Shop.org Blog

Kelly’s keynote was very insightful and high energy, as always. I am proud to serve again with her and the other Board members on the Shop.org Board (thank you for electing me). I wanted to remind the members and readers of this blog that I interviewed Kelly back in May. You can read our interview here (Word of Mouth Wisdom #6). I am really looking forward to reading The Open Brand soon. Kelly was kind enough to interview me for the book, and I believe it will encourage a great dialogue in our industry.

As far as my interview series, you may also be interested in Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #3 with one of the primary Second Life “builders”. Second Life has been in the press a lot lately, and not for the best reasons. But I do believe in the potential of the 3D-Web to create a far more tactile shopping experience, and wrote about that recently in a fairly controversial piece aptly named “Will Second Life Get a Second Life?”. I also spoke about this a bit during my presentation at the Annual Summit.

With the annual conference just over, I thought I’d take a quick survey of the blogosphere and see what coverage is out there on the conference.  I didn’t find much - so if you’ve written posts, or seen good ones, let me know.

Alan Rimm-Kaufman - Jott for conference attendees:
Secrets of paid search from Dana Todd:

Summary day 1: Michael Julson:

Online retailers responsive to shoppers: 

At the BlogHer conference that took place this summer in Chicago, my 16-year-old daughter Chloe gave her first-ever conference presentation. She was on a panel about “professional blogging,” based on success with her blog about the the popular virtual pets site Neopets.com. Her blog, “The Ultimate Neopets Cheats Site,” makes her about $35 per day (from Google AdSense), and she only puts a few hours per month into maintaining the site and blogging on it. Not a bad ROI on her time!

A search engine optimized blog is an ASSET. It makes money for you while you sleep. It drives traffic whether you’ve blogged that week or not. Ideally you want a blog that is frequently updated, but it’s not essential. Steve Spangler, founder and CEO of an educational toy retailer, has a blog that drives over 13% of his ecommerce site’s sales, yet he only posts 3 to 5 times per month.

Note that Steve is on the Advanced Search panel session along with me and Elaine Wu this week at the Shop.org Annual Summit. Do try to make the session if you can!

Also check out the video highlights of Chloe on her panel at BlogHer. I’m so proud!