Thousands of wannabe entrepreneurs dream about being their own boss and the rewards from starting their own company. Unfortunately, they completely overlook the qualities and hard work it takes to succeed. Around 80% of businesses fail in the first two years, mainly due to inadequate skill and knowledge. Below, we’ll highlight and debunk myths about starting your own business.

Economy is bad – This is a popular myth about starting a business. Most entrepreneurs wait for the “right time”. The truth is there is no right or wrong time. There are many entrepreneurs who have started in a bad economy, or when in debt, but are now successful.

We have a perfect business plan- No plan is perfect. Markets change every day and you need to adapt. Don’t spend lots of your time writing business plans and doing growth predictions – you never know how your consumers will react to your products. Instead of writing a detailed plan focus on the key points and revise often.

Innovation means success – It’s good you are innovative and trying something new, but not every innovative product succeeds. You need to confirm whether the market is ready for the concept. A recent example is Google Buzz which hasn’t made a huge impact (yet). Make sure the market has enough space for your product to grow.

Perfection is important – Don’t wait for a perfect product to make your first sale.  Start selling once you’ve got a workable product and improve it based on customer feedback. A good example of this is Microsoft and improvements to Windows 1.0 in 1985 till now on the basis of customer’s feedback.

Turning a hobby into a business –Many business consultants suggest turning your hobby into a business. You still need to understand the huge difference between a hobby for fun and for your client’s money – the stakes and the demands are a lot higher when it’s someone else’s money.

You can set your own schedule – Many aspiring entrepreneurs think they can set their own schedules. The reality is different. As a boss you need to be everywhere, with your employees, your clients and more. As boss you set the work culture in your company – if you want your employees to work extra hours then you have to. As a boss you will often be the first to enter and last to leave.

Products sell themselves – You might have the greatest product in the world but it won’t sell itself without marketing. In many markets thousands of other people might be selling the same products, so you need to take the initiative to go to your audience instead of waiting for them.

These are seven myths about starting a business. Do you know of any others? Feel free to share them in the comments below.

This guest post is by Gagandeep Singh who works for Fortepromo Promotional Products.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Mar 30th, 2010 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Most ecommerce sites are using Adwords. I manage AdWords account on behalf of several clients. Frankly, I’ve never really liked the AdWords interface. I always dreaded going in there and, like it or not, as humans, we are less inclined to do things we hate.

I recently downloaded the Google Adwords Editor. This is a program you download to manage your adwords account(s) in (yes, it works with master accounts for those who have them, a godsend for me). You import your account in, make the changes offline, then when you are happy you sync it back up.

What’s it like? It’s amazing. Every now and then you bump into a piece of software that just works exactly how you think it should. This is one of them. No, it’s not perfect, there are a few things I’d like to change, but overall it’s wonderful. I’ve spent the last few hours over hauling the largest account I manage, and it’s been so easy to do. I’m absolutely convinced that when I go back in a few weeks time to check out the results of these changes, the client’s sales will have gone up at least 10%. I suspect if I were doing it via the web interface I wouldn’t have made quite so many tweaks, and probably not gotten as good a result.

I love it! Well done Google Adwords Editor team!

Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 2nd, 2008 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

One of the frustrating things about being a new site is that new sites rank poorly in Google. This is doubly frustrating for ecommerce sites who often rely on Google organic traffic for a lot of their sales.

In the SEO community, it’s widely accepted that new domains are penalized in search engines (e.g. receive poor rankings) for approximately 6 – 8 months. There’s little that can be done about this. In fact, sometimes doing aggressive SEO work in that period can make it longer. This  is called the aging delay.

If you want to minimise this damage, the best steps are:

• Register the domain as soon as you can
• Put up a one page site, with a brief explanation as to what it is/will be. It doesn’t need a pretty design, just something basic, as long as it contains a few good keywords so Google understands what the page/domain is about.
• Get the site one or two links – beg your friend, your brother’s blog, etc. The links are so Google can discover the site and start the clock running to age your domain.

Given most sites take a few months to build, it’s a good way to minimize the painful waiting period.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 2nd, 2008 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Great news from the Inside AdWords blog: Google Conversion Optimizer is launched. For those of you not clear on this, let’s take a brief look at history. Early ads were all CPM based – pay per 1,000 impressions. This is still popular, and Google supports it. Overture and then Google revolutionized the industry with CPC – cost per click ads, which virtually all ecommerce sites use today.

Most people are also familiar with affiliates, where you pay someone for referring a customer to you if that results in a sale.

Google Adwords now supports CPA – cost per acquistion, which is a hybrid of the above. What happens is you bid how much you are prepared to pay for acquiring a customer (which in my opinion is the single most important metric for marketing). You say “I am prepared to pay up to $5 for every sale my advertising generates”. Google tracks your sales, and runs your campaigns at a frequency, and using targetting that results in you paying no more than $5 sale.

The downside for small shops is you need a minimum of 200 sales/month via AdWords in order to join in the program,  but that’s reasonable (if not slightly annoying for many).

Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 1st, 2008 | Author: Mark | No Comments

An interesting article from Scientific American discussing the psychology of pricing. If you are running a shop, it should give you some thoughts on your pricing strategy.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Apr 27th, 2008 | Author: Mark | No Comments

There are lots of bad ecommerce home pages, right?
But one of them has to be the worst, right?

Well, I found it.

Domino’s Pizza. Having a lazy weekend, I wanted to order a pizza. While with pizza ordering by phone is probably easier, I thought I’d try the online experience, given I am an ecommerce consultant and all…

When I got to the homepage, a great big flash animation came up. “Click here for transformation”. This flash animation was full screen transparent, so I could see the big “Order online” button I wanted. I had three choices – click on the close link which was obscured by being positioned over some other text, click on “Click here for transformation”. Transform? Into what? I’m interested in transforming from hungry to full, that’s all. You literally could do nothing else without first dealing with this piece of flashturbation. Once you click on it, all it does is show you some animation. There’s no campaign, no offer, no competition, not even an especially good animation. And once it’s finished, you still need to find the obscure close button.

Dominos, I will put $5,000 of my personal money on the line. Run an A/B split test on that homepage – one with the animation, one without. My bet says that removing that animation as the sole variable of the test will boost sales at least 5%.

Why is this the worst? Because it’s not some backyard outfit. It’s not some dodgy “my cousin knows web stuff and installed OSCommerce for me” setup. This is a multinational company who cleary invested some serious money into their site, which in general isn’t a terrible site. Why oh why do they actually go out of their way to actively prevent their users from spending money with them?

PS. I tried to send them feedback. They want my full name, address and phone number as compulsory fields just to give feedback.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Dec 11th, 2007 | Author: Mark | 1 Comment

A great webinar about SEO, 50 minutes long.

Courtesy of Stephan Spencer.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 26th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

It’s always a tricky part for the small ecommerce site owner. How much should I spend on advertising?

I’ve been doing some work in the last few weeks for a client, setting up some advertising for a client’s ecommerce site. A part of that was Google adwords. He’s operating in an extremely competitive niche, you need to pay at least $5/click to get in the top spots, sometimes more. Ouch!

So, at $5/click, is it worth even running the campaign at all? It’s pretty easy to work this answer out. Well, kind of.

The biggest question you need to ask is: how much is a new customer worth? For some sites, this is relatively easy to work out. If you are selling a subscription, or your customers tend to be single purchase (no repeat business) then you can probably work it out easily enough. If you do get repeat business, then it becomes a bit trickier. What’s the life time value of your customers? There’s books written on this subject, so I’m not going to attempt to tackle the subject. One thing to bear in mind: don’t assume that the first transaction with the customer should be profitable. If you average customer buys 5 times a year at average $100 each, and an average margin of 20%, then your customer is worth $100/year. You should be more than comfortable spending at least $20, if not a lot more, to buy each customer.

The other big question is how well are you converting? For my client, let’s say we work out we can afford to pay $150 per customer. At $5/click, that means we need to be converting at 3.3% to be profitable. So the other big thing to focus on is conversions – how can you increase the number of customers actually buying? Fortunately there’s many ways to do this.

The higher your conversions, the more you can pay on advertising, the more customers you can get, and the faster your business can grow.

Categories: Marketing | Date: Jul 19th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Like most shop owners, I’ve pretty much abandoned banner ads in favor of pay per click advertising. I’m a huge fan of accountability. The most interesting consulting job I’ve worked on was designing a highly complex marketing measurement system which would be able to trace the exact impact of every marketing dollar spent – and this client spent over one billion a year (that’s not a typo).

However, the niggle in the back of my mind with accountable advertising is always “but what about the brand?”. The older I get the more I realize the importance of brand, how much of an impact it has.

Here’s an interesting article on the psychology of branding, about a study which demonstrates that banner ads, despite not being noticed, can have a measurable positive impact on our perception of a brand.  Fascinating!

Categories: Marketing | Date: May 29th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments

Running an ecommerce site, there’s so much to do. Copy often gets thrown by the wayside, chucked up in 5 minutes with little thought. We’ve all been guilty of it. Here’s a good example of some small copy changes.

When some politicians in the US wanted to abolish the estate tax, they were getting little support from voters. What switched that around? They started calling it the “death tax”. Suddenly it became a subject people were passionate about. Death is a very emotional word which captures people, estate is, if anything, an alienating word with implications of pomp and wealth.

What “death tax” term can you use to engage your visitors, and turn them into customers?

Categories: Marketing | Date: May 24th, 2007 | Author: Mark | No Comments