In this edition of Web Enlightenment we'll be talking about how I dislike nothing and so should you.

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I dislike nothing - and so should you.....

As most of you know I really love my job - I have such a wonderful time doing what I do. When I see that little light bulb go on over a clients head, I get a wow filled charge out of it that really feeds my mind and heart.

Recently I've been getting exposed to more and more people - definitely a good thing - and I've noticed something rather interesting. They care about what I think (that's nice) but then most of them seem to extend that just a bit...and that is where things get dangerous.

They are trying to figure out what I "like" - and I'd guess that's so they can focus on actions that will be more effective.

"Ross likes CPC marketing"
"Ross doesn't like social media"
"Ross likes email newsletters where the signup boxes have a privacy policy"
Ross doesn't like Microsoft or any of their technologies"

And while I must admit my ego enjoys the idea people are trying to figure out what I like, here is the real problem with these types of conclusions - wrong, wrong, wrong.

Like an android seeking love I neither like nor dislike anything at all, I calculate.

My personal opinions about concepts and ideas come from a long history of having made calculations for thousands of people in the last decade and a half, but the one thing that is always true is that calculations reliably surprise. Calculations are individual and while there are some seemingly "universal truths" (like a good website is a good idea) - calculations are only of use when they have been done for a single individual business.

So this of course brings us back to one of my favorite old chestnuts of basic Internet math - the BECAC. For those of you that have been reading my stuff for years feel free to skip the following as you know it already. (right?)

BECAC stands for Break Even Customer Acquisition Cost - and I promise it is much less painful than it sounds like it might be.

Websites are - of course - basically an advertisement. They might be the most whiz bang ad ever invented, they might actually take orders, they might even provide things that no one ever previously thought were possible.....but they are still really, at the core, just an ad.

So for all time ads have had a thing called "circulation" - the number of people that see your ad. This is the basic reason why an ad in the New York Times costs so much more than an ad in the Yokel Podunk Gazette. The "circulation" of your ad is akin to the number of people that visit your website, your unique visitors.

Then we have the reality that a certain percentage of people that see your ad take further action - they call you, they buy your widget, they give you their email address. It is important to note that even if you don't "sell" anything online you have an e-commerce website. For example if you run a medical facility and folks provide an email address to you for further info - and in the past you'd have bought that name for a few bucks - that's ecommerce. When you take the number of people that visit and divide by the number of people that do something that is your conversion rate. If it take 100 people to get an order your conversion rate is 1%, if it takes 50 people it is 2%, and so on...

Finally we have the reality that - hopefully - you make money. When someone does what you want you take an "order", and you have some sense of an average order profit. If you have no idea just take the amount of profit you made last year and divide it by the number of people you serviced to get the info - there she is, your AOP.

With all three of these numbers you can calculate your most important website number, the way we figure out what we "like" and what we "don't" - the amazing ever present BECAC.

Suppose you were a Real Estate agent - the work is hard but the payoffs are large. Say your average order profit was $9,000 (300K house where you get half the usual 6% fee). Your website is pretty good for a realtor, it has a conversion rate of 1/100% - which means it takes 10,000 people visiting your website to make a sale. So we take the $9,000 and divide by the 10,000 people and we get your BECAC of ninety cents.

So any web efforts you make can be judged by this number - if you buy site visitors (and you may use your time to "buy" them) and they cost you fifty cents each your site is a money machine, if you buy them for a dollar and a half tightly bundled money also makes a very nice log.

Let's look quickly at another example at the other end of the scale - a person who sells T-shirts. The AOP (average order profit) is $6 and the conversion rate is 2% (so it takes 50 people to make a sale). We take the six dollars profit and divide by the fifty people we need to make it and we have the BECAC, which in this case is twelve cents. Gets pretty darn easy to judge all web activities using this number - did the people cost one dime (good) or two dimes (bad), that is your real core question.

The important thing to know is whether you are a guy running a farm stand one month a year or a woman operating a fortune 500 corporation this basic "back of the envelope" Internet Math is exactly the same. My oh my, how I love the way the web equalizes all people.

So finally we get back to the idea that a calculator like me neither likes nor dislikes anything, we figure out what our return is on all Internet activities and then rank them accordingly. The things that I seem to "like" best are the ones that provide the very best ROI (return on investment) - great websites, scheduled email marketing that is relationship based, CPC marketing - stuff like that. The things that I seem to "like" the least are the ones that provide the lowest ROI - social media, "new" ways of selling things that are not shopping cart based, proprietary technologies. But I have no personal stake in any of this stuff and all sorts of technologies, concepts and ideas have shifting ROI over time.

The important thing for Internet Entrepreneurs is to make your own calculations and make your own spectrum of "like" - literally a list of everything you are doing that is ranked by ROI. And if I might be so bold I'd also recommend you immediately stop trying to figure out what I like as I am charitably described as quite a weirdo - most of you who are familiar with my hobbies already know this.

Speaking of Speaking

The Maine Association of Non-Profits has asked me to speak on E-Mail Marketing for Non-Profits. I plan to present my complete collection of Obama campaign fundraising emails. This meeting will take place on Thursday, April 30th from 9 AM to Noon in Portland, Maine.

If you have a similar worthy organization where I can donate my time please let me know.