Coaching For Success
dan
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Posts by dan
The Basic Principles Of Web Site Design
Apr 27th
As far as internet businesses are concerned, one of the most important aspects of that type of business is the web site. In fact, having a web site is more or less essential for any company these days, so any discussion of web site design is relevant to practically any business.
Regardless of changes in technology, media, methodology, etc., the basic tenets that relate to web site design never change. And the principles that make for great web site design never change either, and, despite the fact that some companies may use the finest software available, their web sites still don’t look particularly professional, mainly because they just don’t look good.
Making Your Web Site Look Good
There have been many articles, even books, written detailing exactly what needs to be done to design a first-rate web site, but here we’ll look at the basic building blocks needed to create the foundation for a first-class web site.
Choosing The Right Colours
Colour is a very important facet of web site design and sets the tone upon which the rest of the design is based by creating unity, providing emphasis and creating interest.
But problems can also occur through such things as using too many colours, so it’s important to strike a balance. Start with your company logo and choose a colour that relates to the logo, and, simultaneously, your company brand.
Setting Text Font And Appearance
The appearance of the text on a site says a lot about how professional or not a site looks. Using too many fonts for emphasis can result in the opposite effect, leaving a site looking a mess with everything emphasised, meaning nothing is emphasised.
Also important are such things as paragraph width and length – too wide and readers may lose track of where they are; too long and readers may just skip it.
Grid Format
When it comes to design, working in threes seems to appeal to the brain, so creating a grid of three sections for a site is optimal. This way, all the elements on a page can be aligned to create an overall sense of unity.
Creating Relationships With Photos
The photos on a site need to relate to elements in the design to make them stand out. If you can do this in a unique way, it can really make your web site stand out. There are many ways of doing this, such as the use of tools such as PhotoShop.
Convey Brand Through Logo Elements
A company’s logo is not its brand, but it is used to visually convey the brand. Elements of the logo should be incorporated in the web site design to help bring attention to the company brand. This can be done through the use of logo elements such as shape, colour, text, etc.
Use Of Hierarchy
When a visitor arrives on your web site, you don’t want to leave to chance how they interact with the page on which they land. Creating a hierarchy on a web page allows you to lead a visitor through the various elements on a page in the order that provides maximum benefit for both the visitor and your business.
These are the basic concepts of web site design, which, when applied, will help establish your web site and your internet business as a creative, professional entity.
A UK internet business coach can bring web site design expertise to bear on your web site, whether it be initial design or re-design of an existing site.
Learn The Terminology And Improve Your Landing Page Testing
Apr 11th
One thing that’s vital to the success of your internet business is conducting regular and thorough testing of your web site’s landing page. But, in order to do so, you need to be prepared to learn what might almost seem like a foreign language, such are the concepts and terminology associated with landing page testing.
And this is further complicated by the fact that, while the names of the concepts are the same, they may carry different meaning in some areas of the testing community.
What’s The Big Idea?
The goal of testing a landing page is to find out how visitors react to the page and the various elements on it. It starts with collecting and summarising a small sample of data (known as descriptive statistics), and then predicting people’s behaviour once they land on the home page from the same traffic sources (known as inferential statistics). Ultimately, it’s all about finding the best possible landing page from all the various permutations available.
Elementary, Dear Tester!
Let’s look at the various elements involved in testing and their function.
1. Input and Output Variables
Testing consists of 2 basic factors – input variables (also referred to as “independent variables”) that can be controlled and manipulated by you, the tester; output variables (also referred to as “dependent variables”) that are used to measure and evaluate results.
2. Variable
Refers to a tuning element and can vary in coarseness or granularity from just a landing page heading to the re-design of an entire page. A single variable within a multivariate testing strategy is referred to as a factor.
Multivariate testing involves several variables so each needs to be identified separately. An example might be using a capital “V” for all the variables plus a number to identify each one uniquely.
So, say you’re testing a headline, sales copy and a button (the call-to-action), here’s how those variables might be designated:
- V1 = Page headline
- V2 = Page
- V3 = Call-to-action button text
- V4 = Call-to-action button colour
Variables don’t have to be associated with items in different locations. Take a look at the example above – the button has 2 variables associated with it, one for text and the other for colour. Nor do they have to refer to a specific location. For instance, you may want to check the effect changing the font on your landing page has, so that would affect the entire page rather than just one area.
3. Value
A value is the state of a variable at a given time, and, since, for multivariate testing, values are generally consistent across a given range, it makes it fairly easy to predict intermediate values when needed. So, if an engine produces 100 horsepower at 1000 rpm, and produces 200 horsepower at 2000 rpm, we can safely predict that at 1500 rpm, the engine produces 150 horsepower.
But, most landing page tuning involves variables with discreet values, such as our button example, in which the button may be assigned various colours, say green, blue and red. The distinction would be shown by assigning a different lower case letter for each colour to the variable name, with the letter “a” assigned to the original, baseline value, as follows:
- V4a = blue button (the original colour)
- V4b = red button
- V4c = green button
4. Branching Factor
This is the number of values a discreet variable may contain, which must be at least 2, the original value plus an alternative. In our button example, that variable has a branching factor of 3.
When it comes to traditional multivariate testing, the number of values a variable may hold is known as the level of the factor.
5. Recipe
A recipe is a unique set of values assigned to variables for a given test. Given our example above, let’s say the variables are assigned the following values for a landing page test: V1a, V2c, V3b, V4b. The recipe in this case would be:
acbb
All recipes are unique, with the initial baseline test being assigned all a’s and all subsequent testing compared to this.
6. Search Space Size
Calculated by multiplying all the branching factors of the variables that are part of your testing, this represents how many unique recipes make up your testing.
Using the variables mentioned earlier, let’s say we have 2 headlines, 3 different versions of the sales copy, 5 calls to action and 3 button colours. Here’s how the search space would be calculated, with BF being the branching factor:
– BFV1 X BFV2 X BFV3 X BFV4
= 2 X 3 X 5 X 3
= 90
Obviously this is a very small size, and in reality this would normally be larger. But, too large a space may make testing very cumbersome and exceed what’s practical for tests such as standard A-B split testing.
With an understanding of testing terminology and methodology, you’ll be in a position to map out the testing strategy you need to take your internet business to the next level.
Contact a UK internet business coach for help defining and executing your landing page testing strategy.
Reap The Benefits Of Twitter’s New Advertising Platform
Mar 14th
Promoting your internet business on the various social media networks is regarded as a major component of any search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy today.
Some of the social networks, such as Facebook, also offer excellent opportunities for paid advertising, and it appears that Twitter is about to leap headlong into that market also.
Watch For Promoted Tweets Coming Soon
Advertisers’ messages on Twitter are known as Promoted Tweets, and users should start seeing them in their timelines any day now, if they haven’t already.
This is part of a major push by Twitter to sell advertising space to small-sized and medium-sized businesses in the form of either Promoted Tweets or Promoted Accounts, which is Twitter’s pay-per-follower advertising system.
Choose The Right Type Of Advertising
The question then is, Which type of advertising is right for your business? That all depends on the amount of money involved and also what the goals of your business are.
If the aim is to promote a single product or a single piece of content, your best bet may be to use a Promoted Tweet, but that depends on how popular what you’re offering is with the Twitter users and how relevant it is, not to mention the quality of the copy in the tweet.
If you’re looking to gain more followers, then the Promoted Account may be right for your business, but the expense can only really be justified if you intend to maintain your business’s presence on Twitter over the long haul.
The optimum option may actually be a combination of the two, particularly if most of your user base comes courtesy of Twitter.
Is Advertising On Twitter A Good Bet?
While it’s estimated there are over 200 million accounts on Twitter, only about 20 million are “active”, i.e. access their accounts at least once per month. So, this begs the question, “How effective can advertising on Twitter be?”.
That remains to be seen, but Twitter is determined to become a major player in the advertising stakes and is putting plenty of its not insubstantial weight behind a push to match, and, eventually, overtake Google and Facebook when it comes to revenue from online advertising.
Its sales force is playing a leading role in the push, but even more important is its upcoming platform for self-service ad buying, similar to Google’s AdWords, making ad buying much more accessible and affordable on Twitter.
More and more internet business owners are advertising on social media platforms to great effect, and adding Twitter to your advertising portfolio may be a great move, provided your budget can handle the expense.
For more information and help advertising on Twitter, check with a UK internet marketing consultant, who will help you determine the best strategy for your business going forward.
Ten Rules To Building A Successful Internet Business App
Mar 7th
In recent years many internet businesses have developed applications to enhance their users’ experience. Nowadays, applications can be created by companies in the cloud and deployed to millions of users.
Not All Apps Are Good Apps
With the increase in the number of applications available, the number of those that are mediocre or at best poor has increased proportionately. So, if you’re considering creating an application for your business and your users, here are 10 guidelines to follow to give yourself a good chance of creating a successful application:
1. Make it useful
This may seem obvious, but it’s vital to the success of any app that it provide value to users to keep them coming back and perhaps get them to pay for it.
2. It Must Be Fast
Users are used to apps being lightning fast these days, so yours must be the same. If it takes a while to load, make sure to display something to keep the user engaged while the rest of the app loads in the background.
3. Keep It Relevant
It needs to be sleek and modern with the latest design features, especially as it relates to your market. Take a look at other apps in your field to see what they’re doing and incorporate those features in your design.
4. Overdeliver And Surprise
Be sure to add more value to your app by including a few little extras that will be a pleasant surprise to your users and convince them that you’re working hard for them by giving them what they need before they even realise they need it.
5. Must Be Easy To Use
If your app is complicated and takes a while for a user to understand, you’re likely to lose many of your visitors. Keep it as simple as possible initially and add more complexity later.
6. Provide Notifications
Your app should let users know when something’s going on. For example, Groupon lets users know whenever a deal becomes available in their area. The main thing is to keep users informed regularly yet remain unobtrusive.
7. Make It Fun
Add an element or two of fun to your app, because fun = engagement.
8. Provide Great Service
If there’s one thing that will keep customers coming back, it’s great service. And that’s how your product or service gets recommended to others, so make providing excellent service a priority.
9. Respond To User Feedback
Give the customer what they want by responding to feedback as quickly as possible.
10. Charge A Fee
If your app is following the preceding guidelines and delivering a first-rate customer experience, don’t hesitate to levy a fee for your app, especially if it’s costing you. Remember, you’re a business, not a charity.
Follow the above guidelines and enhance your internet business with a great app.
A UK internet marketing service will be glad to provide all the help you need to develop a superior quality app.
Long Tail Keywords Attract More Traffic And Higher Profits
Feb 21st
In internet marketing, search engine optimisation is one of the most important strategies used to get web sites in front of users’ eyes, and one of the important factors in search engine optimisation is the selection and optimisation of the correct keywords for your web page content.
But, what are the correct keywords? Well, the exact nature of the keywords you use on your site obviously depends on your market and the particular topic of your individual web pages. But, Chitika, an online ad network, has recently released the results of a study, which shows that, if you can rank high for keyword phrases of three to five words in length, you should be able to achieve optimum results for both traffic and conversions.
In other words, the correct keywords for your web site are ones from three to five words long that are relevant to your site and the topics of your site’s pages.
Multi-Term Keywords Produce Best Results
The study looked at search traffic coming into the network over a period of six days and was based on a sampling of more than forty-one million impressions.
Three word searches accounted for 26 percent of all search traffic, while 19 percent of all traffic was generated as a result of keywords made up of two terms and 17 percent of search traffic came from searches where keywords were made up of four word phrases.
An interesting side note is that one word keywords accounted for only 14 percent of traffic, further emphasizing the power of multi-term keywords.
Also, queries longer than five words result in much less traffic, an indication of just how fragmented the traffic resulting from longer queries is.
Longer Search Terms Result In More Revenue
Another interesting fact that surfaced from the survey results is that it seemed that the more words used in a search query, the more likely the searcher was to click on an ad. In fact, the most profitable queries in terms of ad clicks were those consisting of 5, 6 and 4 words, in that order. In other words, the longer the search query in terms of the number of words, the more profitable it was likely to be, with the magic number once again appearing to be 5.
So, what does this mean for you and your internet business? It means that, if you’re not targeting traffic using keywords of 3 to 5 words in length as part of your search engine optimisation strategy, you’re missing out on some substantial and potentially extremely profitable search engine traffic.
For help optimising your web site for these long tail keywords, contact a UK internet business consultant who will set your web site up for success for longer search terms.
