by Jeff Sexton
I couldn’t help but write down a few comments and links in response to a recent Smashing Magazine post. Designed to Sell: 8 Useful Tips to Help Your Website Convert kicks major butt, and I thought you’d both enjoy the article and a few comments/additions thrown in for each of the 8 tips:
Tip 1: Subiminal Suggestion
Basically, make sure your design elements – and most especially your pictures – enhance your credibility and put visitors in the right emotional frame of mind to convert.
Sound advice, to be sure, but the example Website the author (Dmitry Fadeyev) provides seemed kind of lame to me. Here’s a more-thorough 5-minute video on this principle by Dave Young:
Tip 2: Prevent Choice Paralysis
Too many choices results in buyers avoiding a decision and failing to convert. You need to make it easy for a buyer to say yes without getting too bogged down in the details. One way to do this is to provide a recommended or “best value” option.
But here’s where I’d go a bit beyond that by looking at this through the lens of temperament:
- Spontaneous temperaments like recommended and “most popular” options. They also ver much want to shorten the time spent shopping and setting up so they can maximize time spent actually DOING THE THING. If your recommended option helps customers get out on the playing field quicker, then be sure to tell visitors that.
- Methodical temperaments will want to know WHY you believe this is the best value and how you can prove it. Show your reasoning/methodology in coming to your conclusions and offer up proof of value. This may involve linking to a mouse-over or additional page from the recommendation box. Maybe a little link on “Why we recommend this package.”
- Competitive temperaments don’t necessarily need a recommendation, but a quick way to narrow down their choices by advanced filtering. Or a quick way of knowing why the choice you’ve labeled as premium will give them an edge. Keep them in control and convinced they’re getting an advantage through their purchase and they’ll convert.
- Humanistic temperaments usually want to know how easy it is to upgrade or downgrade a recommended service or swap-out a product if your recommendation ends up not quite suiting them. They also want a sense of your motivations in recommending one product over another and possibly if they can Chat or call someone about the recommendation.
Tip 3: Show The Product
This is very similar to my post on “Show me the pics.” People want to see what they are buying. Not only do the pictures answer questions, but people want to imagine using the product.
What I’d add to this is that one picture often isn’t enough and that action photos are gold. For software and services that means not only offering product tours with lots of screenshots, but also in using scenario-based product tours rather than functionality-based tours. Walk me through doing something rather than randomly showing this or that functionality.
Tip 4: Let People Try It
Great (and self-explanatory) advice, but I was glad that Show the Product came before this. I’ve seen a fair amount of software companies believe that visitors would just leap at a free trial in order to experience a product first hand, and that just aint how it works.
Visitors invariably want to sniff a product out BEFORE downloading it and investing time with it. Realize that “Free” doesn’t really equate to risk free. Dmitry writes about the positive benefits users’ emotional “sunk costs” that come with using a free piece of software – the kind of thing that leads to a paid updgrade vs. a search for a whole new product. What he doesn’t mention is that visitors are well aware of that sunk cost and will avoid downloading software unless and until they have a decent sense that it will work well for them.
So, yes, by all means, let people try the product for free. Just make sure you show them enough of the product and what it can do that their willing to invest the time trying it out.
Tip 5 & 7: AIDA and Next Steps
I combined these because they are intimately related and are both areas Future Now has quite thoroughly covered. We, of course, add the “S” of Satisfaction onto the end of Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.
Also, planning persuasive momentum/next action steps should be more involved than simply ensuring visitors can find a buy button when they’re ready to buy or that you have some additional link made available to them.
Finally, you gotta love this money quote from the article:
“…you shouldn’t design a nice website first and then fill up the space with words. Instead,think about the message you want to send out, write the copy and then construct a design that delivers that.”
Amen, brother. Amen.
Tip 6: Guide Attention
Having just finished writing about the impact of design on visitor eye tracking, I naturally found this to be the best part of the article. Lost of great stuff on intelligent use of design to guide the eyes/attention of the visitor.
As for additional resources on the Web, check out
The Elements of Design Applied to the Web
Good Call to Action Buttons
Making Tabs Work for You
Looks can Kill Design Effectiveness
Color, Contrast, and Dimension
and Rowland Wilson on Composition
Tip 8: The Gutenberg Rule
I really don’t have too much to say about this one, other than it’s another rule of thumb for good composition/page layout and that you should go and take a look at it for yourself.
And that’s it. I’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and additional resources as well. Let me know what ya think…
Filed under Marketing Online by on Sep 8th, 2010. 
by Melinda Brennan
You can get “how to be successful in business” advice till the cows come home, but you also need to know about the factors that will kill off your business. It’s usually a question of attitude. As in, when you’re sick of it, when it’s only a hobby and you don’t want to take it too seriously, or when you’re equally “scared of success and failure.”
And then there are just basic mistakes, which, fortunately, can be corrected.
If you want your business to thrive, watch out for these warning signs. Get them straightened out and you’ll get your business on the road to good health.
#1: A toilet attitude
Your attitude about your own business will affect everyone else’s attitude about it. Every web visitor, every person you speak to, every twitter and Facebook contact. They’ll know, without you telling them, exactly how you regard your business.
What are some of the warning signs that your attitude may suck?
- When you don’t post for weeks on end.
- When you haven’t put out a new product or service for the last six months.
- When you say your business would be great if it wasn’t for those darn customers.
- When you whine about how hard business is and how all those successful A-Listers must have had friends in the right places.
- When you’re expecting to be an overnight success and you’re surprised that you aren’t both rich and famous after six months.
#2: Marketing to a demographic, not a niche
The best and simplest definition of an online marketing niche that I’ve seen is “a group of people with a common problem who congregate together.”
What’s NOT a niche? Freelancers are not a niche. Work at home Parents (moms, dads, or both) are not a niche. Small business owners are not a niche. Copywriters are not a niche. Women over 40 are not a niche, neither are men after retirement.
Those are all demographics — and they’re all groups that people try to market to.
It’s only a niche when they share a problem.
So what’s the problem in your niche, and how are you going to solve it? Where does your niche group together so you can market to them specifically?
It’s an online marketing paradox: the more you narrow your niche, the more successful your marketing will be.
Have a look at who you’re aiming at now and ask yourself if it’s a “demographic” or a real “niche.”
How can you narrow your message down to their core problem — the one that you solve brilliantly and uniquely?
#3: Looking like a penny pincher
It’s so easy to set up an online business these days — just crank up a WordPress.com or Blogger site and off you go.
Need graphics? Pick up some clip art. Logo and website header? $50 should take care of that if you outsource to the lowest bidder. Business cards? You can get freebies from Vista print, why pay money for a designer and printing? Newsletter list? Send that from your desktop with Outlook.
The only problem here is that your online presence (and therefore, your business) looks cheap. And the overall impression visitors and potential clients get is that you’re either (a) broke, (b) cheap and (c) unprofessional.
There are some things you can do free or low-cost and no one will notice. Your website is not one of them.
Don’t get me wrong, you don’t have to go to the other extreme and mortgage your house to pay for the website. You do have to make sure that your site has a clean, professional look, that it’s easy to navigate, and that your web presence makes you look worth the prices you charge.
#4: Not capturing visitor info
Someone comes to your site, looks around, reads some posts, and then leaves. Sure, they liked it and intend to come back and read some more — but they never do. They forget, lose the URL, and get busy… And you’ve lost them forever.
I’m amazed at the number of small businesses that don’t have a way to capture visitor details — their names and email addresses. They’re losing customers and making life harder for themselves. It takes time and effort to attract people to your site, so why let them leave without a way to keep in touch?
Set up an email newsletter list and offer a valuable free report or eBook in exchange for their details. Mail Chimp is free up to 500 subscribers if money is tight at the start, and you can build from there.
Once you’ve lost a visitor they’re gone forever — along with every person they may have referred you to. Do you really want to let them get away that easily?
#5: Failing to plan long term
Or don’t plan at all. Business plans are for big businesses, and for when you need to go to the bank for capital, right? Wrong!
When you don’t plan you’ll drift. You’ll chase the latest online marketing guru and technique, flit from this to that and wonder why nothing seems to work for you. What are you aiming for? What do you expect out of your business? How will you know when you’ve reached it?
You don’t need a 100 page plan full of legalese and possible budgets and financial projections that no-one but your accountant understands.
But at the very least you do need to know what your aims (goals) for your business are, who you’re marketing to, and what makes you different from everyone else out there.
No plan = No business.
#6: All learning, no action (Paralysis of Analysis)
Are you a ‘gunna’? You’re ‘gunna’ do this and ‘gunna’ do that?
Just as soon as you’ve studied this online marketing e-course, read those 136 eBooks, listened to the 84 Tele-seminars and watched the 78 hours of business videos that you’ve downloaded onto your computer?
How many information products have you bought that you’ve never read, listened to or watched? How many of them have you actually worked through step by step?
We all do this, or rather, don’t do this. Me? I’m watching my 35th training video so I don’t miss a trick.
Ebooks, courses, videos and all the other teaching methods are great, as long as you utilize what you’ve learned. Information junkies abound. People who take action on what they’ve learned are rare.
You’ll learn more in your first twelve months of actually running your business and putting yourself out there than you will from any number of books, courses and videos. Information is great, but nothing beats taking action.
About the Editor: Steve Berchtold is an internet marketer and SEO Consultant. You can also catch him on Twitter.
Filed under Marketing Online by on Aug 18th, 2010.
More often than not, marketers jump into SEO without being fully prepared. Although it is easy to do, it could eventually have harmful effects on the business. In this interview with WebProNews, Heather Lutze, the Director/Owner of the Findability Group and the author of The Findability Formula, explains how marketers need to understand the foundation for setting up an effective search marketing plan in order to have maximum findability.
As she discusses, there are many dangers with jumping into search. For starters, the technicalities can quickly overwhelm people. Search efforts are also often isolated to one division, such as PPC. As a result, businesses could end up missing out on a lot of benefits they could be receiving from search. Another danger is that many marketers think they know what their searchers want, when they actually do not.
“Don’t stand in judgment of your own search, let your searchers tell you what they want,” says Lutze.
She goes on to point out that marketers need to focus on all 3 areas of search. These areas are PPC, SEO, and Social Media. She says if a business really wants to be findable, it needs to be where users expect it to be. Since it’s difficult to know where the users are, she advises being present in all 3 areas.
By utilizing these 3 components, businesses can develop a consistent message across all its channels, which will increase their chances of being findable.
Are you getting the maximum findability out of search? Watch the video HERE
Filed under Marketing Online by on Aug 11th, 2010.
This is a guest post by Justin Brooke, author of SEO Lies: A Book About SEO Truths. Justin has helped everyone from home business start-ups to 9 figure earning CEO’s, so you can rest assured he’s got a wallet-fattening tip for you too.
Would you like to get thousands of highly targeted visitors to your website for just pennies each? Want to know my secret source from above? It’s FACEBOOK!
How do I get my ads to cost so little?
There are 5 important steps you must follow, but before I teach you those 5 steps there’s a really big obstacle you’ll have to over come – it’s called Banner Blindness.
You see, so many people are on Facebook for hours at a time and every single day sometimes.
They spend hours on end reading profiles, checking status updates, etc. They get so used to the Facebook layout that their eyes start to tune out the unnecessary content (ads they see repeatedly) and only focus on the main content.
Banner Blindness is where your readers are overlooking your ads because they have discredited the “ad” area as having no value, so you’ll need to make sure you constantly change up your ad image at least every other day. If not you’ll see your click thru rates plummet and your costs skyrocket.
Other than that follow these 5 best practices and you too can get traffic for pennies…
1. Call Out To The Target
Your first step is to call out to your target audience in the title. You’re going to call out to the people you want reading and clicking in your ads. The only way to get their attention is to call out to them specifically. For example, If you were targeting tomato growers you’d say, “Do You Grow Tomatoes?” If you targeted bloggers you’d say, “Are You A Blogger?”
Also, notice the question mark at the end of both those titles. That one character has ALWAYS improved my conversions across text link ads, to Google Adwords, to Facebook advertising – even email subject lines. One of the reasons this works so well is because it causes the reader to think more… Are you a tomato grower? Yes – I love growing tomatoes, etc.
2. Ugly images get noticed.
I see too many people trying to use the gorgeous traditional images or they want to look really professional so they have this guy in a suit and tie, but those ads just do not convert.
They are the most susceptible to banner blindness because they are normal, they are common, they are easy, but they don’t break up the vision pattern. Where as if you put in an image that is less common or “ugly” the eye is attracted to it because it is out of place.
Take these two ad pictures for example – Picture 1 is a common stock image that has nothing to really think about, but picture number 2 breaks up your vision. It’s not even an ad you really want to look at for too long, but it gets the point across right away and it gets thought about.
When you’re ads get thought about, your ads get clicked!
Picture #1 |
Picture #2 |
Another tip for creating “ugly” images to overcome banner blindness is to take a regular picture and turn it upside down or sideways. Just make the picture look wrong or all jacked up.
Also, make sure you’re rotating your images. If you’re using the same “ugly” image repeatedly you’re feeding the banner blindness – change it up every couple days so that your viewers don’t ad your images to the “normal and useless” category. Doing these 3 things with your images will get your ad noticed and help improve your click through rate.
3. Predict their near future.
Step 3 is an important tip for you to really learn and apply to get your description section to be most effective. It’s a concept I learned from Brad Fallon a while back – he said that you need to demonstrate the buyers experience.
You need to pretend the person has already bought your product and describe to them what they are going through. If you are selling a Tomato Growing Secrets ebook where you teach readers to grow giant tomatoes. You need to write your description in a way that shows the viewer what their life will be like after they buy.
Other marketers call this WIIFM – “What’s In It For Me.” Tell the ad reader what their life is like now (after they’ve bought the product). For example, Imagine you’ve grown the largest tomato and your friends are raving about it – click here to find out how. This technique really helps the conversion of my ads.
Here are a few ads I created that use the tips I’ve listed here to help you when building your ads.
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4. Target your dream visitor
In this section we’ve created the ad and are now ready to target who gets to see the ad on Facebook. In this step you need to think, “who is the perfect visitor to your website.”
If you were selling a mommy blogger workshop in Tampa, Florida. You could specifically target 35 year old women, in Tampa, Fl. who like blogging. You can even target that they are married so that there is more of a chance they have kids (not that you have to be married to have kids, but it’s more likely).
Be specific and ad in the interest of your audience. If they are bloggers, you’d type in blog, blogs, blogging, blogger etc. If it was for the tomato growing niche I’d type in growing tomatoes, gardening, and gardener.
5. Pay for the eyeballs and sell clicks
My final tip is to get you to pay per impression – DO NOT pay per click. Here’s a little example to explain why you should choose CPM over CPC.
CPC MODEL -> 1,000 views @ $0.50 cpc x 10 clicks = $5.00
CPM MODEL -> 1,000 views @ $0.50 cpm x 10 clicks = $0.50
Most marketers get scared and pay CPC to insure they get the clicks, because on CPM you can pay for impressions but never get a click. Even if I only get 5 clicks out of 1,000 views and I’m paying $0.50cpm that’s still 5 clicks for just $0.50.
Just need to start out slow and test different ads to see which ones get clicked. Then once you know what catches their eye you’ve got just about all the traffic you can shake a stick at coming your way for pennies!
Here’s a short video showing you how to setup your own campaign…
It’s been my pleasure to share this with you, if you have any questions post them as a comment below. I’ll hang around for the next couple days to answer them all. You can also just say hi or leave some feedback, either way let’s chit chat ok!
Filed under Marketing Online by on Jul 27th, 2010.
