Having the right online business strategy is the difference between doing things right and actually doing the right things. Sure, you could be as efficient as possible. Or you could offer the most beautiful website in your market. But, if your efficiency is costing you customers or nobody comes to that pretty site, your business is just as dead in the long run.
Here are four unconventional tips to help you consider whether you’re doing the right things with your online business:
Many online businesses put a significant portion of their advertising into paid search. I think that most businesses can benefit from well-executed PPC marketing. But, you can easily spend too much money for too little return. Then why is it that the folks at Rimm-Kaufman suggest maximizing your marketing budget’s ROI bad for you? I’ll give you a hint: your ROI probably isn’t the problem. It’s how you budget.
Finally, Steve Rubel commits heresy by looking at when should you build someone else’s website instead of your own.
Obviously, part of doing the right things for your business online is making sure that each of these suggestions fits your business. Don’t do ‘em just because I say so (Or George. Or Kevin. And so on). These 4 tips challenge us all to reconsider whether we’re following the wisdom of the crowd or are just following the other lemmings off the cliff.
Look at your business. Look at your goals. Line up your measures and your standards with those goals. And give your team the tools to get there. And that’s the best tip I can ever recommend.
Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.
Do you check your analytics dashboard every day? Yeah, me neither. We all mean to do it. We know it’s important. But, real life – helping customers, dealing with employees, what-have-you – sometimes takes priority. That’s what makes Google’s new “Analytics Intelligence” and Analytics Alerts so handy.
Basically, the new features within Google Analytics allow you to define events – a big jump in traffic, or worse, a big decline – and receive alerts when those events occur. Here’s what they say about it on the Google Analytics blog:
Analytics Intelligence: We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
Custom Alerts make it possible for you to tell Google Analytics what to watch for. You can set daily, weekly, and monthly triggers on different dimensions & metrics, and be notified by email or right in the user interface when the changes actually occur
And here’s Google’s video that explains how to use them:
What do you think? Will Intelligence and Analytics Alerts help your business? Tell us about it in the comments.
Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.
My mother loved St. Patrick’s Day. It was her favorite holiday. Why? Because it was a day to celebrate our heritage, the heritage of a resilient people.
Sure, the Irish often get credit for being lucky, but luck – whether or not you’re Irish (and who isn’t Irish on St. Patrick’s Day?) – comes from how you react to what happens to you. When you consider the history of Ireland, it’s tough to say that the Irish were alway lucky. But the image persists, likely because of how they responded.
So much of what we consider luck boils down to 2 things:
Goals. You’ve got to know where you want to end up. The most successful people, the ones we all consider lucky, are those who get to do what they love. What could be more lucky than that? Do you know what that is for you? Where you plan to be down the road? History is made by those who choose to make it.
Persistence. As one of my greatest teachers used to say, “90% of life is just showing up.” Once you know your goals, you’ve got to work towards them every day, without fail. It isn’t always easy. But giving up guarantees failure. At least when you work at it, you have a shot at getting lucky.
No one in business is just “lucky.” Sure, trying to survive – let alone thrive – in tough economic conditions isn’t as easy as it was when times were good. And you certainly can’t control everything that happens to you along the way. So, I guess you could consider what’s going on now bad luck. But, you can always control how you react to it and whether you choose to keep trying to accomplish your goals. The luckiest people in the world tend to be those who don’t give up on their goals. Or on themselves.
Do you think you’re lucky? Have you found a way to succeed in this market? Tell us about it in the comments.
Are you getting enough value out of your small business website? Want to make sure your business makes the most of the local, mobile, social web? thinks helps you understand how to grow your business via the web, every day. Get more than just news. Get understanding. Add thinks to your feed reader today.
Having the right online business strategy is the difference between doing things right and actually doing the right things. Sure, you could be as efficient as possible. Or you could offer the most beautiful website in your market. But, if your efficiency is costing you customers or nobody comes to that pretty site, your business is just as dead in the long run. 
