We are giving away 5 copies of Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah to five winners who want to join the Conversations on Conversion Book Club.

To enter:

Just comment on this post.  Extra entries for the following:

• If you blog about this on your blog.
• If you tweet about it on Twitter.
• Sign up as a fan of Diamond Website Conversion on Facebook.

To make sure we count your extra entries, please reference them in your comment on this post…. for example:  Enter me + give me 3 extra entries for a tweet, a blog post & Facebook fan.

Entries close March 17 – Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Winners will be selected using Research Randomizer’s Software.  Winners will be announced on the blog on March 18^th.

Read more about the Conversations on Conversion Book Club.

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts, follow us on Twitter, or become a Facebook fan to be the first to know what Diamond Hazelton is up to, get conversion optimization tips, and get updates  about the book club.

Diamond Website Conversion invites you to join us for our exciting, new online Conversations on Conversion Book Club. We’re selecting an enticing new book every other month – starting with this juicy read about getting your business found online using Google, Social Media, and blogs.

Our first book club selection for March-April:

Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah

Stop pushing your message out and start pulling your customers in

Traditional “outbound” marketing methods like cold-calling, email blasts, advertising, and direct mail are increasingly less effective. People are getting better at blocking these interruptions out using Caller ID, spam protection, TiVo, etc. People are now increasingly turning to Google, social media, and blogs to find products and services. Inbound Marketing helps you take advantage of this change by showing you how to get found by customers online.

Inbound Marketing is a how-to guide to getting found via Google, the blogosphere, and social media sites.

• Improve your rankings in Google to get more traffic
• Build and promote a blog for your business
• Grow and nurture a community in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.
• Measure what matters and do more of what works online

The rules of marketing have changed, and your business can benefit from this change. Inbound Marketing shows you how to get found by more prospects already looking for what you have to sell.

Conversations on Conversion Official Book Club

This online book club is designed for anyone who wants to read and discuss books that will help improve and grow an online business. We will be reading books that focus on things  such as web analytics, social media, optimizing landing pages, online marketing, writing for the web, etc. The goal of the book club is to talk about hot topics and key themes of books, and participate in an ongoing engaging dialogue with active book club members on this blog and on Facebook.  Join our fan page where we will be using the Discussion section to talk about the different chapters. With other people’s input and different perspectives it should prove to be  lively and interesting dialogue.

Be Part of the Discussion

If you’d like to participate in the Conversations on Conversion Book Club sign up leaving us a comment at the bottom of this post. We all know publicly committing to a group event helps us all stay accountable.  We’re leaving it open until March 22^nd, the day we start reading, so if you’re late getting to us, it’s OK.

If you miss the cutoff or don’t want to commit just yet, don’t worry…  just join our discussion on the Diamond Website Conversion Facebook Discussion Page any time after Monday, March 22nd .

Reading by Carbon NYC

Join now

We’ll be posting articles and discussion threads on this blog and on Facebook. We hope you’ll participate….so grab a glass of wine, pick up our first official Conversations on Conversion Book Club pick (or “Enter to Win” will be a link to another post a copy in our Conversations on Conversion Book Club contest where we have 5 copies of Inbound Marketing to give away!), and get reading. Every other month, we’ll select a new book and start the lively discussion all over again.

If you have any questions, please leave a comment or email Shelby at shelby@diamondwebsiteconversion.com. Otherwise, let the fun begin! We’re really excited about this . . . and we hope you are, too.

Like what you just read? You can subscribe to the feed of these posts, follow us on Twitter, or become a Facebook fan to be the first to know what Diamond Hazelton is up to, get conversion optimization tips, and get updates about the book club.

Happy reading!

Upcoming blog post: Book Giveaway & Reading schedule

Taking In The View by Randy son of Robert

Website visitors are fickle creatures. They click, they scan, they browse, and nary a second goes by they aren’t moving. With all the extraneous content available online these days, people have become exceptional skimmers—the skill is crucial now that almost half their time is spent just looking for what they want.

For companies hoping to improve their website usability—thereby making it easier for visitors to get from landing point A to selling point B—a basic understanding eye movement and user behavior is a must.

The first impression is crucial. Users whose expectations aren’t met immediately, by what they see on the home page, often become confused, and turn away. The causes are diverse—too much graphical clutter, a missing navigational bar, and even a nonconventional color scheme, can all contribute to reduced website usability.

There’s a simple way of evaluating your initial impact: try flashing a picture of your home page in front of a new user for a few seconds and ask what he or she remembers.  Another thing to do is to check what other similar websites are doing, since most visitor expectations are formed by precedent. For instance, informational sites often minimize glitz and focus on a tight typographical design. Business-to-business websites often feature sedate color schemes that lean toward the blue end of the spectrum. Nearly every website places navigational buttons at the top or top-left of the main page, and there’s a good reason why.

Experts who track eye movement across web pages have discovered an interesting pattern that has huge implications for website usability. Employing advanced cameras and other equipment, they’ve learned that website skimmers often zip over page content in an F-shaped pattern. The average eye drags first over the top banner, then runs even more quickly over the page sub-heading or content descriptor just below. Then, taking occasional stops for the interesting picture, the eye moves down along the right site of the page searching for keywords or subjects of interest. Assuming the content has engaged the user, the eye ends up at the bottom left-hand corner of the page.

This pattern isn’t absolute, but understanding it can be extremely helpful in improving website usability. By placing the navigational structure at the top of the page, you lead the user quickly to where he or she wants to go. Similarly, when you frontload vital content and bulleted lists along the common skim pattern—and place related links or further selling info at the bottom of the page—you can significantly raise your website’s usability.

There are plenty of other ways to improve website usability and keep visitors from getting lost on your website. Check out our services or give us a call.

In the sixth grade, I knew a girl who read dictionaries for fun. While other kids ran around during recess, kicking their hacky sacks—do they still have those?—and rubbing dirt into each other’s hair, this girl sat under a tree, her eyes skimming over individual definitions and sample sentences, reveling in whatever illumination she found there. We snickered at her and continued playing what could loosely be interpreted as kickball—not sure we made as good a use of our time as her. Last I heard, she’s running a highly successful engineering consulting firm, which leads me to a general conclusion about my own field: sometimes in the wide world of web analytics it’s good to take a second and review the terminology. And especially if you’ve never taken the time to understand the jargon bantered about by the kids down in the IT basement, here’s a crash course on the relevant techno-slang.

Web Analytics: the collection and evaluation of all data regarding the use of your website, including how many hits each page received, who linked to your site, and so on. This information can be used to identify which portions of your site are receiving the most attention and which are leaking potential customers.

Abandonment: also called cart abandonment, whenever a visitor stops partway through the checkout process  for whatever reason, be it confusion or a usability issue.  Conversion optimization seeks to minimize this.

Bounce Rate: the percentage of visitors enter your site, look only at one page and then exit (the visitor enters and bounces right off your website)

Conversion: whenever a visitor performs a desired action, be it making a purchase, downloading a white paper,completing a Contact Us Form,  signing up for an email newsletter, or printing a coupon. The Conversion Funnel is the process each visitor goes through to perform this action—try to keep it short, sweet, and relatively painless. A high Conversion Rate is what you’re after.

Entry/Landing Page: The first webpage seen by a visitor upon entering your site, whether by a search engine query a web banner, a link from another website, or a PPC (pay-per-click) advertisment.

Recency: the number of times a unique visitor goes to your site within any particular time period (once a day, every two weeks, once a month)

Segment: usually of visitors, that web analytics seeks to identify in order to help you craft appropriate marketing and content changes to increase conversion rates

Session: the time a unique visitor spends on your site in one sitting

Unique Visitors: the number of inferred individual people who visited your website once (or more) within a designated time frame.

Hits:First a little background on “hits.” A “hit” occurs when a visitor accesses your website; their computer sends a request to your website’s server to begin downloading a page. Each element of a requested page (graphics, text, multimedia, etc.), is recorded by your site’s web server log as a “hit.” The first few years that websites were a reality, webmasters got really excited about the number of “hits” to their web pages and initially a large number hits were equated with a really popular website (lots of traffic). But a typical page will cause more than 20 hits on the server and that number can go up dramatically depending on page design and visit patterns, so webmasters and analysts soon figured out that tracking hits didn’t give them accurate picture traffic to a website. Instead, today we use metrics such as page views and visitors as guides for traffic measurement.

Is anyone else starting to feel overwhelmed with the number of social media networks to keep up with? To add to the long list of ways to “join the conversation,” Google Buzz is a new social networking platform that launched this last Tuesday, February 9, 2010.  It is social networking tool that allows Gmail users to share updates, photos, videos, links and more instantaneously online and on Android phones and the iPhone.

My question is do users really need or want a new social network? Facebook has become most people’s default choice for social networking, making it easier to find old friends and business contacts. Do I really want to post everything twice in order for all my friends to see it? That may be reason enough to hope for Buzz’s quick demise.

On the other hand, it seems that for small businesses that rely on customer referrals and word of mouth marketing, Google Buzz can act as another megaphone for customer conversations by publishing them to the inbox of millions of Gmail users. If consumers mention a product or service, their comments can spread virally through their social connections without the need for services like Twitter or Facebook.

The service appears to be optimized for the mobile web which will be very useful for businesses that engage in linking their geographic locations to instant messages which is a benefit.

The bottom line: Google Buzz is a powerful new social media channel that offers a simple way for consumers to voice their opinions about products and services they use. It offers another opportunity to listen to what customers are saying and to drive awareness and enthusiasm for their brands by participating in the conversation.

For social media savvy small businesses, only time will tell if it makes sense to use Google Buzz instead of or in addition to Facebook or Twitter for communicating and engaging with customers.

What do you think? Will you be using Google Buzz?

Sticky Man by Tiago

Everyone knows the guy that likes to talk about himself. He drones on and on about his college football years or his recent ingrown toenail removal. For those of us not clever enough to fake a conversation-stopping seizure, social protocol demands we make a polite excuse and edge away slowly. If your business website is dull, it receives no such courtesy. Visitors, bored with your generic ‘About Us’ page and malfunctioning contact form, simply close the tab. You have to be sticky.

A good website conversion rate needs—among many other things—a set of pages that grab and engage the viewer. There’s no exact science to this—just a clear understanding of the goals of your website, the audience you’re hoping to reach, and the image you’re trying to convey. If you haven’t done so already, scratch these down and look at them. Then figure out what it’ll take to keep these potential clients bouncing around on your site until they’re ready to make a purchase, donate to your charity, or subscribe to your publication. This, of course, is the goal of website conversion.

One of the best things you can do is offer up a whole lot of small ‘stickies.’ Some of the most under appreciated of these are well-implemented pictures. People like images, trust them, and—best of all—notice them quickly in fields of text. A quick way to direct a visitor’s eye to a value-producing link is to wrap it in an image that seems offer even more engaging content on the other side. Likewise, videos, flash animations, and other media-rich content can direct your visitor’s attention around the page, boosting your website conversion if you manage to push them in the right direction. Decent copy and streamlined organization does not hurt, either.

Perhaps more difficult to implement are the long-term stickies. Community sites and social networking are certainly all the rage these days, and it seems everyone has the little cluster of Facebook, Twitter, and RSS icons on their ‘About Us’ page. These can represent phenomenal ways to establish and develop extended relationships with new and existing clients, but there has to be some follow-up. Determine early on who in your company will maintain these community accounts and how often they’ll need to post. Set up contests, feedback polls, and other big stickies to keep people checking back.

Improving your website conversion rate can be a complicated process, but offering up interesting and engaging content can be a great way to start. For more a more in-depth analysis of how your website can be turned into a value-generating machine, check out the services we offer.