Does Your Site Design Fit?

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Experiential marketing: the art and science of selling the experience. It’s like your time in starbucks. The essential product is just coffee, but you’re willing to pay so much more for the company, ambience and overall atmosphere. It’s cool to be seen in the atmosphere.

Your site design should create the desired experience for the target market as well. WordPress templates come in all shapes and forms, from magazine to two columns to even one single page templates. WordPress users are spoilt for choice with the variety of themes. The key is to design for your target market, but with your personality in the design as well. A site solely fitting your target market but one you go all erky about defeats the joy of owning your blog.

Marriage your personality and the target audience’s culture in your blog.

Adding An Index Page to Your Blog

The index page of a book serves a different purpose from the contents page. The contents page is for browsing by the unconverted. The index page is for targeted marketing to the converted.

Similarly, tags are the web’s way of creating an index of key terms for people who already know what they might be looking for in your blog. In WordPress, tagging is as easy as entering in the Tags frame located underneath your “Write Post” frame. Terms you could use to enter as tags include names of famous brands or persons and popular topics featured in your posting.

Web users are in transit, and will switch loyalty faster than you can spell the word when nothing on the site grabs their attention. Tags could just be one of your best ways to scream to them on terms which they might just be looking for, before they browse away from your site that is.

Should You Display Prices Online? (4 Tips Included)

The online platform gives much stress to a marketing component: Price. The consumer is empowered more than ever and can search for the lowest prices in the comfort of his home.

This then raises a question to you, the internet businessman. Should you display the prices of your products and services online?

Here are my guidelines:

1. Understand that by putting a price, you are priming your web reader to go look for another site to compare your prices against his.
2. If you decide to put a price, ensure that you state accompanying benefits which are hard to imitate. Saying “Best deals in town” is just a matter of copy and paste. Stating your qualifications and track record is another thing altogether.
3. Ensure that when prices are stated, you also display mechanisms on the site which allow the reader to make payments without hassle. Provide information on the purchasing. The logic is that you’ve displayed the price, and you’re now attempting to sell your pricing via your smooth transaction processes too.
4. If you’re bold enough, display price list comparisons. Focus on the intangible services.

If you’re unsure of whether you should state your pricing, google up your competitors and see if they state their prices.

Should You Write Posts in Advance?

The hook and the buzz. When your suppliers go on deserved breaks, should you have inventory at hand?

WordPress allows you to write your posts and schedule their dates and times of publishing. This means that you could go on a month of post-break, but your readers won’t notice because it seems you’re still posting daily, or frequently based on your presetted publishing date and time for each article that you’ve written in advance.

The question: should you? I’ve tried writing posts in advance and personally, I don’t like it, because one of the perks of blogging is that your posts are fresh, and you feel like a reporter reporting breaking news, even if the breaking news is about your cat. However if I do go on a holiday, my blog still should buzz with activity, and hence that might require writing in advance (like an inventory of posts). I might be able to overcome this if I inform my readers of the absence, the reason, and when I will return in advance. This could build anticipation (or you might just fade away from popularity).

So should you write posts in advance? My advice is to try it out. If you’re okay with it, then it might serve you well on days when you are blog dead. But if you’re like me and you can’t stand the post not being fresh…

Be connected wherever you are. What do you think?

Best Ad Placements (with Scientific Proof)

This is similar to shelf-space at your grocery store or real estate and property. The prime locations cost more cause they get noticed more.

Websites too have prime locations on their pages, and thanks to eye-tracking technology we can do less speculation on where these page spots are. Check out these graphics:

The red hues represent more intense eye viewing. What’s interesting is that the website on the left and centre have red hues especially at areas where the content is short and bulleted. More of the findings of this eye-tracking study here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Interestingly, the above maps well to Google Adsense’s recommendation for ad placement:

A good example of the science of marketing driving the art of marketing.

2 Plugins that Target New Readers

Have you ever been to a new department store before? You’re not familiar with the place, and the friendly staff is there to help you find your way. That’s nice.

20 visits later, that same staff gets on your nerves. The extra help has turned into extra irritation; he keeps greeting you the same way, stands near you as you’re browsing around, and keeps giving you a recommendation, clearly showing that he can’t remember who you are. You’re forgetable. That gets to you, more than the shopping experience itself.

Sites which offer great content can sometimes be like that department store. I’m talking about popups (often used to call the reader to subscribe to the newsletter). These popups can be effective in increasing site subscription, but after that, it can also turn off readership experience during subsequent visits. Your reader has subscribed, and yet he keeps seeing the same “Hello, thank you. Please subscribe. Here’s why…”, followed by a few lines of ridiculous claims that every other site can do too.

So the trick is to make these notifications targeted to new readers, cause these are whom these popups are supposed to be for in the first place right? Seth Godin says…

One opportunity that’s underused is the idea of using cookies to treat returning visitors differently than newbies. It’s more work at first, but it can offer two experiences to two different sorts of people. (Source: In the Middle, Starting)

Here are two WordPress plugins I recommend to offer that added differentiated service:

1. What Would Seth Godin Do Wordpress Plugin: - allows you to add a customized header at the beginning of your page. New visitors will see a different message (customizable) from regular readers.
2. Wordpress Popup Scheduler Plugin: - makes popups less annoying. You can set the popup (for subscription or special announcements) to appear only for new users at the specific page which they visit your site (landing page)

The “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin is a gem because you can also set a custom message for returning visitors (e.g. “Welcome back”).

Do you have your own favorite plugins that do targeting? Share them here.

2 Golden Rules of Blog Post Titles

The look of the product is the first impression that the consumer will form, and can make the difference between getting attention in the first place to a sales purchase.

The main first impression of your blog is your article title, and not necessarily the look of your blog itself. This is because your blog is being promoted primarily via the pieces of text that make up the different titles of your different articles. You are trying your best to get attention via that one magic article, with all the right content, packaged with a super sticky title that search engines will love and that will ignite the reader’s curiosity, just enough for him to click to be directed to your blog.

Here are 2 golden rules for constructing successful titles for your blog posts:

1. Ensure consistency on uppercase and lowercase. If you choose to keep your titles in uppercase always, then do so always. If you want to keep the first letters of each word (encluding the minor words like “of”) in uppercase, then do so for all other articles too. Don’t mix and match too much unless really necessary. It’s like a shoe store that seems to be on sale always: you’d start to think their sales strategy is plain lousy. In the blogging case: sloppy.
2. Try your best to add numbers intro your titles. If that doesn’t fit the content, then try adding any of the 5Ws or 1H (What, When… How). If that’s not possible, then make your title hook with so much curiosity that the reader just has to click on it to find out what on earth it’s about. Use power words.
3. (Yes I know I said 2 rules): Make your title dynamic and part of your posting. Its most basic role is to encourage the reader to click and read the first sentence of the first paragraph. At the other end, its most innovative use is when it’s able to serve more than just a title; for example, when the title and blog contents combine to surprise and excite the reader, like this post and paragraph.

So those were the two golden rules, plus one bonus rule for blog titles. Do you remember any catchy blog titles you’ve seen before? Share with me here.

How to Add Persuasion to Your Blog Posts

Persuasiveness has been a subject of study in marketing, particularly in the field of consumer behaviour for quite awhile. One of the forefront professors when it comes to persuasion is Robert Cialdini. I encourage you to read his masterpiece “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion“.

The main reason why your blog should be persuasive is so that readers feel the need to listen to you, giving you more loyal readers and greater readership. A key way to build persuasiveness is in the main product offering of the blog itself: the blog posts. Within the blog posts, the words you choose to communicate help build persuasiveness in your posts and in turn in your blog. We’re talking about the use of Power Words.

I’ve got just the juicy link you’re looking for: http://changingminds.org/techniques/language/persuasive/power_words.htm .

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PS: Was “juicy” persuasive enough? =p

10 Tips to Add Personality to Your Blog

Branding is an integral part of any product. A dimension of branding is product personality. Simply put it, if you asked someone to imagine your product as a person, they could without much difficulty.

Your blog should have personality too. That’s one of the key differences of blogs and regular websites: the blog speaks with a certain ego.

With that, here are my 10 tips to add personality to your blog:

1. Have a colour scheme to your blog. Colours help to increase familiarity, and people tend to like things that are familiar to them more than unfamiliar stuffs.
2. Put a picture of your face on your blog. To your reader, it’s comforting to know that you’re human.
3. Put a tagline or slogan below the title. It’s like small talk after the big speech (title).
4. Have a style of writing that is not too formal and fits your blog culture too.
5. Encourage and respond to comments in the comments section. Engage in the commentary.
6. Use “I” when it becomes personal. Use “We” when you can share the success with your readers.
7. Add a graphic signature after each posting. Here’s a sample by lorelle: lorelle.wordpress.com
8. Relate your daily experiences in your blogs where possible. Readers love the ability to peek into your life sometimes.
9. Have humour. A little sarcasm once in awhile can do some magic.
10. Ensure that it’s easy to figure out how to contact you. My own standard is that it should take only 1 click to get to a page where I can reach you, regardless of which page I’m at. It’s like customer service: I want to be able to press zero and speak to the operator at every number option I land myself in.

Do you have your own tips on building personality for blogs? Share them with me here.

How to Display Targeted Google Ads

Displaying ads that are relevant and targeted to your target audience is advantageous because

1. Targeted ads can be perceived as extra service instead of spam
2. Targeted ads are relevant, which increases the probability of ad effectiveness
3. Targeted ads can add more relevant content to your product and hence, build product credibility

Google Adsense is one of the most common ways to monetize your blog. They come in the form of text links or banner ads. The contents of these ads are controlled by the the Google Adsense algorithm which spiders your site for the most commonly used words and phrases, using this logic to decide what to display.

To display ads from Google Adsense that are relevant to your audience, the secret is in your blog itself. The more targeted your blog is, the more focused your writing becomes. This results in certain keywords which are closely related to each other to be used more frequently by you in a natural manner, allowing the Google Adsense system to make better guesses on what your website is about, and hence what ads should be displayed.

The more focused and niche your blog is, the more relevant your Adsense Ads. When your ads are relevant and matter to your reader, the better the reading experience and the higher the probability of earning from your monetized blog.

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