One major skill that I’m relieved to have learned while in college is how to take good quality pictures. One of our ideas with Assault was to get pictures of our shirts on rock bands rather than on stock mock ups like every other apparel company. We felt it was the one thing to set us aside in a small way from everyone else that would also be a great way to network with bands that we were fans of.

Unfortunately, we didn’t realize that live concert photography is probably one of the hardest forms of photography. You can’t depend on your camera’s automatic mode if you want your photos to look professionally done. You can’t use a point and shoot camera. After a few practice shows though, and with plenty of practice and tips from our friends, we were finally able to nail down our process which we’re going to share with everyone, cause we’re awesome.

Lookout! Giants at the Metro Chicago

Account for lighting & other variables

If you’ve been to Assault’s Online Store you know that we try to get photos of people wearing our clothing during rock shows where there are any number of variables that you can’t account for. Such as:

• The crowd
• The amount of lights
• The layout of the venue
• The variation in color and intensity of the lights

To help you get started doing your own photography under these conditions I’ve prepared a few tips and techniques that will help take your photos from sorority party-girl self shots to Rolling Stone worthy concert photography. (Maybe not THAT good, but close)

As always, we’ll try to accomplish quality results as cheaply as possible.

Equipment: Digital SLR Camera

Your little party camera, aka the point and shoot, isn’t going to cut it. I’m sure it’s got plenty o’ megapixels, but the most important thing is that you get a large image sensor to capture more color information. I started off with a Nikon D70 DSLR that I bought off my friend Dennis Burnett for $300 bucks. It’s older than my little sister’s point and shoot, but the photos still look ten times better.

If you shop around I’m sure you can find a decent used SLR. Try Craigslist, or Ebay. (Does anyone use Ebay anymore besides Nigerian scammers?)

Not only is the camera body important, but it’s important to have a decent lens on your camera. I stuck with the zoom lens that came with my camera to start, but eventually purchased a Nikon 50mm prime lens to help in the low lighting situations.

Equipment: External Flash

A Hero Named Hope live show at the Metro Chicago

The quickest way to make your photos look like an amateur Kenny Powers photo shoot is to only use the built in flash. Buy a decent external flash. You’ll be able to shoot from further away. You can also get a better amount of light around your subject. Along with a softer light, you’ll also be able to adjust the intensity of the light so your shots aren’t washed out and overexposed.

I bought the Quantaray QDC 900WA for my Nikon D70 for $99 bucks. It looks like you can buy the same one online for the same price. Google it.

External flashes can also have a diffusion cover of some sort put on them to reduce over exposure and ensure that your subjects are softly lit.

Chris Huebner from the band, From the Broken

Camera Setup

Put your camera in manual mode. When I first started I asked my friend Dane Sponberg for some settings to start out at. Here’s what he had to say:

Try using these camera settings as a starting point:

• 800 ISO
• F4 or 4.5
• 1/30th of a second shutter speed
• Flash set to +1

If the stage lights aren’t coming through, either bump your ISO up and turn your flash down, or leave the shutter open longer, like 1/10th of a second. Just watch that, cause the longer the shutter is open, the blurrier it will get.

A few additional pointers, tips and tricks

A few of my personal additional settings/tips that you may also benefit you are to:

• Shoot in uncompressed raw mode
• Try not to overexpose, digital imagery picks up more color information in the blacks which is more easily fixed in post than an overexposed shot
• Bring an extra CF or SD card
• Charge your damn camera. I can’t count how many times I’ve been burned on this
• Use Lithium batteries in your flash so it charges up faster
• If your camera is older like mine, clean off the contacts with rubbing alcohol to ensure the external flash will work
• Shoot LOTS of images. Many will not turn out.

Some final thoughts

If you’d like to see how most of my early photo sets turned out you can look at our Flickr Photo feed. The most important thing to do when getting the shots in the show is to make sure you are shooting in NEF Raw mode so you can edit the files later in Photoshop.

The more color information you have the easier it is to make your photos look even better in post. My next tutorial will cover how to edit the photos and color correct them to make them look even better.

Seems like too many websites and brands start up from scratch, and get absolutely NO WHERE. Without the blitzkrieg of press releases and public relations broo-haha, it can be damn hard to get relevant traffic to your site, especially with no money. Here’s my comprehensive guide for getting traffic to your site when you have no fan base, no tribe, no cult following, no page rank, no domain age, no public relations, and most importantly, no money.

Before you even write, follow SEO best practices

We’ve done several posts on SEO here at AssaultBLOG. Our most popular one being, “Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You.”

There’s no point in trying to get Google to spider you if you aren’t following best practices.

A quick recap of SEO best practices from this article

• Minimize HTML and use table-less layouts
• Utilize alt tags, title tags, meta title and description tags, and anchor tags with keywords every
• 3% keyword density is more than enough on every page
• Utilize strong, em, h1, h2, h3 for headings and elements that carry more importance
• Think like a human, what would I search for in a post about [your blog post here]
• Register your business with local search, you appear at the top of the pages in the maps section
• Use an XML Sitemap
• Don’t waste too much time on META keywords
• Keep up with the latest Google trends and follow search engine resource websites

Provide something useful, unique

Content is king. It took me a long time to realize that no matter how much I wrote, unless it was something useful, and interesting to the masses, no one was going to take the time to read it, if they could even find it in the first place.

Writing for the web is a different kind of beast. People use the internet as a tool, to find information. How to do something, how to fix something, What’s the best way to skin a cat? Who did Michael Jordan punch in the face at the Bulls practice one day? What’s the name of Shawn Kemp’s 12 kids–you get the point.

Ulysses is a great novel, but no one on the internet is going to read an epic saga, we’re here to get answers, fast.

Hit the ground running, get links back cause you’re awesome

Congrats, you have something interesting to say, and you’ve followed SEO best practices when coding your website, but you’re still not showing up for any major searches in the top 20 results. It’s not secret, you must have links from other popular, relevant websites pointing back to your site, using the keywords you want to show up for in searches. A good way to start, is to mention other articles, and websites in your posts, and contact the original writers telling them you enjoyed their article, and you wrote about it. Some of my closest network of online friends are people I emailed (or Twittered) telling them I liked their articles.

Use Google docs, and make yourself a list of places you can send out freebie links to. There’s hundreds of websites you can submit links to in a user link feed to a helpful blog post about design, programming, and just about anything else. Our current list has over 100 places we submit our stories to, and we submit every quality blog to every one of the pertaining websites. Most importantly, when you find a new site, take the five seconds to add it to your list, and be sure to update your list if changes are made to the website.

Here’s our list of websites we submit our posts to

The most important thing to remember when getting links back to your site is the popularity of the site linking to you, as well as the relevance of it’s content. Second most important thing when getting linked to is that your targeted search keywords must be used inbetween the anchor tags and title tag.

In our case, getting linked on websites like Shirt.Woot.com, Hide Your Arms, Emptees, has helped us because they’re popular, the send lots of traffic, and in the future their links to us help us float up to the top of popular searches with the word t-shirt in it. This works the same as getting your pages on Digg, Designfloat, and many of the other sites in our list of links above.

Recently, Digg released the Diggbar, and they did a ton of research into it’s SEO-ability, and it appears as though they have done their homework. Don’t be afraid to utilize it, more people will digg your stories, and you can only benefit from it. One general rule I try to use when utilizing Digg is to not submit your own stories. If you do have a specific story you think is worthy of the Digg homepage, go for it and push it-but hell hath no fury like angry Diggers. So submitters beware.

Beware the rel=”nofollow”

When you type your name and website into a comment area on a blog, you get a link back to your website. While I do encourage participating at other blogs and websites, beware the rel=”nofollow”. That tag inside of an anchor tag tells the search engine not to go spider your link, so in other words you are getting no “link juice”. I see comments showing up from normal users and spammers all the time saying things like, “art community” trying to get link juice. I have bad news people, no one spiders your link text in comments–at least everywhere I know of doesn’t.

Delicious bookmarks is one place where the rel=”nofollow” tag is setup, as well in all Flickr image descriptions and comments.

That’s not to say you get no benefit from those User Link feeds on some of the websites in my list of websites we submit our posts to, alot of the time we end up getting featured in other popular design blogs as a direct result of those links. Keep this in mind when submitting your website, but don’t waste your time. We also pull in RSS Subscribers through these posts, so even though there is no actual “link juice” benefit, there is still the benefit of repeat visitors, and possibilities that you may be linked later.

rel=”nofollow” tags do have their benefit though. The more links you have on your page, the more Google divides their importance. For example, if you have 50 links on a page, there is obviously a less amount of importance on each one instead of having ten links. You can carve out which links not follow just by putting rel=”nofollow” in the <a href=”link here” rel=”nofollow”>Link not getting followed</a> I believe this has some fancy title called “link carving”, but that’s just how it was explained to me. If you do have lots of links on one page, sprinkle the rel=”nofollow” tag on ones you don’t want spidered. Like when you’re trashing a competitor.

Freebie “link juice”

I know some people like to keep their secrets to themselves, but I like to tell everyone in hopes that a few of you subscribe to my RSS feed. (As well as hopefully buy the occasional t-shirt, or hire us to design something for you.)

Believe it or not there are ways to get good quality link text back from very popular websites. Here’s a few websites that, upon approval of your content, will link back to your website without the rel=”nofollow” tag (This is subject to change) A couple of places that provide link juice are:

• Ebay blogs – We repost our relevant articles over at our ebay blog and link back to our site. You get quality html link text and there is no rel=”nofollow” tag on the links
• Flickr – While you used to be able to get link juice from flickr.com, that is no longer the case
• I Snare – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• Ezine Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• Go Articles – Limits your links, but does give link backs
• QBN – Design resource website
• Noupe – Design resource
• Squidoo – Make your own pages

We’ve only done a handful of these things, but find a site that fits your demographic and run a contest there, or see if they feature “cool stuff”. Through a mutual friend I was able to show our products to Slash Film, and they wrote a very nice piece about our Chainsaw Bunny Shirt which sent us about as much traffic and sales as getting featured on Woot.com as a side deal.

Surgically Precise Keywords™… No not meta keywords

As I said earlier, pick the keywords you want to show up for in searches and use them inbetween anchor tags, in your title=”" tag, as well as in your head title tag. Don’t forget to use the keywords on your actual site content as well inbetween H1, H2, H3, and <strong> and <em> tags as well. They put extra emphasis on terms. 3% keyword density is MORE than enough per page. Don’t be evil.

Know what you want to show up for in search results and fight for them. Put those words in your H1 and H2 tags. Put them in your title. Put them in your product names. Have blogs link to you with that link text.

I touched on this in the, Tips & Strategies For SEO That The High Priced Consultants Aren’t Telling You, but it really is the do or die for your company.

You’re not going to show up in the top 10 results for “design blog”. At least not right away, you have to attack search results from the outside. Get ranked in the top result for other more specific searches that aren’t highly sought after like, “custom photoshop brush downloads” or, “repeating seamless background image” and you will eventually climb to the top for other searches organically.

Assault is never going to show up for the Google search, “t-shirts”. That search term is dominated, but we did feel we could show up on top for “zombie t shirts”. If you’re small you have to carve out your keyword niche with surgical precision. Pick keywords that are less competitive, but still have high search volume. (Use the Google keyword analysis tool for that)

Give it time, 3-6 months to see results

If you’re doing everything correctly, it still takes a few weeks and/or months to see quality results. Unless you’re a huge brand name, like Oprah, or have your name in the news constantly, your site isn’t going to get spidered and benefit as quickly.

If you’re starting from zero, every link, and every keyword counts. Give your link exchange partners the code and keywords to link you with. Don’t go overboard (title=”t-shirts t shirts art on our fancy designer graphic bloody t-shirts officially zombie awesome cool neato”) You’ll look like a fuck-stick.

A few additional thoughts

Google changes there algorithm several hundred times per year, so your site may fluctuate up and down in the rankings, and a lot of what goes into the Google algorithm is a mystery. What I’ve outlined above works for me. Don’t get discouraged. I should also note that in my other article, I provide a link to the PDF Google has written where I have gotten a lot of this information. I highly recommend reading it, and memorizing it. As I always say:

There are about 50 techniques, and everyone’s doing em, don’t let anyone sell you their Google first page results in 30 days snake oil bullshit, it’s not happening.

Have a tip? Did I miss something? Disagree?

Post it in the comments and share it with the world. I read every comment that hits this blog. (And sometimes when I’m bored I read spam for a laugh, or to order my viagara at discount prices.)

I don’t want to add to the already long list of great iPhone application round ups, so I’ve decided to add some applications that I use on a regular basis that seem to have snuck-in under the radar. Some of them are games, one keeps me from driving drunk, and another helps me post images to my photo blog. All the apps have at least one thing in common, they’re free.

Last Call aka, “How drunk am I iPhone?”

This handy little app has prevented me from driving under the influence more times than I can count. In the last 3 days alone it has helped me keep track of my drunkeness at least 3 times. The way this app works is, you put in your sex and weight, and throughout your night of drinking you enter in all your drinks and it will provide you with an estimated BAC as well as a timeline for how long it will take you to get drunk, as well as to come back down below the .08% thus allowing you to operate a motor vehicle again.

The best part, you can compete against your friends in an accurately weighted BAC competition rather than purely based on the amount of drinks you have had!

Zombieville USA

This is by far one of my most favorite games to kill some time with on the iPhone. Simply put, you walk around the levels and go house to house getting money and supplies, while being attacked by zombies on the outside! For someone who sucks at most video games like I do, this is a great game. It’s fun, easy, and totally addicting.

One more great thing to note is that the game is most fun with the sound on. Plus, Zombies are so in right now, more in than bacon.

WordPress

If you take alot of pictures and want them on your FFFFound WordPress photo blog like I do, then you may want to install the WordPress application. It allows you to blog on the go, as well as take pictures, preview, and post blogs to your live website.

It has support for multiple blogs, blog preview, drafts, publishing blogs, tags, categories, and just about anything you can do with your normal WordPress Administration area. It’s one of my favorite applications along with Tweetie to do my social networking and photo uploading on the go.  (I’m sure you’ve heard of it so I excluded it from the list, plus it is not free.)

Easy Wi-Fi

Logging in everytime you get to a free AT&T wireles access point is a major pain in the ass. Enter Easy Wi-Fi. Easy Wi-Fi takes care of all the heavy lifting making it easy to connect to free wifi spots without the signup and text message process that can be a major pain in the ass to do.

You can also make Skype calls on the iPhone now as long as you’re behind a Wifi connection making this application even more useful.

Bump

Rather than type in all the contact information of someone you want to add to your phone, why not just bump them? It’s the easiest and fastest way to exchange contact information. Check out the video below to get an idea of how it works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZudLSKaBgM

Lex and Terry Morning Radio

My favorite morning radio show, the Lex and Terry Show is now available 24 hours a day 7 days a week on a freebie iPhone application! The application is simple, click the icon, listen to the show, pause, and resume playback. Playback streams live from the Lex and Terry Live stream during the show, and then plays repeats the remainder of the day.

If you haven’t heard of Lex and Terry I highly recommend installing this application and listening to it on your morning commute. I personally can’t stand morning radio, but this show is always entertaining and interesting.

Skype

I know Skype is vastly popular, but it’s new and it kind of came in under the radar for me. (At least when it came out I was only twittering 10 times per day so I may have just missed it.)

Currently, there’s no video, but I have heard rumors on such notable podcasts as TWIT with Leo Laporte that with iPhone 3.0 Skype will work with video too! Unfortunately, it only works when you’re near a Wifi connection. (Good news if you’ve installed the Easy Wifi application mentioned above as it will do all the hard work for you!)

Know any other applications that I missed? Feel free to post them in the comments.

It’s hard to come home at the end of a normal 8 hour work day only to have to sit back down at your computer and start plugging away at more design work, or more development work like I do every day.

There’s a few things I’ve done in the past that always seem to help me find the motivation, and/or inspiration to get back to work. Most of the things I do are somewhat non-conventional in terms of what some “finding inspiration” articles tell you such as, “Go see a museum!”, or “go walk around the park!” Those suggestions never seemed to help me, and it always felt like I was wasting precious time. Here’s a few tried and tested ways that have helped me stay focused, motivated, and inspired to do more work after an already long work day:

FFFFound (or FFFound with WordPress)

If you’re going to surf the web, try to limit your surfing to places like FFFFound, or start your own personal bookmarking service with WordPress like I did. It doesn’t take long to go through literally hundreds of all sorts of different pieces of illustration, photography, and graphic design pieces that you surely can find some sort of idea, or at the very least some really weird shit that might spark an idea.

A Collection of Good Quotes

I made a post of my most favorite inspirational quotes that I refer to quite often while I’m in the middle of designing t-shirts. It helps ground you and at times can give you a new theme for a design idea. Clipping them with Evernote, or just pasting them into your Facebook profile is what I like to do.

Graphic Novels

Believe it or not I have found graphic novels to be a great source of inspiration for my design work, as well as some of my writings here on the blog and on twitter. Some of my favorites:

• V for Vendetta
• The Killing Joke
• The Watchmen

The illustrations are fantastic, and sometimes the symbolism, themes, and characters are the most interesting part of the novel more so than even the artwork.

Watch Academy Award Speeches

Besides Memorial Day when Saving Private Ryan is on TV unedited, the only other time I tear up in front of the TV is when I watch the Academy Awards. Maybe it’s because I was a film student and ultimately wanted to be a big time Hollywood Director, or maybe it’s because you actually get to see people achieving their ultimate childhood dreams right in front of your eyes. Besides Intervention, you’ll never see a more honest dose of, “reality television.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P552i5xx8ww

Put a shitty Action Movie On in the Background

This may sound counter intuitive to helping get yourself motivated, or inspired, but I’ve found that when I put on old action movies that I’ve seen plenty of times, like Underworld, Doomsday, or Death Race, that it’s actually easy for me to ignore them, and focus on what I’m working on. Plus there’s no temptation to actually sit there and watch what ever may be on. Trying to watch something like Heroes or Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles always has me whipping my head around to see what’s going to happen next. Not so good if you are supposed to be working.

This is going to sound weird… but try trance music

You don’t have to listen to any specific kind of trance music, and I’m an expert on the subject by any means… For some reason, though, I am able to blast through design work and programming. Much like the shitty action movie, it focuses your mind on the task at hand, and doesn’t allow you to become distracted by what you’re listening to.

I can’t think of any time I was ever compelled to sing along to trance music like I do when my iTunes shuffles to “Fat Bottom Girls,” by Queen, or “Beat It,” by Michael Jackson. Best part about trance music is that you can find it for free in the Radio section of iTunes. Some of my personal favorite free, streaming stations are Vocal Trance, and House music from DI.fm.

Honorable Mentions: Turn off AIM, Turn off Twitter, drink Red Bull.

Have any of your own little ways to get motivated? How about posting them in the comments!

I recently wrote this post as a guest blogger on, How To Start a Clothing Company, for my friend Jonathan Kruse of Mediocre Clothing, and figured I’d re-post it here on my site for anyone who’s looking for a Lehman’s explanation of SEO, or search engine optimization.

One of the major things that has helped me with my t-shirt brand, Assault, since it’s inception in late February of last year was optimizing my site for Google and other search engines. I’ve worked as a SEO consultant and developer the past 7 or 8 years for various companies, and our list of clients contain some of the biggest names and brands in the world.

I’m not going to add to the gigantic list of of great SEO resources and basic SEO 101 strategies that you can easily find all over the web. Instead, I’m going to go over a few secrets that I have developed specifically for my online store, Assault Apparel, that will help those of you who are like me and don’t have any sort of money to use for marketing and PPC like some of the other t-shirt shops around town.

Assault's URL structure with CSS disabled

Think like a robot – Link Text, Title Text, Content Keywords, Landing Pages

A search engine spider uses a lot of information about your site to determine your search engine rankings. Using links with system text pertaining to your search term is a big factor. Using landing pages with specific keywords in your page title, as well as throughout the text in your actual page is another thing that gives you proper keyword density pertaining to the page titles.

Disable your sites’ stylesheet to get an idea of what a search engine is seeing when it comes to your page. The link text and text position on the site is very important. Be sure to have your links near the very top of the page, and to carve out your sites’ links by putting rel=”nofollow” on your anchor tags associated with pages you do not want spidered. This cuts down on the number of links on the page, thus giving you more weight on your pertinent links.

My links to the right all use the word t-shirts as well as link to my landing pages with the same keywords sprinkled throughout the content. I would say that about 2% of your pages content should contain your keywords. Anymore than 2% is overkill.

Think like a human – Keyword Choices

One of the most important tools I have used to determine naming conventions for my pages, shirts, and images is the Google Keyword Tool. Everyone uses this tool, and everyone who’s good at SEO is following the standards as laid out by Google in their SEO Starter Guide pdf, but what most places aren’t doing is choosing the high volume search keywords that aren’t being target by everyone.

For example, you’re never going to show up in the first 10 results for the keyword t-shirts, or tshirts, or even shirts. If you’re just starting out, there’s no point in trying to compete for this word. It’s already dominated. The words you should be trying to get in the top ten for, are other searches with the word, “t-shirt” in them. Assault‘s top keywords besides searches related to “Assault” are things like

• zombie t-shirt
• band apparel
• graphic t-shirts
• skull t-shirts
• rocker apparel
• chicago t-shirts
• band shirts

You get the idea. These are the keywords you need to use throughout your internal and external links to your pages as well as your actual physical file names. The way you work your way in the top ten is to carve out your niche in other t-shirt related searches and over time you will finally begin to sneak into the top results for other one word searches. Currently we’re between 5 and 9 for the keyword “Assault“, and we never even used to get into the top ten.

Register your brand with local search results

We registered our business as a local business with Google and we’ve seen a significant increase in traffic from “chicago t-shirts” related searches. This is what gets you in the local results up near the top of the search results page.

Link backs are incredibly important to move your site up

The number one thing that determines your page rank on search results is link backs. (This isn’t a proven fact, but we’ve seen our best results from a precision link back campaign) This means if you want to get in the top results for t-shirt related searches, you need to start exchanging links with popular websites, and sites that show up in the search results for t-shirt searches.

A couple of my tips/tricks to get high quality link backs

• Start an Ebay Blog. There aren’t any rel=”nofollow” on your links back to your own site. This is the best quality link juice you can get
• Flickr Photos with links back to your site. This also gets you top quality linkback text to your specific site
• Provide the exact linkback text to your link exchange partners so that it uses proper link text pertaining to your site.
• Forum links – participate in relevant forums and generally your links will not have the rel=”nofollow” on them.
• Start a Public Facebook Fan page. These are showing up in search results now as well.

Myths and irrelevant techniques

While everything I’ve said are examples of things that have worked for me, I should precede all of these things with this statement:

Google’s search algorithm is constantly changing. Last year it changed over 300 times, and no one is 100% how it actually works. Don’t fall for the companies out there selling expensive “black magic” to get your site in top results. Most SEO boutiques are full of shit. I’ve done SEO campaigns for small and big time clients, and independent SEO boutiques trying to scam business off of them gave our SEO work an F grade… no joke. Be wary of SEO marketing companies. There are about 50 techniques, and everyone is doing them. Any SEO company is probably on the verge of spamming if they’re overpromising results.

Google, Search Engine Watch, and the Search Engine Round Table are about the only 3 places I really trust.

Google does not use meta keywords, some search engines do, but I wouldn’t waste too much time on this.

Loading up 30 character file names and 40 word alt descriptions on images is a waste of time and resources. “SEO Experts” like Acronym may tell you to do this, but the time wasted doing this could be used somewhere else and you may get flagged as trying to game Google.  While it is important to use alt tags, and to name images appropriately, overdoing this by using 40 word alt tags, and 30+ character names for your images is a bit of a waste of time and you run the risk of being flagged as loading your image and alt tags.

Don’t use hidden text to fool Google. They’ll find out and you’ll get penalized.

Make an XML sitemap and submit it to Google, and update it constantly.

Don’t overdo keywords in the title. Be specific, but don’t be a total spammer.

Use Google Analytics, and setup E-Commerce tracking. You’ll be amazed at the value of the information you get from this tool. I get 70% of my sales from organic search results, and plenty of that comes from Google Image search related to finding my product images with quality names and alt tags. Like I mentioned before, it’s important to use proper, specific names, but overdoing file names and alt tags is a unneccesary.

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If you liked this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on twitter, and don’t forget to check out the Assault BLOG and online t-shirt store.

Seven Day Sonnet @ The Fuel Room in Libertyville, IL

After going to a great show this weekend by a local Chicago band called Seven Day Sonnet, I realized a few mistakes that all indie bands make, that they should avoid at all costs. Besides having actual talent, of course, there are a few other things that I think you should or should not do:

Don’t Sell T-Shirts

Nearly all the bands at the show had merchandise of some sort that I don’t think anyone would have bought unless it had a “Budweiser” logo on the side of it and was drinkable. Despite probably being broke, all the bands at the show were still trying to sell some sort of apparel. Now I know that the company I run is geared towards “rockers” and t-shirts so shouldn’t I be trying to peddle my shit to them? I suppose that is true yes, but if I was in a band, and was working some shitty dead end job, there’s no way I’d hand my hard-earned money over to some t-shirt printer to put my logo on some silly hanes beefy t-shirt. Save your money, stay away from the shirts for now.

Don’t Use Friend Blaster

Most bands run their own PR these days, primarily through MySpace. As much as I hate MySpace, it can be used for good, but most of the time new bands use it to spam the HELL out of everyone who’s got a public profile.

I understand it’s tempting to use those Friend Blaster programs when you first start, simply because you can’t get anyone to listen to you, but there’s no quicker way to get everyone to ignore you than to yell louder and louder. As an alternative, I recommend using Myspace as an outlet for networking with other bands, as well as to act as a vehicle for your fans/friends to contact you as opposed to a way to spam anyone who has ever friended you.

$200 bucks towards an identity can go a long way

If you want to look a bit more legit, buy yourself a cheap domain at Godaddy, and try out a service like Crowd Spring to help you with a logo and a simple design. $200 dollars there will get you a lot further than $200 bucks on hanes beefy t’s. If you have enough money leftover, use it to get the best instruments/equipment, not some crappy apparel that only your mom and groupies (girlfriends?) want to wear.

Use your time and money creatively/wisely

I know that it seems weird to defy the predefined rules of rock, but you can party once you’re headlining your first venue. For now, you should try running your band like a business. That means calling up local venues, and putting yourself out there.

Have a simple demo CD, (or better yet a cheap USB stick loaded with music) and make sure to only give it to people who have expressed some sort of interest in your band.

“Bravery is all about people being willing to take a chance on themselves and their ideas: Are you willing to put yourself out there and risk seeing something you invented die?”

-Seth Godin

You’re going to have to put yourself out there, and email venues and other reputable rock periodicals. You’re going to have to stalk the local House of Blues owner, but putting yourself out there is going to pay off ten fold as opposed to handing out flyers outside of the local rock venues.

Strangely enough, I’m sure you can find some good PR people to friend on MySpace–Send them a friendly, personal message and see what they think of your band.

Assault custom guitar pick

No flyers, try custom guitar picks

One of the best things we’ve ever done for Assault was to giveaway free guitar picks with our logo on them. People are alot less likely to throw  those away, and they’re alot cooler than some stupid flyer. Surprisingly, custom printed guitar picks are cheap. I’m willing to bet if you spend about $200 bucks like we did you can get around 1000 picks and they cost about the same thing as a 5×7 post card. (Around .18 cents)

This past two months Assault has been nearly radio silent. After reading a post by Seth Godin on goals We realized that part of that reason we had slacked off was because we didn’t have any clear immediate goals in front of us. We met, and exceeded all of our 6 month goals for Assault and even most of our 1 year goals, but we didn’t have any new goals for 2009, and we decided to revise our goals. We’ve been doing just okay in the sales department and we decided it was time to take what we have and move it to the next level. Here’s what Seth Godin had to say about goals:

If you don’t have a goal (a corporate goal, a market share goal, a personal career goal, an athletic goal…) then you can just do your best. You can take what comes. You can reprioritize on a regular basis. If you don’t have a goal, you never have to worry about missing it. If you don’t have a goal you don’t need nearly as many excuses, either.

Not having a goal lets you make a ruckus, or have more fun, or spend time doing what matters right now, which is, after all, the moment in which you are living.

It seems to me, though, that the people who get things done, who lead, who grow and who make an impact… those people have goals.

Since restructuring our goalswe’ve been more productive in blogging, researching printing equpiment, and doing new designs for our next line of clothing for Spring.

Quick Tips for your Goals

1. Set goals that are just barely out of reach, you’ll try harder that way
   
2. Print them out and put them in your wallet, closet, locker, and desk so you don’t forget them
   
3. Cross them out as you go, trust me it helps when you feel like you’re doing nothing
4. If you’re in a partnership like we are, split your tasks up and assign them to who they are most relevant to
5. If you haven’t, bookmark or subscribe to Seth Godin’s RSS feed, he gives great insight no matter what industry or business you’re in.
   

Do you know why we sometimes find ourselves excitedly buying things we don’t really need?  I came across this outline from a book by Dan Ariely called, “Predictably Irrational” that had some incredibly insightful information about people and why we at times seem to act completely irrational. It covers giving away  things for free, putting high price points on products to create demand, and even the benefit of arousal!

The Truth About Relativity

• When Williams-Sonoma introduced bread machines, sales were slow. When they added a “deluxe” version that was 50% more expensive, they started flying off the shelves; the first bread machine now appeared to be a bargain
• When contemplating the purchase of a $25 pen, the majority of subjects would drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7
• When contemplating the purchase of a $455 suit, the majority of subjects would not drive to another store 15 minutes away to save $7

The Fallacy of Supply and Demand

A good portion of what you may have learned in your high school economics class may not necessarily be true. By piggy backing on other brands and setting a unique price point and targeting a higher class of consumer you may find that you can put yourself in the same class as the greats:

Savador Assael, the Pearl King, single-handedly created the market for black pearls, which were unknown in the industry before 1973. His first attempt to market the pearls was an utter failure; he didn’t sell a single pearl. So he went to his friend Harry Winston, and had Winston put them in the window of his 5th Avenue store with an outrageous price tag attached. Then he ran full page ads in glossy magazines with black pearls next to diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. Soon, black pearls were considered precious.

Supply and demand doesn’t necessarily pertain to products either, we’ve all seen that club that’s got a line out the door every Friday Night. (that’s probably devoid of any chicks on the inside.) The illusion of demand creates demand.

The Cost of Zero Cost

When we first started Assault, we charged for shipping. After realizing that that was a huge part of what kept people from buying our product we decided it would be good to try giving our visitors free shipping to simplify the process. We were amazed to see that getting hit with a shipping cost was a huge stopping point for most consumers and we’ve never looked back. Ariely noticed similar things with some of the tests that he tried on students:

• Ariely, Shampanier, and Mazar conducted an experiment using Lindt truffles and Hershey’s Kisses.
  • When a truffle was $0.15 and a Kiss was $0.01, 73% of subjects chose the truffle and 27% the Kiss
  • When a truffle was $0.14 and a Kiss was free, 69% chose the kiss and 31% the truffle
  • According to standard economic theory, the price reduction shouldn’t lead to any behavior change (relative price and expected pleasure should be equal between the two experiments)
• The same experiments were conducted with Kisses going for $0.02, $0.01, and free…and free again made a huge difference.
• Ariely’s theory is that for normal transactions, we consider both upside and downside. But when something is free, we forget about the downside.
  • “Free” makes us perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is
    • Humans are loss-averse; when considering a normal purchase, loss-aversion comes into play
    • But when an item is free, there is no visible possibility of loss
• Ariely conducted a variation, where people were offered a choice between items.
  • He gave kids (and students) 3 Kisses and offered to trade 1 Kiss for a small Snickers, and 2 Kisses for a large Snickers.
  • The subjects overwhelmingly chose the large Snickers (which is rational, given the weights of the candies)
  • When he instead offered to trade 1 Kiss for a large Snickers, or let the person take a small Snickers for free, the subjects overwhelming went for the free offer.
  • The zero price effect applies even when money is not involved.
• In the real world, this effect was demonstrated by Amazon’s free shipping.
  • After Super Saver shipping was introduced, Amazon saw sales increases everywhere except for France
  • It turned out that the French division offered 1 franc ($0.20) pricing instead of free pricing.
  • When this was changed to free, France saw the same sales increases as elsewhere

The Influence of Arousal

Another astonishing piece of information was the interviews of people when they were “sober” and after in which they had “aroused” themselves. People’s minds  function entirely differently when under the influence of… well ya know. (We didn’t have to tell you that sex sells. That’s why our site is absent of pictures of Craig and myself on product pages…)

Ariely and Loewenstein conducted an experiment on Berkeley undergrads (Ariely tried to do this at MIT, but couldn’t get the necessary permissions).  They asked them a series of questions.  Then they had the undergraduates stimulate themselves to a state of sexual arousal, and asked them to answer the same set of questions.

• Some of the results from their experiment:
  • Can you imagine having sex with a 60-year-old woman
    • Sober: 7%
    • Aroused: 23%
  • Could you enjoy having sex with someone you hated?
    • Sober: 53%
    • Aroused: 77%
  • Is just kissing frustrating?
    • Sober: 41%
    • Aroused: 69%
  • Would you slip a woman a drug to increase the chance she’d have sex with you?
    • Sober: 5%
    • Aroused: 26%
  • Would you use a condom even if you were afraid that a woman might change her mind while you went to get it?
    • Sober: 86%
    • Aroused: 60%

A few other interesting pieces of information

In 210 BC, Xiang Yu led an army against the Ch’in Dynasty.  While his troops slept, he burned his ships and smashed all the cooking pots.  He explained to his troops that they had to either fight their way to victory or die.  His troops won 9 consecutive battles.  Eliminating options improved the focus of his troops. We feel compelled to preserve options, even at great expense, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Companies that try to market based on social norms (“like a good neighbor…”) but fail to follow through (e.g. imposing nuisance fees) end up in a worse position. Consumers take personal offense when a relationship framed as a social exchange turns out to be a market one.

If you think you need to play rough, don’t waste money making your company the fuzzy feel-good choice. State what you give and what you expect in return–it’s just business.

A salary alone will not motivate people to risk their lives. Police officers, firefighters, soldiers–they don’t die for their weekly pay. It’s the social norms–pride in their profession and a sense of duty–that will motivate them to give up their lives and health.

Money, as it turns out, is very often the most expensive way to motivate people. Social norms are not only cheaper, but often more effective as well.

Some of this information is invaluable to you when you’re planning the little things on your site or company that you may have never thought of. Free shipping, pictures of pretty girls wearing your product, offering coupons everywhere you can, picking your price point–all of these irrational behaviors have alot to do with the way humans have been wired weather it’s social pressure, or some sort of marketing pressure. I highly recommend reading the book outline of Dan Ariely’s book, checking out his official website, or go look at the Predictably Irrational website.

Feel free to arouse yourselves and go buy some of our shirts.

You’ve identified your niche, registered your business, designed your shirts, and launched your online t-shirt store. Now what? If you’re like we were, you need some sales, you weren’t blessed with $20,000 of marketing money to buy pay per click ads from Google. These few tips should help save you a few headaches as well as give you a few ideas on how to market your product for free.

Don’t give away your shirts for free

Don’t give your shirts away for free to people unless you are guaranteed at least a write up in a blog or a link back to your site or some sort of return on investment. I can’t count the number of times we’ve sent free shirts to websites and companies who said they were doing t-shirt roundups and then never posted anything of the sort after we sent them free product.

If you have limited inventory like we do–reserve your inventory for sales. This may sound like we are slightly bitter, and that’s because we are. I designed most of the shirts on our site and I even pay for them. When you’re just getting started, you can only afford so many shirts. This means every sale counts. Unless you are going to get some sort of ROI on your give away, there’s no reason to do this. GoMedia has a great article about doing design work for the apparel industry that touches upon a similar subject.

GoMediaZine

I know I’ve mentioned them before on this site and in this post, but Go Media is a great resource for tutorials and design insight. If there’s one thing you can take away from this post it’s to subscribe to Go Media’s RSS  feed. They’re the best at what they do. One article that I know can help for you people starting up an on demand t-shirt store is the tutorial that shows you how to make realistic t-shirt mockups.

Here at Assault, we were lucky enough to know a few photographers who would take awesome photos for our site, but if you don’t happen to know any photographers and don’t want your photos to look amateurish this is a great tutorial to get your design renderings onto realistic t-shirts.

Put yourself out there – Network in your industry and local area

Don’t be shy. Send emails to local magazines and websites that are similar to yours. What’s the worst thing that could happen? They don’t respond or they say not interested. It’s a numbers game. Not everyone is going to like your stuff. The people of QBN and Digg LOVE to slam our designs and site. It’s not big deal. Most of the time, they give good insight and can be quite humorous. Your friends and family are going to say your stuff is cool, but people who don’t care about you will be blatantly honest behind the protection of anonymity on the internet.

The first thing we did after launching our store was to send friendly emails to t-shirt blogs and design websites with links to our store and our blog and tutorials. The best way to find sites similar to yours in your industry is to do Google searches. We did searches like “t-shirt blogs”, “t-shirt resources” and “apparel design resources” and sent emails to sites that appeared to be open to reviewing our products.

Forget Myspace. It’s fine to have a myspace page to get in contact with bands for instance, but it’s useless for the most part as far as getting sales. Make friends with fellow designers on twitter. Download Twitteriffic or a similar twitter application and join in the conversation. Share links you find and comment on other t-shirt blogs’ posts. Thank everyone who comments on your products. Send personal emails back to your customers who comment on their orders.

Monitor your site traffic for forum post links

When you’re not getting much traffic it’s pretty easy to monitor your traffic and referrals. I recommend  using something like Sitemeter since it gives you real time stats. (We also use Google Analytics) There’s been plenty of times that a user in some obscure forum posts a poll asking which shirt they should buy (with links to one of our shirts as well as other shirts they like)

Create an account and add a comment to the forum post with a discount or a coupon code to help persuade the users to buy your product. When every sale counts, this is a good way to get a sale.

Give coupon codes to sites that review shirts

Some of our top sales referrals are from sites that we gave non-expiring coupon codes to like Shirts On Sale and Hide Your Arms. They show up for many t-shirt related searches and users are often at their site to do exactly what you’d think–get coupons for t-shirts. It’s the best way to get exposure to your shirts directly to customers who are ready to buy stuff.

Why would you spend $1,000 dollars for Google Ad Words when you can get the same target visitors to  your site for free? We’ve ran a few pay per click ad campaigns, and let me tell you that we’ve never even come close to breaking even. On the other hand, some of our top sales referrers are from a coupon code on a t-shirt blog that we didn’t pay a cent for.

Know of any good tips that I missed?

I know there are countless tips and tricks that I haven’t told as of yet (Maybe a part two?) I’m sure there’s also people who disagree with me on Ad Words, and giving away our product for free. If you have anything you’d like to add, or if you have your own site, post it in the comments!

I’m sure most anyone who reads this is probably coming from Shirt.Woot.com. LOVE those guys over there. We were the Shirt Side Deal of the Day for February 19th and it was legendary. We broke all sales records and a had a huge showing of traffic on our site.

Believe it or not we only had two slip ups and one wasn’t even our fault. (thanks for nothing Paypal development team) That being said just as we expected we are pretty much back to normal operation, meaning 1-2 sales a day and we’re working on SEO for our site and I’ve decided to post a few SEO tips specifically for t-shirt websites that I’ve found interesting and quite helpful:

• Get links back to your site whether in forums or other popular t-shirt sites. A link back is a vote for your site essentially, this will garner you higher search engine ranking results.
• Use unique title tags for every page and be specific, don’t just spam with keywords.
• Read everything Search Engine Watch posts. They’re the real deal when it comes to SEO.
• Submit blog pages and product pages to Stumblupon. Tag your pages accordingly and use relevant tags.
• Broadcast site specials to QBN formerly Newstoday. They’ll put you on their front page.

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