Keen business owners know that monitoring social media for mentions of their brand is a great way to not only find out what people are saying about their products or services but also a means to engage with customers and prospects. While you can use one of the many social CRM platforms available, I recently stumbled upon a simple tool for answering questions that people are asking on Twitter about your brand or about other topics you care about. READ MORE
A business dashboard has been defined by some experts as “a visual display of the most important information needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance.” Business dashboards usually consist of a screen showing you tables and/or graphs pointing out key indicators about your business. You can check your dashboard several times a day, once a day, once a week — however frequently you need to manage your business. Dashboards can be as big-picture or as detailed as you need — ranging from showing you the financial health of the business as a whole, all the way down to detailed slices of an individual activity or department. In this article I’d like to share four low-cost dashboards available for small businesses, some of which you may already be using (even if you don’t realize it): Accounting software dashboards One of the beauties of accounting software today is that most packages come equipped with the ability to run reports. Increasingly they come with built-in dashboard views, to allow business owners and managers to manage the business easily. QuickBooks, which is used by millions of small businesses, has a simple dashboard view, which you can see here. Other accounting/ERP packages, such as NetSuite, have extensive dashboard views. For instance, you can tour the NetSuite dashboard views here. MyBizHomepage.com MyBizHomepage.com is a free Web-based application that includes a dashboard that works together with your QuickBooks data, called MyBizDashboard. Once you import your QuickBooks data, it will display key parts of the data critical to the business owner on your screen when you log in. For instance, MyBizDashboard also displays the age of outstanding Accounts Payables and Accounts Receivables, two metrics crucial to the health of your business. “Seeing” this information laid out prominently on your screen is designed to help prevent receivables from going unpaid too long or getting behind in paying your bills. MyBizHomepage also provides email alerts to notify you if payables or receivables have gone past a predetermined age, and for other key metrics. It has a private messaging feature built right in so that you can discuss any of the metrics with others on your team. A new version of MyBizHomepage was recently rolled out with expanded features such as RSS feeds. SaaS administration screens The explosive growth of online business applications — software-as-a-service (SaaS) — has given business owners access to a range of “mini-dashboards.” What I mean is that most SaaS applications have some kind of administration panel. Those admin panels or screens often are filled with important data, including tables and graphs. Each of these administration screens is in effect a dashboard. Chances are you are already using several of these dashboards. Administration panels are chock full of goodies that can help you understand some slice of your business better and manage it with foresight. For instance, Google provides extensive information in its Google AdSense admin screens to help you see the status of your AdSense earnings. Google Analytics provides multiple dashboard views of website traffic data, based on your role (executive, marketing, technical, etc.) The downside to these administration panels is that they are scattered across the Web, and it’s hard to compare data from different applications. That leads me to my fourth type of “dashboard” — the Web’s free start pages. Start pages One way to organize data from multiple SaaS administration screens so you can access it in one place is to use one of the free consumer start pages: iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes — to name a few. I have cobbled together a rudimentary dashboard to run portions of my business, using Netvibes. In this example, I have used Netvibes to manage intelligence culled from some of the many online applications I use, via embedding widgets into a Netvibes page: The free start pages let you build a “master dashboard” that’s admittedly limited. They won’t support much customization. But for a cheap (i.e., free) solution that you can put together in a couple of hours without technical help, they allow you to organize your access to important information in SaaS applications and at least let you look at some of the information from one screen. Aside from these four inexpensive solutions, you can also purchase dashboard applications and port your business data into them, or you can hire a software programmer to create one specifically for your business. Anita Campbell is a writer, speaker and radio talk show host who closely follows trends in the small business market at her site, Small Business Trends.
Dr. Darren Carter, founder of New York City-based Medical Coding.net, a website that sells books and software primarily about medical coding, used to pay up to $1,000 per month in online advertising. He still does, but now it no longer impacts his bottom line. That’s because he’s found a way to offset that expense letting other companies advertise on his corporate website through Google’s AdSense program. “AdSense usually makes anywhere from $500- $750 a month, but we’ve had months that it’s made over a $1,000,” Carter says. He used to subsidize his own advertising for his business, but now “most months it’s a wash or very close,” Carter says. Carter’s site gets a healthy amount of traffic each month. On average, Medial Coding.net gets about 3,000 to 4,000 ad impressions per day during the week, with about 600 per day on weekends. When Google launched the AdSense program a few years ago, Carter realized it might be a way to leverage all that traffic to capture a little extra revenue and immediately signed up to be one of the early adopters. “A lot of the visitors who come to the site are looking for healthcare products we don’t sell,” he says. “We’re pretty much a bookstore. So it works really well to have the additional ads for other medical products that compliment what we sell.” Whether to allow ads or not For Dr. Carter, allowing the advertisements of other companies on his site has been a great success. Other companies, however, may not be good candidates for Google AdSense or similar programs, like Yahoo! Publisher Network, Adster, or AdMob (for mobile websites). “It’s all about monetizing information,” says Eric Giguere, author of Make Easy Money with Google: Using the AdSense Advertising Program. “For many Web 2.0 sites, serving ads is the only way to make money. But blogs, for example, don’t do very well with these kinds of programs. Their visitors tend to be ‘ad-blind’ only paying attention to the blog itself.” In other words, it depends less on the quality of the ad serving program and more on the core mission of the site itself. Here’s a look at some of the advantages and disadvantages to serving third-party advertisements that business owners should consider in relation to their own business model. Advantages Serving third-party advertisements work best under the following conditions: The website gets a lot of traffic: This is especially true for sites that generate a lot of new visitors who are more prone to click on ads. Returning visitors tend to focus on the site’s proprietary content because it’s what they like and the reason they come back. The website has a low conversion rate: The conversion rate is the site’s ratio of visitors who perform an actionable behavior that’s of value to the business, like making a purchase or giving contact information. A high traffic site with a low conversion rate means a lot of visitors are passing through with no benefit to the business. Getting them to click on an ad is one way to get something of value from them before they leave. The website is content driven: Basically the content of the site is there to push traffic to the ads. “Google has what they call a ‘heat map’ showing the best spots for ad placement. That’s why you often see those ads, for example, between the title of the article and the body of the story or near the navigational elements,” says Giguere. Disadvantages It’s easy to set it up and requires no outlay of cash, so why not allow third-party ads? Here are a few reasons that may give a business owner pause. Aesthetics: The ads, typically plain text with a thin colored border, are not that attractive and can junk up a page distracting visitors from more important content, like information about the site’s own products and services. “It just doesn’t look very professional. Most serious business owners don’t use it,” says Eric Peterson, author of Web Analytics Demystified. Drives away traffic: Most ad serving programs pay by the click. However, it’s usually in pennies. What’s it worth to the business to keep visitors on the site longer for shopping, gathering information about services, or submitting contact information and generating a possible customer lead? For most companies, the answer to that question is probably more than a few pennies. It costs a lot of money to make a little money: Carter has successfully found a winning formula to leverage AdSense to pay his AdWords tab. Notice, however, that he is not making a living off of serving ads. In fact, very few people do. “You hear of people saying they make $10,000 a month off AdSense. What they don’t tell you is their spending $9,000 a month to do it. The people who really gross a lot of money either own one or two really high traffic sites or literally a thousand tiny sites paying off five dollars a month here and there. It’s a lot of work,” says Giguere. Deciding Factors and Conclusion A business owner considering serving ads on the company site would be wise to follow the principal creed of all doctors: first, do no harm. This is one of those times that experimentation can hurt. Be careful of driving away customers prematurely or diminishing the company brand with cluttered pages and amateurish ads. Secondly, set realistic goals of how it can help the bottom line. Is the site optimized to succeed in serving ads? For the business considering an ad serving program, he or she will first want to have clear expectations. How much revenue off the ads would make it a success? For Carter, success has meant making enough off serving ads to subsidize his own online advertising. For another business, it may need to be the site’s primary revenue stream. Like everything else in business, balancing the risks against the chances of success is where the answer lies. SIDEBAR: Ad Serving Programs to Explore For businesses that want to run third-party ads on their websites to raise a little extra cash, here are some of the ad serving programs to consider: Google AdSense: By far this is the largest and most popular ad serving program available. Signing up literally takes minutes and it is all but turn key after that. “AdSense is possible because it’s all about automation. Google’s crawlers determine which ads to place on your site based on the criteria you input. They’ve found a way to open up their advertising network to all these little sites,” says Giguere. Yahoo! Publisher Network: Less popular than Google AdSense, the Yahoo! service is gaining ground. It’s only been out a couple of years and is still technically in beta. Since Yahoo! And Google keep their reimbursement formulas a secret even from the site owners who participate in the program, it is impossible to say which is more lucrative. One key difference from Google, however, is Yahoo! only allows U.S.-based websites to use their program. Adster This lesser known company, based in Milipitas, Calif., has a slightly different business model. Websites aren’t compensated according to some mysterious pay-by-the-click formula; rather site owners set a price for their ad spaces. Advertisers can negotiate that ad rate, with the site owner refusing if the price offered is too low. Adster facilitates the sale and cuts the check, minus its take. AdMob: As the name implies, this is a specific ad serving program for websites optimized for mobile users which is a fast growing market. Since the .mobi domain became available for sale a little over a year ago, more than half a million .mobi sites have been registered worldwide, with most of them in the United States. AdMob, like Google and Yahoo!, compensates on a shared pay-per-click model, as well.
Even the most well-intentioned Web-based businesses may not be bringing in the revenues its founders had in mind. Until the business takes off, why not consider having your website do its own moonlighting? In this case, bring in extra income from alternative revenue streams, such as advertising networks, affiliate links, and paid content. There are even success stories, about how these auxiliary revenue streams have gone on to become the main source of cash for some websites. Take the site Mongabay.com. Originally started as a place for founder Rhett Butler (yes, his real name) to explore and share his interest in rainforests and conservancy, the ads he put on the site brought in so much income that he was able to quit his day job. Revenues went from zero to a few hundred thousand. Not every business will end up as profitable. But there are a series of ways that your business website can help generate extra funds to at least pay for itself. Here’s how: Letting it add up Advertising networks are an easy solution if say, you don’t want to invest in an ad-sales staff. Entities like Google’s AdSense program allow users to easily install the means to do this easily by putting some code in your website or, if you have a blog, just hitting the “radio” button. The ad networks just take over the advertising end, automatically giving the website owner ads relevant for the site. “No matter how specific your interest is we have dozens of advertisements relevant to your content,” says Kim Malone, director of Online Sales and Operations for Google AdSense. “The job of a website owner is to create great content. The job of content is to deliver the maximum number of ads that will pay well and match that content.” You get paid by click-throughs or impressions, depending upon the advertiser. With clicks, you get paid a percentage, which AdSense doesn’t disclose, but Google instead lets you see how much you’re making on a daily basis. Traffic determines how much money you’ll make. The more visitors to your site, the more money you make. It’s that straightforward. Caveat: If you have quality or quantity – for example, you have a very desirable audience — you can charge a premium for that, says Greg Sterling, the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on the Internet’s impact on consumer and advertisers behavior. All your ads don’t have to come from one place. You could use several of the pay per click/pay per impression advertising services at the same time. Affiliate yourself Affiliate programs mean that your business website sells products for other people and that you take a commission. Your visitors click through ads on your site to buy products from another site, most likely the retailer’s. One of the most famous of these is Amazon.com’s Associates Program. It typically works like this: You put code — which the retailer has given you — on your site. To make good revenue this way, your customers have to be buying the products. So, the products need to make sense for your website. Says Yankee Group analyst Gary Chen, “If the product doesn’t really fit in with what you’re doing, it may not make a lot of sense or have a lot of synergies.” So don’t clutter your website with a zillion non-relevant products in the hopes that one will hit. Note that commissions and terms vary. Paid content In a perfect world, we’d all be like gossip columnist Liz Smith, and have publications calling us, begging to run our content and paying us lucratively for the privilege. For Web-businesses that are not in the publishing business per se, that is a long shot. But it does occasionally happen. The most important factor in generating payment for your content, says Chen, is that “you have to have content that other people want to see.” The type of content that is most likely to generate income is information that readers can’t get anywhere else. For example, if you have specialized knowledge of your industry, you may be able to charge for your various reports. You can be paid for your content in either of two ways – by readers or by other sites that want to syndicate your content. To syndicate content, you need to enter into a legal agreement and specify payment to the other website. To charge readers directly, you need to cordon off this content on your site and provide log-ins to people who subscribe. You can also put them on a special e-mail distribution list. To get a subscription they’d have to pay you, which could be done manually or automatically via e-commerce.
As small and mid-size businesses jump on the online marketing bandwagon in droves, there’s an issue they need to consider: trademark infringement risk. Most companies know that using a competitor’s trademarked buzzword, buzzphrase, or logo in a traditional advertisement could get a company in legal hot water. But even using a competitor’s trademarked item to generate an online ad during a basic Internet search could land a company in court, legal analysts warn. Smaller companies, which often lack legal teams, need to be especially aware of the risk. To be sure, there’s a lot of evidence that online marketing is a good way for small businesses to grow. A November 2006 survey of 700-plus small businesses by theYankee Group, of Boston, found that those surveyed will spend between 10 percent and 20 percent more on online marketing in 2007 than in 2006. “This is the biggest jump in spending that I’ve seen ever,” says Gary Chen, a Yankee Group analyst. “There is much more awareness that the Internet lets them reach all these consumers that they’d never be able to reach.” What a trademark is A trademark is any word, name, symbol, logo or device that a company has officially registered to distinguish a product or service from its competitors. Trademarks must be registered separately in each country where a company does business. Multiple companies can use the same trademark if they are in different industries and are not direct competitors. In the United States, a trademark that is registered, re-filed after five years, and actively used can last indefinitely. Paid-search ads also carry risks But companies purchasing paid-search ads need to understand the risks of using a competitor’s trademark as a search term to trigger advertising for their own business. Paid search ads are now offered by Google’s AdWords and AdSense, or Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture). Google tells companies seeking keywords for its ads — words that trigger the purchasing company’s ad to appear in the margin — that “you alone are responsible … for making sure that your use of the keywords does not violate … any applicable trademark laws.” On its site, Google says it will review trademark complaints relating to the content of ads, but “not the keywords used to trigger the ads.” When companies use Google AdWords to develop their keyword list, the AdWords program automatically lists trademarked items as suggested synonyms. For example, a customer keying in the word “computer” to start a keyword list will be offered a long list of terms, including the trademarked buzzphrase “Apple computer” as suggested options. Because a term is suggested, some companies might think it’s okay to use it to trigger their ads. But Terry Ross of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, the international law firm, who specializes in trademark law, says companies should not assume this. “If I were advising a small business owner using Google, I’d tell them that they should not use anything that’s a registered trademark,” Ross says. “It’s that simple.” According to Ross, this means checking every buzzword or buzzphrase a business plans to use against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office electronic trademark database. A history of litigation Google’s success in defending its let-the-user-beware approach to trademark protection has been mixed in the courts. But now its paid-search customers are landing in court, too. In 2004, a U.S. federal court ruled that Google was not at fault in a case against insurance giant GEICO by using trademarks as keywords to trigger advertising. However, the case also concerned Overture/Yahoo! Search Marketing, which reached an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with GEICO. In 2005, however, a French court ruled that Google must stop using the trademarks of French hotel chain Le Meridien Hotels to trigger competitor’s ads. A case against Google by American Blind & Wallpaper Factory remains in court. Meanwhile, three outstanding U.S. cases concern charges of trademark infringement against companies using Google’s paid-search ads: 1-800-J.R. Cigar Inc. (plaintiff) vs. Goto.com Inc., Edina Realty Inc. (plaintiff) vs. The MLSOnline.com and Buying for the Home LLC (plaintiff) vs. Humble Abode LLC. Ross says using the USPTO’s database to check buzzwords first can help companies avoid the courtroom. “It’s easy to check,” he says. “You don’t even need to hire a lawyer to do it.”
