What sells better?

• A website that is only selling one product or service?

Or

• A website that sells everything?

In the real world, if I am going shopping I’ll head to The Mall or Wal-Mart. I know by going to either of those stores I’ll be able to take care of several shopping needs at once. Manuela needs some shoes. Frankie needs clothes. The family needs milk. It makes since to go to a store that carries everything.

Due to time it’s best to go to a store that has a little bit of everything. But what happens if the travel time is non-existent? Let’s say you are standing in Home Depot and there is a line of experts waiting to help you.

You are about to build a fence and want to know how deep you should burry your post. You can ask anyone expert standing in front of you the question. Now imagine as you stand there each expert has a sign above his head. This sign tells you what he’s an expert in. The first one is an expert fence builder. The second is an expert plumber. The third is an expert deck builder and the fourth is an expert in plumbing, deck building, gutters, fences, web designs and if he’s not busy he’ll even shovel snow off your drive way.

Who are you going to trust with the single most important part of the whole project?

You see, a lot of website owners confuse the Internet with the off-line world. They try and build a website that is tailored to everyone and in return it’s built for no one. When you try and become the Wal-Mart of your industry you end up being seen as a company that is not an expert in anything. Wal-Mart is tailored to a person that is not sitting at home watching their favorite TV show while looking for a baby bed for their sister-in-laws baby shower. Wal-Mart is built for someone, who is in a hurry, trying to save money, doesn’t have the ability to push the back button and search 5 million stories that compete with them in a blink of an eye.

With that being said it appears trying to be everything to everyone has worked for Amazon. People buy from people they like. People like people who are like themselves. The reason you buy from Wal-Mart is because it’s convenient. Wal-Mart saves you time and money. When you are online you become the time travel. You are able to travel in time to any shop you want anywhere in the world you want to go. You are no longer looking for a store that has everything. You are looking for an online expert that you like. The way you know you like him or her is because their website was built just for you. It grabs you by the shirt, looks you in the eyes and says, “I am the one, click me now!” Yes it’s that obvious when a website hits its targeted audience.

If it’s raining and your roofs leaking, you need a roofing expert. You need someone close by that does emergency repairs on roofs. You go to Google and do a search for your city and state along with the text “emergency roofing repair”. You click on the first website that comes up and it has a flashing banner that says, “24 hour roofing repairs” and says click this button and we can be there in 5 minutes. Was this website not built and tailored just for you?

What’s Better a Website that sells everything or one that Specializes in Only One Thing?

Let’s go back to the roofer. He does nothing but roofing repair. He lives in a small town and there are three other roofing companies. He’s recently learned that there are only two gutter companies in the town. So he wants to offer gutters along with the roofing repair service.  So…the question is do you build a totally new website for the gutter service or do you add gutters into the roofing repair company. After all it does make sense that a roofing repair company also offers gutter repair.

Let’s look at it from the consumer’s side as you make your emergency phone call;

Negative:

• When you land on the site you now have to choose gutter repair or roofing repair.
• It’s kind of what’s behind door number 1! When you click roofing repair will you be asked more questions or get the answer you seek?
• Now you have to make a decision as to rather you want to start clicking buttons or hit the back button and find another website?

Positives:

• If you have a gutter problem it’s good to know this company can repair it.
• Knowing they do both roofing and gutters makes you think it’s a bigger company and adds some credibility.

It’s not a question of how many services should you offer your clients but how many services should you offer on one website?

Amazon started out as a bookstore but continued to add new products until they’ve become the Wal-Mart of the internet.

Too many options overwhelm us and we do nothing at all.

That’s what a group of researchers said. Researchers put a table of 6 different flavors of jam in front of a store. They then swapped it out with a table of 30 different flavors. They did this throughout the day and studied how people reacted to the 30 choices compared to the 6.

• Both groups tasted about the same number of flavors.
• The table with 30 flavors drew a larger crowd.
• However, thirty percent of the people that visited the table with six choices purchased jam, while only three percent made a purchase from the table that offered 30 options.

So if less is more then why do sites like Amazon continue to grow in size? Could it be the affiliates with the single topic sites that are running the sales up for Amazon?

Does this mean that I would be better off having an attorney web design business in Atlanta Georgia rather than a web design business in Atlanta Georgia? Is a world wide web design business okay, or does that include to many topics? I realize the only way to answer these questions is with split testing and sadly enough I am just starting to get my feet wet with split testing. So…I was wondering if anyone was willing to share what they’ve tested as well as the results from those tests? Oh…and I realize that no two sites or business are the same, so no two results would be the same but just wondering what others have been able to learn from split testing?

This is continued from my Atlanta Georgia Web Designer post that was continued from my We Design Business post.

John Bargh ran a series of experiments where groups of people had to unscramble a list of words.

• Group one: unscrambled rood, angry words.
  
• Group two: unscrambled words that were neither angry nor calm.
  
• Group three: unscrambled words that were happy, calm, pleasant and easy-going or laid back.
  

The second part – once they finished unscrambling the words, they had to go down the hall and find the instructor. When they walked into the instructor’s office the instructor was talking with someone else.

Now…the someone else is part of the experiment. The idea is to see if there is a difference in how the person that unscrambled the rude words reacts to having to wait when compared to the people in the nice or nothing group.

• What they found out is that 20% of the people that unscrambled the happy calm words interrupted the instructor within 10 minutes.
  
• While 40% of the people that unscrambled the neither, rude or happy words interrupted the instructor within 10 minutes.
  
• But a whopping 60% interrupted the instructor from the rude word group.
  

When they asked the group of people if unscrambling the words had any impact at all on how long they were willing to wait before interrupting the instructor, all said no.

We are not aware of how much influence our subconscious mind has on the decisions we make as well as out mood, feelings and the way we think.

Do you love your job?

I can’t think of anything else I would rather be doing. You see Dr.’s and lawyers have to run to the office, court room or surgery the only place I have to run is to the bathroom. No, really I’ll be right back.

If you’ve read any of my latest articles, then you know I’ve been writing a lot about how to design websites for the subconscious mind. To get people to react to a website you have to go deeper than just the conscious mind. But I’ve written enough about the conscious mind as well as the subconscious mind, what I want to do now is go deeper.

Your 3^rd brain controls your survival.

This is the part of your brain only focuses on survival, food, and sex!

This is the part of your brain that is constantly scanning the environment and looking for anything that might mean danger, food or sex. The most important thing to this part of your brain is you!

Did you know that just by changing text on your website to focus on words like YOU can increase your conversion rate?

If I say, “All You Have to Do Is Click Here!” the part of your brain that is always looking out for you says hey buddy this is for YOU!

Now keep in mind there are 3 things he’s looking out for you on. Those 3 things are food, sex and safety. If you’ve got a restaurant this is where you should realize that you are sitting on a gold mine. I’ve got a chocolate cake I saw on a website 5 years ago that I can’t get out of my head. Every time I walk in a store I start looking to see if they’ve got chocolate cake, heck I am getting a craving for one just writing about it.

The neat part about this is that we don’t have to be in the action to get this part of our brain awake and paying attention. Other words, I could be watching a movie of a guy doing something dangerous and my body automatically goes on high alert. When this part of my brain is on high alert I am more likely to retain information.

That’s why a lot of times when you see something horrible it’s sometimes hard to get it out of your head. It doesn’t have to be happening to me for my body to get on high alert and I don’t have to be afraid, scared or anything else. The only thing I need is for my brain to be on high alert.

A Couple years ago I was asked to look at a website where they sold chairs. They had some beautiful chairs but what got me was the content. Content talking about how having the wrong type of chair can damage your back.

They showed a lot of pictures of people walking crooked and I almost bought a chair. Had it not been for me living in Colombia and having to explain to everyone here why I spent so much for a chair I might have one today.

Which PPC vendor (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) has had the worst problem with low click quality (invalid or fraudulent clicks?)

Even if the problem isn’t as bad as it was, who (Google, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) had the worst problem with low quality or invalid clicks?
Have you ever gotten a refund or credit for bad clicks? If so, was it substantial?

 

Google is excellent with their reconciliation on fraudulent clicks. They provide in-depth reporting, as well as refunds for malicious clicks. You can also setup IP blocking to prevent certain parties from viewing your PPC ads, which is convenient. I haven’t personally dealt with Yahoo in terms of invalid click reimbursement, so I can’t speak to that. Same with Facebook.

As far as low quality clicks, that is really more an issue of the quality score of the ads you are running and your keyword selection, in my opinion. Any of the major PPC vendors can have campaigns fall victim to poor click quality if you are targeting too broad of keywords, your ad copy isn’t optimal, your landing page is not relevant or isn’t linked properly, etc. Google’s Keyword Tools and other optimization tools can help you tweak your ads to achieve higher quality scores and relevance in comparison to your targeted keywords, which should result in higher quality clicks.

I have included a great article on landing page optimization. Hope this information is helpful, thanks for the great question!

I enjoy designing websites and have been doing so for the last 7 years. However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s best for me and the business if we only take on jobs that we find interesting.

There is just way too much time involved in designing a website and dealing with clients.

At this time I feel like there are two ways we could go with the business.

1. Streamline the business and figure out the fastest and easiest way to design websites. Use an assembly line approach and try to put out as many web designs per day as possible.

2. Become the elite in the web design business and build a name that we can proudly stand behind. Only take on clients that are serious about building a web presence.

Believe it or not I’ve spent a good bit of time considering the direction I want to go. While I am sure there is more money in the first choose, I enjoy what I do way too much to build an assembly line approach to what has become an art to me.

I enjoy playing with web designs and figuring out how to create them in such a way that they are able to both drive traffic and convert traffic. At this time in my life I am unwilling to trade money for what has become an art to me.

And it’s for this reason that we will be turning down more web design jobs then we will be taking from this moment forward.

I personally feel that this is in the best interest of me, Geeks on Steroids and my clients.