In last week’s article, What’s a “Gatekeeper” and Why Do I Need to “Get Past” Them?, I outlined a strategy designed to enlist the gatekeeper’s cooperation and get you to the decision-maker. It goes like this:

Since gatekeepers can’t make marketing decisions, but they can say “no” to those selling it, give them something to which they can’t say “no”—such as more customers and increased revenue— or reveal a problem they didn’t know existed, in order to get them thinking: “Perhaps my boss needs to know about this …”

One commentator (“a gatekeeper”) said my example wouldn’t work on them—and proceeded to explain why. Yet, in reality, if I’d walked into that person’s business the day before, there’s a 60 percent chance it would have worked. Why am I so sure? Because one “Big Box” SEO company actually measured a number of different approaches to determine which was most effective. Their research revealed that this one in particular landed an appointment with the decision-maker six out of ten times.

One sure way to fail at prospecting is to believe anecdotal evidence as fact. Anecdotal evidence can come in the form of one person’s opinion—as in the example above—or as your own. Just because you think a particular approach will work or not doesn’t mean it will.

Regardless of how effective an approach is, no “technique” is 100 percent successful. Yet, we’d all like to think we’re the exception, that we’re not as readily persuaded or manipulated as the next guy (or gal). In his book, Influence: Science and Practice, psychology professor Robert Cialdini discovered there’s a huge disconnect between how people say they would react when someone was attempting to influence their behavior, and how people actually react.

For example, one control group was asked if they’d allow someone who requested to cut in front of them in line to do so simply based on their looks. Overwhelming, people denied that they’d make a decision on the other person’s attractiveness, or lack thereof.

But in a blind study using people of average looks and ones with “super model” good looks, the super models were allowed to cut far more often than the average-looking individuals. Other similar studies have shown that good-looking individuals obtained help more readily than the average-looking men and women. Clearly, the majority of people aren’t even aware of the factors that influence and persuade them. The truth is, each of us is more susceptible to being persuaded or manipulated than we’d like to believe.

People will always offer anecdotal evidence why a particular prospecting method doesn’t work. There’s even an entire industry that’s sprung up around the myth that “cold-calling is dead.” Yet, most of these voices have either a bias or an agenda. (And what better way to sell your “new and improved” prospecting sales program than to convince your audience that the “old way” no longer works.)

The only way to know what truly does and doesn’t work is by obtaining objective proof. And that requires testing your approach enough times to demonstrate whether it’s successful or not. There are many who scoff at tried-and-true sales and prospecting methods. But as one of the wiser members of SitePoint’s forums recently said, “Trivialize the value of sales at your own risk.”

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Do you list product or service features on your site? What about benefits?

If you’re going to communicate clearly with the audience for whatever it is you offer, you’ll need to understand the difference between these two concepts. Then you’ll need to be able to define them for your product and your audience.

Without this knowledge, your landing page or promo email is likely to read as a mishmash of Interesting Things About My Product. Whether or not they hit the mark for your audience will depend on chance.

But once you get these concepts—and they’re not exactly rocket science—you’ll be able to really speak to the people you want to reach.

Feature or benefit?

When you’re looking at your own (darn fine, I’m sure) handiwork and thinking about what it offers, it can be all too easy to get carried away.

It has this! It does that! It’s better than Brand X! It’s the first Y of its kind! It’s a game changer!

But which of these are features? And which are benefits? There are some pretty easy ways to tell.

Fact versus feeling

One way you can work out if something is a feature or a benefit is to ask yourself whether it’s a fact, or it’s a feeling.

“Compatible with iOS 6″ is a fact. There’s no feeling there. It’s a feature.

“Helps you keep up with friends” speaks to a feeling. We looked at this line when we reviewed the Flickr homepage. There, it was presented as an outcome of the comment and note functionality—or features—that Flickr provides.

If you find yourself falling down the “but it does help you keep up with friends! That’s a fact too!” rabbit hole, don’t think so literally about the terms.

The word “feelings” implies an emotional component that facts don’t have. How many people are going to get emotional about iOS compatibility? Few (none?). But most of us feel good about the idea of keeping up with our friends’ adventures.

Product versus audience

Another way to work out if something’s a feature or a benefit is to ask who has it: the product or the audience? Free phone credits are a feature of a phone plan. The credits are something the product has bundled with it.

But benefits are a function of a feature’s interaction with the audience. For parents buying the plan for their kids, free phone credits might mean peace of mind: they know little Betty can always call if she needs to, so she’ll never get stuck somewhere without a way to get home.

But for Betty, free phone credits may mean she stays better connected with her friends, and doesn’t miss any important gossip as she attempts to scale the social ladder at school.

This raises an important point: benefits can meet conscious needs (staying connected with friends) or subconscious needs (social maneuvering). So it’s important to know your audience and their needs up front. This will help you work out how to pitch the benefits of your service in a way that speaks to those particular people.

Features and benefits in action

Let’s use these two approaches together to try to decipher benefits from features in the real world.

We’ll take lumosity.com as an example. Here’s their brief service description, which I found on a landing page for their service (that is, not the homepage):

Okay, so what about these three points? What’s a benefit, and what’s a feature?

I’d say the first is a benefit, because it’s something the customer has, and the statement elicits a feeling.

The second two points are features, as they’re facts related to something the product has: it’s digital, and it offers tracking.

Getting creative

Further down that landing page we can see features and benefits presented in a different way. They’ve been separated, and the benefits are presented in the words of users, as testimonials.

The business owners I work with often feel that they need testimonials as a form of social proof, and they certainly achieve that goal.

But as this example shows, some well-chosen testimonials can translate features into user-relevant benefits, almost without you having to do a thing—except, of course, choosing examples that convey the precise benefits you want to promote.

How many features? How many benefits?

Now you can immediately tell a benefit from a feature. You can make a list of features for your product or service, and quickly translate each one into a benefit to your audience.

But which should you focus on in selling your product or service: features or benefits? How can you strike the right balance?

If you own the product, or you developed it, you probably think you have a gut feel for the right answers here. But in truth, you’re probably too close to your offering to see it as objectively as you need to.

Enter: Consumer Involvement Theory. This is a theory of customer behaviour that looks at a product and assesses how involved, and how emotional or rational, customers are when they’re deciding to buy it. For the full background, this article is concise but informative.

How can CIT help us? It lets us position our products within a matrix like this one:

Involvement refers to the complexity of the purchase. Buying a subscription to the average app probably rates pretty low on the scale of involvement—unless, as with some productivity apps, for example, users think their jobs depend on making the right choice.

For lumosity, I think involvement might be low to middling.

Emotional purchases are ones that we want to feel strongly about—purchases we buy into emotionally. Informational purchases tend to be more about gathering facts to rationally make the “best” choice.

For lumosity, I think the purchase is probably about health and (mental) fitness, so while we’re going to make a rational decision based on information, there’s no doubt we have an emotional investment in the decision at some level.

So a balance would need to be struck between benefits and features to sell the service, and this is what we see on the lumosity homepage.

Put the theory to work for you

Take a minute to work out where your offering fits on the matrix. This should give you an idea of how much you need to focus on benefits, and how much on features.

You might then allocate a percentage of your message to talk of benefits, and a percentage to features. Will it be 50/50? 75/25? Once you’ve worked that out, you can roughly apply that percentage split to your word counts, page layouts, and so on, to make sure you’re communicating what you need to in the way that best suits your audience.

While you’re at it, prioritize your features and benefits on the basis of your product or service’s value proposition or USP.

Now you’ve got some nice lists of features and benefits, ordered by importance. And you know how much focus you need to give to each. The only question that’s left is: how will you present them?

As a specs list that lets users easily compare your offering against others?

As a customer or member video that shows the benefits one individual gained from your service—and inspires others to join?

Or something else? Let us know what’s most likely to suit your brand—and your audience—in the comments.

In my previous article, What Every Freelancer Should Know about Prospecting for New Business, I said that selling is easy but prospecting is hard. And by far, the most intimidating aspect of prospecting is when you have to interrupt a complete stranger and attempt to get him or her to agree to meet with you. But to get to that decision-maker, there’s another, all-powerful entity you must first confront …

The Gatekeeper.

Gatekeepers can’t make marketing decisions, but they can say “no” to those selling it, because it’s their job to protect their boss. That’s why opening with “Hi, I’m from [INSERT COMPANY NAME HERE]. I’m looking for the person who handles your marketing,” is generally a bad idea. If the gatekeeper is empowered to say “no” to sales people, why would you utter a phrase that immediately labels yourself as one?

Encountering resistance is natural part of prospecting, and you won’t get far selling your services if you’re not prepared to respond to it. But you can circumvent it entirely by treating the gatekeeper like he or she is the decision-maker.

Yes, you heard right. You see, in a typical prospecting call, three things must happen. You must:

1. Get to the decision-maker
2. Say something interesting
3. Ask for the appointment

But that three-step process doesn’t have to occur in that order. Suppose you “broke” the pattern like so:

1. Say something interesting
2. Get to the decision-maker
3. Ask for the appointment

But wait a minute, John. Treating the gatekeeper like the decision-maker makes no sense. Didn’t you say the gatekeeper has no authority to say “yes” to marketing or advertising? That’s right, I did.

But they don’t have the authority to say “no” either.

Let me be more specific. They don’t have the authority to say “no” to the end result of what you’re selling. Such as more customers, increased revenue, more effective online presence.

Treating the gatekeeper as the decision-maker disturbs their complacency. You need to put this thought into his or her head: “Perhaps my boss would want to know about this …” or “We laid off five people last month. Maybe we do need to improve sales …”

Working at AT&T, before I stumbled upon this, secretaries and receptionists would tell me, “We don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages.” (I often found out later that they did.) Even if I did manage to get to a decision-maker, the most common response I’d hear was “I’m not interested” or “We’re all set.”

Sales trainers refer to these as “objections” and teach you to “overcome” them. But, in reality, these rebuttals are resistance—you know, that knee-jerk reaction most of us have when we realize we’re being solicited. By acting like the gatekeeper is the decision maker, you can get past that by leveraging the fact that they have no power to say “no” to executive-level decisions that may affect the well-being of the company. Ironically, assuming the gatekeeper has the power to say “yes” actually takes away his or her power to tell you “no.”

This is known as a pattern interrupt. That’s when you interrupt that “knee-jerk” reaction (or pattern) with which gatekeepers are accustomed to responding to sales people. If you keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll keep getting what you’re getting—a “knee-jerk” response:

Hi, I’m from XYZ Web Design. I’m looking for the person who handles your marketing.

Umm, yeah. We’re all set, thanks.

But interrupting the pattern yields radically different results:

I noticed something about your website and I have a concern that you might be losing business to one of your closest competitors, without even knowing it.

Umm, let me get my boss …

Now you try.

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In my previous two articles I wrote about hosted shopping carts, their features and some of their operations.But what if you want to host your own shopping cart?

For this article I will compare WooCommerce (an advanced WordPress extension), and Magento (Community Edition). Magento Go, the hosted version of Magento, is covered in the hosted shopping carts articles. I will now show you what you need to host Magento yourself, and provide a more in-depth look into its features. But, as I mentioned in my previous article, Magento can be quite overwhelming. So I decided to compare it to WooCommerce, a popular WordPress shopping cart extension that can relate to Shopify in the previous articles when it comes to features.

In each case, I will compare the hosting requirements, setting up and features. Both shopping carts can be used for free.

Hosting

Magento

There are always people debating about Magento hosting, and whether you need Magento optimized hosting. The fact is a successful Magento webshop does require a lot of server resources. A simple installation of Magento can run on basically any type of hosting or server though, as long as you have a minimum memory allotment of 256 MB and meet the  requirements.

WooCommerce

Since WooCommerce runs on WordPress, the hosting requirements are a bit more friendly. The system requirements are pretty standard, and there are no specific server requirements. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to it, you need to be prepared for success.

Especially Magento can become quite a beast when it’s a large store with tens of thousands of items. Your database will grow to tens of gigbytes in size, and its massive file structure will put a serious load on your server. Initially, you can speed up your store by simply adding more memory, and increasing the CPU power. But once that’s not enough, you’ll need to split your front-end and back-end, for example. I could write a whole new article just about optimizing Magento. This also applies to WooCommerce, but not to the same degree. Basically, the larger WooCommerce gets, the slower it will become and the more measures you need to take to keep it fast. This is where specialized hosting comes in, where you can outsource these worries, and focus yourself on building and configuring the store for yourself or your client.

Setting up

Setting up both shopping carts is really easy. WooCommerce is a WordPress add-on, so you’ll need WordPress installed of course.

Almost all hosting companies provide easy install for WordPress, and most offer Magento installation as well. Or you can install it yourself by downloading the install files from Magento or WordPress.

I’ll use my own domain aboutblankenspoor.nl for this. It runs on a VPS with 2GB of memory, and 2 CPU cores totalling 4.6GHz. It’s well suited to the job, and it has Installatron to install both Magento and WordPress.

Let’s start with Magento.

Magento

Magento demo store

During the installation, you can opt to have sample data inserted. The default template isn’t as modern as the Magento Go default template, this one looks a bit dated. Also, you won’t see a handy setup wizard on your first login.

What you do see is a convenient dashboard, with your latest sales data, search terms, bestsellers etc. This can be very motivating when orders start rolling in.

Magento allows you to change almost anything you see, and this gives you great flexibility in customizing your store. Because of this, adding your first product can be quite a challenge.

You start by setting up a category structure.

You can nest unlimited subcategories, with each (sub)category giving you tons of options to configure. You can select a specific design and layout for each category, handy for if you want to make a product specific landing page, for example. Most settings can be inherited from the site settings, to save you time.

After you figure out your category structure, you begin adding products. This is where Magento really begins to shine: You can make product attributes templates, on which you can base your listings. A computer (hard drive, memory) has a different set of product attributes to a t-shirt (size, color), for example. You can make a simple product (just one item), grouped products (sell a bedroom, with bed, sheets, pillow) or configurable products (like t-shirts, in different sizes and color, where a customer selects one combination).

If you select a simple product, you can configure every detail of your listing. Again, many of these setting can be specified site-wide, but it’s a powerful option. The downside of all this power is that it can easily take you 10-15 minutes for each product you add. Luckily, you can save yourself a lot of time by importing CSV files with your products based on these values.

The settings screen is just as extensive as any part of Magento, with hundreds of settings to choose from.

Because of the complexity of Magento, setting up your store can take you anything from a few days for a simple store based on a default theme, to months of work when you add thousands of products and use a custom design.

But, you won’t find two stores the same anytime soon…

WooCommerce

WooCommerce demo store

Setting up WooCommerce starts with installing WordPress, and then adding the WooCommerce plugin. Your WordPress site is enriched with a few WooCommerce features (Cart, checkout, my account and shop). Sample data has to be loaded manually, but it not as easy as with Magento (see instructions).

However, after performing these steps, your WooCommerce shop instantly looks a lot better.

WooCommerce adds two buttons to the WordPress admin navigation, called WooCommerce and Products. In the latter you set up your categories and products. For those familiar with WordPress, this should look familiar. The options you have are quite limited: you can specify if a category view should display the product inside, the subcategories or both.

Adding a product gives you some more customization options. As with Magento you can add simple products, grouped products and configurable products (called variable products). There is also an option to add an affiliate product of an external vendor (more on this later).

Also, you can specify it the product should be virtual (like a service contract) or downloadable. Magento does this too, but with WooCommerce it’s easier.

With not as many options as Magento to specify, adding a product in WooCommerce works much faster. There are more options than you see in this screenshot, because adding a product is basically adding a WordPress post with lots of variables. So you can add images, specify one or multiple categories and add product information. But the power of WooCommerce is in these product settings.

The settings screen WooCommerce provides you is relatively simple, since most settings can be left untouched. But this also allows you to have your shop up and running in a few days, where you will be spending most of your time adding products and not fine-tuning your settings. And you will certainly benefit timewise if you’ve worked with WordPress before.

Features

By showing you some of the backend of both programs, you probably have an idea by now as to what you can expect. But to help you in your choice, I’ve listed some distinctive features:

Magento

• Easy translation: You can translate your entire front-end while browsing your store, no need for editing CSV files (although that is still possible).
• Different store views: This can be used to operate different stores from the same backend. For example, I used this for one of my clients, who had an “all-products” store on their main domain, and a niche store (with a selection of their products) on a targeted domain. The niche products were also sold on the main domain. You can also use this for localizing your store.
• Selling tools: You can put in up-sells, cross-sells, discounts on products/categories/cart and product comparisons to name a few.
• Layered navigation: This allows you to let the customer filter the products listings based on criteria you specify, like price range, color, brand etc.
• Add-ons and themes: There are thousands of free and paid themes to have the site look the way you like. And if you want to extend or improve the integrated functionality, you can use add-ons. These are generally very good and mostly free or inexpensive.

WooCommerce

• Easy setup: This may easily be its main feature, since this allows you to set up a professional store for you or your client, and test the waters first.
• Affiliate products: This is an excellent feature if you’re into selling affiliate products. This can increase your affiliate income, since you can list the products as if it were your own.
• Product ratings: WooCommerce has a built-in ratings system, and you can even offer discounts to those who leave you a review.
• Layered navigation: Yes, WooCommerce has this too, although it’s not as common as you might think. But the Magento version works better because you can only select one attribute with WooCommerce.
• Widgets: You can very simply add widgets for your best sellers, featured products, products on sale etc.
• Add-ons and themes: While not as many as Magento, WooCommerce has its own set of themes and add-ons to extend or improve functionality. And you can also use WordPress add-ons to supplement your store.

Conclusion

When you see all the differences between Magento and WooCommerce, you might think I’m comparing apples with oranges. But that’s not the case here, since I basically wanted to show you the possibilities of Magento and WooCommerce. I think that in a way they complement each other, WooCommerce being the start of your e-commerce adventure, with Magento as the ultimate solution. That doesn’t mean WooCommerce won’t give you a professional webshop, but in time you might want the extra functionality Magento gives you.

They both have their downsides: WooCommerce lacks certain needed features, or doesn’t play them out that well. Magento, on the other hand, has all the features you need, but comes with a steep learning curve.

The great thing is you can try them both, they are both open source and freely available. Let me know what you think.

In my last article, I profiled the features available in three leading providers of hosted shopping cart solutions: Shopify, Yahoo Small Business and Magento Go. Each was found to have distinct pros and cons.

Setting Up

Now, let’s find out how easy it is to set up an actual shop.

Shopify

Setting up your shop with Shopify takes literally less than a minute, and after entering your personal information, you are taken to the dashboard.

You can group products in collections, which works as a category system.

Per product, you can set up the appropriate SEO settings and manage your inventory.

And so within a few more minutes, my first product was on display.

All very clear, and straightforward.

There is a built-in CMS, which you can use to manage your non-product pages, blog and footer. Again, all very clear, it just does what it needs to do.

Switching themes is very easy, just select one from their theme store, and have it installed directly on your shop.

You can download the files to change the HTML/CSS offline.

Shopify uses its own templating language, called Liquid. They provide extensive documentation on how to use it, and you as a developer should be able to quickly pick it up (for a little bit of help, Sitepoint’s got you covered).

Installing apps is as easy as installing themes, and a decent number of apps is provided for free in their app store.

Yahoo Small Business

Unlike Shopify and Magento Go, Yahoo Small Business doesn’t offer a free trial. So you have to start paying right away. You can always ask for a refund when not satisfied, but it’s a bit old fashioned.

Anyway, when you are signed up, you are presented with a handy wizard to set up your store.

You start with selecting a template from their built-in repository. This can be generic templates, or pre-made ones. The difference is in the use of images, but they all seem like they were made in the 90s.

The next screens all show you steps for information you need to enter, which works very conveniently.

And it seems I’m not too far off with my remark about the 90s, since this is the default text for the copyright notice…

Next step: adding products.

Again, you do this by performing a series of steps.

You have to publish your site every time you make a change or add a products, which leaves you waiting for half a minute.

Within a few minutes, I added my first product. You can select “Options” for your product, like difficulty in this example. This field can be used by you to sell multiple variations of a product.

After going through all the additional steps for payment, taxes and shipping (which is all very easy and well described), you are taken to the real dashboard.

Especially the “Promote” section is worth noting, since these are pretty powerful options. Things like promotions and coupons are easily setup and managed.

And you should really check out the Yahoo! Marketing Dashboard, which is a great tool to keep track of your marketing efforts.

As I mentioned before, Yahoo Small Business doesn’t do fancy themes, or apps. What you see it what you get, although you can hire an expert to make decent theme for your site.

Or if you are a developer yourself, there is an extensive store editor in which you can go wild on coloring, HTML and directly editing CSS to make it look professionally.

It’s all there and should be familiar to you, which present an excellent business opportunity.

Magento Go

Setting up your Magento Go store takes a bit longer to set up than Shopify, but you’re still up and running within five minutes.

Magento provides a handy setup wizard, which takes you through all the steps needed to launch your store. During the installation you can choose to load example data, so you can see a working version of your store right away.

I choose to set it up in their UK datacentre (which is closest to me), and I was surprised to see they already added the required Cookie Law notice bar at the bottom.

When you start working on your store, you’ll soon find out why the setup wizard is shown: Magento has lots and lots of options for you to configure, and adding a product isn’t as straightforward as with Shopify.

Their navigation bar is quite extensive, and the configuration screen can be intimidating at first.

This is where you as a developer can display your consulting power, if you know your way around it of course.

And it doesn’t stop there. Adding a product gives you a whole new range of options to configure. And it goes on and on, about every screen you open gives you more options than you can think off.

I didn’t use the word “overwhelming” for no reason…

Mobile

With mobile becoming hotter and hotter, it’s almost a must to have a mobile-optimized site. Not every product line will be suited for mobile, but if you do decide to set up mobile site, it should be easy.

So, let’s see how the shopping cart providers deal with this.

Shopify

Mentioned as a specific Pro, Shopify offers both a mobile site as well as a mobile app for iOs and Android.  You can specify different themes for desktop and mobile visitors.

Their sales page claims you can start selling with a mobile site right away, but their default template isn’t really mobile. You have to look for a mobile or responsive theme first. And there’s currently no free mobile theme. But there is a limited choice for free responsive themes, which should give you enough to start with.

The difference between the mobile and responsive themes is in the navigation: Mobile themes look more like an app, while a responsive theme looks more like the desktop version, with some of the heavy elements left out. So their mobile claim is to be taken with a grain of salt, at least if you don’t want to pay for another theme.

Desktop version	Mobile version (responsive)

So the mobile frontend doesn’t really live up to the expectation, but does the same apply for the app?

I downloaded the free iOs App, and I can see they definitely put some work in it. This is truly mobile management. You can view your customers and orders, and even add new products or modify existing ones. There’s a convenient dashboard with important metrics like revenue, visitors (up to 90 days backs), open orders and a low inventory warning.

You won’t be able to edit the sites’ themes, apps or pages, but that’s because a desktop is more convenient. But all the essentials are included, so this is definitely a plus.

Mobile dashboard	Mobile editing of products

Yahoo Small Business

Not much to cover here, Yahoo Small Business simply doesn’t seem aware of the mobile business revolution which is going on.

When you open the store with your mobile browser, you see what I mean. It’s not even taking advantage of the full screen, which makes it even smaller.

Desktop version	Mobile version

You probably guessed there’s no mobile app.

Magento Go

Well, despite all its features, Magento Go really stays behind on the mobile front. After some hard searching, I managed to find one (1!) theme which isn’t even mobile-only, but responsive.

And even after going through the signup process, and “ordering” the free theme, I couldn’t get to it. But you can give it a try. When installed, it will look like this.

Desktop version	Mobile version (responsive)

Unfortunately, there is no mobile app for Magento Go, so you’re left to visiting the desktop version with your phone.

This requires some patience, since loading is slow and there are too many options to easily click on smaller screens.

Pricing

When it comes to pricing, there are multiple variables to take into account:

1. Monthly pricing compared to number of products and features
2. Hosting costs
3. Transaction fees, not including payment processing fees.

1) Monthly pricing

• Shopify pricing ranges from $14 a month for their starter plan with 25 products and limited features, to $179 a month for unlimited everything and full features.
• Yahoo Small Business starts at $29,96 per month for their starter plan with 50.000 products, and limited features, to $224,96 per month for all of their features (and the 50.000 products).
• Magento Go comes in at $15 a month for their starter plan, with 100 products and full feature availability. Their most expensive plan is $125 a month for 10.000 products.

2) Hosting costs

• Shopify offers enough storage space on all plans compared to the number of products, and unlimited bandwidth (with CDN enabled).
• Yahoo Small Business offers unlimited storage and bandwidth (fair-use) on all their plans.
• Magento Go comes with a limited amount of storage and bandwidth on all plans. Even when you pay the $125 per month, you still only get 5 GB of storage and 32 GB of bandwidth. With 10.000 products offered, that’s not enough. And their overage charges are way too expensive ($10 for each 1 GB of bandwidth you overuse). CDN is included.

3) Transaction fees

• Shopify starts with a 2% transaction fee for their starter plan, up to no transaction fee for their highest plan.
• Yahoo Small Business has a 1,5% transaction fee for their starter plan, down to a 0,75% fee for their most expensive plan.
• Magento Go charges no transaction fees on any of their plans.

Conclusion

When it comes to features, nothing beats Magento Go. But this comes at a cost: their hosting is priced very expensive (but relieves you of the hassles of running Magento properly), and there’s a steep learning curve. If you’re a developer, Magento presents you with plenty of business opportunities: setting up, SEO, custom themes, app development, consulting – all areas in which you can show your expertise. And for an end-user they have the handy setup wizard. But it takes time and patience to build your store properly, both of which you might be lacking when you’re excited to start your e-commerce adventure.

Shopify is another developer friendly piece of software, and you’re openly invited to join their Expert network. Or develop themes and apps, and sell them in their marketplace. For a end-user point of view, Shopify can become quite costly. Standard functionality is a bit limited, and they very much rely on apps to extend it. But not all of these apps are free. Same goes for the themes, there are some good free themes, but to stand out you need to buy a theme. It is very easy to use though, and could perfectly serve as the start of your e-commerce future. And they sure are on the right track for when you want to go mobile.

Yahoo is a bit hard to place. They have a dedicated developer network, which is good. And they provide the tools to make it easy for as a developer to build/customize a theme, or extend functionality. Their backend is actually quite good, with lots of guidance built-in, and it all works very slick. Their marketing tools are great too. And they offer a nice set of features, although it relatively high priced.

But I can’t get rid of the feeling that they forgot to work on the front-end. Their themes are of the design you make when you built your first website in HTML. About 15 years ago. And mobile just don’t seem to exist at Yahoo. I admit this presents excellent business opportunities for a developer, but for an end-user this isn’t perfect. But, if you can get over this, Yahoo Small Business is very novice-friendly and can be a good start. And you can offer more products than you’ll probably have.

In the end it’s up to you, but whether you’re a developer or end-user, you should try before you buy (with Yahoo you actually have to buy to try, but still). Even though it’s possible to switch later on, this isn’t easy and the process might scare off your customers. The opportunity to do your homework is there, and it’s worth exploring how each matches with your needs.

And if you still have questions about these three providers, leave them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

Being a freelancer means you are not beholden to any one employer. It also means you don’t get the perks of regular employment, including time to settle into a job and a network of support as you learn your job.

So how does a freelancers deal with the extensive learning curve associated with launching a new business?  Who can a freelancer lean on when they need some guidance, some assurance, some context?

One option worth exploring is to seek out a freelancing mentor.

What is a Freelancing Mentor?

Freelancing mentors come in all shapes and sizes – providing a variety of services and specializing in a variety of skills.  What a mentor does will depend on what you need.  But putting it simply, a freelancing mentor is someone who understands what success as a freelancer requires, and is willing to share their tips, suggestions, insight, stories and lessons with you.

Some mentors charge a flat rate for their services.  Other mentors ask for a portion of whatever you earn while you are under their guidance.  If you are lucky, you might find a mentor who is willing to assist you for free, acting out of altruistic reasons.

Do I Need a Mentor?

You may not. Many freelancers thrive when they operate alone. Many also find freelancing a challenge, with some quite specific barriers to long term success. In a broad sense, a mentor can help new freelancers who feel like a fish out of water.  This is especially true for those of us who have moved from regular employment to freelancing. Striking out on your own – all on your own – can be tough. Mentors can also help established freelancers who aren’t operating at the level of success they desire.

Specifically, mentors can provide the following:

Personal Attention

Despite all the online and offline resources that are available, despite social media that allows a freelancer to feel connected, despite any amount of self-belief, there are times when you can just barely manage to support yourself.  There are times when you need to talk about your situation as opposed to anyone else’s.

While online resources are great, they aren’t personal.  A blog or forum will never be able to address the individual issues of each reader.

A mentor, on the other hand, can answer your specific questions, monitor your progress, analyze your efficiency and guide you on how to interact with your clients.  They know you, and you know them – and that brings a level of personal attention that may not be available any other way.

Business Advice

You might be a stellar web designer/web developer/content writer/insert-chosen-profession-here, but you might not be a stellar business person.  While there’s no shame in that (you can’t be good at everything), the lack of knowledge could really hinder your success.

A well-matched mentor has been there, done that.  He or she will be able to help you build and manage your business.

What Not to Do

There is certainly value in learning from your mistakes.  That doesn’t mean you have to keep on making the same mistakes, nor does it mean you have to make every mistake. Instead of learning everything the hard way, let a mentor tell you what not to do.  Learn from their mistakes.

Connections

Mentors have been in the game longer than you.  They know more people and they have better connections.  Let a mentor put you in touch with even more professionals who can enhance your career.

Second Opinion

As a freelancer, you can often find yourself working solo: at a home office or in a cafe. There is rarely the opportunity to ask, “Does this sound right?” There isn’t someone sitting in the next cubicle to bounce ideas off.  While freelancing can be a lonely path to follow, it can at the same time bring a high level of responsibility. If you are the sole decision maker, the pressure can sometimes seem overwhelming.

Your mentor is a sounding board, a test audience, an honest response.  That’s why it’s important for a mentor to be someone who at least understands your line of work. You won’t feel nearly as stressed and self-conscious if you know there is someone else who thinks your idea is sound.

A Boost of Self-Confidence

Your mentor is on your side. While you will always have your mother and various others cheering you on, it makes a difference to know that you have the support of someone who chooses to be on your side. It means a lot to have the validation of someone who understands what you’ve accomplished.  A mentor will help you acknowledge your successes and recognize your failings – and help you find ways to build on both.

What Should a Mentor Be?

Above all, a mentor should be well-matched to you. If you’re unable to engage with your mentor then the relationship won’t work. You definitely want someone with whom you “click”, personality-wise, but that doesn’t mean you should take on the person who laughs at your jokes and likes the same sports team.

Look for a person who has these qualities:

Honesty

If you can’t trust the person who is mentoring you, there’s no point.  You will be discussing sensitive subjects – your ambitions and aspirations, your weaknesses, your finances, client concerns, many personal and professional confidentialities.  Honesty and trustworthiness are a must.

Experience and Success

If you’re serious about your work, and see freelancing as a career move, you’ll already know that your business decisions have to be based on more than speculation.  You could get speculative advice anywhere, from your mother if you really wanted to.  There’s an abundance of websites out there, willing to tell you whatever you want to hear.

What a mentor brings is actual experience.  Ideally, your mentor will have been successful in their field, however that success is measured.  This doesn’t mean you need to find someone who is a million years old; it just means your kid brother may not be the right choice.

Someone who specializes in the same tasks you perform is going to understand your situation better, be more likely to have experienced something similar and be able to offer specific advice.

A Positive Outlook

You may think touchy-feely emotions are for the birds, that they have no place in the business world.  You may be right.  Nevertheless, the psychology of freelancing is as real and as significant a factor in long term success as your skill or remuneration.

A mentor will inspire you, encourage you, and focus on the positive things you are accomplishing.

Honorable Intentions

One of the reasons to go with a formal mentoring structure, such as provided by an agency, is that you are more likely to be mentored by someone who is doing it for the right reasons. Otherwise, you have to judge for yourself whether someone calling themselves a mentor really wants to help people and share their knowledge, or is just trying to make a quick buck.

Sound Business Sense

You want a mentor who is responsible, who will encourage you to make sound decisions.  Pushing you to work hard and do your best (“accept one more client this month”) is one thing; encouraging you to make poor business decisions (“go ahead and buy that new, expensive computer even though you haven’t reached your earning goals”) is another.

Available

Your mentoring relationship will likely be based around regular, planned contact with your mentor. Not only should your mentor be as committed to this contact as you must be, they should also be flexible enough to be available when specific needs apply.

Open to New Ideas

Mentoring is about opening up, not closing down. A good mentor will encourage you to look forwards, to extend your capabilities, to embrace new challenges. The last thing you need is someone intent on holding you back.

Where Do I Find a Mentor?

Are you ready to take the plunge?  If so, you’ll want to know how to go about hiring a mentor.

• Consult a mentoring agency. Mentoring is a recognized service in the corporate world, and there are professional agencies that select mentors from a portfolio of consultants and match them to your needs. The costs tend to be commensurate with the level of professionalism.
• Talk to organizations that provide paid coaching.  Coaching isn’t the same as mentoring, being focused more on skills enhancement than personal support. However, you may find someone who can also act as a mentor. This can also be expensive.
• Check with professional associations and business networking groups. You may well find that have a referral structure in place, linking older and wiser industry players with younger ones.
• If you are a graduate, talk to your college. Academics are often industry types who have moved into teaching, and may be willing to act as a mentor.
• Some of your past employers or colleagues might be willing to take on a mentoring role.
• If you are already a member of an industry-focused online forum, make your mentoring needs known.
• Don’t be shy, use social media.  LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook are all good places to get word-of-mouth advice and recommendations.

Should I Become a Mentor?

Eventually, you will come to a place and time where you feel comfortable in your freelancing shoes.  If you have been mentored yourself, it will occur to you to be a mentor to someone else. This will be true, even if you are not ever ready to give up your own mentor. Being mentored doesn’t stop you being a mentor.

Why should you give your time to mentor a fellow freelancer?  Mentoring can bring a whole new outlook to your career.

You Learn

Mentoring is not the same as teaching. It’s more of a two way street. Mentors learn as much about themselves and their work as do the people they are mentoring.

You Feel Good

Mentoring brings both a satisfaction that you are actively helping someone, and challenges to your own preconceptions. Mentoring forces you to keep on top of what’s happening in your industry, and find ways to be supportive to someone who might be struggling. By guiding a newbie, you’ll add some spice and perspective to your own career.  You’ll remember why you love what you do.

You Gain Authority

In any industry, being recognized as a mentor brings it with a sense of increased authority. If the people you mentor become successful, you are seen to have had a part in that success. If you already have standing in the industry, you’ll find that providing formal mentoring stops you being called on in an ad hoc way.

Conclusion

Mentoring has been shown to be highly effective in helping individuals pursue and find success in many industries. Web industry freelancers are prime candidates to benefit from mentoring, offering a chance to develop a professional support relationship that is not built into the way they work. For many freelancers, mentoring may be just what they need.

I recently stumbled on an article published in 2009 about hosted shopping carts, which made me wonder how today’s option compare.

Of the 10 companies listed, one has grown very significantly since then: Shopify. Yahoo, via Yahoo Small Business, is the second provider who is still doing really well, so let’s throw them in the mix as well. And to see how they keep up against any newcomers, let bring in the new and hot kid on the block: Magento Go, launched in 2011 and the hosted version of the Magento ecommerce platform.

In this article, I will compare the features of these three products, identifying significant pros and cons in each case. Tomorrow, I’ll cover setting each one up, how they deal with mobile and pricing.

What about self-hosting? I’ll cover that in a separate article next week. First, let’s look at the hosted options’ features.

Feature comparison

At first glance, all hosted shopping carts may look the same. They can all process orders and keep track of inventory. But if that’s all there was to it, they would only be competing on price. There must be more to it than that.

I made a list of significant pros and cons for each provider. Some features are more important if you are a developer and not the end user, and vice versa. Where applicable, I will make note of this.

Shopify

Let’s start off with Shopify, which has come a long way since it was listed in 2009. Shopify relies heavily on independent developers to improve their product, while maintaining the platform itself. It’s not so much just a shopping cart, more of a whole e-commerce infrastructure where both end-users and developers benefit. And before you think I get paid by Shopify for writing this, let me explain:

Pros

• Templates & plugins: with their own Theme store and App store, customers can choose from 150+ templates and hundreds of apps.
• Shopify Experts: Grouped by their expertise, Experts are experienced developers who can help a customer with their Shopify shop.
• Developer friendly: Guess who makes the themes? And the apps? And who do you think the Experts are? Right, you are (or at least you cán be ;-). There’s even a fund to get you paid while developing an app. And if you want to connect with a current app (with a RESTful API), you can build a special dev shop to test it out. And they promote you heavily. They really love developers, see what I mean?
• Hosting with CDN: While hosting certainly isn’t a specific feature (how else would you sell hosted shopping carts?), hooking it up to a CDN sure is.
• Mobile: Your visitors can see a optizimed mobile version of your site, and you can control your shop on your mobile.

Cons

• Themes: Being able to buy themes is great, but you practically have to. The free templates are scarce, and some of them look very much alike. The cheapest are $80, and this goes up to $180. Paying for a theme isn’t a bad thing, but given the fact you already need a paid subscription, one could expect more and better free themes. On the higher plans you are able to modify the HTML/CSS. You can build and upload your own theme, but developing from scratch can become really time consuming.
• Number of products: Shopify offers the least number of products you can list in your shop, compared to their monthly pricing. Also, not all of their features are available in their cheapest package.
• Built in functionality: Shopify relies a lot on their app system to add additional functionality, like upselling. The cost of this is that it’s rather basic when you first start.

Yahoo Small Business

Also known as Yahoo Store (which originated from Viaweb), Yahoo Small Business is the most “traditional” shopping cart of them all. But being in business since 1995 means they have seen it all, and they offer a huge amount of features to satisfy all sort of customers and developers. Features are clearly based on experience, and customer feedback.

Pros

• Integration: You probably won’t find a payment, shipping or inventory solution you can’t connect with – they even have cash on delivery. And if you do find one, there’s an API.
• Coupons: A great way to generate sales, and available on every plan.
• Number of products: 50,000 products allowed, right from their starter plan.
• Developer network: Just like Shopify, Yahoo doeslike to work with developers. But you have to do a bit of searching (hint: ysbdevelopers).

Cons

• No plugins or fancy themes: You build your store with a design wizard, or pre-made (pretty ugly) templates. And there aren’t any plug-and-play plugins available. This does, however, provide an opportunity if you’re a developer, since a customer will more likely turn to you for extended functionality (remember the APIs).
• Feature availability: Features like upsell, cross sell and gift certificates are great to have, but only available in the more expensive plans.

Magento Go

Magento Go is the hosted version of the popular Magento eCommerce software, hosted by the developers of Magento themselves. One of the main reasons for using Magento Go instead of hosting it yourself, is it can be a real beast to host. You need a better than average server/VPS to host it, and it needs daily cleanup to keep it running smooth. It isn’t just a hosted version of their free community edition, they actually added some useful features to justify the price.

Pros

• Feature set: All of the offered features are available on every plan. And within their feature list you’ll find coupons, gift cards, wish lists, cross- and upsells and related products. To name a few. And to top it off, you can expand your shop with plugins (or extensions as they call them).
• Speed: They know how to host it, which means they can deliver a fast site without modifications of plugins needed. And they offer you a CDN.
• A developer’s new best friend: Magento Go is a developer’s dream come true, since it offers lots of opportunities for you to step in. You don’t have to worry about the hosting, so you can focus on stuff like design (you can add your own CSS and scripts), SEO (more options than an average business user can cope) and consulting (how to set it up and actually use all the features).

Cons

• Feature set: Magento isn’t the easiest store to set up, and it takes a steep learning curve before being able to use all its features. It can be very overwhelming.
• Themes and plugins: You can only select the themes and plugins which are provided on the Magento Go platform itself. Unlike the self-hosted version (Magento Community Edition), you can’t use the full range of available themes and plugins. Especially with themes this means you have a limited amount of free themes.
• Number or products: You can offer a few more products in the starter plan than Shopify, but with 100 products it’s still not that much.

So, now we have an overview of the features offered by Shopify, Yahoo Small Business and Magento Go. They have much in common, but also have significant differences to each other.

Some of these differences will become more apparent as we go through the set-up process, look at how they handle mobile and discuss pricing options. That’s tomorrow’s article.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, over 50 percent of small businesses fail in the first five years. Included in the “Top 10 reasons” is “lack of sales” or, as a recent Forbes article described it: having no clear marketing funnel.

You need to develop a way to cost efficiently attracts leads, then convert some of them. This seems so basic, but hundreds of thousands of businesses start with no clear marketing funnel and then have to rely on luck or referrals to get customers in through the door.

A marketing funnel is the process that brings prospective buyers into your sales cycle and enables you to close a deal within a specific time frame. Unfortunately, there is no one “silver bullet” that magically drops prospects into your sales funnel. Effective marketing is more like a team than a shotgun. And a key player on that team ought to be hunter-style prospecting. (That’s when you head into the jungle to eat what you kill.)

Prospecting for new business can seem like a terrifying proposition, so if landing new or better-paying clients is not mission-critical, feel free to avoid it. But unless you’ve built up an existing base of repeat clients, or you generate sufficient word-of-mouth recommendations, prospecting for new business is essential to your survival.

Prospecting involves creating conversations that lead to sales. Having a great blog and social media activity is all well and good. But unless they create conversations that lead to a steady stream of sales, you might be hiding behind marketing to avoid selling. If your conversation is not designed to bring the other person into your sales cycle and close a deal within a specific time frame, it’s not prospecting.

Using an “Interest-Creating Remark” to Set Sales Appointments

Here’s what those confronted with the need to “sell” their services don’t like to hear: that prospecting requires interrupting people. In order for that interruption to create a conversation, you need an interest-creating remark as an opener. Here are three approaches:

Quote a Trend or Statistic

You can use trends or statistics to grab a prospect’s attention:

Trend: “Mobile search is projected to surpass desktop searches in less than two years.”
Statistic: “61 percent of mobile consumers will leave a site that’s not mobile-ready.”

The problem with using facts and figures is that they don’t “grab” like we expect they should. In order for a statistic or trend, to be effective, you need to take it one step further and disturb their complacency.

Disturb their Complacency

While trends or statistics make perfect sense to you and me, the typical business owner fails to make the connection between how that fact or figure affects his bottom line. You must “connect the dot” to address the other person’s unspoken response of “So what? Why should I care?” Go ahead, shake him up a bit.

I noticed something about your website and I have a concern that you might be losing business to one of your closest competitors.

How so?

You don’t have a mobile website, but XYZ Company does. 61 percent of consumers will abandon a non-mobile site for a competitor’s whose is. You might be losing business to XYZ, without even knowing it.

Offer a Solution to an Assumed Need

Two recent surveys have revealed the following about the typical small business owner:

• 76 percent of SMBs said “how to attract new customers” was their “top concern,” and 69 percent said it was “the #1 challenge” they face
• The average business owner works more than 50 hours a week and sleeps less than seven hours a night

From this, you can “assume” that many SMBs are highly-concerned about attracting new customers, but are too time-strapped to do it themselves. Marketing Pilgrim put it like this:

For the small business owner, it’s all about ROE – Return on Effort. They already have their hands full with the day to day running of their business, so there’s little time left over for anything else. If all a person has to do is say “run it again” when the newspaper calls about their ad, that beats the hours it will take to learn about Promoted Tweets on Twitter.

Based on the above, can you fill in the blanks for an effective interest-creating remark?

We help business owners who are concerned about _______________________, but don’t have _______________________. Is that something you need help with?

It’s not What You Say …

Over the years, I’ve become convinced that at least half (if not more) of your success lies in how you say it. A mediocre interest-creating remark delivered well will win out over an outstanding one delivered badly.

Now’s not the time to exude passion. So be charming, be likable, be casual—even nonchalant. Just don’t be intense. You’ll just freak the other person out. And freaked-out prospects usually don’t agree to an appointment.

At least in my experience.

Image credit

Many developer-business owners and entrepreneurs I speak to have fallen prey to the “this thing I built will sell itself” trap. Then they wonder why no one downloads their new product, or signs up to their new service. Then they call in a copywriter.

What’s the problem here? If you ask me, the strong focus on MVP among startups doesn’t help.

A minimum-viable-product focus sees your team working round the clock to ship something. They get to launch date, and realise they don’t really have any product information—collateral, if you will—to support that launch.

So they whack a signup or download page together, list their app in the App store and Play, and tweet about it. The MO is: build something that works, get it out there, and see if it flies.

But what’s the point of racing to launch an MVP if that’s all you’re going to do? An MVP might make business sense. What doesn’t is to follow it up with an MVW—a minimum viable website.

In this article, we’ll see how you can easily support your next product or service launch with a smart landing page—and without a copywriter if your launch budget won’t allow it.

Let’s take a look at a new, recently released app that’s close to home: SitePoint’s own podling.

An MVW in action

The website that accompanied the recent release of podling is really just a landing page with four words on it.

To find out anything about this service, you need to go offsite, to the podling page on the Apple store, where you get a brief description of the app, and a screen capture.

Many Apple app developers will argue that the page on the Apple store is the main game, and that the website doesn’t matter. But if you’re really going to grow your market beyond the first wave of innovators, you’ll need more than an Apple store page.

What’s an innovator? In any audience, there are five types of customers: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards. Only one of these groups—the risk-taking, tech-loving innovators—is going to bother downloading an app to find out what it does and work out how it can help them. And only a small portion will bother to do that. After all, there are plenty of apps out there. Why should they bother downloading yours?

So what’s the solution here? Do you need a full-blown website for your MVP? Well, no—but if you’re going to give your product or service the best chance of getting audience attention and uptake—an MVA (minimum viable audience), you might say—you’re going to need more than an MVW.

Let’s take a look at another example that ups the ante.

Instagram: basic, done well

The Instagram site does a pretty good job of presenting the app. While Instragram is not an MVP, this kind of website is achievable by any startup or small business.

Like podling’s, this landing page contains the brand name and a four-word tagline. It also has links to the Apple store and Play—to download pages that offer a range of screenshots and details about the app.

But Instragam has a couple of extra assets on its website.

The first is a little blurb, containing key words from the brand vocabulary, which is closely aligned with the category (photography) vocabulary: filters, share, post, and photos.

Why not introduce your new product or service with a quick, friendly elevator pitch? Sure, writing a quick, friendly elevator pitch that means something to users is easier said than done. But it is doable.

The other assets Instagram is using to promote downloads? Help content and a blog link.

Few startups have a blog to point users to at the launch of their product. That’s fine. Linking to your blog from your landing page once you have both assets is, I hope, a no-brainer.

But what about FAQs? Instagram calls this “Support” in its IA, but “Help Centre” at the source.

As Instagram has done, you might just link to your FAQs from your landing page footer. This:

• shows you care. The fact that you’ve got FAQs suggests that you care about your users, not just your glorious technology.
• shows that you understand users. You know that not everyone will want to sign up or download to find out about your offering. Your FAQs are free information for those who want it.
• shows that you’re serious. FAQs show you’re committed to your product or service. The fly-by-nighters wouldn’t bother to create FAQs, would they? No. But you have, because you’re building something bigger than an app—you’re building a business, and relationships with real people: your users.
• is not “in your face.” If users want more information, the reasoning goes, they’ll likely look around for it. If they don’t—if they’re happy to download—they won’t even notice you have FAQs. They’re there if you want them, and will probably go largely unnoticed if you don’t.

Note that your FAQs don’t need to be as extensive as these—you could just have a handful of key questions at launch, and build on them over time. No big deal.

Think about it: most of us know what Instagram is and does. Yet the business provides all this information. On the other hand, countless new-to-market apps with no authority or brand presence tell users next to nothing about themselves.

Don’t hope users will bother to download your app to find out what it does. That is no way to build a userbase.

Focus instead on providing them with access to all the content assets—all the information you have about your new product that may interest them. Use what you have to tell your product or service story.

No, users probably won’t need it all. But different users look for different pieces of information, and different types of reassurance. Your landing page needs to address as many of them as it can if your MVP is going to attract an MVA.

Going further

Okay, so to launch your MVP, you want a landing page that has:

• your brand name and tagline
• some information about what the product or service does for the user
• a sign up form or link to download as required
• a link to support or FAQs that provides more information for those who want it.

What if your product or service is a little more involved than Instagram? And what are you going to do with that demo video you stuck on YouTube so you could tweet it? What about that recommendation you got from an influencer in your industry?

Take a leaf out of Evernote’s book: they’ve smartly integrated these elements—along with selected FAQs and blog posts—into their landing page.

Evernote’s even gone so far as to include links to “Product Guides”, which detail the technical features of each release for each platform.

You might not have this level of user-friendly documentation. But let’s say you wrote a whitepaper or ebook that explains your offering to encourage people to sign up for your service. Could you include that as a permanently offered download from your product’s landing page?

Could you embed your YouTube demo? Could you add that great comment the industry pundit said about your brand as a featured quote?

The answers to these questions will depend on the nature of the content assets you have at your fingertips, and your audiences. And, of course, the goal isn’t just to jam a whole lot of stuff on your landing page.

But if you’re launching an MVP, and you have any content assets that could be presented to, or repurposed for, potential customers, take a look at them. See what’s worth including—and where there are information gaps that you need to fill.

“Lighter is better” … or is it?

One objection I hear to this position—in which you provide information on your new product or service, rather than expecting people to learn about it by using it—is that “it’s too much.”

“Too much information is overwhleming,” people say. “It’s a simple product! So simple! It doesn’t need a bunch of words around it. I’d rather let the app speak for itself.”

Newsflash: if your landing page doesn’t convince users to download your product or sign up for your service, it’s not going to get a chance to speak for itself.

Remember the Instagram example. You could hardly say there was too much information on that landing page.

When you’re launching a product or service, less information probably won’t mean more customers. Including, or linking to, carefully chosen, well-pitched supporting content on your landing page is the smarter way to sell your new product or service.

What does your product or service landing page look like? Does it use key words from your brand vocabulary? Does it provide users with enough information to pique their interest—and download or sign up? Let us know in the comments.

In my last article, I said that you can easily mimic the practices “Big Box” SEO companies have used to make themselves into such effective sales organizations. One of those practices is prospecting for new business.

Prospecting is contacting people with the sole intention of drumming up business immediately. Every industry has a predictable sales cycle—that is, the time required to take a client from first meeting to final handshake. The higher the cost and the more complex the sale, the more time involved. The sales cycle for a box of nails is around 30 seconds. For multi-million dollar enterprise application software, it’s more like 30 months. The goal of prospecting is to find someone who’s likely to buy your product or service within your typical sales cycle.

Because prospecting can be downright terrifying, it might be helpful to establish what prospecting is not—just in case you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that your current activities can be construed as such.

Prospecting is not Selling

Selling is easy. I love selling, even when the prospect doesn’t buy. Prospecting, on the other hand, is hard. Prospecting is finding someone to whom you can sell. Selling begins only after prospecting reaches a successful conclusion.

Prospecting is actually a form of marketing, which is why cold-calling is called tele-marketing not tele-selling. I make that distinction so you may realize that it’s entirely possible to have someone else do your prospecting, leaving you to do the selling.

Inbound Marketing is not Prospecting

Yellow Pages, paid or organic search, and blogs all help you be found when potential customers are in research or buying mode. Inbound marketing is when the buyer is seeking a seller. Prospecting is the exact opposite. It’s the seller seeking a buyer.

Connecting on Social Media is not Prospecting

While posting special offers on social media channels is a form of prospecting, doing so exclusively is the quickest route to being “unfollowed.” The primary purpose of social media is to establish relationships with your followers. Those may lead to sales, but social engagement cannot be called “prospecting” in the strictest sense of the word.

There are many ways to communicate with potential buyers. But unless the sole purpose of that communication is to bring the other person into your sales cycle and close a deal within a specific time frame, it’s not prospecting.

What Prospecting Is

Here are the activities I define as “prospecting”:

Cold-Calling

Cold-calling is using the phone in an attempt to set up a sales appointment with a decision-maker.

Cold-Canvassing

Cold-canvassing is cold-calling in person. Rather than trying to reach a decision-maker over the phone, you walk in.

Email Prospecting

While I don’t personally advocate it, you can use email to the same end. Sending unsolicited email is less effective than other prospecting methods and can land you on the wrong side of the law, if done wrong.

LinkedIn Prospecting

While prospecting on social media is generally frowned upon, LinkedIn is the exception to that rule. When done properly, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for gaining new clients. The reason it’s so effective is that it allows you to target prospects who have a highly probability of needing what you sell. I’ve been prospected a number of times on LinkedIn and in many cases, it was something we were already in the market for.

To Prospect or Not to Prospect

A colleague recently shared with me that his business has changed from chasing new projects to managing long-term clients who pay to keep him within easy reach. But this doesn’t happen overnight. Here are some reasons you might engage in some or all of the prospecting methods I’m recommending.

• You’re just starting out and need clients right away
• You’re in a slump and need clients right away
• You’ve gotten lazy about your other marketing activities and need clients right away
• Your other marketing efforts have suddenly dried up and you need clients right away
• You’ve just lost your two largest clients and you need to replace that revenue right away
• You have too many cheapskate, over-demanding clients and you need to replace them with better-paying ones right away

Are you beginning to sense a common theme? I’ve had people comment that they’d rather quit their business and work for someone else than resort to cold-calling. Personally, I wish I’d learned to cold-call and prospect effectively before I decided to quit my web business.

How about you?

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According to a recent survey by International Data Corporation (IDC), PC sales had the biggest slump since records began in 1994. Shipments dropped by almost 14% in Q1 2013 compared to the previous year. Cue doom-laden stories from The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ABC News, Business Insider and the BBC with subsequent share price drops for Microsoft, Intel and HP.

The meltdown has been attributed to factors including the continuing recession and a poor reception for Windows 8, but the primary reason was highlighted by ABC News:

The ailing personal computer market is getting weaker, and it’s starting to look as if it will never fully recover as a new generation of mobile devices reshapes the way people use technology.

So we can conclude that people have started to shun personal computers … in favor of portable personal computing devices. Why is this a major news event?

The survey indicated more than 76 million PCs were sold in the first three months of 2013 and the industry is on target to sell 300 million by the end of the year. In addition, tablets should account for a further 200 million sales. Is half a billion units a decline?

The real story here is the viability of tablet and smartphone devices combined with increased reliance on cloud computing. Most people are data consumers; if you’re browsing information or sending short messages, a portable tablet with a simpler OS, long battery life and online collaboration makes a lot of sense.

That said, I attempted to write this article on a tablet and it’s a painful experience; an on-screen keyboard, small display and awkward text selection makes me long for my PC. Data production requires a more suitable device and let’s not forget a tablet is a secondary computer for many people.

The news would have been more concerning were portable machines significantly less expensive. If anything, a decent tablet or smartphone cost more than a mid-range laptop. Perhaps the only commercial concern is the extended life of PCs. Component reliability, cloud processing and alternative computing options result in a reduced incentive to upgrade as frequently. However, this must be offset against users owning multiple gadgets.

The most we can gather from this news is that mainstream computing habits are changing. A PC may still be necessary for “real” work, but a tablet or smartphone is useful for surfing the web, analyzing reports, sending short messages, reading eBooks, listening to music and watching videos. Device contexts have changed; not sales.

The good news for web developers: we don’t care what people choose to use (or shouldn’t — take note anyone who neglects to test multiple browsers!). A decade ago, desktop developers could target a single OS (Windows) and guarantee operation on most computers. In today’s mountainous computing landscape, developers must target multiple versions of Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android to have the same degree of coverage.

Fortunately, the web offers a cross-platform standard (HTML5) with comparatively simple mobile support (responsible design). Perhaps the PC will die, but personal computing combined with web technology has a bright future.

In last week’s article, Competing against the “Big Box” SEOs, I said that, faced with declining revenue, traditional media outlets are adding digital to their offering. This means that some of your best clients are likely being approached by their radio, Yellow Pages, or newspaper rep—perhaps someone they’ve purchased advertising from for years—and being offered the very services you provide. Or ones you don’t.

Add companies like Reach Local and Yodle into the mix, and you’re up against some highly-experienced sales people who know how to prospect and close business. That’s not to say there’s no more room for the individual freelancer. But in the same manner that WalMart and Home Depot have displaced the neighborhood merchant and local hardware store, the same threat looms for the local freelancer.

So what tactics do these companies employ that makes them so successful? For starters, they no longer position themselves as “web design” companies because—let’s face it—businesses need more than that to succeed online today. So why are you still hanging onto that label?

No, most have evolved into some type of web or digital marketing agency, which includes both organic and paid search, display advertising, social media, and even reputation management. This means there’s always something to offer a potential client, regardless of whether he’s a beginning, intermediate, or super-savvy web marketer.

Armed with a full quiver, these reps will approach your clients by looking for a “hole” in their marketing armor. They won’t bother discussing how their h1’s and title tags aren’t properly optimized. Instead, they’ll zero in on something more basic, like how their website isn’t mobile-friendly, or that they don’t appear in the local search results and how those impact their bottom line.

When used properly, this becomes a powerful prospecting tool; and by far, the most effective tactic a “Big Box” SEO rep will employ is hunter-style prospecting.

What’s Hunter-Style Prospecting?

You’d think that today’s enlightened digital agency would rely exclusively on search and social media to find clients. While they most certainly do employ these methods, the standard fare for their sales teams are cold-calling and cold-canvassing.

If you think these methods are ineffective and “old school,” you’d be wrong. Traditional media reps have used both successfully for years, and the “enlightened” digital agency has followed suit. You see, these companies understand one important demographic regarding the typical SMB—that they’re extremely time-strapped. In fact, a recent survey revealed that the average business owner works more than 50 hours a week and sleeps less than seven hours a night.

This means that after a 10-hour day of scheduling service calls, maintaining his trucks, paying the bills, making sure his shop meets OSHA regulations, struggling to complying with the new health care laws, worrying about cash flow and wondering if he’ll make this week’s payroll, Fred the plumber has no time or inclination to think about his advertising or whose marketing blog he ought to be reading. Nor is he likely to follow any of them on Twitter.

The Big Box SEOs know that an old school cold-call or unexpected drop-in the quickest way to get on Fred’s radar. Sure, Fred may get mad and throw the rep out. But the best sales people know that with a powerful interest-creating remark, six out of ten “Freds” will agree to an appointment.

Many of you decided to sell your services because of your technical expertise. For me, that expertise was being a good front-end web designer. After teaming up with a business partner who was a programmer, we thought we had all we needed. But we soon realized that our success or failure hinged on how well we could market and sell, not how well we could design and code.

The good news is, you can adopt the principles and practices of the Big Box SEOs. By “principles” I mean that they have a well-oiled prospecting machine that drives new business. Do you? A typical rep for one of these companies may need to close five sales a week to meet quota. Multiply that by dozens of reps, and you begin to see how much business these companies must bring in to maintain and stay profitable. You, on the other hand, may only need to close two sales a month to make a good living.

By “practices” I’m referring to the specify tactics they employ. While cold-calling and cold-canvassing are effective, you may have a different method that brings in sufficient business. So long as you have one.

Do you?

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I never met a developer who advocated SEO. Most of the entrepreneurs I know see it as a business essential—like a bank account, or a band name. And copywriters seem divided: SEO is either the way to structure any and all text, or a last-minute add-on to make the marketers happy.

Recently, I was working with a client who realised half-way through copy development that he wanted to include the current website’s existing body text into the new content we were writing.

Why? SEO. He was worried his business would lose search rank if he replaced the current web text.

I suggested keeping the current text intact as it was and framing the new copy around it, but he liked our new copy better. He wanted to shoehorn existing sentences into the new content wherever they might fit (so long as it was fairly high up on the page).

He revised a page of our draft text to integrate these sentences. We’re not talking a lot of copy here: maybe 50-75 words. But it read badly. In fact, the readability scores for his revised text were two full grades higher than our original copy.

When I pointed this out, along with some factual issues in the current text that we were aiming to eliminate with the new text, he gave me this answer:

“Oh, I don’t think that matters. No one will read it anyway—I think they’ll just read the headings here and click through to the product demo.”

Well then, I wondered, why clutter up the page with all these boring words anyway? Let’s delete them, leave the headings, and let the people just click on through (if indeed that’s what they were going to do).

The problem with SEO as SEO

This client saw SEO as a separate issue from communication. Of course we couldn’t delete the words no one was going to read from this page—they were the thing that would get us search traffic.

But once those people came, they wouldn’t bother reading the text, they’d just click through. Right?

Well, maybe. I don’t know about you, but as a searcher, when I click through from a search result, the first thing I do is look for the words I’m searching for on the page that’s displayed. Ideally, they’ll be contained in headings, because I’m scanning at this point, and keywords in headings act like signposts: here’s what you’re searching for.

If not headings, it’s good if keywords are contained in links because they’re scannable too. If not there, then I guess I’ll just have to start scanning actual sentences (yawn). Or maybe I’ll just hit the Back button and try another search result.

I don’t think this is an abnormal use case. I believe this is how a lot of people often behave with search results.

Don’t dismiss SEO. Use it to your advantage. It doesn’t have to be about keyword stuffing to address machine algorithms. SEO can be about providing potential users of your product or service with the information they’re looking for.

SEO can help communication

Woah, what? SEO can help communication? Come on. Who are we kidding here?

Okay, we all know that keywords and phrases are never going to comprise your brand messaging (I hope!) or your entire content (I hope!), though if they’re particular enough, some of them may creep into your brand vocabulary.

But knowing what people are searching for, and how your product or service meets that need, can help you communicate more clearly—and more quickly—with those users.

It can tie your brand closely to the user’s need from the outset.

Search term: washing woollens

It can present your unique offering as the precise solution to a generic problem—at a glance.

Search term: logo design in Melbourne

SEO isn’t just about long-form text and sales speak. It’s about making a page answer the user’s questions clearly and efficiently—from the opening phrase (whether that’s your IA or page headline) to the “Buy [keyword] now” button.

It’s about playing with content elements to tell new arrivals to your site that they’re in the right place. Content elements such as:

• headings and subheadings
• links
• calls to action
• case studies and testimonial blurbs
• and, of course, body content.

If you’re the type who’s happy to keyword-stuff your copy because you don’t think anyone will read it, then do us all a favor: just delete it.

Instead, write something that’s useful for all prospective customers—including those coming through search who don’t know where they’ve ended up.

How well does your website content meet this goal? Do you think SEO can help you communicate with prospective customers and users? Let us know your position on SEO in the comments.

You’ve heard this before: never work without a contract. The problem is, contracts can take different forms and shapes.

This is actually a good thing, as it means that the law allows you to be flexible in allocating the various obligations between you and the client, but it can also make you feel overwhelmed by options and legalese.

Let’s try to shed some light over developers’ contracts.

Important stuff

Some basic legal information, first. I promise I’ll try to keep it short and simple. Web developers usually go with one of two types of contract. One is the “work for hire”, and one is a version of a “service agreement”, that can be more or less long and complicated according to how big the project is. In both cases, you’re considered as an independent contractor under labor and tax laws (while laws my change across states, every civilized country should have some form of independent contractor relationship).

The main difference between the two types of document is in the management of intellectual property (IP — normally IP just means copyright, but the concept includes also patents and trademarks). Copyright belongs to the creator, in the moment the work is “born” (technically, the moment your creative work is embedded in a “fixed format”, that is, you write it down in an text editor).

If you work under a “work for hire”, the copyright of your work is automatically assigned to the client. Instead, if you use a “service agreement”, you can decide if, when and how the copyright of the work created will be assigned. In both cases, you’re exchanging intellectual work — the so-called “deliverables” — with money or equivalent (shares, future revenues, etc).

The List

Contracts are a little bit like code. There are some formulaic parts that are always repeated to make sure everything is covered, and there are the important sections that are unique for every deal. This is why templates are useful: they take care of the formulaic parts for you, so you can concentrate on the relevant parts.

You, and only you, can spell out what you’ll build and how to deliver it. Remember, as you should never deploy code you don’t understand, don’t sign a contract you don’t fully comprehend. I will try to explain some of the main things, but don’t hesitate to go to a lawyer for help.

Time for the exciting stuff: let’s go through the most popular real world examples.

1. AIGA’s Service Agreement for Interactive Projects. This is the gold contractual standard set by AIGA, the professional association of designers. While it was drafted for design jobs, it’s the perfect contract for big projects that involve a lot of design and code. This document is very long (there’s a short version), but is also very protective of the designer/developer interests. If you look at the section that deals with IP, you can see four main possible variations:
   1. Full assignment: after the price has been paid in full (don’t forget this part) you “assign” the copyright to the client, in full as well. This means that he now owns what you created and he can do whatever he wants with it. He usually doesn’t even have to credit you for the work, but this contract lets you keep the right to display the work in your personal portfolio.
   2. Limited license: you keep the ownership of the work, the client pays you a licensing fee to use it. The terms of the license can be as flexible as you want. You might want to let you client use the code for only that specific project, for example. Of course, the broader the license, the higher the price.
   3. Exclusive license: you guarantee to the client that you won’t use the same code or design for other, third party projects. While exclusivity is usually a perfectly acceptable request, you might not want to license exclusively those snippets of code that you recycle for every project (so-called “design tools”). But wait, this has to be subdivided further:
      1. Exclusive with modifications allowed: the clients get not only to use your work, but to edit / adapt it as he pleases.
      2. Exclusive with modifications not allowed: the client can’t change or add into what you did. A pretty rare, but absolutely legal, provision. If you are such a big shot to negotiate this for a good price, cheers for you.
2. Andy Clarke’s Contract Killer is a very different approach compared to AIGA’s. It’s a short contract in plain English, that sets the terms rather bluntly and doesn’t waste much time in miscellaneous legal clauses. Loved by designers, it’s getting popular among developers and UX people, too.
3. Eric Adler’s Website Designer Contract is a good compromise between the AIGA’s legalese party and Clarke’s British humor. While focusing on design, it takes into consideration coding, and has some nice tips to guide you through it to make sure it works for you.
4. Daniel Bearsdley’s Development Service Contract is more oriented to back-end developers, and takes into consideration parts of the code you might want to release under an open source license. This one’s really short though, and for more complicated projects you might want to check out the next examples.
5. Ross Kimbarovsky, a developer and former attorney, published this Contract for Developers Who Hate Contracts with a handy guide to contracts that’s definitely a recommended read. It talks about stuff that a lawyer can’t really help with, like setting milestones, negotiating the agreement without much hassle and writing a decent statement of work.
6. Speaking of SOWs, while they’re not strictly legal documents, statements of work are legally binding and often govern the operational side of the contract. There’s really no single school of thought on writing a good SOW, as it highly depends on your type and style of work, but here’s an example for Digital Advertising.
7. Remember that independent contractor agreements can be also called work for hire.
8. While you’ll mostly use independent contractor agreements like the ones shown so far, you can’t really go without a classic Software License. For large custom software projects, a licensing agreement might be precisely what you need. This example comes from a lawyer, who goes a long way to explain what the different parts mean and the business decisions behind them.
9. App developer? Don’t worry, this Contract for Mobile Application Development Services is a great starting point.
10. Last but not least: consulting. Everybody’s done it or will consult at least once, so bookmark a Technology Consulting Contract.

Conclusion

I hope this curated and explained list of sample developer contracts was useful. If you’re looking for some other template that you might need, see if you can find it in this larger list. Also, feel free to share comments and suggestions in the comments!

Disclaimer: This article wants to be useful and informational, but keep in mind it is not legal advice and all the legal documents cited are only to be used as a starting point. The author, the publisher, Docracy and the original authors of the documents cited disclaim any liability connected to the use of these material without a licensed attorney.