I just ran across a good article titled 9 website trends that need to disappear. In it, the writer mentions the following annoying features:

1. Pop-up boxes before you start reading
2. Horizontal scroll website
3. Infinite scroll with a footer
4. Slideshows (dividing articles and lists into several pages)
5. Interstitials (pages that load—usually with an ad—before the real page)
6. Every share button possible
7. Crappy native ads (you know, “one easy trick sheds body fat like crazy!”)
8. Autoplay videos
9. Ads everywhere

It’s worth reading in full.

I’ve discussed some of these features before, and I advise friends and clients not to utilize them. Some marketers disagree. They argue that despite being annoying, these methods increase page views—that’s why they’re so prevalent. I always try to explain that their analytics fail to measure the dogs that don’t bark, an expression borrowed from a Sherlock Holmes story.

What I mean is that developers who employ these annoying tricks can’t tell the difference between visitors who bounce because their content is a poor fit, and those who are annoyed into abandoning the website completely. Their stats also fail to measure the people who will not return to the website because of annoying features. This is the metric that doesn’t exist—the dog that didn’t bark.

They have no idea how much they’re handicapping their return traffic and user flow. They think that KPIs like unique visitor count and bounce rate are king. Those stats are useful, but they’re nowhere near as useful as conversion rate. And even if you’re a developer running a website whose only goal is to earn enough ad revenue to sustain the website, why would you stand in between your visitors and your content, waving your arms and yelling at them to look somewhere else? They came for the content. You’re keeping them from consuming it. It doesn’t make any sense!

This article is a good start, but here are nine more things that web developers need to stop doing:

1. Trying to force me to download their app
2. Giving me an inferior user experience on mobile
3. Forcing me to register/join before making a transaction
4. Redirecting my back button to a retention/subscription page
5. Making all links open in new windows (I’m okay with this for downloads)
6. Unnecessary/annoying animations during navigation
7. Using light gray fonts on white backgrounds
8. Overlaying white captions on images that are not darkened
9. Unnecessary splash pages (these are okay if they’re adapted to particular audiences)

Can you think of any more annoying website features that you’d like to see go away? Let me know in the comments below.

The post More annoying website trends appeared first on Chad Chandler.

I recently read a great article in Freelance Switch called The 7 Principles That Should Underpin Any Successful Online Business. There’s nothing groundbreaking in any of the advice offered, but it’s worth taking a few minutes to read through it all and remind yourself what the majority of your time should be spent doing.

There are only so many hours in a day. Generating sustainable growth without burning out due to fatigue is a challenge that many entrepreneurs don’t anticipate. Avoiding burnout comes from effective strategy and a slavish devotion to time and task management. Adhering to stubborn principles can help you to move forward with your business and your life in a balanced way.

The seven principles mentioned in the article are:

1. Identify Your Unique Selling Proposition
2. Focus on the Fundamentals
3. Embrace Modern Marketing Methods
4. Don’t Plan For Failure
5. Be Ruthless
6. Seek Out Growth
7. Review Your Business Processes and Workflow Periodically

Click here to read the whole thing.

7 recommended books

These tips dovetail nicely with the strategic guidance in several of the books I usually recommend to entrepreneurs and frustrated e-marketers. If you were looking for seven books to reinforce the seven principles mentioned above, I would recommend the following books, respectively:

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

This book pinpoints the modern marketing dilemma–there’s too much noise out there. When was the last time you clicked on an internet ad? When was the last time you answered a telephone call from an unknown number? When was the last time you paid attention to a TV commercial or a magazine ad? We’ve all become very adept at ignoring the things in life that we find boring or superfluous. In order to break through the clutter, you have to find a way to make your business remarkable in the literal sense. A good corollary to this book is The Big Moo.

Chasing Cool: Standing Out in Today’s Cluttered Marketplace

This book is a little hit-or-miss. Some of the stories are useful, but others are about catching lightning in a bottle—a feat that’s barely manageable, much less plotted. It’s about establishing authenticity and protecting your brand. If your organization targets young influencers, then it’s worth checking out.

Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing

In this day and age, even if you’re selling a product, you’re still selling a service. This book gets to the heart of the challenge of selling an abstract service—most people don’t recognize great service, but they know when it doesn’t meet their expectations. You have to explain your competitive advantage, manage client expectations, and deliver prompt and courteous service if you hope to win and keep their business.

The Thank You Economy

Social media isn’t a fad—it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Through technology, social platforms allow us to transition easily and often between the roles of audience, author, expert, and advocate. These communications are having an impact on our lives whether we choose to engage in them or not. This book delves into the world of social media and offers several success stories illustrating why and how you should be engaging online with your customers and prospects.

The Art of War: Sun Tzu’s Ultimate Treatise on Strategy for War, Leadership, and Life

I’ve gotten some pushback from friends and associates who have argued that The Art of War is a poor source of strategic business advice in the modern economy. But numbers 4 and 5 from the list above could have come directly from Sun Tzu’s rules about being unpredictable in battle and not being afraid to put one’s resources on “death ground.”

Integration Marketing: How Small Businesses Become Big Businesses and Big Businesses Become Empires

This is probably the least readable of the books on this list, or at least it was for me. I get bored easily with books. It’s about the art of the upsell and it includes some pretty good examples of companies that have used simple calls to action to generate growth with minimal added cost. We all have a tendency to get complacent, especially when things are going well. This book has some lessons about using experimentation to challenge that tendency.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

This is probably the most academic of the books listed here. It’s about forecasting and adapting to change, recognizing competence and incompetence, and identifying what makes some change agents succeed where others fail. The section that compares Walgreens to Eckerd should be passed around the executive offices throughout the entertainment industry. Talk about leaders who are failing to adapt… There’s a companion out there that translates the book’s principles to the nonprofit sector.

Hopefully, these books will provide you with the knowledge necessary to understand why some companies succeed where others fail.

The post What principles are underpinning your online business? appeared first on Chad Chandler.

I’ve said several times before that if you manage a website, you need to integrate with Google. Google’s tools are free. The most powerful benefit that Google gives webmasters is the vision that comes from knowing how their visitors are engaging with their websites. Over time, you can use these tools to set benchmarks to gauge what’s working, tweak what’s not, and identify new opportunities.

The old adage still rings true; you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

I stress to my clients that they should make a point to log into Google Analytics at regular intervals to compare recent activity with their own historical data. I also urge them to incorporate UTM data (code that indicates which of your tactics are converting impressions to visits) into their marketing so that they can establish ROI for their campaigns. That feature is already baked right into Analytics just waiting for you to take advantage of it.

Learning to sort through Analytics requires a little practice. It’s a robust tool with a bevy of options. But once you’ve learned to navigate it, you can understand so much about your visitors. You can see who came to your site, where they came from, and how long they stayed, and which pages they visited. You can also delve deep into technicalities like how many of your visitors came via mobile versus desktop, and which browsers and operating systems your visitors are using. You can even see their monitor resolution and their cell phone brand.

Analytics is always changing and new features are added frequently. One feature that’s fun to play with is Visitors Flow in the Audience subsection. It offers you a visual representation of how most visitors navigate your website.

In this view, you can sort by all of the usual parameters, and you can hover over certain steps for more information.

This is a fun tool to play with and it provides a bite-sized view of the typical customer experience. If you’re losing visitors before they hit the shopping cart, this will show you where they’re aborting. And if your most popular pages aren’t promoting your core message, then you can see where you need to make some changes.

If you manage a website and you’re not currently using these tools, then you need to sign up for them. If you think you need help doing that, you can always contact me for assistance.

The post See how your visitors flow through your website appeared first on Chad Chandler.

I was speaking with a client recently who wanted to add responsiveness to his website. It would require some pretty pricey coding and design work. With that in mind, I think it’s better to just integrate a new theme. It would take the same amount of time and would probably cost less. The problem is, I don’t think responsive themes—the way most of them work—are worth the effort.

We’re in an odd time right now with regard to web design. I like responsive designs that stack content boxes to accommodate various screen sizes (example), but I also think it’s a stopgap development. It can make sites seem disjointed and difficult to follow. Confusing or annoying the user is the last thing we want. Too often, mobile sites deliver the user a more limited experience than they would get on a computer. That’s one of the reasons why so many mobile users opt for the desktop view.

Over the next few years, I think the pendulum of popularity will swing away from native apps and toward mobile apps.

I think it’s safe to predict that, in the future, everyone is always connected to the internet. If you’re always connected, then what’s the difference anyway? I think the trend will be to meet in the middle between apps and websites and develop slimmer, more intuitive portals that act like branded picture frames around content. That’s not so different from the way apps are currently laid out, and consumers have voted with their wallets for more app-like design. As users get more comfortable with smart devices, and with gestures like swiping and zooming, more of those features will be built into hardware in general, and software in particular, to take advantage of cleaner design.

But content is still king. Even the shiniest wrapper won’t sell shit chocolate for very long.

It’s time to give the users what they want and try to stay out of their way. Microsoft realizes this. That’s one of the reasons why they redesigned Windows 8 to be touch-centric, and why they shook up their OEM community by launching the Surface line of tablets. Google made a similar move with the Chromebook Pixel, a touchscreen laptop that’s entirely cloud-dependent.

Let’s recap this. Microsoft jumped head-first into a new, touch-capacitive version of Windows aimed at retaining corporate clients, and then released the ARM-based Surface RT? Then Google released what’s essentially a mobile tablet with a keyboard and loaded it with the web-based Chrome OS rather than Android? These are odd moves, but they’re the obviously best moves that Microsoft and Google think they can make at this odd time. It reeks of fence-testing, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The problems with these products is that they’re trying to serve two masters, desktop and mobile, but desktop and mobile have neither fully merged nor fully diverged. That’s why these devices seem awkwardly targeted and poorly positioned. I think we’ll look back on them in a few years the same way we look back on the Palm Pilot.

Only with hindsight can we see that the Palm Pilot evolved in the odd era between dumbphones and smartphones. And only with hindsight do we recognize the Palm Pilot as an expensive toy that was both ahead of, and behind, its time.

Tech is rapidly evolving. Web design is racing not only to adapt to the emerging tech, but also to users’ ability and expectations. Ten years ago, the internet was filled with websites built on frames and flash. Those are mostly gone now, thanks to Google and Apple, respectively. The popularity of some coding languages and content management systems have risen and declined in that same time. Style is always changing, and we have to change with it. It’s just another operating expense.

It’s no longer good enough for things merely to function. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” doesn’t work with e-commerce. Websites today must look and feel current because perception is a bigger motivator than fact.

If I walked into a dentist’s office that had musty carpet and smelled like cat piss, I wouldn’t stick around to get my teeth cleaned no matter how good the dentist was. My perception would be that if the dentist was successful and respected, he could afford new hardwood floors and a better air filter. How many times have you backed out of an online purchase because the website seemed insecure? How many of your prospects have backed away from you?

Good examples of websites that are leading the way with responsive design are USA Today and Mashable.

For example, click on this article from USA Today that echoes some of what I’m saying about this being a time of great transition.

Do you see how the website layout is doing its best to get out of the way? It’s putting the content first, and it’s the same user experience for someone on a desktop PC and a person on a tablet. It still resorts to some stacking for small smartphone screens, but the stacking and the mobile navigation don’t get in the way of the content. The New York Times is currently trying to get out of their readers’ way as well.

Now look at Mashable’s scalable design.

Scroll down the homepage. You’ll run out of interest before the website runs out of content. Do you notice how minimal the actual site is? It’s just a bar at the top. The bar changes for desktop versus mobile, but it doesn’t change all that much. It may seem like a simple layout, but this interface presumes that the user is an intelligent person capable of gaming out the menu. It’s bold, really. It stands in stark contrast to so many layouts and systems that assume the user is an idiot.

These websites aren’t perfect. They’re reacting to the same challenges that we face, and they’re failing at some of those challenges.

I should stress that being current is not the same as chasing every trend. I consider myself to be a pretty “current” guy, but you won’t see me walking down the sidewalk in skinny jeans and a grumpy cat t-shirt. Those are fads, not trends. That’s why stackable, responsive designs seem so awkward; they’re fads too.

They’re not quite the old thing, but they’re obviously not the new thing either. Like the Palm Pilot before, they’re just a product of the odd time we’re living in.

If you find yourself at a Morton’s fork where you have to deliver your mobile users a non-responsive website, or deliver everyone an awkwardly responsive website, then go with the non-responsive one for the time-being. It’s better to save your money now and do it right next year than to do it twice in two years because you and your customers are unhappy with the compromise. Mobile users are pretty good at pinching and zooming their way across desktop sites these days. Better solutions will come along in time.

If you manage a WordPress.org website, then it’s simply a matter of waiting for a theme to come along that works well for you and your customers. In the meantime, get your current website into shape. Lose the fluff. Cut your word count by half. Drop the blogroll. Focus less on your features and more on the benefits to your customers. They’ll appreciate your direct approach, and you’ll appreciate the spike in traffic.

The post We’re in an odd ‘in-between’ time in web design appeared first on Chad Chandler.

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of RSS feeds. If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, then click here.  Using RSS aggregators like Google Reader and the myriad feed-reading apps can simplify your news consumption and save countless hours. I actually have my feeds set up in newspaper-style categories, sorted by topics that are relevant to me from sources that I trust. It’s like my own personal e-newspaper delivered exactly when I feel like reading it.

Being a news junkie who dislikes TV news, I turn to my feeds for most of my information. The delivery of this information is so efficient that I can glance through scores of items at an impressive pace. I rarely even have to leave the reader, but that’s because I’m biased toward sites that publish full feeds.

Technically-unsavvy people see me staring at my smartphone in the grocery store line and assume I’m texting nonsense to friends. Little do they know that I’m catching up on political news, monitoring sports scores, and educating myself about the latest trends in my profession. And look at how fast I’m able to consume news stories:

These numbers are actually low because they don’t count all of the sharing I’ve done through third-party apps.

One of the things that bugs me about poor website design is that so many local organizations, often on shoestring budgets, don’t publish an RSS feed at all. They cling to their e-newsletters as if it’s still 1999. The sad fact is that they probably paid thousands of dollars for a custom CMS when a WordPress site would have provided the same functionality for free. Plus, if they were using a WordPress blog to publish their updates, then their e-newsletter/RSS/social media cross-posting would be automated. That value of that automation is immeasurable. And thanks to the way WordPress publishes feeds, they could allow users to subscribe to specific topics that interest them. That’s great customer service.

In the Arts folder of my feed-reader, I subscribe to news for bands that I like, local events that are on the horizon, new restaurants that are opening, etc. It’s crazy how many artistic organizations like museums, orchestras, and playhouses don’t publish any feeds at all. All I want to know is what they have coming up in the next few weeks. I don’t want to stop what I’m doing and visit their websites. I don’t want to give them my email address. I don’t want to “like” them on facebook. I don’t want them spamming my twitter stream. I just want to be able to open my Arts folder whenever I feel like it and have their updates waiting for me.

I’m trying to give them my money. They’re making it unnecessarily difficult. That’s bad customer service.

Even though a lot of these organizations have outdated websites, they usually have an intern who fashions herself a social media guru. She’s usually blowing up Twitter to the tune of 20+ tweets per day on a topic that I’m not passionate about at all. I don’t want that level of engagement.

In order to keep my main Twitter stream relevant and interesting, I don’t follow organizations that tweet that much. Instead, I import their tweets into my RSS reader. That way, when I want to know what’s going on at my local entertainment venues, I just click on their feeds. Granted, their description is limited to 140 characters, but all they need to do is pique my interest. The briefer they are, the better the chance that I’ll read what they’ve written.

If you’d like to import some Twitter feeds into your RSS reader, all you have to do is use the following code:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=XXX

Simply replace “XXX” with the Twitter handle of the feed you wish to import. For instance, if you wanted to import my Twitter feed, you would paste this url into your reader:

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.rss?screen_name=chad_chandler

Then just rename it whatever you want and you can check in on that topic whenever you feel like it. Here’s an example from the Twitter feed of The Handlebar, a music hall down the road from my house. All of these tweets were posted in one day:

Can you imagine how much more useful it would be if they allowed me to subscribe to just an “upcoming performances” feed? Not only would I be more likely to know of the shows in advance and buy tickets, but I’d also be more likely to share their updates on my preferred social networks. Instead, I have to endure incessant updates about their food deals. And their food is terrible.

Still, importing this information in to my feed-reader is better than trying to remember to open a new browser tab, search for their website, and fumble around for the right information. This way, it comes to me and awaits my interest. That’s all I want.

Another cool way to make your RSS reader work for you is to import Craigslist search feeds.

For example, I’m currently looking for a used Roland AC-90 amplifier for my acoustic guitar. I’m in no rush to buy it, but I’d like to know if anyone local is selling one. I don’t want have to check Craigslist every day, so I go to the Greenville and Asheville sections of the site, click on the “Musical Instr” category, and search for “Roland AC90.”

It doesn’t matter if anything comes up. At the bottom-right corner of the page, there’s an RSS button:

I right-click on that button and copy the link address. Then I import that feed into my reader. Now, whenever someone sells that particular amp, it’ll pop up in my reader. I never have to go to Craigslist. Craigslist comes to me.

How cool is that?

The post Importing Twitter and Craigslist feeds into your RSS reader appeared first on Chad Chandler.

Most of the businesses I consult are either start-ups or small companies looking to shift their marketing from an old push approach to a newer pull strategy. Part of that transition is embracing web-based marketing. The problem is that a lot of the tactics of push don’t cross over very well to pull. I occasionally recommend books that I think will help clients perceive how the times and the audience have changed, but the nuances can be difficult to understand.

In a recent post titled Mandatory reading for entrepreneurs (and new marketers), I recommended that executives looking to better understand social media engagement read The Fine Art of Small Talk:

Much of the new direction in marketing is focused on relationship management. Now, more than ever, the keys to success are authenticity, empathy, and experience. When you’re blogging or publishing, the idea is to be interesting. When you’re engaging with customers and prospects via social media, the idea is to be interested. This book has some suggestions that should be taken with a grain of salt, but the overall advice is solid. Striking up or joining a conversation online is not so different from mingling at a party. Some people are better at it than others. You need to be good at it if you plan to succeed in the new world of marketing.

In that post, I recommended several books because all of them touched on disparate pieces of the web marketing puzzle. They’re all worth taking the time to read, but I’ve come across another book that more succinctly examines and explains the way new marketers should be using these strategies for long-term growth. It’s called The Zen of Social Media Marketing: An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, and Increase Revenue.

This is one of the easier to understand books on web marketing, online branding, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media integration—topics that can seem abstract and confusing to the uninitiated.

The book glosses over some of the more technical aspects of web design, tracking, and advertising, but the major themes are spot on. The author discusses both strategy (macro) and tactics (micro) that have the most positive impact with today’s audience. And perhaps most importantly, the author tries to manage the expectations of those just starting out. This is something I try to drill into my clients’ minds over and over again.

The Zen of Social Media Marketing is one of the best beginner-oriented social media/SEO books that I’ve come across in the past five or so years, and there have been a lot of books written on the topic in that time. If you’re relatively new to the game, or would just like a deeper and broader understanding of the methods involved in building a meaningful online brand, then I highly recommend it.

The post A good introduction to effective social media marketing appeared first on Chad Chandler.

It seems like more and more news websites are moving to interstitial ads (also known as splash screen ads) as a revenue source. I understand that they have to make money, but there are better ways to do it. It’s an annoying form of advertising that hijacks the user’s attention like a bait-and-switch tactic. I usually hit the back button whenever I see one, meaning the brand in question marred its reputation as trust agent only to lose a potential consumer of its product or service.

But if there’s something more annoying than interstitial ads, it’s interstitial subscription solicitations.

You know what’s annoying? When your browser asks you if you want to save a password before you even know if the password worked or not. That does’t make sense at all, does it? You should be prompted to save the password only after you’ve seen if it worked. Some browsers have made the change to a more common sense approach, but most haven’t.

It’s even more annoying when a website asks us to subscribe to their newsletter/social/feed before we’ve ever read an article. In what world would we subscribe to anything before we’ve seen it? That’s like assuming eye contact is code for a marriage a proposal request. Don’t ask me to commit before we’ve even said hello.

As a matter of fact, I googled “interstitial ads” so I could provide readers with a more technical definition, and I was interrupted with this:

It should go without saying that I didn’t make it to the site. Here’s another site that didn’t waste my time: Splash Pages: Do We Really Need Them?

Interstitial ads pop up like the motorized stop sign on the side of a blinking school bus, informing us that we must pause our lives until the ad goes away. It takes control away from us, the consumers, and puts it in the hands of an advertiser that we never agreed to communicate with.

This is a self-destructive advertising strategy, as it will only annoy and eventually alienate the very consumers whose traffic drives advertising revenue in the first place. If you’re an advertiser, or a website that hosts advertising, it’s a good idea to steer clear from this approach.

In the worst cases, I’ve opened a news item from the feed preview only to be slapped in the face with an interstitial ad that’s not optimized for mobile. There’s no way for me to move the ad and close it. So the news producer created engaging content that motivated me click over to their site to read more, only to let their advertiser freeze up my phone’s browser before I ever got to the article. Do you think I ever went back to read it?

Of course not. Now I think twice before clicking on any of their articles.

Don’t be that guy.

The post Steer clear of interstitial ads appeared first on Chad Chandler.

Smashing Magazine recently featured a great article about search engine optimization (SEO), titled The Inconvenient Truth About SEO. It repeats much of what I’ve been saying lately:

Most website owners perceive SEO as a dark art, shrouded in mystery. They have heard phrases like “gateway pages” and “keyword density”, or have been bamboozled by technobabble about the way websites should be built. All of this has left them feeling that SEO is the purview of experts. This is a misconception reinforced by certain segments of the SEO community.

The problem is that these kinds of complex techniques do work, to a point. It is possible to improve placement through a manipulation of the system. However, although it can have short term benefits, it will not last without continual investment. This is because the objective is wrong. SEO shouldn’t be about getting to the top of Google for particular phrases. In fact, we shouldn’t be optimizing for search engines at all. We should be optimizing for people. After all, that is what Google is trying to do.

You should read the whole thing.

I tell clients all the time that SEO is more about minimizing errors and ambiguity than about stacking some virtual deck. Sure, there are some technical issues that might be a little difficult for the layman to understand, but that should be baked into your website from the start. At worst, it should involve hiring a third party to review your website and straighten out the issues. In other words, SEO should be a one-time cost rather than a monthly fee.

If business owners stopped worrying about what the “gurus” said about SEO and started trying to create more engaging content on a regular basis, they’d be rewarded with better search engine rankings.
 

Content is king

If you can be more succinct, more interesting, and more engaging, you’ll be more popular online. That popularity will translate to leads, and those leads will translate to sales.

The cost of doing it the right way is time; that’s why so few people do it the right way. You might argue that time is money, and that it’s better to your spend money than your time getting your website working better, but you’d be wrong. It might be easier, but it’s not better. No one knows your business (and your competitive advantage) better than you.

I install an SEO plugin into every website I build. I always urge my clients to submit the meta titles and descriptions themselves. Descriptions needs to be 155 characters or less. Being forced to explain different aspects of their business so succinctly is invaluable in rooting out and eliminating ambiguous and superfluous content. Thanks to the digital era in which we’re living, attention spans have shrunk. Consumers like their information in bite-size chunks. Give it to them that way.

We all get caught up in the myriad features and advantages of our services. What customers want to know about is the benefit to them. That shouldn’t be complicated, but it is. I see it all the time.

Once my clients have had to frustratingly come up with succinct explanations of the benefits of their services, they are able to develop better elevator pitches. Once they have better elevator pitches, they can go back and edit their web copy to better engage with readers.

This is the path to success. At least, it’s a better path than paying some “SEO specialists” to have your site linked from a shady network of artificial microsites.

If you want to read more about the productive way to approach SEO, feel free to browse through some of my other posts on the topic:

• Don’t fall for instant gratification SEO scams
• Don’t beg for traffic. Lure traffic with great content.
• Beware of black hat SEO scammers
• The six most basic steps to SEO success
• Mandatory reading for entrepreneurs (and new marketers)

The post When it comes to SEO, you’re probably doing it wrong appeared first on Chad Chandler.

Amazon has begun rolling out brand pages for businesses. Whether you have enough product to stock a virtual store window or not, it’s a good idea to go ahead and stake a claim on your brand name before someone else does.

The company is quietly pushing a service called Amazon Pages, which lets companies set up their own pages on Amazon.com as “custom destinations,” complete with www.amazon.com/brandname URLs and dynamic designs with large photos and social media links. Along with this, it is also offering Amazon Posts for companies to market themselves across Amazon and Facebook, and Amazon Analytics to measure how well all of the above is working. […] The bigger effort around pages, meanwhile, gives Amazon a significant leg up in its positioning brands and smaller businesses that might potentially look to Amazon as a way of running their full online operation, in place of their own standalone websites.

This is a brilliant move by Amazon. So many small businesses see Amazon as a threat to their local positioning, but the reverse is also true. Amazon give small shops the ability to sell their products to anyone in the world. By all means, advertise your local, small, and independent credentials, but also take the opportunity to make an extra buck on the the faraway folks who find you online.

The biggest obstacle emerging businesses face when it comes to ecommerce isn’t getting found; it’s getting an effective and efficient fulfillment system in place. By introducing brand pages, Amazon Marketing Services is hoping to take the mystery out of online sales. In a way, they appear to be copying the basic Etsy shop model and beefing it up into a full-scale ecommerce system complete with analytics and social media management tools.

The old adage says that you go where your customers are. Since Amazon is already integrated into your customers’ smartphones, a branded page would put access to your products in their pockets as well.

Click here to register for your Amazon store, and be sure to use your branded email address.

The post If you sell online, go grab your brand name on Amazon appeared first on Chad Chandler.

Like I’ve said before, if you manage a website, you need to integrate with Google. A great starting point for entrepreneurs and new marketers is Google’s Webmaster Academy. It’s an online training program that incorporates video to provide you with a fundamental understanding of how and why some websites rank better than others in search results. The lessons are fairly brief, they keep from getting too technical, and they give you ‘best practice’ tips and tools you can incorporate in your content production and outreach strategy.

I also suggest that you subscribe to the official Google Webmaster Central Blog feed (more on RSS feeds). You’ll find pithy videos like this one, titled SEO for startups in under 10 minutes.

The post Have you enrolled in Google’s Webmaster Academy? appeared first on Chad Chandler.