One of my goals this year was to finally put together some data for my Filipino Tattoo website to drive business decisions and validate or invalidate some of my assumptions. Overall, I think I was pretty accurate. After 2 years of tracking, I finally have the ability to compare KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). Here’s selected data I wish to share with you.

Transactions by day
- This one made sense but I didn’t think it would be so drastic. The best day is Monday and tails off by Thursday. Weekends were typically blah. This data tells me that I should launch my marketing early Monday morning. My feeling is that most of that activity is late afternoon/evening.

Transactions by month
- The tattoo season is Spring/Summer but last year, I had a big spike in September and November. I can see why September being big because students might want to get inked before going back to school. I have no idea why November was so big. Maybe new ink for Xmas?

Facebook demographics
Every company should have a Facebook page. Besides presence in a site that recently had more page views than the mighty Google, you also get a free basic analytics tool to give you some insight about your fans.  Since I added a Facebook widget for my fan page, it has grown to nearly 4,000 fans organically. It’s pretty tough to get this kind of data for your website if accurate at all.

Two days before Xmas last year, I was contacted by the woredrobe stylist for Black Eyed Peas who was looking for a Filipino design for Apl. I believe it was for the Grammys. The dude was pretty persistant but without going through the usual process of a proposal. He wanted something futuristic tribal that was going to be patterned with shiny material on a black tight shirt.

Here’s the quick sketch of my idea. In the end, things fell apart because 1) He wanted me to incorporate some generic flash tribal tattoo he found and 2) Wanted all the lines cleaned up, meaning he wanted vector files. All without talking about payment. After that, I stopped emailing. The guy was 100% legit but was probably expecting me, as a “desperate” artist do to spec work and not seek $ because of the great opportunity.

If I did go forward with the project, would something else come out of it? I assumed not. I didn’t want to work over Xmas for a freebie for the “potential” for greater things. I had to take a minute and stop daydreaming about getting paid to design for Hollywood stars.

The lesson? Value your work.

If you use Facebook for your business/personal brand, keep your wall clean. Get rid of all that Farmville and horoscope crap.

You wouldn’t allow someone to mess up your store, then why allow it on Facebook?

Why should you take time to maintain your page?

1) Traffic – With Facebook getting so much traffic, it’s become an important extension of your business. For small businesses, it’s your best bet for valuable feedback and market research.

2) Story – When someone visits your page and the 1st thing they see a bunch of Pillow hits or Mafia Wars posts, they don’t get to the important content right away. People have a short attention span and you only have the top 2 posts to get their interest. Due to Facebooks currently poor archiving, your best content can get burried fast. You may find yourself posting the same content multiple times.

3) Response – you should respond to every wall inquiry. With your wall cluttered, it will take you longer to respond and even harder for visitor to read them. This may cause redundant questions wasting your time.