Almost all conversion activities end in some type of form:

• Ecommerce checkout
• Contact form
• Whitepaper download
• Newsletter subscription
• and many more

Yes, most forms are not well designed. The best traffic you can buy will not help you out if your form doesn’t work properly.

However, designing forms isn’t that difficult if you know the major problems to avoid. In this video you can learn some of the major pitfalls to avoid with your forms.

If you avoid the bad stuff, and increase the good stuff – then conversions will go up. And that’s what we all want – more conversions.

The video is recorded in HD. So feel free to increase the resolution to 720 and watch in full screen. If you are reading this in an RSS reader or email; you’ll probably have to click through to the site to see the video.

I hope you enjoy.

How to Design the Perfect Form is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The first step was to examine the major browsers being used to access the site; as your usability testing should follow what your visitors actually use. Global usage stats are useless. According to global numbers, internet explorer is between 30%-50% of overall usage. Here’s our browser usage for last week

We see that Chrome and Firefox are the two browser to start with. So, we fire up Chrome and Firefox and the site looks pretty good. We then go to Internet Explorer 7 and the site looks pretty good (I refuse to make CSS hacks for IE6 any more).

Then we get to IE8 on Windows 7 (this doesn’t happen on IE8 and vista as far as I can tell) and we see the drop down menus are a mess.

This means it’s time to go back to analytics to see the number of users this is affecting. It looks like Internet Explorer on Windows 7 is about 7% of our total users.

That means that we need to add the fix to the To Do list. However, if we had an issue affecting Chrome or Firefox, those issues would take a much higher priority for the design team.

Your usability is important, and IE renders many sites much differently than Firefox or Chrome. However, you need to put the numbers into perspective first to you can give you team’s priority fixes based upon usage.

If you don’t happen to have several machines lying around that you can use to easily test your site – BrowserShots.org has a decent free tool. There are more comprehensive paid tools available as well.

As browsers get updated they may render your site differently even if you haven’t made any changes. Therefore, it’s a good practice to take a look at your sites in each major browser once a month just to make sure you aren’t alienating any visitors.

Usability Reminder: Check Your Website in Multiple Browsers is a post from: Certified Knowledge

We now have enough data to analyze the results and make a follow-up post to exactly what happened with the redesign.

This should let you compare our design decisions to our results and hopefully give you some inspiration into designing your own site.

As a follow-up note; we have since spent another $50 on a better logo – so the entire cost is 2 days and $199.

The Conversions

In the original post, I worked from the design standpoint to show the decisions. In this one, I’ll look at it from the conversion standpoint.

There are several conversions that we track, and we’ll examine each one individually:

• Social media followers
• Social media mentions
• Blog subscribers (RSS and/or email)
• Contacts
• Advanced Google AdWords book sales (via Amazon)
• Google AdWords Seminar registrations
• Certified Knowledge subscriptions

Conversions that Drive Traffic

I’ve broken down our conversions into two sections:

• Traffic
• Revenue

Increasing traffic doesn’t do any good if it doesn’t increase revenue. Conversely, if you conversion rates go up; but your traffic drops significantly – then you need to examine your design a second time.

First, I’ll examine our traffic after the redesign and secondly I’ll look at the conversions that drive revenue.

Here’s a quick overview of our traffic; so you have an idea of scale (of course, this does not those who read our articles in RSS or email; which is most of our blog readers). We are a small niche site; so we’re not talking about a million visitors a month. I think our top month ever has been about 100k uniques.

Social Media Followers

The redesign did very little to increase social media followers who were already on the blog. That didn’t surprise me at all. We already had social media follower icons on our previous incarnation; and this isn’t something we enhanced significantly.

However, we have redesigned all of our Thank You pages (they are the least utilized pages on the web) to include direct calls to action for social media (and some other offers). Our conversion rates for social media followers are higher on the thank you pages than any other section of our website (in fact, our thank you pages are the highest converting pages of our site).

Here’s an example of our Thank Your Page:

Social Media Mentions

Our social media mentions, especially on Twitter, spiked considerable after the redesign. Initially we had a floating bar on the side of the page (similar to what you see now); but as it was a 20px offset, people using small resolution screens had issues reading some of the content of the site. I examined our analytics before I inputted this feature, and less than 3% of our visitors would be affected – so I tried it.

I was wrong to use this method. The sheer number of complaints we had amazed me.

I then went back to researching solutions and found another plug-in (thank you Sharebar) that looks at screen resolution and determines where to put the bar. Go ahead, make your browser smaller and watch the bar float from the side of the page to above the blog’s content.

We had enough social media mentions on our popular pages that it only increased traffic about 5-8% (depending on the retweets) on our new blog posts. Where we’ve really seen the difference is in our archives. Mentions of archive pages went from virtually zero to a handful each day; and our older pages have increased in pageviews by 10-15% depending on the day (this one: Step-by-step guide for checking broken PPC links went from invisible to more than 1000 page views in the past month. FYI – Certified Knowledge has a tool to make that process take just a few minutes).

Blog Subscribers

This blog has had a decent following for many years (I started it in March of 2001 on another domain); and most of our visitors are already subscribers; so I wasn’t sure how many more subscribers a redesign would bring-in.

Our blog subscribers grew about 4% faster after the redesign. The biggest culprit was making a button underneath each post to subscribe to the page. However, our highest conversion rates for blog subscribers are on the Thank You pages (seriously – take a look at yours – if they say ‘go away, we’ll get back to you when we’re ready’ then add interactions on them).

SEO

Our redesign wasn’t centered around SEO – it was about getting more people into our revenue generating conversion funnels. However, I just wanted to make a quick note on our organic traffic: it hasn’t changed. It’s grown a little bit after the redesign; but that’s not because of the redesign. Each month (assuming I write at least one blog post) our traffic goes up a little bit from the previous month.

Page Views & Time on Site

Page views, bounce rates, and time on site are measures of engagement, not necessarily revenue; however, the site redesign helped with these numbers as well.

According to Google Analytics, our overall:

• Page views per visitor increased 3.8%
• Bounce rate decreased 1.85%
• Time on site increased 7.56%

Conversions That Drive Revenue

The above methods just talk about traffic, they don’t mention actual revenue.

The main focus of the redesign was to get more visitors into one of three funnels:

• Contacts
• Buying my book, Advanced Google AdWords (which I’m happy to say has stayed in Amazon’s top advertising books for several months now)
• Registering to attend one of our (officially Google sponsored) Advanced AdWords Seminars for Success
• Subscribing to Certified Knowledge, our online PPC training system & toolset

Contacts

The vast majority of people who contact us have PPC questions; often related to who to buy services from or clarifying some question. We do make some revenue from this group as our second most common question is about the AdWords Seminars, and the third most is about Certified Knowledge.

The number of contacts we receive hasn’t changed at all (nor did we try to increase this number).

However, the number of contacts we generate some revenue from has increased due to our thank you page. Overall, this area was pretty static.

Buying Advanced Google AdWords

When the book first launched, it received a lot of press and had quite a few sales.

After a couple months, the novelty started to wear and the book dropped from number 3 on Amazon’s top Advertising books to around 15-20.

In the redesign, we devoted some space on the site to the book and it immediately jumped back into the top 10.

The book does fluctuate from 5-20 on Amazon (often based upon my speaking schedule); but the redesign has helped aided in selling a few thousand more copies.

On the analytics side; the pageviews for the book increased 28% after the redesign (and excluding the time frame immediately after it launched) and the conversion rate has remained steady.

Registering to Attend the AdWords Seminar

The redesign had a devastating effect on our conversion rates for the seminar.
The redesign had a fantastic effect on our revenues from the seminar.

Do these statements not make sense together?

I think overall conversion rates are useless.

I measured seminar conversion rates in this funnel (starting at number 1):

1. Viewed overview seminar page
2. Viewed individual event page
3. Filled our event info
4. Filled out credit card info
5. Viewed Thank You for Registering Page

This is one of the two places where I was really working through the redesign to improve revenue. We have a lot of blog visitors; few of them convert for the seminars. Now, this makes sense as the seminars are geographically focused.

We added the rotating banner at the top of all the blog pages. I put buttons on the side of the page about the seminars.

This had the effect of increasing people into the seminar funnel by more than 62%. Yes, that’s right; more than 62% additional people entered the funnel.

They didn’t all convert.

Our overall conversion rates dropped by 34.5%.

That might not be bad news.

Our seminar revenue went up by 6.8%.

How is that possible?

The conversion rate of our visitors through other traffic sources (besides the blog) didn’t change. All we did was add additional people to the funnel; so even at a lower conversion rate, any conversions were an increase in revenue.

Let’s do some basic math (easy rounded numbers – not actual):

Since we didn’t affect the current traffic to the seminar pages, but increased traffic to them from blog visitors, the redesign had an incremental impact of increasing revenue.

The lower conversion rates from the blog visitors was not surprising. The events have a geographic focus and many of our visitors are from areas outside of our events (especially all of our European and Asia readers); however, the blog readers were learning more about the events overall.

Subscriptions to Certified Knowledge

Certified Knowledge is our new online, on-demand, interact as you will AdWords training, PPC toolset, and community system.

I wanted the redesign to accomplish two things:

• Increase awareness of Certified Knowledge
• Increase traffic to Certified Knowledge
• Increase subscriptions to Certified Knowledge

Now, as Certified Knowledge had barely launched when we did the redesign, it’s not really fair to compare the traffic difference on Certified Knowledge’s site.

However, our second most common exit site is Certified Knowledge (our top is Adobe, where we send more than a thousand visits a month to for plug-in help).

Our blog is the top referrer to the site, and that site is doing a few thousand uniques each month (not bad for absolutely no money spent on marketing yet); I’m happy with how the design is sending traffic to the site. The site’s traffic converts on the membership site a little bit higher than other forms of traffic, so the redesign is helping there as well.

Conclusion

I wasn’t sure when I put the big banner on all of the blog pages if it would alienate the blog readers because there’s an in-your-face rotating ad on every page, which could have lowered pages per visit, time on site, and increased bounce rates or if it would increase revenue for the company as a whole.

Changing the seminar pages and layout was a big risk as I had a nice revenue stream and I was messing with it.

However, I love testing and had to see what would happen if we started increasing the awareness of our other products.

So far, I’m very happy with the redesign.

So far, everyone who has commented about the design has also expressed their like of the site (after I fixed the share bar on the side of the page to never block content).

In fact, I took some of our very early leanings from this site when I designed Certified Knowledge. That site is by far the prettiest site I’ve ever built (to be fair, I started with someone’s custom designed theme and then I went crazy on the CSS, layout, etc for a few days).

A grand total of two days of work and $199 in expenditures lead to more than $3k in additional revenue for each seminar, additional revenue to Certified Knowledge, and more blog subscribers.

Not a bad payday.

How Our Redesign Lowered Conversion Rates and Increased Revenue is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Even large companies sometimes have SSL issues:

The reason it is so important to test your SSL is not just security (which is important) but also website conversions.

If you see an error message like the above, or worse yet – one of the errors that actually stops you from loading the page (like below); you will lose a lot of traffic and conversions very quickly.

The difficult part of testing your SSLs is that Chrome, IE, and Firefox have different ways they check SSLs and determine if they should show the ‘lock’ icon in or an unlocked icon in the browser decide to interrupt the browsing process with a huge error warning that doesn’t let you get to the page.

It is possible for one browser to stop you and ask you if you even want to go forward and another browser show the page as completely secure.

Testing your SSL in each browser

The easiest browser to start testing in is Internet Explorer. IE is much more consistent than the other browsers in how it renders the lock icon. Rarely in IE will you see a site secure one moment and insecure the next. Usually if your site is ‘locked’ in IE; unless something happens – it will stay that way.

The reason IE is so much easier to check is that IE is a bit more forgiving (or maybe just much better at checking) for intermediate SSLs and identify verification.

Firefox is the least forgiving of SSL installations. Firefox checks intermediate certificates, verification of ownership, etc – and if something isn’t right – then Firefox may show a big error to the searcher. However, once you get your SSL working correctly in Firefox, Firefox is as consistent as IE in rendering lock icons. Therefore, Firefox is the second browser I check items in.

Chrome is the most annoying browser to check. Your site can be secure one minute in Chrome, not the next, and secure again after that. If you are a GMail user – pay attention to the lock icon in GMail. You will notice that even if you access GMail (or G Apps) via https that the icon will fluctuate between sessions from secure to insecure to the new skull and crossbones. Chrome is also the most likely browser to suddenly decide a page is insecure. This might happen in the middle of a browsing session when you are on a page one minute, click around a site, come back to a page and suddenly Chrome displays a huge warning site that the site is insecure or (or some other message such as malware), even when there isn’t anything wrong.  Because of how maddening Chrome can be; this is the last browser I generally check for compatibility.

How do you check a site for insecure items?

If you see issues with your site, there are a few steps to take:

View the source code. Look for images, CSS files, or scripts that are being called by http instead of https. This is the number one reason why pages are not secure. Change the source to https.

If you are using sharing icons on the page, those icons must be called from a secure location as well. You might have pages you need to remove these icons from (and your shopping cart pages or secure forms don’t really need tweet buttons on them anyway – put them on the thank you page).

If you can’t find anything wrong, use a plug-in like HTTPFox. This Firefox plug-in will show you all of the  HTTP requests being made by a page. Look for the HTTP ones as those are causing the errors.

Another easy tool to use is the ‘inspect element’ one in Chrome. In Chrome, right click on a page and choose ‘inspect element’. This will bring up a lot of stats and features to examine a site.

The new chrome warning in a browser is a skull and crossbones. This type of warning is more visible than a simple unlocked icon. Consumers are increasingly becoming aware of security issues (everyone has a friend who has had their Twitter or Facebook account hacked); ensuing your SSLs work, and all of the browsers display locked icons will be a necessity to maintaining and increasing conversion rates.

Do visitors think your site is secure? Quick guide to testing SSLs is a post from: Certified Knowledge

Since I knew WordPress very well, we used WordPress as our CMS. I took a blog template I liked and spent a day modifying the CSS and other files.

When we first launched, our offers were mostly focused on in-house training and the AdWords Seminars. Over the past two years, I’ve written a book, changed the seminars from a one day to two day product, and we’re adding a brand new AdWords training and PPC tools product.

As we added or changed each product, I just kept adding new custom pages. Our WordPress install became so convoluted that we had:

• 8 page templates
• 2 blog templates
• 3 headers
• 3 footers
• 4 sidebars

In the interest of time, as like most of you, we are overly busy – these templates were calling php includes, iFrames, etc, and just becoming more and more complex to try and keep straight, let alone update properly.

And just like many marketers, we fell into a similar trap. Our work was much better for people we worked with than ourselves.

Some simple rules of conversions that everyone should follow:

• Each page should have a primary goal.
  • A page might have more than one goal, two or three is OK – more than that overwhelms people
  • The most real estate on your pages should be dedicated to your primary goals, the second amount of page space to your secondary goals, etc
• Every page of your website is a segmentation page until someone converts.
• Information should be clear and concise.
  • Easy-to-read and digest information is more important than a gorgeous website design.
  • Easy-to-read also means that your links and content should be easy to read for those who are color blind (color blindness is more common than many people think), or need to view webpages in larger font sizes than your default
• Each page of your site should provide value for your company
  • We have some blog posts which have over 78,000 views, and many with over 10,000 views yet our blog was not well monetized
  • I’m not a hard sell person – I prefer to educate and let the revenue follow (your monetization efforts might be different – that’s OK)
  • However, our blog was not leading to many conversions (the revenue was nice; just not what it should be for our page views)
• Tracking is essential. If you can’t track something then you can’t optimize it.

When I examined our analytics to look at revenue by page and traffic source combination (this examines each page and who sent you the traffic, one without the other is useless) and made sure we had at least 500 visitors for each combination. We had some  combinations where the value was nearly $0.00 and other’s where the value was nearing $50 (and if you filter to only include at least 100 visitors minimum some combinations were nearing $100). That’s a dramatic difference across a site.

It became even worse when examining some traffic sources where their value was nearly $0.00 on some pages, and more than $20 on other pages.

That is too much of a variance. Some of your pages will be worth very little, and some of your traffic sources are worth very little.

A traffic source often shows the quality level of visitors. The pages show quality level of conversion potential. Large variances need to be examined and improved if possible (and some pages will always be low or some always high).

Define Your Company

Not enough marketers really define their primary goals.

Are you:

• An agency
• A consultant
• A full service bid management company
• A design company
• etc..

While we do consulting, speaking, in-house training, etc – our primary mission is to empower as many companies as possible with the information necessary to make their online marketing efforts successful.

Our primary goal is not to get consulting clients, or even in-house training. While those two objectives lead to revenue – it’s not scalable revenue.

Our goal is to empower as many companies as possible. Therefore, we want to highlight the ways we scale PPC learning:

• Advanced AdWords Book
• AdWords Seminars for Success
• The new project about to launch: Certified Knowledge – online, on-demand training & tools

As there are dedicated sites for Certified Knowledge and Advanced Google AdWords, this site serves as our corporate site, our blog, and our seminar promotions.  

How will you reach your audience?

Once you’ve decided what your company does, you need to determine how you will reach your audience.

This step is the coordination of your website and your marketing channels.

For instance, with the seminars, Google links directly to our seminar pages. Since Google is passing some of their credibility to us – the seminar pages do not need to offer as much credibility nor showcase different offers because someone came to the site looking for a specific offer. Therefore, we mostly focus on testimonials.

Coordinating your marketing channel with your design

If you are doing email marketing, are your  landing pages extensions of the email offer?

If you have a blog, which often pulls traffic from various sources, do you show your offers on those pages to try and monetize the traffic? Do you show some credibility items on those pages to showcase why a reader should be engaged with (or even link to) your company?

If you are doing PPC, you have extensive control of the landing page – so are you controlling the message and navigation to increase conversions?

Even for SEO, you might create certain aspects of your pages to ensure that your pages can be crawled and rank; however, traffic for traffic’s sake is useless. Traffic that converts is useful. Even your SEO focused pages should be aligned with your company’s goals.

Credibility Does Matter

There are a lot of affiliate offers in the marketing training space. As many of you have seen, there are promises of internet riches that can be accomplished with a website and a week of work. When an offer seems to good to be true…

Therefore, we need to showcase why we’re different than the other get-rich-quick schemes.

Obviously, if Google is promoting the seminars directly – than we can use some of that credibility.

I wrote a book published by Wiley/Symbex (the publishers of the dummies, hour a day, and mastering series – not some random publishing house); and while it is revenue generation – a published book is also a credibility element (in addition, the foreword is by Fred Vallaeys, the Google AdWords Evangelist).

I have more than a decade of experience, and have worked with many types of companies – so we need to highlight the experience.

Some ways in which you might be able to increase credibility include:

• BBB member
• Association membership
• VeriSign logo
• Reviews & testimonials from your users
• Industry certifications
• Partnerships

Bringing it all together – The New Site

Our new site is not quite finished yet. We will be making a few more improvements ov
er the next couple months; and redesigning our logo sooner than later. However, the main design has changed significantly and built around the rules up top.

First off, you must know the limitations and features of your content management system. While hand coding all your HTML will give you the most control over every aspect of your site – it’s too much work for most people. Therefore, we’re still using WordPress.

Before you should start your design, list your constraints:

• Time: I did not want to spend more than two days redesigning the site
• As I’m personally putting many thousands of dollars into Certified Knowledge (and having a custom design created for the site which will go live in a few weeks); I wanted to do the bg Theory redesign cheaply
• Because of the time limit; I wanted to use the same CMS so that I did not have to import a database into a new system and have to go through the entire site to fix problems
• Because of the money limitation; I wanted to find a basic WordPress template that fit the needs and then I could recode the CSS and pages myself (with a max of two days of work).
• I wanted a different sidebar based upon where someone was in the site.
• I wanted some pages without a sidebar (which I can make happen by changing the calls inside a WordPress page).
• I only wanted one sidebar. Our previous site had two sidebars which lead to too much information on a single page – breaking the rule of a goal per page.
• As our seminar and speaking schedules are always updating, it was imperative that it was very easy to update these schedules.
• The old site had custom pages that were built off of 880px width that we did not want to find and re-code. Therefore, the new site had to be at least 880px wide (in fact, this turned out to be one of the biggest changes for the template as we had to widen everything).

I did some research, picked a theme that I liked (in fact, it’s the placeholder theme for Certified Knowledge); and started customizing.

Here’s the decisions I made along the way in choosing how to layout the custom elements of the design.

Our desktop site (we have a mobile version as well) is broken down into a handful of items that we can customize:

The header: The main links across your site

• We don’t link to all the pages of our site. We choose only a handful for very specific reasons:
  • Home: Everyone wants to see a home page navigation
  • Blog: Our main source of traffic, a nice source of credibility, and the reason many people come back to the site
  • AdWords Seminars: Our top product and top credibility source
  • PPC Tools & Training: Our newest product and one we want to start promoting
  • AdWords Book: Our lowest revenue product, but second highest credibility product
  • Speaking: This one was a choice. We could have put up our consulting or in-house training link just as easily as speaking. However, speaking is both a credibility issue and marketing opportunity.
    • As I personally have more than 600 hours of public speaking experience (and that counts speaking at a single SES or SMX session as only a few minutes – that 600 hours is actual time spent standing in front of a group and actually interacting with them); this seems a natural fit.
  • Contact: Obvious choice; make it easy for people to contact you (also why we have the phone number on every page)
  • About: Learn about why you should choose our marketing products
• We have many more pages we could have added to this navigation. However, we choose to slim down the choices that help fit our main marketing objectives: To educate as many businesses as possible about marketing. So every page is about marketing, credibility, or contacting us. So even pages such as ‘subscribe to the blog’ are not on the main navigation. If someone’s in the blog we will push this, but not when they are in other pages looking up marketing training. In pages like that; the subscribe link is a distraction.
• We wanted the phone number on every page for customer support requests
• We wanted a search box across the entire site that was highly visible as our site is often searched

I’m not a designer; I’m a coder and marketer. Therefore, the logo is not what will be there in a few weeks. It’s a placeholder logo to match the feel of the site; but something else will replace that section of the header.

The Main jQuery

This is the big blue section That links to ‘Certified Knowledge,’ ‘AdWords Seminars’, ‘Advanced Google AdWords Book’ and then has the rotating images; which are also links into those various pages.

The reason I call it jQuery as that’s the JavaScript used to power the system. If you are new to jQuery, there’s a great site, jQueryUI where you can see demos.

• The images within the jQuery are linked to actual pages. The images rotate automatically. Therefore, the images were chosen based upon what we’re trying to promote.
  • We have 4 images for Certified Knowledge – our scalable revenue.
  • We have 1 image of me, for credibility.
  • We have 2 images of our seminars; our current highest revenue and since they are supported by Google – also have credibility.
  • We have 2 images for the book; again credibility and some revenue (and since the book has coupons for the seminars and Certified Knowledge, we can also pull a higher monetization from the book sales)
  • Not all people will realize that you can click on those images to be taken to an internal page. Therefore, in most of the images we added buttons so people would realize they could be clicked.
  • Even the real estate devoted to the jQuery is in-line with our site’s conversion goals.
• Normally, I’d tell someone this is too much. You have three products – pick one that’s your primary, another one that’s your secondary, etc. However, our seminars are location based so not everyone can attend. The book is low revenue; but high credibility. Certified Knowledge is scalable revenue. Therefore, we used the links and images to showcase our various products and credibility across many pages.
• Since the seminars are well known; our main secondary objective (besides revenue) is to increase awareness of these other products.

The question then became: where do we add this big header across our website?

The jQuery appears on the main page; which makes sense as your home page should be a segmentation page that shows what you do and provides easy navigation further into your site. In the case of our site, if we were to count all the links on the homepage; which is 20; 6 are for Certified Knowledge, 4 are for the seminars, 3 are for the book, etc. So even the number of possible paths is in-line with where we want to increase our visibility

It appears on the
blog pages so that these previously under-monetized pages will help create additional visibility for the products. The goal of the jQuery on these pages is to increase visibility for our training products. As it’s a blog, the revenue won’t be as high as other pages; however, this will create a lot more awareness for some of our other products. We’ll measure the analytics on these pages to see if it’s successful. If yes, then good. If no, then I’ll work on a different blog page design.

It does not appear on the AdWords Seminar pages. These pages receive a lot of traffic directly from Google’s website. Since the jQuery steals attention away from the page; we wanted the seminar pages to have as high a conversion as possible so decided not to add it to those pages.

It does appear on the other pages of the site at present. As Certified Knowledge and the book both lead to other websites, it made sense to showcase credibility on our other training methods and increase awareness, especially for the book and Certified Knowledge as they are new products. Over time, we’ll measure the effectiveness of the jQuery on these pages and either remove it or change it to be more specific to particular pages.

The Blog Sidebar

• People read blogs for information first.
• Blogs can be monetized, but it’s often a longer process.
• Blogs do increase credibility.
• The top of the sidebar is about sharing information. Make it easy to pass your content around. This is also expected on a blog site; so makes sense to highlight it.
  • Information sharing is also important for credibility. These days, people expect marketers to be on FaceBook and Twitter – therefore, while it’s another conversion type (and we are tracking all social clicks to 3rd party sites); it also helps to increase credibility for someone who is in marketing.
• The recent posts. Make it easy for people to see other content.
• Blogs we like. Blogrolls and featured links are common on sidebars, and there are sites we think deserve some link love; so we kept this to help engage the community and other blogs.
• The blog has more pages than the rest of the site combined – there are 979 posts. I was worried about our SEO efforts as we’re removing a lot of links from our homepage. Therefore, much of the sidebar is still deep links into categories to flatten out the site crawl.
• As the jQuery is on the blog pages, we decided not to feature the other training methods we have. One thing we will test is adding the upcoming seminar

The Page Sidebar

• This sidebar only appears on pages about training, about us, contact, etc. It does not appear on the blog pages.
  • People who are visiting non-blog pages are generally a higher conversion rate for us. They are not just blog readers (not to disparage blog readers – I’m one and the community is essential)
  • We did not want to overwhelm these visitors with a long blog sidebar about posts and categories, etc. These visitors are more interested in being trained through a non-blogging source.
• Therefore, as the seminars are the current highest source of revenue; we highlight that schedule first.
• As we offer a lot of training, and some people skip headers (our jQuery) ; we added a sidebar about ‘How do you liked to be trained’ with the options for reading, in-person, on-demand video. We will test this headline and this sidebar extensively to see what increases conversions and interest.
• Social icons. This is our worst conversion activity – leave the site to increase our social followers. However, it is a much better conversion than absolutely nothing (a visitor just leaving the site). And as social does increase credibility for our industry; we added the social icons and are tracking these clicks separate from the same icons on the blog pages.

The Home Page

• This is the most visited page of our site.
• The page needs to easily convey what we do and how someone can get more information on that training type
• We wanted a very clean page that removed just about everything on the page that did not increase revenue
• The page is dominated by the jQuery; which has links and features of our training abilities
• The bottom of the page showcases our top products we want visibility for (our Seminars and Certified Knowledge)
  • As many people come to our site for the blog; and this use to be highlighted on the main page, we decided to showcase the new blog posts over the book. The book is in the jQuery; so it is already being showcased to some extent.
• Buttons. Most of the images in the jQuery are buttons, but for those who scroll down further on the page, we added buttons (which often lead to higher CTRs than links) underneath these featured products. However, bloggers are more willing to hunt for information, so the links to the recent blog posts are plain links and not buttons.
• The footer. Basic information.

That’s it. A clean, sparse,, information-packed homepage. We removed a lot of information that use to be on our homepage. We’re tracking every single click on this page to see it’s effectiveness. If an individual element is not effective, then I’ll change it.

The Search Results Page

• Search is used a lot on our site; therefore, we needed to make sure there was a custom search page
• As the vast majority of our search results lead to blog pages; and almost all searches originate on the home page or blog page – we wanted to have this page look like the blog results with the jQuery on top.
• As we measure the profit potential of each page, the jQuery might be removed from this page so that the search results are highlighted without other distractions.

The 404 page

A 404 page is what someone sees when a page cannot be found on the website

No matter how hard you try, on a large website (ours is more than 1000 pages, so medium size) you will have people arriving at broken pages. The trick is to tracking these pages so you can clean up your URLs over time.

• One of the cardinal rules about SEO is that not found pages should return 404 results and not 200 (which means the page exists) OK results
• Therefore, the first aspect was to make sure when someone gets to a not found page is that they see a custom 404 page
• The default WordPress 404 page is not very usable. Therefore, we added a search box and some custom text to the page to make it more friendly
• We’re tracking all 404 results so we can see if it’s an internal link issue or other reason people arrive at these pages

Top Product Pages

We have a significant amount of testimonials both in written and video formats for our seminars. These pages sometimes run at greater than a 10% conversion rate. We’ve tested layouts and messages with them over the past two years, so we really did not want to mess with these pages at the moment.

Therefore, these pages do not call our sidebars or the jQuery. These pages are focused around conversions.

Some interesting stats on the event pages:

• When someone watches at least one video at the top of the page, they generally watch more than 6 minutes of information (which is testimonials and other interviews, etc that we’ve done).
• As the benefit message (in the videos) and the registration form are above the fold; but the page is very long; we have the same signup process at the bottom of the page. Adding the signup at the bottom of the page increased conversion rates. Adding the signup form in the middle of the page did not significantly impact conversions.

For the main seminar page:

• We currently have three instances where someone can click from the overview page to an individual event page. We originally had two; and after testing we found that the third even listing increased conversion rates.
• On the actual seminar pages; we have two different places where you can start the ordering process. We tested having three instances on the individual event pages; but having a third ticket box did not affect conversion rates at all.

Everything is still a work in progress

Because we’re tracking all the links clicked across the website, and can then measure which links are effective and which are not – this design is a work in progress. The new template system I set up across our website (each of these elements, sidebars, jquery, top nav links, etc) are very easy to change for an individual page or for a series of pages.

Once we do enough testing that we’re comfortable with the final concept; then we might engage an actual designer to clean up the site, images, etc.

The Page Templates

To make the site easy to change, I simply made several templates:

• Home page – self explanatory
• Blog post page without jQuery and blog sidebar
• Blog post page with jQuery and no blog sidebar
• Page with jQuery and sidebar
• Page with sidebar and no jQuery
• page with no jQuery and no sidebar
• Page with jQuery and no sidebar

This is very simple to do in WordPress. You just change the template to not call the sidebar, or to call a section of a site – and then that section will not (or will) be called.

Now every time we create a page, we can just decide which page template we want. Do we want the jQuery shown on the top of the page? If yes, then use that template. Do we want a very wide blog post with no sidebar? If yes, then we use that template.

While most of the pages and posts are based upon only 4 templates, the others exist to make it very easy to manipulate pages going forward, and we can even test some small changes to individual pages and posts by manipulating which sidebar or jQuery is being called to the page.

What’s next?

We’re not done with the site yet, we still have a handful of things to finish:

• Removing all PayPal processing and integrating another payment processor
• Keeping all conversion activity on the site for tracking (we’re using an easy-to-use simple integration for our seminar pages, but as these occur offsite we can’t see all conversions)
• Redesign the logo. I know what I can’t do – and image design is not my strength. We’ll do a redesign of the logo that matches the new color scheme and focus of the website.
• Increase the content on Leslie’s about page. Leslie’s page is in the top 50 pages viewed on the site; and yet much of her experience in event marketing, traditional media, project management, etc are not really called out.
• Add a ‘top post’ feature to the blog section to showcase some of our best content.
• Test which pages lead to each conversion type
• Change more calls to actions into buttons
• On the blog post pages, institute a jquery tab at the bottom of each post so you can choose what you want to do:
  • Leave a comment
  • See related blog posts
  • Share this information
  • Subscribe to the blog
  • Currently, the bottom of most blog posts are messy with too many options. We’ll still give the users options, but we’re going to consolidate them into an easy to navigate system.
• Others we don’t yet know as we don’t have the metrics yet

The Total Cost of the Redesign

• 2 days (define as you will for your own time)
• WordPress (the CMS) – free
• Blog template $49
• FileZilla (for FTPing) – free
• PowerPoint  for image creation (I’m really not a designer; I made every image on the site except for a few of the buttons in PowerPoint). Already owned – so free. However, I could have used GIMP which is an open source image program.
• Cool Text for button design.
• $100 – the cost we’ll pay a designer to redesign our logo (which I could have done in GIMP; but it’ll look better done professionally).

2 days and $149 is the entire cost of this redesign. A 0.05% (that’s one conversion per 2000 visitors) increase in conversion rates (for a book sale, Certified Knowledge subscription, or AdWords Seminar signup) will make the time well spent. A 1% to 2% increase in conversion rates for just a single AdWords Seminar (let alone across the entire website) will pay for the cost of a high priced designer.

I can also say a semi-techy without design skills can make a decent site with freely available web tools.

The Final Result?

I have no idea on the effectiveness – yet.

We launched this design less than two weeks ago, so we definitely do not have enough data yet to make any decisions.

While the reasons for each decision (at least I believe) are sound, design creativity only brings you so far. The metrics ha
ve to tell you if you were right or wrong and then will give you the data to make adjustments accordingly.

We are tracking everything – so we’ll know small details like the CTR of each jQuery image so that we can add and remove images based upon their effectiveness.

If it seems that we’re on the right track with conversions, then we’ll probably have someone come in and do a nice pretty design based upon what is working. If it doesn’t work, then we’ll try again with a different layout scheme.

However, I can finally say as marketers we’re finally putting our skills together for ourselves – even if it’s just small changes. If it raises conversion rates, then it’s all worthwhile.

We are only the designers and owners of the site; not necessarily the users of the site. What really matters is your opinion. What do you think of the new design?

Inside a Marketers' Mind: Introducing the new bg Theory site with explanations of our redesign is a post from: Certified Knowledge

The other day I was looking around at CrowdSpring, a website that is fairly trustworthy and does not have any major security flaws that I’m aware of – definitely not a site that is trying to infect your browser. The site worked just fine in FireFox and Internet Explorer. However, I was using Chrome (one of the fastest growing browsers that is already up to 10% market share) the browser stopped me from even continuing to a section of the site and told me there was something wrong with the servers and that a hacker might be involved and that I should really leave the site.

It turned out it was a server configuration error on crowdspring’s side that was fixed fairly quickly. However, if they had not been alerted by someone – or worse, never check their site in multiple browsers – they may have just continued to lose new customers without understanding why.

This is why it is so important to look at your site in different browsers. Don’t just look at the the homepage, look at your internal pages, especially your conversion pages.

If you do not want to maintain multiple browsers and machines, Cross Browser Testing is a paid solution that can help you out.

Testing your site in multiple browsers is easy. Fixing some of the issues might be difficult – but at least you’re aware of the problem. Not looking around you site in multiple browsers is an easy way to isolate visitors and lose customers to your competition.

What Does the Browser Say About Your Site? is a post from: Certified Knowledge

• I don’t click on ads, I bet no one does
• I wouldn’t do that; therefore, I’m not going to market that way
• Why would someone search for our products that way?
• Of course our site is easy to navigate, we have conversions
• What do you mean we are a bad judge of our website?

These statements tell someone that you are not looking at things from the customer point of view; but your own.

In every Google AdWords seminar, I end up going on a rant about about how most people are bad judges of their website. Once you know something so well, you do not think about how to use the product; you just do it by instinct.

• Have you ever driven to work and could not remember actually driving?
• That does not happen when you take an unfamiliar route
• When the familiar is routine, we cease to notice the small details

The same can be said for your website. You know that your phone number is in the upper right hand corner inside your navigational banner. Ask someone to find that same phone number, and there are times a searcher stares at the page and says they can’t find it.

You know that to access your shopping cart, there’s a small icon at the top of a page. I’ve been on sites where I added something to the cart, and then couldn’t figure out where my cart was.

• This happens because often designers create a website for themselves.
• Or they create it for the marketing team.
• They are not always creating websites for the consumers.

While these are basic principles, we all forget them sometimes. A good designer never forgets this principle.

I have 6 different Firefox profiles on my computer and often have 3 Firefox profiles open, all with different plug-ins and navigation, along with Chrome and IE. To me browsers are a tool to be customized so each one helps you become more productive. I don’t think about saying something like, “Make a new Firefox profile that just uses GTD & the Better Plug-ins and then layer over a Grease monkey script based upon your email navigation preferences and then you can have have a dedicated email browser for your hosted apps so that you can be more productive.”

I said that a couple weeks ago to a very techie audience, and more than half of them stared at me blankly. I’m not my target audience.

I would guess that more than 90% or more of people who read this blog know what a browser is. However, what about your audience who is wandering the streets of New York City? Do they know what a browser is – the fundamental access point for the web?

Here is an enlightening video that asks those on the street a simple question: What is a browser? For many of you this is your target market. The answers might surprise you.

If you’d like to see all of Google’s videos; and our favorites such as the above video - subscribe to our YouTube channel.

You are Not Your Target Market is a post from: Certified Knowledge

There are four excellent videos that range from 30 minutes to more than an hour, which contain excellent tips on creating, testing, and analyzing landing pages to increase conversions. Learn form both experts in the field to Google employees about possible ways to increase conversion rates.

The first video is by Tim Ash. If you like the video and would like to learn more, Tim, Brian Massey, and myself are conducting a training session at Pubcon in November.

Enjoy the videos.

4 Hours of Video that Will Increase Your Conversion Rates is a post from: Certified Knowledge

I’ve always wanted to test out Dragon Naturally Speaking (a speech to text program), and it’s on sale right now. However, their downloads are by Digital River, possibly one of the worst customer support offices ever. My last time I dealt with Digital River, my experience went like this (and all consumers have bad experiences in their past with some provider):

• Bought the software where you have 30 days to install
• The install failed due to an error on the manufacturer’s side
• Repeated attempts to contact manufacturer went unanswered for weeks
• Repeated attempts to contact digital river are still unanswered
• This resulted in my first, and only, chargeback
• Avoiding any software downloads that involves digital river

However, all Dragon Naturally Speaking downloads appear to be by Digital River, so I wanted to contact Nuance real quick before buying the product just to see if there were alternatives to the download process.

It turns out you have to make an account to contact Nuance by email. And what’s worse, you actually leave Nuance’s site when you hit the contact customer support button (while this screenshot is for technical support, you have to create an account on nuance’s site for standard customer support. And since they are on different sites, you have no idea if you need to create multiple accounts to contact different departments).

Suddenly the trust factor drops significantly, and questions go through the buyers mind:

• A different site?
• So does someone else do your technical support?
• Can I understand the person doing support?

As customer support satisfaction is dropping in many places due to the outsourcing involved, this could be a big issue. And secondly, who wants to create an account just to email technical or pre-sales support?

Post sale support is almost always worse than pre-sale support. Post sales means the company already has money from you, and usually does not support items nearly as well as getting you to buy the product in the first place. So, if your pre-sale support requires this many hoops; what are you imagining your post-sales experience will be?

Suffice it to say, while I was ready to buy the product this morning and test it out. However, after finding:

• Potential barriers to download
• Barriers to customer support
• Barriers to technical support
• Poor experience with their technical backend download system
• A website that auto plays videos with sound (really? That turns off everyone in an office setting)

I’ll wait another day to try out Dragon, or take a good look at some of their competitor’s reviews.

While I’ve rarely ever used customer support for post-sale software; and probably will never need it – it’s the fact the barriers seem so high if I ever needed to use it.

That’s what customers think. If I need this, will you be there?

While most may never need support; if a customer thinks you won’t be available when they need you – then it’s time for your potential customers to move on to your competitors.

Learn from Nuance (the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking) in Making Customer’s Not Contact Your Business to Learn More is a post from: Certified Knowledge

A website could have a high conversion rate, but not necessarily be a credible site.

Or a site could be both.

What website elements are most important to consumers?

I recently came across a fascinating report (note PDF file) that tried to measure what aspects of a site (broken down by a few verticals) were more discussed when addressing website credibility issue. The chart is excellent (and pulled from page 23 of the previously mentioned document):

If this were the overall look and feel of a website, it’s a pretty good list to work from.

However, what if you have dedicated landing pages?

While affiliations only make up 3.4% of all comments regarding credibility; highlighting affiliations on a landing page can often dramatically affect conversion rates.

If someone has not done business with you yet, then 6.4% focus on customer service is immaterial.

If they are doing business with your company, I’d rarely suggest spending 8x more time on your website design than on customer service. Customer service, or past site experience, is paramount to increasing a customer’s lifetime visitor value.

If you are an educational site, and do not focus on Information Clarity (only 3.7% of comments) you might be considered credible, but you will not see many conversions. Information clarity is of high importance when trying to teach concepts.

Note on Aggregate Studies

Studies are good information to make you think and to compare your website against some larger benchmarks.

Never assume that just because the information is in a study that it applies to your business. Studies are often aggregates of information across several businesses and then the information is averaged.

Don’t try to be average, find the data points that matter to your business.

Are you a converter or credible?

Do you want to be both? Do you care if your site is credible? If you are in an industry with zero reoccurring revenue, no repeat buyers, and a limited product set – the conversion probably matters to you much more than being trustworthy.

If you have repeat buyers, create relationships with your customers, then being both credible and a converting site is important.

Are you a reference source that does not really have conversions? Your conversions are page views where you show CPM ads? In this case, focusing on credibility is much more important than conversions.

Take a look at the above chart and examine your website. Does your website have great content but an average design? That might be a signal that you could increase your credibility with some redesign work.

Take a look at the chart and ponder your conversion rates. If you’ve found that certain aspects affect conversions – do not lose sight of those statistics. If you rely on conversions to turn a profit – spend your time testing.

Determine your website’s positioning – then choosing which aspects to focus on (such as credibility vs. conversions) becomes a logical exercise.

And if you really want to dive into this study to get even more ideas, here’s the study’s home page (non-PDF).

Is Your Website Built for Credibility or Conversions? is a post from: Certified Knowledge