Best Ad Placements (with Scientific Proof)

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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 Up-Sell With WordPress

Up-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting higher priced products or services to a customer who is considering a purchase. It is often done at the point of purchase and the item suggested is related to the item the customer is currently purchasing.

So how do you take the concept of upselling in blogging? A dimension to upselling in blogs is to think of the blog article the reader is viewing as the item he is purchasing, and as he finishes the item, he is about to make the purchase. Hence to up-sell articles, ideally you’d want to have similar posts that you offer to that reader after he finishes your article.

That’s exactly the name of this plugin: Similar Posts. It allows you to display a list of posts which are related or similar to the current post, based on a series of calculations done by the plugin already. I’ve used this plugin on a couple of my sites and so far, its suggestions have been an up-selling dream. The reader is tempted to click on one of the other articles (”You might also like to read…”)  the plugin recommends after having read the intended posting (since he finished reading, he has shown considerable interest in the topic). This means a higher “average time on site” statistic, and greater customer involvement.

Plugin-in page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/similar-posts/

Author’s page: http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/

How To Cross-Sell With WordPress

Cross-selling is a marketing term for the practice of suggesting related products or services to a customer who is considering buying something. Cross-selling enables your business to promote your other products and at the same time, help customers solve problems which they might not have identified (or remembered) at the point of transaction.

A cool plugin that helps you do cross-selling with WordPress is Cross-linker. This gem allows you to set-up words which are automatically hyperlinked to desired URLs as indicated by you. So for example, if you have a site on Marketing and another on Motivation, you could automatically link all “motivation” terms in site A to your targeted site B (as I have done with this posting), hence driving traffic to your other sites too.

Here are some other suggestions on how to use this plugin:

1. Linking terms and abbreviations you often use to information sites explaining these words. Readers will appreciate the understanding.
2. Linking certain keywords to your products page.
3. Identifying the most popular postings you have, followed by linking words to these postings. These popular postings are magnets which build credibility. Direct readers to these posts too.

Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker/

Author’s Page: http://www.web-developers.net/