You've Never Seen Time Crisis Played Like This

Full-screen the video for best viewing.

EDIT: Scot from the company downstairs posted a picture of our Time Crisis II machine on Reddit and it's blown up; pretty cool! 

We have a Time Crisis II arcade machine downstairs, and while a bunch of us play it, 2 of my coworkers are more intense than anyone else.

So I took a bunch of footage on my iPhone and put this homage together in a few hours.

*dramatic music*

It's our very own designer duo, Barry Crane and Jeannie Nguyen, VS. Time Crisis II! ...You've never seen Time Crisis played quite like this.

Sorry for funky dimensions due to phone footage, full-screen the video for best viewing.

My personal favorite moment features the UPS delivery man.

Want to learn more about what kind of awesome company pulls off such shenanigans? Check us out at lexity.com, or find more about Barry and Jeannie on our team page.

- Amelia (@linamelia)

6 Pinterest Screw-Ups You Don't Realize You're Making: A Beginner's Guide to Pinterest

 

1. Marketing to businesses instead of people

The people who use Pinterest are individuals, not businesses, so if you are a B2C company, you are in luck! But if you are B2B, you'll need to think harder about how to tailor your Pinterest strategy so that it appeals to individuals at the companies you want to reach, or reconsider investing resources in Pinterest altogether.

2. Failing to include buttons/follow me on your site

This is low-hanging fruit that so many people forget. Make it effortless for your customers to help you spread the word on Pinterest!

• Add the "Follow Button" for websites to your site next to your Facebook / Twitter buttons: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/
• Add the "Pin It" button for websites to your product pages: http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/
• If you're on Wordpress, don't forget about this Pinterest widget: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pinterest-rss-widget/

3. Pinning all your products, even the boring ones

Pinterest is, above all, VISUAL, so put your best foot forward! Curate what you're posting--pick the most irresistible, delicious, luscious, colorful, slick, gorgeous, witty, quirky, funny, cute, fabulous, stylish or otherwise compelling items to show off. Skip any goods with poor-quality, blah, or boring product images. They're not for Pinterest.

4. Pinning everything at once

Think of your product catalog as a collection of precious gems you're dispensing one by one to the world. On Pinterest, your products are your assets. Don't give them away all at once! Plan a schedule or rhythm to pin periodically, so that you have a constant stream of activity to keep people engaged.

5. Marketing to the wrong audience

68% of all Pinterest users are female, and 97% of their fans on Facebook are female. 78% of all users are between the ages of 18-44. If this sounds like your customers, then great! If you sell collectible baseball cards, maybe not so much. We're not saying you can't use Pinterest if your business is guy-centric, but be aware you may have a tougher time than you think.

6. Forgetting to tell your current customers you're on Pinterest

This one is a no-brainer. If you already have a mailing list, Facebook fan group, or Twitter following, tell them about your newborn Pinterest presence! They're already your most engaged fans, so take advantage of that fact and tell them about the latest and greatest way for them to stay in touch.

Like what we have to say? We're passionate about helping small business ecommerce merchants succeed with online marketing. Learn more about our automated search marketing and free real-time visitor tracking tools at www.lexity.com, or contact us.

Lexity Now Available for Every Ecommerce Store Under the Sun

We have a hugely exciting announcement: With our latest release, ecommerce merchants on any store platform, even custom-built setups, can now use Lexity to automate their online advertising.

In the past, we’ve always had to regretfully turn away interested merchants who weren’t using one of our supported store platforms, such as Shopify or eBay ProStores. But no longer! Now, whether you’re using Magento, Big Commerce, Etsy, Big Commerce, OS Commerce, your own custom-built setup, or anything else, you can use Lexity.  Just select “Other” as your store platform during setup.

There are a few extra steps, but we’re happy to offer our help to anyone who needs assistance getting set up (see end for contact info):

• So that we can connect to your store, we’ll need you to copy and paste a piece of code into your site.
• So that we know what your products are, we’ll need you to upload a product feed as an XML file. Many store platforms already allow you to automatically export this file.

We’ve always been all about making online advertising accessible to anyone and everyone. We hope you all are as excited as we are about this latest step towards our goal: Making it simple and affordable for people like you to grow your businesses! 

Interested in learning more about how Lexity can help you advertise your store online? Visit lexity.com or email us! You can also call us anytime M-F from 9-6 PST at our toll-free number 1-888-533-8144, or live chat with us at lexity.com. Pricing starts at $20/month. 

Our Budget Friendly Marketing Just Got Friendlier

Introducing a new Lexity Marketing Plan priced low enough for even the smallest and newest of stores. Starting at only $20 a month our new Shopping Feed option in our Overall Store theme lets even the most meager of marketing budgets participate in the vast world of online marketing. This option is a great choice for newer stores struggling to make their first few sales as well as bigger stores looking to beef up conversion. This option includes optimizing your feeds for maximum exposure and submitting four times a day to keep everything fresh and Google friendly. We also optimize how your products are categorized so that you are sure to get the best possible positioning and be found by relevant searches. Promoting your products with images will also help increase traffic.

For larger stores that are ready to throw some weight behind their marketing budget we have restructured our Overall Store theme to also include a Shopping Feed + Search Marketing option for budgets of $1000 or more. This option includes automatically creating search marketing ads  and keywords for your store as well as submitting your product feeds to Google. 

Lexity has always prided itself on making online advertising simple and affordable for small business ecommerce merchants and we are thrilled to be able to offer a new low priced option that will help them achieve success. And as always, our Shopping Feed customers will be able to enjoy free Live View where you can watch you customers in real-time! Visit lexity.com to learn more!

- Katie

Browser Not Supported: One Year Later

It's been a year and a bit since Lexity--Vurve, at the time--launched with the AIEE (Ancient Internet Explorer Experience) page, in which we refused to support customers who insisted on using Internet Explorer below Version 8. When we re-launched as Lexity this year, we kept the policy and the page, after updating it to a friendlier, not-so-Blue-Screen-Of-Death design.

We had some thoughtful feedback and wanted to come back to everyone with an update, for those who might be curious about how it went. Here is a short but typical time in the Lexity neighborhood, including hits from paying customers who are signed in and new visitors to our front page:

Visits from all versions of Internet Explorer combined are below 10%; here's the breakdown:

IE6 is no longer even a blip on the radar, thank goodness, and less than 1% of total traffic (9.26% of 9.51%, in this sample) strongly suggests that IE7 can also be ignored.

While graphs and stats are lovely, the real test is in customer reaction. I'm happy to say we've had exactly zero customers who were unable to make the switch from IE6 or IE7 to a modern browser, and zero complaints from prospective customers who were unwilling to do so.

What are you waiting for? Grab the conditional comments from the Browser Not Supported blog entry and get your own AIEE page up today!

Kent Brewster