Click on the thumbnail to check the book out at Amazon (aff link)

The evidence of theories of persuasion or influence is everywhere in business. However a lot of the time it’s not understood.

For example you know companies choose celebrities to endorse their products. You know brands want you to ‘like’ them on Facebook? You’ve seen shops give you 3 slightly different versions of more or less the same thing. But do you know why? And can you use this knowledge in your own business online.

If not then you will be the end of this 2 part article).

The reasons for all of these things comes back to the laws of persuasion or influence.

Writers such as Kevin Hogan and Robert Cialdini have covered the concepts in depth, starting with Hogan’s 1996 book The Psychology of Persuasion.

These laws (10 of them) are well utilised in every form of business, but how do they look online?

In this 2 part article I’ll present examples of how each of the laws are implemented online to help companies ‘persuade’ buyers to part with their money and how you can do the same.

This article will look at laws 1 through 5.

Law 1 – The law of reciprocity

When someone gives you something of perceived value, you immediately respond with the desire to give something back

You don’t have to look very far to see examples of companies giving away things of value to potential customers.

How I do it

On my site I have written hundreds of articles, ebooks, videos etc and provided them all for free. It’s not just because I’m nice (of course I am) – it’s called ‘Content Marketing’ not ‘Content Philanthropy’. It’s a marketing technique designed to build trust and build on the concept of reciprocity. People who contact me looking for websites are grateful for the stuff I’ve put up on the site and in some way feel a need to reciprocate.

I give a lot of stuff away for free - not just because I'm nice.

How you can do it

There are many ways to integrate reciprocity into your business. You don’t want to put yourself out of business by giving too much away for free. But the key here is ‘something of perceived value’. You need to think of things that customers will perceive as valuable but don’t necessarily cost you too much to do. Here are some examples:

• Embrace content marketing (write articles, ebooks, videos, do a podcast or free webinars).
• Engage with your audience on social media – retweet their content, like their pages etc.
• Get active on blogs and forums helping people in your industry with their problems.
• Give away a basic version of your offering for free (think ‘freemium’ models like Dropbox.com).
• Offer a free report to relates to one of your services (i.e. we offer a competitor analysis for free to potential SEO clients)

Law 2 – The Law of Time

 People will behave differently depending on whether their primary time orientation is present, past or future.

When a customer comes in contact with you or your business they are likely to be reverting to their inbuilt ways of thinking about things in terms of the ‘past’ ‘present’ or ‘future. A person that dwells on the past might think ‘I’ve seen products like this before, they aren’t as good as they look’.

The most common conversion that needs to occur is to get people away from thinking about ‘past’ and instead thinking about ‘future’.

Enter the experts.

How Apple does it

Check out the ad for the iPad 3 from Apple’s website. People watching this ad may have a computer and not think they need an iPad (thinking about the past). They may have an iPad 1 or 2 and are happy with that (thinking about the past).

Check out how the ad shifts your perspective from the past to the future by:

1. Language ‘A more personal experience with technology than people have ever had’ and ‘distances itself from other devices’
2. Usage – The majority of things they are showing in the ad are things that people probably aren’t doing on their computer (i.e. shopping, books, navigation etc).
3. It talks about how the new features change the game.
4. Tries to get people to forget about the device and focus on the use.

How you can do it

This is clever stuff so how do you do it? Here are a few common ways:

• Define a clear value proposition that differentiates you from others. The headline and copy on your site will focus on this and how your experience is different to any experience your prospects would have had with other companies in the past.
• Purposely call out some dodgy practices of others in your industry. Internet marketers do this a lot – ‘The gurus try to sell you info on making money online without actually making money themselves – we have made money and this is how’.
• Paint a picture of a brighter future. Imagery can show happy clients, people enjoying doing things without worrying about what problem it is that you are solving.
• Focus your giveaways on benefits instead of problems – i.e. you have a carpet cleaning business – instead of a free download called ’10 reasons to clean your carpets regularly’ (this will encourage past thinking) how about ’10 immediate benefits of carpet cleaning’ (to trigger future thinking).
• Showcasing happy and successful customers who’s lives have been improved as a result of your offering (getting people to imagine a better future as opposed to dwelling on a dismal past).

Law 3 – The law of contrast

When two things, people or places that are relatively different from each other, are placed nearer together in time, space or thought, they appear to be more different from each other.

This is a fundamental technique used in retail stores everywhere. Let’s use the king of online retail Amazon as an example.

How Amazon does it

Check out the following comparison charts shown on Amazon Kindle product pages.

First, the chart shown on the page for the $79 Kindle (the cheapest one).

Comparison chart shown on the $79 Kindle page (while you're there feel free to buy the DX with my affiliate link).

Notice the comparison chart above (taken from half way down the page) compares the $79 Kindle with 5 other products all of which are more expensive than the entry level Kindle. This re-enforces to the buyer that they are getting good value by contrasting it with higher priced products.

Now let’s have a look at the comparison chart on product page for the $379 Kindle DX (the most expensive one).

Comparison chart for the $379 kindle DX (aff link)

Fascinating! Did you notice:

1. It’s common for ecommerce sites to have thumbnails that are all the same size but Amazon weren’t silly enough to put the same size image on the $189 Kindle as the DX – the DX is clearly bigger contrasting it with the smaller (cheaper) one.
2. Hold on, what about the others? There were 6 Kindles last time I looked but now it appears there are only 3? Amazon don’t want to make it obvious to the buyer that the chosen one is significantly more expensive than all of the others.
3. But the most fascinating of all is they didn’t even put a price for the base Kindle!

Law 4 – Law of friends

How others do it

Gary V on the One Load homepage

Base camp 'Face to Face' sales page

Facebook ad showing one of my friends who likes fishing.

Facebook knows that if they show that one of my friends likes something then I am going to be much more likely to also like it. So it shows me ads that my friends like and shows me which friends like it.

Google does a similar thing in the search results, if a result is something that one of your friends on Google+ has given a ‘+ 1′ to then Google will show the profile pic of your friend and show that they gave it a +1. They know you are much more likely to be interested in that particular site if your friends are.

How you can do it

There are so many ways you can integrate the law of friends into your business. Here are just a few:

• Include social proof on your site. Show how many people like you on Facebook (if a visitor has friends that like you, Facebook is kind enough to mention that as well).
• Include testimonials ideally from similar people to your target customers.
• Embrace advertising techniques like Facebook like campaigns that utilise the law of friends.
• Expand your social media efforts – the more +1s, Tweets and Likes you get the more this law will come into play.
• Give customers in incentive to refer others – the people they refer will be much more likely to purchase.

Law 5 – The law of expectancy

When someone you respect and/or believe in expects you to perform a task or produce a certain result, you will tend to fulfil their expectation whether positive or negative.

I saw this exact situation on Twitter this morning. Someone had forgotten about a prior appointment and the response from the person was ‘Hi, I’m sure you’ll make it good. Everyone is expecting you! They can’t wait! ‘

This sets an expectation that the person will attend the appointment and they feel obliged to do so.

This kind of thing is prevalent on company websites as well.

Homepage for MailChimp - Eh eh eh eh (rewards link)

Notice MailChimp don’t spend a whole lot of time trying to convince you to sign up for their product. A 3 word heading, 2 sentences then a Sign Up button. Why? Because they ‘expect‘ you to sign up. The confidence in their product is obvious, they don’t need a 5,000 word sales page, they know you’ll sign up – why wouldn’t you.

How you can do it

The law of expectation is about confidence. If you were supremely confident about your product you wouldn’t need huge sales pages to sell it, you would ‘expect’ people would sign up and that expectation would be clear on visiting the site.

So the keys here are:

1. Start with a great product and an audience who really wants it!
2. Don’t oversell, point out the benefits and provide more detail if people want it (don’t assume everyone needs to be convinced some deals sell themselves)
3. Make the call to action very clear – it’s not about clicking for more information it’s about signing up…right now.
4. If you are in a position to offer it for free or a free trial then this can work very well.

To be continued…

In this article I’ve looked at 5 out of the 10 laws of persuasion and shown some examples of these in action online. In the follow up I’m going to look at the second 5 laws.

If you have examples of these in action or if you have anything to add feel free to comment below.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Selling online with the 10 laws of persuasion – part 1

Step 1 – Lower your standards

When I do something I always want it to be perfect. The problem is, if I waited for everything to be perfect I would never deliver anything.

When you are dealing with a new medium like podcasting and you are trying to do something on a budget the absolute most important thing is you ship something.

When I look back to my first videos on this site, they are terrible (see WordPress Menus). I knew they were terrible at the time but I put them up anyway. My most recent videos (see tech tips) are significantly better. They still aren’t perfect but the point is when you are doing things yourself it’s impossible to get it right before you start and still deliver something within a reasonable amount of time and budget. It’s much much easier to improve as you go.

Also on this point what I often so is set my standards very low and focus only on getting the product up. This keeps me motivated with a realistic end goal in mind. Then when it’s up, that is the point when I’ll get picky. In some cases I’ll re-do a good chunk of it but I still think it’s better to stay motivated and ship something. Then once you can see it you will easily be able to spot areas for improvement.

In the case of the podcast, I recorded one episode where it was just me and got that up. Then I replaced it with one where I interviewed Jamie Marsden and I liked that a lot better but it was still me doing the audio intro and the voiceover. I then replaced that one with a version with a professional voiceover (all within 1 day mind you).

Some may call it inefficient but it’s a process that works for me.

Step 2 – Learn a little but not too much

It’s crazy to start something without knowing anything about it so I did a little bit of learning first. Don’t overdo this step, you can go around in circles and be overwhelmed.

I downloaded Dan Lyons’ ebook podcast like a radio DJ (great ebook and he’s Aussie too!) and I skimmed this on my iPad while I was making myself lunch.

I picked up some great tips in here to do with audio sound effects, podcast hosting and marketing (I probably spent 10 minutes max reading it – sorry Dan).

I also validated some of this stuff by Googling some info on hardware and software and let a few people in my network know that I was starting a podcast.

Step 3 – Document your show ideas

If you are going to tell people you are doing a podcast you better have some idea of what it will be like, how often you will do it, topics, formats, guests etc.

I thought about the podcasts that I love such as:

• The Lifestyle Business Podcast
• This week in Startups
• Adsense Flippers
• Small Business Big Marketing
• Freedom Ocean

And why it was that I liked them (see this post from a while ago on this exact topic).

I used Evernote to document all of my ideas and before long I knew what the show would be and I had a few ideas for future guests and topics (as well as a topic for my first episode).

Step 4 – Hardware and software setup

I mentioned this was going to be a 1 day job right? So don’t get too carried away with hardware and software. There’s plenty of time to invest in a pimpin studio setup down the track. For now let’s keep it simple (note I got most of these ideas from Dan’s ebook or just from Googling).

1. A USB Mic or headset (free if you have one already, probably $20 for a cheap one) – I had a logitech one, not the best quality but it will do for now. I’ve heard the Blue Yetti is better so I might get one of those soon if I’ve got some spare coin.
2. Audacity (free) – An audio editing program for Mac or PC. I find it slightly annoying on the mac (doesn’t support the swiping, kind of tricky to move around without scrolling etc) but it’s free and it damn well does the job.
3. Skype (free) – You probably have it installed already, I’ll be using this for my interviews.
4. eCamm Skype recorder ($20) – This lets me record Skype calls (records to a video file and then it lets you split the file into MP3 files and if you want to you can split the caller’s audio and the receiver’s audio into separate files). I didn’t bother with the multi-file thing for the first show but you would get better results if you did and you either had some audio expertise or you were particularly patient (I am not). This is a Mac app, check out this post that I found in Google for other Windows options.

Step 5 – Audio setup

Podcast voiceover intro gig on Fiverr

There are a few things you need to consider with just to get the basics right (a lot more to get a great finish):

1. Who is going to do the final edit and pull everything together for the show. I did this myself in Audacity and I think for a reasonably computer literate person this is achievable (although not especially easy). You could look for someone cheap on Fiverr, Odesk or Elance or find a local audio engineer that specialises in podcasts. Another good idea is to contact some of the shows you like and ask them who does their audio (a lot of times they will mention this on air because the person may be doing it for free or at a reduced rate for them).
2. Are you going to have a professional voiceover intro. I decided to go with a guy on Fiverr for this – here is the gig. I think it’s pretty darn good for $5 but the options above apply here too.
3. Depending on what you did with step 1 and 2 you might also want a few sound effects. I chopped up the audio I got from the fiverr gig and used it in different places throughout the show and threw in a little DJ scratching nice that I found here (I chopped it up a bit in Audacity, not exactly CD quality but it works ok to start with).

Pulling it all together is a bit of work the first time but it will be a lot easier next time. At some stage you’ll hage to think about whether you want to outsource it or do it yourself each time.

Step 6 – Record and publish

Depending on the idea of your show you might be just recording yourself or you might use Skype like I did to record a guest.

I put a thread up on a forum I’m part of asking if anyone was keen and I had a taker within 20 minutes and within an hour or so I’d called him on Skype and used the eCamm recorder software to record the call.

I pulled it all together in Audacity and added in the sound effects and the pro-voiceover as well as my own sections (I introduce the episode briefly at the start and have a tech tips section that I do myself at the end).

When you export the MP3 file from Audacity you’ll end up with 1 file (it merges all the tracks for you) and that is the file you use to upload to your site.

Step 7 – Set up your website

Depending on what you decide you may want to include your podcast in your existing site or you might want a totally new site. In my case I had given my show a name and I want to build it up as it’s own identity so I registered webdomination.co, pointed it to my server and used the Softaculous 1 click WordPress install to set up a blog (Check out my other site createafreewebsite.com to see the exact steps).

WooThemes have great quality WordPress themes

I chose a theme from WooThemes (aff link) and installed it on the site and set up some basic pages.

I didn’t get too carried away with configuring the site but set up links to my other businesses, my social accounts etc.

I set up a little widget to subscribe in iTunes (and linked it up after I set up my podcast in iTunes see below).

Step 8 – Upload the podcast (your site and iTunes)

This step sounds scary but it’s pretty easy once you know the best way to do it.

Step 1 – Buzz Sprout

Buzz Sprout is an easy podcast audio hosting service

Sign up with buzzsprout.com (free for 2 hours a month) to host your audio files. They will give you an RSS feed to add to iTunes when you add the podcast to iTunes.

Note I tried to host my files with Amazon S3 because I already had an account but iTunes didn’t like it.

Optional step – Feedburner

I also set up a Feedburner account for the RSS feed on the site and an additional feed for the podcast audio feed. This is an optional step but with feedburner you get more information on your subscribers and it also means I can track my subscribers in my dashboard app Web Control Room.

So the process for me was copying the RSS feed given to me by BuzzSprout and pasting it into Feedburner then setting up the podcasting options in Feedburner and copying the resulting feed out of there (it’s the feedburner feed that I pasted into iTunes). If this is killing your brain then skip it.

Step 2 – WordPress Plugin

You need a WordPress plugin for showing the audio files up on your site (if you aren’t using WordPress, Buzz Sprout will give you some embed code).

You can either install the Buzz Sprout WordPress plugin or the Podcasting plugin by TSG. I found they were both great but I had minor issues with both:

1. Both use a player that uses Flash (boooo). But the Buzz Sprout one gives a download option if you don’t have flash and plus most people will be accessing it via iTunes.
2. With the TSG one I didn’t really like the plain audio player and it didn’t automatically add in an option to download the audio file (this is pretty easy though, you can just copy the MP3 file URL from Buzz Sprout and link to it in the editor in WordPress).
3. I found with the Buzz Sprout one my episodes don’t display immediately in the selector when you go to add them to a post. I had to wait for the first one to go in there and from there I just copied the code and changed the episode ID (it appears in the address when you look at the episode in Buzz Sprout). If you don’t want to mess with this then you might want to just stick with the TSG one.

Step 3 – iTunes

My iTunes cover shot

Simply open iTunes, click on Podcasts and choose ‘Submit a Podcast’. The first thing it will ask you for is an audio feed. If you are using Feedburner you will use the one given to you by Feedburner. If not you will use the one given to you by Buzz Sprout.

Assuming there are no issues with the feed, iTunes will accept it and take you to a new screen to add in the details.

They will also ask you for a cover shot which is a 300 x 300 pixel image. I mocked mine up quickly using the WordPress theme from Woo Themes.

When you submit the podcast you will get an email from iTunes saying they have received it and will notify you when it’s published.

It took overnight for them to publish my show and it started appearing in the iTunes search.

Conclusion

I won’t cover marketing the podcast in this post but I may do at a future stage. As you can see, setting up a podcast doesn’t have to be a long time consuming process. While the quality of my show needs some obvious improvements I’m happy I could get it up and running in 1 day and without spending much ($20 on the eCam recorder software was the only cost I think).

Feel free to comment below if you have any thoughts on this and please check out the show!

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here How to launch a podcast in 1 day

The Lean Startup Minimum Viable Product

Last year Eric Ries released a book (a movement even) called The Lean Startup.

I tried my best to read it but found like a lot of business books it bored me to death and seemed to spend 300-odd pages outlining one very simple idea that:

Startups should stop trying to build something that’s perfect & instead build the ‘Minimum Viable Product’ and ‘Iterate’ with rapid development cycles until it’s developed into something great.

The concept is appealing. To me a few pages would have captured it but I digress (BTW if you have read the whole book please let me know if I am incorrect – I made it to about 100 pages I think).

The idea of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was in stark contrast to the typical model of starting out with heavy investment, building for years and then undertaking a big do or (often) die launch.

Aside from the appetising buzzwords that startups were now given permission to drop at will (MVP, iterate, pivot) the idea offered a lot of value and appeal. I love the idea of building software and getting it out there quickly and rapidly improving it into something that resonates with people. And I have tried at some level to incorporate this thinking into the launch of my 2 recent software projects Ninja Studio and Web Control Room.

But there’s a problem. There’s an almost totally opposite approach that has equal appeal to me.

Excellence

Last week startup king Jason Calecanis penned a great post called The Age of Excellence (I love this piece and I suggest listening to the audio version with some discussion).  Jason’s main point (which was made in about 4 pages) was different:

The performance of software and companies is more than ever on public display immediately on launch. With rating systems in the App store (and other places – think Google Places for Australians) so easily available along with active and efficient social media channels, companies can no longer hide behind their brands or their marketing to fabricate excellence. They need to be excellent immediately to be noticed and if they aren’t they are dead on arrival. 

This idea appeals to my inner perfectionist. In working on my 2 apps I took pain to get tiny details right. A few pixels being out, a few extra unnecessary clicks for the user, tightening the resolution of the graphics. At every step there was more and more work to get things to a standard that I was happy with. Even then there’s got to be a line when you are working on software that isn’t bringing any immediate money in however who wants to launch something (software, a business, a new product) and have people hate it? Who wants to get 2 star reviews in the app store because you’ve released something sub-standard.

What is the answer?

I don’t know what the answer is but I approach it by way of my best effort at compromising. For a perfectionist while the idea of the MVP has some appeal, it’s almost impossible to implement. At every stage of building something you see things that you don’t like and your impulses drive you to fix them. This makes it more work but it’s important to release something that you are proud of and it’s important to make a good first impression.

But this kind of perfectionism can be toxic (think some of Steve Jobs’ earlier projects, designed and engineered to perfection but overdue and overpriced).

Startups don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars to mess around with so it becomes a compromise. A tricky balancing act of trying to build something great while embracing the philosophy of the minimum viable product.

What do you think?

I’d love to know what other people think about this topic so please feel free to comment below.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Minimum viable product or excellence?

We performed SEO work on the site for 3 months in accordance with the notes I made in the first case study post here in the section ‘Our off page SEO work’.

In addition to this, because the keyword wedding videos was showing Google Places results first we optimised their Google Places page in accordance with 4 ways to boost your Google Places ranking.

The results

About a month after performing the Google Places optimisation the client’s page went from not even showing in the first page of Google Places listings (even when searched from his own premises and even when you zoom in closer to his local area) to showing 1st across Brisbane.

This is a ‘complete’ places listing – Click on the image to see a bigger picture of it.

What this effectively meant was for anyone in his target audience (Brisbane) searching for his keyword (wedding videos) Dave’s site would come up first. And not only that, it showed his 5 star rating so it looked more appealing than the other listings.

If you searched from outside Brisbane his natural listing was coming up 7th (and still is) which was an improvement from 14th when we started.

Note I’ve noticed that Google has since stopped displaying places results for this keyword which is something I discuss in  4 ways to boost your Google Places ranking Google can change their mind at any stage and this can have a big impact on your traffic.

If you have any feedback on this case study or suggestions for future case studies feel free to comment below. I am currently working on a case study for my own blog on longtail keywords so stay tuned for that.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here SEO case study 2 wrap up – Wedding Videos

The new 'simple' Web Circle site.

In re-designing this site my focus was on simplicity. We started working on it about 2 months ago when I decided I wanted a site that represented the way we approach designing and building sites and apps. I also wanted to do this without overloading the site with content. 

Looking at it now I’m very happy with the result and I do think it achieves this but there was a lot of work put into something that was supposed to be ‘simple’.

So I thought it would be a good idea to give people an idea of some of the things built into this site and the amount of work involved.

• The design itself took about 3 weeks to get finalised (not 3 weeks non stop) but there was a lot of fiddling around with the design to get the concept right including a total re-branding (scrapping our logo in favour of very simple letters only, new colours, fonts etc). Anything that wasn’t necessary was removed (time will tell whether we got this balance right, some people might think there were some things left out that were necessary).
• The fonts used are done through Typekit to enable us to have a nice, slightly different font but still have it display properly across multiple platforms.
• The illustrations had to be commissioned for the site (I had mine already, Kellie and Steve’s are new).
• All images on the site are replaced with double resolution images for display on the new iPad. See How to optimise websites for the new iPad for more on how this is done. This required some screenshots to be taken on the iPad, other images to be sourced in high resolution and some to be manipulated a bit after they were taken (not all source example files were originally designed in high resolution).
• I wanted to animate the top menu but I didn’t want to use Flash. So we developed it using JavaScript and it now works across platforms (extra code was required so that on tablets and mobiles (which don’t have mouse overs) it animates on touch and then shortly after it navigates to the page). The code used to achieve this animation was written using Raphael js. To get these buttons working took 8 hours just by themselves.
• The animating of the main 3 homepage images and the inner page sliders was all done using JavaScript and works cross browser. If you look closely you’ll see the background image fade in and then out very slightly.
• The footer ‘More’ button that animates across is done as a custom script that brings in a WordPress page and loads in the links on each page as a menu.
• All of the links on the site fade into a new colour when hovered over – this was done using custom JavaScript.

I’m sure there is more than that but I think that gives you some idea of what can go into a website like this.

What do you think?

Feel free to check out the new Web Circle site and let me know what you think.

I’d love to know whether you like it and any thoughts you have on simplicity and why it’s so darn complex!

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here A peek inside a simple website design

If you are just interested in seeing the outcomes of the case study hang around and when it’s complete in June I’ll do a full wrap up.

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A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Facebook like competition – month 1

I have just entered a competition where people can like My Facebook page during the month of May and go into the draw to win a laptop computer.

I’m doing this as part of research for a new ebook I am writing on blogging for business so:

1. If you are a blogger I suggest you check it out below, the more people the better and it only costs you $7 and I’m sure you will get some activity on your Facebook page as a result.
2. If you are interested to see what kind of numbers we get from this stay tuned to the blog in June i’ll go back over the results with some specific numbers to help people determine whether it would be a good idea for them. I will be reporting on the traffic as well as the additional likes on our Facebook page and anything else that comes out of it.
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A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Facebook like competition – month 0

Here are 10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about.

Check out replace your brain with Evernote for more on Evernote

1. Use Evernote

No matter where I am, if I ever have an idea to cover on my blog I capture it straight away. If in on my Windows computer at home, my Mac at work, my iPad at the cafe, my iPhone at lunch anywhere I’ve always got all of my notes and I can add ideas to my ‘blog post ideas’ notebook instantly (even if I don’t have internet access). You can use it to add text, add pictures, record yourself talking, take pics of whiteboards etc. The first thing I do when I want to write an article for the blog is go through this notebook in Evernote and pick my best idea or the one that is the most relevant at the time and start there.

At the moment I have 15 ideas in there that I could write about today if I wanted to. For more information specifically on Evernote check out my post called Replace your brain with Evernote.

2. Monitor my email

When you run a business your customers tend to overlap pretty nicely with your audience on your blog. Which means if your customers are asking you questions then it’s likely that the answers to these questions would be interesting to your readers. I’ve written quite a few posts as a result of emails I have received. Sometimes I might write a post instead of a long email reply and just send them a link to the post instead. Other times I’ll email back and then I’ll realise that the content is suitable for a blog post. A few examples of posts I’ve written as a results of questions from clients are:

• 15 essential website launch steps
• Choosing a business name
• Editing images for the web for free

3. Reveal secrets and results

How to build yourself a free world class website

As I mentioned above I don’t particularly like blogs filled with generic boring content – I much prefer reading and writing about real things. Some people are hesitant to reveal secrets from their business or real results from things they are working on but I think if you are going to write interesting content then you hage to write real content.

In our SEO case studies we not only reveal our clients but we reveal the exact keywords we are optimising for and the exact steps we are following  in order to rank for them.

In my SEO ebook I reveal the exact things clients should be doing to rank better in Google as well as all the things we do as part of our paid service. In my ebook ‘How to create yourself a free world class websites’ I show people how to cut us out of the process of building a website completely by stepping through the exact steps people can follow to create their sites themselves.

Doing this not only ensures I always have something to write about (because I always have something I am working on that I can cover) but it also means our posts aren’t your typical boring generic blog posts.

4. Be active in forums and social media

Forums are great because people are always asking questions providing great topics for you to cover in your blog. They also give you an idea of what others are sharing and talking about at the time.

This week the buzz has been about high profile link network BMR being de-indexed by Google. So I made sure I updated my post Using blog networks for SEO to cover this news. Last week it was all about the new iPad so I wrote a post How to optimise websites for the new iPad.

Forums and social media also give you a place to share your content and can help build your following and increase traffic. Both Twitter and the Flying Solo small business forums are in my top 10 traffic sources each month.

If people are already talking about certain topics then it shows they are interested and they are more likely to read your article.

5. Go out on a limb

6. Listen to what my mentors are saying

Everyone has other people that they listen to and respect (whether you call them mentors or not) and these people can be a great sources of ideas for blog posts. I love podcasts and I often get ideas from Dan and Ian from the Lifestyle Business Podcast or Jason Calacanis from This Week in Startups or Tim and Luke from Small Business Big Marketing. It might just be something small that they said or it might be the topic of their latest episode or a guest they interviewed. You can always put your own perspective on ideas you gather elsewhere.

The idea for my post Forget focus, stemmed from listening to an episode of This week in Startups where they discussed the various businesses that Amazon were into these days.

7. Do keyword research

One of the main reasons to blog is to generate traffic – and a lot of this comes from Google. In my case Google brings me 3 times as much traffic as my next biggest referrer. If you do keyword research and you find keywords that you think you could rank for usually the best way to rank is to write a blog post and then promote it on social media. This not only gets you a page that ranks but also if people are searching for the particular keywords then you know it’s a problem for people that you can solve with your article.

For example my WordPress menus video is a really simple video that shows people how to add menus in WordPress. I created this as part of our WordPress trainingposts so while it was going to be created anyway, the name ‘WordPress menus’ was chosen specifically because it gets 58 searches a month. It’s not a lot but it’s easy for me to rank for so it makes sense for me to target that keyword.

8. Be controversial

I’m really not controversial all that often but if I do have something to say that people might not like I generally thing it’s a good idea to say it. Worst case is people won’t like it and it will give them a reason to comment which makes the post all the more interesting.

Out of the top 2 posts on my blog, Forget focus suggested that some of the worlds most successful businesses are horrible at focusing and you should be too and the 5 day microsoft detoxprovided an outline for ditching the market leading operating system and office software provider.

Not that these are particularly controversial but they did have the potential to annoy some people or at least get their attention and they’ve turned out to be the top 2 posts on my blog in terms of comments.

9. Curate

Curation is basically just bringing content together from other sources. On this blog I don’t do a lot of it however on my other blog Web Development Brisbane it is filled with small posts and comments on other articles. These short posts are great for Google and I know plenty of people who run these short posts on their main blog.

Most of us are reading lots of articles or comments in blogs, forums and social media throughout the week it’s not hard to find our best posts and add a few comments that might be of value to your readers.

One good trick for this is setting up an account with Posterous. With Posterous you can simply send an email to them with the content for your blog post and they will auto post it to your Posterous page as well as your blog. Most of the short posts on my Web Development Brisbane blogare done this way from the cafe when I’m reading other articles.

10. Write ebooks

One of my ebooks, Small business search engine domination.

Writing ebooks gives me a bit of a longer term view of my blog so I’m not just writing article after article. It does this in 2 ways:

1. If I plan an ebook out in advance I might write a series of posts which will inevitably become the main starting point for the ebook (I am doing that at the moment for an ebook on the topic of blogging for business of which this post will be included)
2. I can also do it the other way where I’ll write the ebook first and then after the ebook is released I’ll go back to it and take parts of it for other things I’m doing. For example last year I released an ebook called How to build yourself a free world class websites which I referred to above. Recently I launched a site called Create a free website where I used a lot of the content from the ebook to write the content for the site.

Writing ebooks forces you to do a lot more research over a longer period of time and as as results you end up getting all sorts of ideas for blog posts.

What do others do?

Here are some other ideas from people who mentioned it on Twitter or that I have found while researching for the post. Dan from the lifestyle Business Podcast who is also a great blogger at Tropical MBA says “Find posts in the Dynamite Circle (private forum) and stealing the content and poaching popular topics out there and responding or mirroring in some way” which is in line with my points above about covering topics that other people have already shown interest in.

Kim Roach as a guest blogger on Smart Passive Income provides these 17 copy and paste blog templates. While I think these have the potential to lead to blogging for the sake of blogging they can also be a good way to kick start some ideas.

Jane Sheeba from Pro Blogging success offers these 40 blog content ideas same comments as above re these, lots of good ideas on there and some more blog post ideas from Mavis at Attraction Marketing.

What do you do?

I’d love to know in the comments below what you do to ensure you always have something to write about.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here 10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about

The new iPad is bringing high resolution to the web

*Update 2 April 2011 – We have just updated this post with a few realisations:

1. Resizing images in HTML works fine on the iPad but makes the image look worse in the browser. So our suggestion of just having smaller images always at twice the size has been removed – we now suggest to use the 2X JavaScript technique for every foreground image. 
2. The previous post didn’t mention what to do with background images so we have updated it to include how to handle these.*

For as long as the web has been around, web designers have been optimising images for relatively low resolutions due to the limitations in monitors. With the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010 (with high resolution Retina display) it meant you could now view things in a much higher resolution. But while many apps may have been re-developed to suit the high resolution display, it didn’t really force web designers to change the way they build websites. This was because the screen is so small, the amount of pixels shown is only the same as a typical website anyway so by default the majority of websites looked great on them (i.e. website was shown half the size and therefore doubling the resolution was fine).

It was still assumed at this stage that higher resolution displays were some way off appearing in full size screen devices like tablets, laptops and monitors because of the engineering challenges associated with it.  However with the release of the new iPad, the challenge is here now. And luckily we have one and we can start getting our heads around how to respond.

HTML vs foreground images vs background images

First of all it’s important to understand that your site is made up of HTML (headings, text, some graphical elements like borders etc) and images (foreground and background). The HTML is not restricted by pixels so it automatically looks great on the new iPad. However the images have probably been optimised to 72DPI or similar so these images are going to look a bit blurry.

For example have a look at the website below.

If you view the Web Control Room site on the new iPad you will notice all of the headings, buttons, images all look fantastic. But the images (screenshot top right, sources image on the left and image of the mobiles etc) all look a little bit blurry. Note the web has always generally been a bit blurry compared with print. Now that we have crisp HTML on pages with blurry images it becomes very noticeable. Note further that we will be upgrading this site so if you look at the site down the track it will all look nice and sharp.

So let’s make everything high resolution!

Unfortunately it’s not as simple as making everything high resolution because there are 2 downsides:

1. High resolution images resized in HTML don’t seem to look any good on low res devices (normal monitors etc)
2. A high resolution image might be 3 or 4 times the size of a low res image. Larger sizes mean increased time to load a website and increased bandwidth usage for the website owners and the visitor.

Here are 2 images that I have optimised at different resolutions.

This image is 280 pixels wide and is a typical web optimised image - it is 54 kilobytes in size

This image is 560 pixels wide (resized in HTM to 280) but as a result it is larger at 159 kilobytes

The 2 images above are going to look more or less the same on a normal monitor (the high res one on the right might even look slightly worse) however on the new iPad they look vastly different. The one on the right is so crisp it almost looks like a real iPhone sitting in front of you.

So what is the answer?

Foreground images

The best practices for managing this situation are likely to change but for now we will be working off what the Apple.com site does and that is:

• Load in the normal resolution image
• Detect for the new iPad and if present load in a high resolution image to replace it.

This technique is explained in detail in this post by cloudfour.com.

For example if you look at the Apple.com homepage you will see a main image of the new iPad (if you are reading this sometime after the release it won’t be there but I’m sure whatever image is there will be done the same way). If you view this image on a normal monitor you will see the standard resolution image however when you view it on the iPad you see the standard one first briefly and it is quickly replace by the high resolution one. It happens so quickly and seamlessly that you would have to look carefully to notice.

It’s quite simple to get this working, you just need your web developer to upload an image replacer script (see this post) and once it’s there every time you load in a new image you need to load in 2 versions and if you name it correctly the script will replace it on iPads. The convention used by Apple is as follows but speak to your web developer about the convention used if you implement this on your own site:

• main_image.jpg
• main_image_2x.jpg

Using any modern CMS (i.e. WordPress, Joomla! etc) you can quite easily upload the high resolution image (but don’t insert it into the page) and then upload and insert the standard resolution image. Note the images both have to be in the same folder and with a CMS like WordPress it may change the folder if you upload them at different times so make sure you upload both images at the same time (if you are replacing old images then re-upload the old ones).

Note we also noticed that if there were a lot of images on the page it took a long time for the script to check each image so we added a qualifier that the image had to be marked with a class of ‘highres’ in order to be considered by the script and provide an alternative. Most editors will enable you to assign a class to an image while uploading.

Background images

Background images are slightly different in that they are generally built into the theme of the website and not added by the owner. Here is how are are handling background images for now.

Media query – This is used to determine  determines if the pixel ratio is > 1.5 (which it is on the iPad adn pretty much nothing else yet). The media query would look like this:

“@media all and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5), all and (min–moz-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5), all and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5), all and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {

@media all and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
all and (min–moz-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5), 
all and (-o-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5), 
all and (min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {

CSS Background image – Then our element would look like this:

.someElement { background-image: url(hi-res-image.png);
-webkit-background-size: 50px 50px;
-moz-background-size: 50px 50px;
-o-background-size: 50px 50px;
background-size: 50px 50px; }

The background-size property should be half of the high resolution images dimensions. There is more information on that here.

Demo of image load technique

For anyone with a new iPad we’ve put together a sample below. If you view the image below on a normal monitor you will see an image that is standard resolution and if you view it on the new iPad it will be twice as crisp.

This image will show normal resolution on your monitor and high res on the new iPad

Some implications

One obvious implication is the file size issue. To me, it’s probably not a huge concern, my bet is anyone who has shelled out for a new iPad is going to be more than happy to put up with the longer download time to view the site in all of it’s glory. Webmasters may not be quite as keen if their bandwidth is limited but with faster internet coming bandwidth will get cheaper and cheaper, this will become less of an issue.

Another issue to consider is on high res devices like the iPad visitors at present will be downloading the image twice. I don’t personally think this is a huge concern I kind of like that the page loads in the same speed and then gets crisper once the larger image comes in. However we’ll monitor where the best practice goes on this and see if people start looking for ways to just load in the high res version.

The biggest issue I can see is a lot of website owners aren’t going to want to go to the trouble of uploading 2 images every time they add content to the site. Over time I think this will change but initially and particularly among small business owners I can see a lot of people not bothering with the extra steps.

One final thought to keep in mind is this is the first device of it’s kind to offer this resolution but you can be sure other devices will follow. There are already rumours that apple will be releasing retina display versions of it’s MacBook pro this year and of course other manufacturers will follow with high res phones, tablets, notebooks and monitors.

Personally after playing with the new iPad this week I can’t wait to see the web in high res across all of my screens.

Also in this post I haven’t addressed having a different version for the iPad, for this you might want to read up on WordPress responsive themes.

What do you think?

If you have any comments on this post please feel free to post them below.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here How to optimise websites for the new iPad

Web Control Room

Web Control Room is a tool that shows a simple 1 page report to help small businesses and web professionals get a quick snapshot of how they are performing. We launched it last week both as a web app and a mobile site.

Mobile site versions

The app itself runs via the browser and also on mobile devices. We are currently working on an app but while we wait the standard version of the site runs fine on an iPad and there is a specific, simplified mobile version that loads when you access it via a mobile phone.

The app is designed to run on the browser via computers, tablets or mobile phones.

Main site design

The design of the app is simple and clean, large charts, lots of space and clear use of size and colour to show visitors quickly which parts of the report demands their attention. This became the main focus of the site design, purely to showcase the app and give people a good understanding of what it does by focusing on the key benefits and features.

The main Web Control Room site is designed to give the visitor a clear idea of what the app can do.

You can check out the site live at Web Control Room.

If you have any thoughts on the project please feel free to comment below.

blossyfloss

The blossyfloss site is a nice clean design which focuses on showcasing their beautiful products. The site has many feature including:

• No flash and built on open standard so it looks the part and functions on all devices
• A simple homepage slider to showcase their work in situ
• Clean simple design which brings the focus to their work instead of to the web page
• Wholesale login to provide different prices and rules to wholesale customers
• Integration with MailChimp so new customers are added to the newsletter list

The homepage is simple and elegant, providing images of the beautiful products in situ as well as clear navigation to the important site elements.

Inner product category page

The inner category pages are super simple and really put the focus on the beautiful designs.

You can check out the live site here, let me know in the comments below what you think.

Bolt Creative

I have already covered the Bolt Creative site in How we built a website for a top 3 iPhone developer however I wanted to talk more specifically here about the design and some of the coding techniques used.

Design

The design for the project was handled by R & P Design in the UK here is a screenshot of the homepage.

I love the design of the site, there were a lot of great source files to work with and as a result the design is catchy and fun.

Features – Ajax loading

There were quite a few neat little features we incorporated into this site but my favourite is the Ajax page loading. Check out the page below On this page you can navigate between hundreds of icons, videos and wallpapers and launch larger versions of each (including watching the videos) all without leaving the page.

The ajax page loading enables the user to browse through hundreds of media resources without leaving the page.

To check out the live page that I am referring to here visit this link.

If you have any thoughts on these projects or comments on projects to feature on the future please feel free to comment below.

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Latest work March 2012