Josh Klein Web Strategy

I’m currently reading Paul Kennedy’s The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. Philip IV, arguing in defense of the Hapsburg Empire spending itself into financial ruin to suppress insurrection in the distant Netherlands, said the following:

“Although the war which we have fought in the Netherlands has exhausted our treasury and forced us into those debts that we have incurred, it has also diverted our enemies in those parts so that, had we not done so, it is certain that we would have had war in Spain or somewhere nearer.”

They didn’t call it the “Eighty Years War” for nothing. Sounds like a familiar argument, doesn’t it?

This blog began almost a year and a half ago to share my thoughts on web strategy. Since then, I’ve written what I think are some worthwhile contributions to the body of knowledge on the subject. Here are my favorites:

Debunking the Social Media Myth: A Framework for Social Media Strategies
Marketing Using Credible Signals to Close Tough Customers
What is Web Strategy and Why Should You Care?
Websites Worth Caring About
You Don’t Deserve to Use Web 2.0, and That’s OK
This Whole Internet Thing Could Get Big Someday

Once you understand web strategy, you need to stop reading about it and start doing it.

I’ve said all I have to say on the general topic. If you’ve been paying attention, you’ve probably read all you need to read about it. I may write about it again in the future, but for now that chapter of this blog is closed.

I will continue to post to this blog on a variety of subjects of personal interest to me. You’re welcome to stick around. I hope you do.

Yesterday was election day. There were not any elections for national offices, but there were a number of contested mayoral, gubernatorial and congressional races.

I’d like to share a quotation in the spirit of elections:

I am unable to conceive that the people of America [...] will [choose], and every second year repeat the choice of [...] men, who would be disposed to form and pursue a scheme of tyranny or treachery. [...] I am equally unable to conceive that there are at this time, or can be in any short time, in the United States any [...] men capable of recommending themselves to the choice of the people at large, who would either desire or dare within the short space of two years, to betray the solemn trust committed to them.

Republican government presupposes the existence of [virtue] in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us, faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

James Madison, Federalist Paper #55

Donors Choose is a website that lets donors directly fund public school education projects in high-needs areas. The month of October is their annual social media challenge, and we’re taking part.

This community has already raised $225 and completed 3 projects, reaching 157 students – not hypothetical “students”, but these specific 157 children. How awesome is that? The more we can raise before this Sunday (October 25th) the more funds Hewlett-Packard will match.

In case that isn’t enough to get you to donate, I want to sweeten the pot by making you a deal:

I’ve written a report called An Introduction to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Non-Technical Business Owners. It contains everything you – real people, not SEO geeks – need to know about how search works, minus the jargon.

Instead of just another technical guide, you’ll get a 20-page game plan for your business. Read it and you’ll know the business side of SEO. Leave the tech guides for the geeks you’re going to hire; you should be running your business.

If we hit $1,000 donated through my giving page at Donors Choose by October 31, I’ll release the report here for FREE. If not, the report will continue to be reserved for my clients.

So help some kids, help your Google rank. It’s as simple as that.

We helped buy school supplies for Ms. W’s Kindergarten class, Ms. L’s 6th grade class, and Mr. W’s 10th grade technology class. How about a few more classrooms?

Click here to donate with your credit card. It takes 5 minutes.

Donors Choose is an awesome organization. Their website allows teachers with underprivileged students to create classroom proposals, and donors to choose the projects their charitable contributions support.

The website is filled with proposals for students in need: basic human needs like toothpaste and toothbrushes, necessary classroom supplies like pencils and books, and technology for advanced students.

Right now, Donors Choose is holding The 2009 Social Media Challenge. Last year, bloggers raised $270,000 to provide 65,000 students with classroom resources.

Budget cuts are seriously threatening education right now, especially here in New York State.

I created a giving page for this blog’s community in the Tech Blog category. My goal is for us to raise $2,000 during this drive, and I’ve added a number of projects I think are worth sponsoring.

If you can donate, please do so at the giving page. If you can’t, please pass on a link to others to help spread the word.

I’ve focused the projects for our group to high poverty areas in New York City, but if you see another project you’d like to fund, let me know!

Donors Choose is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation accredited by the Better Business Bureau, with a 4-star rating from Charity Navigator, and contributions are tax deductible. Kudos to Fred Wilson for inspiring this. I’d say we should beat his donation group, but that seems implausible.

When is an e-commerce shopping cart more than a shopping cart?

Even without dipping into complex issues like PCI compliance, payment processing, analytics, and reporting, selling online requires a stack of systems that aren’t immediately recognizable to the non-technical business owner.

When you think “we need an online shopping cart”, pause to consider the role of each of these systems in your business:

1. Store UI - The User Interface is the equivalent of the layout of a physical retail store. Place a product in the “back corner” of your website and it won’t sell. The store UI is determined by your information architecture and web design.

2. Marketing – Sales, discount codes, coupons, gift cards, search engine optimization, customer reviews; each of these tactics requires a compatible technical system. Doing this manually would be a nightmare.

3. Merchandizing – This is how you can grow your average sales per transaction; up-selling, cross-selling, product bundles, and so on.

4. Prices – You may want to tier prices or offer product options and add-ons. A one-to-one SKU-to-price might not work for you.

5. Catalog – It needs to be simple to manage a product catalogue if you ever plan to add/remove products or have descriptions, specifications, images, and video.

6. Inventory – Receive an order, manually check your inventory, email a customer who ordered out-of-stock items, and refund their transaction? Sounds like a good way to lose business in this just-in-time world.

7. Customers – Managing your customer relationships is mandatory. Generating repeat business won’t happen if you don’t have a system that learns about your customer over time. There are plenty of opportunities; creating email lists, remembering shipping information, one-click purchasing, sending birthday discount codes, offering add-ons to already-owned products, and so on.

8. Fullfillment – Receiving orders and shipping products can be a hassle if you’re printing out emails. You should be able to check if an order has shipped, cancel orders upon customer request, measure and improve the time fullfillment takes, and so on.

9. Deployment – The website hosting, security considerations, software, and integration with any systems beyond e-commerce.

I think too many non-technical business owners look for web development service based on the ability to create the Store UI, implying the business owner already has a handle on the other eight systems. Caveat emptor.

Diagram and inspiration care of the excellent Get Elastic E-commerce Blog. Check it out.

It turns out there was a nasty conflict between two Wordpress plugins: DISQUS (the commenting system) and Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (which generates suggested articles at the bottom of every post).

Since there are other ways to generated suggested posts, I’ve dropped that plugin for now. DISQUS is more irreplaceable, since it’s the platform that manages the community for this blog.

In fact, it was the wonderful Gianni of DISQUS support that helped me figure out what was wrong after my troubleshooting lead me in her direction.

If you haven’t signed up for DISQUS, you should.

I’m experiencing technical issues with my RSS feed. If you’re a subscriber, you won’t be able get updates through the feed. New folks: subscribing to the RSS feed won’t work at all. In the interim, please subscribe by email. I hope to fix this issue soon. Sorry!

I’m a firm believer in scientific, analytical, fact-based marketing. I also believe in the importance of storytelling, building customer relationships, and making things worth caring about. When discussing these subjects — particularly the usefulness of social media — the discussion tends to pit these beliefs against each other.

Either social media works, or it doesn’t.

I’m not sure this is the right approach. It would be better to discuss where and when social media fits into a robust marketing plan.

How can we develop a resilient marketing engine to power a business, and how can social media fuel that engine?

Continue reading »

If you received yesterday’s post by email, apparently something bizarre happened where an earlier version of the post appeared in the beginning of the email. It was filled with typos and the content was a little different. This did not appear on the website itself. I apologize for the mixup, although I’m not sure how it happened. Please click through to read the post on the website here.