Rather than bore you with a bunch of inane goals, i thought I’d share what I’m going to attack.  Then the numbers in the future will bear out if my plans for world domination are working out.

(1)  Visitors:  Obviously I’d like to get more organic traffic to the site while maintaining a low bounce rate.  The blog and videos seem to keep people clicking around.  What I would like is for more of them to do that.  As we all know, getting ranked in search results is free advertising.  My objective: increase my ranking with Lord Google.

(2)  Conversions:  Right now my conversion rate needs improvement.  The rate may change as the first months worth of sales data becomes available.  Examining week over week data, the conversion rate is low.  My goal is to have a conversion of 10%.

Really these goals are nothing special.  It’s what every website tries to do.  Generate more traffic and get people to take action (ie buy something).

As a footnote: Entrepeneur has captured my attention.  Many great ideas, tips and tricks.  I especially liked this marketing article, talking about Superior Service.

My little project has been live now for over a month.  I got some numbers to share with the class.

Number of US visitors:  1,100.

Average time on the site per visitor:  3+ minutes

Bounce rate: 53% (Anything below 60% is considered really good.)

Free software downloads:  3,500+

Amount of money spent on advertising:  Zero.

Now that I have some numbers, some goals can be set.

Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls, and the rest of you.

From the bottom of my heart I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Finally: someone has released a competitor product.

Forgive me if I don’t provide a direct link to their product nor their website.  This is competition and I refuse to drive traffic there.  hehe

Competition is good.  For those politically correct people out there, cover your eyes.  Life has winners and life has losers.  Through some kind of Darwinian evolution, the business with the better product and business model survives.

Fortunately my first tour of duty as an engineer involved competitor analysis.

The knee-jerk reaction to seeing a competitor is usually “Why are they doing it like that?  That’s dumb!”  Finding fault in your competitors puts you on the same level as Steve Ballmer and we’ve all seen the results of his philosophy on the Microsoft brand.  Michael Dell is still eating his words about Apple.

If a customer buys a competitor product, there is a reason why they chose that product over yours.  Something about your competitor convinced your potential client to leave you and go to them.  Do you really thinking you’ll find the answer to your question by trashing your competition?

Smart analysis involves finding out what your competitor does and what do they do that’s better.  For my part, I’ve spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how my competitor could crush me.  By creating this doomsday scheming, I’ve found several avenues for opportunity that I didn’t notice before.  Also several areas of enhancements came to light.

But studying my competition is not the only applications I”m looking at.

This page is gold.  These are the top applications available for the iPhone.  Measuring my product against the best applications available.  Take the bits and pieces which incorporate customer requests and see how others are doing it.  Take those ideas, incorporate my brand around it, and push out another update.

It’s all about competition.  And who benefits from this Darwin competition?

The customer.

How Cow, this is still a partial real estate blog . . .

Well, to be honest: nothing has been going on.

All of my places are rented.  The tenants are all paying on time.  Life is good.

I’m still kicking around the idea of trying to sell the house again come next spring.  To be honest, I’d much rather have a more stable investment.  Prices continue to drop.  At least as of last quarter they were still inching down.  But I think 2009 is going to be a flat year.

So now that the boring Real Estate Stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about FOOD!

Bacon-wrapped prunes, served along side goat cheese truffles with herbes de provence and parmesan reggiano on toasted baguette.  A little Beaujolais Nouveau to wash it all down.

And a cute girl.  :)