Alex Schultz

Category: general comments

  • The Kindle will Crush it in the UK

    One thing is completely lacking from the Amazon.co.uk homepage that dominates the US homepage. The Kindle.

    The kindle will launch in the UK soon and when it does I believe it will be even more successful than in the US. The big reason why is public transport. Whereas in LA and the Bay area and even to some extent the east coast people love to commute by car, in the UK everyone uses public transport. For example in London (where 1 in 5 britains live) every train is massively crowded. The whole newspaper format was changed after 100years to make them easy to read on the train. I was reading my Kindle on the train this morning and noticed lots of people staring (at it sadly not me 🙂 ). They were all struggling with newspapers and big books on a fast moving, rocking train. I had one hand on the rail and was controlling the kindle easily with the other hand and had lot’s of books at hand (currently reading the tyranny of email).

    Anyway just a general thought but look for kindle sales and associated book sales to go bananas (technical term 🙂 ) when the kindle launches in the uk.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • The Browser Landscape 2006-2009

    The above graph shows market share by browser type from 2006 to 2009 for my cocktail making site. I reviewed the traffic to both cocktail making and paper airplanes which have very different traffic types and global compositions but together make 300k visits a month now and millions of page views so have a relatively large sample. As such both sites have a non tech audience which I think makes them good subjects for reviewing this data.

    Bottom lines: Chrome is surging. Safari is still growing strong (most likely driven by mac market share). All of this is purely data from my websites but it is a pretty large sample set and I think what is very interesting is that after a long time of being on the sidelines Google and Apple are leveraging their dominant market share in their particular markets to be really competitive in the browser market.

    I am personally not convinced this is market share leakage driven by competitive products rather than by different companies leveraging their different dominant market positions (in different markets) to succeed in this one and again I am not convinced there is true innovation happening in the browser business… it feels to me like getting your browser installed is just a ploy to get more searches on your service (not that there is anything wrong with that).

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • dimensional reasoning, fermi problems

    This image has been burned into my brain for 7 years now. This image and the story behind it taught me a great lesson about physics and business while I was studying for my undergrad at the Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge.

    The lesson was that you can get to within an order of magnitude of calculating the power of a nuclear bomb using that picture and a bit of common sense. The full story can be seen here and I highly recommend you read it. Spending a short amount of time and really thinking through a well defined problem should give you a good idea of the answer. If the order of magnitude of the result of a test isn’t interesting to you based on that reasoning, don’t do it. Move on to the next thing. Focus on the high impact. Your time on earth is short, don’t waste it doing trivial things.

    The fermi problems are also an interesting space which I consider really similar to dimensional reasoning which is just using common sense to determine a value. My favorite is “how many blades of grass are there in a front yard”. The idea being you realize the yard is something like 10m by 10m and there are something like 20 blades of grass in a cm squared so you have 10^6 cm squared and hence 20million blades of grass in that lawn give or take.

    I am a huge fan of doing this common sense checking before you do projects or to make sure that a number you are quoting is right. Really great reminder from o’reilly radar (an awesome blog) to think about this stuff.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • big changes, big impact

    Earlier this week I posted a blog post entitled “massive changes, minimum impact“. This blog post follows on from that. In making the navigation changes in that article which had essentially zero impact on the cocktail making site I also made changes to the advertising on the site. Moving the ads from the right to the left hand side of the page and moving them up 50-100 pixels.

    Today I had my highest revenue day ever across all my websites and revenue has been climbing steadily since I made these changes despite user engagement staying flat and traffic volume growing.

    Big impact is all about focusing on what you want. I have seen folks made huge impact in my internet marketing jobs over the last decade through minor creative changes in wording shifting text to be a call to action instead of a passive informational call out: in adwords, in onsite merchandising, in email and even in plain text links.

    Plan your goal, make your change, optimize for your success metric and you’ll see massive success for minimum pain should you do it right.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Goodmail in my inbox – on unsolicited mail

    I am confused. I thought goodmail was meant to fix spam or help it and yet here I have two goodmail certified mails from a company who I didn’t subscribe to and have no idea who they are.

    These are the first two goodmail certified mails I have ever seen.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • massive changes, minimum impact

    Last week I made a major change to my cocktail site. I moved the main navigation from the right to left and reduced the number of navigation links shown by half (to reduce duplication of top bar navigation with side bar navigation and give more space for ads).

    Below is a graph of page views per visitor before during and after the change from Google analytics. Can you spot when I implemented it? It’s the 3rd dot from the right. There was absolutely no change, I even studied the hour I pushed the change and nothing happened.

    Sometimes things you think are important, aren’t. I stripped out half the navigation on every page on my site and completely changed the site and still people use the site the same way. I guess the advice is make bold changes, see what happens. Sometime’s it’s good, sometime’s it’s neutral, sometime’s it’s bad but the easiest way to find out is to try it.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Quality work from traditional media in UK

    Above shows high quality advertising and editorial work from Telegraph. Below shows a story from the same day.

    I 100% get the glass houses and stones argument but I find it really painful to see the (successful) digg spam attempts, headline grabbing, publish and be a weak imitation of a blog approach that newspapers seem to be taking in the UK. Then you couple with that absolutely caving on principle for the ads they are selling. On visiting the guardian earlier this year in the UK they seem to be the only paper who are not engaged in a race to the bottom in the UK newspaper industry. Perhaps that is why they are the biggest newspaper site in the UK.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Bloat vs Lite

    A few colleagues here at Facebook put together a product called facebook lite. It launched last week to great acclaim and really set me thinking about bloat on my sites.

    My paper airplanes site is where I have focused so far. All the site does is show you how to make 27 paper airplanes. There are video and diagram instructions and you can vote on something as your favorite plane. That’s it. Somehow I bloated this into 90 different php scripts to run the site ignoring include files and so on. No wonder I got hacked (it happened again in February and I failed to notice) and always felt sick when it came to planning to update the site.

    Videos – I specifically created a section to make my users view more pages using video. I have reversed this decision now making it better for the users even if less page views for me. 3000 people a day are viewing these videos, they are better than the diagrams. This is my most compelling feature and was buried.

    Unusual/Fast/Alex’s Favorites/Gliders – Together these made up <10% of my page views and yet were linked from the main pages. They initiated <5% of my visits. Gone.

    search – On every page on my site I link to a search product from atomz. In the last year this page was viewed a total of 1000 times. What a waste of valuable real estate. Gone.

    paperairplanes.co.uk does one thing and does it well: show you how to make a paper airplane. It doesn’t take 90 php scripts to do that. It takes one page for each paper airplane and a couple of navigation pages. That is it.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

    Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me.

    I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

    • Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
    • Duplicate content issues
    • Getting deep links at scale to 100MM’s of pages
    • Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
    • optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
    • calculating the value of a given potential seo change
    • dealing with international

    So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here

  • Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

    I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

    • Christine Churchill on keyword research using advanced tools at SMX
    • Matt Cutts on the canonical link tag
    • Rand Fishkin on just about anything but specifically page rank sculpting
    • Mark Mahaney on the future of the internet
    • Mary Meeker on the state of the internet around the world from her numerous web 2.0 presentations
    • Sean Parker from the founders fund/napster/plaxo/facebook talking about viral loops
    Get my marketing cheat sheets at Click Here