Creativity is vital to my success as an entrepreneur. I will do anything to facilitate new, unique thoughts to help me step up my game.

In my 100% normal world I hear two voices: the accountant and the entrepreneur.  The accountant keeps me on track and reminds me of risks, real life, and necessities.  The entrepreneur loves to be creative, dream big, and work hard with no immediate reward.  Although these two usually get along, sometimes one voice is louder than the other.

Right now I am in a period of my life where creativity is vital to my satisfaction with what I do.  I have been blessed to have money and good income in a tricky economy and many times I simply need to shut up the accountant in my head and let the entrepreneur run free.

When Ideas Come and When They Don’t

Tricky as that might be, I have recognized times and places where the accountant speaks up and, likewise, when the entrepreneur’s voice is a little bit louder.  Here is a short list:

Accountant is Louder…
-While sending emails and doing busy-work
-While shopping or spending money
-In the mornings

Entrepreneur is Louder…
-While it is dark in the evenings and night
-In the shower
-While I am on the move, especially walking or running

The Formula to New Ideas

So, whenever I need a little bit of inspiration, some good ideas, well, I simply take a jog and then take a long, dark shower.  Because mornings are usually a time I can get into a non-creative rut, I make sure my shower time gets my going by combining two idea-spots into one.

Creativity is too important these days to let it be hampered by something as simple as a little extra light while I wash my crevices.

Take-Aways

If you struggle with new ideas or creativity, spend a few days to a week watching where ideas come.  Try to identify places you receive “inpiration” and places you don’t.  Once you have identified these locations, make sure you schedule time to visit them at least once a day, if not more to let your mind be free and explore new ideas.

Some visitors are looking for your product and others you have to reel in with a clever pitch.  So why do we treat their conversion rates the same?

I’ve long known that my snowmaking business is one that requires educating my market about the existence of my product.  A handful of people realize home snowmaking is possible and search me out, but a lot of my advertising is simply showing people that home snowmaking  is actually doable.

So, I end up with two types of visitors coming to my site:

–1– Those that know about home snowmaking and are looking for a product to buy
–2– Those that had no idea it existed and are intrigued with the idea

The conversion rates between those two groups differ immensely.  During college I heard over and over again, “market segmentation, there are different types of customers for which we must adapt our marketing mix.”  Ok, so we get them interested, they come to our website and they check things out, but time and time again I hear internet marketers lump their conversion rates into one, all-powerful number.  “Become an affiliate, this site converted at 10% during launch.”

Well of course it is going to convert 10% at launch, half the visitors that show up have already been sold on the idea from an early notification email list.  We cannot lump freshly exposed visitors with folks that have already been sold to somewhere else and are finally on your site to seal the deal.

Where are they coming from and what does that mean?

Right before Christmas I held a big launch-esc sale.  There was a lot of excitement around the deal I gave my customers and some bonuses I included, all of this communication was done to my email list.  The day before the sale, I received one order from traffic that was being pumped in from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo PPC campaigns.  The first day of the sale, I received 8 orders but only had 50 more people come to the site than the day before.  So you tell me, should I lump those extra 50 visitors in with the rest?

If we really want to boost our conversion rates, we cannot treat our traffic as one giant, mass.  Running a split test with half of our traffic coming from organic search and the other half coming from Facebook ads is not going to give us the information we seek.  We must segment our conversion rates by visitor type and find ways to increase the conversion rate of each segment individually.

Without segments, we may miss results.

If we don’t we could be making some changes that are boosting one segment and hurting another, and visa versa which may appear like no change is resulting from our changes.  By looking only at the lump sum, we have no idea that by splitting to two traffic streams we could increase our conversion rates in both sectors.