Gary Vaynerchuk Keynote from BlogWorld

One of the highlights of the Blog World Expo in my mind was the keynote given on Friday night by Gary Vaynerchuk (garyvaynerchuk.com, tv.winelibrary.com). If you haven’t heard of this guy, he’s on fire and really gives a lot of great pointers in this keynote about working hard, or killing it as he likes to put it.

I will warn you, he swears quite a bit. I figured I should give you fair warning of that, but listen to what he says and you might just get motivated like I did. I know the recording isn’t great, but this is the best I’ve found of this keynote. Enjoy!

What is the Optimal Work Environment?

For today’s post I just wanted to ask a bit of a random question: do you work well with music or do you prefer it to be silent?

I know that everyone has a different answer to this, and I’ve found that even for myself it sort of depends on the day. But what do you prefer? Do you need the backgound noise to function, or does it distract you too much?

The Optimal Environment

For me, I prefer to have some music or something playing if I’m doing anything that makes me think. But it has to be music that I’m very very familiar with. I swear I have ADD, because if too many things are going on around me (other conversations, etc.) I have a hard time focusing on what I’m doing. So I’ve found that for me personally I have to crank up the music to drown everything else out.

So what is the optimal environment for you?

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A Tip on Establishing Crediblity for Your Online Business

Today I want to talk a little bit about credibility, and I’ll be including a lot of the things that I heard and learned down at Blog World a few weeks ago.

First a question: why is credibility important for a website?

That may seem like sort of a ‘duh’ question, but I think that far too many of us don’t think about our own credibility online.

What is Credibility

Sorry to pull out the dictionary on this one, but I think this is a nice and short definition of credibility from Dictionary.com:

capable of being believed; believable: a credible statement.

So what makes a website believable? What helps people to believe you?

Here’s the thing: the internet is full of all sorts of information. And we all know that not all of it is good credible information. One thing that they said at Blog World is that if you’re going to write about something you have to be your own sort of ‘reporter.’ You have to give credit to where you found stuff if you want to be taken seriously!

Going Back to High School

High school English was my least favorite subject. Actually I hated it. Which is kind of funny to think about considering how much I have to write now a days. But they did teach me one very important thing in those classes: cite your sources.

Nobody knows everything. So if you get information from another source, give it credit! Don’t just quote things without backing them up. By doing this you are showing a few things to your audience:

• You know where to get answers to questions
• You give credit where credit is due
• You have some good connections

I’m sure there are other things I could add to that list, but in the end people tend to trust you more if you are looking things up and backing up the things you’re saying!

Other Benefits of Building Credibility

Credibility equals trust. If you can build credibility with your audience (whether you’re a blog, ecommerce store, eBay seller, or whatever) you can gain their trust. This will keep them coming back to your site. Talk about effective website marketing!

As a side note, make sure that when these people do come to your site that you engage them. Don’t just be the ‘high and mighty’ know-it-all that doesn’t have time to talk to audience. You can build even more credibility by answering questions and being engaged with your audience.

Credibility is honestly really lacking online. So take the time to make sure that you are being credible and you’ll see the benefits of it. Research your topics so you know what you’re talking about, then give credit to where you learned what you learned.

And, to give credit where credit is due, I’d like to give credit to @almacy, @dalbee, @shawnomac for putting on a great panel about this topic at Blog World!

Don’t Forget the Tracking Code!

So a few days ago I decided that it was time to update the look and feel of eComm Tips. So I went out and found a new design that I liked and then made some tweaks for a day or two.

This was all part of a sort of ‘re-launch’ for this site. I’ve had it up for awhile but let it stall for a few months because I was working on other projects. So hopefully you like the new look!

So today i was looking at my stats and it was showing that I had no traffic for the last couple of days. I thought that was rather odd, because I know that I’ve had traffic because I’ve had people leaving comments.

A few thoughts raced through my mind: “Did my tracking company have a problem?”, “Am I really getting no traffic for some reason?”, “Have I been banned from search?” Then it came to me…I forgot to bring the tracking code over from my previous template!

So that’s the lesson for today. If you make changes to a site like a redesign or something like that, always make sure to bring over the essential things like tracking codes, etc. It will save you a headache :-).

Some Thoughts on Duplicate Content

So for the last week or two I’ve had some conversations with my friend Stace Barrus of SpyderCandy.com about duplicate content and what to worry about and what not to worry about.

You see, a lot of times we worry about having too much duplicate content out there on the web, that it will hurt our ranking in the search engines.  Well, after having some of these discussions I think there is a better way to look at it.

What is Duplicate Content

Here is a quick definition of duplicate content from the Google Webmaster Guidelines:

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar.  Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin.

So if you have an article that you write and have it submitted to a bunch of different places, that is technically duplicate content on all of those other sites.  But is that necessarily a bad thing?  Wouldn’t it be good to have your article syndicated on multiple sites? Read the rest of this entry »

Are You Selling Out?

A lot of people have this concern that if they monetize their website, whether it be a blog, regular site or whatever, that they have sold out. Have you sold out? How does that phrase make you feel? It has kind of a negative feeling to it, but it really shouldn’t.

While I was at BlogWorldExpo last weekend one of the speakers made a very good point. I’ll have to paraphrase a little bit here, but basically what he said was that if you want to make any money online, you have to sell out. And, you need to be comfortable with that. Honestly, anything you do to make money could be considered selling out.

What Is Being a Sell Out?

Is there something wrong with making money? I get the feeling all the time that to some people it must be a crime to make money. I always wonder where they got that idea from. Personally, I have no problem making money as long as I’m doing it honestly and ethically!

So if you have a blog and you do paid posts, you’ve sold out! If you show affiliate advertisements you have sold out! If you have an ecommerce business that sells products you have sold out!

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Interacting With Your Audience as an Ecommerce Business

This last weekend while I was at BlogWorldExpo, and one of the main themes that kept coming out of it was interacting with your audience.

Now if you’re a blog, that seems obvious.  But what should you do if you’re a regular ecommerce site?  Here are a few ideas

Start a Personal Blog

One of the problems with a lot of online companies is that they are afraid to show a personal side to their company.  And yet it seems that the companies that are taking the time to do this are getting more interaction and better PR with their customers!

I actually had a chance to talk to Jeremy Schoemaker of www.ShoeMoney.com and I specifically asked him this question (well, this might be a little paraphrased, but you get the idea), “If you have an ecommerce site, one where you’re selling products like a store, would it be best to do your blog as a ‘company blog’ or still take a personal approach to it?”

His response: GO PERSONAL!

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