Measuring Success

It has been awhile since we have looked at the basics of marketing and measurements.  As Peter Drucker said, “What’s measured improves”  and so it goes.

It does not matter if you are measuring SEO/SEM, or direct sales, or how many visitors you have to your site,  the fact that you are measuring it can really help.

What we have in a lot of cases is an in-depth dashboard that allows you to see what is going on every single day in nearly every metric we have in our business.

Are you doing this?  Do you even know what is going on in your business as far as daily cash flow, visitors, customers, amount per sale, profit per visit?  How about your SEO results?  Or your advertising results?

If not, you really need to do this asap. I even if it is nothing more than an excel spreadsheet.  We will be examining some ways to build your own dashboard for your business so you can see exactly what is going on.

What is amazing is that you would not think of getting in your car and driving it if your dashboard was a complete blank and you did not know how much gas you had or how fast you were going or being able to tell what gear you were in…. But almost every business I know of does this with their business. They do not have a real time dashboard allowing them to know exactly what is going on in their business.

We are going to help you take care of that here shortly.

Here is one of the first free tools that you can start using to help you.

Dashboard Spy.  Good resource to get you going.

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

Did you know that on average that it takes a bare minimum of about 7 times before she notices your ad or your presence? And then it can take on average 7 more times to be exposed to your product or service before she buys something for you?

So, that being said, what are you doing to repeatedly get in front of these potential customers and clients? Anything? Anything at all?

This is important. You know why? Because the lifetime value of a customer can easily be dozens of times the initial purchase. One of my first mentors sold a $19 product and would pay out $36 to an affiliate for the sale. Why? Because he would make on average $834 from that customer in 2 years. That is profit, not gross. But, the only way you can do this is to keep in constant contact with your customers and by adding value to them.

Well, one of the ways you can get more value to and from your customer is through an auto-responder on your site. I have one up there in the right hand corner. You sign up and I give away some of my best info for free. No charge, nothing. And actually one of the best ways to do this is to give away a free report or truly valuable information about the problems your product or service solves.

Just in case you do not know what an Auto-Responder is, it automatically delivers emails in a series or as a news letter to people that sign up for it.

Do you have one on your site? If not, you need to get one! The service that I use has a 30 free trial! And as most of my regular readers know, I don’t use things that don’t work and this works better than iContact, AWeber and even MailChimp. Not only that, but the cost can be 1/10th of these others. Click Here to get your free 30 day trial. Yes, I am an affiliate of these guys and if you end up liking it and using it, I will make a couple of bucks.

But, I do eat my own dog food and would not be recommending it if it was not something that I would use. Try it out and let me know. Also, sign up for A Day In The Life and I will show you how to use your auto-responder to more effectively market your product and services.

Let me know how you like it.

Have a profitable day.
Cheers,
Andrew

Google’s New Layout

Here is a link to see it full size.

Tags: Googles New Look

WordPress Hosting For Your Business

The Hosting you use for you Business Website or Blog is important more than ever before.  With Google and the other search engines penalizing you for slow load times and people frankly becoming impatient with sites that take forever to load, it is not imperative that your site runs fast.

Cloud Red Hosting is what I use and recommend to all of my clients.  Give them a try. No long-term contracts and no fuss or muss. Just good service at a good price.

Transcription Services

Do you need Transcription Work done? Try out www.YakWrite.com and get your first 1 whole hour of audio done for just $20! That is about 8,000 words worth. Just let them know you are a new customer when you order and they will refund you the difference when you order! (i told them to do this).

Tags: Transcription Services

We have just opened up membership to Profit Consultant.org for free.

Why Join?

1. It is a great way for you to learn how to add more to your bottom line.
2. You can learn from others in a wide variety of industries and niches.
3. You can let people know about your business with links back to your site.
4. Get access to the latest trends and techniques to help you add more customers and make more money.
5. It is FREE!

So, just sign up today and get started. If you know of other people that want great information on how to help their business, tell them about it too.

Self-promotion and common sense is allowed. But stupidity and bad manners are not tolerated.

Thanks and welcome aboard!  Go Here to sign up!

Cheers,

Andrew Anderson

Tags: Join Profit Consultant.org

How You Can Make More Money Starting Right Now

I hardly ever login to Linkedin and only do Facebook about once a week if that.  Plus, I  have been keeping my Twitter to a minimum these days which is a whole other blog post, but in my quarterly login to Linkedin, I came across one of what I think is one of the core truths about making money.

The first time I heard something similar, it stopped me in my tracks and here is what I distilled that rather shocking moment down to.

“The Key to being successful is to become great at what you are good at, not becoming mediocre at what you do poorly”- Andrew Anderson

And that my friend is pretty much the secret to making money in a nut shell.

If you every really want to get ahead, you need to figure out what you are good at and say to heck with the rest. Become the best that you can be at it.

Let people that love to do what you hate do it for you.  If you can pay someone to do laundry and it costs you less or even the same as what you love to do, let them do it.

Same goes with Yard work, and everything else.

When you do things you don’t like, you are not going to do them as fast or as well and it takes time from practicing and getting good at what will truly make you money.  The mind set may be foriegn to you, but it works.

When someone tells me they have a maid or domestic help, I think what a smart cookie. I used to think they were lazy or pretentious.  Shows you how truly ignorant I was.  They were actually smart and had a lot more money and free time than I did.  But I eventually figured it out.

Now you can too.

Cheers,
Andrew Anderson

Tags: Doing What You Love, Money

Social Media Mangers – Schmedia Managers

OK, having a Social Media Manger seems to be in Vogue these days.  I have seen the ads for some of them with absolutely ludicrous requirements.  I know I have been laughing my ass off just reading the want ads for them and you can bet Gary Vaynerchuk is as well.  I want to share some of the joy with you here.

First off, the biggy seems to be a Journalism Degree or even better yet an MBA.  Really?  How or why that one is relevant is beyond me and actually it is totally irrelevant as I will show you.

What they should be asking is, do you have the ability to communicate in 140 characters or less and do you send out a minimum of 1,000 to 5,000 texts a month? This one is obvious as Twitter is a huge part of social media.

Here at two sample out takes from ads that are laughable.  These are from a REAL ads… LOL

Completion of an advanced degree (e.g. MA, MPH, MJ, MBA) and six (6) or more years of relevant experience

* 7+ years traditional media experience working for industry-leading company with significant media budgets in the area of digital marketing.

Wow, since Twitter has only been around for 3 years and Facebook did not really get going until about 2007 tell me how you pull off that 6 or more years of relevant experience ?   This is not traditional media either. Can you say Clueless?

—–> READ MORE

Tags: CTS, Facebook, Gary Vaynerchuk, Social Medai Managers, Twitter

This is an update of a post I did awhile ago… very relevant for today thought don’t you think?

Could it be that the real secret to profitability is to be Intelligently Lazy?  Could it really be the more Intelligently Lazy you, are the wealthier you become? And what about Alligators?

Well, like a lot of revelations, this one popped up rather unexpectedly right after I took a Green Pill this morning.

With this revelation came a whole breadth of understanding like revelations often do.  Point in fact, one of those revelations is I can tell you are Intelligently Lazy too because you are here reading this.

Hopefully, if I communicate this to you correctly, you are going to want to become the laziest person you know.

You may not know it yet, but I am actually giving you quite a compliment.  Let me explain to you why, by giving you two old adages you may have heard before.

• Most people are too busy making a living to ever become wealthy
• Most people are too busy doing urgent things, rather than important ones

This is because, as the old saying goes, it is hard to drain the swamp when you are up to your ass in alligators.

—–> READ MORE

Tags: Profitably Lazy...

This is an interview I just did with Dave Olson at HootSuite.  I interviewed Dave last April when HootSuite was still a little owl, but growing fast. Now they have over 1.4 million users.

Listen to what has happened at what I consider the best Social Media management tool and learn how you can use HootSuite to help you make more money, stay engaged with your customer base, and learn from the Secret Sauce that HootSuite is using that has lead them to dominate their market in less than a year.

Enjoy,

Andrew Anderson

Here is a link to sign up for HootSuite and get a free account or you can click on the image above or below. If you are a business, you really should look at signing up for the pro service at only $5.99 per month! It is the only way I use to manage my social media for myself and clients. I am also an affiliate too. Which as you know if you are a regular reader of mine, just how rare this is as I always drink my own Kool Aid.

Click the play button to listen to the interview or download the mp3.

HootSuiteInterview.mp3

Interview With Dave Olson Of HootSuite

Andrew: (Laughter) Yeah, okay. Hello, this is Andrew Anderson and I’ve got Dave with HootSuite on the interview here, and we haven’t spoken in, gosh I think it’s been 8 or 9 months or so. And quite a bit has changed. Um, the one thing that hasn’t changed is I’m still a big fan of HootSuite. I still think it’s the best social media tool that any business can use out there. And, point in fact, I became an affiliate, so I think I’ve sold a couple of subscriptions for you guys and I’m also a paying user of them and as everyone knows, if I don’t like something I won’t talk about it and I will not use it. So, that will set the stage for Dave Olson here and we’ll let you rip. Um, so you guys since we last spoke, um, you’ve surpassed a million users I believe. Is that correct?

Dave: Yeah. You know, it’s been a wild year since we spoke last, and it feels like every week we’re pushing out some exciting announcement and even as equally exciting, we’re finding ourselves in the middle of world affairs and business successes and all sort of stuff. So, it’s a real wild ride. We’re up to about 1.3 million users now and adding at a great pace every day. And it’s also really exciting that these users are coming from all around the world. —–> READ MORE

Tags: Facebook, HootSuite, Social Media, Twitter