Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing
Archive for the 'eReplacement Parts' Category
Analyzing Your Website Traffic with Google
Lots of companies have websites these days. Your company probably has one. These commercial websites have lots of functions, and they can range from simple information sites about a company to ones more like ours, which are full e-commerce sites that sell products online. No matter what the primary function of the website is, it’s important to know your customers and know how effective your website is.
We’ve been using a very cool product from Google called Google Analytics which provides lots of tools for checking website performance. There’s a lot more to website traffic than counting hits. Google analytics tells us how many of our visitors are first time customers, and how many are returning customers. We can check which days of the week are busiest on our site, and which sections of the site are most effective. Other convenient features check which browsers our customers tend to use and what screen resolutions they’re seeing. If you’re wondering how customers are getting to your website, Google Analytics can see if they’re visiting from search engine results, direct URL, or other sources. You can also compress or stretch the analysis timeframe to see how your website is progressing in the long run.
One of the newer sections of our website sells Milwaukee Tool Parts and we were able to track and analyze the traffic to the page right away. Conversion rates, which show the percentage of visitors that actually place an order online, are important to keep an eye on and we’re able to check how effectively this new section of the website can sell tool parts to customers.
It’s a pretty simple thing, but Google Analytics has provided us with lots of very important information regarding our business online. I would recommend it to any business owner who is serious about their online presence.
Persistence is Key
Truthfully, I’m not an expert on anything. I don’t even pretend to know much about business and it’s all a constant learning process for me. More often than not, I learn by messing up or by doing something wrong or perhaps by being too aggressive or too cautious. The experts should explain all the really smart technical stuff because they know better than me. But one thing I know all about is persistence.
If you’re a small business owner then you already know that business will never get off the ground without some serious hard work on your own part. We’re definitely no exception. When all of us here at eReplacementParts.com decided to become a tool parts distributor a long road opened up before us. There was, and still is, a lot of work to do. And it wasn’t one day’s work. Our work, and I suspect the work of most small businesses, is a long marathon and the only thing that keeps our company going is pure persistence.
There are always the bad days too. You know the ones. They are the days when you seriously consider closing up the doors. As we make more progress and as we grow those days get more infrequent but they still happen. Maybe a supplier hurts your business or a large customer leaves you. Maybe three employees decide to quit within one month and force you to take on all their responsibilities while you frantically interview people to replace them. Things can get really awful. For me, it all comes down to persistence, persistence, persistence. Every business owner has a vision of what their company can become. We all have grand dreams and it takes hard work each day to keep moving.
So that’s my pep talk. I have to hear it too. The endurance race continues. Well, I’m off to work…
Business ESP
You can’t communicate with employees through ESP no matter how hard you try. And I’m not kidding. Sometimes we act like everyone should just be able to figure out what we’re thinking, and it happens all the time. If Ideas and requests aren’t properly communicated they’re not going to be understood.
I had an employee who was rolling into work late, sometimes an hour late or more. I would stew about it. It would frustrate me and I just didn’t know why it was happening. Turns out, after I decided to lay down the law about it, that he actually didn’t know when work formally started because no one had ever told him. Thinking back on it, I know I didn’t say anything about a specific clock-in time and no one else had mentioned it either. Wow. I made a big mistake by thinking that an employee could somehow get inside my brain and know what I was thinking. And this doesn’t just happen with employees. It happens with business partners, suppliers, customers, and just about everyone else I encounter during a business day.
Of course communication is the missing piece here. Things have to be spelled out. It’s not because people are dumb or inept or anything like that. It’s because everybody is different and they all have different perspectives and ideas. It’s immensely helpful to sit down with someone, no matter who they are, and simply communicate. Maybe you’re better about this than I am, but I find that there is a constant need for more complete and basically better communication.
This goes the other way too. Sometimes people aren’t communicating their ideas to me. Maybe they don’t want to say something critical to their boss or maybe I’m simply not listening as I should be. It’s vital as a business owner, I think, to ask people what they’re thinking. I mean really ask, and be specific. Bad communication is a big roadblock to successful business and it takes constant attention to always maintain proper communication.
Learning to Give Responsibilities to Others
Being a (very) small business owner, I’ve experienced a trend over and over again that never seems to get easier: giving up responsibilities, duties, and decision making to employees.
When we started eReplacementParts.com every responsibility fell directly on the owner’s shoulders. We were in charge of building the site, writing all the content, taking all the orders, and shipping all the tool parts. Just from talking to other small business owners I know, it seems that lots of companies start this way. Perhaps yours did as well. Maybe it still operates that way.
For us right now, growth is our focus. We work hard to sell as many parts as we can and not be content with simply maintaining sales levels. As we grow, we need more people to make the company work and that means I have to give some, and then eventually most, of my responsibilities to others. To be honest, it’s tough to let go. Now we have entire departments dedicated to shipping our packages, taking customer phone calls, and building the website. When I walk through our building, I pass many people and their jobs used to be my job. I took a lot of pride in doing those jobs and it’s hard to really let go and trust that my employees will handle things as well as I did. And while they’re not clones of me, they’re able to handle their individual responsibilities just as well as I can and they’re far more specialized.
I think giving up responsibility is a tough thing for any business owner. For some small companies, the goal is to maintain size and perhaps the owner prefers to retain a large share of the load. That’s fine, but I believe that a small business will remain a small business as long as the owner is the primary worker. Potential is limited. If the goal is to grow, a business owner must give up some responsibilities to employees so that he/she can focus more on the company itself.
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