As you learn more about the brain and how your subconscious is affected by your website design you realize that finding a web designer in India isn’t going to get you what you are wanting. You need someone between you and the design team that is handling the testing, tweaking, and fine tuning of the website.

“Websites That Will Double Your Business!”

Ever wondered why so many people give free information away in exchange for your name and e-mail address?

In 1966 Freedman and Fraser did some research. The first thing they did was to ask people if they could put a big ugly sign in their yard. The sign said drive carefully. Out of all the people they talked to 20% of the people said okay.

The second test they asked people to put this little sign in their car that said drive carefully. Three weeks later they went back around and got 46% of the people to agree to put the big ugly sign in their yard.

The third group was first asked to sign a petition and then three weeks later the same person showed up and asked them to put the sign in their yard. In that group 76% of the people agreed to put the sign in their yard.

So why the big difference?

Each one of us has personas. These are the people we are, when we are around other people.

My persona with my husband would be different than my persona with my kids. My persona with my kids would be different than my persona with the people I work with.

We create personas of ourselves depending on who were around and where we are. Personas are created subconsciously. But each has values and ideas that you give them and those values are real.

So when someone approaches you and ask you to do something small, that is just outside what your persona would normally do, you are more likely to agree to that then if they asked you to do something big. However the small things widen our persona, and subconsciously changes it a little.

Since you signed the petition you are now someone who cares about people driving safely in your subdivision.

When you asked to put a sign in your yard you are more likely to do so because you care about the neighborhood, you are involved.

When you signed the petition you started expanding your persona.  

The other thing that happened was that the person had built a relationship with you before they asked you to put the big ugly sign in your yard. That small relationship more than doubled the results.

By creating websites that build relationships with our website visitors, we can build a business.

In 1955 there was an experiment done where people were asked to estimate the length of a line. One of the things they wanted to study was how committed someone was to their answer.

The experiment included putting people into the group that exaggerated the length of the line. They wanted to know if people would stick with their answer or change their answer and go with something they knew was wrong, only to fit in.

In one of the experiments they asked everybody to write down what they thought the length of the line was.

Group 1
was told to write down how long they thought the line was on a piece of paper but told not to sign it.

Group 2
was told to write down their answer on a magic pad so no one could see it and it was easy to erase.

Group 3
was told to write it down and sign it.

What they found was that people were five times more likely NOT to change their answer if they wrote it down.

We know we can change someone’s persona by getting them going in a direction that they normally would not go. The smallest commitment gets them there even faster.

If someone is on your website and you give them a gift, like a free e-book. In return they give you their email address. They have now made a commitment to you and do not even know it.

If you then follow the e-book with a series of newsletters then you are now building a relationship with that website visitor.

Eventually if this website visitor becomes a customer or even a friend, if you can get them to write you a testimonial then you can put on your website and link back to their website. Then their commitment to you will be deeper. If they ever need a service that you provide, they’ll be coming to you for that service.

Of course to make this work the quality of work, quality of information, and relationship has to always be getting better.

I deal with customers every day that want their website to be perfect.

They’ll spend a year trying to get everything exactly like THEY THINK, it needs to be.

But they’re missing the game.

They’re sitting on the sidelines trying to get everything perfect on their website and they are not even on the field playing the game.

Think about this!

If you had a choice between two restaurants, let’s say one was in the middle of the desert but it’s nice.

Leather sofas, gourmet cooks the works.

If the President of the United States was looking for a nice restaurant this is where he would go. However, the last car that drove by there was six months ago.

Or

You had a restaurant that was sitting in the middle of New York, in the middle of all the action, downtown New York. This restaurant had one big fat ugly waitress with a big wart on her nose and a cigarette in her mouth and the cook has worn the same shirt for the last 10 years.

It’s a rundown piece of junk hole in the wall restaurant, but it’s always full of customers.

Which one would you rather stick your life savings in?

The first step is getting traffic to the site and the site making money, than you can start testing fine tuning and tweaking the site from there.

When building your website you want to set up a CMS system like WordPress. This gives you control over the site, and you’re able to add content, information, photos, pages, videos and anything else to the site, on your own. You also want to set up Google Analytics.

The reason you want to use Google is because it’s more accurate than most other stat counters. Some stats count bots from Google, Bing, Yahoo and may others as visitors. The problem with this is that if you are trying to find a problem with the website and you are thinking you are getting 1,000 visitors a day, then it is natural to start tweaking and fine tuning the website. However, can you imagine the wasted time and money if you find out later that it was actually 1 and not 1,000 visitors per day?

You could tweak and fine tune that website until the cows come home, but it isn’t going to help.

Once the website is designed and online you want to start driving traffic to the site and use the information from your stats to fine tune and tweak not only the site but the content, logos, photos, offers and anything else you can think of.

With Google Analytics you can see how many visitors are visiting your website, what action those visitors are taking and where problems might lie with the website. This is the information you need to get a better ROI.

The information you are collecting from your stats allows you to target the other 98% of website visitors that most websites are missing out on.

Think about the iPhone introduction?

When it came out for the first time, there were long lines to get one. Remember the 3G model came out a year or so later and again there were long lines. Long waits. You can order one, but who knows when you’ll get it. And Apple implied there might not be enough to go around.

Are there long waits because people are ordering or are people ordering because there are long waits?

Scarcity makes us think something is more valuable and it makes it more desirable and our desire to have it grows stronger.

The thing about scarcity is it works, not just for products but for information as well.

We can read about trends in the web design industry online by searching for articles in Google. Or we can subscribe to a pricey series of reports that cost a lot of money and are only available to a limited number of designers.

Which source of information do you think is more accurate, more valuable?

Which source will you use when it’s time to take action?

We think that information that is hard to come by is more viable.

Have you ever noticed when something seems unavailable we want it more?

The other day I went shopping with my four-year-old son, he found a model train set that he really wanted. The problem was that it was the last toy train they had. There was a lady waiting for me to set the train down so she could purchase it. As I spoke to one of the girls that worked at the store she informed me that they didn’t know if they would be getting anymore before Christmas.

So I had no choice! I had to purchase the toy train.

As I walked out of the store, I had a passing thought.

What if they did that to everybody?

Think about it, you have certain items in your store that you want to sell. You hire one girl to walk around the store and shop. You tell this girl that anyone looking at certain items on this list, you should go up to them and wait for them to put the item down. Make it appear that you are thinking about purchasing the item. You tell your stock people to always make sure there is only one item on the shelf. Not of everything, just certain items that you want to push.

Anything that is limited not only by time but also by scarcity creates this effect on you.

There are a lot of free newsletters that you can sign up for? But if it’s free, and available to anyone, is it as valuable?

A paid subscription is often just a newsletter you pay money to receive. This seems more viable because there is a price attached to it.

Using Price to Increase Website Sales

A Couple years ago I worked with a company that was selling a product for $19.99. We ran some split test and just for fun played with the price a little. The results were that the $1,999.99 price sold better than the $19.99 price. The more expensive product gave the impression of being of more value. The company went from being almost bankrupt to doing over a million in sales that year. We unconsciously want what is more expensive and therefore harder to get. We unconsciously assume that expensive means better.

If something is inaccessible, out of stock, unavailable, banned or forbidden then we want it more. Showing a limited quantity or a limited time frame of something invokes scarcity.

Scarcity motivates you to act.

Not only can products be scares but access to information could be hard to get as well. Therefore it makes the information seem more valuable.

This is the reason we need to know how to test and read analytics, so we can discover things like this about our website visitors.

By studying our website visitors we can find out things; like giving too many choices causes your visitors to freeze up and leave your website!

One interesting thing about choices is that we think we want a lot of them, but in reality a lot of choices hinder our decision-making process. If given a choice between a few alternatives or numerous alternatives, we will most likely want as many choices as we can get. But research has shown those choses hurt the conversion rate on products. This is a classic case where what we think we want is not what we really want. We really don’t make better decisions with more choices, but we think we do. Too many choices confuse us and we end up making no choice at all.

In 2000 there was an experiment were they set up booths in a busy upscale grocery store in California and posed as store employees. They alternated the product selection on a table so it showed six choices of fruit jams half the time and 24 jars of jam the other half.

When there were 24 jars of jam on the table 60% of shoppers passing the table stopped and tasted the jam. When there were six jars of jam on the table, only 40% stopped to taste it. So does that mean that more choices lead to more sales?

No, it doesn’t !

You would think that people would taste more varieties of jam when the table had 24 flavors. But they didn’t. People tasted one or two varieties whether there were six or 24 choices available.

And how did the selection influence purchases?

Of the shoppers who stopped at the table with six jars, 30% actually purchased the brand of jam they had tried. Of those who stopped at the table with 24 jars, only 3% purchased jam.

So what do we learn from this? A bigger selection attracts a bigger crowd, but the smaller crowd with less choices purchases more products, and that means more money.

A real estate friend of mine a couple years ago told me people come in all the time with a big list of what they’re looking for in a house but they always seem to settle for things that are not on the list. Other words it’s rare that someone actually buys the house that has everything on the list before falling in love with the house that has very little of what is on the list.

We want to believe that our choices are based on logical weighing of one choice versus another, but there is a lot of research that shows our choices are not logical. In fact, we are not consciously aware of why we are choosing one item over another. And after we make a choice we can’t even accurately explain why we made the choice we did. We will try to make up a reason, but it probably isn’t accurate.

In 2002 a guy by the name of Wilson showed people four types of pantyhose and asked them to select the type they would buy.  People had definite preferences. Most of them chose the pair that was furthest to the right on the table. What they didn’t know was that all the pantyhose were exactly the same.

When asked why they chose the one on the far right, they provided a variety of reasons including its softer or it’s stronger.

You don’t know why you do the things you do, and the only way to find out is by testing it.

This is an exciting time to be in the web design business. It seems more and more people are talking about the effects your website can have on your business, more than ever before. It’s no longer about what the owner of the business wants, but rather what the website visitors want to see.

There are two separate groups of opinion on how we should go about finding out what it is the website visitor really wants to see.  

• Group 1 believes that the best way to find out is by doing online surveys and asking people what they liked and didn’t like about the website and or products. They also believe that an even better approach would be sitting down and talking and working with these people as they purchase something on the site.
  
• Group 2 believes that the only way the information can correctly be obtained is by studying people as they make purchases. They believe we don’t have the first clue as to why we do the things we do, so why ask?
  

Before you decide which group you want to belong to let me give you something to think about.

Wilson and Craft in 1993 asked couples to make a list of the things they liked and didn’t like about their relationships.

They then compared that group of people to another group they were studying that they did not ask anything to. The idea was to see which relationship lasted longer.

The study showed that the couples that created a list ended their relationships sooner than those who did not create a list.

Are you wondering what this has to do with your website?

Wilson in 1993 studied people who buy posters;

• Group 1 listed what they liked and didn’t like about five posters.
  
• Group 2 did nothing.
  

After it was over, each person got to pick a poster to take home. Two weeks later someone contacted them to see how happy they were with their posters. Group 2, who didn’t do anything, was happier with their choices than those in group 1 that studied their posters before taking them home.

I went shopping with a friend not long ago and we spent hours looking for the perfect purse. About a week after that I called and asked how she liked it and she said she hated it. We had spent so much time studying all the purses that we had forgotten to look at the most important part, the inside pockets.

Another study was done in 2005 where they brought each person into a room and showed them a computer screen of posters and then put them into one of 2 groups.

• In the first group people were told to look at each poster and make a list of the things they liked and didn’t like about each poster. When they finished they were allowed to pick one of the posters to take home.
  
• In the second group they worked on task that had nothing to do with the posters and when they finished they were allowed to pick one poster to take home.
  

And like the first study two weeks later they called to see how they liked their choices and found that the first group was not as happy about their choices as the second group.

The more time we spend analyzing our decision the more likely we are to later become unhappy with our purchase. And worst, the more time we spend studying something before making that purchase the less likely we are of being happy with that purchase in a couple weeks.

I say don’t ask the website visitor anything, watch them and see how they react to small changes on the website. And keep tweaking and fine tuning the site, it should never stop.  

When you go to make a purchase two things are happening inside your brains.

• First, the part of the brain you control, is trying to make a decision and weighing the benefits and disadvantages of making the decision.
  
• Second, if your subconscious gets involved then you become more emotional about the purchase and you are no longer in total control of the purchase.
  

One of the things that get this part of the brain involved is instant gratification.

Being able to see, feel, smell and touch the product as well as knowing we can have it right now, causes a part of our mind that we cannot control to get more involved in the purchasing decision.

We know this can work online and with websites, because the sex industry exits solely because of this part of the brain.

But can knowing this help us to make our own websites more effective?

Okay for those movers, shakers & rule breakers…I am setting up my new SEO website here.

Did you know;

  80% of consumers research online before buying offline?

  70% of people searching Google never click past the first 3 links?

  60% of all traffic on the internet is now video?

  YouTube is the #1 search engine?

7 Downsides To Traditional Advertising

  Expensive

  When was the last time you used the Yellow Pages?

  Hard to track metrics

  Longer turnaround times

  Print errors

  Disconnect from your clients

You can’t build a relationship

For a Successful Online Business I need;

  Brand Recognition

  Lead Generation

  Fans

Why Brand Recognition?

  People buy from companies they know!

  When you become the most recognized brand in your industry you become the default “go-to” company.

  Buyers are more informed than ever!

  It is essential to be known as the industry leader. How do you get there? By giving away as much free, valuable information as you can.

  People buy from companies they trust!

  By being an industry expert and providing all the information you are the one they go to when they have questions, concerns or need services from.

Why Lead Generation?

  Lead generation is the backbone to any business.

  Every company needs leads.

  Cold calling doesn’t work.

  Gone are the days when cold calling worked. Buyers are aware when you’re trying to sell them something and are even more guarded than ever. We need a new way to contact clients.

  Offline lead generation can be difficult to track.

  Unless everything is recorded and input into a sales funnel you don’t have a full picture of how your sales team is doing. What if there was a way to automate this and record all your metrics?

Why Do We Need Fans?

  Fans make you famous!

  Find your perfect customer. Find out exactly what he wants. Give it to him.

  Always over-deliver

  Be different, stand out. Be the company that cares.

  Making sure your product works is the best form of marketing.

Video Marketing

Video Marketing is by far the easiest and most effective way to brand yourself as an expert. If you want to create trust, credibility and build traffic all at the same time, video marketing is the smartest and most effective strategy you can use.

Video Distribution

Distribute your videos to top video sharing sites like Youtube, Metacafe, Daily Motion, Yahoo Videos, Veoh etc. This gives is credibility and makes us look like the dominant force in your industry.

Podcasts

We can convert our videos to audio so they can be listed to on an iPod, iPhone, Blackberry, in their car or simply on a computer. We want to deliever our messages when the potential customer is ready to listen.

Podcast Distributions

By submitting our podcasts to the most influential and greatest number of podcast search engines and directories, we make it easy for people to find our message and this gives us greater visibility for our content.

Article Marketing

Content makes a website successful. Article marketing helps build credibility and a great reputation. Article marketing is a great SEO tool because articles appeal to a lot of people who still prefer to read more than any other learning style. Quality and relevant articles are still the most preferred sources of information by many people who surf the internet. If people find the quality of your articles to be good, they are more likely to follow that link to your website.

Article Distributions

The distribution of articles can literally make you an overnight success. By distributing your article to top article directories we get more views and in turn move up in the Google rankings.

Facebook Fan Page

It is important to create and establish a Facebook Page. The biggest distinction between a personal profile, group, and page is that the only one viewable to the public and indexed by search engines is a Facebook Page.

Twitter Followers

Twitter is an excellent source of free traffic.

Feeder Sites

Feeder sites are pages created with blogs or hub pages that will allow you to create very good quality back links to our main website. By building feeder sites that stand out we bring more prospects to our main website.

E-Book Creation

In addition to me having custom videos, podcasts, articles and websites created, our content can be turned into a E-Book to give away to our potential clients at no charge.

E-Mail List Creation

Everybody knows how difficult it is to build an opt-in email list these days. We need to formulate a system that will safely allow us to build responsive list that will continually buy our products.

Blog Creation

A custom blog for our business, not only acts as a direct line of communication with our clients, but also a major marketing strategy that ensures that we remain at the top of the search engine results.

Backlinking

Backlinking is the process of creating links to our website. Each link means that someone is trying to inform others about some interesting page they have found.

Therefore, the number of links pointing to our site is a measure of popularity and reputation of the page. The number and quality of backlinks is the basis of the PageRank algorithm used by Googleʼs web search. Backlinking is very popular and the main reason for this popularity is the fact that it returns relevant results for every possible search phrase, brings you more clients and more sales.

Press Release

It is not surprising that marketing experts recommend using press releases for generating targeted traffic to websites. This strategy has become increasingly popular.

However, press releases are not only great for marketing but also create an excellent opportunity for attracting incoming links, which are essential for SEO.

Dedicated SEO Expert

Hiring Dedicated SEO experts is the greatest choice for a complete SEO solution. You
can acquire the additional improvement of a more concentrated, stronger approach and
cut costs. With dedicated SEO experts you get significantly improved engine rankings.

We will hire, monitor and train an SEO expert specifically for our products or services.
You will be able to contact him or her directly and will essentially be an off-site employee without having to deal with payroll, taxes or HR: the perfect solution.

Split-testing Option

Although we can’t ever predict for certain what will work best, we can get better at predicting what will work in the future. In most cases that’s because split testing and careful tracking and recording has given us loads of examples to learn from. Split-testing is the fastest way to increase your conversion rate and lower your cost-per-action, which increases profitability.

Monthly Reporting

In order to track all the new traffic from our marketing campaign we will be generating a detailed month end report analyzing which methods are the most efficient, where your visitors are coming from, what they like the most and how we can tweak & improve for the next month!

If you have ever worked on or designed a large e-commerce website or even a heavy content website then you know the success of the website depends on content being found. You know it is vital that the design and layout of the search functionality of the website be considered carefully.

When a search is made, the page that is returned with the information is the prime focus for the search experience, and can make or break the sites ability to turn a web visitor into a customer. For this reason, bridging the gap between a user and the content or products they seek, is a crucial factor in the success of the website. The responsibility of the designer is to design an effective search results page and I’d like to take a moment to make a thorough examination of some of the features and functions found on search results page from a number of popular sites.

Other words, I am going to take a moment and look at some of the trends and practices incorporated into a variety of websites.

Google’s search result pages are by far the best known search result pages online.

I will list some of the features from Google’s search result pages, and then we will point out some additional unique features found on other search result pages, including those found on the other popular search engines.

Below are some of the features found on Google’s search result pages.

Search box, with search words, remain at the top of the page.

You have an option to view an advanced search page

The total number of search results shown at the top of the page

Ajax driven auto completed for follow-up searches

There are sponsored links at top and right

The results have titles in bold and hyperlinked

The searched words are shown in bold in a page snippet

URLs shown in a different color under each result

The visited links are in a different color

There are related search phrases listed at bottom of the page

There is a search box, with search terms repeated at the bottom of the page

Most of the search engine result pages follow very similar patterns as the one above for Google. However, below are some variations and unique features that are found on other search engines that Google does not have.

Bing

Microsoft’s new search engine has a list of the user history in the sidebar and the user is allowed to clear the history or turn it off. The search history remains intact even when the browser is closed, once the page is revisited the past history is there.

One improvement on Microsoft’s search engine is at the bottom of the page the numbers for the additional pages is much cleaner, larger and has a mouse over affect.

Yahoo

The search results page on Yahoo displays an Ajax driven slide down unit that appears below the search box when someone is typing in a search query. It is very much similar to the Ajax drop-down featured on Google and Bing with a few extra enhancements.

Yahoo offers features that are still in beta, search pad, which allows the user to record notes on searches and search scan to help protect from harmful websites.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have the experience and industry expertise to enable them to design an effective search results page. The patterns and trends they have are worthy of consideration when designing your own search results page. Even if many of their features are out of your projects budget and scope, the principles behind the features can be considered and incorporated in practical ways.

YouTube

The search results page on video sharing websites have some patterns worth noting. YouTube has easily accessible filtering options near the top of the search results page. Each item on YouTube can be scanned for detailed information such as; a thumbnail preview, runtime for the clip, user rating and age of the item. You will also notice that if there is a list or a series that it is also indicated.

Metacafe

MetaCafe includes many of the features that YouTube offers plus an XML feed for a particular set of results and an option to enable or disable a family filter.

Break

Break includes a top 10 searches box on the right side of the page, allowing the user to view what others have been searching for.

Moving along we will take a look at Social News and Mini-Blogging sites.

Tweeter offers a very clean driven interface that includes real-time results. They also offer a list of what others are searching for. Tweeter also gives the user the
option to refresh the page once additional results appear in real time.

Okay, moving along to what is a critical and crucial part of an e-commerce website and of course that would be the search result page. This is the means by which most users will attempt to find the product or information that they are looking for. I am Going to take a look at some of the popular e-commerce websites and what they have.

Amazon

Amazon allows the search results to be sorted in a variety of ways like best-selling, customer reviews and so on. This is done by means of a select box that adds or removes this option based on the catagories the user is currently viewing.

When displaying results for books, Amazon results page indicates that the book has the look inside feature. There is also a brief description from each book, plus links to view for other editions.

EBay

EBay allows for easy filtering through tabs at the top of the page. EBay also provides a unique feature at the bottom of the page, this option allows you to view the thumbnail preview of the images in different sizes.

Another neat feature unique to eBay is the ability to change the amount of items displayed per page and the ability to go directly to a specific page by entering a number into the text box.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart clearly distinguishes between products available in-store and those available online, allowing the user to filter items through a tabbed interface.
At the bottom of Wal-Mart search results page there are items that were purchased after other shoppers conducted the same search. There is also a feedback option offered, indicating that Wal-Mart is conducting ongoing analysis of user’s interaction with their search features.

Coast

Coast website includes an indicator that lets you know of any new items that have been added recently.

Shoon

Shoon has a list of alternative color options for the individual products. By clicking a new color option the product color changes dynamically.

CNET

CNET allows users by means of a checkbox to select multiple items for a side-by-side comparison.
When it comes to something as simple as the search features on the website they can get very complicated very fast.

The best website design is one that is able to convert the traffic from browsers to buyers. The problem is that every industry is different and therefore every web design is equally different. However there are some things that do work over and over again no matter what the topic.

1. For some reason a blue Buy Now Button will convert traffic better than a red one.

2. A Buy Now Button that is a little larger than the standard size seems to work best.

3. A disclaimer saying you want misuse their email address under a contact forum.

4. A light color blue or color grey as the background color.

The list of little changes that can make a big difference go on and on.

My point is that next time you’re looking for the best website design you need to understand that the little things you don’t really notice can make a big difference.

A good web design is one that converts traffic and makes a profit. The best web design is the one that is converting the most traffic.