Month: June 2008

Stumble Upon – Gang Theory

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You may be familiar with a site called StumbleUpon.com. It’s a very addictive site that allows you to browse sites based on recommendations from other members. You can also put together a group of members who have common interests and stumble upon the pages the different members found useful.

Basically, you have a tool bar at the top of your browser and you click a button and it takes you to a random site someone else (or many others) say is good. You can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to the site to increase or decrease it’s rating.

Of course you could sign up and just give a thumbs up to your own site, but that will only take you so far.

Here’s my idea… Get a group of business people together and create a group on StumbleUpon.com then each member gives thumbs up to the sites coming through the group, allowing each site to be rated positively by several people (as many as are in the group). You would probably want to create a separate login for this, as you don’t want to be sending the normal humor pages, etc, to the group.

20 Minutes a Day

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How much time to you spend marketing your business. I would suggest that you spend 20 minutes every day marketing your business online. You could just go through all of the resources in this site and find useful things to do to help your business on a daily basis.

So often in business we focus on how we use our marketing dollars. While of course this is an important question, I feel the better question is, “how do we use our marketing time?” Lots of businesses don’t spend much time at all on marketing. Of course, you probably don’t fall into this category, after all your reading this.

Track it or Lose it

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Are you familiar with the 80:20 rule? In business, almost without fail, you’ll find that 80+ percent of your business will come from 20 (or less) percent of your customers. Additionally, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your activities.

What am I getting at here?

Only 20% of your marketing activities will provide 80% of the results. When you focus all of your resources on the top 10-20%, your business takes off.

So how do we do that?

You absolutely must do one thing consistently. You must test. Anytime you are running a marketing campaign of any kind, you should be looking for how you can test it. If you don’t, you could pass up that one explosive marketing powerhouse. Or, what’s even more likely, you keep dumping huge amounts of money into advertising that provides little or know benefit.

Let’s look at a few ways to test…

#1 Way, and almost no one does it – ASK

This is such an odd thing. By far the least expensive and easiest way to find out where people are coming from is to just ask. How did you hear about us? I would bet millions of dollars are lost each year because that question isn’t being asked. Businesses probably close their doors because they forgot to ask one simple question.

Coupons/Discounts

“tell us you heard it on the radio and get 10% off” This is also great for word of mouth.

Tracking Websites

You can easily setup a website that points to your main site and you’ll be able to see the number of times someone comes in through that site.

Tracking Phone Numbers

You can use a company like Telecapture setup phone numbers that forward to your main line but count the number of times the number is called. I would never run a paper ad without this unless everyone answering the phone was perfect with the question, “how did you hear about us?”

Well this turned out to be a long post. I hope it’s helpful.