WSJ on Web tools for small businesses

The WSJ covers 8 free or cheap web services designed to help small businesses with organizing, raising funds, or gaining insights. The last 5 all looked interesting to me.

Digital handcuff tools

Ever since reading John Tierney's article on the science of concentration and Rapt, the book it discusses, I've been very interested in finding ways to cut down on distractions and find large blocks of time to focus on one thing. So this recent NY Times piece on taming your digital distractions was right up my alley.

Tired of getting sucked into Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like, the author spent a few weeks trying out "a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions ...

The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused. And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.

He concludes that none of them helped him much, and I think I'd have the same experience. But I am going to try out RescueTime.

The biggest time-suck for me is email, and when I've been able to follow Tim Ferriss's suggestion to only check it twice a day, my productivity skyrockets. It's just very hard to stick to it. Maybe one of these tools will help.

Just go for it

From a WSJ interview with Chipotle founder Steve Ells:

Q. What advice do you give to other entrepreneurs starting out?

A. So many people told me it was not a good idea to a start a restaurant, especially a fast-food restaurant. There was so much wrong with it – it was too spicy; everything was done by hand, from scratch. Everything was wrong. But that's why customers liked it; it's different, in the right way. If you have an idea, just go for it. If everybody is telling you that it's wrong, maybe that's an indication that it's an original idea.

Learning from Mint

I'd just started using, and loving, Mint a week before they got bought by Intuit. From a user's perspective, this seems like bad news. From a Web business perspective, as this Slate article points, it seems encouraging and offers some good lessons. Not sure I get the difference between Web 2.0 and 2.5 as defined in the article, but it is true that more and more tools needed to grow a business online are free or very cheap. Most interesting part to me:

Yesterday, at a panel I moderated in San Francisco, Donna Wells, Mint.com's chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn't have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-trafficked blog, and a popular iPhone application.

Mint.com, which advises customers on how to pinch pennies, does some penny-pinching of its own. It uses Wordpress (free) to run its Web site and blog. To analyze traffic partners, conversion rates, and other essentials of an online business that generates its revenues through lead generation, it uses Google analytics (free and sufficiently simple that Wells' marketing staff can use it without the help of software experts). Wells referred to a bunch of other services it uses to keep tabs on its site, such as ClickTale and Crazy Egg and Compete, as "virtually free"—costing a few hundred dollars a month. Mint.com's main market research tool is Zoomerang, which helps companies conduct online surveys and collect user feedback. The cost: about $700 per year.

Business owners and happiness

Sue Shellenbarger covers interesting findings from a new Gallup survey in her WSJ column:

In the broadest, most-comprehensive survey yet of how occupation affects happiness, business owners outrank 10 other occupational groups in overall well-being, based on the landmark survey of 100,826 working adults set for release today. Defined as self-employed store or factory owners, plumbers and so on, business owners surpassed 10 other occupational groups on a composite measure of six criteria of contentment, including emotional and physical health, job satisfaction, healthy behavior, access to basic needs and self-reports of overall life quality.

This puts Roger the Plumber well ahead of movers and shakers typically regarded as the top of the heap in society—professionals such as doctors or lawyers, who ranked second, and executives and managers in corporations or government, who came in third—according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a collaboration between Gallup and Healthways, a Franklin, Tenn., health-management concern. This is despite business owners ranking below those more-prestigious occupations in physical health and access to basic needs, such as health care.

The findings, psychologists say, reflect the importance of being free to choose the work you do and how you do it, the way you manage your time, and the way you respond to adversity. Regardless of occupational field, the survey suggests that seeking out enjoyable work and finding a way to do it on your own terms, with some control over both the process and the outcome, is likely for most people to fuel satisfaction and contentment.

"Despite the recession, it still pays to be your own boss," says Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll. The survey, adds John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, "reaffirms my view that the more control you have over your work, the happier you are."

WSJ on converting web traffic

The WSJ offers "the three best ways to convert Web traffic into sales" for small businesses:

1. Install a click-to-call feature
2. Chat with customers online
3. Offer a try-before-you-buy program
   

These certainly aren't the 3 best ways for most small businesses, in my opinion. Most are better off focusing on more static approaches, like making their website copy more persuasive, add calls to action, and increasing credibility. But for more advanced players who have the resources, these are 3 features worth considering.