Ecommerce

PoolDawg.com, one of Netconcepts clients, was recently featured in an online article through InternetRetailer.com.

“A year ago, PoolDawg traded in its modified version of an “off-the-shelf

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“As a newer company in an established market, it was extremely important to jumpstart our search engine listings. After working with Acumium and implementing their recommendations and strategies, we saw an overall increase of over 300% in our search engine traffic within the first 60 days of implementation. We are extremely pleased with our initial results and look forward to expanding our relationship with Acumium.”

Mike Feiman
Director of Marketing
PoolDawg

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You may have heard of RSS, a way to syndicate your content on to other people’s Websites as well as to deliver your latest, greatest offers and content direct to your customers, bypassing all their spam filters. For online merchants, RSS offers a new and exciting content delivery channel.

As you might know, RSS stands for “really simple syndication”.‿ At its core, it really is simple. An RSS feed is merely an XML file that you host on your Web server — it kind of looks like HTML code. But don’t let its simplicity fool you; in the hands of a sophisticated marketer, the potential applications for RSS are huge. As a technology, it has been around for more than a few years now. It just hasn’t picked up steam until fairly recently — the upswing due in large part to the popularity of blogging.

People like to follow the blogs of others as much as they like to write their own blogs — perhaps more so. RSS makes that process easy and efficient. In fact, the only really practical way to follow numerous blogs on a regular basis is to use an RSS aggregator or newsreader. Can you imagine the alternative — visiting each blog’s Website one by one? Who’d have the time for that!

According to a Pew Internet & American Life study conducted last year, 5% of survey respondents subscribed to RSS feeds via newsreader software or a Web-based aggregator. Extrapolated out to all online Americans, that would amount to 6 million people who are consuming news and other information from blogs and content-rich Websites via RSS.

And that figure represents only those who knowingly subscribe to RSS feeds; many others subscribe to RSS feeds but don’t realize it. Users of the free My Yahoo! service, for example, can subscribe to RSS feeds without even being exposed to the term “RSS”. Yahoo! search results are peppered with listings containing an “Add to My Yahoo! link. And countless blogs prominently display a clickable “Add to My Yahoo! graphic. Clearly, a Yahoo! user need not know RSS is the enabler of such functionality.

Thankfully, bloggers don’t need to think too hard about RSS either. In fact, RSS is part and parcel of most blog software and hosted blog services nowadays: The RSS feeds are generated automatically without human intervention. So it’s not as if you have to go out of your way as a blogger to create an RSS feed.

But with other applications of RSS outside of blogs — like the publication of new stock arrivals or the latest clearance items — it’s a little more involved. You could instruct your e-commerce platform or content management system to generate the required XML files. Amazon.com, for instance, extended its e-commerce platform to serve up a range of product-related RSS feeds, broken down into dozens of product categories (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/xs/syndicate.html).

Or you could use a hosted RSS creation service that “scrapes” content from Web pages and creates an RSS feed automatically. Online retailer eHobbies employs such a service to generate three RSS feeds: Bestsellers, New Items, and Now Back in Stock. Because the Yahoo! Stores platform that eHobbies is on doesn’t support RSS feed creation, it has opted for a hosted “scraping” approach provided by my company, Netconcepts.

AGGREGATORS AND NEWSREADERS

Web-based aggregators are Websites that allow you to sign up for an account and create a personalized start page that displays the latest posts from your favorite blogs. My Yahoo! is one of many examples of Web-based aggregators.

Alternatively, you could follow RSS feeds by installing software on your PC that grabs the latest headlines via RSS. Rather than visiting a Web page to catch up on the latest happenings on your favorite blogs, you would launch a program on your computer. That program could be a stand-alone application whose sole job is to pull RSS feeds from the Web and display them for you, or it could be a plug-in that extends the functionality of a program that you already have — such as Outlook, Firefox, or Internet Explorer — to include RSS reading.

For instance, if you are a Microsoft Outlook user, you can buy the NewsGator plug-in and then use Outlook to catch up on the latest happenings in the blogosphere. You can even forward an item from an RSS feed to a colleague right within Outlook just as you would forward an e-mail — with the click of a button.

RSS adoption, I believe, will reach a tipping point very soon and go mainstream with the next release of Internet Explorer, IE7. This will offer RSS reading capability built right into the browser — no plug-ins required. Considering the base that Explorer has, that will make for a lot of potential RSS subscribers.

SYNDICATION TO OTHER SITES

As previously mentioned, one of the key benefits of RSS is the ability to syndicate your content to other Websites. This could be in the form of special offers, newly published articles, white papers, research studies, discussion forum posts, and so forth. An RSS feed doesn’t have to contain your blog posts. It can really be for anything. And if your syndicated content is of value to a Website owner’s visitors, it’s a good bet that he’ll be receptive to serving that content on his site.

Associated with your content are links that are included in the RSS feed. Those links will, of course, generate some amount of traffic for you, from visitors clicking through on the Website displaying your content.

Those links will also provide you with a search engine optimization benefit, in the form of increased link popularity and keyword-rich link text. The additional links are registered by the search engines as a “vote” or a “thumbs up” that builds your Google PageRank score and ultimately improves your search engine rankings. But the link text is of particular note: The major search engines — Google, Yahoo!, and MSN Search — all weigh heavily the underlined text used in the link pointing to your Web page.

So if a link used the words “click here” in the link text, it would get the benefit of a PageRank “vote”, but the context of the vote would be all wrong — unless of course you were going after a high ranking for the search term “click here”. What you really want are keywords that people — specifically your customers and prospective customers — search for.

In many cases, you can control what link text is used on other Websites through RSS. When a site owner pulls content from an RSS feed, he typically uses the item’s title as the link text when linking to that item. So by paying careful attention to the words you employ in those titles, you can significantly affect your rankings for selected search terms.

Consider, for example, that the number-one search result in Google for the search term “trustrank” is an article that has been syndicated via RSS, published on the popular technology news site Slashdot. You can see that the URL for this article contains “from=RSS”, a telltale sign that the article link was disseminated exclusively through an RSS feed.

Further inspection confirmed that this URL does not appear anywhere on Slashdot’s site, except within its RSS feed. Yet this article has achieved a top ranking in Google. I credit this in large part to the inbound links and the link text that was used. I doubt that this article would have achieved a number-one ranking for “trustrank” if Slashdot hadn’t incorporated that word into its RSS item title, because then fewer sites would have included the word in their link text.

THE LEADING EDGE OF RSS

The latest, most widely adopted version of RSS is RSS 2.0. Why should you care? Because RSS 2.0 supports what are called enclosures, which include audio and video. This is where podcasting comes in. If you have an RSS 2.0 feed, you can incorporate audio clips saved in MP3 format into that feed. That audio then gets disseminated to your RSS subscribers. Those subscribers with podcast-capable newsreaders would then automatically download the MP3 files onto their computer and ultimately onto their MP3 player. So, for example, a user of Apple iTunes who subscribes to podcast feeds would, overnight, automatically obtain the latest MP3 files referenced in these feeds and synchronized with his iPod. The user would then wake up, grab their iPod out of its dock, and listen to the latest podcasts on his morning jog or commute into the office.

You can podcast video too, although with video it is not something you can play on an iPod currently. You can, however, watch these video clips at your leisure on your computer. A new buzzword has even been invented that refers specifically to the podcasting of video: “vodcasting”.

I have encouraged a client of mine, Steve Spangler, CEO of Colorado-based science-toys catalog Steve Spangler Science, to get into podcasting and vodcasting as a way to reach out and build relationships with the company’s primary customer base, namely teachers. His podcasting has been very warmly received. He mixes it up between audio-only interviews, audio-only monologues, and video segments of science-experiment demonstrations.

As a panelist at the recent Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas, Spangler regaled a packed room with his exploits as a blogger and podcaster. It seems to be working. Thirteen percent of last month’s online sales were attributable to his blog, and the majority of his blog posts this past month have been podcasts.

EVOLUTION OF RSS FEEDS

As the RSS technology matures, it will catch up with the functionality available to e-mail marketers. In fact, you can already track your RSS subscribers. And you can track which items they read, using “Web bugs” like those that get surreptitiously embedded into everyone’s e-mail campaigns to measure “opens”. Similarly, click-throughs from an RSS feed can be monitored using click-tracked URLs, in the same way e-mail click-throughs are tracked. Feedburner is a painless and inexpensive third-party service for tracking RSS subscribers, click-throughs, and reads.

Some of the more advanced e-mail marketers personalize their e-mails to the individual subscribers, taking into account such things as the subscriber’s interests, order history, and surfing behavior. You can do this with RSS as well, providing a personalized feed for each individual subscriber. Software company VMware provides a customized RSS feed in which subscribers can specify their areas of interest and get a feed that focused solely on those areas of interest.

When new channels that reach consumers come into existence, advertisers quickly follow. RSS is no exception: Currently a small but growing number of Websites sell advertising space within their RSS feeds. Of those that do, most use an RSS advertising network, such as Pheedo. Introducing ads into a feed for the first time is a delicate matter. The popular tech blog Signal vs. Noise tested the insertion of ads into its RSS feed and received such reader backlash that it pulled the ads and suspended the trial.

With the accelerating pace of technology, the reaction time for companies to absorb and leverage new technology is shrinking. RSS is a technology that is going to grow quickly. When it comes to offering RSS feeds, don’t wait; find your feet now, and you’ll stand a much better chance of acquiring and retaining a loyal RSS subscriber base into the future.

Stephan Spencer is founder/president of Netconcepts, a Madison, WI-based e-marketing agency, and coauthor of the Multichannel Merchant special report “State of Search Engine Marketing for Retailers 1.0.”

SIDEBAR: Key benefits of RSS to online merchants

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Why did Van Dyke’s, a South Dakota supplier of equipment to animal trophy-makers and collectors and a subsidiary of Cabelas, chose Acumium to overhaul its website and ecommerce strategy?

Ecommerce is a large part of the company’s business says Van Dyke’s Director of Operations Susan Kalb. Their selection of Acumium was because the agency was able to meet their site and ecommerce needs better than any local supplier.

President of Acumium, Dan Costello says that of the last 38 site developments for their clients, 34 were for US-based companies. He also expected Acumium to double its revenue in the next 12-18 months.

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Steve Spangler is what we would call a “Renaissance man.” He’s a television personality, a keynote speaker, an entrepreneur, an educator, and a cataloger. Steve’s conference presentations are captivating; he has a great shtick and an amazing bag of tricks that wow audiences. It is almost like witnessing David Copperfield running a science fair. He carries this over well to TV through his “Science Experiment of the Week” spot on 9 News in Denver, Colorado.

Problem:

Although Steve Spangler has this great persona in the offline world, it wasn’t translating very well to the online world.

“Our ecommerce site was terrible. No, it was worse than that. The website was abysmal,” says Steve. “I was getting one million viewers a week on TV but I was ashamed to send people to our site. After a first re-design (by another company) there will still problems. They knew nothing about SEO or how to translate the Wow Factor into sales. They could make a site that was aesthetically pleasing but they didn’t know how to wrestle the credit cards out of people’s wallets.”

After researching the problem Steve discovered GravityMarket and began a dialogue that continues to this day.

Solution:

The engagement with GravityMarket began with a website audit. We evaluated their existing site and made a whole raft of recommendations on how to improve it or do it better, as far as usability, functionality, search engine visibility, and making the site stickier. All of this had the goal of changing the site so that people will want to return to it again and again.

Steve Spangler Science liked the audit so much they asked us to implement our recommendations through a site re-design which we did, vastly improving the functionality of their ecommerce shopping cart site, and getting every page into Google. The whole site was re-built from the ground up to be search engine optimal.

Steve comments: “GravityMarket taught us to do things differently, to think differently about our web content and to write differently. I realized I was searching for the wrong thing. I had to learn to see the invisible stuff behind the web pages that make them rank well in the search engines. I had to stop thinking like a cataloger and instead draw upon my TV skills from the Four O’Clock News, I had to grab someone’s attention and keep them from clicking off to another site and GravityMarket helped me realize this”.

We also wanted to convey how entertaining Steve was. We did that through installing fun product demonstration video clips on the site and then later through suggesting Steve start a blog. We helped Steve through the whole blogging process: evaluating blogging software, designing the look-and-feel, and training Steve on how to write for blogs.

“The blog came about when I came to the GravityMarket team with an idea for a site re-design and they replied with the blog concept. What’s more, their concept was going to cost one-third less and be more effective than my original idea. I thought this honest, collaborative approach was great and in retrospect the blog was the right next thing to do. It gave our site more punch. Now it will become the cornerstone of my new speaker website.”

The GravityMarket team also assisted with email marketing: email strategy, with template creation, delivery and tracking, ensuring the goals of increasing visibility and usability were adhered to at each step.

Results:

Steve Spangler’s ecommerce site has grown in the past 18 months with revenue increasing three figures to mid five-figures a month..

Steve’s blog, although relatively new as of this year has already achieved a PageRank score on a par with his ecommerce site.

“A detailed analysis of our print catalog marketing plan revealed a direct correlation between catalog distribution and increased web traffic. However, a survey of our top customers revealed that they turned to our website to get MORE information on a product that interested them. Our high-content website not only answered their questions but prompted them to buy additional products that “grabbed” their attention.”

“Together we worked to make a very successful arm of my business. I am a tough client and I don’t have a six-figure annual web budget. Why did I agree to publish information in this case study? Am I concerned about our competitors getting a hold of it? Sure. But I have trust in the GravityMarket team to protect our innovative ideas and creative marketing strategies. Anyone can hire a web design company to “open up shop” on the internet. But just because a store is open doesn’t mean that anyone is shopping or buying. They taught us how to turn shoppers into buyers and the key is to have creative ideas, to think differently and to be innovative. It’s easy for our competitors to imitate (and we see it every day), but the real secret to internet marketing is to innovate. That’s why our competitors will always be 8 month behind. Thanks GravityMarket.” – Steve Spangler

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Van Dyke’s Restorers, a business-to-business furniture restoration supplies cataloger sends out over three million catalogs per year. Van Dyke’s is a leading supplier to professional furniture restorers nationwide.

Problem:

Van Dyke’s online catalog was very search engine unfriendly, and as such, was invisible to Google and Yahoo. Their site supported secure ecommerce transactions, but sales on the site were minimal. The site just wasn’t converting well. Visitors found the site difficult to use and were not compelled to purchase. Van Dyke’s asked friends and employees for suggestions of who to engage to turn things around; they were soon referred to Netconcepts as optimization and usability experts.

Solution:

Netconcepts redesigned the Vandykes.com site with search engine optimization built in from the ground up.

Our primary focus was on Google, as it is the most popular search engine. We made sure the entire online catalog would get indexed by building the site with search engine friendly URLs. We also made each page “sing” to the search engines with search optimal title tags, heading tags, body copy, image alt tags, hyperlink text, meta descriptions, etc. Design and layout was thought through so that the keyword-rich body copy would be high up in the HTML, thus maximizing keyword prominence. We developed a search engine optimal site structure so that PageRank transference from the home page to the sub pages of the online catalog was done in a strategic rather than haphazard fashion.

Van Dykes after SEO and redesign

We also assisted Van Dyke’s with their email marketing, designing HTML templates, executing the campaigns, and tracking total opens, unique opens, clickthrough rates, clickthrough by recipient, total clickers, return clickers, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate, and most importantly, number of orders and order volume attributable to each campaign and each link.

Using Netconcepts’ traffic and sales reporting technology, Van Dyke’s began tracking which keywords, search engines, and email campaigns delivered the most sales.

Results:

Van Dyke’s Restorers has achieved phenomenal website results within just a few short months of launch. The resulting e-commerce site makes its predominantly dynamic pages visible to search engines. Susan Kalb, Ecommerce Manager for Van Dyke’s was enthusiastic about the results:

“Orders attributed to the website have increased over 500% within just the first two months of our re-launch. Traffic in that same time period has increased by over 350%, much of that due to search engine marketing. Every one of our over 9,000 product pages is in Google, most of them with great rankings.”

VanDykes.com sales, 2001-2004

Van Dyke’s is reaping the benefits of prominent search engine placement. People looking for furniture restoration products in the search engines are finding Van Dyke’s.

“It was well worth the investment to have Netconcepts rebuild our site. They have done a fantastic job, improving its usability, optimizing it for the search engines, and providing Internet marketing strategy advice. Netconcepts has far and above exceeded our expectations.”

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“Orders attributed to the web site have increased over 500% within just the first two months of our re-launch. Traffic in that same time period has increased by over 450%, much of that due to search engine marketing. Every one of our over 9,000 product pages are in Google, most of them with great rankings.”

Susan Kalb
Ecommerce Manager
Van Dyke’s Restorers

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