Business Strategy by Achaeus

Hi everyone

We are looking for a new internet product. And, like all of you, we don’t want to do the gruntwork. Now, I have absolutely no doubt that researching a new product is the most critical job - get this wrong and you’re stuffed.

So we spent literally days on the brief for our outsource talent. It took longer and was harder to do than we thought. The brief ended up being 1.5 pages. What a concentration of energy and thought!

Here is the structure that we used:

Purpose, what is required?, the ideal contractor will look like…, specific talent required, timeframe, report requirements, reference resources.

We posted the contract for 7 days on rentacoder.com, elance.com and guru.com. Guru and elance tend to focus more on quality and ratings. We had 16 responses - most of our responses came from rentacoder and were based in the US.

Then we prepared a table listing the bids against a set of criteria like:

done similar work, their ratings, experience, specialised in research, bad feedback, price.

We picked the top 2 , did a little more work and made a selection.

We spent a lot of time on this but the outcome is critical to our success. If your brief is sloppy the result will be sloppy. These contractors cannot read minds. Clear written communication is EVERYTHING. It’s not like having someone in your office where you can tic tac every few hours.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Gail

Well, this internet business is a life of constant market testing.

Christian and I had a meeting with our Google Man, Monte Huebsch, yesterday. So much value. He gave us some great tips about the metrics of Google.

We have spent a LOT of time on our metrics. The beauty of the internet is that you can measure just about everything. Therein lies the problem. What are the key metrics and what are the benchmarks? Of, course they vary from company to company.

I’ll give you just 1 example.

Our Bounce Rate was horrible. Bounce rate is the % of visitors who visit your site for less than 10 seconds. It was way above 50%. Not good. We need to do more work split testing on our landing pages. We change just one aspect and test it over one week. We drop the lowest response landing page and then test another.

For the next few weeks we’ll be doing lots of testing. We’re getting lots of visitors through our google ads but they are not staying. Gotta to change that.

And each market is different.

So develop a good set of metrics (get help if you need to ) because this is the key to success if you are in the business of internet marketing. watch the figures at weekly meetings (or more often if necessary) and TEST, TEST, TEST.

Well, I’d better get onto that testing.
Cheers