You can always tell when the going gets tough, because the tough get going. In other words, when the economy slows down and sales performance goes with it, smart businesses don’t cut back on sales & marketing expenditure, they increase it.

The logic for this is simple. If your competitors are reducing market exposure, that is when you should be increasing yours and get increased value for your marketing budget.

US web hosting company NameCheapHosting are doing just that with some great offers this month. Not only do they have aggressive pricing, they also throw in lots of special offers and freebies when you sign up with them.

(more…)

Microsoft and Yahoo!, Search Engine Partners?
How Mergers and Acquisitions May Change the Search Engine Playing Field - and Where Google Comes In
By Scott Buresh (c) 2008

Until recently, there were five major players in the search engine world: Google, MSN, AOL, Ask.com, and the Yahoo! search engine. These top Internet search engines quickly could be narrowed down to four, however; AOL uses the Google algorithm and will yield nearly identical results. Further narrowing is rapidly occurring - Ask.com seems to be stepping out of the spotlight to focus on specific markets, and in early March 2008, Microsoft began attempting to purchase the Yahoo! search engine. If there are just two top search engines with which to be concerned, what does this mean for your business and for SEO as a whole?

What’s Going On with the Yahoo! Search Engine?

As almost anybody with access to a news source knows by now, Microsoft put in an unsolicited offer to purchase the Yahoo! search engine in early March 2008. Yahoo! rejected this offer at first, saying that it undervalued its company as one of the top engines (and a provider of other services, including email and chat as well). Microsoft did not increase the offer at this point; it instead decided to enter a proxy battle.

(more…)

vzaar, the UK company that offers YouTube-like online video hosting and playback, have announced the introduction of free video hosting, management, and tools for inserting video into eBay listings, for the USA.

Previously only available for UK listings, the service has now been extended for stateside.  vzaar has a heavy presence of ex-eBay UK employees amongst its staff, including Dan Wilson (one of the founding employees of eBay UK) and Jamie Parkins who, until January this year, managed eBay.co.uk’s PowerSeller program and led the Top Seller team.  They also have Adrian Sevitz, formerly of eBay and Accenture, onboard.

Why use vzaar and not YouTube?

This is best explained by the company -

“YouTube is a brilliant website; a phenomenon really. Highly entertaining and built for that purpose, it’s a joy to use. vzaar, on the other hand, has been built for eBay users. Both serious and casual sellers alike, with your commerce interests in mind.

YouTube isn’t tricky to use, however vzaar is a cinch in comparison allowing you to embed video into your listings in just 2 clicks after you have uploaded. This also means that there is no need to alter or insert any html code as our engine does all that for you.

In addition to the ease of use, the vzaar video player contains vital info for the buyer; sellers feedback, bidding time left on the auction and the ever crucial “Bid Now” button - a call to action that encourages sellers to bid on the item at any point when watching the video.

As we all know, one of YouTube’s core strengths is that it is excellent at promoting other videos - allowing you to remain entertained for many hours by other videos…much to the anguish of employers the world over. However we believe this isn’t ideal behavior for a user watching YOUR sales video - you want them to stay with you and your business, not go to a competitor. Your vzaar video encourages watchers to view only your other videos on vzaar, ensuring the customers attention remains with you and your business.

YouTube is free… and so is vzaar. We have developed further functionality that will allow you easily manage your large numbers of videos, add them to multiple listings in one go, search your listings, use smart templates with video and these services will be available at a reasonable upgrade fee. ”

I’ve not yet played with video in listings, mainly due to an overload of other projects, but hope to have time to do so later this year, and will return to blog the results and whether or not the hype is true.

Ed

 Our 3rd-Party Tools Discussion Forum - Have your say!

While attending a recent seminar in Las Vegas, I found myself in a room with horrible Internet connectivity.  As someone who actively monitors and manages hundreds of websites, this used to really panic me.  Yet, I calmly sat through many of the seminar
presentations, knowing that all of my customer service concerns were being handled very promptly.

Let me explain my set-up, and you’ll understand why customer service is so easy for me now.

I should begin though by pointing out that, as your online business starts to grow, keeping up with the customer service issues is often the most challenging part of running your business.

Just keeping up with all of the emails can be nearly impossible!

Like many online marketers, I decided to outsource customer service, but also maintain positive control.  I maintain my own helpdesk (customer service center) where a few assistants take care of 95% of issues within minutes of them arising.

I route a major percentage of communications through my helpdesk because that puts everything all in one place.  I have a threaded record of many exchanges, stored in a secure database, so I can always go back and look up the details later.

I am a bit of a “control freak” so I haven’t put the life of my business totally into the hands of strangers.  I have a few customer support assistants that I know fairly well.  I know that they are trustworthy, understand my business, and have good judgement.

I use a help desk software, called Three Pillars Help Desk, but there are other comparable support desk packages.  At under $100, this is an amazingly feature-rich piece of software though.

The typical customer service interaction is as follows:

1) A customer has a question, lost a download, needs a software install, wants to joint venture with me, can’t get a file to open properly, etc…. they visit my help desk and fill out a help ticket.

I DON’T require them to register.  They just fill out the ticket, and they are entered into the system, receiving an email confirmation.  Actually, before they submit the ticket, they are encouraged to peruse the “frequently asked questions” (FAQ) built right into the help desk.  Often, the answer to their concern is right there and they don’t even need to file a help ticket.

2) As soon as a help ticket is filed, admin assistants assigned to that “category” of ticket, receive a desktop notification that a new ticket has been filed.  They get an audible chime, as well as a desktop icon that tells them how many tickets are awaiting responses.

I have my help desk set up so that I get these same, notifications.  I have it set to check every 15 minutes, so I can see if any tickets go unanswered for too long.  Usually, my tech
support is fairly fast though.

3) Admin assistants log into the admin control panel, using their unique admin log-ins, and respond to the tickets in categories assigned to them.  They don’t see, and can’t respond to tickets in categories not assigned to them.

One of the categories at my helpdesk is “Personal For Willie.”  Naturally, I only want those tickets visible to me.  Three Pillars Help Desk Software allows that option.  Tickets regarding JV’s are also only visible to me, but I could have an assistant assigned to sift through JV proposals, and have all of those tickets ONLY visible to that admin.  Many of my contemporaries do have assistants assigned to screen JV proposals… some using the
very same helpdesk setup that I just described.

4) Many of the help tickets that we get can be responded to with a “one-touch response.” The admin just selects the answer from a drop-down selection of pre-composed answers, clicks “send,” and in a matter of SECONDS that ticket is taken care of.  The precomposed answers are assigned to (and only visible for) specific categories, and the categories are assigned to specific admins.

Perhaps a customer unfamiliar with PDF’s or .zip files failed to download and save one properly, or perhaps they don’t know how to open the file.  Perhaps a customer had a harddrive crash, and needs a replacement copy of an ebook.  If my tech support is provided with proof of purchase, they are authorized to replace these files.  My admins are empowered to make these types of decisions, that I really shouldn’t need to get bogged down with.

5) As soon as the ticket is responded to, the customer gets the response via email, and the desktop notifier, when it next updates, shows that that ticket has been taken care of.

I mentioned earlier that I route most communications through my help desk.  This includes requests for joint ventures, requests for me to broker joint ventures, request for me to review a product, etc.  Details on how I do all of these things are also included in the FAQ, so potential JV partners can see if their product is a likely match before they even file a help ticket.

Email is so unreliable these days.  There is nothing more disconcerting than having a customer upset with you over not responding to an email that you never even received.  You don’t have that problem with the help desk.  The correspondence is stored right in the database, and only visible to appropriate parties.  You can retrieve records by name, email address, and a number of other database variables at any time… even for closed tickets.  So, you have a real treasure of data at your fingertip.

The FAQ file shows how many views a given question has.  That can show you potential problems, or indicate that you need to cover a product feature more thoroughly on your sales letter.  Just paying attention to something like that could easily double your sales of a given product.  The fact is that most prospect, who have a question, won’t bother asking.  So you need to really pay attention to those who do, and assume that many more had the same question

Anyway, I’ve just shared with you how I handle customer service for the hundreds of websites that I actively manage in mere minutes per day.  I haven’t actually tracked how much time my admin assistants spend responding to tickets.  They haven’t asked for raises in a long time, so I assume that it’s not very much.

If you want to spend more of your time working on growing your business, rather than putting out customer service “fires,” then I highly recommend that you set up your own help desk.  My helpdesk of choice is Three Pillars: http://ThreePillarsHelpDesk.com but there are others. You can get as fancy as you want to with a help desk with them ranging from free to several thousand dollars in price.  Three Pillars Help Desk was designed specifically for Internet marketers which is why it was a natural choice for me.

 Our Management Information Systems Discussion Forum
 Autoresponder Secrets Exposed $9.99 in BuildaSkill’s book & software shop

eBay US have launched v1.0 of their browserless desktop tool which lets you  search, bid on, and watch items right from the eBay Desktop application, all while getting alerts about their status and RSS feeds of newly listed products in categories watched by you.

One of the features the developers like most is the Favorite Search feed, which lets you download items from your favorite searches and browse through them, even when you’re not online!  Version 1.0 is available at http://desktop.ebay.com.

I’ve not played with it, and to be honest, I’m not likely to unless I see glowing, bug-free, laudatory reports across all the eBay discussion boards.  eBay still haven’t got the bugs out of the online eBay systems, nor from tools like Turbo Lister, therefore I’m not going to allow a newly post-Beta version of a desktop invader into my systems.  Skype causes enough background and resource grief as it is.

I am hoping, however, that the tool is bug-free, stable, and as worthwhile as the pre-release announcements touted it to be.  If the overwhelming opinion is that it’s bug-free and worthwhile, then I’ll give it a shot.

Ed

 Our eBay Discussion Forums
 The Free Advertising Handbook $9.99 in BuildaSkill’s book & software shop

Sun Microsystems announced a few weeks ago that they’d be attempting the acquisition of MySQL for one billion dollars, made up of 80% cash and 20% stock options.

Sun’s Chief Exec Johnathon Shwartz refers to it as “most important acquisition in the company’s history” and I couldn’t agree more.

Whilst most of the industry pundits are proselytising the relevance of the acquisition to put Sun alongside IBM, SAP, and Oracle in the database arena, MySQL’s particular relevance is to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) due to its lightweight code (it has roughly 10,000 features compared to the bloatware of the bigger names with 50,000) which means easier and faster implementation and maintenance.

This enables SMEs using MySQL to be more nimble and quicker to market with applications and solutions, and being Open Source freeware, it is the database of choice for web hosting services, and used generally in parallel with Linux implementations - this combination seriously contributing to the cost-of-entry drop for creating websites that has been a phenomena since the Millennium.  MySQL has some big name pay-for-support clients, amongst them Google, Nokia, and Yahoo, so they shouldn’t just be thought of as software for the little people.  With Sun’s clout behind them, they should be able to make faster inroads into the large enterprise and multi-nationals market.

As an old hand in IT, and with vivid memories of the battles for supremacy by the mega corporations during the 1980s and 90s, I can’t help wondering if someone at Sun has seen this opportunity to work off a grudge?  Remember the various supremacy battles, around 10-15 years ago, between Sun and the Wintel partnership concerning OS’s and system performance?  I do .   Intel were particularly peeved that they couldn’t produce platforms with the PR pulling power that Sun SparcStations had after George Lucas proudly spread the word that the Sun systems were the engines for producing the special effects in the early trio of Star Wars movies.

I also remember, around 8-10 years ago, the cries of bewilderment when Microsoft diverged MS SQL off at a tangent from other SQL incarnations, and effectively made it proprietory, just as they did with other code families (xhtml and so on)…… maybe, just maybe, this is Sun’s opportunity to turn and bite Redmond in the bum? 

After all, it wasn’t that many years ago that Mssr Gates was dismissing the Internet as worthless to Microsoft, and not a millennia ago that he was dismissive of early versions of Linux as a viable competitor to Windows.  I’ve still not seen too many signs of Microsoft acknowledging that they’re certainly losing market share to the Open Source community in general.  And it seems to be an accelerating situation, as the Firefox success story illustrates.

 Ed

I was a little slow to catch up on the story that sent a shiver through the IT industry between Christmas and New Year last month. 

AOL, who acquired Netscape for 4.2 billion dollars back in 1998, announced quietly via the corporate blog that they are dropping the product, in the same year that its final version (Navigator v9) was released.

“AOL’s focus on transitioning to an ad-supported Web business leaves little room for the size of investment needed to get the Netscape browser to a point many of its fans expect it to be,” wrote AOL/Netscape development director Tom Drapeau.

“Given AOL’s current business focus and the success the Mozilla Foundation has had in developing critically acclaimed products, we feel it’s the right time to end development of Netscape-branded browsers, hand the [reins] fully to Mozilla and encourage Netscape users to adopt Firefox.  While we will no longer support the Netscape Web browser as of Feb. 1, 2008, Netscape.com will still continue to serve as a general-use Internet portal,” Drapeau wrote.

For those who don’t remember it, the first Netscape browser was the pathfinder of free software back before Microsoft killed the founders by bundling Internet Explorer into Windows 95 & 98.  Whilst Tim Berners Lee may have spruced up the Arpanet to become the World Wide Web, it was Netscape that introduced the world to the web and the wide open opportunities it offered.

Unfortunately, Netscape, whilst the leading technology in the mid ’90s, and the launcher of the dot.com boom with its massive IPO, never monetised its product and succumbed to the might of M4 (Microsoft Marketing Machine Money) despite that famous anti-trust suit that tied up Bill’s Baby for years, and in 2003 cost the Seattle company $750 million to settle.  When AOL stepped in, the free-software community breathed a collective sigh and hoped for a renewed battle for supremacy.  Unfortunately it didn’t happen.  AOL was a “gated community” with no intention of spreading the good stuff around.

The corporate blog post announcing the end of Netscape Navigator also has a few FAQ’s at the end, such as -

Q: Will I still be able to use Netscape?
A: You will still be able to download old versions of Netscape from the Netscape Archive (link coming). However, these products are no longer supported. Our recommendation for the nostalgic out there is to download Mozilla Firefox, and add on the Netscape theme and Netscape extensions which are available here.  This way you’ll have a current web browser that is very secure, and has the look and feel you have grown accustomed to with Netscape.

Now it seems, there have been defections and movements of key developers, and some of them have been involved with the FireFox Open Source freebie, heavily supported by Google, IBM & Red Hat (better known as a Linux distributor).  This has resulted in a technology evolution from Netscape to Mozilla to FireFox, all remaining within the open source and free license arena, and there will be some interesting times in 2008.

This year, expect some fireworks in the software industry as a new public champion moves out of the shadows.  The End Software Patents coalition (ESP) will be going public this month with some heavyweight corporations and funding behind it, according to an info page on the Linux.com website.  The Coalition leader is Ben Klemens, author of Math You Can’t Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software.

“I’ve written a lot of software, I know how a computer works, and I know what patents are for,” he says. “That’s enough for me to know that there’s a fundamental mismatch between patents and software. This gnaws me. It bothers me because claiming mathematics as property strikes me as unethical — and I think I speak for every theorist who ever lived on this one. It bothers me because you can’t write a theoretical model that respects the real-world aspects of software and still finds that patents would be beneficial.”

There’s a lot of background on that Linux.com page that makes worthy reading, and Klemens concludes, “I am actively working behind the scenes to build a coalition for this effort, and if your company or organization hasn’t heard from me yet, then drop me an email.”

Watching this one is going to be as interesting as watching the slowly forming coalitions against eBay business practices and bullying of its sellers.

Ed