Monthly Archives: March 2011

Seth’s Blog: Compared to perfect: the price/value mismatch in content

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"How's the wine?"

You really can't answer that question out of context. Compared to what? Compared to a hundred dollar bottle? Not so good. Compared to any other $12 bottle… great!

"How was the hotel?"

"How's the service at the post office?"

In just about all the decisions we make, we consider the price. A shipper doesn't expect the same level of service quality from a first class letter delivery than it does from an overnight international courier service. Of course not.

And yet…

A quick analysis of the top 100 titles on Amazon (movies, books, music, doesn't matter what) shows zero correlation between the price and the reviews. (I didn't do the math, but you're welcome to… might be a good science fair entry). Try to imagine a similar disconnect if the subject was cars or clothing…

For any other good or service, the value of a free alternative that was any good would be infinite–free airplane tickets, free dinners at the cafe… When it comes to content, though, we rarely compare the experience other content at a similar price. We compare it to perfect.

People walking out of the afternoon bargain matinee at the movies don't cut the film any slack because it was half price. Critics piling on to a music video on YouTube never mention the fact that HEY IT WAS FREE. There is no thrift store for content. Sure, we can get an old movie for ninety-nine cents, but if we hate it, it doesn't matter how cheap it was. If we're going to spend time, apparently, it better be perfect, the best there ever was, regardless of price.

This isn't true for cars, potato chips, air travel, worker's comp insurance…

Consider people walking out of a concert where tickets might be being scalped for as much as $1,000. That's $40 or more for each song played–are they considering the price when they're evaluating the experience? There's a lot of nuance here… I'm certainly not arguing that expensive is always better.

In fact, I do think it's probably true that a low price increases the negative feedback. That's because a low price exposes the work to individuals that might not be raving fans.

Free is a valid marketing strategy. In fact it's almost impossible for an idea to have mass impact without some sort of free (TV, radio, webpages, online videos… they're all free). At the same time, it's not clear to me that cheaper content outperforms expensive in many areas. As the marginal cost of delivering content drops to zero (all digital content meets this definition), I think there are valid marketing reasons to do the opposite of what economists expect.

Free gets you mass. Free, though, isn't always the price that will help you achieve your goals.

Price is often a signalling mechanism, and perhaps nowhere more than in the area of content. Free enables your idea to spread, price, on the other hand, signals individuals and often ends up putting your idea in the right place. Mass shouldn't always be the goal. Impact may matter more.

via sethgodin.typepad.com

All-Natural CompoClay: A New Alternative to Gypsum and Resins

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Robyn Griggs Lawrence thumbnail 

CompoClay , a new nontoxic material made from natural minerals, sea salt, water, sand, recycled coal byproducts and natural fibers, is now available in the United States. Versatile enough to substitute for metal, wood and concrete, CompoClay is weather-resistant and free of volatile organic compounds (VOCs). This  promising material can be molded, painted and finished to meet a variety of needs. CompoClay has opened its first U.S. store in Alameda, California, showcasing home décor, lawn ornaments, architectural molding and building supply products, which come in high-end and affordable lines.

“We don’t just make a green product, we are a green enterprise,” says Alex Khan, operations assistant at CompoClay’s Alameda office. “That means we consider the environmental impact of everything we do from the way our product is made to the way we conduct business.”

Patent-pending CompoClay was developed in Hong Kong as an alternative to gypsum, engineered woods, rigid polyurethane foam and resins, which have high carbon footprints, are often sourced unsustainably and are not very durable. CompoClay is expanding into a broad range of product applications, including home décor, garden ornaments, architectural moldings and building engineering products. I look forward to seeing this promising new material in many uses.

compoclay 

CompoClay’s new store in Alameda, California, is a showcase for all the material’s iterations.  

 

 

via motherearthnews.com

Your Bathroom Needs Work | Staging A Bathroom In Armonk NY

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Some sellers often ask the question, “Do I really need to worry about the bathrooms when listing my home for sale? I can just clean it up a bit, right?”

Let’s take these questions one at a time. Yes, you do need to worry about bathroom design and staging when selling your home. Cleaning the bathrooms is the first step to preparing them for buyers, but you should not stop there.

Bathrooms Matter When Selling a Home

If you’ve ever watched one of those home remodeling or design shows on television, you probably heard somebody use the phrase “kitchens and baths” in conjunction with selling a home. That’s because real estate professionals know that these areas contribute a lot to a home’s value. A well designed bathroom will also increase the home’s appeal in the eyes of buyers.

In other words, bathrooms are a big selling point for home buyers, and they therefore deserve your attention. So yes, bathroom design is an important part of home staging and selling.

Bathroom Design and Staging

If you plan to sell your home in the near future, you need to design and stage the bathrooms accordingly. We’ve covered that. So where do you begin?

How to Stage a Bathroom

Your plan-of-attack for the bathrooms can be summed up in two words — cleaning and updating. The clean part is obvious, but giving your bathroom a modern look is also very important. After all, the last thing home buyers want to see when viewing your home is that the bathrooms need updating.

So your plan for bathroom design and staging is to clean everything and update items as needed. Let’s turn this into a motto. Your motto is “clean, bright and modern.” Keep this in mind when developing your bathroom design ideas and when staging the space for potential buyers. Repeat after me … clean, bright and modern!

Of course, if you add “luxurious” onto that motto, you’ll score extra points with home buyers. Clean, bright and modern are a must. Luxurious will help even more. Those are the keys to staging a bathroom for a quick home sale.

Bathroom Staging & Design Tips

Here are some specific tips for carrying your home-staging efforts into the bathrooms of your house.

  • Before listing the home and welcoming buyers inside, clean those bathrooms until they appear brand new. Signs of usage, such as toothpaste stains and soap scum, will turn buyers off.
  • If the fixtures in your bathroom are outdated (spigots, handles, mirrors, etc.), you should replace them with sleek and modern fixtures. This single bathroom design idea will do wonders for helping you sell the home.
  • Stay away from brass fixtures — they bring the 1980’s to mind. There is only a small percentage of buyers who like brass fixtures. To see what the prevailing style is, tour a model home or read through an interior design magazine / website.
  • Adorn the towel rack with high-quality plush towels in subtle colors. Coordinate the towels with the overall color scheme (match them to the rug, accent colors, etc.).
  • Glass shower door a little gross? Remove it and take it outside for cleaning. Use a solution of one part muriatic acid to 10 parts water (wear goggles when mixing). Scrub it with steel wool, rinse it clean, and replace the door.
  • If you have the budget and you really want to increase your home’s appeal, consider installing a pedestal sink. They are very popular with buyers right now, and they make the bathroom seem larger by freeing up space.
  • Fresh flower arrangements do a lot for a bathroom, both in appearance and aroma.

Remember, when potential buyers tour your home their agents will probably be whispering “kitchens and baths” in their ears. So when staging your home to sell put some extra effort into those bathrooms. Your motto is clean, bright and luxurious.

How to Make a Beautiful Weather Vane From Junk

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Making yard art is a great way to express your creativty, decorate your homestead and recycle old things you no longer use. Here’s how I used a bunch of spare parts to make a weather vane for my property.

I’d been impressed for years by weather vanes I’d seen around the country. So one day I decided to fire up my welder and build a weather vane from the junk I had lying around the ranch. As I have one of the finest collections of junk in the area — much to the dismay of my wife — I had and have plenty to choose from.

The first thing to build was a base that would fit the peak of the barn. The base was an old piece of 3-inch angle iron about 4 feet long with two pieces of 2-foot-long bed-rail angle iron welded perpendicular to the center. As our barn is oriented true north and south, I simply cut out letters for each wind direction from an old truck hood and welded them to the appropriate piece of angle iron, according to the way it would sit atop the barn. I welded two braces to the center of the base to stabilize and secure it to the roof. It is important that the base be level so that the center of gravity is perfectly centered.

The next step is to weld or attach an old front-wheel spindle to the center of the base. This is what the upper part of the vane will rotate on. A front-wheel spindle and hub, properly packed with grease, is probably the best set of bearings you could obtain for this purpose and will last for years with little or no maintenance. I then cut out the center of an old wheel that matches the bolt pattern of the hub. The upper part of the vane will be mounted on this, as it allows the weather vane to be bolted together into two parts for ease of installation.

Weld a short piece of hollow driveline, with the solid spline shaft part pointed upward, to the wheel center. Tack-weld a good secondhand thro-out bearing around the spline shaft that will carry the wind cups. The bearing will allow the wind cups to rotate independent of the rest of the vane. It is important to mount the cups on a ring that clamps to the bearing, either by bent tabs or bolts, as welding them to the bearing itself will warp and ruin it.

via motherearthnews.com

Why Your Newsletter Incentive is Repelling People

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This guest post is by Amy of Harrisonamy.com.

We’ve seen recently how you can help pay the rent using your email list, so making sure that as many people as possible sign up is critical to increase your earning potential.

Most bloggers know that one way to encourage people to sign up to their blog is to offer an incentive. Some kind of free report, or ebook or other gift that is a tempting reward for a visitor to transform into a newsletter subscriber.

But having a gift isn’t enough. And what’s more, all free gifts are not created equal.

If you’re struggling to create your incentive, or your incentive doesn’t seem to be converting well, read this article. We’re going to look at how to quickly create an incentive that works as hard as possible to get you the right audience—and get them wanting your freebie.

Don’t give them what they need

It goes without saying that your freebie needs to be valuable to the customer, but giving too much can overwhelm them to the point that they can’t be bothered to sign up for it. Even if it’s something you know they desperately need.

For example, let’s say you run a blog that teaches people how to create a business from making homemade gifts. You know that people who come to your blog really need to know about how to sell their gifts, the best places to source materials, and a great-looking website to showcase their designs.

So you decide your incentive is going to be an auto-responder course over ten lessons, covering a different business foundation subject in each lesson.

Sounds great. Sounds useful. And it would be.

But it also sounds like a heck of a lot of work, which means you’re more likely to procrastinate over it. And it doesn’t take into account what most visitors want when they come to your site.

They want something quick that can potentially solve a problem there and then.

So don’t base your sign up incentive on what they need, base it on what they want.

Make it quick (to create and consume)

Valuable content that can be applied straight away is a very attractive offer for someone with limited time, but with a problem that you can solve.

Think about the kind of quick freebies you’ve signed up for in the past. Which ones have really stood out to you as being valuable?

It’s probably one that solved a specific problem there and then. So you might want to reconsider developing an in-depth product, report, or course for this kind of freebie.

What problem do you pick to solve?

With your visitors all having slightly different interests, and with you knowing so much about your chosen subject, how on Earth do you decide what problem to solve, and what kind of freebie to give away to encourage people to give you their details?

Well you might be surprised what “off the top of your head” knowledge you have that is valuable for your audience’s most common kind of problem.

To identify the perfect subject for your sign-up incentive , the first step is to write down the top five problems you see your audience having.

Ask yourself why your audience is coming to your site and what information are they looking to learn.

For example, if you teach social media marketing for small online businesses, your customers might be coming to you because they want to:

  • get more clients
  • build brand awareness
  • improve customer loyalty
  • increase viral marketing for the company
  • learn more about social media for businesses.

Once you have your top five, pick the one problem that you feel 70-80% of your target market is having. Let’s say in this instance it is: “getting more clients.”

Now you ask: what are the most common questions or problems surrounding this problem in relation to your business?

For “getting more clients through social media,” the most common questions might be:

  • How can you use social media to get clients?
  • What are the most popular social media sites for businesses?
  • How do I find my target market using social media?
  • What is Twitter and can I convert customers with it?
  • Is FaceBook advertising worth the investment?

Now you have five starting points for possible products, which are probably quite “basic” questions for you, but really useful to your customers.

For each of the above, you could create one of the following products for your sign-up incentive:

  • 10 ways to attract clients through social media
  • The top five social media sites for business (and how to use them for your business)
  • 12 steps to simple market research using social media
  • Understand how Twitter can add to your profits (in under 20 minutes)
  • 7 ways to profit from Facebook advertising

The incentive doesn’t have to be a lengthy report. In fact, checklists, bullet points, simple steps, and quick how-to guides are very attractive for people who are interested in your subject area, but want a solution there and then.

If you create your incentive this way, you’re coming from the core problems your target market is probably always going to have, and you’re giving them a short, sweet fix that makes them more likely to sign up for your content.

That means they can become more familiar with your expertise, and are likely to remember and recommend your site because of the instant value they received in your newsletter incentive!

What about you? Have you experimented with sign up incentives? What have you found working for you? What has been your favorite sign-up incentive that you’ve registered for?

Amy is a copywriter for entrepreneurs and in addition to writing for clients, she coaches others to smash through their copy obstacles and get their message out to their audience. She provides free copywriting and content marketing advice on her website Harrisonamy.com

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