One technique that many businesses use to increase their growth is what’s known as a viral loop, a way to create perpetual motion, and increase sign ups within your application.  This technique is being used to great effect across many platforms as a business accelerant, and to grow a user base to tens of thousands of users in a short space of time.

Whilst viral processes has existed on the web for some time, social media platforms have helped to connect us closer together, resulting in new ways for the loop to be initiated.

I’ve decided to highlight some of the vital elements which are essentially in understanding, and initiating viral growth on the social web within any application.

Be Useful

Crucial to a viral loop gaining momentum, is that your application still needs to be useful, even if there is only one solitary user. No-one is going to be inspired to share an app, that doesn’t solve their basic needs, or requires other people to be members prior to gaining value. In many cases, this is the reason that forums are so hard to get started, they need to be active to receive new sign ups.

Have Utility

Utility is a measure of the happiness or satisfaction gained from a good or service in game theory. Think in terms of stroking the users ego. Twitter and Facebook have both done this with their followers / friends counts. Whilst the web is filled with articles on why these numbers don’t matter; clearly this simple pandering to basic human desire has lead to increased growth.

Your users are likely to be some, or all of the following. Narcissistic, lazy, greedy,  and vain. Can you code for that? Probably not, but if some element of your system makes life easier for them, or gives the bragging rights, or makes them feel good, or makes them feel like part of an elite invite only club – you are probably onto something.

Increase Network value

It’s important that at the outset, you build a system whereby value increases, as more people join the network. Email whilst a disconnected network is one of the best example of this. If you didn’t have an email address in 1990 people would have told you to go set one up, and so the value of the network for the users is multiplied.  This in itself can be a motivator for users to invite their friends and family.

Start with the Invitation Process

Instead of making inviting others an afterthought, build the invitation process directly into the signup process. At the outset, Facebook, Bebo and others connected directly to people’s hotmail accounts, sending auto-invites based on existing friend connections. Facebook also spammed Harvard mailing lists at its inception.

Whilst this is without doubt unethical it without a doubt lead to increased exposure. Now, there are Facebook application developers which are now using the data which is available via the API within Facebook to send signup messages, based on existing profile data, leading to increased conversion rates.

Whatever way you decide to invite your users, if you reward this behaviour with greater privileges (think more points, users getting badges or bonuses) you’ll be well on your way to getting the loop started.

Other applications have been smarter again. Google Wave invites were released slowly, resulting in some even being sold on Ebay, such was the demand to be ‘part of the club’. Often beta invites are provided to high profile bloggers to get the ball rolling, and increase awareness about the app. The very fact that doors are closed, but some people are getting in, generates desire. Web applications such as Prefinery, are taking the stress out of this for developers, who can tap into their software to manage the entire invitation process.

Use existing communication channels

There’s no point in reinventing the wheel when it comes to your invitation process. The majority of people on the web now have email, Twitter or Facebook accounts, and in the case of the latter their API’s are there for the taking.  In particular Facebook connect offers an easy way to authenticate your users. Your users are going to want to see if existing friends and family are using the system (and if they are, they are more likely to signup), and get the task done as quickly as possible. Using multiple authentication processes such as clickpass also lowers the barrier to entry.

Ensure you can Scale

No point attracting all of those visitors, if you can’t support them. In many cases, the additional server capacity needed to support extra users can cripple the application financially or technically.  If you architect your initial solution in a way where it can grow and support itself as additional users join, you stand a much better chance of success, don’t however, make the mistake of underestimating your potential success.

Additional Resources

Kissmetrics present user flows to allow you to see how other apps do it.
Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves (Adam Penenberg)
The Viral Loop Workshop (Slideshare presentation including formulas to calculate potential growth
Some great material on the engine of adoption from Andrew Chen

6 vital elements for a successful viral loop is a post from: Webdistortion

Generating Ideas

Writing quick drafts is one of my own favourite ways to stay motivated and continue to write. When a fresh idea for a new post comes to me when I’m online, (or at any other point in the day) I’ll often jump straight to my drafts,  and write a headline summarizing the idea.

When it comes around to writing a new post for the next week, I’ll jump into my drafts, and pick out an idea that I’ve had previously, and this will be enough of a kick to the head to get my brain going.  For the times when I’m not at the computer,  I tend to record my own little vox pop on my phone, which I’ll later transcribe into a draft.

If I find myself stumbling across any trends or insight online frequently, and the subject matter interests me, I’ll often start a little list post that I can add to with URL’s over time. This is almost a micro-blogging approach, which I can expand upon as time goes on.  After all, no point wasting that content on Twitter.

Take Home Tips

Whatever it is you are blogging on, its always been my opinion that people want to read content that educates them. Regardless of whether they are a “teacher” or not.  Sure, opinion and news is great, and that can attract links, but who remembers it in a year? It gets buried in a sea of insignificance over time. Yesterday’s paper telling yesterday’s news.

In every piece that I produce I try to make a conscious effort to create content that people can take something away from.  One little tip. Sometimes that’s all it take in your article to make people feel its worthy of sharing, and worthy of becoming a reader. It also makes your content something that people can stumble upon in a year, and still find useful.

Quality verses Quantity

My basic rule of thumb for keeping this blog up to date, is one new post per week, and when I can, I’ll publish more content than that. However, producing really great content regularly is hard work, and unfortunately takes time.

There was a time when Google rewarded quantity over quality. Prior to them changing the way things worked, many spammers and bloggers just spat out post after post after post, increasing the size of their website, and the resulting traffic.  Those sorts of tricks don’t fly any more, and rightly so.

In my opinion its easier to gain good targeted traffic by creating less fluff, and concentrating on creating meaty, useful and interesting pieces.  Sure, I could split up some of my articles into 300 word posts and spread them over a couple of days for traffic… but would this attract as many links?  Not in my opinion. Contrary to popular belief, people do actually like smart, long form content online.

It certainly wouldn’t keep you guys as engaged with my content, or make me proud of each and every article I produce.  Its the good old tortoise verses the hare approach.  In any case I want to have a digital asset that I’m proud of, and isn’t just some cheap shot at getting visitors.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is a crucial part of blogging, both from an SEO, and readership point of view. When I guest post, there’s one sneaky trick I’ve used previously to win friends and influence people.  It’s one of those things so obvious that I’m often surprised at when even big bloggers fail to do it.

The main objective when you guest post, is to funnel visitors from a potentially larger audience onto your site, and potentially get them to convert into subscribers. Right?

Well, the single biggest thing you can do to improve your chances of conversion, is to showcase a similar piece of content on your own site. Assuming visitors have enjoyed your guest post, and clicked through onto your site, the easiest way to make them stick around, is to publish a complimentary piece of content on your own site that makes them continue to read. If you’ve proved to them that your writing prowess is worth sticking around to read more of, (after all they’ve just read two of your articles) – your chances of turning that person into a long time subscriber improves dramatically. An engaged visitor, is ALOT easier to convert.

No Restrictions

I’ve got a lot of interests, and rightly or wrongly, I write on a variety of topics. Everything from programming, to graphic design, to marketing.  A lot of people have recommended that I stick to a chosen subject of interest, and only blog on that. “Anything else, send it as a guest post to someone else Paul.” I can see why they’ve suggested that. It makes sense to aim at becoming the biggest, or the best at a particular subject.

The other side of the coin, for me personally  is that

1) I minimise the risk of running out of ideas. There’s little chance out of the 22 topics you see to your right, that I’ll find myself unable to write about any of them

2) Combined, they become a useful reference point, and cater to a wider range of tastes than a niche ever could. This gives the site a flexibility to grow and change direction easily over time.

3) It removes the magic a little. Writing a blog for me, is as much about learning what people want to read, and watching and analysing the traffic that particular pieces over time. If I limit myself to one particular topic area “because its what the experts say” that isn’t testing. I’d rather make informed choices about that myself.

Take a look at the major blogs which you currently read – all have started out small, and increased the scope of the information they provide. I’m not about to limit my growth by concentrating on too small an area of content.  If all else fails, you can always try to gauge opinion with a poll.

Motivation

For every piece that I publish, it only takes one person in Google Reader to like it, or one person to share it on Facebook or Twitter to make writing a long piece worthwhile. That’s what motivates me. I blog because I get a kick out of watching people interact with something I’ve created out of my head, and a written expression of ideas.

Autonomy, Mastery and purpose some would say. This video sums it up blogging for me pretty well. Great mind candy here folks.

What’s your approach to blogging? Anything to share? Let me know in the comments.

My approach to blogging. is a post from: Webdistortion

Smirnoff

URL: http://www.youtube.com/smirnoff

Drinks brands have always been pretty good at youth culture and engaging with their audiences using social media, and Smirnoff have managed to do so successfully through this brand channel on YouTube. Their recent campaigns have concentrated on experiences, and being there at popular culture events such as music festivals and gigs. They have successfully leveraged video content to bring this concept to life, interviewing several artists, and sharing their own thoughts on YouTube.

Burton Snowboards

URL: http://www.youtube.com/burtonsnowboards

Burton’s snowboarding channel design remains as clean, crisp and minimal as some of the riders showcased on their YouTube channel. At the time of writing they only had a couple of videos on their channel, however they have achieved over 2 million views, showing just how powerful YouTube can be in building brand exposure. As with Smirnoff they are enrolled in YouTube’s partner program (for premium publishers), giving them access to additional social media links to Facebook and Twitter.

Nike Air

URL: http://www.youtube.com/nike

Although this is currently set to Nike Air, this channel represents Nike’s main brand channel on YouTube, as you can see from the URL, it is the main landing page from many of their digital campaigns. Interestingly this channel makes no use of the advanced publisher features mentioned earlier, and the effective design is achievable by any YouTube channel owner.

Nike Football

URL: http://www.youtube.com/nikefootball

Nike Football’s current YouTube content centres around their sponsorship deal with one of the largest football clubs in the world, Manchester United, and concentrates on their training regime, and how they improve performance. Much like Smirnoff, the content isn’t the hard sell, with Nike preferring to educated their audience. Perhaps its this and the professional way in which the brand is portrayed which has kept both United fans and others interested in their content.

Audi

URL: http://www.youtube.com/audi

Audi have been using video as part of their overall marketing strategy since 2009, and with this German audience focused channel, racked up over 1.8 million views of their extensive list of nearly 500 videos.  As with many of the other active marketers on YouTube, Audi rotate their YouTube channel design with whatever product is currently flavour of the month. At time of writing, the Audi A1 was getting the majority of the focus.

Gillette

URL: http://www.youtube.com/gillette

Gillete’s  (Sponsored) YouTube channel is probably one of the most customised channels showcased here. It not only uses all of the features of the premium partners program, it also has a custom flash player used on the home screen, and full brand engagement available through other links on the channel. Still the design is striking, and showcases the content perfectly to the audience.

Harley Davidson

URL: http://www.youtube.com/harleydavidson

Another premium partner channel, Harley Davidson use the flash video slideshow feature to showcase new content. The remaining parts of the channel tie in well with the brand, and a ‘biker on the road’ image is definitely projected.

Honda

URL: http://www.youtube.com/honda

Honda’s use of video to project a human side to the company is both clever and well executed. Their YouTube channel educates the audience perfectly, showing that they are not just an automobile company, but one that has a focus on human mobility as well. The colour scheme and background used in this custom YouTube channel also perfectly reflects a professional, elegant and innovative brand.

Pepsi

URL: http://www.youtube.com/user/Pepsi

Pepsi not only have reinforced their advertising campaigns on YouTube, they have produced content that highlights their philanthropic efforts as well, and their YouTube design is focused around that.

Motorola

URL: http://www.youtube.com/motorola

Motorola’s channel is vibrant and funky, and unlike some of the other marketing showcased – is extremely product focused. Whilst this may entertain brand advocates, it didn’t really do much for me – although the designers have clearly put a lot of thought and effort into maximise the impact the channel receives.

Panasonic

URL: http://www.youtube.com/panasonic

A modern, crisp, classic design shows the full Panasonic product range and links extensively through to their main website.

Top Gear

URL: http://www.youtube.com/topgear

4OD

URL: http://www.youtube.com/4OD

4OD have went all out with a custom YouTube flash thingy on their channel, and this often changes to reflect the change in programming on the channel. It certainly grabs the attention of the audience, and shows what’s happening on 4OD on a weekly basis.

Charlie McDonnell

URL: http://www.youtube.com/charlieissocoollike

I love that its not all great big brands that have attracted an audience. Well done Charlie McDonnell, for not only wiping the floor with some of the above brands from a subscriber point of view, but for also coming up with a great YouTube background design, and well worth a mention here.  Oh – and the videos aren’t half entertaining either.

YouTube Channel PSD Template

As a bit of an added bonus, and with me failing to find any half decent YouTube photoshop template, I’ve decided to create my own, ready for download,  for your own use. The layers have been separated out so that you can get a feel for how your channel is likely to look, prior to setting it live. It also gives you a way to get the perfect background, as you can be that bit more creative in Photoshop.  The guys over at Strange have a great little post on how you can setup a custom design, once you get the photoshop file sorted. Enjoy.

14 of the Best Youtube Channel Designs is a post from: Webdistortion

With datasets often tucked away in a variety of different places, across a corporate network, this is a challenge facing many I.T. managers across the globe – how to get the vital statistics quickly  into the hands of the decision makers that can make a difference to performance.  Digital Dashboards, and the KPis which are chosen to achieve this, are critical to making a real difference to the bottom line.

The following are a collection of some of the more elegant apps I’ve stumbled upon recently in my travels that let you do exactly that, and have the flexibility and extensibility to put the data firmly back in the hands of business owners and decision makers, and also serve as a good reference point for dashboard design and implementation.

Roambi

URL: http://www.roambi.com/

Roambi is a pretty neat little tool, that manipulates existing business intelligence data, and transforms it into a digital dashboards that are more easily consumable on mobile devices. Current data sources include SAP, business objects, Salesforce, a standard Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or indeed Google Analytics, giving you access anytime anywhere to your data. The lite version is available free of charge for individuals and can transform Excel spreadsheets and CSV files into interactive views for your iPhone or iPad that are much more usable and consume than traditional spreadsheets or dataviews.

GeckoBoard

URL: http://www.geckoboard.com/

Geckoboard is a browser based digital dashboard for gauging general business performance online at a glance. It makes a number of “widgets” available to the user to show how well your online KPI’s are performing. For example, if you wanted to build a quick dashboard of the traffic performance of all of the sites in your portfolio, Geckoboard allows you to do that quickly and easily, by authenticating against your Google account. Want to turn it into your own social media dashboard? No problem. There are out of the box widgets available for Twitter, and the community have already provided a ready to use free widget for Facebook.

The currently supported web application widgets for Geckoboard comprise of the following:  Chartbeat, Google Analytics, Pingdom, Twitter, Basecamp, Github, Prefinery, GetSatisfaction, Zendesk, Google Apps, Google Calendar, Gmail, MailChimp, Standard Email, Highrise – as well as a few other standard text and numeric widgets. However, the fun doesn’t end there, if you happen to want to monitor something other than that, a full API is available to do so.  A quick bit of programming jiggery pokery, and you will be away at the races, with your favourite online application stats being monitored.

Geckoboard is definitely one of the sexiest web applications that I’ve come across in a while. The attention to detail on the implementation is absolutely second to none, and everything from the way widgets refresh, to the openAuth authentication  makes it a breeze to introduce new widgets to your dashboard and a joy to use.  Well worth taking for a spin. (We’ve also scored a couple of invites to give away – just leave a little comment on this post if you want one).

InDinero

URL: http://indinero.com/

InDinero offers a visual overview of your company finances at a glance, and is one of the few web based accounting packages that I’ve seen taking a status / dashboard approach with their features. Future financial hiccups are predicted, alongside existing cashflows, in beautifully presented graphics, with insight into the health of your business. Previous income charts show how you’re spending, what you’re earning, and how your business finances have changed over time.  Data within the application is synchronized with your bank and credit cards accounts in real time providing updates for of all of your financial data at your fingertips.  Although it is available in the U.S. only at the minute, inDinero is definitely one to watch within the online accounting space. The automation and attention to detail in their financial statistics makes it all the more appealing.

Klipfolio

URL: http://www.klipfolio.com/

Kilpfolio Dashboard is a desktop based application for easily monitoring key metrics within your company data from your desktop. Currently, it is available for the Windows platform only, but includes a powerful developer API allowing a multitude of data sources within (and outside) your organisation to be available directly within your dashboard. Functional dashboard widgets aka “Klips” provide out of the box functionality for your data, including sparklines, pie charts, funnels and more.. Real time information can also be pushed to the desktops of users within your organisation, including significant data movements, memo’s, or other short updates.

Klipfolio will undoubtedly provide many companies with the information they need at a glance, and in a way that is persistent, yet not intrusive – with the application integrating directly into the windows sidebar and retracting on demand.

The rise and rise of the digital dashboard. is a post from: Webdistortion

Information graphics or infographics for short are hot to trot online for a number of reasons. Firstly, they illicit the  ’wow factor’ response, (especially if they are vector based and well designed), and secondly and perhaps most importantly they tell us something in an intuitive, and easy to process way.

The very nature of the format, also makes them easy to share on blogs, wiki’s, social networks and tumblelogs, without the associated hangups of traditional content duplication and syndication. You can expect a well thought out, unique infographic to appear all over the web, often with the magical attribution link back to your site.

Things to consider

In 9 out of 10 cases where I’ve seen this work before as a marketing strategy, the data you choose to showcase should apply as closely to your niche as possible.

In simple terms, if your site concentrates on say Facebook or social media, base the information you illustrate be something related to Facebook or social media.. common sense, as any links that you obtain are more likely to be from other websites closely relating to your own, and its widely recognised that relevant links win over any old link because they help to defuse the old Google bombs.

As infographics are often positioned to be shared offsite, its also imperative that you take the steps to improve your brand exposure directly in the graphic itself. Web addresses, logos and sometimes the graphic creator need to be included to help people recognise the originator. This help increase the chances that you’ll get the credit when your graphic gets shared. Making things bigger than the average bloggers viewport, also forces the link to some degree, as it means a simple copy paste is out of the question. To truly get the impact from the piece, they are going to have to link.  Giving the link code for both Vbulletin forums, and HTML may also help to encourage linking from the less technically savvy.

So what works?

If you can move quickly, and ride a meme, that is awesome sauce. The web moves at hyperspeed though, so we are talking about dropping tools and getting a graphic created in as short a time as possible, and unlike creating blog content, that’s not going to be easy.You may have to sacrifice quality, or depth in the graphic for it to remain timely.

If you can predict an event, or meme that is going to be hot, prior to it happening – for example, something like the World Cup, then that is going to get you well ahead of the game. Smart marketers were creating their World Cup content 6 months prior to the event, and you can apply this thinking to your own marketing. I’m guessing you all seen this. Yes. Interactivity + Infographic + Meme = mega traffic. This one piece of content received 19,000 retweets, 218,000 Facebook likes and 15,000 links. Say no more.

If you decide to create something more timeless, then you can afford to take the time  to polish the graphic in question, so find yourself a decent graphic designer with particular skillz in visualising concepts. A good brief also does wonders for your results as well, although generally speaking its your responsibility to think about what would suit your audience, and what data they would find interesting.

Collecting data sources

As I’ve been thinking about this article, I’ve started to naturally collect little morsals of data in my bookmarks, that could easily be turned into future pieces of linkbait, or an infographic.  You’ll often come across these in more mainstream newspaper publications as journalists receive press releases from people quoting facts and figures all the time.

I’d encourage you to become a magpie for these sorts of sites and information as you find them,  as not only will it help you to come up with an infographic idea, but it will also help in your blog writing too. Quoting good data is a great way to build your authority online AND become a resource that people return to.

Don’t forget that your own data is also invaluable, and if you collect sales data, customer information or anything on your own site, often this makes a good data set because its unique to your business, relevant to your niche, and interesting to your customers.

Google’s internet stats.

http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/

Google compile industry facts and figures from a wide variety of third party sources. The topics cover lots of different industries, and look at micro and macro economics, technology, media trends, consumer behaviour and media consumption over time. The sources that Google quote are often great places to look in their own right.

Wolfram Alpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I’ve noticed Wolfram Alpha used in a couple of instances creatively for linkbait and infographic purposes. Suppose you want to see the nutritional difference of two products. Or compare multiple websites in the same niche. Wolfram provides the sort of data needed to do all that.  MakeUseOf have a nice little post to get your brain ticking over on what to try on it.

Traffic & Usage

Google Adplanner – this list of the web’s top 100 is begging to be infographic’d. If again, you want to analyse some other sites which are running adsense, plain old Adplanner on its own gives you some nice data. Alexa, Compete, Comscore (incidently Comscore  press releases are a must subscribe, as they often contain gems of info), and any of the websites found here are great for monitoring competitors traffic. For mobile metrics Taptu’s mobile touch reports provide valuable insight.

Environment

Mercer produce a quality of living, and cost of living report every year, which is pretty interesting stuff for both environmental bloggers, and those involve in real estate. You might have missed the boat this year, but an infographic depicting the areas which have the highest quality or cost of living in a particular area would be interesting, and easier to consume, than a long text based report.

Business

Business Insider have their own regular infographic in their “chart of the day” series. Problem is though, that they suffer from the quality problems in the implementation I mentioned earlier. They do however provide inspiration on what data works and what doesn’t – and its a trivial matter to plug their URL’s into tweetmeme or other social measurement tool to find the details. Standards and Poor’s additional financial information and indices to find top companies that might be worth examining in an infographic.

Media

Interested in the decline of the newspaper Industry, the failings of paywalls, and other data that turns Rupert into a quivering mess? Course you are. Newspaper online metrics measures the traffic to it’s member sites.  Hitwise also make regular reports on the same topic.  Again, a press release you should be subscribed to.  Akamai provide really interesting data on news consumption across the web in real time.

Nielson

Nielson provide tons of information on consumer behaviour trends, and marketing insight, and are often used as official sources on research. Google for example often quote Nielson in their statistics quotes mentioned earlier.

Obviously, all of these are just a small snapshot of data that could be used to provide the data backbone behind an infographic piece, but hopefully you get the idea. If you see good data references, hold onto them for a rainy day, as you never know when they might be useful.

Infographic Software

Probably the best tool for creating an infographic is a graphic designer, and one that has good vector illustration skills. Some of the best infographics I’ve seen have been the result of creative thinking, combined with great graphic design. However, there are a number of sites that may be of use alongside those skills to quickly create the basis of what you want to achieve, which can later be brought into something like Photoshop and perfected.

IBM Many eyes lets you upload a dataset, or use an existing dataset and then create a variety of graphs from that info. They currently support word trees and clouds, histographs and charts, bubblecharts and more. Primitive in the results you get, but may also give a bit of inspiration for how to showcase the data you have.  Some of the more interesting visualisations showcased also animate.

Gephi – Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs.

Free mind – for mind mapping, this open source tool is second to none. It is suitable for some parts of infographics.

Antaeus – free for non commercial use, uses the basis of scatter graphs for creation of matrix’s.

Juice Kit –  JuiceKit is a Software Development Kit (SDK) for building Information Experience applications, available as an Open Source application from t’Githubs.

GGobi – GGobi is an open source visualization program for exploring high-dimensional data. It provides highly dynamic and interactive graphics such as tours, as well as familiar graphics such as the scatterplot, barchart and parallel coordinates plots.

Visalix – Visalix is a visual interface designed to facilitate man-machine cooperation on complex data analysis tasks.

Brilliant Examples

ReadWriteWeb also have a great collection of visualisation tools, as do WebDesignerDepot. Alot of these are pre-built tools though, and are really only useful for inspiration purposes.

Some of these SEO Infographics are particularly impressive, and all created this year show how popular this is becoming as a tool in the marketers toolkit.

Flowtown’s 2010 Social Networking Map.

Value of SEO verses PPC

Reddit verse Digg

SEO Faq’s

How Infographics Pwned Digg.

Linktoberfest

Secrets of Social Media Conversion

Landing Page Rehab

Finally..

Infographics are clearly here to stay. Hopefully the combination of the tools here, and some of the examples will inspire you to create your own – feel free to drop a comment if you’ve come across any that you feel are particularly interesting.

The internet marketing guide to infographics. is a post from: Webdistortion

With the exception of physical user testing web applications, a number of these tools concentrate on monitoring mouse movement, dump it in a database, and show it back to you overlayed on your site.  Simples. Problem is though, that the majority only work as self hosted solutions, only providing access to the data for the owner of the site in question.

The other problem with mouse tracking is that it only does just that. Monitors your mouse. This may or may not actually be where you are focusing your attention at that moment in time.  In comparison, user testing software often gives you a written or recorded explanation of how users found your site, and any problems encountered – which is great. But, what if you could easily get feedback on the most commonly looked at areas of your site? From a multitude of users? And on any site on the web? What sort of competitive insight could that give you as a web professional?

Well now you can. To relatively little fanfare in the UX community, recently launched YCombinator startup Gazehawk does just that.  Using existing technology available in a few places on the web, Gazehawk use webcams as the primary way to monitor how people are interacting with your site. Participants are crowd-sourced and prospected from Gazehawk’s own site, and they deliver shiny reports to your door on where the focus of attention is on yours, or anyone else’s website. To backup the image report, a small amount of feedback is also delivered from the participant of the test, so you gain an additional amount of insight as to how they found your site from a usability perspective.

So impressed with the simplicity of their business model, combined with the all too familiar ‘why the hell didn’t I think of that’ feeling, I decided to take it for a spin with some of the web’s biggest blogs to put it through its paces. Bear in mind, that these results come with a pinch of salt – as these are single user reports for each of the blogs in question. The guys at Gazehawk have advised me that single user tests can be a bit on the shaky side, and the more tests you order the better – but still, interesting insight none the less, as the data is coming as the result of a live user test. So, here are the results of my tests.

Smashing Magazine

URL: http://www.smashingmagazine.com

Full Eyetracking Study Download

Some of the participants in the study gave feedback on the site that they were tasked with reviewing, this was clearly a user who had visited the site previously, however, although this was a single user study – interesting to note that the user wasn’t terribly interested with the remainder of the page. Smashing Mag have notoriously long pages.

Participant Feedback

“I like the clean design. I was interested in a few of the blog posts. Had I been able to, I would have liked to read more on a few of them. I read all that I could on the ones that were most interested to me. It was enough to give me the gist of the article, and let me know if I’d want to continue reading.”

“Right side ‘scrape ads were slow to appear, so may skew my results a bit. Love smashing mag, btw.”

Official Google Blog

URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Full Eyetracking Study Download

Google’s blog design follows a much more traditional pattern of giving away all of the content, without summaries on one page, so that you can pretty much scroll top to bottom to find and read new information without leaving that page. The eye-tracking study suggests that this is pretty much the case with new visitors to the site. A good proportion of users’ time was spent digesting the home page content, rather than scanning for new sections or interesting content and jumping to a new page. The need for a click is only when you reach the bottom of the page (to navigate to the next set of entries).

Participant Feedback

Search Engine Land

URL: http://searchengineland.com/

Full Eyetracking Study Download

Search Engine Land showed a good level of coverage across the site from left to right, and interestingly the subscription, and advertising blocks got their fair share of attention.  The eyes of this particular user made their way the whole way down the page, scanning continuously from left to right.

Participant Feedback

“Nice page the information flowed pretty well – not as dumbed down (via graphics) as some other sites i’ve seen”

Mashable

URL: http://www.mashable.com

Full Eyetracking Study Download

Mashable are another blog who’s information spans multiple pages. In this particular instance, the main story seemed to garner the majority of the attention, with stories further down the page receiving less views.  Maybe not a completely bad thing ,but perhaps the design concentrates to heavily on “what has last been published” which doesn’t encourage first time visitors landing on the home page to browse further. This particular participant was pretty clear in their feelings.

Participant Feedback

“Wanted to read more, but couldn’t find the link to the caveats that Google wants me to know.

So much crap on the screen that it stopped me from doing what I wanted to do: read the story.”

ReadWriteWeb

URL: http://www.readwriteweb.com/

Full EyeTracking Study Download

Read Write Web interesting received alot of visual attention above the log – which was surprising to me, as I assumed that top navigational bars such as this would be somewhat lost. The arrows on the links may have been enough of a visual cue to make the participant want to explore, or see what they did. Whilst this blog is particularly large in depth, it doesn’t make the massive scrolling ask that some of the others that were studied do. In other words, getting visitors off the home page, and deeper into the content that bit quicker.

Participant Feedback

None Received

ProBlogger

URL: http://www.problogger.net/

Full EyeTracking Study Download

Whilst it isn’t reflected in the image below, Darren keeps a video on his blog’s home page to engage visitors.  This is absolutely apparent on this eye tracking study, as it received a good deal of attention. Other interesting take home points were the advertising has a human face, which is known to increase conversion rates. Their certainly seems to be some truth in that from looking at this study.

Participant Feedback

There was a lot of content on the page and the interface wasn’t that clean for viewers. A more simple layout would have sufficed.

The Next Web

URL: http://thenextweb.com/

Full EyeTracking Study Download

The Next Web not that long ago underwent a bit of a design overhaul, and as one of my own favourite tech blogs, I thought it would make an interesting subject. From this single case, we can see that the logo is particularly striking, and brings across the sites branding in a fresh way. Other attention was found on the “Popular” section of the site, which helps to quickly bring new visitors across to popular content.  The mid section of the site seemed to receive more attention than the other sections – perhaps because the eye was firstly drawn to the popular stories, and this particular user continued down the site.

Participant Feedback

“The colored text definitely drew my attention.”

TUAW

URL: http://www.tuaw.com/

Full EyeTracking Study Download

TUAW makes for an interesting test case as it combines not only the “all content displayed home page” design model similar to Google, but also interlaces video, and images into the design. It’s also particular “long” as far as the depth of the page goes.  We can see from this study that the participant paused frequently around the more interactive  content. Again, first story on the home page received the majority of the attention.

Participant Feedback

None available

Conclusions

Whilst this isn’t a terrible scientific study, it did highlight to me a number of things. Blog designers take note – there’s definitely lessons to be learned on how the different content strategies play out in the above, and you might want to start testing to see if you can improve the length of stay, and the number of pageviews your blogs generate – all with a simple design tweak.

Eyetracking should be integrated into your usability testing as it shows things that even a usability test can’t, and information that potentially wouldn’t have been relayed from users can be easily gathered. It also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to perform – if I can do it, so can anyone in the industry – this isn’t something out of reach for the average person anymore. What do you think? Will services such as GazeHawk open the door for more accessible tracking? Let me know in the comments.

8 eyetracking studies from the web’s biggest blogs. is a post from: Webdistortion

Meta Descriptions

Everyones favourite (and probably most misunderstood) on-page HTML element, meta descriptions have their place in a webmasters kit bag to increase the number of clicks you receive on Google. Yes that’s right, they don’t play any part in the ranking of your website.

Repeat after me. Meta descriptions don’t help ranking, Meta descriptions increase clickthroughs.

You should take care to craft unique meta descriptions for each page, and if you can (in natural language) use the keywords you would like to target for that page – not for a ranking boost, but merely because they will be bolded in the meta description if found. This in itself, increases the clickthrough to your website.

The importance of using unique meta descriptions, simply put is this. They can be an indicator to Google that the page containing them, is also unique. Unique content = more pages in the index = more traffic.

Meta Keywords

Again, a misunderstood meta tag, meta keywords are not used by Google, due to the fact that they have been spammed to death over time. Meta keywords, like descriptions play no part in the ranking of your website.

However, its worth mentioning that a) – they will do your site no harm if included and b) – Google isn’t the only search engine out there on the web. You may find that other search engine bots do use meta keywords to determine some degree of relevance to your page, particularly in less sophisticated bots.

One example might be  a student writing a basic crawler that looks for them. If your goal is to get as many links and to increase the reach of your website – something as simple as meta keywords might see your site turn up in places that others are not.

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster tools, first introduced by Google (waaaay back with fat Matt) – is a way for you to check a number of search related factors. You can check indexing status (how many of your pages have made their way into the index), backlinks, (places that search engines have found links to your website), robots, (to test your robots.txt file), Keyword searches  (including positions and clickthrough data) and any errors that Googlebot finds with your content.

This additional information is available within Google and Bing, and you might as well setup accounts with both of these, as you may find information that correlates between the two. Google Webmaster Tools setup firstly requires a Google account. Once you’ve setup and logged in, you will have to verify your site with a meta tag or upload a file that proves you are the owner of the account.

It’s well worth doing this for both search engines at the start of a project, as robots.txt, and sitemaps are verified through this tool. Bing Webmaster Tools has been recently updated to introduce a couple of new features, and runs in Microsoft’s Silverlight technology. Windows Live account required prior to setting that up.

Yahoo Open Site explorer Verification

Yahoo site explorer and Open Site explorer are both great ways of finding out who is linking to you and your competitors. To obtain additional data from Yahoo on the number of backlinks from various sites around the web, and to get other information on the data they’ve detected, its another verfication tag you should be setting up prior to a site going live for seo and marketing purposes.

To a degree, Yahoo’s open site explorer behaves somewhat like Google’s and Bing’s Webmaster tools, with a much more accurate indicator of backlinks.

Search Monkey meta

As well as the link information Yahoo provide, Open site explorer also lists the data they have recognised for Searchmonkey – this technology is likely to be integrated into Bing’s search technology going forward, so get your coding hats on folks.

The primary reason for making sure your markup uses some of these suggestions is that  it is likely to increase clickthroughs from the SERPs – particularly the video markup, which will show a thumbnail alongside your result on Yahoo.   There is some crossover here with the data you can use for Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol.

Robots

Sometimes, it makes sense to tell Google what parts of your website aren’t really worth offering to visitors via their search engine. Typically, this would include things that are sensitive (private documents), or things such as login pages which you don’t want naughty robots sniffing around. Even if you want your entire site indexed, its still worthwhile to add one to prevent 404′s from showing up in your raw server logs (as robots request this file).

Have you told the search engines what you don’t want included in the search engines? Well, without a robots.txt file, you aren’t likely to get what you want.  Google provide good documentation that is worthwhile reading – create it in the root of your website domain, and check, check and check it again.  Failure to get this basic file correct could see your entire site deindexed!

Webmaster tools for both Google and Bing include testing tools for robots to make sure everything is kosher, so assuming you’ve set this up, there’s really no excuses for getting this right.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps not only give crawlers a comprehensive list of URLs to check frequently, they also result in faster indexing of your site, meaning new content gets to the search engines quicker. I’ve already touted the benefits of that before in generating traffic.

If you think about it, it makes sense to provide an easier, more structured way for Google and others to find your new content, rather than parsing through tag soup HTML, (even though they are pretty darn good at that by now).  The faster search engines are, the more profitable they are as they catch waves of temporal traffic and save money on the processing of the information you provide to them.

Sitemaps are supported by all of the major engines, and they managed to agree on the sitemap protocol , so they are here to stay for the foreseeable future.  Sitemaps can (and should) be specified in your robots.txt file, and directly in Webmaster tools.

If you are on WordPress, you can generate a sitemap automatically with plugins. If you are on any other platform, and have a small(ish) site, you might get away with generating via a web based sitemap generator – everything else,  including sites with complex, and large site architectures – these sitemap generators, and programming code will do the business for you.

There are also a number of different sitemap ‘types’ that many webmasters miss, worth examining if your site niche happens to fit in with those.

Headings

Proper heading tags are important to help define relevance for organic keywords in the search engines, and specifying a range of headings helps to segment the page for engines to determine ‘sections’ on the page.  Every document on your site should concentrate on a particular topic or feature, and heading tags contain the keywords which describe this.  Combined with keywords in the title tag, they strongly indicate what a particular web page is about.

So how do bloggers decide on what keywords go in a heading? Well here is a bit of my own strategy on choosing them, really it’s a delicate balancing act between creating attention grabbing headlines, and on making sure your post has relevance for future high traffic searches.

Title Tags

Titles are probably one of the most important tags in your HTML that market your website. You should treat them as such, and as with heading tags, you need to balance interesting titles with titles that contain the keywords which describe the content on that particular page.

Many brands miss a trick by having their company name in every page title on their website, when in actual fact the only page that arguably needs it, is the home page. The reason you should leave it off elsewhere?  If  you have a strong  and unique brandname, your site will get found anyway, from natural search. Unique phrases (such as brandnames) generally rank at number one naturally anyway. Putting a company name in every page only dilutes the other keywords Google has to crunch on.

Google Places Submitted

Previously known as Google Local Business Centre, Google offer a service for location based business, called ‘Places’ which allows you to submit details about your business, including telephone number, website address, and importantly your exact location.

Submitting data here lets your business appear on Google maps, and show up in location sensitive searches. You will have to verify the data you submit with an automated telephone call, or wait for a postcode – details on the how, why and where’s of Google local are all available at Google’s help centre. If you are wondering how to appear higher in the results once you have submitted this, I’ve blogged at length about other ways to improve your local search position.

Interestingly, alongside the rebrand of this service, and the recent publication of an API for checkin’s – one would expect this hints strongly at the move towards Foursquare territory, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them using a mobile game to crowdsource their business data.

Contact Details Markup

Contact Details such as your telephone number, email address and physical address, should be marked up in RDFa. This gives you the best chance of association of your website address with a physical location, and an increase in appropriate local searches. Multiple business addresses should be listed on multiple pages, according to 2010 local search ranking factors.

Google Profile Created

Your Google profile allows you to create a homepage about yourself, and include the (followed) links of the websites that you manage. A full and complete profile will make its way into the search engines, and provide an additional place to capture visitors to your site(s). You can list YouTube, Picasa and Flickr photos and posts that you create on Google buzz are also syndicated here. If you use Google Sidewiki, Sidewiki entries also make their way on automatically, providing additional content for the search engines to find you.

If you haven’t already created a profile, now is definitely the time to do so. Rumours are abound that Google are about to launch a social network of their own ‘Google Me’  - a full and complete Google profile is undoubtedly going to be the home of this service if and when it launches, so it makes sense to at least have it complete now, and if you really want to jump the gun – to start marketing it around the web on your other social profiles.

RSS

Having an RSS feed is paramount to syndication, and providing one can also help to get your content that bit quicker into the search engines. In much the same way that sitemaps improve discoverability, RSS being a structured format is used by search engines to speed indexing in many instances.

The other obvious benefit of RSS is that you are providing visitors with a way to pull your content in, and use it in their own way. Some will use it to automatically tweet your content, some will use it to populate their blog, others will use it programmatically in ways you can’t even imagine. Bottom line, RSS is a must if you are publishing regular content.

Images

Every image on your site should be optimised for maximum search benefits, and if your site is particularly image rich, it can be difficult to provide relevance to Google. Sites such as Picocool , 9GAG and ImgFave have this sorted – introducing a social element to their service, and crowdsourcing tags and descriptions.

A previous post of mine discusses some of the things you can do to optimise your images for search, and one other extra tip to add to this is the image tag inside the sitemap protocol. Further information on how to go about that at the official Google Webmaster blog.

Also worth pointing out that high impact photos used on your site will greatly enhance the chances of your content being shared, so take time and attention to polish your content.

URL’s

Your website URL’s should if at all possible be rewritten to include keywords that underline the main focus of the page. You have probably come across links on the web that look like this:

http://www.domain.com/?p=72&s=0 -

Well, thing is, search engines aren’t really able to work out what is going on with those, they don’t highlight what exactly p=72 means. If on the other hand, your website looks like this:

http://www.domain.com/fruit/apples-and-oranges

Google has a pretty good idea what the focus of that page will be, prior to even parsing the page. Take this advice and apply sparingly – if you already have a structure on the web that looks like the former, it may not be worth the effort to create friendly URLs, as existing links out there will break!

Some people would instictively redirect any broken URL’s that occur, but remember folks, 301 redirects do not carry all the juice, so be prepared to wait a while for you to rebuild your authority, which will probably be worth the effort in the long run. If you are starting out a project from scratch, take the time, and the effort to consult with developers to ensure they are thinking in this way, and following best practise from the get-go.

Architecture

Your website architecture is an important consideration when developing a site. You may choose to have a flat architecture, with no directories, or multiple directories. Google suggest that deep directory structures don’t work just as well from an SEO point of view.  Many people suggest that having dates in URL’s is a no no, as it indicates when content is old to visitors, and adds unnecessary information to your URLs.

The flip side of this is that it enables much more deep directory diving in Google Analytics! I can, for example work out that content in the month of May has attracted more pageviews than February, or that 2008 was a more successful year than 2007. Google automagically categorise content according to pseudo directories.  Just another thing to think about when deciding about your site architecture.

Canonical Tags

If your site has identical URLs which serve the same purpose and deliver the same content, you may be suffering from ‘duplicate content‘ issues. Simply put, this is where search engines can’t work out which content is the most important to show in the results, and it chooses itself. This may not be what you intended, and is commonly the fault of the content management system, or site architecture in question.

Thankfully, Google and other engines have agreed to support a new tag, known as the link canonical which can specify which page is the preferred one.  This will result in link juice flowing correctly (if people have linked to the wrong version), and help Google figure out what page you intended to show in the SERPs.

Yoast has developed a canonical plugin for WordPress, but if you don’t know what you are doing seek advice before implementing this, always better to be safe rather than sorry when dealing with a tag that influences a search robot’s activity.

Social Media

Social media and SEO go hand in hand, contrary to what others would have you believe. It’s just another tool in your marketing kit to get the job done.  Social media makes SEO that bit easier, as it facilitates the sharing of your content.

You can however make things easier on yourself, by weaving a social media strategy around your content. Have you tried turning comments off and letting the debate happen on twitter with a hashtag for example? What about running a competition on Facebook which requires people to enter by commenting on your site? Mix things up a little, and you may find that your content reaches a bigger audience as a result.

At the crux of it, more shares = more potential for secondary links. This is the same reason it is worthwhile making it to the home page of any of the major social voting sites – sure the traffic is bouncy, and not really worth much as regards conversions, but it will put your content in front of the eyeballs that may give links in the future.

Great Content

Not even the greatest attention to detail for on-page SEO can mask poor content.  Far too many people build brochure sites that stagnate over time, and then wonder why they are being outranked by the people developing fresh content.

When you are launching a site for a client, you should really be selling them the benefits of blogging, or creating something with a user generated element to it. If you haven’t an ongoing commitment to crafting great content online, forget about it.

The Ultimate Search Engine SEO Checklist is a post from: Webdistortion

This image was named 'hero' on the Apple website. Could it be just that?

This week, Apple added yet another addition to their product family – the Magic trackpad. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t really bat an eyelid, however, there’s something about this product that shouts business strategy particularly loudly.

Haters have dismissed it as just another interface device a bit bigger than what exists in many laptops, and hey – the good old mouse works, so why change?

Apple brand aficionados, have done what they usually do. Gawp at how stupendously beautiful it is, buy it, and scream from the rooftops how its changed their workflow, productivity and overall sex appeal. Yeah baby.

Anyway, I digress. Analysis of Apple versus / other pissing contests are the online equivalent of feeding a dinner party Marmite or Marmalade to see who kicks up the most fuss in their respective defense. A hearty steak – it aint.

At the risk of sounding like I’ve been drinking from the Apple Kool aid, the reason I personally think that this product is REALLY important is this:

The iPad has been a huge commercial success as well, (which was incidentally conceived as a concept before the iPhone was), giving rise and rise to new applications using gestures, pinch and zoom, and other sexy human interface innovations. These have proven to be extremely popular with  users, and as one iPad user recently described to me after using it for a while to browse - ”It’s like I’m touching the internet now”. We will continue to see applications developed for this platform, primarily because of the experience that it provides.

Developers today not only want to build great software that people use, but great software that people can touch feel and connect with as well. If you take a snapshot of what is hot in the gaming market for example, the Wii and Microsoft’s Kinect both use gesture recognition as a way to further engage an audience.

Other companies such as Synaptics, (RIM / Blackberry’s hardware partner) have also recognised this trend, with software and hardware solutions to implement this.

At the crux of it, I the introduction of the Magic Pad is undoubtedly to bring the touch applications which have already been developed back to the desktop – giving developers who have created apps for iPad or iPhone another market place, and a boost in desktop sales for Apple.  In one simple motion, and with the introduction of one hardware product Apple may have just laid the ground work for a military assault on the desktop market in 2010. Things are already looking positive, according to reports released in March – and this is undoubtedly a hardware product that is only going to bolster that position.

Magic Trackpad, more than just another interface device? is a post from: Webdistortion

Google Checkout

URL: http://checkout.google.com/

Google Checkout is Google’s attempt at a replacement for PayPal, and is still very much an inferior product, with only a small subset of the features offered by others. As for the actual transaction costs, they have completely mimicked the tiered cost structure of PayPal, as low as 1.4% + £0.20 per transaction, but as high as 3.4% + £0.20 depending on your monthly sales volume. further details can be found on pricing here.

In a similar vein to PayPal, Checkout is a middle man solution – storing credit and debit cards in its system, and then using those to transfer funds to a fro a bank account.  With the ability to embed “buy now” buttons if shopping cart functionality isn’t needed.

The adoption of Google checkout hasn’t been all that they have hoped, but that could all change pretty soon. If TechCrunch’s prediction on Google Games is correct, we could see a much more mainstream take up of Google Checkout. At time of writing they were running house ads that looked like this isn’t far of the mark.  Technical support for Google Checkout would need to improve somewhat if they are going to get the traction they need however; an outage of the service back in April saw many developers and e-commerce merchants disgruntled, with no apparent response from the Google team. Checkout is available to customers in both the U.S and Europe.

Money Brookers

URL: http://www.moneybookers.com/

Money Bookers is a UK based company,  and is Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority of the United Kingdom (FSA). They offer a number of benefits including sending money securely worldwide to anyone with an email address – even if the recipient does not have a Moneybookers account yet, and accept business from lots of different currencies.  January 2010 they were reporting a user base of 10.8 million accounts – although this doesn’t indicate how many active.

Following the online wallet model, they hold all payments in limbo prior to transferring through to the final recipient, giving you some amount of protection. Escrow services are available for auction services. All previous transactions can be found in the history section of your account which can be accessed at any time and the data can be easily exported to an excel file if you want to maintain a digital backup. In the setup of an account there are a lot of verification procedures, which can take time, and they are certainly not as easy to use for someone in the US compared to someone in Europe. That level of protection will however help to give users piece of mind.

Their fees are on a flat per transaction basis, where uploading fees to a moneybookers account is free, but withdrawing funds from your account costs you. Further details for different countries can be found here.  As with Google Checkout and Paypal, they do offer a payment API - however there didn’t seem to be any quick “copy and paste to buy now” type scenario, which will put off some of the less technical users who are looking for a quick e-commerce solution. That said, requesting money is a simple matter of logging in and sending a money brookers email.

Paymate

URL: http://www.paymate.com

Availability: Australia, USA, New Zealand

Paymate provides secure, reliable and innovative Internet-based payment services to buyers in 57 countries around the world and sellers in Australia, New Zealand and the USA. You can use Paymate to receive online payments via credit card, and like PayPal – you don’t need to have a merchant facility with a bank.

Although this is a service which exists inside particular locales, it is still a worth competitor to PayPal, and has performed particularly well on Ebay Australia – where Ebay were forced to accept it as an alternative payment provider for fears of anti-trust litigation.

Details on the fees charged can be found here – with the fee for buyers in the UK at the time of writing being 3% + 0.25p  per transaction regardless of the size of transaction. However there does seem to be charges for chargebacks and a credit check charge for new customers opening an account.

OboPay

URL: https://www.obopay.com/

Obopay is one of the first mobile payment systems to make it to the web, enabling customers to transfer money to one another right from the mobile phone.  Technically this is achieved using a combination of the technologies offered on mobile devices – traditional SMS, WAP,  HTML / Web apps and bespoke iPhone applications – allowing them to cover all bases regardless of  the handset capabilities.

With more and more of the web moving mobile, its no surprise to see startups taking advantage of this, and wedging a foothold in this space. For example in May that announce that they were going to allow banks a branded payment solution to take advantage of the growing mobile trend – saving them the hassle of the implementation, and allowing OboPay to get on the pig’s back so to speak.

Amazon Payments

URL: https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/personal/money

Amazon have a number of interesting products under their ‘Payments’ banner. They have a system  for sending money which is free to use for sending money between Amazon users, and they have a number of more ‘E-commerce’ related products. If you are looking to just send and receive money in the U.S. they have a pretty attractive offering.  If however, you are needing a transaction option, you are going to have to pay for the privilege. 

All of Amazon Payments uses their databases stored internally to aid with the checkout process, essentially giving sellers less hassle with the checkout process, also giving access to Amazon’s patented ‘One Click order’ services. In a similar vein to PayPal, they also offer cut and paste HTML code for their Simple Pay product, which can get you up and running quite quickly if you only have a handful of digital products to sell. Processing is performed on Amazon servers, prior to the customer being returned to finish the checkout process, which isn’t that big a deal considering its an out of the box payment solution.

As for costings, this is worked out on a per transaction basis, with fees starting at 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction for volumes under $3000. See more details on the pricing for business accounts here. 

At time of writing, Amazon Payments UK hadn’t been rolled out, and the service exists for the U.S. only. 

Notable Mentions – Digital Software Carts

These other links and systems may be suitable for a variety of scenarios, including digital shopping carts, card processing and digital wallet solutions. Some of them mirror the free software features found in PayPal, some of them are just bare bones solutions, but hopefully they will be useful for you to review.

E-Junkie

URL: http://www.e-junkie.com/

Provides shopping cart software which integrates with PayPal and other card processing gateways. If you are selling digital goods, thoroughly recommended folks.

Kagi

URL:: http://www.kagi.com/

In a similar vein to E-junkie, Kagi offers a digital goods delivery, and integrated shopping cart experience solution for those looking to get up and running without the hassle of setting up a full e-commerce store.

Digital River

URL: http://www.digitalriver.com

Digital River’s Element 5 product is also used across the web for digital software delivery, and its shopping cart is well respected.

Other PayPal Alternatives

Some of these additional alternatives may also be applicable to your particular situation.

1. Neteller- Prepaid card solution, giving you a mastercard that you can use instead of a credit card.
2. CCNow
3. PayPay
4. DirecPay – PayPal Alternative in India
5. AlertPay
6. Liberty Reserve
7. Strictpay
8. Perfectmoney
9. TrialPay - Ad funded Payment Platform used for social games on sites such as Facebook, and for software companies who can offer trials.

17 paypal alternatives for easier e-commerce. is a post from: Webdistortion

What are question queries?

Simply put, question queries are the direct questions that your visitors are asking the search engines, and landing directly on your site.  e.g. “What colour is the sky?” – Google have been trying to improve this section of their algorithm,  (see this research paper from Googlers who realised that question queries, as opposed to keyword queries failed more often) – with a social question engine Vark (acquired) most likely being used to improve the results when question related queries are presented.  Interestingly, they also found that question queries are also formulated more often when other search terms failed, so this often presents webmasters with an opportunity to “plug the hole” so to speak, and provide searchers with the information they need.

Finding your own question queries?

The first thing to do, is to work out what constitutes a question. My own technique for this with Google Analytics, is to pull out all question words. For example “Who”, “What”, “Where”, “Why”, “When”,”Should”,”Can” are all words that constitutes a question when used in a long tail phrase – particularly when used at the start of the string. You can create a segment to show you these quite easily.

In Google Analytics Under “Manage Segments” > Go to, Create New Segment, then make your screen look like this:

Or alternatively,  I’ve shared the segment directly here. You should hopefully be able to click on that link and apply it to your own Google account. Once you have that in place, you can apply the filter, and see what terms come back. Plugging these back into Google will let you see how you are performing, how well your page answers the query, and where you can possibly improve.

If nothing else, this data alone could make up the basis of a frequently asked question page that takes visitors to other pages within your site that better answers the question.

Segmenting question queries for fun and profit. is a post from: Webdistortion