When I analysed the inbound organic search terms on Web Design from Scratch over a 12-month period, Google Analytics gave me the maximum 500 rows of data.

I was interested to know where the 50% point was… How many of my top terms represented half the inbound traffic.

I didn’t find the halfway point. The top 500 terms only accounted for 42% of all traffic. So the long tail of the graph delivers more traffic (on a rich site) than the “head”.

This graph shows the actual distribution for those top 500 terms. Even though several of my top terms delivered over 10,000 visits, most of the traffic is not displayed here!

Rule 2 – You can’t directly optimise for the Long Tail

Of course, the more pages and content you have, the more opportunities there are for the search engines to match people’s queries to your stuff.

But it’s practically impossible to optimise any site for the hundreds or thousands of different phrases that (should) actually bring the majority of your traffic.

So what can you do?

How to Optimise for the Long Tail

My idea is, if you imagine picking up the head of the graph and lift it, the Long Tail should also raise.

But, in the spirit of good marketing, I thought I’d test that assumption.

So I pulled up the numbers for a selection of 8 of my most popular terms, each taken over two separate periods.

Here are my results.

Notes:

1. Obviously, there will always be more phrase matches (searches containing e.g. “css block”) than exact matches (only the phrase “css block”).
2. The longer the phrase, the more likely it is that the exact score will be the majority of the searches (e.g. “top 10 websites in the world”, where the phrase match numbers are only 3-5% more than exact).
3. There are variances between the two years. For terms like “css block” and “modern web design”, the proportion of exact:phrase is almost identical. In other cases, the numbers can vary by as much as 66%.
4. What’s really important is, in every case, when the exact-match number goes up, the total (phrase-match) searches go up, I think proving the hypothesis that lifting the most popular terms will lift a range of other terms.

The post Exploring the Link Between Head and Long-Tail Traffic appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

Contents

• Introduction to semantic HTML
• Why semantically correct HTML is better (ease of use, accessibility, SEO and repurposing)
• Comprehensive list of HTML tags, which to avoid and which ones to use, each with their
• semantically appropriate uses
• Tips for writing better semantic HTML, including a neat DHTML trick for automatically
• wrapping HTML tags in new tags
• Worked examples

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to the book

What is Semantic HTML?

Semantics is the study of meaning: how meaning is created and applied to signs. “Why does X mean X?” is a
question of semantics.

HTML is the markup language that we use to write web pages. It’s understood by standard web browsers,
as well as dozens of other types of “user agents”, including mobile phones, search engine spiders, aural
browsers etc.)

HTML consists of two types of things:

• Tags
• Text content

A few tags can be content of their own (like images, Flash movies, or metadata), but most HTML tags are used to apply structure to content.

Semantic HTML, or “semantically-correct HTML”, is HTML where the tags used to structure content are selected and applied appropriately to the meaning of the content.

So, if you’re wanting your HTML to be semantically-correct…

A <p></p> paragraph tag pair should only be used to indicate a paragraph (which is a structural concept). It should never be used to apply space to a web page. Never, ever, use a series of <p> tags to create space!

The HTML tags <b></b> (for bold), and <i></i> (for italic) should never be used, because they’re to do with formatting, not with the meaning or structure of the content. Instead, use the replacements <strong></strong> and <em></em> (meaning emphasis), which by default will turn text bold and italic (but don’t have to do so in all browsers), while adding meaning to the structure of the content.

Always separate style from content

HTML tags should never be used to apply presentation – that’s the job of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). See http://webdesignfromscratch.com/how-html-css-js-work-together.cfm to learn more about how HTML, CSS and JavaScript fit together in web pages. (Note, perfect production practice also removes all JavaScript functions and event handlers from the markup as well!)

Why semantically correct HTML is better

Writing semantic HTML brings a wide range of benefits:

• Ease of use
• Accessibility
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Repurposing

Ease of use

First of all, semantic HTML is clean HTML. It’s much easier to read and edit markup that’s not littered with extra tags and inline styling. Clean markup also saves time and money when other people have to interact with it – say, a web developer who has to implement your page template in a content management system or any other web application.

A corollary benefit is that your HTML files are also smaller, so they load quicker.

Accessibility

Unless you’ve had to interact with HTML markup through media other than your web browser, it doesn’t seem obvious to imagine that your web pages have a life outside the browser window – but they very often do. Web pages can be consumed by humans and machines in lots of different ways!

When you separate visual aspects (i.e. style) from the actual meaning of a document, you end up with a document that always means the same thing. The way it’s presented or consumed can vary. One common technique web designers use is to apply different style sheets for different media. For example, you can apply a certain stylesheet only when a document is printed to paper, another one when it’s viewed on screen, and yet another when it’s accessed by a text-to-speech aural browser.

A text-to-speech reader also understands the tags <strong> or <em> but it treats text output with those tags very differently to the way a visual browser responds. The TTS reader adjusts vocal tone or volume, rather than contrast or text style, which conveys the same meaning but through a different medium.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine spiders and crawlers, like Googlebot, represent another genus of user agents. They also consume web page content, in an attempt to discern the meaning within.
When a crawler finds a web page, it stores its assessment of what the page is about on an indexed database to use when matching people’s search queries. The big question is – how do search engines match search terms to known pages to create a prioritised list?

Of course, they all do it a bit differently, but one of the keys to Search Engine Optimisation is to use plain old common sense. If you were a search engine, how would you do it? If you work through the problems a search engine faces, a few things soon become clear, often easily expressed prefixed with “all other things being equal…”.

Let’s say you have two web pages, each with exactly the same text content (10 kilobytes). One of the pages has an additional 5KB of HTML markup, neatly annotating the semantic meaning in the content.

The second page has 30KB of additional markup, with inline styles, lots of nested <div> tags, and decorative imagery.

Now, the more graphically intense page might look better to human visitors (might!), but if each page contains the search term “bluebottle” 5 times, which would you (pretending to be a search engine) judge was most relevant to someone searching for “bluebottle”?

Clearly, it’s the first, more lightweight page, for a few possible reasons:

1. The keyword density of the lightweight page is greater. It features the search term five times in 15KB of markup, whereas the second page features it five times in 40KB of markup. Whatever the additional markup is for (the search engine might not be able to tell), it doesn’t seem to be about “bluebottle”.
2. Each occurrence of the search term is likely to be higher up towards the start of the document in the lightweight page than it is in the 40KB page. All other things being equal, the earlier you find a search term within a document, it’s more likely that the document is about that term, or the term is more prominent in the document’s content.
3. Assuming that the first document is neatly marked up with semantically correct HTML, it’s more likely that the search term will be placed inside a higher-value tag (such as a heading, or link) than in a more graphical page (which might use an image as a link, perhaps without a proper alt attribute).

Repurposing

When your markup (content, with meaning) is separated from your styles (style sheets for different media),obviously the content can be understood more easily by all user agents. That means not only user agents you already know about, but ones you don’t yet know about (like automated crawlers that create custom RSS news feeds on a certain topic, or image- or video-specific search engines), as well as others that have not yet been invented!

The last couple of years have seen mixing and mashing content emerge as a major feature of new web sites and applications. This can happen without the knowledge of the original site owner, but in most cases this freedom of content to move around the web, adapting to various media, is beneficial to the original creator.

Often in these situations, the content taken from a web page is formatted differently on the new remixed page, which makes it all the more important to remove any style content from the markup itself. (Note that inline styles, applied directly within HTML tags, override any other styles implemented through separate stylesheets, and so they would have to be stripped off programatically.)

Clearly, it’s easier to grab and re-use content from any source, and apply it to any medium, when it doesnot contain any hard-coded style information, and also when it does contain semantic markup that canhelp a computer program understand the meaning and structure of the content.

The post Free Semantic HTML Ebook appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

After having freelanced myself since 2007, I can honestly say that I’ve made all of these mistakes and more. In fact, I’ve made more mistakes than I care to remember. Most noticeably was sitting through an hour long meeting calling my client by the wrong name. But I won’t get into that, lets take a quick look at the top 5 most common mistakes that freelance web designers make, and how you can avoid them.

Mistake #1 – Taking any job that comes your way

This is definitely one of the most common problems that almost every freelancer makes, and typically its due to the fact that they are dead broke and desperate for cash. In just about every case, it results in the developer working ridiculous hours for peanuts, all because they smiled, nodded and shook hands at the first mention of payment (for any amount) and accepted the job.

In my experience, having made this very regrettable mistake when I first started out, it was just a case of not wanting to argue the point over costs, in case I may have offended the client in any way. That, added to the fact that I was eating dry toast for dinner most nights, meant that I had to take virtually anything that came my way.

It became obvious pretty much right away, that if my business had any chance of surviving, and me not ending up in the nut house, that I needed to be much more vigilant about what jobs I agreed to and was a lot firmer about my pricing

Solution – Learn when to say “No”

Even if you’re down to your last dollar, don’t agree to a custom built, database driven website with video, audio, and a 45,000 member base that needs to integrate with PayPal for $600 – it’s just not worth it. Instead, learn when to decline a job.

Better still, price the job at what it should be, and if the client rejects your quote, then consider it no loss and a headache avoided. In any case, you should always have sufficient money (somewhere) to prevent desperation. Because when you’re desperate, you tend to say ‘yes’ to anything – and that can be dangerous.

Mistake #2 – Not using proper contracts and agreements

I remember how happy I was when I landed my first client. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my partner about it. Everything seemed peachy. That was until I hadn’t been paid a month after having finished the job. Needless to say, I was devastated, and I had visions of my old workmates gathered around me back at work saying, “We told you it wouldn’t work. We knew you’d be back”. Well I certainly didn’t want that to happen, so I chased them down and eventually got paid.

It turned out that the client decided to take a holiday to Bali for a month towards the end of the project, which left me hanging big time. I had quit my job and desperately needed the money – just in order to pay the rent and buy food. I knew when I shook his hand and accepted to take the project, that I should’ve used a contract, but stupidly, thought “It will be right, he’s a nice guy”. It’s funny, clients always seem nice and reassuring about paying on time during the initial meeting, but always seem to find excuses afterwards.

SOLUTION – Always use signed contracts

It doesn’t matter who the client is, even if it’s your mother – always use proper documentation and signed contracts when starting a new project. Regardless of the project size, whether you’re building a comprehensive e-commerce store, or a small 5 page brochure website, at the very least, use work orders, and have everything double checked, and signed off upon before proceeding. Its just not worth it otherwise. By using formal contracts, you’re protecting yourself legally in case any disputes or non payment issues arise.

Mistake #3 – Not being firm enough

As most freelancers know, its easy to get sucked into adding a “few little things” here and there, that clients assure you “won’t take too long”, or “aren’t too hard”.

As we all know, nothing in this industry ever takes 5 minutes – as most clients suggest. Most definitely, one of the biggest mistakes I made was not being firm enough, and telling clients “no”. In the beginning, I did whatever I could to keep clients happy, because I figured that was the right thing to do.

Well I achieved that, clients were happy, but I was miserable. I found myself working countless hours, setting email accounts, troubleshooting servers, working on desktop computers and providing training that was never agreed to. The worst part was in most cases, clients just expected it – without offering any form of payment, and stupidly, I let it happen.

SOLUTION – Be firm, learn to say “No”

In my opinion, you’re better off offending or upsetting a client momentarily, rather than sitting at your desk for days wishing you had of said something earlier. For myself now, when a client even hints at something that is outside the scope of the agreement, I kindly remind them of what they agreed and signed off upon. In addition to this, I always include “exclusions” within my contracts, covering what’s not covered. This way, I can easily say, “I’m sorry, but it states clearly in my contract that that wasn’t included in our agreement”.

Mistake #4 – Trying to do everything yourself

Its easy to get caught up in the action. Finding clients, meeting with clients, organizing meetings, preparing documentation, answering emails, answering phone calls, developing websites, doing graphic design, troubleshooting issues, and so on. If you’re a one man band, chances are, you’re doing all of these things, and at the end of each day crawling into bed feeling completely exhausted.

Don’t worry, I made this mistake too. At times I wondered why I left my cushy government job and took on the extra stress. Besides, being your own boss was meant to be easy, right?

SOLUTION – Start hiring

Now I know most freelancers will read this and think “What? I can barely afford to make enough money on my own, let alone hire someone!” Hear me out, because I’m going to share with you what I did. Instead of trying to do all of the coding and design myself, I outsourced.

This freed up so much of my time it was incredible!

I would follow the same principles as before, but instead of sitting at my desk for days, or even weeks as I had done previously, I would simply pass over the job details to my virtual assistants and they took care of everything.

To make this profitable, I set a profit margin of at least 50% on my hourly rate. This way, I had more time, and less stress. In fact,once I started doing this, I had much more time to meet with existing clients, and find new ones.

Mistake #5 – Struggling to find clients

Without a doubt, one of the biggest frustrations for most freelancers is finding clients. I know this first hand from experience. Calling prospects, banging on doors, handing out cards, passing out leaflets and promoting your website everywhere. Its enough to do your head in.

Thankfully for me, I never really had too much trouble finding clients, however I have spoken with numerous freelancers that are at their wit’s end trying to find work. The mistake that most of them make, is that they’re constantly chasing new clients, which leads to them being in this position.

SOLUTION – Offer complementary services to clients you already have

In almost every case, when designing a website for a new client, they would ask me, “John, can you help us get rankings in Google as well?”, or “John, do you do logo design?”, or “Can you help us with our online marketing?”.

Whenever you hear questions like these as a web designer, jump on them as a huge opportunity!

By offering complimentary services like this, you’re increasing your income, and you’re not having to be constantly chasing new clients. Even if you outsource the work, it doesn’t matter. Having these extra services will help “fill the gaps”.

Bio

John Romaine is a freelance web designer, SEO consultant and full time internet marketer based in Sydney, Australia. John operates http://www.webdesignbusinesskits.com which provides freelance web designers with a fast start business kit, and ready made contract templates. All included within the Web Design Business Startup Kit.

The post Top 5 Mistakes Most Freelancers Make… and How to Avoid Them appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

And you’ve probably wondered what I’m talking about.

I guess it’s like my grand unifying theory… something that brings together everything I’ve been doing in SEO, in conversion, usability, persuasion, and graphic design.

Let me try to sum it up for you in a few sentences.

First, here’s what’s wrong with web design today…

Clients pay designers a big chunk of money for something they have no idea will work.

Put another way, it’s gambling!

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half!”
~ John Wanamaker

Now, I don’t believe in gambling.

I do believe in marketing, though.

And, what’s more, I believe that every dollar spent on marketing should generate more money for the client.

If you agree with me, read on…

That principle is really at the core of Strategic Web Design.

Instead of paying a big wedge of cash up-front, for someone’s “first best guess”, SWD says we should invest as little as possible in order to test a theory.

Instead, we want to develop rapidly, and make decisions quickly, based on facts, not opinion. Plus, every step should minimise risk and maximise return
on investment.

Here’s how it works…

Phase 1: Research

A Strategic web designer will spend much more time on research, interviewing the client, checking out the competition, defining the propositions, and estimating the size and composition of the market.

So, before we even fire up the FTP client, we have a really good idea of whether there’s likely to be a profitable market niche there, and how to reach them.

(Hint: a new website isn’t always the best way… But we’re interested in marketing, so we’re open to any channel, including Facebook, Etsy, LinkedIn, etc.)

Phase 2: Test Site

In the second phase, they’ll rapidly launch a thin website.

This won’t be over-designed, but based on the simplest appropriate theme.

The purpose of this website is to test the market, to answer questions like…

• How much traffic can we get, how easily?
• Is the market interested in our offerings?

We’re looking for actual, real-world data here… So that we can make good decisions.

Instead of spending days on graphics and production, SWD says, design the content! (If you’ve read Save the Pixel, you’ll recognise that phrase)

That means the propositions, the guarantee, the irresistible offer, the human story…

The second phase is complete when we have an initial round of stats on traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, average sale value, etc.

Put those numbers together, and you’ll have a picture of how viable the market really is.

Then you should know how much every 1% of growth is worth — REAL ROI!

So you can decide whether to continue to invest in this opportunity, and how much.

The best bit is, you’ve got to this point with minimal investment.

Phase 3: Kaizen!

Can you guess what we do next? After we realise we have a viable opportunity?

We optimise. We build, step by step, inch by inch, day by day…

We add content that will bring more visitors into your sales funnel.

We test different appeals, headlines, angles, positions, imagery, messaging…

And – finally – we’ll test graphic design features. (The fact is, graphic design factors tend to be very minor… Content is far, far more significant. So why the hell do we spend so much on what doesn’t matter?!)

Repeat month by month.

Increase the traffic. Increase the conversion rates.

Spot the holes, and fix them.

Report to the client. Discuss what to do next.

Experiment. Have fun. Learn.

And – if you’re a STRATEGIC web designer – get paid every month…

And sleep well at night, knowing that your clients are making more money,
because of you.

What do you think? Comments below please…

The post Introducing Strategic Web Design appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

I have, and at best it’s inconvenient and embarrassing. But it can be quite damaging to your business.

The fact is, WordPress is an incredibly flexible blog/CMS platform, but its architecture does not make it particularly secure — at least out of the box.

Fortunately, there is a lot you can do to make your WordPress blog or WordPress-powered site more secure.

If you would like an expert to do this for you, scroll down because I have just started to offer this as a service for $199.

If you are interested in doing it yourself, here are all the basics you need to cover.

WordPress Security Basics Checklist

1. Rename user Admin to something else.
2. Change the ID field on the first user from 1 to something else.
3. Enforce strong password requirements for all system users
4. Don’t let anybody but admins see available WP updates.
5. Remove the ability for non-admins to modify theme files.
6. Tweak the database so tables aren’t prefixed with wp_.
7. Don’t use the MySQL root user to access the database.
8. Limit the MySQL account used to the site database only.
9. Restrict the MySQL account so it can’t perform destructive actions (i.e. DROP, etc.)
10. Give the MySQL account a very long, randomised password.
11. Don’t allow the server’s root user access via SSH. Use an account with SUDO privileges instead.
12. Ensure all the secret key fields in wp-config.php are completed with 16-bit SHA keys.
13. Disallow indexes on all site folders.
14. Hide the admin area.
15. Rename the wp-content directory to something else.
16. Block bad hosts and agents with blacklists.
17. Make any .htaccess files and wp-config.php non-writeable.
18. Make the admin area inaccessible outside of work hours (handle this one with care)
19. Schedule regular database backups.
20. Restrict the length of allowed URLs to 255 characters or less.
21. Require SSL connections on the admin area (if possible; this one has an on-cost attached)
22. If possible, install and run server-side antivirus software such as ClamAV.
23. Consider restricting the server’s FTP service to only accept connections from certain, whitelisted IP addresses (only applicable if you have at least one static IP).
24. When deploy complete, consider stopping the server’s FTP service completely. You can always temporarily switch it on again if required.
25. If your web server is allowing proxying (for example, if you’re load-balancing), ensure it’s not configured as an open HTTP proxy.
26. Remove any open SMTP proxies on your server.

Want Professional Help to Secure Your WordPress Site?

For a one-time fee of just $199 (US), my pro developer will help secure your WordPress site, using all the techniques above (where available), and usually adding a few more.

We’ll just need (where applicable):

• FTP access to the server
• Admin user credentials for the WordPress implementation
• Linux user with SUDO credentials (or CPanel access)

We’ll also take full backups, and provide you with a report of exactly what we did. We’ll aim to implement your security update as quickly as we can (hopefully within 48 hours).

Order Now

Simply pay the fee, and we’ll get straight back to you for access details. Then you can put many of your security concerns behind you.

The post WordPress Security – 26 Essential Steps to Protect Your WordPress Site appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

The past two weeks have been quite a flurry of activity.

On Sunday evening two weeks ago, after a couple of beers, I said to Sally,

“Here’s an idea… How about having a website where people could sponsor a day?”

The idea stuck.

A couple of days later, I had a design…

That Saturday, I turned the design into an HTML & CSS template, and handed it over to one of my Scratch Web Marketing team – the highly talented WordPress hackmaster Doreen Hulsey.

By the following Friday, we had a working WordPress site, complete with live auctions using an auction plugin.

Let me tell you a bit about the concept, and then I’ll tell you the problem I’m facing.

How “Sponsor the Day” Works

The idea is very simple. Anyone (businesses, non-profits, or individuals) can bid at auction to be the “official” sponsor of a calendar day.

The winning sponsor gets their large graphic at the top of the site’s home page for 24 hours, plus a text link back to a webpage that they specify.

Why Would Anyone Sponsor a Day?

Great question! There are a few reasons:

• Bragging rights. “Sponsor the Day” is unusual, it’s original, and the concept is fundamentally left-field and cheeky… I mean, who has the right  to make someone else the official sponsor of a day?
• Building awareness. My current goal is to generate 100,000 followers for Sponsor the Day within 12 months. That means sponsors will get their promotion seen by a lot of new people, through a unique channel.
• Relevance. Every day of the year has special relevance, for many reasons. It might be a festival, anniversary, or special day of remembrance. But there are also lots of launches, sales, and promotions starting at any time. Being able to bid to own this channel exclusively for that day could really help reinforce the point of a campaign.
• SEO benefit. Of course, every sponsor gets a permanent backlink from http://www.sponsortheday.com. But the site is brand new right now, so links don’t have much value – yet.
• Free to Good Causes. Oh, and I’m also giving away every Sunday to a good cause. They won’t pay a penny.

Why Would Someone Follow “Sponsor the Day”?

Another great question!

Of course, pure curiosity isn’t a very reliable motivator. We’re surrounded by so many messages that we have to be cynical. The marketing that gets through tends to be either extremely straightforward (offering the solution to something we need), or it’s so original that it bypasses our usual filters (like the Million Dollar Homepage, or One Red Paperclip).

Now, Sponsor the Day is original and fresh, but that’s not enough. When the Million Dollar Homepage launched in 2005, it was so unusual that it became a hot talking point.

So I can’t rely on pure originality taking Sponsor the Day viral today, at the end of 2012. And I want real followers, not just momentary mentions.

There has to be WIIFM. To get 100,000 real followers, people need to believe there’s some real benefit in following.

So my idea is to persuade the sponsors of each day to provide a cool giveaway, which followers could have the chance of winning. Maybe followers will be required to do some kind of stunt to help promote the cause of the day, and post on the Sponsor the Day Facebook page.

However, there’s a problem…

My Problem

Sponsor the Day faces a similar challenge to most “Web 2.0″ type sites.

In this context, “Web 2.0″ refers to the way the site is a meeting point between two groups. Like eBay’s buyers and sellers, or Match.com’s singles, Sponsor the Day has sponsors and followers.

Clearly, there has to be something in it for both groups. But the core problem comes from the fact that sponsors are attracted to large numbers of followers, and followers in turn will be attracted to the giveaways that the sponsors provide.

At the time of writing, Sponsor the Day has just 37 followers on Facebook – a long way off my 100,000 target!

So what sponsor is going to be drawn to that market? Who’s going to give away an iPad, a vacation, or something else that’s so cool it will attract hundreds and thousands of followers, when there are only 74 eyeballs likely to see it?

That was the starting point of my challenge. Followers are drawn to sponsors, who are drawn to followers. It’s chicken and egg. How can you get the cycle started?

Let me take you through my thought process on this.

Solving the Chicken and Egg Problem

Obviously, you can apply brute force to this problem. If I had a big pile of spare cash, I could by a year’s supply of iPads, and give one away each day to a lucky winner. That 37 followers would certainly rise pretty fast!

Or, I could spend every hour of every day on forums, emailing friends, and blogging, trying to coax people to follow or sponsor.

But neither of those routes is feasible, so I need to find a way to attract followers and sponsors, where everyone still wins, and doesn’t take all my time or resources.

Let’s break it down.

• Sponsors want good exposure, hopefully in a way that will spread virally. The bottom line is, they need a good return on any investment.
• Followers want to be entertained, and they’ll only remain as followers if they get a steady flow of fresh, appealing offers.

Resources?

I would always approach a problem like this by looking at the resources available. What about the resources available to me?

• Sponsortheday.com is already up and running.
• I have a popular website, with around 35,000 weekly visits.
• Plus a mailing list with nearly 22,000 names, at the time of writing.
• I have a good reputation in the web design world.

Looking at these assets, if there is a starting point to this chicken-and-egg problem, it’s the sponsors. If I can get an interesting enough sponsorship, and if it’s relevant to my audience, I can promote their promotion to my followers.

That’s part of the key.

The other one is to look at the concept of added value.

Added Value

Another great tip for problem solving is to look for where the added value comes from.

This is something I have been thinking about recently.

Over the past few weeks, Sally, Marie and I have also been setting up a new local business, selling sweet bouquets (see Sweetopia.me on Facebook).

When we make one of these bouquets, we take candy (bought at trade prices), and arrange it into something that is more valuable than the component parts, which we then sell at about 50% mark-up over what it cost to make.

Customers love these, because they get something far more impressive than just the chocolate and candy. They get a great gift. See how we’ve added value to the candy? That’s the way all business works.

Now, in theory, we could approach another provider, who also adds value to their raw materials in some other way, and do a trade. If we gave a £30 sweet bouquet (which cost us £15) in return for a £30 meal in a restaurant (which cost the restaurant £15 to provide), everyone wins again! We get something that’s worth £30 to us, in return for giving something that only cost us £15. And the restaurant does the same.

Let’s take that principle and apply it to my Sponsor the Day problem…

What I need to find is someone who has something that has a downstream, external value that is far greater than its cost of production.

iPads are out of the question. They’re expensive for everyone to buy!

What is cheap to produce, but worth a lot more to the consumer?

One classic example is digital products. Once created, they cost practically zero to distribute.

Another may be time. Let’s say you’re a talented web designer, who could make a day of spare time each week. That time could be worth hundreds of dollars to a client, if the client could find you and hire you. The time actually costs you nothing (unless you would be doing something else profitable in that time).

That’s where I need to look for my first sponsors, at the intersection between:

• the area where I already have influence (web design and marketing), combined with either
• digital products, or
• valuable services provided by talented people who need more exposure and have spare time.

That’s my solution: great offers, which may be offbeat and unusual, but actually deliver incredible value.

I can help promote someone’s ebook or video course, or a smart service provider who needs the exposure, at very little real cost to them.

Plus, I can gain broader exposure using my existing channels (Web Design from Scratch and/or my mailing list). This is appropriate, because it’s offering real value in the sector in which I already operate, so I would not expect to piss off my followers.

So I’m putting the call out NOW for business owners or professionals who are crazy enough to bid $5 – $100 to get the opportunity to trade some of their assets in return for outrageous exposure!

Ideas for Crazy Promotions

Here are just a few things, off the top of my head:

• You have an ebook to promote. You offer 20 free copies to the 20 people who come up with the most original Facebook shares to promote your book.
• I could do similar with my Pro Web Design Course! At full price, it’s worth $1200, but costs me nothing to give away a place in return for additional exposure.
• Offer to redesign a the winner’s homepage, write them a sales letter, or give them a free month’s link building, which you could publish as a case study. Only costs you a few hours, but could get you a lot more business.
• A web pro could put on a webinar, where you analyse the websites of three winners. Or do it jointly with me!

All these ideas seem crazy-good. But maybe you can come up with even crazier ones?

Are You Crazy Enough?

I keep thinking about two essential elements that every marketer needs…

I’m convinced that original marketing needs to be really original to get through all our bullshit filters. So let’s come up with something crazy – together.

Another vital trait is cheekiness. Balls, moxie, guts, chutzpah, cohones… whatever you want to call it, if you’re in business, maybe you should do one thing every day that’s out-of-your-comfort-zone cheeky! You never know what’s going to work.

I need crazy people right now!

I need you to:

1. Think about what you could offer the world, that doesn’t cost you too much, but will really get people talking.
2. If you want to partner with me to deliver something insane, try me!
3. Head over to http://www.sponsortheday.com/and bid to be the “official” sponsor of a day.
4. I’ll help you craft your offer into something that’ll appeal to the market.
5. And, if it’s crazy enough, I’ll help by publicizing your offer through my contacts and channels!

Come on, let’s do something crazy together.

If you accept my challenge, comment below, leaving your email address.

The post I’m Looking for Slightly Crazy Partners appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

The site is well established and popular, but the owners suspected they could get more new sign-ups, and wanted to know how.

I was happy to oblige, and in a few hours provided a new rough design for their home page.

After the internal graphic designer did their stuff, the company ran a split test using Convert Insights.

If you’re not familiar with split testing, whenever a new visitor (in this case) arrived at YouWager.eu, they would be shown either the existing home page or the new design. The software would then measure various goals. In this test, we measured two goals: clicking through to the sign-up page, and completing the sign-up form.

After running the test for just four days, it generated some conclusive results.

New design generated 61% increase in click-throughs to the Sign-up page

As you can see, 61% more people clicked through to the sign-up page from the new design. As the data shows, this is statistically conclusive, with a far less than 1% chance that the old design could outperform the new one.

The results for actual sign-ups are also very satisfactory.

New design increased sign-ups by 31%

This element of the experiment is not statistically conclusive, because the number of results is lower at this point in the funnel. However, a 31% lift with nearly 88% confidence is a good result.

Imagine the Impact

Imagine the impact on revenues and profits for this business (or any business) resulting from a 30% increase in new customers!

There was no new ad spend, simply doing a few basic things right.

So you can see the difference for yourself, here’s a screenshot of the previous home page.

Previous home page design

And here’s the redesign, based on my recommendations.

Redesigned home page

Summary of What Changed

• Primarily, the new design gives multiple reasons why you should be interested in the offer. The old design mentioned what was on offer, but not WHY you should care.
• The call to action button has benefits: “Register now to get your first free bonus”; it is large and in a striking colour. The old design just said “Join us” to start playing, without benefits.
• The real customer testimonial in the redesign adds proof. We’re all interested in human stories, and are much more likely to believe a proposition that is validated by third party evidence.

Those relatively simple changes are enough to generate 30% more sign-ups.

Great Return on Investment!

The cost? A lot, lot less than it would cost to get 30% more sign-ups through pay-per-click ads, organic SEO, or a PR campaign!

And here’s the best bit. The client gets to enjoy the 30% boost next month, and every month after that, at no extra cost!

Of course, there’s always more we can do with conversion optimization. The sky’s the limit.

If you’re interested, here’s the design I sent to the client. It has more changes than what could be implemented this time round, including the logo and navigation.

The post How I Helped Boost a Gaming Site’s Sign-ups by Over 30% appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.

I sell professional grade equipment for cleaning cars.

This was my site in March:
http://www.screencast.com/t/qprpSPgi

Now:
http://appliedcolors.com

The feedback I got from customers, friends, colleagues was that my site looked like a blog, and not like a store.

Plus, we were trying to do so many things on the home page (educate, ask for email, present reviews, present our articles) but it wasn’t clear what our PRIORITIES were.

I paid a few designers for “mockups.”  To implement them was around $6k, including the shopping cart software (big commerce)

They were good.

I bought Save the Pixel with the intention of guiding THEM as they built the new site.

But, instead, I designed a version of my own in Photoshop, implementing the concepts of…

• simplicity
• space
• color
• contrast
• navigation
• size

… to make the site more “gettable” and make it clear that, above all, we wanted our customers to learn about and buy our great equipment

I’m not a designer by trade (I cleaned and painted cars for many years), but have adequate Photoshop skills.  Most of the elements you see in the home page were bought from Graphic River.

I presented the designs to my customers and they overwhelmingly chose MINE!

So I had a programmer convert the design to a WordPress theme for $500.

I then learned WooCommerce and implemented the shopping cart myself.

So essentially I saved $5500 between your book, hiring a coder, and using Graphic River!

I didn’t think I had an eye for “Design” but after reading your book, it gave me confidence to make designs for my own sites – and gain more control of my marketing.

Thanks!

Robert Keppel

What I love about this story is how it supports my conviction that the real skills in web design are really marketing skills, and the functional techniques required to publish online are now in the hands of any business owner.

Robert did the smart thing – the right thing!

• He educated himself about what really mattered in visual design (through “Save the Pixel”)
• He purchased graphic resources (from Graphic River) instead of paying a designer to create them by hand
• And he learned how to use a simple e-commerce plugin!

The net result is a website that looks and works great, for a fraction of the price it would have cost a few years ago.

For more about this, read my recent post: Web Designers, Quit Reinventing the Wheel, Today!.

The post How a $27 Ebook Made Me $5,500.00 appeared first on Web Design from Scratch.