4. Buy a domain name. I suggest to do this even if you don’t want to start a website for a few years. I’d even suggest this if you don’t know what you want your website to be centered around. Buy a domain name that is related to your name, your family, your hobby, your dog, anything! Because once a domain name is off the market, it’s rare that it’ll become available again. Go to GoDaddy.com and buy a domain name NOW!  If you know the keywords used when people search for your target product or service, try to get a domain name containing target keywords (e.g. “MensUnderwearStore.com”).

5. Set up persuasive momentum before a line of code gets written. This tip came straight from Melissa Burdon herself!  And, she knows a thing or two about creating persuasive momentum.  I think of this step as outlining your ideas before writing a term paper. Planning the path your visitors are going to take on your site before building it a) makes your site is easier to navigate for visitors,  b) allows visitors to become customers more quickly and c) saves money over the long run because you’ll spend less money on optimization and marketing.

6. Micro-test before you invest. That catchy little phrase came courtesy of Brendan Regan.  Consider setting up an eBay or Yahoo! store to see what demand there is for your product and help you gauge interest. This will allow you to also realistically project how much money you can invest upfront and if it’s going to be a profitable venture for you.  There’s a chapter dedicated to this concept in Timothy Ferriss’s The 4-hour work Week.

After you’ve completed these first 6 steps, you’ll be ready to begin planning your site. You’ll be prepared for who else you’re up against in the industry, and maybe even have a little money to get you started.

It’s an interesting predicament that he, and like-minded entrepreneurs, are in: Can a unique, persuasive website be created if you don’t know anything about creating a website, and don’t have the resources to hire someone to do it for you?

YES! (I’m an optimist)…  BUT (I’m also a realist), you have to be willing to “do your due diligence.”

Because I know that many of our Grok followers are like my friend, and are of the DIY school of thought, I thought I’d create a list of where to begin if you’re inspired, “broke” (i.e. don’t want to shell out $100,000+), and want to create a website.

1. Figure out what you want to sell and if there’s a market for it. There are some markets that are over saturated; within which a mom-and-pop site would have difficulty competing.  Examples of this are SEO, iPods, and shoes. You generally have a better chance if your “product” is something with quality you can control, like a service. When you’re competing in an industry where everyone is selling the exact same thing, your only means of differentiating yourself from your competitors is price, delivery time, and freebies (like shipping).  This makes your chances of success much slimmer.  (I warned you that I’m a realist).

2. Check out the competition. Do some keyword research. Figure out who else is out there in the area that you want to succeed in. This day and age, it’s extremely rare that you’ll create website for a business that isn’t already out there. If you’ve already determined that there’s a market (see #1), make sure that you can offer something better than your competition. Go to their website(s) and pick out what you don’t like from a visitor/customer perspective and how you’d do it better, then make note (WRITE IT DOWN OR YOU’LL FORGET) to do it.

3. Create a UVP. If you’re a Grok follower, you’ve heard us (possibly for years) go on and on about creating a UVP (unique value proposition) but I promise that if you spend the time on the front end creating a strong UVP, you’ll reap the rewards in the long run. Think about why you want to start this business. What need is there in the industry? What do you want to do better (and with more passion) than anyone else out there? How will you accomplish this goal?

Ok, that’s enough to get you started. Stay tuned for part two! (Note: None of these steps can be completed in a few hours, let alone a few days, for even the most diligent of workers. Remember, you signed up for the long haul, and I’m not promising that you won’t have to work hard, but you’ll be working smart.)

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches from all Google domains to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you’ve entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results, indicating interest over time, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100; the totals are indicated next to bars by the search terms.

Read more about how we scale and normalize the data.On the results page, you’ll also see a list of the top searches, top rising searches, and a world heat map graphically displaying the search volume index with regions, subregions, and cities.

Keep in mind that Insights uses data aggregated over millions of users without personally identifiable information, and is powered by computer algorithms. Additionally, Insights only shows results for search terms that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool. For more information about how Google protects privacy, please refer to our privacy policy.

Go try out Google’s Insights for Search for your keywords. Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Our firm is very skeptical of surveys. They can annoy customers. The questions themselves tend to reflect the bias of the person or company asking them. At best, they offer directionally-correct information, which is often taken out of context and used to replace an old assumption with some shiny new (and equally dangerous) one.

The great thing about Web Analytics is that it allows you to see how people are using your site — without surveying them.

Our motto: “Believe what they do, not what they say they do.”

But there are things your Web Analytics can’t tell you, especially if you didn’t use personas to plan the site in the first place. And if you haven’t planned the site with personas, even believing “what they do” can be misleading.

That’s when a survey can help. When handled correctly, surveys can provide a good starting point for gathering qualitative data about the customer experience.

Not just any survey will do. You need the greatest survey questions ever:

1. What is the purpose of your visit to our website today?
2. Were you able to complete your task today?
3. If you were not able to complete your task today, why not?
4. If you did complete your task, what did you enjoy most about the site?*

Avinash Kaushik, the man who developed these powerful (and modestly-titled!) survey questions has teamed up with iPerceptions to create 4Q, a free tool that allows you to add this survey to your site.

Seeking Analytics Nirvana

It’s rather strange, isn’t it? Why would one of the World’s foremost experts in parsing quantitative Web Analytics data — the guy who wrote the book on it, actually — insist we get excited about fuzzy, qualitative data?

Let’s see what Avinash has to say about 4Q…

If you have read my book or my blog you are quite aware of the What and the Why issue. All the quantitative data you and I have from our web analytics tools is really good at helping us understanding the What happened.

Visits and Visitors, pages viewed, referrers, keywords, bounces, paths (!), campaigns, and so on and so forth. All critical data that helps you step up your game – improve your campaigns, fix pages, fire someone.

It cannot, no matter how much you torture the data, tell you Why something happened.

[...] We overlay our own opinions and experiences and preferences.

Unfortunately we are not our customers. In fact being as close to our companies as we are, it is quite likely that we are the worst possible people to empathize with our customers.

Sounds crazy, we know, but this whole “visitor empathy” concept might be the best thing that ever happened to your relationship with Web Analytics — let alone your relationship with actual customers.

In this YouTube presentation, Avinash explains how qulitative and quantitative data live in harmony:

*Fourth question added by iPerceptions.

[Disclosure: Future Now's Bryan Eisenberg is an adviser to iPerceptions.]

• Analytics-based optimization
• A/B testing
• Online surveys and offline focus groups
• Site search functionality overhaul
• Total site redesign
• Insert your own tactic du jour here

Which tactic requires the most effort and resources? Why did you choose one tactic over another? Can you articulate the risk of your efforts? Have you tried all the above, only to experience marginal improvement?

Continue reading my column at ClickZ…

I sing this song a lot: “You sell, I buy, tra la tra la.” But that’s what it all comes down to. Whatever you’re doing, you’d like me to take advantage of it. You’re selling. I’m buying.You’ve got a process in place to manage the transaction from your point of view. Meanwhile, I have my own agenda, and you want to find a way to convince me you deserve line item space on that agenda!

That’s where an understanding of sales topology really pays off!

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Around here, we rarely worry about whether a client’s business is B2B or B2C or any flavor in between. Because any “sale” takes place largely within the context of a customer’s buying decision process, we look instead at how customers view the complexity of the sale.This customer-centric perspective allows us to fine-tune the personas and scenarios that make up your persuasive system based on the various dimensions of your sale’s complexity.

As we proceed through uncovery, gathering information about how you sell and how your customers buy, we create little thumbnail portraits of your customers that will guide us through the process. We call these ComplexogramsTM. These visuals help you translate the nature of your business into terms that are meaningful and persuasive to your customers!

What’s a Complexogram? How do we use it? Glad you asked!
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And now for something completely different.

We do a lot of brainstorming … projects, problems, reports, how to communicate a difficult idea. And we’re pretty visual folks around here; we work best when we can “see” how our thoughts relate.

A while back, I wrote an article about the top ten application toolsthat consistently made our day. MindJet’s MindManagerwas (and still is) on the list. It’s the tool that lets us develop our ideas and visually map out plans of action on the spot, then share those creations with others.

Given our happy experience, I’d love to turn you on to mind-mapping. We mentioned the program to our colleague, Fredric Gluck, who was so thrilled, he wrote up this review so I could share his (and our) enthusiasm. Think of this as one of my very few word-of-mouth spots! Read the rest of this article.
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‘Scenario’ is making its way into more and more conversations these days. You’d like to wrap your mind around this concept, ’cause you have the sense it’s the essence of how you construct your online experience (and you’re right!). But depending on who you ask, you get a entirely different answer to the question, “What exactly is an online scenario?”So join me for another installment in my “What Exactly Is” series. Today we come to grips with persuasion scenarios.

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You’ve got yourself a stellar online experience, a mean, green construction of persuasion architecture that meets your visitors’ needs in all possible ways – for viral stuff to work, you have to begin with substance and value. Now you’re ready to encourage your visitors to become word-of-mouth marketers, spreading your glory deeper into cyberspace.

Most people who are pleased with you and your product or service are happy to spread the word. You just have to make sure you ask them to do this by providing the opportunity. The opportunity you provide is a call to action.

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You sell aromatherapy products. Are all your visitors nature-loving women who are vegetarians, do yoga, mediate, promote world peace and wear Birkenstocks?

You sell football packages for a satellite service. Are all your visitors blue collar, couch-potato-type, middle-aged guys who drink beer, eat potato chips, have medium to minimal IQ and brag about the size of their TVs?

Careful … you may be falling into the stereotype trap. It’s not hard to do; stereotypes are embedded in our culture. And in some ways, they have their value. But when you do business online, you don’t undertake transactions with stereotypes any more than you undertake transactions with a single generic composite of your audience.

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I’d happily pass out rules right and left on a silver platter. If only I could. But in our business, we live and breath the fine line between “best practices” and “principles.” If we didn’t, we couldn’t help you be effective in your online efforts.

Sometimes practice and principle are a comfortable fit. Sometimes they aren’t. What should you be doing on your Web site? You know I’m going to say, “That depends on the function and purpose of your site.”

So, cozy up folks; it’s time for a ponder. This particular ponder is brought to you courtesy of Linda Caroll. I’ll confess right now … I have a bone to pick with Ms Caroll. But by picking that bone, I hope to shed light on the nature of the choices every single one of us has to make when it comes to the design and development of our Web sites.

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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 applications without which we really couldn’t do our job well. So what essentials are in the prop room of a conversion rate marketing boutique? Walk this way …

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