Publish your e-mail address, put up with the spam

In a recent webinar, I recommended that you should publish your e-mail address prominently on your Web site, rather than forcing users to fill in a form. One of the participants asked the obvious question:

"How do you avoid these being picked up and used for sending spam?"

There are ways to spam-protect e-mail addresses (e.g. turning them into graphics). But the real answer is to put up with the spam. It's a small price to pay.

That might not be what you wanted to hear, but it's good business sense. Sure, it's annoying to get spam, but it's even more annoying to lose business.

In any case, although some spammers do get e-mail addresses from Web sites, that's not the most common source now. It's more likely they will get your e-mail address by a virus that infects somebody else's address book and captures all the e-mail addresses in it. And there's nothing you can do about that.

The Web Marketing Pipeline - And Why Yours is Leaking Money

It's easy to get confused by all the things that you hear people say about making money with the Internet. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics, blogging, shopping carts, e-zines ... It's all too much!

Let me simplify this for you ...

There are - fundamentally - only four ways to use your Web site to increase your income:

1. Lead: You bring more traffic to the site.
2. Sell: You persuade more of those people to buy from you.
3. More: You increase the amount of each transaction.
4. Again: You make repeat sales to those customers.

That's the Web Marketing Pipeline:

In other words, your job is to sell more things to more people more often for more money.

The big mistake

Most Web site owners make the mistake of trying to focus too much on the first of these four steps - i.e. getting more traffic. They obsess about Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and every other new Bright Shiny Object that comes their way. And they try to use these tools to drive traffic to their Web site:

Why is this a mistake? Because it's hard work. Sure, it works - but it takes work. A lot of work.

Here's a better way ...

Rather than obsessing about getting more traffic, turn your attention instead to converting the traffic you do get:

It's absolutely true that if you get more traffic, chances are you'll make more sales. But it's also true that if you were able to improve the conversion rate of the people you're already getting, then you'll also make more sales. It's often much easier to improve the conversion rate than it is to get more visitors to the site, and it's also much more cost effective.

The good thing about converting people on your Web site is that conversion rates are pretty low in general. I bet you're not convincing even 1% of your site visitors to take action.

But don't be disheartened! If you're getting a 1% conversion rate, you have 99 people out of 100 not buying. Believe it or not, this is good news! If you can reduce that to just 98, you just doubled your whole conversion rate, which means that you've doubled your profits, you've doubled your sales, you've doubled everything.

Compare that with trying to get twice as much traffic to your site!

Recording: Planning Your Web Site - Part 2 of 3

Today was the second of my free three-part webinar series about planning your Web site.

If you don't have a Web site yet, this webinar series will help you plan for it. If you do have a Web site, these webinars will help you fine-tune it to make it more effective.

Session 1 (1st March): Understanding your site visitors
Session 2 (8th March): Leading them on the right path
Session 3 (15th March): Persuading them to buy (or take action)

If you missed this session, you can watch the recording here:



Note: The webinar included a special offer for coming to my "Build Your Web Site In Two Days" Boot Camp in April. This offer is only available until the end of today - Monday 8th March. You get $500 off the Boot Camp price, making it less than $1,000! If you're interested, register here.

It's not too late to register for the final webinar, even if you haven't done so yet. Register for the two remaining webinars here.

Thinking Ahead Journal: Matt Hern, Sue-maree McEnearney, Gihan Perera, Matt Church, Glenn Capelli, Ian Berry, Ross Clennett, Karen Schmidt and others

Every week I collect the most recent blog posts from my clients and members - all leading thinkers about business and life - and assemble them into the Thinking Ahead journal.

Download the 7th March 2010 issue here.

What's in it:

• Ann Rolfe's Mentoring Works Blog: Mentoring | Return on Investment
• Let's go there...: There is no excuse for being a bully
• So What's Next?: Fulfilling our promise
• Thought Leaders Blog: Helicopters and vending machines
• Ann Rolfe's Mentoring Works Blog: Be An Employer Of Choice
• Gihan Perera: Connect your blog feeds to Twitter
• Matt Hern's Money Guide: Comparison of business structures
• Peter Webb's "Wisdom Circle": Positive Psychology!
• Gihan Perera: On-Line Collaboration: The Principles
• Gihan Perera: On-Line Collaboration: The Tools
• Notes from the workplace garden: Potted plants matter too!
• Sue-maree: Cope Strategies: Power Plays & Compliance Capers
• So What's Next?: Differencemakers Master-Class Tour - 12 cities, 7 countries
• Gihan Perera: The importance of being able to update your own Web site
• Matt Hern's Money Guide: Store your Will safely in the Will Bank
• Matt Hern's Money Guide: Tragedy strikes around 20 percent of working families
• Ross Clennett: Getting past 60 seconds: tips for telephone prospecting
• Thought Leaders Blog: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!
• Matt Church: Take No More
• Gihan Perera: Recording: Planning Your Web Site - Part 1 of 3
• Sales Success Forum: More Sales Lessons From Salespeople
• Let's go there...: It’s your dream so why would you let someone else squash it
• Thinking Caps: The Lack of Service Systems (bring out the Wanker in me)
• The Truth about Trust: Complaints when trust breaks down
• Gihan Perera: Show word clouds with Wordle
• Sales Success Forum: Abundance And Success In Sales
• Notes from the workplace garden: You aren’t crazy if you talk to your plants

Connect your blog feeds to Twitter

Not everything that you tweet about is worthy of a blog post. After all, that's what made Twitter so popular, because you can type something brief and send it out to your mates, without composing a full blog post.

But look at it the other way around. It's probably true that everything you write in your blog is worthy of going out to your Twitter followers as well.

Use the free Twitterfeed service to automate this process:



You simply give it your blog address, and it will check for new posts regularly (you choose how regularly) and publish them to your Twitter feed. Of course, it can't fit the entire post into a tweet. Instead, it sends the post subject as the tweet, with a link to the full post on your blog. Exactly what you want.

This is one of the on-line services featured in my Gold Star Services mailing list. If you would like to learn of more services like this to help you be more productive, sign up to the mailing list here.

On-Line Collaboration: The Tools

In our previous podcast we discussed the principles of on-line collaboration. In this episode we look at some practical tools for making this work in practice.

Listen to this episode here:


MP3 File

Web sites we mentioned in this episode:

Setting up the project:

• Creating the workspace: Ning, Wiggio, Twitter
• Forming the team: Outsource using Elance.com, Guru.com, Rent-a-coder.com
• Project planning: BasecampHQ.com

Scheduling meetings:

• Send around meeting invites using Outlook, Lotus Notes, etc.
• TimeBridge.com allows you to nominate up to 5 possible times for a meeting
• Tungle.me (and many others) allows you to show the team when you're available for meetings

Conducting on-line meetings:

• Teleconferences, Skype
• Webinars: WebEx, Netmeeting, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar

Informal discussions:

• Discussion forums are useful for asynchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Chat rooms are good for synchronous discussions (Ning provides this facility)
• Bubbl.us for collaborative mind mapping
• Wallwisher.com to create your own bulletin board - example:
  

Document sharing

• Google Docs: A web-based office productivity suite, i.e. a word-processor, presentation tool, spreadsheet etc.
• Wikis: Web sites for collaboratively editing a collection of interlinked web-pages (e.g. Wikipedia)
• Use a Wiki farm for hosted wikis
• Use Rapidshare or Dropbox for sharing big files

Document management:

• Help desks and issue trackers: Bugzilla, Trac
• Google Docs provides revision control

The importance of being able to update your own Web site

I can't emphasise enough the importance of being able to update your own Web site. Don't fall into the trap of thinking you can get by with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social media tools. These tools are important - no doubt about it - but remember that after you make the connection with somebody, they will want to visit your Web site to find out exactly what you do. If that Web site is out of date - or even wrong - it destroys all credibility.

Peter Dhu recently attended my Build Your Web Site In Two Days Boot Camp, because he had an old, out-of-date site. After two days, he had rebuilt the site to be modern, fresh, and - most importantly - completely within his control.

Here's what he had to say:

"I must admit I was sceptical when I started, and a bit nervous about the technology. But I'm truly amazed at what I achieved in the 2 days. I had spent time gathering and writing material for the web site. But the amazing thing is that I can now manipulate my new web site - the functionality is brilliant I'm thrilled that I can finally manipulate, edit and update my own website, independent of any third party or web designer. And if I can do it, then truly anyone can."

Peter Dhu

Thinking Ahead Journal: Matt Hern, Gihan Perera, Karen Schmidt, David Beard, Hugh Gyton, Ann Rolfe, Ian Berry, Glenn Cardwell, Anne Riches and others

Every week I collect the most recent blog posts from my clients and members - all leading thinkers about business and life - and assemble them into the Thinking Ahead journal.

Download the 28th February 2010 issue here.

What's in it:

• Matt Hern's Money Guide: The must read book for aspiring entrepreneurs
• So What's Next?: The Wisdom Manifesto by Umair Haque
• Gihan Perera: Is Avatar just the same as Pocahontas?
• Gihan Perera: Be the Centre of Your Tribe
• Notes from the workplace garden: After the storm
• Lifelong Fitness: Strength helps you remember
• Gihan Perera: Use Case Studies to Build Trust and Facilitate Sales
• Just a conversation™: Difficult Conversations
• Ann Rolfe's Mentoring Works Blog: Evaluating Mentoring Programs - Webinar
• So What's Next?: Doing what we are capable of - with thanks to Gandhi and Haque
• Gihan Perera: Val Jones' engaging presenting combining Pecha Kucha and limericks
• Glenn Cardwell: The obesity epidemic
• Glenn Cardwell: Juice Plus revisited
• The Almond Effect: CLUES Is lack of sleep making you a poor leader?
• Thought Leaders Blog: The Inaugrual Thought Leaders Magazine
• Thought Leaders Blog: Inspired or Simply Surviving?
• Gihan Perera: Alicia Curtis presents the 2010 Australian Emerging Leaders Report
• Matt Church: Who is really stopping you from taking your business to the next level?
• Ross Clennett: Atlassian32 - the story (and lessons) so far
• Notes from the workplace garden: Preparing for the storm
• So What's Next?: When sustainability isn't sustainable and how it can be
• Just a conversation™: Building Trust - It's not about hugs

Recording: Planning Your Web Site - Part 1 of 3

Yesterday we ran the first of my free three-part webinar series about planning your Web site.

If you don't have a Web site yet, this webinar series will help you plan for it. If you do have a Web site, these webinars will help you fine-tune it to make it more effective.

Session 1 (1st March): Understanding your site visitors
Session 2 (8th March): Leading them on the right path
Session 3 (15th March): Persuading them to buy (or take action)

Here's what Jacquie Molloy had to say in a tweet immediately after the webinar:



If you missed this session, you can watch the recording here:



It's not too late to register for the rest of the webinars, even if you haven't done so yet. Register for the two remaining webinars here.

Show word clouds with Wordle

Wordle is a service for showing "word clouds" from your text:

A word cloud is a picture ... kind of. It shows the words in a piece of text, with the most frequently occurring words larger and bolder. You might have seen these word clouds on blogs or forums, to show the most popular topics.

Now you can create your own, based on any text you provide. For example, here's a sample showing the latest word cloud from my blog:

This is not the sort of service you would use every day, but it's handy for special circumstances. For example, you could use it to show:

• Popular topics from a conference program
• The most common words on a Web page
• Popular words in a discussion forum
• Most common words from your client testimonials

The word clouds you create are entirely yours to use for any purpose, so use your imagination. For example, why not make up T-shirts of your word cloud for promotional purposes?