Pinterest and the B&B

You may have heard of Pinterest. As its name suggests, it provides you with virtual pinboards to which you can attach images you like as you browse the Internet.

It's grown in popularity very quickly, coming seemingly from nowhere to rival Facebook and Twitter.

So what's the big deal? Partly, it's the interface, the way it works. It's super easy, you just add the Pinterest button to your web browser as part of signing up, and then whenever you see an image you like on the Internet, you can Pin it by clicking the button. You can create more than one 'board', so you can have the one of images of kitchens you like because you're planning on redecorating, the one of kittens because you like those, and another for charcoal drawings because that's your hobby.

When you sign up to Pinterest, it works out who your friends are based on your Facebook and/or Twitter account, and links you up. So your friends can see the images you Pin, and if they like one, they can rePin it or Like it. When you go to Pinterest, you can see images your friends have Pinned, and you can do the same.

During setup, Pinterest wants to connect you to various hot celebrity pinners. I'd reject all of those, assuming you have friends in Facebook or Twitter. Pinterest is full of, essentially, nice and tidy, aspirational white American women wanting to share their fabulous ideas for making apples look like dancing elves for children's parties. That's great, but I'd recommend you find your own people to hang around with.

So, how do we use Pinterest to publicise our B&B or small business?

Pinterest boards are public, here's mine for Scarborough. Every day, I search Google images for 'Scarborough', and look for images from the last 24 hours. To do that for your own location, type it into Google to search as normal, click images down the left hand side, and also in that column you should see that you can select images from just the last 24 hours. Click an image you like to check the website it's from is OK, and if so, click your Pinterest button to Pin the image from the site into your board for your location. Sometimes the image has moved, but mostly that will work. Give the image a description hopefully involving your target search phrase and you're done.

If you search Google for "pro ginger hair" you'll probably see a Pinterest Board I created to provide positive images of ginger hair, so your Pinterest Board can rank for you.

Anyway, here's the thing. If a Pinterest user clicks an image, they see a bigger image, and if they click that, they go right through to the website.

If you're the website, that's traffic .. right?

So as a general rule, use plenty of great pictures. See if local photographers want to throw you some images in return for credit (I'd recommend not going further than providing text credit or credit on the image itself, and then the link to the photographer's site would be from a credits page, otherwise you start to leak PageRank (and traffic) off your page.

Take photographs yourself, apps such as Instagram are great fun and make photo sharing quick and easy.

With lots of great pics on your website, someone looking to shortlist their B&Bs in Scarborough may well start a Pinterest Board.

As well as a board for your location, you may want to start other boards for whatever your area is famous for, whether it's surfing, art, cake or the northern lights, people wanting those things will have you in mind, and if you provide a Pinterest Board you can collect that traffic and guide it back to you.

Practically, if you are collecting surfing pics from your town, that's great, but to get traffic back to your website you'll need some pics on your own website. So you'll need to create a page on your website for 'surfing' in which you talk about it, link out to providers and provide some great local pictures and videos.

So then your Pinterest Board will comprise some pics from other places, and some from yours. (Pinterest allows you to pin videos too, btw).

Now, if and when someone likes one of the surfing pics you've put on your Pinterest Board, you can click through to their Pinterest site and like some of their boards. What I tend to do is to click through to all three of the people THEY have pinned from and try to find a board I like. That way, all four people will get notified I've been and liked one or more of their pics. If you happen to be able to follow a surfing or beach life path then you'll get people liking your images, seeing your B&B, realising they can come and surf and .. that's business.

Now it may be that you have a hobby of collecting wedgewood, so, off you go with that. People like people who are like themselves, so given the choice of 100 B&Bs, if I collect wedgewood and you collect wedgewood, that can only be good.

Locally here in Scarborough there's a hotel that markets itself as being gay friendly and also they are big fans of the theatre, so loads of scope there for Pinterest boards.

It's early days for Pinterest, but there's bound to be more buttons and web gadgets to come. As I write, there's not even an official app. But for now, it's all a bit exciting, just dive in and see what happens.

Teasing graphic designers

I've been teasing graphic designers and, really, challenging the status quo a little by creating websites with no graphic design input whatsoever.

I recognise that our sight is our primary sense, and that first impressions count. But I think people use the web like they use a cash machine .. to get what they want quickly. Good graphic design can help with that, sometimes it gets in the way though, and basically when compared to things that help the user get what they want .. like usability and accessibility, information architecture and SEO and other traffic generation activities that help the site get found in the first place, graphic design should be a very small part of the budget because it's really not that important.

A friend challenged me. He said of TweetCloser.com when it was black Times Roman on a white background with no colours or logos at all that it desperately needed graphic design input now because "if I wanted a list of countries I could go to Wikipedia" .. that's not graphic design, that's usability. I can't remember the other issues, but none of them were graphic design ones.

Anyway, TweetCloser is such a challenge. It's a single page, but I've been testing. There are variations. Some of you will just see text, and some will see a photograph too. The former stay for 15 seconds on average, the latter 2 minutes 20 seconds, 9 times longer.

Again, that photograph is photography, not really graphic design.

But if you've read the previous blog about whether adding pages to a small website is worth it it becomes clear that there is clear justification for me to add some more pages to this website.

Hang on. That's really curious. I multiplied the time visitors spent on an ecommerce site by 9 or 10 times by changing the text on the page. And in that previous blog I got the same result by adding pages.

Perhaps the rule is this: if people don't perceive there's anything to stick around for, they're gone. But if you can get them to stick around whether that's by a photograph, a better headline, or by demonstrating there's more to explore, they'll give you ten times more time on your site. It's about getting over the hump, getting them not to bounce.

This might be obvious to you, but I'm an engineer, I proceed on evidence and science. That's a good thing, it means if you engage me to help with your website, I'll only do things that are proven to work.

I wanted to take this opportunity to gather some evidence about the most minimal websites, because often that's all people can afford. I wanted to be able to say "yes, that will cost you £100 but it will make you £1,000" or whatever.

So. I hear you. Next up .. more pages for the million tweaks website.

A Million Tweaks is a consultancy specialising in helping online businesses evolve towards best Internet marketing practice.

Are extra pages worth it (for a very small website)

A one-page website can be cool. If you're a plumber, and your web developer charges .. well let's play with some figures, £300 for the first page, and £100 for each page thereafter, £300 for a website seems fair enough, why add a contact page and, say, an about-us page?

I just took a site from one page to eight pages. It's too early for it to affect the traffic, but visitors now spend 907% longer on the site (2 minutes 55 seconds as opposed to 17 seconds), and the bounce rate has gone from 69% to 32%.

This site was getting about 25 visitors a week. So rather than being in front of prospects for a total of 7 minutes, this business is now in front of its prospects for 72 minutes per week.

I'd say it might be hard to replicate that sort of increase using SEO. And of course now, if I were to, say, triple this business' natural search traffic, the results of my efforts are multiplied by ten.

Conversion specialists would like you to believe that conversion comes first. That's fine, this would back that up. But you do need some traffic in order to test. So conversion specialists are living in the world of big websites. For small businesses who perhaps don't have much traffic at all, some traffic is necessary to start with, otherwise how will you know when a website change has had a good or a bad effect?

So for small businesses and startups, a little traffic is needed first, then conversion work, then serious SEO and other traffic generation.

You can, of course, buy real traffic for test purposes using Pay Per Click ads.

A Million Tweaks is a consultancy specialising in helping online businesses evolve towards best Internet marketing practice.

A Million Tweaks is an experiment

A Million Tweaks is an experiment. It's an attempt to prove that just by writing and blogging about what you do, being just a little active on social networks and evolving your website according to what your visitors tell you, you can build a great business from scratch.

Of course that's not really all that's required. I have to know my business, I have to be able to write clearly and engagingly. But to try to evolve a business from next to nothing, to build a mammal from a single cell, that's what I'm trying to achieve here. Just to prove a point.

And barring the initial low-key announcement to my friends on Facebook (only three of whom fanned my page), I've not used my connections. This is from scratch.

So, this is going to start slowly.

But I did want to say that I now get a visitor a day. I mean, wow :-) , but it's up on one every three days just a couple of months ago. My bounce rate is down from 90% to 70%. And the average length of time people are spending on my site is over 2 minutes, up from 6 seconds before.

So thanks people. Why don't you say hello on Facebook or Twitter?

A Million Tweaks is a consultancy specialising in helping online businesses evolve towards best Internet marketing practice.

How to use Delicious

Most people save some bookmarks in their browser. That's fine but .. your home bookmarks aren't available to you if you're at work, for instance, and probably won't survive when you upgrade your computer.

Using Delicious, you can save your bookmarks on the Internet, so you can get to them from anywhere and they do survive a computer upgrade.

What if you could see the bookmarks of others in your class, or workplace, or others in your profession? With Delicious, you can.

My habit is to save great things I find to Delicious through the day. But once a day in the morning, I look in my 'network' to find the most bookmarked website from the previous day.

I started to build a network of like-minded souls by checking who else has bookmarked the things I bookmark. But nowadays I just check who's bookmarked the best thing from yesterday.

Looking at the list of people who have bookmarked a site I like, I choose people who tag well and write their own description. I'm thinking they perhaps take more care over what they are doing. I click them and see if I would like the sort of things they tag. I check their top tags to see if we share similar interests. If it's all good, I add them to my network.

Once I had a few people in my network that morning-check thing started to work. Now I get a bit of inspiration every morning, and it's really helping me at work. I'm discovering great how-to's and fabulous resources I'll use for new projects.

It ends up more like a daily magazine that's customised for my interests, whether that's web development, drumming, local stuff, CFS or politics.

All in all it feels like I'm giving back to the Internet, contributing my votes so others can find great online resources too.

Try it. Open an account and start. And if you want me in your network, this is me.

A Million Tweaks is a consultancy specialising in helping online businesses evolve towards best Internet marketing practice.