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Amazon Webstore Google Analytics

Andy Brudtkuhl — Mon, 06 May 2013 03:34:30 +0000

Installing Google Analytics on Amazon Webstore is pretty easy. Add a couple more steps and you’ll be doing some advanced analytics like tracking funnels, conversions, ad performance, and more.

How To Install Google Analytics on Amazon Webstore

Step 1: Setup Google Analytics

Step 2: Enter Google Analytics URL into Amazon Webstore Analytics Widget

That’s it – you are all set.

Let me know below if you want learn about tracking funnels, ad performance, and other advanced Google Analytics and Amazon Webstore integration techniques.

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Amazon FBA Labels

Andy Brudtkuhl — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 03:49:14 +0000

Earlier this year we started using the Amazon FBA service to handle inventory for a Jambox Case. In order for Amazon to manage your inventory, each unit must be labeled so their warehouse can easily find and ship your orders.

“Each unit must be labeled so that the correct item can be picked from inventory in our fulfillment center and shipped to your customer. Labels also help in tracking units you have in inventory at our fulfillment centers.”

Amazon provides a labeling service that costs $0.20 per unit. If you have a lazer printer, you can use these printable labels for Amazon FBA you can print your own for about $0.01 per unit. If you are doing high volume inventory this may be worth the price, but in many cases you can do the labeling yourself to improve your margins.

Amazon FBA Labels

Amazon FBA Label Service

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Cheap Printable Shipping Labels

Andy Brudtkuhl — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:05:40 +0000

I run a few e-commerce sites and hunted around forever to find affordable quality printable shipping labels. I print my own postage to save trips to the USPS so finding something that prints and sticks well was important.

Recently I started shipping a lot of the Jambox Case product so needed high quality shipping labels. After a visit to my local Office Depot to pay for overpriced Avery labels I went on the hunt to find something cheaper but good quality.

Here are the affordable printable shipping labels I ended up using. They work great.

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Best Cycle Speaker Tips

Andy Brudtkuhl — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 22:28:14 +0000

Looking for the best cycle speaker?
If you are an avid bike rider you’ll know that riding while listening to headphones can be dangerous. Many cyclists opt for a clunky speaker that requires a rack system installed on your bike. Check out the best cycle speaker I was able to put together using an iPhone, Jambox, and Bluetooth connection.

Check out this combo to get killer bike speaker action, using a bluetooth speaker, iPhone, and mounting equipment.

Jambox Cycle Speaker

iPhone (or other bluetooth enabled audio device)
Jambox – the best bluetooth speaker on the market
A Jambox Case – for your Jambox bike mount
A Rokbed v3 Bike Mount (or other iPhone bike mounts)

How to mount your iPhone to a bike

How to mount a Jambox to a bike

Other cycle speaker options

The Sound Shell is a great bike speaker options that works with iPhones. If you are in the market for a dual purpose cycle speaker and bike light, check out the Syba Bicycle Bluetooth Speaker. It also uses Bluetooth to create a wireless connection between the speaker and your smartphone.

How do you listen to music on your ride? Let us know your best cycle speaker setup in the comments!

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Light Bulb To Launch In A Weekend

Andy Brudtkuhl — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:49:50 +0000

Those of you that work with me know I’m obsessed with internet business models. I love the scalability, the science of a conversion, and meticulously tracking funnel metrics. That being said I’m always looking for the perfect niche. Tim Ferris often speaks of “engineering a muse“. This idea of a muse is “a low-maintenance business that generates significant income”. In his case it is funding his lifestyle and in my case it will help fund (and create time for) other startup ideas.

Light Bulb

Just over one month ago my wife was throwing a baby shower for a friend. I was home working and she asked if I could print some things out for her while I was sitting at the computer. She had paid ~$15 for printable baby shower games. Within 30 seconds I had worked out the idea in my head.

I was going to create an online store selling printable baby shower games.

Why? It fits as a good muse because it is

scalable
systematizeable (I can automate myself out of the business)
timeless (baby showers aren’t ceasing any time soon)
a digital product (profit margin will grow to near 100% as it scales)

Back to the computer for some due diligence and market research.

Market Research

This section is going to be an entire post in the future on validating a market or product with a couple hours of research. Gone are the days of focus groups and product development by committee. Within 2 hours I had vetted my new idea. How?

Does a market exist?

I’m often leery of ideas (especially of this nature) that have not been executed online. If someone hasn’t tried something throughout the short life of E-Commerce technology then it is likely a bad idea. My validation? My wife spent $15 on similar products.

Need more validation? Search Google for your product. If there are advertisers there is a market for your product or idea.

What’s the competition look like? Can I do better?

After visiting some of the top ranking baby shower games stores and clicking through on some of the ads I knew I had a chance. Many of the site are poorly optimized and were running generic ads. Most of them did not focus solely on games but other baby shower wares. With a strategic SEO and content plan I knew I could outrank the competition organically. And to get things started I could definitely outdo them with a carefully constructed AdWords campaign.

And I knew we could create better designed games than were on the market.

Testing the market

I simply jumped on one of the best looking keywords, created a highly targeted AdWords campaign and dropped a landing page for free baby shower games. Let’s see what this market has to offer. Plenty, it turns out. All signs point to GO.

Implementation

Once the market was validated the next step was “How do I get this thing running as soon as possible?”. Luckily I run a WordPress consulting company and can build an E-Commerce site on short order. I also run a WordPress hosting service so I had the site up and configured within 4 hours with my prototype product.

Next I found a designer to start on the initial mockups on game ideas.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

All this in one weekend!

One month later we have 8 games in the store, we have generated revenue, and we’ve acquired a few dozen email subscribers. At the current rate of growth we should be profitable by our 3rd month in business. All from a light bulb idea and a few days worth of work…

I look forward to sharing my experience and techniques in building this business. Next up …

startup costs
how it took 1 week to realize I was a bottle neck in the business
how I use market research to create products
how I optimized the hell out of my store
getting my first customer
initial roadblocks and how to get over them
how I used social from the start
how I am tracking everything
much much more.

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How I Used Data For Product Development

Andy Brudtkuhl — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 16:38:39 +0000

I shared with everyone my launch of a printable games company and how we found our first niche in baby shower games. As I build this company I have decided to share as many details as I can – from research to revenue (which we finally generated!).

As I mentioned in my lightbulb to launch post, getting the website up (about 4 hours) was the easy part – I build websites every day. The hard part was deep diving into a niche that I knew absolutely nothing about. I didn't even know a market for printable baby shower games existed until the lightbulb flashed. How do you start a business with no subject matter expertise?

I used data. If you follow along with me online you may remember a podcast episode about Data Driven Marketing. The idea is to use data (from analytics, search, social) to identify and execute strategies for a business.

In this case I used data for defining a product development strategy in a market I knew nothing about (more on mastering the unknown later).

How? Well….

Crowd Sourced Data Gathering

As I mentioned I knew nothing about baby shower games when starting this venture – I just liked the model. So where the hell do you start? My first task (and first expense) was outsourcing this initial data gathering. I needed to know what baby shower games are played. I hired a couple researchers on ODesk (you could use Mechanical Turk or CrowdFlower) to source a list of baby shower games from the web.

The cost? Around $10. The Results? Hundreds of baby shower game ideas.

Okay I have data … Now what?

Analyzing Data

I took the list of potential baby shower games and plugged it into Google's Keyword Research Tool. Using this tool I could see which games had the highest demand and lowest competition. Using a few similar metrics as data points I was able to pinpoint the best products to have designed first.

Example: Let's say you have two product ideas… A widget and a watchamacallit. Using the aforementioned tools you figure out that….

Widget: 100,000 Monthly Searches, $1.00 Cost Per Click (CPC), High Competition

Watchamacallit: 60,000 Monthly Searches, $.39 Cost Per Click (CPC), Low-Medium Competition

Which product should you make first? Well, the watchamacallit because the barriers to entry are far less while maintaining a decent amount of search potential.

Validation

If your product idea has less than 1,000 monthly searches – nobody is looking for it. Why create a product nobody wants? For $10 and an hour of research on baby shower game search and advertising patterns I was able to vet my idea. Not bad.

Not only was my idea validated with this research, I was able to create a prioritized list of games to design. I can now create baby shower games that are in the highest demand. That's extremely good information to launch with.

What's Next?

Free is huge (see free baby shower games)
Perfection is the enemy of production (just put something out there)
Getting out of the way (automation)
E-Commerce SEO
Easy mistakes to avoid
Importance of design
Social early and often
AdWords Optimization
What do you want to learn?

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Meetings From Dilbert

Andy Brudtkuhl — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 14:15:41 +0000

via dilbert.com

You have my attention.

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Google Launches New Search Index: Caffeine

Andy Brudtkuhl — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 03:38:13 +0000

via googleblog.blogspot.com

“So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”

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Jeff Jarvis On AT&T’s Bait & Switch

Andy Brudtkuhl — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:40:00 +0000

With GoogleVoice and Skype, I don’t even want your voice minutes, phone companies. All I want is your data. And I don’t even necessarily want data over your stupid caps. I don’t want to worry about it. Selling me a service I have to worry about is bad business.

Can you hear me now?

via thefastertimes.com

Exactly.

Great article …. Tell em Jeff!

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Using WordPress As A CMS

Andy Brudtkuhl — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 15:51:07 +0000

–>

Colin Loretz: WordPress as a CMS

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

–>

via wordpress.tv

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