Web Wisdom #3 – Vince Lombardi & Napoleon Hill

March 21st, 2010

Inches make champions.

- Vince Lombardi

While laying one’s plans for online fame and fortune, it’s very easy to come up with ambitious and daunting plans for a massive web project which oftentimes is so ambitious and daunting that it just-plain never gets done.

And while I’m tossing quotes around, how’s about this one?:

Guessing instead of knowing destroys persistence.

- Napoleon Hill

An E-Commerce Site Minus the Commerce

Sure, your idea for an keychain-collector-e-commerce site whose functionality and infrastructure rivals that of Amazon.com makes for a powerful vision, but do you even know for a fact that anyone even wants to buy your Wayne Newton-endorsed lucky rabbit’s foot key ring?

Why not proceed just a few “inches” by testing your concept using a quick n’easy e-commerce solution such as e-Junkie, 1-Shopping Cart, or Shopify before hitting up Silicon Valley for Angel funding? Test your calls-to-action using Google’s free and ultra-powerful Website Optimizer to see which calls-to-action result in the most sales.

And if you see that you’re making strong sales with your itty-bitty shop, then it’s a good indicator that you’d be wise to proceed that next “inch” towards implementing a more robust online store…That is, if, and only if, more robustness is going to provide significant additional value to your customers and to you.

A Social Network Minus the “Network” Part

Looking to create a new social network for fans of 1960′s Polynesian pop music? Why not test the waters with a Facebook group to see how much activity there is around your topic? From there, you can set up a blog outside of Facebook and check out your website traffic using the industry standard (and free, of course) Google Analytics.

And since we’re talking about a blog here, definitely check out the amount of commenting on your blog posts. If nobody cares enough to leave a comment, you can bet your Tiny Bubbles that nobody’s going to bother creating a new user profile on your site either.

If the online user profile thing seems like it might work, give the awesome service, Facebook Connect a go before dunking thousands (possibly many thousands) of dollars into your own custom social network.

I think you catch my drift, that’s all for now…

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