Conversions are any change in a viewers behavior based on your message. Usually online this means clicking something but not always. Consider the following common conversions:

• Increased awareness of a business brand, product, service or person.
• Conversations or references for a business, person, product, service or article.
• Enhanced understanding of an issue that leads to more or less use of…
• Make a purchase
• Click a link

Increased Awareness

This is usually branding or making someone or something more recognizable to a viewer. This comes in handy for people looking to raise their stature in their industry or community. A great example of this are the politician’s websites that are gearing up for the November elections. Common examples are just about every business website out there - they all affect the brand of that business (for better or worse).

Conversations or References

If two people I’ve never met have a conversation about something I wrote that article is successful. If I can get people to link to something I wrote even better. Conversations and references are word of mouth or viral marketing. It’s a tough thing to make happen but always worth the effort.

Enhanced Understanding

Enhanced understanding naturally leads to people doing more or less of something. For most businesses they want the viewer to do more: buy more of our stuff!
But a non-profit may want people to do less: stop smoking, consume less energy, etc. The viewer has to make a choice to either ignore the message or accept it.

Make a Purchase

Making a purchase may come from enhanced understanding but it’s really about the value proposition and how your goods stand up against the competition. Competition that’s just a few clicks away online. Is your pitch good enough to get the viewer to stop what they are doing and navigate through your checkout process?

Click a Link

Learn more, order now, and subscribe are the most common calls to action I see. Then there are the ads including affiliate programs and contextual (Adsense). Sometimes getting the viewer to click the right link is the trick. Usability is the key to get viewers to click the links you want.

When I think of conversions for websites these are the categories I place them in. Once I know what types of conversions I’m looking for I start to define my market: not just people interested in “product x” but also people that will request more information or tell a friend about it or… whatever I want them to do. It’s a special type of person that will convert at all and a rare person that will do it the way I want.

I think that is overlooked on most websites. Traffic for the sake of traffic does not help your brand and can hurt it a great deal. Building traffic to increase conversions is as old as the internet. If you have 1,000 visits per day and 2% convert then if you get 2,000 visits per day your sales numbers double. Simple enough but what about the other 98% of viewers that didn’t get what they wanted? You also doubled the number of frustrated viewers which hurt the brand.

By knowing what you want your viewers to do and building the site around that your viewers will be much happier and your conversions will increase by percentages. How different would your bottom line be with a 5% increase in conversions?

Posted in Sales and Marketing, Business Owners, Customer Service, Marketing, Web Design

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What would happen if Digg had a story that was so crazy popular it got over 16,000 votes in less than 20 hours? Now, what if that story leaked proprietary information and the folks at Digg got a cease and desist order? Now what if someone resubmitted the article? And that story got over 15,000 votes in 15 hours?

Digg is in a state of open revolt right now.

The controversy began when someone posted the 32 bit hex code that is used to encrypt HD DVDs. This code can be used to make copies of commercial DVDs. The Advanced Access Content System Licensing Administrator LLC sent Digg a C&D so Digg removed the story which was quickly reposted.

This is where things went wrong. Instead of explaining the situation, Digg admins deleted the stories relating to the issue and banned the account holders who submitted the stories. The controversy that ensued is still moving with hundreds of blogs and forums now commenting on the disaster. The issue at hand is not whether or not it was ok to post the HD DVD hex code but rather who is in control of user-generated websites: the site owner or the users that make it work.

Jay Adelson posted an explanation of Digg’s stance on the Digg Blog this afternoon — too little, too late. And missing the point - users don’t like heavy-handed tactics and banning accounts should be a last resort, not a preventive measure (as learned a while ago at another user-generated content site).

Ironically, Jay made this point:

“we all need to work together to protect Digg from exposure to lawsuits that could very quickly shut us down”

Digg and the Digg Mirror have both been down several times throughout the night. Currently, every story on the Digg homepage is about the HD DVD code or the controversy around how Digg handled the situation (see screenshot).

Update: Founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, has given in.

Posted in Customer Service, Promotion, Industry News, Marketing

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It seems there are quite a few people out there that just don’t “get it” when it comes to blogging. Rand at SEOmoz wrote A Lot of People Have to Die for Corporate Blogging to Succeed. Many organizations require 3 levels of proofing before any communication can go out killing the creativity and excitement that goes into blogging.

BlogWrite for CEOs seems to justify blogs or promote their uses every 3 posts or so.

Church of the Customer points out the single greatest value to blog and gives 7 reasons small business should blog.

Mary Schmidt explains how blogging isn’t “playing on the computer” (something my wife accuses me of).

And I’ve seen several other similar posts over the last couple weeks.

I’m going to make this real simple: If you want more customers or want to improve the customer experience for your business get a website. If you want to take that to the next level, add a blog.

Blogs draw traffic and create unique networking opportunities. Yes you can use them to engage your ego or express yourself or *whatever* but the results speak for themselves.

I will continue to urge my clients to add blogs when appropriate. And I will continue to keep this one running as best I can.

For anyone unwilling to take two minutes to Google the value of blogging I just have this to say: Thank you for your customers.

Is that enough justification?

Posted in Customer Service, Promotion, Industry News, Marketing, Web Design

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SearchWarp came clean about the changes they made on their site. Their solution to making their articles rank well in the search engines is to nofollow the external links and to move articles that don’t fit their quality guidelines to Users.Search-o-rama.com. SEO and Internet Marketing articles will be moved to SEM.SearchRamp.com. Note: existing SearchWarp articles will not be moved, just the new ones that are submitted.

The explanation for the change begins:

It is with great remorse that I am making these announcements to the friends and users of SearchWarp. I feel compelled to be transparent and honest with our users, and I believe that I need to let you know what has been happening behind the scenes here.

I’d like to commend SearchWarp for bringing the truth even if it did take a bit of encouragement. I still say there are better solutions but at least now SearchWarp authors are getting the whole story and can make an informed decision about where to post their articles.

One “problem” about doing business online is that when you try to be clever someone will figure you out. And then some jerk will start making noise about it. Good service is just good service and that requires being upfront about your policies not hiding behind half-truths. If your service really is valuable your users will stick around.

PS. Special thanks to Lorien1973 for taking the “other side” and shedding some light on the SearchWarp perspective. Your time and insights were of value and I hope to hear more from you on other topics. Lorien1973 is a popular author at SearchWarp and pretty sharp guy IMO.

Posted in Customer Service, Industry News, SEO, Marketing

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For those of you not familiar with SearchWarp they are an article submission site. You write something, they post it. In the process they place ads along with the articles to make money. The benefit for the person posting is SW articles tend to rank pretty well in the search engines giving them some exposure and they also link back to their sites for link-love.

SearchWarp just started a new policy of adding “nofollow” to the outbound links on their site. This prevents the article authors from getting the most benefits of their submissions because it blocks the search engines from following those links.

In a response to toddieg, SearchWarp explained:

Earlier this year we were targeted by a number of large off-shore SEO companies which started submitting a large number of articles to us. At first we were hadn’t noticed, but eventually the high-quantity and low-quality of articles forced us to start rejecting and removing articles.

Eventually this escalated into the SEO firms vowing revenge, and apparently at least one of them was able to switch the links on their existing articles to link to some pretty bad places, which eventually caused all articles to tank in the search results in the major search engines. Despite making some pretty good guesses, we have been unable to know for sure which articles and which links have resulted in the articles at SearchWarp being deranked. The only solution offered to us by Google was the use of the nofollow attribute. The bottom line is that if we continue to allow unrestrained linking, very few people will be reading the articles on SearchWarp anyway.

Maybe Google doesn’t care about SearchWarp’s authors. Maybe they gave a solution from an engineer’s point of view and not a marketing one. Maybe looking for a tool like bad-neighborhood.com would have been better.

There are really three issues that I have with this policy.

The first is SW tried to slide it in quietly. The only notice I saw was on their new blog that states “We’ve toyed with the idea of using the rel=nofollow tag in all links that appear in articles, but so far we have only used this method in a very limited manner.” There’s a huge difference between “toyed with” and “implemented” and their definition of “limited” is not the same as mine. If you have to be sneaky it is bad policy.

I checked SearchWarp with this CSS hack for FireFox to verify which links were affected. It looks like all external links are now nofollowed from the author bio to the social bookmarking links in the footer of each article.

The second issue is those links were part of the agreement when the “old” articles were added. By removing those links now SearchWarp is effectively altering the agreement without consent. Yes, I am sure the TOS says they can do what you want. Yes, I’m sure you they are legally within their bounds. But I am sure they screwed over their contributors and that won’t play out well. And it will make it harder to get more quality contributions from here out.

The third problem is this is a blatant link-juice grab. When you look at the Author Benefits page SEO is clearly part of the SearchWarp method of operation. They know what they are doing here and the explanation they gave to toddieg doesn’t hold up when they also state “All articles are manually reviewed to ensure that they meet our quality guidelines.”

The end result is spam is a problem for any site that encourages user-contributions and while “nofollow” may be the easiest solution it is definitely not the best. It is just a convenient smoke-screen. By following the policies they set forth themselves SW would combat a lot of the spam problems they are having. By funneling link-juice internally they boost their own site at the expense of the contributors (the internal links become more powerful because the external links are excluded in the eyes of the search engines). SearchWarp is trying to have its cake and eat it too.For the record, I do not have any articles posted at SearchWarp. Now it seems I won’t bother getting around to it.

Posted in Customer Service, Promotion, Industry News, SEO

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