The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

This week I completed Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. I highly recommend this book for anyone looking to improve the usability of their website or software application. I especially like his concept of "The Reservoir of Goodwill", where visitors to your site enter with a full reservoir and each time they run into a problem it is lowered. Once this reservoir is empty they will leave. I think this is a great way to think about usability and something to keep in mind when designing/re-designing your website.

Overall, I appreciate the many screenshots throughout the book displaying the correct and incorrect ways to optimize your website for usability and Chapter 9: Usability testing on 10 cents a day is worth the price of the entire book.

When starting out it can be tough and getting those first few customers can be challenging. Below I have provided three ways to market your website for free.

Writing Articles
If you have a web-based business and your marketing budget is tight, I recommend writing articles to promote your business. It’s one of the best ways to build credibility, promote your business, and best of all it’s free. With each article you write, include a byline that tells a little about yourself, your company, and include your email and web address. You can submit your articles to websites such as GoArticles.com, ArticleCity.com, and WebProNews.com to name a few. Also, include all articles on your website, offer them as free content, and encourage visitors to publish your articles as long as they keep the byline intact.

Your Email Signature
How many emails do you send each day? Be sure to include at least your name, address, business name, and URL within the signature of every email you send. This is a small but powerful addition in marketing your business.

Trading or Giving Away Your Products and Services
When starting out it’s tough to establish that initial base of customers. Offer to trade services with vendors that can help your business. For instance; if you sell web design services, offer to build or re-design an attorney’s website in exchange for his/her legal services. It’s also a great idea to start out completing a number of pro bono projects. Look for non-profits in your area and speak with them about their needs and how your products or services can help them.

So what worked for you when you were starting out?  How did you get those first few customers?

I am still blown away by the Million Dollar Homepage. He launched the website August 26th, 2005 with the idea to sell pixels for $1 each and the goal of selling a total of one million pixels. On January 13th, 2006 he sold the remaining 1,000 pixels and reached his goal of selling one million. An original idea, the internet, and the power of viral marketing.

I thought I’d share a few tips for those of you on a budget
looking to use Cost Per Click advertising.

• Start with Google Adwords. There are many providers of CPC advertising, however many will fall short in sending the quality traffic you’re looking for. After achieving success with Google Adwords I would then move
on to Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture).

• Set goals for your CPC campaign. If you offer a trial of your products and/or services determine your trial to full conversion rate and use this to determine the number of trials you’ll
need in order to at least break even.

• Be sure to have a means of collecting information from those who click through your ads. If you invite visitors to sign up for your email newsletter many who do not immediately sign up for a trial will subscribe
to your newsletter to receive additional information on your offerings.

• Use Yahoo’s Keyword Selector Tool to determine the number of times various keywords/phrases are searched on a monthly basis. Obviously the terms that are searched for more often will require a higher investment per click to raise your ad into a higher, more visible, ranking. Bid on specific phrases that are searched for around 1000 times per month and direct these visitors to the page that contains the relevant information connected to this phrase. For instance, if you sell shoes online perhaps bid on the phrase “blue and orange puma shoes” (searched 756 times in December 2005) and link this ad to a search result on your
website that contains a wide selection of blue and orange puma shoes.

• Experiment with various landing pages. Don’t always send visitors directly to the homepage of your website. As mentioned above, be sure to send visitors directly to the page that contains the items/information in which they are searching. Taking this a step further, try various layouts for displaying this information and see which design yields the greatest number of sales.

I hope these tips help all of you on a budget make the most of your CPC campaigns.

When designing your newsletter always keep in mind the amount of time you can expect your reader to spend viewing your newsletter. Everyone today is information hungry, but always in a hurry. How you display your content within your newsletter can capitalize on this assumption.

What Information Should I Include in My Newsletter?
Obviously this will depend on your business and the audience in which you are marketing, but here are three recommendations:

• Announcements: Include recent information about your company and/or products that impacts your readers. For instance, you can include a link to an upcoming tradeshow where your company will be exhibiting or perhaps a seminar that your company will be sponsoring.
• Article: Include an article that relates to your products or services and helps your readers. It is also a great idea to develop a resource library that contains additional articles and provide a link for your readers so they can find more information on similar topics.
• Case Study: Provide an example of a client who has achieved great results while using your products or services. This will help build credibility with your readers. Again, provide a link where your readers can view additional case studies.

Those are three key items to include in your newsletter. If you include these you are keeping your readers up to date on recent information about your products or services, including an article providing value on topics affecting them and by providing a case study you are proving to your readers that others are achieving success by using your products or services.

Making Your Articles Easier to Digest

Think of how we read newspapers; the same holds true for how we read material on the web. We skim headlines looking for something that interests us and only then will we begin reading an article. We also stop to view photographs and any visual cues offering greater insight as to the information held within an article. I see far too many articles within newsletters that are very long (greater than 900 words). When writing your article try to keep it at 800 words or less and break each section into smaller, easy to read blocks with bolded headlines over each section. This will encourage your reader to skim your article and stop at each section they find interesting. If you are finding it impossible to trim your article simply find a good point within 800 or fewer words and provide a link to a webpage that contains the article in its entirety.

Sharing Your Newsletter with Others

Always give your readers a reason and a means by which to share your newsletter with others. By providing valuable and relevant content to your subscribers they will be inclined to share this information with others by forwarding your newsletter. Email marketing software, like IntelliContact, provide a “Forward-to-a-Friend” feature that inserts a link within the footer of your message allowing your readers to easily forward your newsletter. The goal is to obviously reach out to as many as possible by providing valuable, relevant, timely content, and an easy way for your readers to share this information with others.

Someone sent this to me the other day. It’s pretty funny, so I thought I’d share.

Click the image to enlarge.

In August 2004 there were 5 of us and there were a little over 500 clients. Over the past 16 months we’ve gone from 500 clients to over 3700 and the number of employees has grown from 5 to 22. It has been very exciting and interesting to see how things have changed as we’ve grown over this time. Lately, the greatest challenge has been communication. When there was 5 of us this wasn’t much of an issue. Our office was only 700 square feet, so it wasn’t a great challenge to keep tabs on everything going on within the company, from support to development. Everyone could hear all support calls and would subsequently be aware of any issues as soon as they arise.

In January 2005 we moved into a new office space that was over 6000 square feet. This space would allow us to expand over time, to our current number of employees and into the future. As mentioned above, this creates a challenge; communication. We have to ensure that everyone is on the same page and all employees are working from the same, up-to-date information. For instance, in marketing I want to know, from our support department, any issues that our customers are experiencing to see if we could solve these by improving the website, user interface and/or simple communication. This is something that we have all been working on and setting up policies, procedures, and software applications to ensure the proper information gets to the right person in a timely manner. As we move forward I think this will be a greater challenge as departments will continue to expand and hierarchies will continue to grow. The foundation that we put in place in now will certainly help as we continue into the future. I think the lesson here is that even when you’re small you have to start thinking about and planning for these things as the organization grows. If your company has around 5 employees and you would like to continue growing, go ahead and start thinking and planning for communication flows within your company. Go ahead and put the tools in place whether a project management software, CRM application, etc. As you grow having these procedures and tools in place will allow you to establish this foundation early and “plug” new employees into your system as you bring them on board.

Today I received my Free the Genie cards from Idea Champions. The "deck" contains 55 cards that are designed to, as they put it,
"Unlock the imagination,
Inspire quantum leaps, Awaken creativity, Spark insights and ahas!, Unleash genius, Free up stuck energy, Boost motivation, Increase adaptability, Diffuse doubt and fear, Accelerate change, Enhance collaboration, Build momentum, Close the gap between thought and action".

So I drew a card and it stated:
"Be a Beginner - What enhancements or simplification to your idea would please a child? What would a kid’s version of your product or service look like?"

I thought this was a great way to look at usability, in my case, for web applications. So I thought a little more about "….kid friendly web apps". Sounds a little strange, yes. But this really forces you to focus on the critical elements for making a user-friendly application. Think about visual cues such as colors, sizes of elements (buttons, text, etc), and keeping the interface uncluttered as to not distract the user from the task that was meant to be completed within a given screen. Just a five minute brainstorming session I thought I’d share.