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.

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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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.