The view from my office on Day 1 of working for myself 9 years ago.

Exactly nine years ago I acted on my decision to never work for anyone again. I started Brand5 out of the dining room in my apartment with exactly zero clients and a very small bank account balance.

Nine years later I’m proud to say that Brand5 is still very much alive (and thriving). The company’s success has afforded me the opportunity to take some additional entrepreneurial leaps. I’ve been fortunate enough to start and sell two other companies in addition to Brand5 – Beelya and FileLater – and I’m working on my next one already. As a result, I’ve become passionate about starting, and helping other people start, their own online technology companies (my term for websites). For me, nothing is better than taking something from the back of a napkin or a white board, turning it into something real, getting customers, generating revenue, and wrestling with all of the things that can happen trying to make it grow into a real product or service.

Along the way I’ve learned a crazy amount of lessons. I do my best to take those lessons with me when I work with clients or on my own ventures. Here are nine (9 years, 9 lessons get it?) that I hope will help others out there trying to find their way building their own online business. As always, forgive the plethora of sports analogies. I’m a big fan of business and sports and the two often get mixed together.

Do one thing really well first.
It’s easy to get caught up in the potential of an idea, to look ahead at everything it could be one day. Chances are an idea’s potential is almost impossible to achieve out-of-the-gate. Instead, use a logical, realistic starting point to begin your online company. When thinking about what an online business should look like the day it launches, make sure it does one thing really well (as opposed to more than one thing done not so well). That one thing should be the core functionality – the reason the site exists. If your idea is to make it easier for people to share photos, make sure it’s easy for your users to upload and share their photos. Resist the urge to do the next 10 features that will make it even better. If that one thing doesn’t work, it will be hard to get people to try the other 9.

Give me a winning team over a killer idea.
For sports fans, this is akin to the veteran athlete signing with a team because he says it gives him the best chance to win a championship for before he retires. This idea proves itself to me over and over again every year. If I’m weighing getting involved in a new project, I’d much rather work with a team loaded with talent and people I like and believe in over a project where I don’t know the other parties as well. If something I’m working on takes off to the point where a lot of time will be required, it’s critical to spend that time with people you like, respect, and trust. Starting something new is stressful enough. Interpersonal drama is wasted energy. It can, and should, be avoided.

Keep moving the chains.
The life/work combo gets busier every year. A couple of years ago I learned that it’s important to try really hard to keep things fresh. That’s why I vowed to launch at least one new product/idea/website every year. While I focus most of my time on what pays the bills (client work) I’ve found that I feel fulfilled if I have an idea working in the background at the same time. The more ideas I launch, the more I increase the chances that one of them will take off. What if it does? Then I’ll spend more time working on it and a little less time on client work. But here’s the key: you’ve got to keep moving the ball down the field with every idea. An idea stuck in neutral will tend to stay stuck in neutral. Set modest goals of moving the chains to get more first downs. You’ll find a nice balance of paid work and risk that can be extremely rewarding.

Don’t watch the standings.
It’s hard not to pay attention to what everyone else is doing.  Unless you are the luckiest person ever, competition is inevitably going to pop up. In my experience it always seems to happen at the worst possible time. Stop watching the standings on the scoreboard and get over it. Focus, instead, on making your product the best it can be. My suggestion is to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, but don’t become obsessed with following their every move.

Try not to assume the worst.
Related to the last point – don’t assume everything your competitors are doing is smarter than what you’re doing. They got an article on a popular blog? So what. Stay focused on keeping your customer happy. Do that and it won’t matter what your competitors are doing.

Learn by failing.
Mistakes are a reality of being an entrepreneur. It’s what we do with those mistakes that shape our career path. We can either ignore the mistakes or, worse, blame them on someone else. Or, we can embrace the mistakes, chalk them up to experience, and move on. I’ve learned a lot over the years by failing on ideas, a lot of which I was convinced would work (like hiring a high-priced PR form to get press). When those ideas failed I moved on and remembered the important lessons I learned. I’m convinced that this is the only way to get better as an entrepreneur.

Cash is the ulimate power.
Starting a new idea or company without the cash to launch it and fund it for an extended period of time (in my opinion at least 18 months) is a one-way ticket to Failure Town. Without cash, ideas fall flat on their faces. Nothing ever gets done and the door is left wide open to competition. I see it all the time.

Your own cash is best.
I used to think that in order to be successful I had to go out and raise a bunch of money to fund a startup. Let me tell you that raising money isn’t the holy grail. Neither is running a VC-backed company for that matter. Contrary to popular belief, there are other ways to build successful businesses. For me, the best way to do it is with your own money. I’ve raised money and I have heard too many horror stories from people who work for BC-backed companies. It’s a super tough route to success. I’m not bashing angels and VCs. I’d be a moron if I was. All I’m saying is if you have the option, put together a great advisory board and fund the company yourself. This way you get the valuable advice that you need and you end up with a whole lot more equity and a lot less headaches and obligations. The obvious downside here is that self-funding is way easier said than done. Not many of us can afford to fund every great idea we get.

You never know who you’re talking to…unless you care to find out.
This is not a new lesson learned in the last 9 years. It’s something my Dad always preached that has been constantly reinforced over the years. It’s so important to treat everyone you meet with respect. You never really know who they are or who they know that could help you. I constantly see people lose interest in the person they are talking to after falsely surmising in 20 seconds that person is valueless to them. Not only is judging people so quickly rude, it’s a terrible move business-wise. All I’m asking is that you give people a chance. Over the years I have seen time and time again that the best entrepreneurs will always engage with you. And they all ask you, “so how can I help you?”.  They don’t worry about you stealing their ideas or taking up their time. They genuinely just want to help. We are all in this entrepreneurial thing together. More of us need to act like it.

Best of luck to you in 2012 with your endeavors. Keep a few of these lessons and mind and you will save yourself some time and money.

Feel the same or different about any of my points? Let me know what you think in the comment section below.

Spike! Sample demand chart for tax industry

Cyber Monday’s recent passing got me thinking about the pressure involved with trying to complete a ton of sales in a short period of time. Cyber Monday is super important to online retailers for lots of reasons. The main reasons are revenue generation (i.e. profitability) and inventory control. So that means that those sites can’t afford to mess up. They have to get traffic and convert it at a high level in a very small window of time. Failure affects the bottom line for the entire year.

When I helped run FileLater, we had very similar pressure. Over 80% of our revenue was generated the last 72 hours before the tax deadline. And 40% came within the last 12 hours before the deadline! (see the Google Trends chart to the right)

The reality was simple – if we didn’t produce, we were cooked until the next tax season because tax extensions can only be filed from January to April of each year. That’s extreme pressure.

We described the business as being hyper-seasonal because it’s basically a seasonal business on steroids. And let me say that we learned a lot. We failed enough to help us succeed and grow to the point where the company was acquired in late 2010.

Here are the biggest takeaways I always share with businesses in similar high-pressure industries.

1. Usability is critical
Assuming you’ve done all the work to get customers to come to your site, don’t blow it by making your product to hard to buy. Spend as much time as you can before the spike testing sales funnels. Talk to customers who have bought from you previously. Ask them to tell you what would make the sales experience easier. With so much at stake, it’s critical that customers get onto your site, pay, and get off as fast as possible. This will also help to prevent a long line of customers waiting to chat with someone on your support team.

2. Keep testing
Others may disagree with me here, but it’s important to test even on the big day. Test wording, call-to-actions, images, everything you can. If you don’t, you won’t really be sure where to improve next year. And, you’ll be a lot less willing to test. We saw this with FileLater. We didn’t test the first year. The second year came and we wanted to test messaging, but we didn’t know where to start because we had no idea what our strengths and weaknesses were.  This may cause some brief, short-term pain but it will be worth it in the long run because your site will improve every year.

3. Learn fast
Keep experienced, dedicated resources assigned to analytics.  Have one person (or more if you need it) watching what is working and not working and make decisions FAST. Lost time definitely equals lost money. So if your head of support is also watching your A/B testing results, there could be a big missed opportunity while that person is handling a 35-minute phone call.

4. Support, support, support
Killer customer support can always be a differentiator. On a day when your business is on the line, make sure to do everything possible to give customers the best experience possible. Have  the best, most up-to-speed resources possible available by chat and, if possible, by phone. This will increase your conversions rate and will make people repeat customers. This is something we excelled with on FileLater and it paid huge dividends. People trusted us because our service was so much better than our competitors.

5. Stay alive
Let me be the master of the obvious: a server failure on your most important day of the year is a killer. Do everything you can to avoid it from happening. Suck it up and spend the extra money you need to have contingencies in place to make sure that any outing is brief. And do it early. Don’t wait until a couple of weeks before your big day. Do it at least a moth in advance. Work closely with your hosting company to alert them of what you are going to need. The great hosts, like Rackspace for example, are well prepared and experienced for spike scenarios like this.

I hope this proves helpful. If you have anything to add or a comment, let’s chat in the comment section below.

I wanted to share a case study about a new home page design that helped a client in the estimated tax business improve conversions. The results have been great so far – up 83%.

First, let’s get the background info on the client (Easy Estimated Taxes) out of the way. Easy Estimated taxes is a site that allows taxpayers to manage their quarterly estimated tax payments. Taxpayers can pay their estimated tax payments out of their bank account, keep record of their payments, and they get reminders of when their next payment is due.

Probably the most important thing to know about the business is that it’s seasonal. There are four payment periods per year and their traffic peaks during those four periods. That means those four periods are super important to them – it’s how the business sustains itself for the entire year. By now you’re putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that their site needs to perform during its peak period. If not, then they have to wait 3 months for another peak to come around.

The client had the following goal: get more of the existing traffic into their sales funnel. Put another way, get more of the people that visit the site clicking on the right call-to-action.

Accomplishing this goal goes beyond making the call-to-action button larger. There are some subtle details we had to address to make people comfortable with clicking that call-to-action. In other words, not only should people click it, but they have to want to click it because they were confident that Easy Estimated taxes would provide the services it claims to provide.

Here’s the design before we got our hands on it:

Here’s what we noticed needed to be adjusted to help accomplish the client’s goals:

1. Above the fold was actually decent. There is a clear call-to-action with fairly easy -to-understand text. There is always room for improvement, however.
2. Everything below the fold looked inconsistent with the rest of the page. In the tax-related industry, it’s incredibly important to convey a strong, professional, and trustworthy appearance. Users in this industry are highly skeptical of sites that don’t appear to be run by the government.
3. It wasn’t clear to the user how much the service cost.

After some iterating, here’s the design that we launched for the client in time for the last peak period (September 15, 2011):

We focused on conveying more trust, tweaking the text to better educate potential customers, and increasing the perception that the site is a legitimate, trusted way to pay estimated taxes online.

The results were all very positive:
When compared to the previous quarter, 83% more customers completed the signup for the site. Most importantly, the client was psyched!

Thoughts, comments, or questions? Let’s discuss i the comment section below.

The new IRS.com layout - optimized for revenue generation

Last month we completed a project for IRS.com. I just finished writing an SEO case study (it may be better classified as a white paper) highlighting the process we went though with our client and ensuing results.

The entire case study is fairly lengthy, so I’m including just the summary in this post.

Just five months of working with Tax Center produced extremely positive results. The website is now better positioned in the search engines than it was before and it is receiving more traffic because of that positioning.

This project was different from most for a couple of reasons. First, it was shorter. Most content strategies are at least 12 months in length. Second, we began working with Tax Center at the beginning of their most important months of the year (as opposed to implementing our plan in the offseason for taxes).

This means that we needed to implement a strategy that did all of the following:
A) Got results without adversely affecting current search engine positioning,
B) Resulted in accelerated returns (meaning immediately), and
C) Laid the groundwork for long term performance beyond the scope of the project (future tax seasons).

We began the project by performing an in-depth audit of the site. The audit pointed to several key areas of improvement – basic SEO fundamentals, a more trusted user experience, and more high-value content. We based our strategy on those key areas.

The results were quick, and significant. First, the site was better positioned in the search engines:

• The number of pages on the site that come up in search results went UP 686%
• The number of pages on the site that are on the first page of Google search results went UP 175%

Second, more people visited the site in the 2011 tax season than in 2010:

• 49% more people visited the site
• Traffic coming from the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) was more than 4 times higher

The content created yielded an immediate return. The ROI for the more than 250 pieces of content we created and posted was better than 127%. That means the client more than made their money back for the cost of the content in less than 5 months.

The positive results don’t necessarily end with the passing of the 2011 tax season. The groundwork laid for the client will continue to bear fruit in the offseason and in future tax seasons. All of these numbers may increase in the future as the new content gets more inbound links.

Here’s the full case study.

What are your thoughts? Any feedback? I encourage you to participate in the comment section below.

Proper domain management can save you time and money

If you’re like me and own lots of domains for more than one business interest, you know that it can be challenging to keep everything organized (not just with domains, btw).

I’ve learned some valuable lessons about managing a portfolio domains. These are simple, but they’ll save you time and money down the road as your business interests grow and, ultimately, make it big.

1. When in doubt, buy them out
This one’s not so much about management, but it’s worth passing along. When your company is in the spitball phase of trying to come up with a winning name, buy every single domain you think has a chance of being the final pick. Here’s why: first, don’t ever leave it to chance that the domain will be available tomorrow. You never know who is watching. The last thing you want to do is to have to go pay someone for the domain you really want. Second, you may forget. Sounds dumb, but that stroke of genious you have can easily vanish into thin air because you’re attention got drawn to some other important detail. Buy that great name before it leaves your brain.

2. New company = new account
Starting a new company? Buy the domains under a separate account with your registrar. Don’t make the common mistake of buying every single domain via one account. Next thing you know you have 200 domains for 5 companies all under the same registrar’s account. Besides being a total nightmare to manage, here are some practical reasons why you want to keep things clean:

3. Get started on the right foot legally and with your partners
It’s better to show that your new business entity own the domains instead of you. The domains are assets after all. Plus, show your business partners that you’re not hoarding the domains yourself. Show everyone you’re a team player.

4. Make billing less complicated
Having all domains in one account can be a huge pain when it comes to billing. If you don’t have each company renewing it’s own domains, you’ll get into a situation where you need to renew and then be reimbursed. That’s a pain that can easily be avoided with separate accounts.

5.  Stay under the radar
I fully support the notion of keeping your startup in stealth mode until there’s actually something tangible to talk about. Stealth mode has to include keeping your WHOIS information either private or under the name of the company. The last thing an outsider should see is the CEO’s name on WHOIS. That’s not stealth. Separate accounts means you can manage separate identities easier.

6. Lord Google is watching
I’ve said it before, Google rules the world. In this case, you don’t want Google thinking you own a lot of domains. Being the entrepreneur that you are, there will probably come a day when your domains will need to link to each other. Having all of your domains under your name on WHOIS and all under one account (and one IP address) may lead Google to think you are trying to create a link farm. And if they think that, they might slap you. You don’t want that.

7. Easier transition
This is the most fun reason to keep your domains nice and neatly organized: when it comes time to sell the company, it’s about a billion times easier to transition the domains to the buyer when they are organized in their own account. Not to mention due diligence is much more efficient because you won’t have to pour through your master domain account looking for the domains the selling entity owns (and risk making a mistake). The last sale I was part of involved nearly 100 domains. We literally had them transfered in about 5 minutes thanks to being organized.

What are your thoughts? Any additional tips you want to add? Let’s discus in the comment section below.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the title tag in the search snippet for one of our clients completely changed. Well, that doesn’t sound too horrible or harmful you say. Normally that’s right. Sometimes titles in snippets can be altered by the search engines and in rare cases can improve click-thru rates (I still recommend controlling all information in snippets with custom META data for every single page on your site).

The issue in this case was that the title tag now included information referring back to a really old (and outdated) sponsor…like years old. Even though the META data and the code said one thing (and keep in mind hadn’t been touched for at least a year), the title tag said something completely different.

Check it out. Here’s a screenshot of the source code:

And here’s a screenshot of what a users would see on Bing (and Yahoo) when searching for “holiday bowl”:

Notice anything strange? Hint: the title tag in the search results does not match what’s in the source code. In fact, nowhere on the Holiday Bowl home page does it even mention the word “Culligan”.

So what gives? And more importantly, how can it be fixed?

I had heard that sometimes the search engines pull META data from DMOZ and use that in snippets – overriding what a website has in its source code. So I checked DMOZ to see if that was true in this case.

Here’s what I found when I did a search for “holiday bowl” on DMOZ:

There it is! There’s the source of our pain. Bing and Yahoo are pulling “Culligan” from DMOZ and using it in the snippet.

After a quick search, I was able to find and install the following script into the home page code telling the search engines to ignore the META description in DMOZ and use what’s in the source code:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noodp”>

After about 4 days the title tag was back to normal:

Hooray! It’s fixed. Bing and Yahoo are pulling from the right source and “Culligan” has disappeared from the snippet.

Whenever you see this problem with one of your sites, just use this simple-to-implement fix and you’ll see results very quickly.

Have you ever had this problem? Did you use this method to fix it? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Today’s post is the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Michael W. Kearns, CEO of TurnkeySchool.com – a school CMS website that Mike and his business partner  Jake Johnson developed.

I think you’ll like this discussion. Michael shares some great insights.

Here’s our discussion:

Back to reality after a great week in Vegas attending PubCon.

Really quickly I wanted to share, in no particular order, my top 5 takeaways from the week.

1. “Likes are the new links” – this was a quote from Bruce Clay during the week’s best session. Bruce was part of a panel that discussed Google Caffeine and May Day. Bruce thinks that when you add up what Google did with Caffeine (increasing the size of the index) with the fact that they have to account for social in search results plus the fact that a greater percentage of links are spam - the currency for validating sites will change from links to personal recommendations.

Whether or not you buy it, it’s definitely thought-provoking. I’m going to be testing this one while following it closely.

2. Local is everything – More and more search results have the top organic listing below the fold (most of them local). This will eventually be the new normal as Google deploys this layout for more keywords. Making sure your business is optimized for local search will mean the difference between gaining or losing organic traffic. It’s that simple.

3. Blekko = Buzz - It may have been just my imagination, but there were a lot of people talking about, and trying, Blekko. Matt Cutts even mentioned it in his keynote. All I could think was, “How long until Google buys them?”.

4. Page speed is on the clock - I had read a bunch of posts about the importance of page speed. I’ll admit, I haven’t done a ton to adopt this strategy. After last week I am a believer. Page speed should be improved whenever possible. It’s good for the users. And it’s good for SERPs.

5. Three that made me think – No offense to anyone else, but the three best speakers I saw were Scott Stratten, Rae Hoffman, and Tim Ash. All three brought it. They made me think. They gave me some helpful tips. I was impressed by each of them. If PubCon could get more people like them the conference would be much better.

Did you attend PubCon? How did your takeaways compare? Did I miss anything? Let’s chat in the comments below.

Today’s post is the latest installment of our Q&A Series – short interviews with talented, experienced, and successful entrepreneurs who are on the front lines of running online businesses.

My guest is Reed Humphrey. Reed’s an experienced entrepreneur having cofounded or led marketing at four start-ups, including a tax services firm that grew revenue by 100-fold under his direction. Currently he leads the marketing and public relations functions for New River Innovation/easyIRS.com, including advertising, social media, partnerships, news and media.

I think you’ll like this discussion because Reed is a smart, experienced guy who is right smack dab in the middle of the startup experience. He’s got a lot of good input on financing and marketing. And his company is working on a pretty cool idea that I think could be huge.

Here’s our discussion:

B5: The name of your company, easyIRS.com, probably says everything. But just in case, tell me about what the company is all about.
Reed: easyIRS.com is focused on solving personal IRS concerns beyond April 15 by automating tax analysis and support. Examples of IRS concerns include tax debt, unfiled tax returns, audits, liens, levies, and penalty abatements.

Our vision is to create the world’s first web service for IRS problem resolution. We are similar to WebMD or LegalZoom, except with a dedicated focus on tax problems. It’s all about eliminating the fear and uncertainty of dealing with the IRS, and providing people with practical solutions.

B5: Can you give me some idea of the scope of this market? How many people struggle with IRS and tax related issues?
Reed: The target market for easyIRS.com is approximately 32 to 35 million taxpayers whom the IRS contacts every year (about matters ranging from simple math errors to delinquent tax debt). The market is served by CPAs, tax attorneys, enrolled agents and tax resolution firms such as JK Harris, Tax Masters, and Roni Deutch.

In recent weeks, we’ve seen a big momentum shift concerning those “pennies on the dollar” tax debt resolution firms. New FTC legislation prohibits debt relief firms from charging upfront fees or making false promises about debt reduction, and requires them to adhere to strict disclosure standards. The rule’s implications for deceptive tax debt resolution firms are catastrophic, because many of the firms depend on charging large upfront fees.

We’re glad to see the industry cleaned up and consumers protected. And we’ve invested millions of dollars in automating IRS response systems, so that consumers can solve their own tax issues, without paying big fees to tax relief firms.

B5: What makes EasyIRS.com qualified to help taxpayers with their issues?
Reed: We are staffed by a team of IRS and tax experts, including a CPA, enrolled agents, tax preparers, IRS negotiation case managers and certified tax professionals. This team has more than 100 years of combined experience working with IRS, accounting and tax-related issues. They apply this knowledge and experience in solving personal tax concerns beyond April 15 by automating tax analysis and support. These tax and accounting experts are complemented by technology professionals experienced in high-security applications.

B5: How’s it going so far?
Reed: It’s going great! We’ve been busy developing our solution set for the past few months. We are preparing for a national launch of easyIRS on Dec. 1 (just ahead of tax season). Our value proposition is “The best way to solve your tax problem. Save money. Fix your tax situation. Guaranteed.”

Because we are an online software provider, easy IRS fees are 95% lower than traditional tax resolution firms. We do not make unrealistic promises of debt reduction, and all of our services are backed by a 100% Money Back Guarantee. No other company is doing what we’re doing, and we think this changes everything in our industry.

B5: What advice can you share with readers about having the right financing partner(s) for an early stage company?
Reed: I can’t emphasize enough the importance of finding the right financing partner. I have been a part of four start-ups, with financing provided from founders, banks, angel networks and venture capital firms.

I can honestly say that our relationship with Intersouth Partners has been the best. Intersouth took a risk on us as a seed company at the zenith of the economic downturn in mid 2009. They saw something in us that others did not. Our sponsors, Mitch Mumma and Katrin Burt, meet with us every month for 2 to 3 hours, and they provide business insight and experience that are priceless. They understand our business, and they bring so much more than just capital to the table.

B5: Let’s jump from financing to marketing. What is your content strategy? (How are you getting traffic to your website?)
Reed: We’re committed to providing the most authoritative, complete database of IRS tax debt information on the web. Statistics from 2009 show that the IRS sent more than 200 million notices to American taxpayers, more than 26.4 million IRS penalties were assessed, 3.5 million taxpayers broke a payment agreement, and close to 69 million audits were conducted. With all this activity, it is clear that there is a tremendous need for easy-to-understand content. We’re committed to providing expert content through a variety of channels; we have hundreds of articles, videos, and slideshows related to various tax topics, all of which are available on our website.

EasyIRS has created the nation’s first taxpayer advocacy site, specifically focused on IRS problem and resolution topics. The “Learn” section of our site is free, and it features hundreds of original stories, videos, slideshows, and how-to articles designed to simplify dealings with the IRS. We’re organizing and optimizing this site for SEO purposes, and we believe that free leads and word of mouth will be huge drivers of traffic, as will PR and social media.

B5: What’s your split between organic versus PPC?
Reed: We have been using PPC to test, but many of the keywords are expensive relative to our low price point. PPC makes sense for tax-resolution service firms that charge upward of $3,000 for their services. This is not true for easyIRS.com, because we charge less than $150 per engagement. So, content, social media, public relations and search engine optimization (SEO) are clearly our best long-term plays.

B5: What tips can you share with our readers about traffic acquisition?
Reed: Inbound lead generation, Sales 2.0, and content generation are the wave of the future. Traditional mass media channels will continue to be less effective until the day when they start sharing the risks and rewards with advertisers. By that, I mean that offline media needs to stop charging exorbitant fixed fees and start offering more tracking, reporting and ROI accountability. So, start your marketing with low-cost, measurable, online sources. Explore all avenues there before you consider dumping cash into a big offline media buy.

B5: What can we expect to see from easyIRS over the next few months?
Reed: Over the next 12 months, we expect our company to reach $3 million to $5 million in revenue with 40 employees (currently 20). Within 5 years, we hope to establish easyIRS.com as a household name, the first site anyone would visit if he or she had a problem with the IRS.

What are you thoughts on all of this? Got any reactions? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Does 500 million users = automatic success for your biz?

Here’s the point I’m going to try to make in this post: don’t allocate your precious resources to scoring new business on social media until you’ve perfected the art of converting relevant traffic on your own website.

Bear with me while I step into the time machine to get things started…

Remember 1o-15 years ago when companies starting including their domain on TV commercials and magazine ads? The “Information Superhighway” was so new that addresses included “http://www” at the beginning and some instruction like, “type this into your browser. Blah. Blah.”

In the last 18 months or so we’re starting to see a similar trend happening. Brands are including a Facebook and/or a Twitter logo in their ads to tell consumers they can be found on the world’s most popular social media sites.  I’ve even seen some Foursquare references as well.

I’m here to say the following: Resist the urge! Don’t blindly follow the trend!

My issue is with resources. Too many companies are abandoning their content strategies for their own websites in hopes of striking it rich in social media.

Big mistake for 99% of companies out there.

Assuming your business doesn’t have unlimited resources, my advice is to nail your your own internal content strategy first. Forget Facebook and Twitter for now.

Here are 5 reasons why levers like Facebook and Twitter are nice-to-haves instead of must-haves:

1. Conversion is king. There’s only room for one king, but what’s even better than traffic? Converting that traffic into paying customers! Again, assuming bandwidth and budget are not unlimited, doesn’t it make more sense to spend your efforts converting the traffic your have instead of trying a totally new medium that everyone else is trying to figure out for an unknown return?

2. Search is queen. Some think Facebook might eventually replace Google. That’s a topic for another day and it’s not going to happen all-of-a-sudden. Until then, assume search engines are still the way everyone finds everything online (Google Instant isn’t going to kill search overnight).  Spend your time capturing relevant traffic through the perfection of keyword analysis and conversion optimization. And don’t forget about Bing.

3. Twitter is noise. I realize Twitter has made a big jump from “I just ate an awesome burger” to a select few talented subject matter experts. It’s getting better. That being said, in most circumstances it offers zero value to businesses. There’s just too many Tweets and not enough listeners. Sure, there are stories of success on Twitter. But most of them come from big brands who can afford to spend through the learning curve.

3. Facebook doesn’t have your best interest in mind. The reality is that Facebook has never made it easy for businesses to prosper from the Facebook ecosystem. For example, a few years ago they opened up the developer platform. Everyone and their brother developed apps. Now you can’t find an app anywhere. They are completely hidden.  What happened to all of that time and money invested? It’s gone. If you need more proof, ask any developer that’s used their unsupported API. It’s very difficult because it’s so unstable and the documentation is lacking. At the end of the day, Facebook can change the rules overnight. Is that worth the risk?

5. Less clicks = more conversions. This one is simple. If you sell products or services on your website, the chances of converting traffic to paying customers is better on your website than it is anywhere else. Why? It’s simple math. Less clicks.

Conclusion
Marketing is an ROI-driven game. Before you go spending a lot of time and money trying to create the next great Facebook or Twitter success story, make sure your website is doing these two things really well first:

1. Leveraging search engines to find customers looking for your product
2. Converting your traffic to customers at an optimal level.

Your own website’s content strategy is the best value in marketing. Work on getting more relevant traffic and converting it!

Once you get that figured out, then tackle a social media strategy. You’ll be much more focused.

What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let’s chat in the comment section below.

I integrated(*) the Thesis WordPress theme to this blog 30 days ago. Granted, 30 days isn’t a long time, but it’s long enough to begin to look at some data. In particular, I want to see if what the makers of Thesis claim is true – that inherently it will help SEO performance out-of-the-box.

* The theme is up-and-running, but obviously I haven’t done anything to customize the design. Work comes first, you understand.

Here’s what good old Google Analytics reports for thew 30 days since Thesis was integrated:

Basic Data:
Traffic: UP 39%
Pageviews: UP 40%
Pages per visit: UP 0.5%
Bounce Rate: DOWN 5%

It’s always nice to see traffic up. I’m not pleased about the bounce rate actually getting worse, but all of the other high-level numbers are going in the right direction. At first glance, bounce rate got worse most likely because I haven’t done anything to incorporate my brand into the blog and don’t have a really great call-to-action.

Let’s look a little deeper – into some SEO indicators to see if Thesis is actually delivering new traffic from the search engines:

Organic search traffic (all search engines): UP 7%
Google organic search traffic: UP 8%
Yahoo! organic search traffic: DOWN 15%
Bing organic search traffic: DOWN 26%

Pages per visit from organic traffic: DOWN 11%
Bounce rate for organic traffic: DOWN 13%

So…overall organic traffic is up, but it’s down on Yahoo! and Bing fairly significantly. And again, it looks like the engagement metrics have gone in the wrong direction. This data points to the fact that I need to do more to make this blog more sticky.

Here are a few qualifiers to go with the data:

• The data compares the last 30 days to the previous 30 days
• I try to blog once a week. In the first 30 days I posted 3 times. In the most recent 30 days I posted 5 times.
• When I integrated Thesis, I stopped using “All In One SEO” and opted to use Thesis’ built in SEO tools.

After 30 days of having Thesis integrated it looks like traffic is a little better, but engagement is down. At this point, Thesis’ claim that it works well for SEO out-of-the-box appears to be true – it definitely didn’t hurt (which can happen when you change your internal SEO Structure like I did). My best guess for the downside is a lack of engagement. Readers are not feeling compelled to click on other posts and visit other pages once they finish reading the first post they read.

How do you interpret the numbers? Have you integrated Thesis on your blog? What happened to your traffic? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Which icons best promote trust?

Conversions. There’s a lot to discuss. So I’m going to try and keep this simple and stick to one small contributing factor.

A couple of the most recent Internet Marketing consulting gigs I’ve been involved with have been focused on improving conversion rates. Both are websites that don’t struggle getting a decent amount of traffic. The problem is that too many people leave without converting (in both cases the goal is to get people to sign up for a free trial of their service).

In each case there were multiple culprits contributing to low conversion rates. One of the biggest mistakes was the failure to gain people’s trust. Nothing, on either website, told users that the site was legitimate, safe, and could be trusted.

Remember, when someone comes to your website (and it might not be your HOME page by the way) they perform an instant assessment. Among others, they ask themselves two questions,

• “Does this website offer what I’m looking for?”, and
• “Can this website deliver?” – in other words, “Are they full of crap, or are they legit?”

One of the most effective ways to give potential business a quick answer to the second bullet is by using trust icons. These are visual cues that all, in their own way, add the perception of legitimacy and trustworthiness to a website.

Here are my top 5 that I recommend using on your website:

1. Better Business Bureau Accredited Business
If you run a website that does any business in the US, this is the best trust icon. It screams legitimate business. Best of all, it links to the businesses profile and rating with the BBB. If your company doesn’t have a good rating, get that taken care of first before adding this icon to your website. Posting a link to a C+ rating will do more harm than good.

Details: a company must be more than a year old and its website has to have a privacy policy prominently displayed before being considered for the icon. In my experience, as long as a company has both the BBB will “pass” the website. This is a premium seal, so you’ll need to pay an annual fee to be part of the program.

2. Associations / Trade Groups / Memberships
Any business that is part of a larger association or group of companies should leverage that membership and feature that icon on their website. For example, let’s say you’re a realtor. I would recommend having the National Association of Realtors icon on your website. Number one, it’s a quick sign that your firm can be trusted. Number two, I’d be willing to bet it’s a differentiator with your competition. If someone comparing your site to a close competitor sees that icon on your website and not on the other, that may be enough to call you and not the other firm.

Details: it depends on the association. Some will offer an icon with a membership. Some memberships are free and other paid.

3. Payment
If your website processes payments, then it has to have an icon saying that their information will be safe. Examples of icons for payment are PayPal, Authorize.net, Thawte, and Verisign. Each example, in their own way, tells the user that they can feel good about taking their credit card out of their wallet and forking over those hard earned dollars to buy your product or service. Like #2, the biggest error is in this category is the error of omission. When a website doesn’t talk about how payments are processed safely, that’s when a red flag goes up.

Details: in most cases these icons are free. Many payment gateways (like Authorize.net for example) make it really easy to add their icon to your site (because they get the added benefit of an inbound link).

4. McAfee Secure
This one should look familiar because it’s seemingly everywhere. It’s becoming so prevalent that it’s almost a “must have”, which is why it made my list. These days it’s weird when websites don’t have it (btw, great business model for McAfee). This icons says to people that the website can be trusted because it is safe.

Details: this is another premium icon. It’s close to $1,000 per year, so it’s not cheap. The requirements for getting the icon are relatively easy as long as the site is hosted with a legit hosting company. This does work with hosting on shared servers, so you don’t have to have your own dedicated machine to get this.

5. US Flag
Your first instinct might be that adding the stars and stripes is a cheesy 1997 website move that doesn’t belong in today’s real-time web. I’d say you’re wrong. There are plenty of industries where consumers feel better knowing that the website is owned and operated in the US, and not in Europe or Asia. For example, the tax industry. I know from working with clients in that industry that there are companies based in Eastern Europe that perform all kinds of tax preparation and accounting tasks. Think about it, would the average US taxpayer want someone in Europe storing their data and advising them on tax issues? Probably not. But those sites based elsewhere do every well. No one ever thinks it might be operated out of the country. The flag is a subtle way of showing that a business is based and operated in the US. If people assume that means it’s more safe or legitimate, then why not take advantage of that?

Details: there are no requirements (other than being honest about the business being located in the US). And it’s free! I’m sure you are resourceful enough to find the flag somewhere on the web.

The last thing I’ll say is if you buy into the trust icon theory, then don’t hide your icons. Make them prominent so people can see them.

What are your thoughts on trust icons? What do you think my list? What’s missing? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.