The North End Caffe

I discovered a new place to eat recently. I drove by it all the time, but never stopped.

One day, I saw them shooting the TV show, Diners, Drive ins and Dives there. Guy and his red Camaro were out front. I’m a huge fan.

I stopped by later, to get an order “to go” and check them out. It was a friday night at dinnertime, so the place was busier than an Apple store on iPad day.

The guy who took my order was really friendly. I told him it was my first time there.

The owner talked to me a bit and gave me free samples of their fried pimento cheese balls. That name doesn’t do them justice. They were little bites of heaven.

When I got home, my wife and I tasted all of the food we got. It was all amazing.

I think they use too much butter on everything. (How can that be bad?)

We kept saying to each other “Try this! Isn’t this amazing?”

(If you are ever in Manhattan Beach, stop by The North End Caffe. Try the “Shroomin’ Chicken” or the “Kahlua Pig Monte Cristo Egg Rolls”.)

Painted in big letters, above today’s specials, across the entire wall at the back of the restaurant, is the phrase “FAME OPTIMUM CONDIMENTUM“.

FAME OPTIMUM CONDIMENTUM

I asked the owner what it meant.

He said is was latin for “Hunger is the best seasoning”.

He was right. I wanted this food and it tasted great.

Story Two

A reader recently asked me to look at their site to see what was wrong with it.

They followed all the SEO advice I’d written and did everything they could to get more traffic.

They weren’t getting much, and the traffic they did get, didn’t convert into sales.

I looked at their site. It was obvious what they were selling.

The site looked OK. No spectacular design or anything out of the ordinary, but it was fine.

The products that they were selling were not exciting. I know that I personally wasn’t interested in their type of product, but I knew some people would be.

But the designs and colors and the finish and everything about the products just seemed blah to me.

I didn’t care. I had no desire.

I had no hunger for those products.

If they were food, they’d taste like oatmeal.

Without the raisins.

Basic Business

You’ve heard of “supply and demand”, right? The higher the demand and the lower the supply, the higher the cost.

When the price of gas goes up, people drive less. There’s less demand. The price comes back down.

I don’t really care what the prices are at The North End Caffe.

I love their food. I want their food. I’ll buy their food. Here, take my money, please!

The products in the second story are not worth anything to me.

I wouldn’t even want them if they were free, because then I’d have to walk them out to the curb on trash day.

A common mistake that I see with people’s businesses, is that they create and sell what they want to create and sell, with no regard for what the market wants.

If there is no demand for your products, you are going out of business.

Don’t make what you want. Make what your market wants.

Find their desire and satisfy it. This is true of jewelry and oil pumps.

Make people happy and you’ll never have to worry about money.

From Noami at IttyBiz.com:

There’s a lot of talk these days about creating the business, product, or service of your heart. Kind of like business as self-actualization tool. We’re all supposed to create the thing that would bring us transendental bliss to make. Create soulful stuff, they say, and people will come.

Yes. Fair enough. If you create exactly what makes your heart sing and publicize it adequately, your odds are good that eventually, somebody will show up and buy your sh*t.

Alternatively, you could look at the people you have now and solve a problem they already have.

You see this a lot in, weirdly enough, craft businesses and techie types.

Read the entire article at:
http://ittybiz.com/selling-what-people-want-to-buy/

I heard about a friend of a friend recently who had a bunch of ideas for businesses to start. All of the ideas were bunk. (Yes, bunk. I said it.) It seemed that all of the ideas were about what they wanted to do and had no relationship with what anyone else, their customers, might want. They wanted to sell where there was no market. They wanted to produce a product that no one wanted.

“It’s great that you want to sell this thing, but you realize that no one will pay you any money for it, right?”

I was talking with another friend recently who had one idea for a business they were starting. It met a specific need for a large market. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t fun. It wasn’t “fulfilling”. It did save a lot of money for the clients and could possibly make him a lot of money. There was the possibility of a million dollar deal in the works.

“Do what you love and the money will follow” has been going around for years. There is some truth to that. There’s a lot more truth to “Find a problem and solve it.”

Marketing, at it’s core, is about what your customer needs and meeting that need.

Forget about yourself. No one cares what you want. It’s not about you.

The craft people she mentions love doing their crafts. They add features and make products that they love to make. It makes them happy. If you want to be happy, make the nice things that you love. If you want to make money, make the nice things that other people love.

I’m a techie type, so I know what she’s talking about with us. We love to add cool features because of the cool technical challenges. We think that everyone else is as interested in AJAX and PHP and databases as we are. They aren’t. No one cares that the database is UTF8_Unicode compatible. They just want it to work. “But, dude! This is 64 bit!”

I once read a study that asked people what they most valued in supermarkets. I figured the number one issue was price. I’m always looking for the cheapest price on stuff. I was wrong. The top priority for stores where people buy their food is “cleanliness”. Woah, I guess that’s right. Me too. I didn’t think of that. What aren’t you thinking of? What aspect of your service or product do people care the most about, but you didn’t think of?

Think about who you are selling to. It’s time for a little market research. Ask. Watch. Listen.

Here’s a practical way to find out what people want, by looking at what people search for on the Internet.

Click here: adwords.google.com

What is your client’s greatest problem? How can you solve it for them? You may think this is a simple question, or that you’ve heard it before, but if you don’t have an answer, then you don’t have a successful business.

Find a problem and solve it. If you do that, you’ll make a ton of money.

What problem have you solved? Tell us in the comments.

Read that again slowly. “Blog more often” correlates with “more customers”.

An underutilized blog means customers are being left on the table. The survey this year shows a direct correlation between blog post frequency and the chance that a company has acquired a customer through that channel.

Read the entire article at:
http://bit.ly/aewfHr

Among the 7 people who followed directions and commented on the post was this from Tess Richardson:

After months of procrastinating over the SEO thing, I downloaded your free guide and started getting busy. In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, sites related to one of my Etsy products, Google analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views. I can send you a screen shot if you would like it.

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Conrad.

Click to see the whole chart.

This kind of feedback makes me crazy, so I had to follow up and find out more. Please visit her site. Here’s the interview she gave me. The book she refers to is The Simple Guide To SEO.

What prompted you to download the SEO book?

Tess Richardson

I was–until Dec. 31 of last year–a communications and marketing director for an employee benefits consultant. I am not new to some of these concepts, but I had never tried them before and did not have a comprehensive understanding of them until I read your free download. Before that my knowledge consisted of bits and pieces: use really good keywords, inbound links, converse on other’s sites/blogs in a meaningful way. I never had time to put this knowledge to work at my previous job. I really needed someone to put it all together in terms I understood.

When I saw the post in the Etsy forums, I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed.

How would you describe the book? Good points? Bad points?

I love the glossary. I love the light, readable style. I love that it’s free! (I kept wondering, “What’s the catch?”)

I LOVE the checklist toward the back, but it doesn’t seem to be in the same order that things are discussed in the book. That bothered me.

I would also like to see the checklist broken up into “Things to do RIGHT NOW,” “Things to do next week,” “Things to do next month,” or something like that. For newbies it’s a lot to digest in one sitting, even if it is all well-explained. I have gotten a start, but I did skip over some of the “sign up for this account and that account” things. I mean to get back to them, but I just picked a couple of tips at random and jumped in. Many people are not comfortable doing that, I suspect.

What did you learn from the book? What stood out?

One thing jumped out at me right from the moment I skimmed it, before I downloaded and printed for later digestion: You must have a blog. Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above. I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book. http://homespunlife.wordpress.com

Another thing was about using bold and italic. I had never read that elsewhere.

Tess Richardson at her Ashford Spinning Wheel (aka My Precious)

How did you find the sites to comment on?

A little background on my Etsy site…I started with rosaries, then added homespun yarn, then got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on a young adult trilogy, The Hunger Games (THG) by Suzanne Collins. A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next BIG THING, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet. Even though I hope to really establish myself in the homespun yarn market (hence my blog focus), the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales since it was an untapped niche with an eager market.

I thought about where I could find my target (tweens and teens who loved the books) and started Googling for fan sites. That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them, getting a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some I had to join, like Facebook fan pages and Fanpop.com.

How many comments did you leave? How much time did you spend?

I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord. I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.

It was time consuming, though. I spent an entire morning on it earlier this week and maybe posted on 4-5 sites total.

What was the biggest obstacle in starting from nothing to getting 132 page views?

Having to register for some of the fan sites. I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!

What was the easiest part?

Actually, it was all pretty easy. I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites.

What surprised you the most?

The fact that my Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place, on the first page overnight!

What advice would you give someone else with an Etsy shop?

Some niches will be much harder than others to see results on. For example, my homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors. But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.

Any other comments?

Having spent time chatting up my Hunger Games bracelets on fan sites makes me look at my future product offering with new eyes. I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop. On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining Hunger Games fan sites by developing other products for HG fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.

Another thing I’m really excited about, having tasted just a bite of success, is that I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction. My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.

Thanks, Tess!

If you want more information about Tess, please visit her sites:

http://www.etsy.com/shop/ColdHandsWarmArt
http://homespunlife.wordpress.com/

What did you learn from this story? Did you learn that if you leave interesting comments on other people’s sites that you might end up getting a lot of attention for your site? Would you like to leave a comment now, after reading the interview, and tell us all what you learned? I thought you might. Thanks!

If you haven’t read the book yet, you can download it here:
The Care and Feeding of Search Engines, A Simple Guide To SEO

Timothy Adam Designs

I started reading the Etsy forums to see what people are talking about there that might apply to my products here.

One area popped out at me and that’s the problem with getting traffic to your Etsy site. There are 21 items posted every minute there! There are 135,000 new people joining every month! I was shocked. No wonder products get buried there.

The first post I read there was from Warmth, saying they were ready to pay someone to help get more traffic. There seems to be some real desperation. (If you like cute little felt mice, check out their store on Etsy.)

Of course, I think I have all of the answers, but that’s just my personality type. The answers would be having a blog and promoting it off site. There are things to do on Etsy, but I know more about the off site stuff.

I found this thread in the forum and they had a lot of great advice. There were 569 responses when I saw it.

Here’s a quote of a small part of the initial post. It’s worth reading the whole thing. Notice the mention of a blog and a mailing list. Key factors there!

By Timothy Adam Designs

I am only going to hit a few key types of off Etsy marketing.. There are so many, so i will share the 3 that I use the most. At the end I show how put all three together along with on etsy promo to get 500 views to my shop in just over 1 hour.

Blogging:

I have been blogging for a little over a year. My blog has played a very important role in the growth of my Etsy shop. With my blog I have grown an e-mail list through my monthly giveaway.. This list has grown to 1500 people.. Last spring I held a product test with the small list I had at the time, which was 250. Long story short.. I sold 15 of the product test necklaces in less than 2 hrs. E-mail lists are very powerful!

Your blog should include links to your Etsy shop. These link should be very visible so it is easy for your readers to navigate to your shop. The best method for acheving this is to use the Etsy mini that is provided by Etsy.. here is a how to video I created all about the Etsy mini.. CLICK HERE

Facebook:

I recently joined facebook, and I have found to be a very powerful marketing tool. I use my facebook for networking and marketing my business, but you have to tread lightly. Facebook is cracking down on accounts that are doing this.. make sure your main account is set up in your name and not your business. You can set up a group for your business.. where you can promote all you want.

Twitter:

Twitter is my big hitter right now.. it is very powerful.

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. wiki

I am running a Lunch Time Shoppers Series, which generates great traffic. The most popular post is the Top 10 Monday post.

Tune in every Monday at lunch time (12pm) for my top 10 Etsy picks. This list is generated from the top 10 monday thread forums on Etsy, which starts at 11 am sharp. This is part of my “Lunch Time Shoppers” series… you can find these posts from 11:30 am to 12.30 pm. Check out more details HERE

Read the entire article at:
http://www.etsy.com/forums_thread.php?thread_id=5959620

I asked for my landing page to be reviewed and got some great feedback.

They pointed out that the story of how I beat Wikipedia for the word “survivor” was powerful and I should move that up a bit. I added a new image that points out the rankings on Google.

It’s really important to ask other people to review your site. Other people will always see things differently than we see things ourselves. That’s true for everyone, no matter how experienced or smart you may be.

This is especially true for copy. Having a proofreader review your copy is really helpful. Review it from the marketing point of view, did you hit all your marks?, and from the proofreading point of view, did you make any typos?

No matter what you write or design or post, run it by someone else first. It will ALWAYS make it better.

Get an Evergreen for Your Blog This Holiday Season

These kinds of posts should be about what your site is about. They should show your expertise on the subject. They should be the kinds of posts that are so valuable, so informative or entertaining or insightful, that people will want to read them for years to come.

If you could write THE definitive guide or explanation to the subject of your site, there will be links and tweets and traffic.

Think about what your subject is, what keyword you want to be know for, and write a really good post about it.

You’ll see the traffic.

The evergreens we admire for their longevity

The most obvious way is to write about a topic that never gets old. These are cornerstone reference posts, like ‘10 Ways to Build a Better Blog.’ These posts are evergreen simply because people always need that information.

The good news is that evergreen reference posts are pretty straightforward to write. Do a step-by-step summary of how to do something from start to finish, and you’ve got yourself an evergreen post.

They’re also good for defining something that’s often mis-defined. For example, I have posts bookmarked in my ‘Evergreens’ folder on “What Marketing Really Is.” And I refer back to them often, because marketing is a slippery subject.

There are downsides to these types of evergreen posts. You’re up against a lot of competition, for one. There are already thousands of evergreen posts on building a better blog or providing better customer service. There’s probably an evergreen post on 10 Ways to Do Absolutely Any Topic Imaginable.

If you want your evergreen post to be the one that gets bookmarked, you’d better make it really, really good.

Which brings us to the second downside: Evergreen posts often require much more work than your standard post. You’ll probably wind up putting in at least 5 hours — and probably more like 15 — making sure everything is well-written, entertaining, compelling, and that you didn’t make any mistakes.

You might also be putting some extra hours into in-depth research if your evergreen post is on a topic that’s difficult to understand.

Read the entire article at:
http://feeds.copyblogger.com/~r/Copyblogger/~3/0GUusIszMsk/

KICKAPOO JOY JUICE - THE ORIGINAL DOGPATCH RECIPE

I’m a sucker for free stuff so I got a bottle of it and drank it down. It was like nothing I’d ever tasted. I saved that bottle for years before losing it in an annual bedroom cleaning with my mom.

It was Kickapoo Joy Juice.

What a great name! I want “joy juice”, doesn’t everyone? The bottle I saved had a painted label and is probably worth some money today, but it’s long gone.

I remember feeling like I was in on a secret, on a new soda pop that was coming to market and I got it first. It was like owning the first record of a band that got famous later, but you could always say that you liked them first.

I never heard of Kickapoo Joy Juice after that encounter, but Mountain Dew came out soon after. I always thought that the just changed the name because of marketing reasons or something. It seemed like the same stuff to me. The labels even looked the same back then. Of course, Kickapoo Joy Juice never sponsored the X Games.

You do get the whole Dogpatch comic strip tie in, right? If I remember correctly, this drink was featured in the comic strip.

That brings me to this bottle. It’s back. The label is printed paper, instead of painted on.

The smell is the same. The taste is the same. It’s sweet, but citrus. I never knew it was “citrus” back then, or even that Mountain Dew is “citrus”. This has a full, sweet, citrus taste. I really like it.

Mountain Dew has more a chemical taste, but otherwise it’s similar to this. This is what Mountain Dew SHOULD taste like.

I’ll buy this again. I do like it. It takes me back to being 13 years old.

I think the girls were wearing Daisy Mae outfits, the original “Daisy Dukes”.

INGREDIENTS: Carbonated Water, High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or Sugar, Citric Acid, Sodium Benzoate (a preservative), Concentrated Grapefruit Juice, Caffeine, Gum Arabic, Sodium Citrate, Natural Flavor, EDTA (to protect flavor), Brominated Vegetable Oil and Yellow 5.

Everyone tends to do it. It takes a conscious effort to not do it. I mean, you are a rational person. You believe everything you believe and think everything that you think. Why wouldn’t everyone else think and believe the same way? What are they? Morons?

It's really easy to believe that everyone else is like you. They aren't.

When you are designing your site and writing your content, do it from the users point of view, not your own. They are the ones that you have created this magnificent new web site for, so honor them by talking in their language and answering their questions and meeting their needs.

The first step to do this is to define just who they are. Once you have them defined, forget everyone else. If you want to sell video games, your site will look much different then if you want to sell medical equipment.

It might be helpful to write down your definition of your users and tape it to your monitor, where you can remember them while you’re writing.

Their words, their needs, their solutions. That’s what you need to focus on.

It's Twitter Time for Your Church

Facebook has everyone and their brother on it now. I’ve met more people from my past in the last two months than I knew that I knew. It’s what’s happening now. Twitter is what will happen next year.

Do you use Twitter? Do you use it often? For what purpose? Do you follow more than you tweet? Please leave a comment.

Quoting from Church Marketing Sucks: It’s Twitter Time for Your Church

The Reasons Your Church Must TwitterAnthony Coppedge recently released a $5 e-book entitled The Reason Your Church Must Twitter.

It covers everything from what in the world a Twitter is to how your church can make maximum use of Twitter in various flavors–from simply having public conversations to using Twitter as a devotional tool.

Read the entire article at:
http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/archives/2009/01/its_twitter_tim.html