Scott Smigler's BlogFounder of Exclusive Concepts and Conversions On Demand

Everyone should be paying attention to what is going on in Europe right now. It was announced today that the United States Treasury will ramp-up its printing presses as part of a global effort to flood Europe with cheap dollars. Why? Because several European Union countries are on the verge of fiscal collapse, and if they fail the impact on healthier European Union countries and the world at large will be significant. Central planners believe that flooding Europe with cheap dollars will go a long way towards averting (or in my opinion postponing) the deepening of the current financial crisis.

How did we get here? Good intentions. Voters in Europe had good intentions when they supported the entry of their countries into the European Union. Voters also had good intentions when they voted to grow the size and scope of government in response to the needs of its citizens. But when voters make decisions without applying reason and logic, big mistakes like this can happen. Read: They should have listened to Milton Friedman.

Why should we (Americans) care about what’s happening in Europe? For one, you are facing a retroactive tax. The value of every dollar you have in your wallet or bank account will decrease. Yes, in order to bail out the voters in Europe who made bad decisions, you, your families, your friends, and your companies will see a decline in the purchasing power of their dollars. Read: inflation. The other reason you should care about this is that the ratio of debt to gross domestic product in the United States is now 100% and growing. That’s alarming.

European countries like Greece and Italy are imposing drastic cuts on the services its government provides to its citizens, but they are too late. That’s why we are bailing them out. But who will be there to bail out the United States if we fail to shrink the size and scope of government before it’s too late?

I don’t see this as a political issue – the blame should be shared universally among political parties and voters alike. It’s a common sense issue. The United States is $15 trillion in debt, and what we have learned from Europe is that there is only one practical way to reduce that debt over the long-term: Spend less.

I just filmed this 30 minute segment with Ed Gaskin for CMO Advantage.  I appeared on behalf of SEMPO and shared data from their State of Search Study.

It was a lot of fun, thanks Ed!

I updated my “my articles” page to include 6 or 7 new articles i’ve written recently.

The most recent ones:

Pay-Per-Click Ads: 5 Tips for Higher Clicks this Holiday Season

To online retailers, Google’s surge in revenue may be yet another sign that the marketplace is becoming more competitive. Such competition normally translates into smaller margins, and that’s bad news for online retailers. I would, however, like to share a different perspective.

Ramping Up Your Holiday Pay-Per-Click Advertising

The holidays are coming. For many online merchants, this means dramatically increased revenue and conversion rates. Start ramping up for holiday pay-per-click advertising now to ensure that you maximize your profits — and build momentum for 2012.

Becoming a Data-Driven Company

Surviving and thriving in ecommerce requires a more sophisticated approach to marketing, branding, merchandising, and operations than it ever has before. Ecommerce is growing up from its adolescence, and the reward for growing past your competition has never been bigger.

View all recent articles here. Also, please follow me on Twitter, where I will announce new articles as I write them.

Thanks to everyone for coming out for today’s SEMPO Boston event at HubSpot, in Cambridge. This was, in my opinion, our best event since I became Chair of SEMPO Boston. The credit goes to Maggie Georgieva who planned the event, our great panel, and to the rest of the SEMPO Boston Working Group. Our social media chairs John Short, Tim Radwankski, and Pavel Khaykin have done a great job covering the event on SEMPO Boston’s Twitter account (@sempo_boston).

Here are a few photos. Go to SEMPO Boston’s Facebook Page for more.

 
Maggie and I introducing the event

View from the back

After over a year of testing and iterating we launched Time2Buy, new hosted conversion improvement software. Time2Buy is offered through Conversions On Demand, which is an Exclusive Concepts brand.

Please go here to read my official post on the Exclusive Concepts blog.

Time2Buy helps merchants convert more browsers into buyers:

It’s tested and proven:

Learn more

Step 1: Brainstorm a list

Example: A to-do list

Step 2: Rank each item on the list using a 1 to 5 scale using whole numbers (1 = lowest priority, 5 = highest priority)

Example: Rank the list above based on priority

Step 3: Sort the list, highest to lowest

Step 4: Identify items on the list that are ranked the same, and refine the ranking

Example: I have multiple items on my list ranked “4,” so one may be revised to 4.1, while another may be revised to 4.5.

Step 5: Re-sort the list

Step 6: Repeat Steps 4 and 5 continually, if/as needed

Last week the Secretary of the Treasury, Timothy Geithner, said that small businesses must be taxed more in order to keep government from shrinking.

He defended his comments by saying that only 3% of small businesses would see an increase in taxes, to which he was informed that those 3% created 64% of the new jobs in this country over the past 15 years. Further, the graph below from Heritage shows that 8% of small businesses pay 82% of all small business taxes.

This is a classic case of robbing Peter to pay Paul. The United States government may be the nation’s single largest employer, but according to the SBA, small businesses:

- Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.
- Employ just over half of all private sector employees.
- Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.
- Create more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP).
- Made up 97.3 percent of all identified exporters and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in FY 2007.

Small businesses don’t have the political power that large enterprises do (including the Federal Government), but any policy that creates more impediments to small business success is sure to have a negative impact on the U.S. economy at large.

If the United States government needs to increase taxes on small businesses to finance its payroll, perhaps its payroll is too big. Politicians will essentially be shifting jobs away from the private sector in favor of the public sector. Given that private enterprise gets a greater return on the dollars it invests than the United States government does, it should be clear that policies like this one will hold back the economic recovery in the United States.

According to data published on Census.gov, the growth rate of e-commerce sales in the U.S. hit a 3-year high in the fourth quarter of 2010 (seasonally adjusted). E-commerce sales in Q4 of 2010, compared to Q4 of 2009, were up 16.1%, the highest increase since Q4 of 2007 when year over year growth was 18.4%. The graph below shows year over year quarterly growth rates for each quarter since 2002.

E-commerce sales have now grown by double-digits for 5 quarters in a row, following 6 quarters of low single-digit or negative growth in 2008 and 2009.

That’s good news for online retailers, but consider Amazon’s sales growth in 2010 of 40% compared to total e-commerce growth of less than half of that. Amazon has grown due to a number of shrewd strategic initiatives, like persuading its competitors to sell products through its marketplace, launching its own products like Kindle, and mastering the blocking and tackling necessary to outrank and outperform competitors (like conversion optimization, site performance optimization, content optimization, and achieving vast operational efficiencies).

The rising tide will continue to lift all boats in e-commerce, and I expect e-commerce as a whole to continue to grow at an accelerated pace. The long-term winners will be those who go beyond best-practices and recognize that innovation and creative thinking is well-rewarded in e-commerce.

Given how much I dreaded what I perceived to be the slow pace of high school, the idea of spending 4 more years in “higher education” to get my Bachelor of Science was downright sickening. But I knew I would do it anyway because it was an important step in my growth.

So I searched, and I searched – in order to find a College that would allow me to thrive as an entrepreneur. Eventually I found Bentley, a small private business university outside of Boston in Massachusetts, and it was a great fit. I majored in Finance, built my business from my dorm room, and by the time I graduated I had a thriving company with an office in Burlington, Mass.

Going back to Bentley

Every year since graduating, i’ve been invited to return to Bentley by Professor Jeff Shuman (www.rhythmofbusiness.com), to talk to his MBA students about my path to entrepreneurship.

In my most recent visit (Monday of last week), I realized just how valuable these visits have been for me because they give me an opportunity each year to stop and reflect on my entrepreneurial journey. During this year’s reflection, I recalled how excited I was when I started the multiple businesses that created the foundation for my company. The sky was the limit, and creativity, hard-work, and honesty were the only mandates I created for myself.

When I polled the students in attendance to see how many of them planned to join the entrepreneurial journey, either by starting a company, or by joining a smaller company early in its lifecycle (like mine!), 75% of those in attendance raised their hands. I’ve done similar polling in the past and only a handful of students raised their hands. This really fired me up. I wish I had the time to sit down with each one of them to start business planning.

Alignment of Values and Reality

As I left Bentley on Monday I thought that I should pinch myself because every time I walk into my office, I have the opportunity to be surrounded by people who are creative, hard-working, honest, and entrepreneurial in spirit… From our internal team… to our clients. Those are things I learned to value very highly in high school, and today, they are my reality. It was good to know that my values and my reality are in alignment.

I would highly recommend that everyone find time each year to do their own values/realities check-in.