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.

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.

I just did an interview for my Baybayin site with Michelle from Philippine Script Designs via the Facebook iPhone app. We did it via email 1 question at a time rather than me emailing a bunch of questions. While it’s no Twitterview, it’s quiet effective due to the layout of the app. It’s much better than the browser version. My wish though would to be able to export the conversation somehow keeping the speech bubbles.

Check it out then add me on Facebook

Paul Boutin has a great article on The Standard regarding those Facebook “Stimulus” ads. They are usually with some guy holding a check or showing off a roll of cash with a tagline of  “Get your Obama check” or “$12,000 Stimulus Checks”.  Sound too good to be true? Trust your gut.

Get the money that the government owes you. Each year, the US Government gives out billions and billions in Grants to people just like you. No one ever thinks they can really get a grant,which makes it easier for the few people who actually try!

You can search for grants yourself on Grants.gov. No need to pay $1.99. Check for yourself if you qualify for individual grants. I couln’t find anything.