Kikabink News

Over at Micro Persuasion, Steve Rubel reports on some research by Forrester Research, Inc. indicating that RSS penetration among Internet users may have peaked at 11 percent.

Yes, you read that right: just 11 percent.

Sure, almost 50 percent of Internet businesses have added RSS feeds to their websites, and RSS adoption among Internet users has increased from 2 percent in 2005 to 11 percent now. But if Forrester Research’s findings are accurate then of the 89 percent of users who don’t use RSS feeds, only 16 percent are somewhat interested, and just 3 percent are very interested, in using them.

According to Forrester, marketers have not done enough to promote the benefits of RSS to their customers. Probably because they’re too busy promoting the benefits of RSS to other marketers! And there ARE benefits - just ask a guy like Peter Drew about the power of RSS in terms of search engine optimization.

But when it comes to consumers using RSS, maybe Steve Rubel is right when he says that “feeds are way too geeky for most and the benefit does not outweigh the learning curve.”

Rubel also makes a great point: just because RSS adoption may have peaked, it doesn’t mean other online optin communications aren’t working. Writes Rubel:

“The Facebook newsfeed, Twitter and Friendfeed are perfect examples of opt-in vehicles that bring content you care about to you… In each case, you’re total in control. You can unsubscribe from individuals or groups and tailor the stream so that what you want finds you… RSS is only one form of opt-in communications. The potential is bigger when you look more broadly to social networking. This larger promise still holds and as the technologies become more invisible the newsfeed could even one day subsume RSS.”

Source: Steve Rubel, “RSS Adoption at 11% and it May Be Peaking, Forrester Says”, Micro Persuasion, October 20, 2008

Jason Calacanis thinks we’re in startup depression. He’s probably one of the more qualified to comment, having built several tech companies in the last decade (Silicon Alley Reporter, Weblogs, Inc, Mahalo) including one which rather famously died in 2002 (Silicon Alley Reporter).

Now, I don’t think most of us running self-funded Internet businesses need to be worried about a depression. Sure, we may see fewer customers or sales over the next year or so, but we don’t need to worry about venture capital drying up. (Basically, because we’re not seeking or relying on it.)

But for those of us relying on venture funding to get our products and business off the ground… be worried, very worried. That is, if you take Jason Calacanis’s article ‘(The) Startup Depression’ to heart.

According to Jason, ‘the economic downturn will be much worse than it is today… 50-80% of the venture-backed startups currently operating will shut down or go on life-support (i.e. 3-4 folks working on them) within the next 18 months.’ He believes that 8 out of 10 of all the ‘Web 2.0′ startups to raise an A or B round of venture capital will go under.

I guess Jason Calacanis can relate. His first business, Silicon Alley Reporter, went from 70 employees to 12, and with the bank account running out of funds, he struggled to meet payroll. And that was BEFORE the stock market crashed in 2000.

But, according to Jason, that was the ‘darkest hour before the dawn’ and it was just a year after the company went under, that he started Weblogs, Inc. Just 18 months later, Jason sold Weblogs, Inc. to AOL for $25 million.

Which is why Jason Calacanis’s seemingly negative article is really a message of hope. This quote from Jason’s article applies not only to tech startups in the grip of the economic depression, but also to ANY entrepreneur struggling to get a business up and running or through any kind of difficulty:

‘If you’re failing right now, and if you’re suffering, you need to take Kurnit’s test. You need to access where you’re at and you need to fight on. You can give up, sure, but the truth is that when you give up, you have to live with that fact for the rest of your life. For me, living with having given up in tough times is a much worse fate than certain failure.’

(According to Scott Kurnit there are three (3) reasons why a business will fail: bad idea, bad execution or outside factors.)

If you want some timely inspiration – and a quick education in what makes for a successful growing business - I definitely suggest you read Jason’s article, if only for a full explanation of his 10 tips for getting through tough times:

1. Execute better.
2. Grow the talent you have.
3. Fire the ‘average’ people on your team.
4. Cut spending every where you can.
5. Find a revenue stream and ride it.
6. Focus on your profitable clients.
7. Make your top 10 performance areas 10% better.
8. Hold an optional off-site breakfast meeting on a Sunday and see who shows up. Whoever doesn’t show up is unlikely to step up during the tough times: fire them.
9. Build market share.
10. Raise money.

(Those tips about firing people may sound harsh… but may just be the right advice.)

Source: Jason Calacanis, “(The) Startup Depression”, September 29, 2008, Calacanis.com

A couple of years ago Simon (my business partner and husband) and I had an argument. We didn’t end up screaming or throwing things at each other, but it did get a little heated. But it wasn’t about one of us coming home late… or whose turn it was to do the dishes… or who was or wasn’t pulling their weight around the house…

It was about marketing!

Specifically, Internet marketing and how to design our websites.

In this case, Simon had his search engine optimization (SEO) hat on, while I had my ‘conversion’ hat on. As such we had different ideas about how to construct our websites.

We both agreed that designing a commercial website to ‘look good’ was not the most important objective (rather, it was to sell products or services), but when it came to designing a website to sell, we looked at things differently.

Simon wanted to maximize search engine traffic, so he wanted our sites to be ’search engine friendly.’ I wanted to maximize conversions, so I thought that every aspect of our websites should be engineered to sell. If this meant something wasn’t ’search engine friendly’ then so be it!

Simon argued that the site would miss out on lots of traffic unless it appealed to the search engines. He said, “What’s the point of having a highly converting site if there’s no one to visit it?”

I said, “What’s the point of generating a lot of traffic if you can’t convert it into customers? In any case, search engine optimization is only one method of generating traffic, so why should a website be designed with only that in mind?”

Yes, acknowledged Simon, but the search engines often generate the most traffic… and, what’s more, it’s free.

Who was right? We both were!

The truth is, many Internet businesses need both organic search engine traffic AND the ability to convert it into customers.

Why do I say they NEED organic search engine traffic? Can’t they just use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and non-search engine sources of traffic?

Well, you may be able to rely on PPC advertising alone, but you’d be missing out on attracting the vast majority of people who search on search engines. Eye-tracking research by Enquiro and MarketingSherpa has found that a fraction of searchers look at the right side of the page of search results. That’s right, where all the PPC ads are.

Now, plenty of people DO look at the right side – and these may well be enough to support your business.

But if ‘almost no-one’ looks at the PPC ads on the right, then ‘almost everyone’ is only looking at the natural / organic listings on the left. Do you want to attract ‘almost everyone’ or ‘almost no-one’ to your website? In other words, if ‘almost no-one’ amounts to 100 people a day… imagine how many the ‘almost everyone’ is!

And in case you don’t really care about generating traffic from the search engines, let me quote Dearl Miller of Trafficology who has said that 85 percent of all online sales originate from searches on search engines.

That’s a lot of sales to say goodbye to!

But if all this supports Simon’s view that website design should be based around search engine optimization, let me re-iterate my argument: loads of traffic is worthless if it can’t be converted into customers. I firmly believe that your website should be designed to sell.

Which leads me to how Simon and I resolved our differences.

Eventually, after we both calmed down, we agreed that there must be a ’sweet spot’ – likely to be different for every website – where the design achieves a balance between generating the most organic search engine traffic and converting the most visitors into customers, and where the result is the maximum possible profits.

So the challenge is to find that balance.

How do you do that? Simple. You test. Yep, you try something and see what happens. Or as we say, you innovate, test and track. Innovate, test and track. Innovate, test and track. On and on, with the aim to continually improve your profits.

And it’s profits that really matter. Not the amount of traffic. Not even the amount of customers or sales. Profits.

That’s what your website should really be designed with in mind. And, because no one – not even you – can really know what will yield the most profits, or even what the ‘most profits’ is, you must constantly innovate, test and track!

Last Thursday I closed my Facebook account. No, it wasn’t out of protest against the new Facebook design… or because I don’t like my Facebook “friends”… or because I have anything against Facebook.

It was simply because… I just don’t use Facebook!

And rather than continue enduring that nagging thought, “I’ve gotta do something on Facebook to promote my business”… I realized I had fallen into the same trap so many Internet marketers fall into: thinking we need to do EVERYTHING to promote our businesses.

Having worked with both small Internet businesses and large corporate Internet marketing departments, I am yet to meet an individual OR an entire team that is able to pursue every single avenue for promoting their business, product or service. Everyone has limited time and resources. And with the Internet evolving all the time, it’s hard enough to stay on top of one aspect of Internet marketing, let alone several.

I’m not saying anything you probably haven’t heard before, but let this article serve as a gentle reminder: it’s better to do a few things really well, than do a lot of things half-baked. And just because you hear some guru preaching about how you MUST get involved in social networking… or blogging… or article marketing… or podcasting (see above!) or anything else… it doesn’t mean you have to at all.

Jay Abraham - a true marketing genius and guru in my opinion - wrote a book called “Getting The Most Out Of All You’ve Got” and that’s really what we should focus on as entrepreneurs. We should do what we can to get the best possible results based on what we have in terms of time, money, skills and other resources. This principle should guide us in deciding what we do in our businesses, and if that means stopping or cutting back on certain things - or closing a Facebook account we never use - so be it.

Of course, let me say that closing my Facebook account doesn’t mean I don’t see value in social networking. Or that you should do the same. It’s just not where I can get the most out of what I’ve got right now. You may find that it DOES work for you, while other things don’t.

P.S. One social network I AM loving at the moment is Imeem. Not sure about a business angle yet (if ever), but I just LOVE creating playlists and listening to music while I work. Check out my Imeem profile here: http://www.imeem.com/annaj/ I also use Twitter. You can follow my “occasionally regular” ramblings at http://www.twitter.com/annajohnson

Here is one of the biggest lies being either purposely or accidentally perpetuated within the Internet marketing community: you can and SHOULD be able to make a fortune without spending much or any money to do so.

It’s a lie.

Don’t get me wrong. An Internet based business is certainly one of the cheapest businesses to set up. And, compared with traditional, “bricks and mortar” businesses, Internet businesses can achieve returns on investment (ROIs) that are nothing short of spectacular. Both in terms of the increase in value of the business and in terms of ongoing profits.

But the idea that you don’t have to spend much or anything on your business - and in particular, on marketing - is just not true.

The truth is that the “big boys” in Internet marketing invest in marketing. They don’t rely on approaches that are likely to attract web visitors and subscribers in the handfuls… they invest in approaches that generate visitors and subscribers by the hundreds and thousands.

This includes investing in pay-per-click advertising… newsletter advertising… off-line advertising… paid press release distribution… paying people to write and distribute articles and engage in various back-linking strategies… sharing generous commissions with joint venture partners, and so on.

Again, that doesn’t mean you need to spend a fortune. Or even to spend a lot when you’re starting out. But to really grow your business, be prepared to invest a few hundred to a few thousand dollars on marketing per month AT LEAST.

And here’s the good news. If you’ve been beating yourself up over why everyone else seems to be able to generate such amazing volumes of website traffic, build such enormous lists, and make so much money… while you’ve continued to struggle… now you know why: No, everyone else is NOT smarter than you… they’ve probably just spent more money on acquiring visitors, subscribers and ultimately, customers.

Sure, there ARE cases of Internet marketers who have not spent much and have achieved huge success with cheap viral marketing, or have fortuitously hooked up with a joint venture partner who has, or has access to, a huge list.But most of us have to buy our ways in.

And, let’s be honest here, no business that has been around for any length of time gets to survive, let alone thrive, without investing in marketing.

So stop thinking you should be a miracle worker and start working out how much you can invest and what you should invest it on.