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"

Your objective: Stand out, differentiate yourself from your direct and indirect competitors.

Your challenge: You launch a great concept of a campaign, or on your website and weeks or months later you see something similar your competitor is now doing.

Your exercise: Go through all your current campaigns, website and landing pages that use stock images, and make sure your competitors aren’t using anything similar.

Some of you may remember the graph with the curved arrow on our FutureNow homepage. For those of…

...continue to read "Conversion Rate Exercise: Take Stock of Your Stock Photos"

Human nature hasn’t changed and neither have the priorities required for successfully conveying your message.

Contrary to common opinion, David Ogilvy didn’t have a preference for long copy.

What he had was an overwhelming bias towards anything that had been proven to work (which included long copy).  Ogilvy’s real, professed preferences were for consumer testing, research-driven techniques, and performance-based advertising in the truest sense of the term.

Based on those things, the conclusion he came to was that messaging and relevance had…

...continue to read "Tests Indicate Ogilvy’s Old-School Layout Still a Winner"

We at FutureNow sometimes wonder why more companies aren’t busy optimizing their websites and online marketing, or why those who are “on board” with the concept don’t always commit the right amount of resources towards the effort.

I’m not a mind-reader, but I think it’s due in part to an all-or-nothing mentality where nothing short of a full optimization ‘project’ is worth putting effort into.  Most companies are more interested in redesigning their websites all at once instead of incrementally, even though…

...continue to read "For Every Optimization, There’s a Pyramid, So Get Started"

As consumers you and I see many product images (both on ecommerce and B2B) on websites weekly. How do you make a product image stand out from all of those? What I want to highlight are the best, the most persuasive, the unforgettable ones. Who has them? Do you have a favorite?

Here are a couple of my favorites:

This one is from Harry and David:

Here is one that shows an ordinary product like paper, that is hard to distinguish, in an…

...continue to read "The Best Product Image On A Website"

The ecommerce shopping cart is a great place to run tests, as simple changes (layout, copy, color, etc.) often yield fantastic results.  There are unanswered questions in the minds of our customers that we think are obviously answered on the page, but they’re not.  If you’re not sure about what those unanswered questions are, you can back up a few steps and use personas or user testing to uncover them.

Here are 5 key, unanswered questions (beyond shipping costs) of the shopping…

...continue to read "The Shopping Cart: How to Answer the 5 Unanswered Customer Questions"

As weird as it sounds, it’s the norm for businesses with sales cycles that might be as long as several months to a year and that might involve multiple decision makers and influencers to utterly fail to take these factors into consideration when constructing their website or selecting an analytics package.

In fact, whenever I work with B2B and complex sales clients it’s a sure bet their website won’t:

1) Adequately address the multiple decision-makers and influencers involved in securing the lead…

...continue to read "Can your Website Handle the Complexity of your Sale?"

Clients often come to us to fix their shopping cart abandonment issue. We’ve written before about how to decrease shopping cart abandonment before, but I wanted to share another simple and cost effective way to deal with customers who refuse to give their credit card information online.

One suggestion is to make sure your toll-free or 800 number is clearly visible at the top of all pages and even more visible during the checkout process. However, many businesses balk at this because…

...continue to read "Sorry, I Don’t Give My Credit Card Online"

I couldn’t help but write down a few comments and links in response to a recent Smashing Magazine post.  Designed to Sell: 8 Useful Tips to Help Your Website Convert kicks major butt, and I thought you’d both enjoy the article and a few comments/additions thrown in for each of the 8 tips:

Tip 1: Subiminal Suggestion

Basically, make sure your design elements – and most especially your pictures – enhance your credibility and put visitors in the right emotional frame…

...continue to read "Comments on 8 Useful Conversion Tips"

Long and short are linear terms (they refer to length, right?).  So they work fine to categorize or describe copy found in a sales letters or print advertisements.

But (most) websites aren’t linear because hyperlinks break linearity (aka subvert hierarchy).

People don’t read (most) Websites one full page at a time in a numbered order; they read/scan/move from one link that interests them to the next link that interests them, often entering or starting on something other than page #1 (what bad web…

...continue to read "How to Think About Long vs. Short Copy"