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A Guest Post by Warren Davies from GenerallyThinking.com.

It’s pretty clear that if we want to be pro bloggers, we can’t rely purely on producing fantastic content. We have to optimise our pages for search engines, build backlinks from relevant sources, as well as putting our heart and soul into our content to make it as valuable as possible for the reader.

But what if the reader gets what they want from the post and then leaves? Well, that’s nice of us to solve their problem, but it’s not going to help us earn the money and freedom we want!

We need to entice first time visitors further into our blogs, expose them to its different areas and articles, make them feel like a kid in a candy store when they see all the information inside!

One way we can do this is through a landing page analysis – to see which pages people are landing on, checking the metrics for these pages, and then optimising them so that they are better placed to convert first time visitors into regular readers. Here’s a 4 step plan.

Step 1 – Identify Problem Pages

This is easy to do with Google Analytics – just go to Content -> Top Landing Pages, and check the chart at the bottom of the page. These are the pages that visitors are most likely to enter your site through. Now check the column to the far right – Bounce Rate. This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site without looking at another page on your blog. They hit the landing page, get what they want (or not) then leave.

If you have any high bounce rates in this section (80%+), you’re missing out on further page views from these first-time visitors. This is vital; pulling readers further into your site is essential to converting visitors to subscribers and/or sales.

Step 2 – Analysis

Before we start optimising the page, we need to do some more research. Here are the two main things you can do:

• Click on the name of each post, and look at the Time on Page. Is it significantly lower than the time it takes to read the article? If so, it’s likely that the reader is not finding the answer to the question they had when they clicked through.
• Ask them. Set up a Poll on the page, entitled “Help me improve this article: What information were you asking for?” Give a few options, and don’t forget to add ‘something else’ as an option. Alternatively, a simple “Did you find the information you were looking for?” can be useful. Experiment with putting it at the top and bottom of the post, to see if people are reading the whole article before bouncing.
• Check the entrance sources for the post on Google Analytics. Are people mostly finding the article through Google images? This might account for the high bounce rate.

Step 3 – Optimise

You should now have some ideas on how you might optimise the article. Perhaps there’s more information you want to add, maybe you want to shorten it, or then again maybe you want to make it more appealing and add more images. Then again, maybe the site design is unattractive, or there are too many ads or other annoying things on the page. Whatever you do, don’t assume; test.

Also, do ensure that there are links and pathways to other content on your site! This is essential. Maybe your related posts plug-in and category list are not effective – you might have to tell/coax your reader into looking deeper.

If you have several ideas on how to optimise the page, you may want to use Google Web Optimiser to run several new versions of the page. Each visitor will be randomly directed to one of your test pages, and you can compare the metrics against each other at the end of the test.

Step 4 – Check Results

One week should be a good enough time frame to compare the before and after effects. Going back to Google Analytics, bring up the Content Detail page for the entrance article you’ve been playing with. Set the date for the week leading up to the day you edited the page (but not including that day). Copy and paste the stats into a text editor or Excel; the main ones you’re interested in are Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Exit %. Then set the date for the seven days after you optimsed the article. Again, copy and paste the results, and compare.

How did you do? If you were successful, you may have seen an increase in the Time on Page – although maybe not – but certainly a decrease in the Bounce Rate and Exit %. This would indicate that more readers are looking further into your site – congratulations!

What if there was no difference? Then go back to step 2. Conduct further research on how you might improve the page. Ensure you have links to other content on your blog, and that the wording of your article makes these links seem like essential further reading.

What’s a ‘good’ bounce rate?

Unfortunately, it’s impossible to give a one-size-fits-all figure to aim for. It depends on many factors. A bounce could mean the visitor literally only wanted one piece of information, and left because they got it. The ambiguity of the keyword you’re targeting will be important. If you’re getting a high bounce rate from an 8-word keyphrase, it’s probably a worse situation than the same bounce rate for a 2-word keyphrase. Your domain name could play a role too – ‘Problogger’ is pretty clear, but would an article on, say, ‘marketingtips’ be specific to blogging, or to offline marketing? Maybe you’d have to read it to find out.

Having said that, bounce rates over 80% generally mean there’s work to be done.

Landing Page Analysis – A Case Study

I performed a landing page analysis analysis on GenerallyThinking.com, my psychology blog. My top landing page by far was my post on personal strengths and weaknesses. This article proved hugely successful with search engines, and accounts for 25% of the overall traffic of the site! However, the bounce rate and time on page were dismal, as you can see below:

• Time on Page – 00:01:35
• Bounce Rate – 86.67%
• Exit % – 82.98%

I ran a WP-Poll asking what people were looking for at the bottom of the page, and got no results. I put it to the top of the page, and got a few replies, but still not many. Clearly, people weren’t reading to the bottom – there was a need unfulfilled. The data I collected from the poll indicated that people wanted more information on strengths than I was offering – the article was too focused on weaknesses.

So, I ripped out the section on how to manage and work around your weaknesses completely, and posted it as a new article. Then I re-wrote the post as a portal, giving a basic overview of personal strengths and weaknesses, including how and why they could be identified – but not giving too much away. I preferred to point to other articles on my site that cover these topics in depth.

I uploaded the new page, waited, and then tested the results as described above. Here they are:

• Time on Page – 00:02:31
• Bounce Rate – 66.67%
• Exit % – 66.20%

Fantastic! Time on Page increased by a minute, bounce rate reduced by 20% and Exit % reduced by nearly the same amount. A little more tweaking and playing with images might improve things further.

(By the way, if Darren will forgive the flagrant self-promotion that article’s worth a read actually – what successful entrepreneur would say personal development is not an important part of their craft?)

How much could you improve your site by performing an entrance analysis? Remember – don’t make assumptions; test and measure everything!

Warren Davies is a positive psychology student at the University of East London, who runs a psychology blog at GenerallyThinking.com.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

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Perform a Landing Page Analysis on your Blog

For those of you who are new SBSM readers & subscribers, here’s a list of noteworthy posts you probably missed from one year ago. I try to put together a post like this each month to introduce new readers to old content that might be worth reading.

• Hey Google: Not Having an XML Sitemap is Not an Error
• Keyword Discovery adds Question Phrases
• Case Study: Power of a Blog Comment
• Why Trust Matters & How To Earn It
• Video is the Hot Tactic for 2009
• 2008 Small Business SEM Blog Stats

Previous Flashbacks

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SBS Flashback: January 2009

Related posts:

1. SBS Flashback: August 2008
2. SBS Flashback: January 2008
3. SBS Flashback: December 2008

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SBS Flashback: January 2009

A long rumored Harvard study once found that the 3% of the population which makes the effort to write down their goals makes over ten times as much as the other 97% combined. While further research has shown that this study was never actually conducted, it has spurred a number of other research tests to see how one can maximize their chances of achieving their goals.

One of these research studies was conducted by Dominican University, where participants were divided into five groups, one which simply thought about their goals, one which wrote their goals down, one which wrote their goals and formulated action steps to reach these goals, one which wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, and sent their goals and steps to a friend, and a final group which wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal.

The test was conducted over the period of a month so it was for short term goals and a total of 149 participants were part of the study.

The research findings showed that of the participants in the study who simply thought about their goal scored a 4.28 on a scale of 8 in terms of achieving their goal where 0 is no progress made and 8 is goal fully accomplished. However, those in the last group who wrote down their goals, formulated action steps, sent their goals and steps to a friend, and created weekly reports on progress towards the goal scored 7.6.

Hence, this research supported the positive effective of accountability as those who sent progress reports to friends accomplished more than those who did not. The positive effect of written goals was also supported as those who wrote down their goals accomplished significantly more than those who did not.

So, what is the moral of the story and how does it apply to web entrepreneurs and bloggers? Well, if you want to accomplish your goals, find out what you want to do, both in the short term and long term. Once you have a list of goals, write them down and create a series of action steps that you must do reach your goals. Lastly find a family member or friend and share your goals and the steps that you will take to accomplish your goals with them. Then check in with them on a weekly basis to share the progress you have made towards reaching your goals.

This post was written by Aditya Mahesh, founder of AMBeat Wire, the ultimate social news website for web entrepreneurs and bloggers.

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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How To Double Your Chances of Achieving Your Goals

When many people think about search engine optimization, they assume that is something that they can handle on their own. They assume that they can simply tweak the wording on their respective websites and they will automatically skyrocket to the top of the search engine results page.

Well, it’s not quite that simple. In fact, there is a lot that you can do with search engine optimization that has absolutely nothing to do with tweaking your own websites and webpages. To prove this point, the folks at SEO Arbiter decided to order this review, illustrating just what is possible when you make use of their SEO services.

Professional Search Engine Optimization

As you can probably figure out, SEO Arbiter specializes in the search engine optimization of their client’s websites. You can get one-on-one consultation and they will recommend a plan and a strategy to rank for your most highly treasured keywords.

They take a comprehensive approach to the search engine optimization, approaching the project from a variety of different directions. Based on the page with the plans, they utilize techniques like directory submissions, article marketing, social bookmarking, and more.

The Power of Off-Page SEO

In case you haven’t figured it out for yourself already, search engine optimization off your own webpage is just as important (if not more important) than the SEO you do on your own webpage. My own minor SEO victory was achieved largely with off-page strategies.

For the purposes of this review, SEO Arbiter ran a case study on John Chow dot Com, trying to improve its search engine optimization for a number of keywords. Part of the technique involved a lot of article submission.

Shown above is one of the articles that was submitted to Ezine Articles on the subject of authority sites and blogging for money. As you can imagine, this article came with a couple of links back to John Chow dot Com using the targeted anchor text.

SEO Arbiter submitted a total of 51 articles specifically for this purpose. Those articles have been viewed 1,779 times with 63 clicks to John Chow dot Com.

The Proof is in the Pudding

So, how did they do? After almost two months of search engine optimization for John Chow dot Com, SEO Arbiter was able to propel the blog into the top ten results in Google for five critical keyword phrases.

For some of these, John Chow dot Com was able to move up between 14 and 25 positions in the search engine, but the SEO pushed the blog up more than 91 positions for “earn money blogging.” That’s quite the achievement in a relatively short amount of time.

You can see that for some of the other highly competitive keyword phrases, SEO Arbiter was not able to get into the top ten, but the rankings did improve substantially.

Exclusive Offer for John Chow dot Com Readers

Do you want to get the same kinds of results for your own website or blog? SEO Arbiter is extending a special offer for readers of John Chow dot Com.

Normally, you have to pay the $250 startup fee and then a $500 monthly fee for the SEO Arbiter service. However, you can have your first month of service for free if you simply pay the startup fee.

This offer is limited to the first 20 people who sign up through the special link and it expires on January 8, 2010. Based on the real world example of what SEO Arbiter was able to achieve for John Chow dot Com, it looks like they know their stuff.

CLICK HERE FOR ONE FREE MONTH WITH SEO ARBITER

Discover the SECRETS I’ve Learned to go from zero a month to over $40,000 a month from blogging. Download Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com for FREE!

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Search Engine Optimization Case Study with SEO Arbiter

Finding Readers for a blog is one of the biggest challenges that bloggers face – as a result we cover the topic quite a bit here on ProBlogger. As part of this week’s Best of ProBlogger 2009 series today I’d like to share a list of 13 tips and tutorials related to the topic of finding readers for a blog that I hope will help you in your planning for next year.

1. The Myth of Great Content Marketing Itself
2. 9 Things to Do to Make Sure Your Next Blog Post is Read by More Than Your Mom
3. 5 Ways to Get Your Blog Indexed by Google in 24 Hours
4. SEO Tips for Bloggers
5. How Not to Promote Your Blog: Top 10 Broken Blog Promotion Strategies
6. How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Blog
7. The Day 250,000 People Showed Up at My Blog Case Study
8. 6 Reasons Your Blog Traffic Might Be Declining and What to Do About It
9. How to Promote a Blog with Social Media
10. 13 Tips for Marketing Your Business With Your Blog
11. A Secret to Writing Posts that Go Viral on Twitter
12. 11 Ways to Increase Your Chances of Being Linked to By a Blogger
13. My Real Secret to Growing Traffic to a Blog

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

13 Tutorials to Help You Grow Your Blog Readership Next Year

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13 Tutorials to Help You Grow Your Blog Readership Next Year

Conferences are a hub of learning, growth and progress in the SEO industry. They’re part of the glue that connects members of the community, offering a cherished opportunity for forging relationships and friendship.

And no matter how many conferences they’ve been to, most attendees almost always walk away from a conference with new professional knowledge in their head or with new business connections stored in the BlackBerry.

But if there’s a lesson in human nature to be learned from time spent at a conference, it’s that when interacting with an audience there are two channels to pay attention to today. Forget the fact that you’re interacting face to face, because there’s also a conversation happening right behind your back.

In a blog post for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Marc Parry writes about tweckling, or heckling a speaker on Twitter. It was during a higher education conference last month that one episode of tweckling lit up Twitter like a Christmas tree, the episode becoming the poster child for the dangers of disgruntled audience. Scratch that. The audience didn’t even have cause to be disgruntled. They were just bored.

Bored and looking for entertainment with other sympathetic or tortured audience members on Twitter.

The incident was enough to make conference organizers consider new ways to integrate the Twitter stream into the event.

Steven W. Tally, a strategic marketing consultant at the university, points out that people are accustomed to commenting about articles they read online. Now they want to comment in real time about speakers, too.

“We’re going to have to get used to the fact that you’re not speaking to a group now — you’re really leading a conversation,” Mr. Tally says. “And if you’re not listening to the other people who are participating in that conversation, it’s not going to have a good outcome for you.”

Now take a trip with me over to the Econsultancy blog for their analysis of Razorfish’s Digital Brand Experience Report. After surveying a thousand Internet users about how they engage with brands, the findings showed what we all could have guessed: digital interactions matter.

According to the study, 65 percent of participants said they made a first purchase from a brand due to an online interaction. And a whopping 97 percent said that their decision to buy or not by a product has been influenced by an experience online.

Mosey over to Marketing Pilgrim to read up on PostRank’s blog reader engagement study. The gist is that on-site engagement is dropping off while off-site engagement continues to climb. Brands may have enjoyed the measure of control afforded by keeping the conversation on-site, but that’s not really up to them anymore.

Learn the lesson taught by poor Mr. Galper at the higher-education conference. No, not whatever he was sharing in his keynote presentation that day. I’m talking about the lesson being acted upon by the conference organizers in the fallout of that infamous presentation. In planning for future conferences, some organizers would like to see Twitter feeds broadcast on the screen as the speaker talks. Not only would it lessen the chance of snarky anonymous Twitter commenters bashing the event, it could prompt speaker-audience interactions.

There’s no ignoring the online channels, and why would you want to? At best, you gain customers, visibility and brand credibility. At worst, you become the laughing stock of the playground. And there’s little consolation in the fact that you didn’t know they were calling you names in the first place.

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Sticks & Stones May Break Your Bones But Ignoring the Online Convo May Crush You

A Guest Post by Marelisa Fábrega. Image by drmama.

Do you have a really good idea which you want to go viral? Is there a behavior you’re trying to modify in your blog readers, such as encouraging them to save, eat healthy, or start an exercise program? Are you looking for ways to persuade readers to purchase an affiliate product you’re promoting? If your answer is “yes” to any of these, then you need to make your writing stickier. In this post I’m going to share with you six principles which you can begin to apply right away to make your articles as sticky as urban myths, Aesop’s fables, the “Don’t mess with Texas” slogan, and JFK’s “man on the moon” speech.

In the bestseller “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die”, the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, explain that sticky ideas–ideas that spread, that are remembered, and that people act upon–have six traits in common. Sticky ideas are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and they’re told as stories (the authors use the acronym “SUCCESs”, with the last s omitted). Here’s an explanation of each of these principles:

Keep It Simple: It’s the Economy, Stupid

In order to make your message sticky, it has to be simple. This means that it has to convey a single, core idea that is meaningful and easy to understand. You need to make sure that your core idea stands out clearly from the very beginning, instead of being buried under an avalanche of facts, details, and abstractions. Keep in mind that simplifying your message doesn’t mean that you dumb it down; it means that you strip an idea to its most critical essence.

In addition, you need to prioritize. Psychology research shows that choice can hinder decision making. In one experiment cited by the Heath brothers, researchers took a group of college students who were planning to spend their evening studying and offered them a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend a lecture by an author they admired. Almost 80% decided to skip the study session and attend the lecture instead.

However, when a second “fun” choice was added—watching a foreign film that was getting great reviews-only 60% opted for one of the “fun” choices and 40% chose to study. That is, when students had to choose between two “fun” options, more students chose to study as compared to the scenario in which they only had one “fun” option.

When you have several good ideas about a topic it’s difficult to pick the single most valuable idea and make it as sticky as possible, but that’s what works. Successful trial lawyers know that if they argue ten points, even if they’re all good, when jurors get back to the jury room they won’t remember any of them. James Carville summarized the most critical issue of the 1992 U.S. presidential election when he said: “It’s the economy, stupid”. Narrowing the issues to that one sentence stuck with voters and helped Clinton get elected.

Another way to keep it simple is by using analogies so that you can capitalize on what your readers already know. Think about the following movie pitch: Speed is “Die Hard on a bus”. How can you compare your idea to something your audience is already familiar with to help create hooks so that they will remember your idea more easily? Analogies allow you to say a lot with a little.

Make it Unexpected: Lose Weight by Eating Fast Food

With all of the information that’s available, one of the biggest hurdles you’ll have to face is capturing your readers’ attention. You can get their attention by taking an unexpected approach. Then, you hold their interest by making them curious. Behavioral economists argue that when we have a gap in our knowledge, we strive to resolve it. We’ve all stayed up late at night reading to discover who did it in a murder novel, or watching a movie to see how the conflict is resolved. Make your readers curious from the very beginning of your article by raising questions they don’t know the answer to, and then gradually filling in the gaps as they read along.

As an example of doing something unexpected, Chip and Dan refer to City Year. City Year is a nonprofit organization which offers 17 to 24-year-olds the opportunity to engage in 10 months of full-time community service. Here’s a slogan that they use: “We envision a world in which, one day, the most common question asked of a 17-year-old in this country will be, ‘Where are you going to do your year of national service?’” That’s a powerful, unexpected view of what the world could be like, and it gets people’s attention.

Another message that was unexpected was the one used in the Subway Guy marketing campaign. Jared was a college student who weighed about 430 pounds; he created a “subway diet” for himself and started walking every day to his local Subway Restaurant to have a subway for lunch and one for dinner. With this diet, Jared lost over 240 pounds. Subway came across Jared’s story and they turned it into a marketing campaign which was incredibly successful and which increased their sales dramatically. People were captivated by Jared’s story, in part, because of the unexpectedness of someone losing weight by eating fast food.

Make it Concrete: What Do 37 Grams of Fat Look Like?

In order to make sure that an idea can be grasped and remembered later, you have to make it concrete. If you describe something in a way that allows your readers to see, touch, or imagine it in their mind’s eye, the chances are much better that you’ll communicate successfully with them.

In 1961 U.S. President John F. Kennedy announced the following: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth”. This was a concrete vision: it was very clear about what it required—get a man on the moon and bring him back safely–and when it would happen. It captured the imagination of the American people for almost a decade.

The Heath brothers explain that Kennedy’s speech would have had much less impact if he had said something abstract like the following: “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” What does that even mean? Make sure that you make your ideas tangible, instead of delivering them in abstract, difficult to understand terms.

Here’s a second example offered by the Heath brothers of how to be concrete: A health organization was trying to convey to the movie-going public how incredibly unhealthy movie popcorn popped in coconut oil was. A typical bag of popcorn contained 37grams of saturated fat, nearly double the recommended daily allowance. But movie-goers weren’t interested in statistics. The health organization had to find a way to turn the abstract “37 grams of fat” into something concrete which would get the public to stop eating the harmful popcorn.

So what did they do? They called a press conference and laid out all of the following in front of the television cameras: a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings. Then they explained that a bag of popcorn had more fat than all of those meals, combined. If you think this was tangible enough to get the public to demand that movie theatres stop popping their popcorn in coconut oil, it was.

Make it Credible: The Surgeon General says . . .

If a message doesn’t seem credible it will be discounted, even if it’s perfectly true. Credibility can be achieved through status–such as citing a study conducted by a Nobel Prize winner–through prior performance, through the use of convincing detail, or through the appropriate use of statistics. When you use statistics, contextualize them in terms that are more everyday and human. A good example of making statistics more accessible is “The World of 100”, which presents different data about the world population in terms of a village of 100 people.

In addition, you can encourage your audience to test out your ideas for themselves. Chip and Dan explain that in the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics on the economy. Instead, he encouraged voters to test the effectiveness of the Carter presidency for themselves by telling them: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

Appeal to People’s Emotions: Make Them Care

Information makes people think, but emotion makes them act. You’ve probably heard of urban myths such as “the kidney-heist”and the Halloween candy tamperingstory. How do stories such as these spread across the country—and even the world–despite a lack of evidence? Why are they remembered and believed by millions? These stories are sticky. And one of the reasons that they’re so sticky is because they evoke emotion: in the case of urban myths, they evoke fear.

The authors of “Made to Stick” explain that in order for people to take action—donate money to your cause, buy your product, modify their behavior, and so on—they have to care about your message. You appeal to people’s emotions to get them to care. There are many different emotions you can tap into, such as a person’s “group identity”. When the Texas Department of Transportation was looking for ways to reduce litter on the Texas roadways, they discovered that most of the litter was being caused by truck drivers.

What was the best way get these truck drivers—characterized as “Bubba”—to stop littering? Applying threats and fines? Telling them about the impact they were having on the environment? What they did was much more effective: Bubbas love Texas, and the Texas Department of Transportation appealed to this pride. They cast Dallas Cowboys and Houston Astros in testosterone-soaked ads telling drivers: “Don’t mess with Texas”. With an emotional appeal to identity, the campaign managed to reduce litter on Texas highways 72% between 1986 and 1990.

Tell Stories – A Well-Told Story Jump-Starts Action

Research shows that when people swap stories they’re not just entertaining each other; they’re providing mental training. In “Made to Stick” the authors explain that when firefighters swap stories after every fire they’re helping each other create a rich archive of situations which they might encounter during a fire and the appropriate responses to these.

When we hear a story, we create a simulation of what’s happening in our minds. By providing a story in which the protagonist is in a predicament that is similar to our audience’s situation, we allow our readers to apply the story to their own situation.

In addition, Chip and Dan explain that a story is also important because it provides the context missing from abstract prose. Aesop’s fables—such as “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”–teach their morals through stories. By telling the story of a bored shepherd boy who entertained himself by crying out “wolf” on repeated occasions and watching the villagers rush to his aid, and who was subsequently ignored by all when a wolf really did appear, Aesop shows his readers how liars lose all credibility and aren’t believed even when they’re telling the truth. Telling this story is much more effective than simply saying to people: “Don’t lie”.

As a further example of how to use stories in your blog posts, the best way to promote an affiliate product is to use it yourself. Then share a true story with your readers of how the product helped you to solve a problem that they might be having as well. Invite them to try it on for size and see for themselves.

Conclusion

To summarize, you can write sticky blog posts that get your readers to take action by making your ideas simple, unexpected, concrete, credentialed, and emotional, and by presenting them as stories. You don’t need to apply all six traits to have a sticky idea, but it’s safe to say that the more of them that you’re able to work into your writing, the stickier your idea will be.

Don’t just read this blog post and store it away as interesting, new-found knowledge: take the six principles presented by the Heath brothers and begin crafting your stickiest blog post yet. Incidentally, I tried applying most of the “sticky principles” to this blog post. How did I do?

Written by Marelisa Fábrega. Marelisa blogs about creativity, productivity, and simplifying your life over at Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online. Marelisa is the author of the ebook “How to Be More Creative – A Handbook for Alchemists”.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Write a Blog Post That’s Stickier than Velcro

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How to Write a Blog Post That’s Stickier than Velcro

Buying online is a consumer’s paradise, right?

One can compare competing offers ‘til the heart’s content, all with simple clicks of a mouse.

Well, it’s not that great if you happen to sell online.

And what if I told you it’s not really that great for consumers, either?

Sound crazy? Read on.

Preface: Start with a killer product or service

This should go without saying in our age of global competition and reduced barriers to entry. But so often merchants are looking for a magic bullet to widely distribute something that the market simply finds inferior.

The problem is, there are plenty of people out there with exceptional products and services who are losing out to others with lesser offerings and higher prices.

What’s going on with that?

Superior marketing and sales techniques, that’s what. Here are 3 ways to level the playing field (or even tip the scales in your favor).

1. Eliminate competition with artful positioning

Wouldn’t selling online be wonderful without competition? Well, it’s possible, if only to the extent that a certain type of person considers you the absolute only option. Yes, it’s our friend positioning again, and we’ll keep talking about it because it’s so vital to success.

The traditional approach to positioning involves offering a benefit your competition cannot or will not offer, thereby making your offer the only choice for those who value that benefit. It still works too – look at the insane level of customer service that Zappos offers, and you’ll understand why throngs of people wouldn’t dream of buying shoes elsewhere.

For small and micro-businesses, positioning (a/k/a your unique selling proposition) can be as simple as creating a unique bond with enough people to build a thriving business. Whether by creating a hybrid business at the intersection of disciplines, crafting a better metaphor that communicates what people need to hear, or creating an emotional bond and huge trust based on your own personality, modern online positioning has come down to connections that resonate authentically and generate loyalty.

Remember, it’s not about where you rank in a hierarchy against others. It’s about carving out your unique territory and owning it outright.

2. Confront your competitors proactively

Let’s face it, in some markets, positioning alone might not get it done. When you’re selling retail items such as consumer electronics or commodity goods, shoppers are more focused on overall value for the buck.

The most common merchant response to the threat of online comparison shopping is not very effective. “Hey, let’s pretend they’re not there!” is nice as wishful thinking, but let’s be realistic.

You’ll hear time and again that the initial objectives of copy in a call-to-action environment is to 1) attract attention; 2) express benefits; and 3) overcome objections. The fact that your prospect thinks you have legitimate competition is really just an objection to buying from you right now.

Instead of sticking your head in the ground, why not proactively address why your offer is better than the other guy’s? Don’t assume that your prospect “gets” that your offer is superior; “show” her it’s better by doing a head-to-head comparison with charts, checklists, or even an interactive apples-to-apples demonstration.

People examining your offer want you to be the solution to their desire or problem. It’s your job to eliminate the lingering doubt that exists in the form of objections, and like it or not, your competition is one of those objections.

3. Emotional benefits make everyone happy

We tell you over and over (and over) to focus first on benefits rather than features, because people decide to buy based on lightening-fast emotional responses, and justify that decision with logic. But what if it turned out that making purchase decisions via emotion (instead of by overly-rational research and price shopping) actually made us happier?

Recent psychological resaerch indicates just that. The study focused on using proven methods to impede logical decision-making, thereby forcing people to go with emotional, intuitive choices instead.

The results?

Those who used primarily emotion rather than primarily logic made more consistent choices. And consistency is one of the hallmarks of a “rational actor.” In other words, the “emotional” people made more “rational” choices than those who focused on rationality!

What does that mean? From the study:

For the consumers, contrary to lay perceptions, attending to one’s emotional responses may prove to be very valuable in understanding one’s preferences. It is possible consumers would be much happier with choices based more on their emotional reaction. For example, if one buys a house and relies on very cognitive attributes such as resale value, one may not be as happy actually living in it, as opposed to a person who attends to his or her emotional reaction to the house prior to purchasing it.

Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, thinks that online price shopping might actually make us unhappy. He notes that the study speculates that the Internet leads consumers to engage in more rational deliberation, which in turn produces an outcome that contradicts our assumptions about the “online shopping paradise.”

Remember, when introduced to an emotional benefit in an offer, neurology shows that our brains react as if we were already experiencing the actual benefit. In essence, employing emotional benefits not only begins the customer satisfaction experience before the sale, this latest research indicates that initial satisfaction maintains after the sale.

Isn’t bonding with prospects and customers better for everyone?

It’s amazing how many of the initial assumptions sparked by the Internet continue to be dead wrong. E-commerce was supposed to benefit the consumer by providing limitless options, and yet the counterintuitive paradox of choice shows that too many options make us anxious and unhappy.

Instead, we now have an entire movement devoted to voluntary simple living. We don’t necessarily want more choice; we want something that does what we need it to do when we desire a solution.

In an ultra-competitive environment, a quality product or service is an indisputable market obligation (and I’d say an ethical obligation as well). But given how we actually operate as human beings in the face of overwhelming choice, isn’t a communication approach that bonds emotionally with our prospective customers also a market obligation? Perhaps even an ethical one?

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and co-founder of DIY Themes, creator of the innovative Thesis Theme for WordPress. Get more from Brian on Twitter.

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Three Ways to Make Your Competitors Irrelevant

This week I’m featuring a short series of interviews with successful bloggers looking at a popular post on their blog and why they think it went viral. Today Leo Babauta from Zen Habits has agreed to dissect the popularity of one of his site’s most popular posts.

1. What is the post on your blog that has had the most traffic in the last 12 months?

I would never have guessed this until I looked it up in Analytics, but the top post in the last year is “10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas“.

2. Where did the traffic mainly come from?

The page had nearly 500K pageviews in the last year, almost all from Google searches. A small amount came from Yahoo (#2), direct traffic, MSN, and other search engines.

3. Did you do anything extra to market or promote this post or did it just happen organically?

No, I didn’t promote this post any more than other posts. It did well in delicious.com the first day, without my help, and quickly found its way to the #1 spot in Google searches for “healthy breakfasts” and related search terms. I don’t do SEO at all (I don’t believe in it), so this happened totally organically.

4. What can we as bloggers learn from the success of this post?

Google can bring tons of traffic, but the way to get there is not through SEO or overly promotional techniques. It’s by creating useful content that people will want to bookmark, link to, and find in searches, solving problems that many people have.

So:

1. Figure out what problems a lot of people have.
2. Create really useful content to solve those problems.
3. Write a good headline to help the post get spread more widely.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits Shares a Popular Post Case Study

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Leo Babauta from Zen Habits Shares a Popular Post Case Study