The seconds pass by in your visitor’s mind as they arrive to your website. If they don’t bounce immediately because of poorly targeted marketing efforts and sucky landing pages, you’ll still be lucky if they’ll stick around for the next 2 minutes. It’s like every visitor to your website has a timer in her head and if she can’t complete her task in the allotted time, she is out of there.

How are you wasting your visitors time?

...continue to read "The 120 Second Visitor"

Social marketing is a shiny new toy and almost everyone is wising up and getting involved, as they should. In fact, a rumor is spreading that the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard, is integrating Facebook addresses directly into its own address book app. There’s no question that social applications are becoming central to our online lives, and soon social apps will be a central part of the very operating systems we use. People are tweeting, flickring, and facebooking like mad, with…

...continue to read "Social Media Is Not the Message"

Here are the top 10 converting websites for July 2009*. These are based on Nielson Panel data and are calculated by user to final conversion. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

1. Schwan’s 35.2 2. Keurig 31.3 3. ProFlowers 26.0 4. Vitacost22.5 5. Blair 22.4 6. DrsFosterSmith.com 22.4 7. Woman Within 21.3 8. Amway Global 20.5 9. Roamans.com 18.7 10. Office Depot 17.9

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

Benchmarks according to the FireClick Index

Increasing your conversion rate…

...continue to read "Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: July 2009"

Anyone can sell nutritional supplements, and many do. However, what would you think would happen to a company that stripped everything away to focus on selling magnesium supplements?

Magnesium — not something you hear about everyday, huh? It’s not really the product with the most “sex appeal.” As Patrick Sullivan, co-founder of Jigsaw Health which focuses on selling these wonderful magnesium supplements, explains:

“Magnesium is involved in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body. It works in tandem with calcium — calcium…

...continue to read "Increase Your Search Rankings by Shrinking Your Offering"

I love Nikon. My dad had a Nikon. I bought my first Nikon SLR (an F3) when I was in college and a couple of years ago my wife brought me into the digital DSLR world by buying me a Nikon D60 for Father’s day.  So it pains me to see a company I love make such critical mistakes.

Last night, I got an email from them on my Blackberry.  Like most people, I typically just delete promotional…

...continue to read "Nikon’s Email Marketing is Out of Focus"

When you think of a cherry picker, do you conjure up images of someone who only picks the easiest or ripest fruit? Or does it perhaps have some artisanal connotation, waiting until only the proper time before action is taken?   Is that how you go about optimizing your web site?

Or are you a lettuce picker? The sort of person that toils for long hours in the field and accomplishes a long day’s back-breaking labor of work that most…

...continue to read "Low Hanging Fruit: Cherry Picker or Lettuce Picker?"

Many of our clients are in the business of being Experts. Some are consultants, some are advisors, some highly-skilled professionals within their field. The challenge with using the Web to market one’s expertise is that the online world is full of charlatans, and most people who’ve hired a few “experts” have had at least one of them not live up to their claims and produce poor results.

Selling expertise face-to-face is quite bit easier. The true Expert’s skills come across in their…

...continue to read "Six Ways to Sell Your Expertise Online"

Think about it: if those questions really are FREQUENTLY ASKED, why the heck isn’t your regular copy answering your visitors’ questions?

Unanswered questions keep visitors from buying/converting — that’s not theory; it’s a fact!

So why, oh why, would you knowingly allow your persuasive copy to ignore a frequently asked question?  Why would you possibly be content with hiding the answers to your prospective customers’ questions in an FAQ page?  Are you trying to weed out all but the most…

...continue to read "FAQ Page = A Sign Warning Drivers of Potholes"

During a recent visit with family and with the fuel tank showing a big red Empty, my Mom was insistent that we had to get gas from Billy. “Who the heck is Billy?”, I wondered? (Bear with me, this gets interesting.)

We pull into the most ordinary of Shell gas stations (international readers: you might better recognize this company as Royal Dutch Shell) and are greeted by a very happy personality, Billy, who pumps the gas at this full service station.…

...continue to read "What Could Happy Billy Teach You About Your Business?"

Bryan and I had the honor of attending and speaking at this year’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose. The amount of blogging and tweeting going on during the conference was phenomenal, so we won’t attempt to “cover” what went on.

Instead, we’d like to present our brief “Best Of” List so you can get some quick highlights from our (somewhat biased) perspective:

Here we go…

...continue to read "FutureNow’s “Best Of” List from SES 2009 San Jose"