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Last week I beat you up about why the number one way to increase revenue is by getting feedback from lost sales. Feedback from the field, not adding new features, not polishing the website, not even talking to existing customers.

That’s right, talking to existing customers isn’t good enough! They bought in spite of your faults; you need to talk to the other 99.9% of your potential customers who aren’t so forgiving and understanding.

But how?

(Cartoon by Andertoons)

It’s unfair of me to say “find out what’s stopping sales” and then not tell you how to go about it.

So here are eleven ways to collect empirical data about why people are checking out your product ..read more

Gregg and Dale were wondering why I switched blogging platforms from Squarespace to WordPress.

If you were not wondering, you should stop reading now.

Here’s what I’m doing with WordPress that was  impossible with Squarespace, even after repeated appeals to their tech support.

Comment spam management.  I get between 5 and 20 spam comments per day, and it’s been increasing.  Squarespace has no support for automatically flagging obvious spam (like contains the word “Cialis”), using blacklist sites, or CAPTCHA.  Wordpress not only has all these options, but features like “Moderation required, unless a comment ..read more

There are quite a few options when it comes to borrowing money. When it comes to small personal loans, you can go to the bank and if you credit is good enough, they may lend you the money that you need. Some people do not have that luxury and have a few bad marks on their credit that would not allow this to happen. There are also people who just do not wish to go through all of that hassle to borrow such a small amount of money. For these people who would rather have it easy, payday advances are the best option. These are short term loans available online where you give the payday lenders your information and they wire the money to your ..read more

This blog gets a daily average of 9,330 hits (up from 5,900 a year ago).

It pops up prominently when people with problems search the Internet.

So, please permit me to use today’s post for a panoply of complaints that can’t find a home elsewhere.

(OK, enough P words.)

“An ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure,” said Benjamin Franklin. But I won’t say it because I promised not to persist in this practice.

I’m involved with several little companies right now. They all have the same problem, and they’re all avoiding the clearest, fastest path to fixing it.

Their problem is: We don’t have nearly enough sales. Some actual quotes (sound familiar?):

“We have 300 downloads and no sales.” “People tell me I have a great idea, but none of them are buying my software.” “My sales/download conversion ratio is 1%. It should be 8%.” “Folks are signing up for an account but they don’t come back.”

Cartoon by Andertoons

Of course everyone wants “more sales,” but I’m specifically talking about the early stage of your company, when your v1.0 is shaky but has enough features that it should be more viable than it is. When your website copy ..read more