Brian Mark - Guitaraholic

Many of you are probably familiar with I Can Has Cheezburger . If you're not, it's a site where pictures of animals (normally cats) are portrayed with funny / catchy slogans with simple misspellings that make it even better. That's often referred to as lolspeak. Today, Michael (sitting across the square room from me) came across one of their tools for making your own and put together this image: Very nice. Now, we just need to get a blog set up for properpet.com to start putting those on.

Today, as I was reading an article on Nascar.com, I noticed a banner on the left margin. They were toting "Celebrating 5 years of caring". Well, I don't think I took that how they wanted me to, but I see that as "before then, we didn't care at all". Seriously, how do people at these marketing companies get jobs? That's a terrible message they're sending, which for a charity shouldn't be tolerated. Surely someone other than me can see the negative side of this message. Usually, I like Nascar's advertisements. This time, I almost found it offensive. Really, if you didn't care in the past, cover it up... don't flaunt it.

Once again, we've made lots of changes at ToolBarn. But now, I'm looking for some feedback. We've got a cache on our local servers of what most of the competing sites are priced at on every product we offer. If we show that, similar to Progressive Auto Insurance, are we asking for trouble? Two thoughts on why we should : 1) Establish ourselves as a destination. 2) Give our customers less reason to leave our site and look around. Two thoughts on why we should not : 1) We may not always have the lowest price. 2) We've got more traffic than most of these sites, so we'd be building their brand for them. Such a tough choice. We'll probably run an experiment at some point and see what it does. What do you think?

Ok, so the 500 Internal Server Error was funny. Well, this upgrade message is funny, too. Hmmm... something like this could work well on our new site. ;)

I tried going to twitter's homepage today and got a 500 Internal Server Error. For a moment, I wasn't sure what I was looking at (it was one of the many tabs that started with my browser), but it was sure a lot more entertaining than the traditional 500 error. On a side note, it looks like my blog post yesterday got the attention of Hitwise. My account got unlocked. I think it was probably through a google alert or similar, because I don't think they normally read my blog. Thanks for the responsiveness, guys.

I was doing some work today and was trying to pull some stuff up, planning on side-by-side of us vs. our competitors in Hitwise. I got to the point of logging in on one screen, and got the following error message (you may need to click to read the larger image). What happened? I was using Internet Explorer. Normally, I log in under FireFox. Since I've logged in on our CEO's PC during a meeting once, from our conference room during a few meetings and my own PC, I'm not allowed to log in on more machines. To top that off, IE and FF on the same machine is considered 2 machines as well. Ok, so now what happens if I clear my cookies? Does that mean I won't be able to log in on my PC at all? Doesn't seem like a real friendly way to let me use the service we paid quite a bit for. EDIT: After coming back later, I found that I can't log in via FireFox, either. I guess we paid for a service I can't use any more. Time to make a phone call. RE-EDIT: The next morning, th...

What happens when you let a few computer geek types loose to run the marketing department? Well, that's what we've been doing at ToolBarn for a while, so it's been interesting. For example, the homepage now has some rotating buttons on it, which you can see here. First off, the very boring, I'm a geek look: Second, a little medical humor: Third, the off-colored humor approach: Fourth, the "We need lightning" button: And finally, the "Get a bigger tool" button: I'm not saying they're all terrible, but I think this is maybe why we need a graphic artist's help in doing some marketing materials. After all, we're just a bunch of geeks.

Many times, niche sites hide in the SERPs. I know that for ToolPartsDirect.com, there are some competing sites that we've never heard of when searching. But I know about quite a few of them. How did I find them? I did a niche keyword search in Google Image search. Even some of the more general searches, like makita parts, show some competitors that don't normally hit the SERPs. While I was doing some research in this manner recently, I saw some familiar names on the tool side that seem to be trying to take our idea and slowly work it into their site. But I know they're there, so I can monitor what's going on.

Jeremy Schoemaker put together a nice event for Nebraska, which I attended last night. Today I see he's already calling me out to speak at the next one. If that's the case, I'll have some demands. First, I want access to the presenters lounge. I think that's the restroom, but someone's gotta show me where that is anyway. Secondly, I'm gonna need another link, but this time with the words power tools pointed at ToolBarn.com. Third, I want a couple of questions to answer to get started. I've never actually been asked to speak on SEO, and I've got no idea what level the attendees are at, so it'll be much easier to speak if I have questions from the group. I'm sure a post on shoemoney.com would get a few responses that would help. Oh, and #2 is optional. The bottom line: I'd be delighted to speak to the group, Jeremy. And, not being like those MBL people , I'll even send you an email to let you know this.

Congratulations, Rand and Geraldine. That's awesome. So is the reaction. Of course, had the SEO world known it was you, we would have first asked why you needed our money, then you would have had more than you knew what to do with for just one commercial. In any event, congratulations and well played. It was certainly a proposal that fit your personality due to the buzz behind it and knowing how good you are at creating that. Here's to many happy years of creating buzz together.

For those that aren't really familiar with Hitwise , they're a data collection agency. Through relationships with ISP's, they track user behavior. Then, they turn around and sell the information back to us webmasters. I got an account approved for my 2007 budget (not an easy task, let me tell you) and started poking around in there today. My first impression is that this is really amazing data. For starters, I've taken most of our top competitors and found all of the phrases that are driving traffic to their sites. For those of you doing your own sites, how useful would that be? I'm able to see if there are phrases that would make sense to target ourselves that our competitors are using. Secondly, once I've found a cool phrase, I can see what websites get what percentage of the traffic for that phrase. This is really cool for benchmarking how well we're doing for a given term. While this data is cool, it's also incomplete. For example, Amazon hasn't ...

Todd has convinced me to start a new domain, so the contents of this post have been relocated on my new blog. How important is one-box?

We've never really wanted to offer free shipping. After all, it something we get charged for every single order we send out. So we're running a test. Let's see what our conversion rates do. It's not actually free, but it is one penny. Close enough for me. Over the holidays, we had some manufacturers pony up and pay for shipping on a lot of the orders. Our conversion rates really went up. But this will mark the first time that any order over $99 (and under 75 lbs) will ship for 1¢ on ToolBarn. I've got my eye on it, and when I learn something, I'll report back here. But for now, it'd be a great time to buy something from ToolBarn .

I got interviewed alongside Allan Dick at SES in Chicago last week by WebProNews.com, and they posted the video on their site. Go ahead and give it a watch. I'm sure I said something stupid somewhere, but I think it shows my long-term strategy a bit.

Every time I go to SES, I end up talking to Todd . Lately, I've also been talking with Rand , Ken (some guy), and Todd . What do the first two have in common that the second two don't seem to buy into as much? Linkbait. Todd and Rand are two very good writers, and the linkbait they produce is second to none. Ken and the other Todd seem to use more traditional SEO methods, although they're not totally ignoring linkbait. Nor are they ignoring rankings. I guess what it comes down to is this: Do you want to do linking strategies, or do you want to be creative and have links show up because of some (interesting / controversial / insightful) content? Either one takes work. So what type of linkbait could we come up with for power tools? Something viral, like doing stupid things on video with power tools, would obviously attract some attention. Buying guides and hands on stuff seems to get minimal attention, although they do bring a few links if done well. I've got a couple i...

I'm going to SES in NY next week, so I'll be heading out on Sunday. Anyone that sees me there, mention this post and I've got toys for the first 100 that ask. Stress Balls with a catchy slogan on them. TOOLBARN.com Don't stress, we have the tools to fix it. This reminds me of some other (rejected) marketing slogans we've tossed around here. Ok, so they haven't all been tossed around while printed on a stress ball, but you get the idea. Most of these were mentioned as a joke at one point or another, but then got some thought before being rejected. If you want "Tickle me Elmo", you know where to go. If you're serious about Power Tools, come to the barn. There are three things that were rejected about this one. First, the search traffic could have been wrong. Second, we're referencing that giant among e-commerce giants, which probably wouldn't have been the brightest move. Finally, we didn't even have our full site name in there. Tired of...

With our Mini, I have been toying with some ways to search for substrings. What I'm finding is that dashes, dots, etc. don't allow for a substring match. However, there is one interesting observation that I have to note here. The first special character is dropped. That's right, be it a dash or a dot, the first one is dropped and ignored. Even when searching, the same behaviour occurs. What does this mean? How can I use it to my advantage? Well, let's take a look at the UB181 example. If I were to make 2 variations of that in our "Additional Keywords" field (only shown to our Mini), simply making ub-181dz and ub181-dz (adding a dash where a letter meets a number, which is a simple regular expression) will not allow these to match a search for 181dz or ub181. Instead, I'd have to make ub-181-dz for a match of ub181 and u-b-181dz for a match of 181dz. That seems like an odd way to have to handle this, but again - simple regular expressions to make this happe...

We bought Google. Ok, so it was just a mini , but it's cleared up my understanding of Google a bit. Upon setting it up, nothing really great came to mind. However, after doing some tweaking (it's powering the search on toolbarn.com right now), it has become clear that the more I learn about this box and it's capabilities the more I understand Google. For starters, I ended up having to cloak some pages to our mini to get our results to come out right. A search for makita drills gave me results of milwaukee drills as well because of our breadcrumb navigation and the cross-linking. Every page on our site was returned for power tools because it's in the main navigation. Some searches return poor results, such as makita 5000, which several people have searched for. I have a temp solution in place for that. So, after playing with it and then sitting back to think about how it works / serves results, I figured something out that may end up being priceless. Searches done on our...

We have an affiliate that just started creating some content, which we encourage. However, they started bidding against us on Overture and getting quite a few sales from that. While it isn't a problem them getting sales, when it's sales that we would have gotten already (same keywords on Overture) it raises a question with me about the real value of this affiliate. The other question I have is this: would they be seeing enough traffic for it to pay off? Granted, these keywords are mostly under 20 cents per click, but even a 20% conversion rate means they need to make almost $1.00 per sale (if people are following their links in the first place). They don't rank in any of the 3 major search engines, so we aren't competing in that market yet, but they originally copied most of our homepage as their homepage and now they're paying for traffic that we normally buy. Sure, we can afford to get the #1 position back from them, but the real question is why should I have to b...

Being the CTO of an online company, I am aware that we don't want to keep our eggs in one virtual basket. I've done a lot of things to broaden our reach, including PPC advertising on Google, Overture, and Kanoodle. Shopping engines have become an integral part of our marketing mix as well. I've also worked on our organic search rankings in MSN, Yahoo, and Google. Ask Jeeves is on our radar as well, but the whole Hubs and Authorities makes it very important to have a lot of content, which we just don't have anyone to write currently. When the Google update "Florida" hit us back in 2003, we realized we had a problem. Our sales were pretty well gone overnight. That's not a good feeling. At that point, I started looking to see what we could do, and I attended my first "Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo" in New York. After some trial and error, we are diverse enough that we totally missed a problem recently, which is a problem. While it...