One Man Band

If your business has a website, you must pay close attention to web analytics — analyzing statistics about traffic to, on, and away from your website.

If you’re a cash-strapped One-Man Band, finding cheap (or free) web analytic software builds a stronger business in at least three ways: lower costs; higher income; and more traffic.

So the release of Google Analytics 2.0 is a gift:

Google Analytics version 2 is not revolutionary. It does not extend web analytics software by providing new forms of analysis. Neither does it extend our understanding of websites by offering new approaches. What Google has done is simply take every feature in every product on the market and put them all into one system, and then make it available for free.

The quote is from Brandt Dainow in a recent article at iMedia Connection. Brandt’s company was a direct competitor in web analytics.

The company is turning the software out to open-source pasture because they can’t afford to support and supply it for free.

Ouch.

So take Google’s gift and run.

But while you’re running, think about whether something similar might happen to your own company.

Microsoft has.

Hosted by Rob at BusinessPundit.

I comb through the posts looking for those that are apt for small business or one-man bands. Here are the first three posts that made me click through:

• The first-click-through award goes to Nikole Gipps at Small Business Essentials for “The Five Business Colleagues You Should Have” because nobody should start (or run) a business in isolation — especially one-man bands.

• The second-click-through award goes to Mike Buckley at Mine Your Own Business for “Not So Smart After All” because every small business owner or one-man band should know how to spell I-N-T-E-G-R-I-T-Y.

• The one-more-before-the-door award goes to Chris Denny at Lead Optimize for “End-to-End Online Marketing” because slacking on marketing isn’t an option for a one-man band.

As always, there are more posts than the three listed. Click through for the whole shebang.

And — hey! — my own post made the cut this week, down in the “Miscellaneous” category.

…does your business still exist?

An article by Jason Prescott at iMedia Connection describes “Google Hell,” when a website is shuffled off to Google’s supplemental index for undisclosed reasons and for an indeterminate time. The result? The website vanishes from Google search results.

Shows what I know. I didn’t know a Google supplemental index exists.

However, I recently suffered what I’ll call “Google Limbo,” and Google was only tangentially to blame.

Beginning the first week of June, I noticed visits and page views at my website nosing down after month-to-month increases sustained over a year and a half.

I kept poking around, becoming more alarmed as the stats headed south along with my site’s traffic-driven income.

By the middle of the month, I was getting no referrals from Google. In contrast, prior months showed Google as hands-down the highest-in-number referring website.

I finally tracked the problem to a robots.txt file in my website’s root directory that denied access to the site for Googlebot. I hadn’t put it there, and the protections showed the owner as root.

When I complained to my hosting service, I was told that automatic software had created the file because my website was being crawled too frequently! That exclamation point was earned by my hosting service because I received no notification of the problem prior to incurring blunt-force trauma to my online presence.

I went to Google’s webmaster tools section and clicked the box to to request lower-frequency crawls.

The robots.txt file was removed by system staff, but it took three weeks for my website traffic to recover.

Here are my take-aways from this episode:

• Watch your website stats and investigate aberrations.

• Be familiar with the content of your web directories beyond html. What you don’t know about can kill your online presence.

• Don’t rely on your hosting service to be on your side, or make decisions in your best interest. Holler if wounded.

• Have more than one online presence. While my website was tanking, I still received income from other sites, including my Café Press shop, my Squidoo Lenses, my microstock portfolios at Bigstockphoto and iStock, and a recently set up Associate-o-Matic Amazon shop.

At The Solo Scoop, Amy Ewart of The Pillar Group posts about “selective ignorance’ in order to increase productivity.

Although she uses a new book, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich by Timothy Ferriss, as the springboard, her post reminds me of Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload and his recommendations regarding letting the bits go.

Come to think of it, some of the recommendations in The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency As a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less by Peter Bowerman, while specifically aimed at freelance commercial writers, could be used in a similar fashion by anybody.

One of my mantras when setting out on my own was “outsource everything” — which was an overstatement, really. But wherever possible, I outsource niggling (and, to me, mind-numbing) infrastructure or support so that I can concentrate on creating content: writing, designing, photographing. I get to do the fun stuff, and somebody else gets paid for doing the other stuff.

UPDATE (2007-07-28): Jason Calacanis has hit the wall of information overload, and declared “Facebook Bankruptcy.”

An article by Jeff Stone at iMedia Connection analyzes often-overlooked steps in raising money to fund a business. My favorite is #5, because it is a widespread temptation for solopreneurs:

Never proceed with the planned venture until the full amount of necessary capital is in the bank. Becoming undercapitalized is a common and dangerous mistake. Many companies procure a portion of the capital needed and then rush into implementation in the hopes of raising the remainder along the way. In almost every case, the economy works against them, and the shortfall turns the entire project into an unrecoverable investment.

Don’t quit the day job until you have the plan in place, and money in the bank to tide you over until the plan is producing enough income to support not only your business but also you.

Solopreneurs tempted to take the plunge too early can talk themselves into believing that cost-control is easy since there is only one person involved.

This is the 98th Carnival of Hurricane Relief. The first was hosted by Glenn Reynolds at the urging of Hugh Hewitt with the support of N.Z. Bear in direct response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast in 2005. It also includes areas damaged by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma.

Hosts are needed! Posts are needed! Pictures are needed!

See the CoHR homepage for details.

In its latests newsletter, Springwise describes a new venture to help connect entrepreneurs with venture capital. Vator.tv provides a web platform for prospective start-up principals to make their pitch:

Pitching the next great idea to prospective business partners, investors, service providers and fellow entrepreneurs just got easier with Vator.tv—a new venture that combines online video and networking. Based on the proverbial elevator pitch—the notion that you should be able to sum up a new business venture in the few minutes it takes to ride an elevator—Vator.tv is an online marketplace for new ideas. “Anyone, across all industries, at any stage, can share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video.”

Here’s how it works: users sign up for a free account. They then create pitches for their ideas, projects or businesses in a rich media environment by uploading video, images, PPT or PDF files. They can choose to share their pitches with a personal network or with the entire Vator.tv community. Users build their networks by inviting friends to join or browsing through other ideas and connecting with like-minded people on the site. The website includes tips on creating compelling pitches, such as how to pack the most punch into a three-minute video clip.

This sounds like a cool place to poke around in, even if you’re not looking to get or give money.

Springwise spotlights an instance of business opportunity within social networking websites that should be quickly generalizable. Social Flowers sends flowers to Facebook friends without having to know their personal info:

As people are stockpiling online friends and contacts through social networks, it makes sense to let them be as giving to their online friends as to their offline buddies. Online flower store Social Flowers spotted a business opportunity, and has created a way for consumers to send flowers to their Facebook friends without having to ask for their personal details. How it works? Users install the Social Flowers Facebook application, select a recipient from their friends list, pick a floral gift and pay. Social Flowers then sends the recipient an email and a Facebook notification requesting their address, and the flowers are delivered by one of 30,000 local florists in the US and Canada.

Social Flowers aims to extend its service to other social networks as soon as possible. Meanwhile, other retailers should jump on the potential for integrating all kinds of gift giving. A notification of a friend’s birthday on Facebook could be accompanied by a retailer’s special offer for sending chocolates, for example. Or Match.com suitors might want to send a bouquet to a virtual paramour. Books for contacts on LinkedIn, photo prints for Flickr friends, etc. One to pursue if you’re in online retail! Key points to keep in mind: ensure both parties’ personal information is safe and secure, and respect the community—don’t peddle your wares aggressively, just make it easy for consumers to show the same kind of appreciation for their online friends as they already do for people they know offline.

What service might be tailored to LinkedIn? How about corporate gifts? Or higher-end techy-geeky gifts?

Does you own business offer an opportunity to adapt this technique?

Hosted by Small Business Essentials.

Here are the first three posts relating to solopreneurs that made me click through:

• The first-click-through award goes to Raj Dash at Bootstrapper for “20 Ways to Finance Your Business Startup” because anybody thinking about starting a business needs ideas about financing. (The prospective entrepreneur also needs ideas about how to control costs!)

• The second-click-through award also goes to Raj Dash at Bootstrapper, this one for “Optimize Your Work-at-Home Time With 22 Simple Schedule Tweaks” because any home-based entrepreneur can find slack to take up.

• The one-more-before-the-door award goes to Voodoo Turtle for ”Firing Clients” because anyone with a business client list needs to weed-and-feed that list.

As always, there are more than the three listed posts. Click through for the full capitalist sizzle.

So you don’t have a lot of money left over for paying a website designer: what to do?

As a website designer, I cringed over the insta-site building detailed by Nikole Gipps in “Your New Website, in One Hour” but also admired the innovative use of Typepad and Flickr.

After arguing myself to a draw, I decided to declare victory with this paragraph near the end:

This is not meant to be your final product, just something professional looking to help you raise some working capital! I would definitely recommend returning later to redesign and expand your website once your company is running…

As a bootstrap or stopgap, her method is ingenious and looks much better than many sites that don’t take advantage of existing infrastructure. It’s not acceptable as a long-term solution, but it’s not meant to be.

All in all, I’ll squinch one eye shut and say: go for it. But realize you’ll need to circle back, sooner or later.

One note of caution: securing a domain name that redirects to this blog-as-website is important for later. When you regularize your site, the domain name redirect can be changed simply to point to the new site. Without the intervening indirection, changing sites can be, er, painful.

When I read the title of iMedia Connection’s article, “What is an ad exchange?,” I thought it would be about software that supports automated link exchanges, something that I am not a fan of.

Not.

The article is about folks like AdBrite that provide an ad marketplace allowing advertisers and publishers to meet up:

An ad exchange is a company that brokers online advertising by bringing publishers and advertisers together on a website where they can participate in auctions for ad space. An ad exchange is a marketplace — set up much like a NASDAQ exchange for online ads — where publishers and advertisers can find and execute advertising transactions. Ideally, exchanges provide a system of controls to keep the community safe from harmful, objectionable content as well as create an open development structure to encourage innovation in the industry.

Lo and behold, the article’s first example is AdBrite — so I had better include a disclaimer that I use AdBrite on a couple of my other blogs, Red County, California (local issues in Southern California) and Cockle Shells (drought-tolerant pet-friendly gardening). I got started with AdBrite because of BritePic, their technology for placing ads on static photos. I picked those two particular blogs to test it out because I use a lot of pix on them. AdBrite highlights their reach in “long-tail” websites as a differentiator:

Enable large brand advertisers to access “long tail” publishers. With more than 32,000 active publisher sites, AdBrite is generally able to reach a wider audience across a large number of small sites than an advertiser could reach by just advertising on the largest sites in any category. AdBrite’s transparency (showing every site on which an ad appears, et cetera) is a prerequisite for most large brand advertisers who are interested in reaching a broader audience across long-tail niche sites.

That looks at ads from the point-of-view of advertisers, but looked at from the point-of-view of those small websites and you see that AdBrite makes possible monetizing lower-traffic sites that might not otherwise qualify.

The article goes on to look at AdECN Exchange, ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ, Datran Media’s Exchange Online, DoubleClick, and Right Media (whose CEO just won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2007 award)

From Unusual Business Ideas That Work, a low-risk service to find a domain name:

PickyDomains.Com is a perfect example of how to turn one’s talent into a profitable business. With ever expanding Internet and tens of millions existing websites, finding an available domain name that’s not already taken by cybersquatters can be a real nightmare.

But one man’s problem is another man’s solution. Rather than to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars for a domain name on the aftermarket, an increasing number of web entrepreneurs turn to professional “domain namers”.

While most naming agencies charge a non-refundable fee that can be as high as $1500 for a corporate domain, one service that unites 17 professional domain namers from countries like United States, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, decided to offer a risk-free service that costs only 50 dollars per domain.

After 50 dollars are deposited, clients start getting a list of available domain names via e-mail for a period of 30 days. If they see a domain they like, they register it and notify the service about domain acquired. The individual, who came up with the name, gets $25, the other half going to the service. If no domain is registered, the money is refunded in full.

And here I was doing it all by hand…

(Note: I covered this same company earlier at my other blog, Prosthetic Device, as a way to make money for freelance writers, contributing domain-name suggestions.)

I recently signed up (for the first time) at a local gym, and my trainer (a 5′ 10″ blonde cheerleader putting herself through Cal State Long Beach by torturing middle-aged marshmallows) insists that I keep a food journal. I already knew that what I ate was okay — it’s how much of all that nutritious food that was the problem.

In other words: portion control.

So as to not embarrass myself in front of my incorrigibly cheerful taskmaster, I have (mostly) been keeping the portion size within bounds. This week’s jury duty was tough because I didn’t want to pack a lunch, and restaurants are worse than I am at portion control.

But maybe now there’s a glimmer of hope.

This week’s email from Springwise included a description of Minnies:

Bucking the trend of ever-expanding dining portions, Chicago-based Minnies is out to prove that bigger isn’t always better. Featuring a wide selection of bite-size gourmet burgers and sandwiches—including traditional favorites such as grilled cheese and Reubens, alongside the more inventive Mykonos (roast chicken, tzaziki sauce and kalamata tapenade) and Thanksgiving delight (roast turkey, cranberries and wild rice gravy)—Minnies applies nouvelle cuisine portions to casual dining. Besides serving waistline-minded eaters something to nibble on, the fifties-style diner gives hungrier customers the mix-and-match pleasure of tapas restaurants.

While other restaurants are starting to offer Lilliputian portions in response to consumer demand, serving miniatures-only is a niche concept that could definitely take off, much like dessert-only eateries. While Minnies isn’t currently offering franchises, interested parties are encouraged to submit their contact information should they elect to do so in the future. In the meantime, this could be a fun one for budding restaurateurs to replicate in other regions.

As mentioned above, for a while some time back there was a rush on tapas restaurants, where everything was served appetizer-sized. Then there is the concept of dim sum, where individual items are purchased from carts as they roll by.

The assertion that nouvelle cuisine requires tiny portions is not true, however much it often occurred in practice.

From a recent issue of Denny Hatch’s Business Common Sense:

* Never take your current business model for granted.

* If you are giving away for free on the Internet the thing you are trying to sell, how will you get paid? How will your paying customers feel about you? How will your advertisers respond?

* Your paying customers are worth exponentially more than strangers. They deserve to be treated with love and respect and protected from the barbarians at the gates.

* Only The Wall Street Journal—and a few other publications—have figured this out.

* The twenty-something kids with the high-tech knowledge who dictated the protocols of Internet marketing at the end of the last century did not understand business. For them, all information and intellectual property should be free. They had never written a song, spent their life savings to make a CD and then watched it circle the globe to be downloaded by millions and be worth zip, nada, nothing in a matter of minutes.

* The old rules of business and marketing apply to the brave new world of the Internet.

Read the entire article for a description of his micropayment scheme for monetizing web content.

I’m headed to Santa Ana for jury duty today.

Hosted at Marketing Whore.

Here are the first three links for One-Man Bands that made me click through:

• The first click-through award goes to Ask the Career Counselor for “Is Freelancing Foolish?” because you ought to know what you’re getting yourself into before taking the plunge.

• The second click-through award goes to The Beef Jerky Blog for “How to Start an Online Store” because I was really curious and wanted to know, despite vowing never to run my own e-commerce site. (My collection of stores are out-sourced to Café Press, Amazon, Zlio, and Associate-O-Matic.)

• The one-more-before-the-door award goes to Tom’s Franchise Information Blog for “Don’t Buy A Franchise with your Ego” because a solopreneur doesn’t have a big enough capital cushion to pay for ego.

As always, there are more than the three listed links. Click through for the full frontal assault.

And it has nothing to do with Pay Per Post, much to my surprise.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim passes along Elinor Mills’s concern over a possible conflict-of-interest at Associated Content.

Transparency note: I have posted (and received payment for) articles at Associated Content.

(Hat tip: CNET via Twitter.)

This week’s email from Springwise included a description of Zlio:

Zlio — the ‘social commerce network’ that lets anyone set up their own web shop in a matter of minutes — just raked in USD 4 million in funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, an early investor in Skype. So what have they been up to since we featured them in February? Two milestones were recently reached: 100,000 shops (from 35,000 in February) and 2.5 million visitors per month.

Shopbuilders now have over 3 million products to choose from, with sales handled by partners like Barnes & Nobles, which recently signed up as a merchant. Participating minipreneurs are earning up to USD 750 per month in commissions, by carefully selecting products, tweaking their shop’s design and promoting it everywhere they can. Shops focus on niches from Birkenstocks to Great British TV, and Gifts Under $20 to Everything Elvis.

Some users have started operating multiple boutiques, cross-promoting and buying AdWords to drive traffic to their ZlioShops. Bloggers place widgets on their websites featuring products that appeal to their audience. As explained by a shopkeeper who blogs about mediaeval re-enactments: “Instead of being an affiliate marketer for 15 different sites, and having multiple competing ad blocks on my page, I can just select the products I want to promote regardless of the store of origin. Saves me lots of time in signing up, getting approved and designing ads from the many different websites offering affiliate marketing programs.”

Oh, yeah. Gotta try this one out, for sure.

Once I’ve been Zlio’d, I’ll update this post with a link.

UPDATE:

I decided to create shops themed to tie in with my blogs, similar to what I tried at my online shopping mall and my collection of astores.

The online shopping mall is turnkey shop software that uses amazon’s API, and requires an amazon affiliate ID.

The astores aren’tied so closely to the blogs.

Zlio shops created so far, with commentary:

• Kicking Over My Traces
  Tied to my original blog, this shop should feature items relating to conservative politics, Internet governance and Catholicism. As a first try, this was unsatisfactory in the inventory to choose from — but that’s more my fault in topic than anything else.

• Red County, California
  Tied to my local-issues blog on Orange County, California, this shop should feature items relating to California and its lifestyle. As a second try at setting up a Zlio shop, this was much more satisfying — there are dozens of possible products. I tossed in a bunch, but will need to go back and properly organized the shop before adding more.

In a move that could upend how online advertising is priced, Nielsen/Netratings has changed how it values a page visit:

The research service announced yesterday it would measure popularity by how long users linger on sites, not by how many pages they view, a move that could affect how online advertising works.

This new measure will report the total time spent for all visitors and provide a better understanding of users’ total engagement of Web pages and volume of traffic, Nielsen said.

The biggest winner? AOL, moving from the No. 7 U.S. site to No. 1.

The biggest loser? Google, sinking from No. 3 U.S. site to No. 5.

The change was prompted by evolving dynamic webpage technology, such as Ajax, that refreshes or retrieves information without the user having to click.

(Hat tip: Techmeme via Twitter.)

Hosted at The Married Guy Cook.

Here are the first three posts that made me click through, that may also be useful to One-Man Bands:

• The first-click-through award goes to Wally Bock’s Three Star Leadership Blog for “Letter to a New Manager” because anyone going freelance becomes not only his own manager, but possibly a project manager of ad hoc groups of fellow freelancers.

• The second-click-through award goes to Business Pundit for “What Bullet Holes in Airplanes Can Teach You About Making Better Business Decisions” because I’m always looking for what killed the goose, so to speak.

• The one-more-before-the-door award goes to Blog Business World for “Simple marketing: Ideas you can use everyday” because you can put these into action right now, and they cost nothing, or next-to-nothing.

As always, there are more than the three listed posts. Click through for the full-court capitalist press.