After analyzing hundreds of businesses, I realized that there was one indicator that could help me predict which companies were going to succeed and which ones were going to fail better than any other indicator.

Case 1 (On Average, Each of Your Customers Tells Two Friends About You):

1. 100 visitors multiplied by 200% = 200 new visitors.
2. The 200 visitors from Step 1 multiplied by 200% = 400 new visitors.
3. You can keep multiplying by 200% as many times as you want to see how fast your business will grow.

In this case, once you get the ball rolling, your customers and fans will do the rest of the work for you.

Case 2 (Out of Ten Customers, Nine Don’t Tell Anybody About Your Business and One Tells One Friend):
100 visitors multiplied by 10% = 10 new visitors.

10 visitors multiplied by 10% = 1 new visitor.

In this case, the trend decreases over time, meaning that the moment you stop inviting people to your site or store, your business will be on its way to death. The second thing to consider is this: Even if you have the money and time to market to new prospects all the time, at one point you’ll run out of prospects to market to.

So, What’s the Main Difference Between the First and the Second Example?
The first company GETS PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THEM and the second company doesn’t. That’s it. That’s the most important marketing lesson I’ve ever learned. If you’re remarkable, all you need to do is tell a few people about your products and word-of-mouth will do the rest. You won’t be able to stop sales from constantly growing no matter how hard you try. On the other hand, if people don’t talk about your business, you can spend thousands and thousands of dollars in marketing and your business will never take off. You might get some customers, sure, but you have a car without an engine; the moment you stop pushing it, it stops moving forward.

Then, The Question Is, “How Can I Create a Remarkable Business?”
This is my favorite part: you need to be weird. Having a better product at a better price won’t do the trick. When I say weird, I mean different, unique. I’ll give you some examples of companies that did things differently and got the whole world talking about them:

• When Yahoo! was the top search engine, their competitors tried to beat them by having more features and information. Google did something different: they offered LESS: Less clutter, fewer features and more accurate search results.
• Twitter created a new concept in blogging: posts that can’t exceed 140 characters.
• Zappos revolutionized the shoes industry by offering free rush delivery and free returns (they even pay for your postage costs if you need to return or exchange a pair of shoes.)
• Whole Foods offered a central location for premium organic foods like no one else.

So, how will you make your company unique and weird? What will you do to get some raving fans to spread the word about your business? How can you make a difference in the world instead of being just another company in your industry? I promise you that if you take 10 minutes to think about these questions, they’ll be the best 10 minutes you’ll have ever invested.

I believe that discipline is one of the most important skills an entrepreneur needs to have to succeed. After all, there’s no boss telling you to do your job, so without discipline you won’t get anything done.

However, I think that we are somewhat confused about what discipline is. We tend to think that we need to be strong enough to resist all temptations and do all the work we need to do. What I’ve discovered lately is that the best way to be disciplined is to help yourself by removing all possible temptations from the situations where you need to get your work done.

For example, I’m a rugby player and I need to train six times a week. Sometimes I train with my team but twice each week we’re supposed to train on our own. I had been skipping at least 50% of those training sessions. When I talked to my rugby friends about it, it turned out that this had been happening to them too. We made an agreement: instead of training on our own, we’d get together at the park to train. Whoever didn’t show up had to pay the other four of us $20 each. That’s $80 if you miss a practice! In two months, only one of us missed a session.

Here’s the funny part: because we all live in different parts of the city, we need to drive for 30 minutes to get to the park. It’d be much more convenient to train on our own. The problem is, it doesn’t work. We’ve already tried. Most of us are faced with situations like this one every day of our lives and we usually try to convince ourselves that driving 30 minutes to do something you can do in your own neighborhood is stupid and that we should be strong enough to not miss any training session without any extra incentives. You’re a human being; relax, take it easy. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Temptations exist. You can either make it really hard for yourself or manipulate the situations you’re in so things are easier for you.

This is how I manipulated some situations of my life to make things easier for myself:

• I wanted to eat more fruits and less junk food. So, instead of buying both at the grocery store, I only got fruits and no junk food. Now, every time I want junk food I need to drive a whole mile to the closest gas station. I’ve probably reduced my intake of junk food by 90%.
• I used to check my email several times a day and that was killing me. There’s no way to focus on something and be productive if you check your email every five minutes. I decided to tear up a $1 bill every time I checked my email during the day. Six months later, I’m out $3 and I’m 200% more productive. Not bad, huh?
• When I get very stressed out, I start sniffing. This gives me headaches and stomach cramps. I used to think that it’s part of me and I couldn’t change it. Last month I did an experiment: every time I started sniffing, I’d take a 5-minute break from work. The first week of my experiment I was really pissed at myself. I’d work for two minutes, start sniffing, take five minutes off, then work for 30 seconds, start sniffing again, take another five minutes off and so on. I couldn’t get any work done. But little by little I started associating the sniffing with the punishment and I stopped doing it. Now it probably happens once or twice a day, but I don’t have the headaches or stomach cramps anymore.

This post is a little different from my usual Internet marketing posts, but being disciplined is extremely important, and I found a technique that worked for me and wanted to share it with you. I hope it was helpful. Talk to you soon.

I get a few dozen emails per week from frustrated business owners whose websites aren’t making them money. Their words are always the same: “My website isn’t working and I don’t know why.” Are you in the same situation? Are you frustrated because your site isn’t working and you don’t even know the reason? I think this article will help you.

These are some of the most common reasons some websites don’t work and what to do about them.

Your Product Is Not Good Enough or Useful
The problem: If you’ve been in business for several years and don’t get a big chunk of your business from referrals/word of mouth, you might be offering a low quality product. That’s probably why people don’t recommend it. Maybe your product is amazing but there’s no market for it. I know a company that used to sell a very bitter salad dressing. Nobody wanted it and although they did a great job marketing their product, they went out of business.

The solution: Survey your past customers and learn what you need to do to improve your product. Track your referral rate and make sure it grows. If nobody is buying your product, check how the competition is doing. If someone else is successfully selling the same thing you can’t sell, it’s time to do things a little differently.


You Don’t Know How to Market Your Product
The problem: Nobody on your team has strong marketing skills.

The solution: This might look like a very difficult problem to overcome, but it is not. All you need to do is ask questions. Ask your customers why they decided to buy your product. Ask them what they’ll use it for, who with and how often. Ask them why they decided to buy it from you. When someone calls you and you don’t close the sale, ask them why they won’t buy from you. Explain to them that you’re trying to understand how your customers think so you can offer them a better service. Most people will be happy to help. Once you know what your customer wants and what motivates them to buy, creating an effective marketing message will be a piece of cake.


Buying From You Is Too Risky
The problem: “Buy my product. If you like it, great! If you don’t, too bad. I’ll make money either way.” Does this sound familiar? This is how most companies operate.

The solution: Offer a “better than 100% money back guarantee”. Pay for the return shipping cost if people decide to return your product. Let them keep something just for trying it. Offer a free trial. Ship now and charge your customers in 60 days unless they return your product first. Show your customers testimonials from other satisfied customers. Show them a list of your clients, references, case studies and any kind of evidence you have that your product works.


Little or Unqualified Traffic
The problem: Your website gets very little traffic or gets traffic that doesn’t care about your offer.

The solution: if you’re getting very little traffic, work on getting more! There are basically two ways to get website traffic:

• Help hungry prospects find you: this could happen online (on Google, for example) or offline (think about where your prospects would look for your services. For example, if you’re a locksmith, you can assume that people will use the Yellow Pages to look for someone to fix their locks.)
• Find your prospects before they need you: this also happens online (if you sell guitars, you can post relevant content to a guitar players forum) and offline (call a guitar teacher and ask him to carry your guitars and promote them to his students.)

Poor Website
The problem: Your website sucks.

The solution: Believe it or not, having a poor website isn’t the worse problem you can have. If you have an amazing product that is priced right and you market it very well, in most cases you can get away with a website that is below average. And, a great website won’t make up for a poor offer. That being said, there are several things you can do to improve your site and increase your revenues. You might want to read this report.


There Are Better Alternatives in the Market
The problem: Your competitors offer a better product, have a more appealing offer or a better price.

The solution: First, you need to understand WHY people aren’t buying from you. Don’t do what most rookies do when their sales are down: lower their prices. Don’t blame your prices for the lack of success you’re temporarily experiencing. My suggestion, once again, is to talk to your customers and to those people who call you and end up buying from somebody else. Learn why the make the decisions they make. They won’t only tell you who they’ll be doing business with, but they’ll also tell you why they’re choosing them. Analyze your competition and copy as many good things from them as you can. If everybody is telling you that they’re going with your competitor because they like their blue widget better than your red one, start producing blue widgets. Be humble enough to let your market make the most important decisions in your business.

A few years ago, I read The 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferris. Every business book I had read before it talked about how to increase revenues and make more money. The 4-Hour Workweek was different. It talked about making ENOUGH money to live the kind of life you want. Interesting, isn’t it? I never thought there was such thing as enough money. I mean, if you can have more, why would you settle for less, right?

About two weeks later I read an interview in which one of the founders of PayPal -a guy worth tens of millions of dollars- was telling how he sold his Porsche Boxster and replaced it with a much more affordable Toyota Prius. He said that when you have a Boxster, you want a Porsche 911, and once you have the 911, you want a Ferrari. Our minds get used to what we have quickly and, all too soon, what we have isn’t enough. He said he wanted to be a Prius guy, not a Ferrari guy.

Think about it: when you’re a Ferrari person, people have huge expectations about you and you have a lot more pressure on your shoulders than a Prius person. If you’re thinking: “that might be true, but a Ferrari will make me much happier than a Prius”, let me share the results of a research performed by Dan Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness.

He measured the happiness levels of two groups of people:

• Recent lottery winners
• Folks who recently lost both legs

A week after the events (winning the lottery or losing their legs), the lottery group was a lot happier than the other group. But, six months after the events, both groups had equal levels of happiness. This is because, after a while, you get used to your new situation, you accept it and it becomes part of your life. In fact, during periods of my life when I was pretty broke, I wasn’t less happy than I am now.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t work hard to get out of my financial problems. I saw them as a challenge that I wanted to overcome (and I did). But, I learned a few lessons:

• Happiness doesn’t depend on how much money I make. I know countless happy, poor people and unhappy, rich folks. I bet you do, too.
• There are periods in our life when we feel like getting to the next level, and we should. But, there are also periods when we feel happy where we are and we shouldn’t try to get to the next level just because we can. Enjoying the place we are is a very important part of the equation. If you’re not moving forward, it doesn’t mean you’re moving backward; you’re just in one place and having a good time, and this is a great thing to do.
• Make a list of what you want, figure out how much money you need to get it all. You’ll discover that to live the life of your dreams you need a lot less than you thought.
• Don’t wait until you have a lot of money to do what you want. I wanted to have a lot of money to retire for five years and travel around the world. Once I put together a big pile of cash, I started my trip. I discovered two things: 1) traveling was a lot cheaper than I thought. I could have started my trip a few years before. 2) Being retired is boring! After traveling for six months I couldn’t help myself and I started a new business.

Making money can be a lot of fun, but you can be happy no matter how big your bank account is. (Yeah, I know this is corny, but it’s also very true.)

Yesterday, I discovered something really interesting. All the business networking books give you the same advice: help people; they’ll feel they owe you something and will want to return the favor at some point.

I love helping people but I have two problems with this piece of advice:

• When I help people, I like helping them because it’s the right thing to do, because I feel like it or because they need help. I don’t like helping people so they owe me a favor.
• I think that doing what books teach you puts unnecessary pressure on other people. I want others to help me because they want to - not because they owe me.

Because of the two points above, I never did favors for others unless I really felt I wanted to. Yesterday, I was stuck calculating some stuff for a financial report I was putting together (I’m a marketer and finances are not a strength for me.) I called a client of mine who is an accountant and I asked for help. She was thrilled that I asked for help and she solved my problem in a matter of minutes. She actually thanked me for giving her the chance to help me.

I wasn’t very surprised. I believe people love doing things for other people. It makes them feel good about themselves and appreciated.

Later in the day I emailed some of our new clients (the accountant was in this group) asking for testimonials. She was happy to write a testimonial for me. If you’ve read Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, you’re familiar with the concept of consistency. Just in case you don’t know what this concept is about, this is a brief explanation: people like to act consistently with previous actions. If you ask two groups of people for $5 but you ask one of them for $0.10 before asking for the $5 and they say yes, that group will be more likely to give you the $5 you’re asking for than the group that never said yes to you in the past. That’s why marketers always recommend asking prospects for a tiny commitment and then ask for more instead of asking for all they want at once.

The bottom line is this: because my accountant had agreed to help me earlier in the day, it was easier for her to say yes when I asked for a testimonial. This wasn’t an experiment and I certainly didn’t try to manipulate her. This was a coincidence but reminded me of the concept of consistency. The truth is that I might have gotten a testimonial from her anyway, but consider this: my accountant was very happy that I asked her to help me and told me that I could count on her for whatever I needed. Our relationship became much stronger because I asked for a favor.

Today I started thinking that it could just be an isolated case and I decided to ask more people to help me with different stuff. They were all very happy to hear from me and they felt great when I asked them for the favors I needed. This made me feel good because I like living in a world where people enjoy helping each other and because I discovered a great way to connect deeper with some people and re-connect with folks I hadn’t talk to in a while. I suspect that one of the reasons people like helping you so much is because when you ask for help, you show you’re vulnerable, and that’s something very few people do.

That’s another piece of advice most self-help books give that I decided to ignore: be a superhero, win every time and don’t show any weaknesses.

SortFolio
Are you looking for a web design company but can’t decide which one is right for you? On SortFolio, you can view portfolios from hundreds of different web design agencies and choose one whose work you like. It even allows you to filter by price range.

How to Build a Web 2.0 Website
This comprehensive guide shows you how you can build a killer web 2.0 site.

FootPrintLive
This web analytics tool allows you to track your visitors in real time (i.e. you can see who is on your website right now, where they are from and what page they’re viewing.) It’s so good I can’t believe it’s free!

Google Wonder Wheel
If you’re a visual person, this might be the best tool to find keywords for your search marketing campaigns.

Last week I needed to cancel a flight I booked on Continental.com. I called them and I got a message that said something along the lines of “we are no longer taking phone calls.” They didn’t give me the option to leave a message or even send an email. The message said I should go to their website and ask my questions to Alex, their “online virtual assistant.” That pissed me off. I love flying Continental, but when I call a company I expect an actual human being to answer the phone.

I finally asked “Alex” my question and I was able to cancel my reservation online, so the experience wasn’t so bad after all. Do you know what really bothered me? That nobody explained to me WHY I had to ask my question to a computer and nobody apologized for the inconvenience. Imagine how different my opinion of Continental would be if the phone message had said this:

“Hi, this is Jeffery Smisek, the CEO of Continental. I am very, very sorry that we can’t take your call. I realize you want to talk to an actual human being instead of listening to a recorded message, so please let me explain why you’re hearing this recording. We do everything we can to keep our costs down so we can pass those savings to you. That means we no longer can take all the calls we get. Let me suggest something: go to our website, click on the Ask Alex link and ask her a question. I’m 99% sure you’ll be very happy with the answer you get. But, if you are not, just email our customer support team at support@continental.com and we’ll get back to you in less than two hours. If your matter is really urgent and you can’t wait two hours, please call 888-999-0000. Thank you!”

What do you think? Would you feel better if companies explained to you why they do the things they do? Wouldn’t it be nice to get some honest, straightforward explanations instead of just more “corporate talk”?

I’ve been really busy the last couple of weeks and I haven’t been able to blog at all, but now I’m back and I wanted to tell you about some of the coolest stuff I’ve found online last week.

Free Tools to Improve Your Site
My friend and social media expert Catherine Daar sent me this really cool link. Thank you!

The Paradox of Choice
Being free and having a lot of options to choose from is great, isn’t it? According to Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who happens to be a terrific speaker, more choices could lead to less satisfaction and happiness. This video blew my mind and I can’t recommend it enough.

How to Conduct a Usability Test
Performing a usability test means watching people use your product. It’s a very simple, yet very powerful thing. The insight you can get from it is priceless. You’ll be able to see what your customers struggle with and you’ll be able to fix it. In this video, usability expert Steve Krug performs a live usability test. I love it.

How Being Creative Can Get You the Job You Want
I love seeing real life examples of people who think out-of-the-box. This video is really funny and eye-opening.

Why Delegating Is So Hard
Most entrepreneurs and managers admit that delegating a task is one of the hardest things they have to do. You’ve heard it before: “if you want it right, you have to do it yourself.”  While that may be true in some cases, just because you’re the best at something doesn’t mean that you need to do it yourself. We all have 24-hour days and if you do everything yourself you’re putting a limit to how big your business can grow.

Focus on the Highest Revenue-Generating Tasks
Let’s say you’re a web designer. If you design all the websites your company is hired to do, you’ll spend almost all your time doing design work and won’t have any free time to get more clients. As a business owner, you should focus on the tasks that generate the highest revenues, and in most cases that is finding new clients. Hire a great designer and work on growing your business.

Hire People that Are Better than You and Let Them Do Their Job
Having great people on your team makes all the difference. If you hire whoever is willing to work for less, forget about delegating; you’ll always have to micromanage them. Hire people that are better than you and let them do their job. But remember: they’re not you. They’ll do things differently and this is not a bad thing. Avoid being a control freak; explain to them the desired outcome and let them choose the path they want to get there. Don’t expect other people to work just like you. That’s not how it works.

Have Realistic Expectations
When people do something for the first time, they almost always make mistakes. Expecting them to do everything perfectly the fist time wouldn’t be realistic. After all, it took you a few weeks or months to do it as well as you do it now. When you need to tell people they made a mistake, start by showing your appreciation for all the great effort they put into something, explain how they can do it better next time and finish by thanking them for doing such great work.

Sometimes we get so carried away by new tools, trends and advice from business gurus that we forget to do the most basic things. Think about it: when was the last time you called one of your customers and asked him about his experience with your company? When you lose a prospect to your competition, do you call her to find out why she didn’t choose you? In this article I share some of the questions I ask my clients - the clients that leave and the prospects that decide to go with our competition.

What You Should Ask Your Clients

• When you decided to hire us, have you considered other options? If so, why did you choose us?
• How satisfied are you with the way you performed in that area? (If they tell you they chose your company because of its customer service, ask them how they would rate your customer service.)
• If we could do one thing different to increase your satisfaction level, what would this be?
• How likely are you to recommend us to your friends and colleagues?

What You Should Ask Leaving Clients

• Why did you decide to stop working with us?
• What could we have done to prevent this?

What You Should Ask Clients that Seemed Interested But Went with Your Competition

• What did you like about our proposal?
• What didn’t you like about it?
• In what areas was the proposal from Company XYZ  better?
• What were the top factors that made you choose Company XYZ over us?

Be Courteous
Remember that these people have better things to do than answer your questions, so ask nicely.  Explain that their input will mean a lot to you and if they agree to answer your questions, don’t be pushy and let them know that they don’t have to answer all your questions if they don’t want. If they help you, send them a thank you letter or a small gift.

Why This Is Important
Think about it: how much could you improve your company if you knew EXACTLY WHY YOUR CLIENTS DO BUSINESS WITH YOU AND WHY OTHERS DON’T? You can spend a few years figuring it out by trial-and-error or pick up the phone and just ask the right people.