Greg Goodson

What is Rafflecopter?

Greg Goodson — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:42:51 +0000

I don’t often talk about business on my personal blog (well, at least I haven’t in a while!), but I wanted to give friends and family an update of why I’ve been so busy over the past few months.

We’ve been building some pretty cool things over at our startup and we’re getting close to releasing our first product. For more, read on!

We’re happy to introduce Rafflecopter!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

What is Rafflecopter? Rafflecopter will be an application that that will help publishers create, run, and organize giveaways on your blog. It’s a service that will allow you to place an embeddable widget that displays the specifications and entrants of the giveaway you’re running.

When a user of Rafflecopter signs in to their account, they’ll see a dashboard of past, current, and future giveaways. They can create a widget for a new giveaway by entering the giveaway specs: start and end dates, ways to enter, rules, etc. You’d then take the widget embed code and place it on your blog, much like a youtube video.

Publishers will benefit from this in several ways. Rafflecopter’s main objective is to save the publisher’s time by allowing them to manage their giveaways from a single location. We hope to improve the entire flow of the giveaway process, from identifying false entries to selecting and presenting a winner. The widget is also designed to allow the entrants to fill out more entry options by providing them the giveaway options in a format that makes it simple and convenient to enter.

We’ve received a lot of feedback from publishers interested in trying out Rafflecopter, but we’re always looking for more. We’re also completing our hunt for private alpha users, so please feel free to get in touch with us if you’re interested in trying it out! We’re looking to release our first product privately sometime in April 2011. So if you’re interested, feel free to e-mail me at greg@rafflecopter.com.

We look forward to helping you!

- Greg

Snowed In – Why Atlanta Is Freaking Out Over 4″ of Snow

Greg Goodson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:41:18 +0000

I grew up in New Jersey, and enjoyed skiing the slopes of Vermont, NH, Maine, and Canada. We got a lot of snow living on the “ice coast” as ski bums out west would call it… every winter, we’d get some pretty big storms. Remember turning on the TV in 1996 seeing that monster of a nor’easter climbing up the seaboard towards the northeast? I think we got upwards to 35 inches in my hometown of Randolph, NJ.

I’ll never forget that day: we were driving home from Okemo, a ski and snowboard resort in Vermont. We skipped out of town a day early for fear of being standed. We tried to make it back to Randolph, but the storm hit us like a wall when we hit Albany. We had a Ford Station Wagon (you know, the one you could drive in backwards and make obscene gestures at the people tailgating you?). We made it all the way to Mahwah, NJ before we had to pull off and get a hotel room for the night. It was a crazy car ride… I had a blast! My father’s knuckles have never been whiter.

Long Story Short, It Was A State Of Emergency

Despite the roads being closed, we opted to leave the in the early afternoon. The drive were terrible; the 35 minute commute wound up taking 2+ hours. We probably should have stayed another night at the hotel. We parked our car at a neighbor’s house we had never met (we asked first) and walked through several properties and chest-high snow to get to our garage door. It was a war zone; the plows hadn’t gotten to our house yet. They did later that day though, and the next morning, we paid a guy way too much money to plow our driveway. All in all, we were without road access for 2 days.

During the past two years, I lived in Park City, Utah, a ski town known for being nestled in the Wasatch Mountains. It’s not unusual for the Wasatch to get 4 feet of snow with a single storm. I think it’s not uncommon for Snowbird, a local ski resort to the area, to get over 700 inches a year. While living there, I was surprised that I was rarely snowed in. We typically were forced to deal with roads that were always sketchy, but definitely drivable, but very rarely closed state-of-emergency style. That’s because Park City did such a great job to clearing the streets. Once we got a crazy amount of snow and I couldn’t move my car for about 16 hours, but it’s cool, I wanted to ski anyways.

You Can Probably See Where I Am Going With This

Fast forward to the past four days. We’ve been stuck in our homes in downtown Atlanta since the storm dropped 4 -5 inches. It was really coming down for an hour or two… it was pretty awesome! But by the time it was all said and done, we got about 4 inches of snow, and maybe an inch of wintry mix (sleet, freezing rain).

I’m sure we all went outside and danced in the snow between timeouts of the BC / Nevada Bowl game, right? The snow stopped, and was pretty much done for the night. We all knew we were going to get ice on top of that, and we all knew that it would shut things down. Atlanta very rarely gets this much snow though, so let’s enjoy it! But wait, did anyone check to see what the weather would be like for the next 5 days? Below 35 degrees you say? Through Friday? Hmm.

The combination of that much snow and ice was rare for Atlanta. But then you throw in the temperature over the next 5 days and you got what we have… #snowpocolypse2011. I’m sure the city of Atlanta is doing what they can, planning what roads to work on with the limited resources they have. Did anyone really expect this? Maybe. After seeing how cold it was going to be for the next 5 days, I have to admit I thought we’d be stuck inside for a while (onwards, Cpt. Hindsight!). I thought I would have a fun time being snowed in for 4 days. Boy I was wrong there. Pretty bored!

But Can You Point Your Fingers At The City Of Atlanta?

I bet if you spread it out over a ten year time span, Atlanta is snowed in by the hour just as much as Randolph, NJ is, and just as much as Park City, UT is. In my 7 years of living in Atlanta, this is the first time I’ve seen this kind of snow. I would expect the ratio of snowfall predicted in Atlanta would be equivalent to the amount of snow-removal equipment and resources. Could you imagine if Atlanta went out and bought as many snow plows as the city of Boston? Where would we put them all? How much money would be wasted?

I feel like it’s a matter of statistics. The amount of time we’re stuck snowed in (as in can’t-move-from-our-house-snowed-in,) in Atlanta is the same amount of time someone might be snowed-in in Boston, New York, Erie, Minneapolis, Salt Lake, Tahoe, etc. Put some numbers together:

Please statisticians out there, feel free to correct me. I know enough statistics to get by. It’s probably fuzzy math. *Edit – If there’s one factor I failed to include in this, it’s the amount of opportunity cost lost for businesses suffering in this downtime. I guess that’s something you have to throw into the mix.

Bottom Line

All of this being frustrated about being snowed in is out of our control. Don’t point fingers at the city of Atlanta. If we were over-prepared for this, wouldn’t you be suspicious how we were able to clear off all the roads within the perimeter in 24 hours? Just be patient, wait for the roads to clear in the next 24-48 hours, and be happy we only have to put up with this “white crap” for once a decade.

And to the people in Utah, Buffalo, New Jersey, Maine, and other places who are so proud of getting 99x the amount of snow Atlanta gets: dude, the roads here are really bad. I’ve driven some slick roads over the past 2 years in Utah. I drove to Target on Tuesday, and it wasn’t fun. Have you seen the video of the guy ice skating down Peachtree St.? Trust me, these roads are bad.

High Heel Shoe Guitar Tab | Bryan Sutton

Greg Goodson — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:00:08 +0000

Here is a tab for a song called ‘High Heel Shoe’ by Bryan Sutton. From my understanding, it’s a traditional fiddle tune. It wasn’t written by Bryan Sutton, but this tab is what he plays on his album ‘Bluegrass Guitar’. I’ve tabbed it out to the best of my abilities.

The tab below is broken out into three parts (A, B, and C). I’ve also included a video below the tabs. The tab and video might not be perfect (it’s as close as I could get), but I’ve looked everywhere for a good tab of this song and couldn’t find one.

If you’re interested in the chords for this song, it goes something like this:

A part (key of G) – G G D G
B part (key of G) – G G D G
C part (key of C) – C C C C C G C

So here’s the tab:

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes [ 0-1/2 ] |
notes [ 3-1-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-0-3/2 ] |
notes [ 7/1 3-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-5/2 3/1 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 2/1 3/2 0/1 3/2 ] [ 1-3/2 0-2/1 ] |
notes [ 3-2-5-2/1 ] [ 3/1 3-0-1/2 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 3-1-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-0-3/2 ] |
notes [ 7/1 3-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-5/2 3/1 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 2/1 3/2 0/1 3/2 ] [ 1/2 2/3 0/2 0/3 ] |
notes [ 2-0/3 4s5/4 ] :q 0/3 :8 [ 0-4/4 ] |

Here is the ‘B’ part:

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 0/3 3/2 0/3 3/2 ] :q 4/3 5/3 |
notes :8 [ 3-5-3/2 4/3 ] [ 0/3 0/4 0/3 0/2 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 1-0-1-0/2 ] [ 2-0-2s4/3 ] |
notes [ 3-5-3/2 4/3 ] [ 0/3 0/4 4s5/4 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | [ 0/3 3/2 0/3 3/2 ] :q 4/3 5/3 |
notes :8 [ 3-5-3/2 4/3 ] [ 0/3 0-2s4/4 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :q
notes | 3/2 :8 [ 3/2 0/1 ] [ 2-3-5-2/1 ] |
notes :q 3/1 0/3 :8 [ 1-0/1 3s5/2 ] |

Here is the ‘C’ part:

tabstave notation=true
notes :q
notes | 0/1 3/2 :8 [ 1/2 2-0/3 3/4 ] |
notes [ 0-1-2/4 0/3 ] [ 1-3s5/2 3/1 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :q
notes | 5-3/1 :8 [ 4-5/2 ] :q 3/1 |
notes :8 [ 3-5-3/1 4/2 ] [ 5-3s1/2 2/3 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :q
notes | 0/3 :8 [ 2-0/3 ] [ 3-2-0-2/4 ] |
notes [ 3/4 0-2/3 3/4 ] [ 0-2/3 0-1/2 ] |

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes | 3/2 :q 1/2 :8 3/2 :q 1/2 :8 3s5/2 |

VexFlow TabDiv Software

Greg Goodson — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:52:00 +0000

Testing this thing I stumbled upon for guitar tabs. Mad props to the guys building it… check em out here – VexFlow TabDiv.

Currently tabbing out some flatpicking bluegrass songs.

Anyways, more to come on this. Testing it out now.

tabstave notation=true
notes :8
notes [ 0-1/2 ] |
notes [ 3-1-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-0-3/2 ] |
notes [ 7/1 3-0-3/2 ] [ 3/1 3-5/2 3/1 ] |

How To Make Outgoing Calls With Google Voice

Greg Goodson — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:19:36 +0000

Ok – this wasn’t completely obvious to me, but this should clear up how to make outgoing calls with Google Voice.

Here it is – easy step by step format:

Call your Google Voice # with your cell phone
Type in your pin #
Press 2
Dial the number you wish to call
Done.

Totally easy and painless.

Google Introduces ‘Seller Rating Extensions’ On Google Adwords Ads.

Greg Goodson — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:58:34 +0000

I think this is fairly new for advertisers in the US. Maybe I missed a press release somewhere, but it looks like Google quietly launched a new feature in Adwords: a Google Product Search Rating OneBox:

I just did a search for ‘showers pass jacket’ and I saw an ad for REI. The ad is interesting because when you click on the text “rated”, it takes you to a Google Product Search rating page for the merchant. If you keep clicking, you will more than likely wind up on the retailer’s page, free of charge. Heck, in some cases, the folks like Bizrate.com may get some money out of this. I clicked through from the Google SERP to the GPS ratings page to a review on Bizrate all the way through to REI’s homepage (via a PPC link on Bizrate).

It’s an interesting move on Google’s part. Maybe draw some more eyes towards paid search ads, maybe draw more attention to Google Product Search, maybe give the user a sense of trust for the retailer being rated (and a sense of trust with Google), maybe to help keep the advertisers honest, maybe a mix of everything.

Should be fun to see where this goes and how various advertisers react.

Update: I just read the post on the Inside AdWords (maybe I should have came here first… ha!) These are officially called seller rating extensions. And wow – what a plan this sounds like. From Google:

If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have 4 or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you’ll automatically get seller ratings with your ads. What’s more, you’ll only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of your ad – clicks on the review link are free.

All e-tailers, start your engines… this could be fun! The ads are rolling out over the next 24 hours. This is another way to owning more SERP real estate. I predict an onslaught of accounts being open with Bizrate (and other various rating sites that GPS crawls). I wonder if you can opt out of this (for whatever reason).

Should be fun to see where this goes and how various advertisers react.

Update: I just read the post on the Inside AdWords (maybe I should have came here first… ha!) These are officially called seller rating extensions. And wow – what a plan this sounds like. From Google:

If your online store is rated in Google Product Search, you have 4 or more stars, and you have at least 30 reviews, you’ll automatically get seller ratings with your ads. What’s more, you’ll only be charged if someone clicks on the headline of your ad – clicks on the review link are free.

All e-tailers, start your engines! This could be fun. The ads are rolling out over the next 24 hours. This is another way to owning more SERP real estate. I predict an onslaught of accounts being open with Bizrate.

‘Delivering Happiness’ Book Review And Thoughts

Greg Goodson — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:49:52 +0000

I was excited when I received a package from Amazon a week ago with a copy of Tony Hsieh’s book ‘Delivering Happiness’. I actually got a copy for free because of some contest on twitter or something back in April or May. I thought it was a scam, like one of those banners that say “Congrats! You’re the 999,999^th visitor!” Apparently, they gave away many copies to folks who signed up on their website and tweeted about the book. I guess it does pay to be on twitter.

Having heard all the buzz about Zappos for the last 4 years and seeing all the PR that the company was getting, I knew that it was a book that I was going to pick it up. During my several years working at Backcountry.com, I remember folks coming to my desk telling me that they had seen Zappos ads running on keywords that we were bidding on. Their ads read something like “Free Overnight Shipping, free return shipping”. I’ll be honest, it’s tough to compete with that! I had to know the deal behind this company in Las Vegas.

The book is organized into three sections and reads very well. The first hundred pages of the book were very entertaining. Tony told a lot of stories about his businesses when he was young, starting with a worm farm, progressing into a button mail-order company. Some of the companies did well, others not so much, but it was fun to read through all of his ventures and what he learned from each one. Hsieh attended Harvard, and had some great stories about his ventures in college as well, which included running a pizzeria in the bottom of his dorm.

Tony was always taking risks, from buying supplies for the worm farm from his allowance to throwing down a few thousand dollars to buy a pizza oven. When Tony got out of college, he took a job with Oracle, only to take another big risk 4 months later by leaving and starting up a web-design company with his college buddy and roommate Sanjay, who also worked at Oracle. Push comes to shove, they focused their efforts on an idea they called LinkExchange, which they built up and sold to Microsoft for $265MM.

While LinkExchange was growing, he realized that he was hiring people who were smart and passionate, but not passionate for the right reasons. I would say this is a turning point in the book where he began to realize that creating a company culture was underrated and would pay off in so many ways in the long-run.

I won’t give a play by play for the rest of the book, but Tony writes a great story of Zappos going through their ups and downs from when they were a small company in San Francisco to the time they sold the company in 2009 to Amazon. He tells us everything he has learned in his 10 years at Zappos; everything from creating a company culture, to the mistakes he’s made, and how happiness plays such a key role in the way he runs his business.

The book flows nicely all the way through the Amazon/Zappos deal in the summer of 2009, which I remember distinctly. When working at Backcountry.com, the day they announced this deal, our whole office was buzzing. Everybody in the office that day had their eyes glued to various news websites and blogs, reading the buzz that this acquisition was producing. I would be lying if I said we all weren’t a little envious of Zappos’ tactics.

For anyone out there working at a retail or ecommerce store, I highly recommend this book. On top of it being a fun read, I took away a lot of wisdom. Heck, you don’t need to work in retail to enjoy this book. If you’re interested in wondering how to bring happiness to your employees, to your customers, to yourself, and to the world, pick up the book. I’d put this book up there with ‘Good to Great’ and ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.’ The book has changed my outlook on a lot of subjects, and I hope to make changes to the way I run my business moving forward based on the stories and lessons found here.

Thanks for writing this, Tony! It was a tough book to put down.

For more info, check out these links:

Zappos home page

‘Delivering Happiness’ website

How Twitter Can Make You A Better (and Happier) Person

Woman Sues Google for bad Google Maps Walking Directions

Greg Goodson — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:35:41 +0000

So a woman got directions on Google Maps from her Blackberry telling her the best walking route in Park City from a residential home to a hotel. She took the directions (about 2 miles from start to finish), and along her way, she was struck by oncoming traffic. She is suing both the driver of the car and Google. Here’s a good link to an article: http://searchengineland.com/woman-follows-google-maps-walking-directions-gets-hit-sues-43212

I’ve run down this road a few times when I lived in Park City… probably not the most pedestrian friendly road, but I probably wouldn’t go down this road walking from A to B in her case because a) there is free public transportation in Park City and b) while those pictures posted in the article above are nice, there are massive snowbanks on the side of the road in January in Park City… you can bet that dirt path wasn’t there when she got struck.

If she was from Park City, she should have known better (I’ve read other news reports that she is a resident there).

This reminds me of The Office episode where Michael drives his rental car into the lake because the GPS said for him to turn right (also the episode where the employees receive blackberries).

I guess I’ll make it a Memorial Day adventure (happy Memorial Day by the way!) to find “dangerous” directions on Google Maps in the city of Atlanta. If I am lucky, I’ll get hit and then try to sue Google.

Not really sure who is at fault, but I thought this article was funny.

Google Product Search: 10 Reasons Why It’s Great and Why It Will Always Be Free

Greg Goodson — Mon, 24 May 2010 22:19:09 +0000

Quality score. Inbound links. Broad match vs. phrase match. Robots.txt. Universal search. A/B split testing. All of these terms are familiar to you if you are a search engine marketer. SEM and SEO get a lot of play these days in blogs, webinars, and tweets. I’d like to take this time to discuss a Google product that doesn’t get a lot of play in the internet marketing world, yet if you are a retailer, you know or should know how important it is. As a CSE consultant, I’m still shocked on how little some retailers know about Google Product Search.

Google Product Search, formally known as “Froogle”, is Google’s comparison shopping engine, where users are able to browse products for sale listed by retailers. Like Google SERPs, the Google Product Search results pages are aesthetically pleasing and clean, offer the user extended options to filter and sort your results, and are monetized only by the sponsored links on the top and right of the page. Over the last few years of working on various Google Product Search accounts with about 10 different companies, I can say that Google Product Search is becoming more and more popular with the user, and continues its trend of eating away at traditional CSE market share, such as Nextag, Shopping.com:

As a marketer, there are many reasons why you should be aware of Google Product Search, particularly if you or your clients are part of the retail vertical. Like many products of Google, Google Product Search has a lot of things going for it from a marketing stand-point. Behind search engine marketing and search engine optimization, it’s probably one of the best ways to get visibility on the first search engine result page (and we all know how important that 1^st page listing is). Having said that, let me dive in to the ten reasons why Google Product Search is great for retailers looking to take a huge step towards increasing their store’s revenue:

10. Google Product Search is “spam-free”.

Several years ago, it was way too easy to submit an affiliate store to Google Product Search. Heck, I’ll admit that I was one of those folks making a storefront based off a data feed I received from several retailer’s affiliate programs. Back then, Google didn’t keep a close eye on Google Product Search. Some stores were submitting their feeds twice for added visibility, affiliates were crawling around looking for an extra buck, and Google Product Search didn’t have any account managers on the product to help remove these poor listings. There was a “report violation” button to call out these “spammers”, but it was rare that these violations were ever taken care of. Google Product Search up until 2008 was like the wild west… laws didn’t apply to anyone.

Fast forward to 2010, and you’ll see a completely different Google Product Search. First off, you won’t find an affiliate storefront listed on Google Product Search any more. Most drop-shippers are no longer there either (also not allowed to list their products). Google has increased their headcount within the GPS department, giving bigger retailers an account manager (much like the Google Adwords program), and has become more strict on who can list their products. A direct example of this includes Google asking retailers who wish to be listed on Google Product Search to verify their store by installing a snippet of code on their homepage, confirming they’re the URL associated with their account number given to them when they signed up for the program.

9. Google Product Search is relatively unnoticed.

What I mean by this is that while GPS has been around for 7+ years, I am still shocked to find legitimate retailers who don’t list their products here. I was on Facebook several days ago when an ad was served to me by an outdoor gear retailer. I was dumbstruck to find out that this retailer was savvy enough to run ads on Facebook (which are served on a CPC basis, and for retailers, have a relatively poor conversation rate), yet didn’t have any Google Product Search listings. Many retailers are still in the dark about Google Product Search, meaning there is still time to get your foot in the door before your competition does. Learning Google Product Search yourself, or hiring a team that already has the know-how is definitely worth your effort if you haven’t listed your products here yet.

8. Google Product Search is focused on the interest of the user.

Google is not afraid to put the user first, and their company second. After all, it is how the company has grown to its immense size over the last decade. Taken from Google’s corporate information page, you’ll see that Google’s #1 philosiphy is to ‘focus on the user and all else will follow’:

Since the beginning, we’ve focused on providing the best user experience possible. Whether we’re designing a new Internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line. Our homepage interface is clear and simple, and pages load instantly. Placement in search results is never sold to anyone, and advertising is not only clearly marked as such, it offers relevant content and is not distracting. And when we build new tools and applications, we believe they should work so well you don’t have to consider how they might have been designed differently.

What does this have to do with Google Product Search? Google Product Search’s main objective is to give the user the best product search result listing hands down. This means there will be better listings than other comparison shopping engines and a more enriched experience for the user. This is also good news for the advertiser. Your brand will be safe with Google when you list your products. When you list with other CSEs, it’s very rare that their philosophy and thinking is the same, as their first priorities may be satisfying board members, year-over-year revenue growth, and profitability.

7. Starting a Google Product Search campaign requires little effort.

In order to have your products listed on Google, all you need is your product catalog’s data feed, a few hours of your time, and the desire to drive more traffic to your site. Once your feed is successfully uploaded, just watch the traffic roll in. Because Google Product Search is free, the time spent managing your Google Product Search campaign is much less than running the same feed through a CPC-driven engine. There is no need to optimize your listings based on poor performing products (high-cost and low revenue) because cost isn’t an issue. Of all comparison shopping engine programs for retailers on the market today, Google Product Search gives you the best revenue-per-time-spent ratio, hands down.

6. A Google Product Search feed means easier integration with the Google Affiliate Network (ability to have SERP image ads).

If you don’t have a Google Product Search feed and are still unsure you want to put the minimal time and resources into getting one up and running, let me add that if you have a Google Product Search account set up, you’re one step closer to running on the Google Affiliate Network and displaying image ads on the Google SERP. Here is a photo of a SERP for the query “Big Agnes SL1 Tent”:

If Backcountry.com didn’t run have a GPS feed, they would only have the one SEO listing for this product and the other sponsored adwords listing. However, because they do run on their feed through GPS, they have the ability to show not once, but twice more on the SERP thanks to the product listing result one box, as well as the image ads typically seen on the top right of the SERP. There have been case studies that show synergy exists when a company has two or more listings on the SERP. Running campaigns with Google Product Search and their affiliate network means more visibility, and more search engine result page ‘real estate’. Running your feed with Google will allow you to have your website visible on both Google Product Search listings and image ads, allowing you to dominate the SERP, much like Backcountry.com has in this example.

5. Google Product Search uses the ‘Google algorithm’ to list products.

It is one of Google’s core competencies: their search algorithm and the ability to provide great results to the user based on their search query. Google is number one in this field, with many imitators and SEOers trying to figure out just how Google ranks websites for the billions of search queries the search engine sees a day. As a core competency, Google is able to leverage this ability to provide useful results in their result pages of Google Product Search. This is a huge advantage for Google over all other comparison shopping engines.

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve looked on a Become.com, a PriceGrabber.com, or a Nextag.com to find and compare products offered at different retailer websites, just to be frustrated with the poor results that I get when I do an internal site search. Sometimes I’ll do a search for a winter jacket, and I’ll have a bra and a DVD show up in the results of my search. As a user, it’s very frustrating. Poor results time and time again have users considering their loyalty to these comparison shopping engines. Eventually, they’ll wind up on Google Product Search, where they don’t have to waste time sifting through products that they weren’t interested in. Because Google’s algorithm is much better at finding what the user is looking for in comparison to other CSEs, it makes the user happier and increase loyalty to Google Product Search.

4. Google Product Search doesn’t compete in shady practices.

When someone asks me which CSE has the ‘shadiest’ practices, I always answer PriceGrabber without hesitation. While most CSEs are trying to lean towards a more user-friendly experience, they still need to focus on revenue, meaning your partnership with them isn’t always in their best interest.

As an example, PriceGrabber has a network of sites where your products will be listed when you start running your product catalog feed with them. However, PriceGrabber refuses to send you the list of websites where your products could be listed. PriceGrabber’s reasons for not telling you is because the “list is long and difficult to come by”, when the real reason is they are scared of what you’ll find (this is the same reason why Yahoo doesn’t allow you to manually download a search query report like Google allows… you must request it from your Yahoo Account Manager, if you’re lucky enough to have one). I don’t have the whole list of PriceGrabber network sites, but some of these sites that they don’t want to tell you are Compare247.us, Best-Prices.com, and CheapUncle.com. If you check out these sites, you’ll see they are in it purely make PriceGrabber some extra money, a practice that Google won’t be a part of. When Yahoo announced that they were partnering with PriceGrabber, I was not in the least bit surprised. I am sure the PG/Yahoo partnership gave Google Product Search folks a good laugh.

Shady practices, especially outdated ones as described above, won’t be around too long. The general population is becoming more educated to the internet, and in turn, folks are able to tell the difference between a legitimate site, and a site made as a money-maker. Your products listings will have a better chance of being associated with a user-friendly experience listed on Google vs. some of the other CSEs out there.

3. You can list your entire catalog on Google Product Search.

Because listing your products on Google Product Search is free, there is no need to filter out poor performing items based on conversation rates or a low ROI. In other comparison shopping engines, it is a common practice to filter out products under a certain price point. If a comparison shopping engine is CPC-based, and your catalog consists of products with a price range under $20, it will be a real challenge making your campaign profitable. On average, retailers are charged between $0.30 and $0.40 per click from CPC-based shopping engines. If you have a product catalog filled with tee-shirts on sale for $14.95 and your margin is 50% of that, you have a breakeven conversion rate of 5%. If you don’t sell 1 shirt per 20 clicks to your site, you’ll be losing money. On top of that, average conversion rates in CSEs are usually below 2%, and often much lower than that depending on several factors.

But because Google is free, you’ve got a win-win situation for both the retailers and the users. Retailers are able to submit their entire product catalogs without danger of running up costs, and users now have the ability to search for a much broader range of products since there aren’t any barriers for retailers to list products.

2. Listing on Google Product Search means more SERP ‘real estate’.

As listed above in reason #6, listing your products on Google Product Search means more search engine result page real estate. Not to repeat myself, but this is done through the shopping results one box and through image ads, run through Google Affiliate Network.

However, one thing that wasn’t touched on in reason 6 was the Google Adwords Product PlusBox. All retailers with both a Google Adwords and a Google Product Search account are able to link the two accounts together, and give them yet more visibility in the SERPs by enabling the Product PlusBox feature. When you connect these two accounts together, Google puts an expandable ‘plus box’ below your sponsored ad, which allows the user to see the most relevant products offered from that retailer depending on the user’s search query. If a user interacts with the plus box by expanding it but doesn’t click through to your site, you’re not charged with the CPC fee associated with the sponsored link.

Having worked with the product plusbox in the past, adding this to your adwords campaign is wildly successful. It increases conversion rate, click through rate, and brand interaction on the SERP. I’ve run tests that have shown that a sponsored link with a plusbox gets a 41% higher CTR than those ads without one. Also, take a look at this image of the expanded plusbox. The added visibility and real-estate is a nice win.

1. Google Product Search is FREE.

The number one reason why you should be running with Google Product Search is obvious; because it doesn’t cost you a dime. The only thing required of you is your product catalog feed and a little bit of your time. Google Adwords charges you a CPC fee, hiring an SEO agency will cost you a good amount of management fees, and listing on any other comparison shopping engine will cost you. Not Google Product Search… it’s all free. And it’s my opinion it will remain free for the foreseeable future. Here’s a quick summary why:

Google recognizes the competition in the CSE landscape (at least they have in the last few years). Offering their product listing for free means there are no barriers to entry for the retailer… any mom and pop store with thin margins can list their products on GPS for no charge. They can also list all of their products without any repercussions. Because Google Product Search is so inviting to retailers big and small, the user gets a better experience while shopping on their site: more products, better search results, non-obtrusive advertising, and a better selection of stores to choose from. Finally, not charging retailers for listing their products is good for Google. They are able to own the CSE landscape leveraging what they’re already good at, they’re able to sell great advertising space on the right side and top of the page, and they have the ability to provide the best user experience folks have ever seen in the CSE landscape.

Some industry folks say that Google will begin charging retailers to list on Google Product Search. If this happened, there will be massive backlash. Google beginning to charge for GPS listings would be getting awfully close to bait-and-switch strategy, which isn’t in Google’s best interest. There is no good way to start charging retailers for something that has been free for its 7+ years of existence. Google Analytics is free, Google Docs is free, Google Mail (g-mail) is free, Google Reader is free: so what would happen if Google started charging for all these services? It would be pretty ugly. As an ‘industry folk’ myself, I’ll stand firm that Google Product Search will remain free.

In the companies I’ve worked with and consulted for, Google Product Search has shown that it has the ability to bring in just as much revenue as a robust SEM campaign can. Google Product Search listings, like SEM and SEO campaigns, can also be tweaked for maximum visibility. There are strategies that can be implemented to see that your products get listed higher than your competition. So why doesn’t Google Product Search get a lot of play? Not sure, but hopefully this post serves as a great start to getting to know Google Product Search. Begin to impress your retail clients today!

Greg Goodson is internet marketing consultant and founder of Sawtooth Media, LLC, who provides CSE consulting services to internet retailers big and small on the web.

A Career vs. a Job: What’s the Difference?

Greg Goodson — Wed, 19 May 2010 23:52:50 +0000

What is a job?

–noun: a piece of work, esp. a specific task done as part of the routine of one’s occupation or for an agreed price: She gave him the job of mowing the lawn.

What is a career?

–noun: an occupation or profession, esp. one requiring special training, followed as one’s lifework: He sought a career as a lawyer.

What do you think of when you hear the word “job”? What about “career”? When I think of a ‘job’, the first thing that comes to mind is maybe emptying the dishwasher, or raking the leaves, or shoveling the snow off my driveway. When I think of a ‘career’, I think of a profession, a path that gets you from your college diploma and your off-campus apartment to your Maserati and your house on the golf course.

This is why I cringe when I look at the footer of websites of companies who are hiring, and instead of labeling their available employment slots as ‘careers’, they list them as ‘jobs’. I think you send the wrong message when your site shows ‘jobs’ vs. ‘careers’ (unless you are just hiring for a job, like a seasonal employee at a ski resort for example). If you don’t like either word, then what about using the phrase “employment”?

Anyways, if you are applying for a very specific ‘job’ opening at a company, be sure to ask what the career path is, because job paths don’t really exist. Companies that have ‘job’ listings are looking for a peg to fit a hole, while companies looking for a folks to have a career with them sounds a heck of a lot better. When the day comes and we hire our first employee, I’ll see that ‘jobs’ isn’t listed on our website. I want someone that can be molded, someone who performs a collection of different duties, and someone who is flexible and can learn different subjects, all while keeping their focus on where they want to be in 5 or 10 years. In return, I’ll see that we can offer the ability for the individual to grow.

Ultimately, I feel that it’s the company’s responsibility to give the employee a road map to having a successful career path. It’s the people that make the company revolve. Next time you go to interview for a ‘job’ vs. a ‘career’, play cautiously. Ask very specific questions on how the company helps it’s employees achieve their career goals.

A career is the pursuit of a lifelong ambition or the general course of progression towards lifelong goals.

A job is an activity through which an individual can earn money. It is a regular activity in exchange of payment.

Career = good, job = bad. Just a heads up!