Routine Order

Juicy Couture is a hip line of contemporary casual clothing from California. You’ve probably already seen it on some pop and hip-hop stars, and found yourself wondering, “Wonder what brand it is.” It’s Juicy Couture, with taglines like , “The joy only bling can bring!”.


The line is best known for the terry cloth and velour track suits and is sold almost exclusively at up-scale stores, such as Neiman-Marcus. However, you can always find Juicy Couture deals if you know where to look for them. Here’s some of the Juicy Couture Velours I was talking about. If success is here, can the replicas be far behind. Not so! Here’s a bunch of Juicy Couture replicas for those of you trying to same some greenbacks. There’s nothing for men from Juicy Couture, but there is Juicy Baby, for babies, of course. I can almost see some marketing professional making the connection, “We sell to women, and women shop for babies, so…”

I have seen bracelets, rings and chains that consist of inter-woven silver and gold. I thought it was interwoven platinum and gold, but I was probably wrong. Here’s a sample:


That’s a fine piece of Jewelry from David Yurman. There are entire blogs dedicated to David Yurman Jewelry!

The company was established in 1979 and the reason why you see it around a lot is because they use top models, like Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, and Amber Valletta to advertise their products. In the US, you find David Yurman Jewelry at Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and at David Yurman Flagship stores. The jewelry is very highly priced - even over-priced. I guess they have to make the customer pay for their high profile product placement and advertising. However, you can find deals online. You can even find David Yurman inspired jewelry and David Yurman replica bracelets for example. Ebay has a “fine” selection of Yurman pieces too. But you better know how to spot a genuine item. You could always play it safe and pick up a replica for $69.00 instead of the original for $6900. Beauty is surface deep, now, isn’t it? I couldn’t say the same for quality, I suppose!

I know, Christmas still seems far away, and that is precisely the reason why you should start shopping now. Starting now will give you the time to hunt for the best deals, and wait for the right price - before the whole world crowds the mall. The most difficult part of Christmas shopping is, of course, deciding what to buy. If you’re short in this department, check out these Christmas gift ideas. The true measure of a list of ideas is ideas for Christmas gifts for boyfriends and males. It is easy enough to pick gifts for girls, but girls must find it difficult to pick gifts for boys. The gifts I get from women are usually “nice” but I’d love something more practical. The more impractical a gift is, the more women seem to appreciate it But I guess it is just different for us.

Shopping for Christmas gifts in September reminds me of the December Effect in stock markets. Thing is, a few people caught on that buying shares in Decembers and selling them in January or February can be profitable since stock prices go up a little at the beginning of a new year. So not long after, some started buying stocks in November, since they expected the December Effect buying to increase prices. That then meant that some started buying stocks in October, and so on, till the December Effect all but vanished! But even if everyone starts thinking like me, there will still be the advantage that I have more time to decide what to buy and to wait for the right prices.

Ever wondered how, or who makes the digital signs that seem to be everywhere these days?

Image from user wfryer (Wesley Fryer) on flickr

Digital signage is popular for a reason - they are highly effective in getting across to the casual consumer. That’s why you see them everywhere from the checkout counters at grocery stores to subway trains. Helius is an example of a company that offers digital signage, among other things. I think that in a few years from now, all the billboards will become digital signage of one kind or the other. They are more intrusive in a way - it is hard to ignore a moving image, or a sign that keeps changing. Some of these by the highway might even be dangerous, depending on what is shown on them, but I, for one, welcome our digital overlords. They beat looking at the covers of the B magazines at the checkout counter.

The technology behind all this is incredibly well-done. Helius’ IP video solutions are pretty neat, for example. The following figure taken from their site shows how video content from multiple sources can be transmitted via multiple channels to many things, including digital signs. If you are in marketing, then this pretty accurately describes the immediate future. Or is it the present?

SEO Optimization is making a copy of the book SEO Made Easy (where, of course, SEO stands for search engine optimization) available as a prize to the win SEO Made Easy eBook contest. Writing about it makes me an entrant to the competition

I am just learning the ropes with respect to how to optimize this blog for search engines. This is not trivial, since more than 50% of my new readers arrive via some search result. I’ve been reading up about the keywords, meta tags and SEO tips for wordpress and the lot. The SEO tutorials category at SEO Optimization has more good stuff. Check it out. I hope I win this contest, an eBook should be much easier to read than a bunch of webpages all over the place. I’ve heard good things about Cutline, the theme I use on this blog - it seems to be optimized a lot better than other themes, but I guess one could always try and improve

My landlady is a real estate broker with a local firm. When she gave me her business card, the first thought I had was, “Wow, they do them with a photo in the foreground and the background?” Her card managed to pull it off without looking too gaudy, and I have been searching for cheap ways to get the cards printed in full color, with color photos or pictures on them. Black and white text doesn’t quite leave an impression. I found this business card website which offers similar cards. They offer 1000 cards at $125, which is 12.5 cents a card - not too expensive. The cards look pretty snappy too, here’s an example from their site:


Not so surprisingly, real estate business cards deserve their own section on the site. What is it with real estate brokers always having the best business cards? I understand that they are in the selling business and the margins are large, but the same can be said about a lot of other careers, like selling cars. The last time I got a card from the salesman at the Ford dealership, I did not want to put it in my wallet. I still have my landlady’s card. I guess a year or so from now, the car salespersons will have the same kind of card the real estate folks have, and the real estate folks would have moved to the next thing. I wonder what that next thing could be, though, I mean, where do you go from having multiple color photos prints on your card, in a glossy or matte finish!

One of the biggest factors affecting how visible a website is on the web is its pagerank. Google’s method of calculating pagerank has led to a flourishing economy around one-way link building. Whatever the faults in the technique used by Google to determine the best search results, you have to build links pointing to you website to be successful in web-based business. Pagerank and search engine results don’t matter so much for personal blogs such as this one, but they are critical to business. Ironically, it is easier for this blog to attract incoming links than, say, a business. Because linking to my blog is a person-to-person or blogger-to-blogger thing. Linking to an obscure business is not usual.

This has led to the practice of business (including the biggest and best) to supplement offline advertising with online advertising in the form of link, and banner ads. When it comes to building one-way links, there are several ways a small business can go wrong. Here’s some tips to get one way link building right:

1. Never buy links from services like ReviewMe or PayPerPost - these have a 50% overhead, so the good bloggers won’t use them, and surfers will immediately detect that it is a low-quality paid post
2. Directly approach bloggers to purchase links - either directly email them, or ask in forums
3. Don’t waste your time - set a time-value for your money, and use a professional one way backlink building service - these guys will do things right, and you are just paying them for the time and effort it takes
4. Subscribe and read blogs that deal with one way link building methods and stay up-to-date
5. Never, ever buy a whole lotta links just because they are cheap - such cheap “blog networks” forward very little of the little pagerank they have, and will sooner or later be penalized which may ripple forward to your site.

Let me try this once:) You can get your own free Zune player at myzunefree.com. All you have to do is sign up for one or more of the offers on display after you login, and complete enough offers to get one credit. You could get the one credit for completing just one offer, or, if you choose to try the several free, no-cost offers, you may need to follow through on more than one of the offers to earn your credit.

I’ve long been curious about these schemes, but this Microsoft Zune offer has a great FAQ that addresses the questions I have had in the past. In fact, the first question in the FAQ links to a video from the BBC that explains how these schemes work. Then there’s more:

How can you afford to give away a Microsoft Zune for free?
Our sponsors pay us a commission for users to try out their products and services. That is then used to purchase your Zune MP3 player or other related product.

The basic reason I signed up is because I have been wanting to try Blockbuster’s online video renting scheme for some time now. So I will just cancel my Netflix subscription and give Blockbuster a chance to impress me. What’s really cool about Blockbuster is that you can exchange the movies you get in the mail at any BlockBuster store, and instantly get a new movie! So unlike Netflix, you don’t always have to wait for the next movie to arrive in the mail! So as far as I am concerned, this is a win-win situation. I get the $9.99 for the first month Blockbuster rentals, and if enough of you choose to sign up for the free Zune offer, I might get a free Zune as well. If the blockbuster deal doesn’t cut it for you, try some of the other free, or even $1 offers. You can’t lose, especially with the money-back offers. So sign up for your free Zune now!

I am kind of toying with the idea of driving visitors to Clickbank using affiliate links. Fear not, it is not on this website, but on another one. Clickbank is probably the largest internet retailer of digital products - mostly ebooks, guides, scripts, tools and even some merchandise. The most difficult part of becoming a clickbank affiliate is finding the right products that talk to your visitors and setting up the links to those product pages. In clickbank terminology, these links are called “hoplinks”. That’s what put me off so far - the process of creating those links on your website and updating them periodically is tenuous, but even that is nothing compared to the process of finding new products on clickbank that are worth promoting.

So why am I thinking of doing this now? What has changed, you might ask? Well, I just found the killer tool to make life easier for me as a clickbank affiliate - hoprss. HopRSS provides an easy to use Clickbank RSS Feed that allows you to display the latest and greatest products on Clickbank forever - with just the initial setup.

What’s great about hoprss is that it does not rely on javascript. So the RSS feed gives you a list of products related to specified keywords or niches and once you set it up, the HTML source of your website that displays the item links is updated automatically. What this means is that in addition to being a valuable monetization tool, hoprss also adds new, relevant content to your website regularly. This can only be good for your website as seen by search engines. Try the Clickbank affiliate feed for your site, if it is oriented towards some commercial niche. And no, the links in this post are not affiliate links, I gain no kickbacks from these links whatsoever. The service is 100% free too - the author of the script probably hopes to earn enough from the ads on the hoprss homepage.

Profitable Marketing: McDonalds, Starbucks and Now is Time for Chipotles Growth Strategy is a look at how Chipotle focuses on word-of-mouth marketing to popularize itself.

Chipotle’s website is minimalist and a lot of fun, too. Their food is better. There is absolutely nothing, and I mean nothing, that I crave more than their burrito-in-a-bowl. I love it. I tried Qdoba’s “naked” burrito, which sounds sexy, but is everything but. Something about the chipotle taste makes me want to go back for more.

Now read Business Week’s article on how Chipotle spends so little on advertising and still manages to grow phenomenally. Instead of serving ads, they serve their A-grade food, for free sometimes:

When Chipotle came to midtown Manhattan last July, it gave burritos away to 6,000 people, some of whom stood in line for two hours. The stunt cost $35,000, figures James W. Adams, Chipotle’s marketing director. In return, the company landed 6,000 new spokespeople. “You could spend that same amount on an ad in The New York Times and you wouldn’t have that many people talking about you,” Adams points out. “The response to the food is almost always positive. It’s unique and it’s tasty.”

Heck there’s even a blog about Chipotle (Where “blog” stands for burrito log, it seems).

I have personally introduced at least 10 people to chipotle. I myself went there first after being told of a friend’s girlfriend who woudn’t eat anywhere else. So what is it that I love about Chipotle?

1. I like the fact that their food is organic - everything(including the meat) is grown organically, naturally. Admittedly, their beans are not 100% organic, but the fact that they want it to be provides economic incentive to organic farmers
2. I love the way the food tastes
3. I love how much food they give, and that you can limit your portions if you want
4. I love the simplicity of ordering food at Chipotle - fewer choices, but really you can get a lot of variation in taste with the choices offered
5. I love the music that’s playing at the place - always different, always interesting

I don’t know how many people will end up at a Chipotle’s after reading this, but this I am sure of - you’ll love it, and think it worth every dollar spent.

The Consumerist asks for tips on organizing their site better. I stopped by from my feedreader to leave a comment, and guess what, you need to login to comment! (And finding how to create a login is not intuitive).

That is unacceptable to me, and I bet to a lot of people. We all know that comment spam is a problem. Combating it by making it more difficult for folks to leave comments is a lame approach, one which would be justified only if that were the only way to prevent comment spam. Fortunately, that is not the case now. Use Akismet — use a nuclear weapon to toast the spamming vermin! The consumerist, more than any other blog should know that collective power equals nuclear weaponry! Seriously, what you lose when you turn down one valid commenter is worth a lot more that what you gain by using Akismet for free. No brainer.

Now for answering the question they ask:

1. Add a search form
2. Use the Sidebar for displaying a list of tags, or categories, or something that enables better navigation.
3. Cut down on the number of front page posts so that people actually see the fat footer, or add a link on the top to the fat footer.
4. Use some plugin like the Ultimate Tag Warrior to make tagging easy - and if possible enable us to add tags.
5. Whatever you do, add a page in the “About” links that details how best to find the info that I am looking for, in simple terms.

The current archives are 100% useless. Who would want to read old posts, purely by their date? Even if I do remember that the consumerist wrote about some company in the past, what are the chances I remember the date that appeared on? So what would I do to find the post? Search on google, and then there is the possibility that I wander away to some other site that seems like a better answer!

Think as someone who lands there for the first time would -
she reads a post, and is impressed. Next, she wants to find out what you have to say about Foo Bar corporation. She looks up an down, looks in the archives, can’t find a way to search, and flails about for a while. Then she throws up her hands and goes away.

Or, she arrives at the site, likes what she sees and wants to read more about something. Thing is, there is no way she can continue reading except down the page - with tags, or categories, or lists of relevant related posts, she’ll probably stay a while, and who knows, maybe click an ad or two.

The sidebar is currently dedicated to ads! Agreed, ads float your boat, and are probably a major reason why you blog, but they should be secondary to my interests. Why? Because I am the consumer - the dude you put your weight behind (and who is the weight behind you!)

I guess the tool used dictates the ease with which the information can be organized, so use something like WordPress or something that is fully featured and that you are good at modifying.
Good Luck!

LoudLaunch is a budding site, much like Pay Per Post or Review Me that rewards bloggers for blogging reviews about their sponsors. So far, so good.

So what do I think about it? Please note that my opinion does not count, in any way, and that I am not getting paid or anything like that.

I think it won’t succeed. The first reason is that they don’t clearly mention how the bloggers will get paid. They say:

If your blog and interests are aligned with an advertiser’s campaign then you can do your own research and write about them in exchange for pay—not in exchange for a pre-determined outcome but for a fair assessment.

So you expect good bloggers to sign up on uncertain terms? What the heck is “fair assessment” is that based on click-throughs or pageviews or conversions, or just the fact that the review has been posted, and has stayed up for a week/month? You need to be crystal clear if you want someone to put their reputation and resdership behind your business!!

Things like stupid answers in the FAQ don’t help either. Here’s one:

Q. How do I get paid?
A. No, we only use Paypal.

Huh?

I love doing reviews, for free.