‘Giving back’ as the American’s call it seems to be all the rage these days.  Perhaps a latent guilt for money/success drives people to try and rebalance the scales a little.  Of course they’re bloody unlikely to much of an impact.  95% of the worlds population live in vast pools of poverty.  A relentless focus on profit and money is perhaps wearing on the soul after a while.

Let us be clear about this however.  I’m pretty sure there is no such thing as an altruistic act.  When I take part in some kind of charitable activity I’m in it to make myself feel better the next time I meet someone working with drug addicts or rehabilitating abandoned quadriplegics.  One group that I’ve been keeping an eye on from afar is Connect Ethiopia. Read the rest of this entry »

Adrian Mole might have have been on to something.  Measurement seems to be all the rage.  So why all the focus?

It comes down to this.  Growing our cashflow is basically a monotenous task.  We try out various things in an attempt to find new ways of growing our income.  New sales strategies, blogging, calling, networking are all thrown into the mix.  It is fun.  Finding out what works is fun.  The trick is – once you have found out what works, these tasks become boring.  The initial rush of blood with the first sales fade.  It is down to plain old repetition.

Repetitive tasks bore the bejesus out of me.  I prefer to call them habits.  Habits form the progress.  Successful bloggers post regularly.  Social-pop stars tweet regularly.  Fit people train regularly.  Smart people do the crossword etc.

The truth be told that most of the activities or habits we have that grow Piehole are not really web related.  With all that in mind I’ve put together this simple tool for tracking non-webby activities online.  You can see it in action at www.piehole.ie/event_stuffer/event_stuffer.html.  It is basically a form that lets us pump our own events into Google Analytics so we can track over time what we have been up to and what is working.

So why bother?

• I find it kind of motivating to see a spike in revenue that co-encides with a load of outbound customer service calls.
• We can design custom analytics reports showing correlation between marketing activity and site performance.
• Ideally, when it comes to selling Piehole, it will be a great sales tool to actually have a demonstration of what works in black and white.
• Over time we can really see which habits work and which are worth dumping.

So for now it is back to the grunt work (I mean habit forming).

While I’m not really in the habit of quoting management gurus, Tom Peters had it right.  Measuring stuff works.  By measuring you focus your attention on whatever it is and that extra attention naturally means you spend more time thinking about achieving the objective.  “How much money did we make this week?”.  “How many leads converted to sales?”.  “What drove traffic to the site this week?”.  It is the last question that I’ve been tinkering with in particular.  We know that blogging helps our stats and get people into our sales pipeline.  We track manually the number of blogs we write each week but I’m trying to get as much of our data into Google Analytics as possible.

I hunted around and couldn’t find what I was looking for so I put togther this wordpress plugin.  Once installed you can enter your GA tracking code under the Settings menu.  The script tracks every time you publish or edit a blog along with a couple of other events.  These events show up under the ‘Events’ tab in the analytics interface.  You can customise your dashboard report to include these metrics so you can easily see what when you blogged and what impact (if any) it had on traffic.

Ideally I’d like to add extra metrics such as ‘outbound phone calls’, ‘inbound phone calls’, ‘tweets’ and all the other stuff we track manually.  I think there is a lot of scope for pimping out analytics with this type of extra information.  While it is easy to know that you blogged last Wednesday  – having a record there permenantly helps to identify trends over time.

Right.  Enough of all this coding business.  Time for some real work …

Short.ie is a great service. It whittles down URL’s nicely but I’ve always found the interaction a little bit clunky. You copy your URL, carry it over to short.ie and paste it in. There you can press “Shorten” and finally copy your shortened text. Inspired by picomarks and skitch I knew there had to be a better way. With that in mind I’ve written a little button you can drag into your firefox/safari browser tab.

Grab the above link and drag it to the top of your browser just under the address bar and let go.  It should snap in as a new button.  It can take a few attempts to get right.  I’m afraid this trick only works on Firefox and Safari for now.  Now clicking on the button makes a little yellow box pop up with your short.ie URL ready to copy.  You can copy the URL to your clipboard by clicking the copy button.

So has this anything to do with building online income?  Well.  No.  Part of the reason for the move to the other side of the world was so that I could play around with stuff like this.  Its nice to be nice and lets hope someone finds it useful.

Pop down to your local Spar.  Look at the wine on offer.  The majority of it is betwee €8 and €12.  There might be one or two for €5 and a couple for €16, but the majority lies somewhere in the middle range.  Have you ever wondered how wine which has come from so far and near, from France to South Africa to Australia, should all settle down to this narrow band?  I have.  I blows my mind that even though the South African Pinotage had to be shipped from another hemisphere it still costs roughly the same as the French Cab Sav.  Is it a massive co-incidence?  

No.  The reason is – the customer gets to chose what price to pay.  Its true for wines and it is true for web-apps and websites.  The value of one wine over another is purely subjective and it is up to whoever has the moula in their pocket at the time to decide how much of it is worth handing over.  As merchants, we don’t really have any control over that.  All we have control over is the amount of value we chose to offer.  So when it comes to pricing, here are the things I always try to implement.

1. 9 buck starting price: Offer a few bucks for something basic.  For consumers this should be around the €9 /month range.  It is a table wine for every day consumption.  For business’s that should be more like €25 a month.  No matter what the product, these are the psychological pressure points for consumers / business consumers.  The latest example of this style of pricing I have come across was for EasyTweets.
2. Up-sell by adding value: Above the basic plan, offer more value in return for a higher spend.  You can’t control how much your customers think your service is worth but you can control  how much value you can add at each price point.  On level up from the basic plan will be the €19 a month for consumers and €49 for ‘business consumers’.   
3. Look for ways to build in some kind of obsolescence:  Blinksale, BackMeUp and Basecamp all use this model.  After you start using more than x number of invoices/megabytes/projects a month you need to upgrade to the next price point.
4. Always have a plan you don’t think anyone would buy:  Because you don’t know how much value your customer will place on your service, always have a top plan or price you don’t really expect anyone to buy.   In any restaurant, the most popular bottle of wine will be the second least expensive.  This is because guys don’t want their dates to think they are cheap – so they don’t want to buy the cheapest bottle on offer.  At the same time, they normally are cheap, so they buy the next one up.  In a similar way, some people don’t want to appear flash – and will feel it more ‘reasonable’ to buy your middle plan as long as there is something above it.  Of course there will be others out there (about 5%) who have to have the best plan available.  Don’t forget to come up with a way to take their money and deliver a suitable level of value. 

On the Piehole project we added a top plan for almost €2,000 a year  - not really expecting anyone to buy it.  When we did add the plan however – two things happened.  

1. Sales of our middle plan went up.
2. Two people actually bloody bought the top one.

We are delighted that we were able to deliver enough value that someone would consider giving us that much of their hard earned cash.  As it turns out – they both made their money back in the space of a couple of weeks.  

I get this question a lot.  ”How much should I pay for a website?”.  Of course everyone really just wants to hear an answer like “you can get it for free” – which isn’t the case and even if I am about to talk about a way to get one for very cheap – that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth shelling out a few bucks for some professional design.  It is true that you get what you pay for – but if you are running a sprint or just want to experiment, wordpress.com offers you an option that’ll get you 20% towards what you might consider to be a professional site.

1. Go to wordpress.com and sign up for a free account.  Wordpress is a free blogging system.  A blog is just a website that allows you to write a type of diary online.  I really like wordpress because you can also use it to create webpages without having to know anything about how the guts of a website actually work.
2. Once you have an account, select Settings (on the right hand side) and then Domains (in the middle).
3. Now you’ll have to whip out your credit card and pay $15 for your domain name.  
4. I just set up one this morning in about 15 minutes.  Of course you will have to learn how to use wordpress but there are plenty of tutorials out there on wordpress.com.