by Mark Faggiano on October 20, 2010
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.
Read the full post >>
by Mark Faggiano on September 15, 2010
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!
Find out more…
by Mark Faggiano on September 9, 2010
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:
See the results…
by Mark Faggiano on August 26, 2010
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.
Check out the 5 trust icons…
