using internet marketing to grow your business
As many fields, products, and services are becoming commoditized, it’s become increasingly important to plan and implement a great customer experience. Much of this involves planning and gauging how your business makes your customer feel. Creating those “wow” moments aligned with your strategy is key.
Read on to find out what I’ve been learning from E-myth and Adaptive Path about how prototyping can be an effective tool for meeting these ends.
In case you weren’t aware, you can create a FeedBurner URL with a forward slash in it. I like this because you can design subfolders off of a main folder. Combine with MyBrand, and you have a rather intuitive system for feed URLs.
Read on to find out more about what this means for your site and its visitors.
The beautifully-designed source code control site GitHub has the best explanation of Gravatar yet:
You’ll notice that they don’t really explain it. They show the info that you need to know and help you get to the next step, which is gravatar.com. And gravatar.com does a really good job of explaining how it works.
Sometimes the best way to explain something is to not explain at all.
I wrote last week about showing, not telling. But I didn’t give any examples. Well, here you go.
They give us a sentence, 6 bullet points, and a dead-simple diagram showing what it does. They even show us a video demo that was created using the product itself. Brilliant.
Read on for 2 more examples.
Time and time again, I’ve been able to increase website performance simply by showing, not telling. Showing is a lot harder than telling. Presentations, graphics, videos, Flash animations, and demos are a lot harder than writing words.
Don’t get me wrong: the words are important. They’re what search engines see. People still need to read some.
But in this visual YouTube generation, people need to see that your product or service meets their needs, not just read about it.
This simple chart by Jessica Hagy is perfect when you think about web pages:
A single web page addresses a single topic. As the amount of information on your site grows, each page’s ability to walk this fine line grows more important.
Include the right amount of information—no more—and give the visitor a clear set of next steps. (You may have heard of these next steps referred to as “calls to action.”)
Even as a writer, you are also a designer.
I’ve been ripping on other sites lately, but I’ve just been overly amused lately at the poor quality of these scammers’ sites.
Take a look at the primary photo used on the home page of BackLinkPageRank, a link exchange service.
What the hell does that photo have to do with their service? Are free link exchanges fun for the whole family? Will your little girl laugh with glee as you gain low-quality links back to your site?
I’m hoping that the designer of this site thought, “Well, it’s better than empty space.” Then they would have at least a little saving grace.
But in this case, a better choice would have been leaving the space empty.
I picked up a simplehuman trash can on Monday and was surprised to see how well it was designed.
I had noticed on the label that it fit most plastic grocery bags but didn’t investigate it any further. When I got home, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had holders for the handles of [...]
This week, I’d like to point you to an article by Jared Spool called The $300 Million Button. Jared was hired to study the user experience of a $25 billion retailer’s web store. During his studies, he found that customers were being tripped up during a key part of the store’s check out process.
To sum up the direct results of his finding, Jared writes the following:
The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.
Finding the places on your site that are confusing your customers can yield similar results for your business (though probably not at that scale!).
I’ve seen it firsthand myself. Improve the experience, watch more business roll in.
Yahoo! photo-sharing site Flickr is a vast collection of imagery captured by talented photographers. And there’s a great way that you can tap into the community’s talent to improve your presentations and blog posts with better imagery. Even better, you won’t be breaking any copyright laws if you follow these steps.
About MeI'm Chris Peters, and I'm an addict. I want to make this marketing and technology stuff less of a burden. I hope I can help you out with that.
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