the Vendetta C6 rails the same on…?
DEMARINI GUY: The same on all the Vendetta handles. They are just different paint jobs.
And then this is the Vendetta aluminum. So this is the Vendetta C6 composite and this is going to be the Vendetta aluminum.
Rob: Two piece?
DEMARINI GUY: Same deal. All going to be two pieces. The difference with this one being you are going to have the hybrid rails handle, but you are going to have aluminum instead of composite.
So this is the SC4 alloy, which is our high end alloy just like our Voodoo, but the difference being that that has a pitch black composite handle. This one is going to have the rails handles. So you are going to get more flex in this bat.
Roy: So is it the same barrel as the…?
DEMARINI GUY: Slightly different, but yes. Again, this one is built a little more balanced. This is our long barrel.
Roy: So the shell is longer.
DEMARINI GUY: Yes.
Rob: On which one?
Roy: On the Voodoo.
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. On the Voodoo you are going to get a longer shell on the barrel. They are just built a little bit differently. The sweet spots are going to be virtually the same. But because of the handle on this one, you can tell that the handle is a lot longer than on the Voodoo. That absorbs more of the vibration.
So while it looks like the sweet spot is going to be bigger on this one, it is really not. It is about the same. But the barrels are built differently. But it is the same exact alloy there.
So this is going to be $249 for the Vendetta with the rails. Again, you are going to get a different grip on this. This is our pause attack grip opposed to our verogated comfort grip. This is just a little bit stiffer feeling grip. That one actually has got a little give to it. It is softer. This is actually more of like the old school grip. So that is what we are talking about with the Vendetta.
So again, these are built with a little more flex. You are going to get more bat speed with these two bats. And those two are going to be your high end power bats. So depending on what kind of hitter you are sometimes determines what kind of bat you want to swing.
Does that make sense, the difference between these? Again, you are going to get one that is composite and one that is aluminum. Same handle, the barrels are just going to be different.
Again, on aluminum you need to absorb more vibration. So the hybrid handle on this one has to be a little bit bigger to absorb more vibration. That is why. Again, composite absorbs more…
Rob: That is why the rails are longer on the Vendetta.
DEMARINI GUY: Correct. On the Vendetta without the C6. So that is why it is different. Again, the barrel’s sweet spot is actually the same. But to absorb the vibration you need to make this handle a little bit bigger.
VN620054
DEMARINI GUY: We call the Vexxum the bat that bends. It was our original two piece bat, the first one that kind of put DeMarini on the map.
Rob: When did Vexxum come out?
Roy: It has got to be three or four years.
DEMARINI GUY: It has got to be longer than that, I think. I think about six years. Maybe not. What was the first one? That ugly yellow and black one? Maybe about five or six years. We can find that out for you.
This year’s Vexxum is going to look very similar to this. Obviously the color pattern is going to be different, but it is the same deal. You are going to have CS4 alloy. Instead of the pitch black plus composite handle, you are going to get this C6 composite handle.
All of our materials we use throughout all our bats. So now you are going to get that wider weave composite in the handle of the Vexxum. So what does the wider weave mean? Wider means you are going to get more flex, more give.
So while this is a 3.5 on the flex scale and it has got the stronger, more powerful composite in it, the Vexxum is going to have the wider weave one that is going to flex a little bit more. So you are looking at a 3 on the flex scale for that.
Rob: Why would that be important?
DEMARINI GUY: The flex is more for somebody who is lacking bat speed. If you think about it, this bat doesn’t have flex as much, so I have got to make sure to get it all the way around. So my power is going to come through there from myself. If I am lagging something that is going to have a little more flex, by bringing it slower through…It is kind of like a golf club. Do you ever see that? The more flex you have the more the bat is going to bend and then fire through the zone as you come through it.
Rob: So why would somebody not have bat speed?
DEMARINI GUY: They are not strong enough to swing a bat. There are multiple reasons why you wouldn’t have bat speed. Again, it mostly comes down to strength. A lot of leagues now are going to make kids swing heavier bats because they are afraid of people getting hurt like that.
In that case, you probably want as much flex as possible if you were a smaller kid swinging a bat because it is just harder for you to get it around. So if you have a little more flex on there, as you come through the bat is going to help whip through the zone, creating more impact, hitting the ball further. That is why you would definitely want more flex on a bat.
So the Vexxum is going to be very similar to the Voodoo. Same alloy barrel. You are going to get a different composite handle. It is going to flex a little bit more, so you are going to have a little bit more whip through the zone. It is going to feel a little bit whippier when you swing it. Same grip, same everything else.
Roy: So there is no DeMarini baseball bat -3 that has a metal shaft. Every shaft is composite.
DEMARINI GUY: Incorrect. There is the brand new one that just came out which I will talk about in just a second.
Roy: What is the retail on that? Is it lower than $199?
DEMARINI GUY: I think it is $229 maybe. The Vexxum is at $199. And then this M2M, which is a brand new bat, is going to be at $229. And like he just said, all of our bats are going to have composite handles except for this brand new bat.
It is going to be M2M, which we call our metal to metal construction. Some players like to have two piece bats. But the one complaint is that they flex too much.
Rob: So why do they like a two piece bat over a one piece bat?
DEMARINI GUY: Because they like a bat that can flex through the zone to give them a little bit extra pop.
Rob: So they can feel the difference blindfolded?
DEMARINI GUY: Probably. You might be able to, too. A two piece bat has a slightly different feel. Again, if you are not used to swinging them, all of our bats will feel a little end loaded. It is not just one piece throughout the bat. You actually have two pieces working independently of each other.
So a guy who swung a Louisville exo-grid his whole life…The Omaha and the exo-grid, those are one piece bats. They are none for being just a one piece bat. So a kid who has swung that bat his whole life might not like the feel of this because it is going to be something different to him. He is going to get a little more give and a little more bend in the barrel.
At DEMARINI we are a two piece bat company. We will never be anything but a two piece bat company because that is just what we do. That is what we were founded on. We have constructed a bat that is going to feel a little stiffer, more like a one piece bat. It is not going to give as much.
The M2M is going to be just like the Vexxum or just like the Voodoo. You are going to have the SC4 alloy, the metal barrel, and instead of having a pitch black composite handle or the rails in the case of the Vexxum, or having the SC6 alloy, it is going to have a brand new M2M handle, which is just going to be an aluminum metal alloy handle.
So since it is two piece you are still going to get a little bit of give, but it is going to be a lot stiffer and it is going to feel more like a one piece bat.
Rob: So is that like the stiffest two piece bat ever?
DEMARINI GUY: It will be our stiffest two piece bat. It will be a 4 on our flex meter. The Voodoo and the CF4 were a 3.5. So this will be our stiffest bat on the market.
Roy: Why would it be more money than the Vexxum?
DEMARINI GUY: Which is using the composite? Because I think making the aluminum handle is actually a harder process than making the composite handle, because composite handles get shipped in overseas. Aluminum we are making here. That is what I am guessing.
Rob: So it is half made in the USA?
DEMARINI GUY: Well they are constructed in the USA. You know the Vendetta is made in the USA from top to bottom.
Rob: But all of them are assembled in the USA?
DEMARINI GUY: We have our own factory in Oregon. So we are not shipping overseas like Easton does. Now the reason this M2M came into existence was the Vexxum little league bat, as you know, was a dog. It really was just a bad bat. It sold because it was a good price point, but it had a sweet spot that was tiny.
The M2M in the little league is off the charts they said. That is the reason they brought it into existence. It is going to have a bigger sweet spot and it feels just so much better on a little league level than the Vexxum did.
You got some of those Vexxums, right? The barrel was like this big. It was so tiny.
Roy: It was all shaft.
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah. It was all shaft. Exactly. That is what she said.
Roy: Hopefully.
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah! So that is where that came from. They were actually going to get rid of Vexxum all together and leave the M2M throughout the whole line. Or they were going to call it the Vexxum and have it as aluminum and metal, but we said no. The Vexxum is a composite shaft with aluminum barrel. So we ended up making two bats.
The M2M is going to be available in a -3 and a -12 little league. That is it. There is not going to be anymore little league Vexxum. It is just going to be -3, -5, and -10 senior league. So that is where that came from.
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Rob: When you say everything is the same, you mean…?
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah. Exactly right down the line. We keep everything similar right down the line of all our bats. In little league, the only one that is going to be different is the Voodoo double wall -10.
Roy: Rob does that make sense for you?
Rob: Well yeah. The materials are the same.
DEMARINI GUY: Everything is the same.
Roy: But as far as when you go from the baseball to the senior league, that is a -3 and these are -8’s.
Rob: But is there a difference between the bats?
DEMARINI GUY: No. Just the length and weight is going to be different. Barrel size is actually exactly the same. We keep it 2 5/8 throughout. Everything is the same. Even in little league everything is going to remain the same, just the size of the barrel is going to shrink.
In little league, our Voodoo black in the -10 is actually a double wall aluminum bat.
Rob: Why did they do that?
DEMARINI GUY: So we have a little league in a -13 that is a single wall. We had a bat a few years ago that was called the F4 which did really well for us. It was a double wall aluminum bat. The problem is when we came out with the CF4, it kind of eliminated that, but we wanted to keep the double wall aluminum for the kids who liked that line. So they added it to the Voodoo line. So now you have a double wall aluminum bat in the Voodoo line, only at the -10 level. Everything else is going to be the single wall aluminum. If that makes sense.
Rob: I think so. After a while it kind of…
DEMARINI GUY: It all blends together. If you are just going through the catalogue, all you need to know is that the -10 Voodoo is going to be a double wall aluminum bat. And again, it is just going to be two aluminum walls working independently.
Rob: Is it the same aluminum in each wall?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes.
Rob: So what is the difference between a single way aluminum bat and a double wall aluminum bat of the same thickness? The two walls being separate gives you the trampolining effect?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. Because you are making it a thinner….You can’t make a double wall aluminum at that size. You can’t form it correctly on a bigger barrel. This is what I have been told. On the bigger barrels, you can’t form an aluminum double wall bat to work effectively.
But at the smaller levels, since you are doing a smaller barrel and you are working with less material…This one kind of gets bigger as it goes up. That one is almost flat across. So you can actually make it a double wall aluminum. It is actually a smaller barrel than our -13, which is…
Rob: They are both little league bats?
DEMARINI GUY: They are both little league bats, but that one is actually going to have a smaller barrel, the -10. Again, this was a bat that did well for us, and they wanted to keep it in the line, so that is why it got moved to here. But this is your -13 little league bat.
Rob: So are those different skews?
DEMARINI GUY: They are different skews. As you can see, this is one inch bigger, but you are going to get a smaller barrel and it is going to be a double wall.
Rob: So you are trading the sweet spot size for a trampolining effect?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes.
Roy: And the -13 sells better.
Rob: And it is lighter?
Roy: Yeah. You have to be a stronger, bigger kid to use that bat.
Rob: To use the -13?
Roy: To use the -10. It is a heavier bat.
DEMARINI GUY: So it is for a kid who is a little bit bigger and stronger; more of a power hitter. Most little league bats are -11 and -13. Not many kids are swinging a -10. It just doesn’t make sense. That is usually a senior league size weight drop.
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DEMARINI GUY: …the specifics of our bats; the materials, what we call everything. It is the same throughout every line. We don’t change it. Our high end softball bat has got the same materials in it that our high end baseball bat does.
Rob: So do you only have two types of composite material?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. Softball and baseball have the same types of material. Slow pitch has a little bit of difference, because we were originally a slow pitch softball company. So we have a couple different composites in there. But I will talk about that when we get there. But whatever is in our baseball line, the same stuff is going to be in our softball line.
Rob: So the whole purpose of the DEMARINI company was two piece bats?
DEMARINI GUY: yes.
Rob: Did you invent that?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. We were the first ones to do it and then everyone else followed it.
Rob: Knocked y’all off.
DEMARINI GUY: Well like Easton, they have their connection piece. That was there way that they got around...They said, “Well ours is connected. It is not actually two pieces.” They kind of do both. They do their connection piece and they still have some that are just a regular one piece throughout.
Louisville claims to always be a one piece bat company, and if you look, they sure make bats that look like they are two pieces, don’t they? They went after DeMarini when we first came out, and then they started making bats that look like two piece bats just to confuse people.
And their Triton up there, which was supposed to be there biggest bat in forever, it was a freaking dog. At least Easton changed it a little bit. They put that connection piece in there. That was their way of getting around two piece. That is fine. Easton makes good bats. I am not going to dog Easton. But Louisville? Their bats don’t sell.
Rob: Do y’all sell a disproportionate amount of slow pitch softball bats because you started off that way?
DEMARINI GUY: It used to be that way. But now our baseball bats and especially our fast pitch bats are probably pretty hot. Again, we were in that slow pitch market forever.
Roy: Yeah. DeMarini was really a men’s bat. From the beginning, slow pitch softball was where they were. Dean Marini, who obviously was the starter and inventor of the company, he was a softball guy. And then slowly but surely they kind of start to enter a little bit of the baseball market. I would say four or five years ago was when it all of a sudden started to come on a little bit. In the past two seasons you have seen little league, senior league, fast pitch really come on strong.
Slow pitch still does really well, but they are kind of pumping on all cylinders right now.
Rob: When did they get bought out by Wilson?
DEMARINI GUY: About six years ago.
Roy: It is still kind of thought of as DeMarini.
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah, because DeMarini had brand recognition within the industry.
Rob: That is why it doesn’t have a Wilson logo on it?
DEMARINI GUY: Right. All our bats will always be DeMarini.
Roy: Also known as Dan Marini, DeMartini, Dean Martini, or Dean Marino
DEMARINI GUY: What helped us, too, was we signed a couple schools. We signed Oregon State a few years ago and they won back to back national championships swinging our bats.
Roy: Let’s put it this way. Nike for example. Georgia two world series ago was runner up. My feeling is they were using Nike. Where is Nike?
DEMARINI GUY: Worst bat in history next to Reebok. So like he said. Baseball was really hot…Our first F3, the red one, came out and was good. Then the black one came out and it was really good. This F4 this year has been great.
Fast pitch has been unbelievable. The growth we have had in fast pitch has been tremendous. The Phoenix was the first one. Last year’s F3 did tremendous.
Rob: Do we sell proportionate amounts of DeMarini bats or is it still weighted towards men’s softball?
Roy: No. I assume we sell more fast pitch than we do slow pitch. We slay it when it comes to fast pitch softball.
Rob: Why are they coming on strong like that? Is it new? Are they hotter?
Roy: Don’t get me wrong. Easton is still the top dog. However, DeMarini is closing the gap. They are coming on. Louisville used to own most of the market. Now when I tell you they own nothing, they own nothing. They sell less expensive bats, $99 and under. That is where Louisville Slugger is in the business. They have a bat for $79.95 and $99.95. I do pretty well with those. $199? $299? Forget it. When I tell you I buy eight pieces, at the end of the year I have six left and I give them away at cost and move on. But yeah, it is just a dog and a half.
Rob: So DeMarini is definitely like a strong 2nd in the fast pitch?
DEMARINI GUY: In the high end, yes. I would say we are top of the line. Easton’s bat didn’t do that great. There bat was just OK this year.
Roy: It did pretty well.
DEMARINI GUY: We gained a lot of ground. We will never be Easton. That is what they do. Everyone knows them. But we thought we had an opportunity to gain some ground on Louisville because there product was just performing inferior. They were just not making a good high end product. I don’t know if we took any share away from Easton, but I think we gained a lot of Louisville.
Roy: I think Easton owns 50% of it. DeMarini owns 40% of it. Louisville owns not even 1%. They own nothing. I could not carry them and not miss a beat. Mikken and Anderson have come on. But Anderson is very specialty. They have a heavy bat, so that takes a lot of girls right out of the picture. If you are not big and strong, you can’t use it, so forget it. But it is a wonderful bat. We do decent with it. And that is it.
Mizuno is meaningless. Rawlings, meaningless. Combat, again, minimal.
DEMARINI GUY: They are breaking their way along.
Roy: Fast pitch softball is not their cup of tea right now. So again, from what I sell, Easton is at 50% and DeMarini at 40%. Could that go reverse? Yeah, it could.
DEMARINI GUY: So again, the CF4 is our high end girls fast pitch bat. Same deal as our baseball bat. You are going to get the pitch black plus composite, which is our high end composite weave. Double wall composite.
Roy: Does it say double wall on the barrel?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. “Half and Half Double wall.” So you are in the best composite. You are going to have the thinnest walls working with Silver Trace giving you the strongest composite for the best trampoline effect off this bat. Because of the way the barrel was made, you are going to have the old Clutch end cap on here.
Rob: Because it is double wall?
DEMARINI GUY: No. It is just the way the barrel is formed. As you can see, that is much more of a wider barrel, so that is why it uses that end cap. But again, all this one does is it redirects the power back to the sweet spot of where the ball is hit.
This is available in a -10, which is the most popular softball size. We also have it in a -9 and -8 weight drop. The -9 is going to be an ounce lighter, but the barrel itself is going to be more balanced like this bat.
Last year’s F3, the -9 was end loaded. It was more handle, less barrel, more power in the end. The new F4 -9 is going to be a longer barrel like this, more balanced. We made it that way because we saw some girls wanting to swing a little heavier bat, but they didn’t like that big end loaded feeling to it.
And we also have this available in a -8 drop, too.
Rob: Those are separate SKUs?
DEMARINI GUY: Separate SKUs, yeah. You have three separate SKUs. And the -8 is again, bigger handle, smaller barrel, more end loaded.
Roy: What is the difference between this CF4 and CF3 from last year?
DEMARINI GUY: Again, you are using the pitch black plus composite, so you are getting a stronger composite weave. It is just a better composite that we are using in that. It is just going to be a more powerful composite.
Rob: Why would people think that if something is more durable…Is it like something burns brighter and burns out? The hotter the bat, the shorter the life span? Is that the perception?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes and no. Honestly, you want a bat that is going to last and perform. But the fact of the matter is, if a bat is going to perform out of the wrapper, it is not going to last that long. That is just the way it is.
We try to make our bats as hot as possible. And everybody is trying to do this. ASA changed their regulations two years ago. You have got to keep within the restrictions. The bat cannot break in over time and go out of their restrictions.
Rob: At what percentage is that bat hot coming out of the wrapper?
DEMARINI GUY: I would say 99%. It will break in very, very minimally. There will be players that tell you it is going to break in a little bit, but the fact of the matter is we make this bat as hot as it could possibly be right out the wrapper.
Now again, a bat is going to be at its hottest right before it breaks. That is just the way it is, especially on the composite end.
Right before a bat breaks is going to be the hottest it is going to be. The composite is stressed so far to a point where you are getting the most flex out of that, but any more flex and it is breaking. So that is why a bat is always hotter before it breaks.
And again, before ASA changed regulations, everybody was making composite bats that would just break in over time. They said, “All right. As long as it passes spec right out of the wrapper, you are fine.” Then over time, people hit them against trees, take a hammer to them, do whatever they need to do, mallets, whatever, and that composite would break in and break in and get hotter and hotter and hotter.
Rob: So it would go from like 100 to 115 or whatever?
DEMARINI GUY: It would be craziness. And that is kind of what forced Easton to do their clear bat up there. People were doing different things with their bat. They were gutting them. They were breaking them in. That bat clearly shows that that bat has no tampering. The problem with that is people say that bat takes longer to break in.
So we designed this bat…By adding the pitch plus composite we were able to thin the walls even further. This is the CF4. By thinning the walls…We were still able to keep them strong. So you are getting thinner walls, but they are going to hold their performance, so the bat is going to perform very, very hot by adding that. So that is going to be the main difference between that bat. Where that one didn’t have the Silver Trace technology, last year’s CF3. So your walls are not going to be as thin as they were on this bat and they are not going to be as strong. So this bat will perform better out of the wrapper than that bat will because you are having thinner walls and there is no break in period.
Rob: So why does DeMarini improve their bats in the same line or family and Easton just repaints their bats? Is that a fair question to ask?
Roy: Well, in my opinion of being an impartial guy here, just because somebody says pitch black plus, to me that doesn’t mean anything…
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DEMARINI GUY: But again, if a bat is hot, kids will find out it is hot and they will buy it. This bat has been pretty hot. I have sold a lot of these. It has sold because it is performing. But everybody has a different opinion of what performance is. You will have people that love the freaking Anderson or the Rocket Tech bat up there and they will never swing another bat other than that one. They love that bat because of the way it feels.
So yes. Did Easton just do a paint job on their bats this year? Probably. Did we do that on some of our bats? Yeah, on occasion we will do it. But the fact of the matter is if we are adding something, if we are doing something, it is always in the way of performance.
Rob: Isn’t that a gamble, though, because if it doesn’t perform as well…
DEMARINI GUY: Sure. We have put some duds out there. It happens. But like with anything, you have got to take a shot to know if it is going to work. So that is why they said…
Rob: But why is there such a difference between what happens in the lab and what actually happens on the field? What conditions are happening on the field that cause..?
DEMARINI GUY: Temperature. Coldness especially. Composites do not perform as well in cold weather. Nobody will ever say that, but they just don’t. The cold weather, I think, hardens the composite and doesn’t give you enough effect on there. So that is something that can happen.
When you are producing thousands upon thousands of bats, there are going to be slight variations. It is just going to happen. We had a problem last year with one of our bats that was splintering. It wasn’t a problem with the bat. It was just the coating they were putting on the bat. The whole bat looked like it was shattering throughout the bat.
Roy: Oh, you mean the Crazy! There is a term for that, the Crazy.
Rob: That happens on guitars. It is actually a cool thing on guitars because it makes it look vintage and cool. But with bats I guess it is a bad thing.
DEMARINI GUY: But when you are dealing with composites, it is such a new area…We have this girl that works on our composites. She is really hot. But if you talk to her, you couldn’t even understand what she is saying when she talks about this S#!%. It is such an involved, really new department that they find out new stuff everyday.
We know one thing. The thinnest walls perform the best. But when you make a wall too thin, it breaks and it cracks. So if you can thin it out and still add strength to it, which that Silver Trace does, that is when you are going to get a bat that is really going to perform.
Ideally, you want a bat that is going to last forever and stay hot the whole time.
Rob: But is it realistic for someone who is a very serious baseball player or softball player to say that you want a bat, that even if it blasts out in one season, it is OK because you get your money’s worth…
DEMARINI GUY: That is what it has come to.
Rob: They are disposable.
DEMARINI GUY: They are almost like a disposable commodity. And you know what? At the end of the year, that kid hit .350 and had 25 homeruns using the Voodoo; he don’t give a damn if it broke. Next year he is going to come back to buy that same bat.
Look at the returns he has over here. Every time I come in here there are 20 or more bats there, because performance does not equal durability. It is just the way it is. The old Black Magic Easton was a freaking war club. You could do anything to that club…The ball didn’t go anywhere of that, but it lasted forever. But nowadays kids want performance.
Roy: Usually when a bat breaks and it has to be replaced, a consumer will say, “Let’s look at something else.” When a bat is very good (hot) and the bat breaks, they go, “I want the same one.”
And sometimes kids will see bats break and break and break, but they want another one. It is that good. It performs so good that they still want it.
Rob: So do hotter bats have a shorter lifespan?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes.
Rob: Can we say that? Can we get disposablebats.com?
Roy: Performance has gone up.
Rob: You have two totally different sciences here with the aluminums and the composites. Do you have to have two different kind of experts?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes and no. It is two different sciences, yet it is the same effect. You want to try to build durability, but that is always second to performance. Performance is number one.
Roy: I am waiting for a manufacturer to go, “30 day warranty.”
Rob: It is that hot.
Roy: Let’s put it this way. We sell a demo bat and the manufacturer does not warranty it because they are selling something cheap, cheap, and we are making strong money on it, which is why I can put my neck on the line and say, “I will give you 90 days.”
…
And there are guys that say, “Well I am only playing summer tournament ball and next year I am going to the bigger field so I need a bigger bat, so 90 days suits me just fine.”
People don’t balk at 90 days.
DEMARINI GUY: But again, we are trying to make our bats as durable as possible, but we are not going to trade performance for durability. It is just not going to happen. Performance today to kids is what is most important.
Go on any chat site or any softball forum. All the kids are talking about is, “That bat is hot. This bat is so hot.” They don’t give a damn if they broke 10!
Rob: So what sites do you look at to see what folks are saying?
DEMARINI GUY: I can get them to it. I will email them to you. I have them at home. There are so many different places you can go.
A kid doesn’t care if he broke his F4 three times in a season. You know what he cared about? He hit three homeruns or four homeruns with it.
Roy: But what is interesting about these chat rooms is that…How we had that SCX 3 Extended bat. We had the exclusive on there. We had that order. They made them for us. The F4 or F4 special color. Or the bat that was written on there, “No warranty.” On those chat rooms is where somebody will go, “I got this new bat from closeoutbats.com called the no warranty bat…” And then all of a sudden it is like, Thank you!
DEMARINI GUY: He had a bat that he didn’t sell and he mistakenly put on his website for cost. Remember that? One dude bought it and within two days you were out of them. Word gets out like that!
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah! Once that word gets out, “Hey, closeoutbats.com has got the F4 at this price,” that stuff spreads like wildfire.
Again, it is performance definitely over durability. That is all I will say. It is totally opposite of everything else in the world. You want your car to be durable. You don’t give a crap if it…Well, some people want a performance car, but you want it to be durable.
DEMARINI GUY: It was a good time for 90 days! But I mean take a look at his warranty policy.
Roy: Yeah, but some of these have extreme issues. Some of them are blem’s that dented that I had to eat. Quite honestly I shouldn’t even have them sitting there. I should throw them in the dumpster.
But a lot of times, what happens is a guy will come in and say, “Hey, I just want a bat that I can beat the crap out of in the batting cage.” $200 or $250 bat, “Give me $40. Here you go.” So at least I can kind of recoup a little.
Rob: But with that, if the dent is on the other side, does it still work as well?
DEMARINI GUY: You are not going to be able to use it in the game, but for batting cages…
Roy: As stupid as this sounds, this guy said, “We are working on hitting tires.”
DEMARINI GUY: Even if it is a cracked composite…Like say that F4 right there. It is beat up, but that might be good to take in the cage, because you want to have the same bat in the cage and you don’t want to use your good bat to hit in the cage.
…
But some of these are…Like here. This is a good example. Look at the end of that by the end cap where that piece is…Or this was a demo. You can feel the dent in it. This is a demo bat, so again, I warranty it.
DEMARINI GUY: So that is the paint. You can see the composite. That is a chip in the paint there at the end of the bat. Now is there anything really wrong with this bat? No. You probably won’t be able to use it in a game, but a kid could take it to the cage.
Roy: But feel this.
Rob: OH, OK. So is that from hitting a ball?
Roy: Probably hitting a ball. This one is dented also. So again, this is no warranty, no warranty. These are bats I am just eating. So again, they are just sitting here. I should have just taken them to the dumpster, but, anyway.
DEMARINI GUY: So yes. Performance outweighs durability by far.
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DEMARINI GUY: If a kid is hitting great with a bat, he doesn’t care how many times he breaks it. He is not going to change bats. It is just that way. That is why he stays in business, because people want…
OK. So that is the CF4 high end composite. Was $279 last year. It is $299 this year because we did so well with it. We are going to jack up the price, but you are getting a little bit more.
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The Ultimate Weapon. You will be stocking up on those. They went to the original Ultimate Weapon, all silver looking bat. It is in the catalogue. It is ugly. It is really ugly.
Rob: From 1979?
DEMARINI GUY: It is old school. I don’t know. There might be some guys who want it.
Rob: So they were like, “Hey, we don’t have to hire the graphic design department! We can just fire them!”
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah. “Use this one! It is retro!”
So, CF4, $299, -10, -9, -8, all same price. -8 is going to be really end loaded, smaller barrel. The -10 and the -9 are going to be more balanced. That was different than last year, because the –9 last year was end loaded. The -9 this year is going to be balanced.
Roy: The CF3’s are now all price protection, correct?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes.
Roy: One hot thing that we have is we have the -9 in the CF3 that we bought as a closeout. So presently, where everything is $280 and $299, we are $199 on that bat because we bought it as they were getting rid of it.
DEMARINI GUY: I think there is a market out there for that -9.
Roy: I think so. It is a stronger girl. Hey, they sell it at Rocket Tech. But I guess my question is unrelated to product and what not. Have you or can you look into CF3’s, like, “Hey, OK. It is over.”
I mean it is August basically. All this is over. Everybody is winding down now because seasons are finishing come now. So the question is, from a CF3 standpoint, white, do they have…?
DEMARINI GUY: Any left? I wonder if they do. I bet they are holding some for blems and stuff like that. Not blems, replacements. I wonder if they do have any. I will check into it.
OK. So then you go from that to the Vendetta. This is a $199 composite fast pitch bat. C6 composite, which is a step down from our pitch black composite, which is going to be the single wall wider weave. That is going to be the difference.
Instead of your double wall tight weave it is going to be your single wall wider weave. It is going to come with the hybrid handle with the rails technology in it. So you are going to get a little bit more flex in this bat. It is going to give you a little more whip through.
You are going to get a big barrel on this. This is going to be a price point item at $199. He sells it all day at $199.
Roy: It is a great bat. The person who buys that bat is the girl that wants a composite performance bat but physically cannot swing a -8, -9, or -10 drop in a composite bat. So they have to go something like this, or the Mikken Rain, or the Easton Crystal.
DEMARINI GUY: And this market is really growing. I would say this is probably the fastest growing market, that travel ball…
Roy: And also, too, it is made in smaller sizes, like 29, 30 inch where these girls are 9, 10, 11 years old and they are spending $200 retail on that bat. The other ones are $250 and $300, not to say they wouldn’t spend it. They would, but they just can’t swing it.
Rob: What percentage of folks on a team could swing the heavier bat?
Roy: It is a very hard question to answer. It depends on the team.
DEMARINI GUY: This bat is mostly going to your travel team, starting at age 13 or 14. I would say this bat is more geared for your 10…
Roy: The girls that are hardcore can swing those high end performance bats because your results are better with those high end performance bats, if physical you can swing it. If you can’t, it is just working against you. You are going to be late on everything. You are not going to be able to get the bat to do its dance, so to speak, and make it perform. So therefore you can go into something that is going to give you good performance but is lighter.
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah. You are getting 2 ounces lighter. You are going to get a really long balanced barrel. It has a huge sweet spot on here.
Rob: That is the Vendetta?
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah, this is the Vendetta for girl’s fast pitch.
Roy: We started this year with like 300 of those. That is our stocking order.
DEMARINI GUY: And you have sold tons.
Roy: It is a good number. Again, it is for that girl that is only 80 pounds.
DEMARINI GUY: And again, you are going to get the flex absorber. So for your younger girl who doesn’t want to sting her hands, you have got the hybrid handle here with the rails that absorb the vibration through the bat. It has been a really solid bat for us over the last year.
Rob: Just an aside on the sales levels of bats for you. Just take fast pitch bats in the past year. Can you bucket sales like, “OK. This one is…Our best sellers are huge.” At what point…You said like a 300 initial order.
Roy: Well I think that our initial order was 300, which we just got in like last month. That basically is what I am considering my 2010 order. Prior to that, we might have said, “Give me six of every size right down the line.” And then all of a sudden it is like every week, “Give me 12 more 30’s. Give me another 12 32’s.” It was just continuous. Every week, every other week, we keep on getting more and more and more. It was like, “When is this going to stop?” It just kept on going.
DEMARINI GUY: We had a price point here that nobody was hitting for a while.
Roy: This bat and the Crystal were kind of the only ones. And actually, one of the reasons of course also, too, is that they offered a great deal on it. They had buy 12 get one; baker’s dozen. So I took advantage of the baker’s dozen and said no problem. I will look at my numbers, see what I did.
DEMARINI GUY: This year, new to the line is going to be the Vendetta fast pitch aluminum bat double wall. Last year it was the Voodoo up there, a double wall aluminum bat with the C6 composite handle. This year it is going to be the Vendetta double wall aluminum, and you are going to have the rails handle there for the girls, available in a -11.
Roy: -10 and -11?
DEMARINI GUY: I think it is just going to be -11.
Roy: Just -11?
DEMARINI GUY: -11. Just -11. So you are going to have the -12 in the Vendetta and this Vendetta aluminum in a -11. And then also this year, instead of Cat bat at $99, we just did a paint job and we did a new bat. It is going to be this bat. This is a $99 bat, aluminum. It comes with our FRC handle. This is just a tool that absorbs vibration through the bat.
This is more of your traditional fast pitch bat where you see the skinny handle that goes into a long barrel like that opposed to those two. This is for your lower end player who wants a good bat. And you sell a lot of these, too.
This year it is going to be called the Bustos.
Christa Bustos is the best female hitter in the entire world. Do you know who she is? You have to meet her once. Google Christa Bustos one day and you will see.
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DEMARINI GUY: Anyway, she is {so strong} She hits homeruns every time up. They like intentionally walk her every time she comes to the plate because they don’t want to pitch to her.
So anyway, we had her design this bat. She is big into neon green. It is probably the {brightest} bat I have ever seen, but so be it. There she is. That is her.
She is a trip. From the streets of LA, rugged. We talked about her tricked out car when I was talking to her. It has the big gold chain with the thing on the bottom of it. Pretty awesome.
The girl knew her hitting, too. She talked about hitting like you wouldn’t believe. Just unbelievable.
So yeah, that will be DeMarini’s four high end bats in fast pitch. The CF43, the high end composite, the best composite, pitch black handle, pitch black barrel. That is $299.
And then the step down to $199 you are going to have the Vendetta in a -12, rails hybrid handle, C6 composite barrel.
Then a step down from that at $179 you will have the Vendetta aluminum double wall, rails.
And then at $99 you will have the Bustos, which is just going to be your basic aluminum bat.
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DEMARINI GUY: Why didn’t you get any of the J2’s?
Roy: I did. The white..?
DEMARINI GUY: The white J2.
Roy: The white steel?
DEMARINI GUY: No. The J2. This one. It has got the black and white graphics on it.
Roy: Dang salesman. I don’t know. Where is it?
DEMARINI GUY: I don’t know. I don’t know why you didn’t get any. You are probably missing out on all kinds of sales.
Roy: I would have not not ordered it.
DEMARINI GUY: It was on early release. I think you just picked one of them. You didn’t want to do both of the high end ones for some reason. All right. Slow pitch.
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DEMARINI GUY: J2 slow pitch softball. Again, all slow pitch bats are going to be 34 inch. 26, 27, 28 ounce.
Rob: Why is that? What are all slow pitch bats 34 inch?
DEMARINI GUY: Just the way it is.
Rob: You have little bitty dudes playing. You have big old hosses playing.
DEMARINI GUY: That is true. You are never going to have a bat that is more than 34 inches, though. The thing about it, with 34 inches you are getting a longer barrel on it. It is more about the weight. I think they figure that in men’s softball, anyone swing a 34 inch bat. It is not like you have to catch up to someone whipping one at you.
The J2 is the first one that is out there. This is based off our Juggernaut bat which is the bat that we had last year. It was a popular two piece bat that we had. This year’s is made with the same materials as our high end baseball and fast pitch bats.
Pitch black composite handle, pitch black composite barrel. That is the J2. So you are just going to have a composite, composite.
Roy: Did you go over the 1?
DEMARINI GUY: I am going to do that right now.
Rob: So why is it called a J2?
DEMARINI GUY: We had a little bit of name recognition with the Juggernaut, which was a pretty good bat for us. We sold that for the last two years. This one was just supposed to be the next version of that, because it is built the same way. So we went with the J2, which is the next version.
Rob: But it is identical in materials to the…?
DEMARINI GUY: Yes. The CF4 got its name recognition in…First they had in baseball as a CF3 and then we kind of transferred it over to softball over the last year. But in slow pitch there never was a CF3, so that is why it had a different name. But same materials.
This is a brand new bat for us. This is the one we call The 1. This has a brand new composite we call our 4.1 composite. The 4.1 composite is meant to feel more like a one piece bat.
The standard for slow pitch softball, the best bat ever created, was the Mikken Freak. Mikken made a bat a couple year sago…
Roy: The Ultra.
DEMARINI GUY: The Ultra, not the Freak. The Mikken Ultra was the best performing slow pitch bat that ever existed. It was a one piece bat. The more you hit it the hotter it got. It just continually performed. There are guys today that will pay an extreme amount of money to get that bat.
Roy: It is illegal most places.
DEMARINI GUY: It is illegal, but it was just the hottest bat ever made. So that was kind of the standard throughout. It was a one piece bat. It was a real stiff bat, but it really performed well.
Guys who use DeMarini for a long time like the two piece feel. They like a little bit extra flex. They like the Juggernaut. We do miss out on the market. The guy who likes the one piece Mikken’s that are over there doesn’t like our bat because he likes a little bit of stiffer feel.
So we wanted to try to get everybody involved. So we made this bat, which is a 4.1 on our flex meter. Again, our stiffest bat that we make other than this is a 3.5. This one is a 4.1 on our scale of five. It is as stiff as you could possibly swing. There is not going to be a lot of flex in it. It is going to feel more like a one piece bat. So that is why we did that.
Double wall composite. Stiff composite barrel, stiff composite handle. Everything else is going to be the same, it is just going to be a stiffer composite that feels like a one piece bat. We are doing pretty well with this bat. I have seen a lot of them on the field. I don’t know how you have sold them.
Roy: I have sold them pretty good.
DEMARINI GUY: It has been selling. It is a good bat. It looks sharp. It is one piece. So we are doing well with that.
So on the high end composite at $299, you are going to have the J2, which is going to be a pitch black composite barrel, pitch black composite handle, little more flex. And then you are going to have the 1, which is going to be a stiffer feeling composite bat with a 4.1 composite barrel. That is going to differentiate the two high end softball bats. J2 is going to have a little more flex. The 1 is going to be a little stiffer feel.
Step down from that, at $249 is going to be the Creature. You are going from our pitch black composite and our 4.1 composite to the C6 composite. Same composite that is in the Vendetta. Single wall. Any time you see C6 composite it is going to be the wider weave single wall. Just like in the Vendetta here, just like in the Vendetta C6 there. Same composite.
So this is going to be a single wall composite bat, wider weave, same thing. And this is an older barrel for us that we used to use. It is called our CRC handle.
[crosstalk]
That is just a carbon reinforced barrel. It is just a different type of composite barrel. It is older. But that is at $249.
The F4 is going to be our double wall aluminum, our C6 composite shaft. So it is going to be a white C6 composite with a double wall aluminum barrel. He is getting a bunch of them coming in this way. C6 composite handle. So F4 is going to be double wall aluminum, composite handle. SC4 alloy, which is our top end alloy, and then you get the C6 composite wider weave composite handle.
The next step down from that is going to be the 375. This bat is specifically made to hit the 375 compression slow pitch softballs which most leagues use. It is made of our DM1 alloy, which is a different type of alloy than our SC4. And it is going to be double wall aluminum one piece. So that is where we are a little bit different here. This 375 is just going to be a one piece alloy bat.
Rob: Is that the only one piece bat you make?
DEMARINI GUY: That and the Ultimate Weapon are both one piece. So 375, one piece, aluminum, double wall, specifically geared to the 375 softball. It has got our DM1 alloy on that.
Next from that is going to be our steel, AKA, our old White steel.
Roy: Is that the burgundy color?
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah. It is actually a really sharp looking bat. It has got our C6 composite handle, so same handle that is on the F4, that is on the Vexxum, that is on every C6 bat that we make. Except this one is going to have our steel single wall barrel. It is going to be one of the few bats that you will on the market that is going to be single wall. It is made of steel as opposed to aluminum. So it is going to have a really teeny ringy effect to it.
A lot of leagues are now going to, “You can’t use double wall bats or composite bats.”
Rob: Because of the trampoline?
DEMARINI GUY: Because of the trampoline. Old men get hit in the face with balls. So if you have a league specific to using a single wall bat, this is a good bat to have.
Roy: Very good.
DEMARINI GUY: C6 composite handle, steel barrel. Good bat. Does well for us. The F4 is $229. The 375 is $199.95. The Steel is $189.95.
Roy: They all sell pretty good.
DEMARINI GUY: Again, we have different price points. They are slightly different bats. Again, the slow pitch player can be the most fickle customer you will ever meet in your life. Really.
Roy: Arrogant. Lot of chuckleheads.
DEMARINI GUY: So yeah. So the Steel is good. Does it perform as well as the other ones? No. But as a single wall bat, for a league that is specifically single wall, it does really well, and it is under $200.
Roy: I have been at tournaments when I start talking to guys. They are like, “I love this! This is the only bat I swing with.” Then later on they get up and swing, and I am like, “I have seen third graders swing better than you! Are you kidding me?” These guys talk like they are…
Everyone coach thinks he is Joe Torre and every guy thinks he is Derek Jeter. It is like, “OK. Good. You are tremendous dude. If I ever want to learn how to pop up to the pitcher, I will call you.”
DEMARINI GUY: Yeah, so for a single wall specific league, that is a good bat. And then the Ultimate Weapon, which has been around forever. This year again. It is the 20th anniversary. Space Age alloy, it says it right on there for the Ultimate Weapon this year.
Rob: I thought the space age was like in the ‘60s.
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Roy: Just go briefly over the bats, kind like baseball and little league and whatever. And let’s just kind of chat about the whole nanotech thing and what it is and etc.
Anderson Guy: Do you want to get into some of the technical aspects of the nanotech first?
Roy: That is fine.
Anderson Guy: If you think about it, there are really three or four technologies that Anderson uses in their bats. They use a double wall. And they use two version of the double wall, and I will show you the difference.
One is an internal sleeve and one is an external sleeve. Then we do this new nanotech technology. And then we do just a basic Pyrotech single wall bat. So if you consider that you have the two double wall technologies, internal and external, you could possibly count that as two, but otherwise it is three technologies.
Rob: Can you explain what an internal and external sleeve is?
Anderson Guy: I will show you the difference. We will start with baseball first. We will go the way the catalogue goes and then we will go into internal/external sleeves. I am going to show you a couple Conways, too.
So when you go back, you can look at the arches, the power arches, the foam and all that stuff, you will see how all that stuff works. Did you get a chance to read that stuff that…
Roy: I just read the first little bit.
Anderson Guy: How does it look? Is it pretty much what you need, do you think? I haven’t seen it.
Rob: For me it is marketing copy that I either need to dumb down or wash all the marketing speak off of it.
Anderson Guy: I have not read it. Apparently that is the way he described it. He described it as sort of a mix of advertising talk and conversational pieces.
Roy: I would say you need to dumb that down.
Anderson Guy: If you go to the first page, this is just going to give you three ideas of the technology that they use. The first just gives you the information on the vibration that flex management…That part probably doesn’t mean all that much. The key is the second part, which is the power arch multi-wall construction. That is the double wall that we were talking about.
And then the next section is acoustic enforcement technology. That is the foam, and I will show how that works. I was going to show you in the core of the bat and also show you this foam that is a separate piece and how they do all that stuff.
So when you go to the page after that then, you have the Nanotech category, the Nanotech Excess which is there adult baseball bat. This is a new technology that they came out with. They have been working on it for about 10 years. It shows you the little diagrams that talk about the grains in the bat. The simple principle is that when they do this nanotech alloy, it makes it very durable. In baseball and softball, the idea is if you can thin the wall of bats and make them very flexible, you are able to hit the ball a lot better.
The problem is when you do that they are not as durable. So they bend a lot easier. So the feeling always was you have got to figure out a way to make the walls durable but thin enough that you can get that trampoline effect of the ball off the bat. And they think they have discovered that way to do that.
So what they are doing is they take this nanotech technology. They apply it to the barrel of the bat. And you can tell…I have another sample in the car. But you see where this little break is here and that break is there?
That is actually the hitting surface. Usually the sweet spot of a typical baseball or softball bat is very small. This is the sweet spot of the bat on this particular nanotech technology, both on this one and on the kids bat. So you have a much larger hitting surface. Very durable, very flexible, and the thing lasts like crazy.
The sample that I have in the bag I bring to batting cages and let them use the thing. You just beat it up and you wash it off. The thing doesn’t dent at all. It is goods for thousand and thousands of hits. It hits well, plays well, but very durable. It is also very expensive.
Rob: What is the price point on that?
Anderson Guy: It is $500 retail. The regular one piece price is $249.
Rob: It is an alloy, so it is all metal?
Anderson Guy: It is all metal. No composites at all. They had a composite bat in the lineup one time. I am sure you are aware of all the stuff that took place last year of all the composite changes with ASA and USSSA. So they are completely out of the composite business here. They don’t want to mess with composites. They think aluminum alloy is the way to go.
I just got this sample yesterday. You have the adult version.
Rob: So what is the difference between that bat…?
Anderson Guy: Same bat. This is just a kid’s version. This is senior league, so the way the catalogue breaks down, you have adult, which is the regular Nanotech Excess, then you get down to Senior leagues, Nanotech XT. So that one is a -5. With the adult bat it is a -3. Other than that it is the same technology.
So those two bats are the same. And then you get down into this next one, this KXR bat, and this does not use the Nanotech technology. It is a single wall bat. I just got that sample yesterday.
Roy: Did you have any printouts of those, of the Nanotech’s?
Anderson Guy: No they don’t, because it is a regular single wall. The only ones that we do cutouts on are the double walls because it is a slightly different technology that DeMarini is using in their double walls, and you will see that when I show you these samples.
Rob: As far as durability goes, like returns, do you see returns on the Anderson bats as a percentage?
Roy: No. Granted, yeah, we sell more of the other manufacturers, but at the same time…The only thing I could say as far as return problems, the Rocket Tech tends to kind of dimple up a little bit.
Anderson Guy: And actually they claim that the bat is not playing well until they dimple. That is an unfortunate part of the situation, because the consumer will look at the bat and go, “The thing is dimpling. There is something wrong.” It doesn’t start playing well until it starts dimpling!
Roy: Right. Once there are those peaks and valleys and it is able to flex even more because of those peaks and valleys, then it gives off a better response and a little bit more energy.
But there are no defective issues as far as I am concerned with Anderson. If I had to pin one company, it would be Combat. They are high, high, high on return rate.
Anderson Guy: What is happening with those?
Roy: They are just breaking. I mean it is a composite. They only do composites and they just seem to crack.
Anderson Guy: I wonder what is going to happen to them with all this composite stuff going on.
Roy: College isn’t really where that business is because there is such a small fraction of kids that are playing college baseball. So it is an 18 and under business. But what will happen to the baseball business going forward with the new BB core, with new different things like colleges saying, “Hey, you can’t play with a composite bat,” will high school follow suit. There are so many different things.
However, truth be told at this point, there are not going to be any changes I am sure for a couple of years because they can’t do that to the manufacturer. They have built their 2010 line. They can’t just all of a sudden go, “Oh, in 2011…” It is not going to happen. It is like a 3-4 year process before they kind of wean all of it out.
You are talking tens of millions of dollars that the manufacturer would be screwed for that is not sellable. What are they going to do?
Rob: Do they have to telegraph what they are doing to the manufacturers?
Roy: Well they will present their case to the manufacturers. I am sure that is what their meetings where. Every year they have all these different meetings. If this is the direction that they want to go, the manufacturers need to be abreast of what the direction they are going is so that they can make the proper changes.
So whether making this new, where we have the BESR certification now, and they are going to change to the BB Core certification, those BESR bats which are legal now will not be legal going forward. It is not like, “Hey. Next year we are going to change.” It is like, “Well gosh. We have all this inventory and so does the retailer, so it has got to run through the system so that we can get out of it.”
So it is not going to change overnight. It may be several years down the road when they change. But there is talk of, “Hey, we don’t want composites period.”
Rob: Because they are too hot?
Roy: They seem to be the hotter bat, yeah. They seem to have been performing great and performing better with use and getting hotter and hotter as you use it until it finally breaks.
Combat’s probably was that the bat was just breaking. When you use it it was hot as S#!%, but then it would just break. Whether you used it a week or you used it six months, it was just breaking.
So you think of a manufacturer selling a bat to us and then they are replacing it once or twice thereafter. They say, “Hey, we only replace a bat one time.” But if a kid buys a bat and after a week it breaks, and then you replace it and the kid breaks it in a month, what are you going to say, that you can use the bat for five six weeks and thank you?”
Anderson Guy: Did Combat give you a length of time?
Roy: None of the manufacturers give a length of time, but I think that it is kind of case by case where if they feel that…I think it is only being fair. “Hey, we will be fair with this.” Fair is if it breaks immediately, or if it breaks in a month or two months, and then they get another one and it breaks in a month, and the kid has gotten three months out of it, that is really not fair.
If a kid uses a bat for eight months and then breaks it and gets a new one and uses it for a month or two, all bets are off.
Anderson Guy: Because there is no telling what he did to break that bat.
Roy: That is more of the softball player’s mentality that do things like that, not so much the little leaguer. But Combat is on the map in little league. They are not so much on the map really in…Senior league, they are kind of getting there. High school, not yet. But as the kids progress into those categories I think it will follow through.
So they are doing pretty well. Yeah, granted we sell three or four different models from them, so it is not a ton, but it is getting bigger.
Anderson Guy: Yeah, they are doing well. You hear the name all the time. They are certainly growing. That is for sure.
When you have a chance, take a look at the catalogue and look at one of those previous descriptions on the Acoustic Enhancement Technology on the first page. You see that it is sort of a circular piece with a hole in it. That technology is on all the single wall bats. It is not on the double wall bats.
This particular bat, and you can look in all of them because they have clear end caps on them, they call these bullet proof caps, but you can see this foam inside the bat. This is what it looks like and what it feels like. And you can see that it is a circular piece and you can see the hole that comes through it.
So the idea is that they want to keep the noise and vibration down, and that is on all the single wall bats. So you will see it on the Nanotech’s and also on these single walls on the Pyrotech.
Rob: Now the reason they do that is because it doesn’t sound good and they are trying to dampen the sound?
Anderson Guy: They just want to keep the sound down.
Roy: It doesn’t cut down on performance, though.
Anderson Guy: No. It just cuts down on the vibration as well, but it is mostly a sound issue.
Roy: A real high pitched bat is like a Japanese bat. If you ever see them play, all their bats have a very, very high pitch ping; super high pitched. Real loud.
Anderson Guy: And they would rather have this sound like a baseball bat than to get that ping in there that you hear on some of the other aluminum bats.
Roy: Also, 30% of the Japanese baseball players have gone deaf.
[laughter]
Anderson Guy: These are all American made, by the way. It may be a little bit of a misnomer, but they say they are all the only fully American made bat left. What that could mean is that Easton may be making some in America, some overseas, and Louisville may be making some in the states and some overseas…
Roy: I think that they are not. I think that they are all making them overseas now.
Rob: So they are made and assembled in the US with Anderson?
Anderson Guy: Yes. They are made up the street from the address that you see on all the catalogues in California. So they are not shipping the stuff over the border and sending them back assembled and all that stuff. They are made right in Orange County California.
So I guess for them to make that claim they would have to be fairly accurate with that statement or somebody would be calling them on it I am sure.
Rob: Well some can be assembled in the US and still have Made in the USA. But they are not doing that?
Anderson Guy: They are not doing that. Consumers can go on the web and they will show you some of the manufacturing that they do in California.
Roy: So what is the difference, as far as baseball bats go, in the Pyrotech and the Nanotech?
Anderson Guy: Well the Pyrotech, either in baseball or in softball, is a simple technology. It is a single wall technology. It uses a fairly normal extrusion. In the Nanotech it is an entirely different extrusion. It is very durable, very long lasting, much larger sweet spot.
Roy: Is it a different grade of aluminum?
Anderson Guy: Yes.
Roy: End caps are the same or different?
Anderson Guy: End caps are the same. They use the same end cap all the way through. They use that bulletproof end cap. You will see a slight difference in the way they install the end cap on the double walls compared to the single walls.
So since we are talking about it, if you look at the bottom of that bat you will see that it inserts on the end of the bat. If you look at these double walls you will see that there is this groove around here. In order to set that in tightly, this end cap, they do that groove and it really works well.
That way they don’t have any pins to hold in the end cap and you don’t get any pinging and loss of the cap during use of the bat.
Rob: So the Nanotech metal is aluminum?
Anderson Guy: It is aluminum. It is a different extrusion. The picture explains the way the grains of aluminum are extruded. A fairly typical extruded aluminum has these much larger grains. But in this Nanotech technology, the way they treat it, much smaller grains makes it durable.
And it strengthens the thing, which is really the key to the whole thing, because you can, again, make a larger sweet spot, use thinner walls, get that trampoline effect without worrying about losing any durability.
Rob: So when everybody says that these walls are the thinnest they can make, do you say how thin the walls are?
Anderson Guy: They would know that. I tell you the truth. I don’t know that. But since they are the engineers and they manufacture all that stuff, they would have that information if you need it.
Rob: That would just be interesting to see, because everybody is talking about…We talked to five different people and it is like, “Our walls are the thinnest and get the biggest trampolining effect.” It is like, OK.
Roy: You think that one of them would take all the bats, cut them in half, and then measure it and see.
Anderson Guy: I am sure that it gets to a point on these aluminums that there has got to be a failure rate. So you want to get as thin as you possibly can.
So that is all the information on baseball. In softball, in fast pitch, on the page to the right you are going to notice there are three styles of bats. They start of with Techzilla. Then they go to the Rocket Tech. And then they go to the Pyrotech.
And again, I would say that, depending on how you view it, on that particular page there may be as many as three different technologies. The top two bats, the techzilla and the Rocket Tech, are both double wall bats. The Pyrotech is a single wall bat. And they are all aluminum.
These are cutaways. This happens to be the cutaway of a youth baseball bat. This shows you that power arch and the difference between our bat and a DeMarini bat.
Originally when Demarini came out, that was just a double shell.
Roy: It was a shell within a shell.
Anderson Guy: Yeah. And they would take a machine and they would slam that inside piece into it to give it that trampoline effect. So on both the Techzilla and on the Rocket Tech, we both use this power arch. It is the same technology on those two bats.
Here is the cutaway. You have got this arch that runs all the way through it. The idea is that it gives a little more power and brings the vibration and power down the barrel.
Roy: So is the thought of that inner-core the through process of, “OK. Our bat is now dimpling,” you are dimpling it inside to create more peaks and valleys to create more energy.
Anderson Guy: You get more energy and power. And the dimpling comes from the inside of that arch. So when people see it and they go, “The bat is going bad. It is dimpling,” it is really not. It is playing very well at that point.
Rob: It is just showing the inner shell?
Anderson Guy: It is just showing the inner shell. Now the two pieces that you have here and the one that Roy has there, that is the Rocket Tech. That was the first double wall bat that they made. That is an external sleeve.
So if you look at the difference you will see that the barrel runs down here and there is a break here. So in this case, instead of doing like the DeMarini where they take the inner core, that inner barrel, and jam it into the shell of the bat, they actually did it on the outside.
On that one, on the Techzilla, it is on the inside. So we have an outer shell double wall and an inner shell double wall. What happens with these two bats, and particularly with fast pitch, and the reason they did it, this comes in a -9, the Rocket Tech. This was their first bat that they came out with. This is a heavier bat, so you have to be a little better player to use it.
Roy: It is definitely considered a top heavy bat, but very popular.
Anderson Guy: It was their number one selling bat. The Techzilla is starting to take up speed. This is only about a year old. And the reason that is starting to do well is that is a little lighter and that is a balanced bat, where this is an end loaded bat. An end loaded bat is a little harder to play with.
Rob: Which one is end loaded?
Anderson Guy: The Rocket Tech is end loaded. The Techzilla is a balanced bat and lighter. So that is a little more agreeable and forgiving to more ballplayers than this one.
So they think that eventually that will end up passing the Rocket Tech in sales.
Rob: So on the internal sleeve the handle is really what is inside the interior wall? It is the same piece?
Anderson Guy: That is correct. So you see external, and then internal, nice and smooth, and it looks like a traditional baseball or softball bat.
Roy: In reality, you look at the Rocket Tech, the one in Steve’s left hand, the red one, the red part is like the part that is not there originally and it just goes over, where the other one is more of the pushed in one.
Anderson Guy: And both of them, as you can see, have a groove in the end of the barrel so that you can set that end cap, as compared to the baseball bats where it is smooth.
They are going to make some other changes, too. They haven’t announced them, but what they are going to end up doing is they are going to take the Nanotech technology and bring it into some of these fast pitch bats. And you will see that information sometime in the early fall for spring 2010. So they may end up taking the Pyrotech and changing it over to the Nanotech.
Roy: It needs to change. It is a little tired, I think.
Anderson Guy: Yeah. It was a price point bat. But at least in these other bats they have something to talk about, some other technology, where on the regular single wall, the Pyrotech, it is a price point item.
Roy: Yeah. Those bats are $200+ where the Pyrotech is like $120.
Anderson Guy: That is almost exactly the price point. And we are talking wholesale not retail, so it is about $120 at wholesale for a Pyrotech, but the Rocket Tech and the Techzilla are up in the $250-$325 range. The Nanotech baseball bat is a $500 retail bat.And then they map it and you are allowed to drop off a certain discount structure. So at retail you would be able to go down to about $400.
Rob: So these are pretty high end bats.
Anderson Guy: Very high end bats.
Roy: Well all of the top end bats from Easton, DeMarini, etc, -3 bats, they are all $400 and up, all of them. This past year, 2009, they were all $389, $379, $389.
I remember when we were going over $100 and going, “Oh my God.”
Anderson Guy: Everybody was having a heart attack.
Roy: “Let’s find new business to go into.” And how far away are we from $500? Can you imagine that?
Anderson Guy: And now we are here. And who knows what the next technology will bring.
Roy: But if it hits the ball further, people will buy it.
Rob: You were talking about on the sweet spot, the little indention there in the Anderson logo and to the left of the A. That is the…?
Anderson Guy: That is the sweet spot.
Rob: That is not just on the demo, that is on every bat?
Anderson Guy: That is on every bat. They call that it a launch pad. They don’t call it a sweet spot. That is the terminology that they are using. That is how big the sweet spot is on that particular bat, both on the -8 and on the -3 which is the adult bat. So that is the size of the sweet spot.
Rob: So does it sound very different when somebody hits it not on the launch pad?
Anderson Guy: It does not, because the Nanotech actually runs down from the break in the bat through the taper, so you won’t hear much of a difference. They also wanted that, because of that foam inside, you get that baseball sound through it. You don’t get that ping on it.
Rob: When you say baseball sound, I don’t understand.
Anderson Guy: Well in the old days you played with wooden bats, and you hit the ball and you had a whack to it. That is the way it sounds. Then they went into cheap aluminum in the beginning and you hear a ping. It sounds like a golf club hitting a golf ball. Some people don’t like that noise.
Rob: But that is a pretty subjective thing? We watch a lot of college baseball and hear the aluminum sound. But when we hear that, though, that is a good sound.
Anderson Guy: Yeah, because they are whacking the ball like crazy.
Roy: It is a preference thing.
Rob: So it is subjective. And you were saying that the foam is for bat sting as much as noise dampening?
Anderson Guy: They say it is all for noise. But anytime you put a little foam on aluminum you are going to get some vibration dampening on it. So it takes a little of the sting out of it.
Rob: Roy, do you have any bats that are dimpled that we could look at to show that or take pictures of?
Roy: I don’t think that pictures will do it any justice.
Rob: Is it really hard to see?
Roy: Yeah. …
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Rob: With other manufacturers are those interior walls ribbed like that?
Roy: No. This is more of a dent actually. I wouldn’t call it a rib. As stupid as this sounds, there is a very easy way of feeling it. If you put a shirt, a piece of cloth, or just a hand towel or something over this, then you can feel how much more it is dented.
You really can’t take a picture of that.
Rob: Is that dimpling?
Roy: No, that is dented. In reality, what they do is they have like a test where you put this ring over it. And then what happens is if it doesn’t hit the table, the ground, or whatever you want to call it, they consider it out of round or too far out of round.
Rob: One more time.
Roy: See, if it hits the ground that is legal. Actually, this is a 2 ¼ inch diameter barrel. So this is basically the same thing, a 2 ¼ or a softball bat. See? It goes right down to the floor.
So even if it is dimpled and they say, “Hey, my bat is dented.” I will take the ring and I will go, “Yes it is dented, rippled, but they still consider it a bat that is in round, and that is legal.”
Rob: Is that something that we could include with orders for people to test their bats with and make a promotional item?
Roy: I have had this for 10 years. I have never seen this anywhere. Umpires, on occasion, will have something like this. Other than that I have never seen it.
Rob: It is neat how people get around patents and do all kinds of crazy stuff to call it different.
Anderson Guy: Yeah, they are all fishing for some other way to make it unique and different.
So those first two fast pitch bats, we have those two different types of double walls. And then the Pyrotech, again, is the same type of technology that we did on the single wall on the other bat; very basic $130 wholesale bat, dampening core on the inside, and single wall extrusion.
Then when we get to the next page you get to slow pitch, and it is the same idea all over again, because you are going to see the Techzilla, the Rocket Tech, and you see the Pyrotech. Same technologies, just done in a different weighting format. The fast pitch is all done by weights, meaning inches minus ounces, and the slow pitch is done with ounces. So all this is just measured a little differently, but the technology is the same. Two double walls, one single wall, and slightly different price points.
Rob: And do they do the same thing? Do they shave the aluminum off to make the different swing weight because they all have to be 34 inch?
Anderson Guy: Yeah.
Rob: So where does that weight come out? Do they take it in different places?
Anderson Guy: Yeah, all throughout the whole bat. Did you have to review all of Louisville’s…Was he showing you 2010?
Roy: Just bats. Yeah. Just bats. It is pretty easy to go through and just kind of touch on the different…I mean it is very repetitive. You look at the baseball bats, they are the same in each category, Triton, Triton, Triton, Triton, whether it is little league, senior league, slow pitch, fast pitch. So really what we are looking for is technology or language on those items. So other than, “Hey, this is a different weight or a different barrel diameter, it is the same.”
For example, in, say, slow pitch or fast pitch, the Rocket Tech or Techzilla. It is the same bat. The rocket tech in the slow pitch is 34 inches only, and 26, 28, and so on and so forth. Whereas the other ones are different. The fast pitch version is 30-34 inches where the other one starts at 34 and gives you other ounce options.
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WORTH
Rob: Worth slow pitch bats.
Worth Guy: If you go on any major chat boards for slow pitch you will see that Worth is predominately the number one player. Roy is just not in tune.
Roy: Well let’s look at the statistics on the website and see how many Worth bats sell.
Worth Guy: We will start with the Jeff Hall Mutant. Jeff Hall was a big time muscle head. In the slow pitch softball world he is a real popular guy. He is under contract with us, that is why we have the Jeff Hall Mutant.
This is a two piece construction. It is a composite handle with an aluminum barrel. These bats have half ounce end loads, so it is 26.5, 27.5, 28.5 ounce.
Rob: When you say end loads…?
Worth Guy: It is balanced differently. It is a little bit heavier than a regular slow pitch bat. And there is more weight distributed towards the end. This bat is basically for a big muscle head; one of these guys that is taking steroids and is huge. This is the bat that they would prefer to use.
Roy: So it is an end loaded bat. So it is a USSSA bat only?
Worth Guy: Yeah. Most of what we are going to do is USSSA. A year or two ago ASA had a ruling and they changed their ruling around. So pretty much ASA bats, the last few years, have really been on decline. The demand has been for the bats that were produced two or three years older that are grandfathered in.
With these new standards on the slow pitch, basically the composites can’t break down. On a composite bat, when it starts performing is when the composites break down. But within the new ruling of the ASA, these bats…
Roy: So it is a composite handle, metal barrel?
Worth Guy: Yeah.
Rob: So why do composite bats getter hotter when they break down?
Worth Guy: The resin. The material breaks down and has better performance features to it. A couple of the other things we do, like technical jargon bullS#!%. Like this, the EIP.
Rob: What does that mean?
Worth Guy: I don’t know what it stands for, but it is the way they construct the bat. Basically the resin particles we use for the composites are much smaller than in years past.
So we put the composites into this shell, or into the tube for the bat, and then what they do is they rapidly remove the air. So when you get an air pocket in the bat, that is less composite material and that is sort of like dead space. So you want to try to fit as many composite particles as tightly together, which will elongate the sweet spot.
Rob: But like on this one, it is just a composite handle?
Worth Guy: Right. It would be more in the handle so you get more flex. But like in these two, the Resmondo Titan and the regular Titan, these are 100% composite so there is much more flex in these bats.
Rob: But that is approved by ASA?
Worth Guy: The Jeff Hall Mutant, the Resmondo Titan, and the Titan are strictly USSSA.
Rob: What percentage of softball players are playing in leagues that can use that bat?
Roy: It depends on what part of the country you are from. In this part, like in New Jersey, for example, it is basically usually 100% ASA. Unless you are playing in pickup or a lot of the Spanish leagues. They are more just standard everyday stuff.
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Rob: All right. So we got the…
Worth Guy: That is the Jeff Hall Mutant. Then we have the Resmondo Titan. Resmondo is, again, a top notch slow pitch elite team. I think they are based out of California. But consistently they are one of the top teams at that elite level. We have a contract with them and that is why they have a bat named after them as well. It is called the Resmondo Titan.
This is 100% composite. And basically what it is is what we call end loaded. So the weight is more distributed towards the end of the bat than it is balanced.
And again, this would probably be preferred by one of the bigger guys who wants to get a lot of flex in his bat but has a real quick swing. The end load will slow it up a little bit.
Rob: So like a fast strong guy?
Worth Guy: Yes. Then you have the regular Titan. Also 100% composite, but balanced. This would be for the normal guy. The smaller guy who is not all juiced up or not tremendously big, but doesn’t have that quick of a swing but is still looking for the performance at that level.
Roy: All that is based off a balancing issue?
Worth Guy: Yeah.
Roy: Because like a 34…You have the same weights.
Worth Guy: Right. You have the same weights, but it is the way it is balanced. And again, to a novice they probably feel the exact same. But to the slow pitch guy who is really playing four or five times a week, there will be a considerable difference And the guy who is looking to swing a little bit quicker or come through the zone faster, they are probably going to prefer this. A guy who has got too quick of a swing and is looking to slow up is probably going to go with the Resmondo.
Rob: So what about for playing modified? Do you have to use something like that and not something that is end loaded?
Worth Guy: Again, at the end of the day it is still personal preference.
Rob: So you can play modified with an end loaded bat?
Worth Guy: Yes. It is strictly personal preference at the end of the day. So those three that we just mentioned are all USSSA bats. Then we have the Toxic, which is ASA approved.
Rob: And it is less hot than the other?
Worth Guy: Exactly.
Rob: How do they determine that?
Worth Guy: By some crazy, crazy testing standard that you are not going to comprehend and I barely comprehend.
Roy: It is based on the speed the ball comes off the bat.
Worth Guy: Yeah.
Rob: Do they do that to protect the infield and the pitcher from getting killed?
Worth Guy: Yeah, I believe so. The other thing a lot of these guys do is they will shave the bat. So they will take it to somewhere, remove the cap, and then they will shave it down to get even more performance out of it.
Rob: So it is lighter and faster?
Worth Guy: Yeah. It is lighter. And again, it has more of a trampoline effect.
Rob: How do umps catch that?
Worth Guy: On the field it is virtually impossible to detect. And believe it or not, there is like a whole black market of this being done.
Rob: And like rolled bats.
Worth Guy: Exactly. An umpire will just look to see if the bat has the certification. That is all he cares about.
Rob: So it is kind of like corking a bat?
Worth Guy: Yes, in the slow pitch world. So this bat is ASA. It is 100% composite. It won’t break in like these USSSA bats.
Rob: So it just won’t be as hot?
Worth Guy: Yes.
Rob: A lot of people say like hot out of the wrapper.
Worth Guy: These bats here, the thing with them…Also we have what we call the original Mayhem. It is known as the Booger Green. That was known as hot right out of the wrapper. Like I said, it takes time for the composites to break down, so you might have to get a few cuts to get the composites broken down.
Rob: So is that like jeans? Like when you get new blue jeans and they are real stiff?
Worth Guy: Right. You wear them a few times and they begin to break in. Great analogy. That is pretty much the scope of the end line product.
Rob: If somebody is new to playing slow pitch, but they have money to spend, are they going to come in and buy one of these bats?
Worth Guy: I mean, yeah. There is really no in between in softball. If the guy is playing and he is playing competitively, he is going right towards this and he already knows what he wants.
Rob: He doesn’t need a sales pitch. He doesn’t need a buyer’s guide. He is looking for this make and this model and the best price.
Worth Guy: Like I said, if you go onto any of the chat boards, you will see that these bats are…Roy doesn’t believe it, but I am trying to tell him. If you go down South, or Florida, or west into California, Worth is the hottest thing out there. That is all they want.
Rob: Is it because of the USSSA?
Worth Guy: Well we have a great affiliation with USSSA. And these teams, like this Resmondo team, is always in the spotlight. There is also a big competition, bat wars. These bats have always performed very well at Bat Wars.
This bat here actually tested too hot, the Toxic. So we have until December to keep manufacturing them. And then after December we have to discontinue producing it. But it will be grandfathered in.
Rob: Was it OK and then not? Because they changed the way they test things. I mean the first test was for brand new…
Worth Guy: Right. The first one was brand new. Now it is throughout the duration of the bat. I don’t know if they did just a sample testing and they happened to pick one and that one tested, or if they tested 100 and all 100 tested. But that bat is too hot. Same with the fast pitch version of it, the fast pitch Toxic, which is orange.
Rob: Is there a lot of consistency from bat to bat as far as in the manufacturing?
Worth Guy: There definitely should be because it is all automated.
Rob: The same materials. The same process.
Worth Guy: Right. So in theory, yes it should.
Rob: When you guys say hybrid, is that when it is like an aluminum shell and a composite handle?
Worth Guy: Yes.
Rob: Why would you want an aluminum shell versus a composite shell?
Worth Guy: It won’t be as flexible. It is a little stiffer. Aluminum won’t break down when you hit it.
Rob: Why would somebody want a stiffer bat? Is it faster across the plate? Does more power go into the ball? I don’t know anything about softball. I know the web.
Worth Guy: Something that is all composite is going to have break in and you are going to get a tremendous amount of flex off it. A big guy doesn’t really need all that flex because by sheer power he is going to hit the ball far. So he doesn’t need that break in.
So that is why an aluminum…That is why the Jeff Hall has the aluminum barrel. He doesn’t need that flex. His arm is humongous. So just by connecting and hitting the ball it is going to go.
Rob: How much of the bats are about getting the bat to where the ball is going to be so they can hit it, and then how much of the bats are about the power it takes to see how far you can hit it?
Worth Guy: These guys are all…And again, at the end of the day we are talking about a few feet. You are not talking about hitting it out of the infield as opposed to hitting it out of the outfield.
I find it funny, especially with parents who are buying bats for their kids who are playing little league or high school ball. They want to spend $349 on a baseball bat.
At the end of the day, if your kid doesn’t have the basic hand/eye coordination and the skills, I don’t care what you put in your hand. You can put a rocket launcher in his hand. You have got to have the basic fundamentals, the hand/eye coordination, and the swing. And then after that it is all personal preference.
Do you like something more balanced? Do you like it end loaded? What type of swing do you have? That is something, again, that the player who is using this bat is going to figure out.
Rob: So they will use their friend’s bat or they will test different things.
Worth Guy: Right. They will demo it at Bat Wars or somewhere. Or if they are a true diehard they will just be following these chat boards and something picks up steam…
I would definitely recommend reading these chat boards. It is an entire world that me and you don’t {fall into}.
Rob: They will all argue over what…
Worth Guy: Literally everything.
Rob: Right. Every single component.
----------- END OF ROY4.doc -----------
ROY STUFF
Blems & Unused demos
Man 1: BLEMS -- We’re still kinda using that as a terminology because people understand it.
Rob: People search for it.
Man 2: There are, and I have probably outside, a couple bats that are blemished. If we have maybe less than 5 total bats that are blemished on the website. However, in demo we probably have a good amount because we just got those in in the last 30 days or so and those pump out pretty good.
As a matter of fact, ironically I was going to say, of course, we haven’t had a return yet, effective about five minutes ago from an email; I have one guy whose bat broke. Send it back. We will replace it no problem.
Rob: So these are unused demos?
Man 2: They are unused demos. That would be a good definition.
Rob: So they are the exact same thing as the regular bat.
Man 2: It has that stamp. I call it engraved; engraving. I don’t want to call it a stamp. Stamps is more…I don’t want them to think, “Oh, we will get it and we will rub it off…” You can’t rub it off.
Rob: Sell it on EBay; yeah, they can’t do that. Engraved. OK.
Man 1: Laser etched I am guessing.
Man 2: Yes. We definitely want you to take some pictures of some demos so people can go, “Oh, OK.”
Man 1: That’s what it means.
Man 2: Because I usually go, “Oh, it’s about the size of your thumbnail; the size of a dime. It’s pretty miniscule. It’s not…”
Man 1: Well we need to get multiples, too so that you can get a perspective of it.
Man 2: It’s not like it is going to say, “Here is your bat…”
Rob: I thought it was going to say demo in 72 point type to where the guys in the outfield could see it. “Ah, its demo! Demo is up at the plate!”
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…
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Man 1: Well that’s kind of hard to say. I mean it depends of course how much they grow, how much weight they have put on, how much they physically develop.
Inch. Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm. Well it sounds like the older guy can go with the negative 10. And the younger guy you may want to change out.
I couldn’t answer that. It is hard to say. Obviously, without him here in front of me it is really tough to say, “Can he handle…?” Sure. Sure.
Hmm-hmm. You know. If you were asking for an answer, I would say yes, I would think so. Yes.
OK. Yeah. I mean he knows the kids though, right? Yeah, so there you go. All right? So everything is cancelled. Just resubmit. All right? Thank you.
Rob: Just real quick, what kind of questions was he asking?
Man 1: What I think a lot of the success of the business, or of any business, is that he was able to talk to me, who knew exactly what he was talking about in the questions he was asking, and I could kind of go around and bring up a point.
The hard thing is when he goes, “Well do you think that is too heavy or too light for him?” How the !@#$ would I know? He is not sitting here in front of me.
Rob: OK. Tell him to think about the Whistle Buyer’s guide. You stop getting a bunch of questions.
Man
Hmm-hmm. You know. If you were asking for an answer, I would say yes, I would think so. Yes.
OK. Yeah. I mean he knows the kids though, right? Yeah, so there you go. All right? So everything is cancelled. Just resubmit. All right? Thank you.
Rob: Just real quick, what kind of questions was he asking?
Man 1: What I think a lot of the success of the business, or of any business, is that he was able to talk to me, who knew exactly what he was talking about in the questions he was asking, and I could kind of go around and bring up a point.
The hard thing is when he goes, “Well do you think that is too heavy or too light for him?” How the !@#$ would I know? He is not sitting here in front of me.
Rob: OK. Tell him to think about the Whistle Buyer’s guide. You stopped getting a bunch of questions…
Steve: Well yeah, that was what we were talking about. We would constantly get questions from people going, “I am looking for a whistle that will make dogs go away from me when I am jogging.” There is no such thing!
Man 1: OK. I was just going to say in my mind I am thinking, “Wow! That is a pretty cool invention!”
Steve: A great one! It is the same thing along the lines of a whistle that will stop your neighbor’s dog from barking. I can come up with that. I can take everybody that I know, everybody that you know, and we could all go to the Bahamas and stay there forever! But it doesn’t exist.
So I wrote up a little thing about whistles. And it was more of a “Here’s what whistles do,” but we also had a section on, “Here’s what whistles don’t do.” We wrote all that and all the questions went away.
Rob: With the questions he was asking, what type of player was that? Was that a youth?
Man 1: Yeah. Little league bat. He has got two boys throwing Little League. He wanted a 30 inch for one. One is a 28 inch.
Rob: So age wise, what are these guys?
Man 1: Probably like 12 and 10. But his question is kind of a question you almost can’t answer. “Is this bat too heavy for him?”
Steve: Right. Don’t know.
Man 1: How do we know? We don’t! What we do know is we can ask questions. So a lot of what happens is if I just put some yahoo on the phone and just say, “Hey, answer the call,” they are not going to know, and the guy is going to be frustrated, and within a minute he is going to go, “These guys don’t know what the !@#$ they are talking about.” Whether he buys something coming back because we have cancelled this order, at least he knows that he spoke to somebody, and he goes, “Wow. That guy knew what he was talking about.”
So he can ask that question and say, “Hey, what about this and what about that?” I can ask him questions to answer questions.
Rob: What kind of questions was he asking?
Man 1: Well first and most importantly was, “Do you think this is too heavy for him?” “Hey, we don’t know. OK. What has he been using?” I kind of turned the question back to him. “What has he been using? Has he been having success with that?”
Rob: What size bat was he using?
Man 1: Well he didn’t say the size. What he did say was it was a 10 ounce drop. So in other words, meaning it was a 30 inch negative 10, so 10 from 30 is 20. So it is a 30 inch, 20 ounce bad.
“Had he been having success…?” “Yes, he is doing very well…”
Rob: And that is a smaller bat for a lighter bat?
Man 1: No. It is kind of considered a heavy bat. For Little League it is definitely considered a heavy bat, 10 ounces. They go 11, 11.5, 12, 13; they go lighter. So 10 is kind of what they call the power hitter’s bat. So you know, power hitter, you think of a kid that is a strong kid.
Steve: So he’s having success with that, but he’s trying to buy a different size.
Man 1: So now all of a sudden he is totally flimflammed and he is going, “Well I am thinking of this other bat, this LB1.” OK. Well the LB1 is a negative 12.
Rob: So that is lighter?
Man 1: Much lighter. It is a 30 inch, 18 ounce versus 20 ounce. Two ounces is big.
Rob: You are really good with math.
[laughter]
Rob: It makes a big difference!
Steve: It makes a big difference on a bat.
Man 1: Big difference. Not only that, one was a composite bat and one was a metal bat.
Rob: What is the difference?
Man 1: The new thing nowadays is composite.
Rob: What is composite? Is it multiples…?
Man 1: It is like a mixture of Kevlar, fiberglass, carbon. Everything is fused. And what happens in metal…If you looked at metal in a microscope, there are a lot of peaks, and pits, and valleys in metal. What happens with composite is it is supposed to fill all that in and give a little bit more elasticity to the trauma of the ball hitting the bat and trampolining out.
So what is going to happen is, some of the hotter bats with composites, which is like the Combat, that one it says Combat V2 and the Combat, the one above it, those bats…And I know personally, because my youngest son, who last year when we first went out, he doesn’t even play baseball. He likes baseball but he doesn’t really play. He doesn’t play Little League. He gave that up two or three years ago.
I took him to the field and I was pitching balls, and I am seeing him hit the !@#$ing ball. He is like, “I think I might play baseball now!” I was laughing to myself, because this freaking bat! I mean it just !@#$ing launches the ball! How it is legal, I don’t know.
Rob: Because it’s composite?
Man 1: He is hitting the ball…I mean on a little league field, which is like 200 or 210, or whatever it is, he was hitting the ball over, but he is…
Rob: He is putting it out there.
Man 1: He is putting it out there! And he never hits the ball out! I know…And I am like going, “What the !@#$ did he…?”
Anyway, yeah, the composites have definitely been the material now that the whole market has kind of gone to. What is happening now of course is that college now says, “We are eliminating composites.”
Rob: Right. Aluminum only or metal?
Man 1: Yeah. So that is not going on like right now. And not only that, now they have also come out with a new thing called BESR Certification that had been approved by college and high school. Now they are going with a new thing called BB Core, which is another technical whatever. Effective as, I think, 2012, any bat that I have now, these bats we call BESR Certified, every one is obsolete.
We have two years to flush and get done with it. So probably effective almost immediately, everything that Easton and every bat manufacturer makes will be the new BB Core bat.
So as you roll through your inventory, before the time 2012 comes, you should be almost into all BB Core bats anyway.
Rob: So are they grandfathering any of those in?
Man 1: Right now, yeah. You have until 2012. So kids that are going into like their Junior and Senior year in college, they will never see or know of the BB core bat.
Rob: Right, because everybody will be using these.
Man 1: A kid that is a freshman, for this year and next year he is going to use it and then he is going to switch to what they call the BB core bat. As to how that performs, who knows?
Rob: And that is mostly college?
Steve: Are those out yet?
Man 1: They are not out yet. This just happened like maybe 30 or 45 days ago. It has been in talks for the past year, and now they kind of authorized that as what they are going to do. They are changing. They kind of give you that transition time.
For most stores it doesn’t really matter all that much, because they don’t have the inventory that I have. But yeah, I better go through that inventory or I have a big !@#$ing problem.
Steve: Are you going to be able to move everything?
Man 1: Yeah. I mean I don’t really have…Some guys are panicking, like, “Well nobody is going to want to buy, blah, blah.” You know what? If this bat outperforms the BB Core bat and this kid is a senior in high school. He ain’t buying a BB core bat. He goes, “I don’t give a S#!%! I am not going to be playing next year in college. I can’t make the team at such and such university. I am living for today!”
Rob: Up until that last second they are still going to be using the ones that are…
Steve: What kind of lifespan does a bat normally have? Does it depend on how much you use it?
Man 1: Definitely. Well I said to that guy, just to be an asshole, I go…Well these guys also go, “Will he be able to use this bat for the next five seasons?” I go, “Well if he strikes out a lot and doesn’t hit the ball, absolutely! It will last forever!”
But in reality it is like, “Start him chain-smoking now. When he is [xx] and not sleeping, just keep him up and let him sleep for an hour a day and he won’t grow; yeah, he will fit that bat!”
Steve: Yeah. It will be perfect.
Rob: We don’t necessarily have to get into this now, but eventually I want to go through it. OK. You have got somebody in little league. Walk me through from little bitty kid just getting into little league to big slugger getting into little league. What are their options? That is the kind of content that we need on the website.
Man 1: There is a tremendous amount of options; huge, huge, huge amount of options. With the younger kid it is basically the lighter the bat the better, because really what you want to do is just make contact.
Rob: So those are what types of bats? Those are the 12’s you said?
Man 1: Well they are T-ball bats, so they are usually like 24, 25, or 26 inch, that teeny tiny bat.
Rob: And the age of the kid?
Man 1: Four, five, or six. Keep in mind it is T-ball. The bat is tiny and the barrel is this big, so it is not like they can whittle and make that bat super duper light. It is usually a negative 10 to a negative 12. Because I mean in reality, what are you swinging? You are swinging…I mean literally, the bat is like this big. It is about this big.
All the weight is in here.
Rob: In the barrel?
Man 1: Yeah. The more that they whittle it out, I mean the bat will end up breaking.
Rob: So lighter bats have thinner barrels?
Man 1: Thinner walls. Sure.
Rob: But as far as the width of the barrels, the width is the same but they use thinner…?
Man 1: The width of the barrel is always going to be 2 ¼ inch diameter, which is what all little league bats are; every one of them. They are all 2 ¼ inch diameter. And then the thinner the wall, the lighter the bat. So depending on the materials they are using, or whether it is composite or metal, some of the bats are what they call two piece bats. So in other words, this is a separate piece than this and it is put together. This is what they call a three piece bat.
Rob: That is the Triton? Who makes that? Is that Easton?
Man 1: Louisville.
Rob: See. I am here to learn!
Man 1: So yeah. But as far as a younger kid, they are using the lighter, smaller bats just to give themselves the ability to make contact. If they get up there and use this heavy, heavy, heavy, big, big long bat and they can’t swing the bat, after one year it is like, “Ah, I don’t wanna play.”
Steve: Right. It is not any fun.
Man 1: No. Not at all.
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Rob: So t-ball is like the ball sitting on the tee just like it was when we played t-ball 30 years ago.
Man 1: Yeah. The ball is sitting on a tee. Usually, what they do is by the end of the season, then they go into what they call coach pitch.
Rob: OK. There coach is throwing the ball.
Man 1: Yeah. Here is the mound and here is the batter. The coach is usually half way. He can’t sit there and throw, so he is usually like on one knee and he just kind of lobs balls in. The kids are obviously free swinging or trying to swing, hopefully.
Rob: Then they graduate from t-ball and go…
Man 1: They go from t-ball right into little league.
Rob: And those ages are…?
Man 1: Usually anywhere from 7-12. And then there are birthday cutoffs, and they have different levels, like minor league and major league.
Rob: But within little league, if it was five different years, would you have five different teams? So like the seven year olds aren’t playing the 12 year olds?
Man 1: Of course. Usually what they do is, I think it is like third and fourth is together, or like 2nd and 3rd, 4th and 5th, 6th and 7th, and then the older 7th and 8th graders are together. And from there they move onto the bigger field at the 7th and 8th grade level.
Rob: And with the range of bats they would be using, is that where the little league/youth label comes in?
Man 1: I call it little league because little league is what we are. Where you guys are, they may not call it little league. They mall call it Dizzy league. They may be like, “We don’t play little league.” In reality it is a generic, Xerox name of like, “Oh, it is little league.”
I tend to use the word little league where I probably shouldn’t, but it should be youth league.
Rob: And that is just ages…?
Man 1: Up until about 12.
Rob: As far as the options in bats that they have, they are going to be using heavier and longer bats as they…?
Man 1: As they get older they go up.
Rob: So what is a good entry level bat for a new little league kid?
Man 1: There are so many choices.
Rob: What would be the best seller, you think? Just to pick one just as an example.
Man 1: Price is always a factor. Like, “Hey, he is just playing in 12 or 14 rec games. He is just playing because his friends play. He doesn’t need to have the $250 bat.”
Rob: So walk my nephew through. Let’s just say he is just starting little league and he gets a youth bat or a little league bat. Let’s say he wants Easton just to make life simpler. So he has got 10 different options, or even more than that? Like within one model year, because I am trying to wrap my head around how…
Man 1: They try to work it as good, better, best. They have like, “here is your $29.95 bat, $39, $49, $59, $69, $79, and on and on.” What we do well is we have that $250 bat, or that $150 bat, or that $100 bat that now is $39, $49, and $69. Their lesser expensive bats I generally don’t carry because their better bats, I make my lesser expensive bats, and then the new bats are the more expensive bats.
Rob: So like good, better, best, you are saying $29, $49, and $69?
Man 1: Something like that. That is how we present it. We will present to a consumer and say, “Hey, what are we looking for? OK. He needs a little league bat. OK. So we know he is little. Any brand specific? Has he had Easton, always had Easton, loved Easton, brother had Easton, you are an Easton guy?”
Some guys will be like, “I only want Louisville.” Or they are men where Dean Marini is very popular in softball and they will go, “I have Dean Marini and I want him to have Dean Marini.” “Dad, I want the same bat you have!” You know, Dean Marini. And then it becomes, “OK. Here is what we have.” We can really spell it out pretty easy.
We ask the question, which is, “Is he playing travel ball?” Once he is playing travel ball, we know that they will spend whatever they want to spend.
Steve: Well it is an indicator of interest. Travel ball guys, I mean they are on the road every weekend.
Man 1: Sure. They are playing all over. They are on a team that they pay. So they may pay to be a member of this team and they play 40 games a summer, which is a good amount. They may $500 to be on that team.
Steve: Right. So a $250 bat is nothing.
Man 1: And they are well aware that it costs that much.
Rob: And they would be going for the best. No matter what, whatever is legal, they want the most potent…
Man 1: Latest, greatest, hot. And then it really becomes a sales pitch to say, “OK. Here is the latest and greatest, top, top, top of the line, and bang, bang, bang. But other values, we have this, we have this, we have this.” So it is not uncommon that we have a guy come in who is looking for the top of the line bat and we throw literally 10 choices at him, which is great because they just can’t get that anywhere. They just can’t.
Rob: But what are the differences between those 10 bats? That is the kind of thing as far as developing a buyer’s guide…
Man 1: Weight is an issue. So for example, if we look at the top, the white bat, so Easton Synergy. That is a composite bat. Beneath it you have three bats in a row that are composite bats, but they are two piece bats.
So for example, what that means is you see that little rubber ring in the middle of all those bats? Those are two piece bats.
Rob: Those are all little league?
Man 1: They are all little league bats. Everything on this right side is little league. But if we look at the top, the top bat is a composite bat and it is one piece. See how it doesn’t have the connection?
Steve: So it is the entire thing from…
Man 1: The entire thing is one piece. It is a composite. So it is also 12 ounces less the inches. So 30 inch is 18 ounces. Whatever the inch, always 12 less.
The next three bats in a row are also 20/10 bats, as well as the white one. But the difference is that…Actually, we kind of have them out of order a little bit, because the red one is the negative 13. And again, 30 inch, 17 ounce.
The blue one up top is negative 12, so it is 30 inch, 19 ounce. And then the green one is 9 drop, which is 30 inch, 21 ounce, which is a heavy bat. So really you have three bats that are the same bat. For the most part, as far as technology, weight is your issue.
Steve: The majority of that weight is taken care of in the barrel?
Man 1: Correct. So if you have a kid that comes in and I look at him and go, “Hey, what high school do you go to?” And he goes, “No, I am in sixth grade.” For him the heavy bat would be a good bat, because weight is good, but if you have the power to swing that heavy bat…
Guys will say, “What weight should I get?” Swing the heaviest bat that you are comfortable swinging. Period. If the lightest one is the most comfortable, then that is the one to use.
However, if you are a big kid and you are strong, and you swing that bat, your results will be tremendous. So those three bats, where they are the same bat, same bat, same family, same…
Rob: Is Stealth the family?
Man 1: It is. Well, the new name this year is the Stealth Speed.
Rob: And that is the 2009 or the 2010?
Man 1: 2010.
Rob: OK. And then the weights are the red, blue, and green?
Man 1: Right. So 9, 11, and 13. If you look and you say, “Hey. The four top of the line bats, what do we have?” As far as bats go, we have those four bats, and actually, all four of them are different. They are all $250 and they are all four different.
People say, “Which one is the best one?” We don’t know that. Let’s see. What is he capable of swinging? What is he physically comfortable with swinging?
Rob: Do they know that when they are the website? Do they have a pretty good idea?
Man 1: Yeah, I mean…Again, this guy on the phone, who kind of really didn’t know, but he said, “Hey. He swung a negative 10 last year.” He knew enough that he did swing a negative 10. He said, “Hey. He swung it last year. He was OK with that. He did well.”
Or it may be like one I talked to last year, “Yeah, my kid swung a negative 10 last year. He struggled. He didn’t hit the ball for S#!%.”
Steve: So if that is the case you would tend to go with a lighter bad?
Man 1: Yeah, you should go lighter. You absolutely should go lighter. There is no reason that he needs to struggle. I mean, yeah, you bought that bat. Why, I don’t know. If it was a hand me down or if it was something that somebody gave you or something that you bought and you bought it because it was a good deal, maybe you didn’t make the right decision.
Rob: So all four of those are $250 a piece? Would those be the best in the good, better, best?
Man 1: Most definitely.
Rob: What is the difference in the heaviest Stealth Speed and the Synergy Speed, just the material?
Man 1: Well the Synergy is a one piece and is a negative 12, and the Speed…OK. If you notice, they didn’t duplicate the weight since it is a 12. So you have a bat that is a minus 9, minus 11, minus 12, and a minus 13.
Some guys will say, “Oh, I don’t like the connection. I don’t like the two piece bat.” Sometimes guys will go, “Oh, I don’t like that connection piece because if you hit the ball there…” And I say, “Fine. If you hit the ball there, the ball is going nowhere anyway. You shouldn’t be. If you ever hit the ball down there, you are not hitting the ball in the right spot. And yeah, the ball is not going anywhere. But even if it was a one piece bat, if you hit the ball there it is not going anywhere anyway.”
It also acts as a vibration dampener. That one piece bat tends to bring it right down to your hands. That other way it has to pass through that. The rubber piece kind of acts as an absorber.
Steve: But that would be a good thing, wouldn’t it?
Man 1: Yeah. But again, I have heard people go, “I don’t like connection bats.” OK. And they realize that and they say, “OK. Not everything can be a connection bat. For those non-connection people, here is…”
Rob: And a connection is a two piece. And the Synergy you said is a minus 12?
Man 1: It is.
Rob: And it fits in between the medium and the heavy one?
Man 1: Well exactly. In the Speeds, you have 9, 11, and 13. There is no 12.
Rob: So those four bats are all completely different weights?
Man 1: Totally.
Rob: And if you are a power hitter and you could wing a 13, why would you do a 12?
Man 1: Well a power hitter should be a stronger kid, and he should go on the heavier bat side. And that is what I would use. Some guys would just be more comfortable if they said, “Hey, you know what? I like the lighter one.” “OK. You like the lighter bat. Whatever.”
Rob: So it is just kind of like gearing down a little bit.
Man 1: Right. But that bat, that minus 9, is made for you. That is your kind of bat. It is really trying to custom fit that bat for that player for his…You are trying to enhance his positives. “Hey, he is a strong kid.” “Heavier bat, better results if he can physically swing it.”
Good player, small kid, very, very lightweight, can’t swing that bat, but he is a good player and he is an enthusiast. Gotta have something for him. Can’t just go, “OK. Here is the heavier bat…”
Steve: “Go struggle with this.”
Man 1: Yeah.
Rob: Just get him on base, right?
Man 1: Well he may not have the power, but again, when it comes to the younger kids it is all about getting on base, making contact, and hitting the ball. I mean they don’t think of it as like, “Hey, I got a hit,” as if I hit the ball and they didn’t get me out. It is like they hit the ball and they threw him out at first base. They think, “Oh, I got a hit.”
Steve: Right. Getting on base is less of a…
Man 1: Right. They hit the ball. “I got a hit!” It is not a hit, but in essence they hit.
Steve: They didn’t strike out.
Man 1: Right. “Strike one, strike two, strike three! Sit down!”
Rob: Yeah. “All right Snell! Next Snell!”
[laughter]
Rob: I don’t know why I didn’t get drafted!
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Man 1: Now just to go one step further product wise, as you kind of tier down, the yellow bat, silver barrel, what that is is composite shaft…
Rob: The fourth bat up there? The SV12?
Man 1: Fifth. Composite shaft, connection piece, metal barrel.
Rob: So it is kind of like a hybrid barrel?
Man 1: So it is kind of like…
Rob: The best of both worlds or the worst of both worlds.
Man 1: So that is a 13 ounce differential, so it is a good lightweight bat that kind of acts as a counterpart. Sometimes guys say, “I don’t like the thud. The composites sound very thuddy, very woody sounding, very dead.”
Steve: Right. They don’t go ding.
Man 1: Right. “I like the ping of aluminum.” Like you hear the, “I like the crack of wood.” Instead it is the ping of aluminum.
Rob: Mississippi State baseball; we know that sound. Be looking, because if it is a foul you are going to get hit.
Man 1: So from there, then you are going to go down into the V12, and the V12 is a counterpart of the top bat, the Synergy. It is one piece, but it is metal.
Rob: OK. This is very helpful.
Man 1: So now all of a sudden, if you look at all the bats we just looked at, every one of them is different; every one.
Rob: So whatever you like, there is something for you. It is like driving cars. My girlfriend’s car is really lightweight and it is really punchy. You step on the gas and you are going, you know? But it is like a four cylinder.
But my car is like really, really heavy and not a lot of punch. But once I get going, it is not going to stop. So talk about bat speed. Is that something where a bat being light or heavy is…? To be able to increase bat speed. You know, like the parachutes we were pushing.
Man 1: Right. Bat speed is, again, you mechanics, your ability to be able to swing the bat hard but under control. Anybody can get up there and just take a bat, and somebody is just throwing the ball, and you kind of go back like you have an ax or a sledge hammer in your hand and just swing.
But baseball is definitely a game of mechanics, of muscle memory, of swinging and keeping your eye on the ball and following through and using your legs and your hips, not just getting up there and swinging with your arms, because that is only going to take you so far. When you can enhance those things, that is when your results are much better.
You can tell with the kids. You can see how they play. Everything is in tune, with their feet all the way up to the top, when they are swinging, and those are the kids that perform.
Rob: So with the SV-12, is that a best bat or a good bat?
Man 1: I still consider it one of the better bats. As a matter of fact, this entire wall basically is better bats; all top end stuff that is up here because either A, it is a 2010, or B, because it is a 2009 that has now become a great deal.
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Man 1: We did this last year if you remember, or the year before, where we tried to have like, “Hey. Here is the 2010. Here is the 2009 and here is the 2008.” We kind of try to match these things up.
So for example, you could look at like the copper color barrel with the blue and the red shaft and then basically look up and go to that SV-12. So that SV-12 in reality is really the same bat as those two bats, except for some weight, which I will get into in a second. But that bat is $90. That bat is $199.
Now don’t get me wrong. At this point right now, quite honestly, we probably paid $60 for those bats. So at $99 we are still whatever, but I would certainly love to have been able…I mean at one point we were selling that bat for $149, $129, and now it becomes like, “Well we have got to get rid of this stuff.”
Rob: But the fact that, for the customer, it becomes a better deal…Like last year’s bats are virtually the same. So you are comparing what, the SV-12…?
Man 1: Well here. Let me compare this. This is a negative 13.
Rob: The Stealth CNT?
Man 1: Right. So this is a 2008 model; composite shaft, metal barrel. The SV-12, this yellow one, is the same bat as this bat, composite shaft, metal barrel. That is on closeout now for $149, I think. OK. And then SV-12, the silver barrel, yellow shaft, is a 2010.
So you have that family, $90, $150, $200. You want 2010? You have got to be the latest, greatest guy in the world? Great. But that 2008, that 2009, great deal.
Rob: And they are virtually the same?
Man 1: It is the exact same. Obviously there is a color difference, but other than that…
Steve: But as far as materials and how it is made.
Man 1: Absolutely. Same thing. 100%. Connection piece, carbon nano-tube shaft. It is the same bat.
Rob: That is like cars. They just put different paint jobs on them and make them look…
Man 1: Yeah. So that is a real good example of year, versus year, versus year. Then I will say, “Hey. Yeah, those bottom two bats that I showed you, those were actually $189, but now they are older and the price has dropped.”
The V-12, the black one, there was no previous, previous year, so that is an 09. And then look at the green barrel V-12.
Steve: Exact same construction.
Man 1: Yeah. So now the black and green is $129, and that one, I think, is $179. So yeah. Same bat.
Rob: How far back do these bats go as far as tracing bat history?
Man 1: Well hopefully we are doing our job and we are getting rid of bats, so it is not like, “Hey! In 2001…” You know, it is like…
Rob: But seriously. Walk me through something that has got like four or five years back. Do they do that or do they change so much?
Man 1: Four or five years back would be extreme. Like in those bats, we had like over 1,000 of them. That is tough to move that kind of quantity. So for the most part, in reality, what we are doing is eventually get down to where we only have one size. Like, “Hey, I have a 2007 bat, but shoot. I only have 28 inch,” which is like the least desirable size.
So yeah, sometimes it will sit. But I think that my push to differentiate us from everybody else is, “Yeah, we have the 2010, but I also have the 2009, and I may even have the 2008. And basically they are virtually the same bat, but for a heck of a lot less money and the same technology.”
If they came out with a bat every year that hit the ball further than that bat the previous year, we would just sell that one bat because people wouldn’t even want to hear it. “If that hits the ball furthest, that is the bat I want.”
Rob: But it is like clothes in fashion. Everybody wants this year’s…
Steve: No. Some people do.
Man 1: Some people do, but I will tell you what. We have developed a following of people that, “Hey, I don’t…” This bat over here, which is the high school or adult baseball bat, Louisville made this bat for Sports Authority. They had it in their lineup. It is a 2008 bat. And in typical fashion of the big box stores, they probably said, “Oh, we have 1,500 left to take. We don’t really need them. We didn’t sell as many as we thought. We don’t want them.”
Now the manufacturer had been selling this and built that for them. It is not in the product line. Nobody else has it. What is good for them and it is on ad, and, “Oh, it is normally $289.95…” No, it was $369, on sale for $299. It was on sale for $299. BullS#!%, right, because they paid, which they told me what they paid. They said that they paid $175 for it.
In reality, if that was a $369 bat they would have paid $275. So they are like, “Oh, we are good guys. We are putting this on sale.” Everybody knows it because Exo is a pretty big name.
So now all of a sudden you have this bat that is a 2008 removed, but it is a great value, because they are the only ones that have that bat. So they screw them over. In turn, I come in, or somebody like myself, and says, “Yeah, OK. 59? I will buy them all and give you $100.” So I am going to sell that bat for $199.95.
Rob: And it used to sell for $300 and now it is $200?
Man 1: What do you call it is still running it on ad. I saw it. I think it was at $299, and I think they put it on ad at $249.95.
Steve: You are still $50 under them.
Man 1: I am still on $199. So again, now this bat is to go similar to that bat. This is the 2010 version of that bat. There was, and I think we have a couple of pieces left, a 2009 which is black. So again, it is the same thing.
Rob: Now what is that, the exo-grid?
Man 1: Right, the exo-grid. So it is $369.95 for the 2010. I got the same bat. It is the same bat.
Steve: Right, just different colors.
Man 1: $199. That is a S#!%load of money.
Steve: Especially if you have got three kids playing baseball.
Man 1: Absolutely.
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Man 1: …$249.95. And I had it there and $199 just sells so much better. So we could probably lead them out at $249, but I figure, let’s just not keep things.
Steve: You like moving them.
Rob: OK. When somebody is looking at one of these, back to these four that are related, they Stealth Speeds and the Synergy Speed. When somebody is looking at one of those, do we need to refer to those other bats, like, “Need a heavier bat? Click here. Need a lighter bat? Click here.”
Like if they are looking at these four bats…
Man 1: Well almost like same family, same brand, same type, same make?
Rob: Right.
Man 1: This is another one that is a little lighter. This is an option that is a little heavier. What fits your body style? What fits your game?
Rob: But would that be something to have on each product page? Like go, “Want a lighter bat? Here is a lighter bat. Want a heavier bat? Here is a heavier bat.”
Man 1: If you have it available, yes. But if you don’t have it available…Some guy will go, “Yes, I do need a heavier bat.” Oh !@#$, we don’t have it. Well then the guy goes, “Oh, well then I don’t need this one either.”
Rob: Right. But we could have it to where if there is not one, it wouldn’t show up. But would that be helpful for folks shopping for a bat if they didn’t know what they were looking for?
Man 1: I think so. I think that the question is, “Is this bat to light or is this bat to heavy? Here are your options. Here are potential options in the same type of bat.”
Rob: What if we are out of something…” Like you talk about the different lengths. The drop is the same in all these different sizes, right? How many different sizes will you have in one of those bats?
Man 1: The drop is always the same.
Rob: It is a ratio.
Man 1: Right. So if it is minus 9, whatever the inch, if it is a 30 inch it is going to be 21 ounces. If it is a 31…Again, it is always going to be that negative nine. So it is not as if you can get that other option…
Rob: So what determines what the length of the bat is, how long somebody’s arms are?
Man 1: That is also, again, very difficult. Could a kid swing a 30 inch if he is swinging a 29? Yeah, he could probably get away with it. It is all about comfort. And it is...It is difficult. And it is my business. It is difficult to order something over the website.
Rob: It is like ordering shoes.
Man 1: Exactly. In Nike I wear a size 11. In Adidas I wear a 10 ½. It is like the just cut them differently.
Rob: So you could get a shorter bat that is heavier or you could get a longer bat that…
Man 1: Longer generally tends to be the way that people go because of the fact that they always kind of want it to last. “Oh, I don’t want to buy another one next year.” “Will this last him his whole little league career?” So length is always an option that people say, “Hey, I want to go with the longer just because I think it will last him longer.”
Steve: But they could be cutting this kid short. If they buy him the wrong size bat thinking, “OK. He will do better in a year or two,” if they get him the wrong size bat now he might not want to play in a year or two.
Man 1: Sure. Absolutely.
Rob: So would it be better for somebody that can swing a heavier bat to get a longer bat instead? See where I am going? If you are swinging a bat that is in the middle…What is one of the Stealth Speeds that is in the middle? Which one is that?
Man 1: Negative 11.
Rob: OK. So if you are swinging that easy and you want something bigger, you could actually go for a longer one of those, right?
Man 1: Well if you are using negative 11 and you can go longer…In other words…Well do the math. If you look at the bat that is a negative 11 saying, “This is 30 inches, 19 ounces. I could use a 31 inch in the negative 13 and actually be an ounce lighter than the other bat in the negative 11.”
Here is the one thing, though. Actually, here is a better comparison. See the two Stealth bats, the one with the copper color barrels?
Rob: Red and blue?
Man 1: Right. So here you have the blue one. The blue one is a negative 13 and the red one is a negative 11. Look at the length of the shell on the negative 11, how much bigger. There is a lot more surface.
Now with the speeds they tend to not be so extreme. But those bats in general…Again, when somebody comes in and says, “I don’t know which one,” I say, “Here is what you are looking at. Here is the surface to hit with as opposed to…”
Rob: How can we show that on the website? Is that something…Is there a number that is the length of the surface?
Man 1: Not really, no.
Rob: I am still not wrapping my head around that. Walk me through that one more time. So the Stealth CNT; there are two different drops.
Man 1: Right. Well let’s go back to the 20/10 bats which don’t have such an extreme differential in barrel length. If it was as extreme as these, we could look at it and go, “Well S#!%. Look at the length of this shell versus this shell, versus this shell.”
But here is the upside/downside. Longer bat, longer hitting surface. Heavier bat, a lot of hitting surface, but it is heavier. Can you physically swing it?
Rob: So people want to swing the heaviest bat they can possibly swing accurately and comfortably, but no heavier.
Man 1: Right. I think when you use the word heavy, that is kind of like a bad word for people, because they are like, “Heavy?” I say you want to swing as heavy a bat as you can handle. What can you handle? And if that happens to be the lightest bat, then that is as heavy as you can handle! That is what it is.
Rob: So walk me through this again. You said the 2010’s are different in the barrel lengths?
Man 1: Right. The barrel length on those bats tends not to be as extreme. And we can actually go out and open up a box and kind of take a look at the three of them side, by side, by side and say, “You know what? S#!%.” It is all interior then versus exterior.
Rob: What is interior?
Man 1: Interior as far as where your weight issues are. With the other one, the blue and the red one, you can see that the red one has a shell that is very…Anybody can look at it and go, “Damn. That thing is much longer.”
Rob: So what would the weight be of one of those bats? What is a popular weight?
Man 1: Let’s just pick 30 inches. So a 30 inch minus 9 is 21 ounce. Minus 11 is 19. And then minus 13 is 17. So those are your three weight differences.
Rob: And there is a big difference between a 21 ounce bat and a 17 ounce bat?
Man 1: S#!% yeah. An ounce is a pretty big jump for a kid. Two ounces is another world.
Rob: I wonder if there could be like a chart or a matrix that could show age and…
Man 1: There is. I am not a big fan of it.
Steve: Well I was about to say, that would be difficult because…
Man 1: It is a very box-storish type of thing where you come in and you say, “I don’t know S#!%.” “Oh great! Here is a chart.” “He is 9. How much do you weight? 65 pounds. He is rated beginner intermediate or expert.” “Oh, here is what we have!”
Rob: A little kid in our neighborhood, Clint Sims, he could swing the heaviest bat you have. And I would be the biggest kid in the neighborhood and I would have the little bat. You know what I mean? Just because somebody is little or young, they might be great and really strong.
But is that where you could put the experience tag on somebody? You were talking just a second ago about levels of…
Man 1: Generally the smaller kids do tend to swing the lighter bats just because of that reason; they are lighter. Again, they could be a great player…
Rob: A really great player as a kid, he can be a lot stronger than he looks, right?
Man 1: Oh, definitely. But I think that is the extreme. That is not the…
Rob: That is not the norm?
Man 1: No.
~~~~~
Yahoo Store Designers Resources@@@@@@http://dmoz.org/Bookmarks/R/robsnell/Yahoo_Store_Designer_Resources/~~~~~
Yahoo Store Developers, Tools, Resources, & more...@@@@@@~~~~~
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Yahoo Store Keyword Datamining@@@@@@Your Investment: $495 Turnaround time: 5 business days
What you get:
Ranked & weighted list of keywords based on traffic / popularity.
* My interpretation of data.
Recommendations and first drafts for Yahoo! listings, Looksmart submission, and meta
tags, and other uses for keywords.
Input on OVERTURE, Google Adwords Plus and other affordable and advertising strategies that scale
Phone consult on how to use data in other ways
What I need from you:
Beginning list of 15-20 keyword phrases
URLs of 4 or 5 sites that are like yours
A 30-45 minute interviews to educate me about your business
Temporary Access (ALL) for Yahoo ID "COPYCOW" to your Yahoo Store
Call me at 1-800-332-7601 or email me at rob@ystore.com with any comments or questions.~~~~~
Yahoo Store Keyword Datamining: Keyword Research Package - More Information@@@@@@First we go in and look at your Yahoo! logs and pull out your very most important keywords, as well as a bulk list of everything ever searched for to reach your site for the past 6 months. This helps you optimize your Yahoo! Shopping listing as well as give you a leg up on the OVERTURE.COM keyword buys.
From this we compile two lists:
(1) A list of keywords and phrases that actually produced revenue, and (2)
a VERY LONG list of unique phrases that produced traffic. >From these two lists you
can decide what words to buy on OVERTURE.
The last client we did this for got a list of 3,000 unique words and phrases used to
search for his store. His sales have really jumped in the past 60 days, and so much of
his traffic is from OVERTURE and their affiliated partners Yahoo, MSN, ALTA VISTA, NETSCAPE SEARCH, etc.
Example of datamining results
Just did some "keyword mining" on one of our Yahoo! Stores. There were
some very interesting results.
From roughly 215,000 visitors you can see exactly what 60,000+ folks typed in
various search engines and directories to find our Yahoo! Store. This data came
from 50 different sources with roughly 30,000 different search terms. The rest of the
traffic came from directly typing in the URL, "unknown search terms," banner ads,
and links to the site.
Filter the data into two groups: (1) Revenue Producing Keyword Phrases -
(keywords that produced online sales) and (2) Traffic Generating Keyword Phrases
(keywords that generated traffic, but no "trackable" sales.)
Only about 15% of my online sales are traceable to the exact keyword phrase, so we just have to weight the known data to reflect this.
REVENUE KEYS -- The first group of keywords are now prioritized by sales
dollars to go after the most profitable keywords, and the goal is to try to stay in the
OVERTURE top 4 and still make money. There were 561 unique keyword phrases that
directly resulted in online sales.
The great thing is that 54% of this store's directly
trackable keyword sales came from the TOP 40 keywords and phrases, so that's
where we focus our dollars and attention.
Looking at the competition in OVERTURE, about half of the words don't even have
bidders. And most of the other half consists of bottom feeders paying 2 or 3 cents
for the keywords. Holy COW!
There were also 3 phrases where a national manufacturer who sells direct is paying
close to a dollar per click through. That tells us how much THOSE phrases are
worth to that guy! Probably need to open another Yahoo! Store just to go after
THOSE phrases!
TRAFFIC KEYS -- After consolidating the same phrases that were on multiple
search engines into a single unique list, the second list boils down to about 15,000
unique words and phrases. For example, a search for "blue baby bed" on Yahoo,
Alta Vista, and Excite would count as 1 unique phrase with 3 searches.
Since only 15% or so of our sales come from directly trackable links with the specific
search phrases, we know that some of these 60,000 shoppers with 15,000 keyword
phrases really ARE buyers. How do you get this list down to a manageable
size?
I take this list of 15,000 keywords phrases and start chopping to remove the words
that don't really make sense. In your Top 50 Sources of Traffic, there may be as
many as 25-30 search engines, meta search engines, and directories. Any keyword
phrase that was only requested 2 or 3 times from these sites over a period of many
months probably isn't worth spending the time to write a title or description.
I also use the Pareto Principle, also know as the 80/20 rule (80% of your results
comes from 20% of your efforts) to see where the break is. I can get 70% of my
"bulk keyword traffic" with about 2000 keywords. OVERTURE is going to cut this list
pretty hard anyway. My goal is 750-1250 nickle keyword phrases when I get
finished. ~~~~~
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Yahoo Store Main Page@@@@@@http://store.yahoo.com~~~~~
Yahoo Store Marketing with Email @@@@@@ View more from Rob Snell .
Rob: My name is Rob Snell. I am from Starkville, Mississippi. We have been doing Yahoo stores since 1997.
There is my baby brother Steve back in the back.
Today I want to talk about success we have had on our sites. We have multiple stores. I am going to be talking about Yahoo stores that I can't talk about, so I am going to use a dog metaphor.
We sell dog stuff, but I am actually going to be talking about one of my revenue share retailers who said, "Keep it on the down low. Things are good. We don't want any competition."
Here are five things I have learned from email marketing.
It is all about the offer.
I have been doing this for about nine or ten years, and in the past year I have learned more about email marketing by having awesome offers that were sent in to our customers.
And by offer, I don't mean discounts. I am a retailer, OK? I mean I have done some development, but I am a retailer. Discounting is the worst thing that you could do. If that is the only way you can compete on costs, I feel sorry for you because somebody is going to be less than you.
When I say offer, I mean'Next week, or tomorrow rather, the new iPhone is coming out. That is the offer. You send an email saying, "Hey, the new iPhone is coming out." So when I say offer I don't mean discount. I mean what you are sending in the email.
When you want to get customers to come back to your store, the offer needs to be relevant. That means it is about me, what I am interested in. I am talking the subject line needs to be relevant, the offer itself, the HTML email, the landing page, the product. It has got to be about the customer.
But also, I want it to be compelling. It could be exactly what I am looking for but the offer could just be crap. You know, no discount, no free gift, or no free shipping. So you want both. You want relevant and compelling. People like both kinds of offers where I come from. And there is a sweet spot in the middle and it kind of looks like that.
[laughter]
This is a site, NOT Gundogsupply.com, but this a real Yahoo store. I have got access to about 300 stores and this one of those. I am going to run you through this.
This is three years ago and I thought I knew what I was doing. We were doing PPC. We were doing some SEO. We are driving some revenue and triple digit growth. My retailer is excited, excited, excited.
Then Ron comes along and says, "You don't know what you think you do Mr. Snell. Why aren't you doing'?" And it was that flow chart because I was doing one thing on there. Now I am doing three things.
I was like, "Nah, I get it. I get email. Here we go. I get it. I get it. Each one of those little spikes on there is an email." I was like, "I have got email." I am going to my client and saying, "Come on. Give me some more offers. They like the offers. The better the offer, the more the clicks and the more the sales."
My retailer said, "OK. How about this? Let's just do something awesome." And he did. Each of those is emails. We did more in one email that I knocked out in 45 minutes than we did the whole first year that our company was in business back in the good old days.
That is close up.
[laughter]
I like that. Isn't that pretty?
OK. The second thing is
More relevant offers convert better.
Ron told you all about that.
Some offers apply to everybody. Let's just take dog shampoo, just using the metaphor for the dog store. We sell (and offer) dog shampoo. I would be willing to bet that every single customer we ever had had a dirty dog at some point. But sometimes you have got an offer that only applies to a smaller segment.
If you send this $600 Garmin Astro 220 super awesome dog tracking unit and you sent an email to this guy'.
[laughter]
You are wasting his time, you are wasting your time, and you are wasting your money.
So what you need to do is you need to bucket'He says segment. I just like saying bucket. Do we sell buckets?
Bucket your customers as best you can.
And Ron gave you a whole bunch of info about that. Let's take the first bucket. It is a big ole bucket, customers with dogs. I bet every single one of our customers has a dog. Well that is not a bucket. That is a barrel.
I am in that bucket. That is me and my little puppy Georgia there. Let's bucket a little bit tighter; customers with hunting dogs. Lots of our dogs are pets and lots of them are hunting dogs.
When I think of our customers with hunting dogs, I think of three different dogs where the owners buy three different kinds of stuff. Let's go even further than that.
There is Steve with Roxy out in the field creating content, for anybody who was in the last session. Let's go customers with hunting retrievers. OK. Now I have a bucket to where it is like these guys identify with that label. They are retriever owners. They are duck hunters. There are all kinds of products that indicate that they are that type of person.
I don't even have to ask. I know if they buy duck [xx] it is that guy. I know if they buy a certain type of collar it is that guy. Customers with hunting retrievers; that is a good bucket, but how thin can you slice it?
Customers with hunting retrievers that have more than 12 dogs, drive a Ford F-350, and wear Carhartts 24/7. That is my brother Steve right there. That is a one man bucket. That is too thin.
[laughter]
So you have all kinds of different buckets. For me, 5,000 people is the magic bucket size, just based on my averages. I need to look at your numbers [Ron] because maybe I am not doing as good as I should be. I will get 10 orders if I sent that to my magic bucket. And if the offer is more relevant, then we will probably have higher conversion rate.
When something is easy to do, it gets done.
I can knock out an email. Once I have the offer and once I write a subject line, and I will spend four or five hours agonizing over both of those, I can make an HTML email in five minutes.
I think that is why y'all don't do emails is because it takes so long to put an HTML email together. I get Steve to write his "Howdy" message. I paste that in there. I build this inside the Yahoo Store. It is in custom RTML.
Any developer worth his stock can knock this out in an hour. He will tell you four hours, but just go ahead and pay it. It is easy. I throw the ID for the offer in one field. It pulls the picture from the product page. It pulls the text from the abstract. And then I go get five more ID's from related products, and boom, I have got an HTML email.
And sign your dang emails. You are not a marketing team or a company. People buy from people. They don't buy from companies. Sign your emails. Be personal.
Always keep score.
Finally, you want to look at the numbers. This is how I look at the numbers. Ron I don't know if that is good enough for your MBA. I do know what a spreadsheet is and I will break one out'
Ron: [inaudible]
Rob: So let's take a look at some numbers. Total emails sent-one of your favorite metrics. Let's just take 50,000 emails sent. This is my average for this year so far on this one project.
From that I will get 24% of those people for whom the subject line was good enough to open the email. That gets me 12,000 people, roughly, who are opening and reading my offer.
I have got a 7.17% average click through rate. Those are people who get the email and open it and they decide, "Hey I am going to click on it." That drives 3,500 people to my landing page.
I have got a conversion rate, on average with these offers, of about 3%. And this is percentage of the folks who actually make it to the page. That gets me 100 orders.
So you want to look at the numbers. Then I take the revenue per email, and I look at each individual bucket and separate offers. But these are the five things that I have learned. It is all about the offer. I said relevance converts. Bucket as best you can, make it easy and it gets done, and look at your numbers.
All right. Here is my email list. If you want to be on my email list it is info@ystore.com. You will get an auto responder that is probably seven years old with some old links in it, but you will be on my mailing list. I hit my list probably about three or four times a year.
And that is me. Thank y'all very much.
[applause] ~~~~~
Yahoo Store MULTIPLE IMAGE UPLOAD notes@@@@@@go to CONTROLS (last button on EDIT NAVBAR)
click on link: MULTIPLE IMAGE UPLOAD
upload the ZIP file just like you upload an IMAGE
STUFF YOU PROBABLY DON'T NEED TO KNOW
all files must be named same as orderable items 1234.jpg should match 1234 ID
the zip file shouldn't contain an IMAGE without a matching file. If it does, Yahoo Store just stalls and all the files after that do NOT get uploaded
the ZIP file should be a Y!Store friendly 5 megabytes or smaller IMHO
the JPEGS / GIFS inside should be no more than 80-90K each for load speed / Yahoo filter reasons
if you get the RED SQUARE where the image should be, either the IMAGE was too big (file size wise) or not a JPEG or GIF format.
~~~~~
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Yahoo Store Product Page@@@@@@Click the next button to see more Yahoo Store designs...~~~~~
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Yahoo Store RTML Custom Cart + Order Functionality@@@@@@This detail shows the CUSTOM ADD TO CART button and a QUANTITY field we added to the site using RTML to make it easier for folks to buy more, and to lose the ugly standard html buttons Yahoo! Stores are known for...~~~~~
Yahoo Store RTML Custom Navbar@@@@@@Logo design & custom icons by Logo Design Guy . Uploaded to Yahoo Store using RTML custom templates by Rob Snell.
Click the NEXT button to see more...~~~~~
Yahoo Store RTML Custom Site + Marketing Package Example@@@@@@http://www.streamlight-flashlights.com~~~~~
Yahoo Store RTML Footer Detail@@@@@@Using RTML (the proprietary markup language of Yahoo! Store) we were able to add a custom footer to each page of EMBROIDERTHIS.com. This detail shows the CUSTOM BUTTON for SEARCH and using the "NEXT" functionality which increases pageviews by encouraging customers to browse to the next page in a section or subsection of your Yahoo! Store...~~~~~
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Yahoo Store Secure Servers (Security & Credit Cards)@@@@@@Secure Server (SSL) Shopping Cart Order Form
Credit Cards
Real Time Authorization
Use First Data Gateway with your Merchant Account
Get a Merchant Account with Yahoo's credit card processor
Manual Credit Card Authorization: Process credit cards manually through your existing merchant account~~~~~
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Yahoo Store Support > "Secret" Manager/Editor backdoor login@@@@@@Sometimes you can't access your store.yahoo.com login due to Yahoo Store server maintenance issues. It's only happened to me maybe 8 or 9 times in the past 5 years, but when it does, it's EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING!
"Secret" Manager/Editor backdoor login : Use http://edit.store.yahoo.com/RT/EDITOR.YOUR-ACCOUNT-GOES-HERE/cgi-bin/mgr-startup?ADVANCED
Replace YOUR-ACCOUNT-GOES-HERE with your account name. Then click on INDEX and the MANAGER button should work.
Rob Snell
~~~~~
Yahoo Store Tip 1 -- You must get a DMOZ directory listing!@@@@@@(This falls under GET LINKS ) If you have unique content on your site, you MUST try to get a listing in the DMOZ. The DMOZ.com , or OPEN DIRECTORY project is huge collection of volunteer editors who catalog the web. I'm a editor in the STARKVILLE regional category for my hometown.
Search the DMOZ to find the category that best fits your Yahoo Store and write an effective directory listing. There are no guarantees for getting your Yahoo Store listed in the DMOZ. ~~~~~
Yahoo Store Tips - What I learned at Search Engine School...@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Tips & Tricks - Using Search Results to Create Relevant Landing Pages@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Store Tips & Tricks - by Michael Whitaker & Istvan Siposs@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/yahoo-store-tips-and-tricks.html~~~~~
Yahoo Store Tips -- JPEGS are for photos@@@@@@(1) JPEGs are great for photos!
(2) JPEGS are horrible for text logos, line art, and areas of flat color.
(3) JPEG compression is good, but if you can see the little bubbles and the image distorts, you've compressed the image too much. I usually compress the files about 15-25% depending on how the photos look after I compress them.
(4) Is your image less than 100x100 pixels? JPEGS work for Yahoo Store THUMBNAILS(or the ICON field) if the graphic is a photo.
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Yahoo Store Tips and Tricks@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo Trying to Sell HotJobs, Yahoo Small Business@@@@@@http://www.pehub.com/45262/yahoo-trying-to-sell-hotjobs-yahoo-small-business/~~~~~
Yahoo! Shopping drives traffic to your website.@@@@@@Get listed in Yahoo! Shopping! If you opt in, Yahoo! Shopping lists your store in their merchant directory and lists your products in their product database. This is a great way to get access to thousands and thousands of shoppers. Yahoo! Shopping is featured on the front page of Yahoo.com
Y!Shopping: STAR WARS T-SHIRT Story
In May 1999, just before the release of STAR WARS: Phantom Menace, Y!Shopping featured a link to all of the STAR WARS products currently on Yahoo! Shopping. We just happened to have added 13 Star Wars T-Shirts to our online store the day before. All of a sudden our t-shirts page was getting 1500 people a day looking at it. This generated more than enough revenue to pay for our Y!Store rent for the next year in a matter of days.
Want to know what's hot? Yahoo! will even tell you what people are looking to buy. Every week Yahoo releases the YAHOO! SHOPPING SEARCH - TOP 100 SEARCHES report which shows you what customers are looking for in Yahoo! Shopping. This list is comprised of popular consumer goods categories like computers and electronics, brand names like SONY and NIKE, and fads like Pokemon and DragonballZ.
Stores with great customer ratings get ranked higher in Yahoo! Shopping. Every time someone shops with you they have the chance to rate you (if you participate in Yahoo! Shopping). About 10% of the folks who buy will rate you which tends to skew your ratings a little. Customers who are very satisfied and customers who are very dissatisfied will rate you.
The exact ratio Yahoo! uses is a trade secret, but the key is somewhere around 90% positive ratings. If you ship products very quickly and keep in contact with your customers, you can build up a solid Y!rating in very little time.
You can also buy additional advertising in Yahoo! Shopping - Yahoo! Shopping features very large national retailers as "Featured Merchants." These stores pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their Yahoo! Shopping listings in front of the thousands of customers using Y!Shopping. If you get enough traffic from specialized directory pages or specific item searches, you can buy banner space, product space, and button space for as little as $5,000.~~~~~
Yahoo! Store & Google Product Search Optimization -- SingleFeed Webinar 1-27-2010@@@@@@
Howdy! I broke the Yahoo! Store FEEDS Webinar into 3 separate slide shows:
#1 Brian on Shopping Engines 101 ,
#2 Rob on Yahoo Stores & Feeds ,
#3 Ryan on Optimizing Feeds ,
or you can read the TRANSCRIPT below
Part 1 of 3 : Shopping Engine Success For Yahoo! Stores Jan 2010 Webinar View more presentations from Rob Snell .
Part 2 of 3 : (Rob Snell on) Shopping Engine Success For Yahoo! Stores Jan 2010 Webinar View more presentations from Rob Snell .
3 Of 3 Shopping Engine Success For Yahoo! Stores Webinar View more presentations from Rob Snell .
TRANSCRIPT
Rob: Howdy. All right. Let me get this thing fired up here. How we looking over there? All right. Cool. I’m up.
Slide #9
How ya’ll doing? Rob Snell. I’m here in Starkville, Mississippi. Today we are going to be talking about Yahoo! Stores, and your products, and getting in Google, and the SEO implications of shopping engines.
Slide #10
And the reason I am doing this, recently, I shot my mouth off on Yahoo! Store’s official SEO Webinar three or four months ago, and at PubCon during one of my three presentations that while I knew a lot about Yahoo! Store SEO, getting ranked in the Google Shopping results made my head hurt.
And fortunately, the guys from SingleFeed and the guys from Fast Pivot and a couple other guys were listening, and I got all these emails saying, “Hey, you need to talk to these guys at SingleFeed. They are doing Yahoo! Stores in the shopping engines, not just Google Products.”
So they contacted me after the show and I was really impressed. The main thing that got my attention was they are one of four companies that are endorsed by Google for doing feeds. I mean you can do feeds yourself. You can get somebody else to do them, but these guys are actually endorsed by Google as a company that does this for a living.
And my main takeaway from talking to SingleFeed guys is it is not good enough just to have a feed, which seems to be a big problem for most Yahoo! Stores, not meaning Google Products, but you have to optimize it. So I said, “OK. Show me.” And this was, I guess, back in October or November when we were working on it around the holidays. And we caught just the tail end of the holiday traffic.
And normally, I don’t do a Webinar about a subject that I am just brand spanking new to. I have been doing feeds with these guys maybe since November. And I am really speaking today more as a retailer than as a Yahoo! Store evangelist, as in this is working for me. And I know so many people out there in this economy are hurting and are needing extra sale, and this is the way to get it. Let me go through some of my stuff here.
Slide #11
I will have information from today’s Webinar on my website. If you go to Robsnell.com, I have got a link that says “Read this first” in the nav bar. Click on that. I got a ton of SEO stuff there. I got all my PubCon presentations; a lot of information there.
Most folks who are on this Webinar are on my newsletter, but if you want to join up, just drop an email to info@ystore.com. And I will repeat this at the end of my stick here.
Slide #12
Like I said, my name is Rob Snell. Most of you folks know me. I am from Starkville, Mississippi. We have multiple Yahoo! Stores. Today, I am going to be specifically talking about our family business, which is owned by my brother and me. We sell training supplies for hunting dogs. Gun Dog Supply. We have been online with Yahoo! Store since before it was Yahoo! Store. Back in ’97 is when we got started.
After I built my store, Paul Graham, the guy who created Yahoo! Store, contacted me and said, “Hey, you did such a good job on your folks’ store, why don’t you consider doing this for other folks?” And I said great, and I became a Yahoo! Store developer. And I used to do that. I am kind of semi-retired from that now.
Slide #13
The Dummies folks contacted me a few years ago. I wrote a book called “Starting a Yahoo! Business for Dummies”. It is on Amazon. It is probably three or four years old now, but the information in there on the marketing and the merchandising stuff is still pretty good.
Slide #14
I speak about Yahoo! Store and e-commerce for small business folks all the time. I just got back from Iceland. Had a pretty cool keynote there.
Slide #15
But why am I doing this Webinar about shopping feeds? The thing is, is that Google Product Search is so much more important today than it was a year ago. It is probably five to 10 times more important because of some changes that Google is making with the organic search results, and I am going to go into that.
Slide #16
Back in the good ole’ days, Froogle, which was Google Product Search, it was built on the back of Yahoo! Store. The guys at Google contacted Yahoo!, if I understand the story right, got permission to get all the XML feeds from 45,000 stores, and they actually built their shopping engine off of Yahoo! Stores. So by default, I mean we were the basis for their shopping engine. And this was, I don’t know, five, six, seven years ago. I don’t remember. It was a while back.
And it never sent a ton of traffic. I remember how everybody was disappointed. Google was getting into shopping and then nothing happened. And so Froogle just kind of didn’t do anything.
Well then, they changed it to Google Base and they have made all these changes, and I never really followed it because it wasn’t 1% of my sales. We would get some traffic from it, but most of my traffic would be from AdWords ads running on the Google product pages.
And then, the Google Products, sometimes they would scrape your site, like the organic Google Bot crawler would. Sometimes you had to submit an XML file. It was really complicated. But Yahoo! Store took care of this in the backend.
In the good old days, all you had to do was turn on your XML and it would automatically suck that data down into Google. And the thing was that your products weren’t really optimized, because they started adding all these new fields, all these different parameters, like brand, and UPC, and manufacturer part number.
And the way that Yahoo! Store generates thumbnails, if you change the size of your thumbnails and republished, the old thumbnail URL’s wouldn’t work anymore because Yahoo! does crazy stuff with the way they do images.
Slide #17
And then last year, in June or July, Google added this new mandatory field called “condition”, which Brian was talking about a minute ago. And if you don’t have condition…and for most of us, the condition would be “new”. For some folks it would be “used”. And there are a couple other conditions. If you don’t have this condition in your product feed, then Google doesn’t like you.
Slide #18
And so immediately, if you had a Legacy store like mine with the info XML, your store is not in Google Product Search, unless you had a custom solution.
Slide #19
You go to Google Products…I was just doing this last night for some little baby products that I have got. I may be making $500 a month off this little baby store that I did 5 years ago. But you do site:yourdomain.com at Froogle.com, which will take you to the Google Products, and you can see if you are in there. And this basically tells you that if you have a Legacy store, you are not in there, which was totally freaking me out on these things.
And again, it was maybe 1% of my sales and my traffic. I mean I could spend my time on SEO and get such a higher ROI, a bigger bang for my buck, by going and getting more links, developing content, and all that kind of stuff, and grow greater than 1%.
Slide #20
But things keep changing, and especially the last three or four months. Google has been increasing the number of search queries in the organic search results and including shopping results, and that is why this is a big deal for me now. That is why I am getting religious about product feeds.
So I am looking at shopping feeds and comparison shopping engines from the vantage point of a person who gets a lot of free traffic through organic, through SEO, somebody who does pay-per-click, but shopping has never been a major challenge for us. But now, you have got to pay attention to it. You have got to make sure you are in there, and you have to optimize it.
Slide #21
And so, it is January, and if you don’t have a custom feed, or you haven’t added “condition” to your XML files and to your product files, then you are missing out on tons of free traffic, and you may be losing some SEO traffic that you don’t even know about.
Slide #22
Search engine optimization is always changing. I mean every 90 days, it seems there is just like a change of how you go about doing things or what the engines are doing. You always have to stay on top of it.
Slide #23
But one thing seems to be a constant: Google has more than 50% market share. Google is the 800 pound gorilla, followed by Bing, Yahoo!…
Brian: Rob, I have to interrupt. They look like Pac-Man right there.
Rob: Yeah, yeah. And they are eating all their competitors. And it freaks me out a little bit how much of my traffic these days comes from Google. And I am getting 75%, 80% of my traffic on most of the sites that I work on from the Google site.
Slide #24
Let’s take a look at the search engine results page. So when someone goes to Google and they do a product based search like “orange dog collars”.
Slide #25
In the yellow there, you are going to see the organic search results. And most of all you all know this. This is free. Google crawls the web. It finds websites. It follows links. It uses an algorithm to determine the rankings based upon relevancy. I talk about this ad nauseum on my website and in my book. I am obsessed over getting ranked here. And for this query, you can see that I am number one and number two.
Slide #26
Also, above the top and down the right-hand side, you can see the sponsored links or pay-per-click advertising. You have to pay to be in these positions. So this is the other half of search engine marketing, pay-per-click. And as you all know, you have to pay to be in here, but you only pay when people actually click on your ads.
The thing that is changing, though, is they have this thing called “universal search results”, where the search engines are now pulling information from multiple places. Not only are they pulling stuff from the organic index and from PPC ads, but they are also pulling results from their video search database. And sometimes, if a video is relevant to a search query, Google will pop that up.
Slide #27
And down here at the bottom in the pink, you will see the shopping results for “orange dog collars”. This screenshot is probably from 6-8 months ago. It is one of my pet queries that I use in a lot of presentations. And you will notice, I am not listed here. And it is a generic search. It is pretty broad. There is not a product called “orange dog collar” that we sell. But if you look down there at Petco, you see the words “orange dog collar” in the name of their feeds. And not only do they have a feed and they are in there, but they are also optimizing for it.
Slide #28
And like I said, the SingleFeed guys contacted me and educated me about what I was supposed to do, and then did some stuff behind the scenes. And this is just a quick overview of what we had to go through over the four or five weeks of setting things up. I mean I had to set up an account. I had to do some things that Yahoo! normally does behind the scenes if you are using Yahoo! for your feed. I had to set up a Google Merchant Center account. I had to unhook my XML. I had to email Google to get them to undo Yahoo! as my feed provider. Then I had to go add these custom shopping fields to STORE.
And then, the guys at SingleFeed had the Yahoo! Store developer FastPivot, who are some hillbilly buddies of mine from North Carolina, they went in and did some RTML, because I have got a Legacy store, so they made me an export template.
And then SingleFeed did all this stuff. I know they are not getting enough credit with these two lines here. They categorized the products. They cleaned up the data. They set up some rules. And then they started sending my information to Google.
Slide #29
Here is a screenshot of the Google Merchant Center. One thing that you don’t really think about, you actually have to go create an account, and this is kind of like your AdWords account. You can kind of think of it that way.
Slide #30
And the thing is, we got pretty fast results. I mean I kind of set it up…I had a whole bunch of other things going on. And then Ryan started emailing me, and he said, “What do you think about your Christmas present?” And I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?” So I said, “I need to go check and see, because maybe we are getting some results.”
Slide #31
And like Brian was saying a minute ago, are you even in Google Products Search? So if you go to google.com/products or froogle.com and type this query in, type in site:yourdomain.com, you can actually see if you are showing up.
Slide #32
And lo and behold, we were showing up. So I did site: gundogsupply.com, and all of a sudden, wham, all my products came up. And I was getting really excited here. And I could see some of the work that we had done paying off. I could see that our products were…you could filter by brand, and those were brands that we had specified in our data feeds, going in and hand coding every single product with a manufacturer field.
You can also see here by one of the product listings, you can see the new field. You have to have condition for your products to be included in Google. There is also a free shipping field. This product is more than $125, so the guys at FastPivot made our template say anything that is more than $125, turn on the free shipping field.
Slide #33
And you can see the seller ratings. We have 430 ratings, and that is taken into account in the algorithm as far as a return in results. And one of the really cool things is that I cut off the Yahoo! Store ratings that came out…When somebody places an order, as a merchant, you can give them the option to rate the transaction on those five different things. And I think we change the order motion. And at that time, for some reason we just cut it off. And of these 431 reviews, all but about four or five of them are actually from 2007 and before. So it is pretty cool that you still get credit for those. But that is a really important thing to turn that on, because that helps your ratings.
Slide #34
OK. Let’s actually look at some specific results. This is a keyword that converted into a sale. Somebody went to Google and searched for “Lewis dog boots”. And there you see it. It is right there in the shopping results. We are popping up. We are popping up above the organic results. If you look at the organic results, you can see us listed there. But at the very, very bottom, you can see Steve’s blogs listed there, too.
Slide #35
But in this example, somebody did this search. They ignored my organic listings. They ignored the ads. And the clicked on my Google Shopping results, went to the store, and placed and order. So that is a converting keyword right there.
Slide #36
Here is another example that really freaks me out, and this is why I was like, “I have got to talk to all my peeps about making sure that not only are they in Google Products, but they are optimizing for Google Products.”
Slide #37
All right. “smartwork dog training books”. This is a search on Google for this type of books that we actually publish. My brother has a publishing career that nobody knows about.
But if you will notice this, look how far down the page this is. Someone has skipped over the organic results, where we are ranked #1 and #2, the holy graile of search engine optimization, and they are going to the shopping results. And this totally freaked me out, because this tells me that shopping is so much more important than it was a year ago.
A year ago, Google shopping was maybe 1% of folks’ traffic. For me, half of that traffic was coming from my AdWords ads that I was running because I was too lazy to figure out shopping stuff. But now, I mean it is so much more important. You have to pay attention to this kind of stuff.
Slide #38
And the way that I know it is working on my end, I love Yahoo! Web Analytics. A lot of folks are running Google Analytics. I am running that too, but I am deep, deep, deep into the Yahoo! Web Analytics.
And if you want to see how much traffic you are getting from Google Products…Wait, let me say one more thing. On the Shopping Search results…let me go back. In my analytics, I can see that 60% of my traffic from this feed is coming from people clicking on the shopping results for “smartworks dog training books”, going to the Froogle part of Google, poking around, and then clicking and going to my site. They are actually coming from that small…just from Product Search.
So they search on Google. Then they bop around inside Product Search. Then they go to my store. But, this is the important thing: 40% of the clicks that I am getting from SingleFeed right now are coming straight from the search results page. That means they are clicking on that “smartworks for retrievers,” the red down there, which goes straight to my Yahoo! Store.
And one thing is if you don’t tag your shopping feed URL’s, you will never know that that was a click from being in the shopping feed. Because in your Analytics, it is going to show up just as a search query, like, “Search for hunting dog boots.”
You cannot tell the difference right now in a click from that little thumbnail compared to a click from your organic listings.
And so, what you think happens, “Hey, my organic traffic is doing fine,” but you may be giving some of the credit for your SEO efforts to clicks that are coming from an unoptimized feed by accident.
Slide #39
And the way we found out, we looked in Yahoo! Web Analytics. I set up filters to say, “Show me all the customers who are coming from Google.com/products and the URL.” And I looked back. And I switched over to the new Yahoo! Web Analytics, I guess, back in June. And you can see here…I mean this is just a trickle of traffic. I went back to my old analytics. I was using Index Tools up until the middle of the year. And I was getting maybe 10-20 people, even before Google changed and shot all the Yahoo! Stores in the head and said, “You can’t be in Google Products unless you jump through these hoops.”
Slide #40
And look at this. You can tell when I hooked up with SingleFeed here. And this isn’t a million visitors a day. But this is, you know, anywhere from a buck to three bucks a click. This is awesome traffic that I am paying $99 a month to be doing this. That is why I am pushing these guys.
Slide #41
And here you can see, these are all the visitors that have the tag. If you guys at SingleFeed can jump in right now if you can, is there a switch in SingleFeed where you have to click a button or something to automatically tag your URL’s, or does it automatically happen?
Ryan: So, yeah. There is a little tiny checkbox to append tracking code URL’s. And this is something that is applicable to Google Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics, Core Metrics, Omniture; whatever kind of tracking codes you want to throw on there, you guys can customize these. By default, we can do Google Analytics just with the click of a mouse.
Rob: Yeah, and I think that is what happened. Either I clicked it on or you guys did, because all of a sudden, they started showing up with this filter that I set up. So in Yahoo! Web Analytics, I have got a custom report that I have got bookmarked, and so I can just go look and press a button and see exactly how much traffic I am getting. And my traffic from Google Products actually shot up before my tagged URL traffic did. That’s why I am bringing that up.
Slide #42
But like I said, I didn’t get a million dollars in sales from this. Since the thing turned on about December 13th, as of last week, we had 131 extra orders.
Slide #43
And if you annualize that, you know, you are looking at less than $70,000 a year on a multi-million dollar Yahoo! Store. But this is just showing up. I mean, we weren’t even really optimized for, I’d say, 90% of that graph. Just now we got all the manufacturers added. We are in there adding UPC’s and part numbers.
Slide #44
Now what? I guess the question is, “Do you want to let Yahoo! Store handle your feeds? Do you want to let the default settings that apply to 45,000 other stores control your destiny now that Google is actually pushing Google products on the homepage?” So it is 5-10 times more important now to be in control of what is showing up there.
Or, do you want an expert? In my life, it is like I either have to become that expert or hire that expert. And with SingleFeed, man, they take care of a lot of that kind of stuff.
And my disclaimer here. I am not getting paid for doing this Webinar. I am not an affiliate of SingleFeed. They have asked me to become one because I am getting a bunch of folks going over there. Any revenue that I get from SingleFeed, if you mention my name, anything that comes to me, I am going to donate to the Red Cross for Haiti, because I don’t want to…I like to be independent. I am not a Communist, but it is something that is important. And the reason I am talking about this stuff is because it is important for retailers, not so that I can make an extra $1,000 or something.
Slide #45
All right. So let’s talk about adding mandatory fields. You can do this yourself. My friend Shauna at One Choice for YStore has got a great video on Youtube. If you want to do this yourself, if you have a merchant solutions store, if you want to turn on the condition field…And probably half the people on this call have already done this, because maybe you sell more consumer oriented products than I do. I mean I sell weird specialty niche stuff. Most of my clients sell weird specialty niche stuff; stuff that is not really…You know, it is not iPods and shoes. So shopping engines haven’t been that important to us.
But she has got a great video. It is five minutes long. It walks you through how to turn on these things that you have to turn on.
Slide #46
And as a Yahoo! Store owner, you need to know if you have a Merchant Solutions store or a Legacy store. If you are like me, I have had a store since ’97. We are Legacy stores. If you opened up a new store today, it will be a Merchant Solutions store.
Slide #47
The main difference is that there are two different XML feeds. If you go into your Yahoo! Store Manager, I mean you can tell by looking at the top of your account; you know what you got. But I mean Legacy Stores only have the first XML feeds. But people who “upgrade” to Merchant Solutions get both. And I have a pretty strong opinion about that, but I will talk about that in a minute.
Slide #48
So to get our data out of our Yahoo! Store, to get our product data out, because we are a Legacy Store, because of some funky things Legacy Stores don’t do, we had to get some custom RTML from FastPivot. They were awesome and they knocked it out really fast.
Slide #49
And here is like an example of the feed. And basically, it is a text file. They take the data and they…Like I said, remember about the free shipping field a little while ago? It is a smart page, in that if the product price is more than $125, it puts free shipping in there. If it is less than $125, it doesn’t. So there are some cool things that they can do with that.
Slide #50
And then we had to actually go in and add custom fields.
Slide #51
Merchant Solutions is easier. It is really easy to add a field, or tons of fields, to Merchant Solutions Stores. But if you are a Legacy Store, Yahoo! is going to charge you a 50% increase in revenue share. And to me, the ability to add custom fields is the only advantage to having a Merchant Solutions Store.
With a multimillion dollar store, if you want a 50% increase in that Yahoo! revshare, go ahead. I am not going to do it. I am going to do the hard work.
Slide #52
Here is an example on the Merchant Solutions. You go to Store Manager, you go to Catalogue Manager, you click on the tables. I am not going to go through all the details o this, but here is a list of the fields that you can select. This is under Shopping Fields. And you can see on here where I have added “condition”, which is the main one, and “classification”.
Slide #53
All right. If you are a Yahoo! Store owner and you have a Legacy Store, I am going to touch on a couple of these things. You need to get your propeller head to know about this. As a retailer, you don’t have to know about types. But the guy who is programming your store, or whoever does your RTML or your templates, your developer, they can tell you whether you have the default types or custom types.
Slide #54
If you have custom types, which is really cool, all you have to do is go to one place and you can add all the fields that you want to add, hit update, and boom; it is rolled out across the entire store. You publish and it is done. I mean you go to the “types”, you click on the “custom types”…
Your propeller head can do this. If you have questions, you can email me, but this isn’t a tutorial on that.
Slide #55
If you are like me and have a store that is 12 years old, I still had 600 products that are literally 12 years old. These are the default item.types. So we had to go in and hand add, to every single one of these 600 products, a manufacturer field, a UPC field, a manufacturer part number to every single product. And it sucks, but it is better than the revshare increase.
Slide #56
All right. So I made a utility template on my Yahoo! Store so we could go in and do this, and this is an example showing the name of the product. And then on the right-hand column, that is a list of the manufacturer names. We had to go in and add all this data into the fields now that they were on the Yahoo! Store.
Slide #57
And so, we started off with brand or manufacturer. Now we are adding UPC data and manufacturer number. Just a quick note on UPC fields. If you put the wrong UPC # in there, or like the UPC # with a space, Google will spit it back out. Like last week, one of my best products disappeared from Google Product Search. We tried to figure out why and we found that it had a bad UPC # in that. So I went in and took out the space.
SingleFeed scrapes every single day. It republishes every single day. It pushes the data every single day to Google. So within two days, SingleFeed had gotten it, fixed it, and uploaded it to Google and we were as good as new.
Slide #58
If you are competing with like the Amazon’s and Cabela’s of the world, you need the same quality product information. So you need to have the brand, the UPC #, the manufacturer number. If you sell books, you need the ISBN. If you sell digital cameras, you need all the specs that are in Google.
Slide #59
A good tool to see what specs other folks are using is tomthedeveloper.com. He may be a competitor of SingleFeed in a way. He is a consultant, but he has got a cool free online tool that you can go in and do this competitor analysis. And at the bottom, you probably can’t see that, but you can see…this is one of my products. You can see the product type, the UPC code, the ID, the brand. And you can see that I’ve got two custom attributes showing up now: the shipping field and this product_ad_extension_trademark_cleared, which I am not even sure what that is.
Slide #60
One note. Once you get your feeds set up, if you have an AdWords account, you can marry up your AdWords account and your Google Merchant Center so that you can take advantage and pump some of your feed stuff into your AdWords ads.
I don’t really have a lot of time to get into that, but if you search for “orange dog collars”, sometimes you will see “show products from Gun Dog Supply for orange dog collars”. If you click on that little plus sign, this box will open and you can see different products. And there are some fields inside your feed where you can control what products they are or what products actually show…
SingleFeed guys, help me out. Is there a field where you can actually say what keywords to show on the product level? I am not sure, but we can touch on that.
Slide #61
All right. Just to sum up. It is January 2010. If you don’t have a custom feed, or if you haven’t added “condition” manually, you are missing out on tons of free Google traffic.
Slide #62
I have got a ton of information on my website. Click on the “read this first”. My email is rob atsign ystore.com. I try to answer anybody who emails me questions. I like to talk about this kind of stuff. I got tons of free info on my site. Sign up for my newsletter with info atsymbol ystore.com. And fellas, that’s me. I am done. Let me turn it back over to Brian and Ryan.
This is the email I sent out:
-- -- -- --
Recently, I shot my mouth off on a Yahoo! Store WEBINAR and at
PUBCON that while I knew Yahoo! Store SEO pretty well, getting
well-ranked in the Google shopping results makes my head hurt.
Fortunately, the guys from SingleFeed were listening, contacted me
after the show, and told me they knew comparison shopping engine
feeds like I know SEO.
My main takeaway from them was "It's not good enough to just HAVE a
feed. You have to OPTIMIZE IT." Ok. So show me!
Sign up because you need this info:
http://bit.ly/robsnell-webinar
Free Yahoo! Store WEBINAR:
"Optimizing Google Products / Shopping Feeds for YAHOO! STORES"
next Wednesday, January 27 @ 1pm Eastern, 12noon Central, 10AM Pacific
LIMITED SEATING:
Look: I'm sending this to over 3000 Yahoo! Store owners.
I want to cap attendance at ~125 REAL store owners so we can handle questions,
so if you are NOT a store owner, please DON'T sign up!
If we get swamped like last time, we'll do another one ASAP.
SPEND / EFFORT:
I spend $99 a month on Singlefeed for one store. I had to add
a manufacturer field to my products, and change a few settings
on my Google Merchant account, but it was really easy.
RESULTS:
Our new feeds were indexed and showing up in Google on 12/13.
Since then we've gotten 2986 EXTRA visitors,
131 orders, with $7817.65 in sales.
And I know SOMEONE will say that bump's just the last week of the
Christmas season, so check this out: In the past 19 days, I've
gotten 1713 extra visitors, with 77 extra orders for an extra $3588
in sales that I would not have gotten otherwise, JUST from free
Google Shopping clicks. Sweet!
Multiply this increase out for the rest of the year and I'm looking
at an extra $68,927 from FREE Google traffic I didn't have before.
And to be TOTALLY candid, we've only really gotten started. Now
we're adding more data and more custom fields to more products to
optimize them to get MORE free traffic. And I'm rolling this across
ALL MY YAHOO! STORES now!
WANT TO KNOW HOW "I" DID IT?
I'll take all the credit, but Ryan and the SINGLEFEED guys did most
the work. Some of the same concepts from SEO apply, but you have to
have all the right info in all the right fields. Get ready to take
some notes!
Please sign up for our FREE ONE-HOUR WEBINAR
Next Wednesday, January 27 at
1:00PM ET / 12NOON CT/ 10:00AM PT
http://bit.ly/robsnell-webinar
I'm a guest on their webinar on optimizing your Yahoo! Store
for shopping engines. We'll share what we did, what worked,
what we're working on now, as well as what's next.
These guys know what they're doing. If you're interested in
getting more traffic/sales from Google, or sticking your little
toe into another source of shopping traffic, it's worth a listen.
DISCLAIMER:
Personally, I'm not selling anything, nor getting paid if you
sign up for SINGLEFEED, although if I get 100 people to show up,
they said they'll give me a t-shirt.
I probably SHOULD be an affiliate, but I'm doing this for them
for free because they give away SUCH good info.
And even though I'm a guest, but I have a feeling we'll take
over the webinar! ;)
Thanks!
Rob Snell ~~~~~
Yahoo! Store 101@@@@@@I'm so excited about Y!Store101, that I can't sleep. I woke up at 3:37 a.m. and I realized I had to immediately get out of bed and write you about our new seminar and workshop.
Let's face it. If you’re a Yahoo Store owner, you’re slammed! You are extremely busy taking care of customers, managing your employees, maintaining your web site, processing orders, and running your business. If you are like 99% of the Yahoo Store owners I run across every day, you don't have any time to waste. Every second counts, so you must do anything you can to ramp up your business to better market your Yahoo Store!
What if you could pick the brains of three of the world's leading Yahoo Store design, development, and marketing consultants over a couple of days in sunny California? Do you think you could learn lessons from the most successful Yahoo Stores? Do you think you could spare the time? Do you think you could afford not to?
~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Editor makes it easy to build & maintain good looking pages@@@@@@Even with the standard battleship gray side-buttons and other Yahoo! Store defaults, you can have a functional store. With only a few minor tweaks, you can have a very presentable ecommerce application.
There are three levels of STORE EDITOR for the various experience levels of USERS. BEGINNER, REGULAR, & ADVANCED editing. The first level is really only good for learning the most basic Y!Store concepts. The Regular interface shows most of the features you'll be using on a daily basis. The ADVANCED EDITOR gives you access to everything you'll need to customize your Yahoo! Store from RTML templates to database uploads.
Adding, Deleting, Editing & Moving products around is simple. It's very easy to teach your staff the most useful functions in a matter of minutes. If they're sophisticated enough to have an email account and browse the web, then they'll be able to handle the most common applications of a Yahoo! Store.
Want to change the price on an item? Login at http://store.yahoo.com. Select the EDITOR. Go to the item page. Click EDIT. Change the Price. Click UPDATE. Go to the home page. Click PUBLISH. The price is now changed.
You can also restrict different users to what information they can see by using the ACCESS feature.
There are 15 predetermined looks with colors and fonts. The majority of stores on Y!Shopping use these looks, so if you want a unique look, you have to try a little harder, but these are a step up from the default gray templates. (Yuck!)
Yahoo! Store offers customizable templates so beginners can get pretty good results with predefined HOME, SECTION, and PRODUCT page templates. Once you format the templates with the colors, fonts, and buttons you want, adding a new product or section that looks great is as easy as clicking one button to upload an image and write the product name, description, and price.
Each product has its own separate page using static html which is better for search engines. Most ecommerce solutions rely on databases that dynamically generate the html as you are looking for something. Looking for POWERPUFF Underoos at a major entertainment e-tailer? Their database creates a page that lists all of the available POWERPUFF articles available for sale. Unfortunately, when the search engine robot comes crawling across their site, these pages don't get indexed.
Advanced users can place html inside templates for a unique look. You can format text with html tags, add extra graphics stored in your FILES library, add simple forms, and even use your own HTML documents using the RAW-HTML template.
Bulk uploads for larger catalogs are available for advanced users. If you have a database or text file of your products, you can use the BULK UPLOAD feature so you don't have to manually add each product. I created a 3500 item store using a distributor's catalog on a CD-ROM in about 3 hours one night.
Power Users & Developers can build custom looks using RTML template scripting language. If you understand HTML tables, RTML isn't that hard. This proprietary language has very little documentation, but there is a group of enthusiasts in the Ystore Clubs forum who share RTML secrets and tips with each other.~~~~~
Yahoo! Store For Dummies@@@@@@Build your store from scratch, or make the one you have more profitable. His online business has been paying his mortgage for years. Now Rob Snell is sharing his Yahoo! Store secrets for planning, building, and managing an online store that delivers the goods! Here's how to profit from keywords, handle credit-card payments, find out what's hot in other stores, maximize your marketing efforts, and much more.
Discover how to
* Use the Yahoo! Store Editor and Manager
* Plan effective store navigation
* Use better images to sell more products
* Build successful advertising strategies
* Generate more traffic from search engines
From the Back Cover
Turn browsers into buyers, boost traffic, and more. Build your store from scratch, or make the one you have more profitableHis online business has been paying his mortgage for years. Now Rob Snell is sharing his Yahoo! Store secrets for planning, building, and managing an online store that delivers the goods! Here's how to profit from keywords, handle credit-card payments, find out what's hot in other stores, maximize your marketing efforts, and much more.
~~~~~
Yahoo! Store For Dummies@@@@@@http://www.ystorebooks.com/~~~~~
Yahoo! Store help is available@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo! Store hosts your online catalog on their servers@@@@@@There's no expensive web catalog building software needed. You use your browser and an internet connection to build your store. Yahoo! hosts the LIVESTORE store building software on their servers.
Use your browser (Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer) and the Yahoo! Store Manager/Editor to build and maintain your store using the Yahoo! Store EDITOR. You can log in from anywhere in the world and look at your orders, requests, and statistics
SIDEBAR - Rob on Vacation
All you need is product information & graphics, your business terms and conditions, and the methods of payment you accept to build your store. To turn your store on, Yahoo! requires that you have a merchant account with a credit card processor so they can verify that you have the ability to process the crediit card numbers you collect via their secure server.
Yahoo! can also host your domain name. Using NETWORK SOLUTIONS you can reserve your domain name so www.mycompany.com points to your Yahoo! Store. Y!Store can also redirect email to your POP accounts so Ed@MyCompany.com goes to your email box.~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Ideas Not Fully Addressed in the DUMMIES Book@@@@@@Q&A to First Panel by Rep. Charlie Gonzalez
In 1997, we launched our first online store and since then,
I’m also going to talk about how other small businesses can use search marketing to gain a competitive advantage over those using more traditional methods of advertising.
I’ll also touch on the some of the pitfalls of this new advertising medium, and address some concerns I have as a small business owner.
I speak at search marketing conferences, perform seminars and Webinars, write a blog about retailing, and write guest columns from time to time for Yahoo! Small Business.
My client’s sites (combined) will do closer to a hundred million dollars this year. Yahoo! Stores in general will do closer to $5 billion this year (estimated).
Before the Internet, my brother & I were comic book retailers working the daily grind. My parents sold premium dog food and worked their retail store 6 days a week. My Dad was still loading customers’ cars with 50 lb. bags of dog food when he retired.
COLLEGE -- In 1985, I thought I escaped from the family business when I went to college at Mississippi State and majored in graphic design. My brother arrived a couple of years later, we started our own company selling comics books and baseball cards. After we graduated, we expanded that business to 5 retail stores and a mail order business which we would also take to the Internet 10 years later.
Sidebar: ABOUT YAHOO STORE -- The Yahoo! Store platform is an online store builder and Web hosting service where retailers own their own store and are responsible for driving customers. Yahoo! Store is a little different than some other, more familiar ways to sell on the Internet like eBay and Amazon. To me, eBay is like the flea market ( a XYZ billion dollar flea market) where you compete against used products, closeouts, gray-market goods, and even stolen merchandise. Amazon is like the high-end shopping mall. Amazon sells products themselves, and competes against their retailers. Amazon will let you sell your products through their store for a hefty fee (13-17% of your sales).
Yahoo! Store is like the online strip mall across the street. You rent the store, but you own the store itself. Your products are on your own Web site, not eBay’s, but unlike a mall or a flea market, you are responsible for getting your own visitors to your Yahoo! Store.
As a consultant and speaker, my job is to teach the little guy to whoop up on the big guys using search marketing. We use the Internet to leverage the strengths of small business: unparalleled product knowledge, enthusiasm for what we sell and do, and outstanding customer service and support.
Then Google came along.
We started advertising on Google back in 2003. Spent $
One client did $15,000 back in 2003. In 2008 he’ll easily pass the $3 million dollar mark. All of his traffic is from search engines. Mostly free traffic, but a lot from paid search ads as well…
We took new pictures and wrote new product descriptions and made what we THOUGHT
With no warning, one Friday the 13th, we had 6 feet of muddy Pearl River water in our house for 6 days.
I was looking over some old records from the early 1980s, and o
which was code for we’re poor, don’t ask for anything that costs anything.
By the time we headed off to college, it looked like they were finally going to make it.
when we mailed it out to our entire mailing list
to promote the dog supply business
And it was SO EASY. You didn’t have to be a programmer or developer. You clicked a button, typed in a product name, description, and price, uploaded a picture, clicked another button and you were selling on the Internet.
And color was free! Turns out search engines like unique content, not just recycled product descriptions from the manufacturer
YAHOO BANNERS -- I liked the results the banner ads were getting, so I called Yahoo to ask about buying some banner ads. The ad rep asked me a few questions and told me that their minimum was $10,000 a month. Holy cow! I was willing to pay for traffic, but not $10,000…
either selling products or promoting their black & white catalog
Thanks to our success on the Web, thanks our Yahoo! Stores
like Infoseek, Excite, Hotbot, Altavista, and the Yahoo! directory.
And there was something else about this traffic.
I started noticing these keywords inside every other merchant order email.
I have been a small business owner for over twenty years.
My parents started their company when I was 5 years old, so I grew up in small business retail. We sell dog collars: Leather dog collars, electronic dog training collars, and GPS dog tracking collars. If your hunting dog needs it, we sell it.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s MSN
Our cost of designing, printing, and postage for a paper catalog was over a dollar, but that cost dropped to a couple of cents when we got on the Web.
There are two types of search engine traffic: free traffic and paid traffic.
Free search traffic comes from visitors who search for a keyword phrase and click a link in the free search results which usually the left side of the screen.
Paid search traffic comes from visitors who click on our ads which are the sponsored results which show at the top and right side of your screen.
Both kinds of search traffic are very valuable, but extremely different forms of marketing, and I’ll discuss the differences and advantages of each.
PAID SEARCH WORKS -- With an online store, a small retailer can instantly have access to millions of potential customers. With as little as a $5 deposit in a Google Adwords account, a small business owner can buy targeted advertising and get instant traffic to his Web site for as little as pennies a visitor. Retailers can run national ad campaigns targeted only to folks searching for what they sell. You can buy ads but only for keyword searches relevant to your product mix. Local retailers can also target their ads to run only in the specific markets they serve. No other marketing method can touch search engine marketing for targeting the right prospects in the right places at the right time – when folks are ready to buy.
FREE SEARCH IS EVEN BETTER -- When I took all the content from the print catalog and used that for the online catalog, what I didn’t know at the time was that 50 pages of text covering hundreds of products would be the secret to our online success with the search engines.
Future Blog Posts -- Random Snippets Go Here
Thank you~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Manager - User Friendly Business Management & Marketing Tools@@@@@@Manage & Process Orders on secure server with Yahoo! Manager. The Manager is the first page you come to on your Yahoo! Store. It displays basic sales and traffic information at a glance, gives you access to the EDITOR, and houses the various tools and reports you use to manage the back end of your Yahoo! Store.
Receive Orders via email, FAX, or Secure Server Login. There are three basic ways that Store Owners are notified when a customer places an order: Email, FAX, and from the Manager.
Most Y!Store owners get an email from Yahoo! whenever a customer places an order. Unless you have encrypted email, you do not receive sensitive customer data such as credit card numbers and expiration dates in the email. This email also shows customer comments, so if there is a question about a product or order, you can simply reply to the order because the reply address is the one your customer input on the secure order form.
The second way is via FAX. You add your FAX number and usually within seconds of a customer placing an order, the Yahoo! FAX server sends you a FAX that has all of the information needed to fill the order including credit card information. This FAX can also be used as a pick ticket or invoice.
You can also login to the MANAGER and view and download orders from the ORDERS section on the Y!Secure Server.
Powerful STATISTICS tools show sources of revenue & traffic from search engines and your other sources of traffic.
Track where sales are coming from with REFERENCES to see what keywords your customers use to find you
Manage Email lists of customers for inexpensive and effective marketing
Track links through simple Affiliate Program Manager
Configure accepted payment methods & shipping methods and rates
Customize your order form and site settings
See individual customer paths through CLICK TRAILS
Submit pages to most popular search engines
Manage domain name and email settings~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Marketing -- Rob Snell's 2008 PUBCON Presentation@@@@@@ Yahoo Store Marketing -- 17 Things to Make More With Your Yahoo! Store
SLIDE: Snell Brothers
I have been doing this for a long time. Like I said, it was late ′96 when we started looking and early ′97 when we got started. Ever since then I have been writing about e-commerce, speaking about e-commerce, doing Yahoo! Store seminars. I write a blog sometimes.
SLIDE: Blog
About three years ago the Dummies folks called me up and said, “Hey, do you want to write a book? Yahoo Store for Dummies?” Sure! This book came out a couple of years ago. Right now it is about 60% obsolete thanks to the features Jimmy and his team keep cranking out. I am going to have to rewrite another book, but the marketing information in there is still pretty good.
SLIDE: Congress
The highlight of my career was getting invited to testify in front of the United States Congress this summer about the impact that the Internet has had on small business, specifically how search marketing has changed the fortunes of small business folks. I told the guys in Congress, “Just don’t mess it up. Search marketing is working great. Please don’t mess with it.”
SLIDE:]
SLIDE: 1 change increased our conversion rate 20%
Page 4 About four years ago we made one change in our company philosophy and that decision increased our conversion rate almost instantly by 20%. What did we do? We told folks what to buy. We used to just offer products and let people make their own decisions about what they wanted to buy, but once we actively expressed our opinions online, sales went up. People are busy. They have a lot of choices. They don’t want to have to wade through all this information. For example, one of our Yahoo! Stores -- Gun Dog Supply -- is a company that sells training supplies for hunting dogs. My brother actually uses the products that we sell. So if you have got a Pointer and you do field trials in Texas, or if you have got a Springer Spaniel and you hunt upland game in the mountains, we sell what your kind of folks are looking for. And we’re REAL retailers. We are not a drop shipper. We are not folks who just put something in a box and ship it out. We actually use the products that we sell. Real retailers can leverage this to your advantage. Here is an example of a product that we sell.
SLIDE: Example Review
This is an online product review that Steve wrote. We sell 1600, 1700 different products. Some products are better than others for specific situations. Once we realized that directing folks to what they actually needed instead of letting them have to wade through all that other stuff, our sales went up. Page 5
SLIDE: 2 -- Give folks enough info to decide for themselves
The second part is giving folks enough information to decide for themselves. I am going to recommend that you need a Sport Basic for training your pet to stop jumping up on your kitchen countertops. But if you don’t believe me, you can go through the information on our Website and our buyer’s guide and actually find out for yourself and make your own decision.
SLIDE: Example Buyer’s Guide
This is an example of a buyers′ guide. I recommend that anybody with multiple categories of products write a buyers′ guide for every single major category on your website. You basically just guide folks through the lay of the land- through that product category. You teach them what they need to know and you say, “If this is your situation, look at this product. If you are in a different situation, then look at this different product.”
SLIDE: Buyers′ guides = 50% higher conversion
Buyers’ Guides work! With buyers′ guides we have had a 50% increase in conversions when buyer’s guide pages were used as entry pages. When folks would come into our site from a search engine organically, if they come in on the buyer’s guide page, they are 50% more likely to convert. Buyers Guides also work with PPC or paid search traffic. In my paid search ads, when I use the content from a buyer’s guide as a landing page rather than just a generic section page of manufacturers, I have a 50% increase in conversions over typical landing pages. Show your prospects that you are an authority on what you sell and customers are more likely to buy. Page 6
SLIDE: 3 -- Write unique product descriptions
The third thing that I recommend folks do is write unique product descriptions. Google likes unique product descriptions. It is good for your customers to show that you are an expert and you know what you are doing, but Google loves unique product descriptions.
SLIDE: Garmin screenshot
If you notice here, we rank number three and four for one of the best keywords for us, Garmin Astro, a new product that came out last year. We haven’t done a lot of link building for these pages -- some links came from the manufacturer, but these rankings are mainly from having page after page of new content on this new product line which draws links. Normally when a company releases a product they take some stock photos and they have their marketing department write up some copy. It is usually the same text in their sales brochure. What most folks do is they take this manufacturer copy and they literally copy it and paste it into their store. This just drives me nuts. If you want to see how many people are cutting and pasting, you can actually look at one of your competitors who just copied and pasted from the manufacturer. Go to Google and do a search for the first sentence in that manufacturer’s description and put quotes around it. What you will see here when you search on Google for the first sentence in the Garmin Astro is that there are 1,770 other pages on the Internet with that content. These people suck. Page 7
SLIDE: MANUFACTURER COPY: 1-10 of 1770 Lazy competitors
I mean they are lazy! It is lame. When you are shopping online, if you go to store after store after store and they have the exact same thing, the boiler plate from the manufacturer, and then you go to another store where they have a picture of the guy actually using the product and talking about it like he knows what he is doing, who do you think is going to get the sale?
SLIDE: You have this
This is our product page for the Astro. You can tell it looks a little different.
SLIDE: And this
Here is some of the content. People ask me, “Great. I have got to write unique content, but how much content do I have to write?”
SLIDE: Write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price
This is my rule of thumb. I want you to write one new paragraph for every $10 in item price. Now I just made that up. Write what makes sense to you, but that is a good rule of thumb for creating content. You go, “Gosh. That is a $600 product. You mean I have to write 60 paragraphs about the dang Garmin Astro?” That is what my brother would say. You wouldn’t say dang.
laughter
Page 8 How do you get folks to get this content? What I will do is I will lock my brother in a room. I do not let him go outside to smoke or to pee until he gives me his content.
SLIDE: 4 -- Play 20 Questions with every product -- Who ? What? When? Where? Why? How Much?
We play 20 questions with every single product. What I recommend is that you start at the top with your best selling products and you work your way down. Originally he just said, “Well let me just start with the A’s and I will work my way through.” I said, “Dude, no way. Start with the best sellers. And if you only have time to get four or five of them done, by that point you have actually accomplished something and you will most likely see big increases with your search traffic.” Here are some examples. This is more like 200 questions. As yourself, “What is a customer concerned about when they buy this product? Is this product going to solve their problem?” Uh, Shirley, don’t take a picture of that.
laughter
I spent hours on those questions! Ask yourself what customers have in their mind when they are looking to buy something. Customers want to know if this product is going to work for them. There are hundreds of different questions you can ask. I literally have over 200 questions that I can any product through and ask. Examples: “Is this product right for the job? Is it overkill? Compared to the manufacturer, are their equal alternatives? Is this for professional use or amateur use? Why should I buy this one? Page 9 Why should I get this one from you? Are there any third party reviews?” I have tons of these questions. Here is another screen shot of a word document where I have got these questions. Answer these questions on your Website and it’s great for SEO. It is amazing how many keywords you naturally use while writing these product descriptions.
SLIDE: 5 -- Capture killer content any which way you can!
Capture killer content in which way you can. Like I said, I lock my brother up in a room and pull it out of him. Steve is the guy, during hunting season; he is out in the field doing research. He is riding around Texas with his shotgun with some of his hunting buddies in the back of a pick-up truck. He is always doing research and development. One of the reasons he goes out in the field to hunt and run his dogs is so that he can tell our customers and the manufacturers what is good about specific products and what needs work! Photograph everything. Here is a shot of Steve on the back of his truck with Em, one of his best bird dogs. Just looking at this photo, I can see 10 different products that we sell in the background. Why is this important? Well, a customer of ours looking at this picture knows that it is not some supermodel in a studio somewhere with a model dog. This is real. He is just like them – he’s actually in the field using this stuff. Here he is putting some boots on Em’s tender little feet so when she runs across some cactus she is not going to bleed to death. Record everything. Audio. Video. Still pictures. I mean, everything. When I don’t’t want to carry a professional digital Page 10 camera, I have a little FLIP (video) camera over here I carry everywhere I go. I have an iPhone. I take pictures of everything. We record everything. It is amazing how much content you can get just walking around. I can get my brother to jabber on about some product about why this manufacturer should do this, blah, blah, blah and I have great info for the Yahoo! Store.
SLIDE: 6 -- Convert audio assets into text
Next, I convert the audio into text. Search engines need text. They can’t really index audio. Yet. What I do is I email an MP3 that I rip from that video to a buddy of mine. I have no idea where he lives because I got him from Mechanical Turk, an Amazon service where you can outsource things. For $1.50 a minute he will actually listen to that MP3 and transcribe it for me and email it back to me. And he has got a three-hour turnaround time. I have shared him with some friends of mine, but I think he is all booked up now.
laughter]
SLIDE: 7 -- Leverage ALL manufacturer content *
You can also get content out of manufacturer’s videos. Sometimes products ship with a DVD; like an owner’s manual or a guide on DVD. I can actually get the content out of those and use that on our website as well. Leverage all manufacturer content.
SLIDE: *It′s easier to get forgiveness than permission:
This comes with a caveat. I am not recommending that you break the law. I am not recommending that you violate somebody’s Page 11 copyright. But for me, it is easier to get forgiveness than it is permission to use a manufacturer’s text and images to help sell their stuff through my online store. Here is some copy that I stole from Innotek that basically says, “You can’t do this” on the bottom of their website. Well we sell millions of dollars of their products. They are never ever going to say, “Hey. Quit using our product shots on your website.” But if you need to, ask permission.
SLIDE: Make manufacturer images your own
What am I talking about as far as using manufacturer content? Well they give you stock images, right? If you want to look like everybody else, use their stock images. If you don’t, pimp them out a little bit.
SLIDE: > your product image
All of the stuff that is in this image right here came from Garmin that we basically remixed into these product photos. We take our own product photos as well. Where else can you get manufacturer content? Well look at the packaging. If you are a drop shipper, sorry. If you are a real retailer…
laughter]
SLIDE: > Box copy
If you are a real retailer, you have a warehouse, and you have the products, there is text on the packaging of these products that is nowhere else in the world. Go get the box. Get somebody to type it up. Stick it on your website. Page 12 Also, use the point of sale materials manufacturers provide for retail brick and mortar stores. We don’t really have a “store” store. We have a warehouse where folks can come in and buy stuff. But any time a manufacturer releases point of sale materials, I say, “Yeah, send me that.” Those cards on that display, down there? We’ll remove them, scan them, and put the content on the Website. Do whatever makes sense for you. Page 13
SLIDE: > owners manuals
Owner’s manuals. They’re great! A lot of these companies provide PDF files of owner’s manuals instead of a printed one. Sometimes manuals are online and indexed in the search engines. Sometimes they are not. There are tons of images in there. Grab product images, graphs, tables, diagrams, comparison charts, etc. – all these things that you can use on your website. Again, it’s easier to get forgiveness than permission… But we don’t go to jail, ok?
SLIDE: > Press releases
Press releases. These companies send out press releases all the time. They actually do a pretty good job of writing up what this stuff is about. Now this text is probably duplicate content, but you can put text from these releases on your website and it actually helps you sell stuff.
SLIDE: > Extract flash
Flash. All these big boys like their Flash Web sites. Ugh. The thing I like about Flash is that there is unique text hidden in those Flash movies. Now the search engines are getting a lot better about indexing Flash, but they pretty much still suck at it. There is good information hidden inside these Flash movies. Transcribe those as well.
SLIDE: Link building SUCKS
All right. I love SEO, but link building sucks. I am not patient enough to build links. I just don’t have what it takes to do that. Page 14
SLIDE: 8 -- Promote your new content for traffic & links
When you develop content like this, your new content will actually get you links from authority sites. Here is an example.
SLIDE: NYT Web article with link
Right before Pubcon last year we got featured in the New York Times. I don’t know if y’all have ever heard of that paper or not out here. They were doing an article on Garmin and the new Dog GPS technology. One of the best things you can do when you are selling stuff for a manufacturer, you want to let the manufacturer know that you are doing a good job pimping their products. Email your sales rep or the marketing VP copies of your buyer’s guide, copies of your reviews, copies of your product descriptions, copies of the pictures that you take on your website. Sometimes the marketing folks will hook you up with some PR folks and you will get some real coverage. We got a link from it. If you will notice in there, there are two other billion dollar companies: Bass Pro Shops and Cabela’s do billions of dollars a year in sales. They don’t have a link. Gun Dog Supply in Starkville, Mississippi? Yep. We’ve got an NYT link.
SLIDE: 9 -- Blog to build content and links
Blog to build content and attract links. I do a much better job of this as an e-commerce consultant and a speaker than I do with the dog stuff or our other stores. With the dog stuff most of our content is actually on the website because I want the customers to see it immediately. Page 15 We just started doing an external blog, Steve Snell’s Gun Dog blog. We basically take email questions that he has answered, his content, and we repurpose it to the web. Now I am not going to quote a guy’s email without their permission, but I can rephrase the question. I got 1,000 pages in a word document once I exported Steve’s sent emails. He sends 100 emails a day answering customer questions. The more of this kind of information you can actually put on your site, the fewer emails you are going to get, the fewer phone calls you are going to get.
SLIDE: 10 -- Support the orgs that your customers do
Support the organizations that your customers do. This is an awesome way to do SEO, to support your community, to make your customer’s really happy, because you go to the websites that they go to and you buy ads – either links or banners. OK. So you want to support the organizations that your customers do, but how do you find out which ones those are? Ask your customers! For example, on another project I have I sent an email to any customer that had ordered more than once. I said, “Hey, I have some advertising dollars. I want to do something that is going to support your local organizations. Do your favorite local organization have a Website because want to advertise.” The next day I got 342 responses from folks who wanted to let me advertise on their website. I was overwhelmed with the response. You can use your email marketing list for this.
SLIDE: 11 -- Make vendors link to you!
Make your suppliers link to you. I call this Vendor Links. I finally have everybody in the company used to the fact that when we buy something from somebody, they are going to link to us. Or Page 16 else! Linking to is almost a condition for doing business with us. A lot of wholesalers will have dealer’s pages where they list out all the various dealers.
SLIDE: Garmin Blog
Romance your suppliers for links and content. Here is an example where Steve took some of the guys from Garmin out bird hunting on one of his fancy Texas quail leases. He gets to be good buddies with folks he needs to have a good relationship with and we ended up getting a link out of it. He got featured in the Garmin blog and we got a link, which is really nice. We are also listed in their dealer’s section. All right. This is the part that is more about the geeky SEO, PPC conversion stuff, which I am more interested in.
SLIDE: 12 -- Collect Converting Keywords
Collect converting keywords. The most important thing that I learned, and this is thanks to Yahoo... In the original Viaweb way back in 1996, Paul Graham had it figured out. Every time you got an order, you would get your merchant order confirmation email. And in almost every email, it would tell you what the referrer was, how the customer found you, the Web site they came from, and (if a search engine) what the converting keyword was. So the second you placed an order on my website, I would get an email from Viaweb, now Yahoo Store, that would say, “Hey. This guy searched for dog training supplies and he bought these things.” Page 17 1997 was when I got obsessed with converting keywords. Right now on one project I have got almost 20,000 unique converting keyword phrases. On another project I have got about 11,000. Some people collect stamps. Some people collect baseball cards. I collect keywords.
SLIDE: Yahoo Web Analytics
Use Yahoo Web Analytics In April 2008, Yahoo bought IndexTools. Again, thank you Mr. Jimmy. I have been using Index Tools for four years, which is now Yahoo Web Analytics. YWA beats Google analytics hands down. If you are not using it you need to take a look at it if you have an e-commerce site. It is now included in most Yahoo store packages I think. Jimmy: Just not in the starter package. Rob: OK. It is awesome. YWA is more like a three dimensional look at your customers, where Google analytics would be like two dimensional. You can actually do ad hoc reporting. I don’t want to do an ad for Yahoo Web Analytics, but I love it. If you have any questions… ask. I just shot some videos with Avinash, the Google Analytics dude, about this with the Market Motive guys. YWA is great. For example, these are some converting keywords. I just ran a quick report and did a screen shot so everybody could see. For example, this is a product called Tuff Foot. These are converting keywords that folks searched for on a search engine, Page 18 landed on our Tuff Foot product page, and then ended up buying. I had to chop this info up a little bit so you could see it. Look at all these different phrases that converted. If you will notice there are lots and lots of different phrases. Different customers spell things differently. It is just amazing to me.
SLIDE: 13 -- Optimize for transaction assisting keywords, too!
Optimize for transaction assisting keywords too. What are those? I remember an Overture slide from about four or five years ago where they said that folks would search 13 different times before they would actually buy something. One of the problems with analytics is that they will only show you one or two of those keywords out of the 13. So you are missing out. Folks are searching for stuff and you have no idea how much they are qualifying their queries before they get to your website. Monitus.com has fixed a lot of this with their TRANSACTION ASSIST REPORTS. My buddy, Michael Whitaker, is the guy who wrote a tool that allows Yahoo Stores transaction information to be passed to Google Analytics. OK. I do Google, too. We have Google analytics on our Yahoo Stores as well. Here is an example of the transaction assist report where he shows you all the keywords that lead to an order. I have blown this up so you all can see this in a real keyword phrase that just happened a couple of days ago. You can see at the bottom hunting dog is stuck together in a search for “huntingdog coats” plural. The little red dot in the report means that “huntingdog coats” is not in the text on our Website. I have no idea how this came up. Google probably suggested, “Did you mean “hunting (space) dog coats?” Then they searched Page 19 again a couple hours later for “hunting dog coats” (singular). Then they searched for “hunting dog vests” and placed an order. What that tells me is that I need to go to the hunting dog vests page and make sure that they word coats is on there. So we did that.
SLIDE: 14 -- Put ALL converting keywords on the page (including long tail)
All right. Put all your converting keywords on your page. Now everybody knows basic SEO. Remember from that slide earlier. Tuf foot was number one. Tuff foot with two F’s was number two. Tuff foot for dogs was number three in terms of converting keywords. Well you are going to put those in your TITLE tag. You are going to write a unique Meta description using those words. You are going to have those keywords in an H1 tag, which is what that red text is. You are going to have those keywords in the body text. The report that you saw a minute ago was probably for like the last six months. This report is more like a year. 75% of the revenue from that page came from the top three money keywords. Tuf foot, tuff foot with two F’s, and tuff foot for dogs. But 25% of the sales came from 39 different, more specific, unique “long tail” keywords. I am sure you have heard about the “long tail” all week. When I look at two different lengths of time; it looks like I have gone from 75% of my sales being from the three words to more like 50%. So I think now 50% of my sales are coming from long tail because of this optimization that I did in the short term. In the past year or so, more and more of my sales of this product have come from long tail searches. Page 20 To rank for these long tail keywords, the words need to be in the text on your page. The easiest way to do that would be to cut and paste a list of dozens of converting keywords on each page, but that’s spamming. That also telegraphs your best words to the competition. I want a list of all the unique words that make up all the converting keywords. First, I paste ALL the converting keywords for the Tuff Foot page into a text file. Then I delete all the words contained in my top phrases: “tuff foot” with two F’s, “tuf” with one F, and “for dogs”) because those words are already all over the page. What’s left is a list of words unique to those long tail keywords, but somewhat redundant, so I alphabetize and de-dupe that list to come up with a much, much shorter list. Finally, I make sure that all those long tail words are used somehow, somewhere in the text of the page. The words don’t even have to be together, they don’t have to be phrase matched. But when you have the words on your page you are much, much, much more likely to get free search engine traffic. All right. Add keyword modifiers to the page text. Remember when we boiled that list down, we de-duped it and alphabetized it? Well, these are modifiers in that list: buy, discount, free, online, and shipping. The funny thing is that these words would apply to any product that you have on your website. For example, you could stick the word “buy” or “free shipping” or “discount” in front of almost any other converting keyword and you would want to rank well for those keywords, too, right? Page 21 Let’s look at the Google, but first, remember to log out of Gmail or other Google accounts and delete your cookies so you see what everyone else sees -- raw Google searches not affected by your past search history. Here are some examples: Remember a minute ago customers were searching for “dog vests” and “hunting dog vests?” I did a Google search yesterday for “discount hunting dog vests” and we were number one and number two. If you look in the snippet on the search engine results page, the second line says, “Buy online with confidence when you order discount retriever blah, blah, blah.” I also searched for “buy hunting dog vests.” Here we are at number one and number two. And then I did another where I said “hunting dog vests online.” OK. We are not number one and two. We are actually number three and four. One of my competitors has online in his domain name and he is going to outrank me for anything with the word online.
SLIDE: 15 -- Add keyword modifiers to page text
I have over 600 modifiers that I have identified that generate revenue for different business, and I use those where they make sense in the text on the web page. Ask me later. I have got some good secrets that I can’t share over the microphone on how to do that. Buy me a beer…
SLIDE: Ten Little Thumbnails
Page 22 A lot of folks will have a category page with a picture, a headline, a small text description and 10 thumbnails with text links to products or sub-categories. Here’s an example: When Google crawls this page, this text from the Google Cache shows what Google sees; the text in the headline, the text in the description, and the text in those links. I want more on my category pages. I want to show snippets of text from the product description and list the different items contained within subsections. With Yahoo Store it is really easy to write RTML with custom templates that will do this, and you can also do it by hand. Different store building platforms can do it as well. If you are a competitor of mine and you are using just ten little thumbnails, my category page is now competing against your product page. Category pages typically have a lot more pagerank / link juice than product pages, so they rank higher, and with text snippets most of the converting keywords now show up on the category page.
SLIDE: 17 -- Survey your customers
One of the best things we ever did was install 4Q, which is the free customer survey software, on our website. I love 4Q. Avinash Kaushik, the Analytics guru partnered with this company. Basically what they do is they don’t look at your information individually, but they aggregate it so they have got overall trends. What 4Q does is it asks your customers four questions. Page 23 They ask, “What are you here to do? Did you accomplish it? How satisfied were you with the website, and why?” Basically it allows you to go through and see information about not just what your customers are doing, which is what Analytics does, but why they are doing it. It was amazing to me how many people were not coming to the site to consult a review. On another site that installed 4Q, on the first day I learned that 80% of the people were coming to the site to check prices, which told me that most of the people coming to my site where discount shoppers and that was extremely important. The thing I like most about this is not how your satisfaction scores are. The thing I like most about it is this report that you get. I went in and colored the different sales. If someone says they did not complete their mission I colored it red. If they did complete their mission I colored it green. You probably can’t see this, but it is amazing the actual raw information that folks will give you if they know that they are anonymous. Most of the problems that the folks have on the Gun Dog site is that we are out of stock on something. So I go to my buyer and I say, “Dude, do not run out of stock on these products.”
SLIDE: E-commerce? It′s a jungle out there
All right. E-commerce. It is a jungle out there. You want to show your expertise. You want to express your opinions, maximize your SEO and SEM, and you want to spoil your customers. Just ship the damn box, OK?
Thank you all very much.
Page 24 Copyright 2008, Snell Bros. LLC. All rights reserved.~~~~~
Yahoo! Store online documentation is pretty good.@@@@@@Yahoo! Store online documentation is pretty good. The best way to find out about a question or feature is to use the search feature at http://store.yahoo.com. If you'd like a list of all of the pages in their account, their store name is vw (for viaweb). Goto http://store.yahoo.com/vw/ind.html to see the automatic alphabetical index created by the Yahoo! Store software.~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Portfolio -- "From $15K to 1.5 Million a Year in Less Than 3 Years"@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Power Hour Notes -- Rob Snell, Monday, Nov. 24 2008@@@@@@Rob's Notes~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Price Change Analysis = Wilsonweb.com@@@@@@http://www.wilsonweb.com/wct5/pricing_yahoo.cfm~~~~~
Yahoo! Store Seminars@@@@@@~~~~~
Yahoo! Store TIPS AND TRICKS (Mike & Istvan's latest)@@@@@@http://www.ytimes.info/yahoo-store-tips-and-tricks.html~~~~~
Yahoo! Store's Front Page, Section Page, & Item Page@@@@@@Here are the basic elements of Yahoo! Store. Once you understand how the front page , sections ,
and items work together you can then move on to more complicated layouts.~~~~~
Yahoo! Web Analytics FREE VIDEO@@@@@@http://www.marketmotive.com/yahoo-analytics-training.php~~~~~
Yahoo! Web Analytics on YAHOO! STORE POWER HOUR @@@@@@http://wsradio.com/internet-talk-radio.cfm/shows/1-Choice-Yahoo!-Store-Power-Hour/archives/date/selected/11-24-2008.html~~~~~
yahoo-store-design-partner@@@@@@~~~~~
YEditor@@@@@@ Y!editor Yahoo Store Management Tool -- Manage all your items quickly and efficiently with this software package. Simply type in the item information. This software will create a perfect file that you may upload through your Yahoo! store account. Download Free Trial Now 9.5 meg
~~~~~
You ask, "What's it gonna cost me?"@@@@@@Your investment in a new Ystore.com project runs usually between $2500 and $4995 for design, development, & consulting with a few additional expenses in the initital marketing push for directory listing fees, PCC initial accounts, domain name registration, etc. We usually get a deposit of $999 to begin the project and spread the other payments to coincide with specific benchmarks and deadlines along the way.
You get a package price for my experience, brainstorming, research, store development, action planning and implementing the plan, as well as a block on my calendar every week.
Another way to look at your investment is what some folks pay for traffic. Think of this spin-off projects as the same thing as buying about 20,000 pairs of eyeballs because that's how many folks you would get with your $5000 from GOTO/Overture at the average price of a TOP-3 positon at .25 per click. Remember: All the traffic that comes after the site has paid for itself is gravy.
(Some people are concerned about Return On Investment. I shoot for 100% within a year or the project is a flop in my eyes. Anything faster than 13 weeks is a breakout hit and needs to be juiced.)~~~~~
You gather company information and terms of ordering.@@@@@@Then,
Allen provided me with his 1-800 number, street address, fax number, shipping methods and rates, a letter from the founder, and the domain name he wanted to use. This information can be provided as a final step to get the site up and running.
The majority of this information needs to be formatted for your information page for customers.
He also provided me with a list of keywords he wanted for metatags, a
22 word description for his Yahoo! listing, and a 10 word description for his listing in Yahoo! Store directory.
All of this is then e-mailed to me as attached files.
With graphics you can either zip them all up in a winzip file or send multiple attachments.
This is the point where the designer steps in and works a little e-magic... ~~~~~
You get product shots together from catalogs or take photos.@@@@@@Next, Allen got together product images for each of the 50 items, and scanned catalogs and used a digital camera to capture items he didn't have in the catalogs.
Allen named each of the items with the product number so that matching the images to the
items would be simple. Make sure that you have permission to use the images from your distributor. All it takes is an e-mail or a phone call, and most suppliers are ecstatic that you're about to put them on the web. For example, this item was scanned as a jpeg with 20% compression, was about 50K in size, and was named RF3950.jpg.~~~~~
Young Agent Jones@@@@@@ Rob: So what happened
when you first got in there?
Mike: Like when I first
walked in the door? Rob: Yeah. Mike: I just went...I
walked...I think I went straight into the main room and was just like,
“OK. This is cool." Yeah, we were actually working on
drums before I even met Butch. And then...because Mike was like,
“Oh, yeah! I guess you want to meet Butch!" I was like,
“Well, yeah. It might be nice." Because he had come
into the main room, so I walked over there and talked to him for a minute.
Then I went back to fiddling with drums. And once we got the drums pretty
much set up...you know, we still hadn't picked the snare yet.
We kind of got everything set up where they get the mics... Rob: What kind of drums
were they? Mike: DW.
Rob: So were they new
or were they like...? Mike: They were relatively
new. That was the set...I believe he said they were custom built
for Matt Sorum [sp]. Rob: OK. Who's
that? Ben: The Cult, and then
Guns N Roses after...Steven Adler, was that the first drummer?
Mike: I don't know. Ben: Anyway, he was the
second drummer for Guns N Roses. Mike: But he didn't
like...he told them he wanted black sparkle...And the shells are a custom
thickness on that set, and it is custom finish. But DW makes this
custom one of a kind drum set for him, and it was like, “OK.
Here you go!" And he set it up and the rest of the band saw
it, and it had kind of a multicolor sparkle in it. And they were
like, “OK, that's lame."
Rob: They were making
fun of him? Mike: Yeah, so he returned
it and said, “Nevermind. I don't want it." And so,
they had this one of a kind kit sitting there. And basically,
Mike the drum tech bought it at cost. He paid like two grand and
it is like an 8 piece kit or something. Yeah, it had like a 24
and a 26 inch kick drum, six toms or something. He was like, “But
I just wanted like a 22 kick and like a 10 inch tom or something, you
know, one other tom size it didn't have." So he wanted to
use smaller toms instead of the bigger ones. And just the two
additional toms were like $1,700-almost what he paid for the whole set,
because they had to custom tool it and the shells were a custom thickness.
And the finish was custom, so they had to go back and retool for all
that. Rob: So they looked at
pictures of you playing online, and from that they could kind of figure
out that you played a five piece? Mike: Yeah. That
was why they did a four piece, because most of the photos...Because
for a long time, I did just play a four piece. Rob: But I mean you ride
cymbals on the other side...
Mike: Yeah, they had
that set up correctly. They had the ride already on the left side.
Of course, I told Butch that on the phone, too. He was like, “Oh,
OK. Cool!" Rob: So when he called
you at Gun Dog, beside the fact that we lost contact with him four or
five times or whatever, what all did you tell him about....What did
ya'll talk about?
Mike: Well, you know,
we talked about what song we were going to be doing. And he told
me, “I would kind of like to make this change," and, you know, just
a couple minor things, like he drums in the middle and a couple guitar
bits. As he put it, everything we will do on the fly. Those
were his words. But honestly, it is hard to
remember at this point after, like, the whole week doing all that stuff,
because it wasn't, like, you know, anything crazy. It was just
kind of like... Rob: About the song and
that kind of thing.
Mike: Yeah, pretty much. Rob: Well what about
like with the drum tech. I mean he got you...he had that, like,
huge case of different snares that he brought in, right? Mike: Right.
Rob: And you used your
own pedals? Mike: Yeah, I used my
own kick drum pedal. That was all...I just brought the stick bag
and the kick drum pedal. That's all I brought. Didn't
get to use the finger cymbals. Rob: Yeah, well, only
13 hours, you know?
Mike: Yeah, we will do
that when we do the dig-redo... Rob: Yeah, for the Australian
version. Mike: Right. Rob: All right.
So where is the doughnut gas station? Ben: Um, it's on the
right. Rob: It may be that Texaco. Mike: There are only
a couple more before we are out of town. Rob: I think it's that
Texaco. Is it?
Ben: It might be. Rob: I think it is. Mike: Well, that is where
we are headed! Ben: That would make
sense. They have got to have something to compete with the Dairy
Queen.
Rob: Yes. Mike: It's not a Dairy
Queen; it's a DQ. Get it right! Ben: Oh, sorry.
Rob: They changed their
name? Or is that a movie thing that I don't get? Mike: No. Well,
you know, it is like KFC. Most...actually, there are a few that
have signs... Rob: All right.
Can we not do music for the... Mike: For the exclusive? Rob: Yeah, this is for
Westwood One. You are listening to Behind the Music...Inside the
Music...In Between the Music... Mike: In the Backseat
of the Music?
Rob: Yeah, exactly.
All right. So, Mr. Hodge, what did you do when you first came
in? Ben: Let' see.
I just kind of started looking around trying to get comfortable.
I was like, “All right. Looks nice."
Rob: Funky lights? Ben: Oh, yeah.
Walking in the big tracking room was awesome. I was like, “Oh,
this place is awesome." Rob: And you didn't
really have like...I mean there wasn't a bass tech, so Billy...
Ben: Yeah, Billy was
handling...Like, he was kind of hanging around by the bass amp kind
of waiting for me to come over there. [police siren] Ben: Where is that coming from? Mike: I don't know.
Ben: Oh, over there. Rob: They found us.
“I didn't mean to download that!" So you got your bass out
and got it all tuned up and everything. Ben: Yeah, yeah.
It didn't take long. Once they got the drums kinda going a little
bit, we just started playing, working on bass tones. I don't
know if they got it dialed in... Rob: So was that the
SVT? Ben: Yeah, it was an
Ampeg SVT running an 810 Ampeg cabinet. Rob: And that was in
another room, like a separate room for the...
Ben: Yeah, to keep the
sound from bleeding into all the drum mics. And then that was
miced with the $40,000 microphone. [laughter] Rob: That was awesome!
Ben: Yes it was.
Rob: And here it is right
here in my... Ben: I was afraid to
look at it too closely. I was like, “I am just going to glance
at it." Rob: Yeah. Peripheral
vision only. Ben: It was like the
mic of God.
Rob: How could you hear
your tone? Was it like through the headphones? Ben: Yeah. You
could actually hear pretty good. At first it was just kind of
crappy. But after they tweaked it for a little while, it got to
where it was pretty accurate.
Rob: OK. They had
like a 412 underneath the amp, didn't they? Ben: It was just sitting
there. Yeah, it was just a table. Because at first I thought
that is what it was, too. I was like, “Ah, well. All right.
This will work." Rob: Won't be too bad. Ben: Still had a squeaky
head. Rob: Yeah. So Mike,
could you hear the bass amp at all? I mean did it bleed at all
through the room?
Mike : I could hear it through
the wall just a little bit. Rob: So he had it cranked
up pretty loud? Mike: You know, it is
kind of hard to say, because I walked through the room where the actual
amp was to get to the bathroom at one point, when Boom was playing,
and it really didn't seem all that loud. And I was kind of wondering,
especially given the microphone that they had it miced with...I didn't
think they were going to have it, you know, blowing the walls down loud.
But, like I say, it was loud enough...I could hear it a little bit through
the wall. Ben: They managed to
make it sound loud, because he still had, like, a little bit of that
overdriven kind of gravel to it. I like that sound a whole lot.
Mike: But since I didn't
stand in the room while we were actually doing a take, I am not exactly
sure. Ben: And they had a direct
out running, too. Rob: OK. So they
were micing it and they had it... Ben: Yeah.
Rob: Was it going to
like a special kind of direct box? Mike: It was a tube one... Ben: Yeah, yeah.
It wasn't just like one of those little black DI boxes like everybody
has...
Mike: Were they using
that one that was sitting right by the... Ben: Yeah, the blue one? Mike: OK. That
was an Evil Twin to DI. That was what it said on the front.
I don't know who makes it or anything.
Ben: I don't know either. Mike: I happened to look
at that and I was like, “Ooh, what is this thing?" Rob: “I need to get
me one of those!"
Ben: Yeah. But
yeah, that was what threw me...After I got done tuning one time and
I came back over, I got my bass on, put the headphones on, and I was
about to reach back and turn the standby off, and then I hit my strings
and it made a noise I could hear in the headphones. And I am like,
“Oh..." Rob: “I guess I'm
on!" Ben: “I guess I'm
on." But no, I was not.
Rob: So once they got
the overall drum sound done, is that when they came back in and started
doing snares? Mike: Yeah, because we
actually tracked just a little bit of stuff...I think that was when
you and I were both playing... Ben: Yeah, it was. Mike: And just kind of
goofing off...
Rob: Just rhythm section,
kinda? Mike: Yeah, just bass
and drums, not to a click or anything, just off the cuff, just to check
the tones... Ben: Yeah, we do like
a verse and a chorus. Mike: Yeah. And
that was after...I mean they had me sit there just with the drums by
myself playing...
Rob: Individual drums? Mike: Well, sitting there
playing a groove for a long time, just kind of like a “Boom, kick,
boom, boom, kick" kind of thing. Throw in a little fill here
and there just to kind of balance it all out. And then they had
Ben play along with me. And that was when Butch came in and said,
“The snare is not quite doing what I want it to do." And then
we tried...I think, all together, we tried four different snare drums.
Rob: What were they?
Do you remember? Mike: Let's see.
You had a... Ben: A Mel Gibson...
Mike: Well, there was
a ‘70s engraved Ludwig Black Baby snare, which is the one I wanted
to steal and take home. Then there was the...What was it, a Craviotto
DW snare, I think was one of them. Then we had a Tama which was
made out a of cymbal brass shell. Rob: Oh, wow. Mike: Yeah, it weighed
a ton. And then there was...I guess it was just the DW snare,
or maybe...I am getting a little confused. The Craviotto, I think,
was the one that matched the kit. That was the one we ended up
using, I think. It was the one that...But, yeah...
Rob: Was that the Mel
Gibson or was that not the Mel Gibson? Mike: The Mel Gibson
was the Ludwig. We did not get to use...I know we did not use
the Ludwig. We did not use the cymbal brass. And there was
another metal one that we tried that we did not use.
Rob: And then, like,
how was he micing the snare? He had like a mic on the top and
on the bottom? Mike: Yeah, the top and
the bottom. I didn't get a look at what kind of mic was on the
bottom. The top one was some kind of a...I think it was a Telefunken
of some sort. Something a little more expensive than your run
of the mill SN57.
Rob: So the next thing
was like getting the rhythm tracks, or did they get the guitars dialed
in at that point? Mike: Well after they
got it where they were happy with the snare sound, yeah, they told us
to take a break for 5 or 10 minutes and they started dialing in the
guitar sounds. Rob: So Todd had his...what
was that, an orange Chet Atkins? Mike: Yeah. It is a
Gibson Tennessean. And then Jason had that American Tele.
Rob: Todd was going into
what amp? He was in the Marshall? Ben: Yeah, it was the
Marshall. Rob: And it was an older Marshall? Mike: I think it was
kind of a reissue Plexi, is what it looked like. I didn't get
a really good look at the guitar amps.
Ben: And then they had
Jones in the crazy Diesel amp. Rob: Yeah, the Vin Diesel,
the $5,000 four channel.... Ben: Those whacky Germans! Rob: Yeah. Oh,
it was awesome.
Ben: It sounded great. Rob: And then, that didn't
take too long for them to get the guitar sounds. Mike: Not too long.
I don't know, we were...I was outside just kind of hanging out... Rob: Hang on just a second.
Mike: Ah, man.
If we had driven out here we could have saved 10 cents a gallon!
Oh, that reminds me. You want this, don't you? Rob: Oh, I might.
Yeah.
Mike: [laughs] Rob: It's doing it
again. I wonder what that means. Mike: It means hang on
to your pants!
Rob: And we are back.
All right. Sorry about that. So where were we? Ben: Uh, guitar tone?
Rob: You got the guitars
dialed in. And at that point, did ya'll do like a basic take? Mike: Well, we did a
run-through with everything just so you get to hear it again and just
kind of check everything. Once again, just an off the cuff, once
all the way through the song... Ben: Well, then we did
several all the way through just to kind of get the drums down, or the
drum part that he was happy with.
Mike: Yeah. Well,
you are jumping ahead, though. We actually made the changes to
the songs.
Ben: Oh, that's right. Rob: So what were they?
He changed the bridge, the note that the bridge came in on? Mike: Yeah. After
we played through it that first time, he said we needed...the bridge
needed to have a little more... Rob: Definition? Mike: Yeah, or, you know,
just something that really establishes it and differentiates it from
the verse proceeding it or the chorus preceding it, or whatever; the
part that precedes it.
And so what he suggested that
was we add, I guess it was four bars to the front of the bridge and
bring it on the... Ben: On the D instead
of on the A. Mike: Thank you. Ben: Yeah, no problem.
Mike: And, you know,
but not have the words start until it gets to the A. So it just
added a little instrumental section, almost kind of like a little pad,
a little buffer zone... Ben: Which kind of makes
the bridge hit a little harder. Rob: Before you started
singing? Mike: Right. Before
I started singing. So you have that, and then the vocals come
in. And it really completely changed the whole feel of it.
Rob: Yeah, it really
did. It kind of...I don't know. Ben: Well it made the
bridge pop a lot more. Mike: Well, it's that,
and then we also changed the drum part in the bridge from the way we
had originally done it. And this was one of the things he and
I talked about on the phone, on that drum part. And he said, “Yeah,
you know, maybe try to come up with something..." He said he
liked the half-time I did on the outro. “Maybe come up with
something not exactly like that, but something with, maybe, that kind
of a feel."
And so that was also what we
were doing. We kind of practiced it to get that change, and then
I was kind of feeling out...trying to find a drum part that worked and
sounded good. Rob: That went really
quick, though. I mean I was kind of like... Ben: And we moved the
bass up an octave. Mike: Yeah, we did that
also.
Rob: And you said, like,
you didn't do the pumping until a certain point? Ben: Yeah, well that
was...We were just trying different stuff with it, because we knew we
wanted to do something different with the bass. We thought moving
it up an octave and driving instead of just hitting the long notes might
sound good. But then when we tried it, it made it a little too
busy, so we decided to stay with moving it up. Rob: Oh, OK. So
I caught the second half, I guess. And then once you kind of got
the form of that song right...I mean that was probably...That was an
hour or two into it, you think?
Mike: Honestly, I didn't
have a watch. Ben: Yeah, I have no
idea. Mike: There was no timeframe
at all that whole day, really, except for when I would go outside and
go, “OK. The sun is here now." That was really about
it. You know, it was just kind of...
Rob: But then at that
point, it was like, “OK, well let's get the drums right."
And so everybody played and he recorded everything... Mike: Yeah, that was
doing the drum takes for keeps, for real. Rob: Playing to a click? Mike: Yeah, with the
click track, but with the full band playing and Todd doing the scratch
vocal just to kind of help keep everybody together.
Rob: But he wasn't
singing the whole time. He was just kind of giving like slight
audio cues. Ben: Yeah, just so we
always knew where we were.
Rob: Because he would stop...if there as like a break, he wouldn't
say anything so it wouldn't bleed into the drums, right?
Ben: Yeah. And
on that song, since there are only two chords that keep coming over
and over and over again, the scratch vocals really help with something
like that.
Rob: Yeah, I was about to say. It is easy to get lost. Mike: And so, the bass
and the guitars that he recorded during those takes...I think he kept
them maybe just for kind of emergency backup. But those were never
going to really be the serious tracks. They were all replaced
later.
Rob: How many takes did
it take to get the drums? Ben: Four or five, maybe? Mike: Once we fired up
the click track and we were doing them for real, after we had gotten
all the changes done, we only did three takes and we kept...it was takes
two, three, and four, because take one was before we changed it, and
it was the sound check take. I don't think it had a click on
it either, so that one was set aside. Yeah, we just used...we had
takes two, three, and four. And if I remember right, it was take
four that he used for most of the song. And then we took a couple
of drum fills from like takes two and three, a couple things that I
liked. I was like, “Hey, I really like what I did here.
Let's put that on there." Rob: Yeah, I saw the
song map, and it was really interesting to see kinda how he would... Mike: He was checking
off, like, which was the best... Rob: Yeah. Mike: Yeah, the full
map of the song. It was like, “I am going to have to steal that.
I really like that." Rob: Yeah, he had a column
for each take, and he had checkmarks. And to me it was like the
darker the checkmark was, the better the take was. Mike: Well there were
some where he would just draw a line. It is like not even...And
t hen there were some where he would put two checkmarks, because he
had one that was his favorite, and then it was like, “OK. Now
here is my double favorite."
Rob: Right. And
then, the other thing, from that, did he comp a rhythm track together? Mike: He did a...what
did he call it? Rob: Speed comp?
Mike: Speed comp, yes.
But it was mostly take four, as I recall. Most of the rhythm,
just the groove, I think almost all of that was take four. And
then, like I said, there were a couple fills. I think a little
bit of the stuff from the bridge, we used from take three, just because
he and I both agreed that was the... Rob: The looser...
Mike: Well, it was the
best performance. It was the most confident. The most interesting,
too. By the time I got to the fourth one, I kinda got stuck in
a rut on that one and kept repeating fills and stuff. Rob: From that, he made
a speed comp, but he still used the bass, and the guitar, and the vocals
for placement? Mike: Yeah, he had them
in there for reference, because then when Ben went in to track bass,
he could still put that guitar in there, or the scratch vocal, or whatever.
Rob: So in your headphones,
Ben, what were you hearing, like, when you went in there? Ben: Guitar, drums, and
what I was playing. Later, I got them to add the scratch vocals,
because it helped out a lot on the bridge. Rob: Did he make any
changes like to the micing or the tone of the bass or anything while
they were...?
Ben: Once we got it established
originally, no. They kept it pretty solid. Mike: Because remember,
weren't they...I think they had some trouble with some hum or something... Rob: Oh no, that was
Jason... Ben: Yeah, that was Jason
playing with his...
Mike: Well no, I could
hear the amp buzzing back in the room, though. Rob: Yeah, there was
definitely... Mike: There was some
60 cycle hum going on. Rob: Yeah, somewhere.
But that was funny. Jason's Theremin app for iPhone was going
off, and they could not find where it was. I mean Butch was walking
around the control room putting his ear up to things, and he finally
put his ear up to Jason's chest, and he was like, :"It is coming
from Jason."
[laughter] Rob: That was so funny.
Because, I mean, Mike the studio guy, tattoo Mike was like freaking
out, because they could not...they thought it was like a speaker feeding
back inside the studio. They were listening to the wall.
They were listening to behind Jason. And Jason would move and
the sound would move. It went on for about three or four minutes!
It turns out he had his Theremin app on. And it was just really
quiet, really, really quiet, but enough to make... Mike: [makes weird humming
noise] Rob: Yes! Made
you really, like, cock an eyebrow. And tattoo Mike was running
around like a chicken with his head cut off going, “What's that?"
And then it wasn't his fault, and he was like, “Ah, man." Ben: So when did I blow
the speaker? I missed that. Rob: That was after...I
think it was after we got all the bass stuff done and he was playing
it back through the big speakers. And he cranked it up really
loud...Well, I think you were still in the big room.
Ben: Yeah, I wasn't
in there for that. You guys told me about it later. Rob: It was kind of like...We
were like listening to the track...Like, you would record something
and then he would play it back so that you could hear it, but also so
that we could hear it. At that point, he cranked it all the way
up, you know, like that Maxell cassette commercial. Mike: Martini glass blowing
back...
Rob: Yeah, yeah.
And there was a loud ripping sound... Mike: [laughs] Rob: Because he had the
bass...He had the bass turned all the way up, you know? And tattoo
Mike jumped in, too. That was interesting. But then he just
started to back down. He was using the reference monitors, the
one that were sitting up on that...George Martin's desk, the Barefoot
monitors. He was running it through those most of the time.
But every once in a while, I think just to kinda clean his ears out,
he would swap it to the big honking speakers that were in the wall. So, like, how many tracks was
it to get, like, the bass track? Mike: You only did like,
what, two takes? Ben: I think it was three,
because there was one where the amp wasn't on. Rob: Oh, OK, the standby?
Ben: Yeah, there was
one where the amp was on standby and it was just the direct. But
yeah, there was one...Yeah, I guess two real takes. And I think
they punched me one time on the beginning and one time on the end. Rob: And that went really
quickly. Mike: That is our Ben!
Ben: Ha, ha. Rob: That was great.
Ben: I felt like I should have messed up a little more just so
I could have more time doing stuff. It was like, “What, I am
done? Ah, man!"
Rob: Yeah, “Here is
your plane ticket back home! See ya!" Ben: “I guess I'll
just go drink a..." Rob: Like 12 beers. Ben: Barley Pop.
Rob: How much beer did
we drink? Ben: Well, we started
off with that 12 pack and we went through that in about an hour... Mike: See, I didn't
even drink any of those. The first round of beer was gone before
I had my first one. Rob: So they had to make
a...ya'll were spelling out a beer run, I guess.
Mike: There were two
beer runs. I know that. Rob: Yeah, didn't he
send Alyssa to go get beer or something? Ben: Yeah, Alyssa went,
and then he and Todd went. There might have been three.
I think Mike went on one, too. Mike: Yeah, I think so. Rob: Geez. That
was great. Mike: I don't know.
It was a lot of beer. Rob: Yeah, he's a big
fan. Ben: Whack. Rob: OK. So the
bass track was done. And then what was the...it was the guitar
tracks?
Ben: Yeah. Todd
went first, I think. Well, I think we took...We took a break before
we did the bass. Rob: OK. Was that
the lunch break or whatever, kind of like where we were standing around...? Ben: Well, it was kind
of like a 25 minute, everyone kind of relax, stretch your legs...
Rob: That was around
3:30 or four o'clock, because I remember it was like...it was either
four or 4:30 we were going to be back...we were going to be done with
our lunch break. Ben: Oh, that was a different
one. That might have been after tracking some of the guitars,
because I think the bass one, we were starting at...Actually, hold on.
I might have it on my phone because I think I texted somebody.
Let me see. Rob: But I think from
the pictures we will be able to put a timeline together.
Mike: See, I never caught
anything about starting at any particular time for anything. It
was just like, “OK. We are taking five..." Rob: Yeah, people were
rotating out. Like if somebody wasn't doing something, they
would be hanging out in the alley, or in the kitchen, or in that little...
Mike: Hallway, or sitting
in the control room. Rob: The control room,
yeah, because everybody seemed to kinda wind up there. Mike: Where the action
is. Rob: Man, it sounded
great. I had the best seat in the house up there in the captain's
nest, you know?
Mike: In the center of
the stereo field. Rob: Yes. Right
behind Butch Vig's head. And every time he would turn around,
I would be like, “What? What did I do wrong? What did
I do wrong?" You know, he was just getting his notes off the
desk that was like right in front of me. But I swear, every time
he did it, I would jump, you know?
But he was really grooving
on it. I was excited. Ben: Yeah. Actually,
that would have been right. We started the bass about four. Mike: Wow. See,
it doesn't seem like it was that late.
Ben: No, not at all. Mike: I thought it was
like one or two. Ben: Yeah, that is what
it felt like. Mike: Yeah, because I
guess like, while we were doing drums, everybody was wanting to play
it over, and over, and over again.
Ben: Which was nice,
because it got us all good and warmed up. Mike: So yeah, I guess
we did take a fairly decent little break after that, I think. Ben: Yeah, about 30 minutes. Rob: I think I ate my
weight in cheese off that cheese tray.
Ben: Man, that salsa
was awesome! I gotta get some more of that. Mike: I didn't try
the salsa.
Ben: It was spicy and tasty and delicious.
Mike: I had some turkey
and some potato chips. Ben: I had many a turkey
sandwich this week. Rob: Yep. Ben: Good thing I like
turkey.
Rob: And so after tracking
the guitars, didn't Jason come back in? Was that the arpeggiated
part? Was that the...where was the...? Mike: Well, the first
arpeggiated part was in the song originally. And Butch decided
he wanted to get a little bit different tone on it so it kind of cut
through better. Todd did his part, and then Jason went in and
did the riff part, and then they went back and did a separate track
with the arpeggiated part that was in the middle of the song.
And that was all they did initially,
because didn't we do...We did vocals before Jason did the second part,
right? Ben: Yeah, that was late
in the evening. Mike: So we did all that
guitar stuff and then that was when Todd started singing. Rob: Man, I mean how
many takes did he do to get the vocals the way he wanted them?
Ben: A lot! Rob: I mean it was like
12 or 13, wasn't it? Ben: Yeah, watching it,
especially on the end of it when it is so high and it has got to be
like loud and rocking... Rob: But it is funny.
You could tell that Todd's voice was like warming up. Ben: Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Rob: You know? Because
at first, like the first take, I was like, “OK. Well there is
something in there we can use." And then the second take, it
was like, “OK, well..." But man, by like the fifth or sixth
take, it really was kind of like an amp warming up, you know?
Ben: Oh yeah, completely. Rob: And then by like
the seventh or eighth or ninth take, man, he was just nailing it. Mike: Yeah, because once
we was doing it kind of phrase by phrase, or verse by verse, you know,
wasn't he trying...I think he was trying to get something like five
or six really good...
Ben: from each...
Mike: From each section;
each verse, each chorus... Rob: OK. Now, he
didn't track like from zero to the end of the song. He would
do it like a verse at a time. He did like 12 on the first verse,
and then he did the chorus, right? Ben: Yeah.
Rob: And then he did
12 choruses... Mike: Yeah, verse, chorus,
verse, bridge, ending... Rob: So like five or
six chunks...OK. Ben: It makes a lot of
sense to do it that way.
Mike: He did my vocal
the same way. I did a verse and an “Ooh part", and then the
next verse and an “Ooh" part, and then my little middle section,
and then the ending. And I did four times of each. Rob: But from that, he
would take the best ones and build like a comp. But he was also
using them to double up, right? Mike: On some of it.
But like Todd's vocal, he kept a single track except, I think, in
a couple of spots, just for some...If I remember right, just from listening
to it...Yeah, just for a little emphasis. But he had all my vocals
and all of Jason's doubled. So he was taking like the best,
at least in the case of mine, like the best two out of the four. Rob: And he told me he
liked to pan like hard left and hard right when he would double something
up. Mike: Yeah, it gives
it a really wide sound, especially like on “Oohs" and “Ah's".
You know, it sounds really neat on that kind of thing.
Rob: And then, OK.
After he got all the vocals tracked, then that is when he came back
in and started putting on the extra stuff? Mike: Yeah, that was
when we...Yeah, because the idea was that the vocals, obviously, are
crucial. They have to be there, so we went ahead and did those.
So the vocals were done...All the...
Rob: All the meat was on there? Mike: All the essentials
were in the can. Ben: Yeah, “Let's
see what else we can add in the time that we have got left." Rob: We had about two
and a half or three hours left, and that is when ya'll went it...like,
Jason was doing different things with the chords.
Ben: Yeah, we put an
arppeggiated part on the end. Mike: Yeah, that was
the first thing, doing that.
Ben: Yeah, and that was the fingers. Mike: Yeah, the up and down...
Ben: Actually, no.
That wasn't.
Mike: Yeah, up and down was in the bridge... Rob: It was different?
Mike: Well, he was adding
just another part which was kind of high.... Ben: But you know what?
He always played only the riff on that song. He never had to put
chords into that before. Rob: And they were weird
chords or something?
Ben: Well, it was the
chords we had just changed. Mike: But yeah, he was
always just playing the riffs and he was oblivious to what was going
on around him. Normally, as far as...
Ben: Yeah, even when we changed it, like when we added in the
extra four bars, it didn't effect what he was doing at all, because
he just kept plowing straight through with the riff.
Mike: So that is what
the up and down was. Rob: But then somebody
turned it into flipping Jason off? I missed that little part of
it. Mike: Yeah, I think Butch
was actually the first one to do that... [laughter]
Rob: He said something
rather obscene to one of ya'll. I can't remember what it was.
Maybe it was Todd when he was tracking his vocals. Mike: I don't know. Rob: But we won't go into
that.
Mike: And Todd kept getting
it wrong. That was funny.
Rob: OK. What, the vocals? Mike: Well, no.
The up and down. Ben: The up and down
point. “All right. Up for D, down for A. No, wait.
It is up for A, right?" Mike: “D is down, right?"
Rob: Yeah, we got some
pictures of both pointing in different directions, and that was funny. Ben: Yeah, and that first one
where Jason was like, “You have to point before! You can't
just do it as I am making the chords!" Mike: Yeah, Todd was
very diligently pointing on the downbeat of each measure. You
know, waiting and....up, two, three, four, down...
Ben: It is hard not to
do that because you are so used to doing everything on the beat, because
I was doing it, too. I was trying to point along. Rob: So then after that,
that is when the feedback and stuff was added, and the tambourine part
was added? Mike: Yeah, the tambourine
was the very last thing that we did for the night.
Rob: And then he went
and made another speed comp... Mike: Well, by that point,
there wasn't really much left to comp... Ben: He did a couple
of speed comps here and there...
Rob: He did a mix, though. He did a really, really rough mix.
Mike: We had a rough
mix, yeah. Ben: But I guess the
speed comps were like once we got the drums done, speed comp.
Once we got the bass done, speed comp. Once we got the guitar
part, you take the best of each and make one guitar part. Rob: Billy's fingers
were flying over that keyboard.
Mike: That was one thing
I noticed as kind of the day was going on, like when we were doing bass
stuff or something. Whenever there was a moment of downtime, like,
he was going back into the drums... Rob: Cleaning them up? Mike: And like going
ahead and edit, edit, edit, edit, you know, whatever, cleaning up fades,
just like constantly...He was always doing something. Rob: I remember he said
he took samples....
Ben: Oh, yeah.
I forgot about that. Rob: What he meant by
that, though, is he was just recording a clean, you hitting like the
tom... Mike: He took a single
hit... Rob: And letting it resonate...And
then later on, if he needed to, he could cut that out and paste that
one top of a mis-hit or something that sounded a little wonky, or...
Mike: Well, not so much
a mis-hit. Primarily, it was there for....For example, I play
the high hats really low, so they were real close to the snare mic.
And when I go into the open high hat, if it bleeds into the snare mic
too much, he can replace that top snare sound with the sample one, keep
it clean so that high-hat is not...You know, if it is a backwards reverb
on the snare, you are not getting backwards high hat also. Rob: Well, I noticed
one time he came over to the drums and was tightening up the snare drum
a little bit. That was after he picked the...?
Ben: Is that a deer? Rob: Yeah. That's
a big buck, too. Ben: Yeah!
Rob: So, like he was
saying that the snare is a little doinky and he went over there with
a drum key or whatever... Mike: Well, the one he
was tuning, that was actually the brass snare that we didn't use.
But it was actually really loose when we first set it up. It was
floppy, kind of loose. So he was tightening it up.
But yeah, like the Ludwig, I think, was the one he was saying was a
little doingy. It just had a little too much ring in it.
He was going for something that was kind of in between; something that
had a good woody, full sound but still had a little bit of ring to it. Rob: I remember him saying
something about, because he was using compression on the drums, that
was causing an over ring or something like that to get emphasized that
normally wouldn't. He said he counted eight of them in the track
that he was going to replace with one of the samples, which I thought
that was pretty cool. Mike: Oh, OK. I
wasn't there for that conversation, so...
Rob: Yeah, that is some
of the stuff I wish ya'll would have got to hear. I wish I would
have had this recorder in there recording, but I didn't want to push
it too much, you know? And the other part, he was
like, “Hey, does Ben play with a pick?" And Butch Vig said
to Billy Bush, “You are just being lazy." Ben: I remember him asking
me.
Mike: Yeah, he came on
the headphones and he was like, “Well, that is what compressors are
for!" Rob: I was like, “I
bet he could!" But he was like, “Well, look at the blood blisters
on his fingers. You tell me: does he use a pick or not?" Ben: I was hoping the
blood blisters were going to come up in conversation just around him
sometime.
Rob: Yeah. I think
he noticed. I think he noticed. Ben: Sweet. Rob: You bleed for your
art, you know? So he had separate tracks in Pro Tools for each
of the drums channels. I mean he had like overheads...there were
overheads in the room...
Mike: You had stereo
overheads, you had stereo room mics, you had snare top and bottom, each
rack tom, and two kick drum mics, and a high-hat mic. So actually,
with the exception of the high-hat mic, he actually miced it the exact
same way I did in my house. I didn't have a high-hat mic.
He did have that. Yeah, otherwise... Obviously, his mics were a
little nicer and little more expensive than mine, but... Rob: Same idea.
Mike: Yeah. And
he even had, like the overheads, he had set up in a spaced cardioid
patter, which is also exactly what I did. I was like, “Wow!
Maybe I do know what I am doing." Rob: Well they were running
HD3, so it was in a...at 192 kilohertz, right?
Mike: Well, that is the
highest setting. I don't know what they had it set on.
Rob: I think that was what they were running. And then he
said something about, like, it was at 40... Mike: 44.1?
Rob: Yeah. They had it set to that. I remember that. Mike: Well, if it was
44.1, then it wouldn't be at 192. Rob: What is 48?
Mike: Well, 48 is just
another sample rate. Those are all different options. You
can do 44.1, which is CD. 48 was old VAT; you used 48. And
ADAT's...was it ADAT's also, maybe, that could run on 48?
I don't know. And then you have got like 96...
Rob: Multiples of 48... Mike: And then you get
into multiples, because there is like 88.2, or you can get into, yeah,
96, which is double 48, then 192...it is all multiples. Rob: But I think there
is something where he set what the target resolution is going to be
at the end of the song...I think that is what he was setting, not the
sample rate... Mike: That was probably
for the mix, then. What he was doing, he had the stereo two track,
that would have had to have been at 44.1. And also, dropping [xx].
I am sure he was tracking 24 bit and had to drop it down to 16 bit. Rob: All right.
So that is the technicalism for the night. Mike: Thanks Mr. Science!
Rob: When ya'll went
out in the alley and were talking about stuff, do you remember what
he was talking about? Mike: Like outside? Rob: Yeah, just talking
about different bands... Ben: Just whatever.
Mike: I honestly don't
really...Unless somebody says something that like jogs my memory...There
wasn't any...Like literally, it was just kind of goofing off. Rob: My favorite moment,
though, when I was asking him about what Garbage was going to do next,
and he said they were going to get together in studio and do some songwriting,
that is when I got up in his face and said, you know, “Where is my
album?" No pressure. That was awesome. Ben: Nice.
Rob: But he was really
digging on ya'll. I mean I remember like him...I mean, you know,
nobody is paying attention to him. Nobody is recording.
Nobody is looking at him and he is playing the drum part and whistling
the melody while he is kind of bopping around the studio. That
was really cool seeing him get into it like that. Mike: Yeah. Hell,
yeah. I did talk to him about gear just a little bit. I
asked him, at one point, if like the old vintage stuff compared to like
the...
Rob: The reissues? Mike: The reissues or
some of the new recreations, if there is a noticeable difference to
justify the huge price difference. And he said, “Not really."
He said, “Occasionally...Usually the ones..." I was actually about
to start spouting my opinion... Rob: Were you talking
about microphones or guitars, or...?
Mike: Like recording
gear. Like preamps, and microphones, and that kind of thing.
A good example is an LA2A compressor. It is a tube compressor.
You can buy a brand new one that is a reissue that looks pretty much
just like the old ones, made by the same company that made them...You
know, it is like the son of the guy that invented it is still making
them. A new one is, I don't know, three grand, $2,500, and an
old one, I don't know how many thousands of dollars you are looking
at. Rob: Did he say they
are virtually the same?
Mike: Yeah, pretty much.
You know, it is not a big difference. He said it was a lot easier
when not as many people knew about Ebay. It was a lot easier to
snap up vintage stuff. And he said the vintage stuff is cool,
but, really, when it comes down to it, from a utilitarian standpoint,
that you can pretty much get the same effect with the reissue stuff. Rob: What was he talking
about the console? Didn't he say it was like George Martin's
console from Sky Studios or something like that?
Mike: Air Studios.
Yeah, that was on the website for The Boat. It talked about it.
It was originally built, I think, in '69 for George Martin, Air Studios
in England. Rob: Well that is cool. Mike: And actually, I
didn't get a chance to ask. I was curious what all modifications
had been made to that board over the years.
Rob: They need to fix
the talkback button. Mike: Well, at least
they have the foot pedal, yeah. Rob: Yeah, he did not
like that. And the headphone mix; when ya'll were tracking your
parts, did ya'll have a bad headphone mix?
Mike: Mine was fine. Ben: They never got the
vocals in for me right. Mike: I think a lot of
it...I don't know if maybe they had some stuff patched wrong or what
was going on. I didn't really experience it until I was...I
tracked drums and then I didn't do anything else until it was tambourine...Well,
I guess vocals. And it was a little...I couldn't quite figure
out what was going on when I was doing vocals. It was like, “OK,
I got some guitar and I had bass." There were no drums in it
at all. But I had enough to go on to sing to, so I didn't really
worry about it.
And Todd had it cranked as
loud as it would go, just about, so I was turning all the volume way
down, because I put the headphones on and it about blew my head up.
But when I went in to do the tambourine, it was like...It was just going
[makes static noise]. You know, it was just distorted and all
bass and nothing else... Ben: So it was awesome.
Rob: Yeah! What's wrong with that?
Mike: Anyway... Rob: What else do you
need? Mike: Well, I don't
know. You know, when you are shaking a tambourine, drums would
be awesome. You know, a source of rhythm other than [makes distortion/static
noise].
Rob: [sneezes] Ben: Bless you. Rob: Thank you. Mike: Rob is dying in
the back.
Rob: No, no. I
am multi-sneezegasmic. Mike: But it turned out
that what the problem was, tattoo Mike...I wish I knew his real name.
I hate having to use all the... Rob: But there were three
Mike's there. There was drum tech Mike, the Mike Yeager, and
tattoo Mike.
Mike: Right. But
anyway, he came in and he pointed at two of the knobs on the little
mixer there. He said, “OK. This is your tambourine and
this is everything else." Well, that wasn't exactly the case.
The knob that said Bass still controlled the bass, and it was on 12
of 12 or whatever. Rob: Right, like it should
be!
Ben: Exactly! Rob: Gosh, Mike.
You just don't appreciate us, you know? Mike: And then the two
knobs that said guitars still controlled the guitars. And the
one that he said was everything had the drums and the vocals on it,
which was kind of weird. I think I ended up having...I got the
bass volume turned down enough where I could actually hear the rhythm
in it, and that was still about all I had in my headphones to do tambourine,
but I could hear the [simulates bass progression]. And it was
so...Good old Mr. Hodge here was so solid that...that was all I needed.
And I just played with that and it locked in. Rob: So you are admitting
that bass is all you need. Mike: Well, it certainly
worked for Vic Bonham [sp] with Spinal Tap, although they did have drums
on that. Rob: OK. Well,
I guess maybe a little bit.
Mike: And a little bit
of keyboard. Rob: OK. And he
had, like, yall's names down from like the first 30 seconds. Ben: Yeah, he did. Rob: I mean because he
had your names written by your instruments on the console. Ben: Yeah, I saw that.
Mike: So I guess he did have flash cards there, so...But, yeah,
that certainly made it easy, when he is not just, you know, “Hey,
um...uh, uh...you, guy..." “OK, drummer, I need you to..."
You know.
From the get go, it was almost
like...I mean I felt as comfortable as I do in my home studio from the
minute we got there. Ben: Yeah. The
whole crew did a really good job of making us feel at home... Mike: I was never nervous
at all. Now, I was serious about it. While tracking drums
to that click, I was concentrating. I was serious. I was
focused, but I was never nervous. I am more nervous playing at
Dave's Dark Horse Tavern than I was being there recording with Butch
Vig in a real studio in LA. You know, recording with a guy that
I would have to mortgage my house to afford to hire. Rob: Right. He's got
a hit or two. Cool. I think I got enough... ~~~~~
Your front page is designed.@@@@@@This is where we tweak the elements of the front page to get a pleasing and fast-loading page.
Remember, You have NO RISK when you hire the Webstore Design Company to build your Yahoo! Store.
We guarantee your satisfaction with our work, and we'll either go back to the drawing board, or refund your money unless you are absolutely satisfied.
Click here to send me an e-mail
and get a bid for your Yahoo! Store - ROB~~~~~
Your site gets a unique look.@@@@@@I really looked forward to doing the look for dragonstore.com. Allen gave me a general idea about what he wanted for the site, but the specifics were up to me. He also didn't have a company logo yet, so we made him a logo as our first part of the project.
Since this logo was going to be used on the front page, and on every page to brand the site, I also made smaller versions of the logo for the home button and to run across the top of every page.
Even though dark text on light background is the easiest to read, we decided that since the illustrations from our distributors' catalogs
had dark rich blue-purple and black backgrounds that we would go with a black background.~~~~~
Your site is enhanced with matching colors and fonts.@@@@@@Then we chose colors and fonts that matched the colors in the logo and in the product shots.~~~~~
Your site is then "branded" with navigation bar colors & fonts.@@@@@@First we color matched the button color with the logo, headline font, and body copy font. Since we used
side buttons, we put the home button on top using our custom graphic substituted for the "normal"
Yahoo! Store button.
Next we placed the "contents" so the major sections would appear on every page.
Yet another cool thing about Yahoo! Store is the diagnostic tools are superfantastique! I've learned that
the majority of folks come across your site sideways through search engines instead of going straight
through your front page to a section page and then to a product page.
That is the reason why EVERY PAGE needs to have your e-mail address, your phone number, a link to your home page, etc. You may only get one shot!~~~~~
Your site's product page layout templates get designed.@@@@@@Yahoo! Store offers two layouts for product pages. Top Buttons and Side Buttons.
We chose side buttons for this site because the color helped brand the site, and I wanted
the viewer to be able to see the section pages on every page.~~~~~
Ystore Club (Unofficial) Users Group@@@@@@Access to the Ystore Club (Unofficial) Users group on clubs.yahoo.com is open to the public. If you want to really know what real Yahoo! Store owners think, log in here at http://clubs.yahoo.com/ystoreclub.
This forum is a great place to ask questions, and most of the regulars are friendly and willing to help newbies. Sometimes discussions turn into bitch sessions, but mostly the club
There is also a private club for store owners only to discuss security issues and topics that may be inappropriate for a public forum.~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Email Works@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2009/02/email-works/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Free DUMMIES book chapter: Improving Conversion Rate@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2006/08/everyone-loves-free/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Link Building Strategies: Tapping Your Suppliers for a Fresh Supply of In-bound Links@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2007/09/link-building-strategies-tapping-your-suppliers-for-a-fresh-supply-of-in-bound-links/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Looking for Links in all the Right Places@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2008/03/looking-for-links-in-all-the-right-places/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Mississippi Meets Manhattan:Rob Snell Gives the Low-down on SES NY@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2007/04/mississippi-meets-manhattanrob-snell-gives-the-low-down-on-ses-ny/~~~~~
YstoreBlog: Movin'On Up in Search Results: Link Building and Keyword Ranking@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2008/06/movin-on-up-in-search-results-link-building-and-keyword-ranking/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Rob Snell Gives the Scoop on SMX Advanced@@@@@@http://www.ystoreblog.com/blog/2009/06/rob-snell-gives-the-scoop-on-smx-advanced/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Southern-Fried Search Marketing Secret Family Recipe@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2006/09/southern-fried-search-marketing-secret-family-recipe/~~~~~
YSTOREBLOG: Yahoo! Store CAPTION Linking Secrets@@@@@@http://ystoreblog.com/blog/2006/10/yahoo-store-caption-linking-secrets/~~~~~
Ystorebooks@@@@@@http://www.ystorebooks.com~~~~~
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