Phantom CTO

Your business idea doesn’t have to be great but getting momentum is critical.

If you wait to be great before you get out there, you’ll never move. Get out there when the edges are rough and keep on improving it while your out in your market. Let your market shape what you give them. Use technology to get the feedback and reiterate what your market demands from your products.

Tech breaks borders: location, location, location doesn’t mean the same thing anymore.

Email, blogs, video conferencing, wikis, and skype are some of the tools that are breaking down walls. What tech helps make happen is build interactions that foster trust and value. The key is to building relationships with your market and within your company. You don’t have to be in the middle of the hottest town to grow your business or start up. You have to provide value to your market, and they don’t care where you are while you do it.

Starting with little cash means focused better business discipline and good spending habits.

You have to choose options with better value. Limitations are your best friend to finding creative solutions to problems your business will face. Technology has made many improvements on how to get better value for your business dollars.

You do not have to be the next Google-sized business. Seriously.

Do you really need to be the next 450 billion dollar business? Heck no. Consider being the next level up from where you are today. That’s got a much higher chance of success and it’s completely within your reality. Let technology help your business move forward, not have you follow a business idea that has a gigantic chance of failure.

You don’t need a huge budget to get your business in front of your market.

Technology makes it cheap to do so and lets your message be the focus of the interaction. How much does it cost to be on YouTube versus to be on a 30 second TV spot? How much does it cost running an ad in print versus writing a blog post on your company website? How much does it cost hosting a live event versus a doing a video or teleconference?

In the early days of your new business, don’t focus on finding money. Focus on solving customers problems and getting feedback.

You might think you need lots of capital to start your new business. But what you really need is to get immersed in your customer’s world and identify their problems. Present solutions to those problems and ask them what they think of your results. At the start of your business, no amount of money will help more than being in sync with your market’s needs. It’s the ultimate litmus test: do you provide answers your market is looking for? Is it a business idea only on paper: in a business plan or through market research? Have you had real experiences with providing value to make a genuine decision on the likelihood of success?

Don’t write a business plan. Write a blog, post when you want.

Ah!! The MBA woman is saying screw the bplan. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying. Why is that? First off, who’s reading this plan? Investors? Banks? Your Future Partners and Employees? Do you really think someone wants to wade through 50 pages of a future potential with 5 year projections of million dollar revenue. Not really.
On the other hand, what do you think people interested in your business vision want? Bite sized chunks of value that they can get. Think ‘Thousand Songs In Your Pocket’ as the way to describe the iPod. That phrase was enough to get people to buy it.

Do small sampling size value with a blog post or a short video that you can continually trickle out to your market and get immediate and visible feedback from the people you want to serve. Not the imagined people your research tells you about. No business starting out ever has all things figured out. Be real with your market and tell them that you’re working with everything you’ve got to make their lives better. That’s what a business should be writing for. A business plan should be a living and breathing plan that changes. Make your company blog into the channel that shows your market and your peers what your business stands for. That kind of writing is what creates paying customers who will finance your business, not borrowed money from someone who is looking to turn a profit on your work.

Measure what you Manage, How Small Businesses Get Results From Their website

Step 0: Get an account with Google Analytics

If your business has a web presence that you expect to turn into business results like new sales, new client introductions, customer service and building relationships you’ll never know how well you’re doing until you track and analyze the data.

There are plenty of web tracking tools to choose from but what I recommend and use with clients in Google Analytics, the free analytics software by Google.

Have a Website to Generate Revenue? Enable the eCommerce Analysis

If you want to drive visitors to a page for a purchase or newsletter signup you can track successful conversions using Goals and Funnels. Enable eCommerce reporting and the eCommerce Analysis report set. From your dashboard, go to edit settings. Then in the main website profile information, go to edit in the right upper corner this will take you to the  Edit Profile Information. Here you’ll find the e-commerce section, select Yes and save changes.

Machiavelli Meets Business Intel, GAnalytics Style

The End, The Means, GAnalytics Goals and Funnels

In GAnalytics  the end is called a goal. It’s the action your visitor takes that you defined as important. It’s the end result you want to track to show progress towards your business goals. In GAnalytics the means is called a funnel. It’s the path you want your prospects to take in order to reach your defined goal.
For example,  a small business looking to build a relationship with prospects through its email would define a goal as newsletter signup and the funnel as landing on a recent blog post then entering their information on the sign up box on the sidebar.

Falling Off the Bandwagon Never Felt So Good

Usually, if you’re not tracking you have no idea where your clients and prospects go other than the place you’d like them to go like an add to cart button. So without tracking all you know are your successful transactions. You know nothing about how many other people were there and just didn’t pull the trigger on going forward or worse started to then didn’t complete the transaction.

Tracking lets you know where your visitors fall off your bandwagon

When you have your ends and means defined you’ll now have the data needed to see where your visitors fall off the desired path you want them to take. This lets you know more than just an abandon rate but exactly where your customer was just before they left your site.

Tracking Lets Your Business Read Between the Lines

Get context of your visitors intent and expectations when coming to your website.
GAnalytics lets you learn how visitors came to your site by the referring url and if they searched for a phrase and went to your site, you’ll know what they were looking for in Google. You can also tell who is sending you visitors by looking at the referring URLs

Your homepage isn’t the one place visitors go to when they visit your domain.
Visitors come to your website from search engines that dig through all your web pages. GAnalytics will show you what pages they came to first, known as the landing page, the last page they were on before leaving your site, known as the bounce page, and which pages they viewed.

Who Yelled Fire? Bounce Rate and the Bum Rush Off Your Site

An interesting factor you’ll get to know is what pages on your website is most often the last page your visitor sees. This will tell you where you’re loosing their interest or attention or need to deliver more value.

From tracking you’ll be able to see which categories of products are most popular. There’s an 80/20 somewhere on your site, and you’ll want to maximize the 20% that’s bringing in you more business.

Get to Know Google Optimizer. Another Free Google tool

Does She Want the Black Dress or the Little Black Dress?

Sure you’re prospects are looking for what you’re offering on your website but did you know that you can test out different parts of your page to see which gets a better response out of your visitors. Maybe they were looking for a black dress and you show them the little black dress and a whole new association pops int their head bringing them closer to a sale.
You wouldn’t know any of that is possible unless you are doing split testing.
Without split testing your are your own worst enemy to reaching your prospects
I’m not talking about Christan Slater, or even Sybil. Split testing lets you try out different headlines, colors, offers, guarnutees to different groups of your visitors and tracks the results of those tests.

Conversion Testing Rules of Thumb

For every 100 conversions test 1 page element over 2 weeks. That’ll give you enough time to see results and make adjustments. Once you find a winner, replace the old variable and keep trying to beat your results. Split testing lets your business sharpen its personal best in conversion which means more sales, happier customers and more growth.

Never Spazz Out on the High of a Good Revenue Day

When your website is giving your a great revenue day. Don’t think you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth by not understanding why you’re performing so well. Analyze your website data and see where they are coming from what they were looking for and make sure its something you can repeat again!

The Holiday Season: a Retailer’s Shot in the Arm

Many retail businesses are cyclical. Sometimes earning as much in the last quarter of the year as the previous two combined. I’m going to say it again, tracking will tell show you the trends in visitors coming in, from where, and what they are looking for. Make the most of your peak season by opening all lanes for green on your website.

Aside from your internal tracking, Google can offer you an industry wide tracking from Google Insights.
An example of what Google Insights can show for an industry is a comparison between basketball, football and golf in the US over the last 12 months. What can you tell about people’s interest in these sports? What sport specific business wouldn’t benefit from knowing this?

Look at this chart directly below. This shows the results of the top geographic areas for the keyword football.

What regionally targeted business wouldn’t want to know where their most interested prospective visitors might be coming from during football season?? Take a look at the second graph for footballs most interested US areas and key searches.

This is a hopefully brief, but long blog post,  overview of using Analytics on your website to help grow your business. If you feel I should cover more or have questions, please comment below!

As more business owners and executives read about how successful and influential blogs have been in building other businesses, many are interested in starting a blog and dive head first into the pool without ever testing the waters. I would never suggest diving into blogging simply because you read about it in business newspapers or because you’ve seen other top execs start blogging and you instantly want the same results they have. No, that’s a sure fire disaster. Instead, I recommend you get a sampling of what a business blog can do following this two week challenge.

If you’re not a strong writer or find it difficult to make the time to write, it would be better to do this experiment before plunging ahead with a blog.

Here is the gist of the experiment: test the waters by following blogs in your niche and become an engaged reader by commenting on posts that have meaning to you or make you ask questions.
Blog commenting is a good way to develop your writing habits on someone elses blog (and their blog investment). You also get to develop thought leadership in your arena and helps build your reputation for your name and business. Here are the details.

The 2 Week Challenge

How to Decide if Blogging is Right for Your Business

First step: Get to know your industry blogging peers

Figure out who are the most influential blogs are in your industry. Subscribe to their feeds using a reader like GoogleReader or Bloglines, you should limit this initial challenge to 5 to 10 blogs.

Second step: Seeing what’s out there
Every day, skim all the headlines and only read full posts that pull your interest.

Third Step: Become an engaged reader by commenting
Leave a comment on the posts you read that you found interesting or ask a question to the author to expand on the topic. Remember to always add value to the conversation between the author, yourself and the rest of the blog readers.

I suggest using RSS feeds instead of visiting the individual websites as an effort to save time and get an overview of what is happening in your industry. Learn how to use Google Reader in Plain English

If you’re hard pressed to come up with industry peer blogs, consider doing a Google Blog Search or Technorati Search for your market. You can also search and subscribe to similar blogs inside of Google Reader. I reference a great article in a previous post, see question 4 to find relevant blogs in your industry.

By the end of the challenge you’ll have jump started your blogging authority and found your ‘blog voice’ in your industy amoung your peers and their readership.

You will also be able to decide if blogging was what you thought it would be like.  You’ll be able to answer these questions before making your decision to start a blog for your business.

Was the experience similar to what you expected?

Did you have a hard time scheduling time to do the challenge?

Did you see how your peers’ blogs work to build a community and increase business? Did you see any benefit for the other company’s blog that you would like to add to your business?

Would you like the results of blogging but find that you may not be the best person to be the voice for your business blog?