The ONE Secret to Accelerated Business Growth

What is the one secret to faster business growth?

What is Your Current Business Focus?
What is the best thing to focus on to ensure sustainable business growth? Is there only one thing to focus on? Could it be?
* quality
* customer orientation
* branding
* leadership
* financial management
* profitability
* customer service
* benchmarking

So Many Studies, So Many Books, What Really Works?
The list could be much longer. Just read the titles of current best selling business books. Why is there so much information available with proven studies and case studies and still, so many businesses cannot seem to achieve accelerated sustainable growth?

There is No One Best Focus
The reason is, “The Delusion of Single Focus.” There is no single explanation for why some companies achieve high performance and others don’t. More and more thoughtful business studies are concluding that high performance businesses tend to do almost everything right. When companies stray away from doing almost everything right their performance suffers. Many business studies and best selling books focus on a single explanation that they correlate to high performance however they cannot prove causation. Books like “In Search for Excellence” and “Good to Great” give good ideas but fail to give us a practical roadmap for achieving sustainable high performance. It creates a false sense of security when we tend only to look for “one thing” that will make a difference. The answer is approaching your business holistically.

Improve Your Entire Business at the Same Time
The Hot 100 Business Program is the only program we are aware of that takes a comprehensive approach to improving almost every part of the business at the same time. We have identified 7 areas of your business that need to be improved simultaneously:
1) Ownership
2) Management
3) Marketing
4) Productivity
5) Accounting
6) Risk Management
7) The Next Phase

Through 12 years of research identified over 300 best practices that need to be implemented systematically. Through pilot testing we have designed an approach that helps you prioritize and individualize the system to your situation.

Proven Results. Remove the Friction of Growth.
The Hot 100 Business Program has proven results. By implementing the Hot 100 Best Practices, companies have achieved an average of 406% growth over 3 years. (I know It sounds too good to be true, however please check out the case studies on our blog.) The Hot 100 Best Practice remove the friction of growth and make it possible to achieve rapid sustainable growth. The Hot 100 Best Practices are published in the book "The Best Practices of High Performance Entrepreneurs" and is available at Amazon.com.

Hot 100 Business Blog
Best Practices of High Performance Entrepreneurs at Amazon.com

Top 10 Sales Converting Websites July 2009

Here are the top 10 converting websites for July 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. Schwan’s 35.2
2. Keurig 31.3
3. ProFlowers 26.0
4. Vitacost22.5
5. Blair 22.4
6. DrsFosterSmith.com 22.4
7. Woman Within 21.3
8. Amway Global 20.5
9. Roamans.com 18.7
10. Office Depot 17.9

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

Increasing your conversion rate requires you to follow a continuous improvement program? If you need help improving your results let us know.

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14 Tools for Legally Spying on Your Competition

Have you ever wished you were Bond? James Bond? Here are 007+007 = fourteen ways to spy on your competitors’ web sites, without breaking any FISA laws.

1. Statbrain – Using several sources, Statbrain’s algorithm computes the number of visitors to a website based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc. Statbrain does not have access to log files or any hit-counter information. Use this as a rough relative benchmark of your traffic to theirs. First run your website and compare the results given by StatBrain to your actual results to get a sense of its accuracy in your category. Figure out what the multiplier is and then try it on a competitor.

2. AideRSS – Find out which of your competitors’ blog posts and topics are engaging people. This should provide you with a list of topics you should be covering. Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean your competitor’s opinion is right or even agreed with — but it does mean the engaged people are interested in the topic and therefore why not your opinion on the topic.

3. FeedCompare – If you use Feedburner to track your rss subscribers you can compare the size of your feed to others. Just like in #1 above, figure out your own multiplier and then compare it to the competition.

4. Xinu Returns – Xinu Runs a report from multiple sites to tell you how well a site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking sites and other technical details. How well are you stacking up against your 5 biggest competitors?

5. Google Trends For Websites – Enter up to five topics and see how often those topics been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most. You can learn more on how to use this from our friend, Avinash Kaushik.

6. Google Insights for Search – With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Again, Avinash explains how to use this well.

7. Microsoft’s Keyword Forecast tool – This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

8. Microsoft’s Search Funnels – Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences. Search Engine guru Mike Grehan explains the value of these query chains.

9. WayBackMachine – Go back in web history to see how your competitors’ site has changed through the years. Look for the things that have stayed consistent, because those might have been the most successful. In the same vein, what have you changed on your own site during that time? It’s easy to lose track, particularly of your own work, and to think of your current site as “how it’s always been”.

10. Web Page Speed Analyzer – Compare the download speed of your pages with those of your competitors to see which are loading quicker. Quicker loading pages tend to have an advantage at converting visitors. This analyzer provides a detail analysis of the page elements. For a rough comparison of two pages side by side try WebSlug. And, WebWait is great when you want to get accurate speed results from the visitors perspective because WebWait pulls down the entire website into your browser, so it takes into account Ajax/Javascript processing and image loading which other tools ignore.

11. Web Page Readability – By comparing the readability score of web pages you can optimize your writing and make sure that you aren’t creating overly complex sentences and paragraphs for your audience.

12. Attention Meter – Attentionmeter gives you a quick snapshot comparing any websites you want (traffic) using Alexa, Compete, and Quancast.

13. Websitegrader – Website Grader is a free tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective. Also worth checking out Twittergrader to check on your competitors’ twitter accounts.

14. Google Alerts – set up searches for your competitors, key employees, and keywords to monitor their activity.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it: Try some (or all) of the above techniques and report back on your intriguing espionage! This tape will self-destruct in 10 clicks.

Shhhhh… care to share your spying secrets? What tools or techniques do you use?

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