Blogging Tips from Etsy Labs & The Beatles

Some notes from the Microbranding talk (I just transcribed them this week)

Long Tail Theory
According to Wikipedia.org, "Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of items at small volumes than f popular items at large volumes."
The chart displays sales rank vs. inventory. From what I understood it to be, there are a small portion of companies that sell quite a lot and the 'long tail' is a good majority of the shops but they sell smaller quantities. In order to be a successful microbranded shop, you'd like to be somewhere in the corner of the green colored area so you are selling a nice amount of items and can still keep up with inventory.

New international market: Japan
Why? Japanese youth likes American culture a lot and are big consumers of American products (although that's true for many countries, he only mentioned this one as an example).

Some ideas for a blogger
- Run a "free gift" post to get more viewers (and bring out the lurkers).
- Use Google Translate (done! I got this idea from the Bent Objects blog)
- Create 3 Main Topics for you blog, then 3 subtopics for each. That way, you'll have 9 topics total which should be plenty to work with ( I really should narrow down the number of tags I have ).

Some sites to check out
- www.shapeshifters.net (creative people social networking site)
- www.deviantart.com (artistic community)

- www.dismantleddesigns.com
- www.theblackapple.typepad.com
- www.squiddo.com
- www.englishcut.com

So while researching "Beatles algorithm" in my failed attempt to find some programmatic algorithm to a Beatles song, I discovered this great blog entry: Great Blogging Tips from the Beatles

I found it so awesome - it's written as if the Beatles had had a blog, what would it be like, what kind of thought would go behind it, what would their principles be?

The ones I found most appealing:

Strive for Continual Improvement

"I’m pretty sure if John Lennon was a blogger, his attitude would have been that if his post didn’t come up high in the search engines, then let Google fix their algorithm."

Dream Big - Change the World

And of course, All you need is love :)

Labels: geekery, lecture, photography