Today’s Ecommerce Times has a good article on small businesses called “Can a Small Biz Make it Online?“. It’s certainly worth a read if you operate a small business on the web.

The article stresses that the #1 challenge for small online businesses is getting noticed.

“The biggest struggle young companies face when bringing their business online is getting noticed,” Chris Hall, marketing programs strategist and tactician for Chris Hall Marketing, told the E-Commerce Times.”

Without a good bit of internet marketing knowledge, it is difficult to get noticed online. The best way a small online business can maximize their revenue is using email to retain loyal customers while acquiring new customers through press and search engines.

“Limited marketing budgets are to blame for most of the challenges small businesses face when deciding to go online, acknowledged Sonal Gandhi, SMB marketing analyst at JupiterResearch.”

Start-ups don’t often have the funding that a larger company might have, so they have to find marketing partners on a shoestring budget. If you’re a small business owner, consider asking prospective consulting firms to do work for you under a revenue sharing agreement. By sharing incremental revenue, you’ll pay your consultant only if they lift your sales.

Once established, it makes sense to invest in at least a basic analytics package and understand conversion rates, which pages are the most popular, and what products are the best-sellers, Mulpuru said. “Then companies can look to big competitors for where to expand to next, and which customer-friendly features it may make sense to integrate next.”

I can’t even begin to tell you the importance of web analytics to your online business. Not having web analytics is like trying to take your body’s temperature without a thermometer. A good businessperson can spend 5 minutes per day examining their web analytics and get new ideas for growing their business.

As they become immersed in all of the technological research, SMBs must not lose sight of the basics, however.

As engaging as researching technology on the web can be, rely on your marketing consultant to do a lot of the legwork and research for you.

Let me offer up this as a parting thought. Many of the small business owners I work with devote most of their day to the operations of their companies. Getting packages shipped, dealing with the accounting and books and managing employees can take up a lot of time. I advise them to use their morning or evening commute to think about customer service and the way people buy and use what they’re selling. By understanding their customers, they’ll be able to offer better customer service and keep customers loyal.

With landing pages becoming more popular with internet marketers due to a landing page’s ability to effectively convert browsers to buyers, it’s only natural for businesses to compare their results with others. So what is the industry average conversion rate for a landing page?

That’s the question I got recently from a client. The answer is that you’re not likely to find an answer, and here’s why — the term “landing page” has different definitions to different marketers.

Here are some of the different ways a marketer describes a landing page:

• A page a user gets to when clicking on my search engine advertisement
• A page a user gets when clicking on my ad banner
• A page a user gets when they click on a link in my email marketing campaign
• A page a user gets when they click an ad on my homepage
• A hidden page that people get when they click a specific link on my site.
• A hidden page that people get when they click on my link from a web directory or other web site

These are just a few definitions. Additionally, because there is no standard format for a landing page, landing pages can look significantly different. Compound that with the fact that a landing page might be doing something as complex as selling a $3,000 television or as simple as collecting an email address.

If you’re trying to improve your landing page conversion rate, make sure you test different versions of the page so see which has the highest conversion rate. Here are some more landing page conversion tips:

• Keep the page simple and uncluttered.
• Write compelling copy.
• Use color to highlight the most important area (the desired action).
• For lead generation, make the form as short as possible and make it the focal point.
• If selling a product, include a large product photo and clearly state the offer.
• Assign tracking codes to each individual version and track sales/leads from each.
• Make sure the landing page has only one subject/focus/product.
• Consider not including your site navigation on the landing page and reduce the number of links off of the page.

After attending a recent business blogging seminar, I realized that most business managers really want to build a business case for blogging. After all, blogging takes time away from other business activities and requires a good amount of effort, so wouldn’t it be helpful to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of a business blog?

When I’ve pitched business blogs in the past, the client nearly always asked what the benefits of a blog were. The reasons to maintain a business blog include creating a sense of community with your customers, getting feedback from your customers, generating fresh content for your web site, building company credibility and improving search engine visibility, just to name a few. That was always good enough for the client. I’ve never been asked to specify the ROI of a business blog. Eventually, someone will ask, though.

But is there a way to calculate a return on investment of a business blog? I turned to the web, thinking that someone had already answered the question. What I found out is that other attempts to calculate business blog ROI had been somewhat futile.

After some thought, I decided that it would be possible to calculate the monetary value of a business blog by applying ecommerce metrics. Treating your business blog as a sales channel allows you to quantify the monetary return.

Most internet retailers religiously follow many site metrics, including conversion rate (buyers/visitors) and revenue per visit (revenue/site visits). The higher these metrics, the more effective the site is at generating revenue. The same metrics can be applied to a business blog.

I’m making the broad assumption that your business blog follows sound blog effectiveness principles — you have a good web analytics solution in place, you provide links in your blog to products/services on your web site and you provide a way for customers to contact you directly from the blog.

If all of this is true, you can relate revenue back to your blog. Through path analysis, you can find out what pages customers visited. If the path included a look at your blog and later a purchase or a successful completion of a contact form, you can relate the revenue generated to the blog. For a service provider like me, I have the contact form tagged in such a way that I can distinguish blog contacts from regular web site contacts. If a contact becomes a client, the fees get associated to the blog or to the site (or to paid search, offline advertising, other online advertising, etc.).

	actual revenue	% of revenue
Referrals
Face-to-face networking
Offline advertising
Search engines
Contacts from blog

Examining your web analytics will reveal how many visitors read the blog during the given time period, and this number is used to calculate your revenue per visit. The number of purchases or leads resulting from a path through the blog is used to calculate your conversion rate.

What you’ve now got is an apples-to-apples comparison between the blog and the web site. That’s not all, however. There are other benefits of the blog that are a bit less scientific, including search engine visibility. You can calculate the increase in traffic as a result of having the business blog by analyzing the referring sources of your traffic. You can make the assumption that a majority of visitors that find your business blog through search engines might not have otherwise found your site.

For those business managers who need a business case to blog, I hope this helps. I welcome your feedback if you have other ideas.

I’m the kind of person who likes to put up a web design, test it, then make improvements. It’s how I make my living as a web site effectiveness consultant. A relatively new tool in the web site usability industry is the eye-tracking study, which is used to understand what on your web site people look at.

Seth Godin recently released a video segment of an eye-tracking study for Squidoo. The study, performed by Etre, reveals that web site users’ eyes bounce all over the screen very rapidly. You may have seen a heatmap before that shows where web site users are looking, but this is the first eye-tracking study I’ve seen that shows in a video the eye patterns of real users. It’s enlightening and fascinating.

You can see the eye-tracking study on Seth’s blog here. If at first your inclination is to stop looking at the video, I suggest watching for a while. You’ll notice that the video is shown one user at a time, and that a user’s eyes literally jump all over the screen quickly.

We can learn from this video just how important color and design can be. Your web designer may feel that a certain design will be effective, but you can never know for sure until it’s tested.

Mr. Godin suggests that a user’s eyes are scanning the screen for anomalies and focus on those. For that reason, a web page design that is a little “off” might be the best design.

To me, that’s an interesting tenet. I’ve often thought that a design that’s a little “off” might be the best, but I haven’t been compelled to try this in any professional endeavors. Professionally, I’ve leaned more toward designing sites with more whitespace so aid users in finding chunks on content. I’d like to test that practice.

For more on eye-tracking studies, Etre has an informative video that explains the process.

For years, companies have been trying to understand the effectiveness of their offline advertising and which campaigns generate web site traffic. I recently saw a good example of an attempt to track offline advertising efforts.

I was listening to a local AM talk radio station when I heard an ad for a “I got rich, you can too” offer. While I wasn’t terribly interested in getting rich using the ad’s method, I did find it interesting that the ad asked the listener to go to a web site to sign up for a free book. The web site was 4freekit.com.

I heard the same ad a few days later on XM satellite radio, but I noticed that the web site address had changed to 3freekit.com. I typed these in and you can see what I got:

• 2freekit.com
• 3freekit.com
• 4freekit.com
• 5freekit.com
• …and so on.

I then realized that the advertiser used a different web site address to track performance of ads on different radio stations. He assigned 2freekit.com to one station, 3freekit.com to another, and so on. By doing this, he can measure web site traffic and begin to understand effectiveness and profitability for each channel.

You can do the same thing, but you don’t need to use different domain names. If you advertise in the offline media, start a spreadsheet in Excel and list the media outlet and a memorable, unique web site address for each. For instance, you might use http://www.yoursite.com/newspaper for the local newspaper and http://www.yoursite.com/radio for the local radio station. By putting landing pages at these locations on your web site, you can use your web analytics software to see how much traffic each page gets. If your web analytics software is powerful enough, you can even measure conversion rates and revenue/leads generated from each page.

Use this tactic to understand the effectiveness and profitability of your offline media spend.

Recently there was a story on the ABC News web site regarding web analytics. While this story is good for those that have had no exposure to web analytics, the real value of the article to me is that perhaps web analytics is starting to become a more mainstream, accepted practice. From personal experience, many online business owners still don’t use web analytics to make decisions, and many don’t use web analytics at all. In fact, many people still just want to know how many “hits” they get, which when taken alone is worthless data. (If you want a designer’s take on hits, read the more candid Smiley Cat post dealing with hits).

There are now two good free analytics solutions for those wanting to dig deeper and learn more about the many design and marketing intricacies of your web site. There’s Google Analytics, which I’ve spoken at length about, and now there’s a new free service from Clicktracks called Clicktracks Appetizer. While I haven’t installed and used this yet, I have experience with the Clicktracks Analyzer package and was very happy with the data I got from it. Additionally, there’s a new, more specialized package called CrazyEgg that is due out this month.