Business
How Projects Really Work
I found this one this evening and thought it was hilarious. And I’ve been in this business long enough to know that this is pretty much EXACTLY how it usually works.
I think one of the biggest drawbacks to hiring a web developer is the lack of knowledge. Web developers can be a bit cocky to begin with. Couple that with the drive to make as much money as possible, and essentially they turn into a car salesman with a pocket protector. You need a simple form to take name and address and email it to you? Oh sure! We can do it for you! It will take us a week and it will cost you $1500. My ass!
And this is especially bad in big corporate circles. You gotta love these morans, too. Because none of the people in the corporation are playing with their own money, they insist on going with the most expensive and non-workable solutions around. They want ALL Microsoft stuff, for example, when freebie open source stuff will do the job ten times better, more securely, and cheaper by far. I served a brief stint over at CitiCorp back in college and recall how they were getting big into Cold Fusion work (back when it was still Allaire). Sure, they could do everything they needed with freely available languages, but they insisted on running Windows servers and buying corporate licenses to Cold Fusion, many of which sat on the shelf unused.
Not to toot my own horn (ok, maybe just a little), but when clients come to me for work, I always give them a fair estimate based on what is really involved. I will also explain to them how its going to be done and why. No mysteries. It just gives web developers a bad name, because at some point, some time, the client is going to know the true value of the work that was done. And as any service provider knows, a negative complaint that circles around can have up to 10 times the impact as a positive testimonial in the other direction.
I Can’t Do Everything
Boy, have I been thinking this one lately. It seems that as soon as I put my mind to increasing business, I get exactly that. And then comes the side effect – being so busy that I end up playing a huge juggling act. As I see it, I have three choices here:
- Try to be God and do it all myself, working morning till night, and basically burn out and dream about code at night (I’ve actually done that, as sad as it is)
- Start refusing business or start dropping projects.
- Find others to do some of the work.
As SO many entreprenuers can attest to, the instinct is to try to do it all myself. I’m thinking “its good to be busy” and that “nobody else will do it as well as myself”. What a trap that is! It’s incredibly hard to get out of that mindset, though. PC Media is my baby, and I pretty much came up with every procedure, policy, and project in the business. Those people who work for me in any capacity are pretty much running with things I set in motion. Even little things like shipping orders or my accounting I end up doing myself. Sometimes that is out of necessity (nobody else will do it), but sometimes its also because I think I will do it right. Which is true for the most part. But, at the end of the day, it will only end me up tired and with an incomplete todo list.
My time has been the leading limitation to growth of PC Media in the last couple years. Don’t get me wrong, the company is expanding, but not at the rate I want. And its mainly because I just get more effecient. But, I do have a limit. I want to have a life. Spend time with my wife. Have some fun. Play with the dog.
Refusing business is not a good idea either. Its always good to expand the business to meet demand, not reduce demand to meet the business.
So, I think its time to adjust my expectations and start outsourcing. Why adjust my expectations? Because of that instinct that nobody else can do it as well as me. It might even be true. Nobody knows PC Media like me. However, I need to learn to know when good is simply good enough and move on. There’s also the virtual assistant idea. Need to look into that and see how it works. Right now, I have Rich working for me doing all the online video work for me. But, I really need some other stuff offloaded. Here I am – my ideas and projects are what keep everything here rolling. And yesterday I was dicking around trying to ship ONE UPS order because the damn thermal printer was not set up right for UPS. That’s stupid grunt work and I’m sorry, my time is more valuable than that.
Do any of my readers have experience with this issue? Any input?
Leveraging Your Site
I saw a blog post by Andrew over at Web Publishing Blog which talks about leveraging what you have. I find it amazing how Andrew ends up echoing what I’m doing in my own business over on his blog. This week, leveraging what I have has been big on my mind. And, the end result is that I am getting more done this week than I have in some time.
The situation here has been that, if you extend my revenue stats out for the past year, the graph is pretty flat-lined. If you look back 4 months, it’s a very noticeable downtrend. There is usually a spike in revenue around the holidays so that fact that I’m not generating what I was during that time is not surprising. However, my constant goal here is to always be increasing, even if slightly. So, a year-long flat-line trend is not that great. I’m not bitching. I am earning an easy 6 figures yearly working online full-time.
The thing is that I have a very big asset known as PC Mechanic. The site has 10,000+ people daily looking at it. Eyeballs is the name of the game in this business. I have those. But, am I really taking full advantage of the site? I mean, if I had a store on the street with 10,000 people strolling through every single day…one word. DAMN! But, am I making the kind of money from PCMech that I would expect from a 10,000+ customer store? No.
The big missing ingredient has been marketing. Its about getting the word out. Delivering what people want. Staying on the edge. New products. And, in summary, leveraging what I have. For example, just today I launched a new ad format on PCMech and am currently testing it on the homepage to get more subscribers to the weekly newsletter. The signup stats have SUCKED and now that I’m paying attention to it properly, I realized that. So, instead of using popups, I am using a Catfish-style ad I found from Sitepoint. I am expecting a much increased subscription rate from the same traffic. Leverage.
On a related note, we also just today launched our first DVD over at PCMech for building your own PC. New products. Always good.
Going Native is Good
No, I’m not talking about the benefits of walking around in your birthday suit. I’m referring to a new article published over at Marketing Experiments that does an analysis of ad performance on the web. Not quite as exciting? Sorry.
The analysis does some measurement of online ads and sees which converts better. In short, the findings were that ads which look like they are part of the site they are on perform better. As they put it, “In these cases, contextual ads and offer links that appeared “native” to the page performed significantly better that those that stood out from the site’s own native content.”
People are becoming increasing ad-allergic online, and they just become accustomed to blocking out advertising. If they don’t do it in actuality, they do it mentally. In order for your ad to be noticed, you need to respect the user and make the ad fit into their online experience. Some might view this as tricking the user into thinking it is actual content. There are, no doubt, those who will try that. However, if the ad is indeed relevant to the content and also looks like it belongs, then I would argue that it is not tricking the user at all. It is giving the user an option to solve some issue that they are obviously interested in because they are reading it.
Something to keep in mind, because I know the instinct is to go big, bright and bold in order to get the audience’s attention via the hammer effect. I’ve been guilt of it as well. But, perhaps its not as workable as we might have thought.
Is Your Site STOPPING Customers From Buying?
Shortly before my wedding, when I was still working, I attended a web conference put on by Marketing Experiments. They put on these conferences every few weeks and they are always pretty insightful. The subject of that particular conference was how technology can affect your online conversions. In other words, is your website getting in its own way of you making money? Interesting concept. Well, I took some notes as I went and I thought I would share them with you today.
- “Submit” is NOT a good marketing word, so having buttons on your site that simply say “Submit” can be highly ineffective.
- What they did to test this was to do a traditional A/B split test on an e-commerce site. One site was your typical database-enabled site and the other site was completely static. The two sites looked the same, however the second site simply collected the order information and the staff manually ran the orders in order to see how the site responded. What they found was that about 22% of customers could not buy due to some technology-related issue with the site. It was not a matter of programming bugs. Instead, it was problems with the built-in technical and business features that were part of the website. Therefore, the traditionally assumed business rules built into the technology were acting as friction to the buying process.
- The most common problems were (1) invalid credit card where the customer was not clearly presented a solution for getting around it, (2) Potential customer had previously registered for a free newsletter on the same site but could not remember their username and/or password, (3) Potential customer had taken a free trial already and was thus ineligible for the offer without any clear next step for them.
- One potential solution to lost orders is to simply call the customer and see if you can rescue the order through personal contact.
The top 7 solutions to making your site not drop your customers under it’s own weight are:
- Place an order every now and then in your own store as if you were your own customer. Take note of any and all confusions.
- Call your own customer service line (or have a “secret shopper” do it).
- Make use of your “forgot your password” feature. Is it easy to use?
- Post an 800 number to your store. This can be a rescue line when your customers run into problems with your store.
- Monitor your conversion funnel and find where people are dropping out.
- Monitor the credit card errors from your credit processor. Does your site clearly outline the next steps for customers whose cards are denied?
- Temporarily remove form validation and credit card address verification. Does your conversion improve?
This overall motto here is that we can build in all kinds of great features into an ecommerce store, but sometimes it is those built-in features that can present barriers to your customers. And face it, most customers are not loyal enough to spend much of their time trying to get around any barrier. So, test your site and make any barriers provide clear solutions. Have people test your site (other than you) and you will find where your bottlenecks are.
Google Pay-Per-Action Launches
Google has just launched a new service in Beta called Pay-Per-Action. Judging by the logo in the upper left, this is going to be some kind of sub-service of Google Adwords (and hence Adsense as well). The long and short of it can be gotten right off their site, namely: “Increase your advertising reach while paying only for actions that you define. First, you’ll create an ad and define the action that you want a user to perform when they visit your site, such as signing up for your newsletter or purchasing a product. Then you’ll set the amount that you’re willing to pay when this action is completed. Finally, you’ll install conversion tracking code on your website so that we can verify when an action has been completed.“
This looks like a very interesting model, allowing advertisers the ability to set up simple CPA campaigns and run them through Google’s Adwords network. As a publisher, you could then view available CPA campaigns and decide based on quality and CPA rate whether to run the ad or not on your site. I have to say, this has got to have existing CPA networks a little worried. Google is always the big elephant in the room when it gets into something, and other affiliate/CPA networks have to be a little worried about Google doing this. AzoogleAds, keep your head up.
There are other issues at play here, though, as Diorex so aptly points out. As he puts it, “would you want to share any of this data with your competitors, suppliers, partners, or anyone other than an accountant? Profit per sale, sales volume, average transaction size, conversion rate, or average lifetime value of a customer? I would consider all of these pretty darn proprietary, yet tens of thousands of publishers have handed this very data over to what could very well become your biggest competitor.” It’s a damn good point. As I mentioned above, look at Google now getting into CPA and stepping on the foot of all of those networks already doing CPA. As we all hand a bunch of our business information over to Google, what’s going to happen is someday Google decides to get into a business which competes with us?
I use Analytics on my sites. I am a user of Adsense. I use Google Docs every once in awhile. I use Gmail sometimes when I am out of town. Of all these, Analytics and Adsense is perhaps the most open in terms of handing valuable information over to Google. However, any ad network I would work with would know information about my sites’ traffic, and it really doesn’t bother me. But, Google offers a LOT for free, and it does beg the question “Why would they do that?” IT could be simply that it helps promote Google. It could be that they just love all of us like their children and like to spoil us rotten. Or, perhaps it could be that they are using all the information we all send them to make business decisions that can make them a lot of money. In other words, are we their guinea pigs?
Time to Light the Fire Under my Ass
Well, I am back in the States now, fresh off the honeymoon. Italy was fantastic, but as with any longer trip, I’m always ready to get back to work when its over. With the wedding and honeymoon, I haven’t really had uninterrupted worktime for a few weeks now and there is so much to do. I returned to several thousand emails in my inbox, unfulfilled orders, etc etc. So, there is always that obligatory “putting out fires” mode when I get back from vacation. More importantly, though, I feel this is a good time for me to take a bit of pause, reorganize some things, then really move forward full blast with my projects.
The web is moving all the time. I have been working online since before the bubble burst of the late 90’s. I survived the burst (almost by the hair of my chin) and came out the other end still with a profitable business. Since then, we’ve seen many new companies come into the picture and the rise of Web 2.0. I’ve seen a lot of start-ups come up from the mud to turn into huge web empires. I’ve witnessed the rise of blogging, web video and social networking. Things are changing and they are changing quickly. I was a late adopter into the world of blogging and I hope not to get lost in the mix here. I have also gotten into web video. So, strategically, I think I’m making some good moves. But, its time to stick this boat into hyperdrive, man. Even though, compared to the mix of people who try to make a business online, I am probably above average (I actually eek out a good living doing this), I still feel I am not accomplishing enough.
You ever have that feeling? As hard as I work, sometimes I get the feeling I’m doing a lot of wheel spinning and not making enough forward progress with my business. Its a bit of a professional rut, really. And I’m not the kind of guy who can sit here, doing well, and just be content with it. I can do better.
So, I am going to use the event of getting married as a little bit of a life divider. Its time to regroup, to set some targets, and work aggressively to get there. And, more importantly, its time to change the operating basis.
I hope you will follow WebbyOnline (this site) as I will, of course, be posting here along the way. This site is dedicated to those trying to make a successful business on the internet. I hope my views on this subject will be welcome.
Plunge into Deep MySpace
As we all know, Myspace.com is one of the most popular names in social media today. However, it has a reputation amongst professionals of being basically a big teen hangout and not worth time for anybody with serious motives. The age breakdown might be a bit of a surprise, though. Interestingly, in this article on MSNBC, Myspace responded to a question about age breakdown by saying they don’t discuss the age breakdown (weird response). In this post by ZDNET, we see that there is a drop in the usage by younger people and a marked increase in use by adults. In fact, teenager use of Myspace, according to that survey, is now sitting just under 12% of the total community while 40-50% of the community is over 35.
What does this mean? It means that, as web publisher, most likely much of our potential public is on Myspace. More importantly, as a provider of a service on the internet, many of your potential customers are on Myspace. And, as you might expect then, more and more businesses are now setting up profiles on Myspace. And that is what I just did, as you can see here. I have stayed clear of creating a profile on Myspace for the longest time mainly because I saw no point. But, its so easy that I might as well set up shop there.
Now, using Myspace for business purposes is not easy, and truth be told, I don’t exactly plan to use Myspace as some kind of involved promotional medium. Myspace is a networking site, and thus, can be used to network your business. It will take a lot of work, because like any networking site, the only ways to make lots of contacts is to proactively be out on the site, posting to other’s profiles, getting friends, etc. And you can’t be overt about commercializing your presence because it can be seen as the equivalent of spam and nobody will pay any attention to you. But, used properly, a Myspace profile can be used to:
- Network with others of similar interest
- Promote your business through your friends network
- Monitor market trends and interests
- Use your friends to gauge interest in new products and services
I should also mention here that, in my opinion, most Myspace profiles are horribly ugly. Some people keep the default Myspace profile design which is quite clean, but also very boring. Most customize their profile. Myspace does not provide any built-in way to design your profile. Instead, people do it by pasting CSS code directly into their “About Me” sections and essentially overriding Myspace’s CSS with their own. In short, you’re basically jerry-rigging your profile. If you view source on my Myspace profile, you’ll see that there’s a HUGE block of CSS code mid-way in the code and it is that code which makes my profile look different. I have made an effort to make my profile fairly professional looking, but most users’ profiles are like a blast from the 90’s, complete with HORRIBLE background images, embedded music, you name it. If you are going to create a profile for your business or as a professional, definitely DON’T create an ugly profile that makes you look like an amateur.
Lastly, if you are conducting business on the internet or have a fairly noticeable presence online, if you don’t have a Myspace profile, I think you should create one if for no other reason than to protect your own identity. The last thing you need is somebody creating a profile with your name and then making a mess of your reputation.
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Exporting USPS Orders From X-Cart to Endicia
I mentioned in the last edition of the WebbyOnline Newsletter that I was giving Endicia a try. Endicia is a service with an accompying program called Dazzle that allows quick usage of the United States Portal Service. It can be used for preparing your business mailings, but I am interested in using it to automate USPS orders placed on my ecommerce store over on PCMech. In the past, we used Stamps.com. Stamps.com is pretty good, but doesn’t offer as much for the money as Endicia. I had cancelled Stamps.com due to our switch to UPS, however we found before too long that the higher cost of UPS scared some customers off. So, now, we make USPS appear first as the shipping option but allow the customer to pay the extra cost of UPS if they want the tracking information. Now that our volume of USPS shipments has gone back up, we’re in need of an automated method of handling shipments.
So, having Dazzle installed on the local computer, we want a quick way to export USPS orders from X-Cart (the store software we use) and import them into Dazzle. Luckily, Dazzle supports printing postage labels directly from an XML file. You need to have the premium service with Endicia to use this service along with Dazzle Designer. You can find the PDF document here that describes the XML fields needed to make this work. With that as your reference, let me give you a big head start here on getting this done for your X-Cart store:
- Here is the source PHP code for the export. Note that I had to make this code a little more generic than the one I am using because I use my own database abstraction layer, etc. However, this is the logic I am using.
- In the source code, you may want to modify the $shipfromlocal variable. I used this because I have some products in my store which are not shipped from my office but are shipped from a supplier in California. I obviously don’t want to export those because we don’t ship them. If you ship everything in your store, then you can comment out that variable. If you do, make sure you modify the queries that use it otherwise you will get an SQL error.
- Also in the source code, you can modify the $customdesc variable. These are the item descriptions used on US Customs forms. Since I did not want these to be the same as the actual product names, I used this array to define names which are more vague for the purposes of customs.
- Finalize your PHP file and upload into your X-Cart admin directory.
- Next, log into your X-Cart store and go to the orders.tpl template in the “main” folder of your active skin. In that template, you can add a button next to the order search buttons that will directly call this new PHP file. When you are done, you can click that button and you’ll get an XML export of any new USPS shipments.
This script essentially looks for any orders with USPS specified as the shipping method where the order is in “Processed” status. You may need to modify this to suit your needs, but I couldn’t find anything that did this. Hopefully this can give you a head start.
To use it in Dazzle, you would go to File > Print From > External File. Select the XML file. Dazzle will immediately import the XML file, verify all the addresses, and begin printing postage labels. You will, of course, want to make sure you have any templates set up before doing this. Dazzle just begins printing.
I'm David Risley. I've been making my living as a blogger for over a decade. Blogging is my business and how I support my family. With this blog, I'm just gettin' REAL and telling you how this business works. 
