I often come across situations where business owners or stakeholders get emotionally attached to a particular feature for one reason or the other. However, it is critical to make these decisions as objectively as possible.

The typical CEO and CTO discord: Let’s take an example of a startup that wants to build a site focused on the stock market. They want to be a “one-stop shop for analyst opinions.” While the CTO (or the product manager) is dreaming of a comprehensive portfolio management module being built, the CEO insists on covering as many stocks as possible.

This is a difficult decision indeed! And it needs to be discussed. In any team there are people who will be passionate about certain features or certain ways of doing things. How does one decide? If there is an objective criterion on which a decision can be made, it can make the complete discussion less stressful.

In principle, there should be an objective process that is used to make any decision. One process is to have a five-way filter. Weigh every feature against the following criteria and ensure that you select only those features/modules that pass through all the five layers.

1.    Vision – You need to have a very unambiguous and clear vision statement. How does a particular feature align to the vision of the project? Weigh it against the vision statement. Assume that the vision statement is: “We will provide the widest coverage of analyst opinions for a stock being traded on the NYSE or the NASDAQ.”

Now, portfolio management is an important feature for every investor. However, is that what you want to be? The Best Portfolio Management Company? No! Your differentiator is “widest coverage of analyst opinions.” So focus on that.

2.    Elevator Pitch - One important question that you need to ask yourself is “How will I explain what this site does to someone in less than 25 words.” This is also called the elevator pitch. Once you have answered this question, you need to decide if this new feature is going to add to or strengthen whatever you have defined in these 25 words. In the above example, the elevator pitch is “We provide quality research and analyst opinions for stocks being traded on the NYSE and NASDAQ.”

Based on the vision and the elevator pitch, the CEO would say the decision is quite clear that we need to start covering more stocks. However, the CTO has a valid point as well. Portfolio management will bring in repeat visitors. It is important that people who come to the site get hooked on the site in some way or the other. How do we bring visitors back? So, here’s an impasse.

3.    Market size – You are not building a site that you like. You want to build a site that will add value for its users. Any feature that you want to add in your site should be targeted to a wide majority of your users. What is the percentage of users that will benefit from this feature? If the answer is a very low number, is it still worth it?

Now, let’s try to apply this to the argument that the CEO and CTO are having. How many users will go through the process of registering and create a portfolio? The answer is - a very small percentage of the user base will do it. People avoid registering on sites and will definitely not create a portfolio unless they are sure this is the place where they want to build the portfolio.

4.    Monetization – Which feature can be monetized better? Is there a short-term or long-term monetization strategy for the feature being discussed?

How will you monetize a portfolio module? If people are averse to registering, it would take you a lot of convincing to get them to pay even a cent for the service. On the other hand, if you cover more stocks you will start catering to a wider audience and of course Google will have more to index.  Ad revenue will increase.

5.    Non redundant / simpler alternative - Is this feature already present in the site in some form or the other? Is there an alternative that more users can benefit from and still solve the problem?

OK, people will not register for a portfolio manager. What if we send an email whenever a new opinion is listed for a particular stock? All a user needs to do to register for an alert is to click on the selected stock and enter the email ID. This will also ensure repeat traffic.

This criterion should bring you close to making an objective decision. Now, this is just one feature and after going through this exercise for a few features, the process starts becoming faster and you can easily skim through the complete list of features that you want. This will give you a good start. There may still be a few surprises down the line, but this approach creates a framework that can be used in making all future business design decisions.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

Organization focus should be visible in every aspect of your business. This is true even for your website, be it a corporate website or a transactional or social one. Many websites, even several corporate ones, look cluttered and do not clearly bring out the product/service that is being offered. This dilutes the messaging to your potential customers or employees.

There is a famous dating site called HotorNot.com. It was started in 2000 by James Hong and Jim Young. After creating a basic page where one can upload a picture and get members of the opposite sex to rate the picture, Hong and Young sent the link to some of their friends (40 to be exact) and the site just grew from there. HotorNot was recently acquired for an undisclosed amount. Most bogglers quoted the amount at $20 million.

Today, if one looks at HotorNot, it is a very comprehensive product with many features. Do you think it would have been so successful and gained viral growth if it was launched with all these features on Day 1?  The fact that HotorNot started with the most critical / core applications as the only feature surely contributed to the success of the site. Twitter and Basecamp are similar examples, i.e. started with doing one thing very well and added more features as the traffic started growing.

There are many examples even in the non-IT domain, where a product was designed to do one thing extremely well and more features were added with subsequent releases. For example – iPods dominance in the world of MP3 players is unquestionable. There are several features in iPod today that were not there in the first model that was launched.

Most websites suffer from feature overload. Having Q&A, forums, blogs, chats, messaging, photo galleries, video galleries and shopping carts with comparison shopping all in one website is a disaster in the making. You need to decide your niche, your differentiator and your ability to market that niche. Once you have that, build on top of it.

I am not suggesting that you always start building your website with just one feature or service. However, every feature that you have on the site or every service that you decide to list on your corporate website should be thoroughly discussed to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Everyone on your team, including the development team, should understand why a feature is included and how it maps to the overall game plan.

Success comes with focus. Everyone on your team needs to agree on products and offerings, how they will be monetized and how success will be measured.

My guess is that 99.99% of Internet users use search engines on a typical day. Given the information explosion on the Internet, the surging Internet usage across the globe and people with lesser and lesser time, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that search engines are and will continue to be popular.

But this also creates a problem. If you have a web presence, how do you ensure that you get noticed amongst these zillions of pages? How do you prevent your website, blogs or articles from getting lost in this jungle of information? I am sure there is hardly anyone who has not heard of search engine optimization and search engine marketing etc. In fact more and more people these days are also talking about social media optimization and pay per click (PPC) and many such marketing jargons.

Every problem is also an opportunity! Search engines can be a fantastic tool for generating traffic, increasing leads and revenue. There are many service providers who are offering SEM, SEO, SMO services these days. They claim to perform miracles(almost). Often these companies and some bloggers confuse SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and sometimes they are projected as mutually exclusive concepts. Neither perception is accurate. Instead of thinking of them individually, it is important to completely understand what each of these terms mean and create a holistic plan to improve your online presence. Instead of having an SEO plan, you should have a digital marketing plan or ‘Internet Visibility Optimization’ plan that is focused on generating qualified leads and revenue and not ranking. Sure rankings help, but it might not necessarily get desired results.

Internet Visibility Optimization can be thought of as the whole gamut of activities that boost the visibility of a website or a webpage on the Internet. This encompasses SEO, PPC (pay per click), paid inclusions,SMO (social media optimization) and ensuring your website is created in such a way that traffic is converted to leads.

Before you jump into this bandwagon it is important to understand what these terms are about.

Search Engine Optimization

Most companies love to play with this concept. And most companies that do, get it wrong! The focus of SEO should be about quality of traffic and not quantity. The focus should be on increasing sales and conversions. If you are a financial media company and you receive a whole lot of clicks from folks looking for frying pans, it’s quite useless. This is irrelevant traffic and your SEO efforts are producing results but might not generate revenues.

Sometime SEO can become an ethical debate. There are many SEO specialists who guarantee top search engine rankings. Some of these self proclaimed specialists or gurus use SEO techniques that can do more harm than help. This style of SEO is also referred to as “Black Hat SEO.” Although there is no clear definition of what is allowed and what is not, the following can clearly be classified as unethical and wrong.

• Blog commenting: Irrelevant and automated blog comments (and they are as disgusting as the guy talking on a cell phone in the middle of a movie!). Search engine algorithms are increasingly becoming intelligent, understanding the context and ranking the page and links accordingly.
• Backlinks: Spamming sites to create backlinks to your site. Search engines eventually figure out when they notice too many outgoing links from a single page or site.
• Content spinning: Rephrasing the same content multiple times in order to maximize the use of keywords. No one has time to read crap (pardon my French!). So, while keywords can get people to your site, they aren’t going to stay there if they don’t see anything that adds value.
• Keyword stuffing: Long lists of keywords and no “real” content could eventually get your site penalized by search engines. So, overuse of keywords is not the best idea. Instead keywords can be positioned strategically to help search engines search better.
• Invisible text: Some wise guy came up with the idea of putting long lists of keywords as invisible text – where the color of the text and the background are the same. So, while readers don’t see anything, search engine spiders do. This is, however, not a great idea.
• Doorway Pages or Bridge Pages: These are fake pages that users can not access. They are designed to attract search engines. Most search engines attempt to prevent and even ban doorway pages.

Search engines do not rank websites… they rank web pages. In other words, search engines like content with specific keywords in specific places. Having quality and informative content that is unique is the best way of eventually increasing your search engine rank. It takes patience and persistence.

There are two very important things one must keep in mind during any SEO campaign:

• Relevant Traffic: The idea should not be to get as many people as possible to visit your website. The idea is to attract relevant traffic… people who are part of your target market and those who are genuinely interested in what your website has to offer.
• Focus on the User and not the Search Engine: The design of and content on your website should focus on the user/reader. The idea is not to get people to your website, but to make them stay there.

Pay Per Click

A pay per click campaign is a form of advertising on the Internet. These advertisements could appear on search engines, websites and blogs and/or advertising networks. The main advantages of PPC are that it focuses on relevance of traffic and that you need to pay only if a user clicks on the advertisement. This is a huge topic in itself; important thing about PPC is keyword research and identifying the keywords that will be used and creating an Ad-Copy/ Banner that gets noticed.

Social Media Optimization

Social media has grown exponentially over the past few years. Online marketers are now capitalizing this platform to get their message across. Social media optimization uses the publicity technique on social media sites and online communities to enhance visibility. In short, find where your customers are networking and connect with them on those social media platforms. For example - If your target market is in the age group of 25 – 40 internet savvy users, it might be time you start taking a look at Facebook, MySPace etc. If you are planning to market in India, Orkut cannot be ignored.

If you’re looking for a magic formula to increase traffic and revenue, there isn’t one. But if you’re wondering what clicks, the answer is continuity and consistency. Onetime effort or a short-term focus just would not work. As I mentioned earlier objective is to generate leads and increase revenue not to have random traffic coming to the site. Also, what helps is to keep reading good articles about these concepts. And, of course, a little bit of luck won’t do any harm!!