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What will you do to make a difference?

What Does Your Title Say About You?

Take a look at the title on your website. What’s it saying about you? Is it consistent with the goals of your website?

Looking to build brand recognition? Your title should be your company name, followed by a brief explanation of what the page is about.

Selling something? Skip the company name and focus on the product or service.

Keywords, People!

Search engines pay close attention to your title. It broadcasts the entire point of your page, so make it count! The most important keywords and phrases describing your business should appear in that title. If you are the owner of Widgets R Us, the title on your home page should be something like “Widgets R Us: Premium Widgets and Widget Accessories.”

The product name (widget) appears three times in that short title.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

SEO Book: “SEO Book.com ~ SEO Training Made Easy”

IttyBiz: “Small business marketing ideas - Starting a home business | IttyBiz”

SmallFuel Marketing: “SmallFuel Small Business Marketing | Simple Marketing to Grow Your Small Business”

Take another look at your title. Now fix it.

Subscribe now to keep the tips coming.

I plan to revamp things here in the next month, with a greater focus on cutting costs in IT and marketing without sacrificing quality. There are so many ways to get your name out there or to enhance your IT capabilities with little investment other than your time. Here’s one example:

Check out Balsamiq, my new favorite desktop application for creating rapid mockups of websites and applications. Here are a few screenshots from their website:

I started using this in my company, and can’t imagine doing business without it. Communicating design concepts to a client has never been easier - I can simply mock up a layout in 10 minutes to illustrate what I’m talking about. Simply drag and drop from a library of existing interface items like icons, buttons, windows, lists, and arrange them on screen. Add arrows and virtual post-it notes to explain parts of your design, and you’re good to go. Designs can be exported as images or sent in a format that allows other Balsamiq users to modify them. You can even download pre-designed interface mockups from their partner site, MockupsToGo.net. Check out this mockup of an Outlook message:

There are still a few minor interface issues. Layer control isn’t great just yet - if you want to move a layer but have placed another layer in front of it, you can’t get to it. You’ll end up moving the layer in front of it first. For complex, multi-layer designs, this can get aggravating. Otherwise, the tool is awesome. Check it out.

Full Disclosure: I received a licensed copy of the Balsamiq application in return for an honest review of their software. This in no way influenced my review of this awesome tool.

Talk to the Owner

If you’re able to contact the owner directly, ask for information on traffic and advertising revenue. Chances are they’ll give you that data if they think it’s going to help them sell the site. It’s important to know how much traffic the site gets, where it’s coming from (direct links from other sites, bookmarks, search engines), and what pages on the site seem to be most popular. Any half-decent website analytics package will track that data for you (like awStat and Google Analytics).

If the owner claims to be making $X/month in revenue, ask for proof. If the site generates revenue by selling things on eBay, ask for a screenshot of PayPal payment receipts. If it makes its money from affiliate marketing, see if they’ll send you a screenshot or earnings report for each site they’re affiliated with.

Trust, But Verify

Believe it or not, some people might try to cheat you out of your money over the internet. I realize that’s hard to believe in this day and age, but it’s true. People can lie, screenshots can be Photoshopped, and just about any site can be made out to look good. That’s why you need to check some third party sources.

In my case, the site’s host only kept traffic data for two months. For a site called SnowConditions, August and September traffic data didn’t really help. In this case, I had to look to third-party sources to get some data. I started with Compete.com’s Site Analytics. I can’t say for sure how accurate it is, but as you can see it shows a seasonal trend that would be consistent with a site about winter sports:

For a site localized purely around northern Wisconsin, I was pretty impressed that it was getting as many as 17,000 unique visitors in peak months.

As for revenue, the site has banner ads for local sponsors and charges an annual fee. Once it was established that I was a serious buyer, the seller provided me with contact information for some of the businesses that were advertising and I contacted a few of them directly (after verifying on Google that the names and numbers matched those particular businesses) to verify that they were sponsoring the site at the rate he claimed.

Domain Names and Search Rankings

Search rankings and search engine optimization are terribly complex topics that I couldn’t possibly cover in a few paragraphs. There are countless blogs and numerous books dedicated purely to this topic. Jerri Ledford’s SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible is a great resource for anyone just getting started with the topic.

I started running some searches on Google to see how well SnowConditions.com ranked for different keywords. I was shocked to find that it was the #1 result when I searched “snow conditions,” and the #2 result for “snowmobile conditions” and “snowmobile trail conditions.”

Ranking #1 out of over 7 million sites is fairly impressive, and a top three ranking across several different search terms definitely got my attention. This prominent listing on Google probably accounts for much of the 17,000+ unique visitors/month, as people are looking for ski resorts, snowboarding, snowmobiling, and even winter weather and come across this site at the top of the results. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

The domain name itself is almost certainly worth something. Domain flipping and auctioning is becoming more and more popular, and generic domains are going for big money. Check out Sedo and Sitepint Marketplace to get an idea what a typical domain might sell for, you might be surprised… Dominik Mueller explains the value of a generic domain on his blog, which also mentions some impressive sales figures for other generic domains. I considered purchasing the domain only to turn around and sell it, but felt I could get more out of it through other channels.

Verdict: A Domain Worth Buying

After this preliminary research, I decided this domain had some real potential. After some negotiation, we settled on a four-figure price tag which would pay itself off in under two years purely with the advertising currently on the site. With a nice facelift and some aggressive marketing, it has the potential for exponential growth. We’ll see if it pans out…

I was going to talk about market research in this post as well, but I think this post is getting long enough already. Tune in later this week for the thrilling conclusion of part one of the Building a Web Business series. And to make sure you don’t miss it, why not subscribe?

]]> http://onyourbusiness.com/2008/09/24/building-a-web-business-how-to-tell-if-a-website-is-worth-buying/feed/ http://onyourbusiness.com/2008/09/24/building-a-web-business-how-to-tell-if-a-website-is-worth-buying/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Onyourbusiness/~3/cJ8yo5Xe2m8/ http://onyourbusiness.com/2008/09/23/building-a-web-business-introducing-snowconditionscom/#comments Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:25:49 +0000 Kyle http://onyourbusiness.com/?p=39 Let me start with a little background info. My family has been vacationing in Eagle River, Wisconsin for four generations, since roughly the time of the Great Depression. It’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been  (sorry Florida, Switzerland, New York City, it’s true), and if I ever get around to having kids I’ll be bringing a fifth generation up there with me. We do a lot of boating and skiing in the summer and recently started snowmobiling there in the winter (it’s the snowmobile capital of the world… true story).

It was through snowmobiling that I first stumbled across SnowConditions, a site that tracked the conditions of snowmobile trails in Eagle River, provided trail maps and had a few webcams. It also happened that the site was for sale. I thought it could be a fun hobby and would give me an excuse to snowmobile and write it off as a business expense (note to the IRS: just kidding… sorta). Someone’s gotta report the conditions of the trails, right?

To Buy or Not to Buy

I started doing a little research and decided the site might be worth more than just a hobby after all. The domain name was a good one, and I had been reading more and more about flipping websites for serious profits and snowconditions.com seemed like a good place to give this concept a try.

I’ve never been one to rush into things, and I’m definitely not one to throw my money around. I decided to take it slow, develop a plan, research the market, the competition, and set some goals. If I felt, after all the research, that I could make a good return on my money (without it consuming my life), I’d buy the site.

Building a Business

After doing the research, I decided the site was worth buying and moved on to negotiating a price and a contract.I started to draw up the makings of a business plan, a marketing plan, and various other plans.

At the same time I started thinking about the design: logo, website, business cards, and whatever else I thought I might need. With an internet business (or any business, really), particularly in marketing, you’re sellilng an image. If your image sucks, so will your sales.

There will be plenty more to come as I get deeper into this venture, so this is just the introduction to the Building a Web Business series. Here’s what’s coming up (links to these posts will be added as they’re completed:

• Researching the Business (How to Tell If a Business is Worth Buying)
• Developing a Plan (Deciding What Exactly You’re Doing)
• Designing Your Business (Looking Legit Even if You Don’t Feel Legit Yet)
• Marketing Your Site (Telling the World What You’re Doing)

A quick disclaimer: I don’t consider myself an expert on any of these topics. I’m just describing everything I do as it happens, and sharing the advice and resources I come across in the process. I’ll share the opinions of actual experts as I come across them. Then, if I make a boatload of money, I’ll call myself an expert and charge you for my advice. Until then, we’ll just have to wait and see…

To follow this series as it unfolds, why not subscribe to this blog? It’s quick and almost totally painless.

When I started this site a few months ago, I had a pretty well-defined plan: I would write about whatever topic in the business field caught my interest that day, millions of readers would subscribe and advertisers would throw heaps of money at me. So far none of those things has gone according to plan. The site has lacked focus, and sometimes for a week or two at a time I would find very little of interest to write about. That wasn’t helping anyone.

The New Plan - A Case Study

As I mentioned, I’ve been researching a new venture, and pending approval, will be launching it within two weeks. This venture will involve taking an existing, very under-utilized website, and building a business around it from the ground up. I intend to focus most of my posts over the next few months on the process of overcoming the problems a web-based small business must face, including:

• Market Research
• Logo and Corporate Identity Design
• Website Design
• Marketing and Sales
• Developing Good Content
• Search Engine Optimization

As this venture progresses, I’ll discuss my experiences, the sources I use in my research, the advice I’m given, and the barriers I (hopefully) overcome.

Check back over the course of the next week for updates…

Last weekend I had the pleasure of traveling to the San Francisco area to work with a few clients. I absolutely love that part of the country, but getting there and back from Chicago is a real pain. Very few carriers seem to offer direct flights, so I always seem to get stuck in LA or San Diego with a layover. This time, I flew Frontier Airlines, so I had to pass through Denver. We had 30-40 minute delays going both ways, which no one bothered to explain or justify.

Ordinarily getting by with just a 40 minute delay would be a blessing. Not so when you only have 30 minutes to make a connecting flight. The connecting flight, of course, left on time. Without me. So I found myself at the Denver airport at 9:30 Friday night not sure how I’d be getting home. I was also scheduled to leave for vacation at 8:00 the next morning. From Chicago.

After confirming that I had missed my connection, the gate rep referred me to the Frontier customer service counter, which had a line of 20 other angry looking travelers waiting in front of me. I decided to try to book another flight through their 800 number while I was waiting in line. Fifteen minutes later I spoke with a rep on the phone who informed me that rescheduling a missed flight (regardless of fault) by phone carried a $100 surcharge. I promptly hung up on her and decided to wait it out in line.

Making Up for the Inconvenience

Frontier knew they had screwed up and had seriously inconvenienced those of us trying to make tight connecting flights. They probably also knew that first-time Frontier flyers (like myself) may be inclined to fly with another company in the future.

so what does Frontier think its customers’ time is worth?

• A free hotel room for the night at the Crystal Inn (one of the nicer hotels I’ve stayed in - I kept the Bath & Body Works soaps and shampoos…)
• A $9 meal voucher for dinner that night
• A $5 meal voucher for breakfast in the morning
• A $150 flight voucher to be used toward future flights
• A sincere apology from the service rep who booked my 6:00 flight to Chicago the next morning

Was I still mad? Sure. It set my vacation back by about four hours, I was only able to get 3 hours of sleep that night, and I was cranky as hell all day. But will I fly Frontier again? Yes. Once more at least, since I’ve got a $150 voucher to use. But if they screw me over on the next trip, that’s it for me.

A Lesson in All This

Airlines are particularly good at calculating the value of customers’ time. The 25 minute delay of that flight cost them over $200 for each customer that missed a connecting flight - and there were dozens of us. They could have simply said “sorry about that” and sent us on our way, but the effects of that approach would have cost them far more than $200 per person in the long run (see my post on customer lifetime value). They’d rather pay to make it up to you and hope you come back and have a better experience next time.

This is a lesson airlines have learned better than many other businesses: if you inconvenience your customer or your product or service doesn’t meet their expectations, you’d better find a way to make it up to them. How you do that depends on how badly you screwed up and how much you value your client’s business. At the very least, you have to set things right and fix whatever went wrong. And for god’s sake, apologize, and mean it! If that’s still not enough, offer a free product or service upgrade that will convince your customer that you’re worth continuing to do business with after all.

It’s a whole lot cheaper to keep an existing customer (even a disgruntled one) than it is to find a new one. Keep yours happy.

I’ve certainly been there.

What Was I Thinking?

I was working with a client to put some of their company training online. After I had finished the project, I got a call from my client, which went something like this:

Client: “I was reviewing the training and found typos and errors on these five pages.”

Me: “Okay, well we can fix that. It’ll probably cost about $X to get it taken care of.”

Client:  “You’re charging us to fix your typos?”

Me: “No, I’m charging to fix your typos. What you see online is copied and pasted directly from what you provided us. We don’t proofread your content - that’s up to you. If you want us to proofread your work, that would cost $X.”

I never heard from him again. As far as I know, their training content remains unchanged, typos and all. When I think back on that conversation now, several years later, I think “Wow, what a colossally stupid thing to say.” I was busy. I had other projects to worry about. Bigger clients. Bigger problems. SO WHAT? This is someone who had come to me and said “I need to do this, and I’m willing to pay you to do it.” Even if they’re not a top priority, I should treat them like one.

If I Could Travel Back In Time…

What I should have done is pretty clear. It would have taken me (at most) 30 minutes to make the requested changes. I should have told my client I’d be happy to make those changes, free of charge, but informed my client that, for future reference, it is our policy to take content and put it online exactly as it is submitted to us.

In fact, even before that I should have run a basic spelling and grammar check on the entire document. Then I should have informed my client that I made these 10 changes (free of charge) and wanted to verify that they were in fact errors that needed to be fixed. That would have allowed me to subtly show my client that I’ve got his best interests in mind. A little goodwill goes a long way. Since then, this has become our standard policy.

As a business owner sometimes you have to step back and remind yourself that it’s not about you, what you think, what makes your life easier. You have to look at every part of your operation and say “Is this in my best interest, or the customer’s?” Ideally, it will be both, but when a conflict arises, your operations need to favor the customer.

Ever had a day like this, where your frustration spilled over onto a customer? How’d you make it right? Or was the damage already done?

Beyond Satisfaction

How does Sewell create customers for life? Here are a few of the key points:

Always Say Yes - If it’s remotely possible for you to fulfill a customer’s request, say yes. Sewell has a repair truck that he sends to help customers with flat tires or keys locked in the car for free. His rule? If it’s something a friend would do to help another, do it for free. If you say no, the customer will look for someone else who will say yes.

Extend Your Hours - If you’re only open during the week from 9-5, half your clientelle won’t be able to take advantage of your services because they’re working too. Let your clients know that you’re willing to make the extra effort to work with them on THEIR schedule, not just yours. Customers respond particularly well to businesses who are willing to give out their own home or cell phone numbers.

Standardize Your Business - Determine the best way of providing your product or service, then make sure to deliver that way EVERY TIME. This minimizes flaws, oversights, and customer complaints. If something does go wrong, apologize profusely and make things right immediately at no additional charge. Make a big deal out of it. Let them know they’re important to you.

Charge Less Than Expected - This doesn’t mean you have to be the cheapest provider out there. All it means is that if your initial quote for a service is $200, bill them $180 at the end. This can be accomplished by adding a 10% cushion into the initial quote, so that in the end, you can always beat that price, even if only by $1. Just be sure you never, ever charge more than your initial estimate.

Keep them Coming Back

Think about it. If you keep providing value beyond what you’ve promised at prices lower than you’ve stated, why would your customers go anywhere else? Every time they have need of the services you offer, they’ll come back to you. What’s that worth?

Over the weekend, a long-time client called and said he was having computer problems, and absolutely needed them resolved by Monday morning. While I have largely gotten out of the hardware tech support business, my client was in a jam so I said yes. I met them to pick up the computer and after swapping out a few parts, decided I wouldn’t be able to revive it. So I called my client and, with his permission, did some shopping around and drove 40 minutes out to a store that had a great deal on new PCs.

After I bought the new computer, I installed all the software my client might need, then pulled the hard drive out of his old computer in order to rescue all of his data. By 8:00PM on Sunday, the computer was fully operational and ready for pickup.

This may have cost me half of a weekend, but what was gained?

• Without having to do a thing, my client had a new computer with all necessary software and data installed just like it was on his previous computer.
• By shopping around, I was able to save my client several hundred dollars over comparable PCs at major retailers.
• My client was able to meet his critical Monday deadline.
• I virtually guaranteed that this client would continue to come back to me in the future.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll gladly trade the occasional Sunday for what might very well become tens of thousands of dollars worth of work down the line.

How do you take care of your customers? What do you do to keep them from going elsewhere?

If you haven’t heard about this yet, it’s worth checking out… Adobe has released a “cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, Ajax, Adobe Flash®, and Flex technologies to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the desktop” (more info). In other words, web developers can use the same web tools like Dreamweaver and Flash to develop feature-rich desktop applications.

Great For Developers

If your business has any kind of web presence, this could be a great tool for you. Why? Your customers don’t even need to launch a browser to find you. Your application, branded with your logo, could be sitting right on their desktop. You could package your website or web service for easy desktop delivery. You can even expand to offer features not readily supported by browsers. Take eBay, for example. Alan Lewis, eBay’s product manager, said “We wanted for a long time to create a desktop presence. Previously, our team agreed it was too expensive and couldn’t be done. Then along came Adobe AIR.”

Using eBay’s desktop application, users can get instantaneous alerts about items they’re bidding on, so they no longer have to be checking their email for updates on a regular basis. Buyers can also set up feeds that automatically search and list items based on specified keywords. More on eBay Desktop from the source.

Make Development Even Easier

If you’ve got a cool website or application you’d like to make desktop accessible, you’re in luck! You don’t need to mess around with dev kits or programming in Flex or Flash. The good folks down at arc90lab have developed the AIRifier, which takes any existing website and turns it into a downloadable desktop app at the click of a button. This little video shows how the whole thing works:

The video walks you through the basics of creating a desktop GMail application for your own personal use. It can be used for any website and seems to work pretty well. This could save you, as a developer, a whole lot of time and money, but may not take full advantage of AIR’s features.

Great For Consumers and Business Users

There are a number of AIR applications out there (all free) which are extremely useful. Adobe hosts the Adobe AIR Marketplace where developers can share their applications, and there are currently over 200 applications available. To be honest, many of them are crap (like the Javascript “Guess the number” game), but there are some worthwhile apps out there. Here are a few of the better ones:

Ora Time and Expense

This is my personal favorite: track time and expenses for projects and clients, then automatically generate invoices, time sheets and expense reports. Here’s the cool part: if you have a webcam, you can simply hold a receipt up to the camera, take a picture, and automatically add it to an expense report. Check it out.

Google Analytics AIR

AboutNico has put together a pretty impressive Google Analytics desktop application. You can view all kinds of cool reports on your website’s traffic in completely interactive graphs. You can set up multiple profiles to track any and all of your websites’ traffic, page views, time on site, unique visitors, and all the important details you’d want as a webmaster. The information can easily be exported as a report to Excel or PDF. Give it a try.

Kuler Desktop

This is a cool little application for designers. Use this app to browse a library of color themes (over 12,000 themes currently available). When you find a theme you like, you can import it directly into Adobe Illustrator, InDesign or Photoshop. If you don’t use Adobe, you can easily copy the hex values of the colors to your clipboard, from which you can use them elsehwere. (Thanks to motiondesign for the picture). Try Kuler Desktop out for yourself.

Sky’s the Limit

So far, I’ve only tried out a handful of these Air apps, but I have been pretty impressed. I’m considering re-tooling my online training program to run in Adobe AIR, mostly because that desktop presence would be so great.

How do you see yourself using Adobe AIR, either as a developer or as a consumer? It seems like this has almost limitless potential in the right hands. Let me know what kind of potential you see!