Contextual Commerce
Independent web log publishers are less interested in building a staff to sell advertising for their publication.
Frankly, they don't need to in today's world of Google ads, affiliate programs, and Web services such as those pioneered by Amazon.
For two entrepreneurs who have already gone through the highs and lows of creating a multi-million dollar, 100 person company, we couldn't be more content and grateful to enterprises like Google, Commission Junction and Amazon. We've already learned the pitfalls of taking venture capital money.
At this age and more discerning stage of our lives, we want to be influencers in the world we create, and be home for our kids when they walk through the door.
With just two people and four independent contractors, our online "rugged elegant" community has enabled us to create a sustainable business -- because our audience not only relates to but actually buys the products we promote in association with our stories.
In one year we were able to multiply our business -- ten-fold, in both the traffic to our site and the revenue to the company.
At the end of 2003, three months after launching Rugged Elegant Living, our traffic was 32,000 unique visitors a month.
The average traffic in October, November and December 2004, grew to 360,000 unique visitors a month and almost twice as many pageviews. Revenue from Amazon to Rugged Elegance grew to over $100,000 in the fourth quarter while revenue from Google AdSense and other affiliate programs was a fraction of that.
In the case of Rugged Elegant Living, we target like-minded people who are interested in leading healthy, adventuresome, soulful lives.
We focus on writing about "rugged elegant" people, places, products, performances, prose and photographs.
If you want to be inspired or get inspiration to inspire others, you've come to the right place.
We write about only that which is inspirational and we always link to at least three products that relate to our story.
In a world where most publishers' headlines focus on the scandalous it takes a conscientious effort to find the good in a story. But the effort is rewarding.
Rewarding as a publisher.
Rewarding from the standpoint of how to look at and report on life.
And rewarding to our audience who appears hungry for inspiration.
Yes, garbage will always sell. People are naturally drawn to controversy.
.
But if we wrote about John Kerry all day we would be limited to linking only to books about politics and Heinz Ketchup.
Go ahead; you're laughing now. Click on the link. You never knew Heinz Ketchup was a Gourmet Food product available via Amazon. Did you?
The Blogosphere Enters The Limelight
That said, thanks to this year's presidential race in America, blog publishers entered the limelight.
Bloggers were invited, with official media credentials, to both the Republican and the Democratic National Convention.
Since the December 26th tragedy in SE Asia, online readers are relying on their favorite web logs to learn about those giving and positively impacted by last month's devastating earthquake and tsunamis.
Going The Extra Mile
As an online publisher, we try to go the extra mile above and beyond the efforts of the traditional online publisher.
Being a trusted source of information is key.
Each story we write includes at least 3-4 photographs and direct links to the organizations we refer to in our stories. The goal is to give our audience a flavor and insight that other publishers are simply not taking the time to give their audience.
Landing periodically on the Google News Homepage always helps attract a broader audience, as well.
In addition, we strive to save time for our audience by helping them make better decisions faster.
Specifically, this relates to our audience's buying decisions.
Contextual Commerce
In addition to creating unique content and visual images of interest to one's readers REIN's distinctive voice includes directing our audience to specific, unique, thoughtfully selected products related to what we are writing about.
Traditional publishers have had a Chinese wall between their editorial and their advertisers.
Out of necessity, cottage content providers feel less constrained by this Chinese wall.
In addition, they believe they are creating a value add to their content.
And their readers are responding.
The Power of Contextual Content & Commerce
How many times have you watched a television program and said, "I'd love to buy Oprah's favorite things? Or the Boston Red Sox World Series caps that Johnny Damon is wearing?
In the world of the blog this is not only possible, it is proving profitable.
While Google AdSense is one revenue source, it is not the most lucrative.
#1) We reserve a significant amount of real estate on our site for Google's ads. But in the last quarter of 2004, we only generated a small fraction of our revenue via these ads.
#2) The ads do not necessarily match up with the discerning needs of our high-end target audience.
An interesting variation on this whole advertising approach was the focus of a recent column by Internet thought-leader John Battelle in Technology Review.
The Weblog "Blog" Publishing System with Amazon Web Services
Until the fourth quarter of 2004, Rugged Elegance linked directly to Amazon.com to suggest products related to each web log article or story (called a "post" by web log publishers).
For every product we previously linked to directly we received anywhere from 5 - 10% of the sale.
And then along came Amazon.com Web Services.
In an effort to build on our own brand and leverage Amazon's Web services, we created The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace.
This is a web log of products selected by Rugged Elegance and fulfilled by Amazon.
Rugged Elegance serves as the agent between buyer and seller. We do not take title to the goods. We do not have to ship the goods or deal with returns. We simply inspire the order, and Amazon pays us a percentage of the revenue they generate -- albeit only once a quarter.
The Rugged Elegance Branded Marketplace with Most of Amazon's Bells & Whistles
By marrying our branding and the look and feel of our site with our "rugged elegant" selections together with everything available in Amazon's store, we now are able to generate 10% of everything sold through our marketplace.
Previously, we would earn that much for only the product we were promoting.
Any ancillary products sold would generate 7 3/4%.
The difference has equated to thousands of dollars. Many more thousands than the $2,000 it cost Rugged Elegance to integrate Amazon's content and our marketplace web log.
Jeff Bezos, Robert Frederick, Jeff Barr and the entire Web services team were brilliant in being willing to give third party "marketers" the opportunity to sell any and all of Amazon's products.
As an Amazon Affiliate, Rugged Elegance has been able to combine the Web log and Web services in innovative ways for our audience. .
What Does Amazon Web Services Offer?
They offer access to all of Amazon's data and technology including:
- Product Information (including reviews)
- 3rd Party Seller Information
- Customer Created Content
- Amazon's Shopping Cart
How Does Amazon Benefit?
Amazon benefits from this associate in three ways:
#1) They can potentially reach a broader audience through their 900,000 Affiliates of which Rugged Elegance is just one;
#2) They inspire their affiliates to write stories that relate to new products available in their marketplace (e.g., the upcoming 6th Harry Potter book);
#3) Rugged Elegance has also created an e-commerce marketplace of our own which will promote products available through the world's finest boutiques -- starting with San Francisco. These shops are currently profiled in RuggedElegance.com. Products from these shops will be hand selected by Rugged Elegance.
Once these boutique retailers get a taste of the success that can come from marketing their products online, they will likely want to sell most everything in their shop via the Internet. While Rugged Elegance will remain exclusive in its product selections, Amazon, as far as we know, will remain broadly inclusive.
Rugged Elegance will advise their current Select Establishments in San Francisco and eventually those they promote around the world to turn to the Amazon Marketplace to sell as many of their goods that are appropriate.
Once this begins to happen, the largest e-tailer in the world will get even bigger.
Currently, where most of our friends here in San Francisco still think of Amazon as the place to buy CDs and books, thanks in part to third--party affiliates, Internet savvy online shoppers will finally realize that Amazon is also the place to purchase Ralph Lauren Blue Label apparel, $5,000 mink coats, Gucci watches, Sony HDTVs and other high-end electronics, as well as every day basics like Zone Energy Bars and the Panasonic Panasonic ES8092NC Electric Shaver.
Wade Roush, Senior Editor of Technology Review did a fabulous job articulating the direction Amazon is steering the Web services side of their company in the January 2005 edition of MIT's Magazine of Innovation.
His December 31st 2004 article is called Amazon: Giving Away The Store.
It is a must read for all online publishers.
In his article, he says:
Amazon's move also reflects the spirit of the age -- or at least, the spirit among the Web's technical avant-garde.
At the October 2004 Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Bezos said, "Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people; Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers."
We agree.
As Timothy Fredel, my partner and the ceo (chief e-commerce officer) of The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace, who has gone from promoting life sciences to the best things in life said:
When we built the front-end of BioSpace in 1994, we stored all of our data in a SQL-server database with a Cold Fusion front-end.
Today, in order to similarly build The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace we are able to use XML and Amazon Web services to remotely build pages on the fly.
This enables us to present the data in interesting ways for our users.
To take it a step further, we are using the Movable Type publishing system to create commentary about the places we promote and the products we select for our marketplace.
The Movable Type Category feature is used to categorize our product selections in multiple ways (e.g. "rugged elegant" products room-by-room in a house, person-by-person, age-by-age, from one adventure to another).
And this gets to our bottom line which is to help people identify products that help our audience lead the "rugged elegant" lifestyle.
So what is the "rugged elegant" lifestyle perhaps you ask?
Examples of News & Stories Tied to Related Products
On September 14, 2003, an NPR story alerted us to a hot new British artist by the name of Joss Stone. This led Tim to write a brief story about the sixteen year-old jazz artist. Upon completing our story, we linked to her Soul Sessions CD. Since then, we have written at least a dozen more stories and sold hundreds of copies of the 2005 Grammy-nominated artist's first CD by S-Curve Records.
And thanks to Google News Alerts, we were right on top of alerting our audience to the recent release of Stone's latest CD, Mind, Body & Soul.
Google's News Alerts also allow our audience to stay on top of the stories we are inspired to write at least once a day in Rugged Elegant Living, at least once a month in a site called RE: San Francisco, and when the spirit moves us in our economic, political, social, technological web log called The Change Mariner. Next on the docket for kids, parents, teachers and coaches to set up an alert will be a web log created under the auspices of Thrive Foundation for Youth.
The same thing happened with the twenty-something British , jazz pianist with rock star sensibilities, now 2005 Grammy-nominated Jamie Cullum.
By the end of this month, we plan to launch The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace for our "rugged elegant" U.K. audience, which will enable us to sell Jamie Cullum's November 2004 release of Live at Blenheim Palace.
If he is ever in concert in your town, go!
We went to Bimbo's 365 Club in North Beach and saw him perform in front of 600 San Francisco fans. In comparison, he sells out of entire stadiums in Britain. What a sensation!!
One of the perks that has come from writing about these great artists is that today in the mail, we received a sample CD from The Verve Music Group with seven tracks from seven musicians. The Verve labels publishes the very best in Jazz, World, Blues, Children's and others.
The songs on this CD included:
Jamie Cullum's "Frontin'" from the Verve release Twentysomething
Brazilian Girls' "Sirenes de la Fete" from Lazy Lover
Alice Coltrane's "Walk With Me" from Translinear Light
Jesse Harris' "Wild Eyes" from While the Music Lasts
RH Factor's excerpt from "Bop Drop" from Strength
Hugh Masekela's "Grazing in the Grass" from Still Grazing
James Brown's "Your Cheatin' Heart" from Soul on Top
All fabulous music worth introducing to our audience!
On the front page of The Wall Street Journal last Spring, there was a story about a hot product called The Hanky Panky 4811 Lace Thong. We found it inspirational, so we wrote a story of our own, and then linked to Amazon to sell a variety of these thongs. As a result, we have sold hundreds of a number of them. That's a lot of Hanky Panky!
One day, upon looking at our site's traffic log we noticed numerous people were coming to Rugged Elegant Living because of a previous story we had written when Jennifer Hawkins became Miss Universe. We wrote a story about her embarrassing episode in Australia and again linked to our thong selections. As a result, we sold another two dozen thongs.
Call it adventuresome living? Perhaps!
Since integrating Amazon's Web services which enabled us to build The Rugged Elegance World Marketplace, some of our hottest "rugged elegant" products of 2004 were the U2 iPod, the Fire & Ice Grill, and the book called Games Do Count. In each case, we have sold hundreds if not thousands of each of these.
It is gratifying and a helluva lot of fun to know that our audience trusts our editorial judgment and product selections.
Congratulations and thank you Amazon, Google, Movable Type and the world of fellow Web Log publishers who are helping us to inspire others to lead a healthy, adventuresome, soulful, "more luxuriously unpretentious life". Your brilliance ensures that cottage entrepreneurs like us are here to stay. While were at it, our collective efforts promise to make the Internet better for computers.
Sounds like a win, win, win, win, win to me.
Thank you also to Lee Rainie, Project Director from Pew Internet & American Life Project who inspired this story and the one yesterday about the one yesterday about the growth of web log readership in 2004.
Inspire & Be Inspired (R).
Here's to healthy, adventuresome, soulful, "synergistic online" living!
~ Jennifer Carolyn King
P.S. I don't know how all those people writing journals about themselves do it. I am much more comfortable writing stories about other people. Integrating a story that talks about us took me all day to write. I look forward to getting back to writing about other people, places, products, performances, prose and photographs tomorrow.
In the meantime, thanks for listening, as always.
Source of Image at Top of Story: Cover Art for Biz Stone's book Who Let the Blogs Out?: A Hyperconnected Peek at the World of Weblogs
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