The operating system I want

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I want a project-based operating system rather than an application or file-based operating system. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s say I’m writing a business plan. I have the plan itself in a Word document, a few charts in Excel, and maybe a presentation in Powerpoint. So far so good. I can keep all that stuff in a folder, right?

But what about emails? What about tasks? What about events? Those things are all in Outlook, separate from my business plan folder. Sure, I can create a folder in Outlook for the emails, but it’s still separate from my business plan folder.

I want one project-related folder that contains absolutely everything associated with that project.

  • Files
  • Emails
  • Tasks
  • Events
  • Bookmarks
  • Deadlines and deliverables

So, e.g., when I get an email, I want to be able to associate it with a project folder so that when I open that project folder I see all the relevant emails.

SEO 101 — Your basic checklist

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A friend asked me to take a quick look at his website for him. He’s not a web designer or an IT guy, so he made some pretty predictable mistakes, some relating to search engine optimization.

Over the years, SEO has been part science, part art, part b.s. Clever webmasters have tried to find ways to trick the search engines, and the search engines find ways around those tricks and punish the sites that use them.

Lesson one in SEO is to forget the tricks. The search engines want to find pages that are relevant to what the person is searching for. That should be your guiding principle. I.e., “what would someone be looking for that would make them happy to find my site?” Keep that in mind as you build your page.

For example, let’s say you’ve figured out the perfect recipe for a cup of no-sugar, dark hot chocolate and you want to tell the world about it (or sell your mix).

You might think your ideal search is “no sugar dark hot chocolate mix.”

Here’s where you have to do some keyword research. Which is better, “no sugar,” “sugar free,” or maybe even “low carb”? Try several different versions of your search in a keyword tool and find out which one gets the most traffic. Once you have a search phrase that gets a lot of traffic and actually relates to what you have to say, then do the following.

Your basic checklist

File names — Name your page something like “no_sugar_dark_chocolate_mix.html.”

Title tags — An html page has a title tag. Make sure that tag has your keywords in it, like “No sugar dark hot chocolate mix — best ever!”

Keywords — Html pages have headings, usually in h tags. The headings are a good indication of what’s important on that page, so make sure your keywords are in those tags.

Alt tags for images — Your img tags have a place for an “alt” tag, which allows you to say what the image is, or what it’s about. Put a relevant image on your page and label it with something like “a cup of no sugar dark hot chocolate.”

Once you’ve built your page, you also want to get incoming links, preferably with your keywords in the links.

That’s the very basics. It gets more complicated than that, but you should at least start with this.

Will all content be online by 2025?

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The good folk over at Mequoda are predicting that information products will be digital by the year 2025.

Note that it’s one thing to say that all content will be available digitally, but it’s another thing to say that it will only be available digitally. Which is what they’re predicting.

In 15 years, no one will be printing newspapers, magazines and books — everything will be digital and delivered immediately.

I would agree that almost all material will be available in a digital version by 2025, but I don’t agree that content will not also continue to be available in print.

I’ve been in publishing for about 25 years, and I’ve seen lots of predictions about the demise of print. I also ride a commuter train every day, and while I see more and more laptops, PDAs, Kindles and so on, people still prefer — by a substantial majority — to read print on paper.

I propose several reasons for this.

  1. Print folds, screens do not. There are advances in foldable screens, and we may get to the point where you can have a piece of “digital paper” in your shirt pocket that will display whatever you like, but I don’t think we’ll be there in 15 years, and we certainly won’t have widespread adoption by then.
  2. You can take notes on print. There are ways to bookmark and make notes in digital documents, but they’re not nearly as convenient as scratching an underline in a book, or writing in a margin.
  3. Little screens stink. You can put a lot on a blackberry, but it will never be the same as stretching out a newspaper or opening a large coffee table book and looking at the photos.
  4. Print is more portable and versatile. Blackberries and Kingles are small and portable, but you don’t them to get rained on, or fall in the pool (or the toilet), or get exposed to salt water while you’re fishing. In short, there are places you can take a piece of disposable paper that you might not want to take your $300 electronic gizmo.
  5. Reading print is easier on the eyes. This will get better over time, but there’s a big difference between reading reflective light off paper and reading a computer screen. Print is more relaxing.
  6. It’s easier to loan or borrow a book.
  7. Print is easier to scan or flip through. Quick. Find the definition of “oolitic.” You can type it into a search engine or go to dictionary.com, but it’s a whole lot easier to grab the dictionary off the shelf and find the word.
  8. Print has a more stable location. We’ve all had this sort of experience. “I’m looking for this passage in Strunk and White, and it was about a third of the way down the left side of the page …. Ah, here it is.” We’ve also had the opposite experience of trying to find something on a web site that has moved.

    9. I’m sure you could add many more reasons why print is preferable. Technology will continue to close the gap between the online and the paper experience, but I think it will be a very long time before all content becomes exclusively digital.

“Upper funnel” keywords and landing page design

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Avinash Kaushik has a very interesting article on measuring the value of “upper funnel” keywords.

The basic idea is that different types of keywords get you different kinds of traffic, and that it doesn’t make sense to evaluate all your keywords on the same basis — i.e., first-visit conversions.

So if you’re not going to evaluate keywords (that you’re paying good money for!) on the basis of conversions, what do you do?

Kaushik says you put keywords through a funnel analysis. Some of them introduce people to your company / website, but they’re not likely to convert. Measure them by bounce rate.

Others relate to category or brand. You measure them by time on site or return visits.

Finally you have your “conversion” keywords, which you measure by sales.

Okay, this sounds reasonable, but it sounds a little like the “branding” pitches you get from people who sell display ads. “No, these ads don’t convert off clicks, but they increase traffic to your site, brand-related searches, etc.”

Which is all well and good if you can prove it!

That’s where you get into the tricky analytics portions of the discussion, which involves “multi touch attribution analysis.” What’s that, you ask? It’s “the art … of measuring truly pan session customer behavior.”

Lovely. Can I do that with Google Analytics? (Maybe. See comment 16 in the post I link to above.)

Oh, but I said I was going to talk about landing pages.

If this theory really works, it argues for different landing page strategies for different groups of keywords.

Many people design landing pages for “conversion only.” Drive visitors straight to your cart and don’t give them any options to do anything else!

(There’s a smarter, middle ground that gives them some other options, like going to your home page, but that’s for another day.)

However, if I have a pile of keywords that are designed to get people interested in my content, I obviously don’t want to send them to a page that says “buy my widget” and nothing else.

So Kaushik’s “funnel” approach to keywords leads to a strategy that involves several different groups of keywords going to several different types of landing pages — and a headache of a time tracking it all in some fancy pants analytics tool.

Long vs. short, pretty vs. ugly

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I was at the SIPA Washington conference this week, chatting with colleagues in the publishing industry about this and that, but mostly landing pages.

A lot of people seem to think of the web as a fast-moving, short-attention-span place where quirky people with ADD are blazing from page to page as fast as they can click.

In order to grab these people, the story goes, you need short sales pages that get right to the point without a lot of text. And God forbid you make them scroll.

I’ve not found that to be the case, and almost every person I spoke with who had tested long vs. short copy found that long worked better. (One person said his test was inconclusive.)

This applied to landing pages and to email copy.

Obviously you need to follow basic copy writing rules. Headlines should offer a compelling benefit. There should be a clear call to action. Etc. Etc. (More on that later.)

But when people are interested in a product, sometimes they want to read about it for a while and get comfortable before they buy.

In direct mail, some companies use very long copy. Like 18 pages. (I’m not kidding.)

So don’t be afraid of a long sales page. Use Google’s Website Optimizer to test long vs. short and see what you can get. (If you don’t know how to use it, there’s plenty of good help on Google’s site, and there are some youtube videos about it. Or you can ask me.)

And oh yeah. The other thing is this idea that a page has to look “professional.”

It seems there ought to be something to that, right? Who wants to buy a product from people who can’t even make a decent web page?

OTOH, have you looked at Craigslist recently?

I’ve tested pretty vs. ugly, and often ugly wins.

It may be that I’m trading short-term sales against long-term trust in my brand.

Maybe, but I’m not convinced. I think the “you need a professional design” thing is promoted by the graphic designers.

Except …. You do need to make your site “professional” when it comes to usability. I don’t think you need lovely colors and a crisp layout. But you do need to put things where people expect to find them, and you do need to make it easy for your visitors to use your site.

Landing page optimization

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These are my notes for a SIPA Roundtable discussion on landing page optimization.

The visitor to your landing page is asking these questions:

  • Am I in the right place?
  • Can I trust this site / company?
  • What do I do next?

Am I in the right place?

Consider how the visitor arrived at your site and make the transition from the previous page as smooth as possible.

The visitor has a goal in mind and wants to know if this page is relevant to completing that goal.

Can I trust this site / company?

Any kid and his mutt dog can make a web page, and web visitors know that. You have to win credibility with your visitors with …

  • A professional design
  • A guarantee
  • A good brand name
  • Transparency (“About Us” and “Contact Us” links)

What do I do next?

Your page should be goal-oriented. Goals might include …

  • Browse news articles
  • Sign up for an e-mail alert
  • Buy a product
  • Watch a video
  • Get more information

Whatever goal your page is directed towards, make it plain to the user how to achieve that goal and avoid unnecessary distractions.

However – don’t try to herd your visitors, and do provide links back to your homepage. (It helps with your page rank on Google.)

To optimize conversion rates, focus on usability

Keep it simple

  • Make links speak for themselves
  • Make the structure of your website predictable
  • Provide clear feedback to user actions
  • Make it hard to commit a serious mistake

These are just guidelines … and I’m not sure they’re all true!

Think of these concepts as you come up with ideas for your landing pages, but always test them.

For Discussion

  • Reaction to these guidelines?
  • What’s worked for you?
  • What difficulties have you faced?
  • Have you tried …
    • Cool effects (Ajax, jQuery, etc.)
    • Video
    • User ratings, testimonials
    • Other?
  • Do you test your landing pages?
  • What do you use?
  • Any problems?
  • Any successes?

Resources

Let’s Talk Landing Pages

Optimizing Conversion Rates: It’s All About Usability

Creating effective landing pages – optimization tips

Today’s “give it to me quick or I’m out of here world”?

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10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics gives this advice.

In today’s “give-it-to-me-quick-or-I’m-out-of-here” world, you need to keep your landing page very focused and pretty simple.

Why do people have such a quick draw on relevance?

Perhaps it’s because the barrier to entry for new products, new services, new advertising, … let’s face it, new annoyances … has become so small that any clown with a computer can get his voice on the street.

If you were going to pay $100,000 on an ad campaign, you’d going to take some time and do it right. But if you can whip something up in five minutes and start driving paid search traffic in another 30, you might not be so concerned about quality.

The web is full of cheap garbage and shoddy pages because it’s so easy to do.

Your visitor is looking for something. To find it he has to wade through 100 pages and decide if you’re one of the 99 bozos or the 1 keeper. He doesn’t have a lot of time to fool around.

You have to build trust by making it clear that

  • your page is relevant to his search,
  • you’re a trusted and trustworthy merchant, and
  • it’s easy for him to do what he wants to do … get information, buy a product, whatever.

I don’t believe the problem is short attention spans. Once you build trust and convince the user he’s in the right place, he’s willing to hear you out.

“But display ads lift your other efforts”

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Yes, they do.

Display ads don’t usually work in isolation (i.e., on a click to purchase model).

However, several studies have shown that display ads result in more searches on branded terms and more visits to your website. The display ad salesman will tell you that if you’re making a profit in those areas — and if you’re not you might be in the wrong business — then display ads could make up for their dismal click-to-purchase perfomance by helping your channels that are making money.

The problem with this kind of analysis is that it doesn’t account for how much you have to spend on display ads to get the lift.

For example, just to make the numbers easy, let’s say you get 100 “direct” visits to your site every day (from people who type in your address), 100 visits from natural search results and 100 visits from paid search results.

Let’s say you can convert 5% of your visitors into $10 sales. That gets you $150 a day in revenue. (5% of 300 visits times $10.)

Of course you’ll have different numbers for the different sources, but let’s keep this easy.

Now let’s say that a display ad campaign can increase each of these by 50%. So now you’re getting $225 in revenue. (5% of 450 visits times $10.)

If you spent less than $75 on your display ad campaign, you’re doing well. If you spent more, maybe not. You have to look at the numbers more carefully than we’re doing here.

The point is that the simple claim that display ads increase search by 50% doesn’t tell me anything useful. How much do I have to spend on display ads to get that 50% lift?

What we really need is a study that compares PPC spend with display ad spend. IOW, what percent of your PPC budget do you have to spend on display ads to get what percent lift?