In next week’s podcast, I asked Kristin Zhivago a series of questions on what it takes to be successful on the web today. Kristin is president and co-founder of Cloud Potential LLC, which offers best-practice analysis and improvement of a company’s digital impact. They are mostly working with companies that have historically done well in their space but are now being surpassed – even blindsided – by those who operate at cloud speed and use cloud-based tools. They are instructing managers how to master those tools and then optimize their digital revenue-generation efforts. Kristin is also the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy a book that I still use on a weekly basis.
Podcast Excerpt
Joe Dager: What’s the starting point? How do I start getting better? Do I just start with SEO, SMO?
Kristin Zhivago: What we’ve discovered and what we’ve done over the last year and a half is 
we’ve investigated 28 different industries and more all the time, but at the moment it’s up to 28, and what we’re doing is we’re looking at the leaders, the people that are winning and getting the most traffic and the most customers, the most conversions which are sales basically. Sometimes you can measure a conversion by a download or whatever, but the revenue is there, and I’m a revenue coach, that’s what I care about is revenue. We looked at the people who have been doing the best job, and we discovered that they share best practices in common, and it turns out those best practices fall into six separate areas, and this is held true all the way down. We’re doing digital impact appraisal for people, for companies, where we come in, and we examine their digital footprint and their influence compared to their competition, and we look at their competitors as well and see how well they’re serving people in these six areas.
The six areas are how well are they serving their customers, are customers looking for them, are they showing up when they come, how many of them are finding them for their keywords that Google says, “Oh, this company, I’ll display these keywords for them…” There’re customers; there’s search, there’s paid search which actually can be profitable if you do it right, there’s a good solid look at the conversion rate and what you’re getting out of your investment, there’s the whole competitive analysis, and then there’s technology. If you don’t get the technical part right, if your site’s too slow or you’re not serving up mobile properly, Google is going to penalize you for that and drop you down in the rankings.
Again, those area are the customers, search, paid search, conversion, competitors and technology, we look at all of those and come back with basically a report card and say, look, you’re strong over here but weak over there and what we have found is your Website is all of those things. If you’re not getting those things right, your Website is not going to be effective. We just help people however they need it. We either get involved by doing some work or we teach their people how to do it and to fill in those blanks, because if one of those is weak, the whole thing gets thrown off.