Five top tips to starting a successful business~By Richard Branson

As LinkedIn is a business that started in a living room, much like Virgin began in a basement, I thought my first blog on the site should be about how to simply start a successful business. Here are five top tips I’ve picked up over the years.

1. Listen more than you talk

We have two ears and one mouth, using them in proportion is not a bad idea! To be a good leader you have to be a great listener. Brilliant ideas can spring from the most unlikely places, so you should always keep your ears open for some shrewd advice. This can mean following online comments as closely as board meeting notes, or asking the frontline staff for their opinions as often as the CEOs. Get out there, listen to people, draw people out and learn from them.

2. Keep it simple

You have to do something radically different to stand out in business. But nobody ever said different has to be complex. There are thousands of simple business solutions to problems out there, just waiting to be solved by the next big thing in business. Maintain a focus upon innovation, but don’t try to reinvent the wheel. A simple change for the better is far more effective than five complicated changes for the worse.

3. Take pride in your work

Last week I enjoyed my favourite night of the year, the Virgin Stars of the Year Awards, where we celebrated some of those people who have gone the extra mile for us around the Virgin world. With so many different companies, nationalities and personalities represented under one roof, it was interesting to see what qualities they all have in common. One was pride in their work, and in the company they represent. Remember your staff are your biggest brand advocates, and focusing on helping them take pride will shine through in how they treat your customers.

4. Have fun, success will follow

If you aren’t having fun, you are doing it wrong. If you feel like getting up in the morning to work on your business is a chore, then it's time to try something else. If you are having a good time, there is a far greater chance a positive, innovative atmosphere will be nurtured and your business will fluorish. A smile and a joke can go a long way, so be quick to see the lighter side of life.

5. Rip it up and start again

If you are an entrepreneur and your first venture isn’t a success, welcome to the club! Every successful businessperson has experienced a few failures along the way – the important thing is how you learn from them. Don’t allow yourself to get disheartened by a setback or two, instead dust yourself off and work out what went wrong. Then you can find the positives, analyse where you can improve, rip it up and start again.

 

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How do you think about your conversion rate?

BY Mike Moran

Photo credit: Stefson



You have probably thought about what your most important online conversion is–check out (if you’re an e-Commerce site), call on the phone, fill out a Web contact form, or something else (if you’re not an e-Commerce site). Good Internet marketers pay close attention to conversion rates, checking their Web analytics to see how many folks came to the site and how many actually converted. But admit it. Are you a good Internet marketer?

Many marketers I speak with let it slip when I ask them. They really don’t look at the numbers. Oh, somebody does. Some green eyeshade guy in the analytics department who e-mails a link to a report each month–a report you never look at.
If I really press marketers, they often haven’t even thought through how to calculate their conversion rate. If you sell low-consideration products, such as Amazon, then people come to your site every day who complete their purchases in the same visit. Amazon should divide the number of purchases by the number of visits for their conversion rate.
But you might sell a high-consideration product or service, such as a car or a consulting project. Your customers likely visit your site several times before they convert, so you don’t want to figure your conversion rate based on visits, but rather on unique visitors.
Think about it this way. If every visit to your site could result in a purchase, then divide by visits. If your customers would never buy from you three visits in a row, then divide by visits. So, ask yourself if you’ve thought this through. Do you even know how you’ve calculated your conversion rate?
In some sense, it doesn’t matter, because what you care about is the trend–the difference between last month’s conversion rate and this month’s, for example. As long as you use the same method each month (divide by visits or divide by visitors), you can still compare last month to this month to make the decisions you need to make.
But, at a deeper level, it does matter. What I have called mini-conversions (and Avinash Kaushik popularized micro-conversions) depend on following visitors step-by-step. Instead of looking at the big conversion at the end, look at the smaller steps that people take along the way and how your marketing is persuading them to take each one. By dividing by the right metric, you can look back over multiple visits (or not) to improve your marketing.

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