So You Want to Sell Advertising

Many people start sites with the preconceived notion that they can make tons of money by selling advertising. Don't be fooled, the road to riches is more detailed and complex than you know. For those of you moving forward, here are some tips for getting started.

What you need prior to selling anything is a detailed breakdown of your traffic. Understanding the types of visitors and members you have is going to be essential to successfully finding advertisers. You want a user base that is targeted, but not so targeted that you are limiting advertising prospects.

You need to know that in addition to users being interested in your site's primary focus, they are also within 'x' age range, 'x' income level, gender, etc. You absolutely need to understand figures such as bounce rates, the average time spent on your site, where the majority of traffic is coming from and the rate of growth/month.

Being that the economy is presumably slower than it was in the ad boom we saw about a year ago, you can be pretty sure that budgets for advertising are somewhat smaller. The rate of spending is still increasing, but at a slower rate than before. Because advertisers are a bit more cautious, a Pay Per Click (PPC) package may be more attractive, since the ROI is much more tangible.

CPM advertising (cost per thousand impressions) is the other alternative. Advertisers looking to maximize exposure in a specific market will likely flock to this option. Again though, the ROI is less tangible, and MOST companies, in my humble opinion, are looking at PPC options.

When you structure deals you want to emphasize the uniqueness of your audience and understand who your key prospective advertisers are going to be. Offer all encompassing advertising packages in addition to a single banner, like what you see on sites such as break.com, where a company gets the banner, in-video ad, and perhaps a "free offer" opportunity from the advertiser. Sponsorship is a great word to use and paradigm to embrace since it feels less "advertisy" to consumers.

Traffic: this will be a tough barrier to overcome given that you probably don't have start up capital to spend on advertising yourself. My suggestion is to structure a vigorous grass roots campaign Which is often much better for long term results and for generating a consistent user base.

Blogs are a great first step in spreading the word and building natural traffic. Submit value based content to article databases as well. Original videos are also an emerging tactic that can build viral traffic to your site. My suggestion is keep it somewhat short, and very funny. Humor is key. Submit releases to other websites that may have an interest in your site. Offer to write stories on other companies in order to get them to post your story on their blogs.

Be creative. The more creative you can be as far as distribution methods the better.

Be patient! Don't expect your traffic and page rank to skyrocket over night. But also know that the harder you work and the more time you put in, the faster you will see results.

Visit Grantdeken.com to get more ideas and information on how to boost your company's marketing efforts!

Jacksonville University Creating CEO's

The Davis College of Business is out to make a name for itself and this past weekend was no different. The College of Business, along with the JU entrepreneurship club, sent three students to the Collegiate Entrepreneur Organization’s annual conference in Chicago, Illinois.

Roughly 1,400 students, faculty, and entrepreneurs gathered together for three days of networking, workshops, and keynotes by some of today’s most prominent business leaders. “It was a rewarding experience to be surrounded by a group of people who have many of the same goals as you, that think the way you do,” said Grant Deken, a senior economics major and founder of a small marketing firm, Tangent Initiatives, LLC. “We came out of the conference with a different paradigm. The three of us feel energized and confident we can take our businesses and our organization to the next level.

The conference featured more than twenty workshops from basic concepts to more advanced subjects such as venture financing and search engine optimization. Veteran attendees competed in business plan and elevator pitch competitions for large cash prizes. “The workshops and keynotes were amazing,” Said JU Entrepreneurship Club president Chris Salley, “but the opportunity to network with peers and business leaders was truly invaluable. We are really thankful to have the support of Dr. Rossiter, Dean McCann, and the whole College of Business.”

The JU Entrepreneurship Club currently meets once a month and focuses on bringing in local entrepreneurs to discuss different aspects of starting and running a business. “We have big plans for our organization this year. We want to continue to bring in speakers, but also move towards bigger things, like competitions, more conference opportunities, and social entrepreneurship within the city,” Salley said. “Our organization encourages anyone interested in starting their own business to attend our events and meetings.”

If you would like more information about this topic or to schedule and interview with Grant Deken, please call him at 904.254.5768 or e-mail at Gdeken@jacksonville.edu

Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization 2008 – Chicago, IL

It was like a breath of fresh air, being surrounded by 1,400 young, motivated, big thinking, wealth aspiring entrepreneurs. This year the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization hosted its annual conference in the heart of the windy city and between the speakers, the company, and the city, it did not disappoint.

Speakers like Robert Kiyosaki inspired and motivated us with stories of triumph and failure and most importantly, overcoming failures to go on to triumphs. As first time attendees to the conference, the experience was an unforgettable one. Advanced workshops gave insight into specific issues like venture capital, internet marketing, and understanding the importance of bootstrapping (and how to do it effectively). It was a hub of unbelievable resources for anyone aspiring to start a business or take theirs to the next level.

Now back in Jacksonville, I’m more ready than ever to continue with my plans to create a multi-million dollar enterprise. But it’s not all about the money, and that was a point of emphasis that CEO illustrated. The success of business allows us to think bigger, change the status quo faster, and access the needed resources to solve the world’s problems. It’s our responsibility to create jobs, find better sources of energy, and end the disease and hunger that millions of humans face every day.

So here’s my challenge to you. Stop what you’re doing and just think for a minute. Where do you want to be in five years? Do you want to be a millionaire? Do you want to help people? Even better, would you like to be a millionaire helping people? The questions are a bit rhetorical, but I sincerely hope you consider that entrepreneurship is the key that can open the door into a new world of thought and freedom. Can you work hard enough to obtain that? Do you want to?

Managing a Marketing and Sales Transformation

Authors: Joel Claret, Pierre Mauger, and Eric V. Roegner

The marketing environment is unprecedentedly changing and becoming more complex. The result is a need to reorganize brand portfolios, rethink spending approaches, generate more fine-grained customer insights, overhaul pricing and segment management, and restructure sales, service, and channel strategies. Each change is a challenge in its own right, and some companies are tackling more than one: GE, for example, has been trying simultaneously to improve the way it approaches innovation, brand management, and customer care. This level of change represents a commercial transformation—that is, a transformation of the company's broad-based marketing and sales elements.

It's difficult to carry off change of this magnitude at a brisk pace: deeply ingrained habits keep employees from embracing new techniques, skill-building efforts break down, and leaders lose focus. To counteract these problems, companies have developed a variety of change-management approaches, particularly in operations, where techniques such as Six Sigma and Total Quality Management (TQM) have flourished. Making change stick typically requires both planning and action—centering change on a powerful aspiration, establishing systems and processes that reinforce the goals of change, modifying mind-sets by creating a sense of shared purpose among employees, conducting targeted skill-building efforts, and creating role models for employees.¹ While such change-management practices are useful, they are difficult to apply to marketing and sales. One reason is that these organizations—encompassing brand managers, market researchers, and segment and channel managers, to name just a few—are more diverse and complex than the shop floors where many improvement programs take place. Figuring out how to keep disparate parts of the organization working together is a key challenge of change. Second, the rationale for transforming a marketing organization is often to jump-start growth. That requires creativity, not just strong execution, so the change effort is more difficult and the related decision making more complex. Finally, the responses of competitors and customers to marketing changes are difficult to predict, so it is hard to eliminate variability (a goal of many operations change efforts); maintaining flexibility is essential; and the establishment of goals and metrics is complicated.

In our experience, five critical ingredients of transformation are key to overcoming these issues (Exhibit 1):

1. Leadership, aspirations, conviction, and clarity of purpose: committed leadership that can bring together disparate parts of an organization to achieve an ambitious and clearly articulated aspiration
2. New ways of working: a combination of improved processes and tools that help make sense of complex information, redefined pivotal roles, and performance management that drives the transformation forward; together, these serve as the foundation of a commercial operating system that, when fully developed, improves consistency, coordination, insight, and decision making
3. Capability building: on-the-job apprenticeship and high-caliber coaching designed to upgrade critical skills while delivering results
4. Changes in mind-sets and behavior: necessary steps such as removing cultural barriers to change and developing a tailored set of interventions to shape behavior
5. Transformation design: an approach that delineates the scope of the journey of change and the support needed to meet its objectives

You can read the rest of this article and others at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com

Grant

How Retailers Can Make the Best of a Slowdown

Moving quickly to improve performance can help retailers to recover faster.

Ashish A. Kotecha, Josh Leibowitz, and Ian MacKenzie

September 2008

Downturns are tough on retailers. Recent McKinsey research indicates that during the last two recessions (1990–91 and 2000–01), growth slowed for nearly every retail subsector in the United States. Ninety-three percent of the retailers surveyed that existed during both downturns experienced slowing revenue growth in one of them, and 59 percent endured it in both.¹

Unfortunately for retailers, their position on the front lines of consumer spending doesn’t translate into a rapid turnaround when the general economy experiences a subsequent uptick. The average retail subsector growth rate during the first year of recovery following the 1990–91 and 2000–01 downturns was 0.3 percent. And 12 of 15 retail sectors lagged behind even that rate of growth during one or both upturns.²

These downturn dynamics—declining sales followed by a sluggish recovery period—mean retailers should move quickly to minimize performance deterioration. The challenge, of course, is that retailers have a large number of options to sort through, ranging from cutting costs by shutting stores or restructuring support functions, to increasing revenue by refreshing stores or overhauling promotions. Many make the mistake of focusing on what is easy or known to them and fail to tackle more challenging goals that might improve their competitive positioning during the inevitable upturn.

In our experience, some basic rules of thumb are invaluable for helping retailers rapidly sort through their options and set priorities for action—in particular, determining whether to take an offensive or defensive approach. Combining a tough self-assessment with a hard-nosed scan of the environment can help retailers decide on the relative importance of reducing costs, increasing investments, creating financial flexibility, and seeking near-term revenue growth (exhibit).

Retailers should start by taking a rigorous look at the health of their balance sheets, management teams, and overall operating performance. Companies with reasonable cash reserves and ready access to credit lines, for instance, have options—such as investing in stores, people, or acquisitions—that weaker competitors simply lack.

At the same time, retailers need to be realistic about the potential of their businesses. Do they operate store formats or play in a subsector with strong growth prospects? To what extent is the market already saturated, and where does the retailer stand versus competitors? Recent growth rates, market penetration figures, and a serious review of the strengths and weaknesses of competitors are all important factors to consider.

Companies with good financial strength in markets with significant growth potential should lift investment to gain strategic advantage over competitors. Big bets, such as doubling down on new stores or remodeling old ones, are one possibility. Equally important are smaller bets, such as recruiting talent from weaker players or investing in more precise local market execution. For example, when one specialty retailer began suffering from declining foot traffic in its stores, the company built an analytic tool to help merchants and members of the central marketing organization more effectively use data from customer-relationship-management (CRM) and transaction databases. This allowed the retailer to better predict local demand and decide which items should receive how much space in its advertising circular. Comparable store sales have risen between two and four percent in test markets employing the new promotion-effectiveness tool.

Retailers with good financial health in mature industries can also go on the offensive, taking actions to quickly grow revenue by driving traffic into stores through more compelling offers and ensuring that staff is ready on the floor for the assisted sale. For example, a North American soft goods retailer has reversed declining sales, improved customer satisfaction, and increased the frequency and average size of transactions by focusing on eliminating out-of-stocks, raising the effectiveness of front-line salespeople, and making small store-layout changes that help customers find the goods they want.

Companies with weaker financial health will need to focus more aggressively on reducing costs. Our recent experience suggests that weak performers have major opportunities to rationalize inventory stock keeping units (SKUs)—freeing up working capital—and to renegotiate terms on direct sourcing. These companies can also increase shop-floor efficiency, an area where they frequently lag. By applying lean operations techniques to redeploy labor, they can shorten the time staff spend on noncustomer-facing tasks and increase the time spent helping customers. The focus should be on getting more from existing sales resources, not just on cutting labor hours. Indeed, the key driver of economics is sales—not just cost as a percentage of sales.

More broadly, retailers should bear in mind that the least effective thing to do during a downturn is to simply “hunker down” and “weather the storm.” Though there’s no escaping some pain, moving quickly to improve performance can reduce the odds of a deep dip in sales and position retailers to participate fully in the inevitable upturn.

Original Article: http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Retail_Consumer_Good/Strategy_Analysis How_retailers_can_make_the_best_of_a_slowdown_2188

Leverage Your Marketing Efforts

Today's economy is volatile and unpredictable. Markets feed off of each other like nothing before, and the world economy is one marketplace. Consumers today are smart. They research purchase options, talk with others, and can make or break a business. Understanding how to engage this marketplace changes is essential to being successful. However, complex problems tend to come with long complex answers and complex answer eat up precious time. So, for our purposes, I have shortened some simple small business recommendations into short, easy to understand strategies that every business should be actively engaging in.

1. Enterprise Branding - Many companies are doing an exceptional job branding at the micro level (product) but is missing the mark on creating an enterprise presence. Evolving your company's - not just product - brand is an essential part in growing the business and establishing a larger market presence.

2. Analytics and Email -

a. Leverage the internet by employing an email marketing initiative. You can use this to put your products in front of more people, more often while at the same time increase the availability of feedback and behavioral data from consumers. This will also help with enterprise branding, customer loyalty, and market exposure.

b. What are you currently spending on marketing and where is it going? Based on current pay per click (PPC) rates, what kind of turn over are you seeing. How leveraged are your key words respectively to the search volume of those key words?

c. Home Page - What is the click through rate on your home page? Bounce rate? Building high value content into your home page, such as product demo’s or a welcome video to captivate an audience will encourage a higher CLR and a lower Bounce rate. Ideally, to work in conjunction with enterprise branding, consider re-tooling your home page.

3. Economic Outlook - An economic slowdown will take a toll on businesses expecting U.S. retail to maintain its current pace. To hedge against losses, consider some of the following:

a. Inventory turn over - Has it gradually slowed? Keep less inventory on hand if so and more cash available.

b. International Markets - Consider putting your sites in multiple languages and buying country specific domain names (.cn - China, .se - Sweden, .uk - London). This can help you penetrate similar target markets in foreign countries. Be sure to do some thorough research to ensure you are marketing a product correctly given the cultural differences of foreign consumers. This is an ideal growth strategy (if done correctly) but can be even more rewarding when you need to find new channels of distribution due to economic slowdown.

These are some of the essentials that every business can employ with little real capital while at the same time seeing exceptional results.

Stocks tumble as bailout plan fails in House

Monday September 29, 2:26 pm ET
By Tim Paradis, AP Business Writer

Stocks tumble as financial bailout plan fails in House vote; credit tightens further

NEW YORK (AP) -- Fear swept across the financial markets Monday, sending the Dow Jones industrials down as much as 705 points, after the financial bailout package failed the House.

As the vote was shown on TV, stocks plunged and and investors fled to the safety of the credit markets, worrying that the financial system would keep sinking under the weight of failed mortgage debt.

"Clearly something needs to be done, and the market dropping 400 points in 10 minutes is telling you that," said Chris Johnson president of Johnson Research Group. "This isn't a market for the timid."

While investors had some worries that the vote would be close, many investors appeared to believe it would ultimately pass.

The markets were highly volatile, with the Dow regaining ground then falling backing again, trading down 577.37, or 5.18 percent, to 10,565.76.

Broader stock indicators also tumbled. The Standard & Poor's 500 index declined 79.35, or 6.54 percent, to 1,133.92, and the Nasdaq composite index fell 146.72, or 6.72 percent, to 2,036.62.

The Federal Reserve declined to comment on the market's decline.

With Wall Street in turmoil, the yield on the 3-month Treasury bill fell to 0.32 percent from 0.87 percent on Friday. That showed that investors were prepared to get meager returns on an investment as long as it was secure.

Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, said investors are worried about the spread of troubles beyond banks in the U.S. to Europe and other markets.

"Things are dying and breaking apart while they sit there and vote on this thing," he said.