Successful Blog

How to monitor the health of your online business

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by Rosemary O’Neill

These days, everything around us has a built-in indicator to tell us when something’s wrong. My car has been telling me I need “Service A4” for about a month now. Our iPhones have battery life indicators. Even my kids’ school lunch account pings me when it’s low.

But there’s no handy-dandy centralized indicator to tell you when your online business needs maintenance.

Key indicators for your business
Keep an eye on your key indicators

There are so many things to keep an eye on when you’re a small business owner or an entrepreneur.  
 
Industry developments, customer challenges, payroll, legal requirements, and (if you can squeeze it in) planning for the future, all must be monitored. Toss social media tracking and reputation management in the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for stress.

Let’s set up a manageable system that tracks only the most important indicators. Pull out your business plan and/or marketing and sales plan. What are your key milestones for success? What is your “red line” you can’t go below as far as sales pipeline or conversions?

Bearing in mind your goals and critical areas, here are some of the items you might want to add to your weekly checkup. I use simple spreadsheets.

Brand awareness indicators

Set up Google alerts on your company name and your own name, as well as your product name(s).
 
Visit Topsy.com for mentions on the web and on social networks (you can set up alerts or periodically check in). For the spreadsheet, you could track number of mentions over time to see if you’re on an upward trend.
 
Another indicator of increasing awareness is branded searches. In your Google Analytics, click Traffic Sources Overview. The keyword list will show you whether people coming to your site are typing in your brand name to get there. You could tally up the number of branded searches each week and track that trend as well.

Marketing and Sales Indicators

Again in your Google Analytics, track the number of new visitors over time. That’s a good indicator of increasing interest, and possibly marketing success.

Track true conversions over time. You can set up conversion paths within Google Analytics just by telling Google which action on your site represents a “conversion,” for example, subscribing to a newsletter or clicking the “buy” button. Conversions can also be tracked by dividing raw unique visitors by number of sales over a given time frame.
 
If you’re using Hootsuite Pro, you can get reports of activity across all of your connected accounts. This is a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of your social networks. Are your Twitter followers increasing? Is your content getting shared? Your dashboard should include some idea of whether your overall network is increasing.

One other statistic to track is the number of new incoming sales inquiries. Most CRM systems make it easy to keep track of new leads, but it can be as simple as tallying the number of new email inquiries from a form on your website. That’s the top of your sales pipeline, so you want this number to stay healthy.

Revenue, of course, must be on your dashboard as well. Be detailed enough that you can see which lines of business are doing well and which might be struggling. That might mean breaking out products vs services.
 

Planning for the future

Just as you get periodic checkups from your doctor, you should re-evaluate your plan and dashboard indicators routinely.

Weekly updates on the spreadsheets plus a quarterly plan review will keep you on track and allow time for course correction if necessary.

What are your key indicators for the health of your business?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Did You Picture a Successful 2012 for Your Company’s Employees?

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With Christmas in the rear view mirror, many thoughts now turn to New Year’s Eve and the New Year that will be here in less than a week.

For many small business owners, that also means looking back at the past 12 months and determining what worked, what maybe did not work, and what needs to be done over the next 12 months to make 2013 an even better year for one’s company.

As noted last time, how did you treat your customers over these last 12 months?

As some small business owners have discovered, this last year meant gaining some and losing a few customers. The ultimate question many of them will be left asking, what could they have done better to cement these relationships with the very people that keep them in business?

While business owners will agree that customers are a vital part to staying in business, employees prove just as important if not more a key component to keeping the doors open. Without quality workers to keep things running smoothly, a business owner can see their dreams go down in flames rather quickly.

Along with reviewing what you did for your customers this year, take a few minutes at this time and review what you did for your employees.

Among the items to look at:

* Making sure their needs were met – From the little things like benefits to making sure they had all the tools necessary to complete their jobs (see below), did you meet their needs? While many small business owners have had to scale back on benefits due to the economy, others still continue to offer things like health insurance, 401(k)’s and more. If you are not offering these, can you change that in 2013?

* Setting the scene – Whether you operate out of a spacious office or one the size of your home living room, what were the conditions your employees had to work under during the last 12 months? Did you make the office environment as comfortable as possible, making sure simple things like office space, lighting, ventilation, safety etc. were in place? Office workers tend to thrive in environments that are both comfortable and secure. If they are currently working under strenuous conditions, there is a good chance that their work performance suffered at times. What do you need to change in 2013?

* Taking time to reflect – While the goal of any company is to be as productive as possible, did you recognize your workers during the year? Such occasions can be things as simple as office happy hours, a party from time to time, birthday celebrations, awards for a job well done etc. If you offer a year-end party, did you record the last 12 months and show off all the success via things like an office video or blurb photo album? By reminding employees of all the successful things they did over this last year, you not only make them feel better about their efforts, but you also give them reminders of what can be accomplished. Lastly, videos and photos of the office team working together, solving customer issues, and celebrating office milestones (birthdays, anniversaries and more) helps make for a more unified staff;

* Staff improvement – Finally, you always hear coaches and many athletes talking about there is always room for improvement with their teams. The same holds true in the workplace, especially when you run a small business with a small number of employees. As noted a moment ago, everyone there is part of a team, a unit that must function as one for the entire company to succeed. While you run the company and have the final call, get input from your workers on the company’s efforts these last 12 months. From the administrative assistant on up to your top employee, everyone’s feedback counts.

As you get set to run your business into 2013, always remember that without your dedicated employees, you could be hanging a permanently “closed” sign on the front door.

Photo credit: blog.parago.com

About the author: Dave Thomas covers small business topics for a variety of websites, including www.verybestsoftware.net.

 

 

 

Building An Anti-Fragile Website

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by James Ellis

What’s the opposite of fragile? Robust? Strong? Wrong. Those words imply the ability to survive change. Fragile means the inability to survive change, so the opposite would be something that actually gets better with change. It’s not robust, it’s antifragile.

Bend, Don’t Break

Based on an argument by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his new book Antifragile, we should be looking for things, processes and ideas that are antifragile, things that actually get better the more you beat up on them. They learn to bend instead of break, and actually become stronger at the bend.

This twistedly simple idea sounds impossible. How can we build web sites and tools that actually get better the more they fail?

It seems impossible. The code structure that controls all of our web creations is very fragile, as anyone who forgot to include that trailing slash in a div tag can tell you. A single missed keystroke can be the difference between slick and useful and a mound of bit-based junk.

Create Antifragile Systems

So how do we build antifragile web sites? I propose that it’s not the sites that need to be antifragile, but the systems we place around them that we should focus on.

Here’s an example. You build a web site. Do you have some completed procedures to test your code before you launch? Is there a committee that looks at every word and every image and analyzes each page? These are processes that work to make sure that the site doesn’t break on launch. These processes are necessary, but they drag out the launch process, sometimes doubling or even tripling development times. And because of these processes, you and your business feel confident that anything you launch is pretty much bulletproof.

Until something changes. A new browser, new audience, new business requirements, unforeseen product launches, new digital channels, whatever it is, change is coming. You built a site designed to withstand 2012 pressures, but 2013 is right around the corner.

So instead of building a perfect site for the now, you build a great site for now, but you build a process that learns from the failures that always follow? Spend less of your resources on quality assurance, and more on post-launch testing and learning. Because you are anticipating and looking for failures, you will be the first to spot new trends and ideas. Because you are learning how to fix these new failures, you are becoming a smarter development house. Because you are not pretending that the future isn’t coming, you will be the first to succeed within it.

Your website is inherently fragile. It will break. No amount of thought, time, brains or energy can keep you from building a future-proof site. Can’t. Be. Done. Changing your process from 100% proactive-focused into something that can react to inevitable changes better completely revolutionizes your web development strategy and makes you better long term.

Because what have you made antifragile? Your entire web development business. The more failures you see, the faster you can address them and the better you become. You will get better the more you fail. And since failure is inevitable, this means you will inevitably become better at web development.

Author’s Bio: James Ellis is a digital strategist, mad scientist, lover, fighter, drummer and blogger living in Chicago. You can reach out to him or just argue with his premise at saltlab.com.

The Necessity of Frustration

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Paintbrushes
Without doubt, no breakthrough

by Ric Dragon

Big Doubt, Little Doubt

Beginnings are typically joyous, euphoric occasions. Whether it’s a software project, a barn-raising, a romance, or a painting, the earliest stages are exciting, not yet informed by the difficulties that lie ahead.

The art of making paintings is remarkable. It doesn’t matter if the painter is portraying mountains and streams, or is creating an abstraction. Taking the three-dimensional world and portraying it on a flat surface is abstraction, and creating shapes and color is quite concrete and real. So it follows that a lot of the distinctions that are made about painting – whether it’s realism, abstraction, or some other genre – are somewhat moot. But what all painting shares is that there is no guidebook. Each painter is on their own in trying to figure out what it is all about.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that I look forward to starting paintings. The canvas, newly tacked over the stretcher bars, presents a vast area of whiteness. A brush loaded with paint is picked up – and that first mark is made. It’s exhilarating.

I also know what to expect about a third of the way into the painting: frustration. In those early years, it was unnerving: I’d be wracked with feelings of doubt and inability. Like an arctic explorer without a compass, I’d look around and realize that I didn’t have a clue as to where I was or why I was there. These aren’t the little niggling doubts that sometimes come to haunt us, but the big doubts. What does my existence mean?

For hundreds of years, practitioners of Zen Buddhism have been using doubt as a key to their practice. In the various approaches to Zen, the feeling of doubt is considered to be critical to finding awareness. In fact, koans, those baffling stories used in zen, seem designed to help bring about that total frustration. As one teacher exhorted, “let all of you become one mass of doubt and questioning.” Without this doubt, you can’t have breakthrough.

Self-doubt can be totally debilitating, too. If you understand, though, the importance of doubt in the creative process, you can more easily say to yourself, “heh, this is all part of the process – let’s just go with it.”

Happy break-through!

—-

Author’s Bio: Ric Dragon is the founder and CEO of DragonSearch, a digital marketing agency with offices in Manhattan and Kingston, NY. Dragon is the author of the “DragonSearch Online Marketing Manual” and “Social Marketology” (McGraw Hill; June 2012), and has been a featured speaker at SMX East, Conversion Conf, CMS Expo, and BlogWorld, on the convergence of process, information architecture, SEO, and Social Media. You can find Ric on Twitter as @RicDragon.

 

Image: John-Morgan, Flickr Creative Commons License.

ADDIE: 5 Simple Ways to Start a Successful Blog

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by Angie Picardo

If you have a website or product that is trying to gain recognition online, you have probably learned by now that it is essential to start a blog. Maintaining a blog about a subject matter you are well versed in—and particularly one that advances the popularity of the product and/or service you are selling—is essential for sales. The vitality of your business will often heavily rely on a blog and social media presence in order to inform users about what you’re selling and provide them a smooth process for purchasing.

But how does one begin to write a blog?

It takes more than just sitting down and freewriting fluff and extraneous content about your product. High quality content is essential, but just as good writing will make for a great blog, bloggers need to know their audience, inform new and potential clients, and drive traffic with snazzy quips and cool pictures.

Use the ADDIE model when building your blog (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation):

Analysis

This is the brainstorming phase. On scratch paper or blank Word document, outline the basics (who, what, where, why) about the blog. Who is your audience? What do you want to say? Why is this blog necessary for your product? Where (in which market) will this item(s) be presented?

Design

Come up with a few sample blog posts off the top of your head. For example, if you are selling a unique twist on children’s coloring books, remember to consider how you can incorporate clear and relevant pictures and images with each post. A few sample posts could be:

o Why Kids Love Coloring Books

o Statistics on the Coloring Book Industry

o Child Education and Art

o What to Use for Great Coloring

o A post on Your Specific Product

o Why Schools Should Embrace Art Classes for Kids

o Top Coloring Books of the Year

Development

Begin to write and design a few blog posts without publishing them. These are essentially rough drafts that you will be able to edit and manipulate before publishing them to the world. Once you have a few drafts, edit for style, grammar, and logic. Be a perfectionist.

Implementation

Publish your articles. Create a routine (2-3 times per day or at least 5 times per week) to add new content to your blog. Add keywords (http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/2012/4-nobrainer-seo-moves/) and categorize each blog post accordingly. Embrace the process. Don’t fall behind.

Evaluation

Pay attention to the web traffic that your blog is receiving. Most free services have a basic web analytics widget or tool that will show you the number of visits per day/week/month and how they were directed to your site. What can you improve? What are your visitors saying in the comments section? How can you increase the traffic to your blog? Evaluate critically.

Following these steps is the perfect way to begin to think about blogging for traffic. While other techniques like search engine optimization and e-marketing and advertising will help increase traffic to your site, those novices who are not sure how to approach blogging should follow these steps to establish a successful blog.

Author’s Bio: Angie Picardo writes about personal finance, travel tips and more at NerdWallet.