City company watches what you say <b>online</b>

Who knew that the largest company in the world doing online content moderation is based right here in Winnipeg?

The multimillion-dollar company is called ICUC Moderation Services, and its CEO, Keith Bilous, is up for an a global entrepreneur of the year award from Mashable.com, a web source for news in social and digital media, technology and web culture.

ICUC has 150 employees -- 50 in southern Manitoba and the rest of them scattered across all seven continents -- all hunched over keyboards making sure the more hateful and rude online comments don't make it onto your website.

Bilous got the idea for ICUC in 2002 when he was doing some early mobile text-to-screen events with his previous company called Captive Interactive at a Canad Inns nightclub. He realized there had to be monitoring of the texts before they went on the screen because some of it was clearly not good.

Soon after he got a call from MuchMusic to do the same thing for them for a contest they were running.

"I fell into the business really by necessity," he said.

A decade ago he was travelling around rural Manitoba and Saskatchewan marketing a pre-Twitter mobile texting service.

"Now I'm travelling to global headquarter of companies like Chevron and Starbucks," he said, mentioning some of his clients which also include the CBC, the Globe and Mail, Calvin Klein and Intel.

It's a 24/7 business completely operated online around the world. Any site that has user-generated content will have some level of moderation. Many companies do it themselves but increasingly it is being outsourced and ICUC is becoming the go-to service provider.

"We are a true virtual company," he said from his world headquarters at his home in Headingley. "Last week I did a virtual town hall with all 150 of our people on Skype."

And now he's among the top five in the running for a global entrepreneur of the year award with online voting at http://mashable.com/awards/votes.

"This summer I woke up and realized I have more than a 100 employees," he said. "I had to pinch myself."

-- -- --

Next to ICUC Complex Games may seem tiny, but the 10-person Winnipeg computer-games development studio is a bona fide local success story.

Noah Decter-Jackson, the founder and president, built his Winnipeg gaming studio from scratch over the course of the last decade and now has 10 employees.

Last week it won a Canada New Media Award for best web game for an interactive game that accompanied a CBC documentary mini-series starring David Suzuki and produced by Winnipeg's Merit Motion Pictures called One Ocean.

Decter-Jackson said they were "overjoyed" with the award.

Not that it is necessarily the biggest or even best thing his company has ever done, but it's testimony to the diligence and business savvy he and his team had to keep working at their dream.

"When we first started we had a huge game we were trying to do and after a year we realized there was no way we were going to be able to finish it and we had to refocus our business model," he said.

Now the company does interactive online projects for clients in various sectors using the specialized skills that his team has They include things like virtual tours for real estate companies, property developers and architectural firms and third-party serious games, simulations and interactive training demonstrations.

Those jobs help pay the development costs its own projects like a karaoke iPhone app for Sony called Music World and an action game for the iPhone that is about to be released as well as some Facebook apps.

-- -- --

Speaking of big computer game projects, Winnipeg's CubeForce Media, the brainchild of teenagers Sean Oosterveen and Graeme Borland and Sean's dad, Neil, have released to the world their online fantasy role-playing game called Aerrevan.

CubeForce is Winnipeg's only other computer-game company with at least 10 employees. They raised more than $1 million to put the project together and now hope to attract online players who pay a monthly fee.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 9, 2010 B6

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Walla! Chooses Adtoma&#39;s Fusion <b>Online</b> Advertising Solution

 

STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN--(Marketwire - December 9, 2010) -  Adtoma, an online advertising and media management company, today announced that Walla!, the premier online destination of Israel, has chosen Adtoma's Fusion advertising solution for online publishers. Fusion is a complete business solution that streamlines the entire media supply chain, thereby simplifying its advertising workflow. Fusion integrates many traditional media tools into one streamlined process -- optimizing the publisher's online advertising business and increasing ROI.

With Fusion and its unique targeting and automation tools, Publisher can combine workflow, ad serving and business intelligence, which results in a dramatic increase in efficiency and reliability. Within the system, ads can be targeted to match individual requests and automatically selected with the highest revenue potential based on criteria factors. Moreover, Fusion offers visibility that enables the publisher to traffic purchasing, sales and reporting and make intelligent decisions that increase revenue and overall ROI.

"Adtoma offers a product that streamlines the business process, ensuring efficiency and centralizing data for online advertising," said Sharon Weiss, CTO of Walla! "Fusion offers revolutionary management visibility into sales and operations."

Adtoma offers the first all-in-one system to streamline revenue optimized delivery of online ads. The technology behind Adtoma's Fusion product offers the simplest, smartest and most efficient business system for online media publishers to manage all aspects of their revenue streams, giving both management and front-line staff the tools to do their jobs efficiently. Accommodating various business needs, Fusion is also the only system offered in two forms: Software as a Service and individual licensed software built into the company's hardware.

"Online advertising is a $50 billion dollar industry and growing," said Ingemar Johnsson, CEO of Adtoma. "Fusion is the first software solution to offer an all-in-one engine to drive advertising from end-to-end in the most targeted and efficient way. We are pleased to help Walla! increase its ROI and internal collaboration on multiple levels."

About Adtoma

Adtoma is an online advertising and media management company based in Sweden founded by alumnus of DoubleClick. It has a global reach with a strong foundation in Europe and is currently expanding into North America and Asia. The company's flagship product offering is Fusion -- a powerful software solution that integrates and streamlines the entire media supply chain process, including CRM, proposals, inventory and sales management, advertising operations, and business intelligence, resulting in a dramatic increase in efficiency and visibility. Fusion combines the essential business functions of multiple systems in the most comprehensive and intuitive application on the market, tailored exclusively for online ad-sales organizations. Adtoma's clients are some of the world's leading media companies, including Bonnier Publications and eBay/Tradera.

About Walla! Communications

Walla is Israel's leading portal, managing a wide range of online services including news, video, mail, e-commerce and online classifieds. Walla! serves a diverse community of more than 6 Million monthly unique users mostly from Israel. Walla! is a public company, traded in the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TLV: WALA.TA).

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Google says it was cut off from USDA project bid

Google is claiming that it was not given a chance to bid on a cloud-computing project for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for which the contract was awarded to rival Microsoft.

Announced yesterday, Microsoft's winning bid will kick off a project to move 120,000 USDA employees to the company's cloud-based Business Productivity Online Suite, a collection of applications that includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Office Communications Online.

Though Microsoft already counts more than 500 state and local agencies among its cloud-computing customers, the new project marks its first with a cabinet-level federal agency.

But the news wasn't well-received at Google headquarters, which said it never had a chance to compete for the business despite its contention that its solution is the more cost-effective one.

"We were not given the opportunity to bid for USDA's business," a Google spokesman said in a statement e-mailed to CNET. "When there has been a full and open competition - as with the General Services Administration, Wyoming, Colorado, and Los Angeles - customers have chosen Google Apps, and taxpayers are saving millions of dollars."

The USDA said that over the past six months it had been working closely with Microsoft and Dell on a plan to move its 120,000 workers to a cloud-based environment. Security, always of paramount important to government agencies, was a key consideration. Microsoft's cloud infrastructure has been given Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) Authority to Operate (ATO), which certifies a secure and trustworthy environment for the government. Google Apps for Government is also FISMA-certified.

"Migrating an enterprise of USDA's size and complexity from multiple environments, across multiple agencies, requires not only a trusted enterprise-ready solution, but also a partner who is able to work with us and navigate everything from archiving to authentication to mobile phone support," USDA CIO Chris Smith said in a statement.

Microsoft does tend to win most government cloud-computing contracts, according to Reuters. And though Google has increasingly been fighting for its slice of the public sector piece, the company has maintained that it's cut off from the bidding process by agencies failing to look beyond Microsoft. In early November, the search giant filed a lawsuit against the federal government claiming that the U.S. Department of the Interior did not properly consider Google Apps when it was searching for a new Web-based document system.

Still, Google has managed to pick up more government business recently. Last year, the company won a $7.2 million contract from the city of Los Angeles to move its staffers to Google Apps for Government. And in the last few weeks, the search giant was part of a team that captured a $6.7 million contract to migrate the U.S. General Services Administration to its Google Apps suite.

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Web strategy series

Published Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010 2:27PM ESTLast updated Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010 2:42PM EST

Looking to boost your company's Web presence a notch or two? The following series, which cover a range of topics from building a site to crafting a social media plan to making your site mobile-friendly, will help your business get started.

You’ve decided to build a website for your business. It’s a smart move: All companies, big and small, benefit from an Internet presence, but a significant number of small businesses across Canada either lack a website, or they have no strategy for their online properties. In this four-part series, Your Business takes you through the initial planning and setup phase, to launch and maintenance.

1. You need a website. This is where to start. The planning process is the first stage, and it’s also the most important.

2. Domain name crucial when launching a website. You want it to be similar to your business name, but there are a lot of factors to consider before you choose a host.

3. New tools ease pain of website design. There are three basic categories: software for your computer, ‘hosted services,’ and content management systems.

4. What to do before launching your website. After months of hard work, you’re ready to unveil your site to the world. Here are a few things to consider before going live.

Blogging can be a useful way to update customers, keep staff informed and to differentiate yourself from competitors. But is it right for your business? In this four-part series from Your Business, we'll examine the businesses that are doing it right, provide you with a checklist of goals to achieve and outline the tools you'll need to get started.

1. Does your company need a blog? A company blog can be an invaluable way to communicate with customers and employees, but does it make sense for your business?

2. Should you go big with your blog? It depends. But the first thing you should do, is focus on making the content relevant and interesting.

3. Electrify your blog with simple tools and plug-ins. Tips and tricks to effortlessly create a dynamic blog

4. Keep your blog out of the bunker. When setting up a blog for your company, always remember: what happens on the Web, stays on the Web

While 'the cloud' seems to be the latest buzzword in the computing world, it's actually been around for quite a while. In this four-part series, Your Business explores developments in cloud computing and whether it's right for your business.

1. Outsource IT headaches to the cloud. From e-mail systems to digital storage space, cloud computing lets small businesses focus on the tasks that really matter

2. Is cloud computing safer in Canada? Because of the Patriot Act, the American government can go into any data stored in the U.S. and look into it

3. Choosing the right cloud provider. Navigating the vast sea of cloud services can be daunting, especially for the firm just starting out

4. Issues still hold cloud's future back. The dilemma of whether to jump into a still-evolving technology or risk missing the boat has given rise to new ways of thinking about the cloud

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URL Shortener Bit.ly Now Generates QR Codes, Too

URL shortening service bit.ly announced Tuesday that users can now automatically generate QR codes that, when scanned with a mobile QR code reader, automatically direct users to shortened links.

To create a QR code, visit bit.lybit.ly, write or paste in a URL address, click “Shorten,” and add .qr to the end of the generated bit.ly link (like so: http://bit.ly/9STstv.qr). Next, copy the modified bit.ly link into a new browser window to view the QR code, which you can then print out, send to your friends via e-mail, post on your blog, etc. I’ve included a QR code that links to my MashableMashable author page in the right-hand corner of this post.

To scan the code, you’ll need an app like QR Scanner [iTunes link] for the iPhone and iPod touch, or ShopSavvy for AndroidAndroid devices.

The new QR code feature arrives just 12 days after GoogleGoogle released its public URL shortener goo.gl to the public, which includes the ability to instantly generate QR codes in the same fashion as bit.ly.

While the ability to create QR codes via URL shortening services isn’t revolutionary in any sense, it’s a fun feature that should increase interest and familiarity with QR codes, which continue to grow in popularity among marketers in the U.S.

[via TheNextWeb]

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Kindle App to Come Preloaded on Select Android Devices

Amazon’s Kindle app, which allows users to download and read electronic books on a variety of mobile and desktop devices, will now come preloaded on a few Verizon phones running Google’s Android operating system.

The app will come pre-installed on new copies of the recently released Samsung Fascinate, as well as Motorola’s Droid 2 and Droid X smartphones, Amazon and Verizon jointly announced.

Amazon VP of Kindle Dave Limp suggests that the Kindle app will come preloaded on “other [Verizon] devices” in the future, as well; however, there was no mention that it would appear on Verizon’s version of the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Late last month, RIM announced that Kobo’s e-reading app would come preloaded on its forthcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet device.

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Windows Phone 7 Syncing for Mac Coming Later This Year

 Mac users will get the ability to sync Windows Phone 7 devices with their Mac computer, sometime in 2010.

Microsoft UK’s head of Windows Phone marketing, Oded Ran, first tweeted that WP7/Zune syncing with Mac is coming “soon,” with Microsoft later confirming it’ll happen this year.

“Later in 2010 Microsoft will make a public beta available of a tool that allows Windows Phone 7 to sync select content with Mac computers,” Microsoft’s statement said.

While that doesn’t really sound like a full-fledged Zune client for Mac, it’s still nice to see Microsoft giving some love to Mac users who also happen to be interested in a Windows Phone 7 device.

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How To Market With Blog Comments The Right Way

What’s the most common and simplest marketing advice for attracting traffic to your blog?

Leave comments on other blogs.

Yep, it’s easy, it’s quick, and because of that, nearly everyone does it wrong. However because so many use blog comments to pretty much just leave spam, if you use blog comment marketing the right way, you really stand out from the crowd and can enjoy good results.

Watch the video and I explain how to more effectively use comments to market your blog.

If you enjoy this video, please tweet it, you can share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

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Why Small Businesses Fail & How You Can Be One Of The Rare Success Stories

In a previous articles I discussed the importance of having a thorough understanding of your customer psychology. Knowing why your customers are motivated to do what they do on an emotional level means you can intimately communicate with them, demonstrating you know their problems better than they do.

In another article I explained the distinction between your grand vision, versus your guiding strategies and your every day tactics.

I taught you that the key word when it comes to understanding your customers and your own process, is “why”. Ask why your customers behave how they do so you can best work to meet their needs and communicate in a language they understand. Ask why you make decisions and take actions so you are clear about how your every day actions relate to your overall strategy and vision.

The final piece of the puzzle, which I will explain to you in this article, is all about execution.

It’s great to conceptually understand these ideas and know the why behind human motivation, but if you fail to execute then you’re not going to get a result. At the end of the day, if you want success, it’s what you do, not what you understand or assume, that will lead you there.

Many people when they start new businesses fail because they don’t have enough knowledge. Knowledge is the first step because knowledge gives you clarity and clarity give you purpose.

At the end of the day, businesses fail because the people behind them stop doing the right actions or continue doing the wrong actions (usually a combination of both). The key to success is to figure out what are the right actions AND determine what is the right order to complete them in.

You need a clarity of purpose and enough motivation to keep working. The human being, or beings behind the business are the most important variables, and if you as the business owner, or your partners, contractors or staff don’t remain motivated, then you’re heading for failure.

I’ve worked with many start-up solo-entrepreneurs, most of whom never realize the success they want. The reason? They give up too soon. They haphazardly do a few of the right things, but always feel slightly lost or confused or impatient or frustrated. They second-guess their actions, get distracted by new ideas, and jump from one project to the next.

The few people who do enjoy success demonstrate something unique – and it’s obvious to the trained eye what it is. These people stand out from the crowd because of their steadfast motivation towards a goal. They still make mistakes, don’t always stick to one path, but they keep moving forward, failing fast and always learning from what they do. It’s the consistency of their execution that leads to the positive outcome.

You can eliminate much of the ambiguity and fear about what you are attempting to do, if you look at your business as a series of processes that must be successfully executed, one after the other, in order to get the result you want.

The fist step is to successfully execute your customer research process. Learn about your customer psychology before doing anything else (go back and read this article if you need reminding what this means: How To Develop A Crystal Clear Understanding Of Your Customer).

The next process is studying what strategies you need to employ, how they fit together and what order they should be executed in.

For example, as a blogger you usually execute a content strategy, followed by a marketing strategy and then a monetization strategy. Although these things overlap, generally you can’t successfully execute a monetization strategy without first completing a marketing and content strategy, as you won’t have any traffic to sell to.

Once you know what strategies you are going to execute, focus on the first one and only the first one if possible. For this strategy, pick the best tactics you need to complete in order to execute successfully, based on your strengths and current situation. For example, if you are at the content strategy step of building a blogging based business, and your strength is writing, you should map out a series of blog posts that you will write, which could be put together into a free report once complete (like an A to Z guide on how to do what your customers want to do).

From there, you take action and execute the tactics, monitoring results as you go along. Do this with a single-mindedness, as if your life depended on it, for best results. Don’t do it forever, but do it quickly. Execute, assess results, recalibrate, then execute some more.

At the heart of this process working is clarity of purpose. Your motivation is dependent on your confidence. Your confidence is dependent on your clarity that what you are doing works.

When you are confident that what you do delivers the desired result, you do a better job, hence giving yourself a better chance of success. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, or as Eben Pagan likes to call it – inevitably thinking. If you believe it is inevitable that what you are striving for you will have, then you increase your chances of it happening. If you believe the opposite, then you weaken your potential.

It makes sense then, that you believe what you want to happen will happen. However belief doesn’t come easy if you have little real world experience to back it up. That’s why quick and focused execution is critical. The quicker you learn what tactics work and what don’t in your given situation, the quicker you will become confident in your own ability to get a result.

Be careful that when you do experiment that you do it at the tactical level. If you keep changing strategies or you’re acting on assumptions about your customers that keep changing, you’re probably feeling more ambiguity than you are confidence.

It’s okay to experiment at the tactical level and as a result you learn new things about your customer psychology, forcing you to change your strategy, but this should only be done in response to real knowledge gained from execution at the tactical level. Make changes based on what you learn about your customers from directly interacting with them, not simply because you “think” it’s the right thing to do.

Once you start getting results, you will become more confident. Confidence in execution leads to more execution and it’s quite possible to reach a point where execution becomes effortless. Once you’ve done things a few times and the result is consistent, it becomes part of your innate abilities. You just know it works and can repeat the process at will without ambiguity.

Imagine what it would be like to have this sort of confidence when it comes to making money online. If you knew that completing a few techniques results in a certain amount of money coming in every time, you’re going to feel pretty relaxed about your ability to run a successful online business long term. This is the place you want to get to.

Execution is about repetition and testing of tactics until strategy is realized. Once a strategy is realized you know it works and you’re one step closer to what you want. Plus, you gain confidence and thus motivation.

If you want to make this process part of your life so you are successful in business, you need to make execution part of your every day activities.

If you execute in confidence, you can’t help but gain more confidence, because the worst result is clarity of what doesn’t work. Clarity is the path to confidence. Once you eliminate enough of what doesn’t work you discover what does.

If you enjoyed this article, please tweet it, share it on Facebook or on your preferred social network. And of course, if you haven’t done so already, please join my email newsletter on this page (enter your name and email at that link to join).

Yaro Starak
Executioner

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New SBA Small-Business Definition Hurts Actual Small Businesses

What is a small business, anyway? How big can it be before it's not a small business anymore? The Small Business Administration has been mulling these questions and now, for the first time in decades, has redefined how large a company can be and still qualify for SBA assistance.

In some industries, small businesses can now be a lot bigger. Which seems like a big step in the wrong direction.

The SBA sets its cutoffs based on either the number of employees or average annual receipts. Previously, $7 million in annual revenue was the cutoff for most industries.

But in the review, the SBA boosted that cutoff to more than $35 million for some business types. The result is that 18,000 more businesses now can seek help from SBA in obtaining federal contracts and loans.

Industries that now have bigger small businesses in the SBA's eyes include hospitality, restaurant and hotel. In particular, new-car dealerships saw their rules change radically, to allow dealers to have up to 200 employees. Translation: About 90 percent of all car dealerships are now small businesses.

Say what? 

The government is having a tough enough time supporting the smaller small businesses. Adding more and bigger businesses to their plate will only further disadvantage the really small businesses the SBA was created to foster -- because small businesses are such an important factor in job creation and driving our economy.

But you can see why SBA made this move. To sum up, it's easier to help bigger, more established businesses. It's also easier to fulfill government quotas for helping small businesses if you include bigger businesses in your definition.

For instance, the federal government continues to struggle to meet its goal for including small businesses in government-contract assignments. In August, the SBA said small businesses got just under 22 percent of the total. The goal was 23 percent.

Now that $35 million-a-year businesses can be counted in this pot, I'd bet it'll be a snap to close that 1 percent gap. I can't wait to see the analysis of federal contract awards a year from now, to see how many of these bigger "small" businesses are now winning contracts, while struggling small businesses are turned away.

Then there's the SBA loan mess. Despite enhanced support from SBA since the downturn, banks have been reticent to loan freely. But put thousands of bigger businesses into the SBA pot, and just watch bank lending to "small business" rise again. 

In essence, the redefinition creates a PR victory, without the government's having to make any real headway in helping small businesses grow. 

Soon, the government will be able to trumpet its success getting "small businesses" the capital they need. Meanwhile, the same small businesses that have been struggling all along may keep right on floundering. It's just that now, the statistics will mask the problem.

What do you think? Should SBA funding only go to very small businesses, or should these more medium-sized businesses receive assistance, too? Leave a comment and let us know your view.

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How the New Twitter Can Help You

Twitter has announced that it will start rolling out a new interface in the coming days. The updated version will include photo and video sharing capabilities integrated directly into users' streams. Though the facelift does give the 160 million-member micro-blogging site a more sophisticated look, not much is likely to really change for many users.

Twitter.com is actually far behind loads of other Twitter developers who have been creating multimedia-sharing Twitter apps for a quite a while. The only difference now is that many of those third-party apps, like TwitPic, Twitgoo and TwitVid, will now be accessible directly through Twitter.com--making the site feel a bit more like Facebook.

So, how will the new Twitter affect the way you connect with your customers on online? You won't have to worry about downloading so many extras to do the things your follower-base has likely already come to expect. The new features essentially may make other Twitter desktop clients--such as TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop 2--irrelevant. 

It will likely be easier to engage and interact with your customer base on Twitter with so many more information-sharing options available at your finger tips.

Also, multimedia really can be crucial these days when developing brand awareness through social media. So Twitter's new partnerships with Dailybooth, DeviantArt, Etsy, Flickr, Justin.TV, Kickstarter, Kiva, Photozou, Plixi, USTREAM, Vimeo, Yfrog, and YouTube may also help you to attract and retain more followers. 

What do you think about the changes to Twitter? How do you think they'll affect your business? 

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Is the Small-Business Recession Worse Than You Think?

It's always difficult to get an accurate read on how small businesses are faring. Most small businesses are privately held and not very forthcoming in sharing details about their operations. Ask an entrepreneur "How's business?" these days and you could be in danger of getting smacked.

But datahouse Sageworks, which specializes in small-business intelligence, has been tracking small-company employment through the downturn. Their assessment: That recession in the mirror may be larger than it appears.  Looking at revenue data from more than 25 million small businesses, Sageworks CEO Brian Hamilton finds that over the past two years, sales were down about 5 percent for the small-business sector -- and then down another 5 percent the following year, on top of that first decline.

To sum up: "It's bad," Hamilton says.

There are some bright-spot sectors in the mess, Hamilton says: healthcare and education, particularly technical and trade schools. We're apparently drinking a lot -- beer, wine, and liquor stores are doing well. 

Strangely, child care centers are still doing well, even though you'd think there are fewer people needing child care since more are unemployed. That one's a puzzle to me.

Ecommerce is strong, as we've noted in this space recently. But of some 1,200 industries Sageworks tracks, Hamilton says perhaps 40 categories are doing well.
Low points are fairly obvious -- anything real-estate related, basically.

When you go down 5 percent and 5 percent again -- as anyone who knows the magic of compound interest will tell you -- that's more than a 10 percent decline. That level of revenue shrink can have a fearsome effect on the bottom line. "De-leveraging assets" is the technical term the big retailers use, which translated means "I'm stuck with the same fixed costs but have less income with which to pay them." Anyone with a store and rent to pay is in deep trouble with this kind of revenue decline.

On the stock-trading Web site Mr. Swing, blogger TraderMark has his theory about what's choking small-business growth -- the bloated healthcare and government sectors.

What do you think? Has Washington downplayed how bad it is out there for entrepreneurs? If so, what's to blame? Leave a comment and let us know how you're weathering the recession.

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Are You a Happy CEO? Twitter's Co-Founder Wasn't

The blogosphere is buzzing this week with the news that Twitter CEO Evan Williams -- a co-founder of the red-hot social-media company -- is stepping down to "focus on product strategy." Company chief operating officer Dick Costolo moves up to the top slot.

Holy fail whale! What does it mean for the company's future? Why would he give up his chief executive role, just when the company is really taking off? 

I've got a theory.

Often, company founders are idea people. They love inventing things, discovering things, the exitement of building something from the ground up.

Time rolls on, and the company grows. It becomes more successful -- and it becomes more complicated. The CEO's role gets bigger and bigger. They need to know about hiring, people-management, marketing, sales. If they like to create, they wake up and realize they're not getting to create anything anymore. And they're bummed.

That seems to be exactly what's happened here. Williams wrote on his blog, "Building things is my passion." He wants to get back to that. 

He'll probably take a lot of criticism for doing it. People will say he couldn't take the pressure. Or that he was forced out by investors who think the company could be better run. (About that fail whale...we do see a lot of it.)

But likely it's a smart move that ultimately will make Twitter a better company. Product development is everything, really. At the end of the day, in the cutthroat world of social media, you have to innovate and have a great experience, or users stop coming -- just ask MySpace. By freeing Williams from the million other tasks that afflict CEOs, Twitter will have a better shot at staying popular and finding ways to make money off its fast-growing platform.

Also, heading a company like Twitter means living in a fishbowl-bubble. Maybe Williams was ready to take that thing off his head.

Most business founders quit Corporate America and start their own business because they're hoping that will be more personally fulfilling. They're hoping it will be fun. Once the business gets established and starts to grow, if they find it isn't fun, then it's time to tinker with their role at the company.

I think we see the opposite situation to Williams' move too often -- company founder/CEOs who stay in the top spot when they should move themselves back into a creative role instead, and let a bean-counter take the budget meetings. They get hooked on the power trip of saying they're the CEO and won't let go, even if they aren't the best manager for a fast-growing, medium-sized company and could contribute better as a free agent.

Often, at companies that are preparing to go public, the founder/CEO steps down to become chief technology officer or something, and a more experienced CEO is brought in to run things and impress Wall Street that the company has a seasoned team. That could really be what's going on at Twitter, too. Some bloggers report that investors are unhappy that Twitter isn't ramping up revenue fast enough. 

Even if that is the reason why, the change is probably a good thing. Now, we'll see what Williams creates next. 

Are you a happy CEO/founder, or would you rather someone else took that role? Leave a comment and let us know.

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What You Need to Do Before You Pitch Investors

Raising money isn't just about going to venture capitalists or angel investors. In fact, Scott Gerber said during his presentation at the Winning Strategies Conference in Long Beach today that most small businesses don't need as much capital as they think, and some don't need capital at all. Still others simply haven't undergone the proper assessment necessary to determine what they need.

So, how do you get money for your business and how do you know you're ready to get outside capital? Gerber shared three steps small business owners should take prior to pitching investors.

Step No. 1: Rethink Your Operations
Reducing customer payment terms and creating tiered pricing strategies are ways to inject some fluidity into your business's cash flow. Do an assessment of your infrastructure and labor costs. Can you go paperless or make use of internet-based software? Which bills or other remedial tasks can be automated? Try negotiating a lower price or longer payment terms with vendors. Doing an audit of your tax deductions can also help you find money where there was none before.

Step No. 2: Revise Your Spending Practices
Ask yourself what you can eliminate, what you can get for free and what you can borrow. Is there something you can barter with another entrepreneur for? Can your expensive equipment be leased or rented? The basic idea here is to figure out how to get what you need as cheaply as possible.

Step No. 1: Reassess Capital Needs
This is the step where you take a long, hard look at the amount of money you're seeking and assess whether you really need what you're requesting. Once you determine what you really need vs. what you want, break your plan down into steps with associated costs. For each product for which there is a cost, how many different uses can you think of? Gerber recommends finding three alternative uses for each product. Lastly, you'll want to seek out strategic partnerships. This goes back to bartering with other small-business owners. Whom do you know that you can team up with to get what you need?

Once you've gone through these steps, you'll have a better outlook on what you need for your business.

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What's in the Small Business 'Jobs' Bill Besides $30B for Banks

Now that the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act of 2010 is finally law, it's time to take a look under the hood and see what-all is in there. Last week, I discussed the $30 billion in funding that goes to community banks -- hopefully to lend to small businesses, but no guarantee there.

Some have noted that calling it a jobs bill is kind of a stretch. There's nothing that explicitly creates a job in here. The hope is that more funding will allow businesses to do more hiring. We'll see how that pans out.

In the meanwhile, here's a look at the rest of the Job Act provisions...some of which offer at least a glimmer of hope of getting more funding into small business owners' hands. Higher SBA loan limits. The maximum size of an SBA-backed 7(a) loan rises from $2 million to $5 million, and 504 loans rise from a maximum of $1.5 million to $5.5 million. Loan fees for these stay gone for the 2010 tax year now, after earlier being eliminated for '09.

These changes were sought by many entrepreneurs' organizations. Clearly, the prime beneficiaries here are bigger small businesses, if you follow me. But those are important to the economy and can be big job creators. 

At lender CapitalSource's small business lending group, managing director George Harrop put out a release proclaiming, "This is a very big deal for small businesses -- and for small-business lenders."

We'll see. Let's hope this isn't another ARC loan situation, where there's funding, but rules and paperwork burdens keep much of the money from reaching businesses.

Funding for state small-business investment programs: State venture funds have been drained in the recession. The bill allocates $2 billion in new funds for established and new state small-business loan programs. This one's a savvy move, as the state funds are public-private partnerships that use their own money to leverage bank guarantees and additional funds. So this $2 billion is expected to help catalyze $20 billion in lending.

Tax breaks: Once again, I think these help more medium-sized than really small businesses. There's a 100 percent exclusion from capital gains tax for angel and venture-capital investors on small business investments. This is intended to get more investors putting money into companies again. The Administration says over 1 million small businesses may benefit, receiving investments that won't bring the investors any capital-gains tax as long as they stay invested in a company for five years.

The deal where you can take any credits your business has and apply them against any of the previous five years lives on in this bill, as does Section 179 (depreciation) expensing of up to $500,000 in the year of purchasing business equipment. The "bonus depreciation" of another 50 percent of the equipment cost also got renewed.

Two for the smaller fry: A write-off of up to $10,000 of startup expenses for new businesses, and a new deduction for health-insurance costs for the self-employed.

The dark side:The jobs bill isn't all sweetness and light for small business owners, either. One of the provisions many were hoping to see struck that survived is the new requirement that small businesses fill out 1099 tax forms for all their substantial contractors. This paperwork-making pain remains.

What do you think of the jobs bill? Is there something in it that might help you hire more workers? Leave a comment and let us know your reaction.

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So You Call Yourself an Analyst? Part 1: Asking the Right Questions

Today I am going to talk about something that plagues companies and consultants everywhere--half baked analysis. It's something we've all done at some point, and something a lot of us still do on a regular basis. It's unfortunate because as online marketers we all understand the power of good data mining, but time and time again we revert to generic inquiry, at best, and default report templates.

Disclaimer: Origionally I attempted to write about the five steps I follow for solid data analysis in one post, but as I approached my 6th page of content, I realized it may be best to break up into a series.

Alas, this will be the first of three posts, tackling a five-step process toward good data analysis. The three topics are:

Asking the Right QuestionsIdentifying What is Going WrongTurning Data Into Action

Yup that's right...cancel that afternoon meeting because you my friend are going to be stoked about data analysis in 3...2..1...

Rethinking the Questions

A few weeks ago at our SEOmoz PRO Seminar I spoke on "Analyzing What Matters & Ignoring the Rest" and I challenged the attendees to rethink the questions that guide their data research. Too often we get caught up in asking questions that simply put-- don't really matter. Let me explain. It will always be important to know things like "How much has traffic increased" and "What referrers are performing better this month," but this sort of inquiry does not qualify as marketing analysis.

Sure it's valuable to report that to your clients or boss, but as an analyst you are tasked with much more. You are tasked with finding things others can't. You are expected to dive into the data head first and find issues before they become huge problems. You are also responsible for finding opportunities a.k.a. the "game changer" for your company...that is your job. If you don't like the way that sounds, please stop calling yourself an analyst. You are stressing me out.

So what questions should you be asking? Bigger ones to start.

 

I know they sound uber-top level, but don't roll your eyes just yet. I challenge each of you to write these out and really think about the answers. I think you'll be surprised with what you come (or can't come) up with.  I'm going to apply this to SEOmoz as an example.

An outsider would look at our site and say we are -

Trying to sell PRO membershipsAn increase or decrease in completed goals would show us if we are being successfulLosing traffic to our sign-up page, and a lower traffic count would be detrimental to our success

Well that is great, but honestly SEOmoz can't succeed solely on increasing PRO memberships. The truth is, there is a lot more to it than that. We have a recognized brand with expectations on it, and a community of over 200,000 people that come to us for the latest SEO information on the web. We can't afford to lose ground on either of those two. These are defining qualities of SEOmoz, and strong advantages over our competitors. So my three questions would leave me more complex answers, something like this:

Increase organic traffic on "Learn SEO" type queries, increase branded term searches, increase YOUmoz member engagement, and increase signupsMore referrals from links to our resources, more traffic from people researching SEO, more YOUmoz submissions, more comments, improved engagement metrics on site, higher sign up attempts, higher signup completions, etc.Decline in branded term searches, decline in organic traffic to resource pages, decline in time on site for YOUmoz members, etc.

So now what? You are left with a handful of metrics to investigate. Those metrics should be the base of your analysis efforts. I urge all of you to revisit the reasons why you analyze what you analyze, you'll be surprised to learn that you don't really have a good reason most of the time. After you have your new questions nailed down and you know what metrics you want to analyze,  it's time to jump in the data.

Start Macro and Go Micro

This is when I highly suggest you fill your coffee cup, or grab another Red Bull. I also support locking your office door, or putting up a "Do Not Disturb, I am Data Mining You Silly Non-Analyst" sign up on your cubicle. Okay anyway...so the main roadmap to solid analysis includes five steps and they are:

*Please note that Analyze, Value, and Action will be covered in upcoming posts in this series.

What Do We Mean by Macro Analysis?

Macro analysis means you have a solid understanding of the different sections of your site, the different user types that navigate it, and the top-level metrics. You should know these like the back of your hand. In addition to knowing these actual numbers you should know their rate of change (how often does that data point change), the depth of change (how extreme are those changes--big jumps? small steps?), and the way they interact (is there a consistent relationship between two metrics--one goes up/down, the other will too). If this sounds like a lot to continuously track, you are right. Good analysis is a lot of work. Thankfully SEOmoz pays me in cupcakes, and Champagne Wednesdays, I highly suggest negotiating for these perks ;)

At SEOmoz we track our top sections by week, so we can easily identify shifts in the data, and it looks something like this:

 

(A portion of our weekly analysis for full site stats)

You can see we aren't just looking at our homepage, we are looking at our subdomains, our highest trafficked sections. We also are going beyond visitors, we are pulling top-level stats like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rates, etc. This graph goes around to the entire company once a week. This macro level view helps all of us understand the momentum of our site's growth. It helps us easily isolate problem areas so we can address them before they grow into huge "Oh sh*t" moments. Trust me when I say, if you aren't tracking your data at this macro level, you should start today.

What Do We Mean by Micro Analysis?
This part of the puzzle is the one that most people skip over. Micro analysis means you don't just have a sense how your blog's traffic is doing you know how many comments you get on it, how long they spend on it, how deep they go into your site after reading a post, and how many of your blog visitors end up converting for you. In short, micro analysis means you look at all those secondary data points that you can actually manipulate.

While it's great to go into work on a Monday and say I want to increase traffic to my blog by 20%, it is a big feat to accomplish. Not only will it take a lot of time conceptualizing, writing and sharing that content, it will also, most likely, be less lucrative than if you took the existing traffic and increased its conversion rate by 5%. That sort of move is done by honing in on data at a micro analysis level.

Specifically this is where things like event tracking in Google Analytics and deeper dives into your preferred analytics package come in handy. Everyone has their own approach for micro analysis, but I think a good place to start is see where successful events (downloads, subscriptions, sign-ups, conversions, etc.) are taking place and see if you can come up with common demoninators. If you see that successful pages all have one or more thing in common, you can start testing these on other sections to increase conversions across your whole site. Here is an example of what we pull for SEOmoz:

 

(A portion of our micro tool usage analysis report)

We can see which tools are performing the best, and analyze those pages to see if we can isolate out page tweaks to roll out across all tool pages. It seems simple, but way too often analysts look into analytics to see how they are doing, and fail to put in the time required to uncover what they could be doing for increased success. You should know, for every single section and user type on your site, what makes it "successful." You need to be tracking these "successes" as closely as you would your visitor count.

Well this post got a little long, but I really wanted to give you guys some real examples on how I approach data analysis both at the macro and micro level. Hopefully, you can take some of this and apply it right away. I know we all have our own unique approach to analysis, and I'd love to hear yours in the comments below!

Next post I will be talking about the "analyze" step of a solid analysis strategy. That post will hone in on quick ways to figure out what is going wrong. I will talk about some GA features that you can use to make your analysis more effective and less time consuming. So stay tuned!

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What You Need to Know About the #NewTwitter

Well yesterday was a big day on Twitter, wasn't it? I don't know about you but I was glued to the live stream of the not-so top secret Twitter press conference at exactly 3:30 pm and watched closely for an hour and a half while @Ev and @Biz told us all about the new "bigger and better" Twitter.com.  The founders outlined many of the recent achievements they have seen with the growth of their community and announced the release of a brand new interface for Twitter.com, which will be rolling out to all users over the new few weeks (it's important to note that currently only 1% of users have access to the redesign, that decision was not so well received.)

The new  interface has a renewed focus on the user experience with in stream multi-media expansions, more search capabilities, and an all around sexier more fluid feeling. I went crazy yesterday playing with the new interface and wanted to share way too many screenshots and my thoughts on the new layout. I am excited to hear what you guys think all of these changes mean, so let's do this, shall we? What are the big changes to our beloved Twitter.com?

1. Redirect users back to THEIR WEBSITE – Whoa!

I have to admit I got a little fiesty yesterday when I saw my stream fill up with tweets that said things like "that is it?!" and "its just a new interface, what's the big deal?!" Twitter has over 160 million users, but as we all know many of those users use second party Twitter clients rather than the web interface itself. Ev noted yesterday at the conference that Twitter mobile users are up 250% year over year, which was the motivation for them to release their own mobile apps earlier this year. While this mobile surge has meant huge growth for the community it hasn't done as much for their on-site value. The announcement yesterday was important because it was their first real attempt to redirect those millions of users to a more compelling on-site experience. Whatever the long term goal is for Twitter.com the website, yesterday's announcement was a huge step toward a more united community of users. This.is.a.big.deal.folks.

 

 (The new Twitter.com... ohhh pretty!)

2. A whole lot more space for .... uhmmmm advertisements?

So now that we have refocused our attention and time back to Twitter.com what will they do with it? Well sell us things obviously. As you can see below there sure is a lot more space for Twitter to fill. You will notice the "Sponsored Tweets" and the "Who to Follow" elements are more prominent. In addition to that you will see some open areas (that look a lot like traditional ad space units) laced throughout the platform. In general I think its pretty clear that they used this UI redesign to give themselves more options for the up and coming advertising platform we keep hearing about.

 

(Notice all that space they get to play with!)

3. Focus on other tweets, searches…you know uhmmm NOT your tweet

During the press conference Ev mentioned specifically that Twitter is a unique community of users in that not everyone actually tweets. He noted plenty of people use it just to listen or research...very "search enginey" if you ask me (yes I just made that word up). The new design certainly focuses less on my actual tweet and more on the experience I am having as a Twitter user. You will see the "search box" was moved to top right, and has much more functionality than previously. I can see tweets with my searched word(s), "tweets with links" & that word, "tweets near me" with that word, and see profiles or people that include that searched word. This is a far better experience all around if you ask me, again compelling users to stay on Twitter.com rather than leave and search elsewhere. Smart move people, smart move.

 

(New search experience...man I love Pumpkin Spice lattes from Starbucks)

4. Media, media, media oh my!

This is probably the change you are hearing most about. The new platform has the ability to view pictures and video in stream, by expanding from the left column (your tweet stream) to the right column (now used more as an expanded view). In addition to seeing whatever multi media you clicked on you will also see people mentioned in the tweet you expanded, a brief history of that user's tweets, and the latest tweet that tweet may have been in response too. Uhmmm sound confusing? Basically the expanded view of any tweet is now much more of a comprehensive story of that tweet. No longer on the web client will you be clicking from profile to profile to read a full conversation and get context. This new layout has put the story of a tweet together for you in one place. It's smooth, trust me...you will like it!

 

(The new platform when you expand an image... Hi Matt!)

 

(The new platform with expanded video...ohhh puppy!)

5. All sorts of other little things

You are not losing your backgrounds (phew!). Atleast right now we still have them. Also you might want to revisit your right column profile color--it's bigger now.Direct messages are up in your navigation (quite seperate from the other functionality actually) and are much more streamlined in my opinion. You now click in and see the number of DM exchanges, and can expand to see them all clearly. I was happy to see this. However you no longer see a "number" which was the only way us web client users knew if we had a new DM (unless we got an email notification) so be careful not to miss those new DMs!The new platform still does not support multiple users, sorry folks!Retweets. I still don't really like them, so don't hate me when I say that I am stoked they made the ability to shut off retweets from someone so much easier! It's in there next to the option to get a user's tweets on your cell. Both options are right there and a simple click to change. Easy smeasy for sure.The new platform makes replying to multiple people challenging. No longer can you hit reply and aggregate user handles in one tweet, each "reply" click pulls up an individual tweet box. Ugh, yuck. I hope they change this soon.

(When you hit reply a box pops-up...still a bit buggy right now)
"Trends" have some serious face time. I think we will find a lot more focus as marketers on getting our topics on the "trend" list (organically or not maybe eventually purchased) as I can imagine this will be much like scoring first page Digg time...similar atleast. You can see they are now top right, whoa in your face!They are calling this a "preview" on the interface, and when you get it you will have a notification box where you must manually click into it. You can also (atleast right now, I guess its going away in a few weeks) chose to "leave the preview" and return to your old interface. I don't think you will want to, but to each their own ;)

That about sums up the big changes I am seeing. As for what it all means? I think this is a renewed focus on Twitter.com - the site not Twitter -  the company. Both Evan and Biz alluded to lots of changes coming down the pipeline, and there is a clear energy of excitement in the stream. I don't know about you but I am certainly going to playing around more on the web interface both as a user and a marketer. I think we will have some interesting opportunities coming our way...uhmmm both as users and as marketers ;)

Looking for other insights?
Checked out @ev's stream from yesterday, he gave a play for play
Read the official blog post about it
Watch a video and learn more about it from Twitter

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Does It Pay to Cut Prices?

With everybody from Starbucks to Apple cutting prices during the recession, it's little wonder that small businesses are feeling pricing pressure, too.

But, if your business needs a pick-me-up, does it really make sense to cut prices or offer discounts at a time when your customers may not be in the mood to buy? Before you pull the trigger on your pricing gun, step back and ask yourself these questions:

• Do you know how much money you make on every sale?

Most businesses focus on two metrics--sales and bottom-line profits--to gauge their financial success. By contrast, gross margin--the ratio of gross profit to revenue--measures your company's efficiency in turning raw materials into sales. Think of it like this: For every $1 of sales that your company rings up, how much money do you have left over after buying the materials and other supplies necessary to make your product or provide your service? If the answer is 50 cents, your gross margin is 50 percent. If your prices aren't high enough to allow you to maintain at least a 20 percent gross margin on every sale, it's unlikely that your business is going to be able to clear much of a profit after you subtract rent, payroll, insurance and other fixed expenses.

• Do you have "people costs" you need to cover?

Just because you've got a gross margin of 50 percent doesn't necessarily mean that you're making a healthy profit. That's why your pricing needs to reflect your total cost of doing business (not just your cost of goods sold), which, in many cases, can be much higher. Don't forget to factor in the "people" costs--the admins, sales reps, production staff, contractors, etc. who do the work that makes your company tick. Before you cut your prices, remember that you need to pay these people, too!

• Do you need to pay to bring business in the door?

If you run a restaurant or retail store, customers walk in the door and you don't have to worry about paying for sales leads and referrals. But that isn't true of a manufacturing or service business in which small businesses without their own sales force rely on the Internet or on independent reps or agents to bring them customers and orders. Depending on the industry, these reps can charge commissions as high as 20 percent on every sale. Web traffic isn't cheap, either. That's why, if you need to rely on third parties to help sell your product or service, it's important to build in enough margin to maintain a distribution network and still make a profit.

The bottom line: If you've got a good relationship with your customers and sell a specialized product or service that the market wants and needs, you should try to find a way to hold the line on prices without losing business--and build a solid foundation for your company's future. If not, it may be time to go back to Starbucks for a $2 cup of Joe.

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What You Can Learn About Entrepreneurship From SpongeBob Squarepants

"Mom," my 9-year-old son said to me recently. "What's an entrepreneur?"

"It's someone like mommy, who has their own business," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"Because SpongeBob is one," he told me.

Turns out there's an episode of SpongeBob Squarepants, "Chocolate With Nuts," that's all about starting a business. Here's the plot, and what real entrepreneurs can learn from it: In the episode, SpongeBob is struck with the idea that he'd like to get rich after receiving a high-end luxury magazine in the mail by mistake. He and his best friend, lovable-but-dim starfish Patrick, hit on the idea of selling chocolate bars door-to-door to make their fortune. They stock up on two types, with and without nuts.

They run into trouble right off. Their first customer seems scary. "CHOCOLATE!" he screams, and begins pursuing them down the street. (Failure to engage potential raving fan and prospective customer, to learn and then meet his needs.) 

Blowing this seeming weirdo off, the pair then fall victim to a series of marketing scams by a bag salesman and end up spending a small fortune for various unneeded bags to hold their chocolate bars. (Overspending on packaging and failing to stick to a budget.)

When SpongeBob finally finds a customer, she loses patience as he tries to unzip all the bags and find the chocolate bar. (Annoying package design leads to loss of customers.)

They try a variety of overaggressive and strange sales techniques that backfire, then finally sell one bar to an old woman on the idea that rubbing it on your skin imparts eternal youth. (Classic deceptive marketing . . . no doubt the lawsuit could be covered in a future cartoon.) This inspires additional outlandish lies, which sell another bar or two, but no bonanza.

Finally, the strange customer who was shouting "CHOCOLATE!" catches up to them. It turns out he would like to buy all their chocolate bars! Instant profit could have been theirs, if only they were listening to their customer in the first place. But better late than never--SpongeBob and Patrick are rich and four-wall a swanky restaurant for an expensive dinner.

Timeless business lessons there. Listen to customers. Don't blow the budget. Don't tell lies. Be authentic with your brand. It's a formula so simple a starfish can get the hang of it . . . yet somehow, so difficult for many entrepreneurs to execute.

Video courtesy of Nickelodeon.

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Outage: Is it Facebook or Me?

If you've tried logging onto Facebook today (Sept. 23, 2010), you may be wondering if there's something wrong with your internet connection or if Facebook is down. Fear not; it's not you! Sadly, it seems many people and their grandparents (yes, your customers' grandparents are likely trying to access Facebook also) are receiving a message similar to this one:

 

According to my source at the world's No. 1 social networking site, Facebook is currently experiencing "site issues" causing the platform to either be slow or unavailable for some members.

Today's outage--the second in as many days--calls into question the viability of depending on Facebook exclusively (or any other third-party communication platform for that matter) for your company's engagement campaigns. As I point out in 5 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Abandon Your Blog for Facebook, you should view your company blog--assuming you have one--as operation central for your organization's market positioning, communications and online community building initiatives, not Facebook.

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Why America is No Longer Tops in Entrepreneurship

If you've been feeling that our country isn't as hot a place for entrepreneurs as it once was, it's not your imagination. A new study from the Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy shows the U.S. has sunk to third place when it comes to fostering entrepreneurial creativity. Researchers for the SBA took a look at the Global Enterpreneurship and Development Index, which looks at more than a dozen primary attributes for supporting entrepreneurial effort. The upshot: The U.S. now ranks third behind Denmark and -- brace yourself! -- Canada.

Where are we going wrong? The study found America strong in competitiveness, startup skills, and new technology, but we fall short in cultural support for entrepreneurs, our tech sector is weakening compared with other countries' tech effort, and as a result we have fewer high-growth businesses. Reasons we are weak in these areas include fallout from the dot-com bubble of the early '00s, the recession, and simply the comparatively better progress made by other countries.

"The global perception of the country as a land of opportunity and as the Mecca for individuals wanting to do something new and different seems to be somewhat challenged by the facts," researchers Zoltan Acs and Laszlo Szerb concluded. 

We scored lower than Canada and Nordic countries in terms of entrepreneurial attitudes and activities, but higher in aspirations. In other words, more people are sitting around fastasizing about being an entrepreneur in America, but fewer are taking the plunge.

"This seems to suggest that even though the presence of powerful role models and past successes makes Americans have a keen desire to be entrepreneurial, the actual process is finding fewer takers than one would expect," they write. "Cultural support for entrepreneurship and the American youth's perception of entrepreneurship as a viable career choice seem to be limited."

I'm not sure they're right on that. As the mom of a high-school teen who's been active in Future Business Leaders, and a reporter who's written about wonderful youth-entrepreneurship programs such as Empowerment Group's Youth Entrepreneurship Program, I think the problem isn't at that level. 

It's when you get out there and actually try to start a business -- maybe in your dorm room, or maybe after you graduate -- that there's often a lack of support. There's only so many incubators out there. Not every business is near an SBA Small Business Development Center or SCORE office. For many, that critical infrastructure is missing. 

We could use more entrepreneurship programs in colleges, more incubators, and more funding for startups at every level. The shrinking venture-capital sector certainly isn't helping us fuel the growth of "gazelles," those fast-growing companies so essential to economic recovery.

Many more don't take advantage of the resources that are out there. Sort of the entrepreneur equivalent of not asking for directions...and it is apparently having real consequences for our nation's economic future.

At the risk of stating the obvious, in today's economy, there's also a lack of available capital, too. 

What do you think would boost America's global entrepreneurial standing -- and more importantly, get more entrepreneurs up and going? Leave a comment and let us know.

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Optimizing SEO Resources - Whiteboard Friday

Hello everybody! My name is Aaron Wheeler and I do customer service here at SEOmoz; if you call us or email us, there's a 50% chance you'll end up talking to me. Oh well! Your loss is my gain. =) Anyways, one of my new tasks in the office will be video production so you may end up seeing my gob around the blog every once in a while. I'll be the main one posting these Whiteboard Fridays in the future as well as some of the other glorious cinema we create to vitalize your ears and eyes. It'll be fun! If you have any feedback or ideas, I'd love to hear them; you can reach me by email or twitter at my contact page: Aaron Wheeler. Nice to meet you!

This week, our very own Danny Dover discusses some important and scalable ways to optimize your SEO resources. We all know that pickins' can be slim when it comes to many companies' budgets for SEO, so why not make the best of what you've got? Danny has some ways that you can make the most bang for your (and your boss's) buck.

Hello, everybody.  My name is Danny Dover.  I do SEO here at SEOmoz.  Today we have something a little bit special.  We've bought all new equipment and new microphones.  We heard your comments in the blog posts that our sound quality was a little bit "meh."  So, we're trying to make it a lot less "meh."  So, please give us your continued feedback in the comments below.

For today's Whiteboard Friday, we're going to be talking about optimizing your SEO resources.  So, according to my research, this is the most meta SEO Whiteboard Friday we've ever done.  We have optimizing and then, of course, the O in SEO stands for optimization.  So, if there is some kind of time warp or something that goes on, just expect it.  It is kind of the things, part of the downside of this job is that sometimes you disrupt the universe.  Oh, well.

So, I've broken this down into three categories that I recommend.

1. Define Goals

The first one is define goals.  Just like self-help books, goals are very important, right?  That analogy didn't work per se.  Maybe I need to read more self-help books.  That would be a good idea.  Define goals, right.  I have broken that down into three subcategories.

Find your highest ROI customer.  This is a little bit counterintuitive but it makes a lot of sense.  I recommend doing this first.  If you have an established website and you're trying to optimize your SEO resources, you're already going to have some data on who your customers are.  Let's say you are a newspaper website.  I'm sorry, first of all.  Hard times for you, but good luck.  So, if you're a newspaper website, you've got to figure out if it is your politics readers who are going to make you more money or if it is going to be your sports reader that are going to make money.  Then based on this information, you get this from your analytics and some Excel stuff, figure out what you can do to target those customers specifically.  So, really maximize the money you are already getting.  So you have these resources in place.  Make sure that you are getting the most out of them.  That is kind of the key to optimization.

Identify your budget.  They say the creativity is limited by, or creativity is dictated by limitation.  The Google homepage is always the example I hear about this.  Although, if Google is watching, you're kind of getting overboard lately.  The one where the balls went flying everywhere annoyed the heck out of me.  Please don't do that again.  Identify what your budget is.  This is going to dictate everything that you are able to do.  Are you going to be able to hire on a whole team of content writers?  Are you going to be able to get SEO consultants onboard with you?  How are you going to do all of your web development stuff?  It's all dictated by budget.  So, know what that is going forward.  Get it on paper.  Make sure you know what this is.  Make as elaborate a budget as you can upfront so that you know what you are going to be able to do going forward.

Develop a Content Strategy. this is the one where I see mistakes made the most times, myself included.  I mess this up all the time.  Develop your content strategy.  The key to SEO -- and you have heard lots of talking heads like myself talk about this in SEO spaces  -- is that content is the key for SEO.  That's because when people go to search engines, be it Google, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever it may be, they're going there to find content, right?  That's the purpose.  They want some kind of question answered.  The key to SEO is content, building that thing that Google is going to want to index and provide in their search results.  You need to figure out how it is going to happen.  Who is going to be writing these contents?  If it is a blog post, is it going to be Jamie from marketing, is he going to be the one who is going to write it every week?  Is it going to be every week?  Is it going to be every day?  Do you have a signed contract from Jamie saying he's going to do this?  What happens if he is out on vacation or something?  How are you going to get the content produced every week?  Who's going to write it?  Who's going to edit it?  How is it going to get published?  You need to figure out these details early, as quickly as you can.  Get them ironed out on paper.

2. Calculate Impact vs. Effort

Calculate impact versus effort.  This one is kind of core to optimization.  Figure out what are your lowest hanging fruits, this is the first one.  I found the best way to do this is using, this is super self-promotional here, using OpenSiteExporer.org, which is a SEOmoz product.  It's free.  You don't even have to sign up to use the basic version.  But with OSE, with Open Site Explorer, you go in there, put in your URL or your competitor's URL if you are really clever.  Click on the tab that says top pages, and it will show you all of the top pages by links, so which page has the most links to it.  It will show you the status codes.  So, if it is like a 404 error, it means you have links going to that page, but you are not getting any SEO value from it.  The same thing with a 302 redirect.  If it is not a 301 redirect, it is not going to help you from an SEO perspective if it is a 302.  These are links that you already have.  You've already done the effort to make these work, but you aren't getting any benefit from them.  They're the low hanging fruit.  Again, that is OpenSiteExploreer.org.

Meet with stakeholders.  I would say it is about three months ago now, we did this at SEOmoz.  We brought in all the heads of the departments here and then a couple other important influencers for the company.  We put them all in one room.  We were like, "Okay, what are everyone's top priorities?"  What do they want to see happen in the year to come at SEOmoz?  We wrote our suggestions on sticky notes, put them up on the board.  It was not surprising that they varied by department.  I am in the marketing department here and mine happened to be marketing goals, whereas the developers wanted some more back end things to happen.  The bus dev people wanted more, like, "We should make more money. That'd be a great idea, right?" That's why they're the bus dev people.  Then we had operations who were doing other things like that as well.  We put all of these on a whiteboard, discussed them all, and then voted on them as a team.  Based on this, based on how much effort it is going to take from the marketing department, how much benefit are we going to get globally for the entire company as a whole?  We found that this exercise provided a lot of value for us.  It is actually the roadmap that we are using today.

3. Document Repeatable Processes

Document repeatable processes.  This is kind of self-explanatory.  In SEO, there are lots of tedious projects you have to do.  Let's say it is link building. You're going to go do the keyword research, figure out what anchor text you want to target, then you are going to go through and find out what the relative link sources are for that.  You're going to contact the right people and ask them if you have a template probably.  Or you're going to do some kind of, build some content so it can attract the links naturally.  That's the way I like to do it, just as a side note.

With these, whatever your process is, whatever you find works for you and your organization, document the processes.  Write down every single step.  I do this for two reasons.  The first one is so that I know I am not missing a step when I go through this.  A lot of times when I have done a process for the umpteenth million time, I skip a step just because I am human, I get bored of it, and I stop paying attention.  But if I have a checklist in front of me, I can go through and make sure I don't do it.  The other reason is for scalability.  If you can take this process and hand it off to more people to do the same process as you while you are doing it, then it is going to scale, right?  You're going to get more throughputs on this process.  I have found this to be extremely successful here and especially when I was doing SEO work with clients in the past.  If I push this off to other people who are working for the company who are doing similar things, we can maximize the amount of impact we get with minimal effort from the people involved.  So, it's fantastic.

That's all the time I've got today.  I look forward to hearing all your comments below.  Thank you.  I'll see you next week.  Bye.

If you have any tips or advice that you've learned along the way, we'd love to hear it in the comments below. Post your comment and be heard!

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How To Craft A Compelling Offer In 7 Easy Steps

At the moment I’m madly running around in an attempt to put together a page to promote the workshop Alborz Fallah and I are running in October in the USA. If you are interested in attending I’ll have full details for you very soon…as soon as I get the page up!

There are two things I need to complete in order to finalize the page.

The location for the workshop. It’s going to be in New York City in October, and I think I’ve just found a venue to host it, so this is almost sorted.The sales page video that tells you about the event.

Alborz and I began filming the video footage last week and managed to record some very good blooper reel content, but nothing we could actually use (we did have lots of laughs though!).

I realized one of the main reasons we had such an unproductive day was that I didn’t have a good enough plan for what the video should contain. I went back to some of my study materials and cheat sheets on how to construct a good offer to refresh my memory.

I came across a video from Eben Pagan’s Guru Blueprint course which gave me the reminder I needed. The video wasn’t too long, about 20 minutes, but had a really simple 7 step formula for coming up with an offer. I’ll share it with you in a moment, but first let me explain what exactly an offer is.

An offer is the final place where you tell your potential customers what you are offering them in exchange for their money. It might be a sales page, or a sales video or a pitch on stage at an event or on a live webinar. Whatever the format, the content remains much the same and there are some key points you should cover to help increase your likelihood of making a sale.

I previously became very confused about what exactly an offer is. I thought it was just the buy button on a sales page or simply saying you get this if you give me X amount of dollars. I later learned that an offer is a lot more than that. It includes the obvious component – a price and a mechanism to make the transaction – but it also includes other important things like price justification, risk reversal, background story and other marketing elements.

The offer is absolutely critical because it’s the final piece of marketing your prospect experiences before making a purchase. You might lead them towards an offer with all kinds of different marketing tools, but the offer is the final conclusion.

In the case of the video I am making now, Alborz and I are relying on our reputations, personal case studies, record of results and established relationship with you as key components of our offer. That means the video has to explain a lot, which is why having a framework or even just a checklist, is helpful.

I’m not going to repeat word for word what Eben teaches. You can take one of his courses if you want his break down. That being said, these are not strictly Eben’s ideas either, he’s taken what he learned from other people, in particular copywriters like John Carlton, and come up with his interpretation.

In the spirit of interpretation, here is my take on the 7 steps, which you can use to craft an offer for your next product.

1. The headline.

This is the element that encapsulates what your product does in a brief sentence or two. It should focus on the core emotion driving your potential customer to make the purchase, and must be clear about specific outcomes. Like writing headlines for blog posts, this is the most important element because it’s the initial attention grabber. For a video offer, I consider what you say in the first 30 seconds equivalent to the headline, or you can include headline text above the video to entice people to click the play button.

2. Set up the scenario and explain the challenge the customer is up against.

In this section you frame what the potential customer is facing and what experiences most people have when trying to achieve whatever your product helps them achieve. This is where you demonstrate you know the problem or desire the potential customer has better than they do. This is very powerful because it shows your intimate knowledge of the situation and that infers you might have something that actually works, because you know so much about what doesn’t.

3. Tell your story.

I’ve relied heavily on this element in many of my offers when it comes to teaching how to make money online with blogs and membership sites. If you’re teaching how to do something or how you went through an experience to come up with your product, going through the before and after story is very powerful. It helps to hook the prospect in because stories are the most compelling content you can create. As you tell the story you should point out your ah-ha moments and how you came up with certain techniques or solutions that no one else uses.

If you don’t have your own story, or even if you do, telling the story of other people works well too. Adding some case studies of previous customers or people who have benefited from your work is a very good idea and another technique I’ve used many times before. Testimonials are good, but stories from other people who were just like everyone else with a problem that you helped them solve with your product, are much better.

4. Dish out a list of the benefits of your product using specific and tangible results.

Eben suggest you come up with twenty dot points you list out of all the amazing things your product or service does, focusing on tangible outcomes and specific problems (avoid abstract concepts like “you will feel better” – instead use phrases like “You will lose ten pounds and be able to play tennis again”). This is a good chance to touch upon sticking points that your prospects might have. If your prospect sees just one point that strikes a nerve that they simply must know about, this could be the trigger that convinces them to buy.

5. Next you state the price, but you don’t just lay it out there, you justify it by demonstrating how much incredible value you are delivering.

Eben recommends you focus on showing how you are charging just 10% of the value you are delivering, for example pointing out that you charge X dollars for private coaching, yet this product costs just a fraction of that. This is a good time to include bonuses, which as Frank Kern calls it – you “stack the cool” – including so many relevant and exceptionally valuable additions to your core product that people can’t help but say yes.

6. The Risk Reversal.

This is where you tell prospects that there is no risk buying because they are protected by a guarantee. The risk is then placed on you to deliver, since they can ask for their money back if they don’t like it. Of course you plan to over-deliver, so this is a win-win, your prospects are protected so compelled to buy, and you are committed to delivering a great product.

7. The Call To Action.

This is straight forward, yet needs to be very specific. Tell your prospects to buy by saying do this (e.g. click the buy button), then this will happen (e.g. you will be directed to our secure order form where you will make payment via credit card or paypal) and then this (e.g. you will receive a confirmation email within a few minutes of processing your order).

Don’t just say “please buy now”, tell them how to do it and say do it now. This needs to be explained as if you are teaching someone how to use the computer for the first time.

Obviously these points can each be dissected to much more depth, but this list is a good starting point. I recommend if you want more details on what to include in a sales page but you don’t have money to invest in a full course on copywriting, try Alexis Dawes Desperate Buyers Only ebook, which you can find my review of here and costs under $100.

I need to get to work and start compiling my answers to these seven points for the New York workshop with Alborz I will be offering you very soon. It looks like we will have about 10 spots available, so stay tuned if you want to come hang out with us in October.

Yaro Starak
Crafting Offers

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Online Marketplaces: Market Outlook, Revenue Models and Recent Trends

The forecast is bullish. Experts predict that by 2008, 27% of all e-commerce sales will be generated by multi-merchant product aggregators. Shoppers are expected to use Comparison Shopping Engines to the tune of $54.3 billion in revenues by 2008.

There are primarily two types of prevalent revenue models among online marketplaces – pay per click (PPC) and percentage of sale (POS) or cost per order (CPO) as a means of paying the marketplace. There is also a third type: Froogle.com. Offered by Google, Froogle.com is free. The rest charge merchants based on visits or sales.

Pay per click is how it sounds. Each time a potential shopper clicks thru to your site, you pay a fee. While the fees can be very low per click, it is crucial to monitor your visits closely. If your conversion rates on certain products are low, that is if shoppers are looking but not buying, the clicks are costing money and you may want to discontinue listing those products. That can be a real headache. For instance, if you have 500 products and you’re listed on three PPC shopping search engines, you could be monitoring 1500 products. That’s a lot of man hours. And in many cases it is difficult to get that specific click information from the comparison search engines. In essence, you could be draining significant profits from your business while shoppers visit who have no intention of buying.

Cost Per Order (CPO) Revenue Model on the Rise

Shopping.com will begin testing a universal shopping cart feature over the next couple of months. The service allows shoppers to add products from multiple merchants to a single Shopping.com cart and purchase those products through Shopping.com. The payment system will be powered by PayPal. Merchants participating in the test will be charged on a revenue-share basis as opposed to the standard cost-per-click model. Shopping.com / Paypal will process the transaction and send the necessary information (name, shipping address, quantity ordered, etc.) to the merchant for order fulfillment. There are two ways merchants can receive this information: via FTP and via the Merchant Account Center. The merchant will then send Shopping.com a status update when the order is processed and Shopping.com will relay an order confirmation to the buyer. Buyers can find out about their order status from their cart account on Shopping.com. The buyer will receive one order number even if she buys from multiple retailers. The test isn’t live just yet.

Positives from the Merchant Perspective

Shopping.com’s universal shopping cart should increase conversion rate. Merchants only pay on a CPA basis thus removing all risk from the marketing channel (merchants should now feel comfortable listing entire product databases)

Negatives from the Merchant Perspective

Ceding customer ownership to Shopping.com (Shopping.com controls all communication with the customer. Merchants can’t access a customer‘s e-mail address or phone number. Merchants lose ability to upsell/cross-sell other products during the buying/checkout process which lowers the average order size. ]

Concern about Ceding Customer Ownership in CPO Model

In a proprietary survey of more than 30 online retailers at the 15th Annual eTail Conference in Philadelphia, 81% of the online retailers indicated that they probably will not implement Google Checkout primarily due to the concern about ceding customer ownership to Google. Specifically, online retailers were concerned that Google limits online retailers’ ability to market to customers directly. The online retailers also expressed concern about disintermediation, lack of system flexibility and the perception that Checkout provides Google too much visibility into their business, especially relating to Google search-driven conversion rates. Online retailers were concerned that Google stores all customer information, and Google Checkout limits an online retailer’s ability to directly market to a customer via e-mail. Given the low cost of e-mail marketing once a customer has been acquired, the e-mail marketing limitations placed on online retailers who implement Google Checkout may slow the rate of adoption of Google Checkout.

Online retailers also expressed concern that Google undermines the ability of an online retailer to directly connect with a consumer by requiring Google Checkout users to go to Google Checkout to make changes to orders and transactions instead of to the online retailer’s site. This requirement once again prevents an online retailer from marketing or cross-selling to a user when they return to the site to check order status or to make changes to an order. Similarly, some online retailers did not like how a Google Checkout transaction ends with a Google Checkout page instead of on the online retailer’s web page.

M&A; Activity in this Space is Very Vibrant

Shopzilla est. 2006 earnings = $50m
Shopzilla (acquired by Scripps) deal value = $560m or 11.2x est. 2006 earnings

PriceGrabber est. 2006 earnings = $35.25
PriceGrabber (acquired by Experian) deal value = $485m or 13.8x est. 2006 earnings

Shopping.com est. 2006 earnings = $22.8m
Shopping.com (acquired by eBay) deal value = $476m or 20.9x est. 2006 earnings

Internet Retail Marketplaces – The Landscape at Glance

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