According to Gartner, about 30% of employees’ emails are spam. Not the Viagara kind of spam, but what is called “occupational” spam: emails from colleagues.
Why did email go from being a “wonder drug” to something that clogs up our inboxes, makes us feel overwhelmed, and ends up reducing our productivity? A podcast from The Economist about wikis (“The Wide World of Wikis”, May 12, 2006) suggests we’re using email for something it wasn’t designed for.
Email began as a tool for asynchronous communication – talking to people who weren’t online at the same time as us. But even now that we’re more connected than ever, we’re still using email in the same way.
The hosts of the podcast suggest we should use (“God forbid”) the phone, or instant messenging (the way those trend-setting teenagers do) for the people who are around at the same time as us. For those who are not, stop! Don’t send that Word document via email; use a wiki instead.
Michael spoke with John Marshall, founder and CEO of ClickTracks, last week. Award-winning web analytics software, ClickTracks was created out of frustration with existing web site analysis tools in the belief that there had to be a better way.
Here are brief notes and timelines from the call with John:
(0.20) Agenda for the call.
(2.27) How and why John started the company, ClickTracks.
(4.07) Why would someone want to analyse traffic on his or her web site?
(4.46) Differences between measuring consumer interests and behaviour in physical world and online world.
(7.42) What are the steps to start tracking your web site?
(9.37) Do certain sites lend themselves towards certain types of goals? The importance of setting goals.
(12:33) Can you have more than one goal for your web site?
(13.10) Are there best practices regarding where to start (with what to do with my web site data)?
(16.05) Data trends, comparisons, and the importance of data segmentation.
(19.50) Why it’s more important to look at your data once a week than every day.
(24.00) Types of log file-based products.
(25.34) Types of JavaScript-based products.
(26.39) Technical differences between these products: what you can measure using log file versus JavaScript products.
(28.57) How search engine robots respond to log file vs. JavaScript data collection.
(32.15) Advantages/disadvantages of log files.
(38.11) Why some companies use JavaScript and log files.
(39.39) There’s so much info included in web analytics software; what information should I concentrate on measuring when I start?
(41.30) Why not to compare these measurements across multiple web sites.
(42.27) Where can one get benchmarking data to understand what a reasonable goal is?
(44.09) Why John cautions against benchmarking of this kind, and what data he recommends using for benchmarking.
(45.19) Using a change log to keep track of web site changes.
(46.20) Most people are coming to my new site through my Yahoo profile; how can I use this information to meet my goals of increasing lead generation and opting in for future newsletters?
(49.20) Can you explain segmentation?
(53.14) Organic vs. paid search segmentation: how people behave differently if they’re arrived at your site from an organic versus paid search link.
(54.51) Any other examples of user segmentation? Visitors from profiles vs. blogs.
(55.42) Your most versatile and powerful tool for online marketing.
(55.55) Another example of segmentation: first time versus returning visitors. Which segment do you cater for when optimizing web site usability?
(59.26) Thanks very much John, and look forward to speaking with you again next week.
In a recent post, I explored a sad truth: fear stops many entrepreneurs before they even start. Today, I want to explore how a lack of trust can STOP you from growing your business.
Eventually, as a business achieves success, there will come a time when an entrepreneur can’t have their hand in every pot. The trouble is many entrepreneurs insist on keeping their hands in every pot. They micromanage, and what drives them to do it? They don’t trust their staff.
It’s sad to see. Truly sad. I know entrepreneurs who have stood at the crossroads of expansion with real growth prospects MANY times. One fork means they take on new staff and expand their direction. After years of doing the same things day to day – and knowing its safe and that they can manage the workload – they shy away from expanding because they don’t trust that other people can their jobs.
You don’t need to grow rapidly to see cases like this – they are everywhere and it’s a shame in my books. Choose your team, shape your team, and trust your team. Chances are they want challenges anyhow. I’m not advocating growth for growth sake – I abhor that – but growing can help you reduce turnover, improve job satisfaction, add more value and increase your margins. These are great benefits of the journey which is growth.
So…if you are considering growth and you have a solid business case and customers at the ready, spread your wings, trust your staff and grow your business….or stagnate and die slowly as competitors take the steps you won’t. There’s a happy thought.
Imagine volunteering your time everyday to a worthy cause like finding the cure to cancer or AIDS. Now image that you could do both without really lifting a finger.
The answer is donating your unused CPU power and a tiny amount of bandwidth to projects that can benefit humanity. When you leave your computer idling or if you are just surfing the web, your CPU has plenty of juice to spare. This unused CPU power can be used to do calculations in conjunction with other participants to really make a difference.
Complex calculations are required for a number of projects such as finding the cure to AIDS. In this example, joint computational power is used to find drug structures that have the right shape and characteristics to block HIV enzymes.
This really isn’t a new concept, but I thought I would share this with any business owners that might want to consider participating in charitable projects for the betterment of humanity. It doesn’t matter what sized business you are and even the slowest computer will make a difference. What’s great is as your business scales, your hardware will likely get a boost in performance to help out even more.
“As often as possible, start your paragraphs with sentences that hook readers and drive them deeper into the copy.” Why? Because — after the headline — the first sentence in any paragraph is what gets read most often.
Karon includes some before and after examples like:
BEFORE: Hello and welcome to our website. If you are looking for [enter product name here], you are at the right site. (In this case, the example is from a wedding photographer’s site.)
AFTER: We don’t take pictures. We capture precious memories that you can enjoy for a lifetime.
Three savvy entrepreneurs talked to me recently about their businesses and how they use FreshBooks:
John Lasiter from Qfolio - online portfolios web sites for web designers and artists.
“We love web-based services like this, that enable our staff to work off-site. I used to put off creating invoices at the end of jobs, but now it’s easy so I do it right away.”
Ryan Sharrer from NBI Designs – a web design, hosting, and search engine optimization firm.
“FreshBooks has saved about $260 a week by reducing billing personnel and software. We can now easily see who has viewed their invoices. We can run reports and see where our money is and who has paid – and send “Pay up, Deadbeat” reminder notices when needed!”
Noam Birnbaum from MacCentric Solutions – a computer consulting firm specializing in Macintosh.
“We get paid faster. It’s really helped me get a handle on my cash flow and helped my customers with getting their accounting straight.”
A big thank youto these guys for taking time out of their busy days to do this.
It’s important to us to have these conversations so we can understand where in the billing process it hurts, and what works or doesn’t work. This understanding contributes to how the service is refined, to make sure it continues to be a relevant, useful tool that helps people run their businesses better.
If you would like to be featured as a case study, please email me kathy [at] freshbooks [dot] com with your availability and time zone.
When building a business, your goals and objectives can be wide ranging. One of our goals at FreshBooks is to be not only a great service for our clients, or a great place to work, but also a great company to do business with.
When we talk about partnerships, it’s a little like hiring staff – we want to find a great fit. But it’s more than that too – we want our partners to benefit from our relationship – just by virtue of the fact that they have chosen to do business with us.
So, I’d like to take a second and highlight the conference call provider we use for our teleseminar series – Conference Calls Unlimited. I was introduced to the company by John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing. We’ve used their services for about 9 months. Two things stand out to me about the way they do business. First, customer service. Conference Calls Unlimited is a business that takes care of you. Second, they are high minded in their promotions. They have an excellent email newsletter and invariably it is based around some charitable initiative they are running. Seeing those emails makes me glad we are purchasing services from such a business.
I have also had the good fortune to speak with their CEO Zane Safrit. He is a wonderful guy, with a palpable entrepreneurial spirit. It turns out Zane is on the board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association which just seemed to add up. His company’s dedication to customer service and charity are a reflection of the importance Zane puts on word of mouth referrals. There may be faster, broader ways to build your business, but I can’t think of any better ways than through word of mouth.
I’m planning to run a series of podcasts this spring all about FAILURE…entrepreneurial failure. Anyone who’s run a business has made mistakes and there is a lot the rest of us can learn from those mistakes. While I’m not sure Zane has made any mistakes running his business, I’m going to try to have him on one of the podcasts with me and two other entrepreneurs. Looking forward to it. In the meantime, check out Conference Calls Unlimited if you are looking for conference call services. They are a great company to do business with.
Today I got a call from D&B (Dun & Bradstreet), asking me to confirm our company’s details which they hold in a database. They asked for our company and trading name, mailing and physical address, phone and fax number, number of employees, a primary contact’s name and if that contact reports to a board. When I asked why they wanted this information she stressed that she was not asking for financial or confidential information.
She finished the call by talking about a service D&B are offering called “D&B ImageScope (TM) Plus”. For the low low price of $297.50 we could use this service to compare ourselves to others in our industry.
Hmm, I thought to myself, that sounds mightily similar to the (free) service FreshBooks is going to start offering, described by Mike in a recent blog post, and reported on by Zoli from the Office 2.0 conference.
“It describes a business, like Craigslist or Digg, that enters a market, like classifieds or news, and by virtue of the amazing efficiency of its operation can rely on a fraction of the revenue that the market leaders need to operate profitably. These zero billion dollar businesses are highly disruptive and change the economics of their industries over time.”
Joe upgraded to a 24″ Dell widescreen recently. He’s pushing hard for the rest of us to do the same. Daniel is always preaching about productivity gains from multiple monitors. Personally I get by on a Dell Trinitron 21″…someday the radiation will probably kill me, but until I start growing extra appendages this setup works just fine for me.
What do you like? One big monitor? Two monitors? How about you laptops users and mobile workers out there…are you frustrated by one small screen?
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