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Seth’s Blog: Six questions for analyzing a website | Bedford Corners Realtor
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Six questions for analyzing a website
It’s tempting to believe that any website can become a perpetual motion machine of profit. But before you start one, invest in one or go to work for one, a few things to ask:
- What’s the revenue per visit? (RPM). For every thousand visitors, how much money does the site make (in ads or sales)?
- What’s the cost of getting a visit? Does the site use PR or online ads or affiliate deals to get traffic? If so, what’s the yield?
- Is there a viral co-efficient? Existing visitors can lead to new visitors as a result of word of mouth or the network effect. How many new visitors does each existing user bring in? (Hint: it’s less than 1. If it were more than 1, then every person on the planet would be a user soon.) This number rarely stays steady. For example, at the beginning, Twitter’s co-efficient was tiny. Then it scaled to be one of the largest ever (Oprah!) and now has started to come back down to Earth.
- What’s the cost of a visitor? Does the site need to add customer service or servers or other expenses as it scales?
- Are there members/users? There’s a big difference between drive-by visits and registered users. Do these members pay a fee, show up more often, have something to lose by switching?
- What’s the permission base and how is it changing? The only asset that can be reliably built and measured online is still permission. Attention is scarce, and permission is the privilege to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them. Permission is easy to measure and hard to grow.
Do the math on successful companies online and compare it to those that are struggling and these six metrics will help you understand the difference. For example, if the RPM is less than the cost of getting a new visitor, you’ve got trouble. If the site is relying on fads and occasional PR but isn’t building a permission base, that’s trouble too.
The good news is that each of them can be changed if you’re alert and willing to do surgery on the business model and structure of the site.
The ideal structure is a business that’s a platform, not merely a place to stop by. Once people move in and become members, they’re hesitant to leave, they share permission over time, they tell their friends, their RPM goes up and the cost of acquiring and hosting members goes down. The real question is: are you on that path?
Posted by Seth Godin on November 07, 2011 | Permalink
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Why Your Home Is Being Sent To Escrow | The Bedford Corners Realtor
First time home buyers can often become a little confused by the terminology used. One term that actually causes real concern is when an agent tells them their home is being sent to escrow. Of course, the home is not actually going anywhere – in fact, I am sure there are some real estate agents that take pleasure from making these announcements. So what is ‘escrow’?
You can liken escrow to a safety deposit box where a neutral third party holds the one and only key. Your down payment and the seller’s ability to sell the home are placed in this safety deposit box until all parts of the sales contract have been met. Closing, or settlement day, is just that. The third party that has the monies and title to the home meets with both parties. If all the paperwork is right, then the funds are taken out of escrow and distributed where the belong – this includes funds to the lender if the home is still under mortgage. There is a mistaken belief that home owners get all the money and then pay off the mortgage and real estate agent – but they don’t. This is all done at closing. At the same time, the new owners get the house keys, and if they are buying using mortgage funds, then the deed of title technically goes to the lender – that is their security.
Escrow was introduced to protect both buyers and sellers. In the past, a buyer would make an offer, which was accepted, pay their down payment, only to find another buyer stepping in with a better price. Worse still, some home owners would accept a range of offers, and the down payments, then disappear in the middle of the night leaving everyone out of pocket and trying to sort out the mess. Escrow is also a safe haven for down payments in that the seller is protected should the buyer wish to break the contract for no sound reason.
If you home is being sent to escrow, you know it’s going to a neutral third party for safe keeping. Your down payment, and the home, are technically safe.
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Bedford Corners Realtor | Top 10 biggest website mistakes
Share Following on from my last post about building websites to take account of Social Media, I thought, seeing as I spend most of my life reviewing sites that I’d share some of the most common errors I see – these are not in any order and the list is not definitive, but hopefully they may strike a chord!
1) What’s it all about then?
If I see another website where I struggle to understand why on earth it was built in the first place, who it’s for, what it’s supposed to do or what I’m supposed to do on it, then, I will …… have seen an awful lot that fall in to this category. Websites need a purpose!
2) Build it and they will come?!
The key to a successful website is understanding your audience and building a site that offers value to them. Without knowing that, you’re on a hiding to nothing!
3) Accessibility isn’t for me
There are laws and there are standards – make sure you follow them. Visually impaired and people with other disabilities use the web too you know!
4) Well I know where everything is!
Any usability study will tell you that when people are lost, they leave. Clear, logical navigation and tools to improve (such as breadcrumbs) are key.
5) Looks good in my designer’s office!
It looked great when you saw it on a 25″ widescreen monitor, on a safari browser. Now that you’re looking at it on a 17″ monitor using Internet Explorer 6 – it’s not so great! Ensure that you build for the widest possible audience.
6) They’ll get in touch if they really want to
You build a site, you attract traffic through Search Engines and other mechanisms and then you leave site visitors to their own devices when it comes to what you want them to do – be clear, be bold. Make specific to the page the visitor is on.
7) Website – done. Now back to the day job.
You have a site which is invisible to the outside world – don’t get me wrong, there are occasions when you don’t want any profile, but most clients build a site to attract business, yet the site has either been built so the Search Engines avoid it like the plague, or there are no links in to it……
8) Build for now, we’ll think about tomorrow, tomorrow!
Think of your site as an apartment block. If you can consider what you’d like the block to look like over a 3-5 year period and then build the site – even if it’s the first storey, then at least you’ve got the architecture to allow you to continue to built. The amount of multi-storey bungalows I see!
9) My developer knows what I want
“I thought the guy knew what he was doing and gave him £1500 and my logo and he built me a site – now I find it has no search engine profile and I can’t update it myself”. True story and oh, so common. Always specify your requirements before starting.
10) We’ll get an enquiry one of these days……
Everyone says that Google Analytics is wonderful – question whether they use it and that’s a different matter. It’s as if by the very fact that Analytics is plugged in that the site will heal itself! Analytics are great, learn how to read them (Google’s Conversion University is great) and make decisions based on the information . Two words of warning – make sure that you filter yourself/ your developer out from the data and make sure that you treat the data with a certain amount of common sense – after all they only tell you what people did – not what they wanted to do!
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