How long does it take someone to go to your home page and understand what they are supposed to do?

When someone is using a search engine to do research for a product they would like to buy, they aren’t going to take time to go deep into your product offerings unless they have a compelling reason to do so. The presentation on your home page (or any other landing page, for that matter) is critical to get them to stay. It does you no good to attract people to your site then lose them because your presentation stinks.

Make your presentation simple and to the point. Don’t leave them with questions as what you are all about or where to go next on your site.

You already know that rambling in verbal communication is bad, so don’t let your marketing ramble either.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

I’ve been doing some research for an article that I am writing. It is required that I look at a number of software providers in a particular vertical market. I was doing some research on remote printer management software programs. There seem to be an unlimited supply of this particular type of software available.

Well, for my research, I needed to know why I would choose their product over their competitor. I want the business case for the benefit of their product.

What I notice more than anything is they are very good at putting a feature list but not very good at putting the important business benefits where I can find them. In fact, the feature list is incredibly long (many pages on many) but the benefits aren’t easy to understand. I have to infer from the features what the benefit of their product is. Or, in some cases, what the core positioning of their product is.

Let me give you an example (without naming names so as not to offend).

• Insert & Append Bytes

Inserting

You can insert bytes (using our built-in byte editor) or a file before the print job data.

* Set the printer to a specific mode (useful in pass-through printing)
* Send an overlay to the printer, such as a form or watermark
* Insert a custom banner page or report header

Appending

You can also append bytes (again, with our byte editor) or a file after the print job data.
Example uses include:

* Return the printer to the “normal” mode
* Append a document trailer

• Banner Page Support

[Product] asks whether a banner page should be inserted into the data before printing. This selection is used for raw and filter type queues. The drop list offers three choices: suppress banner, always print, and when requested.

* Suppress banner: RPM will not insert a banner page
* Always print: RPM will always insert a banner page
* When requested: RPM will insert a banner page when requested by the client

In this particular example, there are another 30 features like this. If I don’t understand the basis of their product, how much time do you think that I am willing to spend on this? If I just happen on the site, how much time will I spend learning what they do and applying it to what I need?
Here is a thought… feature your benefits first and show your features last.

Here is a better thought. Have your home page on your website show a simple positioning statement that can show the benefit of your product in one or two key sentences. For the remote printer management industry, try something like this:

Remote Printer Management can help reduce your printer management costs by up to 43%. Our software can provide you with key improvement in the following three, key areas:

1. Remote printer setup and configuration management
2. Automated meter reporting, error reporting and low toner reporting
3. Cost containment and load balancing reports and recommendations

How about that for something concise? Now your customers would know what your main purpose is and what is in it for them in a very simple and understandable fashion.

Couple that with good design and navigation and your product will be far more marketable.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

What is wrong with this pricing model? (look at two buttons on the right)

If I pay for three days, one day at a time, I pay only $27. If I want to get one three day pass, I pay an additional $13. Is that for the convenience? Or for the stupid?

$13… bad luck.

Thanks to John for the image.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

Search Engine Optimization is a funny thing. We do our best to put in the right site description. We do our best to optimize our meta tags. (in both cases, you put too many words in or the wrong words and you are doing more harm for your site than good).

You might have purchased or had friends put links on their sites to try and drive traffic. You might have a blog like I do so that you can get more content.

The fact is, you never know how people are going to find you. You never know what people are looking for when they come accross your site.

Let me give you an example. For those of you that know me, I write this blog as an opportunity to talk about business and technology. My focus is on helping the small to medium sized businesses understand how business and technology can work together. Sometimes I talk about marketing, efficiency, sales or I might talk about document management, data security or business workflow processes.

What I am most amazed at is that the most common search string that people use Google to find my site is “Dear Valued Customer.” As of the writing of this post, it is number four on the search results… out of over 200,000 indexed results. That is amazing to me. I have never tried to optimize for that term. I would have never thought that writing the post that I would have so many hits. But, I do.

Bottom line: You never know why or how people will find you. You never know what is interesting to your clients. If you write contstantly updated content (like a blog), people will find you. The more often you write, the more often you will be found.

As far as the post is concerned about valued customers, I am pretty proud of it. If you are interested in reading it, click through from the search of “Dear Valued Customer.” 

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

Many sales people wonder how to ensure that current and prospective customers can most effectively learn about the offerings they have. So, they usually employ two methods of distributing that message. Method 1: Call them on the phone. Method 2: Visit with the face to face.

This may have been enough 20 years ago, but your customers are being bombarded more than ever with more and more information. They are being bombarded more and more with advertising. More and more they don’t want to hear your message. They view your message as simply another attempt to force your product on them.

How do you get around this? How do you get your message into the forefront of their minds without them tuning you out the instant you start talking?

My feeling is that the most effective strategy is to publish content. Don’t publish more advertising… publish relevant content that they have the option to read. Content that will allow them to gain more useful information. Content that will help them improve. Content that illustrates your expertise in a given area. Content that helps to establish you as the authority of a subject matter. Content that is refreshed on a constant basis.

Okay… so how do you do it? I use my blog as a way to convey my thoughts. When I meet new people and establish a rapport, I invite them to read. I publish a post as often as I want and they read (or don’t read) as often as I want. Those that are interested read more and begin to understand what I really do. I don’t have to force my will upon anyone, but I get my message delivered. If it is a good message, they can comment and share with others.

You may not be interested in a blog. And I don’t think that should be your only approach if you do like to blog. But whether you blog or not, there are other ways that you can publish to establish yourself as an expert. One opportunity could be to find out what industry publications your clients subscribe to and start writing content… I can almost promise you that they want to have more content and will let you write for them as you have good content.

Another option is to publish a newsletter. Invite your customers to subscribe via email or snail-mail. If your newsletter is information rich and ad light, they will be more than happy to continue to read and likely share your information.

Publishing is the way to establish expertise and prove that you know what you are doing. It will be slow at first, but when your name and personal brand is established, you will find that your clients will seek you out.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

A few years back, I needed to rebuild my computer. I was very careful to back up my hard drive. As I started to load the new operating system, I reformatted the hard drive but couldn’t load the system for some reason. I tried again. No luck. I finally realized that I deleted my backup that I just created. Then, I realized that that through the process, I also deleted my original.

Can you believe it? The most recent backup that I had created prior to that was about 8 months old. Yup, I lost 8 months of data. 8 months of data that was very important. Or, at least data I thought was important.

Of course, I had a pretty sick feeling in the pit of my oversized stomach. Over the next couple of years, I found there were definitely files and documents that I really could use. I spent a lot of time rebuilding old data.

Obviously, I now have a better back up strategy in place. I back up my data to an external drive on a daily basis. But, it makes me wonder of the valuation of a disaster recovery plan. For my small business, I really don’t have a large quantity of information that needs to be backed up. But, it is important that I have a backup.

If your organization is rather large, it could be more costly. Your data could be located in file cabinets, on physical desktops, on computer desktops, on CDs, on various servers and on the internet. It can be a very costly proposition to have a good disaster recovery plan.

For example, if you have a lot of file cabinets, what is the best way to back up that data? Really, it is not practical to make a photocopy of that data and store a set of boxes off site. Really, the most cost effective way to back up that data is to scan the documents and store electronically. The problem is, that can be a very costly process. If you are a very small organization, it may not be too costly, but you have to not only consider the cost of the software, but the cost of the support, related hardware (scanners, MFPs, etc) as well as the labor for conversion and end user/admin training. Even for a small organization, the costs can be multiple thousands of dollars or even tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for large organizations.

With the decision of disaster recovery comes the need for determination of how much you should spend. What is the value of that disaster recovery system.

The fact is, there is no way to truly understand that value of any type of disaster recovery system until you actually have a problem. When you have all the data in the world, it is easy to say that you “need” it all. When you lose the data, it becomes easy to understand what you really need. In order to value a disaster recovery system, you must take a realistic look at your data and what it would cost to replace. If you need to save it before a disaster, you need to have it after a disaster. Look at what you have. If you don’t need it, get rid of it. If you need it, plan appropriately for a disaster.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

“We believe that paper-based information will continue to grow, not inspite of, but because of, new ‘paperless’ technologies such as e-mail and the Internet. These technologies have prompted the creation of hard copies of such electronic information and have also led to increased demand for electronic records services, such as the storage and off-site rotation of backup copies of magnetic media. In addition, we believe that the proliferation of digital information technologies and distributed data networks has created an emerging need for efficient, cost-effective, high quality solutions for digital archiving and the management of electronic documents.”

Source: Iron Mountain 10-K Report

How do you think that affects you?

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

From a recent discussion and LegalTech

1GB of storage costs about 20 cents to buy

1GB of storage costs around $3500 to review

Thanks to John Mancini for this.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

You may understand what needs to be done, but do you understand how to do it?

Just because you know what to do (or what should be done) doesn’t mean that you have any clue as to how to do it. If you know what to do but not how to do it, find someone who does and let them do if for you. If you still don’t know what to do… you better get some help.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free

As businesses expand to other ventures… As people become more skilled… As technology advances…

The lines of your core competency shifts and changes.

One such example is the office equipment industry. 20 years ago, the primary focus of office equipment dealers was fax machines and copiers. 10 years ago, the focus of those same office equipment dealers was to connect those copiers and fax machines to the network and replace printers. Now, those same office equipment dealers are focused on print management and document management software solutions.

The lines in many businesses are being more and more blurred. Your competition is becoming more difficult to identify. Innovative people are doing old things in new ways and new things in evermore innovative ways.

You may be the one to blur the lines. You may be competing against someone that is blurring the lines. The fact is, you can’t compete the same way today as you did just a few short years ago.

Change your approach to stay on top.

Corey Smith
Co-founder of Resumango where you can build a better resume for free