SMART is an acronym coined by the “Power Business Person League” in the 90’s. The type of people who used to talk about Type-A and Type-B personalities, who used to Power Dress, take Power Naps and went to networking meetings at 5am.

SMART stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Agreed Upon
• Realistic
• Time-Based.

And although I joke about it – it’s a good system.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing that people say when they approach us for a new website.

We would like to get more business from our website.

Now – I bet you’re saying “that’s a bit of a woolly goal” and you’re right. So lets make it SMARTer.

We would like to generate 200 qualified business leads per month.

Much better eh? But is it SMART?

Is it specific? Yes – 200 leads per month.

Is it measurable? Yes – I can count the number of leads and if they exceed 200 – bobs your uncle.

Is it agreed upon? Not Yet

Is it realistic? Who knows? Maybe not if you are selling battle-ships or the implementation costs exceed £200million.

Is it time based? Not completely. We have a time base to measure the number of leads over but when will the flow of lucrative new leads start. How long will it take for the new site to ramp up.

So the new goal is a bit SMARTer but not completely SMART.

To make it completely SMART we would need to do some market research, planning and produce a specification.

Then it would be really SMART!

Happy goal setting :@)

Adrian Smith

We analysed his website server logs and found that they contained only 12 unique IP addresses and 21 http page requests. In simple terms, nobody was visiting the site. I suspect that the 12 unique IP addresses were his mother and friends.

But where had the client gone wrong? The same place that that 95% of small business owners go wrong. They focus on the drill and not the holes. The client really wanted business leads but that wasn’t the specific object of his project. I’m sure he never told his web designer that the sole purpose of the site was to generate leads, and (as with most small business owners) when the site was finished he thought that the project was over. Well it wasn’t – it had just started!

The most successful internet marketing project that we have ever managed was for a small financial company that wanted to generate business leads. The project produced 15,000 business leads in the first 12 months of operation and from this the client captured 625 new clients. I can’t tell you how much the client made (because I don’t know) but I do know that his lowest priced product was £5,000 and that it wasn’t unusual for somebody to invest £30,000. Do the maths and you will find that the additional revenue was somewhere between £3.1million and £18.8million! The most astounding point is that all of this high value business came from a 1 page website with a few pages of terms and conditions.

The secret to this success was the client. A very forthright chap from Manchester. His focus and his brief were simple:

“I have £5,000 invest and I’m willing to take a punt. I want you to generate as many leads as you can for the 5K and when the project is over we will review the campaign and decide whether we would like to proceed with another campaign.”

Within a year he had spent over £150,000 and in the end the project was getting too big for us so we had to help him to set up his own internal internet marketing team.

Today he uses Search Engines, Banners, Trade Fairs, Radio and TV adverts to bring traffic to his many 1-page websites where he captures the visitor’s details and converts them into business.

The moral: Get a clear focus of what you are trying to achieve and design an integrated program that will meet your goals – even if it’s just a 1 page website.

But this needn’t be the case and over the next few weeks I will be writing a series of articles designed to help the small business owner to avoid the common causes of internet project failure.