Freelance Consultant's Diary

When economic times are hard, consumers (and businesses) get scared and spend less. For instance, right now there are several drivers for lower consumer spending: Fear of job loss (due to outsourcing, offshoring, etc.) Continued drop in incomes (lower wages, higher health insurance costs, higher energy prices, etc.) Overall social/political environment (risk of terrorism, war in Iraq, lack of a clear plan on economy from either political party, etc.) What can businesses do when consumers are not shopping? Pay more attention to those consumers that are shopping. Treat them better than ever before, offer past-customer only discounts, followup individually to find out how satisfied they are with their past purchase, etc. Develop a strategy to increase order size. Offer credit for purchase of large-ticket items. Online commerce option. As consumers spend more time at home and surf the Internet (and not go to the mall and make impulse purchases), give them the choice to make impulse pur

Let us review some recent statistics: Number of uninsured Americans = 45 million The amount workers paid for premiums rose 36% on average from 2000 to 2004 -- nearly three times faster than average U.S. earnings iProceed forecast The number of uninsured Americans will rise even faster since we do not expect any change in public policy As individuals/families find it difficult to pay for healthcare and small businesses (many of them already do not provide health coverage) stay away or drop healthcare coverage, number of uninsured will grow even more. Opportunity to provide healthcare for uninsured Americans It is estimated that 36 million American live below the poverty line and if we assume that all of them do not have health insurance, that leaves us with 9 million Americans who most likely have jobs but not health coverage. That is a pretty sizeable number for any marketer. Illegal immigrants, who do not always get counted in a lot of these statistics, also do not have any health ins

If you have been reading our blog, particularly the piece on generating a steady stream of revenue from nano-publishing , you might be tempted to think that you can get rich overnight if all you could do is to write. We said it before and let us repeat that before you see any substantial income, you will need to put in months of work. Here are a few facts to know: Attracting high-quality traffic is key to success of a website. This, however, can take a lot of time. While Google, the largest search engine, is also the easiest to work with, it will be months before you see hundreds and thousands of visitors a day (our analysis shows that you will need several thousands visitors a day for substantial income). Your website will be crawled in a matter of days. With other search engines it is a different story. Not only it is costly to register, they attract so few search queries that they are not worth bothering, except for Yahoo. Having said that, just being crawled by Google does nothing

That is a question that many executives will need to answer soon. At iProceed.com since we discovered the power of blogs (lead generation, communicating with clients on a broad range of topics beyond what we do in an engagement, customer education, quicker indexing in search engines of time-sensitive articles, etc.), we have been pleading that more business leaders need to start blogging (Related article: Business bloggers wanted ). It seems that there is some progress in that direction, though a quick search will still produce only a small number of hits on business related topics. Fortune is reporting that Microsoft, Sun, Yahoo, Google, Intuit, Monster.com, Maytag, and others are now letting their employees blog. Blogging is the cheapest and most effective way to communicate key messages (though it may be hard to control the message when several people freely speak their minds without editorial axing by the PR department). While we found Jonathan Schwartz's comment that "

A lot of people have written to us asking about the role of images in web design. This is what we know about images: Images, particularly high-quality, appropriate photos make the website more appealing to visitors and their eyes are likely to go right to the area of the images (thus, a great locations for ads is next to an image). Images consume a lot of memory and bandwidth and can slow down loading of pages, turning many visitors off and motivating them to hit the 'back' button (so use smaller size images and optimize them for the web). There are many thieves on the Internet who will steal your images in two ways (1) simply copy and paste your image in their website (2) put a hyperlink to your image without even asking for permission or acknowledging the source by giving you a visible link. Thus, you pay for bandwidth while someone else enjoys the benefits. Technically, you can make it 'difficult' for the novice webmaster but there is no way to make it impossible. Im

Over the years we have heard a lot criticism of investments in two areas of information technology in particular: customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resources planning (ERP) softwares. Let us address only CRM in this article and how you can maximize the ROI on the CRM investment. (Related article: How to improve customer service using a formal customer relationship management program ?) Reasons why customer relationship management may not produce desired ROI Choosing the wrong CRM solution (either because of price or due to poor understanding of your needs and how they match with the software's capabilities) Lack of customization Not enough training to users (thus, lower adoption rates) Not using as recommended Not using enough How to maximize the ROI of a customer relationship management software investment? Unless there is a technical problem with the specific piece of software installed in your business (and if you have bought from a leading CRM company like S

If you are like us, you are probably a small business (or self-employed). And like many small businesses that do not know where their next dollar will come from, most of us ignore retirement planning for ourselves, but even worse, for the employees. Thus, a big disincentive for working in a small business is the lack of good retirement programs. (Related article: Retirement planning if you work for a large firm ) Another important reason why you should be thinking about retirement planning is that if you don't save and plan for retirement now, you will literally be working forever. And if you work like us (about 60-70 hours a week), you don't want to do that. Retirement planning options for small businesses and self employed Start your own 401(k) program. It is not as difficult/expensive to set up as you think. In fact many financial institutions, particularly Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, etc. have schemes for small businesses and self-employed individuals. If you are self-emplo

At some point, your website will become too large. Good news! However, it also means that you will need a system to efficiently manage content on your website. The key to success of a website is allowing your visitors to find what they want to peruse in the easiest way possible. To be able to provide that you will need a system to collect, format, publish, and link all the content in a way that old content and new content support each other and are consistent in their look and feel. What you will need is a content management system. There are several companies that provide high quality content management solutions. Of course, we would like to mention Refresh Software right here in our neighborhood. We have heard great things about them at various networking events. Some other firms active in the content management space are Ektron, which is also based close to where we are and we also visited their counter at a trade show in New York City, Octigon, APW, IBM, Serena, PaperThin, OpenText

We recently discussed value creation strategies with a rapidly growing firm. They were experiencing heavy turnover among their customer base and did not know what was going on since their product was clearly superior to anyone else out there. One of the casualties of rapid growth is poor customer service to existing customers. While this is understandable (particularly in the case of startups), it is inexcusable and potentially disastrous, as was the case with this firm. Why customer relationship management (CRM) is needed? The #1 reason is that in absence of a structured process, employees can get distracted. New business is always more exciting (bonuses, promotions, etc.) to employees than keeping existing customers happy. One company that we worked for had salespeople to sell and account executives to manage the account afterwards. Fair enough. The problem: the account executives were lower in hierarchy than sales executives. If an account executive performed well, s/he could be pro

This is a question that has often been asked to us. In sharing our research so far we have essentially said that it is up to you to determine what works best for you. While blogs are easy to create and require no maintenance, websites can be a lot of work to create and maintain. While operating a full-fledged websites requires some degree of technical competence, a blog is as easy to use as an online email program. Which one is better for Adsense? Blog or website While individual results may vary, from our network of websites and blogs (about a dozen), we have found that the CTR is higher for websites than for blogs. Or in other words, you are to likely to make more money from websites than blogs. What are the other benefits of websites? You have total control. You can do whatever you want with your design, layout, architecture, etc. You have a lot of flexibility in how you display ads, where, how many units, etc. With a blog, you have too many restrictions and you are stuck wit

iProceed has been arguing that we need to transition from being a knowledge economy to a wisdom economy since parts of economies of countries like China and India are already operating as knowledge economies (Related article: Knowledge economy becomes global ). To expedite the transition of US economy to a wisdom economy, two things are critical: education of younger Americans and retraining of older Americans who are increasingly being pushed out of jobs that they did all their lives and do not have the skills to do what may be needed in a rapidly changing economy in which many services can be provided from almost anywhere. (Related link: End of knowledge economy; birth of wisdom economy ) It was, therefore, sad to read the findings of the study by National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education that we get a F grade in affordability of education. It may be worthwhile to point out that we already are lagging in producing enough "technologists" compared to India and Ch

The rank of your website could make or break your business. The biggest advantage of a high rank of your website is the position at which your website is displayed in a search. Since only a finite number of websites can be displayed on page one or two in a search result, it is not easy to maintain a rank (there are always other websites trying to dislodge your website from that rank). Here are some tips to increase your website's ranking. These tips are useful not only for nanopublishing websites but also for ebusiness websites: Think of your customers/readers and create products/content that is good for them rather than playing the ranking game. Like the word-of-mouth marketing, if you have good products/information for your readers, your visitors will talk about it and put links to your page. That way you will get a lot more relevant links (which are much better than links from unrelated websites). We only worry about two search engines: Google and Yahoo. Other search engines ar

If you want to have a proper website that you want to run as a business, one of the most important things that you will need to have is a web hosting company. Let us share our experiences so that you can develop the right criteria to pick a web hosting company. Before we do that, here is a little background. When we first started in 1999, we signed up with Hostway. Since we were small and relatively new to the Internet, we did not realize that we may not have picked the right company. When we grew, Hostway simply wanted to rip us off by charging a huge fee to upgrade to higher level plan. By that time the hosting business had become pretty competitive (and rates were rapidly falling) with numerous choices so we switched to HostRocket. They promised enormous bandwidth but apparently it was only a promise that they never intended to keep. It is unbelievable what companies will do to mislead customers. While we never exceeded the bandwidth we were supposed to get, they still threw us out

It is not a big secret any more among the advertisers that traditional advertising ROI has rapidly dropped. In fact it continues to surprise us that there is still so much advertising budget for television despite the low return. Sometimes you actually wonder why some companies continue to waste their dollars on what everyone knows does not work effectively. (Related article: Traditional advertising in danger ) When we proposed the 3Es of advertising , we were not sure how many advertisers we will see who will embrace embedded advertising but one example that we want to point out is that of General Motors giving away over 200 cars to the audience in Oprah's show. Wow! What a smart move? The publicity is incredible and would not have been possible even if they had spent $100 million on traditional advertising. The overall cost to GM: less than $10 million. Tips on implementing embedded advertising Think outside the box. An emerging high-end restaurant in the Boston area recently ser

As we pointed out in the introduction to the ebusiness blog , MYNIPPON.com underwent a business model transformation in August of 2004. The process took approximately three weeks and we shifted the center of gravity from an affiliate-programs based revenue model to pay-per-click advertising model for reasons that we have been discussing through this blog. So we would say that from a 100% affiliate-programs based model we have now shifted to 10-90 model. We have identified several faults with affiliate programs in their current forms and how they are not based on the principle of mutual success (they are heavily biased towards the merchant). Until the industry comes up with programs that are based on mutual-win, only naive affiliates will base their business models on affiliate programs alone. Others like us are rapidly redesigning (or redesigned it during last 18 months) their business models on PPC advertising. A business model transformation of this type does not, however, mean that

While it was no surprise to us that growth continues to be the #1 challenge for business leaders what did surprise us somewhat was that, in a Bain & Co.'s survey, three out of four executives said that finding the next wave of profitable growth will be the most difficult in their businesses' history. We at iProceed believe that growth is never there for everyone to just see and grab; innovative companies connect the dots to identify growth opportunities. (Related link: A series of articles on new growth opportunities identification ). Over next couple of weeks, we will be discussing a series of new growth opportunities identified by us. In this article, we want to start off by discussing a tremendous growth opportunity to serve those Americans (and while we have not yet profiled consumers outside the US, the number is much larger) that do not have any relationship with a bank for whatever reason. Attributes of non-banking American consumers Estimated to be approximately 30-

A question very often asked by entrepreneurs is if they can build a real business (for the purpose of this article we are defining it as equal to real median household income of ~ $43,000 for each person employed in the business) with just affiliate programs. A perusal of the websites of merchants that rely on affiliate programs and a host of other websites on the Internet might lead you to believe that affiliate programs provide you with a 'get-rich-quick" program. The answer is that for over 95% of the people the affiliate programs produce essentially pocket money. Yes, there are affiliates that have real businesses but these are not businesses that can be started overnight by anyone and money will not come the next day. The limitations of affiliate programs Since the clickthrough rates for affiliate programs tends to be pathetically low, high traffic is key. While you might be tempted to "buy" traffic from all the sellers out there, it doesn't work very effect

If you are a commercial website, you expect that your visitors will take an action that will create income for you. For a content-rich website like ours designed to push ecommerce for our advertisers, a desirable action by our visitors for us is a click on an ad. Once the visitor reaches the ecommerce website, the desired action can be a purchase or something similar. How can good web design increase clickthrough rate (CTR)? Avoid clutter at all cost. Most human beings don't like clutter in their lives and so is true on a web page as well. No (our pick is this one) or minimal animation. It it a distraction and an irritant. Make navigation easy. Place your ads so that they are neither intrusive nor hidden. (Take a look at this page http://www.mynippon.com/beauty/belly-dancing.htm ) Place your ad in a place in the article where the reader is likely to say, "Gee, I need more information on this" or "I gotta buy this stuff." (Take a look at this page http://www.myni

Do you know where your website visitors are coming from? If you do not have this metric accurately captured, you will be wasting a lot of dollars. We learned this lesson the hard way. As everyone knows, today it is possible (and cost effective) to measure the geographic location of your visitors with a high degree of accuracy. It wasn't so just two years ago and whatever tools were available were unaffordable by small businesses like ours. Being an English language website we attract visitors from all English-speaking countries and to a small extent even from non-English speaking countries. While US has always been, and still is, the largest market for us, MYNIPPON is very popular all over the world. However, visitors from other countries can rarely purchase the products that we recommended (as part of our affiliate programs). The result: While we attracted a lot of visitors and had an impressive click rate, our conversation rate was pathetically low because these visitors could no

As we discussed in our previous article, public service ads can be a serious waste of effort for real businesses that leverage high quality content to generate revenue. Of course, you can eliminate public service ads by using your own banner instead (sophisticated users can even show advertisements from Google competitors). However, the best thing to have is never to have the situation that you need to deal with public service ads. While we have not yet perfected the system to have minimum possible public service ads, here are the learnings from our experience with our network of websites: Always do some research before you even create any content. If a quick Google search does not show a lot of ads on the right hand side, chances are that your article is unlikely to show any ads either. While you might still need to write an article because it will be of interest to your readers, but you can do other things with advertising space on that page. Ask the question that, based on your arti

If you have listened to our advice and started publishing content for generating income through advertising, you have probably seen public service ads. While all businesses should think how they want to contribute to non-profit organization, this article is designed to help you with those situations when you would like to eliminate public service ads for purely business reasons. While Google has an explanation on its website, we (technically unsophisticated team at MYNIPPON) found it to be too difficult, until we sat down one to day to figure it out ourselves. Here is a very simple explanation of how to get rid of public service ads (or PSAs). We will only describe an example of a 160X600 size ad that you will replace with a banner directing visitors to your home page (there are many other complicated things that you can do but this is what we think is the best): Create a page in the mother web of your website and name it 160600.htm (you can choose other names but we find it easy to fo

In July 2004, we had made a bold suggestions to advertising executives: leverage the power of the bloggers and use them in your guerilla marketing efforts . We had suggested that advertisers approach the bloggers and work with them to create buzz. Yes, it can be an efficient and time-consuming process to approach bloggers (many of them are not businesses, some do not even disclose their real identities, while others are just skeptical of corporations who want to influence their message), but a new service will make this easier than ever. What this company is offering is data mining of blogs. Blabble, while still in beta mode, will allow you to find who is talking about your products/services and what are they saying. Why data mining of blogs makes sense? Blogs are just starting to explode. Their very independent nature makes them attractive to consumers who can read unadulterated commentary. The young generation does not care about the political correctness of established media outlets

We have been discussing a company that we like a lot: The Limited Group. In our previous article, we discussed how Victoria's Secret has gone through a business model transformation recently. This time we want to review how one of their other divisions, Bath & Body Works is pursuing the strategy of providing "luxury for the masses". Luxury for the masses We have been converted to the philosophy of "luxury for the masses" because of several economic indicators in 2004 (we have written extensively on these indicators and rather than providing many links here, we encourage you to do a search instead on our website to read the detailed analysis): Some 1.3 million Americans slid into poverty in 2003 despite the economic recovery. The percentage of the U.S. population living in poverty rose to 12.5%from 12.1% in 2002. We have as many as 36 million poor Americans now. Income of Americans (who are still employed) continues to fall. iProceed.com expects taxes to rise

A lot of our readers were intrigued when we mentioned the reasons for our high profitability . We watch our costs very closely. Apart from what we mentioned there (we fly coach and avoid business trips as much as we can), one area that we have made tremendous savings is the tele-communications, or in simple words, telephone bill (we will deal with other areas where we manage our costs very carefully in later articles). We switched to a new technology called voice over internet protocol or VOIP in November of 2003. What is VOIP? This is a non-technical explanation. Instead of sending the phone calls over traditional phone lines, they are sent over the Internet (which you typically access if you have a broadband connection). Thus, your phone call is identical to an email or a chat or surfing of a website. In other words, it is as cheap as sending an email, or almost free (you will need to pay a small monthly fee to a VOIP provider and pay by the minute for international calls). So if you

We have been discussing how you can replicate the MYNIPPON business model to develop a web-based content publishing (sometimes also referred to as nanopublishing) business that produces income through advertising. At this time, according to the statistics available, believe it or not, there are more advertisers and less places on the Internet to advertise. No wonder Google is trying to increase its inventory as fast as it can to meet the demand from advertisers. There is simply not enough search inventory available and that is why Google is relying heavily on contextual advertising (through its AdSense program: the one that we use). You are encouraged to do your research in an area that you are interested to find out who the advertisers are, how many publications are available, what is the best method to reach the readers (blog or website), and anything else that you think will help you better design your business model. In our previous article we provided insights on how you can dev

How do we make money? This is one of the most frequently asked questions to us by our fans, and of course, our network of friends, business associates, and partners. So here are a few important facts about MYNIPPON before we give you our money-making secrets. We also suggest that you keep reading till the end even if you do not understand certain things. There are plenty of other helpful links on this page. MYNIPPON is not a hobby (though it used to be at some point when it stared in 1999). We are now part of the eCreativa network that includes other very successful websites like Lindisima , LuvCube , and iProceed . All these websites combined together attract over half-a-million visitors each month. We derive over 90% of our income from advertising (that includes PPC, affiliate programs, advertorials, etc.). Why are we so successful when many online content businesses are struggling? We happen to be in the right place at the right time and our costs are under control (unlike the folks