My best girlfriend, Brittany was searching online for an apartment in Salt Lake City last week. She told me about her frustrating experience with Rent.com. I want to share her experience with you, to show you what NOT do on your site. This is a perfect example of a reputable company, getting a boat load of qualified traffic, who may be losing out on a lot of leads because some visitors are hesitant to enter personal information, as the first…

...continue to read "Avoid Asking for the Lead Too Early"

Last week, I posted the first three tips for savvy DIY-entrepreneurs wanting to start their own website (check out tips 1-3 in Part 1).  Now, without further delay, I’d like to get right back into providing you with the next 3 steps:

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…

...continue to read "Creating a Website: Something from Nothing Part 2"

Henry Ford perfected the assembly line concept in the automobile industry many years ago, and it has been utilized successfully in many industries since. Before Ford implemented the highly successful assembly line, instead of focusing on what each skilled worker specialized in and passing the car down the line to the next worker, the skilled workers crafted cars one at a time together as a team. Ford’s introduction of the assembly line resulted in the development of affordable cars (decreased…

...continue to read "Who’s Working Your Website Assembly Line?"

Last week, I posted Part 1 of my book review of Steven Wood’s Digital Body Language book.  It covered how the landscape of B2B, complex sales, and marketing has changed because of rapid developments in the Online world, and what the Digital Body Language (DBL) concept is.

In this post, I’ll wrap up by covering some of the benefits you can get if you learn to observe and leverage DBL, as well as some of the author’s ideas about the future of…

...continue to read "B2B Marketing Book Review and Commentary, Part 2"

Early this morning, I was woken up by a constant pinging sound coming from my Blackberry.  Yes, I know I could turn it to silent or even off, but what can I say, I’m attached (they don’t call them “crackberries” for nothing).  After a few more hours of tossing and turning, I woke up to review the 47 new emails I’d been receiving since 4:30am.  I didn’t find a note from Grammy, or a funny story from…

...continue to read "Email Feng Shui: The Unsubscribe Option"

Attracting visitors to your site is similar to the dating scene and wooing your prospective partner. And, like in courting, there are some hard-fast rules of engagement for attracting your prospect.

1. Look Nice – You want to put your best face forward. Your homepage is often the first thing that your visitor sees when they visit your site, so make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing and easy on the eye. Remember, for a vast majority of sites, the homepage has…

...continue to read "5 Ways to Court Your Visitor"

Most valuable writing lesson ever. Or so says Steven Pressfield in this blog post on how his first professional job as an advertising copywriter indelibly carved this truth on his psyche:

“Nobody wants to read your shit.

Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and…

...continue to read "Nobody wants to read your sh**!"

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"

Here’s an issue/question that arrived in a comment to my post on Playing an Idiot Online [emphasis mine]:

“Brilliant post. We get this all the time, when designing websites for our clients……..But our clients will often use the line “but my customer understands this terminology, these acronyms, my customer is from a particular niche and they all use this terminology”…….It can be hard to argue this point, the client knows their customer better than us…… Yes usability tests would be a good…

...continue to read "How to Handle Jargon and Acronyms"

In fact, you may not like the product, either, simply because you’re probably not part of their targeted audience.  So make up your mind now to look past that in order to see the marketing decisions behind both the product and the site.

Let’s start by imagining that you’ve just been challenged to enter the fitness category. Not to sell some machine or piece of equipment, but to sell…

...continue to read "On Target Copywriting and the next “Buns of Steel”"