boo-blog

boo-box has been cited in several publications as an example of successful entrepreneurship that is increasingly conquering more and more devotees around the globe each day.

One of the first magazines to mention boo-box was Webdesign. In an interview with them, Marco Gomes outlined his reasons for leaving behind a successful career at AgênciaClick to invest in boo-box, launching a new phase in his own career. As a good entrepreneur, he states:

(…) I was seeking new challenges. When the boo-box project began to gain momentum, I began to understand the scope of what we could really do based on the concepts we had created, and I was really, really excited by the prospect. I wanted to dedicate myself full time to the project.” The rest of the interview goes on to detail the company’s first steps, seeking out the investment partner Monashees, and following through to the goals and dreams boo-box foresees in its future.

Você S/A magazine also cited boo-box in their April 2008 edition, in an interview with Marcos Tanaka, the company’s CEO, who declares having a “taste for risk-taking” as he, just like Marco Gomes, left behind a successful career as a consultant to associate himself to boo-box, even knowing that this would mean radically altering his lifestyle. He concludes with:

(…) I wanted to be a pioneer, an entrepreneur, I wanted to create more.

Marcos Tanaka –CEO of boo-box

boo-box’s most recent venture into printed press was in Exame magazine. In a recent article about the internet, the publication cites boo-box as one of the many examples of successful businesses. In the article, Marco Gomes presents relevant data on boo-box’s performance and asserts that it was the interest and coverage of specialized media that drew the attention of investor partners Monashees.

The Ikwa Team — a company in which Monashees have chosen to invest as well — was also cited in the interview as an example of successful business entrepreneurship.

boo-box’s first television apparition was on the news interest segment Mundo S/A, on GloboNews channel, in a very interesting bulletin featuring Marco Gomes (founder) and Marcos Tanaka (CEO), who explained the emergence of boo-box in the market and as well as the company’s expectations for the future. Eric Acher, managing partner of Monashees, also spoke about their investment in the company, citing the reasons why boo-box drew their attention, and which of their characteristics were vital to the final decision of investing.

(…) we saw young entrepreneurs with enormous potential, who are entrepreneurs by choice. They could be following careers in more established corporations but instead chose to go out on a limb and face the challenge of following their own vision.

boo-box has been earning a name for itself, slowly working its way towards its main goal: Enriching your content!

Hi! My name is Dirceu and as a boo-box ninja I’ve come to announce some big news:

It is now possible to use more than one tag in our product search system. This was already possible with the widget on the fixed list, but now the function is available both in the virtual shopping window and directly through the API. The tags need to be separated by commas, for example:

Our API now has the limit parameter to define the maximum number of products that will be returned. The new URLs for API access look like this:

Or, for use with jQuery JSONP:

In the event that this parameter is not defined, the pattern will be for 6 products. Our API users please note: update your applications.

Recently the widgets also underwent some changes. Back when we launched, the search product happened simultaneously in the same script call and would end up slowing down the entire page’s loading. Now the product search is asynchronous, and therefore should no longer interfere with loading and annoy the users on your website.

We hope that with these innovations it will be easier to use our tools to increase your profits and offer increasingly better recommendations for your users!

The boo-box tool was born from a mix of Web Services and ecommerce APIs, links with affiliate codes in HTML, libraries, frameworks and plugins in free code. Without these open source tools we would not have been able to create applications that have been helping over 1,000 content originators to earn more (and more objectively) with what they publish on the web.

In November 2007 we released boo-api, which allows developers to use our infrastructure to search for offers in any of the ecommerce retailers with which we are integrated. Our intention is to develop, for the community, knowledge that we gained using their tools.
The way in which we created the boo-links is simple, and since then developers that don’t work with us have programmed tools that create boo-links in ways that we hadn’t thought of ourselves. This is part of our vision of creating a community of developers working towards our common goal.

Using these two characteristics: open source API and easy to create boo-box links, some developers created insertion tools for boo-box links and creative new ways to exhibit offers.

Paulo Duarte created the Plugin Wordpress Images Boo-Box and the Boo-Box module for aLinks; Richard Barros created Boo-Box it! WordPress Plugin for blog monetizing. GraveHeart created the bootube, Pedro Menezes created the Boo-Boxifier, Manoel Netto created the first version of the widgets for personal use, and several other programmers continue to develop other tools to use with boo-box’s infrastructure and intelligence.

We’ve noticed these proactively created applications and have decided to absorb them into our projects, reviewing the source-codes, creating new resources, making a few adjustments and re-releasing them as WordPress plugins and boo-widgets.

This is the (intelligent) Web development cycle: we take open sources from programmers and ecommerce, use them to create tools that are made available to developers, who then create new tools that we reabsorb, improve upon, and release back to them.

Six months have gone by and now we are back with great news for you!

Our tagging tool has had a makeover! Besides a clean new look, it is now even easier to test tags, chose stores and apply the boo-box links. And now our users will each have a boo-box account with password, which will allow us, in the near future, to offer even more new functionalities (such as boo-shop). Come see what we’re talking about on the installation page of our new tagging tool.

Now it’s become even easier to apply boo-box links in images and videos. The links are applied in semi-automatic fashion using WordPress plugins. Go to this page to install.

boo-widgets is an entirely new line of boo-box solutions. Through these widgets the publisher creates product recommendation areas, remaining totally in control and avoiding creating any visual pollution on his or her website! Learn more by following this link!

New retail shops have also been introduced in the system. Special emphasis given to the InterneyShop store, that has products showcased and handpicked by Brazil’s top blogger, Edney. Install the new plugin and check out our new partners!

Our new motto, “Enrich your content,” conveys the spirit behind boo-box in its most objective form: more money and less pollution!

The new website also has a cleaner and more professional look, reflecting a new phase the company is embarking on.

And last but not least, we are keeping a new batch of innovations hidden up our sleeves (including the revolutionary my boo-shop), to be launched in the upcoming months!

Keep checking in for updates on our blog.

Marcos Tanaka

This is a very good text from Seth Godin about good content and of course good marketing, here is an excerpt:

This is a truth of the Internet: When traffic comes to your site without focused intent, it bounces.

75% of all unfocused visitors leave within three seconds.

…

So, what should you do about silly traffic?

The tempting thing to do is to obsess over it. If you could just convert 10% of the bouncers, you’d be increasing your conversion rate by almost a third! (7.5% is about a third of the 25% who don’t bounce). There’s a million things you can do to focus on this, and almost none of them will show you much improvement.

…

I think it’s more productive to worry about two other things instead.
1. Engage your existing users far more deeply. Increase their participation, their devotion, their interconnection and their value.
2. Turn those existing users into ambassadors, charged with the idea of bring you traffic that is focused, traffic with intent…

So, how did you do on the test?

What this video really demonstrates is how we tend to not pay attention to secondary matters when our attention is focused on one main subject.

Online advertising has been increasingly treated as a ‘secondary matter’ that has to vie with specific content to grab users’ attention. Flashy banners, pop-ups that block content, sponsored links, such as AdSense; all try to guess what the user is searching for, all vying for space and attention with the content of your web site.

It is inevitable that, just like in the video, these ‘secondary objects’ will be overlooked by the majority of people, or that, in those cases where they do manage to grab attention, they tear the focus away from what’s truly drawing the user: content. (If you had been paying attention to the “moonwalking bear” you probably would have missed the number of passes!)

Due to this inevitability, and due to the driving need for increased publishing, publishers are forced to join the fray for mass audiences, and thus are born the black-hat SEOs (Search Engine Optimatization). The black-hat SEO is the art of directing a maximum flow and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines by applying algorithmic manipulation techniques in ranking of search results for targeted keywords (especially on Google).

But hang on. If I’m a publisher why on Earth would I associate my web site with advertising material that vies for my user’s attention? Moreover, why would I use SEO techniques that bring users who are not really interested in what I have to say to my web site? It is a vicious cycle: a drive for bigger traffic equals black-hat SEOs, which equal less influence of content over users, which in turn ignites a new drive to attract an increasingly larger user traffic to your web site.

We at boo-box believe that the publisher shouldn’t be pushed into this vicious cycle. On the contrary, you should captivate a loyal following by creating innovative content and investing in attracting those people who are truly interested in what you are publishing (and not in the most frequently typed Google keyword).

The respect you garner from your followers for the quality of your content can and should be rewarded. Your endorsement maximizes product and service recommendations and each time the user finds a good recommendation or review, a positive cycle is strengthened: good content equals greater respectability, good recommendations in turn equal better financial results, which generate a greater interest in publishing good content.

A number of publishers have been achieving success and getting better financial results using boo-box without having to fight for that extra traffic. In a recent event, Paulo Henrique from GraveHeart and Lucia Freitas from Ladybug both declared they increased their revenue by more than 100% in some affiliate programs without having changed a single thing, just by adding boo-box links to their content. We gathered statements from other users that attest to having tripled or even multiplied by 10 their gains using boo-box while maintaining (or even reducing) the number of hits on their web sites.

By using boo-box you will be taking the advertisement on your web site from a ‘secondary object’ to being an integral part of its content; after all, these are products and services you are recommending to your users!

p.s.: This is a substantial topic to cover, so be on the lookout for new posts on the effects of the loss of relevance to advertisers.