Category Archives: Web Technology

Why Creating a Successful Business is like Winning in Ice Hockey

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Why creating a successful business is like winning an ice hockey gameCoaching & Strategy

In hockey, the coach can make or break a team. A great coach inspires the players, guides them to follow a rock solid strategy, and helps them keep their head up when times are tough.

A great business mentor needs to have the same qualities. Although it may take “10,000 hours” to become a master in something new, you can certainly speed up your process by borrowing hours from people who have been there and back. Great mentors can give you a solid strategy to market your business, convert more sales, keep your customers coming back for more, and give you advice when things aren’t going your way.

A great business coach (and a supporting mastermind group) can make the difference between a business flop and a tremendous success. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but the fortune is in the execution.  My business coach is offering a new challenge this week that will certainly transform some businesses for the new year!

Agility & Responsiveness

In hockey, players need agility to cut in and out of tight spots, turn on a dime, and re-act in super human scenarios, because a second late can make all the difference between a win and a loss. In running your business, you need agility to make changes on the fly when something you thought would be a huge success isn’t working.

While you’re running your big marketing campaign, you need agility to analyze and take action on results from split testing to achieve maximum profits. With the speed at which the modern world operates, failing to react quickly to signals can mean the difference between a massive success or a disappointing failure.

Coordination & Teamwork

In hockey, having the best players in the world isn’t always going to lead to a win. The use of great teamwork and coordination is just as important as the skill of the players. We’ve seen this many times when underdogs “outplay” the teams expected to win. This happens in all sports and many times it’s a matter of superior teamwork and coordination that leads to winning the game.

In business, it’s critical to have all of your systems and employees talking to each other and working together. If your email system doesn’t know which customers purchased products, you can end up with embarrassing emails going to the wrong people. If your team members aren’t aware of new promotions coming along, your customer support can falter from miscommunication.

Having alignment in your systems and team is incredibly important to having a business that runs smoothly and grows rapidly. This is one of the biggest reasons we love Infusionsoft so much – it makes this level of coordination easy and seamless in your business!

Stick-to-it-iveness & Commitment

In hockey, it takes incredible commitment to show up game after game with intensity and focus. Down the stretch when teams are tired and worn out, the best conditioned and most committed teams rise to the top and claim victory.

In business, it’s a similar story. My good friend Lynan once gave me some advice when I was starting a new project. She said, “This part is a sprint, the rest is a marathon”. Sometimes you need to be able to take a few blows while testing new ideas to see what works, and stick in there when things are getting tough. You can’t always give up after the first try.

With that said, it’s also imperative to give yourself time for recovery and rest. Otherwise you risk burnout which can be detrimental to your focus for a long time. Hockey teams regularly take breaks from practice to recuperate. This is essential for solid performance in the long haul!

Hunger & Hustle

In hockey, commentators regularly say that the best players are “hungry for the puck”. They’ll do what it takes to get the puck on their stick to make a play, score a goal, etc. A little bit of extra hustle can mean a big difference over the course of a game or season.

In business, companies have to be hungry for the sale. This isn’t to say that you should compromise your values and integrity – that’s a whole different topic. However, if you don’t ask for the sale and fail to give your customers a clear and obvious path to buy from you, they will never convert from prospects to customers.

Getting the Right Support

If your team needs support in the sprint or needs help preparing for the marathon then it may be time to invest in a strategic coach to help you reach your goals. If you want to discuss how better marketing automation can support your business and launches click here to schedule a call.

In other news, I am so glad hockey is back!

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Image credit: 5of7

5 WordPress Plugins to Optimize Your Site in 2013

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One of the most common questions we get around web site design and maintenance is a list of favorite plugins for WordPress.  It’s almost like the entrepreneur’s version of wanting to know the “must-have” apps for that new smart phone!

Here’s our list of “must-have” plugins that will re-vamp your website for the new year!

1. Google Analytics for WordPress

It’s shocking how many businesses with websites aren’t using Google Analytics – an amazing FREE tool that tells you who’s visiting your site, what the are clicking, how long they are sticking around, and how well your goals (like getting folks to view a sales page and click through to purchase) are converting.  It’s a must have, and our favorite plugin to tie WordPress to Google Analytics is Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast.

2. WordPress Backup to Dropbox

We’ve written about securing and backing up your website data before, and our favorite plugin to accomplish this task is WordPress Backup to Dropbox.  If you’re living under a rock (haha just kidding), DropBox is a free service that allows for automatic backup of data to your free “cloud” storage drive.  You can get several GB of space for free, which is sufficient for most sites.  Configuring this plugin is a breeze, and you can set it up to automatically back up your website every day or week.  This one has been a life saver in the past!

3. WP-Optimize

Do you regularly go through your MySQL database to manually clean things up?  Nope? Same here.  That’s why we use WP-Optimize to delete old junk (old post auto-saves, and other things that build up over time) which improves the site’s speed and user experience.  It’s free and super easy to use once you’ve installed the plugin!

4. MaxButtons

Want to make those awesome looking call-to-action buttons that you see everywhere around the net?  (You know, those ones that change color as you hover over and look beautiful?).  If you aren’t much of a CSS3 coder, no worries.  MaxButtons is a great plugin that allows you to build your buttons (and choose where they should link) with an easy what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor.  Once you’ve created your buttons, you can pop them into any page or post that you’d like with some super simple shortcodes.

5. nRelate Related Content

What are your website visitors supposed to do after reading an article?  If you’d like to keep them around to consume more, one great way is to display related articles that may tickle their fancy.  One of our favorites is nRelate Related Content.  It’s easy to set up, looks fantastic, is fairly customizable, and – best part – it’s totally free!

(Bonus!) 6. iMember360*

If you’re already using Infusionsoft, then iMember360 is a plugin that will super-charge your WordPress website.  Using iMember, you can create content that is restricted to “members only” who have paid for access to your material.  But that only scratches the surface.  With iMember, you have control to display nearly any data from your Infusionsoft database on your WordPress page.  

For example, you can customize pages by merging in the user’s name, you can make notes of their actions by applying tags based on activity, you can create one-click-upsells for users who are already previous customers, and so much more.

iMember360 is a premium plugin that costs some money, but used properly, it’s worth its weight in gold many times over.  If you choose to purchase through our links on this page, we earn a small commission which helps support the site.

Need help installing and configuring iMember360?  

Head over to the contact page and get in touch.

Put Your Social Media on Auto Pilot

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I’ve recently been playing around with a few options for automating my social media posting. There’s a few commonly known solutions – like Hootsuite – that work very well.

But being the automation nerd that I am, I wanted to find a solution that would automatically syndicate all of my WordPress blog posts to all of my social media channels in a way that’s appropriate to optimize each channel (for example twitter locks you at 140 characters, while facebook allows you to have a thumbnail image and longer text).

My New Favorite App – IFTTT (If This Then That)

My favorite aspect of Infusionsoft is that I can set up automation triggers.  If I want to trigger a certain outcome based on an event, all I have to do is set up the appropriate actions and rules.  For example,  if I want to have a followup email sequence automatically send to a customer after a specific product is purchased, all I need to do is set up an action set to make this happen.

But what about social media?  I want to be able to publish a new post to my site and have it automatically syndicate across all of my social media channels – Facebook, twitter, google+, linkedin, etc.

I’ve found a few solutions that attempt to accomplish this, but I wasn’t pleased with them because each of them had a substantial delay between the kickoff action (publishing a post) and the resulting effect (publishing to social media).  I wanted this to happen immediately!

Then I stumbled upon IFTTT.  With this amazing (free!) app, you can create “recipes” that work very similar to actions in Infusionsoft.  For example, take a look at my recipes for syndicating my materials across social media as soon as I publish a post:

Social Media on Autopilot with IFTTT

 As soon as I finalize and publish this post, it will automatically post a snippet to my Facebook fan page, Twitter, and Linkedin.  But what about Google+?  Although it isn’t natively supported yet, I have a hack for you:  Set up a new recipe to watch for a facebook fan page post to go live, then once it does, have that post to Google+ through Hootsuite!

The greatest part is that you can customize how each snippet will look.  For example, with Twitter I only have room for the very basics (title of the post + a shortened link), but for Facebook it will automatically post the title, description, and try to pull a featured image.

Need help getting these set up?  I’ve shared a few of my “recipes” here.  Click each of them to create your own off of my models.

WordPress Post publish to Facebook Fan Page

WordPress Post publish to Twitter

Imagine how much time this saves if you are posting to all of these multiple times per week!  Talk about saving time through automation.

Taking Automation Further

Do you pay any virtual employees or business expenses through Paypal?  If so I have a cool recipe for you:

IFTTT Paypal receipts to Evernote

Any time I make a payment through Paypal, this recipe will automatically save a copy of the receipt to Evernote.  The possibilities are endless and only limited by your imagination.

How much time would this save in your business?  Post you answer in the comments below.

Are Your Split Test Results Lying to You?

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Statistical DifferenceStatistical Significance in Split Testing

In Marketing, we LOVE split testing — and for good reason — it’s a fantastic method of optimizing a campaign for the best conversion rates and ultimately biggest profit margins.

However, one very important thing to keep in mind when performing these split testing experiments is the “statistical significance” of the results from a split test.  For those of you who’s eyes just glazed over when I dropped the word statistics… I’ll try to keep this topic high-touch and easy to digest.

If you look up the wiki on statistical significance, you’ll find that we’re essentially attempting to predict if the results we get from a split test are meaningful and repeatable.

Why is this important?

Let’s imagine that we are attempting to test the effectiveness of 2 headline options on the sales page for our next launch.   We want to figure out if headline “A” or headline “B” is producing more sales.

Here are the theoretical results after sending 1100 visitors to both sales pages:

[hr]

Example #1

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 1100

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Using a Statistical Difference calculator, we can determine that the difference is 4%, with a comparative error of 2.1.  Don’t worry if you don’t understand the math behind it, just be aware that a higher comparative error is bad!

The part you should care about is that the answer is “YES“, there is a statistical difference.  We have statistically proven that Headline “B” is converting better, so we’ll go ahead and run all of our advertising dollars towards Headline “B”.

Now what happens if we reduce the traffic to the site during the test?  Can we still be sure that Headline “B” is better?  Let’s suppose that we were only able to drive 200 visitors to each test.  Are our results still valid?

[hr]

Example #2

[twocol_one]Headline “A”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 5%

[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Headline “B”

# of visitors: 200

conversion 9%

[/twocol_one_last]

[hr]

Checking the calculator again, we now see that the comparative error has jumped up from 2.1 to 5 (remember, higher is worse!).  And the result is that there is NOT a statistical difference between our results.

What does this mean in practical terms?

Say we have $10,000 to spend on advertising for this campaign.  From our quick calculations, we have proven that the results from Example 2 could be a total fluke.  We didn’t have enough visitors to the site to validate that the results are meaningful!  So now we really DON’T know what headline should yield higher results without sending more traffic to verify.  Better do some more testing!

Have you ever run a split test with interesting results?  Post your story below in the comments.

What is Marketing Automation and Why Should I Care About It?

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In an ideal world, we would have the time to reach out to each customer in a very personal manner.  We’d call them and chat with them for hours on end, trying to help them in any way possible.

We’d treat them as if they were the only other person in the world, and our only goal would be to help them achieve their goals.

Unfortunately most of us don’t have time to spend endless hours with every single customer.  As our businesses grow, our time available to interact with each customer starts to dwindle.  Responsibilities arise, management duties expand, and the customer is often forgotten amidst the hustle of running the business.

However, new tools are emerging that help us to leverage our time so that each customer feels loved and appreciated.  Those tools are bundled into marketing automation software such as Infusionsoft.

The Problem With Automation

The problem with sitting behind a powerful piece of software like Infusionsoft is that it’s easy start talking like a robot.  There’s some psychological switch that gets flicked when we gain the power of speak to a large audience online.  What starts as well-meaning, value-adding information somehow twists into a cold corporate voice when blasting emails to a list.

Think about it — would you write emails to your best friend that sound like that?  If not then why are we talking to people (our loved customers) in such a way?

Jermaine Griggs coined the term “Scaling Personal Attention”, and I think it really suits the optimal way to take advantage of a tool like Infusionsoft.

Marketing automation provides us with the ability to treat each customer as if they were our only customer.  We can listen closely to them and discover their deepest goals through intelligent web forms and tagging.  We can customize product suggestions based on what we already know about their frustrations.  We can stay in touch with them via multiple channels of communication.  We can automatically follow up with customers if we haven’t heard from them in a while.

Treat your customers like your best friend.  We have the power to do so with marketing automation – the key is tweaking how we approach the power.