Author: Jon Jordan

While the economy is certainly not firing on all cylinders, corporate profits are up,  some signs of hiring are visible in the marketplace, and the flow of money between banks, businesses, and individuals is picking up pace.

The lack of trust in our markets and economy have put a significant strain on growing businesses. Many businesses large and small have decided to put off improvements to their websites over the last couple of years. This is understandable; even more important than keeping up with the competition is keeping the doors open, and in many industries, there just hasn’t been a lot of money to invest. If history is any guide, though, that trend can be expected to reverse itself – competition is going to be back in full swing, and those owners and managers who move rapidly are going to see the biggest gains.

With that in mind, here are five areas  of your company’s website and online marketing plan you might think of upgrading in the coming weeks:

1. Search engine optimization strategies.

As buyers come back out of the woodwork, most of them aren’t going to be turning the yellow pages to find what they need. Because of their instant, specialized nature, sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing are continuing to gobble up ever-increasing amounts of advertising focus. SEO is the marketing revolution of our time, and you can’t afford to fall behind – much less drop out – of the race for the top positions in your industry or area.

2. Social network marketing.

In its beginnings, Facebook was a place to keep tabs on family and friends that you don’t see as often as you’d like. Now, you can continue to do that while hearing about the latest sales, shopping for what you need, becoming a fan of your favorite team or institution, and sharing your thoughts and opinions with the world at large. When it comes to Facebook and other related platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, there are really only two kinds of companies: those who are taking advantage, and those who are going to wish they had.

3. Open job postings.

Your website can be a great recruiting tool, bringing you qualified candidates from all around the world. All it takes is a brief description and the patience to sift through the resumes that arrive in your inbox. Given the cost and effort involved in bringing on new staff, why not invite people to apply online?

4. A secure customer area.

Generally speaking, it costs you a lot less to have your server on at 3 am than it does a paid employee. And as an added bonus, the server generally won’t leave coffee stains on the desk, so why not automate some of your customer service tasks? Some buyers, by the nature of their job or lifestyle, are going to want service outside of normal business hours. Having account information, order histories, the answers to frequently asked questions, and other details online probably isn’t going to eliminate the need for live staff members, but it can do wonders for their workload and your expenses.

5. A blog or newsletter.

Granted, blogs and online newsletters aren’t exactly cutting-edge, but that doesn’t mean you should stop using them, or put off implementing them if you haven’t already. Finding new customers is expensive; selling to the men and women who already know, love, and buy your products isn’t. Generating a bit of insightful content with tips on using your products, or a fun story about your company, isn’t that hard. Combine it with a soft marketing message and you’ve got a once-a-month opportunity to increase your repeat sales. It’s hard to beat that strategy for a quick, bottom-line improvement.

The last couple of years haven’t been easy, but marketers and business owners who are expecting an improved economy to solve all of their problems overnight are probably going to be disappointed. Tough economic times typically force all of us – buyers and sellers alike – into new routines and habits. As customers and revenue return, it’s going to be those companies who were ready that will reap the lion’s share of the profits. Is your site going to help you find your way to the top?

When it comes to profiting from a website, most marketers and business owners will immediately think of online sales. After all, the easiest way to bring in dollars and cents is by selling more product and expanding your company’s reach to find buyers in more places, 24 hours a day.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, however. There are dozens of other ways a professionally designed, state-of-the-art site can help your business, including reducing customer service time, educating customers, and decreasing costs on recurring orders. To that list, I’d like to add one more benefit…one that can literally make or break any company, but most clients never think of: recruiting.

For much of the world, your website is the face of your business. The numbers change in every industry and geographic locale, of course, but it’s safe to assume that more than three quarters of all online businesses – even those with brick and mortar locations – will never be seen or experienced offline. That means it isn’t just customers who are forming impressions from your site, but prospective employees, as well.

What are they seeing from your company’s site? Are your pages helping to attract quality candidates? Since it can cost, on average, more than 50% of a new hire’s salary if they don’t work out, you need to be sure they are a good fit. Here are a few steps you can take to increase the level of talent that your website is bringing you:

Post openings. As obvious as this might seem, lots of businesses never post their openings on their websites. Usually, it’s because they don’t want to be deluged with resumes, or are only seeking local candidates. Even if that’s the case for your company or department, however, it makes sense to extend your search to your website. For one thing, you’ll probably attract sufficient local traffic to justify the effort. But more to the point, some of the best employees come from a business’ customer base. Who better to work for you than the men and women who already know and love what you sell?

Seek referrals. You could always take that idea one step further and seek referrals from your online customers. Given that you’re about to devote a serious amount of time and money interviewing and training a new employee, offering a few hundred dollars in the way of a gift card or free merchandise is a small price to pay to have people recommend a strong candidate. Just be sure you outline exactly what type of employee you’re looking for, along with the qualifications and background needed.

Show appreciation. Actions always speak louder than words, and one of the simplest ways to attract top talent to your company is by showing that you care for the employees you have now. While it’s a bit of a longer-term strategy, highlighting a member of your team and one of his or her achievements each month can help create the impression that your business is a good place to work. And as an added bonus, it might help morale around the workplace, too.

Be fun and personable. We all know that the best jobs aren’t necessarily the ones that pay the most – they’re the ones that we actually look forward to going to. Your website doesn’t have to be a barrel of laughs to show your office or facility has a little bit of personality. In fact, all it usually takes is a willingness to highlight a few details here and there, like photos from a recent company picnic, or staff pages that show off a little bit of flair. As with the other steps, this extra touch doesn’t only help your recruiting, but can also strengthen customer relationships by giving customers a “behind the curtain” look at your team.

Generating online orders is important, and no Internet marketing venture is going to succeed if you can’t convert visitors into customers. But, as any experienced business owner or manager can tell you, having the right people around you can make every aspect of your business easier, not to mention more profitable. Take that knowledge to heart and add elements to your site that can help you attract the best talent. It’s usually not that hard, and the effort will pay for itself many times over.

Recently Mark Thompson wrote a post on Search Engine Optimization vs Pay Per Click Marketing and which marketing strategy is more effective. This post is focused more on pay-per-click marketing and something we call the “PPC Trap.”

Here’s how the PPC trap works:

A business jumps into online advertising by bidding on a few keywords on a search engine. At first, competition is low and the bid price for the keywords is also low, so the business is able to grow and prosper online. As time goes on, more competition enters the market and bid prices steadily increase. By now the business is dependent on the flow of new business leads from the paid advertising, so they double-down and increase their spending to maintain top positions and traffic. As spending increases, conversions decrease because there are more competitors aggressively competing for each customer.

We call it a trap because companies we’ve worked with (and we were brought in to help) were literally trapped by their paid search engine advertising. The operation they have created around the business generated from the PPC advertising creates fixed overhead/expenses so they are forced to continue advertising just to sustain their operation. However, simultaneously they are breaking even (or worse) from their ongoing operations due to the high cost of advertising.

Breaking the cycle can be difficult and requires some delicate work to bring the business back to profitability and eliminate the PPC dependency. In many cases it simply involves a focus on fundamentals including increasing conversions, increasing revenue per customer, reducing overhead, and a focus on natural search engine optimization. However, in some cases the business fundamentals can be so upside down that the only option is a bankruptcy reorganization and subsequently focusing on the fundamentals described above.

If you think you might be at risk of falling into the PPC trap, the sooner you identify the issue and begin working on solving it the stronger your business will be in the long run. Even if things are going well and profits are strong, if your business is based in a large part on PPC advertising it would be smart to diversify your advertising and marketing a bit and concentrate on building competitive advantages wherever possible.

These days everyone is looking to save a few bucks, but is your web hosting account a good place to start? Let’s explore the economics of web hosting a bit so you can see what you’re really paying for.

With hosting prices as low as $5 a month you have to ask yourself what kind of service you can really buy for that amount of money. After all you can’t even buy a good fast-food meal for that price.

The economics for cheap hosts is roughly the same as it is for high quality hosts who might charge as much as $75 a month for what appears is an equivalent account. Cheap hosts still want to make a profit just like the quality hosts. They just have to do more with less so corners need to be cut.

Here are some examples:

Internet Connectivity/Bandwidth – You may not think so, but there are different grades of bandwidth and different ways of delivering it. Technically awebsite can be hosted off a cable-modem, which isn’t to say this is what cheap

hosts do, but they often use the least expensive providers of bandwidth and often there is no redundancy in their networks. It’s up to 50% cheaper than doing it the right way with tier1 bandwidth providers and redundant routing through different providers.

Power – Power can be one of the most expensive parts of delivering hosting or datacenter services. Leading hosting providers use redundant power circuits with battery backup and generator power, cheap hosts normally have a single feed to each server and fortunately often have battery backups and generators. Often the power capacity isn’t sufficient so if there is a power outage some services still get interrupted.

Servers – Leading hosts use high quality server-grade hardware from reliable manufacturers, cheap hosts often use PC-grade hardware. Under continued high load PC-grade hardware doesn’t stand up well to the load and can fail.

Support – Hiring good people with technology experience that know what they are doing isn’t cheap. Often cheap hosts hire entry-level people to follow predefined support scripts to save money. The relative number of hosting accounts per support rep is often higher for cheap hosts, which means each rep spends less time per customer each month.

Performance and Site Density – Each server a hosting company purchases costs them money in a couple different ways. 1) initial hardware cost 2) operating system cost 3) setup cost 4) maintenance cost 5) power and cooling costs 6) rack/space costs  The more sites you can put on a single server the better your economics get from a utilization perspective. The only trouble is that if a server is overloaded it won’t perform well and your site may either load slowly or not at all. As a general rule of thumb you wouldn’t want any individual server to run higher than 50 or 60% utilization during normal usage. This is to allow sufficient headroom so that during peak utilization (such as an unexpected spike in traffic for several sites) the server can easily service the spike and overall performance won’t be affected. The economics of cheap hosting dictate a higher utilization rate and consequently performance is often affected.

Backup – Backup software and storage is expensive. Proper backup routines create several full copies of data and often many partial copies for daily incremental backups. In most cases the costs to do proper backups put them completely out of the realm of something a cheap host can provide. If you are working with a cheap host you better make sure you are performing your own backup routine.

Conclusion:

Our normal hosting plans start at $25/month. The difference between a cheap host and our quality hosting plans is $20 or less, so the question you should ask yourself is “do you feel lucky?”. If you’re lucky, your cheap host will perform just fine and your business won’t be affected. If you’re not lucky, the $20 you saved just might cost your business a whole lot more in downtime and aggravation.

Our company purchased and implemented FrontRange Goldmine ® at the end of 2005. This is a 3 year lookback at its strengths and weaknesses and whether we would choose to go down the same road again if we had the choice today.

At the beginning of 2005 we were a 6-man shop with less than 100 clients so it was easy for us to keep up with contact information and share client details with our team. However, by the end of 2005 we were eyeing our first acquisition and we new we would need a more efficient way to manage information. Through the recommendation of a trusted consultant we began exploring Goldmine®. Of the features that attracted our attention, the most important were that it was based on SQL Server and attached all inbound and outbound e-mail to a contact record automatically.

We soon installed the software and were off and running. Aside from the very un-2005 interface (more like 1990) and annoying mannerisms (such as random screen refreshes and the exclusion of Windows standards like “undo” and floating windows) I suppose we were somewhat happy. We were after-all still in the throws of an interesting acquisition that brought much more load to our team then we were expecting, so Goldmine® wasn’t at the top of our list.

Maintenance

After the first year we received our first note from FrontRange to renew our product maintenance. Of course having tried using their support a few times in the first year and not seeing a single worthwhile maintenance upgrade I opted not to renew the maintenance.  However, being a growing company we soon needed new licenses and I was informed that we couldn’t purchase new Goldmine® licenses without renewing maintenance. WOW! Now that’s a zinger… overnight the TCO doubles in price (or I suppose becomes infinite if you continue indefinitely), which isn’t cheap to begin with. I believe we had 15k in our initial first year software costs (not including hardware, and labor).  At no time in our purchase process was this made clear. Not wanting to rip everything out, we bit the bullet and we have been buying maintenance ever since.

Data Structure

Goldmine® reuses tables for different purposes so a column called “Email” might actually be a street address in one row and a date stamp in another. These are fictitious examples but I assure you the point is real. Additionally there is no such thing as a one-to-many relationship between company data and contacts. So every contact creates a new company and they have a really hacked together way of joining additional contacts together in an org chart. The data mess associated with the org chart stuff would make your head spin. We needed to integrate Goldmine ® with our own software for managing other parts of the business, and this single issue has created a very lousy connection and will probably ultimately precipitate a move to something else.

“New Version”

So after 2 years of the clunky 1990’s style interface and no undo function (this is a really important feature in goldmine after the screen refreshes and you accidentally wipe out the text of the e-mail you were working on) we find out there is a big new release that has a nice looking interface and new features. Of course we are on product maintenance so we expect it to be included. WRONG! We have to pay to upgrade to the new version because they have changed the name to Goldmine ® Premium.  They added 1 or 2 new features and called it a new program. For legal reasons I won’t say that’s a rip-off, but you can draw your own conclusions.

Poor Support

We originally installed Goldmine® onto Windows 2000 server with SQL 2000 db. Of course we now want to get it off that old server and onto 05 or 08. We contacted support for the procedure and were informed that there isn’t an official procedure and we need to work with a partner. We are paying $4,000 a year for support and maintenance and we want to do something as simple as rehosting the application to a new server and we need to involve a partner. Perfect.

We have asked for support on a variety of other issues and haven’t faired much better than the example above. In one case one of our techs waited on hold for 30 minutes and then they wanted a credit card before they would help. I suppose that was some glitch where they didn’t understand we were on maintenance but all the same..

We pay maintenance on other products such as BackBone’s Netvault® backup software. I don’t like the fees there either, but their support is prompt and helpful so its worth the money.

Conclusion

Despite the commentary this isn’t designed to be a bash of FrontRange Goldmine ®. We have used it for 3 years and it certainly has its ups and downs. We wouldn’t have been able to keep organized as we have grown from 6 to near 30 people in 3 years without some kind of CRM and Goldmine ® does some things well. If some other CRM vendors would provide an integrated e-mail conduit and a good one-to-many relationship between companies and contacts we would be very likely to switch. So far, unless we roll our own software I haven’t seen any viable options so for now we’ll grumble and stick around. Here are some summary strengths and weaknesses for Goldmine® if you are considering a purchase.

Strengths:

• Integrated e-mail client
• Desktop-based system. Power users will find it faster than a web-based sytem
• Full-featured. There are gobs of features built in
• SQL Server based (vs. a proprietary or non TCP/IP accessible RDMS)

Weaknesses:

• Database structure
• FrontRange corporation (a customer-centric management style would take this product far)
• Desktop-based system.
• Deployment to remote locations is going to be a hassle.