My buddies over at FutureNow have consolidated all of their bloggy efforts into the NEW GrokDotCom blog.
It's a great new site powered by a ContentRobot installation of WordPress with some very cool technology humming in the background.
In addition to the original content, it pulls in feeds from some great marketing blogs and sites. It may just be the only blog you need to read! I've added the post feed to my sidebar. Check it out.
(This has been one of the top stories on American Small Business for several months. So, I'm stealing my own story and sharing it here.)
Best-selling author Bryan Eisenberg has been dishing out super advice over at ClickZ for nearly 5 years now. If you will take the time to read all 239 of his articles, you'll be way ahead of most.
The two most recent articles talk about two very important pages on your site, but pages that usually get only a cursory effort from most site developers. Your "About Us" (read the article) page is a key source of confidence for many of your customers (many could care less).
An "About Us" page is a tremendous opportunity to cement a relationship with many prospective customers. It can put a human face on an otherwise technical, dry, and impersonal page. Properly written, it can provide some serious buying resolve to certain customer segments.
Your "Contact Us" (read the article) page is equally as important. People want to know how to reach you when there's a problem…or if they want to compliment you! Bryan gives some great examples of companies doing it right and companies doing it wrong. He wraps it up with this:
The "contact us" page is a lifeline for many businesses. For others, it's what a visitor should click on as a last resort because she's failed to find answers elsewhere on your site. Either way, take the responsibility. Make sure visitors don't become frustrated before they reach out. In the end, that's the key measure of a good "contact us" page.
March 7-13. That was the last full week I spent in my own home. Austin to Winnipeg to Denver to Phoenix to Los Angeles to Melbourne to Hobart to Los Angeles to Las Vegas to Austin to Phoenix to San Diego to Denver to Knoxville where I hear the lovely drawled greeting of the waffle lady here in the Residence Inn each morning at breakfast. I've got just a 74 more miles before I make United's Premier status this year. Too bad we're driving to Austin for Wizards of Web. ;-)
The more personas I create, the more wireframing I do, the better and quicker I get at it. It's fun work and it's exciting to see the lights come on in the eyes of the business owner as he gets a deeper understanding of his own business and realizes how important the Persuasion Architecture process will be...not just for his web site, but for all aspects of customer interaction.
I'm excited to be headed to Austin for Eisenberg's BIG EVENT. It's not too late to join us!
I'm also excited to get home the next week. That's where you'll find me for at least a few weeks.
June 2002 Wizards of Web is where I first swallowed the red pill and had my eyes opened to how things really work on the web. I've been following along with the Eisenbergs ever since and using their Persuasion Architecture techniques to make fists full of money for me and baskets full of money for my clients.
That's why I'll be in the room on May 9-10 at Wizard Academy when Jeff and Bryan present the 2-day version of the class. The class is free...sort of. By your attendance, you'll be helping them promote their new book "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?". You see, you'll get 100 hardback copies of the book when it's released in June for $1,800 now. You'll also get one signed preview copy of the book when you attend. Buy 100 books and attend a $3,000 seminar free.
I'm not sure how to put it more plainly than this: If you are in charge of your company's web presence and you don't increase your sales by more than the cost of the 2-day trip including all your expenses...you're a doofus. If you are smart enough to get to Austin on your own, you are very likely smart enough to understand how to use the information in the course to make more money.
And then, in June, when you receive 100 books and start giving them to your colleagues and customers, you will again be recognized for your intelligence and thoughtfulness.
PSSST...I've read the book. I have a galley proof. It's the best, most accessible book on marketing I've ever read. No kidding.
If you want to read more about it, click here for the Wizard Academy description. If you just want to register, go here.
I'll see you in Austin in a few weeks!
Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.
Looking for a quick trip to NYC for a great learning experience? Want to write better online copy? Check out Future Now's seminar coming up next Monday and Tuesday. It's a great class and Holly's a super teacher. Besides, when on earth will you get another chance to hang out in Red Hook? Take the subway to Smith and 9th and you're almost there!
Link: Marketing to Women Online: Online Copywriting Seminar.
It's official. (read the release) I can blog about it now. My buddies at Future Now Inc. are being praised for their work on the new Universal Orlando Resort web site. It's a big site, they've been working on it for at least the last 6 months and it's already making a difference for Universal. Persuasion Architecture is about mapping the company's selling process to the customer's buying process instead of forcing the customer to figure out how to buy.
It's a cool new site and I haven't had the chance to really dig through it all. Here's my advice to you: Go to the site with the assumption that you have decided to take a vacation to Orlando. Follow your instincts. See where the scent trail leads for you. Have your kids do the same thing. Have your spouse do it. You will each follow different paths and end up in a similar place...ready to buy. Give it a try.
When you think of Orlando Vacations, you probably first think of Disney World. Check out the comparison page on Universal's site. I like it.
You may have noticed (and you may not have noticed) that the great majority of your customers are quite a bit like you. You have your own buying style that informs your selling style. You'll always sell more to people who share more of your personality traits.
Old School Sales would tell you to find more of those people and make more presentations, hence you'll sell more. And who cares if 75% of your prospects fail to buy something? You just need more traffic from more people like you.
New School Sales says traffic works, but it's expensive. What if, by adjusting your selling style just a bit, and only when needed, you could sell twice as much. Are you willing to "compromise" just a bit to double your income? Hmm?
Scott Adams has a great post about how he changed his Dilbert comic strip to accomodate his readers. He describes how comic readers fall about 20% into a Gag Lovers group that loves cleverness, 20% into a Visual group that loves the art in comics, and 60% that want relevance.
"When Dilbert first launched, I was aiming for the gag lovers, and they responded. But there weren’t enough of them to make the comic a success. Dilbert was published in fewer than 100 papers and it stalled. But I noticed – thanks to readers sending me e-mail – that the Dilbert strips people liked the most were the relatively few that showed Dilbert at work. So I took the hint and moved the focus of the strip to the office. That’s when I hit the mother lode – the Relevance People. Dilbert shot to over 1,000 newspapers in just a few years. Now it’s in over 2,000."
Did he sacrifice his "artistic integrity" to make a buck? Nope, he did it to make millions. I don't think he sacrificed anything. He accomodated his readers and it enabled him to make blog posts from a beachside condo in Hawaii as he watches whales swim past.
Are you accomodating the diners in your restaurant? The shoppers in your store? How about the visitors to your web site? Yes, your web site.
Persuasion Architecture is about making sure your site is relevant to more personality types than your own. It's how you can have multiple sales paths through one channel. You should give it a try. Hey, I like hanging out with people like me. But, I'm happy to sell to everybody.
It's amazing to me that people are still asking this question. The answer is "OF COURSE!"
The answer should possibly have more than one exclamation point, but I don't want to be overly dramatic.
The next question is, "But, we don't sell our merchandise on-line."
The answer remains the same. Always. The reason is that your customers are still looking for you on line, even if they have no intention of buying from you on line. They want to know your hours, your phone number, you product lines and anything else about your store that might make them just a bit more confident about getting in the car and driving over to your place.
My web development partner, Thomas Tucker of Hover Studios wrote a nice explanation of this and uses one of his clients, a Jeweler in Evansville, Indiana as an example.
I found a great Call to Action today in the bathroom of the Holiday Inn Express. Their "Stay Smart" campaign reaches into the bathroom to the labels of the toiletry items.
What's the difference between Soap, Shampoo, Conditioner, Lotion and Lens Wipe vs Cleanse, Wash, Tame, Soften and See?
VERBS. The strongest Call to Action is always a verb. Make people see themselves doing the thing you would like them to do.
(I'm just glad the toilet wasn't labeled.)
[Mom objected to the original picture. Here's another.]
The conversation goes like this:
Mom: So...now tell me again...you're building web sites for your clients?
Me: Not really, mom. I'm not much of a techie.
Mom: How can you build web sites if you're not a techie?
Me: I'm not building anything. I'm helping my clients plan their web sites for persuasion and conversion.
Mom: Oh. Hmmm. That's nice. [pause] More dessert?
Architecture is the metaphor for how we plan a web site. Think of building a new mall. You had better involve architects, engineers and site planners before you go inviting the interior designers to the meetings. There are major considerations to be accomodated waaaaay before the fabric swatches and tile samples come out.
Likewise, if you plan on operating a functional web site that was planned from the start to make the on-line experience easy and natural for nearly every personality type, you should leave the code geeks and the flash geeks alone until you figure out how people will want to use your site.
Up until now, I've been explaining the process using this metaphor.
Bryan Eisenberg and Lisa Davis (collectively writing as The Grok) put together this somewhat lengthy, but VERY valuable, case study to show what a Persuasion Architecture project can mean to your site. They used a real world example and 4 personas. Take a look.
If you want to know more, you'll be in Austin on September 8-9 for Call to Action. I'll see you there.
By the way, I know that I can talk Jeffrey into a very limited number of alumni-priced "scholarships" just for sharing your story about your experiences with on-line persuasion. Especially if you've used some of the techniques in their latest best-seller, Call to Action. Just drop me an email. (In case you don't know, alumni prices at WizardAcademy are half-off. So...a cool grand plus 2 days of car rental for a simple email.)
