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.)
These people are idiots!
Do you know how little I care about that last statement? Allow me to explain…
I’m on an email list that I think is a very valuable resource. And it’s a new list, so I’m a little more forgiving in terms of giving a pass to the inevitable bumps and rough spots. But there’s been a recent issue that I think would make for a good discussion here, so I thought I’d share it with y’all.
If you run an email list of any sort, one rule is paramount: Keep the list professional, and don’t use it as a bully pulpit from which to whinge on about how stupid other people are who don’t agree with you or who don’t “get” you.
Here’s the story:
This list is new and growing. It’s one of those compilation lists that comes out three times a day (sorta like a Yahoo group, but private label). A while back, apparently some folks griped to the list-runner that three emails a day was too many. So he held a survey of the subscribers, and the overwhelming response was that three emails was just fine, thank you very much. So the list-runner has decided (wisely, I feel) to keep it to three emails a day and let those who disagree unsubscribe.
And if that were the end of the story - list owner takes the responsible route vis-a-vis some complaints, checks in with the list and comes out with a majority ruling - we’d have nothing to talk about. But it’s not.
The list-runner has spent the time since that event complaining about the people who think three emails is too many - basically trying to argue them out of their own opinions. In a recent email, he pointed out that a similar service sends over a dozen emails a day, and by that comparison his list is downright shy and retiring, so these people are crazy for thinking three emails is too much. Which is a ridiculous argument to make, because A) how many emails constitute too many is for them to decide, not you, and B) if they’re unsubscribing to a list with three emails, they’re almost certainly NOT subscribing to the other list anyway.
I chalk it up to this being a new list, and have corresponded with the list-runner to share my opinions (and they have responded more or less in agreement). Hopefully, this will die a natural death and all will be well.
The point I’m trying to make here is that if you’re running a list, a newsletter or any other professional public correspondence, keep the tone professional and on-topic. This is not to say you have to be without any personality at all. Said list-runner does include some witty personal banter in the emails which I find very humanizing and funny, and which I think adds to rather than subtracts from the list, although that’s also an opinion others have apparently differed on.
But for God’s sake, don’t use the list to harangue others, revile people who don’t agree with you, ridicule “losers” who leave the list for some reason or basically turn the list into a platform for you to rage against all those people out there who just don’t get you, and how stupid they are because of it.
Doing so only makes you look whiny, intolerant, ungracious and unprofessional. It never makes the others look stupid, no matter how clearly you try to connect those dots, because every single person on your list has held a minority opinion on something at some point and knows good and well that opinions are just that - a matter of personal preference, and as such, always right (for that person, at that time, in that situation). If I hate meatloaf, than I’m right, regardless of how much you feel meatloaf to be the food of the Gods - trying to argue me out of my opinion by pointing out how much other people like meatloaf, how nutritious it is, how cheap it is to make and so on is both pointless and makes you look like a blithering idiot for trying.
I’ve had to unsubscribe to countless lists for just this reason - some of which were hard to give up, given the value I was otherwise receiving. But, as I noted in my correspondence with the list-runner, I’ve got enough drama in my life to be adding someone else’s to the mix.
Do your subscribers a favor. Keep it light and professional, stay on topic and don’t give into the temptation to feed the trolls. This is even easier if you’re running an email list or newsletter, since the trolls can’t even be heard by anyone but you unless you give them a platform in the first place.
Your subscribers are there to get the information you’re sharing and to be a part of the community. And none of them wants to wade through your rants about the philistine, uncultured idiots who are chapping your ass because they don’t get your particular brand of genius in order to do so.
ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse lists 20 (plus a few extra, in the update) static pages that every blogger should have in their blog. In addition to the traditional About page and FAQ, there are quite a few you probably haven’t thought of before, such as a Press Page, Affiliate Presell pages and special event landing pages.
Considering that Darren makes an exceedingly healthy living as a professional blogger, I’d listen to what he has to say if you’re serious about making money with your blog. Check out ProBlogger’s take on the 20 vital pages your blog should have.
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.
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.
Patrick Coffey has an insightful - and statistically supported - take on why making the front page of a major aggregator site like Digg, Stumble Upon or Reddit doesn’t do you any good.
His key message? A small amount of highly targeted or qualified visitors will out-convert a tidal wave of random visitors every time.
Through some trial and error, Alexis was able to help our natural health e-letter site get a boatload of traffic from Stumbleupon. In fact, in the last month, one page generated over 28,000 new visitors.
When I heard this, I thought it was great news. You see, when we get traffic from outside sources, we can generally convert at least 10 percent of it into e-mail sign-ups.
So how many of these 28,000 social media visitors do you think signed up for our natural health e-letter?
500? 1,000? 1,500? 2,800?
No! Try 80. That’s a conversion rate of just over 0.2 percent.
In the article, he notes that the reason for this is that social media visitors are notoriously hard to convert. They tend to be very ad and marketing savvy (and resistant), they rarely sign up for stuff like newsletters and they don’t tend to stay around on a site for very long (stickiness is vital to making sales). He also notes that the added expense of the bandwidth use and server strain also detracts from any value this sort of traffic brings
Being someone that surfs the social media sites for news and other interesting tidbits, I have to agree with his conclusions. I rarely stay on any site I click through - usually just long enough to skim it for relevant news. I almost never sign up for anything on the sites (who needs more inbox filler?), nor do I buy stuff. I’m news and giggles hunting, not shopping.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Increasing your traffic can help sell advertising and increase awareness of your existence. Plus, sites that get Dugg or Stumbled stand a better chance of attracting the attention of top-level media sites, highly-rated blogs or other websites that can provide qualified visitors. And if your product or service truly does fit the needs of all those Diggers, you might have better luck with the sales. So it’s not all bad news.
The key here is that social media sites are a great tool for getting traffic, but getting traffic is meaningless unless that traffic converts once it’s on your site. If they don’t, then no matter how many hits you get you’re no better off than a storekeeper on the Pamplona bull run. There’s a lot of people running by, but none of them are going to stop and shop.
This doesn’t mean you should ignore these sites. Nor does it mean that hitting the front page is pointless. Just keep in mind that for the most part, it unlikely to bring you much of anything other than a temporary spike in transient traffic. To increase sales, you need to increase your exposure to specific, qualified people. Everyone else is just passing through.
[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.
Since I can’t think of anything brilliant to say tonight, here’s a buffet o’ biz and marketing genius from around the web for you to snack on until my smarty-pants come back from the cleaners.
To lead off, Seth Godin points us to the latest in eye-tracking research results (i.e. what bits works best where - and which ones just get ignored - for your website). He also points out that “most people focus on comparisons, not absolutes” when it comes to making a choice between several different products, which leads to some very interesting marketing tricks.
Here’s a cool site: Good URL/Bad URL critiques urls and tells you what works - and what doesn’t - and why.
Neuromarketing shows us just how important perception and bias are to making or breaking a sale, and a really fast, effective way to make your customers hate you.
Grokdotcom weighs in on the importance of choosing your words wisely.
And finally, proof that the global, virtual market is one of the most powerful forces on Earth for putting economic opportunity within reach of everyone, regardless of age, nationality or geographic location: A fourteen year old blogger from the Philippines who blogs better than you, makes more money than you do and ranks higher on Google.
blogger, blogging, business, domain name, eye tracking, neuromarketing, urlWatch this video to see how you can make your marketing sparkle with the Make My Logo Bigger! Cream line of marketing enhancement products.
OMG. This is so funny, yet so relentlessly dead on. Really, just when you think they’ve gone as far as they can…they go farther. But, having been out on the web a bit myself, I have to say they must be selling this stuff by the warehouse full.
Hmmm…where’d I put my checkbook…
ad design, design, humor, logo, make my logo bigger, marketing, webpage designThe ladies over at the Bitchery are discussing the concept of authors promoting their books in Second Life:
…not only can authors promote themselves in the “real world,” but they can promote themselves in virtual worlds as well, with avatars representing their actual selves, interacting with an entirely different audience of potential readers. (Or you can be really pessimistic about it and shriek to yourself, “OMGWTF I have to promote myself in TWO UNIVERSES NOW?!”
It’s 1:30am. Do you know where your avatar is?
(BTW, if you’re interested in some weapons-grade visual humor and not offended by a little man-titty - okay, a lot of man-titty…a lot of scary, scary man-titty - spend some time working through their Covers Gone Wild category on the Archives page, where they roast God-awful romance and erotica book covers. But save it for home. Some items are most definitely not safe for work, and most of them will provoke sounds that could cause co-workers to call in EMS on account of your having a choking seizure in the next cubicle over. A recent commenter’s angst sums up this collection quite effectively: Saying “behind the fold” isn’t nearly warning enough. You ought to add “viewing these covers may permanently damage your DNA and affect future generations.”)
author, bitchery, books, marketing, promotion, publishing, second life, virtual world