Ride Like A Penguin, Nicole Donnelly [the beginning after the end read novel txt] 📗

positive relationship with your customers. In the event of bad press or a slip in reputation, your VST will be there to help support you in regaining your image or fixing a public mishap.

Communities, especially fast forming and fast moving ones that form online these days, are a powerful force; make sure that you are working to create one that will work in your favor and not against you.


3 Business Tips From Frogger: Traffic, Bounce, and Conversion

If you are not familiar with the classic arcade game, Frogger is a game featuring a loveable frog that you must safely navigate across a busy highway so that he may feast on the tasty bugs on the other side. It is simple enough, but I was thinking aboutthe topic of web analytics and metrics, and realized that the frog in the game has many of the same issues to consider that we do in measuring the success of our websites.

In order to get a handle on the performance of your site there are some key metrics that you should always be aware of: Traffic, Bounce, Overlay, and Conversion. These are not the be all end all, but generally these few simple metrics can give you a really good picture of how your site is performing.

Traffic is obviously a key to the frog trying to get to the other side, same goes for your site, if no one visits you need to work on your SEO and content production.

Bounce rate is a measurement of the type of traffic that is hitting your page, a high bounce rate means people are visiting and clicking away quickly. The lower your bounce rate, the better your site.

Conversion is simple; it is how many times you get the frog to the other side, it is the percentage of visitors that complete a task on your site. (Sales, email address entry, etc.)

Lastly, overlay. Overlay is a tool that you can use to see where people are most often clicking. Examining the success of those areas can help you craft the rest of the page to match. If you are continually having success on a particular path across the Frogger highway, it makes sense to stick with that formula and the same goes with your website.

These metrics are available to you free through tools like Google Analytics and they can help you guide and tweak your site into a sales powerhouse so take advantage!


Online Marketing: It’s All About U, and X Marks the Spot

Success is a simple formula: One part passion, one part ability. This is true in life, business, and today, your website.

Think of your website in two parts, the user experience (UX) and the user interface (UI). The user interface is the technical side of the website; it is how a user physically interacts with elements on the page and uses its functionalities. The user experience side is the emotional component, the ‘it’ factor that draws people back the site over and over again. The ability and the passion, respectively.

Unless you are the lucky person with the technical skills and the vision for the site, form a team to create you website. Use your style guide and nail down an interface that is intuitive, simple, and accurate. Couple that with the emotional element found in the core of your mission and values, and you will have a site that not only works, but tells your story and keeps your customers coming back.

Remember that for many, the website may be the only experience a person has with your company. It needs to be near perfect, have both the UI and UX elements, and stay in top condition at all times. The nature of the web is to be ever changing and that includes your page, keep an ear to the ground and always be ready to adjust the site as needed.


Do You Push or Pull?

There are entire classes, sections of libraries, careers, even countless scientific studies dedicated to the field of consumer behavior. The reason for that is clear, customers and their desire or lack of desire for products and services determine the success or failure of each and every business.


Fortunately, there is one simple idea that encompasses all that is important about consumer behavior. That is ‘pull’. Create pull and you are most of the way to a successful business.

So what exactly is pull? Pull is demand and it is all the factors that make customers seek your product or service. In order to understand how to create pull, you have to truly understand what your customer’s wants and needs are. Try to understand what motivates your potential customers. Analyze their thought process, the set of decisions that they progress through on the journey toward buying your product.

The simplest way to do this is to first look at yourself, if you were going to purchase your product, what would you be considering? Going through the buying process alongside your customers will help you identify places that you can better serve their needs, eliminate doubt, and make the decision simpler.

Remember that advertising is the opposite of pull, it is push. Be careful not to focus all your efforts on push tactics. While they may be effective, a carefully identified need and subsequent pull strategy will have longer lasting, sustained impact on sales. The two can work in powerful tandem and can be used to further the relationship between customers and yourself.

Create great pull and customers will flock to you like these penguins to the shore. Remember to Ride Like A Penguin


What Can’t You Live Without? The Numbers That Tell Your Tale

Without numbers it is impossible to know the state of your business. It goes without saying that knowing the state of your business is a necessity.

So, what numbers do you need to keep track of? Unfortunately, there is not a single answer that fits every business. Instead, you will have to determine what the things you want to measure are. To establish your KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators, ask yourself what activities are absolutely critical to your company’s success. What are those few simple things that you could not be successful without?

Whatever numbers your company needs to focus on, they need to be at the core of the business. A great example is SwankyMoms, they measure the number of affiliate links, community members, and sales in real dollars. Because SwankyMoms is a community based page, it makes sense for them to focus on numbers like these, the key is to establish the numbers that are critical to your own success.

Once you have established these numbers, know them. Whether you are looking for money, employees, or just want to have a reputation of being professional and prepared, you should know the latest KPI’s for your company at all times.

Staying abreast of your key indicators will make the big picture clearer. It will make decisions easier and you will know if your company is performing or not. These numbers will provide you with some indication of what the future holds, allow you to set specific and measurable goals, and give you a way to evaluate performance and even the overall value of your business.


Give Them Something To Say

No question about it, the number one way to drive away customers is with bad customer service. One bad experience is all it takes to turn one person into a roving spewer of the negative.

Obviously, any business wants to avoid that and in today’s world, that can be even harder with the ease, amount, and avenues for communication between customers. There are site like Yelp and others, dedicated to collecting feedback and sharing it with the masses.

So here is what you do: load up those mouths with your story. Give people an experience with your product that you would be proud to have them retell. Inject your own story into their experience, what are the values, what are you solving, how is being your patron helping the world. It is all about giving them a reason to feel good about being your customer and providing the matching positive experience as they purchase your product.

If you can turn even just one customer into an ambassador for you, they have the potential to be far more effective than any ad campaign could hope to be.

The idea is to promote yourself by having others promote you.

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Publication Date: 12-06-2010

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