Josh Klein Web Strategy is a blog about creating websites that are worth caring about -- websites that matter to people. If you want instant updates, please subscribe.
I want to teach you a magic trick: how to mint your own money. Don’t worry – below, I’ll explain what this has to do with marketing and the web.
Let’s say I have a tasty sandwich I value at $4.00. You have $6.00 cash in hand. The world, as far as we are concerned, has $10.00 of value.
I’d like to make some money for buying beer this weekend, so I’m willing to sell you my sandwich for $5.00. I’ll be a whole $1.00 richer.
You value the eating of tasty sandwiches at $6.00, so you’re ecstatic to buy my tasty sandwich for $5.00. You’re going to have something you value at $6.00, plus $1.00 left over.
So we make the exchange: I now have $5.00, and you have $1.00 plus a sandwich you value at $6.00. The world has $12.00.
Holy shit, we just committed a felony by minting $2.00.
Continue reading »
Virtual reality (VR) is a good idea for escapist fantasies. I remember visiting Universal Studios, standing in line for 2 hours just get on the Back to the Future ride. I didn’t just feel real - I was in the DeLorean, flying through the skies chasing Biff.
Great, but so what?
Maybe VR could be useful for a military pilot, safely at base, piloting a drone into combat maneuvers. Maybe VR could be useful for a physician in New York doing surgery on a patient in Cape Town. But for regular ‘ol me, what use could I have for VR besides entertainment?
I think I first starting thinking of augmented reality (AR) after reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, or maybe Neil Stephenson’s Snowcrash. I know I associate AR with cyberpunk – how high tech alters human society in the near future – the particular form of science fiction that interests me.
AR is much more attractive than VR, because it is location agnostic. Human interaction with the environment is a precious thing, and I don’t want to suspend myself in a chamber and transport my senses to a distant place.
But I wouldn’t mind enhancing my daily interactions with the world around me. What would life be like if there wasn’t a wall between our regular lives and the lives we spent sitting at a screen?
Continue reading »
Liz Strauss thinks about how to connect people and businesses. Today, that means blogging. Liz runs SOBCon, a business school for bloggers, and writes a blog about successful blogging. If you want to know how your business could use blogging, she is the person to ask. To start you off, I asked Liz 4 questions.
4 Questions with Liz Strauss
Josh Klein: What’s the first thing that attracted you to blogging?
Liz Strauss: The first answer is that a publishing friend called me one day to say that her company, one I knew well, was thinking about starting a a blog, and would I be interested in writing it? I figured I’d better do some blogging to know what it took, because I had no idea what to charge . . .
The second answer is that I’ve always been fascinated with words, and a career in publishing made me think that I might be able to do it well enough. Ironically, I made the same mistakes everyone seems to make. I thought it was about writing. I thought it was about having something to say.
Continue reading »
Visitors coming to your site from forums are worth 2 to 6 times the average visitor. Why? Forum visitors are proactive information seekers, community-minded participants, and engaged users. They do more everything.
The evidence: traffic to my own blog.
In this article, I’m going to show you why you should use forums to drive traffic, then give you the 10 rules for getting it done.
As an example, I’ll discuss a forum I participate in hosted by Sitepoint.com, a resource for web designers and developers.
I use this forum for 3 reasons:
1. I have experience in this category, so I can have thoughtful discussions with my peers.
2. My expertise as a marketer complements the usual community member’s skill set, allowing me to contribute a unique viewpoint.
3. My site’s target audience overlaps with the forum’s audience.
Although the Sitepoint forum does not send me thousands of visitors every month, the traffic driven to my blog by the forum is of the highest quality.
The people referred to my blog from the forum read more, participate more, and come back for more.
Continue reading »
Economics isn’t the sexiest subject. You probably remember the law of supply and demand from high school, but don’t know as much about opportunity costs, shadow prices, price elasticity of demand, information asymmetry, and so on.
This article will not attempt to teach you Economics. You won’t learn what any of those terms mean. Instead, this article will influence you to learn more about the subject on your own as an essential part of Marketing (and life).
Economics leads us to some counter-intuitive explanations for people’s behavior. For example, it can show us that every natural death is a suicide, and that people have higher incomes in New York because time costs more there.
The Economic Approach to Marketing will re-frame your understanding of customer behavior. It will enable you to market your product, service, or idea in a way that directly addresses the unfulfilled needs of your customer. It is a way of thinking about the observations we make as marketers.
Continue reading »