crowdSPRING is a small business – our team totals nine people (and a really cute chocolate lab puppy named Lucy). As a small business, we leverage online tools to help us run our business efficiently and inexpensively. We are selective – we do our homework and always compare competitive products within any category. Before we make any decision, we typically look at the top two or three finalists and thoroughly evaluate them before deciding what to use.
Entrepreneurs and other small businesses often ask us about the online tools we use, and we’re happy to share. We only recommend the tools we personally use and like. Here are our top 10:
What it is: Website Optimizer is a free tool that helps you test and increase your site’s conversion rates. You can test variations of text, images, and other content. It’s easy to use and provides a very compelling way to test and increase conversions.
Why we use it: We’ve used the Website Optimizer for numerous tests on our site, including the home page, our “how it works page”, and on other pages to test specific elements. If you wonder whether the effort is worth it – it absolutely is.
How we use it: We develop content for a specific page and run tests to see which content leads to higher conversions. For example, we’re currently testing three variations of our “How It Works” page. For a more detailed look at how we use Website Optimizer, you should read my post – “Increasing Conversions Using Google Website Optimizer“.
What it is: Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that provides detailed and very useful information about your website traffic and the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
Why we use it: There are numerous paid analytics tools available – and many are quite good. Google Analytics is free and offers more than enough features that most businesses need. Google has continued to innovate in this area and has recently added new features, including advanced segmentation (allowing you to analyze subsets of your traffic) and custom reports.
How we use it: We monitor traffic to every page on our site. We also monitor every marketing campaign that we run to evaluate whether the expenses (both time and effort) are justified. We’ll also occasionally compare our data to those of our competitors. If you’re interested, I recently wrote “10 Tips For Evaluating Your Competitors” – a useful guide that lists additional resources that could supplement your analytics data.
It’s human nature to focus on big stories. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But moments – ordinary and not – are more meaningful and real. We should all focus more on moments, not big stories. Micah Baldwin wrote a brilliant post yesterday called “Moments”. I encourage you to read it. It’s simple. Pure. True.
Micah’s post includes a video posted to YouTube. It’s a powerful video and I’ve included it below.
What do you think? Are moments important? And what’s your favorite?
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post a ton of fun links pertaining to logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! However, due to the fast-paced nature of microblogging, these links become buried within a few hours. So, here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
In the book Tribes by Seth Godin, Godin suggests that anyone, anywhere can be a leader. The one thing holding most people back is the fear of failure.
Tribes is about making a choice – to lead or not to lead a group of people.
Using real world examples, Godin tells stories about how famous and not so famous people made the choice to lead and the amazing things they’ve accomplished. Their accomplishments aren’t amazing because they were grand or because major media publications wrote about them. They’re amazing because many of them seemed impossible or difficult.
One of the many lessons in the book is about management and leadership. Godin explains the difference:
Management is about manipulating resources to get a known job done … Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating a change that you believe in.
My thesaurus says the best synonym for leadership is management. Maybe that word used to fit, but no longer. Movements have leaders and movements make things happen.
Leaders have followers. Mananagers have employees.
Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.
Godin writes that it takes only two things to turn any group into a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.
So a leader can help increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members by
transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change;
providing tools to allow members to tighten their communication; and
leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members.
Most leaders focus only on the third tactic. A bigger tribe somehow equals a better tribe. In fact, the first two tactics almost always lead to more impact.
Tribes is an important book and I highly recommend you read it – especially if you see yourself only as a follower. If you want to learn how to lead tribes, I highly recommend you read my review of Tribal Leadership - and then read Tribal Leadership (or just skip my review and read the book).
What do you do every day to lead, rather than manage? And do you agree with Godin that leadership is not management?
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post a ton of fun links pertaining to logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! However, due to the fast-paced nature of microblogging, these links become buried within a few hours. So, here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The South by Southwest Panel Picker is open and voting has begun for SXSW 2010! This is a great opportunity for the interactive and technology community to vote on the sessions they would most like to attend at next spring’s conference in Austin. Needless to say we didn’t have enough time to slog through all 2,213, but we were able to identify some pretty cool needles in the haystack. Take a look at these 10 I found and please send in any cool ones that you spot that we might all be interested ion. Be sure to click through and sign in to vote for the ones you like.
Twitter is the poster child for the power of small ideas. But can this 140 character mashup of micro thoughts and narcissistic egotism amount to anything truly significant? This engaging tour of 34 inspired tweets will offer a vision of the future, told through the unexpected lens of Twitter.
Digital Natives understand the digital space, but do they understand it from a biz perspective? Has personal branding created a false sense of accomplishment and knowledge? Balancing ambition and modesty? Learning, but also applying in real life? We have so much wealth at our disposal, what’s the perfect ratio of knowledge vs. experience? (This panel is aimed at marketing professionals)
Give Back is the crowdSPRING community’s way of helping worthy non-profit and charity causes in need. Creatives in the crowdSPRING community have agreed that for these special projects, no monetary awards will be given. crowdSPRING will waive its fees and will assist the organizations with posting their project. We will collaborate together to help those less fortunate. You can read more about the origins of Give Back here.
We’re fortunate to have an amazing community of creatives – nearly 36,000 of them, from 150+ countries. They speak hundreds of languages, cover all age groups, demographics, experience and religions. They’ve created graphic designs for companies in virtually every country of the world and in most languages spoken on the planet.
As in all our projects, participation is voluntary. Give Back projects work like standard projects, including contracts, wrap-up, notifications, etc. To help the learning process along in these projects, we encourage creatives to collaborate and to provide constructive feedback to each other.
In Our Own Backyard is an organization of photojournalists committed to the cause of social justice in the United States. Their inaugural project is a multimedia examination of the daily struggles of impoverished Americans: a comprehensive and innovative campaign that will affect the way the general public and policymakers think about poverty in America. The organization believes that increasing awareness about poverty is a critical prelude to building support for initiatives that can create lasting impact in the lives of disadvantaged people. Visual story-telling is unique in its power to achieve that awareness, and it can foster empathy for those living in poverty in a way that text and statistics alone cannot.
Our entire community is honored to be helping this wonderful organization with such an important cause. You can view the In Our Own Backyard project here. Please consider helping this worthy cause. You can help directly by participating in the project, or you can help by telling others about this project and/or about In Our Own Backyard.
We encourage everyone to find ways to help others who are less fortunate. Thank you – from our entire community!
Hundreds of years ago, duels were resolved in an elegant, cultured way: one person killed the other with a pistol. Now, duels have become barbaric. Here are Jerome and Kevin, fighting it out with a crowdSPRING Slinky.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post a ton of fun links pertaining to logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! However, due to the fast-paced nature of microblogging, these links become buried within a few hours. So, here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
crowdSPRING is the world's #1 marketplace for entrepreneurs, small businesses, nonprofits and agencies who need custom logo design, web design, a new company name or other writing and design services. Over 105,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 26,000 satisfied clients around the world.
