Mike Grehan just wrote a fascinating article at Click Z regarding testing; he’s a big fan, as am I, of the Eisenberg brothers and their team at Future Now.  I’ve bought every one of their books and will buy their newest, “Always Be Testing.” If you’re serious about improving your online results, you should also consider buying it; Google’s Website Optimizer, on which the book focuses, has been a staple of our client testing methods for the past several month.

This caused me to think about a talk I gave last week to a group of small business owners here in Cincinnati.  I asked the question, “How many of you know the value of a new customer, client, or patient?”  No hands were raised.  I’m not surprised by this response anymore, but it really is one of the basic numbers one has to know about his or her business.  If you don’t know what new customers, clients, or patients is worth (either initial or life time value), how can you make intelligent decisions about how much to invest in acquiring them?  I think the answer is, “You can’t.”

And it’s really not that hard.  The first decision one has to make is the hardest, that is to commit to finding it out.

This leads to the bigger picture of having a mindset of “test, measure, refine, and do it all over again.”  It’s a little easier to accomplish in the online world, but one still has to commit to do it.

One of our hard and fast rules is that we measure, and we measure everything.  We’ve made the business decision to not engage with clients that won’t commit to putting measurement systems in place.

All of this gets back to Mike’s post.  All of our marketing (and I believe, business) efforts are really just a test.  None of us knows all the answers upfront.  That’s why we need to continually “test”, to try to improve our last best efforts.  Google’s Website Optimizer gives you a fairly simple way to test all types of web page factors.

As a wise man one said, “When you get right down to it, life is a test.  If it weren’t you would have been given more instructions.”

Here’s to testing and measuring.

My friend, David Bullock, just wrote an interesting post this past week on how to set up processes in your business.  Although the example in his post was focused on developing a process for a software program, it got me to thinking.

One of the things that limited the growth of my business for years was my, to take a phrase from Michael Gerber, “working in the business” and not “working on the business.”  As Iong as I continued to work in the business I was really nothing more than a high-paid employee.

As I focused on growing my business in mid-2007 (and we are experiencing phenomenal growth), it became readily apparent that I had to change some things.  As a wise sage once said, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to continue to get what you’ve always got.”

And I didn’t want what I’d “always got.” (How about you?)

The change I had to implement was to look at all the things I was doing (very few of them marketing oriented, by the way…I was just too busy “doing stuff”).  I had read all about this but I hadn’t done anything with it.  Over the next 3 to 4 months, I critically looked at all that I did (I even had to stoop to keeping track of my time in 15 to 30 minute increments – unbelievable what I discovered).

I wrote down almost everything I was doing and it became readily apparent that if I could find someone else to do a lot of those things, I could focus on “working on my business.”

The sad truth is that you can only get someone else to perform a business activity if you can outline all the steps involved (paper, software, etc.) so that someone else can “do what you did.”  I even found (and am continuing to find out) that using a screen capture software so that the person can “see” what needs to be done in addition to reading about it works well.  A serendipity for me was that as I brought people on board to help out (I’m not talking employees, by the way – another story sometime) they figured out better ways to perform the tasks than I had developed.  Fresh eyes do work.

Anyway, the downside of not developing processes for almost every part of your business will keep you where you are.  If that’s where you want to be, fine.  If you want to grow (and help other people to grow) so that you can spend your time on high-value activities, get started today on implementing this approach.

It will truly make a difference.

You may not have heard yet about Google’s new online publishing service, Knol, which some believe is a direct “slap” to Wikipedia.  Knol (a little literacy license for “knowlege”) is a cool tool which gives you the ability to create content on just about any subject and get it posted.  You can, over time, brand yourself as an expert in any field you want.

From a pure search engine optimization perspective it has some pluses and minuses.  On the plus side, one doesn’t have to think real hard about where Google is going.  Search today on just about any term and you’re likely to see a Wikipedia entry in the top 10 results; since Google was unable to get the Wikipedia purchase consummated, do you think it’s possible that they’re positioning Knol to replace the Wikipedia results?  If so, it won’t happen overnight, but what if you’ve done the work to place a large number of Knol articles (all interlinked) on line and done some inbound linking to boot?  Hmmm….

On the minus side, Knol no-follows all the outbound links on an article page.  So, while you won’t get much link credit with internal links within an article, having a large number of articles can, we suspect, increase the credibility you have.

Some of our initial research shows that there are a number of “amateurs” posting; this is an opportunity for you if you develop and publish valuable content.  Funny how it always gets back to the same thing…it’s always about good, valuable content.

Anyway, take a look and get to work.  See how you can use Know to your advantage.

By the way, here’s an article I placed on Knol 2 days after it went live; it’s probably a little long, but you get the picture.

Sean Carton has just written an excellent article at ClickZ where he describes the challenge of social media marketing.  He observes that, in some to many cases, it’s like “1999 all over again.”  Back then folks were all excited about how the Internet was going to drastically change everything and that people would fall in love with your site “just because it was so cool.”

Big mistake.

We saw back through the Internet bust of the early 2000’s how wrong this belief and approach was.

It seems today that many marketers are caught up in the same way of thinking regarding social media.  “I’ll just create hundreds to thousands of ‘friends’ in various social networking platforms and my problems will all be over.”  And so on…

No focus on the amount of time and work it takes to build genuine relationships with people, the level of thinking it takes to create genuine, useful content.  Or, taking another approach, “People will just be so interested in what I have to say that I can communicate ad nauseum with them.”  Witness the huge amount of totally meaningless and useless Twitter posts.  I really don’t care that you’re watching your favorite TV show right now as an example.

Taking an offline example: my experience shows that the most effective “networking” occurs when I find out about you, your interests, and how I might be able to help you.  Then, over time, as we spend more time together, we come to trust each other.  Then, if I want to talk to you about something related to “my stuff,” you’ll be more open to listen because we know one another.

It’s really no different with social media.  To be successful as a marketer will take time and hard work.  Just as in all other areas of life, there is no silver bullet.