Synchronium » Internet Marketing

Squidgy Black

Synchronium — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 22:11:23 +0000

To celebrate the long-awaited return of Coffeesh0p’s Squidgy Black incense, I thought I’d share a nice high resolution photograph of it (click to enlarge):

(Until 3 PM tomorrow (Monday afternoon), we’re giving away 1g samples with all orders over £30)

Post from: Synchronium

Squidgy Black

New Coffeesh0p Logo

Synchronium — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 19:48:37 +0000

While this blog might be getting nice new design in the next few days, Coffeesh0p is being completely overhauled with a tonne of new features, as awesome as they are numerous. I’ll have to detail them all at some point, whether here or on a news post on the site itself, but for now click this link for a little preview of the new logo (Warning: interactively funky):

–> Coffeesh0p’s New Logo <–

Please leave any feedback in the comments below.

Post from: Synchronium

New Coffeesh0p Logo

A Change Of Pace

Synchronium — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 16:46:52 +0000

Or rather a change of pace, a change of content and a change of design.

So far, I’ve mainly written articles with the primary intention of presenting “the facts”, even if you do have to distil them from the murky casserole of terrible jokes, swearing and catpix. These kinds of posts might be about a pharmacological process, a recipe, tek, or perhaps an update on a news story or developing situation, and I’ve tried to write something about once every week or two. The problem is, these kind of posts usually require all sorts of crazy shit like “forethought” and “reading stuff”. It’s not that I’m incapable of such bizarre activities, it’s just that I’ve often got more to say than the time it would take to say it properly. I’ve always felt it necessary to try and cover as much of a topic as I can, while trying to present it nicely as possible, but that level of effort means I can only be arsed only have the time to write articles like that sporadically. As a result, I’ve ended up not bothering to write about a number of interesting topics that perhaps weren’t that big of a deal because there’s not enough time in the day to cover them all “properly”. So, I quit.

Hah. Only joking.

I’m going to try blogging a bit more casually instead. The plan is to write shorter posts, perhaps not going into all the details, or considering all eventualities, or whatever. I might be more likely to just quote the odd article, for instance, or maybe just write down my opinions on something. The upshot is I’m hoping to post more frequently about a broader range of subjects, so everyone’s a winner! That is, unless you hate what I have to say, in which case, why haven’t you fucked off yet?

I’m not giving up writing longer posts altogether though. Far from it! In fact, writing more posts in general will probably encourage me, and I’ve had a few topics in mind for ages.

The next thing I’m changing is the blog’s design.

Probably something like this?

No, nothing that amazing, don’t panic, just a few tweaks here ‘n’ there to find what works best for the largest amount of people. And I’m going to do it with science!

For a while now, I’ve been thinking how long the blog takes to load, especially the front page, and especially for new users with an empty cache. Shaving off a second or two doesn’t sound like a big deal, but you’d be surprised on how much of an impact the speed of a website can have, but it affects almost everything, such as how long people stay on the site, how many pages they view in that visit, how likely it is they’ll pass your link around, how likely it is they’ll buy something and how much they’ll spend (for ecommerce sites) and potentially where the site will rank in Google.

Pages Per Visit vs Page Speed

Have a look at some more graphs ‘n’ charts to see just how much those few seconds matter.

I’ve already gone through the entire blog and compressed the fuck out of every single image, shaving off an entire megabyte in total, but only a fraction of those images are on the front page. Luckily, there’s a few things I can do that will specifically affect the front page:

Display less posts
Display only the first bit of posts (with a “Read More” link to the rest)
Don’t display as many images
Write shorter posts

That last one I’ve already covered, so what about the first three design-related options? Obviously, they’d all reduce load time, and, if I went as far as displaying only the one post’s headline and first three letters with zero images, load time would be minimal, but then no one would stick around anyway. A site needs to be fast, but it still needs some content to keep people engaged.

To find the most effective trade-off, I’ve set up a little experiment… In the marketing biz, it’s called a split test, and it works something like this:

You create several different versions of something — it could be an entirely different page layout or design, or it could be as simple as placing a little button in different places on the same page — and then you randomly assign each visitor to one particular variation (making sure they always see the same variation on subsequent visits). Then you just sit back and watch the data pour in.

After a while, you can then start to compare how each group of visitors behave. Version #3 might keep people on the site for twice as long, but version #2 might see people return thrice as often. When enough data has been collected, hopefully a victor will emerge.

Yesterday, I created six versions of the front page and got the experiment under way. Here are the details:

V1	10 full posts are displayed — this is how it’s been for everyone up to now, so this is the control
V2	8 full posts
V3	6 full posts
V4	Latest two posts displayed in full, next two are max 1300 characters, next two are max 800, rest are 500 max — 15 posts in total
V5	Same as above, but 20 posts (so more of the 500 character excerpts at the bottom)
V6	20 posts again, but only first post in full, next two 1300 characters max, next five 800 max, rest 500 max

Anything that’s not a full post won’t have any images in it either, and older pages (there’s a link to older posts at the bottom of the front page) will display the same as the last post on the front page, so older pages of V1-3 will be exactly the same as the front page, while older pages of V4-V6 will have 15 or 20 posts of 500 character excerpts with no images. Also, the excerpt length is approx, and will (hopefully) round off to the nearest whole word.

When it’s clear that one has performed better than the other, I’ll stop the experiment and implement the winning version for all users. Then I’ll probably test something else. Of course, there’s no guarantee one of them will perform any better, in which case, I’ll pick the one I like best. Whatever happens, I’ll let you know, probably via some off-the-cuff scribble of a post.

… Which is what I was hoping this post would be, but it looks like I’ve ended up writing loads again.

Post from: Synchronium

A Change Of Pace

Best Advert Ever!

Synchronium — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 10:55:29 +0000

My VERY good friend Tim at Just Say Once To Salvia has done something astounding. I don’t know what else to say.

He’s freakin’ tattooed SYNCHRONIUM.NET on his leg.

He’s put these videos up for us all to look at:

How AMAZING is that?! Please visit Tim’s site and his guestbook thingy and show your support!

What a guy…

Post from: Synchronium

Best Advert Ever!

Exams Almost Over

Synchronium — Sat, 16 May 2009 20:24:59 +0000

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!

Post from: Synchronium

Exams Almost Over

Educators Don't Want To Listen

Synchronium — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:37:18 +0000

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!

Post from: Synchronium

Educators Don’t Want To Listen

Coffeesh0p Is Doing Great

Synchronium — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:08:40 +0000

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 herbal highs 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…

Post from: Synchronium

Coffeesh0p Is Doing Great

Keeping on the Straight and Narrow

Synchronium — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 14:08:56 +0000

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!

Post from: Synchronium

Keeping on the Straight and Narrow

Tweaking Salvia Trip

Synchronium — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:44:00 +0000

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…

Post from: Synchronium

Tweaking Salvia Trip

New Avatar

Synchronium — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 14:23:53 +0000

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…

Post from: Synchronium

New Avatar

Synchronium » Internet Marketing

Squidgy Black

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New Coffeesh0p Logo

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A Change Of Pace

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Best Advert Ever!

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Exams Almost Over

Navigation

Advert

Competition Winner

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Educators Don't Want To Listen

Blog Commenting In General

Competition Winner

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Coffeesh0p Is Doing Great

Why I should Be Worried

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Keeping on the Straight and Narrow

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Tweaking Salvia Trip

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New Avatar

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