Author: Erich Stauffer

Business Plans – Are They Worth It?

I’m not a big fan of business plans, but apparently that’s not always been the case. In my Google Drive there is a folder called “Business Plans”. Inquisitively I clicked on the folder to see what it contained.

My last modification was on April 10, 2008 (6 years ago). None of the five businesses listed are still in existence and only two of them ever made money. I thought it’d be fun to open them up to see what I wrote.

Able Trainers

The idea was to create courses on basic computers, the Internet, and Microsoft Office applications. Our target market was “small businesses and suburban schools.” Phonebooks. Business cards. Paper flyers.

Comp Lube

This business plan contains a logo and the words, “Sustainable computer repair.” I’m not sure what that means. I ended up giving the rights to this company to a former employee, who never used those rights.

Telablue

This plan is 9 pages long, 2,250 words. The objective was, “User-friendly, professional, sites with personality based on customer needs and desires. Generate Profit. Grow at a challenging and manageable rate.”

Turn Film

Like Comp Lube, this plan is nothing more than a logo and the words, “Film editing and conversions.” At least it actually described what it did. The idea was a “VHS to DVD” service, which dates it pretty well.

Watershawl

Watershawl was a “new media company specializing in computer services and design.” That’s pretty much true to what it was. I did a lot of web design and IT work, but what I loved doing was process management.

Are Business Plans Useful?

Planning is useful, but I’m not so sure the actual document is useful. It can be used as a way to flesh out ideas, but it doesn’t have to be a long document. One page should be enough to state what you’re doing, how you’ll make money, and who your target audience is.

A business plan is usually all made up numbers, but it’s easy to feel like you’re building your business by writing a business plan instead of actually trying to Sell First. Customer development is one way to figure out whether or not someone will buy what you are selling.

I’ve spent the last year and a half helping one of my customers develop a business plan while another customer has already sold tens of thousands of products. Not all companies can be bootstrapped I realize, but the sooner you can validate your idea, the better.

April 16, 2014
How I Use Google Analytics for Business

There are 6 main areas that I check in Google Analytics to get a feel for how a site is performing, where the traffic is coming from, and what the people are interested in.

Audience Overview

While some may view these as “vanity metrics”, they give you a baseline comparison month over month and year over year for how your site is trending over time.

To give you some context, a starter site should aim for 200 visitors a month, then 200 a day. A good bounce rate (user visits one page and then leaves) is less than 60%.

Acquisition Referrals

There are multiple views under Acquisition (overview, channels, traffic), but I focus on “All Referrals” as it is the most specific category. It lists specific referring sites.

Organic Keywords

The other category under Acquisition I review often is “Keywords > Organic”. It can give some insight into what search terms people are using to find the site.

If your top keywords are your brand name, don’t fret. Congratulate yourself. That’s a sign of success. It means people are searching for your brand name specifically.

Search Engine Optimization Queries

If your top Organic Keyword is “(not provided)” you can still get the keyword information as long as your site is connected to Google Webmaster Tools.

Under Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries will tell you the keyword, impressions, clicks, and average position for each search query.

Site Content

Under Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, Google Analytics lists the top pages on the site by pageview, time on page, and bounce rate.

I use this in combination with the keyword data for content marketing to determine what to write about when creating new blog posts and pages.

Advanced Analytics

There is much more that Google Analytics can do from A/B testing to automatic reports to goal and conversion tracking to automatic alerts.

If you are interested in learning more about the insights Google Analytics can give your business, contact me or leave a comment below.

April 15, 2014
The Average Cost of a Like on Facebook
What’s the average price for a Facebook like using Facebook advertising?

Below are some real examples from ads I’ve ran on Facebook for three different Facebook pages. The first is an example of a poor (expensive) rate. It averaged $1.12 per page like.

There are several reasons why this rate was high:
1. The pictures I used did not match the value proposition of the page I was asking them to like. They were randomly selected images.
2. The ad copy I used was vague. It simply asked the user if they liked to learn online and if so, to like the page if they liked “learning online”.
3. The page itself had little content. There were 4 posts over 3 years and one had to do with learning “how to make Mexican food”.
4. The target audience and the content were out of sync. I was targeting business owners. They might not like to learn online.
5. The budget was too small ($10/day). I have seen a lower rate for likes when the budget is higher because it is shown to more people.
Next is an example of a low (good) rate. The goal is to get down to around $0.10 (10 cent) likes. This one got down to $0.16 per page like with a budget of $7.00 per day.

There are several reasons why this rate was low:
1. The target audience was clearly defined. I used marketing data from magazines to create a target demographic.
2. The image used matched the audience. I used a picture of a woman that looked like the target demographic holding the product.
3. The message matched the page. I asked people if they liked coconut oil and the page was about coconut oil.
4. The page had a lot of content. Once visitors landed on the page they could see that it was about coconut oil.
5. The page already had a lot of likes. People like to back winners (like attracts like).
What’s the average cost of a Facebook like?

$2000 was spent on multiple campaigns for multiple Facebook pages to get new likes, boost posts, and experiment with website ads (links from Facebook to outside Facebook) and so I now have an idea about what things should or should not cost. The average Facebook like costs $0.44. That’s the average cost of a like. The value of a like is another story.
April 14, 2014
Facebook: The Journal of Our Times

Before Facebook, unless you kept a diary or wrote a blog, there was little recording of day-to-day events in most people’s lives. Some people made baby books for their children, but mostly just for their first or second child. But now, the combination of smartphone cameras and mobile apps, documenting our lives has never been easier and never before have more people done it.

Enough time has passed since the mass adoption of Facebook in 2009 for us to see how people are using it long-term. We know what people like and what they hate. We know who their friends are. We know when they start relationships and when they end them. We know what they looked like when they were younger and what they look like now. We know everything someone is willing to share.

Before Facebook, my wife used to blog about what was going on in the house, about her pregnancies, and about milestones with the kids. Now that’s all on Facebook. If I wanted to create a story of our last 5 years together, that’s where I’d look. And our baby books are on there, too. We still have real-life baby books, but we certainly aren’t printing any of our pictures.

What will become of this information?

As a society we’ve all invested so much into this platform. While Facebook’s Timeline feature helps to sort through it all and services that help you print Facebook help, there is still a general anxiety I feel about how we will overcome the White Album Problem. Most people don’t remember Collegeclub.com, but that was a platform like Facebook that one day just disappeared.

And the other side of the coin is that this information will never be deleted and we will always have a perfectly searchable memory of everything that’s ever happened. Nothing will ever be forgotten. No friend is ever left behind. That’s not how the mind works. That’s not how life used to work. We used to forget, move on, and get on with life. Now it’s all just a click away.

Why do I still blog in a post-Facebook world?

I own this domain. I pay for this hosting account. I control what the website looks like and when it changes. I control my own backups. I am not subject to Facebook’s rules. I can download my data whenever I want. I can make my content look like whatever I want. In short – it’s my own platform where I can tell my own story over time regardless of what Facebook is or does, but that’s not the only reason I blog.

I know there is some benefit to me in the short term to be able to flesh out ideas and some value in the long term to be able to look back on what I was thinking or working on, but I didn’t know if it was actually of value to other people. I considered my blog a ‘failure’ because it doesn’t get that many visitors for the posts I care about, there are little to no comments, and little to no email newsletter sign-ups.

It turns out that those metrics aren’t the only ones that matter as people have reached out to me in other ways to let me know they’re reading. You don’t always know what effect you’re going to have on people and you may never know, but if you don’t put yourself out there, you’re reducing that chance. This small bit of encouragement helps. I’m glad you also read my blog.

April 11, 2014
Too Much Content – Advice I Love to Ignore

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve been told there is too much content I’d have, like $5.

The thing I see right away in the content is that there is far too much content. MORE PICTURES!!” -Sam, Web Designer, 11/16/2012

I agree! We need more pictures. Who’s going to take them?

When people say that a website needs less text, what they are really describing is a graphic design problem. They want a zero-entry, spoon-fed, baby-stepped introduction to the content. “Start me off with two-to-three words and a picture. If I like what I see, I’ll keep going.”

Type text layout is just as important as the pictures used on a website. Large fonts, small fonts, bold fonts, and font spacing can all play towards the readability of a site. A web site can be filled with text and still be readable as long as the text is organized correctly.

Okay, I get websites, but what about Social Media?

This morning one of my managers emailed me a link to Mashable’s Sorry, Marketers, You’re Doing Facebook Wrong. In it the author goes over a recent report that states, “When it comes to posts, less is more,” and “suggests a self-imposed 80-character wall for Facebook posts.” People are so “bombarded” with posts that we need to limit what we’re saying down to 80-character posts in order to get people to like us.

How about we make the posts as long as is appropriate for the material and the medium? For longer posts, consider writing an ebook, white paper, or a long blog post. Longer social posts are socially acceptable on Google+, but not as much on Tumblr or Facebook (Google+ tends to have a more intellectual crowd).

So is a ton of content good or bad? I’m confused.

Imagine if Google had the choice between serving up your 80-character post or your 10,000 word essay. Which one would it choose? The one that answers the question. Google wants to deliver the best results so that people keep using it and so they can keep selling ads. Aim to answer people’s questions (ie. add value) and it doesn’t matter how long your content is.

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” ― Mark Twain

Neil Patel, a content marketing expert, recently wrote How Long Should Each Blog Post Be? In short, he found that the more established a brand is, the less they have to write. Conversely, the less established a brand, the more they have to write. This is how Nike can get away with short taglines in their advertisements, but newcomers have to use long sales letters to convince buyers.

One other aspect to consider is market sophistication levels. At sophistication level 1, no one knows what your product is or what it does. It’s totally unique and so it needs a lot more information written about it. At level 2 there are competitors so you’re only talking about what makes your product different. Each of the 5 levels states less and less about what the product actually does.

Content Length is Contextual

A good content marketer will take into account the medium he’s writing for, the target audience, and the market sophistication level of the product when determining how much content is too much content. Blanket statements like “there’s too much text” or “people don’t like to read” are simply not true without context. There is a time and place for all types of content length.

April 10, 2014
Sometimes I Worry

Sometimes I worry about people. There was a guy who went straight into the military from high school. I think about him every now and then and wonder if he’s okay. Today I looked him on Facebook. He’s got 4 kids and he looks like he’s doing okay. Now I don’t have to worry about him anymore.

Sometimes I think about how much time I spent making movies, music, and writing stories when I was younger and how little I do that now. I literally have a video camera in my pocket and I never make movies. What was different about my life then vs. my life now? I’m not busier. I’m less busy now.

Sometimes I wonder why I wasn’t friends with more people who were geographically close to me growing up. There were two girls who lived relatively close to me, but their houses were on the other side of the highway and it was hard to get to. How can I be friends with the neighbors I have now?

Sometimes I wonder what impact I’m having on the world and how I’ll be remembered by my children when I’m gone. I wonder how they’ll think of me and whether or not they’ll remember me or only remember the pictures they took of me and the words I wrote on my blog. I’m glad they took pictures of me and read my blog.

Sometimes someone you thought was no longer your friend reaches out to you to reconnect and sometimes someone you thought would always be there leaves your side. These things happen more often than they told you it would. But what they also told you was that it will be okay. And it will.

April 9, 2014
Twitter Ads: My Experiment and the Results

How Much Does a New Follower Cost on Twitter?

That’s what I wanted to find out. I’d never ran a Twitter ad before. You can run ads for more than just new followers, you can also do it to drive more engagement (retweets, favorites, and clicks). I wanted to experiment with gaining new followers.

I’d had experience running Facebook ads before for new Likes and Google Adwords for page clicks. I was familiar with setting a budget, identifying a target audience, and crafting the ad text. This was no different. The first step is choosing @usernames.

This was an ad for @skinnycoco so I targeted two of it’s competitors as well as “users like our followers”. The latter means similar interests and demographics. You can add multiple usernames and even exclude usernames you don’t want to target.

Like Facebook ads, doing the above step gives you an estimate of reach. In my case it was 7K. The next two steps allow you to choose interests by browsing categories and to choose locations. I chose not to choose a category and chose United States.

The most important aspect of creating the ad is the text of the ad itself. You can either choose from an existing tweet or create a new tweet. Anything you could post under a normal tweet can be posted here (ie. text, picture, or link) in addition to “cards”.

Twitter Cards allow you to attach rich media experiences to tweets about your content. If you’ve ever seen a longer post with text, image, and a call to action underneath, that’s a Twitter Card. These cards can be used at your promoted tweet in your ad.

How Much Does a New Follower Cost on Twitter?

I budgeted $20 to see how much each new follower would cost, on average. For $20 I got 3,977 impressions (views), 66 clicks through to the Twitter profile, and 26 new followers. That translates to $0.77 per like and an engagement rate of 0.65%.

What Could Improve Those Numbers?

The first thing I would change would be to try different tweets and run them at the same time to test engagement. I didn’t realize that you could, like with Facebook and Google ads, run multiple ads on a single campaign. If I do it again, that’s what I’ll do.

April 8, 2014
My Second eCommerce Company: Steak Jerky
I’m attempting to document recent history that is just outside my immediate memory and it’s a frustrating task because accounts change and files get deleted. Domains are let go and information is lost. This is an attempt to recreate the story of my second ecommerce business, Steak Jerky, which was a partnership with my friend, Jason, in 2002.

I think we should have some western theme in at least one of the logos. We’ll also need a common thread among all the artwork including the logos and the text buttons. We need buttons that say: Jerky, About Us, Jerky History, Contact Us, Store, Jerky Benefits and any others we think of.” –Jason, October 9, 2002

Jason had purchased a food dehydrator and had started experimenting with making beef jerky at home. He had just moved to Greenfield from Muncie and had a bigger kitchen to experiment in. This was before either of us had kids and while I was still finishing up college, he had graduated and so had lots of free time to experiment.
Some flavors I’m planning are:
- BBQ
- Original
- Hotter than Heck
- Chinese
- Black Pepper
Will be served three ways:
- Flats (3” by 5” sheets)
- Strips
- Bits (Like popcorn jerky)
Jason was the product guy and he had big ideas. He came up with a list of possible flavors and different ways to serve them. “If I can figure out how to do it, we might even have jerky chew also.” He spent a lot of time learning about jerky, how to make it, and about companies that were selling it. That’s actually how he got the idea – after stopping at a jerky store while out on vacation.
Here is what I need from you to start:
- Logo family
- Website feel (colors, font, etc)
- Ideas, Ideas, Ideas
- Humorous stuff
- The contract
- Logo for bags
- If you’ve got some other ideas let me know.
I was tasked with creating the website, logo, and the contract. I found a ‘mountain ranch’ image and used it as a backdrop for the relatively crude logo. Although I don’t remember for sure, the site looks like it was built on OScommerce, which was around in 2002. That’s the same platform I chose to use for my first ecommerce client in 2007 so it’s a good possibility that’s what it was.

Here’s what I’m thinking… To make the equivalent of a full time job, I would need to sell 2000 pounds a year and that would cover most expenses prior to going legal. That’s 5.5 a day which is quite a bit when we are only talking on the web. However, we have several options of distribution available to us: Web, eBay, Gun Shows, Fairs, Local word of mouth, and eventually going after the big contracts (Marsh, Kroger, convenience stores, even the coveted…WalMart!!!)”

Not just beef jerky….Steak Jerky!

The first sale was on November 20, 2002. The order went out in a plastic ziplock bag with black marker labeling. I remember asking Jason if he could vacuum seal the bags to make them look more professional, but at the time he didn’t have a sealer (he later got one). He was always experimenting with new flavors and cuts. He found that the best jerky was thinly sliced.

I write on the labels for the customers. It wouldn’t be hard to design a logo for the packages and print on stickers that I could print out, but I don’t have the money to buy the sealer. I am going to add black pepper and backwoods garlic and pepper as flavors on the website this weekend. They will be variations on the original marinade. I’m not going to put up teriyaki until I know I can make it, but I will experiment with that too.

We didn’t how to do SEO or any online marketing back then. This was even before we started Neighborhood Geeks together (we had previously ran an antique booth together and formed a band named Shog). I didn’t learn about SEO until I started Telablue in 2007. This was 2002. Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace didn’t even exist then and Google Adwords was relatively new (2000).

I looked into Google advertising and I think that is the way to go at first because it should also get our listing up there quicker. Erich, I have sent you the hot flavors picture and the will be sending the 2 other flavors soon. I will need web versions of these. I also plan a page describing how much a half pound is and how much a pound is. Ross, if you still have interest, we need some modifications to the cart system.

Ross was Jason’s technical advisor back then. That was before I got my A+, Network+, and Microsoft Certifications. That was before I learned CSS, PHP, and WordPress. The business didn’t last long. By December Jason had shut it down but not before we had orders from all over the country. I recently asked Jason why and he said, “At the time, it was going to be too expensive to scale up the professionalism of the product (like good packaging, consistent manufacturing, separate production area) to really be proud of our work for clients we didn’t know.” But we learned a lot.

If this story interests you, you might also be interested in my first ecommerce business or my latest ecommerce business.
April 7, 2014
How We Had Our First $10,000 Day

This is a story about how we had our first $10,000 day in e-commerce on Shopify. It shows the power of the press and the compounding effect of little steps that can eventually pay off if you keep working.

The short story is that we got some national news coverage, which resulted in over $20K in sales over two days. Yahoo! Shine picked up WRTV 6’s story on an Indianapolis dentist (http://www.calmingfears.com/indianapolis/coconut-oil-pulling) and oil pulling (http://www.skinnycoconutoil.com/blogs/skinny-talk/12991161-the-skinny-on-oil-pulling).

The article didn’t contain a link to our site, but the video included many pictures of the bottle and our brochure – information that people then used to search. According to Google Analytics, most searches were coming for the term “skinny coconut oil“, which is the name of the product – and they were coming to buy.

Conversion rates averaged 13% over the two days the article was on the home page of Yahoo! Shine and we actually had less traffic and more orders the second day than the first. I’m not sure if I would classify this as “going viral”, but as of this writing it has 3903 shares on Facebook and 696 comments.

Fortune favors the prepared mind. –Louis Pasteur

While it was certainly fortunate that Yahoo! Shine decided to include WRTV 6’s video featuring our oil, it was the exclamation mark on a long sentence that started back in 2013. [Note: If you’re interested in the story behind how this company got started check out, E-commerce Metric: Time to First Sale.]

One thing content marketers (and lean entrepreneurs) do well is listen. When the vice president of the company told me that our oil was good for oil pulling, I wrote a blog post about it on the dentist’s website. Soon after, the concept of oil pulling started to become more mainstream and it was becoming a hot news item because people knew relatively little about it.

After hearing a story on a business podcast about a man who got some initial publicity by walking into a newspaper office and asking to speak to someone, I asked the receptionist at the dentist’s office to contact local news agencies to see if they’d be interested in covering the topic.

A few weeks later the news agency, WRTV 6, contacted Dr. Reese and ran a story on his thoughts on oil pulling. It was this news article that was later picked up by Yahoo! Shine, which brought it to national attention and our first $10,000 day.

March 20, 2014