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Praesent Et Urna Turpis

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:26:20 +0000

Quisque ligulas ipsum, euismod atras vulputate iltricies etri elit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nulla nunc dui, tristique in semper vel, congue sed ligula. Nam dolor ligula, faucibus id sodales in, auctor fringilla libero. Pellentesque pellentesque tempor tellus eget hendrerit. Morbi id aliquam ligula. Aliquam id dui sem. Proin rhoncus consequat nisl, eu ornare mauris tincidunt vitae.

Vestibulum sodales ante a purus volutpat euismod. Proin sodales quam nec ante sollicitudin lacinia. Ut egestas bibendum tempor. Morbi non nibh sit amet ligula blandit ullamcorper in nec risus. Pellentesque fringilla diam faucibus tortor bibendum vulputate. Etiam turpis urna, rhoncus et mattis ut, dapibus eu nunc. Nunc sed aliquet nisi. Nullam ut magna non lacus adipiscing volutpat. Aenean odio mauris, consectetur quis consequat quis, blandit a nunc. Sed orci erat, placerat ac interdum ut, suscipit eu augue. Nunc vitae mi tortor. Ut vel justo quis lectus elementum ullamcorper volutpat vel libero.

Donec volutpat nibh sit amet libero ornare non laoreet arcu luctus. Donec id arcu quis mauris euismod placerat sit amet ut metus. Sed imperdiet fringilla sem eget euismod. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Pellentesque adipiscing, neque ut pulvinar tincidunt, est sem euismod odio, eu ullamcorper turpis nisl sit amet velit. Nullam vitae nibh odio, non scelerisque nibh. Vestibulum ut est augue, in varius purus.

Proin dictum lobortis justo at pretium. Nunc malesuada ante sit amet purus ornare pulvinar. Donec suscipit dignissim ipsum at euismod. Curabitur malesuada lorem sed metus adipiscing in vehicula quam commodo. Sed porttitor elementum elementum. Proin eu ligula eget leo consectetur sodales et non mauris. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

Nunc tincidunt, elit non cursus euismod, lacus augue ornare metus, egestas imperdiet nulla nisl quis mauris. Suspendisse a pharetra urna. Morbi dui lectus, pharetra nec elementum eget, vulputate ut nisi. Aliquam accumsan, nulla sed feugiat vehicula, lacus justo semper libero, quis porttitor turpis odio sit amet ligula. Duis dapibus fermentum orci, nec malesuada libero vehicula ut. Integer sodales, urna eget interdum eleifend, nulla nibh laoreet nisl, quis dignissim mauris dolor eget mi. Donec at mauris enim. Duis nisi tellus, adipiscing a convallis quis, tristique vitae risus. Nullam molestie gravida lobortis. Proin ut nibh quis felis auctor ornare. Cras ultricies, nibh at mollis faucibus, justo eros porttitor mi, quis auctor lectus arcu sit amet nunc. Vivamus gravida vehicula arcu, vitae vulputate augue lacinia faucibus.

Ut porttitor euismod cursus. Mauris suscipit, turpis ut dapibus rhoncus, odio erat egestas orci, in sollicitudin enim erat id est. Sed auctor gravida arcu, nec fringilla orci aliquet ut. Nullam eu pretium purus. Maecenas fermentum posuere sem vel posuere. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi ornare convallis lectus a faucibus. Praesent et urna turpis. Fusce tincidunt augue in velit tincidunt sed tempor felis porta. Nunc sodales, metus ut vestibulum ornare, est magna laoreet lectus, ut adipiscing massa odio sed turpis. In nec lorem porttitor urna consequat sagittis. Nullam eget elit ante. Pellentesque justo urna, semper nec faucibus sit amet, aliquam at mi. Maecenas eget diam nec mi dignissim pharetra.

Donec At Mauris Enims

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:25:18 +0000

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation.

Class Aptent Taciti Soci Ad Litora

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:24:55 +0000

Quisque ligula ipsum, euismod a vulputate a, ultricies et elit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nulla nunc dui, tristique in semper vel, congue sed ligula. Nam dolor ligula, faucibus id sodales in, auctor fringilla libero. Pellentesque pellentesque tempor tellus eget hendrerit. Morbi id aliquam ligula. Aliquam id dui sem. Proin rhoncus consequat nisl, eu ornare mauris tincidunt vitae.

Nullam Vitae Nibh Un Odiosters

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:23:43 +0000

Proin Sodales Quam Nec Sollicit

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:23:05 +0000

Quisque ligula ipsum, euismod aturesit vulputate a, ultricies et elit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Nulla nunc dui, tristique in semper vel, congue sed ligula. Nam dolor ligula, faucibus id sodales in, auctor fringilla libero. Pellentesque pellentesque tempor tellus eget hendrerit. Morbi id aliquam ligula. Aliquam id dui sem. Proin rhoncus consequat nisl, eu ornare mauris tincidunt vitae.

Nunc Tincidunt Elit Cursus

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 17:22:22 +0000

9 Lessons from 9 Years as an Entreprenuer

Mark Faggiano — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:05:38 +0000

The view from my office on Day 1 of working for myself 9 years ago.

Exactly nine years ago I acted on my decision to never work for anyone again. I started Brand5 out of the dining room in my apartment with exactly zero clients and a very small bank account balance.

Nine years later I’m proud to say that Brand5 is still very much alive (and thriving). The company’s success has afforded me the opportunity to take some additional entrepreneurial leaps. I’ve been fortunate enough to start and sell two other companies in addition to Brand5 – Beelya and FileLater – and I’m working on my next one already. As a result, I’ve become passionate about starting, and helping other people start, their own online technology companies (my term for websites). For me, nothing is better than taking something from the back of a napkin or a white board, turning it into something real, getting customers, generating revenue, and wrestling with all of the things that can happen trying to make it grow into a real product or service.

Along the way I’ve learned a crazy amount of lessons. I do my best to take those lessons with me when I work with clients or on my own ventures. Here are nine (9 years, 9 lessons get it?) that I hope will help others out there trying to find their way building their own online business. As always, forgive the plethora of sports analogies. I’m a big fan of business and sports and the two often get mixed together.

Do one thing really well first.
It’s easy to get caught up in the potential of an idea, to look ahead at everything it could be one day. Chances are an idea’s potential is almost impossible to achieve out-of-the-gate. Instead, use a logical, realistic starting point to begin your online company. When thinking about what an online business should look like the day it launches, make sure it does one thing really well (as opposed to more than one thing done not so well). That one thing should be the core functionality – the reason the site exists. If your idea is to make it easier for people to share photos, make sure it’s easy for your users to upload and share their photos. Resist the urge to do the next 10 features that will make it even better. If that one thing doesn’t work, it will be hard to get people to try the other 9.

Give me a winning team over a killer idea.
For sports fans, this is akin to the veteran athlete signing with a team because he says it gives him the best chance to win a championship for before he retires. This idea proves itself to me over and over again every year. If I’m weighing getting involved in a new project, I’d much rather work with a team loaded with talent and people I like and believe in over a project where I don’t know the other parties as well. If something I’m working on takes off to the point where a lot of time will be required, it’s critical to spend that time with people you like, respect, and trust. Starting something new is stressful enough. Interpersonal drama is wasted energy. It can, and should, be avoided.

Keep moving the chains.
The life/work combo gets busier every year. A couple of years ago I learned that it’s important to try really hard to keep things fresh. That’s why I vowed to launch at least one new product/idea/website every year. While I focus most of my time on what pays the bills (client work) I’ve found that I feel fulfilled if I have an idea working in the background at the same time. The more ideas I launch, the more I increase the chances that one of them will take off. What if it does? Then I’ll spend more time working on it and a little less time on client work. But here’s the key: you’ve got to keep moving the ball down the field with every idea. An idea stuck in neutral will tend to stay stuck in neutral. Set modest goals of moving the chains to get more first downs. You’ll find a nice balance of paid work and risk that can be extremely rewarding.

Don’t watch the standings.
It’s hard not to pay attention to what everyone else is doing. Unless you are the luckiest person ever, competition is inevitably going to pop up. In my experience it always seems to happen at the worst possible time. Stop watching the standings on the scoreboard and get over it. Focus, instead, on making your product the best it can be. My suggestion is to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, but don’t become obsessed with following their every move.

Try not to assume the worst.
Related to the last point – don’t assume everything your competitors are doing is smarter than what you’re doing. They got an article on a popular blog? So what. Stay focused on keeping your customer happy. Do that and it won’t matter what your competitors are doing.

Learn by failing.
Mistakes are a reality of being an entrepreneur. It’s what we do with those mistakes that shape our career path. We can either ignore the mistakes or, worse, blame them on someone else. Or, we can embrace the mistakes, chalk them up to experience, and move on. I’ve learned a lot over the years by failing on ideas, a lot of which I was convinced would work (like hiring a high-priced PR form to get press). When those ideas failed I moved on and remembered the important lessons I learned. I’m convinced that this is the only way to get better as an entrepreneur.

Cash is the ulimate power.
Starting a new idea or company without the cash to launch it and fund it for an extended period of time (in my opinion at least 18 months) is a one-way ticket to Failure Town. Without cash, ideas fall flat on their faces. Nothing ever gets done and the door is left wide open to competition. I see it all the time.

Your own cash is best.
I used to think that in order to be successful I had to go out and raise a bunch of money to fund a startup. Let me tell you that raising money isn’t the holy grail. Neither is running a VC-backed company for that matter. Contrary to popular belief, there are other ways to build successful businesses. For me, the best way to do it is with your own money. I’ve raised money and I have heard too many horror stories from people who work for BC-backed companies. It’s a super tough route to success. I’m not bashing angels and VCs. I’d be a moron if I was. All I’m saying is if you have the option, put together a great advisory board and fund the company yourself. This way you get the valuable advice that you need and you end up with a whole lot more equity and a lot less headaches and obligations. The obvious downside here is that self-funding is way easier said than done. Not many of us can afford to fund every great idea we get.

You never know who you’re talking to…unless you care to find out.
This is not a new lesson learned in the last 9 years. It’s something my Dad always preached that has been constantly reinforced over the years. It’s so important to treat everyone you meet with respect. You never really know who they are or who they know that could help you. I constantly see people lose interest in the person they are talking to after falsely surmising in 20 seconds that person is valueless to them. Not only is judging people so quickly rude, it’s a terrible move business-wise. All I’m asking is that you give people a chance. Over the years I have seen time and time again that the best entrepreneurs will always engage with you. And they all ask you, “so how can I help you?”. They don’t worry about you stealing their ideas or taking up their time. They genuinely just want to help. We are all in this entrepreneurial thing together. More of us need to act like it.

Best of luck to you in 2012 with your endeavors. Keep a few of these lessons and mind and you will save yourself some time and money.

Feel the same or different about any of my points? Let me know what you think in the comment section below.

5 Keys to Leveraging Sales Spikes

Mark Faggiano — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 15:05:01 +0000

Spike! Sample demand chart for tax industry

Cyber Monday’s recent passing got me thinking about the pressure involved with trying to complete a ton of sales in a short period of time. Cyber Monday is super important to online retailers for lots of reasons. The main reasons are revenue generation (i.e. profitability) and inventory control. So that means that those sites can’t afford to mess up. They have to get traffic and convert it at a high level in a very small window of time. Failure affects the bottom line for the entire year.

When I helped run FileLater, we had very similar pressure. Over 80% of our revenue was generated the last 72 hours before the tax deadline. And 40% came within the last 12 hours before the deadline! (see the Google Trends chart to the right)

The reality was simple – if we didn’t produce, we were cooked until the next tax season because tax extensions can only be filed from January to April of each year. That’s extreme pressure.

We described the business as being hyper-seasonal because it’s basically a seasonal business on steroids. And let me say that we learned a lot. We failed enough to help us succeed and grow to the point where the company was acquired in late 2010.

Here are the biggest takeaways I always share with businesses in similar high-pressure industries.

1. Usability is critical
Assuming you’ve done all the work to get customers to come to your site, don’t blow it by making your product to hard to buy. Spend as much time as you can before the spike testing sales funnels. Talk to customers who have bought from you previously. Ask them to tell you what would make the sales experience easier. With so much at stake, it’s critical that customers get onto your site, pay, and get off as fast as possible. This will also help to prevent a long line of customers waiting to chat with someone on your support team.

2. Keep testing
Others may disagree with me here, but it’s important to test even on the big day. Test wording, call-to-actions, images, everything you can. If you don’t, you won’t really be sure where to improve next year. And, you’ll be a lot less willing to test. We saw this with FileLater. We didn’t test the first year. The second year came and we wanted to test messaging, but we didn’t know where to start because we had no idea what our strengths and weaknesses were. This may cause some brief, short-term pain but it will be worth it in the long run because your site will improve every year.

3. Learn fast
Keep experienced, dedicated resources assigned to analytics. Have one person (or more if you need it) watching what is working and not working and make decisions FAST. Lost time definitely equals lost money. So if your head of support is also watching your A/B testing results, there could be a big missed opportunity while that person is handling a 35-minute phone call.

4. Support, support, support
Killer customer support can always be a differentiator. On a day when your business is on the line, make sure to do everything possible to give customers the best experience possible. Have the best, most up-to-speed resources possible available by chat and, if possible, by phone. This will increase your conversions rate and will make people repeat customers. This is something we excelled with on FileLater and it paid huge dividends. People trusted us because our service was so much better than our competitors.

5. Stay alive
Let me be the master of the obvious: a server failure on your most important day of the year is a killer. Do everything you can to avoid it from happening. Suck it up and spend the extra money you need to have contingencies in place to make sure that any outing is brief. And do it early. Don’t wait until a couple of weeks before your big day. Do it at least a moth in advance. Work closely with your hosting company to alert them of what you are going to need. The great hosts, like Rackspace for example, are well prepared and experienced for spike scenarios like this.

I hope this proves helpful. If you have anything to add or a comment, let’s chat in the comment section below.

Case Study: Optimizing Design for Conversion Goals

Mark Faggiano — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:52:41 +0000

I wanted to share a case study about a new home page design that helped a client in the estimated tax business improve conversions. The results have been great so far – up 83%.

First, let’s get the background info on the client (Easy Estimated Taxes) out of the way. Easy Estimated taxes is a site that allows taxpayers to manage their quarterly estimated tax payments. Taxpayers can pay their estimated tax payments out of their bank account, keep record of their payments, and they get reminders of when their next payment is due.

Probably the most important thing to know about the business is that it’s seasonal. There are four payment periods per year and their traffic peaks during those four periods. That means those four periods are super important to them – it’s how the business sustains itself for the entire year. By now you’re putting 2 and 2 together and realizing that their site needs to perform during its peak period. If not, then they have to wait 3 months for another peak to come around.

The client had the following goal: get more of the existing traffic into their sales funnel. Put another way, get more of the people that visit the site clicking on the right call-to-action.

Accomplishing this goal goes beyond making the call-to-action button larger. There are some subtle details we had to address to make people comfortable with clicking that call-to-action. In other words, not only should people click it, but they have to want to click it because they were confident that Easy Estimated taxes would provide the services it claims to provide.

Here’s the design before we got our hands on it:

Here’s what we noticed needed to be adjusted to help accomplish the client’s goals:

Above the fold was actually decent. There is a clear call-to-action with fairly easy -to-understand text. There is always room for improvement, however.
Everything below the fold looked inconsistent with the rest of the page. In the tax-related industry, it’s incredibly important to convey a strong, professional, and trustworthy appearance. Users in this industry are highly skeptical of sites that don’t appear to be run by the government.
It wasn’t clear to the user how much the service cost.

After some iterating, here’s the design that we launched for the client in time for the last peak period (September 15, 2011):

We focused on conveying more trust, tweaking the text to better educate potential customers, and increasing the perception that the site is a legitimate, trusted way to pay estimated taxes online.

The results were all very positive:
When compared to the previous quarter, 83% more customers completed the signup for the site. Most importantly, the client was psyched!

Thoughts, comments, or questions? Let’s discuss i the comment section below.

How a Sound Content Strategy Can Bear Immediate Results

Mark Faggiano — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:05:02 +0000

The new IRS.com layout - optimized for revenue generation

Last month we completed a project for IRS.com. I just finished writing an SEO case study (it may be better classified as a white paper) highlighting the process we went though with our client and ensuing results.

The entire case study is fairly lengthy, so I’m including just the summary in this post.

Just five months of working with Tax Center produced extremely positive results. The website is now better positioned in the search engines than it was before and it is receiving more traffic because of that positioning.

This project was different from most for a couple of reasons. First, it was shorter. Most content strategies are at least 12 months in length. Second, we began working with Tax Center at the beginning of their most important months of the year (as opposed to implementing our plan in the offseason for taxes).

This means that we needed to implement a strategy that did all of the following:
A) Got results without adversely affecting current search engine positioning,
B) Resulted in accelerated returns (meaning immediately), and
C) Laid the groundwork for long term performance beyond the scope of the project (future tax seasons).

We began the project by performing an in-depth audit of the site. The audit pointed to several key areas of improvement – basic SEO fundamentals, a more trusted user experience, and more high-value content. We based our strategy on those key areas.

The results were quick, and significant. First, the site was better positioned in the search engines:

The number of pages on the site that come up in search results went UP 686%
The number of pages on the site that are on the first page of Google search results went UP 175%

Second, more people visited the site in the 2011 tax season than in 2010:

49% more people visited the site
Traffic coming from the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing) was more than 4 times higher

The content created yielded an immediate return. The ROI for the more than 250 pieces of content we created and posted was better than 127%. That means the client more than made their money back for the cost of the content in less than 5 months.

The positive results don’t necessarily end with the passing of the 2011 tax season. The groundwork laid for the client will continue to bear fruit in the offseason and in future tax seasons. All of these numbers may increase in the future as the new content gets more inbound links.

Here’s the full case study.

What are your thoughts? Any feedback? I encourage you to participate in the comment section below.

HOW TO: Choose and manage domains when you’re an entrepreneur

Mark Faggiano — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:05:12 +0000

Proper domain management can save you time and money

If you’re like me and own lots of domains for more than one business interest, you know that it can be challenging to keep everything organized (not just with domains, btw).

I’ve learned some valuable lessons about managing a portfolio domains. These are simple, but they’ll save you time and money down the road as your business interests grow and, ultimately, make it big.

1. When in doubt, buy them out
This one’s not so much about management, but it’s worth passing along. When your company is in the spitball phase of trying to come up with a winning name, buy every single domain you think has a chance of being the final pick. Here’s why: first, don’t ever leave it to chance that the domain will be available tomorrow. You never know who is watching. The last thing you want to do is to have to go pay someone for the domain you really want. Second, you may forget. Sounds dumb, but that stroke of genious you have can easily vanish into thin air because you’re attention got drawn to some other important detail. Buy that great name before it leaves your brain.

2. New company = new account
Starting a new company? Buy the domains under a separate account with your registrar. Don’t make the common mistake of buying every single domain via one account. Next thing you know you have 200 domains for 5 companies all under the same registrar’s account. Besides being a total nightmare to manage, here are some practical reasons why you want to keep things clean:

3. Get started on the right foot legally and with your partners
It’s better to show that your new business entity own the domains instead of you. The domains are assets after all. Plus, show your business partners that you’re not hoarding the domains yourself. Show everyone you’re a team player.

4. Make billing less complicated
Having all domains in one account can be a huge pain when it comes to billing. If you don’t have each company renewing it’s own domains, you’ll get into a situation where you need to renew and then be reimbursed. That’s a pain that can easily be avoided with separate accounts.

5. Stay under the radar
I fully support the notion of keeping your startup in stealth mode until there’s actually something tangible to talk about. Stealth mode has to include keeping your WHOIS information either private or under the name of the company. The last thing an outsider should see is the CEO’s name on WHOIS. That’s not stealth. Separate accounts means you can manage separate identities easier.

6. Lord Google is watching
I’ve said it before, Google rules the world. In this case, you don’t want Google thinking you own a lot of domains. Being the entrepreneur that you are, there will probably come a day when your domains will need to link to each other. Having all of your domains under your name on WHOIS and all under one account (and one IP address) may lead Google to think you are trying to create a link farm. And if they think that, they might slap you. You don’t want that.

7. Easier transition
This is the most fun reason to keep your domains nice and neatly organized: when it comes time to sell the company, it’s about a billion times easier to transition the domains to the buyer when they are organized in their own account. Not to mention due diligence is much more efficient because you won’t have to pour through your master domain account looking for the domains the selling entity owns (and risk making a mistake). The last sale I was part of involved nearly 100 domains. We literally had them transfered in about 5 minutes thanks to being organized.

What are your thoughts? Any additional tips you want to add? Let’s discus in the comment section below.

How to fix wrong title tags in Bing & Yahoo.

Mark Faggiano — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 14:05:38 +0000

Seemingly out of nowhere, the title tag in the search snippet for one of our clients completely changed. Well, that doesn’t sound too horrible or harmful you say. Normally that’s right. Sometimes titles in snippets can be altered by the search engines and in rare cases can improve click-thru rates (I still recommend controlling all information in snippets with custom META data for every single page on your site).

The issue in this case was that the title tag now included information referring back to a really old (and outdated) sponsor…like years old. Even though the META data and the code said one thing (and keep in mind hadn’t been touched for at least a year), the title tag said something completely different.

Check it out. Here’s a screenshot of the source code:

And here’s a screenshot of what a users would see on Bing (and Yahoo) when searching for “holiday bowl”:

Notice anything strange? Hint: the title tag in the search results does not match what’s in the source code. In fact, nowhere on the Holiday Bowl home page does it even mention the word “Culligan”.

So what gives? And more importantly, how can it be fixed?

I had heard that sometimes the search engines pull META data from DMOZ and use that in snippets – overriding what a website has in its source code. So I checked DMOZ to see if that was true in this case.

Here’s what I found when I did a search for “holiday bowl” on DMOZ:

There it is! There’s the source of our pain. Bing and Yahoo are pulling “Culligan” from DMOZ and using it in the snippet.

After a quick search, I was able to find and install the following script into the home page code telling the search engines to ignore the META description in DMOZ and use what’s in the source code:

After about 4 days the title tag was back to normal:

Hooray! It’s fixed. Bing and Yahoo are pulling from the right source and “Culligan” has disappeared from the snippet.

Whenever you see this problem with one of your sites, just use this simple-to-implement fix and you’ll see results very quickly.

Have you ever had this problem? Did you use this method to fix it? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.