Out of my three final exams, I’ve taken the two hardest ones already, leaving one small one for next week. Since this is an ethics exam which I can’t revise for, I’ve finally found a bit of time to do some interesting Coffeesh0p work.

Navigation

If you’ve been on the site before now, you might have noticed the simple breadcrumb navigation at the top of each page under the search box. What we used to have was a simple list of pages all the way back up to the home page.  It helps not only with navigation, but also with search engine optimisation, linking the site together to give a much more structured feel. One problem though – it looked totally shit.

Today, I gave it a bit of a facelift:

As you can see, it now looks like it’s supposed to be there, instead of like it was tacked on as an afterthought. It also shows a drop down list containing all the subcategories for a particular category, hopefully making navigation a bit easier too as well as linking the site up more solidly.  I’ve also moved the search box to the left and brought the category jump menu up beside it to make more room. Unfortunately, it only works on the shop pages for now. I think a good potion of tomorrow will be spent applying it to the rest of the site.

Advert

I also got a bit of time this week to have a proper go on Photoshop in order to design an advert for the next edition of Wasted comic. We advertised in the first issue, but a) that advert looked worse and b) our old Photoshop guy no longer works for us, giving me the perfect opportunity to flex my skillz:

What do you think? Your criticism is more than welcome – it’s the only way I’ll learn.

Competition Winner

Oh, and before I forget, the final competition winner is Virusboy. Your pills will be shipped on Monday!

Everyone else: Don’t be too disheartened. I’ve got some more stuff to give away in the near future, I just need to decide on the most awesome way to give it away, so stick around!

So, I was having a browse round Drug Education News – a blog all about the Drug Education Forum, who are apparently “an umbrella body for national organisations committed to improving drug education in England” – and came across a post about legal highs. Admittedly, this is a repost of a member’s briefing from DrugScope, so not their own words, but that’s not why I have a problem with them. Have a read:

Devon-based Children’s Society projects are concerned about an increase in the availability of these [legal highs] substances and the use of them by young people in their area. This increase in use has been mirrored by recent articles in national press and sector publications, putting forward a range of limited research and anecdotal evidence – with particular attention paid to a few users who have experienced sometimes lethal side effects.

Steven Hawker, Young People’s Drug and Alcohol Worker at The Children’s Society Checkpoint project in Torquay, expressed concern about the way young people view these drugs and the way professionals communicate about them. “While we feel there is some advantage in highlighting specific risks and effects of individual legal highs, it concerns me there is very little literature highlighting the general risks of these substances”, he said. “Of particular concern are inexperienced substance users who may take the view that legal equals safe and that this may impact on them consuming potentially large amounts of stimulants or hallucinogens.”

The Children’s Society would be interested if any organisation has:

• produced any awareness campaigns in their area
• seen significant rises in use
• become aware of specific negative effects of particular drugs.

The Children’s Society would also welcome any thoughts on how young people should be made aware of the potential risks of legal highs, particularly substances where research into the risks of short and long-term use is limited.

Fair enough, sort of. These people are concerned for their kids, but that still doesn’t excuse the hypocrisy subtly interwoven into the fabric of their terror. I’m all for education, raising awareness and semi-anonymously informing people of their mistakes via the internet, so I thought I’d post a little comment outlining my opinion. It went something like this:

What about alcohol and tobacco? By the same reasoning employed above, their legality also suggests to kids they’re safe. In a similar vein, no respectable retailer of these legal alternatives to illegal drugs would sell them to anyone under the age of 18.

I agree that more research into these types of substance should be done, so that we know what’s safe to take and what isn’t. I can assure you though, that acohol and tobacco would end up much further towards the unsafe end of the spectrum.

Am I being a dick? No. Am I being beligerant? No. Am I furthering discussion on the topic? Fuck yeah! So why the hell did they delete my comment?! It seems to me the Drug Education News blog (notice I’m not linking to them for this very reason) simply do not want to listen when it comes to differing opinion.

And here was me thinking education was all about listening to what other people had to say in order to reinforce or refute your current understanding. At the very least, they could have let the comment stay and responded to it with a well reasoned argument about why I’m wrong. A pretty poor show, overall.

Blog Commenting In General

Commenting on blogs is a great idea if you have a site or blog of your own. The majority of blogs allow you to leave your URL along with your comment, allowing visitors to click through to your site, particularly if you have something interesting to say. Unfortunately for this reason, a comment system is subject to a lot of spam, but plugins for your blog can help stop those. This blog gets tonnes of spam comments from unrelated sites, but interestingly, I do get the ocassional legal highs site in there. It’s just a shame that they leave the same spammy message on multiple blog posts that add nothing to the discussion. As a result, they end up being marked as spam not only by me, but any subsequent blog that uses this plugin! NextGenBuzz & SalviaSociety are two examples – their aggressive spam tactics have ended up not only being a waste of time, but actually hurting their site’s reputation. Great going, guys!

Competition Winner

This week’s Hypnotic Pills winner is BFitzpatric! Please email me back or comment on this post before May 9th to claim your prize. Also, last week’s winner never got in touch, so I still have one more pack to give away! For details on how these can be yours, check out this post.

Oh, and it was my birthday yesterday. Huzzah!

So, I’ve been playing around with Excel (read: procrastinating) a lot lately and produced these lovely looking graphs. Since they do look ever so lovely, and without revealing too much, I thought I’d post them here, along with a healthy dose of good advice. Also, the second two show the first month’s results from my little article experiment.

The X axis represents the months from Jan 2007 until Dec 2008. The extrapolated curves of best fit do not take into account December’s data.

I guess this first graph shows we’re here to stay – this is the number of orders placed with us each month. While the number of orders placed last month is a little lower than November’s data, this is consistent with most other e-commerce sites, who all see a slump in traffic (and sales) over the holidays. Who’d have thought people would prefer to spend time with their families rather than shop online? The same thing also occurs during December of last year. Still, not bad for a recession.

This graph shows overall traffic to the site. Internet marketeers may be interested to learn that the distinct peaks represent my limited foray into social bookmarking. Notice how the same months in the previous graph do not show any similar increases in the amounts of orders placed. This just goes to show that social bookmarking is shite for e-commerce.

One final point: traffic dropped significantly in December – far more than you’d expect over the holidays. Fortunately, this was exactly as I’d planned. December was when I moved all the old articles over to this blog, and articles are big traffic-generating machines. Take note, budding marketeers – article marketing can really drive traffic to your site! Compare the month of December on both graphs so far though – while traffic dropped significantly, the number of orders decreased only slightly. There are also plenty of other things you can do with old static content, so make sure you don’t let things stagnate.

This final graph shows each month’s conversion rate – that is, the percentage of visitors who go on to place an order. December’s data shows a significant increase as soon as I moved those articles, which just goes to show – traffic isn’t everything! It surprised me that before then, the conversion rate was still continually on the rise. I must have been doing something right. Unfortunately though, many, many things can affect your conversion rates, none of which have a particularly large effect. Here’s a great post on 108 ways you can increase your conversion rates.

Why I should Be Worried

There’s no doubt about it – our little hobby is kicking some ass, but it’s not all good news. More orders means more work, and right now me and my girlfriend are in the last term of our final year at university, so time is not something we have in abundance.

We might have to hire someone…

As Coffeesh0p gets bigger and bigger, I’m getting more and more worried about promoting the psychoactivity of the plants we sell. Recently, the hyped up sales talk all over EveryoneDoesIt has resulted in them removing Salvia divinorum from their shop, so in response, we’ve slapped “not for consumption” labels in a few of our product descriptions. One problem still remains however – our articles section, which contains cannabis recipes, extraction teks and info on proper usage. While I’ve always been a supporter of providing proper information, these articles are making me more and more uncomfortable as the days flit by. As any Internet marketer should know, article writing is one great way to boost traffic and get links back to your site, but any Internet marketer worth his salt also knows, you shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.

The substantial traffic gained from these articles is also pretty poor when it comes to e-commerce – people looking for information probably aren’t ready to buy anything, so “convert” poorly. But those information seekers make great blog readers, so moving those articles to this blog makes perfect sense. It’s tempting to look at overall traffic and feel good as you see it increase, but traffic that converts poorly is actually more of a cost than a benefit. More people = more hosting bills!

Over the next week or so, I’ll gradually be transferring those articles onto this blog (with a 301 redirect, naturally), so keep an eye out!

Today, I spent a little time making a couple of changes to Salvia Trip. The number one thing I needed to do was create some kind of spam filter. Initially, I planned on moderating all the experience reports myself, but all the american ones had to wait ages before I got out of bed. This kind of delay isn’t very helpful when there’s community buildin’ to be done. A few days later, I just published them automatically, until someone’s salvia experience could apparently be summed up soley by a list of links. “What a spiritual journey”, I thought. After the second beautiful interpretation via the medium of linkage was brought to my attention, I realised something needed to be done… eventually. Naturally, procrastination took hold, and I resorted to deleting them from the database manually as a quick fix. So today, I put my coding hat on and made a little filter to halt any report containing a link. I’ll then delete all the spam, accept all the legit reports and everybody’s happy.

Since my coding hat was barely on for five seconds, I decided further action was necessary. Other changes include:

• Changing the number of trips/comments on a user’s profile page from six to five, like the front page
• Swapping the order of the most popular trips when browsing – least popular were at the top for some reason…
• Adding a default avatar to profiles without one
• Displaying avatars with all trip reports and comments
• Changing the advert blocks to be a bit more complementary instead of blended in with the text

Here’s the new default avatar, inspired by those next to comments on this blog. You might recognise the salvia leaves from SageWisdom – I painted in the leaves, spread them further apart and used them as a pattern for the background.

My head is now sufficiently toasty, so off comes the coding hat and on goes the relaxin’-in-front-of-the-telly poncho. We have some powerful new smoking mixtures to try out…

This has been my avatar for as old as I can remember, when the only thing worth doing with the Internet was downloading single mp3s and learning how to blow things up. As such, the only copy I have is the 80*80px shitty quality jpeg you see here.

It’s now 2008, and as the web becomes a bigger, better place full of rich media and interactivity, most forums have evolved to allow avatars bigger than 3kB. So, to be ready for the next several years haranguing people over the Internet, I figured I’d need to “upgrade”.

An hour or so with Photoshop later, enter Mark II. Bigger, better, certainly more badass AND wearing some kind of hippie T-shirt!

There is a reason to all this though. As every niche marketer should know, posting on forums and being part of a community is a great way to get your name out there. A lot of people don’t do this for one reason or another; maybe they don’t have the time, or maybe they just can’t stand talking to their “key demographic”. Whatever the reason, they should be getting involved. Forums can be both entertaining and worthwhile for your business. They help build your brand, and a signature link under each of your posts will go a long way toward getting you more traffic and getting you noticed by the search engines.

Another reason I wanted to make this new avatar is because my forum profiles needed updating anyway. What with the recent changes I made to Coffeesh0p, a great number of my signature links were pointing to the wrong place! If I was going to have to change my profiles anyway, I may as well update my avatar!

Of course, some may argue that I was merely procrastinating…

Check out my new SupaFly Agaric incense burner! Quite possibly the most tackiest piece of crap ever made, but at only £6.50, can you really complain? My girlfriend and I found this wonderful item at Birmingham’s German Christmas Market, where ample hot dogs and beer in expensive looking glasses divert your attention away from the fact that everything is mass produced in Nepal. Basically, the big mushroom at the back lifts off, revealing a metal plate upon which you place a burning incense cone. Pop the mushroom back on and smoke billows from his chimney. That’s right, his chimney. Not only does this anthropomorphised Amanita muscaria specimen possess a face complete with moustache, he also appears to be a dwelling of some description, equipped with a chimney and a door. What might live in there, I have no idea. Regardless, this was almost the best purchase ever, second only to the £3 spent on deep fried cheese minutes before.

Inspired by this epic work of art, I decided to get A-Muscaria.com back online after a few weeks of down time. This is a small experiment of mine I set up to compete with myself. The ground fly agaric and soma spliffs on there are the same as those listed on Coffeesh0p, just priced slightly differently. There’s a couple of pretty interesting articles on there too about fly agaric basics and history – did you know the laypeople of eastern Siberia would consume their shaman’s piss for it’s psychoactive constituents? You do now!

Hopefully, I’ll have some whole amanita muscaria caps on Coffeesh0p soon. The ground caps still do the trick, they just don’t look anywhere near as cool…

It’s been a long couple of weeks. Not only did new images need making for all of my sh0p’s categories, but several important deadlines are looming just around the corner.

As the title says, I finally finished recategorising all our products. Take a look! I dare say my photoshop skillz are improving daily. I’ve basically reorganised the entheogens and legal highs into their own separate categories, so people who want to legally batter themselves don’t try smoking some dream herb and wonder why they’re not stoned off their arse. Also DIY shamans tend not to like the association between their sacred plants and other, more suspect “herbs” like Spice. And rightly so, hence the reshuffle. The next big step will be to expand both sections considerably.

For the legal highs section, we should be getting some new big brand smoking mixtures and maybe some more pills. We’re hoping to expand the entheogens section the most though. We’ve got loads of new herbs coming, as well as some extracts of a couple we stock already. Very exciting, but a lot of work! Writing descriptions and taking multiple pictures of everything is probably a more daunting task than rearranging the categories in the first place.

I’m still not ready to properly advertise on E-Dot. I want to make sure everything’s top notch before I post about Coffeesh0p there.

I’ve also finally rearranged the legal pills by effect rather than by brand. Initially, when I only stocked two or three brands, it made sense, but now we have so many! Someone who’s never encountered legal pills before may be put off by having to chose by brand, and would instead prefer to buy a product based on it’s advertised effect. Hopefully now, we can expand these effect categories indefinitely.

What better way to celebrate all my hard work than a pack of Trip E, a pack of Spice Diamond and a massive free fireworks display!

On a more technical note, the easiest way I found to move all the products around on the site is to first calculate what the product’s URL should be based on it’s product ID (also in the URL). If the script isn’t at the calculated URL, it then forwards you to it using a 301 (permanent) redirect. Hopefully then the search engines will consider the new URLs as the original products and not new ones, so they’ll retain their rankings. As well as the search engine benefits, anyone that clicks an old link from another site to get to yours will be redirected to the URL behind the scenes. This way certainly seems more simple than filling your htaccess file full of redirects!

In other news, I’m thinking of running a competition here on this blog very soon. I have some things to give away…

Coffeesh0p has gotten bigger and bigger over the past couple of years, stocking more and more stuff. Deciding where it all goes is now more important than ever. Organising the product categories – the virtual floor plan – is increasingly important for both ease of access and intuitive shopping, as well as optimisation with the search engines. I think it’s about time for a big reshuffle!

Initially, Salvia Divinorum was the only category in the sh0p, since I made my own extract, but since then we’ve added tonnes more. The next were probably the Legal Pills and Entheogens categories. Here was the first problem – Salvia Divinorum IS an entheogen, so where the hell do I put it? Since then, I’ve always had Salvia in it’s own top-level category, as that’s always been our product of choice. The majority of visitors come looking for salvia, and the Salvia category, being a top-level category, always does well in the search engines. I’ve always been scared to move it to it’s rightful place within Entheogens in case it suddenly dropped out of the search results and I had to get another job for a bit.

But now, we sell a lot of stuff! Currently, we still have a top-level Salvia Category, along with Entheogens & Herbal Highs and Legal Pills. There are more, but these are the three I’m thinking of shuffling up a bit. When these categories first started out, I wanted to keep everything in tablets in it’s own category and anything herbal in the Entheogens & Herbal Highs category, regardless of what it was. We now stock various popular smoking mixtures, many of whom don’t list their ingredients so are arguably herbal, along with a number of entheogens, like Guarana, that I wouldn’t necessarily call a herbal high. We also have a rather out of place Snuff category, putting herbal Kanna side by side with Snow Blow herbal cocaine.

So, this has been getting at me more and more recently. Also, it might piss off some of the serious herbalists, who get personally offended to see their entheogen of choice listed as a herbal high, but that’s not all. When I started Coffeesh0p, I had no idea about SEO, keyword research or anything else in that field. I figured “hmm, herbal highs sounds like a cool category name”. It turns out, that phrase, while cool, does not get a lot of searches compared to “Legal Highs”. A big reshuffle now might result in more traffic for this search term.

So, here’s what I’ll do. Raw herbs on their own will go into a new Entheogens category, including Salvia. Anything more recreational, like Spice smoking mix, Snow Blow and all of the legal pills section will go under a new Legal Highs category. Thrilling, I know!

But here’s the fun part. I decided it would be a good time to funk up the front page somewhat. Maybe remove those massive ads in place a bit more colour for each category. Here are a couple of new banners I’ve been playing round with this afternoon.

Yes, I did painstakingly lay out all of those herbs, then separate them all again at the end.

One more tip incase you ever need to change your website architecture – make sure you correctly redirect your old URLs to the new ones. The best way I’ve found is to use 301 redirects with the .htaccess file, or make sure your categories and products “know” where they’re supposed to be, and if they get called anywhere else, they can 301 redirect themselves to the proper location. The 301 redirect tells the search engines this is a permanent relocation, and so any benefit received from links pointing to your old pages will carry over the new ones.

Recently, everyone’s favourite Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, set a few disturbing proposals to House of Commons, following advice by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (AMCD), regarding the sale of cannabis seeds and smoking paraphernalia. Let’s have a little look, shall we?

The AMCD recommends investigating:

“whether it might be practical to bring cannabis seeds within the scope of the Misuse of Drugs Act”

and also recommends that:

“The Home Office should assess the extent to which the trade in cannabis paraphernalia might be more effectively regulated”.

So wait, everyone ignores the AMCD unless they agree with your agenda? Brilliant! As if stopping the sale of king-size rizlas will result in massive, country-wide decline in pot smoking, anyway…

Enter The ATA

Naturally, this dick-move is a very unsettling one for anyone that sells cannabis seeds, or smoking paraphernalia, such as myself. Enter the ATA – the Alternative Trade Association! They describe themselves as a “coalition of UK wholesalers, attempting to stop these misguided proposals becoming law“. They not only provide you with a weath of information about the subject and how to keep your business safe (including updates about any future legislative changes), but they also have plenty of retained legal muscle to defend any action taken against the industry.

They’re also setting up a website, Smoke-Aware.co.uk, to educate people on the risks of smoking and the problems drug use can bring. On top of that, they’re also apparently planning to launch some kind of media campaign, but I’m not too sure what that will involve.

For a start, it’s great to see people not lying back and taking this crap, so well done ATA! Let’s hope we can get everyone involved – surely there’s strength in numbers? With any luck, these ridiculous proposals will be nipped in the bud before our government start looking any more stupid.

For any internet-marketing-savvy wholesalers out there, signing up gets you a search engine friendly, high quality link directly to your site. That can only help you in the search engines. On the downside, they do require all members to link back to them, which automatically makes me somewhat wary. But for all you get in return, one link back isn’t going to hurt.