How do you make better decisions with your website? It’s simple – Using analytical data and benchmarking. You’ll want to sign up with a service like Google Analytics (I use this on all my sites, it’s just a superb tool) and install the tracking code on all the pages on your site.
Do business as usual for the next month. Now we have a months worth of data to look at. Now you can implement that marketing campaign, put up advertising, whatever initiatives you wish to try with the website. Then a month later we can look back and compare the two sets of data, to determine if what we did worked. We benchmark against ourselves, in prior periods.
The reports show an amazing amount of data about your website and users. Not only that, but you can setup conversion goals to learn WHY users might be “abandoning the process” (leaving your site) and you can try to tweak the site to increase those conversions. Looking at the data, studying it, and really knowing it will help you make more informed decisions about what you’re doing with your website.
By Josh
Filed in Books
January 1st, 2010 @ 12:11 pm
Gotta love Amazon suggestion emails! Ordered two new books for the new year
How do we know if our new business idea is a viable one? Most people will do some research, write out their plan, but the critical mistake is thinking from the top down instead of the bottom up. You’ve heard it before – “If I can sell to just 1% of the population in China, I’ll be a millionaire!” – Some of us laugh, but people with ideas really do think this way! Bottom up thinking is the exact opposite – What will it take to get just one customer? How about five customers? Fifty? One hundred? And so on. You create a strategic plan on how exactly you are going to get the business off the ground, and how you’re going to get customers and make money.
Like all entrepreneurs, I come up with ideas almost daily. I write them all down in my “idea notebook” (it’s a notebook I carry with me to jot down notes and ideas when the come to me) – then later, when I am deciding if I should move forward with them, I run the through this filter to determine if it’s worth pursuing.
- Create your value proposition
Why would the customer want to buy from you? What additional value can you provide them that they don’t already get? Many buyers don’t necessarily buy on price alone, so being the lowest price doesn’t guarantee business
- Figure out what your core competency is. As you are doing this, make sure it fits with #1.
What is the one thing you want to do better than anyone else? Focus the business and everything you do around this core competency (Think Southwest Airlines – every decision they make is made sure it’s consistent with their core competency – The lowest priced airline)
- Figure out who the potential client is, and how the market is. Look at #1 to make sure it’s consistent and fits
Who are you going to sell to? How does this affect your marketing efforts?
- Figure out what your product or service is. Look at #1 to make sure it’s consistent and fits
- Figure out how your distribution and sales will work. Look at #1 to make sure it’s consistent and fits
Who is going to sell? How will distribution, shipping, invoicing, etc. work?
- Do you solve an existing problem? Make sure you’re not creating a problem, and then solving it
Is there a problem you see in the industry or market place that you can solve? People are always looking for solutions to their problems. Be careful not to create a problem that doesn’t exist, then trying to solve it
This simple filter, if you stay honest to it, will help you create a solid plan for viable ideas, and weed out the ideas that aren’t worth pursuing, thus saving you time, money and effort that you can dedicate to the ones that do pass through the filter.
So what will you do differently in 2010? As the saying goes – “Keep on doing what you’ve been doing, you’re gunna keep on getting what you’ve been getting” or “The height of insanity is doing things the same way and hoping for a different result.”
I hear a lot of people talk about how bad 2009 was and how a new year will be better – well, I must ask, why would it be any better if you don’t plan to make it better? Write down the things you want to do better, and create a plan to improve those things. Talking about something will do nothing – action makes things happen, and to take action you must plan and follow through.
Happy 2010
I have created a simple sidebox add on for Zen-Cart 1.3.8 that allows you to let your users signup for your Feedburner account. It’s really simple. Click here to download the file
