We are closer to this situation than most business leaders realize. This new reality applies to everything we buy: consumer products, business software, tech gadgets, services, shoes at retail stories, meals at restaurants, or employees we hire. This brutal scenario is especially important for startups that are trying to create new markets or break into existing ones.

When you are creating a new product (or service) in the early stages of your company, your first priority should be to make a great freaking product. Make an outstanding product your customers says, “This is freaking great!” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; it’s only great when customers says it’s great. If you don’t hear that from your early customers, you had better keep improving your products or lower your lofty growth expectations.

Your product has to be great to somebody

If your product isn’t great for somebody – really remarkable – no amount of marketing effort or price reductions or sales flogging will help you get really big and bring new buyers to your door without effort. Seth Godin reminds us that products that aren’t remarkably great won’t get talked about. And if it isn’t talked about in the new world, people won’t hear about it, let alone perceive it as the obvious choice.

I’ve been pretty grumpy about the state of many early startups and the perceptions of many entrepreneurs and big company innovators who don’t get it. You can’t market your way to the top without a great freaking product that somebody thinks is incredible and wants to talk about. I have been using the less politically correct version of “great freaking product” in frustration when I see a company that doesn’t get it.

Greatness is relative

Not every new product that takes off is perfect. Twitter has had its fail wail problems, but Twitter is still valuable and noteworthy and far better than the alternatives despite the problems. Guy Kawasaki calls this the 10X rule. Your new product doesn’t need to be perfect (bug free, feature complete, etc.), it just needs to be 10X better than the alternative for people to switch and buy your new new thing.  Great freaking products create change in the world.

Do people line up for the new iPhone just because of Apple’s snazzy TV ads? Nope. Apple makes great freaking products first — then they market them like crazy. Does the team at TechCrunch want to write about mediocre products that don’t have raving customer fans or remarkable news? Never — TechCrunch readers wouldn’t think it’s such a great news source any more if they lowered their high standards.

Yes, there are many ways to sell mediocre products to certain parts of the market where buyers buy for some other reason — your product is cheapest or you have built a personal relationship with the buyer. Just don’t expect your business to be well known and attract customers easily. Companies with mediocre products almost never grow to be big companies, and most won’t last very long.

Still trying to be great to everyone? I call this the Target Market Trap. Remember, single men and women only have to be perceived as great by one other person to find Mr. or Ms. Right and get married.  Narrowing your target market focus helps you get to “great” faster for somebody, which means you’re going to grow and can attack larger markets later.

I’m not saying you can just “build it and they will come” or “product is everything.” Having a great freaking product is just the first thing. You can do great marketing to help spread the word — but only after there is a remarkable story that can be spread.

Your product or service has to be remarkably valuable and feel like the best in class for your business to take off. There really is no other way to make company that will grow fast and be very valuable.

Do you have a great freaking product?

More From New Avenue

• CEO Selling Doesn’t Scale
• The Pomodoro Technique – Ignite Phoenix
• Is Your Focus Narrow Enough?
• Be a Fanatic to Scale Your Service Business
• A Tale of Two Companies

Technology entrepreneurs typically underestimate the marketing execution effort required to succeed – and overestimate the marketing investment.

Big budgets are no longer the magic pill that moves markets. The game has changed.

Execution is always harder than it looks

Like losing weight or getting fit, it’s easier to develop your plan than to actually give up sweets or exercise before the sun comes up every day. Billions of dollars are spent on diet plans, health clubs, and low fat foods, but more Americans are getting bigger each year. Most dieters have a decent plan, but they lack the discipline to do the hard things every day (forever) that are required to be healthier.

Unfortunately, modern marketing is more work and effort than “quick fix” spending on advertising and direct mail campaigns. It’s difficult to continually make your product or service great, write useful content for the Web, participate in the social conversation, develop partner relationships, test and retest new approaches, refine your strategy and all the other things required to grow fast and build a valuable reputation.

The bad news is most marketing activities these days require painstaking labor and detailed savvy about a wide variety of tactics. The good news that most marketing tactics don’t require significant budget any more.

Winning without big budgets

One fast-growing business that is succeeding in the marketing game is FireHost. FireHost delivers truly secure hosting for small and medium-sized businesses that have critically important websites but not big budgets. (FireHost has been a client of New Avenue and I’m an investor, too.)

Yes, FireHost offers much-needed service that is very disruptive to old dedicated hosting business (that costs too much and isn’t very secure). But the FireHost team is winning because they execute like crazy in every part of their business, including marketing.

During an important strategy discussion early last year, we decided that “secure hosting” was an available position in the big hosting market and FireHost was uniquely positioned to go after it. After this meeting, the FireHost team made a long list of the hundreds of additional things they would have to deliver and communicate to be known as the most secure hosting available.

Within months they delivered almost all the items on the list, including changes to their services, infrastructure, website, branding, marketing activities, messaging and content, search keywords, and on and on. When they finished that list they made a new long list. They have done this each quarter for a year. And each quarter they are more laser-focused than before.

Now FireHost is an acclaimed hosting company that is growing twice as fast as the industry and has successfully raised $2 million in capital to help them grow faster.

Lucky? Nope. Great product and terrific support? Yep. But that’s not enough.

The FireHost team executes 10X more marketing activity each month than any other company their size that I have ever seen. They have grown fast without a big budget. It is extremely hard work — and they do it better than most companies of any size.

Here’s another example: How did Marty Zwilling of Startup Professionals get over 200,000 loyal followers on Twitter and build hugely popular website for entrepreneurs?  Without a marketing budget?  Well, Marty has posted a useful article on his blog every day for the past two years. Every day.

This is how the fastest growing companies are doing it now. Modern marketing is mostly about work: consistent effort and constant improvement.  Not big budgets.

To win in the marketing game, be prepared to put in the extraordinary effort every day that is required.

More From New Avenue

• CEO Selling Doesn’t Scale
• The Pomodoro Technique – Ignite Phoenix
• Is Your Focus Narrow Enough?
• A Tale of Two Companies
• Phoenix Groups & Events for Marketers

Ignite Phoenix is a quarterly event that brings together 18 new presenters who each give a brief talk on a particular topic they are passionate about. Every speech is just 5 minutes long with 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. It’s is a fun format which allows for an exchange that is both entertaining and educational.

Here’s the 5-minute video:

(This video was featured on Lifehacker and has been viewed on YouTube over 10,000 times.)

The Pomodoro Technique

I’ve always been pretty disciplined about managing my time, writing down my goals and using various systems to stay organized. There’s just a lot to do every day. But we all face an ever-expanding flow of little things that sap our attention — emails, calls, texts, tweets, meetings, news, and more. And now these digital distractions follow us everywhere.

How can busy people make time to get the harder deep thinking work done that creates the most value in our workday? That’s what the Pomodoro Technique does best.

The Pomodoro Technique uses a simple system developed in the 1990’s by an Italian graduate student to help him be more productive in his studies. It uses a simple kitchen timer – his was shaped like a tomato. In Italian, the word for tomato is pomodoro.

Four simple steps

1. Choose an important task you need to work on and write it down
2. Set a kitchen timer for 25 minutes
3. Work on that task without stopping for 25 minutes (really)
4. When the bell rings, stop for 5 min and take a quick break

That’s it. It’s not a big fancy system that requires you to buy a book or attend a class, but it really works. I started using this method about six months ago to help me get more valuable “thinking work” accomplished during my busy workday.

This system helps our brains to focus quickly; it’s the opposite of multi-tasking. Twenty-five minutes is long enough to make progress on any task, but not so long that it feels like a major time commitment or a big ordeal.

The Pomodoro Technique can be used by any busy person who needs to develop a concentration habit, including business executives, consultants, creatives, programmers, students, writers, teachers. It’s a great procrastination fighter, too.

Take the 25-minute challenge

Take a look again at these simple steps of the Pomodoro Technique. I challenge you to grab a kitchen timer (or Pomodoro software timer app) and pick an important task that your brain thinks is hard.

Then do just one 25-minute Pomodoro in the middle of a busy day. I guarantee the results will surprise you.

The Pomodoro Technique has helped me. Has it helped you?

More From New Avenue

• Video from Ignite Phoenix #6 – Mastering the Pomodoro Technique in 5 Minutes
• CEO Selling Doesn’t Scale
• Is Your Focus Narrow Enough?
• Phoenix Groups & Events for Marketers
• The Freak Show is Never in the Main Tent

Using Google Analytics, the popular and free website traffic analysis tool, you can learn what’s really happening on your website in just 10 minutes each week.

If you aren’t tracking any visitor stats on your website, or if your current website reporting tool is too complicated, you’re missing an opportunity to see what’s really happening on your website.

Google Analytics is the easiest and cheapest way to learn what’s working and not working. No technical expertise is needed.

Once a week I quickly check the traffic statistics for the websites I manage. Here’s my simple checklist using Google Analytics:

Visits
The Visitors Overview page shows total visits, unique visitors and more. I see visitor traffic trends at a glance. Big traffic day on Tuesday? Fewer visitors overall this week? Do more visitors view one page and then leave? After a few weeks, it’s easy to understand typical traffic patterns and what merits further investigation.

Visitor Map
The Visitor Map shows where in the world those visitors are located. Browsing this map gives me some perspective on overall visitor numbers. My site may have had 500 visitors last week, but many of those are from visitors outside my region. How many visitors are my customers or prospects versus interested readers?

Traffic Sources – Search Engines
Web search engines drive traffic to every website, but most traffic comes from Google. Which keywords drove the most traffic to my website? I type those top terms into Google and see where the site ranks in the list of search results. Why did Google suggest that web page when this term was searched? When I change page content get better search results, I’m doing basic search engine optimization, or SEO.

Referring Sites
Which sites have hyperlinks that direct visitors to my site? Try to find more who promote your site too. When someone clicks on a Web link in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn to go to my website, I see it here. Are Social Media sites driving a lot of traffic? Not as much traffic as Google.

Top Content
Which pages on the website are being visited most? The  homepage will be the most visited page, but every other page is ranked, too. Is the best content on the most popular pages? Maybe the site navigation is leading visitors down the wrong path. Pages that are most useful to visitors have the longest “time on page” number.

The first time you view visitor statistics for your website, you might spend an hour exploring all the data. After a few weeks, you’ll just want to check these few things quickly, and then dig in to find answers to the questions you uncover.

For example, I saw traffic jump in the last month for one page on my website — my review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers.” Google recently started ranking this page higher and higher. Now its the second most visited page on my website. Keyword searches like “malcolm gladwell outliers book summary” drove hundreds of visitors last month — and they average time these visitors spent on this page is an astonishing 7:49. They stick around to read the entire post!

So, what did I do?

I changed the post title from “book review” to “book summary” to match what people typed into Google search. Traffic from Google doubled within a week to this page. I had known there was a need for useful marketing book summaries, but now I’ve confirmed it. Look for more book summaries next year.

There is no magic to this.

If your Website developer says, “It’s too complicated for me to set up Google Analytics on the website” or “You wouldn’t understand the data,” he’s lying.

If you care about your market presence on the Web, get Google Analytics and start improving your website a little each week. You will be shocked by how simple and useful it is. Start with the basics. The data is all there.

Take the Google Analytic product tour to learn more.

How did you improve your website this week?

More From New Avenue

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Here are the most active, useful and popular events and groups for marketers in Phoenix.

AZIMA

The Arizona Internet Marketing Association (AZIMA) is new this year, but it has already gained quite a following among local marketers and entrepreneurs. The main dinner event each month features a nationally known speaker, with plenty of time for networking before and after. Monthly webinars for members provide detailed how-to’s of new Internet marketing tools. www.joinazima.org

SEMPO

The Arizona chapter of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) brings together Web search marketing experts and interactive marketers to network and learn from experts on new technologies and approaches. www.sempoaz.org

Social Media Club

The Phoenix chapter of the Social Media Club meets monthly to share knowledge about the latest social media tools and techniques. This is an energetic and casual event where local experts share information with people at all skill levels. www.smcphoenix.com

Podcamp AZ

Podcamp AZ is an annual “unconference” weekend event that teaches hands-on techniques to communicate on the Web using a variety of new technology tools. Local and national speakers lead topical  discussions at this free and informal event. Everyone is encouraged to attend, participate and contribute. podcampaz.org

Ignite Phoenix

Ignite is fast-paced evening presentation event for local creative folks, not just marketers. Each Ignite meeting features 18 offbeat and interesting presentations that educate and entertain across a wide variety of topics. Always fun and provocative, you should be prepared to fight the crowds for tickets and parking. www.ignite-phoenix.org

Agencyside

Agencyside provides seminars and events for agency owners that educates about business and marketing topics to be a more successful agency. The annual BOLO event brings agency professionals from around the country for a 3-day event with speakers, education and networking. www.agencyside.net

American Marketing Association (AMA)

The Phoenix chapter of the national American Marketing Association, AMA Phoenix holds monthly educational and networking events for local marketing professionals. AMA is oriented for senior marketing folks in all industries – it doesn’t just focus on Internet marketing. www.amaphoenix.org

Business Marketing Association

The local Phoenix chapter of the Business Marketing Association provides monthly educational events and other resources for business-to-business marketing professionals. www.bmaphoenix.org

Valley PR Blog

While not technically an event or organization, local PR professionals share their opinions and discuss great topics online. www.valleyprblog.com

Marketing tactics are changing rapidly.  It’s easy to hear from nationally known speakers and meet local experts to learn what’s happening at the leading edge.

Sometimes meeting in person is the best way to learn and connect.  It doesn’t all happen on the social Web.

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I hear this question several times a week. Everyone’s talking about Twitter, but is it really any more than another social networking (“not-working”) goof off tool?

If you are trying to find new customers, build relationships, and grow awareness of your business, then the answer is “Yes.” If you are marketing your business, or yourself, you should be exploring Twitter. (There are other social networking tools, but Twitter is simple to understand and gets a ton of traffic, so why not start there.)

I didn’t say that Twitter should be your only marketing tool, nor should you spend all day on Twitter. You just need to start exposing your business and contributing to the social conversation on the Web, not to mention learning what this new social media world means for your business. It’s important now and will become more important in the future.

I’m not going to teach you the ins and outs of Twitter: there is plenty useful information about Twitter on the Web.

To find out how to use Twitter, you can start with Twitter itself. Twitter Search will search all Twitter entries for any term, so go to http://search.twitter.com and type in “Twitter for Beginners” or “Twitter 101″ or whatever. You will see Twitter posts (called “tweets”) that include the term. These messages include links to thousands of blog posts and Web pages that explain the whole Twitter thing. This should take you about 30 minutes, unless you get lost in all the fun stuff that’s out there.

Back to my friend, Russ. His wife Cheryl is a tea lover and tea expert who has a passion for sharing the “tea experience” with others. She recently opened an incredible specialty tea shop called TeaGcshwendner in downtown Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s a funny name for the popular German tea merchant that is well-known in Germany but is just coming to the U.S.  The store has an amazing variety of specialty teas that you can try and buy.

Cheryl has been on local TV shows talking about the store and teaching about tea. The store has been profiled in most of the local newspapers and publications. How else can they find passionate tea lovers and others who want to learn more about tea?

When Russ asked me if they should try Twitter, I showed him Twitter Search. He typed in “green tea” and then “TeaGschwendner” to see if people are talking about it on Twitter. Well, it seems they are. A lot. There were 25 mentions of green tea within the previous 20 minutes — and several mentions of TeaGschwendner. Tea lovers love to talk about tea. Tea newbies do too.

That’s why you be should trying Twitter. You can find and interact with thousands and thousands of people who are interested in what you have and what you do — if you have something interesting and valuable to contribute to the conversation. (There is no place for hucksters and sales pushers, so be polite and help others to help you.)

This takes time, learning and commitment, but don’t all of your marketing and sales efforts take time and effort?

Some Web marketing gurus say that this is the only way people will be finding out about new products and getting information in the future. I don’t think it will be the only way, but it is clear that it will be very important.

After a while, you can judge the effort and time expense required to get some results. Does this work as well as your networking, seminars, e-mails or other marketing activities? For many companies it will be worth it. For Cheryl at TeaGschwendnder, I predict it will be very successful, since there are a lot of tea lovers on Twitter and Cheryl has a lot to share with them.

Word of mouth has always been important. Twitter is simply word of mouth with a megaphone.

Times they are a changin’.

——-

Try Twitter Search for yourself and type in terms that are important to you. It’s really hard to find something that people aren’t talking about.

Connect with Cheryl Graf on Twitter at @teagschwendner and @teatimelady.

A useful site to learn all about Twitter is http://twittercism.com/twitter-101/.  I found it on Twitter.

New York Times, All You Need to Know to Tweet on Twitter.

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I created an entire Website with a CMS

Take a look at the new Website I built for the school that my children attend. This was a project I volunteered for a few months ago. The previous Website was outdated, incomplete and difficult to update (so difficult that there wasn’t much updating). They really needed a useful new site and I had a little experience with Websites, so I took it on. I started working on it at night and on weekends. Four months and a chunk of my spare time later, the new site was turned on this week.

Total Cash Cost to Build the Site – $350

Using popular tools, I spent a lot less for a much better result than I was expecting. Here’s an honest accounting of the expenses:

• $5 for a domain name I used while working on the site
• $25 for the cool homepage slideshow software
• $40 for a nice pre-built Website template design from Joomlashack
• $15 for several coffees for my web developer friend who contributed a few hours of light technical assistance
• $250 for a graphic designer to improve the images in the site template
• My time? Well, that was priceless (meaning “free”). It was truly about 120 hours of my time for research, meetings and emails, writing, editing and reviewing.

Not including my time, this site cost less than $350 to build. It could have cost $100, but I splurged on graphic design help to improve the template with better pictures and colors. Custom Websites like this cost between $5,000-$10,000 for the programmer or designer’s time, but now they can be built with free Web-based tools that we non-programmers can use ourselves. That’s a big deal.

Web Content Management Systems = Website Creation Platforms

The free, web-based software I used to make the school Website is called Joomla. It is one of the popular Website creation tools known as Web Content Management Systems (CMS). Joomla is a free open-source Web CMS that is ideal for smaller Websites, but there are here are hundreds of CMS tools for any size project. The most popular CMS for blogs is called WordPress (it’s the one I use to create this New Avenue Website). There are more powerful CMS tools, like Drupal, that allow easy content editing for big, custom sites. All these CMS tools allow non-technical people to create, edit and manage content on their Website almost as easily as editing in their word processor.

Joomla, WordPress and other popular Web CMS tools each have large active communities of developers and users who add value to the base software. For Joomla, there are many additional resources available to provide tools or assistance:

• Hundreds of useful software plug-ins called Joomla Extensions that allow you to add features to the base system
• Thousands of third-party Joomla Templates that are complete, pre-built Website designs for free or under $50
• Millions of posts in the Joomla support forum where every question imaginable has been asked an answered by other users

Joomla uses standard Web technologies, so any Web developer can adjust, improve and extend anything in the Joomla system. The combination of the software, the active community of users, and all the add-on features and templates makes it a “platform” for building Websites — not just a single application from a sole vendor.

You may be thinking that free open-source software platforms aren’t ready to run “real” Websites for serious companies, but these systems can do the job quite well and already are used by thousands of companies. I have been in the software business for 20 years and I am impressed with this software: Joomla never crashed, it had all the features I needed in the base software or as add-on extensions, and every support question I had was answered by quickly searching in the support forum. What more could you want?

The more people use these tools, the better the platform gets. The blog revolution has been powered by these easy-to-use tools. The same revolution is coming to the creation of larger Websites.

Now You Can Do It

Web CMS tools are capable and cheap, but that’s not even the most exciting part of the story. The big news is that now regular people can create high-quality Websites without the expense and frustrations of using Web programmers to create custom Websites. We are free at last!

Web CMS tools allow you to add new Web pages, edit the text and images on a page, add new menu items, move things around and manage other site options. This means the Website can advance quickly since we can easily create new and useful content for our audience. To show you what it looks like to work in a Web CMS, below are pictures of the WordPress screen for this blog post and the Joomla screen for one of the school pages.

WordPress Screen - click to enlarge

Joomla Screen - click to enlarge

All big revolutions in software occur when new tools enable the individual to create something incredible all by themselves. From the early days of spreadsheets and desktop publishing software, to today’s web search, YouTube and blogs, the world changes when everyone can do it, not just big companies with deep pockets. This is what is happening at last to the creation of larger Websites.

The Hard Part of Creating Websites

What’s the bad news here? Well, the technical side may be easier than ever, but it’s still up to actual people to create the content, organize the information, design the look and feel, and make it all useful. The brainpower and time is the hard part. It always has been. My technical buddy installed Joomla and the pre-built template in 15 minutes.  I spent 120 hours on the rest of the site, and I’m a quick learner of software tools.

The technology is not the problem. As Pogo said in the popular old-time cartoon, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Here’s a rough estimate of how I spent my time to build the site.

• Strategy and Planning (10 hours) – reviewing other sites, planning, tracking tasks
• Research (10 hours) – exploring and investigating to find useful tools and tips
• Meetings and Emails (15 hours) – planning with  school staff, requesting information
• Website Setup (20 hours) – creating menus, configuring options, adding features
• Writing Web Pages (60 hours) – writing the actual pages (each page took between 30 minutes and 2 hours to create), getting feedback from others, revising and proofreading
• Adding Pictures (5 hours) – reviewing and resizing pictures, making slideshows

If I had to do it again, I would use the same tools and I could do it in about 75% of the time, taking out the time to research and figure things out for the first time. If you divide the time between a few people, it would be very manageable for most schools or businesses.

Now the school has a useful Website that provides complete information to parents and students, connects our active school community with pictures and news, and attracts new students and donations.

The best part? Students, parents, and teachers  are asking for useful improvements and new capabilities for the site, all of which are pretty easy to build. The school Website will be twice as good next year — powered by the people.

More From New Avenue

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• Phoenix Groups & Events for Marketers
• Improve Your Website Using Google Analytics
• A Tale of Two Companies
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