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.

How much time to put into Internet marketing?

Let's imagine you make the world's best cornish pasties and you're in the UK and really, you'd like top spot in Google.co.uk

Let's imagine you have twenty competitors who also want top spot.

If you are all equally skilled at Internet marketing, then the one who works hardest at it will get top spot.

But since we are not equally skilled, actually it's the one who works wisest and hardest that will win top spot.

The wisest SEO consultant who can get the lucky cornish pastie maker top slot will cost the most. Or, that cornish pastie maker will have to employ someone to do it, train them up to be the best, and then risk losing them.

The amount of resource (skill, time and money) it takes to get any position is determined by the resources of those in the positions above and below. Basically, to get 5th place, you have to have put more resource in over your lifetime than the company in 6th place, but less than the company in 4th place. That might not be much. Or it might be a lot. But it's related to the amount of profit it's possible to make for that keyphrase. Everyone wants a profitable business.

Pouring resources into Internet marketing affects your profit. Hopefully positively, because marketing begets sales begets profit, but certainly negatively at the start.

60% of all search traffic goes to the result in the top slot. And once there, with that traffic and awareness, people link to you, talk about you on social networks and so on, it's easier to stay there and harder for others to knock you off.

The link race

If you're going to take the top slot from another company, that takes a sustained effort.

For instance, one important factor Google takes into account when deciding your position in the search results is how many inbound links that page has, that is, how many websites link to the page under consideration.

Internet marketers know this, of course, so they create link building programmes for their clients. Your target company in that top slot might be doing what it takes to get ten new inbound links every day.

If you also get ten inbound links every day, that's not enough. Maybe you'll get second place, but you won't get first place.

What if they've been doing it for a year, so they have 3,650 inbound links and you have none? You'll need twenty new inbound links every day for a year to catch them up.

That costs money. You need the resource to sustain that. And if, ten months in, your competitor realises you're catching up and raises their game, starts doing twenty links a day, you have to raise your game too. It's just, they are in the top slot, they are continually funded by the results from the top slot.

The costs of Internet marketing aren't set by me, they are set by your competitors. You can have a budget for Internet marketing and still fall back down the search engine positions if your competitors are doing more than you. Without Internet marketing effort, you would have fallen further and faster.

How can you win?

Do your first battles in the easier places, the long tail keyphrases. Establish a number one slot for a less competitive keyphrase. Then another. Then another. Until eventually you have them surrounded.

Google.co.uk is not the only search engine.

Conversion might be more important. Your competitor is probably spending most of their budget on getting that top slot. I'm sure they are very proud of it, and they will want to defend it. They have feedback that SEO works, so they will do more of the same. But what if they convert 1% of their visitors to a £10 sale, while you convert 2% of your visitors to a £20 sale? You are getting four times the benefit from your traffic. You can sustain your battle for the number one slot. You're changing the rules on them.

Getting to the top of the search engine is great. Conversion and the building of lifetime customer value is probably what pays for you to get there.

Ultimately, the winner will be the business that converts visitors to value most efficiently.

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