• A new day for Macs in the enterprise? - Some Apple-watchers and evangelist IT practitioners who use Macs for business believe we may be seeing a more enterprise-friendly Apple.

  

Popularity: 87%

• Spam reaches 30-year anniversary - The first junk e-mail or spam message was sent across Arpanet 30 years ago this weekend.

Popularity: 79%

• Amazon sues New York over collecting online taxes - Amazon.com has filed a lawsuit against the state of New York over a new law that requires certain online retailers to collect taxes from consumers residing in the state and then remit them to the state.

Popularity: 75%

Yahoo could begin carrying Google ads within a week, as it waits for Microsoft to give up its acquisition bid or attempt a hostile takeover.

If an estimated 80% of sales start with a search engine year-round, you better believe consumers use search to find gifts for Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and so on. And they often include the holiday name in their search query. Are you showing up in search results for these queries? Let’s look at how two heavy-hitting flower delivery sites have optimized for one of their biggest events of the year - Mother’s Day: Proflowers.com vs. 1800Flowers.com.

Notice that both sites rank for “mothers day flowers” with deep URLs targeted just for Mother’s Day. Both have the search term at the beginning of the title tag, although 1800Flowers has added the term “gifts” to rank for more than just “flowers.” Both have keyword-friendly URLs. When you click through to the sites, you’ll notice the navigation menus both include special Mother’s Day tabs at the far left - can’t miss ‘em.

Proflowers

(more…) The Key to PPC for Online Retailers Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group Register to Attend

We talk about Amazon often here on Get Elastic, because you’ll always find some innovation, design or usability improvement to blog about there. Amazon sometimes attracts more reviews than customers want to read. So Amazon provides tools to filter reviews by star rating and displays the “most helpful” positive and negative review as determined by Amazon’s community.

Plus, you can also search reviews by keyword.

Which is helpful, because you don’t want to buy a product that sucks unless it’s a vacuum or a Flowbee. The Key to PPC for Online Retailers Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group Register to Attend

The promotional potential in packaging and shipping a product can be immense, when materials are utilized correctly. PlumberSurplus.com used to offer each of our suppliers branded packing tape.  Each package they shipped for us, they would use our tape, with our logo on it. It was a great selling point, suppliers loved it, and we got our name plastered on thousands of shipments that went to the United States and Canada. Sounds like a win–win situation right? Wrong. Let me recap for you the problems we ran into. First, we started growing so quickly that we could hardly keep our suppliers stocked with enough tape. We seemed to continuously have boxes of branded tape on order from our vendor. Second, what had been purposed as a several hundred dollar promotional opportunity quickly became a several thousand dollar promotional opportunity. We were willing to keep supplying the tape, and did, in fact, for a few years until we started monitoring returns. This was the third and final problem. We began to notice that our returns were coming back, not with our branded tape used as a seal across the box, appropriate for branding our name on the box, but it was being used to hold boxes together! Any promotional aspect went right out the window when the tape was so overlaid that you could not read the text. We began to closely monitor returns for “tape abuse” and found that many suppliers were taking advantage of the branded tape. We decided to pull the branded tape from suppliers, and instead asked that they use the traditional clear packing tape that they use on the rest of their shipments. Now, this is not to say that if you have only a couple facilities that make up your shipping departments, that you cannot control the use of the branded tape in such a way that it holds promotional value. In fact, in our infancy the branded tape was a great feature for us to utilize.  Anthony Abram has written several articles on, and or related to, packing tape, and its promotional benefits. I would recommend reading them before making your decision. In his article “Packing Tape Facilitates Commerce” Anthony strongly emphasizes the use of tape over other box sealants, and branded tape over clear packing tape. I would agree with him on all points, until the promotional value becomes mute due to abuse. He even explains how the packages are prime real-estate for your logo.  So, how does PlumberSurplus.com take advantage of the prime real-estate we have from shipping thousands of products around the country? We have began investigating the use of branded stickers, much like you already see on boxes. Kohler uses an embossed foil sticker, UPS utilizes colored stickers to designate different levels of services, and many other manufacturers use branded stickers to complete their packaging. A sticker offers the same promotional potential as tape. You can put your logo, contact information, slogan, etc. on the sticker, and you can better monitor their use by instructing that suppliers are to put one sticker on the top of each package. You can even monitor their use, down to the sticker by tracking how many stickers each supplier is sent, how many orders they have processed and the number of boxes used per order. In this example, you would be able to tell when a supplier is running low because you will be able to see that you sent 500 stickers, and they have shipped 450 orders, with one box used per order. As far as cost goes, from our research, the difference between the cost of tape on a box, and the cost of a sticker per box is miniscule. If you are questioning the promotional potential for your company in branded tape, the main factors to analyze are cost and who is going to be using it. If you have control over the output, branded tape is a great promotional avenue.

Colors are search modifiers that can bring a lot of long-tail traffic. When someone searches for a particular product and color, it often indicates someone is close to a purchase, or at least further along the sale-trail than one who goes broad. But you can’t create a separate product page and URL for each color because that’s duplicate content, and duplicate content is the worst of sins, right? That’s what I thought until I started testing it - and it turned everything my momma ever told me about duplicate content on its head. (If your momma never had “the talk” with you - you know, *content reproduction,* we recently did a duplicate content post that included a PG13 explanation. I made sure this post was completely different so nobody mistakes it for duplicate content).

Yes, Virginia There Is A Santa Clause…And You Can Optimize Product Pages for Color

Here’s an example: Jessica Bennett Shoes sells its product through its own e-store and various retailers like Amazon, Zappos and ShoeBuy. One of its styles is called “Harli.” It’s made from burlap and comes in navy, beige and brown. Shoebuy.com has 3 indexed product pages for Harli – one for each color.

Each page has an identical meta description, and according to Webconfs’ Similar Page Checker, these pages are 100% identical.

But Shoebuy not only owns top spot for each color, Google’s also throwing in some indented result love. When you search for “jessica bennett harli navy” (at time of writing and from my data center): Top ranking… and for “jessica bennett harli brown”: “jessica bennet harli beige”: The only differentiators between the 3 color pages are the URLs (just numbers, no keywords) and the title tag. I’ve scoped out other sites that use different pages for different colors and they all seem to rank fine when color is included in the search query. The technique seems to be create color-specific pages in addition to one main product page (hence, indented results). Since all pages are indexed, the color pages are selected to appear when someone searches for the color, with the non-color, main product page potentially appearing as an indented, second result. This leads me to believe that as long as your color pages are getting indexed, you don’t need to worry about duplicate content smackdown. The Key to PPC for Online Retailers Free webinar: May 15th, 2008, 9am PT/12pm ET Guest Panelist: Ryan Gibson, Director of Marketing, The Rimm-Kaufman Group Register to Attend

What’s in a name? err, well, what’s in changing a name? If you’ve been living in a cave you may not be aware that we recently launched OutdoorPros.com.  Ok, given the budget for our PR blitz you may get a pass on being up to speed with our new site.  There’s lots to discuss related to the strategy behind this new venture and the execution of our plan, but I’d like to boil this post down to one of the more practical aspects of this step in our growth. When our plans to launch into a new industry began to take shape my mind quickly began running through some of the ancillary components of the effort.  Sure, we needed to build the site, establish supply, prepare marketing campaigns, and so forth, but we also needed to decide how to organize our business entity, finances, accounting, and banking around two, at that time distinct, businesses. Long story short, we ultimately decided to create a parent company to house our various website businesses.  This decision combined with other factors has thrust us into the throws of upgrading our accounting system, changing banks, and establishing financial and operational reporting and metrics at the parent and child organizational levels. Wow, that’s a long intro to present a few tips I hope are helpful if you find yourself in a position to change your business name.  You see, in the midst of all these dominoes, one task was to change our name and form the parent/child entities. Our business machine has been chugging along for a while now and when I dove into our files titled “business formation”, “operating agreement”, “meeting minutes”, “business license”, etc. I quickly found myself in a pile of paperwork.  After having plowed my way through, with much help from fellow blogger Ellen, we nursed our paper cuts and got the process completed.  So, without further ado, here are the steps/tidbits presented in the order we attacked the change:  

1. Make sure you can secure the necessary domain names and do so.  This is obvious to the online community by now.  If you can’t get the domain names, and I’m not talking about some slightly off version of them, pick a different name. 
 
2. Depending on the type of business entity you have, ours is an LLC, it may be wise to document the meeting minutes when members voted to accept the motion to change the company name.  Along these lines, this would be a good time to challenge your business type given that the new name may represent significant changes.  It may be time to grow out of that sole proprietor status and into a single member LLC, or an S-Corp.  Consult your attorney and accountant; we certainly did before deciding to stick with the LLC. 
 
3. Consider updating any Operating Agreement or Partnership Agreement you may have.  We were able to add a simple addendum to make the name change.  It’s a simple process and can keep the flow of changes well documented and straight forward. 
 
4. And the fun part… here is an overview of some agencies we dealt with to make the change, as a California LLC:  
   • We filed with the Secretary of State to change the name of the LLC to the new parent company name.
   • We were able to keep our existing Federal Employer Identification Number (EIN) but needed to change the name.
   • We were able to keep our existing State Employer Identification Number (SEIN) with the Employment Development Department (EDD) but needed to change the name.
   • We filed for Fictitious Business Names, or DBA’s, in the name of the parent company and the two sites we currently operate with the new parent company as the registrant.
   • We filed for a business license in each Fictitious Business Name.
   • We updated our seller’s permit with the Board of Equalization.
 
5. Finally, plan a fun afternoon of errands.  The county building, the city building, the post office, some shady underground newspaper company that writes your credit card number on a post-it with a crayon, and you are done!

Well, done with that task.  Now its merchant accounts, credit lines, POS integration, and QuickBooks vs. Peachtree.  Hope this sparks some ideas and reminders.  And of course, let me know if I missed anything!  (I’ll blame it on Ellen, as the company fall girl she’s used to that.)

This link was cool, but it generates a graph like this: With a little modification, I made this graph: I like my picture a little better. It was quite simple to make this diagram, and Google provides a free graph-drawing tool that you can use on your own site with a single url — no account or login is needed! Let’s break down how I made this image: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart? Loads an image from Google Chart cht=p Chart type is a pie chart &chtt=Percentage%20of%20Google%20Chart%20Which%20Resembles%20Pac-man Chart title &chs=550×250 Chart size &chd=t:10,80,10 Chart data. This is the only tricky bit. The pie chart starts from the “x-axis” of the pie. The “t:” means that the data is in text format with numbers between 0.0 and 100.0. Going clockwise, the pie chart is 10 units of non-Pacman, then 80 units of Pacman, then another 10 units of non-Pacman. The Google Graph API guide adds “Note: For text encoding, scale your data by converting it into percentages of the largest value in your data set.” You don’t have to scale your max value to 100, but let’s do it for fun. My maximum value is 80, so to scale 80 to 100 I’d multiply my numbers by 1.25. I tried a value of “12.5,100,12.5″ and it generated an identical Pacman graph. You can even make a funky graph using 12.5 for gray, then use eight yellow slices of 12.5 units each (which add up to 100), and then finish off with a final 12.5 of gray: I like using the values 10,80,10 more. If your numbers add up to 100 then the data points are just the percentage of the pie chart: 10%, then 80%, then 10%. So 20% of the graph is gray and 80% is yellow. That’s easier for me to remember. Okay, I geeked out a bit there, sorry. Back to the graph. &chco=FAFAFA,FFFF00,FAFAFA Chart colors. The non-Pacman bits are the color #FAFAFA, while the Pacman color is #FFFF00. &chl=Does%20not%20resemble%20Pac-man|Resembles%20Pac-man Chart labels I really like this graph-drawing service because anyone on the web can use it for free without even registering. For example, I used a Google-o-meter graph in a recent post: I almost wanted to call this post “Stupid Google Tricks.” What fun diagrams can you imagine making with the Google Chart service?