Dwight Design offers these 11 website design mistakes that you shouldn’t be making. If your website commits any of these sins, it’s time to have a word with your webmaster (unless you insisted on them over their objections, in which case it’s time you sat down in front of a mirror and repeated “I am NOT a web designer” until you really, truly get it.)
Inside CRM has a great article, 101 Five-Minute Fixes to Incrementally Improve Your Web Site.
Some ideas:
1. Tell readers why they should perform a task. If your site is full of passive suggestions, toughen it up. People are trained to follow a request, as long as you give them a good reason to do it.
14. Make an offer that visitors can’t refuse. Check out your site to make sure that you’re giving your visitors a reason to pick your company out of an overcrowded field.
24. Never ask for more information than you need. If you’re currently asking for excessive information, rethink your data-mining tendencies. When you get greedy for data, you’ll turn off some visitors.
46. Take off the black hat. If you’ve used tactics like keyword stuffing, remove them from your site. They may be working now, but in the long run, they’ll only hurt.
58. Remove text from images. Using image text will make it difficult for those using screen readers to read text.
82. Ditch frames. If your site uses frames, you need to move on to another method, like CSS or SSI (Server-Side Includes).
87. Ditch crazy fonts. If you’re using a ransom-note font, it’s time to switch to something simpler. Chances are, your visitors’ browsers are rendering it as Times New Roman anyway.
100. Store a Web site cache. Keep a copy of your site handy in case of copyright disputes or loss.
Since a not-insignificant portion of my peeps and potential clients are organ grinders of the artistic sort, I thought I’s pass along Kevin Kelly’s thought-provoking article on making a living as an artist in the 21st century, 1000 True Fans.
According to Kelly,
A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.
[snip]
A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.
Kelly’s formula is at once breathtakingly simple and yet compellingly feasible:
First, create 1000 True Fans. According to Kelly, this involves finding and converting 1000 regular fans to True Fans by connecting with them personally and directly, which is an imminently rational goal and one that any artist worth their salt should be able to do, given access to such basic resources as an Internet connection, some basic marketing smarts and a salable product or service.
Second, Kelly estimates that a True Fan will spend an average of one day’s income per year on a favorite artist, although of course some will spend more and others less. For easy math, he rounds this sum out to $100 per True Fan. At this rate (which is, you have to admit, an entirely realistic reflection of what many of us spend on our own favorite artists in a year’s time) 1000 True Fans + $100/year = $100,000.00 per year gross, a nifty living by any artist’s standards.
The key, he points out, rests on that personal contact. You’ll need to nurture, connect with and personally involve these True Fans. Of course, for the average artist, this isn’t a problem. You want to reach out and touch people personally and profoundly. You want to enter into a conversation with them and hear their responses to your work. You want to learn about them and geek out over mutual interests and so on. That connection is a vital part of what makes your art worth doing. It’s fun. And it’s one of the reasons why you sing/paint/play/film/photograph in the first place. (For those who don’t, however, he suggests that an intermediary or manager can handle this task perfectly well.)
Obviously, as Kelly himself points out, the requirement of 1000 True Fans applies best to the solo artist. Bands, comedy troupes, painter’s collectives and other groups would have to increase their effort to achieve enough True Fans per member to scale the formula. But nonetheless, it does scale relatively easily. Also, the number of fans varies depending on the type of media, price of the work, costs and so on, although not by so much that it upsets the formula in very many cases. Finally, Kelly notes that this formula only applies when the fan support is direct (people go to your site and buy a download) rather than indirect (people buy your book or click on a blog ad, which spreads the money out over a wide variety of middlemen). Indirect income means you’ll need far more True Fans to support you in a reasonable manner.
There are several interesting case studies mentioned in the article, including an author that funded his novel through direction donations and a musician who is paying for the production costs of her next CD through a truly creative, tiered level of direct support ranging from…
…$10 “unpolished rock,” which earns them a free digital download of her disc when it’s made, to the $10,000 “weapons-grade plutonium level,” where she promises “you get to come and sing on my CD. Don’t worry if you can’t sing - we can fix that on our end.
Wrapping up, Kelly has this to say:
The usual alternative to making a living based on True Fans is poverty…I am suggesting there is a home for creatives in between poverty and stardom. Somewhere lower than stratospheric bestsellerdom, but higher than the obscurity of the long tail. I don’t know the actual true number, but I think a dedicated artist could cultivate 1,000 True Fans, and by their direct support using new technology, make an honest living.
Sounds like a plan to me.
Ah, the plaintive cry of the spam-hounded netizen (that quote was nabbed from a comments thread about bulletin board spambots). No doubt you, yourself, have bitched or moaned something similar in response to a particularly annoying or persistent ad. Remember that feeling? Great, now turn it around…
What does that frame of mind mean for you, as a business owner?
Simply this:
I see some of you out there nodding your heads. Now contrast those rules with the rules for Business As Usual:
If you recognize yourself or your business strategy in any of these last 5 rules, you have some work to do. Time to get busy…
*Note that on number 2 of the first list, I DID NOT say “Give me a reason to click through or to stay once I find you.” These days, you start with “NO” and earn “YES,” not the other way around. Remember that.
That’s a quote from Rabbi Pinny Gniwisch, speaking on a podcast with Hugh McLeod about marketing and “Influencers.” They discuss a lot more, and the conversation goes in some very interesting areas, so you might want to give it a listen.
But the primary reason I stopped by to blog was to lay out some righteous honesty for you, from a marketer who hates to hype:
The reality is, you can have the best copy, the coolest widget, the best demographic targeting, the shiniest website and the most bitchin’ marketing plan this side of Eden’s apple and your product launch can still completely and utterly fail. As in no sales, no interest and no money. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
Why?
Luck. Happenstance. Random acts of wtf.
Maybe you just happened to launch at the same time as someone else did and they got all the juice. They don’t even have to be superior to win, just first. Or loudest. Or luckiest. (Remember the Betamax/VHS tech race, now being replayed between HD-DVD/Blue-Ray tech.)
Maybe your launch got overshadowed and out-shouted by world events, local news or just the latest, greatest Internet meme hitting the feeds at the same time.
Maybe, despite all your careful research, quality control and expensive design, no one gets it. Or wants to. Why? Don’t ask me. You’d think that in this day and age, those teeny-tiny gas-sipping mini-cars that the British are so fond of would be all the rage over here in the States. But they’re not. Why? Many reasons, few of which have anything to do with the quality, utility or value of the vehicles. Mostly it’s just cultural machismo bullshit.
Maybe a partner firm or even an unrelated company, in the same business or a completely different one is going down in flames, and for some reason people are associating you and your products with them and the nasty taste in their mouths that the company left behind. This happens completely at random as often as it makes any sense. Several specific toys made in China are discovered to be contaminated with lead. Your toys are made in Japan, or Poland. Now no one will touch them with a ten-foot pole. Why? Mass hysteria bleed-over, that’s why. Foreign toys = death on a stick, no matter what the facts really are.
Mostly, though, success is just a matter of nearly pure luck, thinly plated with a veneer of wisdom, experience, skill and confidence.
And that’s something that marketers don’t always want to admit - the reality that with all of our fancy tricks, our secret handshakes, our specialized knowledge, our dark and eldrich incantations and so on, the best we can do is give you a reasonable chance of taking advantage of whatever luck comes your way.
We can’t guarantee results. We can’t say you’ll make more sales. We can’t promise you the world. We’d love to, trust me, we would. But we can’t. Or at least the honest one’s can’t. Because your luck (or mine) can change on a dime and give you back 8 cents change. And the best copywriting, marketing or advertising can’t do a damned thing about it.
[This is crossposted from a response I wrote on an a Google group in reaction to a bit of spam trying to sell a video full of “Google Smashing” techniques to get you to #1 on Google overnight, or some such crap.]
Here’s my question:
There are all kinds of tricks, tips and tools for getting your website, your ebook, your telecourse or your blog into the top spot at Google. And some of them even work, no question about it.
But (and that rustling sound you hear is me dusting off and donning my coaching hat), let’s reframe this issue for just a second and ask:
Does your content actually DESERVE to be #1?
Is it, really, the most relevant information on the topic a person could find if they went searching for those keywords and phrases? Is your product, site or blog really what they’re hoping to find?
Or, by putting yourself at #1, are you simply acting like one of those annoying campaigners standing outside of the voting hall that won’t let you through their ranks to vote for who you have already decided to vote for without listening to their spiel first and, probably, taking a piece of brightly colored and expensively printed landfill with you?
Are you helping, really, or are you simply getting in the way?
Google and other search engine rankings are supposed to be an indicator of relevance, not your 133t algorithm-hacking skillzzzoorzz. If you can’t get to the number one spot, or at least on the front page, simply by being the most relevant, the most interesting and the most current information, product or service specific to that keyword or search term, then really…you *shouldn’t* be there. (Yes, I’m simplifying a lot. The principle remains the same.)
What is it about being in business that changes us, the minute we get behind our desks, from thinking, caring and empathetic members of the human community into single-minded, blindered profit-makers with bottom-line eyes and a “sell-sell-sell” one-track mind? (Of course, I’m sure that none of you guys are like that. It’s all those other people. I’m using the generalized “royal we” here. Humor me for a minute.)
We stop thinking about how we would like to be treated, and start thinking about what we can do to make the next sale, regardless of how we respond to those exact same tactics when we’re back to our normal “just folks” selves (where most likely we’d spot it for the commercial pitch it is and either ignore it at best or be annoyed with it to the point of fissile combustion at worst).
We stop acting like people who like and are trying to help other people, and start acting like hunters on the prowl, loading up with the latest and greatest take-down weaponry, deceptive camouflage and covert maneuvers we can get our grease-painted, doe-scented fingers on.
In short, we quit being people and start being businesses.
“But the whole point of being in business is to make money…isn’t it?” I hear from the peanut gallery.
Look, I’ve got no beef with anyone making any amount of money, provided they do it legitimately and ethically. Go on, get rich. Roll around naked in a pile of shiny gold coins if it makes you happy (although…ouch). I couldn’t care less.
That’s not my point.
What I’m saying is…hell, you’ve been out there. You’ve been on the net looking for something you needed. You’ve bought stuff from people. You shop.
The times, they are a changing. People these days not only don’t want to be sold (they never did want that), but they’re savvier, smarter and have more recourse to avoid you if you try to sell them stuff.
Business is beginning to be viewed (at least by the customers, which includes you some of the time) as less of a commercial activity separate from and outside the sphere of the rest of human interaction and more of a stewardship of valuable goods from there to here. We the people expect to be able to find what we’re looking for and have it delivered to us with concerned attention to our needs, without having to wade through sidewalk squatters on the way in, or a gauntlet of ads, emails, harangues and other annoyances on the way out. And if we can’t get that, we’ll change laws, we’ll change technology and we’ll change the nature of commerce itself until we can.
Be an ass, and don’t be surprised if your assholery gets blogged, Tubed, Boinged, Dugg and Redd for all the world to see. And act on.
But some people in business just don’t get it. They see anyone who’s buying anything from anyone other than them (or even just looking) as someone who has just proven they have cash in their wallet, regardless of the fact that said wallet-bearing primate has demonstrated NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN THEIR CONTENT, PRODUCT OR SERVICE.
Trying to buy something online during this time of transition is a lot like trying to buy something in a big, open-air market in a third-world country. You spend the entire shopping trip fending off repeated, endless offers of guides and personal shoppers, ambulatory sellers trying to interest you in their wares and people whose uncle is selling the very thing you’re looking for, if you’ll just come this way, sirrah (even when they haven’t a clue as to what you’re interested in).
And God save you if you actually buy anything, because suddenly you’re the picnic at the ant Olympics. You’re immediately swarmed by a thronging mass of these same “helpers,” plus a veritable river of beggars and pickpockets that appears to pour forth from the very walls of the market itself. If you can make it back to your hotel room with all of your limbs, possessions and coins intact, you count yourself very, very lucky.
By participating in “Google smashing” techniques, by engaging in marketing and advertising strategies that would annoy or inflame you if you had to deal with them, by spending more time tweaking your SEO than your content, and by positioning yourself in front of what someone really wants in the hopes of catching some of that traffic (or, likewise, thronging around them on the way out of the store after they’ve bought), you just become part of that crowd of beggars and commercial mercenaries. You’ve become the problem, instead of the solution.
But don’t these tactics make money? Uh, yeah, they do. Quite a bit, actually. I won’t deny it. But they do so at the expense of our humanity, by turning other people into prey and turning us into people who see other people as prey.
And that, as far as I’m concerned, is not who I ever want to be. Not for any amount of shiny gold coins.
Just something to consider, the next time you see an ad for something that promises to get you to the top of Google, or the next time you’re considering just how intensively you want to market your next product or service offering.
I’ve got no beef with good business practices. And I think people who actually have something of value are ethically and morally required to do their best to get it into the hands of those who can benefit from it. But this isn’t that. And if you can’t tell the difference between the two, or if the glare from those shiny coins tends to blind you to such subtleties, then IMHO you really have no business being in business in the first place.
It’s about trees. And Texas. I think.
(Hint: Check out the page title in your browser’s page title bar. And yes, that last sentence was written that way intentionally.)
Look folks, there’s a point at which a keyword-stuffed article ceases to be an article in any sense but a purely theoretical one and becomes merely a handy carrying case for keywords. At that point, what’s the point, really? You’re not providing any value (there’s nothing in this article I couldn’t find clearer and better info on in 5 seconds with Google), and it’s written bad enough that no one’s going to read it. So what’s the point?
This? Not as bad as some I’ve seen (and perhaps even a few that I’ve written, although in my defense they were cobbled together to the client’s spec).
But dude. That page title? That just hurts.
Speaking of advertising, if you’re up for a bit of crude humor, consider dropping by Cracked.com’s If Banner Ads Were Forced To Be Truthful contest.
Some caveats:
1. This is Cracked, folks. There will be adult humor, images and language. Just so you know.
2. These folks are pulling no punches. If you’ve ever clicked on any of these ads in their original incarnation, visiting this site will probably hurt. A lot.
3. Yes, the one’s that say they contain nudity really do. And they’re damned funny, too. So if you’re capable of catching a glimpse into the life of a sexually active adult, it’s probably worth it. If nekkidness bothers you, move along…
In the comments section of yesterday’s post on making love, not war, with your customers, reader Dina writes:
I think this is a complete misinterpretation of the old cliche. I’m pretty sure that whoever out there is calling business “war” is referring to the competition and not the customer.
In my reply, I said:
A decade or so ago, I would have agreed with you. These days, though….well, apparently you haven’t seen some of the marketing training literature I have. A lot of it does act as if the customer (or prospect) is, if not the enemy, then something akin to prey.
Based on this exchange, I thought I’d expand on this a little today to illustrate what I mean. (Yes, I do have lots of work to do - I’m using this as a brain warm-up)
Although there was, and undoubtedly still is, a blood-tinged atmosphere of war between competitors in the world of business, these days that war is spilling over from the competition front and on to the customer front. But it didn’t used to be that way.
The main reason for this is that back when we (the customers) were all behaving like good sheeple and tuning in to watch tv or listen to the radio like we were told to, there was no need for warlike tactics. We were a captive audience; if we wanted to be entertained or informed, there was nowhere for us to go. We had to watch their commercials and listen to their spin, or go without.
Things have changed.
These days, it’s every man, woman and child quite literally for themselves. You can build personalized, eternal music playlists, rent all your movies, watch entertaining video shows and read up on the news all day long and never see or hear one single ad or commercial, if you so choose. Oh, sure, a few businesses are still trying, putting up banner ads and inserting text-link hovers like commercial landmines in a field of information. But a few simple ad-blocking plugins usually suffices to render all that expensive advertising completely invisible. At the same time, the field of competition has gone from just those who can afford the cover charge of big business to anyone who can set up a point-and-click website. And these changes are creating an unsustainable starvation ecosystem for those on the business end of things.
The end result is that these days, the customer isn’t a sheep to be led, they’re prey to be hunted. As such, tactics have changed.
And the language of the copywriting, advertising and marketing information I’ve seen reflects this change. I tend to avoid the worst of it, but it’s not unusual to see copy like, “how to manipulate customers” and “shooting fish in a barrel.” They talk about using holidays to “break down a customer’s barriers to sales,” and about hitting customers with up-sell promotions when they’re “vulnerable” to buying more. There’s even a software product called Marketing War Room, for crying out loud.
Also, it’s no secret that corporations have big, expensive lobbies to make sure legislation stays on their side. But what most people know (but don’t really think about) is how much of that is spent battling offenses by the very customers these companies “serve.” Whether they’re protecting themselves from being legislated out of using tainted or sub-quality meat, false advertising or deceptive business practices (has anyone ever signed up for a cell phone service and actually gotten the price on the poster, or been able to cancel a subscription service without being sent on a months-long runaround?), businesses are making it clear that while they are indeed still fighting a war with competitors, their opposites aren’t the only enemies on the playing field. Anyone who can negatively impact the bottom line is on their shit list. And that includes their own customers.
And then there’s the ubiquitous phrase, “targeting prospective buyers/customers/the market.” I don’t know about you, but I have never “targeted” someone I loved for any reason. I may focus on them, pay attention to them, look at them, listen to them, think about them and try to figure out ways to make them happy. But I don’t target them. That’s what you do to prey, or other stuff you intend to shoot.
This change is also the origin of web tricks like using onLoad and setTimeout calls that prevent a user from leaving your page by hitting the back button (hitting the back button just reloads the page they’re on). I know I’ve fallen afoul of this annoying practice, and no doubt so have you. It’s also the reason for the innumerable popups, popovers, popunders, floating pop-windows and many other pops designed to make your life hell if you don’t pay attention to what I, the site owner, want you to pay attention to. No deluded site owner is saying to himself, “I bet my customers just loooove popups. Let’s add a few!” No, the conversation is more like, “How can I force them to see this ad?” and, “How can I hold them hostage long enough to squeeze an email address out of them?” And sites that sell these devises or tricks don’t promote the positive reaction of customers. They tout their “unblockable” code and “unavoidable” visibility.
And if you think the “attacks” on customers are solely relegated to web hacks, legislation and annoying advertising, you’re sadly mistaken. They don’t just want control of your wallet, they want control of your mind. Marketing and advertising firms pour millions (it’s probably billions, by now) into psychological and neurobiological research (called neuromarketing) in a quest to track down the marketer’s Holy Grail - the Buy Button. This so-far theoretical “buy button” is a response in the brain so strong and so deeply embedded that we won’t be physically able to resist saying “yes” (most neuromarketing research in this arena is now focusing on the science of addiction, a potent and promising field). The hope is that if the scientists can find it, all advertisers will have to do is poke the button and we’ll buy whatever they put in front of us. It’s a serious enough subject that in 2003, a watchdog group called Commercial Alert actually sent a letter to Emory University pleading with it to halt neuromarketing research, calling it unethical and claiming that it promotes human misery and suffering.
So far, though, researchers haven’t been able to find a specific buy button, although they have found a “don’t buy” button, at least for impulse purchases. This is useful knowledge as well, since it tells advertisers what to avoid. But they are uncovering more and more about how our brain works and the results they have uncovered are continually being tailored for and used by advertisers and marketers, not to gain insight into the human mind so they can better serve customers or create better products, but so they can develop better and better ways of manipulating our responses and thoughts, with or without our awareness or permission.
And I don’t know about you, but that sounds a lot more like psyops (military psychological operations) than love to me.
Came across this quote in one of my newsletters today:
Many marketing experts like to compare business to war.
I don’t like the martial metaphor, because it views the customer as the enemy – as someone to be tricked or bullied into submission. As a short-term strategy, this can sometimes seem to make sense. And the direct-response universe abounds in promotional copy that badgers, beats, or bullshits the customer into making a purchase. Smart marketers and copywriters avoid this sort of approach, because they know that, in the long run, it is destructive and self-defeating.
Business should not be like war. It should be like love. And not a steamy, one-night-stand kind of love, but a mutually beneficial, steadily improving romance that lasts a lifetime.
- Michael Masterson
Yes, exactly. Get this, and a lot of other things will suddenly become a lot easier and clearer in your business life.
From AWAI’s The Golden Thread Newsletter, Issue 315