Brian from SpecialtyLiving.com just reminded me of the value on reporting on your internal site-search tool on your website. Brian gets daily reports showing him all the terms his visitors typed into his site-search engine. These keywords they type in give him a sense of what product “his market” thinks he should stock but doesn’t yet, how they refer to products he does stock but he calls them something else and then he can go back and add synonyms to terms…

...continue to read "Searching for Profits"

From Jakob Neilson’s recent newsletter Alertbox…

Deceivingly Strong Information Scent Costs Sales

Summary: Users will often overlook the actual location of information or products if another website area seems like the perfect place to look. Cross-references and clear labels alleviate this problem.

Information scent refers to the extent to which users can predict what they will find if they pursue a certain path through a website. The term is part of information foraging theory, which explains how users interact with systems using…

...continue to read "Ahhhhh, the Smell of Information"

Please please please…..do me a favor…answer your visitors most pressing questions up front.

My wife and I have recently been discussing cooking up different and healthier meals for ourselves. A friend of hers recommended we subscribe to eDiets.com for a good meal plan. So a few evenings ago my wife and I pull up to the computer and give the site a visit.

***Click**** ***Click**** ***Click**** ***Click**** ***Click**** ***Click****

After about a minute of frustration clicking around the site we find the ‘Take…

...continue to read "You Had Me at “Hello”"

We’re blogging: a summertime sampler

If I’m not mistaken, the word started life as a noun. A blog – shortened from “weblog” – in its original incarnation was an online diary charting the personal meanderings (interior and otherwise) of an individual. Then, of course, it caught on. And blogs proliferated … so much so that the noun begat a verb: to blog.

I blog. You blog. He/she/it blogs. I am blogging. Had I blogged that. You gotta love the elasticity of language!

Do…

...continue to read "A Day in the Life of a Persuasion Architect"

The only sane solution to persuading the millions of individuals who visit you

Remember that little cinematic cocktail-party-whisper into Dustin Hoffman’s ear? “Plastics.” These days (circa 2004), you come up to me, and I’ll happily stretch on tip-toe to whisper in your ear: “Personas.”

Taking that big step back to survey the lay of the ebusiness landscape, I see three organizational themes in our line of work: words, numbers and people. However, focusing your attention on the former two when you have incorporated…

...continue to read "Whispered Advice to The Graduate: Personas"