Realize Your Business

I like to take a class every so often to learn new things and keep my brain active. July 9-15 I took a class for business owners to learn ways to improve my business. It was listed as an “intensive” and it really was! I worked at least as hard during that 7 days as I have in the past working on a software project near deadline (Sleep? Who needs sleep!). Jason was definitely feeling neglected!

The work from that class spilled over into the following week, so I’m really just now getting caught up with all the things I neglected during the class. It was quite worthwhile though. I learned a lot of really valuable things, and everything was recorded so I can go back and listen again any time I want.

Especially for those of us reaching middle age, continuing to learn and stretch our brains is extremely important to keep our brains healthy in our twilight years. If you haven’t read it yet, check out the book by Cathryn Jakobson Ramin called “Carved in Sand: When Attention Fails and Memory Fades in Midlife”. She is a journalist who researched all the current thinking about memory failure at midlife and beyond, and what you can do about it.

Exercise, take classes, play Sudoku – you aren’t goofing off, you are keeping your brain healthy!

Best -

Geri

Author: Geri Schneider Winters

In the last few tips I have discussed tools you use to bring visitors to your site and maintain a relationship with them – blogs and autoresponders. At some point in time you will want to sell products to those visitors. This tip discusses several methods you can use to offer your products for sale and collect payments.

You should have a payment service as one way to collect payments. Two such services are PayPal and Google Checkout. They are free to set up the account. You are charged a fee for each sale, which is about the same or a bit less than the fee charged by credit card companies. (Until 2008, Google is not charging a sales fee.) Set up a business account which is separate from any personal account you might have at PayPal or Google.

http://www.paypal.com
http://bizsolutions.google.com/services

If you do not have your own website, you can still sell products on the internet using existing online marketplaces.

For example, many people sell personalized products and artwork through Cafe Press. You can get a free online shop and sell customized apparel, housewares, buttons, prints and cards, hats and bags, books, and audio and data CD’s. And you can sign people up to be affiliates of your site. You are charged a small fee whenever you sell a product.

You can get a free account here:

http://www.cafepress.com

You could get a store at Yahoo. That has a monthly fee, but you sell whatever kind of product you want.

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com

Ebay has stores as well :

http://stores.ebay.com/

You could offer your product for sale in an email, and provide a telephone number for people to call to order the product. That requires no website at all. Or perhaps you have a brick and morter shop and your email directs people to come into your store to buy.

Another way to sell products without a website is to sell other people’s products. You sign up with a marketplace, then promote other people’s products by (for example) sending an email promoting the product to your prospects, with your affliate link in the email. Or you could get a free blog at MySpace, promote the product in your blog, and put in the blog a link to an affiliate product.

Over time, you can add your own products to the marketplace, but then you have to have a place to put a sales page for your products.

One such marketplace is PayDotCom.com. You can sell any kind of products through PayDotCom. You can sign up for free here (which is my affiliate link):

http://paydotcom.net/?affiliate=24644

Another service, for only digital products, is Clickbank.com. This has a one time fee for new members.

http://www.clickbank.com

When you have your own website, you can start selling products by just creating a sales page with a Buy Now button that goes to PayPal or Google for the payment processing.

Over time, you may want to invest in a shopping cart service and a merchant account. One place to look is 1shoppingcart. This service has a shopping cart and autoresponder. They can also help you set up a merchant account. There is a monthly service charge for an account, which varies based on the level of service you select. You can sign up here (which is my affliate link):

http://www.autopilotriches.com/app/?pr=7&id=103162

You do want to have more than one way to process payments. This is in case you cannot use a particular payment processor for some period of time. For example, what if a power failure takes PayPal offline? If all you have is PayPal, how can you process those orders? But if you have PayPal and Google Checkout, you could quickly edit your order page to change the BUY NOW button to transfer the sale to Google Checkout.

The best thing I can suggest is to start simple and add more options over time. I started out with just a PayPal button. PayPal allows people to purchase using a PayPal account or credit card, so this worked fine for quite a while. I have since added 1shoppingcart to provide another means of payment.
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Now it is your turn.

How will you sell your products? Will you have your own website, or get an online shop with Yahoo or Cafe Press?

Will you sell other people’s products and collect affiliate commissions?

Will you have a sales page with a BUY NOW button to either PayPal or Google Checkout?

Will you have a shopping cart service with a merchant account?

Will you participate in a marketplace, such as PayDotCom or ClickBank?

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You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

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* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

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Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Once you have set up your blog, there are some additional tools you will want to add to your blog to either prevent problems or collect information.

I am using Wordpress. This is one of the most popular blogging tools, so it is easy to set up, easy to get help, and easy to get addiitonal tools to use with it. If you check with your internet service provider, you will probably find that you can install Wordpress in your domain directly from your Cpanel.

The tools I recommend to use with Wordpress are two plugins – Akismet and Gostats – and software to make it easy for people to contact you. You may also want to add additional feeds to your blog to make it easy for people with RSS readers to subscribe to your blog.

Since the focus of this article is the tools I use with my blog, I will assume that you have a Wordpress blog already set up. You will need to log into your Wordpress Administrator panel to add this software to your blog.

First, let us deal with the issue of blog spam. Blog spam is where people post spam on your blog, often by using software to do it.

Wordpress provides a plugin called Akismet. What this plugin does is to catch blog spam and delete it for you. Akismet catches and deletes the spam before it is posted to your blog. You have to activate Akismet before it will do anything. There are two steps to activating Akismet.

First, in your Wordpress Administrator Panel, click on the tab marked Plugins. You should be on a page titled Plugin Management. You will see the Akismet plugin in the list, since it comes delivered with Wordpress. Under the Action catagory, click on Activate.

The second part of activation is to get a WordPress.com API key. You will see a link in the description field to get the API key. Click on that link. If you do not have a WordPress account at WordPress.com, then create one, and you will be given an API key. In your Administrator Panel, click on the tab labeled Akismet Configuration. Put your WordPress.com API key in the box, and click Update API key.

Now you do not have to worry about blog spam. I see about 1 spam post a month, but Akismet is deleting about 200 every 15 days.

Another thing I do to prevent blog spam is that I moderate all posts. This means that nothing gets posted on my blog until I approve it. To set this, in your Administrator panel, click on the Options tab. Click on the Discussion subtab. For my blogs, I have checked all of the boxes. I get an email whenever anyone creates a post or comment. That email has links to let me easily allow or delete the post.

For a second tool, you might want to add statistics to your page so you can track visitors to your site. There is another plugin for WordPress that will setup GoStats on your blog.

First, you have to get this plugin. Go to the wordpress website:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

Scroll down to a box that says Search Plugins. Type gostats in the box and click the Search Plugins button. Click on one of the listings and you will go to the GoStats for Wordpress page. On the right, click Download Plugin, and save the zip file to your computer. Unzip that file and you will see something called GoStats.php Use your favorite ftp software to copy this file onto your webserver. It goes in your directory called:

“something”/wordpress/wp-content/plugins

where “something” is the path to your domain.

Second, you have to activate the plugin. In your Wordpress Administrator Panel, click on the plugins tab. You will now see GoStats in the list. Click on Activate.

Third, you have to have a GoStats account to track your statistics. Go to www.gostats.com and sign up for a free account. Register your blog page as a site in your account. Then click on mysites and click on view stats. Look in your browser for the URL for this page. You need two pieces of information from that URL. At the end of the URL, you will see id=xxxxxx where xxxxxx is some 6 digit number. That number identifies this site. The other piece of information you need is the name between // and gostats. It will probably be c1 or c2, but may be something else.

Finally, add your gostats id to your blog. In your Wordpress Administrator panel, click on the Options tab, then click on the GoStats subtab. Put the Id you just found into the Site ID box. Put the other name in the GoStats server box. Click Update Options.

If you go look at your blog, you will see a button at the very bottom that is labeled Free hit Counters and has a stylized G. If you click on that button, you will see the statistics for your site.

For a third tool, you want to make it easy for people to contact you. I use a tool called My Contact Station, and have it on all my websites. This one tool includes a form for someone to email you, send anonymous feedback, tell a friend about your site, and sign up for your email list. It has Captcha built in, which is a challenge question a person has to answer when submitting. This prevents spam software from using the form to send you junk email.

If you do not use that software, you want something like it. Now it does have a cost, but you can get the basic version for $7.00. That is correct, seven dollars. If you want to be an affiliate, then you can upgrade to premium for another $27, for a total cost of $34.00. Buy it once, and you can use it on all your pages on all your sites.

Here is a link where you can get it – and yes it is my affiliate link.

http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com/mcspremium/affiliate.html

Once you have the tool, follow its setup instructions to customize it for your domain.

Now you have to add it to your blog. If you do not know how to edit HTML, find a friend to do this for you. It is very easy, and should only take about 10 minutes to do.

What you will do is go onto your webserver and find the wordpress file:

“something”/wordpress/wp-content/themes/default/sidebar.php

where “something” is the path to your domain.

(If you are not using the default theme, then replace default with the name of your theme.)

Open the sidebar.php file in an editor. Near the bottom of the file, create a new list item (li). I added a header here called Contact Us. Then add the html code that is shown in the install directions for My Contact Station. Save the file. You should see on the side of your blog a new section called Contact Us with the links you created for email, feedback, tell a friend, and subscribe to email list.

If you want to, when you are on my blog at Realize Your Business, look at the very top of the browser, click on View, and select Page Source. Then you can see the HTML for my page. Scroll down near the bottom (look for an h2 header called Contact Us) and you can see the code I added to add My Contact Station to my blog, starting with the li and script tags, and ending just before the /ul
tag. Of course this has my domain in it, and you would change this code to put in your own domain.

This is not the only software you can use for the purpose of setting up contact forms, but it is very inexpensive and works quite well.

The last tool you might want to add is a button for RSS feeds. I am using Feedburner so I have just one button that works for any feed.

Go to the website http://www.feedburner.com and set up a free account. In the box labeled Burn a Feed, enter your blog URL. Once you have gone through all the steps to set up your blog in Feedburner, click on the link for that blog in Feedburner. Select the Optimize tab and on the left side of the page click on SmartFeed. On the SmartFeed page, click Activate.

Now click on Publicize and in the bullet point that starts Chickletize, click on the link Friendly Graphic. Scroll to the bottom of the page where the HTML is listed. Select all of that HTML and add it to your blog the same way you added the code for My Contact Station (by editing the sidebar.php file for your theme).

You can see the result of adding the RSS feed on the Realize Your Business blog. Looking on the right side, you see the Contact Us section that opens My Contact Station, and an orange icon to subscribe to the blog in a reader.

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Now it is your turn.

Which of these tools do you think will be useful on your blog: Akismet, GoStats, My Contact Station, FeedBurner?

Do you have these or similar tools set up on your blog?

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You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

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* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

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Author: Geri Schneider Winters

Once you have an autoresponder set up and are sending out regular messages, you can get a lot of information about your list and their interests by looking at the reports in the autoresponder.

I will be talking about Profollow (Aweber) reports, but you should find similar reports in other autoresponders.

One obvious bit of information is how many people are subscribed to my lists. But trends are more interesting than raw numbers. What do I mean by that? The number of people on my list is important, but more important than that is to learn if my list is growing or shrinking. And I like to look at daily, weekly, and monthly reports to see if I can spot a pattern. Do more people join on a weekday or weekend? Do more people unsubscribe on a weekday or weekend? Do more people subscribe after I post a new articles in my blog?

I looked under Reports, weekly new leads, and found that one of my lists had a big surge of new subscribers the weeks of April 23 and 30, 2007. So I can check my calendar to see what I was doing then. I see that I posted a big article on a popular forum for that market on April 24. They require 10-30 page papers on this site, so it is a lot of time for me to write for them. But the big surge in subscribers to my list tells me that it is worth my time to write and post articles on this forum.

If you look at your reports of new leads, and compare the subscribe rate to your business activities, this will tell you what things are good for promoting your business in your market. Similarly, if you have a lot of unsubscribes, you can determine that something you did made your subscribers unhappy. What business activity were you doing that caused a lot of unsubscribes?

Another report I can look at is verified leads. This tells me the percentage of people who confirm their subscription on a double opt-in. On one of my lists, I see that almost 20% do not verify their email address. That is a pretty high number, but I do not have information as to why these folks are not subscribing. So I have to make some guesses.

One reason could be spam. These are not real email addresses, so the confirmation message bounced. To remove this amount of fake subscribers, I could add a challenge to the webform, so that it will not be submitted unless a real person enters the Captcha code. Some people will still enter fake email addresses, but I cannot do anything about that. Or I could just not worry about it, since the double opt-in prevents fake email addresses from being added to my lists. I do not want to put a lot of barriers for those who want to subscribe.

Or maybe it was a real email address, but the confirmation email could not be delivered for some reason. There is not anything I can do about this, so I will not be concerned about some amount of unverified leads.

Another reason could be that people do not understand the instructions. To remove that issue, I can be more explicit on my thank you page, showing screen shots of the email that will arrive, and the exact steps that the person should take. Many people have found that this increases the rate of confirmation.

Another interesting report is Ad categories subscribed. On my webforms, I include an ad code. This way I know what page a person was on when he or she subscribed to my list. This Ad categories subscribed report shows me a graph of the number of people subscribed from each ad code, which tells me which web pages are the most effective at getting people to register. I use a different webpage for each report I offer, so not only do I see which webpage a person was on, but I also see which report is the most popular. The list I am currently reviewing has over half the subscribers coming from one particular report. This tells me there is a great interest in that topic, and that this would be a great area to develop products.

I took a look at the countries where my subscribers come from. I was not surprised to find most in the USA, but I was surprised by the number of countries represented. If I want to target some of these other countries, I would pick the countries with the highest numbers to start, because that tells me there is a market for my products there. I see a lot of subscribers from Canada, the UK, India, and Australia, so working with partners in those countries would probably be very effective for me.

I can get similar reports for Cities, States, Area Codes, and DMA (Designated Market Area) codes. I do not collect addresses from my subscribers, so these statistics are based on IP addresses. If I had the actual addresses of my subscribers, I would probably find that the numbers are a little bit different. But since I am most interested in general trends, this information is good enough.

An interesting feature of all these reports is I can click on one category, such as the number of subscribers from India, and I will get a list of the actual subscribers from India. I could send a targeted email to people in that country if I wanted to do a targeted promotion there.

Here is an interesting little report: Follow Up Status – Unsubscribed. This tells me which message number the person was on when he or she unsubscribed from my list. I see that if a person is going to unsubscribe from this list that I am examining, it will probably be within 5 messages. Most people who get more than 5 messages stay on my list. Maybe I should wait until message 6 before promoting any products, because by then, this person is my loyal subscriber.

Finally, I like to look at the interest in particular messages or topics. I can look at Follow Up Percentages to see what percentage of the people who received the message opened it. For those messages with low open rates, either the message is not of interest, or my subject line did not do a good job of communicating the contents of the message. I will look at the unpopular messages and try different subjects to see if that improves the open rate. If not, then I can assume the topic is not of much interest.

If I see a message that is opened a lot, then I know that is a topic which I can write more about, or develp products in that topic area. This allows me to fine-tune the products in my market place and also tells me what keywords I should be using to promote my products. Hint: The popular subjects, those opened the most, have keywords I can use in my promotions and articles.

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Now it is your turn.

Have you looked at the reports in your autoresponder?

What do those reports tell you about your list, your subscribers, and the things that interest them?

How can you use that information in your business?

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You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

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* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

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Author: Geri Schneider Winters

The last entry discussed the use of autoresponders. These are great tools for collecting names and email addresses, and for automating the sending of email to those prospects.

With the autoresponder, you can see how many people have signed up for your list. But how do you know if that is a good or bad number? How many people visited your site compared to the number of people who registered at your site? How well does your sales page convert visitors into buyers?

What you need is a tool to collect statistics for your site so you can answer those kinds of questions.

Step 1 is to decide which pages of your website need statistics. I am using my blog home page for this purpose, but you might want to use a squeeze page or a sales letter. Where are you driving traffic? That is the page where you want to add a statistics counter.

Step 2 is to find a tool to measure web statistics. There are quite a number of tools on the market, some free, some for a monthly charge. I am currently using the free version of gostats – http://www.gostats.com – largely because there is a WordPress plugin for it and I use WordPress for my blogs. It is easier to use tools that are designed to work together.

You can do a search on “web stats” in a search engine to get quite a list of possibilities. Just look through the first few to see which ones give you the statistics you want for your website.

Once you have selected a company, Step 3 is to create an account with that company, and register your webpage in that account. The web stats company will give you HTML code for that page. For example, one web page I registered is http://www.writingusecases.com/wordpress/index.html

If you browse to that page (open in another window so you can read this article while you browse the statistics), you will see the gostats counter at the bottom. Click on that counter, and you will see the statistics for that page. You can look over those statistics as you read the rest of this article.

Notice I am not registering the domain, but a particular page that I want to track.

Step 4 is to add that HTML code to the web page that you registered. Since I am using a gostats plugin for Wordpress, I just have to put the site id and gostats server name into the gostats options page in the administrator panel for Wordpress. The site id and gostats server are provided by gostats when I register the web page in my account.

Once you have completed all the setup, the statistics software does all the collecting of information. Periodically (daily, weekly) log into your account and look at the statistics for your site. I can see the number of page views, the number of visitors, how many visitors today, yesterday, the last 7 days, the last 30 days, and the total since the page was registered. I can see graphs with this information and notice trends such as every weekend the number of visitors drops dramatically, then the number increases again on Monday.

In my case, that pattern tells me that posting a blog entry on Sunday means it will be there ready for increased traffic on Monday. But if I post on Friday, very few people will see the post over the weekend.

I can also see where my visitors came from – what country, what IP, what page they were on before coming to my site. This last is great because you can see what query a person entered into a search engine to find your page. This will help you determine if your keywords are optimized for your site. Or you might find that people are using keywords you had not considered.

Another interesting statistic is Rank. This is the gostats rank for my web page based on number of visitors. I like to see that my rank is improving over time. On the right of the statistics is a link for pages popularity. Now I can see which pages on my site (linked to from the main page) are getting the most visits. Since I am using the stats counter on a blog, I can quickly see which topics are the most interesting to readers of this blog, and which are the least interesting.

Another interesting number is the average time a visitor spends on my site. Now this is a little misleading, because the tool counts all visitors – which includes search engine spiders or crawlers. Since they spend far less than one minute on my site, and there are so many of them, the numbers are not the best. But I can use the numbers in the statistics reports, remove those under one minute (assuming they are not real people), and recalculate the average. That is how long I have to get someone’s attention on my web page.

This article gives you an idea of the kinds of information available to you from web stats tools. There are many more statistics available, and if you choose to go with a paid subscription, you can get even more. Since you can get a good tool for free, and it is easy to set up, there is no excuse for not having statistics about your web pages, and a volume of information that you can use to build your business.

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Now it is your turn.

Are you tracking visitors to your site? What tool are you using?

Can you see how useful this information can be to you in learning more about your market?
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You are invited to re-publish articles from this blog, in your publication or website, as long as the article is intact and you include the following Byline paragraph (with live links) after each article you use…

START BYLINE

* Article used with permission from Wyyzzk, Inc.’s Realize Your Business website at http://www.realizeyourbusiness.com This website of reports and tips contains information to help you succeed as the Owner/Manager of a small business.

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