Erich Stauffer

Tag: Google

  • The Future of RSS

    On July 2, 2013, Google killed Google Reader.
    Google Reader

    Thank you for stopping by.

    Google Reader has been discontinued. We want to thank all our loyal fans. We understand you may not agree with this decision, but we hope you’ll come to love these alternatives as much as you loved Reader.

    Sincerely,

    The Google Reader team

    While I have used Google Reader on and off for years, I don’t use it now. However, I still know and care about the value of RSS as a publishing syndication platform and feel that Google has hurt that by creating a monopoly of sorts by buying up RSS apps then killing them.

    ZDNet wrote a piece on this entitled, Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry in which Ed Bott writes, “The entire RSS industry is being rolled back to about 2006 and asked to start over.”

    Hacker News (HN) chimed in when bambax said, “The killing of Reader looks like a desperate move to help Google+: since Google can’t kill Facebook, they’re willing to hurt themselves instead — to cut their left arm so that their right arm can grow stronger. If this is indeed the case, it’s very shortsighted.”

    In another HN thread about the economics of “Evil Google“, RockyMcNuts said:

    It’s not the RSS reader. It’s the open publishing ecosystem. Most clients point to Reader as the central feed aggregator. Most publishers point to Feedburner as the central publisher. Google seized the commanding heights with Feedburner and Google Reader and captured all the publishers and the clients, and now they’re killing the ecosystem. I don’t see why they couldn’t have integrated Reader into Plus without killing the ecosystem. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn are moving into news aggregation, and Google is killing a successful news aggregation system. I don’t understand their strategy, but it’s seems sort of like, we want everyone on G+ and we don’t care how heavy-handed we look or how early adopters feel, and we don’t want an open ecosystem that people can use to pipe content into Twitter and Facebook.

    What other platform has such ease of opt-in as RSS? There are email newsletters and Twitter. Both require that the publisher does some sort of action. With RSS it was/is automatic. That is/was the beauty of it. I keep talking about it like it’s dead. It’s not dead. Google Reader is dead. I asked a friend if he still used Google Reader and this is what he said:

    I definitely still use it. I probably will wait until the last week of June to commit to a new solution. I’ll probably go with Feedly, but I’m not sure if they let you pick any website, etc. Also, I don’t know how they accommodate custom searches [like Google Alerts]. I’m going to wait until there is an opportunity for a mature alternative. I also have questions about how the web will attempt to syndicate in the absence of Google reader. I know people are saying that the shuttering of reader is a pronouncement of Twitter winning vs. RSS. But, Twitter isn’t an adequate replacement for RSS and leaning on newsletters is a step in the wrong direction. I’m all questions and all ears.

    RSS Reader Alternatives

    And if that list isn’t good enough for you, NPR suggested Digg. Microsoft Outlook also has a RSS reader and some Internet browsers have RSS readers built-in. Did you know Internet Explorer 9 had an RSS reader? Firefox requires an add-in like Simple RSS Reader, Feedly, or Sage. Same for Chrome. AOL also has a RSS reader aptly named AOL Reader.

    RSS: Curation VS. Aggregation

    I remember the first time I saw Google Reader. A coworker had invited me over to his house and while there he told me he wanted to show me something cool. When I walked over to his computer he proudly showed me how he had collected all of his favorite information into one place. He was able to sort through article after article with the spin of his mouse wheel. It was glorious. I signed up for my own account and quickly began adding RSS feeds from sites I wanted to follow. I quickly became inundated with more articles than I could read in a day. I started to get discouraged and eventually I quit.

    Marco Arment wrote in The Power of the RSS Reader, “The most common complaint I hear about inbox-style RSS readers such as Google Reader, NetNewsWire, and Reeder: that people gave up on them because they were constantly filled with more unread items than they could handle. If you’ve had that problem, you weren’t using inbox-style RSS readers properly…If a site posts many items each day and you barely read any of them, delete that feed. If you find yourself hitting ‘Mark all as read’ more than a couple of times for any feed, delete that feed…The true power of the RSS inbox is keeping you informed of new posts that you probably won’t see linked elsewhere.”

    RSS is not a curator of content, it’s an aggregator of content, but sites like Reddit and Hacker News are kind of both. Articles are collected there and self-curated by the community. Compare this to Fark, which is a news aggregator curated by Drew Curtis. What RSS doesn’t do is filter out all of the mediocre or non-relevant articles that inevitably appear over time no matter how targeted the blog. Far better to find a community around a subject you like and have articles aggregate and share there. This is the difference between Twitter proper and Twitter lists. The former is mostly noise and the latter is much more concentrated. Apps like Hootsuite can also help curate with search lists for keywords.

    RIP Google Reader. Long live RSS.

  • eCommerce Blueprint 2.0

    I started writing this in January of 2013 in response to the original E-Commerce Blueprint from December of 2012, but now, 2 years later, I have more perspective after having helped several e-commerce companies get started.

    In 2013 I wrote a basic outline of things I felt were important ways to market an e-commerce business: pounding the flesh (pounding the streets and pressing flesh) as well as magazine adverts, Google Adwords, and trade shows.

    Here was my eCommerce Blueprint 2.0 from 2013:

    • Rough Plateau map
    • Buy the domain
    • Build Twitter and Facebook
    • Finalize design request / brand identity document
    • Hire a designer
    • Research product manufacturers
    • Buy a few products
    • Hire a video company
    • Do a Kickstarter campaign
    • Order original inventory

    I recommended Shopify but thought it was worthwhile to mention Squarespace. Lately, both are still fine platforms, but let’s dive into why the list from above is nearly worthless. First of all, what does “Rough Plateau map” even mean?

    Instead of going through them one-by-one, I’m just going to say that this list assumes you have a) a clear idea of the problem you’re solving, b) a known business model (i.e. I do X and I get paid), c) someone to actually do the work.

    Setting up a business in 2015 is incredibly easy. Creating a company that makes money is still hard.

    What Problem Are You Solving?

    There has to be a raison d’être (reason for being). How are you moving someone away from pain or towards pleasure? Do your customers love your product or service? It’s very easy to build a brand, but it’s very hard to build one people care about.

    How Will Your Business Make Money?

    How will you do “X” to get “$” in a repeatable fashion? Discovering the process for acquiring a customer for less than their average customer value (ACV) is called a “business model” and means you actually have a business.

    Who Will Do the Work?

    Even if you have a solution to a legitimate problem people have, customers love you, and you’ve found a way to acquire them for less than ACV, you still need to have someone to actually do the work.

    While at first it may sound obvious, ‘actually doing the work’ is quite complicated. It’s not a hard problem like ‘discovering a business model’, it’s a wet problem because we’re dealing with humans.

    Building a company in 2015 still requires human capital. Somebody has to do the work. Even if you hire someone to do the work for you, they have to actually do the work. No one wants to do the work.

    Who Has the Time to Work?

    It starts with an idea (1,2). You have the best intentions. You’re pumped. You’re excited. You start working on the problem. You get some traction. People are interested. People are buying. It’s time to hire.

    At an e-commerce business, typically the first person you hire is a person to help ship orders. Next, you hire someone to help with customer service issues. Third, you hire a salesperson to get more accounts.

    As you add more staff, you need more income so you decide to hire a marketing person, who then needs to hire a graphic designer to help create content for the website. Soon, you’re spending all of your time in meetings.

    Meanwhile, the first person you hired to ship orders has worked there long enough and seen enough new people hired that they feel entitled to either become a manager, move on to another organization, or hire someone under them to do what they do.

    “I need to get things off my plate so I can ‘X’,” you might here someone say. Or “I just need someone to help me do ‘Y’ so I can do my job.” These are all signs of humans trying to get out of the thing they were hired to do: work.

    But it’s not just employees. You’ll do it too. You’ll say to yourself, “I can’t ship boxes or write a blog post because I’m the CEO. I need to be out there pounding flesh and signing deals. I need to be leading my people to greatness.”

    All of these things can be true and still be wrong.

    There is a time to hire new people and there is a time to lead instead of produce, but make sure it’s not out of a place of selfishness or entitlement. It’s human nature to want to be doing less work and get paid more.

    How to Manage Your e-Commerce Staff

    Let’s say you have already figured out what people want, how to get customers, and you’re profitable. You’ve created a lifestyle business, but you want to scale it into a bigger company. You need to take things to the next “Plateau”.

    You decide to hire more sales staff and you ask the person shipping to help post to social media. On a whim, you decide to have a sale. Someone suggests a new product idea and you okay the development. Things are starting to hum.

    But then salespeople start fighting about one person stealing their leads or who gets credit for what. They don’t like the CRM they are using and not everyone is leaving contact activity notes leading to some embarrassing interactions.

    The warehouse specialists says he needs an inventory system to keep track of all these new products, but since he’s the one who has to ship out the orders, he’s subconsciously sabotaging marketing efforts with his blog posts.

    You decide to hire an outside IT consultant to come in and help implement and train your staff on how to use the new systems, but despite all the upgrades, sales begin to flatline, all while productivity and culture declines.

    People > Processes > Technology > Marketing > Sales

    Your people are your most important asset. It matters greatly who you hire. People affect culture, marketing, attitudes, and product decisions. Early hires have more impact, but every person impacts the company in some way.

    Processes built on the right people can be used with better effect, but bad processes don’t help the company. Be sure that the processes you have in place are known, are useful, and are being used. Ask them to do it and ask if they did it.

    Technology is a multiplier of people and processes. If you have good people in place with good processes, then invest in technology to support them, they will be happy, productive, and may actually enjoy doing the work.

    Once you’ve got all of those things in place, you can focus on marketing because you know with confidence that you’re not throwing good money against people who will turn customers away either consciously or unconsciously.

    A good marketing campaign supports a sales team – and if you’re going to take your e-commerce company from a lifestyle business to a large company, you need a great sales team. Sales will help you grow more than marketing.

    A good manager asks people to do something and asks them if they did it.

    What is My eCommerce Blueprint for 2015?

    If I were starting an e-commerce business in 2015, here’s what I would do, in order, if I were one person with no capital:

    1. Research trends in Google Trends, eBay, Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Google Autocompletes
    2. Pick a trend and research a vertical/niche that has the problem and cash to buy the solution
    3. Pick a vertical/niche and then start calling people in that niche to see if they have the problem and would pay for the solution
    4. Research a solution for the problem and how much it would cost to buy or manufacture
    5. Call people in your vertical/niche and ask them to buy the solution you found for more than it costs
    6. If they agree to buy it, give them a way for them to buy it (i.e. a PayPal button or Square on your phone)
    7. If they buy it, then use the money to buy or build the thing and then deliver the product to the customer
    8. Get feedback from the customer on the product, ask for testimonials, get pictures of people using the product
    9. Use the materials to create a website to sell the product on either Shopify or Squarespace
    10. Setup social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, and Google+)
    11. Setup email list on Mailchimp and add the signup form to the website
    12. Write blog posts that answer people’s questions and post out on social media
    13. Reach out to relevant bloggers and offer to write blog posts for their sites
    14. Social bookmark from sites like Reddit, Delicious, and Digg
    15. Call prospects in the vertical/niche and ask them to buy

  • Integrated Marketing with a Platform

    For the next few weeks I’m going to be talking about how to integrate marketing into the management of your business.

    Today I’m going to introduce a term called “platform”. Your platform is a combination of your website, social media, and any other form of advertising you may have. When you buy Google ads or run a Groupon, you’re paying for using those other company’s platforms.  The bigger you can build your own platform, the greater your own reach can be and the more money you can save (and make).

    Here’s a couple of examples of how you can use your platform:

    1. You have excess inventory so you make a sale and announce it on your blog, across social media, and in an email newsletter. You sell out.
    2. 2.  You’ve got some open appointments that need filled so you offer a sale for today only if you mention where you heard about this offer.

    “To be successful in the market today, you must possess two strategic assets: a compelling product and a meaningful platform.” In this step-by-step guide, Michael Hyatt, former CEO and current Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers, takes readers behind the scenes, into the new world of social media success. He shows you what best-selling authors, public speakers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and other creatives are doing differently to win customers in today’s crowded marketplace. Hyatt speaks from experience. He writes one of the top 800 blogs in the world and has more than 100,000 followers on Twitter. His large and growing platform serves as the foundation for his successful writing, speaking, and consulting practice.

    In Platform, Hyatt will teach readers not only how to extend their influence, but also how to monetize it and build a sustainable career. The key? By building a platform. It has never been easier, less expensive, or more possible than right now.

  • Why Google and Facebook Might Not Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years

    Forbes recently wrote an article about Why Google and Facebook Might Completely Disappear in the Next 5 Years, which had echoes what Malcolm Gladwell wrote about in Outliers, when it said, “Your long-term viability as a company is dependent on when you were born.”

    The author (and Forbes) were getting ripped on this article on Hacker News – but no one can predict the future – we can only look at the past – and even though the timeline is short (15 years), history says Facebook and Google will fail unless they [can] pivot. The gist is that they can’t pivot. It’s not in their paradigm to accept what’s next. Can you?

    But the statement, “X will fail unless they can pivot” is true for every company. The companies that make up the Fortune 500 don’t have a long life on the fortune 500. To say that the web will die out and vanish is reaching, and to say that it will in the next five years is really reaching.

    Does the author (or any analysts) really expect mobile usage to dry up the well of search advert dollars or that mobile apps will eliminate the public/customer need for search?

    The anti-trust lawsuit that is being dredged up against Google will do more to slow them than anything else in the next five years.

    And, to say that Facebook can’t have staying power because MySpace didn’t is far from an analysis.

    I do agree that the web is not dying – all apps need a website even if they think they don’t. Facebook will do (and has done) better than Myspace because they are a software company first, ran by programmers who have kept Facebook constrained, which has helped it grow.

    The problem is that Google only got into social because they were chasing Facebook, just like Microsoft went to the cloud to chase Google. And Facebook only got into mobile because the people demanded it – but they were (and are) late to the game. They are buying Instagram because they are scared of it – not because it will help them grow.

    I read something from Seth Godin today that said basically that not all companies can grow. Some do better when their small and can’t scale across that middle “dead zone” to be a big company. Some companies don’t work as a big company either (like web or graphic designers – at least not using the business models in place now).

    “Perhaps getting a little bigger isn’t what you want, and it might not even be possible.” -Seth Godin

  • What is Cloud Computing?

    Is Google Docs Cloud Computing?

    Google Docs is a free (with paid service options): Web-based word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, form, and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs is Google’s “software as a service” office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user’s local computer in a variety of formats including: (ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Word). Documents are automatically saved to Google’s servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept. Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes.

    Google Docs serves as a collaborative tool for editing amongst users and non-users in real time. Documents can be shared, opened, and edited by multiple users at the same time. Users can be notified of changes to any specified regions via e-mail. The application supports two ISO standard document formats: OpenDocument (for both opening and exporting) and Office Open XML (for opening only). It also includes support for proprietary formats such as .doc and .xls. Google Docs is one of many cloud computing, document-sharing services like Microsoft Office Live. The majority of document-sharing services require user fees, but Google Docs is free (mostly). Its popularity amongst businesses is growing due to enhanced sharing features, accessibility, and stability (it’s no longer in beta). In addition, Google Docs has enjoyed a rapid rise in popularity among students and educational institutions.

    Is Windows Live Cloud Computing?

    Windows Live is the collective brand name for a set of services and software products from Microsoft, which is part of their “software plus services” platform. While a majority of these services are Web (cloud) applications, accessible from any browser, there are also client-side (binary) applications that require installation on a user’s PC.

    There are three ways in which Windows Live services are offered:

    1. Windows Live Essentials applications – Windows Live Messenger, Windows Mail, Windows Photo Gallery, Windows Movie Maker, and Windows Live Essentials
    2. Web services – Hotmail, SkyDrive, Windows Live Contacts, Windows Live Calendar, and Windows Live Devices
    3. Mobile services – Windows Phone Live

    Windows Live is different and separate from Xbox LIVE, which is a multiplayer gaming and content delivery system for Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360 as well as the Games for Windows – LIVE multiplayer gaming service for Microsoft Windows. However, formerly separate, Office Live, (Microsoft Office cloud) services are now part of Windows Live services.

    So is Windows Live actually “cloud computing” like the commercial says? Some of it is and some of it isn’t. Find out more at Windows Cloud.

    Read more on cloud storage solutions from Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft.

  • Are You Overwhelmed with Spam in Your Email?

    When business owners ask me what they can do about all the spam they’re getting, I recommend Google Apps. Not only does Gmail stop most of the spam they’ll get, but it also allows them to create email addresses for all of their employees, setup distribution groups, and access their email from anywhere, including their mobile devices.

    But while spam might be the reason to switch to Google Apps, Gmail is not the only benefit. Your company will also get shared calendar, contacts, documents, and an internal website which you can use as a wiki or as a CRM. And if the tools Google Apps provides by default aren’t enough for you, there are hundreds of add-on software packages for project management, accounting, and customer relationship management that make Google Apps one of the most compelling tools for business owners today.

    Erich Stauffer has helped many businesses switch over from their standard POP accounts to the enterprise-level services that Google Apps provides. If you’re looking to reduce spam in your email and communicate more effectively with your employees and your customers, Google Apps may be right for you.

  • Can’t Create New Google+ Plus Page?

    Is your Google+ Plus Create Page Button Grayed Out and Not Allowing You to Create New Google+ Plus Pages?

    I currently have 13 Google+ Pages, but I’m unable to create more because the “Create” button is no longer active. Has anyone else had this problem?

    [Update 1/2/2011: The “Create” button is red again and I can click on it. It seems Google+ put me in a waiting period and then released me.]

  • How to Find Your Top Keywords in the New Google Analytics

    If you’re like me, you had trouble originally finding where the top keywords were in the new Google Analytics dashboard. It used to be under Traffic Sources > Keywords, but now it’s under Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic.

    Google Analytics Organic Search Keywords report shows Site Usage with Keyword, Visits, Pages/Visit, Average Time on Site, % New Visits, and Bounce Rate as the default metrics. Most of the time its best to have high Visits and a low Bounce Rate, but not always.

    When you’re reviewing your keywords, look for problems people are trying to solve, issues their having, or products their trying to find. If you’re not solving these problems, know the answer to these issues, or sell what they’re looking for, these are opportunities for you to grow.

    Erich Stauffer is a search engine optimization (SEO) web design firm located just north of Indianapolis. We specialize in helping business owners create great content to make it easy for people looking to solve problems to find them as the answer.

    What problems do you need solved?

  • Top Posts of 2011

    Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012

    We would like to thank you for your reading over the past year and look forward to 2012 together. As we look forward to 2012, lets take a look back at 2011.

    Here is a list of our top 20 posts from 2011 according to Google Analytics: