Double Dutch

My grandfather was a notoriously stubborn man. His name was Paulus and he was a baker. What should have been the highlight of his career, turned into a tragedy.

One day he entered his Frisian Rye Bread into a competition, and much to his amazement, he won first prize. I guess that made him the official breadwinner of the family. Anyway, an industrial bakery wanted to mass-produce his loaves, and offered him a huge chunk of dough for the recipe. There was only one problem. My grandfather didn’t have a recipe.

When asked, he said that he just “threw the ingredients together until he got the right mix”. Besides, he had a lot in common with SpongeBob’s Mr. Krabs. He refused to sell his secret formula to the competition. And so grandpa missed out on the biggest and best business opportunity he would ever get.

Meanwhile, he couldn’t figure out why his bakery was still losing money. In hindsight, Paulus was paying as much attention to his books as to his recipes. It was a mistake that cost him dearly.

Fast forward some seventy-five years. You would think that people wouldn’t make the same mistakes all over again, wouldn’t you? With so much information floating around for free, there’s simply no excuse for focusing on our craft and ignoring our bottom line. If only we would mind our own business… Instead, some of us still seem to live in 1932, when Unilever founder William Hesketh Lever cried out:

“I know half of my advertising money is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half!”

Let’s be honest: is that something you could have said? Are you just throwing some ingredients into this mix you call your business, but you have no clue what you’re actually doing?

INTERNET
In all fairness, some things did change since my grandfather ran his Pumpernickel Emporium in the north of Holland. Even though you can’t buy a European artisan bread from me, I’ll certainly help you sell one!

Like most of you, I have a personal website and the world is my marketplace. Word of mouth has gone global. And as you are reading this blog, chances are that people from different continents are doing the very same thing at the very same time.

Of course I’m quite pleased that so many of you have become returning visitors to my corner of the blogosphere. Thanks to you, Nethervoice is moving up in the ranks of the Googles and Yahoos. But to what avail? A website ultimately exists to help visitors achieve their goals, and if they do, I’m well on my way to achieving mine.

If you want to measure your on-line success, there are at least four things I suggest you do:

Determine the ultimate purpose of your site

Define what actions your visitors need to take to move you toward your purpose

Measure the number of visitors and the actions they take

If the actions (or lack thereof) are not getting you closer to your goal: optimize your site! If the actions are getting you closer to your goal: optimize your site!

In my days as an NLP-trainer, I taught my students to differentiate between “means-goals” and “end-goals”. Getting 500 unique visitors per day is not an end goal. Getting 50 of those visitors to buy your latest audio book, is. In that case, your conversion rate (see my previous blog) would be 10%.

MEASURING SUCCESS
William Lever knew that you cannot manage what you can’t measure. At present, his Anglo-Dutch multi-national owns about 400 of the world’s most well-known brands, 13 of them so-called “billion-dollar brands”, exceeding annual sales in excess of 1 billion dollar. I’m sorry to say that my grandfather didn’t do so well, and as a result I actually have to work to pay the bills.

Grandpa Paulus had a promising product; he worked incredibly hard and yet, he was losing money. Lots of money. One day, my grandmother finally found out what had been going on for a long time. She caught the apprentice as he was grabbing a few guilders from the cash register. They fired him on the spot.

Less than a year later, my grandfather’s prize-winning Rye Bread ‘magically’ turned up wherever bread was sold. Apparently somebody had been paying close attention to what my grandfather had been ‘throwing together’.

With the money he had made, the apprentice opened up his own bakery in the same town. In two months, my grandfather’s business went bust. But the worst was yet to come. Desperate for money and with only the skills to bake, Paulus had to find a job to keep his family afloat.

It so happened that there was a new baker in town who needed an apprentice…

Paul Strikwerda © 2009
www.nethervoice.com

PS In my next blog I will  reveal what three pay-to-play voice-over sites had to say about their conversion rate.