I received the sample clips that attach the hang tags to the my line of Silverback undershirts from the Chinese manufacturer about 3 weeks ago. If you look carefully, they made a spelling error in spelling my company name (”APRAREL” instead of APPAREL). I did not find this funny at the time, but I’m somewhat amused now, even through it ended up costing me $3000 to air freight the replacements to keep production on time.

Jonathan.

How do woman differ than men in business and as consumers? I have been focusing mainly on male consumers in my effort to understand consumer behavior, but now I want to know more about woman? Knowing your market’s consumer behaviors is vitally important to understanding how to successfully approach it with your product offerings. Woman spend 4 times more than men in the US consumer market which is a number that I cannot ignore. It means that I must tailor my marketing to be female inclusive, even though (for the time being) my product offerings are exclusively for males. The fact that a significant percentage of my sales will be to women buying for men I am thus forced to create a second set of copy and landing pages focused on converting female traffic. This begs the question: How are woman different from men in their spending and shopping habits, and how do I address this?

The answers to these questions may lie in reports released by several major public companies recently. They may allow me to explain how to format my site’s content to account for spend habits of both sexes. But before a look at the results of this research, I want to see what your thoughts are in the form of a comment in this post. Discussion: How are female consumers different than male consumers in behavior. A conclusion to this post will come in a couple days.

I have always wanted to know the general public reaction to the Silverback Apparel logo. In person general reactions have been overwhelmingly positive but what does the online crow have to say. A month and a half has gone by now since I chose the Silverback Apparel logo after a competition between 32 designers and earlier this week I found the answer to this question.

Yesterday my new toll free number (1-877-7SLV-BAK) has been activated giving my company a central caller switch board. The service I chose was Gotvmail and it give Silverback Apparel a full caller dispatching system for less than $10/month. Not only will it allow me to add lines once employees are hired, it saves me the cost of having to buy a fax machine and $20 per month for a dedicated line. So my consumers and business clients are now able to phone and fax free of cost giving them to opportunity to communicate with a real person if they have any concerns.

The hardest part of having a blog is remembering to write in the blog. I have not been keeping up to date in the last 3 weeks in my posts which is unfortunate. In the past 3 weeks there have been so many new developments regarding my corporation and general business knowledge that I regret not have documented them. So I will force myself to track back all the valuable information and document it here so that I can remember it. I would suggest you follow closely because these bits of information will benefit your quest to success

I have made great advances in understanding the following fields: Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Affiliate Marketing, E-Commerce, Content Creation, Copywriting, Split Testing, Layout Design, Traffic Qualification, Traffic Conversion and much more.

Unfortunately the traffic that my site has accrued over the last 3 months has dropped off to nothing but a handful of uniques per day. I will be changing the focus of this blog, and I will be using it as a test bed for various marketing techniques that I will put into practice. This means that I am going to have to find my niche in order to succeed. Stayed tuned to this site to follow it upcoming progress.

If you notice right below the post title of this website I have added a “Share This” and “Digg It” link a while ago to increase traffic and although I have not been very active with my blog in the last week they have proven to be useful in developing traffic. They have allow many users to share specific posts but the “Digg It” button has only been used a few times. Once I start developing a more technically oriented audience it should prove very valuable. Something that I have noticed is that posts that I have been spending more time developing have brought in more traffic. Especially with organic traffic (traffic derived from when your site ranks high in search engine rankings and users click on your link). I have brought my organic traffic to about 20% especially because of my posts on Blog Rush and John Chow. What I intend on doing is furthering the development of certain keywords and link building to relevant sites (linking back from sites that are topic relevant by posting comments that link back to the topic). Something that everyone should be mindful of is the “post slug” option whenever you write a post. This changes the name of the URL when ever you post to what ever you set as the post slug. This is important because if you are specifically targeting keywords then youI should post more in regards to this later on to see who successful my endeavor is. I also noticed that Blog Rush has been a completely useless tool for for me, but I’ll see if I can’t tweak it to maybe change that. PS. On the topic of traffic in the real world I just have to say stay away from your car in Toronto Fridays at about 5 pm. Especially when you are driving out to Niagara Falls and Buffalo, NY.

I intended on commenting on the US Dollar’s (USD) acquiescence to the Canadian Dollar (CAD) last Thursday when I received an email from Yahoo!, but I have been too busy to do so. As a result of a the half point drop in interest rates by the US Federal Reserve on Thursday we found for parts of the day (first time in 31 years) the CAD to be worth more than the USD. The reason I bring this up is that I wrote a paper 2 years ago on the projected value of the CAD for an international finance and economics course. The inspiration that made me choose the topic of this paper came when the VP of the Canadian Central Bank came to lecture our class on monetary policy and the future of the CAD. The findings in my paper paralleled most economist’s predictions about the CAD and how it was projected to make significant gains on the USD (It was roughly at around $1.25 CAD/USD the day of the lecture). From what I remember, I concluded that the CAD would surpass the USD and possibly by about $0.10 ($0.90 CAD/USD) based on the economic indicators of the time. I am not current enough in my knowledge on recent indicators to give estimates on the what is in store for the CAD (and I would have to brush up on a lot of theory…lol). I still think that the CAD will remain strong at least for a while purely based on what I have been reading recently about the international markets. This is especially rings true when we look at the Chinese currency peg to the USD and the huge amounts of USD China needs to achieve this and how global trade has shifted to demand increasing amounts of commodities from our resource rich nation.

This high dollar does pose a major threat to to all our domestic export oriented firms (although import oriented firms will be rejoicing). We have been blessed for a long period of time here in Canada with a trade surplus which has aided out economic growth and has sustained us in harsher economic times. The economy over the last 30 years has been subsidized by a less valuable CAD, and this has had a definite effect on our economy and the competitiveness of our firms. With a rise in the CAD we are starting to rely increasingly more and more on outsourcing to remain competitive and this will only increase. There is some positive in all of this that we must not forget. The extortion of corporations and the immoral and selfish behavior towards society by unions will hopefully loose ground as an increasing number of union jobs are relocated to countries with a competitive advantage in the labor market.

All jokes aside though, this actually really sucks for me. As the CAD increase, the value of Silverback Apparel sales in the US will diminish as long as I am living here in Canada and eventually converting profits back into CAD. I guess that means I might have to price everything in CAD if our dollar starts doing any better. Anyways I am expecting an early November launch of my first products (October 31th seem unlikely but I’m shooting for the Christmas shopping boom) online and in retail shortly thereafter. Keep up to date with my progress at the Silverback Apparel website.

Check it out here!

Choose your woman!

Choose your car!

Choose you adventure!!!

And decide the outcome!!!

Today I setup Google Apps on SilverbackApparel.com and I have to say that I have been amazed by Google once again. Google Apps essentially plugs Gmail, Gcalendar, Gtalk, iGoogle and Gdocs into your website and allows you to manage those under you own domain name. I for example am using [Edit: Removed Email Address Because of Spam] (one of my corporate email addresses) and instead of using some third rate email solution to manage my emails, I get to manage everything from withing a Gmail interface. I personally love using gmail because it has made email so simple, reliable (unlike hotmail), fast and junk mail free. Not only this, you get 2 GB of storage and POP3 access for Outlook as well just like Gmail. What makes this all the better is that all of these benefits apply to Google Apps for a very Googlish price: $0. With Microsoft you’d pay maybe hundreds, but at Google yes it’s free…And here is the kicker…You can them everything to fit you corporate image.

Check out the pages I have setup and branded with my corporate logo
start.silverbackapparel.com
mail.silverbackapparel.com
docs.silverbackapparel.com

If there is any interest and you want a step by step of how I did it just post a comment and I’ll go through it.

I’ve been following the progress of John Chow’s blog (www.johnchow.com) for several months and there’s no arguing that it’s a great resource and a massive success, enriching the pockets of John Chow and his legion of readers alike.

That being said, I feel as though John is starting to lose significant credibility and slip into the same category as the same unscrupulous ebook marketing gurus that he denounces on his blog.

Case in point is his recent promotion of a traffic exchange widget called Blog Rush (and Agloco before that, for that matter!). Now for those who have experience with banner exchanges and/or network marketing, it’s easy to see the flaws in the system.

First, the exchange system itself is easy to game and defraud. I’m not going to go into significant detail, but it wouldn’t take much more than setting up a page and directing hit bot or cheap, unproductive traffic to boost the credits system in your favor. That’s just what happens when you base a credit system on impressions vs. productivity. Programs like this have been employed in adult site networks for a long time and this impression trading scheme amounts to nothing more than one big traffic circle jerk!

Second, as with network marketing, the math just doesn’t add up. Those at the top are enrichened (i.e. John Chow), while those at the bottom are left dissilusioned. If you think you’re going to get an equal amount of *quality* traffic back with this setup, you are fooling yourself. Go ahead and try the widget out for a week and prove me wrong!

It’s one thing to be “evil” and employ crafty tactics and strategy, it’s another to knowingly promote something that is outright fraud. And as one the most widely read, influential bloggers, it’s absolutely amazing to me that John Chow would risk his reputation in exchange for the being at the top of the Blog Rush pyramid. John, how about taking the same critical analysis with Blog Rush that you take with your $400 reviews? Sooner or later, the lost credibility is going to hit you in the pocket book.

Now, to conclude, I’m not saying that you should throw out the baby with the bath water and not read John Chow’s or any other guru’s blog just because the occasional lapse of judgement, but you should critically analyze anything that you read either in a blog or in the newspaper before blindly taking action. Don’t be one of the legion of Blog Rush lemmings!

• Create a strong subject line that is clear and descriptive of the content.
• Sculpt the message body to make it easily scannable.
• Make the nuggets of information easy to find.
• Your introductory paragraph is vital: Your first impression counts for everything.

Important information in writing attention grabbing emails and posts. Spending time developing an email’s subject line and body is vital in getting your message across. If you are like me and get 30 or more emails per day you probably just quickly skimmed over emails unless something grabs your attention. I only make an exception if I am specifically expecting an email, if not I will generally read less than 20% of an email. Another problem is when I receive an email with a one word subject line such as “Hey” or “Hi” I will generally only refer to it once and then usually never visit it again. The reason is because when an email’s subject line is very descriptive of its content I immediately qualify the content either as desirable or not depending on whether I’m currently seeking information on what the subject describes. In a world where humans are getting increasingly efficient at filtering information, if the subject line describing the email is not clear and concise we automatically tune it out as irrelevant.

The reason I bring this up is because I was reading the July/August issue of Fast Company and on page 46 I came across an article called “Email Is Dead…”. In one of the case studies this article sites the author talks about how Capital One over the last 3 years has put its employees through workshops in order to “reduce email strain by writing better messages”. What they have found is that by writing “stronger subject lines” a recipient knows why they are receiving an email and in the future it makes it easier to refer back to emails. The little blurb about Capital One further expands on clarity by saying that a sculpted email body helps the reader scan through the main body of the message.

I believe that it is vital that companies teach their employees proper email etiquette and that doing so will save the company money and resources in the long run. Doing so will reduce redundancy in email communications and decrease employee stress. Also it should assist the clients in retrieving information efficiently and give them a reason to read entire emails if they pertain to something that they currently need to address. I am reminded of a couple years ago when I sent an email to my university advisor with a weak subject line, and in response she replied: “Remember to send e-mails with identifying headings to get a fast response. That’s how I file them”.

Clarity in the Subject line is not the only thing that you should worry about, because if the body is not easily scannable then your readers will end up ignoring the content and your message. What is important as my as one of my friends and associates stated last week is to make the nuggets of valuable information easily found and make your text easily scannable. Doing so will guarantee that readers will end up drilling more deeply into content and retrieve more value from your writings.

The final thing I have to say is that the introductory sentence of your body need to captivate your audience and grab its attention right away. You have very little time to peak the readers interest before they tune out. So make sure that the first sentence is your strongest and most captivating, because if it isn’t then you are not giving your reader a reason to keep reading.

I have just come across this amazing tool that everyone who has a website or is thinking of building one should know about. It analyzes just how ideally optimized your website is to promote growth, and how big of a footprint your site has in the online world and returns the results in one cohesive report. I tried it out on my blog to see where it stands and I have to say that this tool gave me amazingly detailed information about the status of my website and advice on how I should fix it. It will give an in-depth analysis of all the components in your website and tell you what is good and what is wrong with it. I scored a 63% which means that I am 63% better than all other websites out there that this tool has come across. I think that within about 1 month I should see a jump in my score after I have fully gotten used to blogging and after I have spent some time on link building and driving traffic to my website.

I have been thinking for a while about the many ways in which I would like to utilize Facebook for marketing and driving traffic to my websites. Driving traffic to this blog is not as big a priority as it is to my Corporate site (silverbackapparel.com) once it is fully operational. So far the two notable options in terms of marketing have to do with the groups and the applications features. I know that with a little effort and with the help of some expertise I should be able to drive a decent amount of traffic to my site. Through Facebook alone I have driven in the last 3 weeks 451 unique individuals (as of yesterday) to my blog solely by posting blog notes on my profile. This shows the potential that Facebook has in driving traffic and I’ll definitely be one of those people doing what he can to pawn his cheap goods. The reason I am mentioning this is because a friend of mine has just emailed me an interesting blog post about just this from John Chow’s blog (a blog I regularly read). He talks about exactly how much potential traffic and revenue a 1,000,000 member group in Facebook can bring.

My two trips to the dentist this week really got me thinking about the differences between the cost of living here in Canada versus down in Nicaragua. The two trips that I made to the dentist (One for my annual X-Rays and the other for a cleaning) cost me $495.99 (221.88 + 274.11) which in my opinion is absolutely ridiculous ($250/Hour). It would have cost me only about half as much back in Vancouver due to the fact that I have been seeing that dentist for over 20 years, and had I been in Nicaragua about $25. What I am wondering is where is the extra value and how can a dentist justify charging 20x what the most expensive Nicaraguan dentist charged me when I went last  September and again in March. What I find funny is that the Nicaraguan dentist that I see is educated and trained in the US and is equally as professional in what he does as the one here in Toronto. There are only a negligible differences between the workmanship as well as equipment and technology, so once again I am confused as to where the additional value lays.

I am currently in need of getting all four of my wisdom teeth pulled which means that here in Canada I will be paying out another $1,600 minimum (unfortunately my company does not offer extended dental and medical insurance ;). What I have thought of doing is flying down to Managua and getting my teeth pulled down there because the dentist I see is equally as good at his job as my Canadian dentist. Another thing to note is that should any health complications arise, the Vivian Pallas Metropolitan Hospital is on par quality wise with what you would expect here in Canada or the US (at about 1/10 the cost). Although I would never trust them with heart bypass surgery or anything as technically difficult as that, I would with any surgeries that don’t have immediate ‘life or death’ consequences. When I do the calculations and I figure out all the costs flying to Nicaragua and having all four of my wisdom teeth pulled costs me just over half what it will cost me here in Canada.

What is funny is that this is the most expensive you will have to pay, because my friend flew down and got hers removed for $40 + the flight. So knowing that you could save a lot of money by going down to Central America for dental and medical work would you? And if you would what would you do with the extra money you saved? Recover at a hotel on the beach of 2 weeks maybe? This just goes to show how beneficial outsourcing is, and how much better off the world is with open economies….

Well it is official! Silverback Apparel now has an official logo. I decided after the design competition that I would run a split test to see which logo would perform the best and here we have it. This logo did 21% better than the other logos in CTR, although they were all very similar with reference to conversion rate. This is the logo that I personally felt was the best and most pleasing to the eye and I am happy to see that my target market agreed with my tastes. A lot of people who I asked to chose among the variations chose very differently (much like the Silverback name), but I am not going to appease their poor judgment and lack of taste when my target has made it obvious they liked this version the best.

Now that the logo has been decided on I can now move on to brand development and start designing my marketing campaigns. I would like to thank Joao Franco (the creative genius behind the logo) for all the hard work and effort he has put into the development of Silverback Apparel’s brand new logo. If you are ever in need of a designer, I strongly suggest you consider Joao due to his devotion to professionalism and creative flair. His portfolio can be found at either Deviantart.com or Coroflot.com under either his own name or his user name (Arpad).

Note: The Silverback name will become very clear once I release the first 3 variations of my product and you’ll discover the amazing and unique features that earn the name.

It has been one year to the day since I discovered the amazing county of Nicaragua and I look forward my return very soon. The people and the culture are what makes this such an amazing little country and they are what won me over. During the 8 months I lived here I grew an appreciation for Nicaragua’s various traditions and complexities, but what I found to be its most valuable resource is its people. It is the poorest of the Central American countries due to the idiotic socialist ideologies of the Sandinista regime. Despite Nicaragua’s turbulent past, there is a certain amount of charm to be found in this that you don’t find elsewhere in the region which is why I love this country so much. Their population’s ability to maintain a positive outlook on life during adverse times is what I find gives these people the warmth that is unique to this nation.

I will be posting a detailed critic of the country in the near future discussing the unfortunate turn towards socialism the country has recently undertaken. I am of course also going to discuss the business environment and why it is full of amazing business opportunities although maybe not to the risk averse.

The Quick and Painless Guide To Selling

The common myth about selling is that selling is difficult. Most people believe this and think that to be successful you need to be an actor change your personality. This is absolutely false and the kinds of people who do are horrible sales people who come across as sleazy, self-serving and fake. The best way to sell is to act naturally as if you were talking to a friend and telling him about the benefits of something that you have. To be successful as a salesperson you need to take on an advisory role and lead your customers through the process of understanding the benefits your product will bring them (needs based selling). Make sure that your role as an expert and adviser is credible by knowing everything about your product and industry and by being honest. Sincerity is vital in being highly successful (discussed in “The Problem With Outsourcing“) therefore it is important that you believe in your product and in most of its features. If your product is mediocre and has no real redeeming qualities compared to your competition’s you are better off cutting your losses and dumping the product before your reputation is tarnished forever.

It is hugely important to take a tailored approach to selling and to adopt the mentality that every customer’s needs are different. A scripted approach will only lead to your customer either feeling alienated or annoyed by your sales pitch. What is vital at the beginning of every sales pitch is a Q&A with your customer to find out more about them and to see whether your product can indeed help them out. If it cannot then don’t waist too much time on seeking an impulse purchase, but rather focus this time on qualified buyers who are going to benefit from what you are selling. Once you have enough information about your client from the Q&A, you want to move to your tailored sales pitch that will lead to his understanding of the benefit he will specifically get from your product. A lot of sales people when they sell tend to not gather enough information about who they are selling to and will often promote product features that the consumer is completely uninterested in. This leads to either consumer impatience (sales pitch too mundane) or consumer intimidation (sales pitch too technical) which means the client will walk.

The last important step is to ask for the close. Never expect that the client will tell you that he wants X amount of what you are selling. You have to ask the client directly how much he may want so that the sales pitch can move further down the funnel. If you know the amount that will maximize their utility then take the role as an advisor and suggest the amount they should buy and back it up with your reasoning.

Note: If you get a rejection when you ask for the close do not walk or run away from your pitch and the time you have invested in you consumer’s education. Instead quickly re-evaluate your consumer and your approach and then start from a different approach. It is important to note that if you have gotten far enough into your pitch that you have asked for the close, it means that you customer is genuinely interested and contemplating the purchase of your product. It is up to you to find out what the barriers to that close are and to address those as quickly as possible. You’ll know if there is a lack of interest in your product if you get a rejection soon after you start your pitch. If manage to get to asking for the close though sometimes you will receive several rejections from your client before you finally succeed in closing them.

A fundamental necessity in selling yourself, your ideas, your products, or your services is to have answers to all the questions that the recipient of your sales pitch might ask. Especially obvious question!!! Last night I was solicited by a local politician named Kate Holloway of the Ontario Liberals who is running in the upcoming election in my riding (Trinity—Spadina). When I heard the knock on my door the first person to greet me was a gentleman whose job it is to cordially break the ice with the tenants. He is charged with the duty of informing the tenants of the upcoming elections and to keep them engaged in conversation until the time that Mrs. Holloway is done answering the previous tenant’s questions and arrives to engage the new tenant. So last night when the gentleman arrived at my door he quickly answered my question about the ideological stance of the Ontario liberal party (unfortunately unlike British Columbia’s Liberals they are left of center) and my other questions pertaining to the elections. Shortly after Mrs Holloway arrived and asked if I have any questions for her, and I responded by asking what the party’s political platform was.

Starting from the moment she opened her mouth to answer, everything she said worked to her disadvantage. She immediate when straight into a scripted response opening with, “Well we are going to be opening up new daycare facilities…” (Wrong answer)! In my mind as soon as she said this I thought to myself, in what way have I given her the impression that I even remotely care about day care spending (At the present time I neither have a wife or kids). She then went on and on and on about various unbudgeted social programs…”$130M of new street cars, $670M for subway expansion, $620M for Highways…$200M there…$1B there…$3.6B there…” The image I had in my mind while she was telling me this was little 18 year old Kate Holloway at the mall with a brand new credit card. “I am sorry”, I responded after a while, “but what are you going to do for business…”? Her reaction to my question completely caught me by surprise. She was completely dumbfounded, at a loss for words, and kept repeating “ah” and “um”. The gentleman with her interjected to give her the time to think, and brought the question completely off topic and into an illogical loop. Finally about a minute and a half later she proceeded to give me an answer about how a few years ago their party (still currently in power) fixed the price of renewable energy alternatives to remove price fluctuations. I felt like telling that price fixing actually hurts the overall business environment but instead I just thanked her for her time and wished her good luck.

Now the reason I brought this up is that she made many fundamental mistakes while selling herself to me that led to me not trusting her with my tax dollars. They include not qualifying me through a quick question and answer period (Q&A) to giving me a scripted pitch, to not knowing the details of her service, to not asking for the close. In my next post I have put together a guide that will address all of these fundamental mistakes. I talked a bit to her campaign manager in the elevator about 20 minutes later and told him that they have a lot of work to do. Well at least they now know what they have to work on for the debate.