Jeff Clark's Blog – Page 7 – Tech, Design, Probably Food

Resources Relating to Value Investing

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date September 2, 2015

Since selling the Berkledome, the wife and I have been more interested in finding a place to save the little bit of profit we got from the apartment. So, I’ve been researching investment strategies.

I started out with the obligatory Warren Buffett advice: “invest your money in low-cost index funds“. In addition to investing my 401k and Roth IRA accounts being in target funds, I put some money over into the VFIAX fund and thought I was good to go.

Then I thought, “but what if that’s not good enough?”.

I was looking for a podcast about “how to invest” and somehow came across a great podcast called InvestED. It’s a podcast hosted by Phil and Danielle Towne, and is essentially a series of recordings of Phil teaching his daughter about investing.

It’s not investment advice, nor do they tell you what to invest in. It’s delivered in a straight-forward “here’s what I look for when I’m considering investing in a company” style, which I love. Go subscribe and listen in order.

One of the tools Phil talks about in the podcast is a website called Seeking Alpha. What a great website. It’s essentially a blog written by various investors about strategies, specific companies or general topics. The best part, though, is that the comments are also written by investors. Which is a great way to get free counter-points from people who are into investing enough to read an investing website and form an opinion. You can set up your preferences to follow certain companies. Then, when an article is posted about that company, Seeking Alpha will send you an email. It’s very easy to lose a lot of time on Seeking Alpha.

Finally, I came across the Buffett FAQ today on Hacker News. It’s a massive list of Q&A transcripts Warren Buffett has hosted in the past, categorized. I haven’t even scratched the surface on the content yet, but if you wanted to take Warren Buffet’s opinion into consideration when deciding to buy an airline company, you could “What do you think of airline industry?“.

Professional Development Workplace Culture

Learning From Amazon’s Culture

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date August 31, 2015

Amazon has been in the news lately about it’s treatment of employees. One of my current obsessions is the impact of a leader’s personality on it’s workforce, and how it is reflected in the company’s workforce, so I’ve been reading everything I can about this.

FastCompany published an article breaking down the six fundamental motives that create a culture. Specifically explaining why people work:

While all of us could list hundreds of unique reasons why we do virtually anything, our research shows most of them can be neatly grouped into six fundamental motives:

Play

Purpose

Potential

Emotional pressure

Economic pressure

Inertia

The first three boost performance, the latter destroy it. Amazon offers a great case study to witness almost all of them play out.

While it doesn’t directly offer a solution, it’s an interesting article that adds fuel to my hypothesis that a company personifies it’s primary leader’s personality.

Tech

Download a Tweeted Image in Original Size

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date August 17, 2015

Are you trying to download a tweeted pic in it’s original size so you can set it as your desktop or phone background image? Here’s how:

Go directly to the specific Twitter status. The URL will look like this: https://twitter.com/CowboyFB/status/632179824811839488
On your desktop computer, right click the image and select “Copy Image Address”
Open a new tab and paste in the URL.
Change the text after the colon from “large” to “orig” and press enter to access the original image.
Right click, choose “Save Image to ‘Downloads’…” and you’re done.

Professional Development Work Hacks

Excel: Remove Everything After a Character (like a question mark, comma or underscore)

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date August 12, 2015

If you’re looking to use Excel to trim off everything to the right of a question mark, including the question mark (useful for trimming query strings off of URLs), you can use the following formula:

=LEFT(A1, FIND("?", A1&"?")-1)

A1 is the cell that contains the original string.

If you want to use this for a non-URL string, replace the ? with the character you’re looking for.

Professional Development Work Hacks

How to Make TextEdit Open With a Blank File by Default

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date February 4, 2015

At some point, Apple made TextEdit start with an Open dialog. This is annoying if you use TextEdit as a quick way to jot down notes (like I do).

The workaround for this is a simple Terminal command. Paste this into Terminal, hit enter, then restart TextEdit:

defaults write -g NSShowAppCentricOpenPanelInsteadOfUntitledFile -bool false

Reading List

Reading Today: December 8, 2014

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 8, 2014

Here’s a list of things I’m reading today.

Startup School Lesson 15: How to Manage
I’ve learned everything I know about managing people directly from bad managers and indirectly from great managers. I read as much about management as I can since there’s only one way to get better at it.

Quit Your Day Job: John W. Golden
Some great tips on how John W. Golden (https://www.etsy.com/shop/johnwgolden) has turned his Etsy store into a viable business. I’m struggling with momentum lately, so hearing these stories helps me realize that quitting is easy, but I won’t create a sustainable business by quitting (or relying solely on Etsy).

Grappling With the Culture of Free in Napster’s Aftermath
We run into this every single day at ATK since there are dozens of free recipe websites. I got my first internet connection in 2001 (post-Napster), so it’s interesting to read how “the Internet” became synonymous with “free”.

Etsy Harbor Hangings Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Increasing Etsy Promoted Listing Impressions, or “Think Like Etsy Searchers” (My Thanksgiving SEO Test)

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 3, 2014

As you may be able to tell from my SEO-heavy reading list a few days ago, I’ve been playing with the SEO on my Etsy business of sealife art, Harbor Hangings.

The big problem was that I was spending time and energy putting together and sharpening new products, but nobody was looking at them!

This is just the paid impressions and even they’re only in the 400’s. The actual listing stats are even crappier: single-digit visits per day.

But then I found the light. I saw the way. I read everything on my SEO reading list and took it to heart. And then this happened:

That’s an 11x increase in promoted listing views!

So what did I do? I thought like Etsy shoppers.

“The Goldfish Vintage-Style Print” became “Orange Goldfish Art – 8×10 Fishing Print Poster Beach Lake House Warming Gift Decor Housewarming Ocean Fish Wall Art Dad Christmas Present“.

“The Pickerel or Federal Pike” became “Blue Northern Pike Art – 8×10 Print Fishing Poster Minnesota Lake House Warming Gift Housewarming Engagement Ocean Art Dad Christmas Present“.

When someone is going to Etsy to look for a unique piece of lobster art, they’re not typing in “The American Lobster”. According to my site search stats, they’re searching for “maine boston lobster print” or “lobster art 8×10” or “framed maine“.

I was getting 0 views because the majority of Etsy engagement (and engagement on the Internet) is search – and I wasn’t helping people find my stuff! The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to appear in result 1 on page 1 of a search that relates to you item. According to this tool to determine Etsy search engine relevancy, I wasn’t appearing in the first 10 pages!

So to increase my search views, I:

Used all 140 characters available to me in my Etsy item title to include phrases people are likely searching for. It appears that Etsy uses the item’s description as the heaviest weighted data source when searching, so fill your title up with search terms! I think it looks spammy, but looking around Etsy (and even at the items that I eventually purchased for myself), the most successful stores are doing it. I have to assume that buyers are used to it.
Take that same, keyword heavy title, and translate it exactly into your 13 listing keywords. It appears that Etsy’s second heaviest weighted data source when searching is the keywords. If your title has search phrases and your keywords match, your listings are going to get a high search score and you’ll appear higher in search results.

Titles and keywords won’t grow your Etsy business entirely, though. According to my short test this week, Etsy also takes listing age into consideration (which opens another whole debate about Etsy activity driving search relevancy). Additionally, I continue to have a problem with people seeing my item in search, but not clicking on it. But more on that in a future post.

Product Management Reading List Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Reading Today: December 2, 2014

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 2, 2014

Three articles I’m reading this morning about search engine optimizzation, A/B testing and user experience.

Google Penguin Nearly Killed My Business
The moral of the story is that there’s no shortcut to ranking well on Google. More so than ever it’s about getting established, reputable sites linking to yours for a good reason.

How Naive A/B Testing Goes Wrong and How to Fix it
I’m in the middle of a couple of A/B and multivariate tests both at my day job and on my Etsy store, so it’s fascinating to hear how others do it and what they’re leaning.

“Invalid Username or Password” Is a Useless Security Measure
Another day-job-related link. We currently tell you if the email is unknown, or if the password is incorrect. Since I’m in a unique position to be both the product owner of our largest online product and the director of customer service, I know first-hand the impact this change has had on customer service contact (40% drop in account-related emails). The developers are concerned that this opens up our site to attacks, but I’m pushing back from a UX standpoint. So obviously I sent this link to them.

Etsy

Does Renewing Your Etsy Listing Give You More Views?

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 1, 2014

Lots of Etsy sellers have recently been de-bunking the myth that listing renewals don’t help your search relevancy. Obviously, we won’t know for sure unless we get an answer from an Etsy developer, but based on one recent datapoint on my store, I’m starting to think that the age of your Etsy listing does actually effect your search ranking.

Case in point. I checked search results for my Etsy store, Harbor Hangings. Didn’t see anything interesting. Then, a few minutes later, I apparently showed up in search results when someone searched for literally nothing:

Screen Shot 2014-12-01 at 11.06.26 PM

Now, I’ve been working (a lot) on my SEO, but even this is too good to be true. Clicking on Blank Search shows me one listing:

The one single listing that I renewed in between search term checks (10-15 minutes, tops), my 8×10 Goldfish Print, is the only listing I renewed today. And is the only listing I’ve ever seen show up for Blank Search. And is no longer available when you submit a Blank Search.

Count my vote in the affirmative that listing renewals helps your search relevancy.

Etsy Harbor Hangings Reading List

Reading This Morning: November 30, 2014

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date November 30, 2014

We spent the last few days celebrating Thanksgiving at my wife’s parent’s house this weekend. This gave me lots of time to tweak and play with all the different levers of my Etsy business, including a major focus on search engine optimization. Of all the articles and sites I read in the last couple of days, here are the three that are most interesting to me:

Are My Listings Relevant?
A tool that will do a search for any term and tell you how relevant your shop is in Etsy searches for that term.

Etsy Relevancy SEO and Stats Explained!
Basic information to make you relevant in Etsy searches.

SEO: Low Views or Keyword Rut?
This is the forums posts that helped me the absolute most. Kelly from KAStylesMasonJars offers up on-demand advice on the keywords and titles you’re using for your listings. I went through page after page of other shop owners asking her what she thought, and she gave them the same advice: your titles and your keywords don’t match, aren’t long enough, or aren’t descriptive enough. Then gave suggestions. I’ll do a write-up on my experience (stats and all!), but to show how effective this is quickly: I had 340 promoted listing impressions before I started executing her keyword and title strategy (about average for Saturday @ 7). I now have 1,402 in less than 3 hours.