Thought Leader Thursday – Shane Pike, AskShane.org

Posted by Wildfire Marketing Group | April 23rd, 2009

Thanks for taking the time to share your knowledge with us today Shane. Some time ago, Aaron Wall pointed your website out to me. Since then, I’ve come to believe it should be required reading for any business owner, especially anyone who is trying to make an impact online. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you’ve built up the knowledge that you share on your website?

I graduated from The University of Alabama with a degree in Management Information Systems, which was great because it gave me not only a great computer foundation but also a great business foundation as well. I didn’t appreciate then what a tremendous blessing that would be.

That was 1995, and widespread use of the Internet was just taking off. Thankfully, I got in early and started learning HTML right away — first by building web pages on my own and then changing to a job early in 1996 where I got to do web development full time.

In 1998, that led to an “HTML Specialist” position at HeadHunter.NET in Atlanta. I came in at an awkward time. We were less than 30 employees at that point, and they were rushing to finish a total rewrite of the entire site. My job was to jump in and find some way to contribute. That was great because I got to learn literally everything on the technology side, writing COM objects being the only exception.

That knowledge led to my first independent project. A good friend of mine discovered that the major online computer products retailers all used the same 2 or 3 distributors. In other words, all it took to do the same thing was a website that could display products and take orders. I was in.

I bought the server from Dell, installed IIS and SQL Server, coded the site from scratch, and ran everything off a cable modem in my study. We did over $1,000,000 in sales our first full year in business — virtually all of it from Google traffic. (I can remember getting a call on December 23rd that we had just made a $25,000 sale to NASA that put us over the seven-figure mark.)

Then four months later, we were out of business. Our margins were just too low to maintain for very long, and we knew we couldn’t keep going.

A few months before that, CareerBuilder.com had bought Headhunter.net, and I took a brief detour to InJesus.com (where I got to build another site from scratch) before heading back to CareerBuilder when they brought most of the old team back together.

Later I moved into business development and then marketing at CareerBuilder for about a year and half, picking up a few more valuable skills along the way — not the least of which were getting involved in AdWords from the very beginning and learning how to locate and acquire distressed websites that, with just a little work, could see huge increases in value.

In January of 2005, it was the experience with the latter that finally led me to venture out on my own. Thanks to some great consulting opportunities to bridge the gap, by 2007 I was living full time off my own sites.

In today’s economic challenges, a lot of companies simply don’t have the budget to effectively market online. I think a lot of this is because they really don’t understand the medium. For the cash-strapped entrepreneur, what would be your top three recommendations?

Number one, don’t get ahead of yourself. Make sure you’ve got something worth marketing first. I see too many people who think the Internet is some kind of magic solution to their problems. All their business needs is a website, and customers will start showing up! It doesn’t work that way.

Number two, once you really have something of value, find at least one reliable person with real knowledge of the Internet to guide you in the early stages. There is a tremendous amount of misinformation on the web that not only will leave you broke but also believing that it’s all just one big rip-off. That’s not the case at all, but you need someone to help you learn your way around.

Number three, start slowly. There are a lot of different ways to market online, and you might only need one or two. Experiment with some different things and find out what works for you.

We’ve seen a lot of shake-up in the world of print media, with more and more companies shifting a greater portion of their marketing budgets to online media. What are some things that people should look for (or look out for) to achieve the best results when making the shift to online media?

The greatest thing about marketing online is how closely you can monitor the return on your spending, so you want to be absolutely sure that you’re measuring that. I see too many people who couldn’t tell you how much they’re paying per lead with their AdWords spending, for instance.

And one thing to look out for, to bring up a point again from your second question, is bad advice. Be sure anyone you’re trusting is worthy of being trusted. If you get a bad feeling, trust it and walk away.

You’ve bought and sold a number of websites, spanning various industries. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in the process and what have you learned from them?

The biggest challenge I’ve had is applying what worked in one industry to a completely different industry. The temptation is to think they all businesses online are basically the same, but that’s not the case at all.

For instance, I owned design gallery Unmatched Style at one point. I was desperate to buy another site, so I went outside what had worked for me in the past. It wasn’t a disaster, but I found out that running a site like that was much different than I ever thought it would be.

I was glad to read this week, though, that it’s not just me learning that lesson. Even real pros like Kleiner Perkins are learning that expertise in one area doesn’t always translate.

I think most people would agree that despite the challenges that recessions create, the also create tremendous opportunities for the aggressive, prepared entrepreneur. In your opinion, what are some things that people can be on the lookout for when looking for opportunities?

Many people find success specifically by providing a solution to some sort of common pain point. Solve someone’s problem, and they’re willing to pay you for that.

What we’re going through now has created all sorts of new pain points for people. Figure out what those new problems are and see what solutions you can come up with.

A great example is your website financing deal. People still need new websites, but money is harder to come by. You’re seizing new business with creative solutions.

Successful people see opportunities within problems.

In a recent article, How to Sell a Website for $1M, one of the factors you mentioned that would affect the sales price of a website was defensibility. I think in general, this is paramount to the success of a company, even if they don’t intend to cash out. Do you have any tips for creating a defensible website/company?

I can’t thank Brian and Andy enough for introducing me to the concept of defensibility, because if you’re playing the big leagues you better have a defensible site. It takes so long to build a site into seven-figure value that the odds are against you making it that far if you’re just relying on smoke and mirrors the whole way.

To truly be defensible, you have to create a website that genuinely provides value. Can you look at yourself in the mirror and say that your site deserves to be ranked among the top 5 in Google? If not, that’s what you need to be working on.

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