Back in January I wrote about the 5 Second Test site which helps you discover what people notice about your website. Today I’d like to introduce Concept Feedback.

Concept Feedback offers marketers, designers and developers “quick, actionable feedback from a professional community.” Best of all, this tool is free.

You can get feedback on your logo, website, product design, concept, etc. Just upload and the community will respond. You can also give other professionals feedback on their designs and ideas.

Monochrome kids with red balloons from Banksy, Forever 21 and the silent film Red Balloon

This might be a bit of a controversial post, but I think it’s a good conversation to have. What exactly is a copycat? How do you define it? How fast are you to accuse someone of copying you? I’ve been on both sides of this story, and if you stick around in the creative world for a long time you probably will be too. It’s a bummer when someone is clearly ripping you off, but it’s just as infuriating to be accused of it when you aren’t actually guilty.

I personally subscribe to the opinion that there’s nothing new under the sun. Everything that’s been done has been done before. Thus, I’m very reluctant to call someone a copycat. Unless I see someone outright using my brand’s original illustrations, I don’t assume they copied my idea. Most of the stuff out there that looks similar is more of a reflection of an overall trend than one individual copying another individual.

All of that said, there certainly are times when people do copy. (The flap between Paperchase and Hidden Eloise is a clear example of it.) So how can you tell what’s a legit case of copying and what’s not worth getting your knickers in a twist about? Here are some criteria:

1. How original is your design?
There are a lot of young popular artists right now who are inspired by Margaret Keane. (If you don’t know your art history, Keane is known for her waifs. She painted pale waifish girls with big heads and big sad eyes. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s all over sites like Etsy.com.) Keane’s was creating her waifs long before a lot of her followers were even born.

To me, it’s no biggie. We’ve had impressionists who like to do landscapes before and after Monet. We’ve had people into splattering crap on a canvas long since Pollock. What gets my goat is people claiming that the 20 something artists on Etsy have some exclusive right to this aesthetic, like they invented it.

Before you accuse someone of copying your style or design, make sure your work is completely unique. Take a long hard look around and see how many other people are doing things that look similar. Think about where your ideas came from. Were you influenced by a trend? Were the other designers influenced by a trend? The fact is most of us are influenced by things that came before us and it’s not a bad thing. Design goes in cycles and the internet has certainly played a role in homogenizing design.

2. Are you being duped by superficial details?
Sometimes designs that appear to be similar really aren’t. This post was somewhat prompted by an email that came to my ecommerce business recently. A company accused us of using their logo as a source for our design. Their logo was a drawing of an animal and our design was a drawing of the same kind of animal. We’d never seen or heard of their logo before. Our design was based on a public domain nature photograph and aside from the coloration (which was based on the animal) and the fact that it was the same kind of animal, the designs had nothing else in common. The person accusing us was fixated on color and subject, not the actual details of the design.

Color schemes and subjects go in cycles in terms of popularity, so when you’re evaluating whether something is a copy it’s a bad idea to focus on the subject or color of the design. These superficial details are rarely the substance of the actual design.

3. Are you sure you actually did it first?
If you really want egg on your face, accuse a designer of copying your work and then find out they created their piece first. Oops. A popular website I sometimes peruse tried to argue that the hoodie in the image above (designed by Forever 21) was a rip off of the Banksy’s street art (also pictured above). It was then quickly pointed out that Banksy’s image was probably inspired by the silent film The Red Balloon (image also above). This is a perfect example of my point about everything being influenced by something that came before. So before you call someone out, consider whether they were maybe drawing from the same source of inspiration as you rather than drawing from you directly.

So where does this leave you, the struggling designer, trying to make a name for yourself and get your work noticed? Creating original interesting work is still your mission, but understand that you probably aren’t inventing the wheel. You may not be able to beat competition in terms of having designs unlike anything they ever imagined. And if you’re doing commercial work, you probably wouldn’t want to. Your ability to succeed depends somewhat on your ability to understand what consumers want, and what they want is usually influenced by trends. This brings you back to competing not just as an artist but as a business, in terms of marketing, branding, business development, etc.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• Merchandising Your Vendor Table
• Be Straightforward in What You Sell – using brochures, business cards, and other materials to highlight your product offerings
• How to Write a Good Privacy Policy
• 33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better
• How to Create an Ad for Your Business
• Do Buttons With Unusual Shapes Boost Sales?
• How to Deal With Discount Codes in the Checkout Process

Yesterday I wrote an article about the cumulative effects of marketing and a reader asked how I track my results. First and foremost, if you missed my article yesterday, let me repeat YOU CANNOT PERFECTLY TRACK EVERYTHING. You just can’t. Things happen indirectly as a result of your marketing, that’s where some of that cumulative magic comes in. (Read my article from yesterday for examples of this.)

Now that we’re clear on that, let’s talk about what you can track using Google Analytics (because it’s free and pretty easy to use):

1. Bounce Rates
When you find a way of promoting your site be it advertising, guest blogging, cross-promoting, etc. You’ll want to pay attention to what the incoming traffic from these sources does. If your traffic has a high bounce rate from a source (meaning the vast majority of visitors leave after viewing one page) that source might not be very well-targeted for you and you may want to turn your attention elsewhere.

2. CPC
CPC, or cost-per-click, is what you pay to get a person to come to your site. It’s easy calculate a CPC for an ad. If I pay $100 for an ad and I get 500 clicks then I paid 20 cents per click. The tricky thing is everything has a CPC, even “free” stuff. (Side rant: There is no such thing is as FREE marketing. I am so sick of hearing about FREE marketing. All marketing costs money unless you don’t subscribe to the thought that time is money. And if you don’t you should. Your time is valuable. If your FREE marketing costs 20 hours it is 20 hours x  your hourly rate. Sometimes FREE can be expensive.)

To calculate CPC on stuff you don’t pay for, such as blogging, SEO, etc. keep track of the hours you spend on those things. Then decide what you think your time is worth hourly. If you spend 2 hours per week blogging and you think your time is worth $25 per hour, you spend $50/week blogging. Now go into your site stats and see how much traffic your blog generates. If your blog gets 100 visitors per week you are paying 50 cents per click.

3. Conversions
This is the metric we look at most often. How much did a traffic source result in direct sales? I recommend that, if possible, you track other things than sales, such as Facebook fanning, Twitter following, newsletter sign ups, etc.

Tracking that stuff can be difficult because you either need to be pretty tech savvy or spend money on fancy technology. Google Analytics is free and it will track sales and newsletter sign ups (assuming you can install Google tracking code on your thank you pages for newsletter and sales). It won’t track your Facebook and Twitter sign ups at this time but it’s better than nothing.  (I am sure eventually you will be able to track that stuff with Google Analytics, but not today.)

4. Overall Traffic
You should be seeing an overall increase in traffic as you spend more time and money on your marketing efforts.  I know that as we increased our advertising expenditures on our ecommerce website we saw a drastic increase in site traffic from all over the place. It’s because more people were coming to our site, sharing our links with friends, spreading our site around via word of mouth, etc.

Live Plant Cutting with Recycled Glass Vase and Care Instructions by SevenAcreWoods

The #1 question small business owners want the answer to: “What can I do to grow my business?” This is a loaded question and it has hundreds, if not thousands, of answers. The short answer is that there is no ONE thing you’ll do that will make your business a success. All your press, your marketing, your business development, etc. is cumulative. Here’s what I mean:

Imagine a moderately popular blog writes about your business, 100 people visit your site. One person buys something. 50 of them leave after viewing 1 page. Another 30 leave after viewing a few pages. 5 of them get on your mailing list and one of them makes a purchase 6 months from now. 1 of them tweets about your brand and 10 of their followers visit your site, 1 of them starts following you on Twitter. Another visitor posts your link on her Facebook wall and their friends visit you, one of them buys something. Another visitor posts about your business on his personal blog.

If you’re looking at raw sales that came from this one press hit you might not be impressed. You only got one actual sale.  A closer look reveals that you actually got:

• 1 direct immediate sale
• 2 indirect/delayed sales
• a blog post (which leads to more SEO, more traffic, more fans, more newsletter subscribers, etc.)
• a Twitter follower
• 5 newsletter subscribers

Suddenly that one press hit is a lot more valuable.  Now consider that every little thing you do that brings new people to your site — advertising, getting press hits, blogging, cross-promoting, etc. works the same way. Each thing can result in incremental growth of your brand. This is to say, don’t get discouraged when you don’t see immediate over night success, because each small thing is helping you along in ways you may not realize.

Having owned an ecommerce site for a few years now, I’ve seen this work first hand. My site gets orders each day from press hits that went online over a year ago, Facebook, people who subscribed to my newsletter months ago, things I posted on Style Hive months ago, message board posts our fans wrote months ago, etc.  After having amassed so many links over such a long period of time, we now consistently get business from work we did months or even years before.

It usually takes several months, if not a couple of years, to really break through as a small brand and consistently see website traffic and sales. This is because each little thing you do is slowly building a presence and a fanbase for your brand. Eventually all the little things you do each day will be working in concert to bring consistent website traffic and consistent sales.

While you can certainly throw a lot of money at your brand and get much bigger much faster, most small brands aren’t in the position to do that so it’s a matter of being slow but steady.  As web technology evolves, we’ll probably have smarter and better ways to track long term and indirect benefits of our marketing efforts. As it stands right now, there’s no way to effectively track every little boost your brand gets from marketing.  This means you have to track where you can (newsletter sign ups, increases in site traffic, Twitter and blog posts that mention where the author discovered your brand) and consistently invest time and money in the things that attract your target demographic to your website.

Sometimes as small business owners we create product and then try to find a niche for our product. Other times we’re stumped for inspiration so we seek out a niche to create product for. There are thousands of niches. Need inspiration? Here are just a few:

Brown Pottery Bowls Photograph by henatayeb

Stumped on what to offer in your online store next? Check out your website stats. Your stats probably have a section that tells you what keywords people searched to find your website. What’s interesting is sometimes they found your site searching for things you don’t actually sell, variations on things you do sell.

Let’s say you sell bracelets, maybe you’ll notice a lot of people found your site searching for “plus size bracelets”, which you don’t sell yet. Those customers probably bounced when they realized your shop doesn’t carry exactly what they wanted. This should give you the idea to start carrying plus size bracelets.

Go through all the keyword bounces and see if there’s a pattern. You’ll see what people are looking for most and this can help guide your future product development.

Every day I check out the 100s of subscriptions in my RSS feed about marketing, PR, advertising, branding, social media, and a host of other topics of interest to small businesses that sell online. Most of what gets posted isn’t earth shattering but I reserve Fridays for the best reads of the week. So here you have it, the most valuable things I read in the business blogosphere this week:

• 5 Ways to Build Your Email Marketing List
• Stopping Shopping Cart Abandonment
• Tips on Getting Into Magazines
• SEO: The Myth of Duplicate Content
• Three things you can do tomorrow to create sales – Be forewarned that the title of this post is a teeny bit misleading because it’s more about learning how to ask the right questions to increase sales. I really loved this post because it did a great job of saying what I was trying to say earlier this week.
• E-commerce strategy: that’s not your business! – This is a great post about understanding what you actually sell (hint: it’s not products and services).
• 6 Things to Consider When Creating a Promotion for Your Store
• “What I’ve Learned from Taking Thousands for Product Shots”
• Calculating the Lifetime Value of a Customer – This is a bit of a marketing nerd’s read but I still think it’s a good one to try to follow because it makes an important point about the value of long term customers