Archive for the 'General' Category Page 2 of 4

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

The Devil Is In The Detail

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on January 24, 2008
in General
. 3 Comments

Hi Everyone

You know by now that I’m mad keen on the internet. It’s going to be one of the biggest influencers in 2008. And we are well into gearing up to build a strong internet side of Achaeus.

InfusionCRM (our CRM system) is working - thank heavens! That was a difficult decision but it has paid off. It’s done everything that we needed it to do. If you don’t get the technology right in this business life will be traumatic.

Don’t believe anyone who tells you that you simply set up your systems and marketing and just collect the money. It doesn’t work like that. The devil is in the detail and it can drive you mad. Make sure you have a good techie on staff to plough through the technology maze.

We are planning a big internet workshop to share with all our colleagues and clients what we’ve learnt - warts and all. Some of the best internet marketers in Australia will be there.

Anyway, we’ll be covering all you need to know at our workshop. Contact me if you want more information.

Cheers

Gail

Want tips to outsource research?

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on January 21, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

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

Ready for a big year?

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on January 18, 2008
in General
. 0 Comments

Hi all
It’s been an interesting start to the year. Lots of upset on the stock exchange, US using the “R” word and Australia still fairly buoyant, business wise.

We’ve had a good look at our products and they’ll be lots of new stuff on offer this year. Keep your eyes open for the announcements. We’ve got 2 new products at this stage - Setting Goals and Website Audits. As well, we’re collaborating with colleagues to offer quite a different workshop in March.

Internet marketing will be big for us. We are learning lots about outsourcing research and product development. There are a couple of good sites where you can access a bucketload of expertise. The trick is to get a good expert. We’re constantly fine tuning that process.
Have a look at these sites:

www.elance.com
www.rentacoder.com
www.guru.com

Before you contract anyone go and talk to someone who has been through the process. It’s a little tricky to get it right but when you do the payoff is high.

Till next time.

Gail

Domain “Tasting” with Network Solutions

Published
by
Christian Bowman
on January 15, 2008
in General
. 1 Comment

A colleague of mine Paul Cherry from Boomerang.com.au gave me a heads up on some sneaky activity that Network Solutions have started do. It’s called Registrar Domain “Tasting” which is the practice of a registrar holding a domain when someone does an availability search. So if you search for a domain at Network Solutions, they will register it before you’ve even purchased it yourself and if you try and register it elsewhere it will be unavailable. You can then only register it from Network Solutions who then put the price up when you return to buy it off them the next day until they release it on day 5.

Try it yourself, goto Network Solutions and search for a domain - try something with 3 or 4 different words in it just so you can test it. Then do a availability search at Melbourne IT and do a search on the same domain name…

Basically there is a five day “Grace” period at the start of any domain registration which allows the registrar to refund a domain and return it back to the available domain pool. During this period you can check traffic stats, previous referrals and in this particular case, hold it ransom to get customers to buy only off them if they search for it.

Check out Domain Name News for more information about registrar domain “tasting”.

The Secret To Crack the Code!

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on December 17, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

Hi
I mentioned the metrics in my last blog. We sat down and went through the endless pages of reports and tracking each result through to find out exactly what each set of figures was telling us.
Then we went back to our trusted gurus and looked at what they did and what their advice was.
The end result - we changed:
- our sales letter
- our price
- our offer by including a deadline
Within a few hours we had 4 sales. Not bad.

What’s next?
We’ll now test our landing page to convert more visitors to sign ups and then to sales. We’ll also test a few more google ads.

We are also going to re-package the product so that we can keep the price down and we can then put a few more products out there.
So the New Year holds more testing for us. We’ll know exactly how this market behaves and we also have a few surprises in store.
Cheers

AAAGH! We bombed.

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on December 11, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

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

A blinding flash of the obvious

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on December 6, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

Hi
I was talking to a client last week and their big problem is delivery of their services. They have enough leads, in fact, they are having trouble keeping up with the number of leads.

Clients are getting dissatisfied because the level of service has slipped. My client simply does not have enough staff and is having trouble getting good staff. So we had a chat about the options.

And it was a blinding flash of the obvious!

The answer lay in outsourcing certain functions. The interesting point here is that this was not obvious to my client. He was too close to the action. His service delivery needed to be re-jigged but the re-arrangement was not difficult and could be quite easily managed. He saw just 2 options - totally in house or totally outsourced. But the answer was in a combination of solutions.

It needed a bit of lateral thinking but once he saw the solution then it was full steam ahead.

It sometimes takes an outside view to see all the options. One of my business advisers is just great at spotting these solutions. In fact, I feel a bit dumb at times - ‘how come I did not see that. It is so obvious!’

I’ve learnt that I cannot have an ‘outside’ perspective of my own business. Even though I am an adviser to clients it is impossible for me to play this role for my own business. I’m simply too close to it.

If you are hitting a few dry gullies then think about getting an adviser on board. You’ll be surprised what they can come up with.
Cheers

Tricks and Traps of an Internet Business

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on November 26, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

Hi
We’re now well into our internet business. It’s taking longer than I thought. There are lots of tricks and traps. In effect, its a new business, a startup. But, there are really great opportunities here. I’ve been surprised at the potential for increasing sales. The more I know the more revenue streams I can see for us to tap into.

Here are a few key things that I’ve learnt:

Some tricks…
- work out who the gurus are and copy them
- pay to learn from others, it’s too painful any other way
- look for models that will suit your business, but you’ll need to think laterally
- monitor, test and measure EVERYTHING OFTEN
- build a mastermind group to learn from each other. This is a new area and there are not that many people who really understand how it works
- get (in other words, pay for) a mentor with experience in internet sales

Some traps
- not focusing on traffic generation - 80% of effort should be on driving traffic to your site
- mediocre copy. In this business copy is king.
- copying websites that ‘look good’. They may look good but do they generate sales? Keep the objective clear: to increase sales
- paying exorbitant fees to marketing companies that don’t understand this business
- not understanding this business yourself. There is plenty of information available so go and read it

I’ll be passing on more about our experiences in later blogs.

Till then, cheers.

Want easy to use flow charting software for mac?

Published
by
Christian Bowman
on November 21, 2007
in General
. 0 Comments

As most of you already know, Achaeus is venturing down the path of internet marketing to reach a wider audience to help SME business. My job here at Achaeus is to setup and implement the technology behind automating this process.

Gail and I are both very particular when it comes down to designing processes and one of the ways we do this is through flow charting. Typically we have used just word or excel to do this, (even though we could have used other software) purely because it was simple and everyone could open the document. I have just found some software that is both intuitive, simple and relatively cheap.

We use Mac’s here in the office and I stumbled across from great flow charting software called omnigraffle.

I downloaded and installed the trial, and after only a few moments, I knew I was on a winner. It was extremely simple, quick and very powerful. Gone are the days of boxes not lining up, or manually having to join the arrows between boxes. Omnigraffle is so intuitive that it seems like it reads your mind.

I was working on the flow chart for our new site pitchingtoinvestors.com and it was faily detailed. Using omnigraffle made the process so easy, it allowed me to spend more time designing and less time “fudging” if you know what I mean. It intuitively predicts what space size you want between gaps by cross referencing with any other gap to see if you want that size. It automatically lines up, snaps,  scales depending on what shapes you put on the screen.

I highly recommend this software, check out their website here.

‘Think and Grow Rich’ Seminar

Published
by
Gail Geronimos
on November 13, 2007
in General
. 1 Comment

Hi All

On the weekend I went to the ‘Think and Grow Rich’ seminar. The only reason I went was because I wanted to get a meeting with my very smart friends, Andrew and Daryl Grant - master of the internet business. No, make that Grand Masters.

If you ever get the chance to see them in action then you should definitely go. That is, if you are interested in building some form of internet business.

But I got more from the speakers than I thought. And sitting in a room for hours gave me lots of time to brainstorm a little. My thoughts were having a great time talking to one another!

Background…
Some time ago I read a book by Charles Handy, one of those managment gurus. He was espousing the value of ‘the portfolio man’. What he was saying is that you should have multiple sources on income, spread the risk. Well, that always made sense to me but I work very long hours and it was good in theory but difficult in practice. All my energy went into Achaeus.

Now I have re-structured and have time to put into place my portfolio. One speaker gave a great presentation on share trading and another re-kindled my interest in the property market.

Best of all I have signed up with Andrew and Daryl to get moving on our first membership site - very exciting.

Cheers
Gail Geronimos

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »