When you’re making decisions on different marketing or advertising channels, a big question is how much can you afford to pay for each visitor or sales lead.  This can help you make informed and profitable decisions.  All it takes is gathering the right information and some simple math.

If you’re selling things online, you can use an online tool to track how many visitors you’re getting.  Say on average you get 5000 different people visiting each per month.  From your sales statistics, you had 250 customers last month with an average profit of $15.  Then you can estimate that 5% of your visitors turn into customers, so each visitor will contribute on average 5% of $15, or $0.75 to your sales.  This is just a quick estimate - it doesn’t account for things like repeat purchases or the chance that they’ll tell their friends - but it’ll serve as a starting point.

So now you can use this as a quick test to figure out whether you should use certain forms of advertising.  If you pay 50 cents per click for a sponsored search result on Google Adwords, you’re still earning an average profit of 25 cents each time someone clicks, so you should do as much of this as you can.  On the other hand, if you’re paying $200 a month for a banner ad that brings in 100 visitors, you’re paying $2 per visitor, which probably means you’re losing money, unless visitors from that banner are particularly likely to buy.

You can use a similar analysis to find out how much a retail window shopper or sales lead is worth to you.  But after you make your marketing decisions, go back to treating your visitors as human beings, not dollar signs.  This’ll be both more enjoyable and profitable in the long run.

A common question asked by business owners is “how can other people find my website?”  After all, even if you have the best website in the world, if no one knows about it, your business doesn’t benefit.

One common way is to hope people find you through Google or other search engines.  But say, if your company sells cheese, how many results will turn up if they search for a “cheese company”?  Hundreds of thousands.  Chances are your company won’t even show up on the first few pages, unless you do some search engine optimization (SEO) on your website.

SEO is a big field that requires a lot of knowledge in both the web technologies and how search engines work.  If you want to learn more about SEO, there are plenty of tutorials out there.  But as a starter, if you just want someone to take a quick look at your website and tell you what you should change, you can take a look at WebSite Grader.

Website Grader is a free online tool for SEO beginners that tells you how effective your website is, and how you could change it to get a higher Google ranking.

It’s free, so give it a try.  What’s your grade?

We’re all busy these days, especially at work.  Team meetings, project deadlines, business travel, not to mention all your personal activities and errands.  Keeping track of your own schedule can be hard.  But to remember the schedule of everyone else in your team to coordinate better with them can be headache-inducing.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a centralized calendar you could share with your team?

Google Calendar is the answer.  It is an online web-based calendar that can be shared between you and your colleagues.  You can set events and send email invitations directly on it to streamline your meeting arrangements.  It will even email you reminders of the events if you want.  Best of all, it is free.  You can even keep a separate private calendar right on Google Calendar, so that you jot down your family get-togethers and errands all in one place, without sharing all these details with your co-workers.

Give it a try today.  Stop keeping everything in your head and save yourself some headaches.

Most small businesses these days have a website up to share information and attract new customers.  If you don’t, you might want to consider getting one designed.

If you already have one, have you ever wondered what kind of people are visiting it?  Where are they from?  What do they click?  How did they get there?  How many come back?  Answering these questions helps you understand how people interact with your website, so you can improve on weak points and promote your selling points better.  Luckily, there are free tools online that can help you track how people use your website.

Google Analytics gives you detailed information on how your users browse your site.  It can tell you what time of the day you get the most traffic, which countries the users from, which page is the most viewed, etc.  The nice thing about it is that the graphs are all interactive, allowing you to drill down to find the exact information you want.

Quantcast shows you the demographics of your users.  Information like the age group, average household income, the gender percentage, etc.  How could you target your marketing message better if you found out that most of your visitors were women over 50?

Using these tools is very easy if you already have a website.  Simply sign-up for a free account, and follow their instructions to attach a small piece of HTML code on your website.  You might be surprised by how your website is being used.  We know we were when we saw Malaysia in the top 10 countries visiting us.  Time to go international, anyone?

Listening to your customers is critical in identifying how your business can improve.  But usually, you only hear from either your greatest fans or the customers having the most trouble.  What do the rest of your more moderate customers think?

An online survey tool can help to gather more feedback and help you organize it to decide how to improve.  You can make your own survey, invite your customers to complete it, and then generate reports with graphs and charts on their responses.  For example, you might find that only 30% of your customers know about your latest product, and decide to improve that by showing it more prominently on your website or sending out a newsletter.  Most of these tools are free to start, but will charge reasonable rates if you have a large number of responses.

Here are 2 of these online survey tools:
- Survey Gizmo
- Survey Monkey

Give it a try today.  What your customers think might just surprise you.