Zebra Kick Blog
This post was written by Matt Reed, a good friend of Zebra Kick. It was great to hear that his website is dong well so I asked him to write a bit about the progress of his top bar hive website. You can read more of his posts at his Bee Keeping Blog.
Our business grew from a hobby in our garage, shipping a few top bar hives per month in December 2009, to a full-fledged, alternative beekeeping supplier in March 2010, shipping more than 4 dozen hives monthly, almost entirely due to Search Engine Optimization and Google Ads. Alternative beekeeping — top bar beekeeping in particular — is a niche market, with many options for a simple, cost-effective search marketing campaign. Making use of a technical background, a minimal ability to perform SEO on our Joomla-driven website, and some glaring failures by the competition in our SEO market, we were able to quadruple sales with an investment of less than $150 per month.
We started with a Google Ad budget of $50 per month in conjunction with Google Analytics, monitoring the results and adjusting the ads accordingly. During that time we also began researching SEO and tweaking our website to improve our SERP for our most important search terms. We chose very specific search terms in order to improve our conversion rate and reduce wasted ad clicks. At the same time, we also began making helpful posts on relevant blogs and forums, as well as working with related sites to swap links. The results came quickly, as we saw our Pagerank rise from 1 to 4 in a matter of only a few months. By March we were seeing over 6,000 unique visitors per month.
Today the competition is increasing, but our early and continued foray into SEO continues to give us the edge over competitors. While we’ve been busy the past few months, we cannot stress enough the importance of fresh content through blog posts, and outreach through Facebook, Twitter and other marketing avenues. We monitor daily our most important search terms through Google Alerts, and work diligently to stay current with trends in our industry and the campaigns of our competition. As traffic, sales and our ad budget increase proportionately, we continue to monitor our Google Ads, SERP, and content to ensure there are no issues.
At the same time that we are running an online campaign, we are beginning to focus more on local advertising through numerous avenues, and it is paying off. A combination of word-of-mouth, donations to sustainability-focused non-profits and locally targeted Google Ads have shown an overwhelming increase in local interest. It has been an interesting and amazing jump from a small online store to a viable business that is beginning to ponder the idea of a brick and mortar storefront.
Thanks to a little elbow grease, a monthly-coffee-budget-worth of Google Ads and some Search Engine Optimization, we believe Bee Thinking will grow to be a significant portion of our family’s income, if not our sole income in the next couple years!
Matt Reed
Bee Thinking
Our front office got some new artwork back in November. Alongside our sister company Monster Media, Inc., with whom we share the building, our company’s name and logo was added to the window.
Our logo being added to the front window
Another discussion born from a question at stackoverflow. Today I’m laying out the differences between object literals and constructed objects, when to use which, how to get the most out of them, and a few other tricks along the way. Let’s get started. Read Entire Post
Last week while searching for “Fallout 3 multiplayer” I noticed some really cool results in Google. In the image below you can see that the Wikipedia result has in-site links to subsections of the page. As if this was not impressive enough to see, the following result included a “Jump to Is there a multiplayer mode?” Why is this so awesome? This is another step toward Google supporting onsite semantic markup. What microformat support could be next?
I was logging into my YouTube to upload some videos and stumbled upon this in my feed from Google. Still only has 1k views at the time of this posting, but it’s sure to get picked up soon.
Basically this is how Google records street views for Google Maps on streets that can’t be driven on. Pretty cool huh?
Here are a few links if you found this tricycle interesting.
Video explaining Street View (also embedded in link above).
I was reminded of this age old marketing strategy when I stepped into Bamee Thai Noddle Shop in Chicago’s Lakeview district for a quick bowl of Tom Yum soup. The place was empty at 1:30pm, but looked good. I was immediately seated at the most visible table from the street. Whether or not he realized it, this restaurant owner was using me as a marketing piece, showing passersby that the shop was doing business. Read Entire Post
Somehow, when I opened up my email and saw Hannah Montana in the latest eblast from Redbox, I just knew I had to take a screen shot. Here are a few observations about Redbox and their email campaign that bother me a bit. Read Entire Post
Recently, we rolled out an installation of Magento 1.3.2.3 for one of our clients but ran into small a problem along the way. Being an established open source project, I initially assumed that the error was my own when I found that the onepage checkout process would stop working half way through (step 3 to be exact). However, after digging around, I found that the problem was actually a bug in Magento’s JavaScript. The bug has been reported and will hopefully be fixed soon, but in the meantime, here’s the fix and how I found it. Read Entire Post
I recently contributed this little tidbit to stackoverflow’s Hidden Features of JavaScript and thought it would be best to elaborate it on it fully. In a recent client project, I needed a generic method to produce singleton instances of interface widgets. This is the method that I came up with and it works pretty well. Before we begin, these are not singleton classes in the normal sense, but a generic singleton factory. Read Entire Post
In June, one of our SEO clients had some development work done by a third party vendor. Once the site update was launched, it was our job to monitor the changes in indexing and make sure that everything was running smooth in the engines. The work that had been done was on an e-commerce site, so you can imagine how important it is that things go smoothly.
After a couple weeks of collecting data we realized that our sales numbers were low. Given our recent increase in traffic we knew something was wrong. So, time to dig into Google Analytics. Read Entire Post