Eye tracking study reveals 12 website tactics Eye tracking studies have revealed valuable information about how people read and interact with websites. One study, Eyetrack III, published a summary of their eye tracking results for news sites. While this is just one eye tracking study focused on a particular type of site, I think there are instructive nuggets here for any informational website. In no particular order, here are 12 results I found particularly interesting. 1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures. This might be surprising for some people since the trend has been to add photos and graphics specifically to draw the eye. But the participants in this study looked at headlines, especially in the upper left of the page, before they looked at photos when they landed on a page. 2. This means you should front-load your headlines with the most interesting and provocative words. 3. The implication is the same as before. 4. No nonsense. 5. Be careful with this one. 6. 7. 8. 9. This is another one you have to be wary of. 10. 11. 12.
Emphasize meaning over price = More paid sales If you are a performing musician that sells CDs at your shows, please consider this: Terry McBride of Nettwerk told this story at a recent conference: A band he was managing (Griffin House) was doing the usual thing of selling CDs for $15. They'd mention it once or twice from the stage, and sell about $300 per night on average. He asked them to try a completely different approach: Say to the audience, “It's really important to us that you have our CD. It changes the request from a commerical pitch to an emotional connection. Terry said that the band did this for a while, and soon they were selling about $1200 per night on average, even including those people who took it for free! But the important part came next: Because every person left each show with a CD, they were more likely to remember who they saw, tell friends about it, listen to it later, and become an even bigger fan afterwards. Want to try it? So far this is just rough word-of-mouth from Terry, but it seems like it'd work.
Negotiation Tactics Disciplines > Negotiation > Negotiation Tactics In negotiation, there are many tactics that you may meet or use. They can be fair, foul or something in between, depending on the competitive or collaborative style of the people involved and the seriousness of the outcomes. All I've Got: Limit apparent availability. Sequential requests, Resistance to change, Defensive body language, Questioning, Fallacies
12 Mind-Blowing Statistics Every Marketer Should Know It's no secret that the marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the past few years as social and mobile technologies have gone from early-adopter novelties to mainstream essentials. Still, there are plenty of traditional marketing stalwarts out there who aren't buying all of the social media hype or can't convince their boss or marketing team to experiment in the brave new world of inbound marketing . So we've rounded up a dozen powerful stats that are sure to be eye-openers, if not total mind-changers. 1. 78% of Internet users conduct product research online. That means your website stands a good chance of being a prospect's "first impression." 2. 3. 78% of business people use their mobile device to check email. 4. 40% of US smartphone owners compare prices on their mobile device while in-store, shopping for an item. 5. 200 Million Americans have registered on the FTC's "Do Not Call" list. 8. 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog. 10.
109 Ways to Make Your Business Irresistible to the Media Thanks for visiting! Claim your free e-course: "5 Things You Can Do Today To Increase Your Visibility" find media-sexy angles for your bizcreate your own media list and save hundreds of dollarspitch your story to journalists, bloggers and other influencersalways be ready for media exposurewrite your own press release with our paint-by-numbers template Elena Verlee The Passionate Publicist 50 Awesome Posts on Email Marketing Learn the ins and outs of email marketing, including building your email list, crafting the best email content, email newsletter design, and more in this list of 50 awesome posts on email marketing from 2011. Yup, there’s 50 of them, and they’re all awesome. Bloggers, small or large businesses, and Internet marketers can all learn something from this entire collection… Getting Started with Email Marketing Hit the Internet Running: 9 Email Marketing Tips to Get You Going – It’s time to understand email marketing better and this post brings you a few basic email marketing tips that are the culmination of hours of research. Email Marketing Tools & Services Email Marketing Services Reviewed – Selecting an email marketing service can be daunting. Building an Email List Email Content Strategies Ethical Email Marketing Good Guys Go for Ethical Email Marketing – There are both ethical and non-ethical practices of email marketing. Email Templates & Design General Tips for Email Marketing
5 ways to make your content more shareable If you're disappointed people aren't sharing your content, you're not alone. You spend hours crafting content you think readers will love and then—crickets. There's good reason to want to fix that. Shareaholic's data—based on 200,000 websites that reach 300 million people each month—show that 32 percent of the traffic sent to our publisher websites last month was referral traffic. This is evidence of a change in content consumption behavior. Even then, it's not all about the magic solution of social timing. While there isn't a strict recipe for content people love to share, there are some ways to identify what will work for your audience: 1. Before you try a new content marketing strategy, analyze what content worked best for you in the past so you can replicate success. You don't have to completely forget about your most successful posts once you write them. 2. The key to writing online is to have a distinctive writing style. 3. 4. 5. Ginny Soskey is a marketing manager at Shareaholic.
What to Look for in a Marketing Automation Vendor Did you find answers to the 13 questions ahead of marketing automation? If you decided that marketing automation is for you, then you would want to evaluate vendors. The market is ripe with numerous products that offer varied features at different price points. In this post I give you a comprehensive checklist you can use to choose your marketing automation vendor. Visitor Identification Does the platform identify your website’s enterprise visitors? Email Marketing Can you create, import and segment lists? Campaign Management Can you run multi-channel marketing campaigns? Lead Nurturing Can you set up time-based and behavior-based drip campaigns? Lead Management Does it have lead capture capability? Reports Does it have a dashboard to give you an overview of all activities? CRM Integration Does the platform allow for bi-directional integration with your CRM system? Pricing Marketing automation products are mostly priced on a SaaS basis. After Sales How much customization is possible?
9 Free Tools to Analyze and Improve Your Website Google + Guest article by Eva Vesper of Web Hosting Search. If you're running a web site you need to know how it is doing, in particular how you're performing against your competitors, and where you can improve. These useful tools will help you to monitor and (hopefully) improve the performance of your site according to generally recognized web site marketing criteria. SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool If you would like to measure the strength of a certain page on a site, blog, or an entire domain, then check out the SEOmoz Trifecta Page Strength Tool (free registration required). Based on various factors you will see your impact within your industry and can compare it to others. Popuri If you think it's a lot of hassle to use several different tools Popuri might be what you're looking for. Popuri allows you to get a variety of information — from PageRank to del.icio.us bookmarks — all at once. Raven SEO Analyzer Mint Mint is a web analytics tool somewhat similar to Google Analytics. Crazy Egg
3 Things To Do Before Creating Your First Social Media Ad Before you jump in feet first and start advertising on social media platforms, take the time to determine these 3 key marketing objectives. October 23, 2013 Just when you thought you had a handle on advertising, they had to go and invent the Internet. While no one has completely figured out online advertising yet, one of the biggest areas of growth and opportunity for businesses is social media advertising—social networking is, after all, the most popular activity on the Internet. For business owners unfamiliar with advertising online, it can be difficult to know where to begin because it seems very complex. 1. Of course, each category can be broken down further. On the other side of the coin, there's response advertising. 2. 3. Accept that it's going to take a lot of trial and error to get the targeting right. But here's the thing: Most A/B testing is inconclusive! Once you have some provisional answers to the above questions, you can start creating your first ads. Photo: iStockphoto
68 Expert Tips to Create a Website That Builds Your Business Need a web design or internet marketing tip? Just reach into the jar. ATTENTION: Join us on 5/30/2013 for a FREE live webinar on Turning Likes Into Sales. Last month at the Social Media FTW conference flyte had a booth promoting our services. At our booth was a tip jar. Despite the fact that there were over 400 people at the conference, recent population surveys tell us that many more couldn’t make it. So, to share the knowledge, here’s our list of web design and internet marketing tips that appeared in the jar. Web Design Tips: To increase contact form conversion rates keep the number of fields to 5 or less.Good web design is not just about pretty pictures. Web Marketing Tips: Thanks to Ryan Goan for the web design tips, and Joan Crocker and Nicki Hicks for the web marketing tips. If you need any web design or internet marketing tips that are tailored to your business or non-profit, please reach out to flyte today. Rich BrooksDelegating Photo credit: Tina Burnell