Hail all and well met! I write GrokDotCom and have been the voice of The Grok since the beginning. Today I got an interesting email that has stirred up something of a hornet’s nest around here. It said:

Your bat essay demonstrates ignorance and seems absurd in this time of instant knowledge via the Web. Why didn’t you search baseball bats on the net? At www.baseball-bats.net you’d learn all the things that you found enigmatic.

I’ve got hundreds of letters like this ……

...continue to read "Justifiable Subscribercide?"

Persuasion would be a much simpler process if people didn’t have these annoying things called emotions and imaginations. But then again, without them we would have no persuasion.

Emotions and imagination drive the persuasion engine, but refuse to be chained by those little things called logic and linear processes. It’s one of the reasons why we human folk spend piles of time spouting out logical and sensical reasonings and doing the precise opposite of those spoutings. Everyone has seen the smartest,…

...continue to read "Non-linear People, Non-Linear Sales"

When talking conversion rates do you ever hear this type of mumbling and grumbling?

“Conversion rates my *&%?^ !!”

“Oh happy day, our conversion rate went from 1.57% to 2.12%! Big deal! How can anyone get excited about 2.12% unless it’s your income tax rate?”

“4.2% conversion huh? What about the other 95.8%?”

Believe it or not, there are some people that just plain don’t give a bo-diddly about conversion rates.

Are those *gasps* I hear? Now before you start dissin‘…..think about this.

Most of these…

...continue to read "Conversion Rate Apathy"

Colors mean things.

Colors inject moods of all flavors, murmer suggestively, drum loudly, or siren in confusion and panic. They can lend a helping hand, or quietely disrupt your site’s persuasive efforts. When considering color for your site the only thing worse than not taking color selection seriously is taking it too seriously. The struggle with speaking the language of color is that it can make alot of noise, but it never speaks precisely. This makes colors, by themselves, horrible persuaders.…

...continue to read "Red, White, and Blue"

Let’s pretend you sell gumballs from the best designed gumball machines in the industry. You sell these gumballs to legions of gumball loving folk. The machines you sell from are easy for your customers to use and understand, they even automatically bill the proper customer whenever they turn the knobby thingy to ‘buy’ a gumball. Everything from the plastic glass that let’s us gander and drool over the gumballs, to the shape, to the color of the machines has been…

...continue to read "Apple, Conversions, and Usability Part 3"

Join me as we play the cyber-field in search of a baseball bat

You sell baseball bats. I need one for a 14-year-old entering high school. I believe the right tool can help make or break the experience, so I want to give my friend something that will be an asset. Trouble is, I don’t know the first thing about bats. And they aren’t exactly cheap!

So I’m sitting in front of a screenful of Google search results. I’m eager and ready…

...continue to read "In Search of a Bat"

Ten business tools we wouldn’t be without!

Let me first swear up and down: nobody bribed me to write this and nobody is planning to pop my picture on their “packaging” (although I am receptive to offers!). We were just sitting around the offices one day feeling really happy. The source of that happiness? Folks out there had developed a particular application that helped us accomplish some task with a minimum of fuss and bother.

And that got us thinking about those…

...continue to read "Tools of the Trade"