“6,000 small business owners have told an unusually nuanced story about what they value in their state or city government,” said Sander Daniels, co-founder of Thumbtack.com. “Although Texas and Idaho clearly come out on top as the nation’s friendliest states towards small business, entrepreneurs value a lot more than just low tax rates. Easy-to-understand licensing regulations and well-publicized training programs are often overlooked as critical tools necessary to support small business.”

Some of the survey’s key findings include:

• Texas had three of the top five cities (Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin), while California was home to the bottom three (Los Angeles, San Diego and Sacramento).
• Small businesses said licensing requirements were nearly twice as important as tax rates in determining overall business-friendliness.
• Among small business owners nationally, women were 9% more likely than men to feel supported by their state governments.
• An important predictor of small business friendliness was whether small business owners are aware of the state or local government offering training programs for small businesses.
• Nationwide, small businesses owned by politically conservative entrepreneurs were 17% healthier than small businesses owned by politically liberal entrepreneurs.
• Idaho, Nevada and Delaware had the most small business-friendly tax codes; California and New Mexico had the least-friendly tax codes.
• Nebraska small business owners were the most optimistic about their business improving during 2012, while Iowans were the least optimistic.
• The South was the most small business-friendly region of the country, while New England was rated the least small business-friendly.

The full results can be seen here and include full sets of rankings, dozens of easily searchable quotes from small businesses nationwide, regional comparisons within states, and Census data comparing states’ and cities’ key demographics against those of other states and cities.

“With comparatively few regulations or government oversight on small businesses, Texas is truly a small-business-friendly state.  For the most part, Texas refrains from imposing ridiculous regulations and requirements that only a large corporation can keep up with or afford, and this makes a big difference.”

Roofer – Maud, Texas

Survey methodology

Thumbtack.com surveyed 6,022 small businesses across the United States. The survey asked questions about the friendliness of states towards small business and about small business finances, such as:

• “In general, how would you rate your state’s support of small business owners?”
• “Would you discourage or encourage someone from starting a new business in your state?” and
• “How would you rate your company’s financial situation today?”

Thumbtack.com and Kauffman ranked states and cities against one another along 21 metrics.  The full methodology paper can be found here.

What is Thumbtack.com?

Google is at it again, this time tweaking the way I view my audiences, networks, placements, etc. In the screenshot below you’ll see the new “Display Network” tab:



If you look at the subsequent navigation you see the following areas are all contained in the Display Network tab:

• Display Keywords
• Placements
• Topics
• Interests & Remarketing

Personally this won’t make much difference to me, but I know there will be plenty of beginner to intermediate AdWords users who are going to be thrown for a loop by this. What do you think? Good idea or not?

The other day a friend of mine sent over a screenshot of what is perhaps the worst shopping cart I’ve ever seen. I’ll give you the play-by-play after the break, but behold:



If you want a bigger version, just click on the image below, but here are just the worst offenses on this page:

• Proceed To Checkout is a little link – Initially I thought it was a text link for the Empty Cart button since it was just below the button, but as it turns out, that’s the most important link. Don’t subjugate the main action. Ever.
• Huge Red Empty Cart Button – First of all, why do you ever need to give your users a huge button that nukes everything they’ve done on your site in one fell swoop? Second, even if you feel it’s helpful, why would you make it a big button with the most contrasting color? If you’re going to put it on the page at all, make it a tiny little text link.
• Delete this item is bolded – Again, why are you drawing attention to an undesirable action? Of course people may want to take an item out of the cart, but don’t feature it.
• What’s with the social buttons – Am I really going to tweet, Facebook like, or +1 a shopping cart?
• Recent Posts in the footer – I’m pretty sure at this point you probably want me to finish checkout, not read your blog, so take out the links to your recent posts.

Dell is inviting you to participate in a treasure hunt and the grand prize is a brand new Dell XPS 15z laptop. Follow the seven clues leading to the winning landing page on Dell.com by visiting the Dell laptops page where the first clue is waiting for you.

In addition, Dell is giving away ten gift certificates worth $499 good toward the purchase of $500 or more in Dell products. To enter this sweepstakes, simply Tweet, blog, or share the Treasure Hunt on Google+. Be sure to use the #delltreasure hashtag whenever you share and follow all the official rules found on Dell.com.

Happy treasure hunting!

While at Conversion Conference West in San Francisco last week I had a chance to listen to a great presentation by John Ekman on how online retailers could learn from physical retailers. After the conference we connected on LinkedIn and he sent me this awesome screenshot where it appears that Robert Kiyosaki personalize an ad so much that he even posed just like me (kidding of course).

I’ve never quite understood the logistics of airline routing. I needed to go from Salt Lake City to San Francisco; a pretty straight shot west. However, the cheapest way for me to do so was to route me through Los Angeles? Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. The good news is that I’m here in San Francisco for Conversion Conference West 2012.

I attended the initial Conversion Conference in June of 2010 and the conference has really been picking up steam in the last year and a half. Tim Ash is doing a great job promoting the conference and putting together truly top-notch content. Actually, this year he’s holding the conference in 5 different locations: Chicago, New York City, London and Dusseldorf. How’s that for growth?

I’m Speaking!

That’s right folks, I will be speaking tomorrow on the topic of Leaky Funnel Forensics. We’ll be looking into what is killing your conversion rate and how to catch the killer. For those of you who couldn’t make it I will post my slides to Slideshare and have them here tomorrow afternoon or Wednesday.


I’ll also be taking lots of notes and I’m sure I’ll have a couple posts worth of thoughts to share in the coming days. If you’re at the conference, come say hi!

Continuing on the theme of PPC & the Rainforest you’ll remember that our last post talked about how one strategy to gain visibility is to grow like crazy. By being the tallest tree in the forest you get the first shot at sunlight. However, there are other plants growing in the rainforest that do just fine without being hundreds of feet tall. How do they do it?

Get Broad

If you can’t compete with the towering giants in your space you’ve got to assess how else you can survive. In the rainforest the solution is to get broad – as in broader leaves & broader branches. Despite those tall trees, there is still a lot of sunlight trickling down to the lower levels of the forest. Your job is to pick up as much of that light as possible. Here’s a picture of how that’s accomplished:



Courtesy of the aerial tram I was riding in at the time, this shot was taken from above. As you can see, the tree here has spread out to occupy as much space as possible. This allows the plant to capture as much of that extra light as possible. So how do you “get broad” with your PPC efforts?

Broaden Your PPC

Here are the quickest ways to broaden your PPC reach:

• Add long-tail keywords – Look through your Search Query Reports and find phrases that might be 4 or 5 words long, but produce good results. Place them, along with close variations, into new ad groups and write more specific ad copy for them.
• Use ad extensions – With the ease of implementing sitelinks, call extensions, location extensions, social extensions and product extensions to occupy additional real estate and convey more benefits, you can’t ignore this.
• Start remarketing – Place the remarketing snippet on your site and set up a campaign to target these people anywhere they may be going in the Display Network. You don’t have to worry about irrelevant placements, and if you set the frequency caps correctly you won’t annoy or creep out your visitors.

This is just a quick way to capture more exposure, but what other ways would you suggest?

Continuing on with my series about PPC & the Rainforest, I can’t describe how dense vegetation is in the rainforest. Sunlight is the scarcest resource so I was observing how various plants compete for that sunlight using various methods. The more I looked the more I thought about PPC and how hard it can be to get some exposure (sunlight) in the ever more competitive PPC world.

Strategy 1 – Grow Like Crazy

If you’re competing for sunlight, the first solution is to get closer to the source. In the rainforest this means grow taller. And do they ever…

You’ll probably notice how some trees go from the bottom of the picture to the top of the picture without so much as a single leaf in sight. Just trunk. They get sunlight by getting above the other trees and vegetation. We often see similar behavior from certain PPC advertisers.

Bid Higher = Get Sunlight

Many a PPC advertiser looks at their account and sees a problem: not enough impressions/clicks/conversions. Therefore, they do exactly the same thing these trees did. They get closer to the top. They bid higher and higher on their top terms in order to get higher placement on the page and capture the sunlight before their competitors. They equate success with being the tallest. This works great when you don’t need to cover a broad set of keywords and can focus on your top terms, but there are tradeoffs.

Look at the picture again. Remember how some of those trees didn’t have any leaves or branches in the picture? Just a single trunk extending higher and higher into the canopy. Wouldn’t a few leaves along the way help increase the amount of sunlight being captured? Similarly, you see advertisers bidding upwards of $25/click on keywords but ignoring the $5-$10 keywords in their Search Query Reports that could help provide some extra boost to their efforts.

But what about all those short trees and plants in the picture? How do they compete? That will be the topic of the next post in our series.