The Cart Blog

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Weekend Break: Silly String, Guest Bloggers,

Filed under: Fun — thatsoftwareguy @ 7:07 am

Silly String – Serious Subject

A wonderful story about a Mom helping our troops in Iraq. Silly String can be used to detect tiny trip wires that the insurgents use in booby traps; this woman figured out how to ship a boatload of the product overseas. Kudos to Capacity LLC for shipping the product.

Guest Blogger? No thanks.

CashQuests.com is arguing that bloggers save their best work for their own sites, ergo guest posts are garbage. I’m not positive I agree with this reasoning; a new blogger may want to show off their skills on a site with more traffic and post great work with a link back to their site.

Economists: We’re not worthy of Nobel!

Interesting story in the International Herald about the legitimacy of having a Nobel prize for Economics. Some argue that economic theory is too ideological to be evaluated with impartiality. Speaking of the Nobel, here’s a summary of mechanism design. Research into this idea by Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson won them this year’s prize.

ContentLink – the most annoying service ever?

Filed under: Site Design — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:46 am

If you’re looking at ways to monetize your site, for heaven’s sakes don’t use ContentLink. That’s the one that puts the double underline under keywords in your text.

ContentLink


As you move your mouse across the page, these hideous popups come out of nowhere to occlude your ability to read the content. Yuck! Guaranteed to annoy your visitors. Use something less intrusive.

(Aside: Ad Blocker Plus in Firefox works like a charm to block things like this.)

Friday, October 19, 2007

Where do I rank?

Filed under: Search — thatsoftwareguy @ 4:37 am

A very interesting tool from Shoemoney.com shows how you rank for a specific search term in Google, Yahoo, Altavista and MSN Search.

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Marketing to the Metrosexual

Filed under: Marketing,Sales — thatsoftwareguy @ 10:46 pm

Entrepreneur Magazine writes, “Men need products too.” I guess noone ever went broke overestimating the vanity of men! :)

Facebook for Business?

Filed under: Social Networking — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:14 am

invite friendsIt’s just not clear to me yet that it’s a huge win to list your business on Facebook. OK, you have a profile – big deal. How is that better than Linked In? Oh, and unlike my business LinkedIn account, I couldn’t list my business under its name in Facebook – I had to use my own name, which I thought defeated the whole purpose. And don’t get me started on the goofy personal-ad type features that make Facebook seem like a dating site. Looking for a relationship? No – I’m looking for clients!

People seem split on this issue; you can see what others think here and here. But I’m not convinced.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

StoreSuite – Looks sweet!

Filed under: Cart Vendors — thatsoftwareguy @ 7:31 am

The guys over at Interspire are building their own shopping cart, called StoreSuite. They’re hoping to release this year, and they’re blogging about it on a daily basis. So what’s the differentiator? From what I can tell, they’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what everyone else did wrong, and trying to do it right.

Here’s the Product Comparison page:

StoreSuite Product Comparison Page


Product removals from this page are done by Ajax, so there’s no waiting for page refresh.

Page design is done using Drag and Drop, which is a big departure from normal template design.

And of course, you’ve got to have a tag cloud to have Web 2.0 credibility. :)

You can browse more of StoreSuite’s features here. I’m waiting with anticipation!

Why most blogs don’t last

Filed under: Blogging — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:54 am

Nate Whitehill has an interesting post on why so many blogs are here today and gone tomorrow. Chief reason: it’s hard! Sure, there are lots of crappy blogs (“craplogs?” “crogs?”) out there pumping out spam, paid advertisements, cloned postings and so forth, but if you really want to generate high quality original content on an ongoing basis, you’d better be prepared to spend a lot of time and energy on it – and most people don’t like this plan. Again, from Nate:

Just like going to the gym, blogging takes months of hard work to see any noticeable benefits. In my four months of blogging, only recently am I starting to see these benefits – including financial return, people linking to my posts, and a decent number of subscribers, readers, etc.

I remember when I was a kid in Cub Scouts reading Lord Baden Powell’s remark, “Fitness can be neither bought nor bestowed; like honor, it must be earned.” I guess success in blogging is the same. :)

Jim Rohn – Stephen Covey at the lectern

Filed under: Books — thatsoftwareguy @ 5:42 am


Rohn, The Art of Exceptional Living

I’ve been listening to The Art of Exceptional Living
by Jim Rohn on CD during my commute. His message is very much like Covey’s – particularly in his emphasis on the seventh habit (self-improvement). The audio suggests it might have been recorded in a church, which is apropos because his speaking style has the staccato rhythm and emphatic re-enforcement of a Baptist preacher. He illustrates his philosophy of success with references to his own biography, which he breaks down into the first six years of his working life (“pennies in my pocket, no money in the bank, late on my bills, creditors are calling, behind on my promises to my family”) and the second, in which he became a millionaire, thanks to the instructive example of a successful boss. Takeaways:

  • Reading is foundational. Get a library card and use it. Build a personal library. Spend time every day reading difficult material to expand your intellect. The best money you can spend is on your own self-education.
  • Keeping a journal will help you capture what you’re learning. Use other forms of capture such as photography.
  • Be prepared to work hard – not just at your job but on yourself. “If you work hard at your job, you can make a living. If you work hard on yourself, you can make a fortune.”
  • You cannot change the world, the economy, the political situation, your negative relatives, etc. – you can only change yourself. This is the starting point. If you will change, your situation will change for you.
  • Life is seasonal, so you must:
    • Learn to deal with winter. Difficult times will come, and they won’t change, but you can: you can become stronger, wiser, better.
    • Learn to take advantage of the spring. You must be prepared for opportunity, for it always follows adversity.
    • Learn to care for the crop in the summer. Weeds and pests will always try to take it from you.
    • Learn to reap in the fall without apology if you have succeeded or complaint if you have not.
  • Personal development is critical to success. You must master five abilities:
    • the ability to absorb
    • the ability to respond
    • the ability to reflect
    • the ability to act
    • the ability to share
  • Do what you can, the best you can and rest very little.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

More Top Ten Lists for Cart Designers

Filed under: Cart Design — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:53 am

Reading the previous post from Marketing Pilgrim reminded me of a couple of other links I had up my sleeve.

Blogwatch: MarketingPilgrim.com

Filed under: Blogs,Marketing — thatsoftwareguy @ 6:41 am

The guys over at MarketingPilgrim ran an interesting article called “Ten Tips to Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment” that I thought I’d share. You can see my comments at the bottom of the article.

They also have a very interesting promotion to encourage people to blog about them. I don’t recall having seen this promotional method before. They’d like people to discuss why they read Marketing Pilgrim. So here goes:

Your humble servant reads dozens of blogs – in addition to websites, magazines, newspapers and other media sources – in order to bring you the most interesting cart and e-commerce news. Marketing Pilgrim is one of the sources I read. What’s special about Marketing Pilgrim is that it has achieved a mighty Google PageRank™ of 7, which is just slightly shy of awesome.  The reason this has happened, of course, is that they have a tremendous amount of original content, and great industry credibility, so lots of people read them and link to them.

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