Neither a Committee, nor the "Boss" should design a website

When it comes to decisions on how to design a website, we usually work in a team involving one or two MarCom people from our client staff, a designer, a content marketing strategist, and programmer developers.  But who makes the final design calls?  From experience, I will tell you about two disasters when it comes to design decisions, and then who should design your website.

The Wrong Way to Design Your Website

1. By Committee –  we once had a a law firm client insist on making all design decisions during a round table discussion of people trained… in the Law.  As you can imagine, they made very poor decisions this way based on what they thought might work.  We did finish the job, but you can imagine if we hired the same law firm to represent us in court, then insisted that all legal decisions come from a committee of designers and developers, what probably would happen.
2. Your Company “Boss” Decides -  rarely does any boss have the skills and experience needed to make good decisions for both design, and user interface optimization, two related but separate disciplines.   Odd then, how often they think they do.  Even odder — they hire a team that designs and develops 15-30 websites a year, plus brings career design, usability, advertising and marketing experience to the table, then wish to over-rule the experts they hired at every step.  Luckily this does not happen often, but it does make you wonder why they hired professionals in the first place.

How to Design a Website — for Best ROI Success

I’ll give you two simple rules here that will pay off in business goal results (like leads), assuming you’ve set trackable business outcome goals for your sites.

1. Respect Design/Usability experts — These professionals know how to direct eye flow on a page, set the tone for corporate identity, develop clear and easy navigation, and produce persuasive content that will increase your desired business outcome goals on your site.  Period.
2. Your Customers/Prospects themselves trump the experts, the professionals, the committee, and gasp… the boss.  If the prospects are shown to download a white paper more often in an A/B test because the button was green, but everyone on the internal team likes the blue button… which are you going to choose?  It’s that simple.

Customer feedback on what works and doesn’t, through a number of different testing methods, must trump the “faith based” (I believe this will work) HIPPO (Highest Paid Person in the Organization) every time.

And since we’re on the web, there are lots of efficient and cost-effective ways to get key feedback from real users — in one word, always be testing. You can even do this before the coders start to build your site with both heatmap results and written answers to your UI questions (check out FiveSecondTest.com). Then, during launch a carefully designed A/B, or Multivariate test almost always pays off to increase ROI (see: WhichTestWon.com)

These test results should trump your Boss, your Designer, your Web Developer… and even your own opinion (I am consistently surprised at results, even after a long career in advertising, marketing and publishing).

Three Final Website Design Tips:

• Always tie your design into trackable business outcome goals at your site (contact us to help you develop some custom analytics reports to help you do this)
• There is no “best practice” to be derived by reviewing other tests because your mix of goals, offers, value propositions, and prospect personae’s are different
• The “design” is not finished when you reach first implementation… in fact, it is never finished. Via testing both B2B and B2C companies continually improve their results by testing color, type, placment, image, and message variables on a regular basis.

And in case you’re still wondering what to do when the boss or the committee asks for an unreasonable change at your website, tell them you will test their idea, and let the customers decide.

I’ve found that many marketers are overlooking lesser known techniques for WordPress Content Marketing strategy.  We’ll examine three tactics in this post, and to keep it simple, I’ll narrow down desired on-site Content Marketing goals to two categories:  engagement (visitors view 3 or more pages), and lead generation for B2B.  We’ll leave ecommerce sales aside for now, and in this post look at 3 ways to use WordPress tools to increase engagement, and so lower your bounce rates.  In a future post, I’ll cover lead generation tactics using WordPress.

Above (click to enlarge) we have added several key post categories to our "Blog" menu item to elevate awareness of available content.

Remember to Add Important Categories to your WordPress Menus

Category archives are landing pages too.  Not only does Google index them, but they also provide a gateway to important content on your site, so your tactic here is to surface links to important categories in a highly visible position.  Most content marketers using WordPress do so using a sidebar widget — but there’s an easy, and more visible way to do this.  I’ll share it with you, but first… how do you know which categories are most important to your visitors?  Analytics.

Check Analytics first to see what categories visitors frequent, but since they are likely not being promoted a lot on your site, check also for what key phrases your visitors use before visiting your site — both answers are available in Analytics.  Then, your tactic is  to use the new WordPress 3.x menu system to add categories as selectable items on a pop-down menu.

Most people only think of showing links to pages, and sometimes posts — but why not promote categories of content that you know visitors are seeking on your site?  And, when you do make sure you write a keyword-rich description that appears at the top of your categories — good themes like our Thematic-MAX framework build in the ability to do this.
TIP:  You can reword the Category Title in the Link to something more compelling — then watch “in-page Analytics” to see if your click-through rate increases.

Above (click to enlarge) are some settings with a MaxRef Widget to reveal key content.

Use Sidebar Widgets to Reveal, Engage, and Reduce Bounces

Most WordPress users know about the “Recent Posts” widget that comes standard with WordPress, but what about promoting older posts that are equally important, and for which your Analytics reports show a high degree of interest?

WebFadds has produced a great Content Marketing plugin  after considering much the same questions — MaxRef Widgets (I’d also like to give thanks to Newt Barret, co-Author of “Get Content, Get Customers” who prompted some of these ideas, originally).  “MaxRef” stands for Maximum Reference to content, and the reason we added an “s” to Widget, is that you can use as many as you need in your sidebars and widget locations — we often place one in the footer area to re-engage visitors who have scrolled to the bottom of a page, and are thinking about leaving.

We’re pleased that MaxRef Widgets has a 5-Star rating with over 4,000 downloads at the WordPress plugin repository.  Our screenshot (click to enlarge) shows an example tactic to use its various settings to reveal posts about how Landing Page Optimization helps your ROI.  Of course you can use it for a different strategy, like rotating overall posts into view so visitors may engage with less recent, but equally valuable content.

Link to searches on your blog based on Analytics Key Phrases

WordPress automatically presents a dynamically updated lists based on keywords or phrases entered into its built-in search field(s).  So the next time you write a post, here are three steps to take:

• First check your Analytics for visitor patterns including what keywords/key phrases relating to your post are popular
• Do a search on your WordPress CMS for the phrase* you decide upon.  Copy the URL that results (in your browser).
• Past that into your post using relevant text.  Here are two examples:  Content Marketing  |  Landing Page Optimization

*TIP:  Research shows that Google users are frequently typing in 2-4 word phrases, rather than just a single keyword.

I write for other publications from time to time, in the area of WordPress Development strategies and Optimization tactcs. This is the second post in a CMI series on Connection Cycle Marketing (CCM). 

Remember you are not optimizing a “website,” but actually optimizing the way your visitors/prospects THINK about your company and its offers.

With that in mind, it’s TLA time, folks (Three Letter Acronyms)! I’ll walk you through three types of optimization and their associated tests: what they are, why you would use them and when they make sense.

VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization

VBO answers the “why” of visitor behavior beyond the “what” we get from analytics. For instance, with VBO testing you can ask a visitor “Why did you exit our shopping cart?” or “Why did you choose (or not choose) to download our white paper?” Analytics only report what users did or did not do.

One popular method to test for VBO is to get a heat map of where people click on a page and then ask them questions that get to the “why” of their behavior.

Take a look at FiveSecondTest.com. The screenshot shown is one kind of VBO test we did for CMI (click to enlarge). It provided feedback on where people tend to click on the page (heatmap at left) and what they remembered and believed the site to be about.

Another way to hear what real customers think (not what “HIPPOs” think – see below) is to do an exit survey. I like 4QSurvey.com for this. Note that there are a lot of survey plug-ins and methods out there, but the 4Q people provide a robust community to help you analyze the results you get.

When to use this:  VBO testing is ideal once your have a preliminary design for your site before it is developed. You can quickly get feedback and make changes based on feedback before expensive programming changes are required.

LPO – Landing Page Optimization

LPO focuses on what a user does on a particular page, such as a lead form page for a B2B company or a shopping cart page for a B2C company.

One tactic that works well is a simple A/B test to rotate a different page with a twist on the headline, graphic and call to action to every other visitor. Then you pick the page that “won” (i.e., resulted in the desired outcomes).

An alternative to this is the multivariate test, which rotates in different combinations variables of page elements, so several versions of a page are presented. In a simpler multivariate test where you mix two headlines, with two compelling graphics and two calls to action, this would create nine versions of a page to test. Because you test more combinations, there is a greater chance you will find a version that “wins” with optimal results. Multivariate tests often result in better optimization gains, but require more visitors to the page to get actionable results.

Have a good look at WhichTestWon.com for some great examples. Instead of making arbitrary guesses on what will do well, you let your real visitors choose what “wins.”

When to use this:
I recommend using LPO after your site is launched. These are tests you can continually run and tweak.

CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization

Like LPO, CRO focuses on increasing the number of “conversions” on your website. Conversions are desired business outcomes, such as when you “convert” a visitor to a prospect when they complete a lead form. The main difference with CRO is that you usually test a series of pages instead of a single page. In essence, you are looking at the sales funnel that leads from your home page to a secondary page to an actual desired outcome page.

The CRO testing method may involve all the elements and methods discussed so far. It answers the “what” question but then you need to use the other strategies to understand “why.”

While you can use A/B and multivariate tests for CRO, Google Analytics provides a visual way to review such sales funnels, but you only get a “what” answer with it — what visitors did (went through the funnel) or did not do (bounced away from one page), etc.

This screenshot from Google Analytics (click to enlarge) is one way to consider a funnel (i.e., a series of pages leading to a goal). This is for the site CoffeeNutHut.com, and shows which pages best “engaged” visitors. We can study the top pages and ponder why they engaged better than those that didn’t. Often, we think of a funnel as leading to a specific outcome. For instance, in B2C that might be an ecommerce sale, or in B2B, a lead conversion. Here, we are just looking for best ways to funnel visitors into becoming “engaged” — continuing on to view three or more pages at the site.

TIP: All studies show that “engaged visitors” are most likely to buy your service or products, so this is an important custom segment to follow in analytics.

When to use this:
Like LPO, use CRO once your site has launched to continually improve your site.

General strategies for testing

Regardless of the test you use, keep these tips in mind:

Always be testing
This is a great way to continually improve your site ROI. Vanquish the “brochure site” mentality. Your website is NOT done when you finish the design; it’s only DONE when you finish optimizing for desired results, then start over.

Always build in a component to answer “why”
While analytics are critical in answering what your visitors are doing and not doing, aim to understand why your site visitors behave in certain ways by using tools such as VBO heat/memory tests, exit surveys and polls. You need to actually ASK your customers and prospects for this information.

Stop relying on the faith of your HIPPO
Often, content marketing teams default to the the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” (HIPPO), which is “faith based”, as in, “I really believe this will work.” Instead, reply with “let’s test that with another idea in an A/B test and see which test wins…by actually seeing how real visitors behave.” Worried about offending the HIPPO? Don’t. You are respecting their opinion by including it in the test, plus using a method of increasing site ROI that they can appreciate.

I look forward to your comments and questions. You can find more posts in the series on “Connection Cycle Marketing” on my author index page at Content Marketing Institute.

On the road back from a great “retreat” conference on “content marketing” and “the power of story”, I thought about how important good content is for everyone with a web presence. After a number of good discussions in the quaint island Inn, over lunch, and at dinner, I was also reminded that what really matters happens in the connections you make outside the conference presentation rooms.  So, right now, I want to tell you, how creating great content is your gold… but not your most important goal.

The conference  keynote, given by Joe Pulizzi (a client and colleague — check out his blog and post about 10 reasons your content stinks, and how to fix it) set the tone for an excellent focus on what it takes to create, deliver, and market great content. That’s essential. But as I have written for some time now (see “Why Content is King No More“), people do not buy from content — they buy from people that they feel they know.

“Content is not authentic connection, so recognize what is and optimize your sites for the behaviors that will result in authentic connections as an outcome goal.”

There were some excellent conference presenters who spoke of video content, and telling personal stories — excellent ways to help people to feel they know you. The point was made that journalists can and should have a role in creating compelling content. But it was conference organizer, Russell Sparkman’s presentation that brought two key concepts into focus for me. First, he used the analogy of content as Gold. It’s valuable, and also “conductive”. Second, he has suggested a great content creation calendar (see Sparkman’s post about the 1-7-30-4-2-1 strategy) that involves systematic creation of posts, tweets, newsletters, white papers and studies. Creating content requires discipline (so does making connections). If content is gold for you, and I believe good content always is, then you have to keep building it up in your storerooms.

But content does not equal authentic connection — that is, a real live “handshake” with another business person. And simply auto-sending links to content in social venues doesn’t make those connections either. Being social means connecting with other people, not connecting with content.

Content is Gold, Authentic Connection is the End Goal

So, here are some key take-aways after a review of the conference:

• Content is gold, cultivate and manage it wisely (all presenters stressed this)
• Content is a “promise” (Pulizzi), so schedule it and have discipline in regular creation (ie Sparkman’s Calendar)
• Content is not authentic connection (Frangos), so recognize what is, and optimize your sites for the behaviors that will result in authentic connection as an outcome goal
• I encourage my colleagues and clients to add authentic connection tactics (real-time conversation at LinkedIN and Twitter, visitor behavior optimizations, and landing page optimization tests, for example) to their calendar and list of tactics for connection cycle marketing. Check some posts we already have about optimization, and  I’ll blog more about that here.

And now you see why I place Content as the King’s gold — not the King. But then who’s the King? It’s you. You yourself are the King, and content is your gold. That gold you create is a valuable commodity that people want — great if you’re selling content. But if you are using content to sell a product or service then the end result you want is Connection. Spend your gold wisely to cultivate Connection.

How many leads has your content produced for you on average over the past six months? Puzzle on that. Then, I encourage you to contact me direct, so we can connect and find some answers.

As of September of this year, if you insist on using flash based slideshows and presentations at your websites — 7.5 million viewers will not be able to see them. It’s November already, so make that closer to 9 million who cannot see any flash at your sites.  And that’s just iPads — add 73 million iPhone users who cannot see your flash presentations.

Fortunately there are a number of solutions for display on iPads for those with WordPress based CMS and blogs. First a quick comparison… I just bought an iPad (most fun I’ve had since the first computer I bought in 1985), and took this photo (using an Android phone of course — what a geek) of the homepage of WebFadds:

Above photo of our home page shows one slideshow in plain view at top, and another at lower left not working on the popular iPad (NextGEN Gallery plugin — removed now)

You’ll notice that the large slide show at top is indeed working — it’s not made with Flash, but the slideshow at bottom created with a popular WordPress plugin called “NextGEN Gallery” is not working because it uses Flash.  Now I know some people rave about Flash, but I have never liked it for a number of reasons including that it’s difficult to track visitor behavior in Analytics, and it requires everyone to get the latest Flash viewer, and all your prospects can’t be bothered with that.  Now, Mr. Jobs, at Apple, has wisely said no to Flash in favor of emerging HTML5 technologies that will do the same thing — and be open source.  Still another reason cited to avoid the Adobe made proprietary Flash is that it is security hole prone.  This is why Jobs said famously, that Adobe is “lazy.”

You can rail about the irony of Apple’s “closed garden” policy as it embraces new Open Source presentation and video technologies, but the basic fact is that you’re missing millions of potential eyes on your site if you insist on Flash galleries.

What to do?  Here are three solutions:

1. Use the Built in WordPress gallery to display your photos and portfolios when you need a simple solution. A lot of people don’t realize that WordPress has had a great little gallery built in since version 2.5.  At bottom of this post is a video to help you learn about the WordPress built in Gallery.  To show you an example, I decided to make a quick gallery here of some sites we built recently using the next solution detailed below:

   
   
   

2. Use a non-flash slide rotator like the “Easing Slider” plugin we used at above sites — it offers linking of slides to featured contents.  To see the sites in action go to:  CoffeeNutHut.com | ZSquaredMedia.com | IgnitionMSP.com
3. Consider placing your images in Flickr or Picassa Gallery — then embedding them in your site. This tactic gives you an additional “marketplace” for visibility on your

Short Video About Using WordPress Gallery…

Now you can take advantage of the new, simple — it’s drag and drop — menu system in WordPress 3.0 to reveal all types of content at your website. It’s a new CMS feature that lets you bring posts, categories, tags and more, directly to your navigation menu – great for content marketing strategy. This is important for “Visitor Behavior Optimization” (VBO) where you make adjustments to your dynamic site structure based on a review of Analytics and other testing reports (more on VBO in a future video).

Learn more about using WordPress 3.0 Menus in this 3.5 minute video…

If you find yourself squinting — watch in a larger window at Screencast.com.

Video Production & Distribution Note:  We use Jing Pro by TechSmith to produce our videos, then upload them both to the Jing Site and also to YouTube.com for a double marketing reach.  So far we like the quality that Jing delivers better than the standard compression delivered at YouTube.

There are a lot of short overview videos about using your WordPress CMS at WordPress.tv. We’ve also done a few that include some strategic tips about optimizing your CMS. Below is a good overview video about WordPress — it’s getting older, but you can still get some good tips. For newer videos from WebFadds bookmark our new Videos Category.

Optimization Tip: As I say in the video below, you’re not optimizing a website — you’re optimizing how visitors think about your website and the actions they take including completing key business goals at your site. I recommend you take a good look in Analytics at the new “on page Analytics” that shows you “hot-spot” activity on your pages — where visitors click. Make sure those clicks are tied to goals you’ve set, like submitting a lead form. At right is a thumbnail you may click to review how this looks for our own site. Note that you not only see where visitors click but also get key insights to how those clicks may lead to goal completions, and other visitor behavior including what they do after scrolling down the page, “beneath the fold”. Contact us for an estimate to take your Google Analytics to the MAX with actionable advice.

Video: Overview of Using WordPress as your CMS:

In this ISSUE:

NOTE: There’s still time to save on our WordPress Service and Upgrade PAK — thru. Jan. 15th. See: WP 2.9.x Features & Upgrade Special

Best ROI for online marketing in 2010? ::::::::::::

We have a new poll at LinkedIN of C-Level Marketing Managers to find out what popular marketing methods they believe will be key for ROI this year — you can take it too: BEST ROI POLL . Initial results (51 respondents) are shown here (click to enlarge)… and there’s a demographic breakdown revealed after the poll is taken showing age range, company size, role and other metrics. So far, CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization – is winning, by a nose over SMM – Social Media Marketing. Did you hear that Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl advertising in favor of Social Media? Hmmmm. This is definitely the year for Social Media in terms of spending, but I am in agreement with the current poll stats that CRO will be best for your ROI. I’ll report more on the Poll results in a future post, but in this issue I’d like to give you some tips about each for each of the tactics queried in the Poll: CRO, SEO, PPC, eMail, and SMM.

CRO Tip: Click Heat Maps for VBO… ::::::::::::::::::::::::

Above, (click to enlarge) the click heat map for WPsiteHosting.com shows what elements draw clicks and gives some commentary.

Ok, get ready for another TLA (Three Letter Acronym) for this issue’s tip on optimizing — VBO… Visitor Behavior Optimization. How many times have you been in an internal discussion about what color a box or link should be on your page so more people would click it? Everyone’s got their opinions — even the pros, and often just about everyone’s opinion is wrong — even the pros. So why not ask your visitors? WebFadds has been doing just that and learning some very good things about what visitors do at our site and client sites. Some methods include Click Heat Maps (click screenshot to see one for WPsiteHosting.com — where a lot of our clients have their sites), recorded visit tracking (no audio), and usability testing with transcript and recorded audio. We’re building this in for original design, redesign, and landing page optimization — read more about it here, and contact us for a quote.

SEO Tip: Title & Primary Terms:::::::::::::::::

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org (excellent site with tools to review your web performance), has done a couple of studies in the US and in Europe that point to a key tip for SEO workers: make sure your primary key phrase is in the FIRST part of your Title Tags. Below is a screenshot of an SEO plugin we install as part of our Max-SEO service with a key phrase highlighted in the Title Tag Entry field. To this advice, I would add that the most successful results we see with our clients come when that same primary key phrase (don’t try to use too many keywords/terms in a shotgun approach… instead, rifle in on one phrase for which you want to rank well) is used in seo-savvy copy that still reads well. This relates to the part of Google’s ranking formula called “density” — the number of times a phrase occurs on a page or in a post.

SMM Tip: Listen to Local Tweeters :::::::::::::::::

Above, Nearby Tweets is "tuned" into local talk about SEO.

Use NearbyTweets.com (version 2 BETA adds some great features including saved searches, search radius and more), to find people in your city talking about what you sell. Engage them. Meet them. Do so from a social, or soft-sell standpoint. Don’t begin by pushing what you have to sell. Just talk to them, and listen. In sales, there was a strategy called “consultative selling” that was very popular early this decade. It still works. Listen and wait for them to ask your advice. Then consult. Speaking of consulting, contact us to schedule a SMM training session with your sales and marketing team.

PPC Tip: Quality Score & LPO :::::::::::::

Ok… here’s another TLA for you — LPO, that’s Landing Page Optimization. I actually think that PPC is getting overlooked in the Poll — it can offer great ROI, but there’s a factor in adwords, Google calls your Quality Score that helps determines your placement, per click costs, and so your ROI. Unfortunately we see a lot of clients who are unwilling to give control of the Landing page advertised in adwords ads over to your marketing team. There’s a longer explanation to it (see our colleague Tom Hale’s excellent post on the subject), but to think about why it’s important, remember that Google wants people who click on ads to find highly relevant information, and there are ways to make that happen. One way, is to make sure the key phrase in the Ad headline is used prominently on the landing page. Of course, PPC, like organic SEO, just gets you targeted visitors — what they do after they get there is the other part of LPO. Contact us if you’d like to increase conversions on your landing pages.

eMail Tip: Subject line length :::::::::::::::::

Finally, here’s a tip on the other marketing tactic that’s languishing in the Poll — email Marketing. Email marketing can and should be optimized and tracked in Analytics for best ROI. Mailer-Mailer, an email marketing service provider, has created an excellent report with recommendations on Subject Line Length, Subject Line Content, Personalization, Bounces, and Click Rates. One tip… emails with subject lines of 35 characters or less get more opened more. And the best part of this tip… is the report is free for the download, here: Mailer Mailer Report. Pretty good marketing for Mailer Mailer, huh?

So, I’ll leave you with the challenge question: What are you offering for viral reports, ebooks, and white papers that can be tracked and shown to bring you more business?

WebFadds.com is an agency focused on CMS, Social Media Marketing, & Landing Page Optimization solutions. Contact us today for a free quote. And, be sure to download our latest Guide: “Winning Twitter Marketing Tools & Tactics”.

WebFadds has added VBO service as an essential process both during new site development and redesigns, and in all landing page optimization work. Contact Us for a Quote today — WebFadds VBO services start at $599.  Read below to learn how this service helps you better serve visitors, and increase your ROI.

Why Optimize for Visitor Behavior?

If you have a website, and you’re serious about getting the most out of it, you probably have already done some SEO work. You’re using some form of Social Media to connect with prospects. And, you’re watching those Analytics for actions you can take to guide visitors toward desired business outcomes.  Good… you’ve got Metrics.

But, what are your site visitors not doing — that they could be doing — and which would convert more visitors to prospects, leads, and customers? Answer: Your customers have those answers… not metrics.  Metrics in a good Analytics package (we use Google Analytics alot) will answer WHAT, visitors are doing and not doing — but not WHY.  So, ask them what they understand about your site, and watch them interact with it. Then, you can review the results to look for tweaks and tactics to help visitors get what they need at your site. That’s how you’ll get what you need.

Sounds like a good plan — even essential when you’re designing a new page, or sales funnel of pages? Of course. You need to know what your visitors are thinking, and why they are clicking, or not clicking — their motivation factors missing from cold hard analytics. Addressing those factors will increase your ROI.  This assumes you have defined the desired business outcomes for your site, and are actively monitoring them.

We call understanding visitor thinking and adjusting for it, VBO – Visitor Behavior Optimization. Ask yourself — are you optimizing your website, or optimizing the way visitors think about your website? Remember when everyone used “Submit” as the button text for a form? “Submit” means you are forcing someone to do something. Conversion testing shows consistently that changing the button text to something friendlier results in more desired outcomes because of what your visitor thinks and feels about your site. That’s VBO.

Types & Steps in  VBO Testing:

Here’s an overview of the steps we recommend in a good VBO process, followed by some examples:

• Actions in Analytics – learn visually where visitors are clicking on your pages, and how much each click was worth to you.  With regards to visitors, it answers “WHAT” are they doing and not doing.
• Click plus Memory Testing - What attracts clicks, and what do visitors remember about the items they clicked.  This helps more with “WHAT” (what do they click on), and begins to answer “WHY” (impressions of your site).
• Exit Surveys and Polls -  This is very important because it is one cost-effective way to answer “WHY” visitors do what they do.
• Usability Review - what is in the mind of your visitors as they interact with your site — another way to understand the “WHY” of site visitor behavior.
• Sort it out and apply Usability, Advertising & Marketing Principles - Review, analyze and strategize new tactics.
  After you complete the above, and implement new tactics based on what you learned about the WHAT AND WHY of your site visitor behavior, then you need to optimize for your solutions…
• A/B Test, or Multivariate Optimization Test – Test a number of persuasion variables (Headlines, Persuasive Images, Calls to Action, etc.) as you upgrade your site for more conversions.

1 – Click and Conversion Metrics:  Above [click to enlarge]  is a click overlay from Google Analytics, showing the percentages for each item clicked on our home page.  Hovering over a link also reveals a conversion tracking box showing the $ value for those visitors that completed a conversion on our site (floating box).  But we don’t know yet why visitors clicked on a particular link, what caught their attention, visually, and what they remembered on leaving.

2 – Click (Heat) plus Memory Test: Above is still another test in the VBO process (click to enlarge) we did on our home page.  It is a “5 Second Test” from fivesecondtest.com, and reviewers are asked to look at a static image of your site, then click on the areas of interest, and describe what they were after 5 seconds.  Above we got a high number clicking on the linked flash intros, and two on a “Latest Report” link at middle right.  Only one reviewer recalled, the correctly spelled our company name.  Did anyone hesitate to locate an item on a page?  Why did they choose one Blog Post over another?  These questions cannot be answered in a simple clickmap (sometimes called a heat map) test. TIP:  In order to understand what you are getting from this test, we recommend you, and your makreting team, take at least 10-15 tests (takes a couple of minutes) there before you interpret your data.

3 – Usability Review Testing: To answer the questions the first two tests could not, we need to have at least three reviewers look at the site, and talk their way through it as they interact with it.  Above (click to hear video of actual test), is an actual review done for Clearwire.com’s website.  There are generally two kinds of reviewers — those that are typical prospects you are seeking, and those that have a level of usability expertise so they can identify and advise on issues you need to consider fixing.  This used to be pretty expensive — you had to hire a company who paid reviewers to come into their office, then they videotaped their site interaction and provided a transcript with recommendations.  It’s more affordable, nowadays, as there are a number of reviewers and reviewing services available online.

Steps 4 & 5 – Analyze, then test Revised Combinations: Now that you’ve “got inside the head” of visitors and site reviewers, you should identify elements you want to tweak — headlines, graphics, and calls to action.  Then, your final step is to run software on the landing page you want optimized that will swap in each revision element — in different combinations, and tell you which one converts best.  Usually, you will use a PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising campaign to drive enough unique visitors to the page to get a good reading (around 1,000).    Below is Google’s Overview of their “Optimizer” software — one way to carry out your test:

Extending Your Presence Online — How Intense Debate Comments Helps SEO

“He Parlayed his Way to a Million Dollars” – unknown

As I’ve said before, Publishing is the new Marketing, and Marketing via Content now offers continuing new ways to extend your reach and engagement prospects. But you have to foment — that is, promote the growth and development of  your comments, so you can “parlay” your way toward business objectives. One way to do this is with “Intense Debate” — a WordPress plugin that also helps you with SEO.

What is “Intense Debate”? It’s a plugin for WordPress that makes commenting easier to manage and extends your potential reach by allowing your blog readers to choose to tweet their comments. IntenseDebate.com is owned and managed by the same folks that are behind WordPress.com (the remote hosted blogging platform used by millions) and WordPress.org (the software used to create your own hosted CMS and business blog solutions) — Automattic.com.  The company also enables Blogger, Tublr. and TypePad integration.  Features include Comment Threading, Reply by Email, Reputation points and Comment Voting, and Twitter integration — your commenters have the option to send a simultaneous tweet when they post a comment.  Add to that the opening up of the plugin’s API to developers, and I think there’s even more potential to plumb here.  Try it by leaving a comment below.

Above – the Intense Debate comments template allows your commenters to login with Social Networking IDs, Subscribe to comments, and also to post comments on Twitter.

How does Comment Debate help you in SEO? The system provides a very clean, rankable set of Comments on your site, plus gives each commenter the option to tweet their comments when they post them — with links back to your site.

Above, you can manage the comments from more than one blog — all in the same place.

How does Comment Debate help you in Business?

• As stated at Intense Debate — the system serves to bring “quality comments to the forefront”.  And “forefront” translates to engagement with just the right sort of thinkers and prospects for your brand.
• Save Administration Time: Once you have an Intense Debate account, you can quickly manage the comments from multiple blogs all from one control panel online.
• Synergy Loop:  You comment on a post(s) at other sites related to your business mission, and this gets automatically tweeted on Twitter, whereby like-minded people may visit your business blog, comment and have their comments then appear on Twitter with links back to your blog.

Can my business stand up in an “intense” debate? Of course.  This is like asking if your sales force will be able to handle discussion, and even criticism at a trade show.  They can, can’t they?  Good companies will always embrace engaging the market because the constructive criticism will help them perfect products and services.  And great sales people know that debate is an opportunity to present your position which leads to more sales.  Plus, you can always moderate your comment system to weed out spam and destructive comments.

Recommendation: Install IntenseDebate (the WordPress plugin is freely distributed) and add your business blog to the debate.  Webfadds will be pleased to provide this service for you — we’ll be adding it as an option for our Social Marketing Solutions (just contact us at that page).