Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

We’re always on the lookout for website acquisitions that could fit the Review App model and there are a couple sites we use to find websites for sale. Buying a website can give entrepreneurs a huge jumpstart in building an online business but it’s important to first consider what you need. Some sites for sale offer a large registered user base while others offers may boast significant pageviews. Still others may offer large amounts of original content or design. Again, just keep in mind what your business needs most from an acquisition.

Sitepoint.com has listings for hundreds of ‘for sale’ websites but it’s often difficult to separate the scams from the legitimate opportunities. I recommend sticking with the Premium Web Sites for Sale category if you’re serious about getting started - and keep in mind you usually get what you pay for. eBay also lists websites for sale but the quality of the listings seems to be far lower than those on Sitepoint. Sitepoint offers more verification services as well so you know you’re dealing with legitimate sellers - check to see if your seller has been ‘Site Access Verified’ and ‘Telephone Verified’ before bidding.

Buying a website can be a risky transaction so be sure to do as much due diligence as possible. Also consider how you’ll raise the value of the site - improved marketing to grow pageviews, placing more display ads on the site, etc. The real estate market may be in the tank these days but flipping websites can be a lucrative side business if you know what to look for!

At the Atlanta Online Marketing Summit earlier this week one of the panelists mentioned that the biggest mistake companies and individuals often make in starting a new blog is not doing enough prep work. Specifically prep work includes researching existing blogs within your intended niche or industry and joining the conversation before striking off on your own.

After a recent move to a new city I searched (briefly) for local blogs to get a feel for the city and to keep up on local politics and events but I couldn’t find any. I found it odd that my city didn’t have any bloggers so I decided to start my own blog which I kept up for about a month. Then I started getting pings from other local bloggers that I didn’t even know existed! It turned out there WERE in fact others blogging about my city and they were actually doing a great job. Needless to say that killed my interest in keeping up my own blog and today I’ve abandoned the project entirely. A little extra research could have saved me time and energy.

Once you’ve found other blogs related to your niche or industry it’s a good idea to get involved by commenting on said blogs. It’s a great way to introduce yourself to fellow bloggers and it helps you begin to shape the online conversation. In some cases you may even find others commenting on your comments, giving your valuable market intelligence on your potential audience.

Think about starting a new blog this way: It’s kinda like going to a dinner party where you don’t know the guests. The best thing to do first is to approach a group conversation and to observe - see what kinds of things the guests are talking about and note the tone. Next, try to politely join the conversation - offer agreement with a speaker or ask a question. After you’ve been a part of the conversation for a bit it’s possible to take the discussion in a different direction or to offer a different perspective - but only after you’ve completed the first two steps.

Nope, blogging isn’t rocket science, it’s just a different way of communicating. Use the lessons you learned about conversing in the real world to make your online communications a success!

Okay, I admit it - I haven’t been following my own advice over the past two weeks. Back in May I talked about the power of blogging as a marketing tool and I said it’s a good idea to post every week day. My record for the last 10 business days? About 6/10, my worst performance on a blog yet. For that I apologize to my loyal readers

Yesterday I attended the panel discussion at the Online Marketing Summit here in Atlanta and the panelists all agreed that a blog is an important tool for providing industry/niche thought leadership, generating sales leads, and keeping your website content fresh and relevant. One panelist mentioned how at times it might seem like a blog isn’t effective when posts attract few (or no) comments but it’s important to keep the flow of information going for the reasons mentioned above. Just the motivation I needed, perhaps this will help you too!

Of course one way to understand how many readers your blog has on a daily basis is to use an analytics package for your site. It’s also important to track subscribers who may view your content in an RSS reader and I recommend the free Feedburner service (though it’s been a bit unreliable this week for some reason). But comments aren’t everything and you can’t expect to have hundreds of blog readers at launch. Determine the goal of your blog and try to measure your blog’s performance against the metrics that matter to you and your business.

One of the things we learned a few years back is that turning viewers into users is pretty important in growing an online business. As anyone who runs a forum-based website knows it can be frustrating to see so many “lurkers” who simply read the online conversations taking place without ever contributing. On the revenue path, a vistitor usually needs to become a user before they can become a customer - any webmaster’s ultimate goal.

Here are three things you can do to graduate your visitors to users:

1. Offer something of value for free. Some sites promise free stickers in the mail if you sign up for an account, others dangle email coupons for subscribers to newsletter lists. Review App gives registered users access to online features like wish lists and the ability to post photos. Users won’t sign up just to be on your email list - give them a reason to take the next step.

2. Hold out your best content for registered users. This is similar to the idea of offering something of value mentioned above but it can oftentimes have a much larger impact. For example, on one of our web projects we routinely saw about 200 users sign up for accounts each month to access online “members only” features like those above. We then decided to make a key piece of information on our site - directions to bike trails - available only to registered users. We instantly went from 200 registrations a month to 2,000 and today the site is registering more than 100 folks PER DAY! Since the information left off is minor in relation to the other content available our search engine-visible content is  affected very little.

3. Make it easy to sign up for an account. You’ve seen it before - a sign up form that scrolls for pages and pages just to get a free account. Some sites may even require a credit card to start a “free trial” while other sites’ sign up forms are choked with marketing offers for seemingly unrelated items. The shorter your member sign up form, the more likely folks will get through it and become users of your site - so keep it simple! Review App new user forms ask for 2 things: an email address and a screen name - that’s it.

Giving your visitors a reason to become users and making it easy for them to do so is a great way to improve the number of folks entering your transaction funnel. Take a look at your site and see what you can do to increase your user base!

It was all over the news last week - ex-Googlers launched a “Google-killer” search engine that was going to blow away the competition. Morning news shows picked up the story and curious netizens (myself included) flocked to the site causing it to overload in the surge. Co-workers at companies around the country stated “we need to optimize for Cuil” (seriously). So what’s the deal?

From a marketing and online traffic perspective Cuil is mostly a disaster (see the visitor estimate chart from Alexa above). Cuil did a great job generated buzz and PR but clearly people came, they saw, and they never returned. Surely the folks at Cuil expected the launch to kick start their site’s growth but when your product isn’t quite ready for prime time this strategy can backfire.

So what did Cuil do wrong? Here’s are my thoughts:

• Over-promised and under-delivered. The promise was the Cuil answered search queries better, faster, and more thoroughly than existing search engines. Based on my (and others’) tests it failed on all three fronts. Some searches returned zero results where other search engines return thousands; other queries returned strange and irrelevant listings at the top for simple keywords. On top of it all, Cuil was painfully SLOOOOW on launch day.
• Unprepared for launch. Clearly Cuil wasn’t prepared for the curious users who flocked to the site on the first day and this meant the site was slow or unable to load entirely. Bad first impression for customers who may never return.
• Terrible name. Come on - if you can’t afford “cool.com” then pick another name. I won’t remember how to spell your brand, I’m not sure how to say it, and I don’t understand what it even means. Seriously horrible branding.
• Unconventional layout. Yep, there’s a reason search engine listings aren’t laid out “magazine-style.” When folks are searching they’re usually in a hurry to get somewhere else and they’re not interested in curling up on the couch and perusing the listings before going to an actual website. Give users the relevant information with a minimal amount of scrolling and eye movement and they’ll appreciate your service (and perhaps return). The thumbnail photos are terrible as well and most don’t always come from the website that’s being listed. The WORST search engine user experience I’ve seen yet.

Those are the big problems, each one pretty much a company-killer in its own right. Of course time will tell if I’m right to pronounce Cuil dead on arrival - anyone want to take bets on how long it takes?

On the web, more than most other places, appearances really do matter. My friend Joe likes to say that in most cases websites “give the appearance of a successful business” even when very little business is being done. Just because a site has a shopping cart doesn’t mean anyone’s buying but you’d never know that unless you were the webmaster behind the curtain.

Unless you’re a natural at graphic design and layout, it’s generally best to find someone to help you give your website a professional appearance. Admittedly we hadn’t taken this approach ourselves until recently and I still prefer to build out new sites on my own before hiring a web designer. Once a site has proven itself to be viable and capable of returning a design investment I’m more than willing to take the plunge.

This site was designed by the guys at 45royale and obviously it rocks. The design is professional but not because it’s overly designed; rather it’s clean, easy to use, and consistent. Exhibit Instinct designed our site at Unity3.com and was able to give the e-commerce site a lifestyle look and feel that has suppliers knocking down our door to get placement (just remember what I said about the appearance of business though ). We’re in the process of giving our other sites a professional facelift and we’ll certainly keep you posted on the results in terms of increases in visits, conversions, pageviews, etc.

Last week I talked about Alexa rankings and how the value of thosee rankings is questionable at best. Quantcast provides a similar free service but take a different approach which seems to yield more accurate info.

Quantcast gives webmasters a code snippet to place on their site to ensure that every visit is counted, regardless of whether visitors have installed a browser plug-in. Quantcast also estimates traffic for websites without the code snippet but for low traffic sites the accuracy of these estimates is on par with Alexa.

Unlike Alexa, Quantcast gives webmasters and advertisers alike insight into visitor demographics. The screenshot below shows the demographics for our camping and hiking website, TripleBlaze.com. As you can see TripleBlaze attracts a middle aged, middle income, slightly female audience. This is great for advertisers to understand but it’s also helpful for webmasters seeking to tailor design and content to their core audience. I wasn’t able to find any information on where Quantcast gets their demographic data but my guess is either a panel of web surfers (similar to Nielson) or zip-code based demography. If you need to rely on this info for large scale decision making I suggest looking into the methodology further.

Quantcast also provides tools for comparing visits and pageviews between multiple websites. This means you can keep tabs on your competition while understanding the online traffic patterns that affect your industry. Of course you can also see how your site ranks compared to your competitors but we already know this doesn’t mean much - though sometimes it can provide a nice ego boost

If you’re looking for a free internet rating service for research or finding advertisers, Quantcast is a great option. Sign up for your free tracking code to see who your site is reaching and how you stack up against the competition.

There are several services out there that seek to rank websites based on the number of viewers (traffic) each website receives. Alexa is an Amazon.com service that uses a panel of users who have installed a special browser plug-in to estimate website traffic. The browser plug-in is free and is available to anyone who wishes to use it.

It’s difficult to say how many folks have installed the Alexa browser plug-in but I’m estimating it’s between very few and not many. As such Alexa has a hard time providing useful estimates for low traffic websites since it’s pretty unlikely someone in the tiny Alexa pool will visit a site with very little traffic. When an Alexa user does visit a site, that site’s ranking can quickly jump from 10 million to 500,000 in a short period of time. So don’t stress if your site ranking goes up and down like a roller coaster - it’s normal.

So what is Alexa good for? For starters, it is a pretty good tool for understanding relative traffic patterns among websites. Plug in your site and your competitors’ sites and you can see how your traffic and rankings compare. You can also see which sites link to your site and your competitors’ sites and also get a list of related sites if you’re not sure who your competitors are.

Unlike some website ranking services, Alexa doesn’t give you an estimate of pageviews or visitors. Instead, Alexa displays a cryptic ‘reach percentage’ which is a measure of the percentage of global internet traffic a website receives. So, for example, cnn.com has a global daily reach of around 1.5% meaning 1.5% of global internet users view the site each day. But this begs the question: how many global internet users are there? Alexa isn’t telling us so the measure is largely useless unless we’re comparing relative numbers between sites.

If you already have a website, check out your Alexa ranking today and see how you’re doing compared to your competition!

If you’re serious about building a business online you need a good web analytics package. In the past decent analytics packages were beyond the reach of most small to mid-sized web operators but today you can get professional level reporting from Google Analytics for FREE.

I won’t be able to cover all the things you can do with web analytics in this short post but suffice it to say if there’s anything you want to know about your visitors, Google Analytics can help you figure it out. Here are just a few things we’ve used our analytics to determine:

• Where should we focus our marketing efforts? Google Analytics helps us understand which traffic sources generate the most pageviews per visitor so we can apply our marketing dollars appropriately. A couple months back we decided to give Facebook ads a try and saw that our Facebook-referred visitors viewed 50% more pages than similar campaigns. Since we saw the ads were more effective we increased Facebook spending while decreasing spending on our other campaigns.
• Where do our visitors live? With Google Analytics you can drill down to a country / state / city to see how many visitors you site receives from a given location. We use this information to guide our new content creation and tweak ad campaigns to target certain geographic regions.
• What keywords are visitors using to find our site? This is super important and informs our search engine optimization strategy. Often the results can be surprising and can lead to new insights into your market or industry.
• How is our site performing in terms of transactions? With Google Analytics you can set up various goals to track such as purchases, new user registrations, etc. We look at these closely and make changes to the site to see how they affect our goal metrics. Not sure if the new checkout page on your site is an improvement? Consult the analytics to see how your conversion rate has changed.

Using an analytics package is crucial if you want to better understand and grow your online business. Just remember, analytics alone won’t get you to your goals - it’s just another tool to help you make decisions.

Google Analytics helps you visualize your online traffic with a simple to use interface.

The cool thing about Google’s whole pagerank set-up is that, for the most part, it’s very difficult to game. Roughly speaking, pagerank assigns a value to a website based on the number and quality of outside sites that point to said website. The more links to your website, the higher your pagerank and the higher your site shows up in online search results.

While virtually every other portion of search engine optimization can be gamed to some degree, pagerank is a difficult thing to fake. Of course people have tried all sorts of schemes to increase the number of incoming links to their sites - link farms, paid links, spam links (posted on blogs / forums / etc.) - but in the end, genuine pagerank-enhancing links are made the old fashioned way.

In the early days we used to email folks and ask them to trade links with our sites to build reciprocal traffic (even though there was no such thing as pagerank back then). Today people still try to build links this way but it’s tough work and can come across as spammy to the recipients of link request emails. Even if your emails are genuine and get a good response from webmasters, we’re still talking a 5% hit rate or less - meaning you’ll need to identify and send 100 emails to get 5 new incoming links. Not an effective strategy if you ask me.

Our approach to collecting backlinks is actually pretty simple: we try to create the best content possible. If your site has useful, interesting, and relevant content you won’t need to ask people to link to you - they’ll do it automatically! Focus on making your site useful and not only will you collect backlinks but your users will actually stay on your site longer, generating higher pageviews and perhaps even a little word of mouth marketing for your site.

Now I know, creating great site content is tough but it’s really the only foolproof way I know of building a lasting online brand. A wise man once said “if you build it, they will come” - great advice if you’re considering a creating a baseball field in Iowa. But if you’re launching a new website I like to say “If you create great content, they will visit and link.”