Jordy Blog

Universal Wishlists: A Lesson in Open Marketing

Universal Wishlist Review

I’m not a big shopper, especially when it comes to traditional brick-and-morter stores, but the internet marketer in me loves new features that make online shopping more pleasant. Such is Amazon’s new Universal Wishlist feature. (OK, it’s not that new, but it’s still awesome.)

I love Amazon’s Universal Wishlist because it allows me to save items from other online stores right to my Amazon wishlist. Being able to store all of the products I want in one place has made Amazon my de facto shopping site for filing away stuff that I want now, but can only afford to buy someday. It’s my new virtual den of covetousness.

Other similar services exist as well. TheThingsIWant also looks kind of cool, and it has basically the same core functionality.  I haven’t tried it, but they supposedly have a feature that allows you to syndicate your wishlist to your blog. Very cool, and surely they’re getting some affiliate commission from that. I’m not sure that I would ever use wishlist syndication, but I can definitely see it being an interesting component of a personal or family blog.

It occurred to me that Google Product Search must have some similar feature, and sure enough, they do. Google shopping list lets you save products you want and compare prices across tons of online stores. It also lets you save notes and publish products in either a public or private list. Very cool. The biggest feature that it’s missing (for me, anyway) is the ability to make your own wishlist submissions for items from smaller stores (like the Mises.org store) that don’t show up on Google’s radar. Too bad. Still, it’s great if you only buy from big retailers.

Anyway, if you’re online shopping experience has been bound to one retailer, I now pronounce it unbound.

Lessons in Open Marketing

But, you might be asking yourself: “Why would Amazon extend it’s functionality to to other sites? Isn’t that giving away some of its secret sauce, let alone revenue?”

Answers:

1. Amazon uses the Universal Wishlists to make the “long tail” even longer, meaning it allows for even more product to be saved on it’s site. This is not necessarily to their direct benefit (since they don’t get the direct sale) but it does help build a shopping community around their site, and that’s as good as gold.
2. I’m sure Amazon also gets a bit of a traffic boost from this. When else would I ever go from Mises.org directly to Amazon? Having a “Click to add” to my Amazon wishlist right in my browser makes Amazon one click away from any retailer on the net. Now that’s smart. (This is somewhat analogous to building a brick-and-morter store in the mall. Why build right next to your competition? Because you can both benefit from the increased traffic that being in the the place for shopping will bring. If it’s sybmiotic, it works for everyone.)
3. Another win for Amazon: data mining. Suddenly Amazon knows what products I’m “eyeing” from other sites, often their direct competition. That’s great data to have when for making pricing, merchandising, and marketing decisions. That kind of competitive data is priceless, especially to an online store that process and act on that data quickly. Interested in a lawnchair from so-and-so? well here are our lawnchairs. X customer added Y watch from Z store? Why don’t we sell Y watch? You get the picture.

Overall I think implementing the Universal Wishlist a great, although somewhat unintuitive, strategic move for Amazon. It’s gutsy to encourage and facilitate increasing sales for other retailers; but it also builds community, increases site traffic, and provides meaningful (and actionable) data for competive analysis. Plus it builds goodwill –or at least it did for me. I appreciate being able to use Amazon’s wishlist feature wherever I find good products. That’s just good marketing.

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Software for Starving Students 2007.01 — RELEASED

Here’s the press release we sent out:

The 2007.01 release of Software for Starving Students is now available for download.

Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (but available to anyone). We’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more.

More info:

• Project homepage
• A complete list of included titles
• Screenshots

Please help us out by seeding the torrent, spreading the word, and burning copies for your friends and family. (Nothing spreads holiday cheer like good, free software.)

Happy Downloading!

Last year this got hundreds of thousands of downloads after getting posted on the front page of Digg. Here’s this year’s entry.

Moving a Site with Apache Redirects

My boss, Paul Allen (the lesser) asked me to blog about how I redirected his entire blog site to new domain without losing traffic. So at the risk of boring some of my more technical readers, but also in the name of retaining my job, here goes. :)

Before the Move

First, the part I didn’t do. Before the old site could be redirected, the new site had to exist and look sharp. Blake created a mock-up of the new look and feel and sent it to XHTMLized, a great company in the UK that returned a working WordPress theme the very next day for $150. Mike installed the latest WordPress on the new domain and put Paul on a blogging freeze while he imported the database from the old domain.

List Links that Should Redirect

Once Mike was finished, I made a list of links to the old domain that should redirect to the new domain if clicked or pasted into the browser. I picked a link to each different page type that I could think of. Although yours may vary (depending on what type of site your moving and what kind of link structure your using), my list of old links looked like this:

Main
http://infobaseventures.com/blog/

Post
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/2006/02/16/transparent-companies/

Category
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/categories/companies-to-watch/

Archive
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/2006/01/

Syndication
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/feed/
http://www.infobaseventures.com/blog/comments/feed/

I emailed this list to myself so I could test each link out after the redirect. Be thorough when making your list so that you don’t lose readers (or traffic from important links) during the move. For instance, if you forget to redirect your feeds, plan on losing your most tech-savvy readers.

Use Consistent File and Directory Naming Structure

If you use a similar (or at least consistent) directory and filename structure on your new site, you should be able to write just a few redirect rules rather than one for every page. If you’re just copying an normal directory to a new location, you don’t have to do anything here. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, make sure that your new site is using the same permalink structure. In WordPress this is configurable in “Options > Permalinks”. The end goal is to keep the URLs of each of your pages looking similar.

You can test whether a redirect will be simple by doing a find and replace on your link list, then testing the new links. In my example I replaced “infobasemedia.com/blog” with “paulallen.net”, then tested each link to make sure it brought me to the appropriate page on the new site. They did. If yours do too, your redirect will be easy. If they don’t, you should probably fix your new site and try again. Alternatively, you can do a redirect for each page type, but it will be more difficult. It may however be the desired effect, if the whole reason for redirect was to modify your directory structure without taking a hit in traffic.

Decide if you want “WWW” in your URL and Stand by Your Decision

After I tested my new links, I tested whether the new links also worked without the “www”. They did. This may seem counterintuitive, but for SEO purposes, you actually don’t want them both to work. Or better, you want one to be a server alias redirecting to the other so that links to either URL land on just one, which is good for Google Juice. Which should you choose? It doesn’t really matter as long as you’re consistent. Traditionalists like the “www”. Some newfangled whippersnappers don’t.

Since I didn’t do the server alias for paulallen.net (Mike did), I’ll show you the pertinent parts of virtual host configuration file for Provo Labs.

<ServerName www.provolabs.com>
DocumentRoot /var/www/html/www.provolabs.com
...

<ServerName www.provolabs.com>
ServerAlias provolabs.com
Redirect permanent / http://www.provolabs.com/
...

This makes it so that if you try to go to http://provolabs.com/, you will be redirected to http://www.provolabs.com/. Is this vital moving a website? No. But it’s nice, and it’s better setup the site properly before you start directing traffic to it. At the very least you should know whether you want to include the “www” so that you can redirect it to the one that you plan on ending up with.

Making the Redirect

So, after much testing, you should finally be able to make the redirect. This is actually very simple. You just want to test it beforehand to make sure it’s seamless for your readers.

Here’s the code I put in the .htaccess file of the old blog site.

# Redirect permanent /blog/ http://www.paulallen.net/

Pretty easy, huh? I clicked save and opened up my list of links that should work. But some didn’t. I quickly commented the redirect out and looked again. There were some mod_rewrites on the old site that needed to be deleted for it to work properly, a common problem having to do with the permalink structure. So I removed the offending code, saving it in a separate file for backup. With the next try, it all worked. There were only about 2 seconds of traffic lost in my first attempt, and even that landed on the new site –it just didn’t land on the right page at the new site.

Google Juice

This is all just guesswork, but one important thing to note here is that you should probably use the permanent redirect. This tells people to update their links to your pages. It also tells Google that links coming to your old address should be credited to the new one. Despite this, you will see your PageRank go to 0 because Google dings your new address for being new. Don’t worry about that; nobody cares but you. If the traffic and content is still there and all inbound links are landing (with a permanent redirect) on the right pages, your users are still happy and your PageRank should go back up with a little time. In the interim you will still probably still place fairly well in natural search results for Keywords that you have really targeted. And for traffic from paid results and links, your PageRank obviously doesn’t matter.

But if you have a for-profit site that sells seasonal products and you need the money to eat, you might consider doing the switch in a slow season. And if you can afford to have something decent on the new URL being indexed by Google even months before you make the redirect, that would probably help too. Again, this is guesswork.

Link Checker

Despite testing all the main page types, we still missed a small number of pages because we did a database dump and import rather than copying an entire directory. Overall, we did what we wanted to do, and under normal usage it would have been perfect. But we forgot to check the old blog’s document root for html files and directories that were created outside of the standard WordPress administration panel and were (therefor) not in the database. The omitted pages were insignificant enough that we would not have known immediately that they didn’t work. Luckily Mike decided to use a link checker (like the free one I mention here) to verify all the links on the new site worked. Sure enough, there were some broken links to content that should have been there, but wasn’t. So there’s a little clean up to do (even still), but chances are that none of his readers noticed.

Do it Right the First Time

Demming’s seventh rule of TQM is “Do it Right the First Time”. The same axiom applies all over in life, and it certainly applies here. If you can get your site setup in the right directory and the domain in the first place, you save effort and uptime down the road. So if you can, just do it right the first time. Pretty obvious, I know –but it does take a little foresight and planning.

Deepest Apologies

Well, hopefully that wasn’t the longest post you ever read. If it was I apologize, but you might not be in this mess had you exercised a little self-control earlier on. Despite it’s length, I hope that somewhere in this long mess of verboseness you found a little nugget of wisdom that will be helpful to you the next time you move a website between domains or otherwise. If not, it must be because you didn’t look hard enough. Try reading it again. :)

PS. Let me know if I missed anything.

SSS PageRank

The PageRank for Software for Starving Students (via Google’s toolbar) went clear from 0 to 5 with the latest data update. That’s pretty indicative of the almost immediate success the project has enjoyed. The site has only been up since the very end of December but has had some really incredible growth. Just check out the Alexa traffic:

As the project’s volunteer marketing director, I’ve had a valuable lesson cemented in my mind. SoftwareFor had practically no link recruitment; we just focused on making a really cool (free) product. We included top-of-the-line open source programs and gave it a sleek GUI. About the only “marketing” involved me staying up all night and polishing up some very good quotable text for the webpages. In other words, we focused almost exclusively on making a cool product –which (after all) is what the market wants.

The project got almost 1000 Diggs (thus the traffic spike) because it was cool. People from all over the world linked to it because it was useful to them, not because a bunch of suits spent a lot of money trying to jam it down their throats. Our traffic spiked and our PageRank jumped because we provided a service that people legitimately wanted.

Conclusion: The market doesn’t care how much you spend on it. Instead it wants to know what you can do for it. If what you offer is cool, then your “customers” will market your product for you. A cool product (or service) almost sells itself.

Although link recruitment (for SEO purposes) and reaching your market are important, many people and companies take the wrong approach. It’s not about beating the system via comment spam, round-the-clock commercials, or anything else. It’s the classic standoff of “Push vs Pull”, and with today’s technological sounding boards, “pull” always wins.

The best way to market your products is to give the market what it wants. In other words, just be cool. Be remarkable, and people will remark.

SSS is a Hit!

A few days ago, Dave posted about Software for Starving Students on Digg, and the downloads started coming immediately. With well over 20,000 downloads the last time I checked (a couple of days ago), the project has become a major success. We’ve transferred over 11 terabytes of data and our seeders have held up fine, although a lot of that was done through xmission and other generous mirrors. We also learned a valuable lesson: to turn off wiki and other high computation areas of our site beforehand next time.

We’ve had about 10 people volunteer to be distributor liaisons in schools all over, as well as several interested in helping with translation and distribution for versions in Italy and Cambodia. It’s incredible how small the world has become because of the flattening force of internet. It’s amazing that a few volunteers can work on a little project and have it distributed all over the world, instantly. And that’s one of the reasons that open source is thriving: it leverages free labor from skilled workers distributed all over the world, then redistributes contributions almost instantaneously around the globe. I have a lot to say about the dynamics of open source but will do that later. I’m just glad to see the SSS have seen such tremendous success. After many late nights, it’s rewarding to see our efforts pay off, and it feels good to give a little back to the open source community after so many years of quality mooching.