Internet marketing Archives - Page 6 of 6

Consumer language & leadership

Posted on June 27, 2009 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.

10 steps to web start up

Posted on June 2, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s never been cheaper to start a business in the history of man. Especially on line. Startup guru Guy Kawasaki proved it with his $12,000 example for www.trumours.com – But startup blog says you can do it for pretty close to zero. In the spirit of sharing here’s the startup blog list of the 10 things you need to get started, and resources to help perform these necessary tasks.

Idea generating – Ideas these days are free and omnipresent. Steal ideas from www.springwise.com or www.idea-a-day.com – Just take one that suits you and do it. Maybe bring their idea to your geography, or just copy something already successful and do it. There is no currency in ideas. They are free. Take them. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that is the easiest part of any venture. And they are right.
Name Generating – Actually your business name has nothing to do with success. There’s only two things to consider. Firstly that it’s available (.com?) and secondly that people can say it. Check out www.nameboy.com to help you generate some.
Idea testing – I loved the idea from Timothy Ferriss who tested the idea for the best book name (4 hour work week won it) by using Google Adwords for the various options and seeing which one got the most clicks with certain key words. Inspired stuff. Steal his idea and use adwords to test your business proposition before investing heavily.
Project Managment – Keep your project stuff all in one digital location. The crew over at 37 Signals provide some awesome tools for free in doing so. We’ve used it extensively for rentoid.com
Communication – Get skype set up for all your international dealings phone calls and chats required in managing your project and team. I work with with people all over the world on rentoid and have never paid for a phone call yet. You can even get it on your iphone to make free calls from – Giddy up.
Design – Don’t get stooged paying a zillion dollars for an agency to design your stuff. Leave the agency work for big companies with big budgets, you’re a bootstrapper and need to get it done cheap. But lucky for us these days cheap doesn’t have to mean crap. Check out 99 designs to get your site designed. If you need digital icons or related visuals check out istock photo for great up to date design. For pictures use Flickr creative commons.
CSS (Cascading Style Cheets) – Check out slice and dice it to get your shiny new designs ready for coding.
Coding / Programming – Yep, that tricky stuff which makes it all work under the website. Easy, go straight to Elance or ODesk to find coders for HTML, PHP, Rails, AJAX – anything. They’re all there waiting for your brief. (this should be the only biggish expense for your web startup – which means a few hundred dollars with a currency advantage)
Payment gateway – Use paypal – free set up and the cheapest, most trusted way to accept credit cards and multiple payment forms on the internet.
Promotion tools – OK this is the stuff you’re all familiar with and using daily. So turn these fun parks into business tools by using them properly. But just choose a couple of them and use them well. My favourites are youtube, twitter, blogging (recommend wordpress).

So there you have it – web start up in 10 easy steps. Feel free to add any other cool tools and ideas in the comments.

What are you waiting for? Get started.

Steve.

Threadless – quotes from Ross Zietz

Posted on May 30, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

On Monday night I went to the Threadless in Conversation shindig in Melbourne.

In truth I expected a bit more on the business side, and little less on the design fan boy love.

In the spirit of creating value I have written below some quotes I took from Ross which are in blue, and my thoughts are underneath which are in black.

‘We’d rather just have a conversation’

– Still largely one way. We listen, but to those who deserve to be heard.

‘Started in 2000’

– Another example of overnight success taking nearly 10 years.

‘We saw the idea for threadless and said what if we just did it?’

– Again ideas are free, ideas are everywhere, doing creates winning.

‘I saw a tiny little ad for it in a magazine & just submitted a design & got hooked’

– Action….

‘My interview was in an Irish pub on St Patrick’s day drinking green beer’

– Pretty cool, why do people sit in stupid rooms to conduct interviews, maybe alcohol should be at all job interviews?

‘My title (Art Director) doesn’t really represent what I do. I do all kinds of different stuff’

– Job titles are an outdated idea from the Industrial Era.

‘ Our prints are not selling well…’

– Even successful businesses have flops.

‘Interacting with the community is the first part of my job’

– They all say that. But I wouldn’t know as I prefer Neighborhoodies.

‘My eduction didn’t prepare me for it. It was on the job I learned.’

– Education is just a ticket to the ball game.

‘People want to win, so they tell their friends’

– Viral stuff is about them, it’s never about us.

‘We’re going back to American Apparel. Custom is too hard’

– They create the Illusion of customisation.

‘We’re good friends with the guys at Twitter’

– Collaboration and relationships win in business. Who you know matters.

‘They opened a store because it was a cool idea and people asked’

– Sounds like a diworsification to me.

‘Whenever we have a sale volume goes up like a 100%’

– Even cool brands have price sensitive customers.

‘We email voters to remind them when a shirt they voted on is printed’

– Sounds like a little like spam, er sorry, bacn, but it must work.

‘The oldest person in our company is like 35’

– Is culture age dependent? I’m really curious. Comment if you have the answer.

‘We had a CFO who was like 50 or something and he just didn’t fit in’

– hmm, Did you let him?

‘Our team at threadless has 32 people’

– Sounds like a reasonably tight organisation. We don’t need huge numbers of people to get stuff done.

1 versus millions

Posted on March 19, 2009 by Steve Sammartino

It’s easy for us to be taken by the one in a billion websites like Facebook, Youtube and the like and think we need millions to make what we do work. The reality for most of our businesses is that we don’t need huge crowds, just a handful of good loyal people who dig what we do.
Sure some of us do need the zillions, like my business rentoid.com does… but the large majority of us don’t. We don’t need global awareness and brand recognition. What we need is a small group of dedicated fans, much like what Kevin Kelly has espoused in 1000 true fans.

But it’s often hard to get our heads around this, to believe this could really be all we need in the social media millions focus. So here’s what we ought do. This about how long it takes to have a decent conversation with 1, 10 or even 100 people. To imagine lining up 100 people, all of which are interested in what you do. To imagine them all in your living room or backyard at a BBQ. Your house would be very full, very busy, and chatting to all 100 people individually would take a week or so. In the real world it’s a lot of people.

And the internet is ‘the real world’….

The real world we are doing business in, not a virtual one. The real world where each customer matters and is always the start of our journey towards potentially millions.