But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of the Intelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.

“I thought it was magic,” says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. “It’s as if a human wrote it.”

On Aug 10 2010 I bought a 1-year SSL cert from GoDaddy (I know, I know) for $12.99. I installed it and successfully used it on an ecommerce site.

On June 25th I get an email warning me that my cert “is coming up for renewal in 15 days”. June 25 + 15 days == July 10th. Sure enough, this morning GoDaddy auto-renewed my SSL cert. Which I never enabled auto-renew on. And, they raised its price to $49.99.

Amazon announced today that its Associates program is to be terminated in California, in response to a new sales tax bill there. The move appears to be pre-emptive hardball to try and avert the bill being signed into law.

UPDATE: Gov. Jerry Brown has signed the law.

The new darling of the marketing community still gets grumbles from the old-schoolers. Ignore them for they know not what they say. SMM is a massive topic, so for the noob guide we’ll focus on a few key platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn. And a few key strategies: developing a style and how to convert your social traffic.

#1 - Claim your brand
#2 - Set up your Twitter account
#3 - Have something to say - define your style
#16 - Build a following on Twitter
#23 - Time your tweets
#30 - Create a conversion oriented Facebook fan page
#31 - Connect your blog to Facebook
#32 - Seed some facebook fans
#39 - Start networking on LinkedIn
#45 - Stay in the conversation: Leave Twitter tabs open for "live" social interaction
#46 - Create a social media contest page with viral features

We’ve put together the Pro Website Buyer’s Guide as a point of reference for industry best practice regarding buying websites – this guide draws on our behind-the-scenes website marketplace insights as well as consulting with industry experts such as FlipFilter.

The guide covers key areas such as:

1. Defining yourself – eg knowledge, skills, resources…
2. Defining your search – getting the most out of Flippa’s search tools
3. Understanding the opportunity – conducting due diligence on the website and the website owner
4. Engaging in the Auction – knowing your budget, different bid strategies
5. Completing the Transaction – making the site your own

This guide is free to all registered Flippa user from the Tools and Resources section. If you’re not a registered Flippa user, you can preview the first 2 chapters or otherwise register for free to get the full version at Flippa.com/signup

Shared by JohnH
Smart!

Sales increased by 50% and conversions doubled

WriteWork.com increased its sales by 50% and doubled conversions by A/B testing a radically new design. They utilized targeting and segmentation features of Visual Website Optimizer in order to run test only for direct visitors.

Click here to read the full case study (includes screenshots)

Status - ie: Platinum Elite in frequent flyer programs.

Access - ie:  Gilt Noir members get access to sale items 15 minutes ahead of everyone else.

Power -  ie: After a certain level of achievement, the player gets “power” over other players, like power moderators on Craigslist.  

Stuff - ie: Buy ten coffees and get one free.

The best thing about this revelation is that this is the exact OPPOSITE order for which it costs to provide these rewards.  Stuff is the most expensive, yet garners the least loyalty from users.

1. Emphasize benefits over features
Don’t be fooled, some website buys are impulse buys. Even the big ones. I once sold a small blog for $5,000 in five minutes after a guy emailed me saying he just decided he wanted to be a blogger and didn’t want to do the ground work. The blog wasn’t even earning that much. Given that, you need to emphasize the benefits over the features.

Sure, you need tell them how much it earns, what the traffic levels are, etc. but you also need to tell them what the website will do for them. How will it change their life? How will it improve their prospects of becoming rich and happy? If you can get someone interested in the benefits of a sale you will hold their attention for longer. This is the only reason people buy Porches and Ferraris; the become part of an elite group and that is more important to the brain than driving a well built car.

A Toyota is also a well built car.

2. Use scarcity to encourage action
The human brain is structured in to prevent loss. We hate to lose food, money and sexual partners. It is an evolutionary thing that has helped us in many important ways. The same goes for website sales. People do not want to miss out on opportunities or potential earnings. And the way you can make them feel more interested in the sale is to make it seem scarce.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say there is a website that ranks number one on Google in the extremely competitive dog training niche. You could open your listing with the phrase:

PR4 Dog Training Blog that ranks number one on Google

Or you could use something that makes the user feel like this is a rare opportunity that they need to act on by saying something like:

Rare Buy: Dog Training Blog that ranks #1 on Google in near impossible niche

I don’t know about you but when I see words like “rare” and “impossible” I start to pay attention. And that’s all you want to do at this stage, get attention. Characters like hash signs also do well in this respect because they are less common characters and they take up less room than their wordy equivalents.