Conversion Conference Blog

Vertical Measures CEO Arnie Kuenn on the Hottest Conversion Trend, the Biggest Optimization Mistake, and Seafood-tripping in SF

Editor’s Note: With Conversion Conference 2012 San Francisco just around the corner, we thought it’s about time you learn a bit more from each of our speakers. So we put on our journalist/paparazzi hat and placed each speaker on the proverbial hot seat by asking four questions, including one which can be considered a burning issue for digital marketers and other professionals in the internet industry: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). From this day until the conference, we’ll be featuring a speaker and their answers to the questions so be sure to check out our blog regularly.

But wait, there’s more! You can join in and do some pre-conference engagement with our speakers by sending in your own questions through email, Twitter, or our Facebook Wall. We’ll make sure your questions get the attention they deserve and even feature them here.

Arnie Kuenn must be having the time of his life, with his book Accelerate! getting nominated for and subsequently winning in the marketing category of the 2012 Small Business Book Awards. We were glad we sent in our questions earlier or our email would have gotten buried in the deluge of fan mail. For those who don’t know Arnie, he is the President of Vertical Measures, a full-service internet marketing and link building company in Phoenix. Now hear his thoughts on the hottest conversion trend, the biggest optimization mistake, and where to go for the best seafood in SF:

1) What do you think is the hottest trend in optimization or conversion for 2012?

As far as optimization is concerned, in my opinion “thickening” of your content will be (or should be) the hottest trend.  Our research indicates that pages offering more insightful, engaging, in-depth content are ranking higher than those that are still trying to get away with the minimum.  I recently wrote a post offering several tips on how to thicken your content if you care to read it: http://www.verticalmeasures.com/content/6-ways-to-thicken-your-content/

2) What would you say is the biggest mistake people (still) make when it comes to optimization?

The first mistake that comes to mind is still the title tag. Each page of your website needs to have a unique title tag.  Not only that, the tag needs to be crafted in a way that uses your primary keywords for that specific page and also “sells” the searcher on clicking on your link.  Your title tag is used everywhere; it’s the primary link in the search results, it is what gets shared in most social media and it’s important to the search engine algorithms. Lastly, I recommend putting your brand at the end of the title tag, not the beginning.

3) What’s your take on the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA)?

I have to be honest: I just do not know the issue well enough to comment on it.

4) What’s your favorite place to hang out in San Francisco (that one place you just have to drop by/visit when you’re in the city)?

Queue the groans… I really like the Fishermans’ Wharf, Pier 39 and Ghirardelli Square area. I love all the activity and of course the seafood. If I have time I also like taking the ferry over to Sausalito to just wander around a get a bite to eat. The ferry ride across the Bay is like a day cruise.

Got a question for Arnie that can’t wait till March? Post it on the comments section below, tweet it to us, or post it on our wall and we’ll make sure he gets it.

More About Arnie

Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company helping their clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business.  Arnie has held executive positions in the world of new technologies and marketing for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon.

See Arnie Live!

Arnie will be presenting a session on “9 Powerful, Low Cost Content Ideas to Grow Your Business in 6 Months or Less” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Arnie on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and contact him to request a discount code!

P.S. Regular Pricing for Conversion Conference SF ends Friday, March 02, 2012. Don’t wait the last minute, register now to enjoy some savings while you still can.

By Brian Massey

Conversion Scientist, Conversion Sciences, LLC

A good writer can create images better than a graphic designer.
Whenever we design a Web site, we inevitably ask our graphic designers to give us three comps. Then we, the completely unqualified non-graphic-designers decide which one we “like” best. We might even ask a number of our equally unqualified colleagues to tell us what they think.

Then we pay a copywriter a fraction of what the designers get, and ask them to write the copy for the site, knowing full-well that when we get it, we’ll revise it until every ounce of color, every animating metaphor, and every shred of a story is squeezed out onto the ground in a pool of red ink.

A good writer can create images and convey meaning better than a graphic artist because the writer has the richer toolset. Put down your red pen. Trust your copywriter.

Be bold and your visitors will see you that way.
If you’re designing a new site or refreshing an old one, it’s time to be a little daring.

Tell the designers to hold on until you’ve completed the copy. They’ll look at you like you have an arm growing out of your head.

THEN, start interviewing copywriters. Tell them that you’ll pay them to develop three different versions of your Copy Body, the document that contains the text from which you will take your copy when writing headings, text, offers, emails and any other Web-based communications.

The interviews will be short. You’re looking for a certain reaction.

When you present this proposal to the right writer, their eyes will flash. A smile may creep across their face of its own will. Be careful, though. If they say “You’ll pay me?” you’ve gotten a false positive. You want to choose the writer who feels that you’ve just opened the door to a cage of mediocrity.

If you let them out, they’ll take you with them.

Be very clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as a business and what your visitors are trying to accomplish. Give them a set of personas if you can.

Take no steps.
Once you have your three copy “comps,” do not allocate time to have the writing revised by a committee. Do not attempt to combine the best from each. Do not seek to insert superlatives that declare you the “leader,” to be “unique” or “innovative.” If you have to say it, it ain’t true.

If you have the right writer, one of your choices will be far out, one will be written in business speak, and one will be somewhere in between. Throw away the one written in business speak and consider the remaining two very carefully.

Select the copy body that best illustrates your value proposition, the one that captures the essence of your company without stating it. Look for metaphors that can be applied to a variety of your benefits. Seek a story that can stitch every page together into a coherent theme.

Then fix the inaccuracies, and leave everything else alone.

Does this sound scary? Wait till you see what’s next.

You can let the designers into the room now.
If you’ve selected an engaging copy body, it’ll be really clear to the designers what their designs should express. They can create real images from the ones your writer paints with words. They can guide your visitor through the story with navigation. They can throw away stock photos of pretty people and choose images informed by metaphor and analogy.

Give them the copy body, the corporate style guide and tell them to create a design. One design. Sure, you’ll make decisions along the way and maybe even significantly change the first comp, but try to let them do what they do well.

Steps you could add.
If you realize the immense advantage that powerfully written copy gives you, consider investing in some testing. Implement two of the three copy bodies on your home page and on key landing pages. Use analytics to see which makes visitors stick and which generates more leads or sales.

Which has the lower bounce rate?

Which home page generates more page views and more time on site?

Which has the higher conversion rate?

There is no better way to know if you’ve made the right decision than to test. And you may need some proof when your colleagues tell you that your copy isn’t “corporate” — and they mean that as a criticism, not a badge of honor.

Do you know a great copy writer? Do you have a success story or test results that demonstrate the power of effective writing? Let us know in your comments and I’ll feature you in a future post.

Photo courtesy andrewcs via stock.xchng.

About the Author

Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and he has the lab coat to prove it. His rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses was developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, national speaker and writer. Conversion Sciences was founded to fill the Web with helpful, engaging and entertaining online Web sites that convert visitors into leads and sales. The company has helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. "There are places on the Web that make you feel like they were built just for you," he says. "Is yours one of these? It could be.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be talking more about copy and its role in persuasion and conversion at the Conversion Conference 2012 on March 5^th and 6^th in San Francisco, California. Join him in his session on “Creating Killer Conversion Copy: Emails, Landing Pages, PPC Ads and More.” See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Brian Lewis,

Director of Optimization, SiteTuners

Many times the name we call something greatly affects our attitudes about that something.

Take the term “home page”, for instance. In the context of the web, we all know that our home page is where most of our visitors will first meet us, experience our brand messaging, learn about our products and services, and hopefully determine if we offer solutions to their problems.

As such, many marketers treat their home pages as an electronic kitchen sink, throwing every message, offer, special, countless products and then further distracting us with endless rotating banners under the misconception that “we need to show everything … after all, it’s our home page”.

One of the reasons marketers have gotten derailed trying to construct effective home pages is because this page is referred to as “the home page”.

Think about it … “Home” commonly refers to a place you are content to stay; a place where one lives. In baseball, it’s a place a runner wants to reach to end his journey around the bases and score a run.

On the web, though, we want to get our visitors off the home page and into our site as expeditiously as possible. An effective home page:

1. Quickly communicates  what it is we do;
2. Allows the visitor to quickly decide if the company can meet their needs, and;
3. Guides the visitor to the page in the site that’s of interest to them

I like to think of the home page as more like an airport terminal. Remember your last visit to an airport? The problem you were trying to solve was to get to your destination as quickly and easily as possible. You were looking for information to get you to the right gate, and the shortest path to that gate, so you could board your plane. You didn’t care about flights to other destinations and certainly did not want to spend any more time than necessary there.

Remember that your home page should provide clear navigational information and direct the visitor to their desired destination. The challenge is to meet the various needs of all the many types of visitors who’ll arrive on your home page while not creating an electronic kitchen sink.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the development of Use Case scenarios. To learn all about Use Cases, why they’re productive and how to craft effective Use Cases, stop by my session, “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at the Conversion Conference in San Francisco, CA, March 5, 2012 11:15 am.

The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.  ~Marshall McLuhan

About the Author

Noted author and speaker, Brian Lewis brings over 20 years of both hands-on and strategic online marketing experience spanning a diverse range of industries. In addition to co-hosting the Internet radio show “Best Search Strategies” on WebMasterRadio, Brian has led panels at Search Engine Strategies Conferences, Search Marketing Expo, SMX Advanced, PPC Summit, Conversion Conference, Affiliate Conference, AdWords Advantage, Online Marketing Summit, and Online Marketing Institute. Brian’s articles have been referenced in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Target Marketing, eMarketer, Search Engine Watch, Website Magazine, SEM Journal, and DM News. He continues to be in demand for speaking engagements on PPC, SEO and conversion optimization around the world.

He earned his B.A. in Economics from the University of California, San Diego and his M.B.A. from the W. P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, graduating both schools with honors.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be presenting a session on “Persona-Driven Conversions – Walk A Mile In Your Visitors’ Shoes” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter  to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Linda Bustos

Director of Ecommerce Research, Elastic Path Software

Have you ever visited a website and suddenly ads for the site are virtually EVERYWHERE you go on the web? Chances are, the website hasn’t purchased ad space on all your favorite sites, it’s simply retargeting you.

Retargeting (also known as “remarketing” and “remessaging”) is a close cousin to paid search advertising. But rather than being a tool for driving traffic, remarketing provides an opportunity to win back site abandoners (an average website may have goal abandonment upwards of 98%). Targeting web users who have already interacted with your site allows advertisers to get better results from display ads, strategically messaging visitors based on their site behavior and expressed intent.

While some may feel such targeting is akin to cyber-stalking, when done correctly, retargeting campaigns can provide stellar ROI for marketers. How does it work? How do you know if it’s right for you and how can you get started?

How Remarketing / Retargeting Works

Like personalization and A/B testing tools, remarketing technology uses cookies to track visitors and serve content. Tracking pixels are added to pages to correspond with your various campaigns and ad groups. As visitors view these pages, they are added to an “audience.” You may have an audience of all site visitors, regardless of where they entered your site, and you may concurrently have audiences targeted to site sections or actions taken on your site (like an abandoned web form or conversion funnel). Negative audiences can be set to exclude users whose site behavior indicates they are not prospects, such as career page views, or who successfully convert. Cookies may live for a few days to one year, and you can set frequency caps to limit the number of exposures your visitor will see on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.

When tracked visitors arrive on publisher sites in the ad network, ads are shown based on what audience they belong to (audiences can be prioritized with higher bids). Google’s Remarketing program uses bids and Quality Score to determine “rankings” and impressions, just like with search marketing. Other vendors may use different methods of determining reach and charging advertisers, whether with a CPC, CPM or CPA model.

Is Remarketing Right For You?

While the benefits for online retailers are obvious, retargeting is not just for chasing down cart abandoners. Use it to improve any type of conversion, whether it be a site membership, blog subscription, content download, email sign-up, webinar registration or contest entry. It can also be used simply for branding, or keeping site visitors up to date with what’s new on your site.

Like search marketing (PPC), you must have a realistic budget to play with as well as in-house or outsourced help that can manage and optimize the campaign.

With search marketing, your traffic level is irrelevant. But remarketing requires a certain traffic level to “work.” Google Remarketing requires 500 cookied members of an audience before ads begin to appear. (Some networks recommend 1,000, others don’t have minimums.) If Google’s your tool of choice, it’s important that your site gets enough traffic to “fill the bucket” within a relevant time frame. If it takes 4 weeks to build a list of 500 abandoned carts, and 25% of them were added to the audience in the first week, the ads will likely be irrelevant for an abandoned cart campaign, depending on how long a user typically takes to complete a purchase. (Also consider that up to 30% of your visitors may be deleting cookies and effectively dropping out of your audience.)

How Can You Get Started?

If you’re already using Google Adwords, getting started with Google’s Remarketing tool is explained step-by-step here. http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=1302483&parent=1713922&ctx=topic Even if you are not intending to launch a campaign right away, building up your audience list as early as possible ensures you are reaching as many site abandoners as possible when you do run a campaign. Google’s product plays nicely with other Google marketing tools, so it’s a good get-your-feet-wet tool if you’re just getting started.

However, Google Remarketing has its limitations. It has less publisher inventory than other networks (limited to Google’s Display Network), so you may not be targeting all the outlets you want. It also lacks dynamic personalization of ad creative (such as showing a rotating carousel of recently viewed items or content). Running more than one remarketing tool at once is not a good idea, and audiences take time to build up. So, if you anticipate that Google will not meet your targeting wish list long term, consider launching with a vendor like Criteo, Adroll, Retargeter or Fetchback right off the bat.

http://www.criteo.com/

http://www.adroll.com/

http://www.retargeter.com/

http://www.fetchback.com/

But before you make any moves, you want to nail down your remarketing strategy. Part 2 of this article will discuss how to design retargeting scenarios based on your conversion goals and what you know about customer behavior.

About the Author

Linda Bustos is the director of ecommerce research for Elastic Path Software and the author of the Get Elastic Ecommerce blog. As an ecommerce consultant, Linda has helped some of the world’s largest online retailers and technology brands improve their conversion rates and user experience. An online retailer herself, Linda moonlights as a jewelry designer for Robin Hood Couture, her line of handmade accessories.

Meet Linda in Person!

Linda will be presenting a session on “Many Happy Returns: Remarketing Strategies for Converting Site Abandoners” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Linda on Twitter @roxyyo and @getelastic to touch base and request for a discount code!

By Brian Massey

Conversion Scientist, Conversion Sciences, LLC

Whether you design mobile apps, make chimichangas or provide investment advisory services, your copy writing always has to start with the same two questions:

1. Why is my reader here? Why did he or she click on this website, open this email, download this white paper?
2. Now that my reader is here, how can I make the experience of being here so delightful that the reader will consider his quest fulfilled and seek no further (i.e. on someone else’s website)?

You start with those two questions in your mind and you hold them there the whole time you’re creating copy.  You start every paragraph and edit every version with those two questions floating in the front of your brain.

That seems pretty simple, right? It’s a little more complicated than that—which explains why really great content stands out in all the millions of bytes of content out there.

Sometimes you’re in a situation where instead of one inspired, customer focused copy writer, you have a committee. In the worst scenario, you have a committee in a culture where kissing up is expected and the top level kissers have to kiss up to really old institutional practices. These august bodies do not write quick, responsive copy. They write heavy copy full of venerated jargon. The last time they read anything about writing for the web, they learned about Search Engine Optimization and their content is so full of keywords it looks like it was assaulted by an automatic weapon that shoots the same five words, over and over.

It is very difficult to get this kind of group to pay any attention to the two questions that must be asked repeatedly of every piece of copy.  But you must try.

Show them evidence by experts like Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute or Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, authors of Call to Action about the scientific work supporting the power of conversion writing. Focus on the benefits to the company. This is your only hope.

First you must convince them to answer the first question: “Why is my reader here?” and then you must make an even more difficult case. You must get them to answer the question “How can I make my reader’s experience delightful?”

The tricky part about this is that the only way to make your content experience a delightful conversion experience is to write in Human. To write the way people think. Those heavy, jargony, SEO-laden sentences are not how people think or speak. Words like “leverage your capabilities” and “utilize your CMS to maximize benefits” or “experience of a lifetime.” These are not things normal people say. These are words used almost exclusively in content that’s trying to make you do something you may not want to do. As such, your brain rejects these words. These words are like oil to water. They slide over the brain and out the ears with no impact.

A delightful experience connects with people on an emotional level. Not sappy, but human.

So here’s the thing. Next time you’re creating a piece of copy for your business, pretend you’re telling some people about in conversation and that you’re doing it on one of those days you have a lot of passion about what you do.

Write what you’d say. Nuke any unnecessary jargon, any overused ad words or anything that would make you shut down if it was in someone else’s copy.

What you’ll wind up with is a piece of copy much more likely to hook people who click on your content and turn readers into buyers.

About the Author

Brian Massey is the Conversion Scientist at Conversion Sciences and he has the lab coat to prove it. His rare combination of interests, experience and neuroses was developed over almost 20 years as a computer programmer, entrepreneur, corporate marketer, national speaker and writer. Conversion Sciences was founded to fill the Web with helpful, engaging and entertaining online Web sites that convert visitors into leads and sales. The company has helped dozens of businesses transform their sites through a steady diet of visitor profiling, purposeful content, analytics and testing. “There are places on the Web that make you feel like they were built just for you,” he says. “Is yours one of these? It could be.

See Brian Live!

Brian will be talking more about copy and its role in persuasion and conversion at the Conversion Conference 2012 on March 5^th and 6^th in San Francisco, California. Join him in his session on “Creating Killer Conversion Copy: Emails, Landing Pages, PPC Ads and More.” See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Brian on Twitter to say hello and request for a discount code!

By Robert Brady

Director of PPC Conversion, Trafficado

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is popular with internet marketers because you can track everything. You know exactly what search queries are triggering your ads, you know how much each click costs, you know which ad gets the highest click-through rate (CTR) and you know which clicks turn into actual conversions. This transparency and accountability is how I sell PPC to my clients and it’s how I demonstrate the value of ongoing efforts. But even if you have a great ROI, is there more you could learn from your PPC?

Learn from Clicks

You’re probably already testing at least two different ads in each ad group and rotating out the underperforming ad(s) on a regular basis. That’s great. It helps improve your CTR, your Quality Score (QS) improves, your account history is strengthening, your cost-per-click (CPC) goes down or your avg. position improves. That’s a lot of benefits, but what is it telling you about your customers? Take the following example:

First, you may be tempted to pause Ad #2 because it has lower CTR. However, we see that Ad #2 has a much higher CR, which led to a lower cost/conversion. Therefore, you would likely pause Ad #1 to get less expensive conversions. In addition to the performance boost, what else can you learn from this? Here are some additional learnings.

• The inquisitive call to action “How affordable?” gets better CTR, but it appeals most to price shoppers who don’t convert.
• The positive imagery of Ad #2, “Make your yard beautiful…” primes the user to convert.
• Mentioning Minnesota didn’t help CTR like I expected, but the “localness” may be increasing conversion.

Turn Learning Into Action

The 3 learnings above are great, but how can you act on that insight? Here are follow-up tests to help you learn even more about your customers:

• You like the higher CTR with the “How affordable?” copy, so test a landing page that offers 3 quotes from local providers. By doing the legwork for price shoppers you can capture customers earlier in the buying cycle.
• Positive mental imagery works with the ad copy, so extend it into the landing page copy. Test using more pictures of beautiful lawns. Maybe customers need an idea of what their lawn could be with a little help.
• Take the “localness” to the next level. Target campaigns to cities like Minneapolis or St. Paul. Maybe even suburbs like Ramsey, Anoka and Brooklyn Park. Make sure the landing page supports it too.

Get Started

Your PPC is doing great. CTR is good, conversion rates are healthy and ROI is positive. But you still have the chance to get even more out of your PPC as you look at your results and analyze what the data tells you about your customers. As you learn more about your customers you’ll be able to produce even better results. But that’s enough reading, get to it!

About the Author

Robert is a Google AdWords Certified Partner, Microsoft adExcellence member and is certified with Marketing Experiments for Online Testing and Landing Page Optimization. He has worked with a variety of different companies ranging from a small grass-fed beef grower in Idaho to a large B2B data storage provider.

He currently resides in Provo, Utah and can often be found skiing the greatest snow on earth, mountain biking through the Wasatch mountains or playing ultimate Frisbee at the park on a Saturday morning.

See Robert Live!

Robert will be presenting a session on “End to End PPC Conversion Optimization – From User Intent through Leaky Funnel Forensics” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Robert on Twitter to say hello to him and request for a discount code!

By Arnie Kuenn

President, Vertical Measures

If your business has been stalling right along with the economy, you might get a much-needed boost from content marketing.

Content marketing is the creation, sharing, and distribution of information that’s relevant to customers you want to attract, engage and retain.  Content can be informational, educational, promotional, or entertaining, and if presented properly, it can help you spread your message, enable dialogue between you and your customers, and increase business revenue.

Customers no longer just want standard products and services; they want more engaged vendors.  They want to know that the companies they buy from will go the extra mile to provide advice and information.  This has led to an explosion in content marketing.

However, the process of content marketing can be confusing.  Businesses know they need to do it, but they don’t necessarily know where to start.  Answering six basic questions will give you the insight you need to get your plan off the ground.

What are you presenting?
The type of content you create depends on what your customers want to hear.  You can provide details about your products or services, but you also need to present content that isn’t necessarily about you, but help your customer make an informed decision.

Your content can include industry trends, advice, or an overview of the benefits of buying a particular product or service.  You can also be more direct and talk about your particular products and services, and include a call to action to buy or call for more information.

Why are you presenting it?
The content you publish will depend on what you’re trying to achieve.  Do you want to position your business as knowledgeable?  Helpful tips look like free advice for customers, which makes them come back for more. Talking about trends in your industry makes you appear in touch with a changing market.

Are you trying to generate leads or sales?  A how-to guide about installing a specific product with a link or contact number gives readers an immediate way to respond, and it gives you an opportunity to see who’s interested in your offers, whether they become customers or not.

Match your content to your business goals and you’ll get the results you want.

Who are you presenting to?
Your target markets will affect the way you present content.  If you’re talking to customers, you can talk about new products they might like, or new service delivery methods that make life easier.  If you’re talking to prospects, take a less familiar approach, touting the benefits of your products and inviting them to learn more.

Your audience will also impact the tone you take.  Consumer content can be presented in an informal or even humorous style, but some business content needs to be more professional and objective. Consumers will respond to more emotional benefits, but businesses need more rational facts to see the benefits to their bottom line.  Both audiences will respond equally to calls of action, but make sure there’s enough information to keep them reading.

Where will you present it?
Ideally businesses will present their content on their own sites, to reduce the number of extra steps for people to get there.  The question is where to go to find these new readers. You can advertise online or you can post content to social media sites like Facebook or Twitter to link people to your site. However the very best approach is to optimize your content to give you the best chance to rank at the top of a search engine results page. That’s the vast majority of people will discover your content.

When will you present it?
A website should never be idle for long, and the last entry on a blog shouldn’t be too old. Otherwise, you end up looking inactive, which will drive away people who are looking for up-to-the-minute information.  Search engines love fresh, new content too. That’s why you need to keep your content as fresh as possible.

There’s no set rule for how often you need to post, but the general rule is between once a day and once a week.  However often you decide to publish, the content needs to be relevant to your readers.

How will you present it?
The answer depends on what kind of information you’re providing.  Blogs tend to be the most popular form of content, because they can be short or lengthy, and the topics can be pretty open.  But there are other formats that can drive business as well.

White papers and e-books are great for presenting detailed information, and as downloads, they make great take-aways.  Product sheets and press releases are great for sharing news about your business in a quick, concise format. Video is a booming, highly consumed type of content and is easier to produce than most people think.

Content is the new marketing, especially in the online world, so put together a plan to consistently produce engaging content to keep your business alive and thriving.  To do this, create an editorial calendar. Set modest goals like writing two blog posts per week, sprucing up 5 product pages per week and creating one video per week. Then get started and stick to it!

About the Author

 Arnie Kuenn is the president of Vertical Measures, a search, social & content marketing company helping their clients get more traffic, more leads, and more business.  Arnie has held executive positions in the world of new technologies and marketing for more than 20 years. He is a frequent speaker and author of Accelerate! Moving Your Business Forward Through the Convergence of Search, Social & Content Marketing available on Amazon.

See Arnie Live!

Arnie will be presenting a session on “9 Powerful, Low Cost Content Ideas to Grow Your Business in 6 Months or Less” at Conversion Conference West 2012 in San Francisco, California. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Arnie on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn and contact him to request a discount code!

By Phillip Klien
Owner & Chief Innovation Officer, BTBuckets

As analysts we tend to use our systematic left side of the brain for optimization strategies. We apply multivariate testing and the Taguchi Method, breathe the confidence interval, and digest the funnel reports in our analytics platforms. Sometimes we are so focused on conversion metrics that we forget that we the people visiting our sites are human beings and not just integers in our reports.

A right-sided brain approach

There are different ways to optimize based on human behavior. One of my favorite experts on this subject is Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” – which sold over 2 million copies and has been listed on Fortune Magazine’s “75 Smartest Business Books.” Dr. Cialdini is recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on social influence. and actually spent years going “undercover” applying for jobs and training at used car dealerships, fund-raising organizations, telemarketing firms to observe real-life situations of persuasion.

Dr. Cialdini’s principles are based on fixed action patterns (instinctive behavioral responses) that are triggered by specific stimuli. All animals have these – a mother tiger will go crazy when she hears her cub crying. An yes, we humans are also born with some instinctive triggers that is so hard-wired we will be influenced by them.

The six magic triggers

Dr. Cialdini identified six “weapons of influence” and how to leverage these to persuade people. These triggers are:

1) Scarcity – When we think an item is scarce, we will want it more.

2) Social proof – We determine what is correct by finding out what other people think is correct.

3) Authority – We tend to obey authority figures – even if the acts are objectionable.

4) Reciprocity – We should try to repay in kind what another person has provided us.

5) Commitment (consistency) – Once we make a choice or take a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment.

6) Liking – We most prefer to say yes to the requests of people we know and like.

On the web

When you optimize your headlines, images or call-to-actions – do you consider persuasive messaging? I have seen different sites using different triggers. Here are some good examples of ”
scarcity:”

So, how are you using persuasive marketing to increase conversion rates based on these “weapons of influence”?

About the Author

Phillip has an active role with web analytics and adserving in Latin America. He is also co-founder of Predicta, an adserving and web analytics software/service provider in Brazil that placed 1st in the 2009 WAA Waalter awards and 2nd in the first WAA Championship. Phillip is also a tutor for the award-winning UBC Award of Achievement in Web Analytics and helped develop measurement guidelines for the IAB. He is the founder of BTBuckets – a free on-site behavioral segmentation and targeting platform and SiteApps – app store for websites..

See Phillip Live!

Phillip will be speaking with Carloyn Nye, from USAData, in a session titled, “Triggers & Targeting: How Getting Personal Increases Conversions” at Conversion Conference East 2011 in New York City. See the full agenda and read more about this session.

Want to save on your Conversion Conference Registration? Follow Phillip on Twitter and contact him to request a discount code!

Next in our Conversion Conference speaker Q&A sessions is Eric J. Hansen, CEO & Founder SiteSpect. SiteSpect provides the world’s only non-intrusive web optimization solution, enabling marketers to perform rapid A/B testing, multivariate testing, targeting and personalization, mobile content optimization as well as web performance optimization across all of your sites and landing pages … all without having to implement page tags or change your site in any way.

We are excited to announce the “Ask The Experts” session at Conversion Conference East – 2011.

The session will take place on Day 2 of the conference from 2:30pm – 3:30pm and is all about you…This is your chance to get those questions answered. Make sure you get your money’s worth.

We could all use more expert advice—but can’t always afford it…Here’s you chance (at no extra cost)

This session will feature a panel of experts in various areas who will field questions from the audience. Our speakers’ areas of expertise span across all channels and disciplines of conversion optimization including but not limited to

• A/B testing
• B2B
• B2C
• Form fill optimization
• Lead generation
• E-commerce
• and so much more…

Don’t be shy, let us know what EXPERTS you would like to be present and what topics you would like covered and we will make sure it happens.

Check out all the EXPERTS and their specialties

Post your questions in the comments section below or send us an email at conversionconference@sitetuners.com with the subject line “Ask the Experts.”