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)

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.

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. 

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

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

One of the lessons I've learned from analyzing data to figure out how to improve advertising campaigns is that the quality of your search marketing efforts depends heavily on these pesky Keywords. How do you pick these Keywords? You have to figure out what things people are searching for, and how these searches relate to your product catalogue. Sophie, the automated marketing manager at Lexity, makes managing your campaigns much simpler, significantly reducing the time and resources you need to spend in order to put ads on search engines like Google and Bing.

There are many factors that change which Keywords you should be advertising, the most obvious of which is past performance. Sophie calculates the expected performance for every one of your Keywords and pauses those that are performing poorly. Conversely, when Keywords are performing well and are bringing qualified traffic to your store that leads to sales, Sophie allocates a greater percentage of your marketing budget to those Keywords. Other things that may require you to change your Keywords include changes in your product descriptions, store layout and product catalogue. Managing this is a great burden, especially for SMBs who have limited time and resources to spend on marketing.

Sophie manages your Keywords, tracks your product catalogue changes, figures out how much to spend on each Keyword based on its past performance, and occasionally pauses those Keywords which are not doing well.

When Sophie thinks you need new Keywords, she will prompt you with a Task to add new keywords to your Overall Store Theme or your Specific Products Theme. We've re-designed this Task to give you much more context and ease the complication of managing your Keywords.

Notable features of the widget are:

• The right panel of the Task displays Sophie's suggested Keywords. These suggestions are broken into sections according to how Sophie generated them (e.g., by looking at the Keywords from organic search traffic that previously led to sales on your site, or by reading your entire product catalogue and finding the phrases that most appropriately represent your store as a whole).
• The left panel of the Task displays Keywords which are active (or soon-to-be active) for this theme.
• To add one of Sophie's suggested Keywords to your theme, you move it from the right panel (suggested Keywords) to the left panel (active Keywords) by clicking the left arrow next to the suggestion.
• If you've changed your mind about this Keyword and no longer want to add it to your theme, you move it back from the left panel (active Keywords) to the right panel (suggested Keywords) by clicking the right arrow, thus undoing your previous action. This Keyword will now re-appear in the original list of suggested Keywords.
• If you really dislike one of Sophie's suggested Keywords, you can hit the "X" button next to it, and that Keyword will never be suggested to you again.

One final change you should know is that we have begun to enforce a minimum requirement for the number of Keywords required in your themes. You cannot finish and submit the Keyword task until you have 30 active (or soon-to-be active) Keywords for the Overall Store Theme or for each product in the Specific Products Theme. Why have we added this requirement? When you have more Keywords, you are more likely to capture people using different terms to search for the products you're selling.

Have fun managing your Keywords with the new Task widget!

- Andrew

Since opening their doors in 2007, online ecommerce store EarthLED has found success as one of the largest distributors in the country of LED bulbs. EarthLED specializes in bulbs for retrofit use to replace regular lighting.

In addition, EarthLED has used Lexity for over a year now to fuel that success: Sales revenue has increased 27% year over year, visits have increased 42%, and pageviews have increased 54%.

We asked managing director Mark Costigliola to share his tips with us on Lexity, marketing, and small business in general.

Mark’s recommendations:

• Take advantage of Lexity Live View to keep a finger on the pulse of your business
• Stores that have just opened for business should try starting with the Overall Store or Specific Products themes instead of the Retargeting theme
• Users should make sure to write descriptive site content and product pages to increase the chance of good performance from Lexity
• If you have a bit of extra time, put yourself in your customer’s shoes to help think of ways to refine Lexity’s keyword suggestions
• If you have a new product, reach out to “key opinion leaders” in your industry to help you gain an initial audience
• If you keep inventory on your side, make it a priority to figure out how to do efficient fulfillment
• Before you start your small business, spend time planning it all out

Use Lexity Live View to track your business in real-time 

Mark says Live View has helped give the EarthLED team instantaneous insight into their business and how to improve it.

“Live View has given us a lot more intelligence about how our business operates, and how different things we do during the day affect who's coming to our site. It gives us a finger on the pulse of our business. Being an ecommerce store, if you can't see what's going on in your store at any given time, you really don't know what's going on.”

“I'll watch it and be able to see if someone purchases or abandons the checkout. Or I'll post something on Facebook and start seeing people come in from Facebook. It’s an instantaneous reaction to what you're doing, and because it's something we can watch and measure, it's helped us to be a lot more proactive in what we do every day. It's revitalized how we update our site, because we update things more frequently when we can see we're getting results. For example, we've added a lot more categories and different ways for people to find different products on our site, and we've seen how that helps people actually buy a product. Live View is one of the best things that’s been added to the platform.”

Brand New Stores: Try the Overall Store or Specific Products Themes

Mark recommends that stores that have just opened their doors start with the Overall Store or Specific Products themes. The Retargeting theme shows ads to previous visitors who haven’t yet bought, so it works best for stores that have already built up significant traffic.

Write Descriptive Site and Product Pages

Since Lexity factors in store copy to make keyword recommendations, Mark also recommends that new users make sure their site and product pages have good content to increase the likelihood of good performance from Lexity.

Put Yourself In Your Customer’s Shoes To Help Refine Your Keywords

Mark says he’s surprised at how well Lexity generates keywords on its own and thinks users who don’t want to adjust the software’s suggestions will be “just fine”—nevertheless, Mark admits he likes to spend a few minutes each week adjusting his keywords.

Now that he no longer has to manage the details of executing his ad campaigns, Mark says he likes to take a few minutes each week instead to refine Lexity’s keyword suggestions. “You can stop thinking about logistics and start thinking, what do I want people to find me by?” To help you uncover keywords Lexity might have missed, he says, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. “When you're looking at what Lexity comes up with, ask yourself if there's something your customer would be looking for that's Lexity isn't coming up with.”

If you keep inventory on your side, make it a priority to figure out how to do efficient fulfillment

EarthLED carries roughly 60 products, with about $2-3 million dollars in inventory at any given place altogether.

“The biggest thing, especially for people who keep inventory on their side: Get fulfillment figured out and do it efficiently. Figure out the most efficient way to get from warehouse to customer. Most people like free shipping, so cut as much out as possible to get free shipping in a timely fashion. Once we figured out the key to this, that drove our success.”

“Any store with varied products for varied customers, the first thing people think is drop shipping. We decided to store in our own warehouse. Which was great, except there were a lot of overhead costs. We had to figure out how to get the product to the customer in a timely fashion, had to figure out an inventory management system. So we started using third party fulfillment solutions like Amazon Fulfillment. That's the key thing we use. I definitely recommend Amazon Fulfillment to others. It's difficult to achieve the level of expertise internally that you need. Once we get the product to Amazon, it's a lot easier because they manage checking and managing product inventory.”

If you have a new product, reach out to “key opinion leaders” in your industry to help you gain an initial audience

“If someone's got a new product, go out to the blogs in your industry or focus group, send free samples, build that relationship with who we call “key opinion leaders.” That doesn't hurt. It worked really well in some cases. Some blogs were really popular and got us our initial audience.”

Before you start your small business, spend some time planning things out

What would Mark do differently if he started another small business? Here’s what he says:

"Sit down from the start and plan things out. Do a lot of planning. Try to figure it all out before you launch—but, still launch as quickly as possible. Think it all through but still launch."

Interested in learning more about how Lexity can help you advertise your store online? Visit lexity.com or contact us! There are no fees for the first 3 months, and Lexity Live View comes free when you use Lexity for your online advertising. Lexity supports multiple store platforms, including Shopify and eBay ProStores.

When I am not at Lexity, I like spending time with my family (I have three kids who are growing up fast!) and friends, trying out new restaurants (St. Michael’s Alley and Evvia are my local favorites), and running through my Los Altos neighborhood.  I live close enough to bike to work and look forward to cycling to the office.  Lastly our office is next to Dana Street Roasting Company and I love their coffee and pastries.

- Peter

Hello valued Lexity merchants. It's Barry with some updates about our Lexity application.

This week we rolled out a new interaction for Tasks. 

First I want to emphasize to our customers how important it is that they stay on top of their Lexity tasks!

We believe you as the merchant know your store and your products best. So Sophie asks you to take a look at the ads and keywords she creates before she uses them to advertise your store. This is where tasks come in. Sophie creates tasks for you that prompt you to review and approve the ads and keywords she has generated for you.

If you don't complete your tasks in a timely manner, it makes it difficult for Sophie to market your store effectively. So be sure to stay on top of your tasks!

To that end we made some design updates to tasks. First of all we updated the language in task emails that you as a customer receive. We put the phrase "ACTION REQUIRED" in the subject line to let you know that there is a task or tasks waiting for you and that it is important to attend to them. Next, when you log in to Lexity we added a larger alert banner next to the "Tasks" tab making the fact that you have tasks more noticable. And lastly, when you are viewing your tasks we now display them one at a time, so you can easily focus on each task. When you have multiple tasks to do we display a counter and navigation so you can browse through them before tackling each one. 

We added these new elements to the tasks interaction to emphasize to you, our customers, the importance of completing your tasks with care and in a timely manner to ensure Sophie can market your store successfully and effectively.

So be sure to do your tasks! 

Thanks and I'll check in again soon with more feature updates.

Barry and the Lexiteers

People ask why I'm still in the business after so many years. One reason: I get to see what happens when instruments--and techniques, and people--from opposite ends of the universe sit down and play together. Magic!

Kent Brewster