So what is this first secret ingredient suggested in the title? Well before we get to it, let’s consider some background. Engaging in any sort of weekly routine with diligence for month after month obviously requires self discipline.

And there seems to be a direct correlation between discipline and financial success in online business, especially in the early stages when there is usually only one person working on the business. There are however limit to self discipline as even the most disciplined entrepreneurs run into snags, emergencies, other miscellaneous delays. So what should happen to our batch processing schedule when we run into these inevitable distractions?

Well if we take our cue from those highly efficient business owners who know and practice the secret ingredient of batch processing, then we make sure to make up our lost work immediately after the delay is overcome. This usually means making up the missing work the next day. Please note that this is easier said than done and that there is a subtle trick to making this all work.

The problem for most entrepreneurs is that their next day is already jam packed with activities for them to do, whether these be related to their online business, part-time job, or family. The solution seems to lie in having and understanding the priority stack for your online business.

Of all the functions your online business engages in on a weekly basis you should know in your mind how each of these ranks in importance. Once these are ranked there should be some cut off point which you establish that separates the most important tasks from all the rest. This split could be 90/10, 70/30, or 80/20 like the famous “Pareto Principle”.

If a business grows large enough then at some point business owners will need to delegate some of their business functions in order for their organization to grow, however for those online business that are still one man operations, batch processing is extremely valuable. The first secret ingredient of batch processing then is to make sure that no matter what else happens, those business functions that you deep “most important” are taken care of each and every week.

So how does this relate to online business? One thing in particular which Oogue says to Shifu, “let go of the illusion of control”, I think resonates especially well in the world of online business.

Human beings, as creatures of habit, naturally want to feel in control. The problem is that in the crazy world of growing your own business, rarely are things ever under control.

I know that I would be most comfortable believing that success in business is about creating some sort of master plan and following every step to a tee. In reality however, business is more about having some far reaching vision and then being willing to adventure your way to get to it.

On his blog, GoDaddy.com founder and CEO Bob Parsons, has posted his “16 Rules”. For anyone who has not read this list of success principles I suggest you check them out, they provide a lot of motivation crammed into one blog post.  In the explication of Rule 15, Parsons says that “Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck.”

If this is true, then we should consider how to put this luck principal into work for our advantage. I would suggest that a certain percentage of the ideas we come up with to grow our business, if applied will turn out to be winners. So then it follows that the more things we try and the more experiments we conduct the faster our business should grow.
 

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

Having this kind of leverage gives you two advantages when you make the decision to create a remarkable product or service. First it gives you the initial push to get your message spread quickly. Without this initial push, I would argue that there is a chance that not enough people will hear about your offering to cause the “ideavirus” to take off.

The second advantage is that with such big initial marketing push, everyone will know that the idea was yours. If you are a very small online business and you figure out a way to be remarkable there is a decent chance that one of your larger competitors will see what you are doing and start doing it themselves.

In the world of business there seems to be large rewards for being the first to do something innovative. However if no one knows about you and your remarkable feature is cloned by one of your larger competitors, then the public perception may be that they were actually first to market.

For these reasons I would heavily suggest that you work on building leverage in your online business. Leverage will give you a platform and having a platform will diminish the chances that any remarkable product or service you create will go to waist.

The first method is to just start writing content for your site and see what positive results you get. Then based on those positive results you can test similar keyphrases and track the results.

The second method is to start your accidental SEO traffic flow with some good old fashioned research. Since most of the business owners who read Feedback Secrets are in the early stages of their online business development, I usually suggest starting with a free keyword tracking tool.

A personal favorite of mine is the free keyword tracking tool at WordTracker.com. You can use this tool to narrow down a list of keyphrases in your niche that have the magic SEO combination of a lot of daily searches mixed with a low relative number of competing websites.

Looking at the free tool at Word Tracker, you can get an estimate for the daily traffic for the keyphrases that you are interested in. Then you can visit Google and check to see how many competing websites there are which rank for the same term. You can do this by typing in your keyphrase and then clicking on the search button.

In the upper right hand side of the search results page on Google it will tell you how many competing websites Google recognizes as being indexed for that keyword.

Starting with this highly honed list of keywords you can start producing content for your site. After you produce your first wave of content based around your list, you will begin to see results in your site’s analytics tracking software as to which of these keyphrases are performing well for your site.

You have to keep in mind that just about every site has its own unique SEO architecture and therefore its own unique fingerprint as to which terms will naturally rank well for that site. The idea behind accidental SEO is to capitalize on your site’s natural advantages and therefore profit without spending an arm and a leg on your SEO efforts.

Improving conversion rate, for just about any type of website, is a matter of split testing. Our question then becomes what specifically we should split test for a service based website in order to be as efficient as possible with our time and effort.

Three specific areas come to mind regarding the question of where you should start your conversion boosting campaign. The first of these areas is your unique selling proposition or (USP). The term USP refers to the way in which you express your company’s unique blend of benefits to prospective clients.

Having a well defined USP is at the core of product differentiation and if your product is not perceivably different from those of your competitors then you inject unnecessary doubt in the minds of your prospects regarding the question of why they should buy from you, and not from your competitors. Keep in mind that a USP will never be just one selling point but rather several selling points that distinguish and define your offerings.

The next area to consider revamping and split testing is site design. We live in an attention deficit society with too much information and not enough time to consume it. For this reason we must assume that the visitors who land on our sites are making split second decisions about our companys based on the initial impressions that our sites leave on them.

This is why split testing site design offers large potential improvements in conversion rates for service based companies. When considering possible improvements to your site let your creativity give you ideas for potential improvements but don’t trust these hunches for the final verdict, make sure to make your final verdict is based on the raw data and results you get from your split tests.

The third area that I would suggest you consider split testing for your service based website is the addition of and adjustment of testimonials. If you don’t have any testimonials on your site, you should definitely consider adding some since testimonials are a powerful signal to potential customers that your company is reputable.

Keep in mind that some of the people who are considering buying your service may have first herd about your company after landing on your webpage in the last 20 seconds. They need reasons to believe in, and to trust you. In this day and age where anyone from any corner of the globe can quickly throw up a website and process credit card payments, the ability to convince customers that your company is trustworthy is invaluable.

The fact that people are willing you place their picture and name on your website to attest to the quality and level of service associated with your product goes a long way.

The three above mentioned points are just for starters, if you can think of anything else you might want to split test, then by all means, test away!

Essential to this discussion is the concept of “discounting the future”. It’s an economic concept based on the idea that a dollar in your pocket today is worth more than a dollar you might receive a year from now, due to inflation.

Let’s say you have an email list of size 100, and that your average conversion rate is 3%. That gives you an average of 3 sales per offering. If you present 2 offerings per month than that means you should be averaging about 6 sales per month.

If your average revenue per sale was $50, then 6 sales per month would gross you $300 per month. If we divide this $300 by 100 leads we get an average value per visitor of $3 per lead / per month.

The question is, what if we wanted to calculate not the value of a lead per-month, but its total value to our business? Such a calculation becomes a bit of a “fuzzy” for several reasons.

The first thing we would like to know in order to perform such a calculation would be how long, on average, a subscriber stays “active” on our list. Let’s say, for our example that we know this figure to be one year.

The issue is that we cannot simply multiply our ($3 per lead / per month) by 12 months since we know that each and every month our dollars are loosing value.

To make matters worse it’s a little tricky to figure out the average length of time that a user stays “active” on your list. The obvious way that that a user would cease being active is if they unsubscribed, however this is not the only way that a lead can fall into the “inactive” category.

Leads can go “stale” in a number of different ways. For instance, as a user opts-in for more and more lists they may decide to create a new email account and keep their old account active as a kind of junk mail account. Another way for a lead to go stale is when email providers tweak their spam filtering software, causing emails that used to get delivered with ease to take an unwelcomed detour to the spam folder.

Perhaps the worst way for a lead to go stale is when a subscriber does not bother to unsubscribe but just stops paying attention to your broadcasts.

It is valuable to calculate your total value per visitor, including both your front end and back end value. Knowing the cumulative figure is especially important if you are trying to figure out your “break even” price when paying for Pay-Per-Click Advertising.

Once you start to measure VPV you can decide on how fancy you want to get refining your measurements. For example if your site usually gets many more visits than unique visits, you may choose to track Value Per-Unique-Visitor (VPUV) instead of VPV.

Even if you choose to refine your measurement from tracking the Value Per-Visitor to tracking the Value Per-Unique-Visitor this metric you can still refine things a step further. This is due to the fact that a site’s average VPV could be calculated from traffic from several sites, and the VPV from each of these sites can sway wildly.

For this reason, a good first step is to start tracking VPV, and when you are ready a good second step is to start breaking this down further by tracking your site’s VPV for each source of traffic to your site. Once you know for instance the top three sources of traffic to your site in terms of VPV, you can take steps to increase your traffic from these sources and thereby increase your bottom line.

It’s for reasons like these that the simple act of beginning to track VPV is a great aid in goal setting. If you know what your current average VPV is (let’s say eight cents per-visit) it is easy to set an incrementally larger, and easily obtainable goal (lets say ten cents per-visit).

Once you have started tracking VPV from particular sources of traffic you can get really fancy by tracking the VPV for particular pages on your site. So if you run a content page on dogs you may notice that your Chihuahua page greatly outperforms your Shih-tzu page in terms of VPV. With this new information in mind you might decide to start sending more traffic to your Chihuahua page since it offer more “bang for your buck”.

If you want to get really optimize with the VPV metric, you can start looking at the VPV for a particular source of traffic to specific page on your site. For instance, you may notice that Plurk traffic to your Chihuahua page outperforms Twitter traffic to the same page.

Another technique that can add a lot of refinement to your VPV calculation is the technique of “Discounting the Future” which we will be discussing in an upcoming post.

Once you know which terms you rank well for, you can produce more content pages based around these keyphrases to exploit your site’s natural advantages. The great thing about accidental SEO is that with it, you do not need to be a SEO expert in order to increase your search engine traffic.

If you are trying to market your website as an expert authority in a particular niche, then optimizing using accidental SEO means paying attention not only to the traffic you are receiving, but also how long that organic search engine traffic is staying on your site.

You might have a page on your site that has been bringing your site a significant amount of traffic but with a low average time-on-site.

The problem with a low time-on-site is that it usually means these visitors are bouncing off of your page as soon as they hit. Chances are that they are not clicking on any ads, not signing up for your newsletter, and most importantly not surfing the other pages on your site.

If you are trying to market your site as an expert authority in your niche, then it is essential to build your average number of pages-per-visit as high as possible.

One option you have is to try to edit your page in such a way that you improve time-on-site and the average number of pages-per-visit. The other option is to look not only at the amount of traffic you receive for particular keywords but also how long that traffic stays on your site.

Once you have found these winning combinations you can produce content that should increase the amount of quality traffic coming into your site.

At first this would seem to be a momentous event. Certainly being able to raise over a thousand dollars for the right to sponsor a Twitter feed with less than 600 followers, for one month is noteworthy, even if the purpose of the auction was not for profit. According to Mr. Schafer’s Twitter feed all proceeds from the auction are to go to the David Wright Foundation.

The winning bid for the auction came from a bid from eBay user “teammetacafe” who prior to winning this auction had zero eBay Feedback. I am assuming that the eBay user “teammetacafe” refers to the metacafe.com website, though I am not sure. It is important to note that this winning bid may well have been totally legitimate and un-engineered in any way, shape, or form.

What is particularly interesting however, about this auction is its bid history. If you look at the bid history you will see that there were 22 bids from what appears to be 5 eBay accounts. If you examine this bid history closely you will see that with the exception of the first bidder who seems to have an eBay feedback rating of 50, none of the other accounts had a feedback rating higher than 1 prior to the end of this auction.

Hmm… a bunch of eBay accounts with little or no feedback history bidding what some would consider a surprisingly high amount for the rights to sponsor a Twitter feed for a month. What could it mean?

Regardless of how the end result of this auction came about, I think that there is an important lesson in this story. The lesson here is that marketing, to a large degree, is about creating a spectacle and it is clear that Mr. Schafer here has succeeded in doing so with the sponsorship he has obtained for his Twitter feed.