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G E T P R O F I T A B L E U P D A T E!
January 5, 2001
The “Get Profitable Update” is an Internationally published
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Published by Clark Marketing Group, Inc. © 2001 Issue No. 0101-A
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IN THIS ISSUE:
Entrepreneur: E-Branding Now: At the Threshold of Explosive Growth.
Marketing : Starting Y2001 With 5 Critical Online Promotion Tips.
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I can remember it as clear as day. I was sitting in the Ewing Marion Kaufman building in Kansas City, Missouri on a warm June day. I was serving as a national category judge for the highly prestigious Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards.
This program carries itself with the highest of integrity of any in which I have ever been involved. It will earn someone a front-page article on a USA Today special section and a ton of publicity and credibility.
Enormous work and effort goes into the judging process to insure it is fair, ethical and honorable. The sponsors – Ernst & Young L.L.P., USA Today, Merrill Lynch and the Ewing Marion Kaufman Foundation – have put aside all their personal interests to build a distinguished program that honors the entrepreneurial spirit and success story.
As a regional Entrepreneur Of The Year Award winner in 1993, I was subsequently asked to serve on a panel of three judges for the June 1999 contest. Actually, I had served as a national judge for several years prior to this panel and it was a great honor to be asked to participate in this process.
As a prior winner and past judge I knew the extreme importance of weighing all the information carefully to insure the right person was selected as the national winner.
In our judging room that day I was accompanied by a Kaufman Center facilitator and two other highly qualified judges. Our task was to filter through the regional EOY winners in the specific category we were judging to determine who would be the National Award Winner and the two runners-up.
This was not an easy task when the leading contenders were a group of eighteen “cream of the crop” successful entrepreneurs from all around the United States. As a judge, you are required to carefully examine each candidate, evaluating key factors like vision, team management, financial achievements, and contributions to community among others.
After each judge had accomplished this, we were to submit our top several choices based on the scores we had ascribed to each candidate during our review process.
At this point, the facilitator would list them on the board and then the process of discussion would begin. Each judge would discuss every choice they had submitted and tell why they were ranked the way they were on their personal list.
As had occurred occasionally in prior years in which I had judged, it soon became apparent by our point scores and review of the candidates who would be the top five or six.
As the clock ticked on … I found it was going to be the same this year. After further discussion and debate, we finally arrived at the top three or four contestants that would get a final level of scrutiny from each judge prior to voting.
It was at this point that the problem arose.
It occurred when we were selecting who would be the national winner. This winning candidate had indeed built a very successful business but there was something different. It was a “pure-play” online Internet business.
Up until this point in the prior years, there were a few online companies that had been regional EOY winners including Amazon.com. But e-commerce companies were really just emerging on the scene as companies who were growing business on a new frontier… the World Wide Web.
It was new to everybody about how to judge these candidates because the Wall Street investment community was placing great importance on e-businesses gaining market share at the expense of profitability.
The expectation was that they would eventually turn this large and branded market audience into paying customers or attract advertising revenue and that the profit would surely follow. Consequently, it was a widely held belief that it was acceptable and even preferable to sacrifice profits now for market share penetration.
As I said, this was where the problem came up. The company that was being suggested as the “National Winner” in this particular category was a success story in every sense of the word, but … they had not been in business quite long enough to prove out their e-business revenue model and had not yet turned a profit.
As an entrepreneur of nineteen years, I had a very difficult time choosing a winner that wasn’t profitable and I stated it quite clearly.
Another very distinguished judge – a successful entrepreneur and Adjunct Professor, Entrepreneurship Program at Columbia University, Graduate School of Business – disagreed, saying that “Web businesses were all about building market share and that profitability was less important.”
I disagreed and remarked that profitability is essential and central to being a successful entrepreneur even in pioneering a new industry or technology. Our debate heated up.
Other judges that had finished with their own judging responsibilities were drawn to our room to see what all the controversy was about. We each stood our ground defending our position. In fact, we called in the executive staff of the judging program to come in and help us define the criteria better for making this decision.
Even they found it difficult adding in the “Internet” factor with its undefined profitability territory and basically left the decision to our three-person team encouraging us to work through it.
Time ran out and I was the lone hold out. In the end the company that was the subject of this debate won. In fact, they were a deserving winner.
But you could say that I lost the battle – the company that had not had time to prove out its profitability model was named the winner – but in the end I won the war.
The reason is because I came to an EPIPHANY on that warm June day in 1999:
Time had come in the Internet industry for companies to be making money.
I have since turned out to be right. The market corrected for Internet businesses in the first quarter of 2000 and the la-la land of spend and burn money to gain market share at the expense of profitability is now over.
It is now Phase 2 for Internet businesses.
Investors will only look at businesses whose business plan is built on a solid profitability model. Reality “clicked” in and web businesses like any business must be profitable if they are to survive.
Perspective is now in order.
We are at an important turning point in the evolution and maturity of the Internet and e-commerce. One that will bring more reality into the dot.com world and make the players stronger and more focused. More focused on profitability.
My recommendation to you is to focus your entire business model on profitability even if your website is an online credibility site serving your offline business. If you have any questions about how to do this feel free to call me at 801-459-9589 or email me at: mailto:kevin@getprofitable.com
For those of you who are looking to tune up your website and enhance it with some search engine optimization tips, the following is a quick 5- step checklist for online promotion. This reference guide will show you what to do, how to do it, and help you drive traffic to your site. This may be new to some and a refresher for others but it’s a good review overall.
Here are the aspects of online promotion that I recommend.
They are listed in order of importance.
First, optimize the code of the front page of your site.
- tag all other pages - meta tags and build theme. If you need help with this go back and read my success interview with Sage Lewis of SageRock.com at http://www.getprofitable.com/Interview.html
Next, get listed on Looksmart - this will get you on multiple other engines. They have a $199 submission fee. This is fairly easy to do because LookSmart chooses your category and your description. So you could likely do this yourself. Others can help you do this for about
$250 which should include the $199 submission fee.
Third is to get on Yahoo. This will likely bring you a good deal
of traffic. They have a $199 submission fee. Submitting to Yahoo is a delicate procedure. Making one mistake can ruin your chances of getting in and will forfeit your $199.
I would recommend if you are inexperienced with this that on this one submission above all others, that you get someone to help you. You can get this for about $250 which will include the $199 submission fee. But you can certainly do it yourself - just make certain you follow all of their instructions explicitly.
Fourth, Goto express submission - $99. Call 1-877-WWW-GOTO and let them do all the work. This is what they will do for you: 20 relevant search terms. Professionally written search listings. $50 worth of clicks (up to 5,000 targeted visitors) -- look into getting at least one top 3 position. This will get you in AltaVista, AOL Search, HotBot, Lycos, Search.com (a top 2 will get you also on Netscape Search) I've had pretty good luck with this Express submission.
Spending some time on GoTo will enable you to get the hang of adding key phrases and changing your positions. If you do this on your own, be careful about which phrase(s) you choose to be in the top 3. If they are too expensive and not bringing in the right viewers, you will blow through your budget quickly with little to show for it.
Fifth, pay to get spidered by Inktomi. Inktomi is a service that gives listings to engines such as: iWon and gives secondary results to: AOL Search, HotBot, GoTo, LookSmart, MSN Search, Snap. They charge $20 for your first page and $10 for each additional page per year. This money is simply for them to look at your site - this is called spidering. Once you pay this amount they will spider your site every 48 hours.
You will still need good titles and descriptions and at least some optimization for your site to rank well. The Inktomi partner, Position Technologies: http://www.positiontech.com/ is the service you use to get involved with this system. This is a fairly easy process. You can do it or have it done for you for about $50 plus the $20 fee for your first page.
In my opinion, these are some of the most important things you can do to get traffic coming to your site. If you need help or advice on search engine optimization, I have set up a special discount for subscribers to the Get Profitable Update with Sage Lewis at SageRock.com. For more information you can call him at 330-723-8481 or email at mailto:sage@sagerock.com and mention this discount.
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If you have a question about how to “Brand Your Business” call 801-459-9589 or email kevin@getprofitable.com or go to our website GetProfitable.com for more free information.
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Kevin’s Hot New Book ++ NOW PUBLISHED as an E-BOOK ++
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http://www.getprofitable.com/BooksandTapes.html
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Kevin M. Clark
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Kevin M. Clark is a small business marketing consultant and branding specialist and speaker to many nationally acclaimed groups.
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Written by Kevin M. Clark,
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Winner) and President of Clark Marketing Group, Inc.
(c) Copyright 2000, 2001 Clark Marketing Group, Inc.
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