The moment of truth has arrived. You have a new baby, and like a parent, you are very excited. At the same time, you are wondering what in the world you have gotten yourself into. Thousands of books have been written on operating a website from technical, marketing, content, sales, and operational perspectives. In fact, there is too much information available, and it can feel overwhelming as you begin. But do not despair; this chapter will home in on the most crucial things to focus on out of the gate.
Getting Help
Almost everyone needs a little external help at some point along the way. The seller is always the first and best resource, but he is by no means the only source of help. The good news is that help is actually incredibly easy to find, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. The not-so-secret world of freelancing is at your fingertips. There is someone willing to do almost any conceivable project for you. In fact, there are a lot of someones who will compete for your odd job. Freelancer.com recently announced its one-millionth freelancer. Elance.com, Odesk.com, and many others are online marketplaces, matching those who have skills for sale and those who need something done for a good price.
As the new owner of a website, you may need content created, technical problems fixed, marketing plans written, traffic boosted, conversions increased, customer support help, or faster webpage response times. You might need one-time help, part-time help, or full-time help. All of these are available in freelancer marketplaces. Just create an account, validate your payment details, and you are good to go.
I start by searching project listings and looking for projects that are similar to my needs. This gives me examples to follow as I create my own project. I read the skill requirements others asked for and the detailed project descriptions given to help me think through my own requirements. Then I simply type up a quick project description, pick from a list of skills, choose the least expensive option for posting my listing, and click go. Some marketplaces make money by charging the freelancer a percentage fee; others charge the hiring party, and some have fees for both. Buying upgrades to promote your listing is rarely necessary.
Unless you are looking for a very specific, narrow skillset, you are likely to get plenty of proposals to choose from. The freelancer marketplace is truly global, and this will be evident in the varying levels of English skills exhibited by those who apply for your job. But English isn’t the only skill that will vary; the core professional skills will too.
To minimize the time you spend wading through proposals, look first at those who have a history of successful projects. Browse the feedback received and verify that there is positive feedback on projects where the freelancer has done work similar to your own. Tightwad that I am, I give the low-priced bids a hard look first. The combination of positive feedback history and low price is often a winner for me. The other important indicator I look at is whether a candidate has demonstrated that they understand what I want. They do this (or don’t do this) by what they write in their proposals. If the freelancer has listed your key requirements and specified how he will accomplish them, he has placed himself above 95% of the field. I have had several freelancers create a demo, do a sample task, or write a sample article for me while I’m deciding whom to pick.
I have found some wonderful freelancers in marketplaces over the years; a few of whom have become loyal employees and friends. It is true that there are some bad eggs, and your first choice may not be as skilled or responsible as you would have liked, but I have never failed to find excellent help at a good price with a little persistence.
Tips For Managing Freelancers
Payment. You pay the marketplace where you located the freelancer, and that site pays the freelancer.
Project completion. Marketplaces usually have the ability to set up milestones within projects. A freelancer may ask you to separate payment into multiple milestones so that she may be compensated as each task is completed. Freelancers may also request that you pre-fund the milestones. This tells the freelancer that you actually have the money available. You are not required to release any milestone payments until the work for the milestone is completed. Much like escrow, this protects both you and the freelancer.
Feedback. You are encouraged to leave feedback after the work is completed, and the freelancer will do the same for you. Bad feedback is not helpful for either of you, so there is incentive to do good work on the part of the freelancer and incentive for you to pay on time and provide clear requirements as the hiring party.
Communications. Marketplaces have private messaging capabilities. Any time you want your message to a freelancer to be kept as a matter of record, send a private message. If you ever get into a dispute, the marketplace powers can review your message logs. However, as a practical matter, it is easier to communicate via your platform of choice, be it email, Facebook, Skype, or by phone.
Measure, Measure, Measure
Every business owner knows that improvement starts with measurement. The websites I check up on every day are much more likely to get my care and attention than those I never look at. When I monitor sales and traffic, I can spot opportunities to capitalize on certain customers or certain traffic sources. When I look at my reports regularly, I can assess the effectiveness of changes I made to the website and then repeat the techniques that were successful. While many aspects of a website can be measured and improved, it always pays to focus on traffic and conversions first.
Traffic
Visitors to your site are consumers of your content. They are leads, and hopefully, many of them are paying customers. Get intimate with your customers. You want to know who they are, where they live, what language they speak, and what they are looking at. You want to know how they made their way to your website, where they came from, and whether they have visited before. But probably the most important variable to understand is why they came.
“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”
—Thomas Edison
The visitor’s why is critical because if you understand his motive, you can give him much more of what he is looking for. Did he come to be entertained? Was it because of curiosity or anger? Was he looking for general education or highly specific information? Did he want to buy something, or was he just browsing or collecting information for a future purchase?
I have writers who publish about twenty news articles for me every day. We all have access to detailed analytics information that tells us in real time what visitors are reading, how long they spend on the page, and whether they are hanging around to read more articles or hit the back button to browse elsewhere. We watch that information like a hawk. If readers are interested in the newest Nokia phone on Thursday morning, you better believe we are going to be publishing more articles about that phone until something else is trending higher.
It is important to capitalize on things that are working. If you are seeing good traffic coming from humorous Facebook posts, then that becomes a prime area for experimentation. You would naturally try to create more of the same kind of posts. If that isn’t producing a bang for the buck, then identify the most effective posts and pay Facebook the $6 or $7 fee to “promote” a post. If Facebook seems to be a good overall source of traffic, depending on what your revenue model is, consider purchasing highly targeted Facebook ads. Hire a freelancer who specializes in Facebook and social network promotion. The point is to build on your winning traffic sources—whatever they may be. As you experiment, you will identify new sources and tune existing ones.
Google Analytics is a free system for analyzing hundreds of metrics about your website. Diagram 1 is an overview of the kinds of information available. It shows how many people are online, the pages they are browsing, where they are located, what devices they are using, where they came from, and in some cases, the search phrase they used to find the website. This is a real-time overview, and there is a great deal more detail available for each section of the dashboard.
Diagram 1 – Google Analytics, Real-Time Overview
Google Analytics provides traffic source data to help you understand how your visitors are finding your website. In Diagram 2, not surprisingly, about 47% of the traffic is coming from Google Search; 21% is direct, meaning the visitor typed in the name of the URL, had it bookmarked, or came from an unknown source; 9% was from Google News; and smaller percentages came from Zergnet, Bing, and other sources. The website received 69,999 visitors over a period of thirty days. Less than 8% were returning visitors.
Diagram 2 – Google Analytics Acquisition, All Traffic
An important part of your analysis involves looking at the specific pages that are viewed by your visitors. In Diagram 3 we see that the top article attracted 4.5% of the traffic during the thirty-day period. Readers spent just under three minutes reading the article, but only 11% remained on the website to read another article.
Diagram 3 – Google Analytics Behavior, Site Content
Conversions
Ultimately, you want your customers to take some action that will generate sales. This is a critical area for website success; unfortunately, most website owners neglect or ignore it—to their detriment. The high-level process for increasing conversions is finding out the current baseline (the percentage of customers who make a purchase) and then making changes one at a time, testing them against each other and choosing the one that yields the higher conversion rate. As needed, repeat the process.
Tip: To increase conversions, always start at the top.
The top is the first thing potential customers see that invites them to your website. If your site gets traffic from direct emails, the first thing they see is the subject of the email. If you get customers from advertising, the first thing they see is the headline in the ad copy. If they come from search engines, the first thing they see is the title of the webpage. The first thing they see at the top of your sales funnel determines whether they will enter the funnel; they will either choose to click in or to bypass it completely. It not only affects whether they will open the email or click through to the website, but it also inclines them toward or drives them away from making an eventual purchase.
So what is a good title? If you are providing information, help, or advice, the best titles are those that clearly state what the article will deliver (e.g., “How to Change the Headlight in a 2005 Honda Civic”). A user who wants a quick, specific answer to their question is much more likely to click on a straightforward title that promises a solution. Readers in a predicament are less impressed with attempts at cleverness (e.g., “Shining Light on Honda Maintenance Projects”).
Email subject lines should be built to entice the reader to open the email. Curiosity, controversy, and compelling benefits are a few of the many strategies employed in subject lines. For example, who could help but be curious at the following title: “One Beverage You Should Never Drink on Saturday”? Try to think like your potential reader; make the “top” irresistible.
After you have tested the most common top-level exposure of your website, tweak it to improve the entry rate. Then, you are ready to move to the next thing the customer sees. For email marketing, that would be the content of the email itself. More specifically, pay attention to the very first line of your email. That first line needs to be good enough to get the recipient to read the second line. The second line’s only purpose is to get the reader to continue to the third line and so on. Eventually, you want the reader to click on the link in the email.
The same process applies to people who see your site in Google search results. The title is critical, and the text underneath the title, called the meta description, is the second most important thing. Then, if you have earned a reader’s click, the next thing he will see is your webpage, which may or may not be your homepage, depending on what they were searching for.
The top-down method applies to the analysis of your webpage’s ability to convert as well. The first thing a reader should see on the webpage is your main headline. You need to have one, and it needs to be big and very descriptive. When the visitor arrives at your site, he has two subconscious questions: Where am I? Is this a useful place for me to be?
Those questions should be answered immediately, attractively, and unambiguously by the headline and sub-title of your page—or sometimes the title of your article. Clever logos, pretty pictures, and catchy phrases, while creative, probably do not answer the questions in the mind of the visitor and may even cause him to quickly surf away. Conversely, clear communication of what your site does and what is to be gained by hanging around will keep the lion’s share of the visitors.
Hanging around is the middle game of the conversion sales process. Once the reader has entered your lair, the goal is to keep him on the website, going from page to page. When your content answers his questions and objectives, it builds his trust and convinces him that he has a need. He will feel a call to action to meet that need.
If you want customers to hang around, don’t put Exit doors all over the place. Instead, capitalize on natural curiosity. Don’t put too much content on a single page. Instead, make it easy for them to answer their most important questions quickly. Customers want to know prices; they want to know about support; they want to know how easy or difficult things are; they want to see demos and pictures; they want to know who else has bought the product and what happened; and they want to know exactly what they are going to get. Make all of these things easy to find with clear menus and simple language.
If your site has landing pages to sell single products, the top-down method is key. The headline is most important, followed by the sub-headline, followed by the first sentence, and so on down the page. Each phrase should encourage the reader to read the next phrase and ultimately to hear the call to action.
Informational or content sites also have the goal of keeping the visitor on the site. Some ad contracts are per page view, meaning the more pages opened by a visitor the more you earn. If you are paid per click on an ad, you want people to view as many pages as possible too. The more pages they visit, the more ads they will be exposed to and the greater the chances that something in an ad will be attractive enough to cause them to click.
Financial Tracking
Marketing is more important than financial record keeping (in my little entrepreneurial mind), but you can never afford to be drunk and disorderly when it comes to the money. At the very least, you want to record every expenditure made in support of the website and maintain a profit and loss statement by month. I often keep a simple spreadsheet that has a tab for the P&L, one for expenses, and a third one for revenue. Depending on the complexity of the site, you may need to have a bigger spreadsheet, use bookkeeping software, or even hire an accountant. I have the distinct pleasure of being married to a former CPA who keeps me out of trouble but still makes me do all my own bookkeeping.
“It’s not how much money you make, but how much money you keep, how hard it works for you, and how many generations you keep it for.”
—Robert Kiyosaki
While I monitor sales and traffic daily, taking a look at the larger financial picture once a month keeps me focused on growing the bottom line and helps prevent expenses from getting out of line. Diagram 4 is a sample structure for a profit and loss statement (income statement) that you should create and update monthly.
The top section will track your revenue sources, and the bottom section will track your expenses by category. You may choose to track some key metrics by month so that you can see financial performance alongside the metrics that are important for the website. I usually fill in all the months of the year with a budget and then overlay the budget numbers with the actuals and update the budget numbers for the future months.
Diagram 4 – Sample Profit and Loss Statement.
Numbers in gray are estimates.
|
Jan |
Feb |
Mar |
Apr |
May |
Jun |
Revenue |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Adsenese |
$425 |
$437 |
$400 |
$400 |
$400 |
$400 |
Infolinks |
$37 |
$34 |
$35 |
$35 |
$35 |
$35 |
eBooks |
$28 |
$54 |
$28 |
$28 |
$28 |
$28 |
Total Revenue |
$490 |
$525 |
$463 |
$463 |
$463 |
$463 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Expenses |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Webhosting |
$12 |
$12 |
$12 |
$12 |
$12 |
$12 |
Writers |
$120 |
$90 |
$100 |
$100 |
$100 |
$100 |
Advertising |
$25 |
$25 |
$25 |
$25 |
$25 |
$25 |
Paypal |
$0 |
$0 |
$10 |
$10 |
$10 |
$10 |
$0 |
$12 |
$10 |
$10 |
$10 |
$10 |
|
Total Expenses |
$157 |
$139 |
$157 |
$157 |
$157 |
$157 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
NET INCOME |
$333 |
$376 |
$306 |
$306 |
$306 |
$306 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Key Metrics |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Number of Sales |
2 |
4 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
2 |
Pageviews |
5,645 |
5,733 |
5,500 |
5,500 |
5,700 |
5,700 |
Articles Written |
15 |
12 |
14 |
14 |
14 |
14 |
Promo Emails |
4 |
6 |
5 |
5 |
5 |
5 |
I have evaluated hundreds of websites that did not even have a simple P&L. If you don’t have a P&L, you won’t know how much the site is earning. You won’t know which expenses need managing. You won’t be able to fill out a Schedule C on your U.S. federal income tax form accurately. When you test new strategies, like content writing or additional advertising, you won’t know whether it was profitable or not. You won’t know how much the site generated over the past year or how much it’s going to make over the next full year. You will have less credibility if you ever decide to sell the website. And, most importantly, you will miss the strategic opportunity to step back and assess the website as a whole each month.
Budget: a mathematical confirmation of your suspicions.
—A.A. Latimer
This might sound kind of dweebish, but I actually love month end. The first day of the month is my opportunity to make a final calculation of what happened during the previous month, see where I stand across all my websites, and formulate or tweak my plan of action going forward. I take my wife out for dinner, and I give her the news—good or bad. She patiently listens to my scheming ideas for the next period. This is when I decide to hire an extra writer, go buy another app-design website, start an email-marketing campaign, change ad networks, or write a book!
Whether you have one or many websites, little or big, track the financials.
