Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Illustrated SEO Competitive
Analysis Workflow'
Posted by Aleyda
One of the most important activities for any SEO process is the initial
competitive analysis. This process shouldcorrectly identify your SEO targets and
provide fundamental input to establish your overallstrategy.
Depending on the type, industry, and scope of the SEO process, this analysis
canbecome quitecomplex, as there are many factors to take into considerationmore
now than ever before.
In order to facilitate thisprocess (and make it easy to replicate, control, and
document), I've created a
step-by-step workflow with the different activities and factors to take into
consideration, includingidentifying SEO competitors, gathering the potential
keywords to target, assessing their level of difficulty, andselecting them based
on defined criteria:
If you prefer, you can also grab a
higher resolution version of the workflow from here.
The fouranalysis phases
As you can see, the SEO analysis workflow is divided into four phases:1.
Identify your potential SEO competitors
This initial phase isespecially helpfulif you're starting with an SEO process
for a new client or industry that you don't know anything about, and youneed to
start from scratch to identify all of the potentially relevant competitors.
It's important to note that these arenot necessarily limited tocompanies or
websites thatoffer the same type ofcontent, services, or products thatyou do,
but can beany website that competes with you in the search results for your
target keywords.2. Validate your SEO competitors
Once you have the potential competitors that you have gathered from different
relevant sources it's time to validate them, by analyzing and filtering which of
those are really already ranking, and to which degree, for the same keywords
that you're targeting.
Additionally, at this stage you'll also expand your list ofpotential
targetkeywords by performing keyword research. This should usesources beyond the
ones that you had already identified coming from your competitors and your
current organic search datasourcesfor which your competitors or yourself are
still not ranking, that might represent new opportunities.
3. Compare with your SEO competitors
Now that you have your SEO competitors and potential targetkeywords, you can
gather, list, and compare your site to yourcompetitors, using all of the
relevant data to select and prioritize thosekeywords. This will likely
includekeyword relevance, current rankings, search volume, ranked pages, as well
asdomains' link popularity,content optimization, andpage results
characteristics, among others.
4. Select your target keywords
It's finally time to analyze the previously gathered data for your own site and
your competitors, using the specified criteria to select the best keyword to
target for your own situation in the short-, mid-, and long-term during your SEO
process: Those with the highest relevance, search volume, andprofitability.
Thebest starting point isin rankings where you are competitive from a popularity
and content standpoint.
Tools & data sources
The data sources and toolsbesides the traditional ones from search engines,
like their keyword or webmaster toolsthat can help you to implement the process
(some of them mentioned in the workflow) are:To identify competitors: Alexa Top
Sites, SimilarWeb Websites Ranking & Sites Profile.
To identify keywords: SEMRush for keyword data, SuggestMtrx (you can also use
Ubersuggest or SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder) to gather Google suggestions
for your keywords.
To identify rankings: Authority labs, Positionly, Advanced Web Ranking, among
others.
To identify popularity: The Moz SEO Toolbar SERP overlay view, OpenSiteExplorer,
CognitiveSEO Backlink Explorer and MajesticSEO for link related data and easy to
develop popularity analysis.
To identify page optimization: Moz On-Page Grader, SEOchat's Page Comparison
tool and Web page SEO analysis tool for a quick on page content optimization
analysis.
To semi-automatize the process: There are tools that have already automatized
some of the phases in the process that can help you to advance faster: Moz
Keyword Difficulty and SERPs analysis tool, SERPIQ, SEMRush Keyword Difficulty
Tool.
Hopefully with these resources you'll be able to develop more and better SEO
competitive analysis!
What other aspects do you take into consideration and which other tools do you?
I look forward to hear about them in the comments. Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a
semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips,
and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of
stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Q243R9GxP68/illustrated-seo-competitive-analysis-workflow
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday 29 May 2014
Wednesday 28 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Take the SEO Expert Quiz and Rule
the Internet'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
You are master of the keyword.
You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. You rank for the word "rank."
Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm.
You, my friend, are an SEO expert.
Ready for fun? Here at Moz we gathered our wits (it didn't take very long) and
created a new quiz to test our SEO knowledge.
Based on a quiz thatour co-founder Rand first published back in 2005, at the
dawn of electronics and lighter-than-air travel, we now present to you the new
and improved
SEO Expert Quiz.
The quiz contains
50 questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are
randomized so no two people will get the exact same quiz with the same order of
questions.
Here's what to expect.1. The quiz is hard!
Like, astronaut training hard. Very few people score 100%. The breakdown of
performance looks like this:0-40% SEO Newbie: You rank on page 7, but are aiming
tomove up.
41-60% SEO Novice: Young, but strong in the ways of the Force, you are.
61-75% SEO Pro: The traffic is pouring in!
76-90% SEO Expert and Formula One race car driver
91-100% Lord of the Internet, Master of the SEO Realm2. For fun only!
The Expert Quiz isn't meant to be a rulebook of the Internet. You may even
disagree with some of the answersand you may be right!
We work in a constantly evolving field with lots of room for interpretation at
the top levels. Discussion and debate between very smart people is how we learn
and grow our expertise.
The only reward for finishing in first place is supreme bragging rights. If you
win your office pool, you may get free lunch for the next month. Please
participate and help our knowledge grow, but don't take it too seriously.3. MVP:
next steps
We built this out of passion for testing our SEO knowledge. If you like the
quiz, we'd love to build a more robust version that saves your score, and even
gives you a badge to display on your user profile. Let us know what you think.
Ready to get started?
Take the SEO Expert Quiz
Don't forget to show off your score when you finish. Let us know in the
comments below! What surprised you, whichquestion did you totally ace, and what
should we ask next time?
Rock on, SEO Sensei.Big thanks to Devin, Derric, Josh, Carin, Shelly and Rand
for the hard work putting this together.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a
semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips,
and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of
stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rtBR4mTAYi0/new-seo-expert-quiz
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
the Internet'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
You are master of the keyword.
You create 1,000 links with a single tweet. You rank for the word "rank."
Google engineers ask for your approval before updating their algorithm.
You, my friend, are an SEO expert.
Ready for fun? Here at Moz we gathered our wits (it didn't take very long) and
created a new quiz to test our SEO knowledge.
Based on a quiz thatour co-founder Rand first published back in 2005, at the
dawn of electronics and lighter-than-air travel, we now present to you the new
and improved
SEO Expert Quiz.
The quiz contains
50 questions and takes about 15 minutes to complete. The questions are
randomized so no two people will get the exact same quiz with the same order of
questions.
Here's what to expect.1. The quiz is hard!
Like, astronaut training hard. Very few people score 100%. The breakdown of
performance looks like this:0-40% SEO Newbie: You rank on page 7, but are aiming
tomove up.
41-60% SEO Novice: Young, but strong in the ways of the Force, you are.
61-75% SEO Pro: The traffic is pouring in!
76-90% SEO Expert and Formula One race car driver
91-100% Lord of the Internet, Master of the SEO Realm2. For fun only!
The Expert Quiz isn't meant to be a rulebook of the Internet. You may even
disagree with some of the answersand you may be right!
We work in a constantly evolving field with lots of room for interpretation at
the top levels. Discussion and debate between very smart people is how we learn
and grow our expertise.
The only reward for finishing in first place is supreme bragging rights. If you
win your office pool, you may get free lunch for the next month. Please
participate and help our knowledge grow, but don't take it too seriously.3. MVP:
next steps
We built this out of passion for testing our SEO knowledge. If you like the
quiz, we'd love to build a more robust version that saves your score, and even
gives you a badge to display on your user profile. Let us know what you think.
Ready to get started?
Take the SEO Expert Quiz
Don't forget to show off your score when you finish. Let us know in the
comments below! What surprised you, whichquestion did you totally ace, and what
should we ask next time?
Rock on, SEO Sensei.Big thanks to Devin, Derric, Josh, Carin, Shelly and Rand
for the hard work putting this together.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a
semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips,
and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of
stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/rtBR4mTAYi0/new-seo-expert-quiz
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 27 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '50+ Things You Should Learn About
Your Client'
Posted by RobOusbey
Six years ago I stood in a client's board room with a list of SEO
recommendations that I was convinced would earn me big smiles, firm handshakes,
and and maybe even a celebratory slap on the back. Instead I was met with icy
stares and nonchalance to my suggestions.
This was despite all my preparation to understand various intricate SEO
bestpractices, as well as the quirks of their website and CMS. I just had no
idea what this team believed in, or what angle I should use to persuade them to
get things done.
It was July 2008, and I decided:
SEO is easy. Consulting is hard.
Every day that I've been at Distilled, I've had the pleasure of learning more
about online marketing, but I've also been able to learnthrough research,
practice, observation and teachinglots about the skills that make someone an
effective consultant.
There are many
manytraits of a greatconsultant that can be developed, but one necessary skill
is:getting to know your client and understanding how you can be effective for
them. This knowledge is how you unlock your ability to talk to them about the
problems they're facing, discover the problems they didn't know they had, and
lets you be best set up to deliver solutions that they will actually understand
and implementand which will make a real and impactful change to their business.
Obviously this getting-to-know-youphase is important enough to invest real time
into, but I've found there are a bunch of hacks' that can help you get up to
speed on an organization and its individuals. I want to share these quick tips
and tricks with you, as well as a bunch of other questions that are worth
answeringeither through research, by observing the client, or by asking
outright.
Throughout this post, I've shared examples and anecdotes from my own consulting
experiences.
If you'd just prefer the TL;DR version,the top two or three questions in each
section are highlighted, or you can see the full list of my'50+ things to learn'
in this downloadablecheat sheet.
How much profit does the company make from each additional customer?
How are the company's financials; are they profitable, or making a loss?
We'll begin with this section because it's so cut-and-dry that it's little more
than business 101'. However, some of the seemingly obvious money-orientated
questions can be overlooked; I met with one marketer last year who had
absolutely no idea what the profit was on each sale he made, or which sales he
was making or losing money on; it reminded me that sometimes you do have to make
sure to ask the right questions and then go digging for the answers.
It's worth approaching this at two distinct levelsfrom the perspective of
individual transactions, and the overall view of the company or department.
On a transactional level, we want to know the revenue & profit. For a retailer,
that usually means understanding the average revenue associated with each
purchase. For some businesses, there may also be a lifetime value' (LTV) for
each new customerwhich takes into account repeat purchases or the average length
of time a user stays signed up (for a subscription product, or a SAAS company
like Moz).
For those businesses, it's also important to understand the the marginal
profit' of each purchase. (The amount made on each sale, after the cost of
actually providing the product.) Since most marketing teams also have a good
handle on their cost per acquisition' (the amount they spend to attract each
conversion, etc) it's particularly important to view this in the context of the
marginal profit from each sale. Where marginal profit is significantly higher
than CPA for a particular marketing channel or tactic, it might indicate an
opportunity to increase investment in that channel.
As well as understanding profit margin, CPA, etc, for your client's
transaction, it's worth getting to know what these look like for similar
companies or others in their niche. This maytake some hunting around and
research online, butwill give you an insight into how aggressive your client can
afford to be when it comes to beating their competitors.
On a business level, it's worth making sure you have a handle on certain
financial metrics such as revenue and operating profit. For larger / public
companies, I typically prefer to research these sorts of things myself. If you
have the time and interest to read through financial statements, Google is
usually the fastest way to find these documents. (Search for the company name
plus annual report' or 10k'.) However, various sources have done a good job
making financial information easily digestible; I'm fond of MSN Money (e.g.:
their page for Yelp, showing an $7.9m loss ) or simply Wikipedia (e.g.: their
page on Dell, showing a $2.3b profit.)
For anything other than a fast-growing startup, knowing the company's current
profitability is usually more interesting to me than revenue, as it can often
guide their approach to marketing investment. A company with very little profit
(or who is making a loss) is likely to be interested in very strategic spending,
with a well understood path to return. A company that is flush with profits
might be more able to include some more risky tactics in their marketing
strategy.
Does your POC have more of an analytical or emotional personality type?
How does your POC prefer to communicate on project matters?
Above everything else, the relationship between a consultant and the people
within a client organization is perhaps the biggest factor in determining how
successful the engagement will be. Although building any relationship takes
time, there are a few things I like to uncover (or just directly ask about) in
order to speed up that process.
Beyond just knowing each person's role in a team, I want to understand whatthey
are responsible for (what do they actually do from day-to-day?) and what they
are accountable for. The accountability' includes what they are measured on.
(Which is the most important thing to happen or improve so that they would be
celebrated/rewarded; what would they be criticized for if it didn't happen?)
For my main point of contact inside an organization, we often phrase this as
"what would make you look good to your boss?"which can help set at least one
clear objective for the engagement. Plus, helping your contact to be successful
has a fantastic side-effect: as they get promoted and move up their
organization, it can give you greater access, wider influence, and bigger
budgets to work with.
There are many frameworks for how people view situations and make decisions,
such as
Myers-Briggs, the learning modalities, etc. I love the incredibly simplified
approach of assessing whether someone is analytical (driven by data, talks about
facts, wants to know about ROI) or emotional (driven by personal connections,
talks about vision, wants to hear stories.) Although categorising people in such
a binary way is clearly a gross oversimplification of human nature, I've found
the value in this is that you can make an assessment of someone within justa few
minutes of meeting them, and immediately better tailor your approach to them.
As part of getting close to your client', I also like to ask (to individuals or
a team)
what they have been excited about recently. When you have to start making
recommendations to them, knowing what excites them gives an insight into the
kind of answers they'll respond well to, or what is most likely to get
implemented quickly.
Working quickly to understand how different individuals like to communicate can
reduce friction and repays the time invested very quickly. I've worked with
people who will reply to emails within minutes, people who prefer you to pick up
the phone and call them, people who are great at running meetings, even people
who always respond to messages on GChat / Skype. (And conversely, some people
will have an out-of-control inbox, some never listen to voicemails, and some
never get anything done in meetings.)
Related to communication styles, it's valuable to understand how people like to
receive reports & updateswhether from consultants or their own team-members.
Find out how often you're expected to prepare reports, the style (lots of data,
bottom line metrics, written explanations?), the formats (email, spreadsheets,
slide deck format, online dashboards?) and the audience (a project lead, a whole
team, executives, juniors?).
From a reporting perspective, I've worked with a branding guy who
"left the numbers up to other people", and was more interested in a monthly
face-to-face where we recapped the status of each initiative & campaign, and
I've known a successful CMO who reviewed a three-page spreadsheet/dashboard each
morning and would chase down different team members to ask about the story
behind changes in different numbers. In both cases, providing metrics & updates
in a way that fit their existing process let them understand my information and
respond to me more effectively.
Who will be making the decisions that affect your project?
What constraints does the team have to balance when making decisions?
Early on in my consulting career, I overlooked the value of investing time in
how organizations make decisions. Naively, I would deliver the right answer' for
a client, and be frustrated when they didn't decide to immediately put all hands
on deck implementing my brilliant ideas.
Through conversation with members of your client's team, you will hear about
decisions that have been madeat both the high/strategic level, and down at the
tactical level. Within those stories is the information about what criteria were
important, and who the influential people were. To kick-start these
conversations, you can ask
"which projects were big successes internally?" or "which big decisions do
people still talk about?"
It's easiest to understand the decision making process when you're clear on how
a team's success is measured. I once worked with a marketing team who were
measured and bonused on overall conversion rate of visitors. I failed to
persuade them to invest in SEO because even though it would have brought a fire
hose of new traffic and customers, organic visitors to their site converted at
~6%, which brought down their current ~8% average. I was gobsmacked, but once I
understood their situation, I realized I had to go to the CMO instead to explain
why the teams current objectives were counterproductive.
An aspect of this which can take longer to grok are the constraints, roadblocks
and objections that a team faces. While some are quite easy to ask about (eg:
the team that has a limited budget to invest in marketing activities), some are
only uncovered throughout a project (eg: the boss who wouldn't A/B test pricing
in marketing emails, in case a customer found out that someone else was offered
a deeper discount.) Effective consultants will be respectful of an
organization's history, values and beliefsbut great consultants can balance this
with knowing when to challenge those things.
Finally, a great hack' I learned from one colleague at Distilledis that there's
a lot of discovery value in asking a new client
"what made you hire me for this project?" This forces them to provide insight
into how they made a very real, very recent decision. Plus, by exposing what
they valued in making the decision, it also does a lot to set expectations and
anagenda for the engagement.
What criteria are used to prioritize new tasks or projects?
How does the team tend to run / use meetings?
How risk tolerant is the team?
Beyond just how plans are made, I always want to discover how work is
prioritized, the criteria for that prioritization, and how the plans are shared
with the team. Occasionally, a team will perfectly implement the Agile
methodology, others rely on an odd Waterfall-esqe model, many have something
less formal still. Understanding their processes lets you know, for example,
whether quick & easy wins can be hustled up the backlog, or whether they will
have to wait their turn'.
Related to processes are the tools a team uses for project management. They may
rely on Trello/Basecamp/MS Project, or a wall full of sticky notesand it'll be
up to you to integrate yourself.
I'm always fascinated by the meeting culture' at different companies. I've seen
companies where the most effective work happens during impromptu five-minute
stand up meetings, and organizations that are crippled by the archetypal
terrible' meetings (too long, too many people, no agenda, no actions, etc.)
Understanding whether I need to be in the room' to help make decisions, or
whether to avoid any unproductive time-sinks, improves my effectiveness as much
as my sanity.
There are myriad other cultural factors worth picking up on relatively quickly.
How you behave with them, and the recommendations you make could be influenced
by:a team's degree of risk tolerance (eg: a marketing team might be happy with a
PR story that raises some controversy around their brand, butwouldn'tdo anything
that puts their rankings at risk of a Google penalty)
their bias to action (are they in the Facebook-esque mold of move fast and break
things'?)
their hunger for success (how invested are the team members in the
organization's achievements, or to what degree is this just a job for them?)
For some cultural factors, you just need a trusted person who can give you the
inside track, rather than waiting to recognize them yourself. For example: I've
seen everything from companies that were run like non-stop frat parties,
tocompanieswhere bad language was highly frowned uponso it's good to know which
sort of team you might be talking to.
What is the company's mission / vision?
Does the team you're working with believe in these things?
There are bunch of very straightforward questions here, which typically don't
have simple answers. What is the company's vision? (IE: what do they believe
about the future and their place in it?) Do they have an explicit mission' or
purpose'? What are their stated values? (For instance
Distilled, Moz and Amazon are all very public about these.) Do they have a
BHAG?
Beyond these things, do they have a company strategy (or marketing strategy)
that is congruent with the vision/mission/purpose?
However, beyond the
presence of things like a mission statement or values, I like to understand how
much the team members have bought into all of these things, or whether the CEO
is alone in believing these things. This tells me how much to rely on those
values in working with the team. For example: I've seen Amazon employees make
certain decisions explicitly because "this demonstrates a bias for action", but
that buy-in' doesn't exist at every company.
Does everyone in the the team have a good understanding of the company's USP,
customers, etc?
How much knowledge of your niche (SEO, social media, etc) does the client's
team have?
With each new client, you may have to invest time in reading and learning about
an industry that you're unfamiliar with. (The client can obviously explain lots
to you, but probably shouldn't be your only source; they may be snowblinded, or
only viewing the niche through the lens of their own organization.)
But as a sense-check: don't be afraid to get your client's team members talking
to youabout the company's work and their industry. A memorable experience was
being in the room with the marketing department from a tech company, where 50%
of the team admitted to not really understanding the industry, or their
company's services.
In the other direction, don't skip over getting a sense of the team's
understanding of your industry, whether that's marketing, social media, SEO, UX,
etc. I overlooked this with one of my early clients, and realized far too late
that I was talking to a room split between experienced marketing people, and
product people who didn't know the first thing about SEO. (One quote that stuck
in my head, maybe 45 minutes into the session:
"so you're saying that links are good?" I learnt mylesson very quickly at that
moment.)
Research senior people and your point-of-contact online to find their favorite
concepts or metaphors.
Sign upto all of theirmarketingemails.
Beyond just asking questions or reading about the things I've mentioned, I also
like to do a bit of stalking to see how a company's leaders talkfor exampleabout
their industry and how they use their values when speaking.
The company's CEO, CMO and your point-of-contact are great people to research;
Twitter feeds, blog posts and bylined articles are easy places to start, but you
can usually find webinars, keynotes or presentations to watch as well. Framing
concepts using their own favorite words, phrases and metaphors can be a quick
route being better understood.
In terms of ongoing research of a client, there's an old (but still worthwhile)
recommendation to set up a Google Alert for their nameboth to watch the organic
chatter that exists around the brand, to make yourself look very on-the-ball,
but also justto find out about the other marketing/PR activity that your
contacts may not have known enough about to mention it to you.
In addition, I suggest signing up for all of the client's email marketing
lists, in order to see a side of their content that is hidden from the web or
search engine spiders.
One of my colleagues will routinely go through the customer process' for every
new client, to learn more about how they manage their funnel. (She now has
everything from insurance quotes for her fake grand piano, to a contractor
listing for her fake plumbing companybut always find insights that would have
been missed otherwise.)
Finally, spending time in a client's office can be an expensive, but worthwhile
endeavorparticularly early on in a relationship. While trying to discover the
answers to everything I've talked about above, it's illuminating to have a room
with a good mix of team members. While one person is talking, watch everyone
else for their reactions. A nod of approval, a roll of the eyes, pursed lips, or
a deep breath can all mean different thingsand it's worth catching that person
later to ask their opinion, or (if you're feeling really confident) mine for
conflict there-and-then with the group.
I hope you've been able to find at least one new question or shortcut here, to
give you extra insight into new clients. The
summary cheatsheetis here, and can even be downloaded in PDF formatso you can
load it onto your phone/tablet/Kindle and take it with you to client
meetings.Download it now!Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer
updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links
uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you
don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/g1tD3oKLtYQ/50-things-you-should-learn-about-your-client
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Your Client'
Posted by RobOusbey
Six years ago I stood in a client's board room with a list of SEO
recommendations that I was convinced would earn me big smiles, firm handshakes,
and and maybe even a celebratory slap on the back. Instead I was met with icy
stares and nonchalance to my suggestions.
This was despite all my preparation to understand various intricate SEO
bestpractices, as well as the quirks of their website and CMS. I just had no
idea what this team believed in, or what angle I should use to persuade them to
get things done.
It was July 2008, and I decided:
SEO is easy. Consulting is hard.
Every day that I've been at Distilled, I've had the pleasure of learning more
about online marketing, but I've also been able to learnthrough research,
practice, observation and teachinglots about the skills that make someone an
effective consultant.
There are many
manytraits of a greatconsultant that can be developed, but one necessary skill
is:getting to know your client and understanding how you can be effective for
them. This knowledge is how you unlock your ability to talk to them about the
problems they're facing, discover the problems they didn't know they had, and
lets you be best set up to deliver solutions that they will actually understand
and implementand which will make a real and impactful change to their business.
Obviously this getting-to-know-youphase is important enough to invest real time
into, but I've found there are a bunch of hacks' that can help you get up to
speed on an organization and its individuals. I want to share these quick tips
and tricks with you, as well as a bunch of other questions that are worth
answeringeither through research, by observing the client, or by asking
outright.
Throughout this post, I've shared examples and anecdotes from my own consulting
experiences.
If you'd just prefer the TL;DR version,the top two or three questions in each
section are highlighted, or you can see the full list of my'50+ things to learn'
in this downloadablecheat sheet.
How much profit does the company make from each additional customer?
How are the company's financials; are they profitable, or making a loss?
We'll begin with this section because it's so cut-and-dry that it's little more
than business 101'. However, some of the seemingly obvious money-orientated
questions can be overlooked; I met with one marketer last year who had
absolutely no idea what the profit was on each sale he made, or which sales he
was making or losing money on; it reminded me that sometimes you do have to make
sure to ask the right questions and then go digging for the answers.
It's worth approaching this at two distinct levelsfrom the perspective of
individual transactions, and the overall view of the company or department.
On a transactional level, we want to know the revenue & profit. For a retailer,
that usually means understanding the average revenue associated with each
purchase. For some businesses, there may also be a lifetime value' (LTV) for
each new customerwhich takes into account repeat purchases or the average length
of time a user stays signed up (for a subscription product, or a SAAS company
like Moz).
For those businesses, it's also important to understand the the marginal
profit' of each purchase. (The amount made on each sale, after the cost of
actually providing the product.) Since most marketing teams also have a good
handle on their cost per acquisition' (the amount they spend to attract each
conversion, etc) it's particularly important to view this in the context of the
marginal profit from each sale. Where marginal profit is significantly higher
than CPA for a particular marketing channel or tactic, it might indicate an
opportunity to increase investment in that channel.
As well as understanding profit margin, CPA, etc, for your client's
transaction, it's worth getting to know what these look like for similar
companies or others in their niche. This maytake some hunting around and
research online, butwill give you an insight into how aggressive your client can
afford to be when it comes to beating their competitors.
On a business level, it's worth making sure you have a handle on certain
financial metrics such as revenue and operating profit. For larger / public
companies, I typically prefer to research these sorts of things myself. If you
have the time and interest to read through financial statements, Google is
usually the fastest way to find these documents. (Search for the company name
plus annual report' or 10k'.) However, various sources have done a good job
making financial information easily digestible; I'm fond of MSN Money (e.g.:
their page for Yelp, showing an $7.9m loss ) or simply Wikipedia (e.g.: their
page on Dell, showing a $2.3b profit.)
For anything other than a fast-growing startup, knowing the company's current
profitability is usually more interesting to me than revenue, as it can often
guide their approach to marketing investment. A company with very little profit
(or who is making a loss) is likely to be interested in very strategic spending,
with a well understood path to return. A company that is flush with profits
might be more able to include some more risky tactics in their marketing
strategy.
Does your POC have more of an analytical or emotional personality type?
How does your POC prefer to communicate on project matters?
Above everything else, the relationship between a consultant and the people
within a client organization is perhaps the biggest factor in determining how
successful the engagement will be. Although building any relationship takes
time, there are a few things I like to uncover (or just directly ask about) in
order to speed up that process.
Beyond just knowing each person's role in a team, I want to understand whatthey
are responsible for (what do they actually do from day-to-day?) and what they
are accountable for. The accountability' includes what they are measured on.
(Which is the most important thing to happen or improve so that they would be
celebrated/rewarded; what would they be criticized for if it didn't happen?)
For my main point of contact inside an organization, we often phrase this as
"what would make you look good to your boss?"which can help set at least one
clear objective for the engagement. Plus, helping your contact to be successful
has a fantastic side-effect: as they get promoted and move up their
organization, it can give you greater access, wider influence, and bigger
budgets to work with.
There are many frameworks for how people view situations and make decisions,
such as
Myers-Briggs, the learning modalities, etc. I love the incredibly simplified
approach of assessing whether someone is analytical (driven by data, talks about
facts, wants to know about ROI) or emotional (driven by personal connections,
talks about vision, wants to hear stories.) Although categorising people in such
a binary way is clearly a gross oversimplification of human nature, I've found
the value in this is that you can make an assessment of someone within justa few
minutes of meeting them, and immediately better tailor your approach to them.
As part of getting close to your client', I also like to ask (to individuals or
a team)
what they have been excited about recently. When you have to start making
recommendations to them, knowing what excites them gives an insight into the
kind of answers they'll respond well to, or what is most likely to get
implemented quickly.
Working quickly to understand how different individuals like to communicate can
reduce friction and repays the time invested very quickly. I've worked with
people who will reply to emails within minutes, people who prefer you to pick up
the phone and call them, people who are great at running meetings, even people
who always respond to messages on GChat / Skype. (And conversely, some people
will have an out-of-control inbox, some never listen to voicemails, and some
never get anything done in meetings.)
Related to communication styles, it's valuable to understand how people like to
receive reports & updateswhether from consultants or their own team-members.
Find out how often you're expected to prepare reports, the style (lots of data,
bottom line metrics, written explanations?), the formats (email, spreadsheets,
slide deck format, online dashboards?) and the audience (a project lead, a whole
team, executives, juniors?).
From a reporting perspective, I've worked with a branding guy who
"left the numbers up to other people", and was more interested in a monthly
face-to-face where we recapped the status of each initiative & campaign, and
I've known a successful CMO who reviewed a three-page spreadsheet/dashboard each
morning and would chase down different team members to ask about the story
behind changes in different numbers. In both cases, providing metrics & updates
in a way that fit their existing process let them understand my information and
respond to me more effectively.
Who will be making the decisions that affect your project?
What constraints does the team have to balance when making decisions?
Early on in my consulting career, I overlooked the value of investing time in
how organizations make decisions. Naively, I would deliver the right answer' for
a client, and be frustrated when they didn't decide to immediately put all hands
on deck implementing my brilliant ideas.
Through conversation with members of your client's team, you will hear about
decisions that have been madeat both the high/strategic level, and down at the
tactical level. Within those stories is the information about what criteria were
important, and who the influential people were. To kick-start these
conversations, you can ask
"which projects were big successes internally?" or "which big decisions do
people still talk about?"
It's easiest to understand the decision making process when you're clear on how
a team's success is measured. I once worked with a marketing team who were
measured and bonused on overall conversion rate of visitors. I failed to
persuade them to invest in SEO because even though it would have brought a fire
hose of new traffic and customers, organic visitors to their site converted at
~6%, which brought down their current ~8% average. I was gobsmacked, but once I
understood their situation, I realized I had to go to the CMO instead to explain
why the teams current objectives were counterproductive.
An aspect of this which can take longer to grok are the constraints, roadblocks
and objections that a team faces. While some are quite easy to ask about (eg:
the team that has a limited budget to invest in marketing activities), some are
only uncovered throughout a project (eg: the boss who wouldn't A/B test pricing
in marketing emails, in case a customer found out that someone else was offered
a deeper discount.) Effective consultants will be respectful of an
organization's history, values and beliefsbut great consultants can balance this
with knowing when to challenge those things.
Finally, a great hack' I learned from one colleague at Distilledis that there's
a lot of discovery value in asking a new client
"what made you hire me for this project?" This forces them to provide insight
into how they made a very real, very recent decision. Plus, by exposing what
they valued in making the decision, it also does a lot to set expectations and
anagenda for the engagement.
What criteria are used to prioritize new tasks or projects?
How does the team tend to run / use meetings?
How risk tolerant is the team?
Beyond just how plans are made, I always want to discover how work is
prioritized, the criteria for that prioritization, and how the plans are shared
with the team. Occasionally, a team will perfectly implement the Agile
methodology, others rely on an odd Waterfall-esqe model, many have something
less formal still. Understanding their processes lets you know, for example,
whether quick & easy wins can be hustled up the backlog, or whether they will
have to wait their turn'.
Related to processes are the tools a team uses for project management. They may
rely on Trello/Basecamp/MS Project, or a wall full of sticky notesand it'll be
up to you to integrate yourself.
I'm always fascinated by the meeting culture' at different companies. I've seen
companies where the most effective work happens during impromptu five-minute
stand up meetings, and organizations that are crippled by the archetypal
terrible' meetings (too long, too many people, no agenda, no actions, etc.)
Understanding whether I need to be in the room' to help make decisions, or
whether to avoid any unproductive time-sinks, improves my effectiveness as much
as my sanity.
There are myriad other cultural factors worth picking up on relatively quickly.
How you behave with them, and the recommendations you make could be influenced
by:a team's degree of risk tolerance (eg: a marketing team might be happy with a
PR story that raises some controversy around their brand, butwouldn'tdo anything
that puts their rankings at risk of a Google penalty)
their bias to action (are they in the Facebook-esque mold of move fast and break
things'?)
their hunger for success (how invested are the team members in the
organization's achievements, or to what degree is this just a job for them?)
For some cultural factors, you just need a trusted person who can give you the
inside track, rather than waiting to recognize them yourself. For example: I've
seen everything from companies that were run like non-stop frat parties,
tocompanieswhere bad language was highly frowned uponso it's good to know which
sort of team you might be talking to.
What is the company's mission / vision?
Does the team you're working with believe in these things?
There are bunch of very straightforward questions here, which typically don't
have simple answers. What is the company's vision? (IE: what do they believe
about the future and their place in it?) Do they have an explicit mission' or
purpose'? What are their stated values? (For instance
Distilled, Moz and Amazon are all very public about these.) Do they have a
BHAG?
Beyond these things, do they have a company strategy (or marketing strategy)
that is congruent with the vision/mission/purpose?
However, beyond the
presence of things like a mission statement or values, I like to understand how
much the team members have bought into all of these things, or whether the CEO
is alone in believing these things. This tells me how much to rely on those
values in working with the team. For example: I've seen Amazon employees make
certain decisions explicitly because "this demonstrates a bias for action", but
that buy-in' doesn't exist at every company.
Does everyone in the the team have a good understanding of the company's USP,
customers, etc?
How much knowledge of your niche (SEO, social media, etc) does the client's
team have?
With each new client, you may have to invest time in reading and learning about
an industry that you're unfamiliar with. (The client can obviously explain lots
to you, but probably shouldn't be your only source; they may be snowblinded, or
only viewing the niche through the lens of their own organization.)
But as a sense-check: don't be afraid to get your client's team members talking
to youabout the company's work and their industry. A memorable experience was
being in the room with the marketing department from a tech company, where 50%
of the team admitted to not really understanding the industry, or their
company's services.
In the other direction, don't skip over getting a sense of the team's
understanding of your industry, whether that's marketing, social media, SEO, UX,
etc. I overlooked this with one of my early clients, and realized far too late
that I was talking to a room split between experienced marketing people, and
product people who didn't know the first thing about SEO. (One quote that stuck
in my head, maybe 45 minutes into the session:
"so you're saying that links are good?" I learnt mylesson very quickly at that
moment.)
Research senior people and your point-of-contact online to find their favorite
concepts or metaphors.
Sign upto all of theirmarketingemails.
Beyond just asking questions or reading about the things I've mentioned, I also
like to do a bit of stalking to see how a company's leaders talkfor exampleabout
their industry and how they use their values when speaking.
The company's CEO, CMO and your point-of-contact are great people to research;
Twitter feeds, blog posts and bylined articles are easy places to start, but you
can usually find webinars, keynotes or presentations to watch as well. Framing
concepts using their own favorite words, phrases and metaphors can be a quick
route being better understood.
In terms of ongoing research of a client, there's an old (but still worthwhile)
recommendation to set up a Google Alert for their nameboth to watch the organic
chatter that exists around the brand, to make yourself look very on-the-ball,
but also justto find out about the other marketing/PR activity that your
contacts may not have known enough about to mention it to you.
In addition, I suggest signing up for all of the client's email marketing
lists, in order to see a side of their content that is hidden from the web or
search engine spiders.
One of my colleagues will routinely go through the customer process' for every
new client, to learn more about how they manage their funnel. (She now has
everything from insurance quotes for her fake grand piano, to a contractor
listing for her fake plumbing companybut always find insights that would have
been missed otherwise.)
Finally, spending time in a client's office can be an expensive, but worthwhile
endeavorparticularly early on in a relationship. While trying to discover the
answers to everything I've talked about above, it's illuminating to have a room
with a good mix of team members. While one person is talking, watch everyone
else for their reactions. A nod of approval, a roll of the eyes, pursed lips, or
a deep breath can all mean different thingsand it's worth catching that person
later to ask their opinion, or (if you're feeling really confident) mine for
conflict there-and-then with the group.
I hope you've been able to find at least one new question or shortcut here, to
give you extra insight into new clients. The
summary cheatsheetis here, and can even be downloaded in PDF formatso you can
load it onto your phone/tablet/Kindle and take it with you to client
meetings.Download it now!Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer
updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links
uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you
don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
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peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Sunday 25 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How to Be More Creative in Your
Online Campaigns'
Posted by ShellShockThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of
the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the
broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is
common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most
importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can't adapt,
evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with
nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.Be more creative, is a
phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given
to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative? There is much confusion
about what creativity is and a general misconception of mistaking style for
creativity. Most designers are stylists: they make things look good. Creativity
is about concepts, ideas and innovation. In art school, I was always taught that
being able to justify the concept was the most important element of creativity.
You had to argue your reason for why the design piece was a solution to the
problem. I can still recall how nervous I used to get before a group critique
session (the phrase blood bath comes to mind) even though it was over 20 years
ago. It's not about how good it looks - it's how well it answers the
questions.Creativity is a skill we can all access. Everyone has the capacity to
generate ideas. Admittedly, some people are more inclined towards creative
thinking, just as some are able to figure large maths calculations in their head
or swim like Michael Phelps. But anyone can increase his or her level of
creativity by learning the skills of thinking and exercising their idea muscle.I
recently published a free ebook called 'What is Creativity?' and the following
are six ideas extracted and expanded from the book to increase your creative
thinking and improve your online campaigns:Creativity is not a talent, it's a
way of operating. John CleeseLearning to switch into open modeEx Monty Python,
John Cleese understands and defines the creative process as learning to switch
between two states or modes: open and closed. When we are under pressure and
stress to deliver, such as in our everyday working lives, we are in closed mode.
When we are relaxed, detached from problems and playful, we are in the open
mode. Open can be considered playful (lateral thinking) and closed logical
(vertical thinking). Just as we need both lateral thinking and vertical
thinking, we need open and closed states to solve a problem: the open state
allows us to develop creative ideas and then the closed state to plan and
implement the idea. These are similarly aligned to vertical and lateral thinking
processes.1: How to achieve an Open stateSchedule time to avoid being distracted
and remove the pressure to instantly generate ideas; your brain needs time to
open up. The optimum amount of time is 90 minutes, it takes a minimum of 60
minutes for the brain to focus on a task and after 90 minutes will be prone to
distraction and need a break. Place of work is essential for creatives to get
into state - most writers and artists will follow a routine and often have
isolated spaces such as garden offices to minimize distraction. Some artists
need to be surrounded by ephemera such as the collection of memorabilia that
Paul Smith surrounds himself with for inspiration. Others, like Maya Angelou,
prefer minimalism and, like myself, need an uncluttered desk and space for an
uncluttered mind to be able to think.Agatha Christie preferred to work in a
large Victorian bath whilst eating apples. Benjamin Franklin would work naked
for an hour every morning. Maya Angelou preferred the isolation of a hotel room
and requested everything removed from the walls; she would bring her own sherry
and ashtray. The eccentric poet Dame Edith Sitwell would lie down in a coffin
finding inspiration in the claustrophobic and restrictive space.You don't need
to go to the extremes of a coffin but find a space which is conducive to
relaxation and without distraction, anywhere that removes you from association
with work or pressure (preferably not home). Try a coffee shop (JK Rowling
famously wrote Harry Potter in her local coffee shop), the library, a hotel or
even a camper van (Breaking Bad style). Removing yourself from the usual place
of work will remove yourself from distraction, help the brain to break pattern
which in turn will switch into a more receptive state for ideas. To access open
mode if you are in a group:The open state thrives in humor and play so try the
dinner party technique: create the dream dinner party guest list, such as
Einstein, Da Vinci, Churchill, Kennedy or even fictional characters such as Don
Corleone, Jack Sparrow and Luke Skywalker. Each person should take a persona and
become their character - they must answer questions and think like they would
imagine that character to think. The perfect warm up exercise; it is huge fun,
encourages humor, it breaks awkwardness and forces the brain to break pattern
from your normal style of thinking. Keep this game going for a minimum of 20
minutes before your brainstorm.To access open mode if you are alone:Research has
shown a correlation between increased dopamine and creativity. Dopamine is a
pleasure chemical which the brain releases to signal success but this chemical
is not as straight forward and predictable as a reliable tool. The increase of
endorphins will elevate our mood and help us achieve our open state: physical
exercise is one of the easiest ways to access a rush of endorphins although,
spicy food, sexual activity and pain can also trigger release - so whatever gets
you going!Try a walk, swim or bike ride to stimulate feel good. You want to
ensure a careful balance of feeling exhilarated but also avoiding energy
depletion. Opt for a route that you haven't been on before to break any
automatic behavior patterns. Walking in a new part of town and observing the
unfamiliar territory or running backwards will stimulate new thought and
movement patterns thus putting you into a more creative and receptive state.
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because they didnt really do it, the just
saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. Steve Jobs2: Make
connections with an ideas wallThe ability to make connections and see
relationships between seemingly random elements is the secret to creativity.
Combining old elements to create something new.Idea walls solve crimesIt's no
coincidence that you see examples of ideas walls on TV dramas and movies such
as: Homelands, Sherlock Holmes, A Beautiful Mind and Three and a Half Days
Later. Detectives have long used this technique to assist solving crimes.
Placing photographs of the known or suspected perpetrators, victims, crime
scenes and evidence on a wall enables items of evidence to be repositioned and
grouped; string can link items together for visual affect. A detective can then
stand back and mentally take in a great deal of information at once. The brain
begins to process and use its natural ability to seek the connections between
the items, find the clues and answers to the case.images from Crazy WallsWhen
the BBC conducted a site redesign in 2010 they printed out the entire site and
mounted on a wall affectionately known as 'the wall of shame'. To enable them to
better visualize what they had and to unify the visual and interaction design of
the desktop and mobile sites.How to create a content strategy ideas wallTools
needed: paper, colored pens, highlighter pens, print outs of all reference
material, colored string and push-pins, post it notes, blu tack or tape, and a
large wall space, pin board or sheets of foam board.Organize your reference
material into themes or groups and pin/stick to the wall.Devise a color code
system for your different groups with the pen color you have and use the colored
pens and highlighter and mark and highlight relevant pages and sections of
information. (Homelands style, see above)For example, if you are working on
content strategy for your site group into:Influencers - list influencers who
could help to broadcast your content and sub group in different social media
channels, newsletters and authority sites (eg Guardian, Huffington Post, Fast
Company)Audit - audit current site contentIdea sources - places to mine ideas
from such as offline periodicals, online Q&A sites like Quora, social media
channels and Google trendsHost Locations - potential sites to target for
exposure, shares and links: authority hub sites, bloggers, online
magazines/publishers, email newsletters and social media sitesBy grouping
related themes we start to see patterns. If you have a piece that doesn't fit
into a group this 'outlier' could in itself give ideas.Stand back from the wall
and look for potential relationships or connections between the information.
Using push pins and colored string make a visual link between the two. (See
photos above)The key here is flexibility: move pieces of paper round, create new
string links, devise new groups - by repositioning, regrouping and relinking
this is where your ideas will start to form and generate as you begin to make
the connections.If wall space is an issue or you prefer a digital version,
Mural.ly is an online alternative to creating an ideas wall; describing itself
as "an online whiteboard designed to visually organize ideas and collaborate in
a playful way." Mural.ly allows collaboration of team members and you can drag
and drop your reference material onto the white board and reposition items and
make notes. I have only just begun to play with this tool and it has huge depth
and potential to assist in creative projects.image from Mural.lyPinterest is one
of my favourite scrapbook tools for collecting visual information as an
alternative. I use Evernote extensively for collecting information and research
material. Quora is my favourite site for finding ideas for content.4: How to
brainstorm the right way:Generating ideas for content, marketing strategies or
even creative use of data can all be more productive if tackled in a group - the
synergy from more than one person will bring fresh perspective, new ideas and
energy. But, brainstorming is such a common term that most people don't consider
how to undertake a session effectively.One of the most important elements within
team idea generation is trust and harmony. The group must be able to work well
together through respect for each others' opinions and ability and a general air
of amiability. Any disagreeable personalities, critical individuals or large
egos are not conducive to successful creative brainstorming and should be
excluded from the group.image from Atomic SpinThe following rules should be set
to deter any fear or negativity that can squash creativity so that you can
encourage a safe space to open up:A diverse range of skills present in the group
works well in bringing alternative approaches, as does varying levels of
experience, age, gender and personality.Allocate enough time to warm up and to
focus. Between an hour and 90 minutes is preferable - after this the brain loses
focus and needs a break. I recommend the 'dinner party' game above or another
icebreaker to create an open state.Allow the most junior person in the room to
speak first and in turn to most senior. This removes any pressure from a junior
member who may be intimidated to follow an experienced authority.Stay focused on
the topic. It is natural in group discussion to lose focus and drift into other
subjects. The moderator must be vigilant in this area.An experienced moderator
is essential to the process and should be able to direct and manage the group
without obstructing and keep the group on track and focused and ensure everyone
follows the rules (such as not being negative or overbearing). The moderator
will take notes (on a white board) and assist as an objective opinion to draw
connections between ideas.Above all else no judging, criticism or rejection of
any idea anything is valid and can be considered."Creativity is the process of
having original ideas that have value. Sir Ken Robinson5: Change your thinking,
change your lifeIf your natural disposition is not creative a creative thinker
you can become more creative through repeated action, discipline and learning
new ways to think. Repetition and discipline The more the brain processes a
routine or skill, such as a new language or driving a car, the deeper the
synapses physically carve a channel in the brain. Which explains to some degree
why when we first learn a skill we have to concentrate intensely; it takes a
great deal of energy, but through applied discipline it eventually becomes
almost automatic and we dont appear to think about what we are doing, the
subconscious takes over. Ten ideas listsOne of my favorite exercises to train
your brain and develop your idea muscle is to generate lists of ideas everyday.
I have to credit James Altucher and I recommend his article on how to become an
idea machine here:The concept is simple but challenging: think of ten new ideas.
These can be for anything such as ten new business ideas, ten new ways to obtain
quality earned links, ten new ways to improve conversion on a page or ten new
ways to save energy, ten new ways to make a better cup of coffee or ten new ways
to travel to work. For example:Ten new ways to travel to work for free:WalkPush
bikeRunRoller bladesHitchhikeHorseSkate board tied to a car (do I need to
explain why this is a bad idea?)Get a job next to a canal and kayak to workMove
to the Caribbean, live in a beach hut and swim to workMove to the top of a hill
and go kart - makes the home journey a challenge (next list?)The purpose is not
to create ideas you will act on or even sensible, rational or reasonable ideas.
This is gym training for the mind only so don't get precious with your lists.
Your first few lists may appear deceptively easy but as you begin to run out of
obvious ideas you have to work hard just to think of list ideas and ten new
ideas for my ten new ideas list is going to make your brain work for it. Don't
make the mistake of underrating this exercise; everything improves and becomes
easier with practice and repetition.6: Garbage in: Garbage outMy advice above
all else is to read as widely as possible as I believe this feeds a creative
mind more than any other activity. Just as athletes can only achieve their
personal best if they eat a highly optimized diet, creatives need quality brain
food and mental stimulation on a regular basis to operate at their creative
best. You get out what you put in.This article is an extract from 'What is
Creativity?' a 76 page free ebook which offers an introduction to creativity
with actionable tips to improve your thinking skills. The second part of the
book is dedicated to thought leaders interviews who were posed the question:
"what does creativity meant to you?". Contributors include: Rand Fishkin, Bas
Van Den Beld, Paddy Moogan, Neil Patel, Dave Trott, Lee Odden and Chris Brogan.
You can download a free copy at creativity101 here... Sign up for The Moz Top
10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news,
tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive
digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/eY_bZd-x1XU/how-to-be-more-creative-in-your-online-campaigns
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Online Campaigns'
Posted by ShellShockThis post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of
the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the
broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is
common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most
importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can't adapt,
evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with
nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.Be more creative, is a
phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given
to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative? There is much confusion
about what creativity is and a general misconception of mistaking style for
creativity. Most designers are stylists: they make things look good. Creativity
is about concepts, ideas and innovation. In art school, I was always taught that
being able to justify the concept was the most important element of creativity.
You had to argue your reason for why the design piece was a solution to the
problem. I can still recall how nervous I used to get before a group critique
session (the phrase blood bath comes to mind) even though it was over 20 years
ago. It's not about how good it looks - it's how well it answers the
questions.Creativity is a skill we can all access. Everyone has the capacity to
generate ideas. Admittedly, some people are more inclined towards creative
thinking, just as some are able to figure large maths calculations in their head
or swim like Michael Phelps. But anyone can increase his or her level of
creativity by learning the skills of thinking and exercising their idea muscle.I
recently published a free ebook called 'What is Creativity?' and the following
are six ideas extracted and expanded from the book to increase your creative
thinking and improve your online campaigns:Creativity is not a talent, it's a
way of operating. John CleeseLearning to switch into open modeEx Monty Python,
John Cleese understands and defines the creative process as learning to switch
between two states or modes: open and closed. When we are under pressure and
stress to deliver, such as in our everyday working lives, we are in closed mode.
When we are relaxed, detached from problems and playful, we are in the open
mode. Open can be considered playful (lateral thinking) and closed logical
(vertical thinking). Just as we need both lateral thinking and vertical
thinking, we need open and closed states to solve a problem: the open state
allows us to develop creative ideas and then the closed state to plan and
implement the idea. These are similarly aligned to vertical and lateral thinking
processes.1: How to achieve an Open stateSchedule time to avoid being distracted
and remove the pressure to instantly generate ideas; your brain needs time to
open up. The optimum amount of time is 90 minutes, it takes a minimum of 60
minutes for the brain to focus on a task and after 90 minutes will be prone to
distraction and need a break. Place of work is essential for creatives to get
into state - most writers and artists will follow a routine and often have
isolated spaces such as garden offices to minimize distraction. Some artists
need to be surrounded by ephemera such as the collection of memorabilia that
Paul Smith surrounds himself with for inspiration. Others, like Maya Angelou,
prefer minimalism and, like myself, need an uncluttered desk and space for an
uncluttered mind to be able to think.Agatha Christie preferred to work in a
large Victorian bath whilst eating apples. Benjamin Franklin would work naked
for an hour every morning. Maya Angelou preferred the isolation of a hotel room
and requested everything removed from the walls; she would bring her own sherry
and ashtray. The eccentric poet Dame Edith Sitwell would lie down in a coffin
finding inspiration in the claustrophobic and restrictive space.You don't need
to go to the extremes of a coffin but find a space which is conducive to
relaxation and without distraction, anywhere that removes you from association
with work or pressure (preferably not home). Try a coffee shop (JK Rowling
famously wrote Harry Potter in her local coffee shop), the library, a hotel or
even a camper van (Breaking Bad style). Removing yourself from the usual place
of work will remove yourself from distraction, help the brain to break pattern
which in turn will switch into a more receptive state for ideas. To access open
mode if you are in a group:The open state thrives in humor and play so try the
dinner party technique: create the dream dinner party guest list, such as
Einstein, Da Vinci, Churchill, Kennedy or even fictional characters such as Don
Corleone, Jack Sparrow and Luke Skywalker. Each person should take a persona and
become their character - they must answer questions and think like they would
imagine that character to think. The perfect warm up exercise; it is huge fun,
encourages humor, it breaks awkwardness and forces the brain to break pattern
from your normal style of thinking. Keep this game going for a minimum of 20
minutes before your brainstorm.To access open mode if you are alone:Research has
shown a correlation between increased dopamine and creativity. Dopamine is a
pleasure chemical which the brain releases to signal success but this chemical
is not as straight forward and predictable as a reliable tool. The increase of
endorphins will elevate our mood and help us achieve our open state: physical
exercise is one of the easiest ways to access a rush of endorphins although,
spicy food, sexual activity and pain can also trigger release - so whatever gets
you going!Try a walk, swim or bike ride to stimulate feel good. You want to
ensure a careful balance of feeling exhilarated but also avoiding energy
depletion. Opt for a route that you haven't been on before to break any
automatic behavior patterns. Walking in a new part of town and observing the
unfamiliar territory or running backwards will stimulate new thought and
movement patterns thus putting you into a more creative and receptive state.
"Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did
something, they feel a little guilty because they didnt really do it, the just
saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. Steve Jobs2: Make
connections with an ideas wallThe ability to make connections and see
relationships between seemingly random elements is the secret to creativity.
Combining old elements to create something new.Idea walls solve crimesIt's no
coincidence that you see examples of ideas walls on TV dramas and movies such
as: Homelands, Sherlock Holmes, A Beautiful Mind and Three and a Half Days
Later. Detectives have long used this technique to assist solving crimes.
Placing photographs of the known or suspected perpetrators, victims, crime
scenes and evidence on a wall enables items of evidence to be repositioned and
grouped; string can link items together for visual affect. A detective can then
stand back and mentally take in a great deal of information at once. The brain
begins to process and use its natural ability to seek the connections between
the items, find the clues and answers to the case.images from Crazy WallsWhen
the BBC conducted a site redesign in 2010 they printed out the entire site and
mounted on a wall affectionately known as 'the wall of shame'. To enable them to
better visualize what they had and to unify the visual and interaction design of
the desktop and mobile sites.How to create a content strategy ideas wallTools
needed: paper, colored pens, highlighter pens, print outs of all reference
material, colored string and push-pins, post it notes, blu tack or tape, and a
large wall space, pin board or sheets of foam board.Organize your reference
material into themes or groups and pin/stick to the wall.Devise a color code
system for your different groups with the pen color you have and use the colored
pens and highlighter and mark and highlight relevant pages and sections of
information. (Homelands style, see above)For example, if you are working on
content strategy for your site group into:Influencers - list influencers who
could help to broadcast your content and sub group in different social media
channels, newsletters and authority sites (eg Guardian, Huffington Post, Fast
Company)Audit - audit current site contentIdea sources - places to mine ideas
from such as offline periodicals, online Q&A sites like Quora, social media
channels and Google trendsHost Locations - potential sites to target for
exposure, shares and links: authority hub sites, bloggers, online
magazines/publishers, email newsletters and social media sitesBy grouping
related themes we start to see patterns. If you have a piece that doesn't fit
into a group this 'outlier' could in itself give ideas.Stand back from the wall
and look for potential relationships or connections between the information.
Using push pins and colored string make a visual link between the two. (See
photos above)The key here is flexibility: move pieces of paper round, create new
string links, devise new groups - by repositioning, regrouping and relinking
this is where your ideas will start to form and generate as you begin to make
the connections.If wall space is an issue or you prefer a digital version,
Mural.ly is an online alternative to creating an ideas wall; describing itself
as "an online whiteboard designed to visually organize ideas and collaborate in
a playful way." Mural.ly allows collaboration of team members and you can drag
and drop your reference material onto the white board and reposition items and
make notes. I have only just begun to play with this tool and it has huge depth
and potential to assist in creative projects.image from Mural.lyPinterest is one
of my favourite scrapbook tools for collecting visual information as an
alternative. I use Evernote extensively for collecting information and research
material. Quora is my favourite site for finding ideas for content.4: How to
brainstorm the right way:Generating ideas for content, marketing strategies or
even creative use of data can all be more productive if tackled in a group - the
synergy from more than one person will bring fresh perspective, new ideas and
energy. But, brainstorming is such a common term that most people don't consider
how to undertake a session effectively.One of the most important elements within
team idea generation is trust and harmony. The group must be able to work well
together through respect for each others' opinions and ability and a general air
of amiability. Any disagreeable personalities, critical individuals or large
egos are not conducive to successful creative brainstorming and should be
excluded from the group.image from Atomic SpinThe following rules should be set
to deter any fear or negativity that can squash creativity so that you can
encourage a safe space to open up:A diverse range of skills present in the group
works well in bringing alternative approaches, as does varying levels of
experience, age, gender and personality.Allocate enough time to warm up and to
focus. Between an hour and 90 minutes is preferable - after this the brain loses
focus and needs a break. I recommend the 'dinner party' game above or another
icebreaker to create an open state.Allow the most junior person in the room to
speak first and in turn to most senior. This removes any pressure from a junior
member who may be intimidated to follow an experienced authority.Stay focused on
the topic. It is natural in group discussion to lose focus and drift into other
subjects. The moderator must be vigilant in this area.An experienced moderator
is essential to the process and should be able to direct and manage the group
without obstructing and keep the group on track and focused and ensure everyone
follows the rules (such as not being negative or overbearing). The moderator
will take notes (on a white board) and assist as an objective opinion to draw
connections between ideas.Above all else no judging, criticism or rejection of
any idea anything is valid and can be considered."Creativity is the process of
having original ideas that have value. Sir Ken Robinson5: Change your thinking,
change your lifeIf your natural disposition is not creative a creative thinker
you can become more creative through repeated action, discipline and learning
new ways to think. Repetition and discipline The more the brain processes a
routine or skill, such as a new language or driving a car, the deeper the
synapses physically carve a channel in the brain. Which explains to some degree
why when we first learn a skill we have to concentrate intensely; it takes a
great deal of energy, but through applied discipline it eventually becomes
almost automatic and we dont appear to think about what we are doing, the
subconscious takes over. Ten ideas listsOne of my favorite exercises to train
your brain and develop your idea muscle is to generate lists of ideas everyday.
I have to credit James Altucher and I recommend his article on how to become an
idea machine here:The concept is simple but challenging: think of ten new ideas.
These can be for anything such as ten new business ideas, ten new ways to obtain
quality earned links, ten new ways to improve conversion on a page or ten new
ways to save energy, ten new ways to make a better cup of coffee or ten new ways
to travel to work. For example:Ten new ways to travel to work for free:WalkPush
bikeRunRoller bladesHitchhikeHorseSkate board tied to a car (do I need to
explain why this is a bad idea?)Get a job next to a canal and kayak to workMove
to the Caribbean, live in a beach hut and swim to workMove to the top of a hill
and go kart - makes the home journey a challenge (next list?)The purpose is not
to create ideas you will act on or even sensible, rational or reasonable ideas.
This is gym training for the mind only so don't get precious with your lists.
Your first few lists may appear deceptively easy but as you begin to run out of
obvious ideas you have to work hard just to think of list ideas and ten new
ideas for my ten new ideas list is going to make your brain work for it. Don't
make the mistake of underrating this exercise; everything improves and becomes
easier with practice and repetition.6: Garbage in: Garbage outMy advice above
all else is to read as widely as possible as I believe this feeds a creative
mind more than any other activity. Just as athletes can only achieve their
personal best if they eat a highly optimized diet, creatives need quality brain
food and mental stimulation on a regular basis to operate at their creative
best. You get out what you put in.This article is an extract from 'What is
Creativity?' a 76 page free ebook which offers an introduction to creativity
with actionable tips to improve your thinking skills. The second part of the
book is dedicated to thought leaders interviews who were posed the question:
"what does creativity meant to you?". Contributors include: Rand Fishkin, Bas
Van Den Beld, Paddy Moogan, Neil Patel, Dave Trott, Lee Odden and Chris Brogan.
You can download a free copy at creativity101 here... Sign up for The Moz Top
10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news,
tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive
digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/eY_bZd-x1XU/how-to-be-more-creative-in-your-online-campaigns
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday 23 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for
Robots!'
Posted by jennitaLike all good marketers, we think carefully about our title
tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted
title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?Think again!In
today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explainswhy we need to put in a little more
effort than that.
Video transcription:Hey, Moz fans, welcome to yet another edition of Whiteboard
Friday. I'm JenLopez, the Director of the Community here at Moz, and today I'm
going totake you on a tale of two marketers.We have the SEO, right? We focus on
making sure that the robots and thatthe spiders are crawling through our sites
and can get to them. Then whenwe want things to show up in the SERPs, we make
sure that our title tagsare keyword rich and our meta descriptions are super
enticing, right? Wemake sure that when somebody clicks from the search engine
results page,that they see exactly what we want them to see. And that's smart,
right?Those keywords are actually a high ranking factor. All of these things
thatwe focus on, we work very hard to make sure that our keywords are at
thebeginning of the title and that sort of thing.But then we have the social
media marketer. Yes, I drew that. I'm sorry,all social media marketers. I know
you don't actually look at that. Wethink about the people, right? How are people
going to look at it? How arepeople going to re-share this? And so as a social
media marketer, we'rethinking like, "How can we change the Open Graph tags so
that people onFacebook and people on Google+ and people on LinkedIn are seeing
thesethings exactly the way we want to see them?" We want to see big images.
Whocares about keywords? That's what that SEO person does, right?What about
Twitter cards? You want to make sure that when you sendsomething in a tweet or
somebody tweets your blog post or your infographic,or whatever it may be, that
it's coming across exactly the way you want tosee it. You're thinking about rich
pins, and you salivate when you're onPinterest and you see a recipe and it
actually shows all of the ingredientsin the recipe. That might just be me, but
in general that's often what wedo.What tends to happen is people are getting
better about using the OpenGraph tags and the Twitter cards and that sort of
thing. But what wenormally do is we take what we have, put in the title tags and
metadescription, and we make it the default so that it's really simple. Sowe're
doing the basics. We're being lazy. That's exactly what we're doing.We do it on
our own blog. You go to our blog, the title that you see on thepage, the title
of the post, the title that you see shared on socialnetwork, it's always the
same. You're going to see it across the board, andit is time for us to stop
being lazy because think about if you did this.Now let me give you first an
example -- Huffington Post. I recently wroteapost for Huffington Post, and being
a SEO myself, I worked very hard atmaking sure that the title tag was something
that would come across in theSEO world very nicely so that it would show up in
SERPs great and it woulddo all this stuff. What was interesting was, that
without my prompting,that something that the Huffington Post editorial team did,
is after Isubmitted my post with all of my information, they told me it took
severaldays. I get this email that says, "Congratulations, your post is
onHuffington Post." I did a little happy dance because now I can put inGoogle+
that I contribute to Huffington Post.Besides that, the first thing I did is I
went to share it on Facebook.What's interesting is when I shared it on Facebook,
it was not the imagethat I'd used. It was not the title that I'd used nor was it
thedescription. It was very specific to social.So I went back to my page
thinking, "What the hell, did they change all ofmy stuff?" No, my title tag and
images and everything are still exactly thesame. However, they've set the Open
Graph and the Twitter cards to bespecific to social. I had this like "Oh my gosh
moment," when I realized:Why in the world aren't we all doing this? Why aren't
we taking one pieceof content and making it so that not only do the robots see
it and do wecare about the keyword rich title and meta description that looks
good inthe SERPs and getting all the schema just right so that it looks
rightthere? Why don't we do that plus we make sure that the Open Graph tags
aregreat, that you have an image that's super shareable, that you have
adescription and the title that can be somewhat up worthy?I'm not a huge fan of,
"This woman wrote on a Whiteboard, and you'll neverguess what happened next." I
really don't like those, but people click onthat stuff. You put a different
image, a different image here than adifferent image you have here, and you make
it something. You put a circlearound somebody's face in the background. We've
all seen those on Facebook,right? They work really well. It's brilliant. You
take one piece ofcontent, and you make it work really well for the robots, and
you find thathappy place. You get the people plus robots equals love. That's
becauseyou're making your content that you've worked really hard at, you've
puttime and effort into this, you're making sure that it's easily consumableby
the people who want to share it and re-share it hopefully and make itviral
because you want that virality here. But you also want it to bestable, and you
want the robots to see it and you want the spiders to beable to get to it and
all of that.So my quest, you have a quest. I am doing this hopefully internally
assomething that I'm pushing very hard, and I would like to see you step upyour
game as well. So rather than just keeping those defaults of, "Here ismy title
tag and I'm going to use it in all of the places," that you'regoing to take the
time to write not only your title tag and metadescription for SEO purposes, but
that you're going to work hard at takingthese and doing really great things with
your social meta tags as well.Below, I'm going to give you some resources to
specific poststhat talk about how to do this well and how to do this well and
then takethose and combine them. When you do that, you are going to find that
peopleare going to love the heck out of your stuff. I will be the first one
whenwe get that set up on our site, I will tell you exactly how it's workingfor
us. So stop being lazy, do the hard work, and make your stuff supershareable all
over the Web.That's it for today. I hope to see you again soon. Have a great
weekend.Additional resourcesFor more info on title tags:New Title Tag Guidelines
& Preview ToolFor more info on social meta / open graph (OG) tags:Must-Have
Social Meta Tags for Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and MoreSign up for The Moz Top
10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news,
tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive
digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/bqANf0T3OjY/silly-marketer-title-tags-are-for-robots
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Robots!'
Posted by jennitaLike all good marketers, we think carefully about our title
tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted
title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?Think again!In
today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explainswhy we need to put in a little more
effort than that.
Video transcription:Hey, Moz fans, welcome to yet another edition of Whiteboard
Friday. I'm JenLopez, the Director of the Community here at Moz, and today I'm
going totake you on a tale of two marketers.We have the SEO, right? We focus on
making sure that the robots and thatthe spiders are crawling through our sites
and can get to them. Then whenwe want things to show up in the SERPs, we make
sure that our title tagsare keyword rich and our meta descriptions are super
enticing, right? Wemake sure that when somebody clicks from the search engine
results page,that they see exactly what we want them to see. And that's smart,
right?Those keywords are actually a high ranking factor. All of these things
thatwe focus on, we work very hard to make sure that our keywords are at
thebeginning of the title and that sort of thing.But then we have the social
media marketer. Yes, I drew that. I'm sorry,all social media marketers. I know
you don't actually look at that. Wethink about the people, right? How are people
going to look at it? How arepeople going to re-share this? And so as a social
media marketer, we'rethinking like, "How can we change the Open Graph tags so
that people onFacebook and people on Google+ and people on LinkedIn are seeing
thesethings exactly the way we want to see them?" We want to see big images.
Whocares about keywords? That's what that SEO person does, right?What about
Twitter cards? You want to make sure that when you sendsomething in a tweet or
somebody tweets your blog post or your infographic,or whatever it may be, that
it's coming across exactly the way you want tosee it. You're thinking about rich
pins, and you salivate when you're onPinterest and you see a recipe and it
actually shows all of the ingredientsin the recipe. That might just be me, but
in general that's often what wedo.What tends to happen is people are getting
better about using the OpenGraph tags and the Twitter cards and that sort of
thing. But what wenormally do is we take what we have, put in the title tags and
metadescription, and we make it the default so that it's really simple. Sowe're
doing the basics. We're being lazy. That's exactly what we're doing.We do it on
our own blog. You go to our blog, the title that you see on thepage, the title
of the post, the title that you see shared on socialnetwork, it's always the
same. You're going to see it across the board, andit is time for us to stop
being lazy because think about if you did this.Now let me give you first an
example -- Huffington Post. I recently wroteapost for Huffington Post, and being
a SEO myself, I worked very hard atmaking sure that the title tag was something
that would come across in theSEO world very nicely so that it would show up in
SERPs great and it woulddo all this stuff. What was interesting was, that
without my prompting,that something that the Huffington Post editorial team did,
is after Isubmitted my post with all of my information, they told me it took
severaldays. I get this email that says, "Congratulations, your post is
onHuffington Post." I did a little happy dance because now I can put inGoogle+
that I contribute to Huffington Post.Besides that, the first thing I did is I
went to share it on Facebook.What's interesting is when I shared it on Facebook,
it was not the imagethat I'd used. It was not the title that I'd used nor was it
thedescription. It was very specific to social.So I went back to my page
thinking, "What the hell, did they change all ofmy stuff?" No, my title tag and
images and everything are still exactly thesame. However, they've set the Open
Graph and the Twitter cards to bespecific to social. I had this like "Oh my gosh
moment," when I realized:Why in the world aren't we all doing this? Why aren't
we taking one pieceof content and making it so that not only do the robots see
it and do wecare about the keyword rich title and meta description that looks
good inthe SERPs and getting all the schema just right so that it looks
rightthere? Why don't we do that plus we make sure that the Open Graph tags
aregreat, that you have an image that's super shareable, that you have
adescription and the title that can be somewhat up worthy?I'm not a huge fan of,
"This woman wrote on a Whiteboard, and you'll neverguess what happened next." I
really don't like those, but people click onthat stuff. You put a different
image, a different image here than adifferent image you have here, and you make
it something. You put a circlearound somebody's face in the background. We've
all seen those on Facebook,right? They work really well. It's brilliant. You
take one piece ofcontent, and you make it work really well for the robots, and
you find thathappy place. You get the people plus robots equals love. That's
becauseyou're making your content that you've worked really hard at, you've
puttime and effort into this, you're making sure that it's easily consumableby
the people who want to share it and re-share it hopefully and make itviral
because you want that virality here. But you also want it to bestable, and you
want the robots to see it and you want the spiders to beable to get to it and
all of that.So my quest, you have a quest. I am doing this hopefully internally
assomething that I'm pushing very hard, and I would like to see you step upyour
game as well. So rather than just keeping those defaults of, "Here ismy title
tag and I'm going to use it in all of the places," that you'regoing to take the
time to write not only your title tag and metadescription for SEO purposes, but
that you're going to work hard at takingthese and doing really great things with
your social meta tags as well.Below, I'm going to give you some resources to
specific poststhat talk about how to do this well and how to do this well and
then takethose and combine them. When you do that, you are going to find that
peopleare going to love the heck out of your stuff. I will be the first one
whenwe get that set up on our site, I will tell you exactly how it's workingfor
us. So stop being lazy, do the hard work, and make your stuff supershareable all
over the Web.That's it for today. I hope to see you again soon. Have a great
weekend.Additional resourcesFor more info on title tags:New Title Tag Guidelines
& Preview ToolFor more info on social meta / open graph (OG) tags:Must-Have
Social Meta Tags for Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and MoreSign up for The Moz Top
10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news,
tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive
digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/bqANf0T3OjY/silly-marketer-title-tags-are-for-robots
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday 22 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How Our Agency Survived Year One'
Posted by Bill.Sebald
There are some things in life you don't truly understand until you experience
them. I was given plentyof parenting advice when my son was born, but it only
took me so far. Nothing prepared me for the first time our babydecided to roll
over right off the bed onto the floor (luckily we had a pile of laundry serving
as a cushion). If you've never been a parent, you simply don't have a lot of
personal experience to draw from. It's a complete trial by fire, full of
missteps, emotions, andanxiety.
In a way, starting Greenlane was a similar experience.Greenlane Search
Marketing, LLC is my startup boutiqueSEO agency. It started in 2005as asole
proprietorship consulting practice.It was my baby, and I had to let it grow up.
Now it's a partnership between myself and a long-time colleague Keith Urban (not
the singer). However,differing from the parenting example, I did have some
practical experience to guide me this time. I ran an SEO department in a major
digital marketing agency. Regardless, it became very clearwe didn't know a thing
about truly running an agency.We were new parents.What to expect when you're
expecting
We expected to be busy. We knew we'd make mistakes, and we thought we had a
solid business plan in place. In the end we were busier than expected, made more
mistakes than we care to admit, and our plan fell apart on a weekly basis.
ButI'm proud (and relieved) to say we're successful. We have a great staff of
smart SEOs and digital marketers. We have happy clients. We have a great network
of people to tap into. We're profitable, targeting half a million in fee revenue
by the end of 2014. We survived year one, where 25% of startups crash. We're on
yet another phase of growth, with our legal and taxation items well managed, our
employment under control, and the company as a whole being positioned to
overcome year two.
For me, that's an enormous win.
Specifically, what was our secret? Hell if I know. But I think it's this fuzzy
formula: Take what you hear, mixed with what you've experienced in life,
multiplied by your best guess, and divide by quick, brave decisions. But we also
had a motto, one that became our backbone:"Always make it better!"Making it
better for you and your clients
This is a post about some of the more conceptual, "outside the normal" things
we implemented to constantly improve our company from the start. These arebased
on my life experiences and recent business victories.My hope is thatthis will
serve asfodder for your own company, even if you're not theproprietor. This post
is not about tax management, or accounting, or filingsthis is about the
day-to-day behavioral things that can make your digital marketing company a
great place to be, to the benefit of you and your clients.
And to sprinkle in a little fun, since I said life experience fed into many
ofour first yeardecisions, I'll supplement each section with something from my
own awkward photo album.
On to the tips#1 -Think about your group experiences
For those who played team sports, remember when your parents said, "One day
this will make you better at your job!" Go tell them they were right. Working as
a team is an invaluable skill, improved onlythrough experience and
introspection. We've all engaged in group experiences, from grade school to our
earliest jobs. Everyone has some kind of group or department participation
todraw on. Maybe it's as simple as cub scouts, a yearbook committee, or in my
case, a rock band.
Additionally, we've all either seenor have beenthe flunky in the group, doing
the least amount to make the group as a whole succeed. There's also the
oppositea "Johnny-Come-Lately" who shows up with good intentions but sticks a
giant crowbar into the gears, grinding progress to a screeching halt. We've seen
the drama and anger that comes from personalities that just don't mix. Nothing
slows down momentum more than an unfocused crew rowing in different directions.
An agency isno different. You will always have bosses, clients, and employees
that behave or think differently than you. You simply need to learn how to
overcome.
Someone once told me you can't be a boss and a friend. I've never disagreed
with something so hard in my life. A friendship presents an amazing bond of
trust.At Greenlane we've carefully selected co-workers who we enjoy being
around. We all have different talents and roles in the company, but you see
virtually no instances of "pulling rank" over anyone else. There's a respect
that drives each of us to do a good job for each other. It creates more open and
creative dialogue. If you don't feel like you have anything to prove, you can
more easily pause,listen, and learn. We don't want to let each other down, but
we all feel empowered to counter an idea without fear. The best idea wins, and
our clients (as well as ourselves) become more educated. We've nurtured a really
powerful environment. The bigger your group, the harder this is, but certainly
not impossible.
We take the same approach with bringing on clients. We call them partnersa term
I took from an old gig. Just as we are being paid to help businesses be
successful, their actions have a lot of bearing on our success as a vendornot to
mentionour own happiness. I'll often tell a prospective partner, "just as you're
auditioning us, we're auditioning you too." That could come off cocky, but any
prospects we lost for that statement were probably not going to last in the long
run. In fact, I ask all prospective clients to first read our website, where we
openly talk about the kind of clients we're looking for. About two-thirds return
superqualified, with the remainder vanishing forever. Those that return often
say, "you are exactly what we're looking for." It's a bit like online dating.
I wish we could say we've never lost a client due to poor performance. We have.
Two of them actually. But in retrospect, this providedgood lessons on where we
needed to improve. In one case it was due to never being on the right wavelength
to begin with, and the other was simply based on poorcommunicating. We largely
(and swiftly)pivoted internally to make sure we never make those mistakes again.
As a company, we were all just rowing the wrong way. Catching it early allowed
for a very quick adjustment.
By the way, I'm well aware that some internal hierarchies don't allow you to
have a say on the clients that come in. While that is unfortunate, it is
alsocommon. But what's to stop you from climbing the totem pole and pleading
your case?
The TL;DR tips:Don't just act like you're interested in every word of your
clients and employees, trulybeinterested. This is their time to talk, and your
time to pause,listen, and ask valuable questions. Work together!
Ask your clients questions. Let them understand it's your job to pull
information out of them. Don't be a yes man; be a friendly challenger in order
toget everyone nodding in the same direction.
Work with your team, not against them. If you're not actively on the account and
their day-to-day work, be careful not to break the flow of the meeting throwing
out ideas that counter the direction the account managers want to go. Get
yourself on the same page, even if you're the boss.
Have a postmortem on every lost employee or client account, and drop your
defenses. Try to figure out what could have been improved as a group.
You've been an SEO for over 15 years? Good for you. Now sit down and listen to
everyone else's ideas. Be an equal.#2 - The people you meetcould become
important
I'm often asked how we perform lead generation. Our primarily lead source is
our network. Keith and I are very lucky in that regard, both coming from the big
agency world. Big agencies seem to organically create seedlings that go off to
start new companies or work withother established businesses. From former
clients to former co-workers, developing serendipity every chance you get,
should be a 24/7 goal.
You never know when someone you've met will hit it big. If you leave a
goodimpression, they may invite you to their next party.
Digital marketing is one of those rareindustries. There are millions of lawyers
and accountants, as well as designers. There are relatively few SEOs,PPC experts
or affiliate marketers. Make the right impression and your name will get passed
around quickly. If you have a bad reputation, or are generally unliked, the word
spreads just as fast. I've picked against vendors for my clients (or when I
worked in-house) simply based on how phony they came off. I'll probably have
this put on my tombstone because I say it so much, "Perception Is Reality." Let
that onesink in. It doesn't mean "fake it," but be genuine and supportive.
I wrote a post that I still think about often. It was called "
Create Your Own SEO Serendipity." I don't know how, or where, or why I started
doing it, but I've been in the "serendipity" game for a long time. "Karma" might
be a possible synonym. Building up your network is one part of the puzzle, but
building it so you're memorable is a whole other piece that may require a bit of
introspection on your end.
In hindsight,Ispent my entire professional career mirroring my personal lifebe
good and helpful to everyone you meet. Sure you get burned if others take
advantage, but when a referral comes in from an old colleague, I'm thrilled.
It's that warm feeling that makes "doing business" pretty damn fun.
The TL;DR tips:Stay in touch with everyone you can by any means necessary. The
tiniest little gestureslike endorsing a skill or expertise on LinkedIn, or
buying someone a beer at a conventioncan sometimes bring you top of mind when
you need it most.
In my experience jobtitlesdon't necessarily mean everything. Personality and
kindness go further. Always be willing to support someone's little needs. Free
advice or work can turninto major opportunities.
Answer everyone's emails, tweets, texts, whatever. Very few of us really can't
find the time.
Don't just wait for people to call you. If you generally feel good about all
your encounters, there's nothing wrong with reaching out and saying, "Thanks for
the great talk at the meetup last night. I wanted to see if I could help you
solve that problem we were talking about."
Create serendipity every day.
Create serendipity every day (worth mentioning twice!!!).
#3 - Hire people smarter than you
Around 2009, I remember the
CEO of GSI Commerce said this at a company meeting I attended (paraphrasing)"I
built this companyby hiring people smarter than me."This off-hand comment was a
real wake-up call for me. He's since sold his company to eBay, and moved on to
restart something new. If this tip helped make someone a billionaire, there must
be something to it
My partner and I didn't read many business books. Personally, I tried, but
rejected most of them. I stubbornly refused tobuy into some ofthe concepts.
However, there were a few where I recognized common threads. Books like
Good to Great, How To Think Like A CEO, The Outsiders, and The Corner Office
didn't have a "fake it until you make it," or "kill or be killed" lesson.
Instead, they highlighted leading by example, taking calculated risks, being
human, and learning from everyone around you.
We candidly tell our prospects that we hire people with unique experience for
the sole purpose of supporting the clients. We reveal that Keith's background is
in data and analytics, Mike's is in design and development, Jon's is in PR and
outreach, and so on. We're not all experts at everything.We're very clear that
any of our team may work on an account dependent on a given strategy. It's
honest and realistic, and goes over well with prospects. Meanwhile, in the
office, we have a lot of co-mingling, where each teammate may join another to
work out a specific problem. I'm the old dog in the group, but I'll tell you the
honest truthI learn something every day from this team.
The client wins, my company improves, and my own personal development grows.
What more could anyone want out of a job?
The TL;DR tips:Let smarter (or more experienced) people help guide you. It's a
win-win situation for everyone involved.
Don't act like you know it all. Your employees and your clients will see right
through this.
If you don't know the answer, let your clients know that you may have someone in
your fold that might have the answers. When your company is hired, so is your
entire organization. There's nothing wrong with this!
Encourage your team to speak their mind, take a chance, and kick your ass. When
they do, give them a high-five.#4 -Don't be so serious
Last but not least, have fun.
Keith and I don't need to remind ourselves why we took this risk. It's fun
every day. Business is a game, and we're enjoying our time on the field. No more
toxic relationships, no more loss of control, and no more sitting in the "peanut
gallery" watching otherpeople do it wrong.
Be serious enough to hit your deliverables, make your marks count, and help
your clients win. But why not do it with a smile? I've always heard that working
in marketing and advertising is one of the most stressful jobs you could have.
It doesn't have to be.
We didn't build our company with a textbook or a degree. The more I experience,
the more I see most people in our field didn't follow a rule book either. Great
businesses are managed by CEOs who take chances, with varied personality traits
and levels of intelligencesomething school doesn't necessarily teach anyway. For
years I thought I'd have to be an "American Psycho" type business-genius with an
MBA, a big vocabulary, a clean haircut, and a country club membership. I have
none of those. In the end, I honestly believe we were guided by our own
experience, serendipity, and common sense. It's been a great ride so far, with a
lot more learningsand laughsto be had.
Besides, if the business folds tomorrow, at least I achieved the biggest thing
on my bucket list. So there's that.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly
mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad
links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff
you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Jwt3-JhHMNQ/how-our-agency-survived-year-one
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by Bill.Sebald
There are some things in life you don't truly understand until you experience
them. I was given plentyof parenting advice when my son was born, but it only
took me so far. Nothing prepared me for the first time our babydecided to roll
over right off the bed onto the floor (luckily we had a pile of laundry serving
as a cushion). If you've never been a parent, you simply don't have a lot of
personal experience to draw from. It's a complete trial by fire, full of
missteps, emotions, andanxiety.
In a way, starting Greenlane was a similar experience.Greenlane Search
Marketing, LLC is my startup boutiqueSEO agency. It started in 2005as asole
proprietorship consulting practice.It was my baby, and I had to let it grow up.
Now it's a partnership between myself and a long-time colleague Keith Urban (not
the singer). However,differing from the parenting example, I did have some
practical experience to guide me this time. I ran an SEO department in a major
digital marketing agency. Regardless, it became very clearwe didn't know a thing
about truly running an agency.We were new parents.What to expect when you're
expecting
We expected to be busy. We knew we'd make mistakes, and we thought we had a
solid business plan in place. In the end we were busier than expected, made more
mistakes than we care to admit, and our plan fell apart on a weekly basis.
ButI'm proud (and relieved) to say we're successful. We have a great staff of
smart SEOs and digital marketers. We have happy clients. We have a great network
of people to tap into. We're profitable, targeting half a million in fee revenue
by the end of 2014. We survived year one, where 25% of startups crash. We're on
yet another phase of growth, with our legal and taxation items well managed, our
employment under control, and the company as a whole being positioned to
overcome year two.
For me, that's an enormous win.
Specifically, what was our secret? Hell if I know. But I think it's this fuzzy
formula: Take what you hear, mixed with what you've experienced in life,
multiplied by your best guess, and divide by quick, brave decisions. But we also
had a motto, one that became our backbone:"Always make it better!"Making it
better for you and your clients
This is a post about some of the more conceptual, "outside the normal" things
we implemented to constantly improve our company from the start. These arebased
on my life experiences and recent business victories.My hope is thatthis will
serve asfodder for your own company, even if you're not theproprietor. This post
is not about tax management, or accounting, or filingsthis is about the
day-to-day behavioral things that can make your digital marketing company a
great place to be, to the benefit of you and your clients.
And to sprinkle in a little fun, since I said life experience fed into many
ofour first yeardecisions, I'll supplement each section with something from my
own awkward photo album.
On to the tips#1 -Think about your group experiences
For those who played team sports, remember when your parents said, "One day
this will make you better at your job!" Go tell them they were right. Working as
a team is an invaluable skill, improved onlythrough experience and
introspection. We've all engaged in group experiences, from grade school to our
earliest jobs. Everyone has some kind of group or department participation
todraw on. Maybe it's as simple as cub scouts, a yearbook committee, or in my
case, a rock band.
Additionally, we've all either seenor have beenthe flunky in the group, doing
the least amount to make the group as a whole succeed. There's also the
oppositea "Johnny-Come-Lately" who shows up with good intentions but sticks a
giant crowbar into the gears, grinding progress to a screeching halt. We've seen
the drama and anger that comes from personalities that just don't mix. Nothing
slows down momentum more than an unfocused crew rowing in different directions.
An agency isno different. You will always have bosses, clients, and employees
that behave or think differently than you. You simply need to learn how to
overcome.
Someone once told me you can't be a boss and a friend. I've never disagreed
with something so hard in my life. A friendship presents an amazing bond of
trust.At Greenlane we've carefully selected co-workers who we enjoy being
around. We all have different talents and roles in the company, but you see
virtually no instances of "pulling rank" over anyone else. There's a respect
that drives each of us to do a good job for each other. It creates more open and
creative dialogue. If you don't feel like you have anything to prove, you can
more easily pause,listen, and learn. We don't want to let each other down, but
we all feel empowered to counter an idea without fear. The best idea wins, and
our clients (as well as ourselves) become more educated. We've nurtured a really
powerful environment. The bigger your group, the harder this is, but certainly
not impossible.
We take the same approach with bringing on clients. We call them partnersa term
I took from an old gig. Just as we are being paid to help businesses be
successful, their actions have a lot of bearing on our success as a vendornot to
mentionour own happiness. I'll often tell a prospective partner, "just as you're
auditioning us, we're auditioning you too." That could come off cocky, but any
prospects we lost for that statement were probably not going to last in the long
run. In fact, I ask all prospective clients to first read our website, where we
openly talk about the kind of clients we're looking for. About two-thirds return
superqualified, with the remainder vanishing forever. Those that return often
say, "you are exactly what we're looking for." It's a bit like online dating.
I wish we could say we've never lost a client due to poor performance. We have.
Two of them actually. But in retrospect, this providedgood lessons on where we
needed to improve. In one case it was due to never being on the right wavelength
to begin with, and the other was simply based on poorcommunicating. We largely
(and swiftly)pivoted internally to make sure we never make those mistakes again.
As a company, we were all just rowing the wrong way. Catching it early allowed
for a very quick adjustment.
By the way, I'm well aware that some internal hierarchies don't allow you to
have a say on the clients that come in. While that is unfortunate, it is
alsocommon. But what's to stop you from climbing the totem pole and pleading
your case?
The TL;DR tips:Don't just act like you're interested in every word of your
clients and employees, trulybeinterested. This is their time to talk, and your
time to pause,listen, and ask valuable questions. Work together!
Ask your clients questions. Let them understand it's your job to pull
information out of them. Don't be a yes man; be a friendly challenger in order
toget everyone nodding in the same direction.
Work with your team, not against them. If you're not actively on the account and
their day-to-day work, be careful not to break the flow of the meeting throwing
out ideas that counter the direction the account managers want to go. Get
yourself on the same page, even if you're the boss.
Have a postmortem on every lost employee or client account, and drop your
defenses. Try to figure out what could have been improved as a group.
You've been an SEO for over 15 years? Good for you. Now sit down and listen to
everyone else's ideas. Be an equal.#2 - The people you meetcould become
important
I'm often asked how we perform lead generation. Our primarily lead source is
our network. Keith and I are very lucky in that regard, both coming from the big
agency world. Big agencies seem to organically create seedlings that go off to
start new companies or work withother established businesses. From former
clients to former co-workers, developing serendipity every chance you get,
should be a 24/7 goal.
You never know when someone you've met will hit it big. If you leave a
goodimpression, they may invite you to their next party.
Digital marketing is one of those rareindustries. There are millions of lawyers
and accountants, as well as designers. There are relatively few SEOs,PPC experts
or affiliate marketers. Make the right impression and your name will get passed
around quickly. If you have a bad reputation, or are generally unliked, the word
spreads just as fast. I've picked against vendors for my clients (or when I
worked in-house) simply based on how phony they came off. I'll probably have
this put on my tombstone because I say it so much, "Perception Is Reality." Let
that onesink in. It doesn't mean "fake it," but be genuine and supportive.
I wrote a post that I still think about often. It was called "
Create Your Own SEO Serendipity." I don't know how, or where, or why I started
doing it, but I've been in the "serendipity" game for a long time. "Karma" might
be a possible synonym. Building up your network is one part of the puzzle, but
building it so you're memorable is a whole other piece that may require a bit of
introspection on your end.
In hindsight,Ispent my entire professional career mirroring my personal lifebe
good and helpful to everyone you meet. Sure you get burned if others take
advantage, but when a referral comes in from an old colleague, I'm thrilled.
It's that warm feeling that makes "doing business" pretty damn fun.
The TL;DR tips:Stay in touch with everyone you can by any means necessary. The
tiniest little gestureslike endorsing a skill or expertise on LinkedIn, or
buying someone a beer at a conventioncan sometimes bring you top of mind when
you need it most.
In my experience jobtitlesdon't necessarily mean everything. Personality and
kindness go further. Always be willing to support someone's little needs. Free
advice or work can turninto major opportunities.
Answer everyone's emails, tweets, texts, whatever. Very few of us really can't
find the time.
Don't just wait for people to call you. If you generally feel good about all
your encounters, there's nothing wrong with reaching out and saying, "Thanks for
the great talk at the meetup last night. I wanted to see if I could help you
solve that problem we were talking about."
Create serendipity every day.
Create serendipity every day (worth mentioning twice!!!).
#3 - Hire people smarter than you
Around 2009, I remember the
CEO of GSI Commerce said this at a company meeting I attended (paraphrasing)"I
built this companyby hiring people smarter than me."This off-hand comment was a
real wake-up call for me. He's since sold his company to eBay, and moved on to
restart something new. If this tip helped make someone a billionaire, there must
be something to it
My partner and I didn't read many business books. Personally, I tried, but
rejected most of them. I stubbornly refused tobuy into some ofthe concepts.
However, there were a few where I recognized common threads. Books like
Good to Great, How To Think Like A CEO, The Outsiders, and The Corner Office
didn't have a "fake it until you make it," or "kill or be killed" lesson.
Instead, they highlighted leading by example, taking calculated risks, being
human, and learning from everyone around you.
We candidly tell our prospects that we hire people with unique experience for
the sole purpose of supporting the clients. We reveal that Keith's background is
in data and analytics, Mike's is in design and development, Jon's is in PR and
outreach, and so on. We're not all experts at everything.We're very clear that
any of our team may work on an account dependent on a given strategy. It's
honest and realistic, and goes over well with prospects. Meanwhile, in the
office, we have a lot of co-mingling, where each teammate may join another to
work out a specific problem. I'm the old dog in the group, but I'll tell you the
honest truthI learn something every day from this team.
The client wins, my company improves, and my own personal development grows.
What more could anyone want out of a job?
The TL;DR tips:Let smarter (or more experienced) people help guide you. It's a
win-win situation for everyone involved.
Don't act like you know it all. Your employees and your clients will see right
through this.
If you don't know the answer, let your clients know that you may have someone in
your fold that might have the answers. When your company is hired, so is your
entire organization. There's nothing wrong with this!
Encourage your team to speak their mind, take a chance, and kick your ass. When
they do, give them a high-five.#4 -Don't be so serious
Last but not least, have fun.
Keith and I don't need to remind ourselves why we took this risk. It's fun
every day. Business is a game, and we're enjoying our time on the field. No more
toxic relationships, no more loss of control, and no more sitting in the "peanut
gallery" watching otherpeople do it wrong.
Be serious enough to hit your deliverables, make your marks count, and help
your clients win. But why not do it with a smile? I've always heard that working
in marketing and advertising is one of the most stressful jobs you could have.
It doesn't have to be.
We didn't build our company with a textbook or a degree. The more I experience,
the more I see most people in our field didn't follow a rule book either. Great
businesses are managed by CEOs who take chances, with varied personality traits
and levels of intelligencesomething school doesn't necessarily teach anyway. For
years I thought I'd have to be an "American Psycho" type business-genius with an
MBA, a big vocabulary, a clean haircut, and a country club membership. I have
none of those. In the end, I honestly believe we were guided by our own
experience, serendipity, and common sense. It's been a great ride so far, with a
lot more learningsand laughsto be had.
Besides, if the business folds tomorrow, at least I achieved the biggest thing
on my bucket list. So there's that.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly
mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad
links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff
you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Jwt3-JhHMNQ/how-our-agency-survived-year-one
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 21 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Panda 4.0, Payday Loan 2.0 &
eBay's Very Bad Day'
Posted by Dr-Pete
After a period of relative quiet, MozCast detected a major "temperature" spike
in Google's algorithm at some point on Monday, May 19th. This occurred after
some historic lows, including the 3rd coldest day on record (May 11th).
Tuesday afternoon, Google confirmed two updates, Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0.
Matt Cutts tweeted the Panda 4.0 announcement:
Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed the
Payday Loan 2.0 update. This ended a weekend of wild speculation (including
many predictions of a Penguin update), but didn't leave us with many details
about the timeframe or the impact.Which update was which?
For the moment, we're going to have to speculate a bit. If the latest iteration
of the Payday Loan update is like the first, it hit hard but fairly narrowly.
Google laser-targeted some very spammy verticals with Payday Loan 1.0 (back on
June 11, 2013), but the overall impact was moderate. That update was also very
query-specific. My gut reaction is that it was unlikely that the May 19th update
was Payday Loan 2.0 - that update was probably smaller and rolled out over the
weekend (possibly May 16th). There was heavy flux around a few potentially
spammy queries on May 16th, including "mortgage rate trends" and "cheap
apartments", but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence
is unclear.
Google's numbering scheme suggests that Panda 4.0 is a major update, which
probably means that it is both an algorithmic update and a data refresh. This
typically means substantial rankings flux, and I think that's much more likely
connected to what we're seeing on May 19th. While Matt's tweet implies a
roll-out on May 20th, most Panda updates over the past year have been multi-day
roll-outs. We should know more in the next few days.What happened to eBay?
Digging into the May 19thdata (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed
that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain
fell completelyout of the "
Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top
10). Sites shift, and nothing on the level of a keyword means much, so I took a
look at the historical eBay data. This is eBay's share of top 10 rankings for
the past week across the MozCast 10K (approximately 94,000 URLs, since not all
page-1 SERPs have ten results):
Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25.
Change is the norm for Google's SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out
of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st,
and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7
place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of
the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the
ranking real-estate they previously held.
It is entirely possible that this is temporary, and it's not my intention to
"out" eBay I have no idea if they've done anything that merits major ranking
changes. This could be a technical issue or a mistake on Google's part. It's
also worth noting that these results only track the main eBay sub-domain
(www.ebay.com), not other ranking sub-domains, including popular.ebay.com.What
exactly did eBay lose?
Looking just at the day-over-day change from May 19-20, I dug into the keywords
that eBay lost out on, hoping to find some clues about the broader Google
updates. The vast majority of losses were where eBay had one top 10 ranking and
thenfell out of the top 10. In three cases, eBay lost two top 10 rankings for a
single keyword phrase. Those phrases were:"fiber optic christmas tree" "tongue
rings" "vermont castings"
Here's what the top 10 looked like for that first phrase (sub-domain only) on
May
19th:www.kmart.com www.walmart.com www.americansale.com www.sears.com www.amazon.com www.christmascentral.com www.ebay.com www.ebay.com www.bronners.com www.ask.com
eBay held the #7 and #8 spots. Here's the top 10 for the next morning, May
20th:www.kmart.com www.walmart.com www.sears.com www.amazon.com www.americansale.com www.christmascentral.com www.bronners.com www.hayneedle.com www.dhgate.com www.alibaba.com
It's interesting to note that both eBay losses here were category pages, not
specific products. Here's one example (from
this eBay URL):
For the other two keywords where eBay lost two positions in the top 10, the
lost URLs were also category or sub-category pages (not individual auction
listings). The remaininglosses were either situations where eBay went from two
listings to one or one to zero.
Here are the top 25 keywords where eBay lost one top 10 ranking position,
ordered by their MozCast temperature:"beats by dr dre" (231) "honeywell
thermostat" (190) "hooked on phonics" (188) "fajate" (188) "batman costume"
(181) "lenovo tablet" (181) "pyramid collection" (170) "hampton bay"
(170) "jordan 11 concord" (168) "pontoon boats for sale" (168) "mockingjay pin"
(166) "kobe vii" (166) "food trucks for sale" (166) "galaxy s2" (166) "jordan
spizike" (163) "foamposite" (163) "george foreman grill" (161) "wholesale
jerseys" (161) "tend skin" (161) "fender stratocaster" (161) "rims for sale"
(161) "shed plans" (158) "hello kitty vans" (158) "cheap used cars" (158) "lilly
pulitzer bedding" (156)
It's very hard to interpret individual keyword changes, but, not surprisingly,
many of these phrasesseem to be products and product categories, and some are
fairly competitive. Most of these drops seem to be from lower positions in the
top 10 I was unable to find a case where eBay lost a #1 ranking day-over-day.
In one case, it appears that both "www.ebay.com" and "popular.ebay.com" lost
out. Here are the top 10 sub-domains for May 19th for the query "hooked on
phonics":www.hookedonphonics.com itunes.apple.com www.amazon.com en.wikipedia.org www.youtube.com popular.ebay.com popular.ebay.com www.ebay.com www.time4learning.com www.walmart.com
...and here's the same SERP the morning of May
20th:www.hookedonphonics.com learntoread.hookedonphonics.com itunes.apple.com en.wikipedia.org www.youtube.com popular.ebay.com www.amazon.com www.amazon.com thekrazycouponlady.com hip2save.com
One page on "popular.ebay.com" kept its spot (this category page), but two
narrower category pages lost out. In this particular example, Amazon picked up a
top 10 spot, although their highest position dropped. Both Amazon URLs were for
specific products, although it's important not togeneralize too much from one
example.
What does it mean for you?
I'm sorry to say that it's probably too soon to tell. We're hearing reports of
big losses and gains, which is the norm for any major update for every winner,
there's a loser. If Google is to be believed, we're looking at two sizable
updates in the span of a long weekend. It's possible we'll see even more changes
before the US holiday weekend (Memorial Day), so I'd strongly suggest keeping
your eyes open.Update (May 21st - 9:30AM)Good follow-up post from Rishi Lakhani
abouteBay's internal linking structure. Digging deeper, it looks like all of the
URLs of the form "ebay.com/bhp" have disappeared from the rankings, at least
within or data set. We've collected another day's worth of data since the post
was written, and the situation hasn't changed. This could be a manual action on
Google's part, but it's hard to tell.Google is now saying that Panda 4.0
impacted7.5% of English-language queries. Despite Matt's "...starting today"
statement on May 20th, I (and others) strongly believe the Panda 4.0 roll-out
may have begun over the weekend, and is connected to the May 19th temperature
spike.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top
ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team.
Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down
but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Grura1x-huc/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
eBay's Very Bad Day'
Posted by Dr-Pete
After a period of relative quiet, MozCast detected a major "temperature" spike
in Google's algorithm at some point on Monday, May 19th. This occurred after
some historic lows, including the 3rd coldest day on record (May 11th).
Tuesday afternoon, Google confirmed two updates, Panda 4.0 and Payday Loan 2.0.
Matt Cutts tweeted the Panda 4.0 announcement:
Less than an hour earlier, Search Engine Land confirmed the
Payday Loan 2.0 update. This ended a weekend of wild speculation (including
many predictions of a Penguin update), but didn't leave us with many details
about the timeframe or the impact.Which update was which?
For the moment, we're going to have to speculate a bit. If the latest iteration
of the Payday Loan update is like the first, it hit hard but fairly narrowly.
Google laser-targeted some very spammy verticals with Payday Loan 1.0 (back on
June 11, 2013), but the overall impact was moderate. That update was also very
query-specific. My gut reaction is that it was unlikely that the May 19th update
was Payday Loan 2.0 - that update was probably smaller and rolled out over the
weekend (possibly May 16th). There was heavy flux around a few potentially
spammy queries on May 16th, including "mortgage rate trends" and "cheap
apartments", but competitive queries tend to change frequently, so the evidence
is unclear.
Google's numbering scheme suggests that Panda 4.0 is a major update, which
probably means that it is both an algorithmic update and a data refresh. This
typically means substantial rankings flux, and I think that's much more likely
connected to what we're seeing on May 19th. While Matt's tweet implies a
roll-out on May 20th, most Panda updates over the past year have been multi-day
roll-outs. We should know more in the next few days.What happened to eBay?
Digging into the May 19thdata (and before Google confirmed anything), I noticed
that a few keywords seemed to show losses for eBay, and the main eBay sub-domain
fell completelyout of the "
Big 10" (our metric of the ten domains with the most "real estate" in the top
10). Sites shift, and nothing on the level of a keyword means much, so I took a
look at the historical eBay data. This is eBay's share of top 10 rankings for
the past week across the MozCast 10K (approximately 94,000 URLs, since not all
page-1 SERPs have ten results):
Over the course of about three days, eBay fell from #6 in our Big 10 to #25.
Change is the norm for Google's SERPs, but this particular change is clearly out
of place, historically speaking. eBay has been #6 in our Big 10 since March 1st,
and prior to that primarily competed with Twitter.com for either the #6 or #7
place. The drop to #25 is very large. Overall, eBay has gone from right at 1% of
the URLs in our data set down to 0.28%, dropping more than two-thirds of the
ranking real-estate they previously held.
It is entirely possible that this is temporary, and it's not my intention to
"out" eBay I have no idea if they've done anything that merits major ranking
changes. This could be a technical issue or a mistake on Google's part. It's
also worth noting that these results only track the main eBay sub-domain
(www.ebay.com), not other ranking sub-domains, including popular.ebay.com.What
exactly did eBay lose?
Looking just at the day-over-day change from May 19-20, I dug into the keywords
that eBay lost out on, hoping to find some clues about the broader Google
updates. The vast majority of losses were where eBay had one top 10 ranking and
thenfell out of the top 10. In three cases, eBay lost two top 10 rankings for a
single keyword phrase. Those phrases were:"fiber optic christmas tree" "tongue
rings" "vermont castings"
Here's what the top 10 looked like for that first phrase (sub-domain only) on
May
19th:www.kmart.com www.walmart.com www.americansale.com www.sears.com www.amazon.com www.christmascentral.com www.ebay.com www.ebay.com www.bronners.com www.ask.com
eBay held the #7 and #8 spots. Here's the top 10 for the next morning, May
20th:www.kmart.com www.walmart.com www.sears.com www.amazon.com www.americansale.com www.christmascentral.com www.bronners.com www.hayneedle.com www.dhgate.com www.alibaba.com
It's interesting to note that both eBay losses here were category pages, not
specific products. Here's one example (from
this eBay URL):
For the other two keywords where eBay lost two positions in the top 10, the
lost URLs were also category or sub-category pages (not individual auction
listings). The remaininglosses were either situations where eBay went from two
listings to one or one to zero.
Here are the top 25 keywords where eBay lost one top 10 ranking position,
ordered by their MozCast temperature:"beats by dr dre" (231) "honeywell
thermostat" (190) "hooked on phonics" (188) "fajate" (188) "batman costume"
(181) "lenovo tablet" (181) "pyramid collection" (170) "hampton bay"
(170) "jordan 11 concord" (168) "pontoon boats for sale" (168) "mockingjay pin"
(166) "kobe vii" (166) "food trucks for sale" (166) "galaxy s2" (166) "jordan
spizike" (163) "foamposite" (163) "george foreman grill" (161) "wholesale
jerseys" (161) "tend skin" (161) "fender stratocaster" (161) "rims for sale"
(161) "shed plans" (158) "hello kitty vans" (158) "cheap used cars" (158) "lilly
pulitzer bedding" (156)
It's very hard to interpret individual keyword changes, but, not surprisingly,
many of these phrasesseem to be products and product categories, and some are
fairly competitive. Most of these drops seem to be from lower positions in the
top 10 I was unable to find a case where eBay lost a #1 ranking day-over-day.
In one case, it appears that both "www.ebay.com" and "popular.ebay.com" lost
out. Here are the top 10 sub-domains for May 19th for the query "hooked on
phonics":www.hookedonphonics.com itunes.apple.com www.amazon.com en.wikipedia.org www.youtube.com popular.ebay.com popular.ebay.com www.ebay.com www.time4learning.com www.walmart.com
...and here's the same SERP the morning of May
20th:www.hookedonphonics.com learntoread.hookedonphonics.com itunes.apple.com en.wikipedia.org www.youtube.com popular.ebay.com www.amazon.com www.amazon.com thekrazycouponlady.com hip2save.com
One page on "popular.ebay.com" kept its spot (this category page), but two
narrower category pages lost out. In this particular example, Amazon picked up a
top 10 spot, although their highest position dropped. Both Amazon URLs were for
specific products, although it's important not togeneralize too much from one
example.
What does it mean for you?
I'm sorry to say that it's probably too soon to tell. We're hearing reports of
big losses and gains, which is the norm for any major update for every winner,
there's a loser. If Google is to be believed, we're looking at two sizable
updates in the span of a long weekend. It's possible we'll see even more changes
before the US holiday weekend (Memorial Day), so I'd strongly suggest keeping
your eyes open.Update (May 21st - 9:30AM)Good follow-up post from Rishi Lakhani
abouteBay's internal linking structure. Digging deeper, it looks like all of the
URLs of the form "ebay.com/bhp" have disappeared from the rankings, at least
within or data set. We've collected another day's worth of data since the post
was written, and the situation hasn't changed. This could be a manual action on
Google's part, but it's hard to tell.Google is now saying that Panda 4.0
impacted7.5% of English-language queries. Despite Matt's "...starting today"
statement on May 20th, I (and others) strongly believe the Panda 4.0 roll-out
may have begun over the weekend, and is connected to the May 19th temperature
spike.Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top
ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team.
Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down
but want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/Grura1x-huc/panda-4-payday-loan-2-and-ebays-very-bad-day
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 20 May 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Most Entertaining Guide to
Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read'
Posted by OliGardner
Landing pages rule. Blah.
Homepages suck. Blah.
Do some A/B testing. Blah.
Base your optimization strategy on customer feedback. Blah.
All of those statements are true. But they sound boring and being boring is
lame. It's twenty fourteen and I refuse to be lame.
If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it's really easy. Read this post, have a
laugh, and treat everything I say as gospel.
Be warned, however, that
I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and
charming anecdotal rhetoric.
The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that "Shit. The condom
broke!" moment. Yeah you do. You might also remember that it felt like a
good time to run a test. #STDsArentFunny. Perhaps. But, as we go through this
epic journey together today, I'll show you exactly when and how you should
really be testing.
But first. The best 7-part list of bullet points you'll ever read.
The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of
contents:First I'll give you the only rationale you'll ever need to explain why
landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with
diarrhea. Essential.
I'll prove why context - not content - is king when it comes to conversion.
Following that, I will make you fall in love with forms. FYI, it's really,
really hard to make form love a "thing".
Mid way through we'll sip some Canadian Club, get our Don Draper on, and learn
how to write copy like the Mad Men (and Women).
"Paint me a pretty picture Johnny!" "Screw you mommy. Design is not just
rainbows and unicorns!"
Is it greedy to want a second helping when you're an orphan? Not if you have my
name. (It's Oliver in case you're confused). Always ask for more
when it comes to conversion
.
And finally, I'll put my art critic hat on and rip into some landing page
examples, both good and bad.
Challenge laid down. Challenge accepted (on your behalf).
Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign
traffic to your homepage
If I've got your
attention thus far, it's probably because you can't bear to tear your eyes away
from my enchanting prose.
The only important word in that sentence is ATTENTION.
Attention is a state of mind that you can't assume your visitors will even
enter if you don't give them the right conversion experience.
A good conversion experience is one in which your visitors are compelled to pay
attention and ultimately interact with your conversion goal - clicking the
Call-To-Action (CTA).
A bad conversion experience is one in which your visitor is compelled to run
away.
There are three sides to attention that we need to consider:
Capturing your visitor's attention
Maintaining your visitor's attention
Focusing your visitor's attention
Your ad covers point #1, and landing pages are the answer to solve numbers 2
and 3, so let's start with number 2.
Genius Insight #1: attention ratio
Pay attention as I set the scene.
Let's say you're running a marketing campaign for a promotion:
"50% off Miley Cyrus Twerkout* DVDs"
* I'm claiming a on that brilliant piece of branding.
Got your attention, right?
Well, let's see. What is attention ratio?
(Tweet this quote)
With that in mind, consider the two diagrams below. The first is a typical
homepage, and the second is a campaign specific landing page.
The Homepage
On this homepage, your Twerkout campaign is represented by "promo 2"
highlighted by the red circle.
The rest of the page is comprised of a few other Miley promotions, some tour
dates, navigation, a general brand proposition about how Hanna Montana is no
longer a thing, a photo slider, footer navigation and many other page "leaks".
If you send people to your homepage - from a paid ad, email or social media -
the intended campaign conversion goal has to fight to get their attention
with all of the other interactive elements on the page.
A typical homepage has approximately 40 links.
In the example opposite there is actually a total of 56 links, therefore:
The attention ratio is 56:1
#puke
Hey, don't just take my word for it. This overstimulus has impacted many other
people's lives according to Princeton University wuuut!
Princeton neuroscientists
found out the more stuff you have around you, the more each piece of
stimulation competes for "neural representation"--that is, your attention.
Back to our scientific marketing experiment. Let's now consider the Twerkout
promotion on a dedicated, campaign-specific landing page.
The Landing Page
On a campaign-specific landing page, the entire page is focused on only one
thing, the Twerkout DVD campaign.
The messaging is very tightly related to the campaign goal and has only 1
interactive element - the CTA.
The attention ratio is 1:1
#slapmyassandcallmemileythatsgood
Let's look at an example of someone doing this right. Salesforce is a company
with an incredibly complex product offering. Their website is a cacophony of
possible pathways.
If you dig deep into the site, their primary goal seems to be to get you signed
up for a product demo. Not surprising given the complexity of their
software.
So what happens when you search for Salesforce in Google? The first organic
result will take you to the homepage. But the first paid ad (right at the top
of the page) takes you to a different page entirely. Presumable because you
typed in their name and are showing a level of prior knowledge.
The page you arrive at looks like this:
It's a great landing page. Entirely focused on a single goal. To get you to
watch a demo of any of their products. The headline and CTA could use a bit
more mention of the purpose of the page (watching a demo). Also, take a look at
the button. It's the same colour as the form container. DON'T DO THAT! Use
some contrast Salesforce.
Aside from those things, it's a really nicely designed, focused experience.
One last example. Where would you look/click in this situation?
How about now?
Got it? Never feed your marketing traffic to a peacock, unless you've poked his
eyes out.
The feather ones, not his actual eyeballs! Wow, you're sick.Genius Insight #2:
conversion coupling
You are now 50% of the way to being smarter than 98% of all marketers.
(In good company)
Synergy. That's what I'm talking about. Uck. What a gross word.
Here's the second piece of most of almost everything you need to know to be the
cleverest person in the room at any marketing conference. Try saying that
fast.
(Tweet this quote)
In more detail it's comprised of one or more of the following:
Message match: Matching the copy of your ad to the headline of your landing
page.
Design match: Matching the design of your display ad to the design on your
landing page.
Let's look at the good and the bad of them.
Message match
To expand, message match is the idea of matching the pre-click message to the
post-click message on your landing page, with the goal of making people think
they made a "good click".
The messaging on the page reinforces the reason for their click,
reducing/removing confusion.
Here's an ad for a startup I'll be working on after Unbounce:
If that link sent you to a homepage, the target headline may look something
like this:
Get More Projects Done With Less Management
This may or may not be a good headline for expressing the brand value
proposition, but it doesn't match the ad at all. Result? Bad message match.
The correct headline in this instance would be:
Project Management Software Without Deadlines
Result? It matches the headline of the ad perfectly, and thus it's great
message match. Ding, ding, ding. Got it?
To build really strong message match, use the subhead of your landing page to
reiterate the main point of your ad's description.
This example introduces aspects of a concept called conversation momentum,
which I'll get to in part 2. But basically you can see that the subhead repeats
the end of the ad description "Deadlines are dead." and finishes the sentence
like people do when they're in the gushy part of a relationship "Choose
procrastination instead".
And it rhymes. #doublerainbow
Here are some good and bad examples of message match from the Google
Carrying on the thread, I searched for "Project management software for teams".
Here's what I found:
Excellent match for the headline and the form header (Try it Free Try
Smartsheet For Free).
Let's do that again:
There's no message match here. I was expecting "Project Management Software"
and I got "DIY Custom Apps For Improving Team Productivity."
Not to mention the attention ratio, which is a whopping 35:1 not including the
40 links in drop-down menus.
Take a look at the page if we remove all of the distractions:
So much better! The Attention Ratio is 1:1 and it's much clearer what you're
supposed to do.
And, going back to the ad:
Why shorten "management" to "mgmt" just to throw both Intuit AND Quickbase in
there? To me, that's brand overload. I like to think of paid ads that are not
based on a branded search as needing an application of "
Message Before Brand." Your brand experience will be introduced after they sign
up or through the
communication of your page copy. Throwing your name in the ad can waste
precious space with a name that people might not be familiar with.
Now I say this based on most companies that don't have a pervasive brand that
could benefit from this tactic. If however you are doing TV ads and a lot of
other brand exposure work, then this could be a beneficial tactic to catch
people's eye. But I'd rather add 2-3 more value based words in the headline and
relegate the brand name to the 2nd or 3rd row of the ad.
Sidenote: I would love to know some results of this level of branding in paid
ads if someone has tested it.
I dare you to search for something that is of importance to your life and do a
clickathon. The experiences are shockingly shocking.
So that's message match!
Boom. Insights. You're so lucky to be reading this. Next.
Design match
This is one of the easiest techniques to master. Take the design on your
display (banner) ad and repeat it on your landing page.
Deep breath.
This time I'll start with the good side of the force. Example courtesy of RBC
Canada via Facebook.
The Facebook ad:
The landing page:
Not only is the message match perfect (100% perfect - can perfect be less than
100%?), the design match also kicks ass. That little dude is following you
around with his little sign, letting you know he cares.
HOWEVER. Take a look at the landing page in detail, the page does suffer from
Attention Ratio deficiencies (7:1) and the CTA is horribly small. If you did
a squint test (squint your eyes from a distance and see what stands out on the
page) - you'd see the trust seal, not the CTA.
To improve this, the different options for applying for an account could be on
the next page after the click has confirmed interest.
And the CTA would be a lot clearer if it was designed to be bigger with a
strongly contrasting button color.
Brain break! Go smoke, pee, or text your life partner. I'll wait 'til you're
back.
Chapter2: Context is king, queen, emperor, and boss
The more testing I do the more I keep coming back to one central concept.
Context. In this section I'll show you a few examples of context in action.
But first, a couple of definitions with names that I invented. #yourewelcome
#payattention.
2.1 Conversation momentum
The purpose of Conversation momentum is to remove the break in communication
that can occur when the click is made. If you're wooing someone in an email or
blog post, it makes sense to continue to do so on the landing page.
You wouldn't invite someone into your house then act like you had never met
them would you?
A big portion of this concept is respect. Respecting the click, respecting the
time you want your visitor to invest.
Imagine this line is in your email.
"Let me show you how our product/service can help."
Sometimes a good way to preserve momentum is to express gratitude to your
visitor for showing up.
"I'm glad you were interested in learning more about {words that were on the
link}."
Creating a delightful experience humanizes the relationship and shows you care.
It's important to get to the point quickly (like a short email), but you should
do so in a way that flows naturally.
"One of the important things to know about {words in the link} is that it can
{establish the benefit}."
Getting warmer.
"What our solution does is to make {words in link} much easier to do. If you
want to take it for a spin, I'll pay the first month for you. And I'm
personally available if you fancy a chat about the best way to use it."
How yummy is that?
Now consider the lame-o, commonplace, and rude approach:
"Let me show you how our product/service can help."
"We're the best {what we do} in the world. Sign Up Now."
What? You stopped caring about me, and now you sound generic and only
interested in yourself.
Conversation Momentum Case Study - Ecourse to landing Page
To show how conversation momentum works in action, take a look at the CTA in
the top-right corner of the page below.
Establishing context
This page is from an
11-part course about landing page optimization, primarily written by me. It's
driven
by an email drip campaign where I speak to people in a very personal way. So
anyone who is on a course page has received between 2-13 emails from me. My
mugshot is also in the sidebar of every page.
Sidenote: The course is now ungated (no form) so there are no more emails. But
up until this point there were.
At first I was sending this traffic to a rather generic landing page that has
our standard value proposition headline:
The conversion goal of this page was a simple click on the orange call to
action.
To improve the sense of context, I made three changes to the page design,
producing the version below:
The changes were:
A co-branded header. The idea here is represent the before and after of the
experience. You came from the ecourse, expressed interest in Unbounce,
and are now having Unbounce presented to you.
A conversational headline that again connects with where you came from and
introduces the purpose of the page.
A personal message from me (the familiar face of the ecourse).
The result? a 77% lift in conversions.
2.2 Context of use
Context of use can be defined as providing a visual demonstration of how your
product or service will be used by a customer.
And I can't underline strongly enough how important it is for conversion.
Actually I can - how important it is for conversion that's not a link.
Here's an example:
Think of that guy Vince from the Slap Chop and ShamWow commercials. Annoying?
Definitely. A role model for your children? Absolutely not. Excellent
illustrations of context of use? Mos def.
You know exactly how to use them and what the outcome and experience will be
like.
That's context of use. Check out this next case study:
Context of use case study - landing page templates
We all know that research is key when beginning an A/B test. It can tell you
when you're delivering the wrong marketing message, and it provides insight
into opportunities that could change your business.
So, I did some research.
I wanted to know how people were interpreting and reacting to the
landing page templates page on
Unbounce.com, so
I added a
Qualaroo survey widget to the page to ask a simple question:
What do you think of our templates?They look great: [ text box for extra info
]
I don't understand how to use them: [ text box for extra info ]
They don't meet our needs: [ text box for extra info ]
I ran this survey for about two months,
and received 1,771 responses.
Analyzing these responses I spotted 3 consistently recurring questions from the
freeform text entry fields that appeared when you submit a response.
The most common questions were:How much do the templates cost?
Where can I download them?
Can I use them in Wordpress?
Wuuuuut?! They exist inside the Unbounce product. You can't buy them, you can't
download them, and you certainly can't use them with Wordpress!
Epic fail followed by big opportunity.
Clearly visitors (a large portion of whom were arriving via organic search),
were getting an entirely incorrect impression from this page. They didn't
understand the context within which you can use the templates.
How do you fix a broken experience like this?
First, let's take a look at the original page:
Templates right?
Sure, but
for what? In what? How much what?
When someone arrives on your landing page, the first thing they do is to look
around and subconsciously ask for help.
"I know why I came here, but I'm not sure where I am or what this is."
Your job as a business, is to understand the mindset of your potential
customers when they arrive at your landing page, and communicate appropriately.
In this instance, like I said, there are a large number of organic search
visitors showing up who have absolutely zero context. They searched for "landing
page templates" and are thinking about templates and templates alone - not
restrictions of where or how they can be used.
To answer the questions of these visitors, we created a two-step diagram to
illustrate context of use:
The context of use we designed for this circumstance worked as follows:You can
view the template library in the app when you choose to build a new landing
page.
When you choose a template, you are taken to the page builder where you can
customize and edit it.
Test results
Page A [Control] - No context of useThe conversion rate for people who see the
templates page is 2.1%.
Page B [Treatment] - With context of use diagramThe conversion rate of people
who saw the new version of the page was 3%, a conversion rate lift of +43%.
EPIC WIN! 43% Conversion Lift in New Account Trial Starts
A really impressive result. But this type of number is thrown around all the
time. What does it actually mean to a business? What is the impact on revenue?
Impact on Revenue
To figure out the affect this win had on the business I took into account all
of the relevant numbers.Additional new trial starts (NTS) per month due to this
test -- 120
NTS over 12 months -- 1440
Average lifetime value of a customer -- $706
Incremental impact on revenue based on a year of extra acquired customers:
1,440 x $706 = $1,016,640
That's what happens when you help visitors to understand where they are and how
the world works while they are there.
Chapter3: How to make friends forms and influence people
"I f**#ing hate forms! They ruin everything." -- Denis Suhopoljac
That was the reaction from our art director the last time we designed some
landing page templates.
Unfortunately, forms are a landing page staple, and because they represent your
conversion goal, your ability to understand their nuances is the key to
success.
You should remember this statement:
(Tweet this quote)
Friction is the barrier to entry (effort) that your form presents to your
visitors. Friction falls into two categories and has one solution:
3.1 Perceived Friction
This is the shock factor of suddenly being faced with a long form. The
perception of having to fill out such a long form can be daunting and cause
people
to change their mind. A solution to this can be to either shorten the form or
split your form over more than one page.
3.2 Actual Friction
This is the time and trouble it takes to actually *fill in* the form, and it
can cause pretty serious abandonment issues if it's not considered. Things
that can slow down - or cause frustration during - the process of form
completion include:Too many open-ended questions that people have to think
about.
Dropdown menus that don't include a viable option for the visitor. An example of
this is the commonly asked "What industry is your business in?".
If there isn't an answer available and you don't provide a way out (like an
"Other industry" option) then frustration can occur.
Captcha security input fields. This is when you have to read strange looking
words or letters and type in what you think they say in order to
proceed. Anyone not hate those?
3.3 The solution: reducing friction with conversion lube
You probably thought that was a passing reference. Nope. Conversion lube is
whatever you can give to your visitor to ease the transaction.
Method One: Ask the data for help
One approach to improvement is to analyze the results you get and adapt your
form accordingly. When looking at your form data, ask yourself:Are a high
percentage of dropdown results the first option in the list? If so, you should
try to make the answers as short and clearly
distinguishable as possible. If people can easily/quickly read the option
that applies to them without lots of hunting/scrolling, they will be more
inclined to select it.
Are the responses to open-ended questions actually real answers? Or are they
nonsense (such as "asdfasdf") designed to get through the form as
quickly as possible? If so, you should make the questions more direct and
easier to answer. Examples would be: "Tell us about your biggest
marketing problem" (requires a short story as an answer) vs. "What is the
biggest barrier to your marketing success?" (which could often be
answered in a few words like "Not enough traffic.").
Method Two: Apply some balance
"The prize" is the incentive you offer up in exchange for personal data. Your
goal is to balance the size of the prize with the amount of friction.
There are many incentives for a user to give up their personal information:
Digital documents: Ebook/whitepaper/report, webinars, newsletters,
consultations for professional services, discount coupons, contest entries,
free trials, product launch notifications.
The rule here is: Don't be greedy.
Only ask from your visitors what you would be willing to give up if the roles
were reversed.
Okay, be a little more greedy than that, but not much.
For instance, if you will be sending an automated newsletter to registrants,
email or email/name are all that's needed. Whereas if you have a
product/service that requires a follow-up sales call, you would want more
information to qualify the level of interest, and sometimes extra friction can
actually help to remove the looky loos from your funnel and improve lead
quality. Like I said, it's a balancing act.
When in doubt, don't get ahead of yourself. Remember that you should always
start by asking for a kiss before trying to take it a step farther.
I just got a sad feeling.
I don't think I've done enough to make you fall in love with forms.
You should
take a trundle over to this page where it'll all fall into place.
How to design the ultimate lead gen form
Now we've covered some of the theory behind forms, you might be wondering
exactly how to go about creating a rockstar form. We can do this by designing
our
form as if it's the only thing we're allowed to put on our page.
Your form consists of the following elements:A headline to introduce the reason
for the form
A description with bullets to highlight the benefit and contents of what you're
giving away upon completion
The form with descriptive form fields (original label names and questions can
capture attention)
A Call-To-Action
Trust statements or links
A closing urgency or context-enhancement statement
Below is a sketch of how a form designed using this method might look:
How was that? All loved up on forms? Not yet?Maybe we need some real examples.
Below are some examples of lead gen landing pages (#withforms) that I
happen to like.
The short and sweet signup form
The ebook download form
The request a callback form floating over a guy's crotch
The super-long form with a happy guy at the end
#formlove
Chapter4: The Mad Men pitch - writing copy that converts
Your words are the first thing people pay attention to when the page loads, and
the last thing they read before deciding whether or not they will complete
your conversion goal.
You would be a mad man (or woman) not to heed this next piece of advice.
(Tweet this quote)
Of course, that's an exaggeration; you should at least spend 5% of your time
writing the body copy of your landing page, but that grandiose statement
should at least give you a sense of the relative importance of page elements
when it comes to conversion rate optimization. For this reason, I'm going to
stick to these two elements (headline and CTA) and try to get you outta here
before the bell rings.
Start with your headline
Chances are you've had to go for a job interview at some point. Either that, or
you're an entrepreneur begging to be heard by either potential customers or
potential investors.
Regardless, the most and ONLY important thing when you start a conversation
with someone, is to get your foot in the door.
That's what your headline does.
If you can write a headline interesting and useful enough to hold someone's
attention, you've got your foot in the door of conversion. Now that you're in
the elevator, you have those precious extra seconds to communicate/pitch your
idea.
Copywriter
Roberta Rosenberg offers this sage piece of advice:
"
Your headline has one job and one job only. To get your visitors to continue
engaging with your message, increase their desire for what you're offering,
and motivate a Call-To-Action click.
That's why when it comes to crafting effective landing page headlines, choose
clarity over clever.
Clever calls attention to itself at the expense of the message.
Clarity smooths the way to conversion."
I can verify the part about clarity over clever. Whenever we A/B test email
subject lines, the clear version beats the funny or clever one. Stupidly, we
still carry on testing them ;)
There's an art to crafting an effective headline, but there are also some
techniques and formulas you can lean on to help you get started.
To be very clear though. These are formulas for the construction of writing,
not formulas for success - because there are no formulas for success. If there
were, I'd be sitting behind a diamond studded Macbook Pro, eating beef jerky
and telling stories about eating beef jerky while being successful
Point being. Use these constructs to do exactly that. Construct your headline.
The success depends entirely on your idea plus your will and enthusiasm.
So back to the writing:
Joanna Wiebe
from Copyhackers suggests these headline writing formulas:
The Only Way to [Do Something Desirable] Without [Doing Something
Undesirable]The Only Way to Turn Off the Lights Without Clapping or Getting Out
of Bed
[Do Something Hard] in [Period of Time] or [Promise]Tune Your Piano in 15
Minutes or "Piano Tuner App" Is Free
[Do Something Desirable] Like [an Expert] Without [Something Expected &
Undesirable]Learn to Play Chess Like Bobby Fischer - Without Any of the Crazy!
They're not going to work for everything, but they will get you thinking.
I often like to write the landing page value proposition as a sequence of 3
headlines split throughout the page, like a classic story arc of beginning,
middle, and end.The main headline
The reinforcement statement
The closing argument
You can construct your story like this:
Statement of uniqueness
Backed up with a supporting statement to establish credibility
Expand on the experienceAnd explain how you solve a pain point
Close with urgency to encourage a call-to-action click
For example, if you are advertising a luxury resort in Costa Rica (cos like, we
all do that right?), your 3 part headlines might read something like this:
The Only Luxury Rainforest Retreat in Costa RicaDedicated to preserving our
wild jungle paradise
Indulge Your Senses in Our Hot Spring Jungle SpaWithout the crowds and
distractions of the large tourist resorts
Escape to Costa Rica for a Luxury Experience in One of the World's Last
Remaining Rainforests
What this does is provide big bold statements for people who are quickly
scanning your page.
You can see how it's broken down in the screenshot below:
And don't bother asking where the Pura Vida resort is.
I made it up.
You're welcome.
Now write your call to action (CTA)
As Mr. Draper and I pointed out earlier, your CTA is of prime importance
because it represents the final tipping point between the success and failure of
your campaign.
To click, or not to click. That is the question.
You can break a CTA down into many factors, such as:Description (being explicit
about what I'll get)
Actionable phrasing (using verbs like 'get')
Possessives (choosing 'my' vs. 'your')
Subtext (supporting information)
Urgency (a reason to act now)
To expand on that. I'll rattle off a paragraph of words that you should
memorize while holding your breath:
Every time you add a button to your landing page you need to write down exactly
what will happen when the button is clicked, then write those words on the
button. It should be specific and driven by the desire to click it. Add words
like 'Get' at the start to amplify the fact that you will get something by
clicking it. Use 'my' instead of 'your' to personalize the connection. Tell
people how long they have to click the button to encourage them to do it NOW!
And provide extra context and detail in subtext either inside the button or as
an addendum beneath it.
Here's an example call-to-action based on these 5 factors:
Breaking the button apart you can see how the components work together in
beautiful harmony.Description: "Get My Free SaaS Project Management Guide" -
Describes what you'll get by clicking.
Actionable phrasing: "Get" - Describes that you will receive something.
Possessives: "My" - Personalizes it.
Subtext: "A quick 5 minute read with 10 top tips!" - Lends extra benefit to the
offer as it's easily digestible.
Urgency: "Every day you don't implement these tips you're losing productivity
and money" - Connects with the pain of your prospect and how the
offer will help them more if they get it now.
Okay, I get the structure, now how do I write the CTA copy?
Michael Aagaard
from ContentVerve.com recommends asking yourself 2 questions in order to
optimize your call-to-action copy:What is my prospect's motivation for clicking
this button?
What is my prospect going to get, when he/she clicks this button?
Genius takeaway number 412:
A call-to-action that conveys the value of your offering and its relevance to
your prospect will lead to more conversions.
Whoa there, horsey!! You need to resist the "Let's just test 10 different CTAs"
syndrome. I've been there and it's dangerous. Your CTA is also one of the
most sensitive and impactful places to play, both in the positive and negative
directions.
So take heed of this next section.
Unexpected CTA conversion killers: the power of negative suggestion
Something I see a lot of (and something I highly recommend) is subtext beneath
a button. A little horse whisper to encourage the click. These can range
from privacy statements to special offer reinforcements.
However, there is a certain type of statement that you want to avoid at all
cost.
I'm talking about the "insert a negative word that I wasn't even thinking of"
type of statement.
Consider this scenario. You've filled in a form and are about to click the
button, when all of a sudden, your eye sees the word
SPAM! Albeit in a well
meaning way: "We will never spam you."
"But I wasn't thinking about spam until you pointed it out! Now I have 'cause
to pause.'"
Man, I'm getting good at trademarking awesome terms!
What this does is place a seed of doubt in people's minds at exactly the wrong
time.
In an A/B test performed by Michael Aagaard, the inclusion of the word spam
bombed conversion rates by 18.7%.
Another example is shown below where the phrase "No Gimmicks" is written right
beneath the CTA.
I don't think I've used the word "gimmick" in a sentence in years. Yet now it's
playing in my head and I'm wondering why I'm having second thoughts.
Removing the word "Gimmicks" resulted in a 25% lift in conversions!
Be careful how you supplement your CTAs, and please, please, please, test any
changes to avoid an unexpected dip in conversions. I've been there and it
sucks trying to figure out why your business is suddenly experiencing a
negative reaction to something you can't explain.Chapter5: Design theory in 3
minutes
Remember little Johnny from the intro? Don't get me wrong, I like unicorns and
rainbows as much as the next guy - especially double ones. But they have
their place.
When people think that design is just pretty pictures. It twangs my sciatic
nerve.
(Tweet this quote)
As the bloke who's seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet, I've seen
my fair share of design trainwrecks. Designs that are so offensive that for
some sadistic reason, I love them more than the good ones.
I love critiquing landing pages because it engages my altruistic side. It's the
design equivalent of puppy rescue or freeing Willies.
Oh, right, I said 3 minutes. Okay, let me give you some Conversion Centered
Design theory in 150 seconds. Go.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, design is all about attention.
Your ad captures attention, your headline maintains attention, and your page
design focuses attention. As such, your goal with design is to draw attention
to the most important element(s) on the page.
Read faster dammit!
Principle #1 - Directional cues
There's no doubting the power of the image below. It's an iconic example of the
power of directional cues. Uncle Sam is not only staring right into your
soul, but he's pointing at you to reinforce the word "YOU". Or "Me" from a more
user-centric perspective.
Here's another example, this time from the UFC:
And an example from a brick-and-mortar business:
And an example on a landing page (remember why we're here, Oliver).
As you can see, they leave you in no doubt as to what the purpose of the page
is.
The secret is to *combine* design elements so that once you've shown people the
way via directional cues, the placewhereyou're pointing also has
clarity of communication.
There's no point in having the president of your chess club invite people over
for a game of Monopoly. The carpet doesn't match the drapes.
Principle #2 - Encapsulation
You can think of encapsulation as creating a window on your landing page where
your CTA is the view. It's most effective when used to highlight a form
#formlove!
Check out the landing page below. What stands out? The form. How hard was that?
Pretty damn hard if you look at most people's lead gen pages.
It's easy. Just wrap it up...
"If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" -- Beyonce Knowle
Principle #3 - Contrasting colours (Hey, I'm Canadian, we use u's)
Unless you live in a hole, you'll have read about a boat load of button colour
A/B tests. Red is best, green is for go, orange is inviting. Horse
excrement. All of it.
It's as easy as this: Look for the dominant hue of your page, and pick its
complement for your CTA. You can see it applied twice in the previous example,
where the form container is in very stark contrast to the page and the button
then contrasts with that.
If you need help with contrasting colours, check out this colour wheel from
Tiger Color Lab:
Find your dominant hue and look opposite.
The photo below - which I took on the summit of a barren hill during a
lightning storm in Yellowstone - illustrates the power of contrast to suck in
your
vision.
In the interest of bringing Canada and the U.S. even closer together, here's
the word "colour" written as "color". #borderlove
(Tweet this quote)
Principle #4 - White space
Space things out. And because you can use any colour you like, not just white,
it's not as racist a name as it seems. Maybe we should say add gaps. There
you go. Gaps.
Look at the photo below:
Your eye is free to wander, floating over the image, until it rests on the
subject. The Elk in the lower right corner. And then you go "Ahhhhh."
In landing page terms, I like the next one for it's clarity (but it suffers
from terrible attention ratio).
Two Columns, a smiley face and lots of gappage. You always need content, but
that doesn't mean you can't space it out.
And now this:
"You found it!"
Yes I did. By searching for "worst landing page ever." #truestory
Add some gaps, people.
(Tweet this quote)
What I mean by that is that by applying these Conversion Centered Design
principles, you are focusing attention on your call-to-action. This makes it
easier to spot how strong or weak your CTA copy really is. After all, there's
no point in drawing attention to something that's inherently lame.
Chapter6: Please, Internet, I want more conversions
Get this. I'm at a wedding in London in the 70s. I'm 4. My mother turns to the
person next to her after noticing I'd wandered away from the table. "I
should go grab him!" she says. "Let him play" is the reply.
A moment later, another lady at the table says, "Look at that boy on the
stage!" - pointing at a kid standing up there, hands held out in front of him in
a
bowl shape - "he should be called Oliver."
"He is!!!" my Mother replies looking horrified.
That actually happened. No word of a lie. I'll give you my mum's phone
number.Told you there would be charming anecdotes.
What's my point? Isn't it enough that you're all like "I'm listening to Oliver
Twist's life story!"?
I'll make it easy for you. You should
behave like you are Oliver Twist (me), and ask for something more after every
conversion.
When you acquire a lead - when someone fills in your form - the results you can
get by asking for more will blow your mind. Or refill your bowl of gruel.
Your marketing doesn't end with a conversion. Where there is intent there is
opportunity.
Post-Conversion Marketing (PCM)
The act of asking for - and getting - more from your leads, is known as
post-conversion marketing. It's the process of continuing the conversation with
your new lead on the confirmation page they see after filling out your form.
PCM in action - What should you do?
Imagine this scenario in your head brain.
Dude fills out your form to download an ebook about snowboard designs. You say,
"Thanks dude! If you like that ebook about snowboard design, you should
come watch our live demonstration of 3D printing snowboard design transfers!"
That scenario can be applied to almost any online business model. You establish
interest, then you prompt for a subsequent interaction.
How to use confirmation pages to double your lead gen potential
Here's a quick and easy case study for you that you can copy to give an instant
boost to your lead gen numbers.
We changed the thank-you page for our
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/xAvGnk6NW_0/most-entertaining-guide-to-landing-page-optimization
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read'
Posted by OliGardner
Landing pages rule. Blah.
Homepages suck. Blah.
Do some A/B testing. Blah.
Base your optimization strategy on customer feedback. Blah.
All of those statements are true. But they sound boring and being boring is
lame. It's twenty fourteen and I refuse to be lame.
If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it's really easy. Read this post, have a
laugh, and treat everything I say as gospel.
Be warned, however, that
I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and
charming anecdotal rhetoric.
The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that "Shit. The condom
broke!" moment. Yeah you do. You might also remember that it felt like a
good time to run a test. #STDsArentFunny. Perhaps. But, as we go through this
epic journey together today, I'll show you exactly when and how you should
really be testing.
But first. The best 7-part list of bullet points you'll ever read.
The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of
contents:First I'll give you the only rationale you'll ever need to explain why
landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with
diarrhea. Essential.
I'll prove why context - not content - is king when it comes to conversion.
Following that, I will make you fall in love with forms. FYI, it's really,
really hard to make form love a "thing".
Mid way through we'll sip some Canadian Club, get our Don Draper on, and learn
how to write copy like the Mad Men (and Women).
"Paint me a pretty picture Johnny!" "Screw you mommy. Design is not just
rainbows and unicorns!"
Is it greedy to want a second helping when you're an orphan? Not if you have my
name. (It's Oliver in case you're confused). Always ask for more
when it comes to conversion
.
And finally, I'll put my art critic hat on and rip into some landing page
examples, both good and bad.
Challenge laid down. Challenge accepted (on your behalf).
Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign
traffic to your homepage
If I've got your
attention thus far, it's probably because you can't bear to tear your eyes away
from my enchanting prose.
The only important word in that sentence is ATTENTION.
Attention is a state of mind that you can't assume your visitors will even
enter if you don't give them the right conversion experience.
A good conversion experience is one in which your visitors are compelled to pay
attention and ultimately interact with your conversion goal - clicking the
Call-To-Action (CTA).
A bad conversion experience is one in which your visitor is compelled to run
away.
There are three sides to attention that we need to consider:
Capturing your visitor's attention
Maintaining your visitor's attention
Focusing your visitor's attention
Your ad covers point #1, and landing pages are the answer to solve numbers 2
and 3, so let's start with number 2.
Genius Insight #1: attention ratio
Pay attention as I set the scene.
Let's say you're running a marketing campaign for a promotion:
"50% off Miley Cyrus Twerkout* DVDs"
* I'm claiming a on that brilliant piece of branding.
Got your attention, right?
Well, let's see. What is attention ratio?
(Tweet this quote)
With that in mind, consider the two diagrams below. The first is a typical
homepage, and the second is a campaign specific landing page.
The Homepage
On this homepage, your Twerkout campaign is represented by "promo 2"
highlighted by the red circle.
The rest of the page is comprised of a few other Miley promotions, some tour
dates, navigation, a general brand proposition about how Hanna Montana is no
longer a thing, a photo slider, footer navigation and many other page "leaks".
If you send people to your homepage - from a paid ad, email or social media -
the intended campaign conversion goal has to fight to get their attention
with all of the other interactive elements on the page.
A typical homepage has approximately 40 links.
In the example opposite there is actually a total of 56 links, therefore:
The attention ratio is 56:1
#puke
Hey, don't just take my word for it. This overstimulus has impacted many other
people's lives according to Princeton University wuuut!
Princeton neuroscientists
found out the more stuff you have around you, the more each piece of
stimulation competes for "neural representation"--that is, your attention.
Back to our scientific marketing experiment. Let's now consider the Twerkout
promotion on a dedicated, campaign-specific landing page.
The Landing Page
On a campaign-specific landing page, the entire page is focused on only one
thing, the Twerkout DVD campaign.
The messaging is very tightly related to the campaign goal and has only 1
interactive element - the CTA.
The attention ratio is 1:1
#slapmyassandcallmemileythatsgood
Let's look at an example of someone doing this right. Salesforce is a company
with an incredibly complex product offering. Their website is a cacophony of
possible pathways.
If you dig deep into the site, their primary goal seems to be to get you signed
up for a product demo. Not surprising given the complexity of their
software.
So what happens when you search for Salesforce in Google? The first organic
result will take you to the homepage. But the first paid ad (right at the top
of the page) takes you to a different page entirely. Presumable because you
typed in their name and are showing a level of prior knowledge.
The page you arrive at looks like this:
It's a great landing page. Entirely focused on a single goal. To get you to
watch a demo of any of their products. The headline and CTA could use a bit
more mention of the purpose of the page (watching a demo). Also, take a look at
the button. It's the same colour as the form container. DON'T DO THAT! Use
some contrast Salesforce.
Aside from those things, it's a really nicely designed, focused experience.
One last example. Where would you look/click in this situation?
How about now?
Got it? Never feed your marketing traffic to a peacock, unless you've poked his
eyes out.
The feather ones, not his actual eyeballs! Wow, you're sick.Genius Insight #2:
conversion coupling
You are now 50% of the way to being smarter than 98% of all marketers.
(In good company)
Synergy. That's what I'm talking about. Uck. What a gross word.
Here's the second piece of most of almost everything you need to know to be the
cleverest person in the room at any marketing conference. Try saying that
fast.
(Tweet this quote)
In more detail it's comprised of one or more of the following:
Message match: Matching the copy of your ad to the headline of your landing
page.
Design match: Matching the design of your display ad to the design on your
landing page.
Let's look at the good and the bad of them.
Message match
To expand, message match is the idea of matching the pre-click message to the
post-click message on your landing page, with the goal of making people think
they made a "good click".
The messaging on the page reinforces the reason for their click,
reducing/removing confusion.
Here's an ad for a startup I'll be working on after Unbounce:
If that link sent you to a homepage, the target headline may look something
like this:
Get More Projects Done With Less Management
This may or may not be a good headline for expressing the brand value
proposition, but it doesn't match the ad at all. Result? Bad message match.
The correct headline in this instance would be:
Project Management Software Without Deadlines
Result? It matches the headline of the ad perfectly, and thus it's great
message match. Ding, ding, ding. Got it?
To build really strong message match, use the subhead of your landing page to
reiterate the main point of your ad's description.
This example introduces aspects of a concept called conversation momentum,
which I'll get to in part 2. But basically you can see that the subhead repeats
the end of the ad description "Deadlines are dead." and finishes the sentence
like people do when they're in the gushy part of a relationship "Choose
procrastination instead".
And it rhymes. #doublerainbow
Here are some good and bad examples of message match from the Google
Carrying on the thread, I searched for "Project management software for teams".
Here's what I found:
Excellent match for the headline and the form header (Try it Free Try
Smartsheet For Free).
Let's do that again:
There's no message match here. I was expecting "Project Management Software"
and I got "DIY Custom Apps For Improving Team Productivity."
Not to mention the attention ratio, which is a whopping 35:1 not including the
40 links in drop-down menus.
Take a look at the page if we remove all of the distractions:
So much better! The Attention Ratio is 1:1 and it's much clearer what you're
supposed to do.
And, going back to the ad:
Why shorten "management" to "mgmt" just to throw both Intuit AND Quickbase in
there? To me, that's brand overload. I like to think of paid ads that are not
based on a branded search as needing an application of "
Message Before Brand." Your brand experience will be introduced after they sign
up or through the
communication of your page copy. Throwing your name in the ad can waste
precious space with a name that people might not be familiar with.
Now I say this based on most companies that don't have a pervasive brand that
could benefit from this tactic. If however you are doing TV ads and a lot of
other brand exposure work, then this could be a beneficial tactic to catch
people's eye. But I'd rather add 2-3 more value based words in the headline and
relegate the brand name to the 2nd or 3rd row of the ad.
Sidenote: I would love to know some results of this level of branding in paid
ads if someone has tested it.
I dare you to search for something that is of importance to your life and do a
clickathon. The experiences are shockingly shocking.
So that's message match!
Boom. Insights. You're so lucky to be reading this. Next.
Design match
This is one of the easiest techniques to master. Take the design on your
display (banner) ad and repeat it on your landing page.
Deep breath.
This time I'll start with the good side of the force. Example courtesy of RBC
Canada via Facebook.
The Facebook ad:
The landing page:
Not only is the message match perfect (100% perfect - can perfect be less than
100%?), the design match also kicks ass. That little dude is following you
around with his little sign, letting you know he cares.
HOWEVER. Take a look at the landing page in detail, the page does suffer from
Attention Ratio deficiencies (7:1) and the CTA is horribly small. If you did
a squint test (squint your eyes from a distance and see what stands out on the
page) - you'd see the trust seal, not the CTA.
To improve this, the different options for applying for an account could be on
the next page after the click has confirmed interest.
And the CTA would be a lot clearer if it was designed to be bigger with a
strongly contrasting button color.
Brain break! Go smoke, pee, or text your life partner. I'll wait 'til you're
back.
Chapter2: Context is king, queen, emperor, and boss
The more testing I do the more I keep coming back to one central concept.
Context. In this section I'll show you a few examples of context in action.
But first, a couple of definitions with names that I invented. #yourewelcome
#payattention.
2.1 Conversation momentum
The purpose of Conversation momentum is to remove the break in communication
that can occur when the click is made. If you're wooing someone in an email or
blog post, it makes sense to continue to do so on the landing page.
You wouldn't invite someone into your house then act like you had never met
them would you?
A big portion of this concept is respect. Respecting the click, respecting the
time you want your visitor to invest.
Imagine this line is in your email.
"Let me show you how our product/service can help."
Sometimes a good way to preserve momentum is to express gratitude to your
visitor for showing up.
"I'm glad you were interested in learning more about {words that were on the
link}."
Creating a delightful experience humanizes the relationship and shows you care.
It's important to get to the point quickly (like a short email), but you should
do so in a way that flows naturally.
"One of the important things to know about {words in the link} is that it can
{establish the benefit}."
Getting warmer.
"What our solution does is to make {words in link} much easier to do. If you
want to take it for a spin, I'll pay the first month for you. And I'm
personally available if you fancy a chat about the best way to use it."
How yummy is that?
Now consider the lame-o, commonplace, and rude approach:
"Let me show you how our product/service can help."
"We're the best {what we do} in the world. Sign Up Now."
What? You stopped caring about me, and now you sound generic and only
interested in yourself.
Conversation Momentum Case Study - Ecourse to landing Page
To show how conversation momentum works in action, take a look at the CTA in
the top-right corner of the page below.
Establishing context
This page is from an
11-part course about landing page optimization, primarily written by me. It's
driven
by an email drip campaign where I speak to people in a very personal way. So
anyone who is on a course page has received between 2-13 emails from me. My
mugshot is also in the sidebar of every page.
Sidenote: The course is now ungated (no form) so there are no more emails. But
up until this point there were.
At first I was sending this traffic to a rather generic landing page that has
our standard value proposition headline:
The conversion goal of this page was a simple click on the orange call to
action.
To improve the sense of context, I made three changes to the page design,
producing the version below:
The changes were:
A co-branded header. The idea here is represent the before and after of the
experience. You came from the ecourse, expressed interest in Unbounce,
and are now having Unbounce presented to you.
A conversational headline that again connects with where you came from and
introduces the purpose of the page.
A personal message from me (the familiar face of the ecourse).
The result? a 77% lift in conversions.
2.2 Context of use
Context of use can be defined as providing a visual demonstration of how your
product or service will be used by a customer.
And I can't underline strongly enough how important it is for conversion.
Actually I can - how important it is for conversion that's not a link.
Here's an example:
Think of that guy Vince from the Slap Chop and ShamWow commercials. Annoying?
Definitely. A role model for your children? Absolutely not. Excellent
illustrations of context of use? Mos def.
You know exactly how to use them and what the outcome and experience will be
like.
That's context of use. Check out this next case study:
Context of use case study - landing page templates
We all know that research is key when beginning an A/B test. It can tell you
when you're delivering the wrong marketing message, and it provides insight
into opportunities that could change your business.
So, I did some research.
I wanted to know how people were interpreting and reacting to the
landing page templates page on
Unbounce.com, so
I added a
Qualaroo survey widget to the page to ask a simple question:
What do you think of our templates?They look great: [ text box for extra info
]
I don't understand how to use them: [ text box for extra info ]
They don't meet our needs: [ text box for extra info ]
I ran this survey for about two months,
and received 1,771 responses.
Analyzing these responses I spotted 3 consistently recurring questions from the
freeform text entry fields that appeared when you submit a response.
The most common questions were:How much do the templates cost?
Where can I download them?
Can I use them in Wordpress?
Wuuuuut?! They exist inside the Unbounce product. You can't buy them, you can't
download them, and you certainly can't use them with Wordpress!
Epic fail followed by big opportunity.
Clearly visitors (a large portion of whom were arriving via organic search),
were getting an entirely incorrect impression from this page. They didn't
understand the context within which you can use the templates.
How do you fix a broken experience like this?
First, let's take a look at the original page:
Templates right?
Sure, but
for what? In what? How much what?
When someone arrives on your landing page, the first thing they do is to look
around and subconsciously ask for help.
"I know why I came here, but I'm not sure where I am or what this is."
Your job as a business, is to understand the mindset of your potential
customers when they arrive at your landing page, and communicate appropriately.
In this instance, like I said, there are a large number of organic search
visitors showing up who have absolutely zero context. They searched for "landing
page templates" and are thinking about templates and templates alone - not
restrictions of where or how they can be used.
To answer the questions of these visitors, we created a two-step diagram to
illustrate context of use:
The context of use we designed for this circumstance worked as follows:You can
view the template library in the app when you choose to build a new landing
page.
When you choose a template, you are taken to the page builder where you can
customize and edit it.
Test results
Page A [Control] - No context of useThe conversion rate for people who see the
templates page is 2.1%.
Page B [Treatment] - With context of use diagramThe conversion rate of people
who saw the new version of the page was 3%, a conversion rate lift of +43%.
EPIC WIN! 43% Conversion Lift in New Account Trial Starts
A really impressive result. But this type of number is thrown around all the
time. What does it actually mean to a business? What is the impact on revenue?
Impact on Revenue
To figure out the affect this win had on the business I took into account all
of the relevant numbers.Additional new trial starts (NTS) per month due to this
test -- 120
NTS over 12 months -- 1440
Average lifetime value of a customer -- $706
Incremental impact on revenue based on a year of extra acquired customers:
1,440 x $706 = $1,016,640
That's what happens when you help visitors to understand where they are and how
the world works while they are there.
Chapter3: How to make friends forms and influence people
"I f**#ing hate forms! They ruin everything." -- Denis Suhopoljac
That was the reaction from our art director the last time we designed some
landing page templates.
Unfortunately, forms are a landing page staple, and because they represent your
conversion goal, your ability to understand their nuances is the key to
success.
You should remember this statement:
(Tweet this quote)
Friction is the barrier to entry (effort) that your form presents to your
visitors. Friction falls into two categories and has one solution:
3.1 Perceived Friction
This is the shock factor of suddenly being faced with a long form. The
perception of having to fill out such a long form can be daunting and cause
people
to change their mind. A solution to this can be to either shorten the form or
split your form over more than one page.
3.2 Actual Friction
This is the time and trouble it takes to actually *fill in* the form, and it
can cause pretty serious abandonment issues if it's not considered. Things
that can slow down - or cause frustration during - the process of form
completion include:Too many open-ended questions that people have to think
about.
Dropdown menus that don't include a viable option for the visitor. An example of
this is the commonly asked "What industry is your business in?".
If there isn't an answer available and you don't provide a way out (like an
"Other industry" option) then frustration can occur.
Captcha security input fields. This is when you have to read strange looking
words or letters and type in what you think they say in order to
proceed. Anyone not hate those?
3.3 The solution: reducing friction with conversion lube
You probably thought that was a passing reference. Nope. Conversion lube is
whatever you can give to your visitor to ease the transaction.
Method One: Ask the data for help
One approach to improvement is to analyze the results you get and adapt your
form accordingly. When looking at your form data, ask yourself:Are a high
percentage of dropdown results the first option in the list? If so, you should
try to make the answers as short and clearly
distinguishable as possible. If people can easily/quickly read the option
that applies to them without lots of hunting/scrolling, they will be more
inclined to select it.
Are the responses to open-ended questions actually real answers? Or are they
nonsense (such as "asdfasdf") designed to get through the form as
quickly as possible? If so, you should make the questions more direct and
easier to answer. Examples would be: "Tell us about your biggest
marketing problem" (requires a short story as an answer) vs. "What is the
biggest barrier to your marketing success?" (which could often be
answered in a few words like "Not enough traffic.").
Method Two: Apply some balance
"The prize" is the incentive you offer up in exchange for personal data. Your
goal is to balance the size of the prize with the amount of friction.
There are many incentives for a user to give up their personal information:
Digital documents: Ebook/whitepaper/report, webinars, newsletters,
consultations for professional services, discount coupons, contest entries,
free trials, product launch notifications.
The rule here is: Don't be greedy.
Only ask from your visitors what you would be willing to give up if the roles
were reversed.
Okay, be a little more greedy than that, but not much.
For instance, if you will be sending an automated newsletter to registrants,
email or email/name are all that's needed. Whereas if you have a
product/service that requires a follow-up sales call, you would want more
information to qualify the level of interest, and sometimes extra friction can
actually help to remove the looky loos from your funnel and improve lead
quality. Like I said, it's a balancing act.
When in doubt, don't get ahead of yourself. Remember that you should always
start by asking for a kiss before trying to take it a step farther.
I just got a sad feeling.
I don't think I've done enough to make you fall in love with forms.
You should
take a trundle over to this page where it'll all fall into place.
How to design the ultimate lead gen form
Now we've covered some of the theory behind forms, you might be wondering
exactly how to go about creating a rockstar form. We can do this by designing
our
form as if it's the only thing we're allowed to put on our page.
Your form consists of the following elements:A headline to introduce the reason
for the form
A description with bullets to highlight the benefit and contents of what you're
giving away upon completion
The form with descriptive form fields (original label names and questions can
capture attention)
A Call-To-Action
Trust statements or links
A closing urgency or context-enhancement statement
Below is a sketch of how a form designed using this method might look:
How was that? All loved up on forms? Not yet?Maybe we need some real examples.
Below are some examples of lead gen landing pages (#withforms) that I
happen to like.
The short and sweet signup form
The ebook download form
The request a callback form floating over a guy's crotch
The super-long form with a happy guy at the end
#formlove
Chapter4: The Mad Men pitch - writing copy that converts
Your words are the first thing people pay attention to when the page loads, and
the last thing they read before deciding whether or not they will complete
your conversion goal.
You would be a mad man (or woman) not to heed this next piece of advice.
(Tweet this quote)
Of course, that's an exaggeration; you should at least spend 5% of your time
writing the body copy of your landing page, but that grandiose statement
should at least give you a sense of the relative importance of page elements
when it comes to conversion rate optimization. For this reason, I'm going to
stick to these two elements (headline and CTA) and try to get you outta here
before the bell rings.
Start with your headline
Chances are you've had to go for a job interview at some point. Either that, or
you're an entrepreneur begging to be heard by either potential customers or
potential investors.
Regardless, the most and ONLY important thing when you start a conversation
with someone, is to get your foot in the door.
That's what your headline does.
If you can write a headline interesting and useful enough to hold someone's
attention, you've got your foot in the door of conversion. Now that you're in
the elevator, you have those precious extra seconds to communicate/pitch your
idea.
Copywriter
Roberta Rosenberg offers this sage piece of advice:
"
Your headline has one job and one job only. To get your visitors to continue
engaging with your message, increase their desire for what you're offering,
and motivate a Call-To-Action click.
That's why when it comes to crafting effective landing page headlines, choose
clarity over clever.
Clever calls attention to itself at the expense of the message.
Clarity smooths the way to conversion."
I can verify the part about clarity over clever. Whenever we A/B test email
subject lines, the clear version beats the funny or clever one. Stupidly, we
still carry on testing them ;)
There's an art to crafting an effective headline, but there are also some
techniques and formulas you can lean on to help you get started.
To be very clear though. These are formulas for the construction of writing,
not formulas for success - because there are no formulas for success. If there
were, I'd be sitting behind a diamond studded Macbook Pro, eating beef jerky
and telling stories about eating beef jerky while being successful
Point being. Use these constructs to do exactly that. Construct your headline.
The success depends entirely on your idea plus your will and enthusiasm.
So back to the writing:
Joanna Wiebe
from Copyhackers suggests these headline writing formulas:
The Only Way to [Do Something Desirable] Without [Doing Something
Undesirable]The Only Way to Turn Off the Lights Without Clapping or Getting Out
of Bed
[Do Something Hard] in [Period of Time] or [Promise]Tune Your Piano in 15
Minutes or "Piano Tuner App" Is Free
[Do Something Desirable] Like [an Expert] Without [Something Expected &
Undesirable]Learn to Play Chess Like Bobby Fischer - Without Any of the Crazy!
They're not going to work for everything, but they will get you thinking.
I often like to write the landing page value proposition as a sequence of 3
headlines split throughout the page, like a classic story arc of beginning,
middle, and end.The main headline
The reinforcement statement
The closing argument
You can construct your story like this:
Statement of uniqueness
Backed up with a supporting statement to establish credibility
Expand on the experienceAnd explain how you solve a pain point
Close with urgency to encourage a call-to-action click
For example, if you are advertising a luxury resort in Costa Rica (cos like, we
all do that right?), your 3 part headlines might read something like this:
The Only Luxury Rainforest Retreat in Costa RicaDedicated to preserving our
wild jungle paradise
Indulge Your Senses in Our Hot Spring Jungle SpaWithout the crowds and
distractions of the large tourist resorts
Escape to Costa Rica for a Luxury Experience in One of the World's Last
Remaining Rainforests
What this does is provide big bold statements for people who are quickly
scanning your page.
You can see how it's broken down in the screenshot below:
And don't bother asking where the Pura Vida resort is.
I made it up.
You're welcome.
Now write your call to action (CTA)
As Mr. Draper and I pointed out earlier, your CTA is of prime importance
because it represents the final tipping point between the success and failure of
your campaign.
To click, or not to click. That is the question.
You can break a CTA down into many factors, such as:Description (being explicit
about what I'll get)
Actionable phrasing (using verbs like 'get')
Possessives (choosing 'my' vs. 'your')
Subtext (supporting information)
Urgency (a reason to act now)
To expand on that. I'll rattle off a paragraph of words that you should
memorize while holding your breath:
Every time you add a button to your landing page you need to write down exactly
what will happen when the button is clicked, then write those words on the
button. It should be specific and driven by the desire to click it. Add words
like 'Get' at the start to amplify the fact that you will get something by
clicking it. Use 'my' instead of 'your' to personalize the connection. Tell
people how long they have to click the button to encourage them to do it NOW!
And provide extra context and detail in subtext either inside the button or as
an addendum beneath it.
Here's an example call-to-action based on these 5 factors:
Breaking the button apart you can see how the components work together in
beautiful harmony.Description: "Get My Free SaaS Project Management Guide" -
Describes what you'll get by clicking.
Actionable phrasing: "Get" - Describes that you will receive something.
Possessives: "My" - Personalizes it.
Subtext: "A quick 5 minute read with 10 top tips!" - Lends extra benefit to the
offer as it's easily digestible.
Urgency: "Every day you don't implement these tips you're losing productivity
and money" - Connects with the pain of your prospect and how the
offer will help them more if they get it now.
Okay, I get the structure, now how do I write the CTA copy?
Michael Aagaard
from ContentVerve.com recommends asking yourself 2 questions in order to
optimize your call-to-action copy:What is my prospect's motivation for clicking
this button?
What is my prospect going to get, when he/she clicks this button?
Genius takeaway number 412:
A call-to-action that conveys the value of your offering and its relevance to
your prospect will lead to more conversions.
Whoa there, horsey!! You need to resist the "Let's just test 10 different CTAs"
syndrome. I've been there and it's dangerous. Your CTA is also one of the
most sensitive and impactful places to play, both in the positive and negative
directions.
So take heed of this next section.
Unexpected CTA conversion killers: the power of negative suggestion
Something I see a lot of (and something I highly recommend) is subtext beneath
a button. A little horse whisper to encourage the click. These can range
from privacy statements to special offer reinforcements.
However, there is a certain type of statement that you want to avoid at all
cost.
I'm talking about the "insert a negative word that I wasn't even thinking of"
type of statement.
Consider this scenario. You've filled in a form and are about to click the
button, when all of a sudden, your eye sees the word
SPAM! Albeit in a well
meaning way: "We will never spam you."
"But I wasn't thinking about spam until you pointed it out! Now I have 'cause
to pause.'"
Man, I'm getting good at trademarking awesome terms!
What this does is place a seed of doubt in people's minds at exactly the wrong
time.
In an A/B test performed by Michael Aagaard, the inclusion of the word spam
bombed conversion rates by 18.7%.
Another example is shown below where the phrase "No Gimmicks" is written right
beneath the CTA.
I don't think I've used the word "gimmick" in a sentence in years. Yet now it's
playing in my head and I'm wondering why I'm having second thoughts.
Removing the word "Gimmicks" resulted in a 25% lift in conversions!
Be careful how you supplement your CTAs, and please, please, please, test any
changes to avoid an unexpected dip in conversions. I've been there and it
sucks trying to figure out why your business is suddenly experiencing a
negative reaction to something you can't explain.Chapter5: Design theory in 3
minutes
Remember little Johnny from the intro? Don't get me wrong, I like unicorns and
rainbows as much as the next guy - especially double ones. But they have
their place.
When people think that design is just pretty pictures. It twangs my sciatic
nerve.
(Tweet this quote)
As the bloke who's seen more landing pages than anyone on the planet, I've seen
my fair share of design trainwrecks. Designs that are so offensive that for
some sadistic reason, I love them more than the good ones.
I love critiquing landing pages because it engages my altruistic side. It's the
design equivalent of puppy rescue or freeing Willies.
Oh, right, I said 3 minutes. Okay, let me give you some Conversion Centered
Design theory in 150 seconds. Go.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the post, design is all about attention.
Your ad captures attention, your headline maintains attention, and your page
design focuses attention. As such, your goal with design is to draw attention
to the most important element(s) on the page.
Read faster dammit!
Principle #1 - Directional cues
There's no doubting the power of the image below. It's an iconic example of the
power of directional cues. Uncle Sam is not only staring right into your
soul, but he's pointing at you to reinforce the word "YOU". Or "Me" from a more
user-centric perspective.
Here's another example, this time from the UFC:
And an example from a brick-and-mortar business:
And an example on a landing page (remember why we're here, Oliver).
As you can see, they leave you in no doubt as to what the purpose of the page
is.
The secret is to *combine* design elements so that once you've shown people the
way via directional cues, the placewhereyou're pointing also has
clarity of communication.
There's no point in having the president of your chess club invite people over
for a game of Monopoly. The carpet doesn't match the drapes.
Principle #2 - Encapsulation
You can think of encapsulation as creating a window on your landing page where
your CTA is the view. It's most effective when used to highlight a form
#formlove!
Check out the landing page below. What stands out? The form. How hard was that?
Pretty damn hard if you look at most people's lead gen pages.
It's easy. Just wrap it up...
"If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it" -- Beyonce Knowle
Principle #3 - Contrasting colours (Hey, I'm Canadian, we use u's)
Unless you live in a hole, you'll have read about a boat load of button colour
A/B tests. Red is best, green is for go, orange is inviting. Horse
excrement. All of it.
It's as easy as this: Look for the dominant hue of your page, and pick its
complement for your CTA. You can see it applied twice in the previous example,
where the form container is in very stark contrast to the page and the button
then contrasts with that.
If you need help with contrasting colours, check out this colour wheel from
Tiger Color Lab:
Find your dominant hue and look opposite.
The photo below - which I took on the summit of a barren hill during a
lightning storm in Yellowstone - illustrates the power of contrast to suck in
your
vision.
In the interest of bringing Canada and the U.S. even closer together, here's
the word "colour" written as "color". #borderlove
(Tweet this quote)
Principle #4 - White space
Space things out. And because you can use any colour you like, not just white,
it's not as racist a name as it seems. Maybe we should say add gaps. There
you go. Gaps.
Look at the photo below:
Your eye is free to wander, floating over the image, until it rests on the
subject. The Elk in the lower right corner. And then you go "Ahhhhh."
In landing page terms, I like the next one for it's clarity (but it suffers
from terrible attention ratio).
Two Columns, a smiley face and lots of gappage. You always need content, but
that doesn't mean you can't space it out.
And now this:
"You found it!"
Yes I did. By searching for "worst landing page ever." #truestory
Add some gaps, people.
(Tweet this quote)
What I mean by that is that by applying these Conversion Centered Design
principles, you are focusing attention on your call-to-action. This makes it
easier to spot how strong or weak your CTA copy really is. After all, there's
no point in drawing attention to something that's inherently lame.
Chapter6: Please, Internet, I want more conversions
Get this. I'm at a wedding in London in the 70s. I'm 4. My mother turns to the
person next to her after noticing I'd wandered away from the table. "I
should go grab him!" she says. "Let him play" is the reply.
A moment later, another lady at the table says, "Look at that boy on the
stage!" - pointing at a kid standing up there, hands held out in front of him in
a
bowl shape - "he should be called Oliver."
"He is!!!" my Mother replies looking horrified.
That actually happened. No word of a lie. I'll give you my mum's phone
number.Told you there would be charming anecdotes.
What's my point? Isn't it enough that you're all like "I'm listening to Oliver
Twist's life story!"?
I'll make it easy for you. You should
behave like you are Oliver Twist (me), and ask for something more after every
conversion.
When you acquire a lead - when someone fills in your form - the results you can
get by asking for more will blow your mind. Or refill your bowl of gruel.
Your marketing doesn't end with a conversion. Where there is intent there is
opportunity.
Post-Conversion Marketing (PCM)
The act of asking for - and getting - more from your leads, is known as
post-conversion marketing. It's the process of continuing the conversation with
your new lead on the confirmation page they see after filling out your form.
PCM in action - What should you do?
Imagine this scenario in your head brain.
Dude fills out your form to download an ebook about snowboard designs. You say,
"Thanks dude! If you like that ebook about snowboard design, you should
come watch our live demonstration of 3D printing snowboard design transfers!"
That scenario can be applied to almost any online business model. You establish
interest, then you prompt for a subsequent interaction.
How to use confirmation pages to double your lead gen potential
Here's a quick and easy case study for you that you can copy to give an instant
boost to your lead gen numbers.
We changed the thank-you page for our
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/xAvGnk6NW_0/most-entertaining-guide-to-landing-page-optimization
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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