Home Wealth Project

When I was a kid at summer camp, a letter was as precious as gold (or perhaps candy). If you got five letters in a week, you were rich. Most of the time, we stood by the mailroom, plaintively waiting to see if there was some sort of message from the outside world–only to walk away disappointed.

Back home, missing a TV show was out of the question. If you didn’t see this episode of Mannix or Batman, it was likely you’d never get a chance, ever again.

And so we came to treat incoming data as precious. A lost email was a calamity. Reading everything in your RSS feed was essential. What if I miss something?

A new generation, one that grew up with a data surplus, is coming along. To this cohort, it’s no big deal to miss a tweet or ten, to delete a blog from your reader or to not return a text or even a voice mail. The new standard for a vacation email is, “When I get back, I’m going to delete all the email in my box, so if it’s important, please re-send it next week.”

This is what always happens when something goes from scarce to surplus. First we bathe in it, then we waste it.

View full post on Seth’s Blog

Data, Shower

The shower of data

Sep 2nd

Back home, missing a TV show was out of the question. If you didn’t see this episode of Mannix or Batman, it was likely you’d never get a chance, ever again.

And so we came to treat incoming data as precious. A lost email was a calamity. Reading everything in your RSS feed was essential. What if I miss something?

This is what always happens when something goes from scarce to surplus. First we bathe in it, then we waste it.

View full post on Seth’s Blog

Data, Shower

Protecting Your Data: An Introduction

Aug 30th

Protecting Your Data: An Introduction

Data is exploding (not literally, although we’ll cover that, too). The amount of data that organizations are storing has grown exponentially in the last 10 years. According to Gartner research director April Adams, data capacity on average in enterprises is growing at 40 percent to 60 percent year over year. Some of this information is stored locally but, increasingly, data is stored in the cloud.

More data and more ways of storing that information may mean more confusion for small business owners and entrepreneurs looking to protect themselves. The purpose of this post is to explain what you can do to safeguard your data, to advise against bad practices, and to debunk myths about data backup and the cloud.

So what’s the first thing you should do to protect your data? I’ll give you one guess. Wrong. It’s not back up your data. The first thing you need to do is determine what data should be backed up and in what order it should be recovered. Let me guess: You think that all of your data should be backed up, because it’s all important, right? But, guess what, in the event of systemic data failure, treating all your data equally will hamstring your efforts to restore your systems and get your business up and running in a timely manner.

Here is a disclaimer: This all depends on how much data you’re storing. If you’re an on-the-go entrepreneur working from a single laptop, you can quite easily back up all your data. Most businesses, however, should prioritize data in their data backup and recovery planning.

Now, let’s say you’ve culled the critical data from the noncritical data (I’ll explain what this means and how to do this this in greater detail in my next post, “The 10 Percent Rule.”) Now what do you do? You back up your data, which, of course, is at the crux of what this entire series is all about. Over the course of the series, I’ll provide you with practical tips on how to back up, I’ll troubleshoot specific problems and I’ll offer case studies, but the underlying credo will always be the same: Take an active role in safeguarding your data. It’s the lifeblood of any business.

Backing up is not a one-time deal. It’s a consistent, interactive effort, whereby you test elements and adjust according to results. It may sound like a lot of work, but you’ll thank me in the end. After all, 100 percent of businesses experience some form of data failure at one point or another. Will you be prepared when it happens to you?

From Small Business Trends

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

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The Data, the Magic and the Words

Aug 22nd

The Data, the Magic and the Words

We tell a story in everything that we do. For example, our checkbooks tell the story of how and where we spend our time. Do you frequent the same local restaurant every Friday night?

Your paper trail tells a story if you know how to read it. It’s no different in business. Your potential and current clients are telling you a story in the data that you collect on them. But do you know how to read it and what to do with what you see?

What does the data say?

In “How to Use Client Data to Attain Your Goals,” John Mariotti mentions “the four formulas to capitalize on knowledge” including the power of organized data. John says that it’s important to “organize [data] in ways that direct decision-making.”

The raw data that you collect isn’t the same thing as information. If you neglect to turn the numbers into something that you understand, you can’t develop strategy from it. Besides, it’s the lessons from the data that makes it relevant, not the data itself.

At least that’s how I see it.

What do your clients want?

Magic is the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces. In business, the magic seems to come when you understand what your clients want and how to give it to them in a meaningful way. This can seem mysterious to some who don’t know what to do with the data they have. And it’s untouchable to others who ignore the research altogether.

In “How to Use Market Research to Develop Customer-Centered Offerings,” Ivana Taylor gives a different take on the use of surveys as a form of market research. She gives five tips on “how to turn your customer list into a valuable asset.” These tips will work if we work them, but the truth is the average small business owner tends to burn out when it comes to collecting data so that they can measure their impact and plan their futures. In fact, it’s common for small business owners to “shoot from the hip” and see what works—but that type of “research” doesn’t always work out.

If the goal is a better solution for our clients, then research is the beginning. But the magic is in how we use what we learn. Market research takes effort, but it matters. In fact, Ivana says “market research…gets customers involved in designing their own product and service experience.” And giving people what they really want is good for business. But you can’t know the market’s demand without doing the research.

What do you need to say?

Once you know what the data says and what your (potential) clients want, it’s up to you to communicate a message that connects and draws them in. In “The 3 Rules of Crafting an Effective Sales Letter,” Diane Helbig breaks down “the three rules of content.” She says, “An effective sales letter is designed to help you get an appointment, an opportunity to engage the prospect in a conversation about their business and their needs.”

The sales letter (and Diane gives some great and practical advice) works well for service-based companies including writers, speakers and all kinds of consultants. But it also works for product-based companies that intend to:

sell in bulk or
become a supplier at a new event or
form a partnership with a complementing but a noncompeting product.

At the end of the day, once you know what your public wants, it still boils down to what you say and how you say it. The right words can bring paying clients. Put the data and the words together–and magic results.

From Small Business Trends

View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends

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Data Entry Home Business

Jul 11th

Dont pay a fee for some so-called data entry program! Learn how to start your own data entry home business. Become a data entry pro and make legitimate money typing from home.
Data Entry Home Business

business, Data, entry, home

Show me the (meta) data

Jun 25th

Who owns the trail of digital breadcrumbs you’re leaving behind?

Is understanding who you know and how you know them and where you visit and what you’re interested in and what you buy worth anything?

Perhaps you should own it. Richard Thaler’s provocative idea shouldn’t be that provocative, and it represents a significant business opportunity. He argues that you (not some company) ought to own your caller history, your credit card history, etc. If it was available to you as a machine-readable file, you could easily submit it to another company and see if there was a better deal available. You could make your preferences and your history (you, basically) portable, and others could bid for a chance to do better for you.

This is an idea that feels inevitable to me, and I think that entrepreneurs shouldn’t wait for the government to require it. There are already services that scrape financial pages (like Mint), but it could go further. We need software on our phones that can remember where we go and what we do, software for our browsers that can create profiles that save us time and money, and most of all, software for our email that gets ever smarter about who we are and who we’re connecting to.

Data about data is more important than ever, and being on the side of the person creating that data is a smart place to be.

View full post on Seth’s Blog

Data, Meta, Show

CB Marketplace Data Csv Sort and Filter Club for Affiliates

May 30th

Daily update of CB Marketplace data available in downloadable Csv file. It incorporates 3rd party data such as website rank, Seo, and SEM data from Alexa and Compete, SEMRush, and Google AdPlanner. Get the extra edge you’ve been dreaming for now!
CB Marketplace Data Csv Sort and Filter Club for Affiliates

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5 Ways to Benefit from Real Time Data

Mar 16th

5 Ways to Benefit from Real Time Data

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Every businessperson knows that good data makes you smarter. Well, a truer statement might be that an accurate analysis of the right data can make a company smarter, but lack of any data can be fatal.

Using a tool like Google Analytics is one way that many businesses monitor and analyze traffic coming to their web site, pay per click advertising conversion and keyword search terms attracting prospects.

But, Google Analytics, while offering a powerful suite of analytics and conversion tools, has one increasingly fatal flaw – by the time you get the data, it’s already old news.

Today’s reliance on the web and social media requires real time tracking and analytics that are delivered in real time. This isn’t just a way to feed the obsession over traffic and other sometimes meaningless stats, this is a valuable way to view and react to business opportunities as swiftly as they arise.

Speed may indeed be the most important competitive business advantage.

With real time data tools you can:

React to mentions of you brand more fully – You’ll know the minute your business has been mentioned by a blogger or other online publication and the implication that mention may have in terms of traffic and potential reciprocal reactions. You may choose to go comment on every post that mentions your brand, but you may really make it a priority to comment on a post that is sending buckets of traffic your way.
Interact with site visitors live – You’ll get a view of who is visiting your site in a live mode and witness where they came from, what paths they take and where they exit. You can tag customers from your database and know when they are on your site. Some real time stats packages actually allow you to launch a browser chat session with a specific visitor that, say, clicks on several links like they are looking for something.
Watch your test in real time – You can track A/B split tests and see immediately not only what page is getting conversions, but what visitors are doing and not doing on each test page. I think this might allow you to make your testing adjustments much faster and more accurately.
Test your PPC campaigns in real time – Google AdWords data is often hours old and, in my experience, not terribly accurate. By monitoring a new ad campaign in real time you can know immediately which ad version or which landing page version is a winner in a matter of minutes.
Understand the impact of your blog posts – I’m still puzzled sometimes by the reaction to my blog posts. I find it very hard to predict when something I’ve written is going to catch fire. With real time stats I know within minutes of publishing if I’ve happened to spark a reaction with readers and that gives me the cue to get proactive about promoting the post in bookmarking sites and social networks much more aggressively. I don’t like to promote everything I publish in this manner, so this gives me the filter to know when to amplify big right away.

There are by my guess dozens of packages available that can help you get web site data in real time. Some are free, some are actually very expensive.

Below are three that I think are worth a look for small business owners that are serious at all about leveraging their growing web presence.

Woopra – This happens to be the tool I use and really love the interface. The stats are delivered via a java download app that sits on the desktop. You can create filters to view and analyze everything I’ve mentioned above. The tool also features a live view of visitors on your site that is mesmerizing. Live chat launching is also available. Woopra packages are based on traffic.

Clicky – This tool does most of what you would expect from a real time stats package but with a little more emphasis on social media. The interface is simple and doesn’t suffer from trying to do too much. There is also a white label version so marketers and SEO folks can offer Clicky tracking to clients as well.

Mixpanel – I like the marketing emphasis on Mixpanel. Two baked in features that a lot of marketers will like are event tracking and funnel analysis. You get a linear view of your events, like ad campaigns, that makes it very easy to get a snapshot of the entire event without having to link actions together.

For some, the idea of a monthly fee for the benefit of stats in real time may feel excessive, but in the increasingly competitive web world, the businesses that react the fastest win.

View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

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Yelp Data Shows the Power of Mobile Marketing

Feb 8th