Amazon and Zappos gets in bed together

I have been a big fan of Zappos since meeting Tony their CEO at the Underground Seminar a while back. Here is a picture of us while playing some spy game at the seminar.

Zappos announced via Tony Hsieh’s CEO Letter, they are now a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon with a share swap deal worth about $800 m in Amazon stock and about $40 million in cash and restricted stock, based on the July 21st closing price. The announcement has given a nice boost to the share price.

This morning, our board approved and we signed what’s known as a “definitive agreement”, in which all of the existing shareholders and investors of Zappos (there are over 100) will be exchanging their Zappos stock for Amazon stock. Once the exchange is done, Amazon will become the only shareholder of Zappos stock.

Amazon share price

This is an interesting transaction and the question everyone seems to asking is why Amazon took this step. In the video that Jeff Bezos shares his thoughts and reasoning behind this move.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA&feature=player_embedded

The main reason can be summarised as follows:

• Zappos has built a unique culture of “Customer Happiness” which has driven their strong revenue growth.
• Zappos has enormous growth potential.
• For Amazon, the Zappos acquisition will return a better ROI on capital than if they had spent the same amount of money on their existing operations. The sweetener is the intangible value of the increasingly strong Zappos brand which corporate financiers call in their valuations, the goodwill factor.
  Amazon/ Jeff may learn a thing or two from Zappos/ tony about the use of Social Media for customer service and communication with their customers.
  For Zappos on the other hand, they get access to Amazon’s technology and expertise.
  The other obvious benefits are the economies of scale should they reorganise distribution, warehousing and admin costs.

Stop wasting time on SEO for mediocre rankings- fix it!

Things in the Search Engine Optimization world are constantly changing, and it takes a lot of energy to keep on top of the trends. My mentors at StomperNet make it a point to stay on the cutting edge of SEO, which is one of the reasons why I am happy to pay for the $800 monthly membership.

The Stomper guys have just released this new video by Leslie Rohde. If you don’t know who Leslie is, let me just give you the quick description:

In 2002, Leslie was the very first person to advance the idea that Search Rankings could be affected by using the text in links that point to a page.

…Yeah, THAT Leslie Rohde.

Since he’s an SEO Engineer, and a StomperNet Faculty Member, I figure this video is going to cause trouble. Lots of trouble. watch this seo video.

LSI stands for “Latent Semantic Indexing”. In 2006, Google filed a whole bunch of patents that led a LOT of SEO folks to
believe that LSI was in FULL FORCE and EFFECT at Google.

In this video, Leslie will PROVE to you that LSI is NOT having any effect on your Search Rankings. Which means, if you’ve been struggling to get Rankings on Google because you’ve been chasing LSI – STOP.

This video will tell you why LSI doesn’t work.

Do this instead: Leslie is going talk about an SEO Strategy that you ARE going to want to know about…

…It’s called “Referential Integrity”, or “RI” for short.

(I heard a rumor they’re re-opening their awesome Stomping the Search Engines 2 and Net Effect Journal for just $1!)

Using Amazon S3 for hosting media files

What is Amazon S3?

AmazonS3 is an innovative, developer-oriented Simple Storage Service with extremely low prices.

This is how it has been described: “Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites.”

You are billed monthly based on the bandwidth used – $0.15 per GB stored, $0.10 per GB transferred monthly. This is a great alternative if you are paying hefty monthly Hosting fees to store video files which are not used very much monthly.

What can you store on S3:

* Audio files
* Media files
* Podcast files
* photos
* Backup you hard drive

Why should you use S3:

* Amazon S3 is cheap.
* It’s scalable – use as much or as little storage and bandwidth as you want.
* Easy to use with the Firefox addon interface – see below.
* Everyone can use S3 – while it was built for developers, it is now widely used by anyone who needs a secure and simple Hosting solution.
* Your data is safe as S3 is an Amazon service. Amazon is also a brand name that people recognise so it can add kudo’s to your content.
* S3 is more reliable than a homebuilt server or cheap web Hosting account.

How to use Amazon S3

1. You need to go and set up an account at Amazon Web Services.
2. Then you need to download this free Firefox Addon, which looks like an FTP screen, which helps you manage your file transfers. This is better than other paid tools out there that do the same job.

Essential Wordpress Plugin to protect your media files.

If you do use Amazon S3 to host information that you sell either as an online course or for a membership site, you need to think about protecting this IP. One way that I have found to do this so far is to use this clever Wordpress plugin: S3FlowShield. This plugin encrypts the files and paths of files stored on AmazonS3.

If you want to learn more about using AmazonS3 and how to protect your media files from being downloaded illegally, here is a free webinar on S3FlowShield.