What's new with E-business Coach

Data center's 'perfect storm' causes site downtime

It was one of those moments where all of the red warning lights started flashing, across all our systems, all at once. The significant start of the downtime incident portended the scope of the problem to come. The service interruption on 12 November, reported as it was happening on our status website, marks the longest downtime event we've experienced in  four years. Our deep apologies for the downtime at this important time of year in retail sales -- not that there's ever a good time for this to happen.

This event's disruption is compounded by the other extraordinary power failure event the day prior, 11 November, first reported here on our Status website. This prior day's event marked the first service interruption caused by a failure of the data center's systems (networking, power, cooling, etc.) in over two years.

E-business Coach will be examining possible ways to diversify it's primary e-commerce server cluster, or otherwise make it more resilient to such an incident in the future.

Our data center has already launched an examination into how it's multiple redundant power and cooling systems didn't satisfy the chain of events that started with a freeway traffic accident outside the data center in Dallas / Fort Worth. Combined with the event on 11 November, you can be sure there will be changes forthcoming to harden the redundancy of emergency power and cooling systems.

At the end of the day, E-business Coach is responsible for seeing to your site's uptime service level target of 99.95%. These two incidents jeopardize that for the month of November. We will work with our clients to see that we can reach a remedy that satisfies you.

Grow revenues from organic search with new SEO 'coach'

The momentum that we're regaining in the search engine optimization (SEO) department is due to E-business Coach's Howard Gray. Hired in April in the E-business Coach Advisor position, Howard's jumped into helping clients renew their search marketing program, focusing on organic or natural search as a source of web sales.

"Where did you find this guy?" asked Murray Kenneth, the managing director and marketing manager of award-winning UK catalog Urchin. "This has been really, really useful." Kenneth's comments came after a series of discussions and recommended changes to the product catalog organisation. The recommendations, baseline reports, and specific coaching will improve the visibility of Urchin's product and category pages in the top 3 UK search engines -- for the keywords that matter. Howard is following through with Kenneth's marketing assistant and merchandiser so that Urchin's staff becomes more aware and self-sufficient in releasing new seasonal products. The intent is to maximize the shoppers who discover Urchin through google.co.uk's organic search results pages.

The SEO opportunities for our clients go beyond catalogs, as we embrace a "content is king" approach to attracting shoppers from organic search. Howard's copywriting skills are jump starting client efforts to develop educational, informative, keyword-rich stories and articles. Often, existing content can be edited to maximize it's SEO effectiveness. Then clients see the before / after examples as learning opportunities for their own staff to continue the effort on their own -- checking back in with the 'coach' for feedback and new ideas.

"This is just the kind of dialing in that our site needed," said Jim Markel, co-owner of Red Oxx Manufacturing. "Howard gets our brand, and knows how to sell on-line."

Security Guru guides our PCI compliance

E-business Coach has engaged the services of Mark Kadrich and his team at The Security Consortium to guide us through an independent third-party audit of our compliance to the Payment Card Industry's Data Security Standard. We couldn't be happier to have this security guru on our side. Kadrich provides the voice of reason and a been-there, done-that perspective that's proved invaluable so far.

Our auditors at SecurityMetrics are great at holding our feet to the fire for every last nuance and detail of compliance. Kadrich helps us find the workable way through the requirements and presents options that keep the integrity of our e-commerce platform assured. The authority he brings to our deliberations gives confidence and speed to our decision-making about security matters. We'd risk getting bogged down without his guidance.

Kadrich's counsel aids us in such matters as intrusion detection systems (a subject on which he has presented at Black Hat Briefings in Europe), configuration of firewall devices in a data center (with which he's familiar going back to the days he was technical director at Counterpane Security), and policies to ensure that incidents are treated with rigor (a practice he mastered as Senior Manager of Network and Endpoint Security at Symantec). For the past 20 years, he's been a contributing member of the security community. Now E-business Coach clients get the benefit of his expertise in systems level design, policy generation, end point security, and risk management .

Kadrich writes regularly on network security topics from his security blog at Network World, and authored Endpoint Security, published in 2007 by Addison Wesley.

Organic search and SEO: welcome back

From the beginning, the evolution of our Total Blue System e-commerce package has been grounded in solid search engine optimization (SEO) principles. To say Total Blue System was "search-engine friendly" seemed a redundancy because it was so ingrained.  But in 2006 my faith in organic, natural search wavered. We gave renewed attention in holiday 2006 to paid search and cost-per-click models.

Here's an update on Search as a strategy to grow web sales for 2007, from my perspective.

To borrow the analogy of the pendulum swinging left to right and back again, let's just say that in 2006 it was swinging in the direction of paid search. Cost-per-click advertising on Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search (and even Kelkoo), became a significant part of the strategy being recommended and implemented by or on behalf of our clients. It seemed like a necessary complement to the organic SEO efforts, and another way to push web sales growth rates upward. We pulled in paid search guru Tim Ash and his Epic Sky firm to help get it done.

Looking back at the experiments, there's a couple key take-aways:

• Conversion rates are king. What you can afford to pay per keyword click is based upon the cost of customer acquisition.
• Successful campaigns can be perpetually, joyfully self-funding, while struggling campaigns can feel like a weight pulling you down, and down. Do you as a site owner have the patience and budget commitment to see each campaign through a proper evaluation and refinement period?
• Can you make the commitment to refine paid search campaigns, over and again? Are you willing to get the right landing pages, to maximize the conversion rates, to afford to weed out the price shoppers and click fraud, to get the ad copy and keywords just right, and so on and so on?

While success rates varied by client and campaign, the overall feeling was one of disappointment -- at least when compared with the measurable cost of customer acquisition through natural or organic search. Can you get excited about paying $42 or  £29 or whatever to acquire a new customer through paid search when Google Analytics shows that natural organic search customers are converting at a cost that's 30% or less of that number?

Of course not. And given that some clients also cannot answer a resounding "Yes!" to the take-away questions listed above, here's where we'll be heading in 2007:

1. Conversion rates can be better, must get better, and there's a dozen ways to make it so. Hats off to Tim Ash for tips in this regard. Our Idea Exchanges among clients have also generated testable ideas.
2. Organic search has never smelled so sweet. I imagine we're heading for what might be called a 'Summer of SEO' in 2007, with initiatives in both client services and software features to renew our momentum as an organization that demonstrates the long-term value to be gained from SEO and organic search results as a traffic source.

 As if I needed more convincing, I've been reading John Battelle's The Search. The part of the title that deserves the most attention by Internet marketers is the "...and transformed our culture" part. It's eye-opening to remember back to what we were doing in the late '90's and how much has changed. Battelle's interviews with those planning the next great innovations in search are thought-provoking. So, too, are his forecasts about what a shopping experience will be like when SEARCH as an underlying theme breaks out of the virtual, on-line word and touches our shopping behaviors in the physical world. Check out the book, or start with an NPR interview of Battelle about his book.

In summary, the pendulum at E-business Coach is swinging back to organic search in 2007 as the web revenue source of choice. How could I have ever doubted it? I'll welcome myself back to the club...

Author: Patrick Pitman

Visa & Allbusiness.com spotlight Red Oxx's lessons learned

Commitment, persistence, and authenticity define the reasons for ecommerce success at Red Oxx Manufacturing. That's the story according to Allbusiness.com's video interview of co-owner Jim Markel in his Billings, Montana store.  Under sponsorship from Visa, Allbusiness.com came to Billings to feature Red Oxx in the debut of its "How-to Videos" series.

Since 2000, the three decades old company has sold its adventure and business travel gear from RedOxx.com. With triple digit sales growth rates since 2002, Red Oxx's perspective on what matters most online, and how to choose an e-commerce partner, attracted Allbusiness.com's CEO Peter Horan. A veteran of the acclaimed About.com portal, Horan sensed in Red Oxx an example of how small companies in out of the way places can make a big splash by maximizing the Internet's marketing power.

Find out what Jim Markel has to say about How to create a successful e-commerce website, and many more topics including stopping fraud and marketing budgets. The "How to create a successful e-commerce website"  has also been posted to Youtube.com, which is the source for the video embedded in this webpage below.

Allbusiness.com's partnership with Visa supported Visa's search for compelling profiles of "on the verge" companies, poised for a breakthrough. It was all part of Visa's Business Breakthrough program, featuring a $10,000 business makeover award and consultation with a business expert. Might your business benefit from such an opportunity? Apply here before December 31, 2006.

The Red Oxx feature video appeared today on the home page of Allbusiness.com. E-business Coach's co-owner Patrick Pitman appears in the Red Oxx video.