Driving Traffic to your Site - The Real Story

There is tons of stuff on the net about driving traffic on your site - mostly by SEO/SEM marketers, but whats the real story?

An easy way to understand this is to imagine this - you are opening an restaurant - why do you think people would come to eat at your place? Here are common reasons:

1. Your restaurant is at a convenient location where people commute or work and don't prepare food
2. You have a cuisine that is unique and not offered anywhere around
3. You have healthy, tasty food at a good value - something that the overpriced restaurants around you are not fulfilling
4. You have a great atmosphere with live music where people can spend a happy evening.

and so on.

So what is it that you want people to know? Its your USP - what makes you stand apart. Your first target has to be to drive the "initial" customers, then if you believe you are doing a good job, they will come again and bring in their friends too!

So where would you start? If you are at a convenient location, you just need to put up a nice welcoming banner and people will start coming. If you have a unique cuisine, you can start targeting that clientele by showing a presence at community events or doing a targeted mailer. If you offer value, make sure your message covers it well.

Driving online traffic to your site works in the same way! Its all about people, place, product, price - Once you know your USP, it will be logical for you to find out who will be interested. Whats more, if you have an offering that is truly unique and benefits a particular community, people will WANT to talk about it.

The corollary is that if you can't figure where your offering fits, then you need to do that first. Driving traffic is not about some technical wizardry. Its about figuring your marketing USP and asking the basic question - "why would people be interested in visiting my site"

Then its a matter of contacting a few people who could help you and the rest will follow!

iWebNotes - Online ERP for SMBs

Mumbai based Startup iWebNotes has launched an ERP for Small and Medium Businesses at Rs 299/user/month. The ERP covers modules like Accounting, Sales, Inventory, Purchase, Projects and HR. There is also an online demo and an automated 30-day-signup. The initial response to the launch as been very positive and iWebNotes is getting around 10 sign-ups a day.

iWebNotes has breached the price barrier for ERPs and hopes that lowering the cost to such a level will drive mass adoption. The other advantage for SMB customers is also that it is a completely hosted solution on the so-called "cloud" model that is promoted heavily by IT vendors. Using the cloud approach, customers will also benefit by having their servers managed remotely. This is a complete win for customers who want to spend their energies in managing their business not software.

Other SaaS / Cloud applications in the market, mostly clones of SalesForce or Freshbooks are too simplistic or cover only a part of total business requirements. iWebNotes' approach is unique because it takes an integrated approach to all business functions. This is more valuable to companies that are beyond the startup phase.

iWebNotes has also built its own rapid-application development framework that will help companies who want to customize their ERP.  iWebNotes's Open Source model gives customers an exit, in case they want to host it on their own - something that Salesforce and others don't allow. It also allows opportunities for other companies who want to specialize in customizing the product. iWebNotes also plans to provide services to customers to help them setup their servers and migrate the application to their own.

Mr Sooraj Surana, of Peekay International, an early user of iWebNotes is extremely happy with the solution and says "We have a lot more reports that we can view, which helps us manage our business more efficiently. We do not require trained professionals to do simple data entry as with many other business applications which require training before it can be put to use. The best feature is that this application runs on a web browser. No CDs or installation files required. I can get to know what is happening in my company weather I am in Mumbai or Delhi or any other part of the world. All I require is just an Internet Connection on a computer"

First Post

The objective of this blog is to write about Online ERPs. The "Online" part of it is easy, but what is an ERP? Lets explore.

Most of the writing relating to ERPs and "Enterprise" software filled with jargon and keywords and many times, pure garbage. The idea of this blog is also to use simple language, a normal person can understand.


Lets keep the large businesses out of this. New subsidiaries of large businesses are welcome but the real large ones with zillions of transactions are out of this discussion. Now when we look at small and medium sized businesses their challenges are different.

What they are look for is a way to consolidate all their business data that lies in excel sheets and paper sheets everywhere. So whats the big deal?? ... The deal is this:

1. When the customer calls about a current or old order, you don't run around wasting your time finding the right excel sheet or right paper or calling ten people. So it saves time
2. You don't wake up all of a sudden in the middle of the night thinking about a payment you had to collect. Once all your invoices are in one place, the system helps you keep track of your payments
3. You don't start screaming when you find that your warehouse is out of stock. You know before hand what is the position.
4. When you sit to make your next investment, you have all the data you need. You know what are the fastest growing product categories, you know your best performing sale territories.

Not convinced yet? Well give it a thought.

ERP or Accounting Software?

This this a question I have been grappling with for a long time:

What category do we fit in? Are we an accounting software or an ERP?

Here are the arguments either way:

Accounting Softwares are smaller in scope and are used by small businesses. They may also contain additional workflows for stock keeping, but usually are simple. There is not much scope to tag your data across territories etc and not much scope of setting budgets, rules on discounts etc.

ERPs on the other hand are traditionally used by large and mid-sized businesses. They have the capability to handle large volume of data. The core functionality is still accounting, stock keeping, pre-sales, invoicing etc. There are lot more options to categorize your customers, territories, sales people. You can set targets and complex rules.

So where does iWebNotes fit in?

My take is that it fits into both the categories, it has the multitude of options that required for real businesses and also is simple enough to use for small businesses. So we are trying to blur the gap.
Ideally, we must combine the functionality of the ERP and simplicity of the Accounting Softwares so that customers get the best of both world.