BI Revolution

Selling Stuff Online
This Jurij Burchenya post includes excellent tips and demonstrates one very cool content marketing idea. We love the big green "click this button to get a list" riff in this post.

Your content needs to appeal to readers and scanners. Jurij's big green button will encourage scanners to quickly get and use the essence of his article. Well done. 

 In addition to Jurij's tips we would add:

* Magazine Your Content - create expectations about what will happen each week, month or quarter and then exceed those.
* Create stores on scaled sites like Amazon, eBay and Etsy.
* Use PPC to teach you how to form offers and what content is gold. 
* Gamify your content (see our Haiku Deck on the topic here: https://shar.es/1vgyKm ) with contests and games.

Do any two of those ideas plus the ditch digging Jurij's post describes and you will build a following, sell things and have fun. How do I know? I'm a former Director of Ecommerce who managed teams who made more than $30M online during my tenure :). Marty 

Another great "value system" post by author David Amerland. I'm going to quote a big chunk and then come back with some thoughts:

From David's Post
The message of the 21st century is clear: The cost of production is immaterial if the value of a product is uncertain. Companies that understand that operate differently. Amazon invests an incredible amount of money in warehousing technology and delivery infrastructure to make shopping easier (the value is being transferred to the experience). Google spends untold millions in research and development of products it gives away free (the value becomes apparent only when a brand-based purchasing opportunity arises, like in advertising or a Google product). Apple now disregards the cost of upgrades to its iOS because it values the sustained attention of its customers.

These three companies understand that the real value comes in achieving a balanced equation of personal use of their products (uniqueness) rather than scarcity. As a matter of fact their value equation then becomes Value = Uniqueness/Scarcity where the lower the scarcity value is the greater will be the delivery of overall value even if uniqueness remains the same.

Marty Note
I read those paragraphs several times and then did the math. Doing the math helped (lol). Let's say a product has a uniqueness value of 10 and a scarcity value of 2:

Value 5 = 10 (uniqueness) / 2 (Scarcity)
Value 10 = 20 (uniqueness) / 2 (Scarcity)

Now let's up the scarcity value and see what happens to the product's
"perceived" or overall value:

Value 2 = 10 (uniqueness) / 5 (Scarcity)
Value 4 = 20 (uniqueness / 5 (Scarcity)

This reminds me of a conversation I had with J. Langdon when he was the President of Topps baseball cards. I knew J from my tenure at M&M/Mars. J. explained how he knew he was feeding a losing proposition.

His product, baseball cards, needed to have a high scarcity value for it to continue to matter in the artificial marketplace they and other manufacturers created.

The rub was Topps needed to sell baseball (and fantasy) cards in numbers that drove their scarcity numbers down.They suffered a Sophie's choice: either sell enough cards to be able to pay their fixed costs and stock holders and so destroy the market (of perceived exclusivity) or sell too few cards to cover costs keeping perceived exclusivity up but destroying the business none-the-less.

And then the mobile phone was born and bye bye baseball and fantasy cards. Topps needed an Apple-lke pivot. They needed to GIVE the baseball cards away free in support of something ore unique and valuable - the experience of a crowdsourced mobile game or a Threadless-like community where people compete to win coveted printing contracts much the way baseball players compete to get paid God-like sums.

Topps was a casualty of David's "new math". The greater the scarcity of the core product the more nails in the business model's coffin. This discussion reminds me of another conversation. When the founder of Tough Mudder said, "Experience is the new branding" it struck me as highly significant.

I would build on David's thoughts to note the reason scarcity wrecks such havoc with a product or brand's value is COMMUNITY CAN"T FORM. Community is the experience we seek. If community can't form value or "perceived value" as J used to call it  goes down rapidly just ask any baseball card collector :).

David's core "value system" post is here (and a #mustread):
http://davidamerland.com/seo-blog/692-what-if-we-had-a-new-value-system-for-goods-and-services.html

When new clients come to Atlantic BT we want to know four metrics:

* Traffic Rank.

* Social Following numbers.

* Pages and Inbound Links.

* PageRank (PR) for the home page and top interior page.

I've been an Internet marketer long enough to be able to almost tell a website's entire story from those 4 numbers. Each of these metrics is tied to the other in telling ways.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Top Websites
If you create a matrix of these values for the top websites it are easy to know where even an Apple is strong or weak. Apple has amazing page spread and links, but its traffic position doesn't deserve a PR9.

When you've been playing SEO games for more than 10 years you know Apple's inbound links include .edu links and those are the secret gold of the web. Google values .edu links higher. I just saw a demonstration of this when one of the cancer centers we are working with on Cure Cancer Starter was pulling a PR6 with the least amount of support I've seen.

The difference was in WHO was linking and again it was .edu links that helped the website achieve more than you or I could with the same page spread and inbound link numbers. WHO links to you is very important.

The chart above and on the link shows each website, no matter how all powerful, has areas for improvement. If you are entering a crowded web space do an analysis like this to help determine where to attack existing castles. If you want to attack Apple you would be a fool to attempt to out link them or page spread 'em.

Social would be the right breach weapon to use with Apple. Frankly I wouldn't envy anyone trying to attack Apple, but the point is if Apple has vulnerabilities so do your competitors.