tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-96653052011-12-20T02:38:47.406-05:00This site focuses on everything related to successfully creating, promoting, and maintaining online stores. The author, as creative director of <a href="http://www.comcation.com/">Comcation</a> has created hundreds of successful online stores over the last 10 years.Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.comBlogger581100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-90739203027320787122009-07-24T14:26:00.002-04:002009-07-24T14:29:06.470-04:00

I'm so psyched about the launch of our updated online store. Not only will the new site allow us to offer way more products (over a million), but we can also have a lot more options as far as offering specials, coupons and some amazing offers. If you're interested in participating in our affiliate program, please make sure you vist http://ozbo.com/partner/-Josh

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-67129448253107155512008-03-13T15:11:00.002-04:002008-03-13T15:14:24.195-04:00

I finally created my own store, check out SPTrains.com for the best prices on model railroading anywhere. I've worked really hard on being able to offer the lowest prices on trains, scenery and accessories. Please take a look and let me know what you think!Also if you're looking for instructions on how to build a train layout please check out my new train guy blog.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-24511123346743576282007-06-15T15:52:00.000-04:002007-06-15T15:54:09.716-04:00

The deer have been attacking my landscape so I tried out a new deer repellent from Liquid Fence. Wow, this stuff really works!

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-61621131529774409932007-04-25T11:21:00.000-04:002007-04-25T11:22:05.953-04:00

StonePlow America's favorite lawn & garden center has expanded to the internet. We just launched a huge 30,000 product store from them that's absolutely killer.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1154528607257758732006-08-02T10:19:00.000-04:002006-08-02T10:23:27.296-04:00

I have been looking for a DEET free insect repellent that actually works to combat the biting insects and mosquitoes. Most of the products were ineffective, but I finally found one that works and wanted to share it with you. The product is called LiquidNet from The LiquidFence Company. It works fantastic and I highly recommend it. Here's a link to this mosquito repellent.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1152798853213074652006-07-13T09:49:00.000-04:002007-01-13T15:14:29.240-05:00

I have recently become a Google Adwords Professional, going through their certification program and meeting the requirements. The benefits to my clients is already well worth the effort. Through this program I am able to offer new advertisers credits to jump start their ad buys and track everything in a central area. Pretty slick.What continues to really excite me though is Google Analytics (

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1144181951854818862006-04-04T16:18:00.000-04:002006-12-25T14:30:29.436-05:00

Plenty of advertisers may be getting charged for clicks that never occurred on un-targeted ads from software they didn't realize they were advertising on -- all because they thought they bought some targeted search advertising. I'd think though that the high number of clicks/impression would make these things very easy to flag as fraudulent. Right now I'm getting .5% CTR, I'd think that anything

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1143733202036036222006-03-30T10:35:00.000-05:002006-12-03T15:23:06.670-05:00

I just finished two pretty exciting projects. The first one Space / Earth Science Techonologies (SEST) offers Weather Videos formatted for iPods. These iPod Weather Videos feature hurricane data, global warming data and 2 years of global temperature changes.The other project is for Sound Stage Direct which sells audiophile vinyl records, 180 gram vinyl records etc in genres from Rock to

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1140124680260319312006-02-16T16:15:00.000-05:002006-03-29T22:39:38.976-05:00

As part of a blogging community experiment to learn the reach and scope of search engine's crawling, as well as getting lesser known blogs like this one read, I am participating in the brrreeeport experiment. So far brrreeeport searches are the number one search term on technorati, and people are even begining to buy the keyword brrreeeport. Crazy.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1140122861501319432006-02-16T15:43:00.000-05:002006-02-16T15:47:41.880-05:00

I have been absolutly swamped with ecommerce development work, which accounts for the lack of updates on this site. I'm psyched, some of the results have been amazing. Little tweaks here and there have ammounted to huge increases in sales. On little change to two graphics on a site resulted in an increase of 80 orders per day, every day since I made the change. Staggering! This is the kind

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1132667709183613562005-11-22T08:53:00.000-05:002006-05-17T09:30:08.600-04:00

I found this interesting article on Yahoo! News, and thought you'd enjoy it.Thanksgiving weekend may mark the traditional beginning of the retailshopping season, but Cyber Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving, is fastbecoming one of the biggest online shopping days in the year.In fact,51.7 million, of the consumers who participated in the survey said they will useInternet access at work to

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1132155165972494832005-11-16T10:25:00.000-05:002005-11-16T10:32:46.030-05:00

I am so excited! Google has just rebranded and released it's Urchin on Demand service as Google Analytics, for free! I've always been amazed by the level of detail that Urchin provides to a hard core statistics/ROI/SEO junkie, but many of my clients didn't want to spend the few hundred of dollars per month to have access to that kind of information. Now that it's free, I've been going through

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1130960014292838352005-11-02T14:23:00.000-05:002006-01-30T03:42:19.246-05:00

You may have noticed that postings to Everything eCommerce have become pretty sporadic. The reason is simple, as I work to support our customers' sales efforts during this busy selling season, I have less time to update the website. Here's the good news though, I've been working on some pretty amazing sites, and making changes that have dramatically boosted their search engine rankings and

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1126190832881327532005-09-08T10:31:00.000-04:002006-12-02T20:40:58.843-05:00

When building websites it is always important to make sure that our sites can reach the largest audience as possible. This allows our clients to reach the most potential customers and capture the largest market segment. It is a foundation of good design and development. Unfortunatly not all websites adhere to this basic principle and exclude visitors with their design. This is okay if the

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com61tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1125581072810908802005-09-01T09:21:00.000-04:002006-05-17T09:31:23.346-04:00

Two days after updating the content on this site, the results of my efforts are already starting to show. Everything Ecommerce has moved up two slots on Yahoo! for the search term ecommerce to "19" and moving from the third page to the second page of results. It's amazing when looking at traffic what differnce that makes in the amount of traffic that I receive. Continous improvement to

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1125430652701024522005-08-30T15:11:00.000-04:002006-12-09T11:42:33.146-05:00

I talk to ecommerce merchants daily as I help them build their stores, market their sites online and find ways to make more money from their e-business. During these conversations over the years I have learned many things that separates out my most successful ecommerce clients from the ones that languish. One of the key things all of the most successful e-merchants have in common is continual

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1124830445471896832005-08-23T16:44:00.000-04:002007-01-10T14:00:51.323-05:00

A study that came out today reaffirms my personal mantra. Get customers to your site, let them find and buy what they want as quickly and painlessly as possible. Anything that gets in the way of customers ordering results in lost sales, and negative feelings about your company.Here's an excerpt of what they said:The Center for Media Research reports that over 70% of consumers said they'd give a

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1123850113085625772005-08-12T08:21:00.000-04:002006-05-17T09:30:14.990-04:00

One difference that I can see between my most successful clients over the years and the average clients is the most successful businesses continuously improve their website. These improvements can be big or small, but the imporant things is that improvements are being made. The reason why this makes the difference between average and phenomenal success can be attributed to a number of reasons.1.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1123604026139028012005-08-09T12:10:00.000-04:002006-11-14T02:17:14.163-05:00

I found this interesting article about the differences in preferences for a site's design based on the sex of the visitor and of the design team. It's not really earth shattering, but men prefer sites designed by men by a wide margin, and women identify with and prefer sites designed by women. Not only does the preference have to do with the colors but also the use of rigid lines vs. softer

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com44tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1121441284626203132005-07-15T11:23:00.000-04:002006-07-15T08:07:05.263-04:00

This news story was just released from Reuters: Essentially a group of supermarket and drugstore chains are suing Visa for price fixing. Many eCommerce customers that I have worked with have had similar experiences of being unable to locate more competitive rates since the rates were the same everywhere they checked. Hopefully the situation will improve not just for huge companies like these

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1120833904383537082005-07-08T10:38:00.000-04:002006-07-25T11:09:59.140-04:00

It looks like Google has begun shifting around links again. I see more referrers coming in from people linking to Everything eCommerce as well as people using the rss feeds to publish out my content on their sites. This blog was setup primarily as a way to test various search engine strategies and to put my thoughts together on the eCommerce book I am writing.One thing that I did in the begining

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1118865082151537182005-06-15T15:49:00.000-04:002006-11-28T05:01:02.863-05:00

In the last year, the number of e-commerce transactions conducted by more than 135,000 online shoppers tracked by Verisign Inc. increased 31 percent. In addition, the amount each person spent rose on average of 4 percent in the first quarter to $150 from $144 in the fourth quarter of last year.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1118765936814787352005-06-14T12:15:00.000-04:002005-11-23T08:21:31.106-05:00

I am a frequent reader / commenter on This is Broken. I usually read it a few times a day in order to gain greater insight on improving customer's experiences and getting the pulse of the design/development industry. Even though I've been building websites for over 10 years, there are always ways of improving the experience. Companies that do not strive to improve, simply die away.With that in

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1118346491891356012005-06-09T15:48:00.000-04:002006-01-24T00:57:39.690-05:00

I have been working with Kremer Laser Eye Center for about 7 years. In the latest redesign of their site, we went back and reviewed traffic paths, most used pages and competitors. One of the core things we wanted to do was to increase the number of contacts into the call center and ultimatly increase the conversion rate of the site. We added a contact us form to every page on the site as part

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1118252377520072582005-06-08T13:31:00.000-04:002006-03-30T01:23:40.273-05:00

I frequent thisisbroken.com to learn about ways to establish better customer experiences and user interface designs. Today a topic on customer service unleashed a storm of people frustrated with the lack of good shopping experiences. The original post detailed a customer who went to purchase two pairs of shoes and found out that they only had one pair. Ordering another pair was offered, but

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1110383887487861852005-03-09T10:53:00.000-05:002006-05-18T17:57:52.276-04:00

I plan on featuring some of the ecommerce stores that I've built for clients over the last 8 years or so in a new section called Featured Clients. The first one is one of the more recent website designs that I have done. Ewatches.com was launched in November 2004 as a new ecommerce site that utilizes ShopSite PRO for the shopping cart, and a slew of custom templates, and custom add-on modules.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1110383621846259692005-03-09T10:39:00.000-05:002005-11-23T09:02:47.290-05:00

I find that within my industry there is a never ending cycle of feast and famine. Some months you will be swimming with work and then the next month have little to no prospects of additional work. We have been able to flatten the troughs through site maintenance for large companies and organizations, but the core problem still remains.From the time I first talk to a prospect to the time that they

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1109775549284067922005-03-02T09:49:00.000-05:002007-01-11T12:13:09.400-05:00

I ran across an interesting article on WebProNews.Editors Note: The Search Engine Strategies conference kicked off in New York yesterday. As usual, there are a number of panels featuring some very useful and educational information.One such panel attended by Andy Beal detailed the many different types of search behavior. This section detailed how searchers respond to search results. Are they

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1108758761342886062005-02-18T15:22:00.000-05:002006-03-30T01:24:34.436-05:00

Are you maximing your site's search engine potenital. If you are optimizing for brand specific searches and ignoring more generic terms, you could be missing out on a large portion of traffic and sales.A joint study by DoubleClick and comScore Networks suggests that many consumers conduct product-related searches weeks in advance of purchase and they prefer generic, non-branded, search

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1108502892273553612005-02-15T16:20:00.000-05:002006-01-29T10:47:21.186-05:00

We have been talking about the browser wars being renewed with the increasing market share of FireFox. Things are really heating up now that Bill Gates has announced the development of a new browser. Originally, the next version of Internet Explorer was supposed to come out with Microsoft's next OS "LongHorn". It appears that they have decided to speed up the release in order to shore up lost

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1107455144832874102005-02-03T13:24:00.000-05:002006-12-22T14:29:01.283-05:00

I have a bunch of Gmail invites. If you are interested, just email joshualwood@gmail.com with a little note that you'd like an invite and I'll send one on its way. Big update coming soon, check back in the next day or two.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1107281548460804242005-02-01T13:10:00.000-05:002006-11-12T19:20:49.316-05:00

I ran across an interesting article today about FordDirect.com. That site is a partnership between Ford and its dealers that sells cars directly over the internet. In 2004, FordDirect sold over 210,000 cars via the web. I think this speeks volumes about the state of ecommerce and the acceptance of doing business online. Here is the full article for your review. Ford dealers sold 210,000 cars via

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com31tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106759821144763882005-01-27T13:04:00.000-05:002006-07-13T16:47:29.856-04:00

One question that a lot of my customers has is whether I can recommend a website statistics package. Our hosting customers receive a couple different ways of analyzing their statistics, but as sites grow, there comes a need for a dedicated software package. These packages have the ability to analyze conversion rates on campaigns, abandoned carts and other information that goes beyond the display

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com117tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106843009343671302005-01-27T11:19:00.000-05:002006-01-28T02:22:22.906-05:00

It seems that almost daily there are reports of the Browser Wars heating up. One broadband ISP now bundles FireFox with it's setup software as a way of providing choice to its customers. Here's an excerpt from CNet.Speakeasy, which sells high-speed DSL (digital subscriber line) access, becomes the first Internet service provider to package Firefox, a free open-source browser, as part of its setup

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106842505718021892005-01-27T11:15:00.000-05:002005-12-09T04:39:56.226-05:00

Continuing our discussion of the emergence of FireFox, Speakeasy a DSL provider will now be providing FireFox to its users. Speakeasy, which sells high-speed DSL (digital subscriber line) access, becomes the first Internet service provider to package Firefox, a free open-source browser, as part of its setup software for new customers. When people run Speakeasy's setup disc, Firefox and

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106757799751341242005-01-26T11:29:00.000-05:002005-11-26T00:54:28.763-05:00

Posts for the next two weeks will be sporadic. I am currently finishing up a bunch of client sites as well as writing the first two chapters of my book in my spare time. And now on with the show. Something that effects all websites to various degrees is the website browser. Until recently Microsoft has thoroughly crushed the competition with its bundled Internet Exporer. Mozilla's FireFox

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106238036020892682005-01-20T11:16:00.000-05:002005-11-26T00:53:59.356-05:00

Another report has come out today predicting the death of popups. With the google toolbar, SP2 and other browser additions, it is no wonder this method of advertising is going away. With 0ver 50% of home Internet users now using broadband, ecommerce sites will be able to provide greater product detail, product commercials and other marketing methods to sell more online. Here's the report for your

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1106060321607486072005-01-18T09:33:00.000-05:002006-05-02T20:15:25.346-04:00

We have covered ways that the web traffic logs can help tailor your marketing campaign and give better insight into the action of visitors. Another way to use traffic logs to benefit your online store is tracking down the cause of errors and correcting them. With any site of significant size, errors will always crop up and can be difficult to track down. By carefully analyzing your server's log

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105718247906355272005-01-14T10:54:00.000-05:002005-12-27T06:37:12.166-05:00

In continuing our discussion of refferer traffic, I analyzed the 575+ addresses of sites sending traffic to Everything Ecommerce. The resulting graph shows that 2.5% of websites sending traffic to my site account for 50% of the referrer traffic. You can view the graph and acompaning article at Long Tail Marketing.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105655284741516782005-01-13T17:06:00.000-05:002005-11-22T12:05:48.486-05:00

In part 2 of the analysis of your ecommerce site's log files we will look at referrers and everything that we can gather from them. A small sample of what we can find out includes the answers to these questions. What search engines were used to find your ecommerce website?What keywords used on those search engines ?How many of your visitors bookmarked your website?What affiliates are driving the

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105570243898074192005-01-12T17:29:00.000-05:002005-11-20T18:37:50.593-05:00

Definitions This is the first part of a 3 part series on how through the analysis of log files using statistical packages, you can improve your online business. This first part will cover the definitions of some key terms. Part 2 and 3 will then cover the meet of what you can learn. When looking at websites statistics the following terms are usually thrown about: unique visitors, visits, pages,

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105479816815384342005-01-11T16:07:00.000-05:002006-12-22T00:05:12.856-05:00

One question that comes up with my clients who are new to online selling is how to accept credit card transactions. The answer to this question depends on whether they have an existing swipe terminal at their business location or if this is an entirely new venture. Every merchant processing credit cards needs both a merchant account and a payment gateway. Some of the most popular payment gateways

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105358209868348192005-01-10T06:55:00.000-05:002005-11-22T13:00:27.460-05:00

As I look around at the sites on the internet, I find it increasingly hard to find established sites that are not using some form of long tail marketing. I am beginning to think that long tail marketing is actually a discriminator between companies that will survive and companies that will fail. I have posted a full article exploring my thoughts on this over at Long Tail Marketing Read the full

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105297187787138332005-01-09T13:38:00.000-05:002006-09-03T22:23:21.393-04:00

This posting is a little off topic since it doesn't directly cover ecommerce. I wanted to provide some additional information and feedback on the results since publishing my first article at WebProNews. Since writing the original Google Sandbox mode article for WebProNews I have spent a lot of time monitoring the results. One of the first things to happen was my article actually mentioned

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com60tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105040136835980412005-01-06T14:32:00.000-05:002006-11-08T15:11:10.973-05:00

I am considering writing a book on many of the things that I cover within my blogs. It would detail case studies and give practical advice on ways that you/your clients can maximize online sales. If I wrote it, how interested would you be in reading it? Feedback on this is greatly appreciated.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1105022424184404882005-01-06T09:24:00.000-05:002005-12-19T12:43:29.373-05:00

There are a number of simple things that website owners can do to maximize and maintain their long tail. These techniques have been used by many of my most successful eCommerce customers and cost almost nothing. Preserve your site architecture. Whenever a your online store is redesigned or moved to another server, care should be taken that the new move does not cause any broken links and that

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com32tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104839962038159492005-01-04T06:34:00.000-05:002005-01-04T09:30:12.530-05:00

Wishlists allow your potential customers to create pages of their favorite products to order from in the future. There are several advantages of using this feature within your online store. Over the last five years, I have seen my customers successfully use wishlists to increase sales across a wide spectrum of industries and target markes. Wishlists allow customers whose target audience is under

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104691272999381072005-01-02T13:35:00.000-05:002005-11-21T19:10:41.830-05:00

I just posted an article over at Search Engine Guru. It goes into the economics of sponsored listings and the importance of continual analysis of your results. Over the years I have watched a number of my clients spend large amounts of money on advertising that produced little to no results. Whether it's television, newspaper, radio or online advertising the single most important aspect of any

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104445582313326442004-12-30T17:13:00.000-05:002005-12-17T22:12:49.680-05:00

An update on Obscure Obtuse Geometry. Well it took 1 day, but my article on the Long Tail Effect Part 2 which mentioned obscure obtuse geometry is now #1 on Google for this search phrase. There was no doubt that my page would be able to achieve this ranking since the phrase itself is complete nonsense, but I was really surprised to see just how quickly Google indexed the site and incorporated

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com63tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104373728753099452004-12-29T21:27:00.000-05:002006-03-08T03:23:41.036-05:00

I wrote a short article on my experience with the "Google Sandbox" and how at least in my case I don't believe it exists. Check out the article and let me know what you think. http://www.webpronews.com/ebusiness/sitepromotion/wpn-3-20041229GoogleSandboxModeDemythified.html

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104349521100477742004-12-29T14:45:00.000-05:002006-11-14T02:17:02.963-05:00

This whole long tail thinking has really gotten me excited. If you have been studying search engine marketing and strategies, I'm sure you've come across the idea that search engines, especially Google love blogs. This was actually the reason this blog was started in the first place, as a way of capturing traffic. It was on blogs that things like Googlebombing first started. I think high

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104254905916343452004-12-28T13:28:00.000-05:002006-01-29T16:26:43.133-05:00

I've been reading a bunch of interesting articles lately talking about the future of business is within niche markets instead of the mass markets that dominate today. While I think it will be quite a while before the Walmart's of the world go away, it is interesting to think about and does offer potential to online stores. Here's an interesting tidbit. To get a sense of our true taste,

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1104177906824483882004-12-27T15:05:00.000-05:002005-11-23T09:19:16.550-05:00

SEATTLE (AP) - Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) on Monday said sales of consumer electronics surpassed book sales for the first time and was its largest sales category over the Thanksgiving weekend, launching the online retailer's busiest holiday selling season in 10 years. The company also said it set a single-day sales record during the period with more than 2.8 million units, or 32 items per second,

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1103818021299766492004-12-23T11:07:00.000-05:002004-12-23T11:07:01.300-05:00

Google's 2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist gives a look at search patterns and trends for 2004. It covers everything from the most popular query (Britney Spears) to Popular Retail Chains (WalMart). This information is useful for ecommerce companies. The top sport and hobby searches was for "poker chips". I would have liked to have an online business properly optimized to take advantage of this

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1103766440829025192004-12-22T20:47:00.000-05:002006-02-06T05:16:47.870-05:00

The browser wars are heating up again. Users, constantly under attack from spyware, security holes and bloat are switching to Mozilla's firefox browser in droves. Firefox is a standards compliant browser that features tabbed browsing, and extremly fast page loading. Microsoft has also announced in recent months that it is abandoning development of additional version of IE on the Mac, since Apple

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1103661396105471622004-12-21T15:36:00.000-05:002006-09-22T11:58:51.013-04:00

Webmonkey is back and is being updated more frequently. This site continues to be a great resource for all budding website developers. Webmonkey: The Web Developer's Resource

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1103645273805163732004-12-21T11:07:00.000-05:002004-12-21T11:22:57.846-05:00

I'm not a big fan of Jakob Nielsen. I think while some of his ideas may be sound he seems more interested in self promotion and being recognized as "the usability guy" than he is in actually improving the web. His own site at useit.com may be easy to use but it's also one of the most bland, amateurish looking sites that I have seen. It's almost like we're stuck back in the days of Netscape 1.0.

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9665305.post-1103317112610904942004-12-17T16:55:00.000-05:002006-05-17T09:30:17.046-04:00

Well, I've decided to setup this blog to report and advise on everything ecommerce related. I have been building websites for over 10 years, and building sucessful online stores for over 6. Through that time I've been able to come up with the knowledge of what works and what doesn't. Topics you'll see covered include the state of ecommerce, site design tips, search engine optimization

Joshhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15531529562610106231noreply@blogger.com26