Social Media Adivce

Steps for Committing Social Media Suicide

A message to those ruining it for the rest of us

In case you missed the memo, social media has taken off. It's no longer an early adopter technology. Millions of people around the world have jumped into the social media pool building profiles and distributing content across a plethora of sites. 

Unfortunately, every time a good thing comes along masses step in to exploit, abuse or otherwise mar something cool. 

So if you're determined to ruin the experience for the rest of us, I've developed this handy step by step process for becoming a social media reject. Or in case you're just getting on the social media train, think of it as a loose code explaining what not to do. 

1.  Get a Myspace or Facebook account and contact random people to buy your products.

Just like you would to any random stranger on the street, be sure and jump in don't introduce yourself and implore them to buy something. Strangers love it...

Sure .005% of your messages will get a friend back but ultimate conversions for your product or site will be dismal. Bonus - if you do it enough people will deface your comments section or out you across various social media speeding up the social media reject process. 

What you should do:  Connect with people you have something in common with or belong to your shared niche. Introduce yourself, be friendly and save your pitch for the right moment. Sidenote: your pitch should be in the form of desirable content or something people will actually be interested in. 

Rule: Apply the same common sense and courtesy that you would in the real world to the online world. 

2. Steal other people's content and never give credit. 

This is a surefire way to kickstart your bullet train route to social media rejection and its SO simple. Just find really awesome content that someone else toiled over, use the handy dandy cut and paste feature and post. Be careful to remove any trace of their name or link as to properly brand it as your own. If you can't be cool, steal someone else's coolness. 

What you should do: If you really like someone's content integrate it as a part of a larger work or remix it. Just like in college where using one source is plagrism and using many is research the web feeds off hubs of compelling content. If you really like someone's top 10 list, find 9 other top 10 lists and invent just 1 of your own and wa-la you have a top 101 list. (People love to link to 101 lists). 

Rule: Develop your own content, cite multiple sources or remix something your like. 

3. Open multiple social media accounts and carry on conversations with yourself. 

If you don't have friends just invent your own! This is just like when you were 4 and had an imaginary friend named Funnyface. The beauty of this tactic is that you'll do this all from the same IP address and webmasters and many users will see through your cheap trick. They will then immediately ban you, out you or otherwise berate you.

What you should do: Be patient and develop a network of legitimate contacts. Produce cool content that people actually want to comment on or promote. Subversive tactics such as the above only provide minute social media gains and most often deface your brand. 

Rule: No cheap tricks

4.  Spam blog comment forms

Oh this is a goodie. Be sure and contribute nothing to the conversation or limit your post to "Nice post" along with your anchor text and site URL.  Bonus - add 10 or more urls to your signature file to set of warning bells that you are a spammer. Also by a t-shirt that says "I am a  Spammer" and wear it to social functions. Its likely when you're tracked down with zaba search that you'll be tarred and feathered.

What you should do: Again, be a part of the meaningful conversation. Stroke the authors ego with relavent comments. List some key additional resources and join the blog community by being an active participant. Help promote the site and let the author know you did. The true power of comments is in developing the contact not in the typically worthless comment link. This practice is quickly being taken away by Google so its a waste of your time anyway. You'd do better getting a Top Commentor link from a blog and getting site wide publicity. 

Rule: No blog spam

5. Post, comment and tweet like its going out of style

Be sure to provide tons of worthless noise to the conversation. The key contacts you gained love it when you flood their inbox and create lots of short useless content. By all means, feel free to avoid your niche and always make it a goal  to be overlooked and ignored. This kicks the rejection process into overdrive.

What you should do: Have a purpose and focus. Keep clear silos between personal and business social media activites. I can't say this enough add value to the conversation. You know that guy at parties that won't shut up talking about himself and all of the stories are lies, boring or unremarkable? You don't wanna be that guy. So make targeted contributions and promote your content appropriately. 

Rule: Quality not quanity.

6. Abuse my contact information

This is the key to it all if you want to be a stand out social media reject, rivaled by your peers. When you're fortunate enough to get my contact information, misuse it in every way. Add me to mailing lists, send me junk mail and telemarket to me.  People love having their trust betrayed. This is THE best way to get hated and abused by your social media contacts. Better than that you'll know you've done an outstanding job when all you hear back are echoes as every method you have of contacting people is blocked. Better than that you might get sued. 

What should you do: Prize personal contact information. Only get in touch with information they would want. Never sign someone up for a newsletter or add them to mailing lists without permission. Only promote your service and products when appropriate. You only get one screwup.

Rule: Hold contact information sacred. 

Graphics for ROI

Is Your Creative Engaging or Effective?

Heatmap Metrics Tell the Tale. 

The image to the right to the right is certainly a show stopper. You see similar layouts on all kinds of media from billboards to magazines and of course websites. So much money is spent developing this creative and rarely do these companies take the time to test the ad and calculate the ROI. A beautiful girl will get attention yes, but with a little testing these kinds of ads could be ten times more effective. 

This applies to basically every kind of visual media from box packaging to banner ads. Releasing marketing creative that is emotionally engaging and effective is the key to solid ROI. 

So what is wrong with the ad to right? In short, the girl is too strong of an element.  Your audience's attention span is so short and in this case the viewer will get the emotion without the effect. A quick glance at the ad and most people will focus the majority of their time on the girl. The problem is that the ad isn't meant to promote the model but the sell the product.

Take a look at the heatmaps of the image. The only spot that got a red was the girl's face. The model element accounted for 51% of the attention.

Billboards make a good reference to web graphics as the user bases are similar in that both are whizzing by at breakneck speed trying to get somewhere. So its of paramount importance that your designs are tested to be effective.

 Here are a couple of key points to remember when it comes to your designs:

 1. Your opinion doesn't count - Ouch! Ok I know that's harsh and ultimately you have choice but creative should never ever be judged on impulse, opinion or preference. This is because time and time again tests prove that that the vast majority of even seasoned marketers don't make the best choices for their products. This is due to personal biases from past experiences and brand blindness from being too close to your brand to be objective. Always let the customer decide. Because its the ultimate buyer of the products opinion that truly matters.

Your mantra should be "Let the customer decide."

 2. Decide with numbers - We rarely roll the dice when making big choices in life. In our personal lives we do research, get references and test things out. Your business should be no different. If you don't have a metric indicating success one way or the other you're not ready to release live. 

3. Practice closed loop decision making - This means that after release you need to continue to pull data on the success of any creative. Of course conversions is likely the best metric but you can chunk down in comparisons by looking at stickiness factors such as bounce rates or average time on page. Once you have well performing design you can multivariable test various elements to see how it can be improved.

 Advertising Heatmaps Examples

So what are the most effective graphics for websites? You'll see many studies touting one kind of graphic over another. The truth is, there are no hard and fast rules for what will work best. Every business has a unique customer base and you can't predict to the level of accuracy you'd like. 

That being said there are some best practices to follow. 

1. Use images of product success - Show happy people using the product you're selling

2. Use emotionally responsive images - Separate from the rest of the design, each graphic should create the desired emotional response. 

3. Use brand consistent imagery- The images used should align with the brand identity meaning kid friendly stores won't use super models etc. 

4. Use captions when appropriate - Captions help with SEO, user attention as well as adding context to an image. 

 The Sunsilk heatmap is my favorite because it shows several key principles that I think are important. First on a cursory glance you probably didn't notice any difference in the images. 

What is being tested here is the eye position of the model. In one image the model stares right at the reader. In the other image the model looks at the product. 

You can see by the heatmaps how effective the very minor image tweak is in the overall way a reader will view the add. As in the billboard image, a very attractive face gets a lot of attention. And eyes happen to be one of the most grabbing features. So much so that people get stuck staring into the eyes of models. 

This heatmap demonstrates how effective even minor tweaks can be in the overall ROI of marketing materials. 

 So how can you apply this to your business? The beauty of the web is that you can track mouse movements which closely adhere to eye movements. There are a variety of free mouse tracking software applications you can use like Click Tale that will show you movies of users navigating through your site and create banded heatmaps. 

The goal is to establish a routine and practice of gathering useful metrics. Metrics help businesses to make better choices and refine every element of the sales cycle. 

So here's a quick summary if you've just scanned the article:

• The right graphics boost ROI and conversion significantly
• The wrong graphics make you unmemorable and lower ROI
• You can't know which graphic works best without testing
• Design decisions must be made by metrics not opinions
• Graphics that are both emotional and effective have the highest ROI
• You don't need a million dollar budget to get high quality data

 Test & Refine - rinse and repeat often

If you'd like to see some stunning examples of digital art check out the Commerce Chemist Digital Design Blog

"You live long enough to become a villain or die a hero"

 Google has grown far beyond the loveable search engine we all knew in the 90's. Now Google is a Goliath guarding the core gateway we all use to access the internet. Ok perhaps a bit melodramatic, but the truth is that due to Google's success there is a growing sentiment among many circles (especially the SEO community) that the mega company needs to be taken down a notch. So exactly how would one do that?

Learn From Others Mistakes

 Anyone remember Cuil? Ok probably not as they were a tiny blip on the radar in the ongoing Google war. They failed because ultimately their technology was miserable. Unrelated images and irrelavent search results are a huge problem when going up against Google. 

The carnage strewn about from Google's rise to glory is staggering:

• Magellan - you're more likely to think of the Dr. Scholls "are you gelling commercials?"
• Infoseek
• Snap
• Direct Hit
• Lycos
• Web Crawler
• Excite
• Hotbot
• Altavista - ok this is arguable but still just an aggregate
• Looksmart
• Overture
• All the Web
• Teoma
• Wisenut
• Aol Search -Google is a white label search partner
• MSN Search 

The only ones that are left are Yahoo, Ask, Live and Alexa. Of those Google is thrashing the competition. Look at it this way, Merriam Webster agrees that google is now a verb. You can't Yahoo someone.

Identify a Weakness 

For as much as Google has shaped our culture search truly has a long way to go. As I see it, there are two key areas being overlooked in the current Google search experience.

    1. Personalized search.

Now I know they just released the commentable and reorganizable search feature which is a baby step in that direction. But I personally haven't found a clear use for the technology. 

Here's an example of personalized search:

    Bob in the U.S. searches for "cricket". The results include a wikipedia article on the insect, addresses to the local bar called the cricket, pest extermination of crickets and sciencetific entries about technology being developed from crickets.

     Rob in the U.K searches for "cricket". He gets the latest game scores, athlete profiles and detailed links digging into the world of cricket. 

    2. Integration

Google has spent a bunch of time developing its own brand for alot of key platforms. What they haven't done is figure out how to plug into the giant web properties most of us use on a regular basis. Web users in general have become more refined in how they use the internet. Years ago we mainly wanted answers to questions and later wanted to purchase products. Now the web has become a social source of entertainment where the value is not only in being amused or exploring a topic of interest but sharing that knowledge and connecting with others in to the same things.

There are many platforms today that almost know us better than we know ourselves. Case and point, Netflix. The Netflix AI has gotten scary good at picking movies and making suggestions. What's missing from the search user experience is the ultimate integration where all of your platforms are pooled into a launch pad platform. This platform not only would allow us to see what’s going on with the ever expanding list of social media sites, blogs, video, and content updates across our individual hotspots - but more importantly would mine the data of all of your profiles.

Personally I see the social media profile data mining field as the most useful and profitable area not being utilized today. 

Let's imagine a web persona of an average web user today. Meet John. As it stands we know very little about John, he's more a dot in the swarm of data being collected on any given site. As a company, we'd never Google just for John because we need larger data sets. Ultimately, John is unimportant until he buys from us.

But imagine...

Let's say John is a member of Digg, Stumbleupon, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and has a about 15 RSS feed subscriptions with his primary email address at Yahoo. Think about what happens when we can mine all of this data. We'll have a complete profile for him. We'll know his ongoing and evolving preferences for media consumption, interests, size of friend network with their collected interests. Based on the AI we'll know if he's likely to see various upcoming movies or what the odds are he'll like newly released songs. We'll know if he's brand conscious or not. The better the indexing we'll know everything. Imagine merging background info searches with social media and user metrics.

What we'd end up with is a total user profile with obvious benefits to the search engine. And what would John get out of it? Well, the search engine would know what he's interested in, in real time. So if he makes several comments to his Facebook friends about shopping for the wife's birthday, the search engine will be able to make targeted suggestions. In fact, the search engine would know that John and Pam are married and scan Pam's profile for relevant comments and buying preferences. The search engine would not just pull up her Amazon wish list but it would search her livejournal and suggest a trip to Aspen because she's been dying to go snowboarding. Based on John's search actions we'd get an increasingly refined experience. So if John like's the snowboarding idea it might suggest better slopes for snowboarding, better prices, the hottest snowboards, and offer to book the whole trip including lessons. And if you book the trip John might need.... You get the idea.

The aggregator creates a true homepage.

Utilize a New Technology 

The big advantage you'd have from starting from scratch is that all sorts of new technologies can be pulled into the mix. The best example I've seen is micro formats. These allow people to tag information better and would help search engines become far more relevant. So if John searches for "Sue's contact information" he'd get a vcard of his wife's best friend instead of some unrelated webpage. 

The other thing Google has struggled to do is to take all the content out of their silos. Recently they've started mixing in some pictures at the top or a youtube video but really to drill down into any specific media you have to go to the specific search. Its time to mix together the available content to make more relevant queries. If I search for "restaurants in Dallas" I of course want the top listings as usual but I might also want aggregate summaries of blog entries, health report cards, local media video coverage, press releases of new hot spots, zagat listings etc. 

Ultimately, the search engines need to learn. We as users need to be able to provide feedback so that search terms get grouped into concepts that solve problems.

For example: If John is searching for a snowboard for Pam. First he tries the term "snowboard" which is way to broad. Then he tries "buy snowboard" and after skimming over some results see's he knows nothing about snowboards. Then he goes for "snowboard product reviews" and later "snowboard blog top picks". Then he see's that the prices of the best boards are way too high so he searches for "best buy snowboards". 

When John finally gets to the content he wants the result would be marked. Then the search engine would have the entire search path to chunk up to the concept.  If John was a sophisticated snowboard consumer he wouldn't have searched for "buy snowboard" he would have typed in the Burton model number he wanted.

So, to kill Google you need to dominate the search market they are missing - the social search engine.  

What's scary is that most likely Google is already pursuing many of the ideas in this article and a ton of others we haven't even thought of yet. So option 2, buy Google - we only need how many billion dollars? *shakes piggy bank* 

What is the mediaverse meme?

What is a mediaverse? A mediaverse is an immersive cluster of media platforms centered around a brand. The purpose is to continue to expand on a popular idea/brand by branching out with more platforms to further engage the user down the rabbit hole.

Ok, let’s see if we can clarify that with an example. One of the best case examples of a mediaverse is NBC’s Heroes brand. The world started with the TV show itself but quickly after the launch hit the proof of concept metric, a variety of supporting platforms were released. As the show has gone on the platform cluster has evolved, grown and become more interconnected. Here’s a dissection of the Heroes mediaverse:

Feel free to explore at Heroes | NBC

•The core Heroes TV show.

This is obviously the keystone for the entire cluster. All the episodes are available online so that people who miss the show or are more web oriented can be pulled into the show’s gravity. The big added bonus of the online re-watchability is that

-it gave fans a reason to come to the website

-made the show shareable to friends

-strengthened the loading dock for all the future platforms

-provided additional ad revenue channel

•Graphic Novels class="MsoNormal">The website offers users free access to serialized graphic novels about the show. The novels started to bridge the gap between weekly episodes. This gave ansy, dying-to-see-what’s-next viewers the ability to dig into intermediary plot lines and get additional character information. Again, this provided an additional revenue channel by having Nissan Versa sponsored adds throughout the downloadable content.

*Sidenote* Nissan in season 1 was its own key participant in the Heroes media verse and did a genius job of picking the right horse at the right time. The rented Nissan that Hiro uses in the show became an accepted product endorsement that echoed in several of the Heroes mediaverse channels.

•Blogs and Websites

This is really where the immersive factor of the Heroes world started to spider out in more directions. The brand launched a series of websites and blogs that all relate to the world. Many of the characters are represented as well as the influential companies. Here’s a list:

            Primatech Paper

            Vote for Petrelli

            Yamagato Fellowship

            Activating Evolutions

            Corithian Casino

            Hana’s Blog

            Primatech Video Surveillance

            Claire’s Myspace

            And I can’t find it now but there was a Hiro blog

The point here is that the mediaverse grew based on actualizing the fictional world. Also, they picked channels that were relevant and made logical sense. For example the Vote Petrelli site was perfect both for this years media dominating election climate and that Nathan Petrelli would obviously have a political website. Just as a myspace page for the teenage superhero Claire was a great fit. The collections of site provided more ways to deeply engage with the show.

•The Heroes Wiki

The Wiki was another well put together idea. A good portion of superhero fans love to geek out about obscure show details and the wiki gives an avenue for all that information to get compliled. Additionally, anyone wanting to get summaries and relevant production information could jump in and acquire those details. And since the wiki platform is open source and free it took little resources comparatively to put this piece together. 

* Note - the Heroes Wiki is a fan built site that gain enough popularity to be included on the official NBC site. Check out the explanation in the comments of this article. 

•Walkthroughs

The site provides a series of walkthroughs week by week of all the seasons. The walkthroughs interlink many of the other platforms and provide a place of users to comment and ask questions. This resource rocks because it creates a timeline blog cataloging the major events week to week of the world.

•Istory

The Istory feature is an interactive narrative platform for the brand which allows users to make choices that affect the provided narrative. This is a solid reworking of the classic turn-to-page books that used to be very popular. Everyone speculates during movies and shows as to what they would in a given situation and now fans are given that opportunity. The characters are all specific to the Istory so again, fans are given another medium to more deeply engage with the brand and the producers get feedback on what sorts of things fans would like to see happen.

•Webisodes

Yes the platforms keep on coming. Webisodes in their own right are becoming a marketing meme. I love this idea as webisodes are cheaper to produce and provide valuable testing and data collection opportunities to take concepts full bore through other channels. Another example I’m aware of that went from web to TV is the Sanctuary series on SciFi. In anycase, the Heroes webisode, again creates another avenue for users to engage. Even the webisodes themselves spider out as users can access behind the scenes videos, photos and wallpapers relating to the platform.

•Create Your Own Hero

This platform directly pinged users to give feedback as to what character they would like to see in the Heroes world. I love it, testing and release with a bonus of hooking the users who voted on the character in the first place with the option to bring in runner up winners. It looks like the selected character is going to get his own spinoff show or webisode.

•Microseries

Santiago – the winner from the create your own hero platform – gets a microseries. I think by now you’re starting to see the pattern here how one platform spurs on another and creates interconnection between other platforms in a self-supporting mechanism.

•Interactive SMS

The SMS gimmicks many brands have used generally don’t count towards building a mediaverse but live, during broadcast polls, quizzes and trivia totally does. The $5000 sweepstakes is a nice incentive and of course the brand aquires phone numbers and text messaging privileges to numerous fans.

•Heroes Magazine

This is a web only edition but since there is so much going on inside the world it makes sense to have a magazine angle coverage of the whole interworkings. The magazine also fills the void of getting cast interviews which is oddly lacking from all of the other platforms. I’d guess this is because most of the platforms are working to create a fiction to reality effect and cast interviews break the fictional dream so to speak.

•Games

As if you didn’t see this one coming… All kinds of games and quizzes to immerse in. This has been poorly done by many brands but games and superheroes are certainly a good fit for the Heroes world.

•Message Boards

Some of the above platforms provide the opportunity for fan interaction but message boards hone in on this. Speculation and all of the wonderful fan activity that happens on messages boards adds to the world. And again, you see the pattern. This is yet another platform to more deeply engage with the brand. And what are they talking about on the boards? All of the other platforms and elements of the Heroes mediaverse.

•Take It – Widgets and Icons

After all of the above you’d think the mediaverse would be complete but new platforms constantly emerge. Countdown widgets, AIM icons, wallpapers and ecards galore. This platform spreads the brand via fan distribution and owns small user real estate across various channels.

•Shop

Ok you get the idea with the shop I hope..

Whew! So as you look up at the long list of platforms that cluster together into the Heroes mediaverse you can see how its helped stabilize the brand and provide constant content in a medium that normally thrives on eager anticipation.

Ok if you’ve made it this far you may be asking, how does this apply to more traditional brands? Can it work with anything other than tv and movies? Certainly the idea of a mediaverse leans itself towards entertainment channels. You could throw books into the mix as well such as the massive Harry Potter franchise which has spawned a world of its own.

I think we’ve seen a lot of attempts and poor execution in this area without having an overall strategy in place. The closest I’ve seen are some of the movie viral campaigns like the latest Batman release.

So here’s the challenge:

Pick a non entertainment industry or brand (no movies, TV or books) and explain your vision for a brand mediaverse or point out on currently in exsistence

My pick is Nikon. Nikon has leveraged photosharing technology such as Flickr to tag images taken with a Nikon camera and launched their own site showcasing user created content. Photography contests have long been a good marketing arm of camera companies. I think you could extend this with sites similar to deviant art to produce masses of user generated content from Nikon cameras. Also exclusivity marketing would be huge such as buying up key photography spots at events like celebrity awards or sporting events and only allow Nikon cameras in the area. There are ton of mini blog possibilities here for comedic images or any other emotionally engaging theme. Just think how smart it would’ve been in Nikon had launched something as meme inducing as Ihaschzburger or the like.

Let me know what you think.

Do you know the 10 most important places to check for "leaks" in your website? A leak is anywhere that hasn't been tuned to be effective. Of course every site has room for improvement but if your site suffers from any of these warning signs, its time to get to work immediately.

1. Not listed and well indexed on search engines

It is absolutely fundamental that your site be submitted to all of the major search engines. If you haven't submitted to Google and Yahoo stop reading and go do that now. Of parallel importance is ensuring that your site has been indexed well. Its unlikely that every page in  your site will get cataloged but 40%-50% need to get picked up. Spot check a few important pages and see. If you haven't submitted a sitemap (actually 4 different sitemap versions) to both Google and Yahoo you're very likely being under-indexed by search engines. If you're not indexed, you're not being found and thus not even getting the opportunity to make sales, generate leads, get subscribers etc.

Google URL Submission

Yahoo URL Submission

2. Poor Keyword Ranking

What is the most important key word for your users to find your website and what is your ranking position for that term on Google, Yahoo and MSN? If you don't have a good idea about that question chances are your rank is a lot lower than it should be. Search engine statistics show that only about 20% of users go past page 1 on search engine listings. This means if you're site isn't on page one you're invisible for that key word. Have you optimized every page of your site for search engines (ok at least the 10 ten as a start)? Or start from square one and decide if your most important key term is really the most effective. Do some keyword research and find out which term(s) are best. Keyword popularity is constantly evolving and your page SEO should adapt to those trends. Take it another step and see what terms your competition is going after. If you haven't applied solid SEO strategy to your site you're missing out on tons of traffic from potential customers.

4. Usability Issues

Websites are all about easy access to information. If your site is making it hard for your users to move around and find what they want its akin to putting up a sign that says "Go Away, We Don't Want Your Money". Unfortunately, you're likely the worst person to be objective about whether your site is truly usable or not. This means you're going to need some other people's opinions, preferably strangers who won't mind hurting your feelings. Feedback from unbiased usability tests is generally shocking. Not only will you find out what isn't working for people but you'll also see what they think of your branding and the unique way individuals interact with your site. Find the usability issues and keep users on your site longer. The longer people stay on your site, the more likely they are to do whatever it is you'd like them to do.

5. Uninteresting Content

This is a cardinal sin that is flagrantly broken by most websites across the web. Users demand fresh, engaging content. The most common place you'll see this offense is with your basic company brochure site. These sites consist of about 5 pages and are great for getting addresses and phone numbers but present no reason to return. Of course businesses need brochure sites but that doesn't mean you can't connect with the audience through a unique voice indicative of the brand and provide resources, RSS feeds, detailed contact information to all departments, Blogs, white papers, interactive tools.... you get the idea here.

The goal here is to gain and hold the users attention so they'll pay attention to what you have to say. Ask most advertising and marketing professionals, "What is the purpose of a headline" or any other advertising element and they'll get it wrong. The core goal of content is not to promote your brand, build awareness, communicate values although those are nice side benefits. The core goal is to get the reader to read the next sentence. Users read interesting content and hit the back button when things get boring. Don't drive away your customers with boring content.

6. Low Conversion Rate

This is the biggie. Only 25% of website owners even know what their conversion rate is and of those very few have went to the trouble to optimize their rate. Conversion rate optimization is a fancy word for increasing the percentage of people who buy your products or contact you as a lead etc. Its hard to say what an average conversion rate is as it varies wildly from market to market. Most people will say 2-3% is average. If you're at 1% or lower its critical that you optimize. Let's put some hard numbers on it so you can see how much of an impact this has on your bottom line.

If your site gets 1000 hits per month and you convert 1% of those people into sales you get 10 sales. If a sale is worth $100 you'll make $1000. nice

If you change the conversion rate to 2% you'll make $2000. Doubling your sales without spending a penny more on advertising is music to a business owner's ears.

The easiest way to do increase conversion rate is to do an A/B test. Find out which is better, this way or that way. One test is worth a thousand expert opinions. Optimizing your conversion rate is perhaps the cheapest way to make significant boosts to your bottom line.

Google Website Optimizer

If you'd like a team of experts to perform conversion rate optimization or otherwise need help with any of the above items please get in touch with us Here

7. Bonus Advice - Metrics

And how will you find out all of the above? You need to install Google Analytics and Google WebMaster Tools as a solid start. After configuring these tools you'll have a wealth of information relating to the above 6 points.

Google Analytics

Google WebMaster Tools