In our discussion about marketing strategies this week, we’ve already covered cause marketing and relationship marketing. Today, we’re focusing on scarcity marketing.
What is Scarcity Marketing?
Scarcity marketing involves motivating people to buy something by telling them there is a shortage in what is available and a limited time to act. The goal is to create a sense of urgency through an aggressive call to action; to make people scared that they will not be able to acquire something that they want if they don’t act fast.
Scarcity Marketing Background
It’s difficult to pinpoint the first instance of scarcity marketing, but companies have used the technique for many years. One of the most notable examples of scarcity marketing – the Disney Vault – started during the 1980s. Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment began to reissue limited editions of their films and urge consumers to purchase these films before they went back into the “Disney Vault.” Because each Disney film is only for a limited time before it is put in the vault and not made available for several years until it is released again, consumers are driven to act fast when a new video is released.

If you’ve listed products on eBay without a photo and successfully sold them – don’t be fooled into thinking you don’t need a photo. You would almost certainly have got more bidders, and therefore probably a higher selling price, with a photo.
If your eBay listing doesn’t have a photo and your competitor does, you will lose out. If you don’t have a photo, potential buyers will be sceptical or suspicious. They will think that you either don’t really have the item for sale or you have got something to hide, i.e. it’s not in very good condition. Without a photo, your listing will not look professional which will damage your business image.
Your listing MUST have a good quality digital photo of your item. If you are selling new products, the manufacturer or your supplier may have photos that you can use. But you must check that you are allowed to use them. Otherwise you could be prosecuted, or at least have your listing removed. Also, if you use the manufacturer’s photo, all your competitors may be using the same photo, so your listing won’t stand out.
Often, when people are just selling stuff from around the house, they will use any old snapshot of the item and you can see all sorts of domestic mess in the background. This is not good enough if you want to run a successful and profitable business on eBay. A good photo will increase the perceived value of your item and attract higher bids. A poor photo will cheapen your item.

So here is the problem...Google is doing some really odd indexing with my site.

My company did a content rewrite so that we can target some relevant keywords. It took a while for Google to actually index it (according to the cache date) and even took days to update the cache (e.g. last cache date was Jan 23, but it just showed up today).

I check the cache date to see if Google finally got our new content, which it had, but it apparently has skipped over one of my pages. (http://thewebsquad.com/01_about.php). it is not even indexed, but has almost 100 links point to the page. However, (this is where it gets odd) Google indexed the www version of the same page, but there are no links pointing to that page.

Any insights?

When your site or application grows beyond what can be supported with shared or even VPS hosting, perhaps it’s time to look for a dedicated server. Countless companies provide dedicated hosting, and the features of their offerings can be difficult to untangle. In this week’s article, Khurram guides us through ten different entry-level plans and points out their pros and cons to help you make an informed decision.

2010-01-29T00:37:24+00:00

Hi guys. Im new here, so pardon my ignorance :)

My aim with this thread is to learn which skills i need to require in addition to what i already know in order to make a small, but professionally looking article site.

I have two sidebars, a middle "main page", on which i want the articles to be displayed. Is my assumption correct that i need to learn ASP(X?) in order to have the sitebars/header/footer/everything but the main page remain passive while the visitor browses through the articles via the sitebar. Put in other, perhaps more clear, words: I'd like to make it so only the middle div (the one showing the actual article) load as the visitors uses the article links.

Background: I know xhtml and css, can do enough with photoshop to handle the images and graphics.

Is ASP the correct language to learn in order to achieve what is described above?

Are there any specially adapted platforms for showing articles that i can implement on top of my xhtml?

THanks in advance guys :)

Websites can go down at any time, and unplanned outages tend to happen at the worst possible times. But most professional Web teams try to make their planned outages as non-disruptive as possible. In fact, at many of the companies I've built websites for, even updating existing Web pages has to happen at off hours, especially if it's a major change. At one company I worked for, any change to the website that required the server to be stopped and restarted had to happen during our lowest traffic times. That was around 2am where I live. The idea was to minimize the impact. But another company I worked for has no problem taking parts of the website down for maintenance even during business hours. The overtime costs for developers working outside of business hours out-weighed the potential loss of revenue from taking the site down. What do you think? What times of the day is it okay to take a website or part of a website down for maintenance? If it depends, please explain in the comments.
Poll: When is an acceptable time to take a site down for planned maintenance? originally appeared on About.com Web Design / HTML on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 06:18:16.

Yesterday, I wrote about cause marketing as one of four types of marketing strategies I’m covering this week. Today, we’re looking at relationship marketing.
What is Relationship Marketing?
Relationship marketing focuses on using customer service and quality of service as benchmarks in a company’s marketing activities. Relationship marketing campaigns are developed by looking at the lifetime relationship with clients rather than the individual dealings in order to increase profit. In relationship marketing, the goal is to satisfy and retain clients in order to create long-term profitable relationships.
Relationship Marketing Background
Leveraging existing customer relationships in marketing began in the 1960s through direct-response marketing campaigns. However, the term “relationship marketing” wasn’t used until 1983 when Leonard Berry wrote the book, “Relationship Marketing.”
Benefits of Relationship Marketing
It’s obvious that there is a lot to be gained by marketing to your existing client base. Here are some of the positive results:

Episode 46 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week, Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is joined by social media strategist Jim Turner (@Genuine) to discuss supporting good causes through social media.
Listen in your Browser
Play this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below:

A complete transcript of the interviews is provided below.
Download this Episode
You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link:

• SitePoint Podcast #46: Using the Internet for Good with Jim Turner (MP3, 37.9MB)

Subscribe to the Podcast
The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly.
Interview Transcript
Patrick: January 29th, 2010. Social media strategist Jim Turner stops by to chat about supporting good causes through social media. This is the SitePoint Podcast #46: Using the Internet for Good with Jim Turner.

Draw attention to this ready-made web design created with the Silverlight technology - a great new solution from Microsoft.

Category: Art&Photography
Style: Artworks Style

Hi All,

I have a website up that is an ecommerce site. The programmer I used to create the site was a great coder but not the best designer. I am now working with a web designer who is adding a fresh new design to the site but I'm not convinced of his coding abilities as there have been more than several mistakes (quite a lot actually) made that I have caught in my testing.

I am not skilled in coding whatsoever and unfortunately, I don't even have a basic understanding of it so please excuse the potential stupidity of the following query. My question is this.......If everything tests okay on the test site and all the functions are working properly, does that mean that the code is good and solid OR is there such a thing as coding in a way that it holds together only temporarily? I don't really understand the concept of why coding fails in the first place. Basically I'm wanting to know the answer to this question so that I can either relax when it's finally uploaded to my site (or not relax depending on the feedback I get here).

We're getting close to completion and I'm starting to freak about the upload. I'm petrified that there might be a potential of it messing up my site in any way :eek2:.

Thanks so much in advance.