Say goodbye to the days of purchasing a lotto ticket at the convenient store and hello to mobilotto. Based in Toronto, Canada, mobilotto is an application that now allows you to safely and securely purchase lotto tickets on your cell phone! The software only allows you to purchase lotto available in your area using location technology. And the best thing…? You’ll never lose your million dollar lotto ticket since it’s all stored in your account!
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
The image above shows a visualization of 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period in August 2010 (the tweets said “good morning” in English and other languages)
Google has released a new tool – Google Boost – that allows small businesses to connect with potential customers via Google Adwords. The program is still in beta and available to select local businesses in San Francisco, Houston and Chicago.
Boost allows local businesses to create online search ads right from their Google Places account (In an earlier post, I discussed several free resources from Google available to small businesses, including Google Places – Free resources for small business from Google). The advantage for small businesses is that once the ad is created, no ongoing management is needed (unlike Adwords, where ongoing management is important). There is no bidding and no keyword research. Google experimented with a similar program in 2009.
Once you provide some basic information about your business (you can, for example, include star ratings from customers and number of reviews received) and a monthly budget, Google automatically sets up the ad campaign by determining the relevant keywords that will trigger the ad to appear when potential customers search on Google (see image on the left) and Google Maps. Your account is debited – just like with Adwords – only when people click on the ad – and not merely when the ad is shown.
Why should small businesses be interested in Boost? Recent studies reveal that most consumers research online before shopping locally. This trend is increasing – a few years ago, fewer consumers researched products online before buying locally.
If you want Google to let you know when Boost is available in your area, you can complete a short online form.
One of the challenges entrepreneurs face every day is about managing their own capacity. Finding time to think, to plan, and to strategize gets more difficult the larger your business grows. Every day we have to find a balance between the day-to-day chores involved in operating a business and the high-level planning that goes into growing the business.
Each of us deals with this challenge differently, but all of us share this question: how do I manage the time I spend ON the business vs. the time I spend IN the business. I share some thoughts in this short video.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
Many entrepreneurs and small business owners believe that their new product or service will beat the competition with great new features.
Product and service features are rarely a competitive advantage. There are many benefits to “less software”. I discuss why in the following short 3 minute video.
Conversion rate math is simple: by doubling your conversion rate, you double the effectiveness of every future marketing dollar.
But while the math is simple, conversion optimization is not. There are many optimization pitfalls that can easily cripple startup/small business growth (if you’re interested in how crowdSPRING optimizes, I recommend you read Increasing Conversions Using Google Website Optimizer and fora good post on ways to improve conversions, I recommend you read Ten Easy Ways To Improve Your Landing Page Conversions). Here are five of the most common optimization mistakes – and what you can do to avoid them.
1. Optimizing Prematurely. Most startups and small businesses want to optimize the path users take to reach certain core transaction points on your site. For example, crowdSPRING, among other things, optimizes to move more people from our homepage to the first step of our post-a-project page. Another company might optimize to increase the number of people that register on their site.
Although it’s tempting to market and attract visitors who are interested in buying your product or service – you should be careful not to optimize prematurely. Make sure your product/service experience is solid before you worry about optimization. If your product is still rough around the edges, you run the risk of creating a poor user experience and leaving your potential customers dissatisfied. This can be fatal because customer referrals often represent a substantial source of business for startups and small businesses.
There is at least one exception to this: some startups and small businesses benefit from the “network effect” – having lots and lots of people try their service (even if the service isn’t yet perfect). For example, the growth of social networks depends on many people trying out the service and so it’s important to optimize from the beginning if your product or service requires broad acceptance.
2. Ad Hoc Optimization. It’s easy to forget that when you optimize your landing and conversion pages, you should be sensitive to all interactions with users on your site (and off your site), not just the interactions on the pages you’re trying to optimize.That doesn’t mean you should run all your optimization tests at once (you should not do that). It does mean that you should consider and plan in advance how your pages will interact with one another and the extended web that leads to your site.
This becomes especially important when you’re developing a funnel through which you want to move users on your site. For example, most of your users might start on your homepage, then move to a page that describes how your service works, then move to a pricing page. You might not be optimizing all of the funnel pages at once, but you should consider the content on all of those pages to make sure that you don’t confuse your users with different or contradictory content.
Einstein once said, “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.” Common sense, Einstein was arguing, can often be the enemy of rationality, science, and fact-based decision-making. We are all guilty of this; every day our decisions are tinged by favoritism, rules of thumb, partiality, heuristics, predilection; call it what you will but our biases come into play with every decision we make and every tactic we execute. The trick is to recognize our own biases, question them every day, and be constantly aware of their often pernicious influence on our decision making.
Here are my 7 favorite cognitive biases, each of which has the ability to impact on your decision-making process, and some thoughts on how they can be leveraged and ways counteract their influence in your quest for wise determination.
1. Anchoring.
Humans have a tendency to rely very heavily on one specific piece of information in their decision-making. This can happen in everyday life decisions, or in important negotiations. For instance, when looking at a new house a buyer may notice that the roof needs work, and may be prone to focus on that alone, while ignoring the fact that the seller has recently installed a new HVAC system, upgraded the electricity, and refinished all of the hardwood floors. The same seller, during negotiations, may wisely make a low (but not ridiculously low) offer to the buyer in the hopes of “anchoring” the negotiation around that lower number. Studies (most famously Tversky and Kahneman) have shown that when asked to estimate a number or percentage, if the researcher suggested a low number, the participant’s estimates would skew lower, and when a high number was suggested, the result would be the opposite.
How can small business owners leverage this bias? Be aware of the “lock-in” effect, and assess all information critically. Remember that your counterpart in any negotiation may present information that is self-serving, so look skeptically at the particulars. Anchoring can also be used to your advantage – remember that your negotiating partner is equally susceptible to this bias.
2. Bandwagon effect.
We are prone to believe that if lots of other people are doing something that we can or should do the same. We see this every day with people buying products, attending movies, and even joining political movements. Just because others do or believe something, does not necessarily mean that it is the best course of action, or the most valuable philosophy. Herd behavior and conformity can have a negative impact on your business decisions and can impact your ability to consider alternatives and define problems.
How can small business owners leverage this bias? If everyone else is onboard with a plan or proposal, there may be good reason to question why. Seek out alternatives and remember that groupthink can destroy a team’s effectiveness and limit a manager’s ability to choose between viable options.
3. Confirmation bias.
Closely related to the Bandwagon effect, is the confirmation bias. This is a predisposition to look for or information that confirms something we already believe. In other words, we prefer to see data that supports what we already “know,” so if you are politically conservative, chances are good that you prefer the information you get from Fox News. On the other hand, if you are a liberal, you would probably be more comfortable consuming your news via the Huffington Post.
Every day on the crowdSPRING Twitter account and on my own Twitter account, I post links to posts or videos I enjoyed reading or viewing. These posts and videos are about logo design, web design, startups, entrepreneurship, small business, leadership, social media, marketing, and more! Here are some of the links that I’ve liked and shared this past week!
In our 12 Questions blog series, we feature interviews with someone from the crowdSPRING community. For these interviews, we pick people who add value to our community – in the blog, in the forums, in the projects. Plainly – activities that make crowdSPRING a better community. Be professional, treat others with respect, help us build something very special, and we’ll take notice.
We’re very proud to feature Tin Bačić (crowdSPRING username: TinBacicDesign) today. Tin lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
1. Please tell us about yourself.
My name is Tin Bačić. I was born in a small country called Croatia, somewhere between central and southeastern Europe, with a 5.800 km long beautiful coast and 1.246 islands. I’m currently living and working in its capital Zagreb. I guess some of you, like many others, have never heard of my country and therefore as a designer I´m trying my best to promote it here on crowdSPRING. As to my work, I have been employed as a full time graphic designer for about 5 years now and my expertise includes brand identity, illustrated logos and print design. Presently I am building up my skills on a daily basis, occasionally gathering some projects from freelance sites. I got fascinated with design back in high school, and this passion continues as I learn more, but more on that topic later on.
2. How did you become interested in design?
Even at my early age, I was always drawing something, anywhere and anytime, each day at home or even school. I always managed to find a little free space for some of my original ˝piece of art˝…so that after so much drawing and painting through primary school, it was only logical for me to enroll in the Secondary School of Fine Arts and Design, Department of Painting. Although my first choice was the Department of Graphic Design, I didn’t manage to get in. Right about that time when I was around fifteen, me and my brothers got our first computer. At first I was mostly just playing games, but after a while I began to study and work on some design programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Freehand. So eventually, as I had designed beginner logos, covers, etc. , I was more and more fond of it, even more than of drawing which, at that time, I liked the most. I think that that was the period when the turning point occurred, namely the time when I decided to be more focused on graphic design rather than drawing and painting, which is still proving to be the right move. At least I think so.
3. Which of your designs are your favorites and why?
Each of my designs is special to me in its own way. But for certain, one of my favorites, the one I work with pleasure, is “A Tribute to Flor Kilah. It’s a hip-hop and breakdance festival which is held in early October every year in honor of the former best Croatian breakdancer who, unfortunately so, died in a car accident 5 years ago. I am honored to design everything for his festival, because that man was simply the best, not only as a dancer but also as a person. As for the crowdSPRING logos…I can say that “StoryChasers” was the funniest one I’ve had privilege to design lately. Maybe it’s because of those skinny legs or the satirical picture of a microphone as a journalist who yearns for a new juicy story. I might also like to single out another logo that I recently designed, called “Bold Thinking”, for one and only reason – the logo is actually a graffito and as a teenager I was always observing graffiti but never actually drew them (in my whole life I have only made around five sketches). So, I am very pleased with the logo/graffito, because in the end it turned out great.
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 110,000 designers and writers work on crowdSPRING. We are trusted by more than 27,000 happy clients around the world.
Say goodbye to the days of purchasing a lotto ticket at the convenient store and hello to mobilotto. Based in Toronto, Canada, mobilotto is an application that now allows you to safely and securely purchase lotto tickets on your cell phone! The software only allows you to purchase lotto available in your area using location technology. And the best thing…? You’ll never lose your million dollar lotto ticket since it’s all stored in your account!
