Chris Crompton

Upon reading a TechCrunch article the other day, I happened upon a comment by Joshua Ledgard, one of the co-founders of KickoffLabs:

I visited the site and bookmarked it for later.

My other business venture hasn’t been gaining much traction in this off-season, so in my frustration and then burst of happiness yesterday (after finally making another sale) I came up with a new business idea to test in a related industry… (more…)

I wrote about dry testing a while back… but I’ve been thinking that even that method might take too long. At the foundation, all you really need to test the market viability of your new product/service is an ad itself. If you’ve created much more than that, you’ve probably wasted too much time. (more…)

I’ve been using Visual Website Optimizer (aff link) to increase the signup conversion rate on EmberBox.  I’ve been through a couple rounds of optimization so far while getting traffic from a couple email lists.  I brought the optin rate up to 41% from that traffic.

I decided to get some paid traffic from AdWords, which I knew wouldn’t convert as well.  It is one thing to get an email from someone you know telling you you should sign up on EmberBox — it is another to click a random ad and see a sparse signup page.  Unsurprisingly, the control for my 2nd VWO test performed at only 16.7% from this fresh PPC traffic.

For the new landing page test, one variation kicked butt.  It was the addition of a simple sentence underneath the signup box: “We value your privacy!”  The addition of this text converts PPC traffic at 52.9% — a 217.65% improvement over the control!

For the past few weeks I’ve been gathering email signups from those expressing early interest in EmberBox.  The first dozen signups came from friends.  The next few dozen came from someone promoting it to their email list.  The most recent few dozen signups came from PPC.  Pay-per-click traffic presents the biggest opportunity to grow my list — but obviously it costs.

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I came up with the LaunchCap idea a couple weeks ago and got the simple site finished up this past Saturday.

I’ve got some moderate marketing planned, but thought I’d release it slowly so I could make changes early on.  Only about 20 people have seen the site so far, but something didn’t feel right… (more…)

There’s a platform I’ve been thinking would be great for testing business ideas — but it doesn’t yet exist.

You can help change that.

Check out the prototype I just set up — LaunchCap!

I have 5-6 things on my list to promote this new venture… the first was publishing this blog post.  I need to get some momentum going, so I’ve made 5 of the “Early Mover” $10 offer slots available.  Take a look at the offer and let me know if there’s anything that needs changing (besides the cheesy video .

Thanks!

Word of mouth marketing is a very popular idea among small business owners. Yet this is usually born more out of marketing incompetence than than from a thoughtfully considered plan.

The first problem with word of mouth advertising as it is usually applied to small businesses is that it is synonymous with marketing laziness. To lazy business owners, “word of mouth marketing” means nothing more than “do good work and customers will naturally tell their friends.” (more…)

Do you have an idea for a new product or service you just know people are going to love?  Before you spend months (or years) of your time and thousands of dollars of capital, why not first do some dry testing.

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Since I set up this revised blog a couple weeks ago, I’ve been looking for a WordPress plugin to create a nicely styled contact form. I came across the ContactMe plugin a couple days ago and decided to give it a try.  It was actually broken at first, but yesterday I noticed there was a fix so I reactivated it.

You can see the button on the left side of the site.  It also creates a new “Contact Me” page with a nice form — the link is in the header above.

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I’m on the email list for a business broker, so every few days I hear about a new Internet business for sale along with some overall stats such as the gross & net profit.  The biggest turn-off is when I read, “great organic rankings” when describing the main source of website traffic.

Why would you want a business that can only be profitable if you don’t have to pay for advertising.  When I hear someone boast that “all our business is word-of-mouth” or “all our sales come from great rankings on Google”, what I hear is:

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