SMOjoe.com

David Himel is one of North America’s foremost experts on Vintage Leather Jackets. He’ll tell you that he’s the world’s top expert, and this might be true; his blogspot The Art of Vintage Leather Jackets is currently ranked first on Google for that popular keyword, and receives over 500 visits a day . The blog is great; it’s a campy photo journal full of awesome unique information. It’s cute and catchy, but it doesn’t convert.

David Himel is an expert in an age when the search for experts drives the internet.  He writes bi-weekly posts detailing the construction of replica jackets, including the leather source and treatment, and the name and manufacturers’ address and model numbers of period zippers and buttons. Some of his replicas are sold to celebrities, and his blog highlights the jackets worn in movies. Some costume designers have approached him before their movie begins shooting to consult and secure perfect replicas for historical films (Amelia) and all this adds to his street credentials.

How does David Himel make money from his blogspot?

Right now he doesn’t. One piece of the cash machine is missing - David doesn’t have a buckstop.

David’s blog is under monetized. The Golden Age of Ebay is over and he counts himself among the millions of people who can no longer make a living using the auction sales website. But he continues to maintain an eBay store with about 65 items for sale and a leather repair and assembly shop and storage facility in downtown Toronto, with a large inventory of about 1500 coats.

Look at the Google pay-per-click rate / traffic stats for this popular keyword.  Sixty thousand people went online looking for vintage leather jackets last month, and David’s blogspot is probably the first place they picked to visit.  To summarize, David’s fledgling ebusiness has two out of three components necessary for success – he has merchandise and he has handcrafted excellent social capital that’s now yielding lots of traffic.  But he lacks an effective buckstop, which is what Smojoe calls the mechanism by which readers become buyers.  The only way a visitor can become a customer here is to click a relatively small button in the top corner of the blog sidebar and then travel to eBay, which is not effective, and so his coats remain on the shelf.

What would Smojoe recommend?

On Thursday last week David Himel asked Smojoe a simple question, “how can I best turn this popular blogspot into an ecommerce business?’

I pondered the dilemma… He needs an e-store, but the Blogger software he uses doesn’t give much of an option for that, and the widgets that do exist will cost a % of his revenue.  The problem is that his fun and easy-to-use blogspot is owned by Blogger (which is owned by Google) and so he’s spent almost four years fixing up a piece of online property that he doesn’t own. Now it would be a crying shame to walk away and close this portal forever in favour of another site, even if the replacement comes custom built with a proper payment portal. It might be that Dave will never get back on top of the search rankings again with anything but this blogspot… So what’s the solution?

Smojoe advocates a using David’s campy but popular blog to drive a new e-store catalog website with a small network of affiliate bloggers helping out.

Indeed, what Mr. Himel must do is actually very simple. He should build another website that is a slick e-store with a shopping cart and a proper payment gateway. Smojoe recommends the site open up right into a catalog of colourful vintage leather jackets and merchandise in which every item on every page is a separate URL – that way stories can reference and anchor right to individual pieces that are for sale.

David should keep blogging same as before, but truncate material on the old site, and leave links to MORE on the new site. Reduce frequency of posts to one a month on old blog, and post like a bandit on the new site. The new catalog site should have all new original articles, and lots of period photos and keyword rich content. Smojoe recommends David re purpose some of the articles on the old blogspot and bundle together themes into ebooks with long keyword rich excerpts that can be published again on the new site (where content can be downloaded and sold as an ebook).

David should create affiliate marketing badges and place the biggest and best example in the sidebar of his blogspot. The old blogger blog should be edited full of new text links too – stories and photo descriptions should link deep into the new e-store.  Over time the new catalog website will benefit from the links and attention of the blogspot and it too will rise in prominence.

In addition to this primary feed, the new catalog website can attract other affiliates and pay them a percentage of each sale. I know that 69 Vintage on Queen St here in Toronto now has a blog, and popular individuals like Lisa Charleyboy Urban Native Girl Stuff are always looking for cool fashion to represent. Depending on the split, I’m sure other artists and fashion bloggers would also come on board as affiliates. These people would come in handy to help promote David’s future fashion shows and events.

One thing is certain, David Himel and his blogspot have certainly become a very interesting Smojoe case study and pondering his predicament helps answer the question, how do experts convert social capital into cash? Keep your eye on this guy and his The Art of Vintage Leather Jackets blogspot and let’s see if he takes my free advice.

I hope this is the start of a soon-to-be-popular Smojoe blog series. Actually Sharing Secrets identifies those precious few web thinkers and social media marketers that actually reveal their tactics and give precious glimpses into their marketing practices, and not just positive affirmation or basic explanations of systems that most of us already understand. Too many so called ‘experts’ just regurgitate the page copy that’s found on these sites, without ever trying them or seeing what’s possible.

Let me explain something basic, we all know the question that drives social marketing is ‘how can i get more traffic to my website?’

Answer, ‘increase your website page rank to list higher for more keyword results on search engines’

The next question is ‘How do I do that?’

And that’s where it gets complicated. This is an age of earned media, and when people ask me, ‘where can i find the official manual?’ I shrug and tell them to download mine for $9.70 its as good as anyone elses - better, I get specific.

Today you must earn your media by being socially relevant. And not only do you have to plant your own press, you have to research tips and tricks on how to plant it properly and what solution best fits. There is no textbook for social marketing (but there could be). Although you can follow TechCrunch, Mashable and WebProNews, there is no official source for reliable insights into the Google search algorithm. And that’s because something new happens every day, and something old changes.

Google doesn’t publish details of their algorithm. If there is one company that could issue such Holy writ, it’d be Google. But they don’t say much about their ever changing search engine algorithm because they don’t want to lose a perceived competitive advantage, or engender ‘black hat’ SEO practices.

Google endeavors to preserve the effectiveness of organic search, bless their hearts, and ironically one of the most commonly searched topics is how to do search engine marketing? as people look for someone to lead them in knowledge gathering exercises.

Actually Sharing Secrets identifies those people, one by one, who actually share useful secrets.

Toby Miller: Earlier today I happened across a Ryerson online think tank page, Weekend Pictures.ca which I wouldn’t normally scan. But the link was on Zucket.ca and I was trying the figure out the connection (Zucket was featured here talking about Facebook). That’s when I discovered Toby Miller, author of Global Hollywood. In this video he talks about ‘using social networking tools to sell books’.  And of course I was overcome with curiosity; with a title as direct as that, would he actually reveal any useful tactics?

http://stw.ryerson.ca/others/s7may/literacy.html

And he does! Much to my surprise and delight he does actually speak about how he has hired ‘young social marketers in Montreal’ to create and manipulate MySpace pages and profiles (what we at LifeCapture Interactive used to call banner spam). I know from experience the impressions are massive on this type of marketing, and they can be measured with a simple tracking script, but the actual click through rate is usually quite low. However his book does have the word ‘Hollywood’ in the title…

Here is Toby last fall at an event in Calgary called YouTube, Facebook and Blogs, Do They Matter? Unfortunately I didnt see how it all wrapped up, but I think they panel came out with a ‘yes’.

Toby Miller is actually worth watching, but fast forward a centimeter into video below,

To put this in context, Toby Miller is a social media technologist talking to scholars at a stuffy event at the University of Calgary. Right after he says ‘…In the United States, 49 year olds want to look like 24 year olds’, he postulates that social networking sites harvest data for corporate America to help older people accomplish this primal desire. According to Toby, the principle value for corporations getting involved in social media is surveillance, and not for national security, but for marketing purposes. He goes on to talk about Second Life and other platforms like Last.FM He justifies this position in part by the amount of money paid for these properties versus their actual profitability, among other things.

His second book Global Hollywood 2 got a good review in the UK book world,