My own piece of the Internet
 
Category: <span>Marketing</span>

Category: Marketing

How copyblogger got it wrong

The latest copyblogger post by Brian Clarke, “5 Landing Page Mistakes that Crush Conversion Rates” disappointed me. Rather than being the witty informative genius I have come to expect, it was a sales pitch recycling old information with no actionable content for the punters. The 5 tips were: Blowing the headline Using your regular site design Asking for more than one thing Ignoring basic aesthetics Being lazy These are nothing more than a shopping list of commonly accepted truths about landing pages. The problem with truths is that they can become so ubiquitous that they are no longer critically questioned …

Off-page conversion is off the hook

Years ago, I read somewhere that 42% of people abandon a shopping cart due to slow performance. Recently it was proven to me that this might indeed be true which is surprising because most statistical factoids are garbage. After introducing a content delivery network service into an ecommerce site I saw a 20% gain in cart conversion. This was a pretty stunning result and it made me think about all the off-page conversion factors that can have a big influence on visit conversion that might be ignored because of a focus on design and copy. The standard approach to conversion optimisation …

Content marketing, duh

Way back in the mid 1990’s when the Internet was younger and a little more ragged the pundits were saying “content is king”. The thought was that whoever owned the best content would own the web. How we use the Internet has changed a little since, but content is still king. The main difference is that now the content that describes content is emperor. Google have built an empire on this kind of meta-data and Facebook appear to be about to do the same thing with their Open Graph service. Clearly content and the content that describes content is central …

Entertain me

You see them everywhere – people with their heads down, supplicant hands, silent, staring at a mobile device. They are praying to the god of the Internet, requesting that the pipes and bytes entertain them, illuminate them and placate the boredom of being alive. Between 9pm and midnight around the world, the TV sits mute while people hover around the LCD monitor watching a rerun on hulu, or a cat doing backflips whilst wearing a tutu on YouTube. The Internet has simultaneously gone prime-time and become mobile and this is changing what people expect from their online experiences regardless of …

Jumping the sofa, or how to be good at what you do

Once upon a time there was a Hollywood star called Tom Cruise who had the world at his feet. He was famous, rich and in love with a beautiful young woman called Katie. Being rich and successful, woman loved him and men envied him. Then one day late in 2005 whilst talking with talk-show host Oprah, Tom celebrated his success and the joy of life by dancing a jig on her sofa; by jumping the sofa. Tom’s fans were appalled and ashamed for him. This irrational exuberance was not the Tom they loved and respected, it was a freaky guy …

Beware the fexpert

An expert is an almighty and powerful entity. The expert arrives in town to the sound of cannon firing, jets displaying tricks above, an appreciative crowd and a gleeful clanging marching band. A fexpert is a fake or faux expert (aka guru) and they tend to slink into town with no one noticing. Some Fexperts even carry their own one man band just to make sure you know that they are there. Whilst some folks might specialise in an area and have a good knowledge of the tricks, the tips and the pitfalls, few are experts. An expert, as the …

Spamducation

When I was at Uni there was always “that class”. It was the class with the interesting name like “Sex and Politics” but was really about obscure French theory and the heterogenity of Southern Pacific political parties in the pre-war period. That’s right, boring!! I had the same experience the other day when I downloaded an eBook. It made my blood boil that I had provided my contact information on the promise of receiving something really interesting and useful. Sadly, it was neither. Having been disappointed how likely am I to buying the service? I subscribe to a lot of …