The number one factor that makes or breaks your website is whether or not people can use it. This is typically referred to as your website’s usability. It seems simple: if people can’t do what you want them to do (buy things, subscribe to things, request a call, etc.), they won’t do it. Yet, because websites are so easy to change, several companies just create websites, web applications, e-newsletters, etc., and hope that the changes will help their business. What further confuses this is typically a lack of clear insight into your website’s performance. For example, how well does your website convert visitors into buyers? What are the key decisions that visitors must make on your website? Do you give them the information and tools necessary to make those decisions? This article will help you focus on 3 proven techniques for improving your website’s performance: website analytics, usability testing, and personas. Exactly how you choose to implement these techniques is obviously up to you. However, one thing is guaranteed: all three techniques help you get closer to the people who visit your website: their needs, their desires, and their behaviors.
This information is critical if you plan to optimize your website’s usability to achieve your goals.1. Measure Progress with Website AnalyticsMany companies mistakenly install a standard “website statistics” program and only get a group of standard reports. Typically, these reports do very little to help you judge the true effectiveness of your website. Want to get a jumpstart on creating your own website analytics? Just follow these 3 simple steps: 1. Begin with the end in mind – start with your objectives. Define your website marketing strategy objectives (i.e. “Increase the number of qualified prospects coming from web search engines”), and what you want your website visitors to do to reach those objectives (i.e. “See our listing in the top 10 in Google and click on it) 2. Get in touch with your visitors’ behavior on your website. Track how many unique visitors you get, and how long they stay on your site (including how many pages they view). You want all of these numbers to be going up, since that means you’re getting more visitors who are staying on the site longer. You are maximizing the odds that they will do what you want them to do. 3. Develop your conversion rate.
Track how many visitors do the key action you want them to do and compare this number to your total visitors.
This helps you determine your conversion rate. For example, if 15 out of 100 visitors requested more information from you (and that is one of your objectives), then your conversion rate for information requests is 15%. Once you have these key website analytics in place, you can start to evolve your tracking and look for trends to optimize for. Here are two examples: • Let’s say you notice higher conversion rates on weekends. Then you might want to spend more on online advertising on weekends and reduce your spending during the week. • Let’s say you need more visitors and embark on a search engine optimization project to improve your rankings. Then you can track the increase or decrease in visitor flow from your project’s activities. Regardless of what you want to achieve, getting to website usability first starts with solid website analytics. Why? Because website analytics force you to identify those areas that matter most, and identify how well or poorly you are doing in them. Once you know this, you are armed with key data that can help you focus your efforts and determine where things like usability testing can help the most.2. Leverage Usability TestingUsability testing is where you take people who would use your website, and actually watch them using it. Typically, you ask the person to do things on the site, and you watch either over their shoulder, behind a one-way mirror, or via a second computer where you can see what’s being recorded on the test computer.
It’s amazing how many things you can make better on your website just by watching people use it. Yet, as you get into it, you may find that hiring a usability professional for a testing project can be unnecessarily expensive. Usability professionals are helpful, since they typically have substantial expertise in planning and conducting tests, as well as interpreting test results. However, usability testing does not have to be fancy or formal: people are going to give you their opinion whether you’re sitting in a research company or at Starbucks. So be careful when hiring a professional that seems to make the testing process complicated or costly. When someone does this, it’s usually only for their own financial gain. To successfully conduct a usability test, just follow these 5 steps: 1. Define your objectives. Begin with the end in mind. What do you want to accomplish with this usability test? Do you have specific areas of your website that you want to improve? If so, this is a great way to get ideas on how to make those areas better. Are you planning on rolling out a new area of your website? A usability test is a great way to do a “trial run” before the big launch. 2. Recruit the participants. This will take the most time, and can be the most frustrating part of the test process. You have to find people to participate (which can be tough, particularly if you need to match specific demographic profiles), and then you need to schedule them. Then, some will cancel, some won’t show, and some will be great test participants. The best way to get a feel for the person is to talk to them directly more than once over the phone. TIP: Be sure to call the person the day of the test to remind them about it. 3. Script the test. You’ll want to have an intro script, the test script, and a post-test survey. The intro script serves as a checklist of things you want to be sure to cover with the person before you start the test. TIP: During the part, try to focus on making the person feel comfortable giving their opinion, and reiterate that any feedback is good feedback. The next part, the test script, is a checklist of the actual things you want the person to do.
This is followed by the post-test survey, which allows you to ask the person questions, and later compare those answers to what they said during the test. 4. Conduct the test. This is the fun part! You sit down with the person, and walk them through the test scenario. Some tests benefit from close “hand holding,” while others benefit from letting the person do whatever they think is right. It completely depends on the objectives, and they information you want to collect. In either case, the best thing to do is to record both the person and what they do on the computer. TIP: Be sure to compensate the person for their time. 5. Report the results. The best way to report the results is two-fold: First, do a quick, one-page or less recap of each session immediately after the test. That way, the information is still fresh in your mind. TIP: Include a picture of the user in your recap, since it will help make that person’s feedback “come alive.” Next, take the information collected during testing, and create 1 to 4 “personas” – user profiles that explain the type of person, what they need from the website, what issues they encounter frequently on the site, and what can be changed to help them. This will help you explain the results to others, and you can reuse these personas later when you are adding or updating areas of your website. How many people should I test? For most usability tests, you can learn the maximum amount by only testing ten people. Too many more and you’ll start to see too many recurring patterns. If you go less than ten, you might miss things or not see enough of a pattern.3. Develop PersonasLet’s face it – no one reads a 20-page usability report from cover to cover. It just doesn’t happen. Usually, key decision makers ask for “recap” presentations, and then “latch on” to one or two key points from the study, quoting that point over and over again.
This presen
ts a great opportunity: why not give those key decision makers something memorable? Enter personas. Personas are a way to get everyone involved thinking about the actual people who visit your website. What Personas are: Fake people based on real data A practical tool to maintain focus on your target customers A way to make your data come alive and be more memorable What Personas are not: Every possible customer profile “Made up”; they are created from real data, like usability test results A replacement for existing ways we design and build our web site Reporting user tests as personas is a great way to: 1.
Get key decision makers on board with the persona concept 2.
Communicate web site issues in the context of the people actually using your site Creating personas from usability testing data is time-consuming, but very valuable. Just look across the data for key trends: what common roles, goals, and actions do you see? Can you group the feedback along those things? You’ll quickly start to evolve a handful of personas which can be refined over time. Add a name and a few pictures of that “person” and you’ll be on your way to creating a more user-focused website experience. Again, exactly how you choose to implement these techniques is obviously up to you. Even small steps can make a big impact. You don’t have to have super-sophisticated website analytics, test your website with 100 users, or develop extremely detailed personas. Every step you take in these three areas, no matter how big or how small, will help you get more from your website, and your website marketing strategy.
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At TimeshareValues.com we recently communicated with a buyer based in the Midwest. We are in the San Francisco Bay area. We talked a lot at 9pm our time – while he was still in his office. At his time, the clock was moving toward midnight. He bought a timeshare because he feels he doesn’t have enough time to plan his vacation, but he knows he still has to take time off each year. He works long hours, but he hoped a timeshare purchase would achieve some balance between his work and personal lives. This is an extreme case – but it got us thinking about the reason for buying a timeshare. Most people want to achieve a balance between the Two E’s: Emotion and Economics.
We believe a successful timeshare purchase provides a balance between these two E’s.Here’s how: The First E: Emotions Certain people and places always stick with you. Great times, food, scenery, friends. Many of us have great memories of places we want to go back to every year. We hope to recapture feelings we first experienced at these places. Such a place is Cozumel, Mexico. It provides not only a wonderful timeshare vacation for people, but it was also the honeymoon for a couple we know. The couple’s entire trip was amazing, from the great food (the newlyweds actually found a wonderful Italian seafood restaurant there), great diving (the groom remembers his bride’s eyes when she saw her first barracuda), and friendly people. It probably will not come as a surprise that we keep our eyes open for Cozumel property. Emotions help us focus on what really matters in life. The Second E: Economics When you say this ‘E Word’, people think of accountants with green eyeshades. But that’s far from the truth. “Economics” in a timeshare purchase is a simple matter of looking at the yearly cost of a vacation. Economic factors to consider include: · What is the best value for my vacation investment? · What places offer me the best ”bang for my buck”? · What can I afford each year – and not have to worry about paying the credit card bill after the trip? These may be boring questions, but the emotional value of this economic approach is anything but boring.
Answers to these “money issues” can offer you great peace of mind.
Let’s look at a couple scenarios where the economics and emotions are out of balance. More Emotion than Economics Does that sound familiar? Have you ever noticed a great commercial in which the product is secondary to the emotions you feel? All you have to do is purchase the product and you will feel the emotions in the commercial. Have you ever noticed travel web sites never show an unhappy flyer or a seasick cruise passenger? You don’t want negative emotions anywhere near the product being sold. Remember this as you look at timeshare auctions. Like all companies marketing travel products, TimeshareValues want to show our timeshares in the best positive light. However, that’s very easy, since we believe so much in the product and how it improves the quality of a vacation. Making a buying decision based more on emotion than economics has been the American “Way of Marketing” for decades. But the Internet is helping to change this, since you can find a wealth of invaluable information before you make a purchase. You can do extensive research before a making purchase, checking out the Timeshare Users Group (http://www.tug2.net), viewing other timeshare auctions and classified sites, and even calling a the resort. When a buyer makes a purchase based on emotion, he or she will usually pay more for a product than necessary.
A few dollars isn’t’t a big deal, but injecting a little economics can be very helpful. We love people who ask enthusiastic questions. They get more information, which lends excitement and fun to the bidding process. More Economics than Emotion In his book ”Don’t Worry, Make Money,” Richard Carlson has taken a time-worn phrase and re-engineered it. He has a chapter titled: “Consider the Possibility that if it Sounds too Good to Be True – It Might NOT Be” Read that again slowly. Carlson states that cynicism, doubt and suspicion cause people to miss out on excellent opportunities. We see this every day. We get e-mails that say: “Why so cheap – what is wrong with this property?” “What haven’t you told me in your auction?” “This is a rental – right?” These people are interested, but they’re also very wary. Some are wary to the point where they don’t participate. Their decision is based on economics and some negative emotions. These wary people dismiss the prospect of a good deal, because they’ve heard about the prices others have paid. But if they were to ask us, we would tell them 500,000 timeshare owners want to sell their properties, and that creates a huge buyers market. Our company buys properties at a low price and sells them for more than we paid for them. Of course, we make a profit, but we let the market tell us how much the profit will be. People who are more driven by dollars than emotion struggle with this. But this approach has worked for us more than 300 times, so there must be something it! There is an added business benefit to our approach: Our timeshare products don’t sit around – they always sell. This means we return our capital faster to purchase more timeshare properties. People who value economics like to hear that. It’s key to our business model. Finding Your Balance Rarely is a decision based on equal parts emotion and economics. These factors come in different strengths for different people. We propose an exercise that is effective for everyone. If you are inclined towards one E Factor or the other, work on the weak side before you place a bid.
When you find the right balance, your Emotional Side will be happy, and your Economical Side will let you sleep at night. Our auction web site provides detailed articles help your Economical Side plan better, and pictures and personal stories will give your Emotional side a lift by showing you those places you just HAVE to visit! Get your life in balance today!
The simple answer is because you can make money from it! Wouldn’t it be good to spend maybe a few days setting up enough pages to run enough adsense ads to be able to then sit back and do nothing while our adsense campaign is out there working for us 24/7, in all counties and earning enough from that, to not have to work anymore? Or, if it were to take you a few weeks or even months to do this, wouldn’t it still be worthwhile? Ok, so how do we do this? First we ne Many html composers will allow us to edit the page in the “view” that we would see in if it was a live page. So all we have to do is place XXX in the page were we want the ad to appear, and then switch to “html view” (or whatever your composer calls the page that you edit html code on). In the html view we find the XXX, then simply delete the XXX and paste the adsense ad code in its place. EASY! NOTES: Some composers won’t run the script in any view after you paste it, ARGH! This may make you think it didn’t work. In addition when you load it to your server and run it live, you may still not see your ad display! It sometimes takes a little while for everything to propagate on the page. So, as long as the code is there in html view, don’t waste your time trying to figure out why it isn’t showing, just come back every hour or so to check it. Also you will notice at first, the ads may not be targeted or may only display partially, just be patient, I have had to wait up to 3 days for some of my ad displays to appear!Jed to consider how we can make web pages. We can make each one manually and or use some kind of webpage building software. If we choose to manually construct our web pages we also need to include enough content to make people want to go there in the first place so they can click on the adsense ad.
But if the content is good enough to attract them in the first place then maybe they won’t want to go somewhere else anyway, so that really defeats the purpose. So this brings us to another point of consideration. For our adsense ads to work best we need to have people landing on them who are looking for information about a specific subject. So our adsense page has to have lots of information about one specific subject, but not so much that they stay there. To do this we can consider using software to make a directory of information pages, on these pages we have links to other sites that are providing the detailed information that our visitors are looking for. On our directory page we have a description of the sites that are listed there. And many of these sites have provided a “Reciprocal link” to our sites, home page! (This will be covered below) so we will now have a page with lots of great content (all the site descriptions) and this is where people come looking for specific information, so we place our adsense ads here! They are targeted pages, and visitors arrive looking for something to click on! So it makes adsense to do this. Setting up an adsense account: This can be a little bewildering due to the fact that you need to create your first ad as part of the signup process. https://www.google.com/adsense If you go here you’ll find that Google has taken care of everything by providing a step by step guide that tells you everything you need know. Designing your adsense display: Once you have your adsense account set up you’ll be able to choose the type of add you want and Taylor it to suit your site.
Some things to consider when doing this are, do you want it to appear as a part of the page? Or do you want it to jump out as something different? It’s difficult to say which is best, because that depends on a range of variables, such as your target market, your overall objectives and promotional plan. To track your adsense ads performance you can use the “channels” option while creating your ad boxes, this will help you to determine which ads in which pages are doing the best and that, in turn, will enable you to decide on the best possible style and position for displaying your ads. Placing an Ad display on your page: First, this all depends on your skill and knowledge of html, if you’re new to web page building and html, you may find this a challenging task. If you are experienced you can skip to the notes in this section, these notes may save you a lot of time and worry
Every year, many one-man online stores and small e-tailers close their internet doors and drop out of the race without giving themselves a fair shot at success because of Irritable Online Marketing Syndrome (IOMS). IOMS, more commonly known as information overload, presents a real and present danger and although it sometimes attacks veteran online marketers, newbies and intermediate users find themselves especially susceptible to its volatile effects. The «bust» felt by major online companies a few years ago, can no longer shoulder the blame for failure on the internet. Online market research company eMarketer.com estimates that retail e-commerce sales will increase an average 18.6% per year between 2005 and 2009. The site which provides extensive reports online marketing and objective analysis of online market trends, states, «Not only are online shoppers spending more online, they are buying more different types of goods.
This opens new possibilities for creative Web retailers.» According to emarketer.com, small Web retailers can now emerge to meet the needs of shoppers. Overcoming IOMS can often mean the difference between success and failure for home-based and other internet-based companies. IOMS works like this: Someone decides to sell a product or service on the internet. A search on the major engines for the term «internet marketing» reveals a billion pages representing several hundred or thousands of gurus, coaches and wannabees. After selecting a few, scanning their Web sites and downloading ebooks, newsletters, special reports, 7 day e-mail courses, etc., months or even years later, they find themselves either still not doing anything or accomplishing very little towards establishing their internet business. Usually, they then drop out, all the time pooh-poohing accounts that people can make a bona fide living online. Veteran internet marketer Marlon Sanders (www.amazingformulacd.com) describes it like this in a recent issue of MILCERS Magazine: «Having the knowledge is what holds most people back. And yet, a lot of our members and customers feel overwhelmed, frustrated and confused. They have the knowledge but don’t know which method to use first, which method invalidates the other, and which marketing teacher invalidates the method taught by another marketing teacher.» You can find qualified help from almost every nook and cranny of the internet and therein lies the problem. A known factor stops anyone from acting on all of the available information, and that is put simply, a day consists of only 24 hours. Having at your fingertips a storehouse of information can build your personal library, but it may also cause the death of your dreams of internet success –- killing it off before it gets off the ground.
Let me explain it the way a higher education counselor might. Enrolling in a three-credit-hour class means you’ll sit in class for roughly three hours per week. However, if your goal is to make a high passing grade, you’ll need three hours of study time each week for every credit hour. A three-credit-hour class will actually take up nine total hours of your time weekly. If you take three classes with the same credit hours, you will take nine credit hours, and you will need to dedicate a total of 27 hours of your time weekly. The same applies with the study of internet marketing. The latest get-rich-quick schemes or techniques and promises of working one or two hours per day, often lure many would-be internet marketers who underestimate the time needed to understand and learn the real concepts provided. IOMS rears its head when it comes to internet mastery; what you need to do in order to get schooled and not just hit and miss gaining of some knowledge. The sooner you recognize its symptoms, the sooner you can get treatment (change your diet of overwhelming information and select two to three courses of study) and move past its stifling effects.
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