Neil Patel recently blogged about his million dollar mistake. Not a lot of people enjoying talking about their failures, but even if Neil did not enjoy it, he put up a great article that might just save you $1 million. Can you afford not to read it?
During our peak, we were pulling in millions of dollars with high
profit margins. Once ACS started to do well my business partner and I
decide to expand, but we didn’t expand in a good way.
http://www.quicksprout.com/2009/11/10/my-million-dollar-mistake/
Great presentation about how Amazon has improved their website design and functionality.
You’ll learn:
+ The simple Yes/No question that increased revenues by more than $1 billion
+ The elegant subtlety of Amazon’s security system
+ Why Amazon’s business model is more than meets the eye (and why designers need to care)
+ The wins and losses that Amazon has had with social media functionality
Robin Broitman answers the increasingly important question: Want to get the right people talking about you and your business in a flattering light?
This is a great resource and certainly a page to bookmark!
Great article on BNET about 3 web services you should be using: http://blogs.bnet.com/businesstips/?p=5482
Here are the highlights:
Dropbox:
Evernote:
WhichDateWorks.com:
Did your website or web app just get written up on blog or major new outlet? Great! Do you know if your site will hold up to the amount of traffic that is about to come your way? If you hesitated to answer that or feel unsure, check out this tool from Google. It will test your how your website reacts to varying degrees of internet traffic:
Stressful
Application Test (or stressapptest, its unix name) tries to maximize
randomized traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of
creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing
hardware devices in a computer. It has been used at Google for some
time and now it is available under the apache 2.0 license.
Some useful links:
To download the source code, go to the downloads page.
We recently sent a survey to some of our users asking for their feedback regarding their experiences using WhichDateWorks.com. Prior to last week we had never sent out a survey, nor had we used a newsletter email service. Our goal was to generate feedback to improve our web application. We were not sure which tools we would use to accomplish our goal, but here is what happened:
We were looking for the following:
1. Free (we always prefer free!)
2. Robust (usually not associated with free…)
3. User friendly (for both the newsletter service for us and the survey service for our users)
We looked at all the major services but ended up choosing MailChimp.com for our email service and Survey.io for our survey platform.
Why MailChimp.com?
MailChimp has a solid reputation, a user friendly interface and a great freemium model. It was an easy decision since we do not need a recurring monthly service (right now), but we are very comfortable with the features and pricing available to us as we grow and communicate more frequently with our increasing user base.
What did our free account give us?
- 3,000 emails per month
- Multiple lists of contacts (500 subscriber limit per campaign)
- Email template creator
- Analytics
- And tons more, click here for all of the features: http://www.mailchimp.com/features/full_list
The feature set is VERY robust. We could not have been happier!
The free account only let us send 500 emails at a time. Instead of simply sending back to back campaigns, we used this as an opportunity to test various day and time combinations to see which one yields the highest open rate.
Emails successfully went out on schedule so we were very happy with MailChimp’s reliability. For our next campaign, we will search around and see if there is a feature that sends out an email alerting us that the campaign went out successfully. It would have been nice to just get an email on the Blackberry letting us know everything is going well so we don’t have to check the website.
Go to www.MailChimp.com for more information.
Why Survey.io?
We found Survey.io through a blog called Startup-Marketing.com. The author of this blog, Sean Ellis, was one of the co-founders of survey.io along with Neil Patel’s company, KISS Metrics.
We looked at a number of survey web applications, as well as open-source solutions that would be hosted on our servers. In the end we chose Survey.io because they have an incredibly simple and effective product (and it’s free!).
One of our concerns going into this survey was asking the wrong questions or asking questions that did not generate responses that helped us make the product better. When we originally signed up for Survey.io we were prepared to create our own survey from scratch. So we were surprised (and initially turned off) when we could not edit or create our own questions. However, the more we thought about it the more we realized it was for our own good! The questions were exactly what we should be asking, users can skip any they did not want to answer and the results are neatly summarized for us in our dashboard. Unlike other survey services, this was completely free no matter how many users respond.
Here are the 8 simple, but effective questions that came pre-populated in our web application survey:
1. How did you discover WhichDateWorks.com?
2. How would you feel if you could no longer use WhichDateWorks.com?
3. What would you likely use as an alternative if WhichDateWorks.com were no longer available?
4. What is the primary benefit that you have received from WhichDateWorks.com?
5. Have you recommended WhichDateWorks.com to anyone?
6. What type of person do you think would benefit most from WhichDateWorks.com?
7. How can we improve WhichDateWorks.com to better meet your needs?
8. Would it be okay if we followed up by email to request a clarification to one or more of your responses?
The interface informed users that they will be answering 8 questions and how long it has taken other participants to complete the survey. It is a small, but very important feature that we feel is important. Your users are taking time out of their day to help you. Out of respect for their valuable time, they should know exactly what is being asked of them and how long it will take.
Overall we had fantastic results. Our users were very generous with their time and opinions and we could not be more grateful! Their help will make WhichDateWorks.com even better for everyone.
A Brief Guide To Twitter – The Hype, The Power and How It Relates To You and Your Business
How do I describeTwitter
I like to describe Twitter as short, instant messages that are saved on a website for public consumption (there is a privacy feature if you do not like the sound of ‘public consumption’). Users are given 140 characters, similar to a text message, to share their thoughts, articles and links, ask questions or just about anything else you can think of with text and 140 characters.
When I ask people if they use Twitter, the three most common responses I get are…”What’s Twitter?” “I don’t get it…”or “Why would I want to do that?”
Some people feel like they get it right away and some people say they will never understand it. It is OK if you get it or don’t get it or only kind of get it. It’s there for you if you want to use it….and there for you to ignore if you would like.
So why would I use it?
From what I understand about Twitter, the hype revolves around two central themes, real time and one-to-many communication.
Real-time: Twitter will send your message instantly, whatever you’re thinking, feeling, sharing, etc., it goes out that second. Why is this interesting? Google will index what is new on the internet but it measures how recent content is in days and hours, not seconds. If you want to try this out, open up two separate instances of your favorite browser. Go to Google.com in one browser and search.twitter.com in another. Now search for the same thing. Take note of the different types of content. While Google might tell you the best source, Twitter will tell you what is happening or being discussed this second. One person example of when I found Twitter helpful (non-business related) was earlier this year, while having dinner with friends. We were having a nice early dinner, sitting outside enjoying the end of a beautiful sunny day. The only disturbance was an abnormal amount of police, fire and ambulance activity. We had no idea what was going on. I searched Google for “Hoboken police sirens” or something along those lines. Google returned tons of information on Hoboken, its Wikipedia page, a local blog and more…but nothing about the noise I was hearing. So I decided to go to search.twitter.com and type in the exact same information. Within seconds I was reading about someone who had tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Hudson River. While this was an unusually dramatic experience, it illustrates how relevant real-time search and communication is over Google.
More about real-time search here: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/discovering_power_of_twitter_search.php
One-to-Many: Imagine if you yelled into a bullhorn and text came out…that’s sort of what Twitter does. It lets you talk to a fairly infinite number of people by just saying (typing) something once. Type in a quick message once and everyone who subscribes to your tweets will be notified. Twitter will then send that message to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who follow you. If it is something of interest or value, your followers might re-tweet it, sending it to their friends and followers and spreading your message. Some of the top Twitter users (mostly celebrities and other well known people) have hundreds of thousands to millions of followers. The ability to send thousands of people a message from almost anywhere, at anytime from a cell phone is pretty amazing.
Is it right for you?
Sign-up and find out. You can setup your account and make some basic connections either with friends or celebrities. Watch how they use it. Watch how competitors use it. Follow people in your industry. Download a Twitter client and install an app on your Blackberry or iPhone. It might not be right for you, but it is an interesting communication tool and you should certainly explore it.
Where do I begin?
Work on building a strong, captivated audience within your niche or business category. Share information and articles from what you know or from your blog, but don’t forget to share information generated by others! You’ll receive a very swift quick backlash from your followers if you do nothing but promote yourself.
Here is a great introduction by Chris Brogan: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/