I recently posted a small business marketing tip on DIY Marketers on how to use your LinkedIn profile as an SEO tool. Check it out:
I recently posted a small business marketing tip on DIY Marketers on how to use your LinkedIn profile as an SEO tool. Check it out:
Anand Rajaram, OfficeDrop’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer, has just completed a list of tips and tools we used here during our recent website redesign to improve visitor conversion. You can see the entire list of his articles on the Performable blog.
Optimizing Conversion Rates Part One – Quantitative Tests
OfficeDrop’s co-founder, Anand Rajaram, has recently written a post on tests we used here at OfficeDrop during our recent site redesign to optimize our conversion rate. The post is found on Performable’s blog here: Optimizing Conversion Rates with Simple Tests.
When we remodeled our site, we took advantage of a large number of online tests to make the site experience better. Anand set up and ran some pretty cutting edge tests that helped us understand what our visitors were looking for, how they interacted with the site and where they got confused/lost the message/didn’t like the navigation. The post I’ve linked to above is the first in a series that he is going to write on how we did this.
Anand mentions a few pretty cool, cutting edge testing tools that we used, including UserTesting, Feedback Army, and FiveSecondTest.
Special thanks to the folks over at Performable for giving us the opportunity to post on their blog. They are a local, Cambridge MA company focused on helping startups turn website visitors into customers, and are a great contributor to the startup scene here in the Boston area.
On Tuesday, October 5th, Healy Jones – OfficeDrop’s Vice President of Marketing, will be speaking at the “Customer Development: The Second Decade — with Steve Blank’s co-author Bob Dorf.” The event will start at 6 PM and will be hosted at Microsoft’s NERD Center, One Memorial Drive in Cambridge, MA.
The event is free (sponsored by General Catalyst, a local venture capital firm.) To register for the customer development event click here.
More about the conference: At Customer Development: The Second Decade, a FutureM event organized by General Catalyst Partners and FastIgnite, Bob Dorf will provide an exclusive peek “under the covers” at some of the many new rules and advancements that Steve, Bob and the ecosystem of thousands of entrepreneur, marketer and investor practitioners have developed over the past several years. The event will feature a keynote by Bob, guest appearances by entrepreneurs and executives who have successfully applied customer development in their businesses and a discussion led by General Catalyst Executive in Residence and FastIgnite CEO Simeon Simeonov.
The March 1999 Fortune magazine raved about The One to One Fieldbook, which Bob Dorf co-authored, saying, “if your company is launching a customer-focused strategy…it sets the agenda.” Bob has advised more than a score of startups on customer development, including Steve Blank’s startup, Epiphany, as well as Broadvision, and Markettools, among others. Entrepreneurial from the age of 12, he personally founded six substantial startups, including—as he puts it—“two homeruns, two base hits, and two solid tax losses.” Dorf+Stanton Communications, founded at age 22 in his living room, grew from a staff of two—Bob and a St. Bernard—to more than 150, when Bob sold it in 1989. Dorf lives in Stamford with his wife Fran, a serial published novelist. An avid bicyclist and skier, Bob’s proudest startup by far is daughter Rachel, a psychologist who recently made him a grandpa.
A parallel entrepreneur and investor, Sim has co-founded several companies, most recently Better Advertising & Thing Labs, and has played a key role in dozens of v1.0s, financings and exits. Through a partnership between FastIgnite and General Catalyst Partners, Sim helps entrepreneurs with big ideas find Product/Market Fit and happy, paying customers while building a team and raising capital along the way. Previously, Sim was a partner at Polaris Venture Partners and chief architect at Allaire and Macromedia (now Adobe). He blogs at blog.simeonov.com, tweets as @simeons and lives in the Greater Boston area with his wife, son and an adopted dog named Tye.
David Cancel, serial entrepreneur and founder of Compete, Lookery, Ghostery and Performable.
Andy Moss, founder and CEO of ESMZone.
Andy Greenawalt, founder and CEO of Perimeter eSecurity and Continuity.net.
Healy Jones, founder of Startable and VP Marketing at OfficeDrop.
Rob May, founder and CEO of Backupify.
DIYMarketers, a resource for CEOs looking for affordable marketing tips, published a piece by Healy Jones (i.e. OfficeDrop’s Marketing department), called “5 Tips for a More Professional Website.”
We learned a lot when we relaunced our website, and these are some of the key ideas we used when we remodeled the OfficeDrop home page. Hopefully some other small businesses will find these tips helpful!
OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad Thammineni, knows his stuff when it comes to small business tips. He’s spearheaded several business ventures, and has been sharing his knowledge and experience on Small Business Trends.
In his latest article, he gives 20 tips for adding credibility to your business’ web presence. You can have a website, but that doesn’t mean anyone is going to buy anything from it. For that to happen you need to exude safety, professionalism, and sincerity with your website and related online representations.
Prasad’s list gives a lot (20, actually) of ways to accomplish this, including the following techniques:
and our favorite:
And those aren’t even half of the tips provided by Prasad in his informed and extensive article. If you haven’t already, check out his full list of tips, complete with explanations, on Small Business Trends.
You may think you already have a strong web credibility, but these are a lot of tips. Does your business take advantage of all 20 of Prasad’s suggestions?
You might have heard about OfficeDrop CEO, Prasad’s radio interview last week; he was interviewed by loyal OfficeDrop customer, Greg Skidmore, on his AM1490WGCH radio show, Greenwhich Entrepreneurs.
Greg asked some great questions and Prasad fielded them all with helpful answers. A few of Greg’s questions (paraphrased):
For the answers to these questions and more, those who missed it can listen or download the interview below (it’s the first segment titled “OfficeDrop”).
The interview was packed with helpful tips for entrepreneurs. Topics covered included:
Lowered costs of web services for small businesses
Tips for small business owners
Prasad’s previous ventures and his inspirations for them
The roots of OfficeDrop
Prasad’s youth and how he developed an entrepreneurial spirit
Lessons learned marketing to small businesses compared to enterprises
New OfficeDrop features
Greg also had some nice things to say about OfficeDrop throughout, including the following quote about the OfficeDrop document search feature:
Greg (in respect to financial documents): “You have to either be absolutely meticulous with your filing, or make your documents searchable. I think it’s a lot more time effective to make them searchable.”
Thanks again to Greg Skidmore for hosting Prasad, for using OfficeDrop, and saying nice things about us on the radio. We enjoyed the show and look forward to serving your document needs.
We’re proud to announce that OfficeDrop has been featured as one of the workplace apps featured on Intuit’s “Get Organized. Get Rewarded” campaign. Designed to get businesses started with helpful organization apps, OfficeDrop and other helpful tools will offer free trials and other limited-time offers for a one month period.
Ok so here’s the kindle part: As part of the campaign, Intuit is giving away a Kindle to users who will increase their chances of winning the more they sign up for apps and use them. You are automatically eligible once you sign up for a workplace app, so be sure to sign up for your OfficeDrop free trial through Intuit to give yourself the chance to win.
If you find yourself wading through paper, or struggling to utilize information around your office, now is the perfect opportunity to sign up for the apps that can save your sanity. OfficeDrop and other featured apps will require little to no commitment and will be sure to get you organized quickly and easily. If that wasn’t enough, you might win a kindle too. What’s not to love?
Many businesses use the iPhone in their business. With the release of the new iPad, we think there are many applications that if specialized for the iPad, could make Apple’s new tablet a valuable asset for small businesses. We are currently developing our own iPad application, which we think would be a great way to view, organize, and search your documents with the new iPad.
Though the iPhone is designed more like a consumer good than a business tool, the personality of the device didn’t hinder app developers from making a boatload of iPhone apps that make life around the office easier.
All the great business iPhone apps can be downloaded to the iPad, but the iPad will just be a big iPhone until app developers start taking those iPhone business apps and making versions specifically for the iPad. Here is a list of business-focused iPhone apps that we would like to see made into full blown iPad versions.
FreshBooks (Billing and Finance)
We love FreshBooks for our online billing and invoicing, so obviously we would love to see the FreshBooks application on the iPad. Paired with the slick multi-touch features of the iPad, online billing would never be easier or more fun.
Zoho CRM (Customer Relations)
We use Zoho CRM to keep track of all of our customers and leads. If you were taking your office to go with an iPad, you would want to keeps tabs of all of your customers, and react quickly to any questions or problems. Thought the Zoho team is just working on an iPhone app currently, we would really like to see that functionality ported to an iPad-specific application.
iWork & Keynote (Production)
The Apple equivalent of Microsoft Office, iWork will allow you to word process, make spreadsheets, and put together striking presentation with Keynote (Powerpoint for Mac). This application will be made to fully utilize the multi-touch features of the iPad, and will also be compatible with Microsoft-created documents.
WordPress (Blogging)
As you can see, we like to keep our company blog active and up-to-date. The WordPress iPhone app lets us manage our blog from anywhere, and an iPad app would make blogging on the go even easier. Benefits would include the large display and full touch screen keyboard for added convenience.
Chartbeat (Analytics)
What better way to watch over your site’s analytics than on the rich graphical display of the iPad. With the chartbeat iPhone app you access your Google analytics account, and get real-time alerts on stats like average page views, uniques, and sources to see when you’re site is getting hit, and when you’re falling behind.
Those are the business apps we’d like to see on the iPad. iWork and Keynote are already available, and we hope that the iPhone apps mentioned roll out iPad equivalents.
It’s been a few weeks since we changed our name, and the change is turning out really well. Customers are happy with the new name and it has done wonders in better defining our business’ personality.
We learned a lot about changing a business’ name, and now you can see some of our process on QuestionPro.com. The article outlines some of the techniques we used to come up with our new name, and provides tips for businesses thinking of making a similar change.
Thanks to QuestionPro for taking interest in our name change and turning our story into a learning experience!
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