Tag: websites

Consumer language & leadership

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

It’s one thing to be clear and succinct in our copy writing, and it’s another thing entirely to create language which means something to consumers. Language which paints a clear picture in the consumers minds that you can solve their problems. The best way to do it is to relate numbers to something we are all very familiar with…. ‘Join for the price of a coffee a week.’

In recent times some of the world leading websites have done this beautifully. Web businesses where scale matters to the end users, websites where this type of language can be the difference between a click out, and instant confidence.

Seek.com.au – A new job loaded every 30 seconds (Great this’ll have the job for me for sure…)

Elance.com – $201 million in provider earnings. (Wow, I will make money using this site…)

Flickr.com – 2744 uploads in the last minute (This is a safe place to store my photos…)

As soon as we read information like the examples presented above we know we are in the right spot. That we can do our business right there, right at that moment. And I know what you are thinking, this is the type of language that is limited to the successful few – not so, all it takes is a little bit of creativity to find some numbers which mean something….

We just need to work out what we are the most, best, biggest, quickest at, and there will be something. Maybe your site is the hyper local expert. Has more X from your city. The most members in Y community or the lowest click out rates for the industry? Even a micro website does something the best. And as soon as we work out what we are the ‘most’ at, we need to put it right there on the home page, no better yet, the top of every page on our website.

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Set up costs

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

When starting out in business the first thing we often do is set up the relevant legal structures:

  • Partnership agreement
  • Logo design
  • Business name registration
  • Operating company
  • Holding company
  • Non disclosure agreement
  • Holding company trust
  • Member terms & conditions of product / web usage
  • Specific bank account
  • Small business book keeping software
  • insert other legalese business recommendation here

Startup blog advice is this: Don’t waste your time or money. Get revenue first, register later.

With the only possible exception being a .com registration – which if you’re in the on line world may be an actual requirement to simply operate. No doubt this is contrary to all you’ve read in business guides. Sure, keep accurate cash flow books, run things professionally and stick to project deadlines. The reason for the recommendation is pretty simple. Most startups never get to revenue. If you’re like me you have a hard drive full of business ideas, half written business plans, and a spare room full of product prototypes. Until we have revenue (which doesn’t mean a couple of orders, it means thousands of dollars) we have nothing to protect. It also adds a strong reporting and administration burden which startups could well do without.

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So why waste time and money building a fence around nothing? Build the castle first, or at least get the foundations in place. If we follow the lawyers advice, they may be the only people who ever make money from the venture.

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The Feedback Trap

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

I recently heard an interview with the Drummer from band Midnight Oil, Rob Hurst. He was asked how he felt about a particular record which made it to number 1 on the US charts. His response was this:

‘We were too busy touring, putting on shows to follow the bands progress.”


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It sounded as though serving the fans they already had was more important than gaining new ones. And guess what happens when we do that? Our reputation grows and more fans arrive, they find us because we are delivering something special to those who already appreciate what we are doing.

The formula for success is to continue to focus on delivering good stuff to those who already believe in you. To improve our delivery to them. Just like Midnight Oil was continuing to perfect the live performance of it’s songs. They weren’t worrying if their songs were good enough, they weren’t focused on external feedback from sources like sales revenue or chart positions. They ignored all feedback, except that from existing fans (customers). They didn’t get caught in the feedback trap.

So what are the feedback traps of the modern entrepreneur?
–    Website traffic
–    Google analytics
–    Facebook friends
–    Twitter follows
–    AC Nielsen data
–    Market share statistics
–    (Insert feedback mechanism here)

These tools can be useful, but they also tempt us to change tack.  They tempt us into believing we are strategically wrong, because the feedback is so instant. Where as the benefits of our strategy is never so instant. Strategy takes time to work, it takes belief and patience, more over it takes ‘the real feedback’ cycle to spread before we can truly know if we have something. And the real feedback cycle is what our current customers have to say, and if they spread the word.

Startups out there – don’t fall into the feedback trap.

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