Competitive Intelligence Blog Sails Forth

° Competitive Intelligence Blog started. The first post is about True Benchmarking.

° This What’s New Section itself only added today.

° The StomperNet Diary is on Day 42. The thought process behind videos as well as writing content for this website is shared.

° Except for Sample Reports, all other Menu Item links have been updated.

Benchmarking: The 5 Steps

When you use benchmarking to simply see how you stand side by side with your competitors, you are just doing a research project. Nothing more. When you use benchmarking to improve your business continually… now that’s Benchmarking!

Benchmarking is a continuous process of measuring yourself against the best in order to improve. Author, Larry Kahaner best describes Benchmarking in 5 steps:

• Step 1: Identify what needs improvement in your company.
• Step 2: Identify best-in-class companies.
• Step 3: Measure your Company’s performance.
• Step 4: Measure the performance of other companies.
• Step 5: Use the information you learn to improve yourself.

Step 1: Identify what needs improvement in your company.

If you base it from a book, you would go out and get a picture of how things work within the company. Then get the thoughts of all the people involved on ways to maybe improve the operation.

From experience however, Competitive Intelligence should take into account that humbleness is an uncommon characteristic on most managers. Thoughts of, “I taught him everything he knows.” are human nature. While it is true that a manager trained or continuous to train the people under him, the manager and the trainee are two very different people so the insights they can arrive at are going to be different. While most insights maybe covered by the manager on account of his experience. It never hurts to get the insights of everyone under the manager as well.

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Day 42: Product Launch Writing and Video Preparation

By the time I have finished this blog post, I will have written the equivalent of 7 average length blog entries including this one. I timed it. It took me 4 hours. But it did get most of the menu items to have their text content in place. People who are able to read through it should have a good idea what my product is all about. I know. I know… You’re saying, “Chris, your content is putting me to sleep.” Some visuals will come by the next post or on Monday. I want to have the time to hunt around for the proper images so I won’t rush it.

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Day 41: Making Videos

Today’s entry will be short. I attended a real-life seminar on Videos. Sad to say. I left very disappointed. This is because I feel I am getting more information from my StomperNet teacher’s (Sherman Hu) website: http://www.shermanlive.com.

A friend, finding out I was on the look-out for any help on making videos, recommended this seminar very strongly. I won’t name the seminar or speaker anymore as it was just a one-day event. I do not doubt that the speaker was highly talented on all things video. The problem was he was neither a good speaker nor a good teacher. Out of respect for my friend, I tried to keep awake but she herself was dissappointed too and was pointing to someone else who strongly recommended the seminar to her.

Cheers!

Day 40: Product Launching Murphy’s Law

Murphy’s Law threw pie on my face on my 40th day of using StomperNet. Admittedly, there was a point there where I felt that I would not even make it halfway through my countdown. I’ll share to you what happened and how it got fixed.

I received feedback from a StomperNet veteran that my site had half the focus being stolen by this blog. It was staring me in the face and I missed this one. He is right. Even my menu had StomperNet Review coming right after Home. Since English is the language used. Almost all the people visiting my website would browse my pages from left to right. So on my Main Menu, StomperNet Review gets read first before Business Intelligence.

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Day 39: Product Launch No No’s I Did

I got good feedback from Industry Veterans on some of the No no’s I did. Let me share what I was able to address today, the reasons why they are No no’s and how I fixed them:

No Widget Control

My front page with the Countdown Timer still had all those Blog categories and recent posts displayed on the right. They cause distractions from the focus I wanted to give to my Business Intelligence product. This website is built using WordPress and those categories and recent posts are called widgets. The solution is a free plug-in called Widget Logic. It lets me control which, where and when my widgets should appear.

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Day 38: Product Launch Questions & Feedback

The Questions:

I received some questions via Email and Facebook messages yesterday:

Exactly how out of reach is Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Course?

It is $5,000 out of reach. Well, the exact terms are $5,000 up front then another $5,000 when you make your first $100,000. If you thought that was steep, your jaw might drop all the way to the floor if you hear that before this, he taught Product Launching to a limited number of students for $25,000 per head. I heard that all seats were taken. If you are interested, here is his link: http://www.productlaunchformula.com/?gclid=CKq9k8KxpZ4CFRhfagodEQhWlQ

I thought this is a 90-day thing. Why does your countdown exceed 90 days?

I don’t do any heavy lifting on Sundays. So no StomperNet or BusinessTeligence work and no posting on Sundays. So the dates will indeed be off. It will also be Christmas and New Year. I’m spending that time with the main reasons why I am pushing myself hard on most days. Read more

Day 37: Product Launching Juggernaut

I’ve been working hard the past couple of weeks and I’m really excited to announce and welcome you to look at the changes I’ve made to the site. Of note is the introduction of Business Intelligence. It currently has an intro and a sign-up page. But this is going to be my product so expect major additions and changes in the next week or two.

A fellow Stomper gave me a lead to a lot of eye-opening tips on how best to launch my product. He says the biggest thing is to build anticipation and need instead of just coming out with the product with maybe a press release. He made a lot of good points. He didn’t give details on how to build the anticipation and need so I did a search on both StomperNet and Google about doing a Product Launch.

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Day 36: Incubator – Mostly on the SEOQast Webinar

Woke up and immediately buckled down to continuing the build work on the product. I’m really excited about doing this and I can’t wait to get feedback when I launch it next week. I won’t bore you with the details of the build work though.

Instead, let me tell you about that second StomperNet Webinar I attended the other day. It’s about the benefits of SEOQast by Ross Goldberg and Ryan Taylor. SEOQast is one of the Software tools that comes with StomperNet Membership. It semi-automates the process of letting people know about your newly published content whether it is an article, an rss feed, a video, etc. It displays a huge list of websites you can announce your new content on. You have the option of submitting to all of them or just to a few of them, say just the top 10. Here’s a screen cap of what SEOQast looks like so you get an idea of the amount of websites you can announce your content to. The pic shows these websites sorted by Page Rank. Clicking on the pic will take you to the SEOQast page if you need more info.

Today’s post will be one of the shorter ones as most of the activities today dealt on getting the product built by Monday. Have a great weekend.

Cheers!

Day 35: StomperNet – The Sinkhole & The 5 Steps to Internet Income

The desk and tack-board that got cleared yesterday is starting to pile up with clutter again. Ideas were drawn up, sifted through then kept or discarded depending on how they fit with all the other parts. I more or less ended the designing session with the excitement every entrepreneur has when they think they have it. I only spent a couple of hours for this. Then immediately buckled down to work on what I could do myself or contact people who can help out with the parts I am having difficulty with.

A couple of hours is okay. Past experience has taught me how vulnerable I am to falling into an analysis by paralysis sinkhole. So it was more important to me to get some tangible work done today versus getting what I think will work on paper. A gamble? Yes. But I’ll take this gamble today already knowing what all this will amount to if I don’t take the gamble – Nothing!

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Day 34: StomperNet – Figuring out my Product

With my mind made up on coming up with a product of my own instead of selling somebody else’s product, I was able to drill down a bit further today as to what I can sell. I quickly discarded manufacturing my own product due to limited funding. So I basically had this initial list:

1. Continuity
2. Micro-Continuity
3. Software
4. Services
5. Other Digital Products

Continuity simply means a subscrition based product. People pay you monthly for as long as they find your product useful. This is where recurring billing on your credit card usually occurs. Examples of this are:

1. Private clubs or forums
2. Add-ons to software like Firefox, Joomla, Wordpress, etc.
3. Services like Automatic Backups, Intelligence Gathering and Monitoring.

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Day 33: Agonizing Decision

Yesterday, I attended my first Stompernet Mastermind Group Online meeting. It is a focus group of StomperNet members that help each other out. There were a lot in my group who actually live within a 40-minute drive radius – 25 minutes if I drove like the crazy way I drove back in the Philippines.

They are a lively group. One showed us his website and we entered into a critique of his website on how it can convert visitors to business better. The group is lead by Mary Bowman who may need to move to Vancouver, BC soon so she can be closer to most of the group Seriously, Mary got my vote on Day 1 when a member of the group shared a technique for browsing the StomperNet site. Even though she is the Mastermind, she is humble enough to acknowledge that the technique shared by the Member is new to her too. This one moment encouraged the group to be more sharing of their knowledge and experience. I wish I can acknowledge the person that shared the technique but I was having audio problems on my PC so I wasn’t able to pick up on the name. Lots of ideas were exchanged and I’m positive that this group is going places.

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Day 32: Incubator – The Last Lesson

The last lesson. Ross Goldberg closes the Incubator Lessons by giving final tips on what to do with what was given in the lessons and what to do next now that the lessons are over.

Now that the lessons are over, Days 33 up to Day 90 are all on me now. A Newbie no longer, I am a Rookie in Internet Marketing now. This blog will keep going till Day 90. Beginning tomorrow, this blog will have a running total of how much I have made starting at zero dollars. Hmmm… I’ll even include what and how much I spend. I will try to chronicle every step I take, every mistake I make and every success I get on my way to meeting my goal of getting a new cashflow stream. Wish me luck.