It’s just a single sentence from the Statistically Speaking section:

“There are between 15,000 and 17,000 components in the average automobile made in the United States. In North America alone, 70,000 cars are delivered every business day.”

For those of you without a calculator, that’s over 1 billion components. Every day. Just in cars. In North America alone.

When I think about how that scales to the entire global economy for all products and services, it’s like trying to picture infinity.

Successful people are often too busy to spend time on forums, so they wouldn’t even be aware of the survey. Others just wouldn’t be interested. Business is war – why share data? My neighbor runs a successful microISV, and he doesn’t hang out in any online communities. He’s too busy. Scale that to the globe and you’ll have a good idea why I think the results of the survey may be skewed to the low end.

Still, I’m a data junkie and there are several data points I’d be interested in seeing. Are the microISV’s with two or more people more successful than one person shops? How do revenues correlate between B2C versus B2B apps? Of the successful companies, what’s the breakdown between those selling a small number of flagship products or a handful of smaller products? I have a gut feel for each of these, but I’d love to see the numbers.

Taking a step back for a second, here’s a worthwhile quote from Jack Welch…

“One thing we have discovered with certainty is that anything we do that makes the customer more successful inevitably results in a financial return for us.”

Products and services sell because they solve people’s problems. They make customers more successful. And the only way you can solve their problems in the first place is if they become aware of your product, understand your product, and see the benefits. So the voice of the customer needs to start with marketing.

In his recent post on MicroISV.com, Dave Collins touches on this. He makes the point that software vendors should sell the benefits, not the features:

“Customers get freaked out by features. We don’t like them, they sound intimidating, and they do nothing to make us smile. But we love benefits. Save time, save money, use more for less. Lovely. Music to our ears.”

Stepping back into the voice of the customer mode, want do customers really want to know when they visit a site? It’s simple really, they want to know:

• What the product is.
• How it will benefit them.
• How much it will cost.
• How credible the offer is.

Notice that I wrote “How it will benefit them”, not just “the benefits”. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one.

When you get into the business of running an online company, “sell the benefits” is one of the mantras that get chimed over and over again. Emotion sells more than logic is the copywriter’s motto. Dave’s a smart guy and runs a successful software marketing firm, so I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about. But the problem is it’s a concept that gets misconstrued and taken to the extreme.

I’ve seen too many software sites that get so focused on the benefits that it’s hard to tell what the product actually does. Microsoft’s Silverlight page is a perfect example of this. Most enterprise software websites are even worse.

In any product genre, you can find numerous product sites all claiming to “save time, save money, use more for less.” But that’s not enough. What you really need to do is connect the dots between the benefits and the features in order to be credible.

Do customers really get “freaked out by features”? Not me. In fact, they’re typically the first thing I look for. When I’m buying a product to solve a problem, I need to know whether the product has the capability to do so.

Sure, I’m an engineer, so that may seem like a quirk. But the majority of my support time is spent on pre-sales inquiries. Are these people emailing me about the benefits? No, they are asking if the software supports one feature or another. That’s real data that proves to me that customers don’t get freaked out by features.

So the next time you work on your company’s marketing, put on your Jack Welch hat and think about how your product will make your customers more successful. Drill it down to how each of the features in your product will benefit your customers. The end result should strike a nice balance between “sell the benefits” and “sell the features.”

The Top 10

1. InFormEnter

What it is: When you turn it on, it adds a little button next to all the form fields on a web page. Clicking the button pops up a list of all the phrases you’ve saved:

Why you’ll like it: It’s a great time saver for any web forms requiring name, address, email, product description – you name it.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/673

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2. ScrapBook

What it is: A tool that takes snapshots of the current web page. You can organize your scrapbook items in folders and access them through the menu or a sidebar:

Why you’ll like it: From a business perspective, it’s good for recording receipts of online purchases. Plus the edit page capability allows you to erase elements, making it easy to clean up a page for printout.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427

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3. Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE)

What it is: This extension allows you to save all your FireFox data, including passwords, bookmarks, themes, extensions, preferences, and more:

Why you’ll like it: If you do enough business on the internet, eventually your find that a lot of mission critical information is stored in your browser. Backing up this data becomes crucial.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2109

[Note, this extension has a companion extension – CLEO that will combine all your extensions into a single .xpi file for easy reinstall: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2942]

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4. ViewMyCurrency

What it is: A tool that will convert any amount on a page to your selected currencies. Click the status bar button and any currency values found on the page will be changed, as the following before and after pictures show:

Why you’ll like it: This is probably more useful for those outside the U.S., but it’s handy for anyone that wants to save themselves a trip to www.xe.com to get convert prices into your local currency.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1854

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5. WorldClocks

What it is: A tool that shows you the current day and time for selected cities around the globe. Clicking on the status bar display, it pops up a list of all the cities you’ve added. You can either use the built-in list of cities or set up your own.

Why you’ll like it: It’s great for figuring out when someone halfway around the world is likely to be at work.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3010

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6. Fetch Text URL

What it is: A tool that allows you to right-click on a non-linked, text URL and fetch it in a new tab.

Why you’ll like it: It saves you added typing.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/518

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7. SearchStatus

What it is: A SEO tool that sits in your status bar. You can see the Google Page Rank and Alexa rank, and you can access the robots.txt, archive.org (aka, Wayback Machine), and whois of the current site via the popup menu.

Why you’ll like it: Unlike other SEO toolbars, it’s unobtrusive and provides quick access to information.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321

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8. RankQuest SEO Toolbar

What it is: A full featured SEO toolkit (accessible via toolbar or context menu) that provides a number of analysis tools for webmasters. Included are speed test, a lynx viewer (how does the Google bot see your page), meta tag analysis and generator, keyword density analysis, text ratio calculator, and many more tools.

Why you’ll like it: It packs a lot of tools into a single toolbar. But, toolbars take up page space so this one is better off hidden most of the time, and SearchStatus (above) is more convenient for day to day info.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1471

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9. Web Developer

What it is: A toolbar with a wide assortment of tools to provide you with info about the current page. It has too many features to cover here. The snapshot below left is the information panel shown when clicking on any page element. The snapshot below right is an example of the CSS editor (in this case, in the left sidebar).

Why you’ll like it: This list is for Internet Entrepreneurs, not web developers, but this is a handy tool for anyone who owns a web site. It’s helpful for debugging CSS layout problems. Added bonus, too many sites today think it’s cool to have low-contrast text. No problem. With the Web Developer toolbar you can simply identify the element containing the text and then edit the CSS in the side bar and have the page style updated instantly.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60

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10. PwdHash

What it is: An automatic password generator.

Why you’ll like it: Security, security, security. With this tool, there’s no excuse for using the same easy to remember password for forums as you would for your online banking account.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1033

[Note: The author of Allow Right-Click, listed below, also has an "Always Remember Password" add-on that lets FireFox save passwords for sites that normally don't allow it: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/always-remember-password/]

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5 Honorable Mentions

Yoono

What it is: A sidebar toolbar that shows related web sites for the one you’re currently on.

Why you’ll like it: This is incredibly handy for both topic research and seeking out sites for back links.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1833

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Allow Right-Click

What it is: Overrides any web scripting that disables right-clicking your mouse and getting the context menu.

Why you’ll like it: If deal with web pages (or control panels) that disable right-clicks, this add-on will let you context menu item.

Link: http://roachfiend.com/archives/2005/03/03/allow-right-click/

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Image Zoom

What it is: Right-click on any image and zoom in via the context menu.

Why you’ll like it: Bigger is sometimes better.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/139

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IE View

What it is: Opens the current page in Internet Explorer. (Note there is also IE Tab add-on, which runs IE in a FireFox tab. Both work equally well.)

Why you’ll like it: Some websites are still operating in IE only mode. This tool will make swear at the screen less.

Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/35

But life shouldn’t be spent in front of a PC. (It shouldn’t be spent in front of the TV or in a car either, but then we’d have a different blog post.) So here are three “old media” resources for entrepreneurs worth checking out.

1. Your Business on MSNBC. Most “business” news programs cover Wall Street, big business news, or personal finance. You don’t get many that actually talk about running a business. That’s where Your Business differs from the pack. The 1/2-hour show is the Web 2.0 of business shows. It features real advice on starting and running a company. Recent topics included picking a domain name, getting funding, advice on setting up a partnership, viral marketing, and their regular elevator pitch segment (which I’m pretty sure they stole from StartupNation, below).
2. Small Business School on PBS. This hour long Sunday morning show has been running for several years, and I catch it whenever I can. Each episode does an in depth feature on a small company, and focuses on what made them different and what challenges they faced. It can be a little preachy, but the central message for each show is worth paying attention to. One of their recent show titles captured it all, “There are 19 million sole proprietorships in the U.S. alone, and each one is different.”
3. StartupNation Radio. This is a fun radio show that runs on Saturday afternoons. They’ve recently covered marketing strategies, e-commerce tips, eBay businesses, and building on-line communities. One of their best regular features is the Elevator Pitch Contest, which is not only entertaining, but it also reinforces how much you need to focus not only your message but your business plan too. The only downside is that many people listen to talk radio only when they’re in their cars, so it can be hard to remember to tune into this show.

1. Break your campaign in groups of 10-20 highly related keywords.
2. Use exact matching or phrase matching, but avoid broad matching.
3. Use negative keywords (e.g., -free) to improve CTR & lower cost.
4. Put keywords in the headline and repeat them in the body.
5. Body: 1st line = descriptive benefit and 2nd line = a feature, offer, or call to action.
6. Create separate landing pages for each target keyword group and make content relevant to keywords, putting the landing pages in sub-directories named after target keywords and making sure the sub-directory is included in display URL: www.blah.com/keyword.
7. Find tangential keywords. **
8. Always run 2 ads side-by-side. ***
9. Run different campaigns for different geographical regions (e.g. US vs. Europe).
10. Search Search Network and Content network ads in separate campaigns with lower CPC and daily budgets.

Notes:

* Make sure to disallow duplicated pages in your robots.txt file to avoid Google’s duplicate content penalty.

** Example of tangential keywords: I make flowcharting software. I targeted the keywords “E-Myth” and “EMyth” because I figured entrepreneurs who were standardizing their business processes might want to flowchart them. It worked.

*** Shuffle the word order, capitalization, try synonyms, price vs no price, etc. Run a week at a time and always replace the poor performer with a tweaked version of the good performer.

So What is an AVS Mismatch?

AVS stands for Address Verification System. It’s a system used to defer credit card fraud by checking the customers billing address versus the address filed by the credit card company for that account.

Seems pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? So why is it a problem?

The problem often comes from customers buying with corporate credit cards. I’ve experienced this problem a number of times, and every time so far the problem is that the customer assumes that the address of their work facility is the same as the credit card billing address of record. Often it’s not.

Three Common Scenarios

Here are three common scenarios I’ve had first-hand experience with AVS mismatches:

Small Businesses: With small businesses, sometimes the owner will register the card with their home address used for billing. That’s fine, but they do need to realize that their business address is not going to be the same as their billing address when doing credit card payments on-line.

Medium to Large Businesses: Another common case is when the buyer is located in one state and the corporate headquarters is located in another. Their billing address is usually the address of the headquarters – not their local shipping address.

Parent Companies: This is just another variation of the same thing. If a company has corporate credit cards issued in the name of the parent company, then the buyer needs to know the billing address that the parent company uses.

What Can Be Done?

If you’re a customer, then it’s pretty simple. Find out your corporate billing address and use that.

If you’re a vendor, then there are several things you should do. First, put a small note on your order pages for customers using company buying cards. Second, periodically monitor your transaction logs, looking for AVS mismatches. Third, if a potential customer emails you about a credit card problem, use the advice given here to determine whether this may be the cause of the problem.

AVS Is Good for Everyone

Now all this may seem like a hassle – especially if you’re a customer. But online credit card fraud is a rampant problem, and e-commerce providers take fraud detection seriously. So they really are helping businesses with these extra security measures.

But customers benefit too. You and I are all potential victims of credit card fraud. Online, the fraudulent buyer doesn’t even need your card – just the number, expiration date and usually the 3-digit verification on the back of the card. So AVS checks are a simple way to ensure that one avenue of abuse is cut off, protecting us all.