The Internet By the Numbers

Interesting statistics on the growth of the internet. Facebook continues its dominance (6 million page views a minute) and incredible growth (350+ million users). Incredible. Another stat that I find alarming is out of the 247 billion emails sent a day, 200 billion are spam!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

What’s your Online Identity score?

If you are looking for a job in this tight economy, recruiters and potential employers will surely be looking you up online.  When a potential employer searches on Google or Yahoo for  someone, they judge the results based on two factors: volume and relevance. Volume speaks to the quantity of results on the Web. If there are a lot of results for a search on your name, surely you are more relevant than other candidates.

Relevance is an even more important element. When someone searches for you on Google, they wants to assess what it says about you. Is it consistent with how you show up in the real world? Does it show pictures and blog posts that you wouldn’t want any employer to see?  Does it back up your experience from your resume?  Does it make those who are searching about you want to get to know you? What does it say about your personal brand?

I did a search on a the Online Identity Calculator, and found I’m digitally distinct! What does that mean? From the Online Identity site:

This is the nirvana of online identity. A search of your name yields lots of results about you, and most, if not all, reinforce your unique personal brand. Keep up the good work, and remember that your Google results can change as fast as the weather in New England. So, regularly monitor your online identity. That way, if something negative, such as an anonymous ad hominem attack on your character on a blog, crops up, you can address it quickly, before it gets out of hand. Read Chapter 11 of Career Distinction: Stand Out by Building Your Brand for more ideas on how to continue to build your brand online.

If you want to find out what your Online Identity is, visit the site and check your score. It’s free.

30 Essential Books for Web Professionals

Keeping up to date on the latest technologies, marketing concepts and internet trends can be a daunting task. There is never enough time in the day to stay on top of everything. Trying to find the right reading material can be just as challenging. To help, I’ve compiled a list of the essential books I have utilized to keep me in the loop over the last few years.

• Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
  Marketers must look to the Web for new ways of finding customers and communicating with them, rather than at them. From Facebook and YouTube to blogs and Twitter-ing, social media on the Internet is the most promising new way to reach customers.
  
• Word of Mouth Marketing, Revised Edition
  Who Is Talking About You?Master the art of word of mouth marketing with this practical hands-on guide.With straightforward advice and humor, marketing expert Andy Sernovitz will show you how the world-s most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth.
  
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
  While at first glance this volume might resemble the latest in a series of trendy business advice books, ultimately it is about storytelling, and it is a how-to for crafting a compelling narrative. Employing a lighthearted tone, the Heaths apply those selfsame techniques to create an enjoyable read.
  
• A Whole New Mind
  “Abundance, Asia, and automation.” Try saying that phrase five times quickly, because if you don’t take these words into serious consideration, there is a good chance that sooner or later your career will suffer because of one of those forces.
  
• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works
  This book meets a major, previously unmet need of a very large audience: almost everyone who works on a web site. As Ginny points out, good writing is a critical success factor for every web site, and the really good book about how to write for the web just doesn’t exist.
  
• World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories
  A World Wide Rave is when people around the world are talking about you, your company, and your products. It’s when communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. It’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.
  
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
  Usability design is one of the most important–yet often least attractive–tasks for a Web developer. In Don’t Make Me Think, author Steve Krug lightens up the subject with good humor and excellent, to-the-point examples.
  
• Designing With Web Standards (Voices That Matter)
  Standards, argues Jeffrey Zeldman in Designing With Web Standards, are our only hope for breaking out of the endless cycle of testing that plagues designers hoping to support all possible clients. In this book, he explains how designers can best use standards–primarily XHTML and CSS, plus ECMAScript and the standard Document Object Model (DOM)–to increase their personal productivity and maximize the availability of their creations.
  
• Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer
  Stop guessing, start testing, and enjoy greater success with your website. If you’re looking for more leads, sales, and profit from your website, then look no further than this expert guide to Google’s free A/B and multivariate website testing tool, Google Website Optimizer.
  
• Web Analytics: An Hour a Day
  Written by an in-the-trenches practitioner, this step-by-step guide shows you how to implement a successful Web analytics strategy. Web analytics expert Avinash Kaushik, in his thought-provoking style, debunks leading myths and leads you on a path to gaining actionable insights from your analytics efforts.
  
• The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
  Tim Ferriss has spent more than five years learning the secrets of the New Rich, a fast-growing subculture who has abandoned the “deferred-life plan” and instead mastered the new currencies—time and mobility—to create luxury lifestyles in the here and now.
  
• Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day
  If the idea of starting a social media marketing campaign overwhelms you, the author of Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day will introduce you to the basics, demonstrate how to manage details and describe how you can track results. Case studies, step-by-step guides, checklists, quizzes and hands-on tutorials will help you execute a social media marketing campaign in just one hour a day.
  
• Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time
  Social media has given online business the fuel to ride the next wave of the Internet for many years to come. If you want to be on the cutting edge of strategies that are being implemented by the most successful businesses, Twitter Power is a must-read. Joel has done a great job of demonstrating how a minor investment of time and energy can result in long-term payoffs.
  
• Build Your Own Web Site The Right Way Using HTML & CSS
  Build Your Own Website The Right Way Using HTML & CSS, 2nd Edition teaches web development from scratch, without assuming any previous knowledge of HTML, CSS or web development techniques. This book introduces you to HTML and CSS as you follow along with the author, step-by-step, to build a fully functional web site from the ground up.
  
• Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions
  How much money are you losing because of poor landing page design? In this comprehensive, step-by-step guide, you’ll learn all the skills necessary to dramatically improve your bottom line, including identifying mission critical parts of your website and their true economic value, defining important visitor classes and key conversion tasks, gaining insight on customer decision-making, uncovering problems with your page and deciding which elements to test, developing an action plan, and avoiding common pitfalls.
  
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
  This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals. Between these covers you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience.
  
• The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly
  Though it may not yet have affected the value of 30 seconds of Super Bowl advertising, PR insider Scott argues that understanding the growing irrelevance of marketing’s “old rules” is vital to thriving in the new media jungle.
  
• Search Engine Marketing, Inc.: Driving Search Traffic to Your Company’s Web Site (2nd Edition)
  In this book, two world-class experts present today’s best practices, step-by-step techniques, and hard-won tips for using search engine marketing to achieve your sales and marketing goals, whatever they are.
  
• Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
  Corporate executives are struggling with a new trend: people using online social technologies (blogs, social networking sites, YouTube, podcasts) to discuss products and companies, write their own news, and find their own deals. This groundswell is global, it s unstoppable, it affects every industry and it s utterly foreign to the powerful companies running things now.
  
• Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules (IBM Press)
  In this book, Internet marketing pioneer Mike Moran shows you how to do that–step-by-step and in detail. Drawing on his experience building ibm.com into one of the world’s most successful sites, Moran shows how to quickly transition from “plan then execute” to a non-stop cycle of refinement.
  
• Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads
  Your web site is a business–design it like one. Billions of dollars in spending decisions are influenced by web sites. So why aren’t businesses laser-focused on designing their sites to maximize their Return on Investment (ROI)?
  
• Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
  Written by an internationally acclaimed specialist in this field, Killer Web Content provides the strategies and practical techniques you need to get the very best out of your web content.
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
  This is not another SEO book written for marketing professionals. Between these covers you’ll find practical advice and examples for people who build websites aiming to reach their target audience. Each chapter will introduce you to best practices and fresh perspectives on how to accomplish these simple, yet indispensable goals
• Killer Web Content: Make the Sale, Deliver the Service, Build the Brand
  Written by an internationally acclaimed specialist in this field, Killer Web Content provides the strategies and practical techniques you need to get the very best out of your web content.
• Web Copy That Sells: The Revolutionary Formula for Creating Killer Copy Every Time
  When it comes to copy, what works in the brick – and mortar world does not necessarily grab Web consumers…and with new developments like social networks, blogs, and YouTube, the strategies that worked even a few years ago, are unlikely to grab people’s attention today.
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t
  Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?” In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets.
• The Findability Formula: The Easy, Non-Technical Approach to Search Engine Marketing
  To be successful in business you must be able to attract the right clients and persuade them to buy. However, on the internet, people only see what the search engines direct them to and the competition for those top spots is fierce. So how do you ensure that your business is front-and-center when prospects are searching for solutions? The answer is The Findability Formula.
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
  With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, “flow,” “mind like water,” and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you’d almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance.
• The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
  The E-Myth, Michael Gerber dispels the myths surrounding starting your own business and shows how commonplace assumptions can get in the way of running a business.
• Long Tail, The, Revised and Updated Edition: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More
  In the most important business book since The Tipping Point, Chris Anderson shows how the future of commerce and culture isn’t in hits, the high-volume head of a traditional demand curve, but in what used to be regarded as misses–the endlessly long tail of that same curve.

Don’t be the next retail failure. Do your research.

If I asked you to name a few locations around your house that are perpetually business failures, you could probably rattle off a few. One location in particular I pass by often is now changed hands once again.

Located in the prime location next to OR-217 and Canyon Road, this location has been at least 5 different businesses over the last 4 years.  To my recollection, it has been a been an electric car dealership, a rim shop, a teak outlet, a carpet retailer and is now a bargain basement store selling all kinds of products nobody wants.

The location on the surface seems like a winner. With close proximity to a major highway and a large city street, thousands of cars pass by this location daily. It only takes a quick look to see why the location is not ideal:

• The parking lot can only accommodate 4-5 cars.
• You can only enter the parking lot if you are headed west.
• If you are coming from the the east, you can’t pull into the parking lot because of the median. You would have to go to the next intersection, pull a u-turn and come back.

About every 6-9 months a new business decides that they are going to be the one that finally makes it in this location.  It must be basic optimism, but if they did any research they would see that every business that has been in this location over the last 4 years have failed.

If you are starting a retail business, you must do your research and ask a lot of questions. A simple survey of the surrounding businesses would have turned up the high turnover of this space.

A few steps to develop an effective retail strategy

• Collect basic economic data about your specific geographic market to determine potential retail demand. This can be found from your city demographer or large brokerage firm.
• Create a vision for the retail area, work with a retail professional/consultant to create a merchandise mix and implementation strategy.
• Identify key retail streets and areas and collect retail square footage numbers (net rentable sq. footage, and lease information) and build a database with contact information, photos, etc.
• Create simple marketing materials to help drive traffic and awareness of your business.