We are going to start our series on e-commerce with “The Formula” for online revenue. The purpose of the formula is to calculate gross revenue to your website, by multiplying three specific statistics from your website.

In each of the next three posts on Feedback Secrets, we will be taking a look at one of these factors in order to get better understanding of what goes into the revenue that our sites receive every month.

The first of these factors is Traffic which can be measured in any number of ways. You could measure it in terms of page views, visits, or absolute unique visitors.  Regardless of which metric you choose, as long as you consistently use that same metric in your calculation it should not make that much difference which factor you use in your calculation.

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Split testing is a process used to optimize conversion rate. The term conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take a particular action. If we are talking about an email newsletter opt-in page, then an opt-in is a conversion. If instead, we are talking about a sales letter, then each and every sale is a conversion.

Split testing comes in two basic flavors. The first is the relatively simple, yet effective A/B split testing. In this type of testing the idea is to test only two options against each other while trying to keep all other factors constant. The second family of split testing is the possibly more effective, yet significantly more complicated, multi-variant split testing. In this post we will examine only A/B split testing.

Now that we know what split testing is, let’s consider some of the situations that we can use split testing in. We can split test different layout versions for an e-commerce site. We could test different versions of a sales letter. Alternatively we could split test various attributes of an email opt-in, name squeeze page.

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Well do you? If so we want to know! Here at Feedback Secrets we are gearing up for a new series on the subject of e-commerce sites. To kick off this series, we are asking you to share a link to your e-commerce site.

All you need to do is email us at feedbacksecrets@gmail.com with your site’s name, URL, and up to seven words describing the nature of your business.

We’ll post your link and site description in this post and we will continue to update this list throughout the week. BTW, no sites of an “adult nature” please. Thanks for your participation.

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So earlier today I was eating at a local location of a restaurant chain that has become a recent lunch time favorite of mine. The chain is a small but up and coming organization, I think at the moment they only have four locations.

I don’t know how long the company has been in business. I first heard about the place about a month ago, and since then every day I walk past it during lunch, the place is packed. The food is really good and the price is not totally unreasonable. In their menu, they have managed to come up with a new twist on an old theme.

So here is what happened… I was stuffing my face, enjoying a break from work when I happened to look towards the restaurant’s front door. At that moment a cute little girl, who to me looked to be about seven years of age, walked in with a high power Minolta digital camera complete with a giant manual focus lens attached to the front.

What happened next was even more bizarre. This little girl systematically walked up to just about every menu hanging on the wall, focused her camera and then snapped a picture. After she was done with the menus, she repeated the process with the marketing posters on the wall. I don’t know if she got a shot of every single marketing piece they had, but she came close.

I noticed at least one other person in the restaurant who had noticed the strange behavior of this adorable little girl. He had a look of utter confusion on his face that seemed to say “what in the world is going on”? Most of the other patrons seemed not to notice this tiny photography enthusiast.

So what in the world does this have to do with online business? Well the business world, in all its forms, can be highly competitive. This level of competition drives people to do all sorts of things in an attempt to gain an edge. I am not suggesting that you engage in any business activities which make you feel uncomfortable.

What I am advising is for you to be aware of some of the techniques that others may use in attempt to gain information on you or your business. There will be some information that will be almost impossible to protect, like a menu on a wall. There will be other details that you will want to protect to the best of your abilities.

In our last post on Batch Processing we wrote about the incredible value that can comes from knowing the “priority stack” for your business and making sure that those weekly business functions that you deem as most important, are completed without fail, every week.

So what is the other secret to batch processing? As we mentioned in our last post in this series, hopefully one day your business will grow to the point where you have to hire people to work in order to farm out some of your business’ functions. Until you reach that point you will have to decide which functions you will take on, and which you will leave alone until you can retain some help.

Once again there should be two lists. A first list of those functions that you must complete each week without fail, and a second list of all the tasks you hope to hammer out in an ideal week. The second secret ingredient in batch processing is to make sure to leave some business function off of both of these lists.

Each of us is different, and some entrepreneurs seem to be “superhuman” in there ability to accomplish an unnatural number of tasks each and every week. The point is that you know your own optimal stress load. To little stress and human beings tend to get lax, on the other hand, if you stack too much responsibility on yourself you may feel swamped if you are unable to complete your tasks.

Several weeks in a row of feeling swamped can have an extremely discouraging effect on a small business owner. This is why we recommend a small list, faithfully completed every week. Too much of load and you run the risk of either stressing yourself to the max or of spreading yourself so thin that you cannot maintain the standards of quality that you have set for your organization. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to leave alone.”

So by now you may have heard that Twitter has purchased the search engine Summize for a deal worth an estimated 15 million dollars, according to Silicon Alley Insider. For more on this story, check out the article “Twitter Buys Summize For About 15M…“

This of course comes as good news to the five founders of Summize who are currently based in the D.C. metro area. This story is good news to us here at Feedback Secrets as well since we are a start up based in the D.C. area… GO D.C.!

The important question is, what does this story mean for entrepreneurs with small online businesses? I think the lesson in this story is something that has been suggested before on this site, which is that “You Can Always Monetize Web Traffic“.

Looking at the sale from a technology point or view sparks some interesting questions. First of which is, why in the world didn’t Twitter just create there own Summize clone to compete with Summize. I don’t think that Summize created some technological marvel, that in terms of their algorithm would be near impossible to duplicate.

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Whatever form of online business you engage in, you can probably benefit from batch processing. This could mean blogging, writing sales copy, combing thorough analytics, cold calling…whatever. For those not familiar with batch processing, it is the practice of lumping together related business activities in an attempt to be as efficient as possible.

So what is this first secret ingredient suggested in the title? Well before we get to it, let’s consider some background. Engaging in any sort of weekly routine with diligence for month after month obviously requires self discipline.

And there seems to be a direct correlation between discipline and financial success in online business, especially in the early stages when there is usually only one person working on the business. There are however limit to self discipline as even the most disciplined entrepreneurs run into snags, emergencies, other miscellaneous delays. So what should happen to our batch processing schedule when we run into these inevitable distractions?

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My favorite movie so far this summer has been Kung Fu Panda, and my favorite character from the movie is Master Oogue. I’m an Oogue fan for two reasons, first he is super wise and second, despite the fact that he is obviously a high-mileage turtle, he is fast when he needs to be.

So how does this relate to online business? One thing in particular which Oogue says to Shifu, “let go of the illusion of control”, I think resonates especially well in the world of online business.

Human beings, as creatures of habit, naturally want to feel in control. The problem is that in the crazy world of growing your own business, rarely are things ever under control.

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If a cow is purple in the middle of the woods with no one around to see it, does it really matter what color the cow is?

A lot of us have read Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow, which advocates making products remarkable so that the most powerful form of advertising, word of mouth, will naturally work in our favor. The term for such a revolutionary idea that spreads like wildfire is an “ideavirus”, as in the book Unleashing the Ideavirus by Godin and Malcolm Gladwell.

Here is the question though, are there limitations or even possibly dangers to being remarkable without a platform. When I say a platform, I mean anything which gives you a significant amount of leverage in initially promoting your company’s new offering. For instance in the world of online business your leverage could come from an email list of 100,000 members or a Facebook profile with 2000 friends.

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