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Simple Publishing: 1-2-3-4

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:00:00 GMT

The other day there was an interesting little story about the history of blogging - or more accurately, someone making a mistake when recounting the history of blogging. This got me thinking about the history of publishing in general, and where it's heading.

Publishing on the web has truly grown and changed from its humble beginnings, especially in the context of how businesses utilize the tools that are available to them.

Blogging is just one of the tools that in recent years has become a mainstream business tool. Before that it was discussion forums. And currently, we're seeing the rise of RSS for business and marketing. Traditionally it's been that each type of publishing matures and spawns a product that implements that form of publishing. So a business owner that wants to engage in one of these types of publishing would go and find a blog product, or an RSS product, or a forum product, or a website product, or an email marketing product... and so on.

All of these products enable a certain type of publishing to take place. Even online shopping and ecommerce is a form of publishing - it's about publishing your products online. So the majority of what we are doing on the web boils down to publishing!

But it doesn't stop there - after publishing you need to measure the effectiveness of what was published, and then improve what you've published. So, you've got a publishing cyclic like this:

Publish
Measure
Improve
Go back to 1.

Which means that on top of all the publishing products above, now you need reporting and analytics packages and products to help you quickly and easily improve your content.

Now, we're approaching an era where a business needs 10 - 11 software products in order to publish, measure and improve their online business! So what's this got to do with FluidArc?

Well FluidArc simplifies the publishing cycle, making it less of a hassle and more productive. How? By providing an all-in-one, one-stop-shop to fulfill the publishing cycle. We're bringing together all the publishing tools you need, combined with smart measurement tools that tell you about the interactions and cause-effect relationships between your different types of publishing.

To illustrate that point a little, let's consider the relationship between a blog, email marketing and ecommerce:

Shirley reads your blog and likes what you say
Shirley subscribes to your email newsletter
Shirley receives your email newsletter
Shirley reads your email newsletter
Shirley comes back to your website
.... and purchases a product

The blog caused the newsletter subscription. Which caused them to read your newsletter. Which caused them to purchase your product.

So FluidArc's all-in-one product not only powers all that publishing (A blog, email newsletter and products) but it can measure and draw links between those actions. Without adding a line of code to your web pages. Without doing anything at all - it just get's measured.

And here's the really exciting part.

Before I'd need to go through the publishing cycle, 1-2-3-4, with a handful of different products. In four or five different places I'd have to jump in and measure, improve, publish. In many cases I'd need to measure using a different tool than my publishing tool!

FluidArc lets you do all that measuring, publishing and improving in one place. We're tightening and speeding up the online publishing process.

That's a FluidArc difference—we take these steps from 1-2-3-4 times 5, down to just... 1-2-3-4.

It's simple - just the way we like it.

SEO - 3 Things Business Owners Should Know

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 05:19:00 GMT

This week I read a great (repeat, great) beginners document on SEO, and felt there were some great kernels of wisdom in there that are worth sharing in short form. The entire document I read can be found at SEOMoz. Those guys rock - thanks for a great document on SEO.

Background: What Is SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your website so that your potential customers can more easily find you via search engines. Since search engines involve people typing in certain words to find relevant content, and search engines rank popular sites most highly, SEO is about

The relevance of your content to the keywords that the searcher has entered
The popularity of your site, often measured in links from other sites.

While the practice of SEO is still a little arcane, it seems there's definitely some core concepts that you can stick to reliably - and it's not all about keywords!

Links Matter. But Not Always.
Some think that SEO is all about volume of links to your site and keyword density on your pages. This isn't false, but it's not true either.

For example, not every link is worth the same. A link from a large, trustworthy site like CNN is worth a great deal. But links from known bad sites, such as link farms (where groups of people link to each other for the sake of building link volume) can actually lower your search ranking.

Apparently, links from sites or groups of sites that are considered "subject matter expert" pages by the search engines are worth a huge amount too.

Think About What Would Your Customers Want
Many things cited as SEO advantages are also advantages to your customers. Valid links, working tools, accessible HTML code, fast loading times, well structured navigation, easily found and focused content - they're all good for SEO.

This also all good stuff for your customers, and it helps with SEO for two reasons:

The search engines can find their way around, since the site is well structured and easy to navigate
People are more likely to link to your site if *GASP*... it is ACTUALLY useful and easy to use.

So if you try to make using your website a great experience for your visitors, you'll find long term SEO benefits too - which is pretty cool, since it makes sense that good sites should be rewarded.

High Quality Is Key
Creating a high quality site that's worth visiting and linking to is a pretty big part of online success, and it's a strength for SEO too. From the quality of your web design to the quality of your content, it all matters. And not always because it matters directly to the search engines, but because it matters to people, and it is people that provide the links that the search engines pay attention to.

So those were three points that really struck me as interesting. Ultimately, it seems that SEO could be summed up in a sentence: "Build a really useful, high quality and easy to use site, and you'll get traffic from search engines." Naturally that's pretty simplistic, and it's a huge field and discipline that most business owners will probably need help in (read that guide, seriously).

There are also a number of technical concerns there, which you'll need to learn or get someone to look at. But technical stuff is easy. Creating high quality content is not - so which do you think you should start with?

Side note: We are an SEO Friendly System & CMS - Hooray!
On a final (geeky) note, I was pretty chuffed that with FluidArc we've got a lot of the SEO friendly features that SEOmoz.org mentions. For example, 301 redirects on the web page level for duplicate content is there. Friendly, human readable links for blog posts, products and catalogs - check! Google sitemap creation, yep! We've even totally covered the website metrics and analytics they recommend.

Increasing Online Conversions: The Window Shopper Syndrome

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 04:15:00 GMT

Every business owner wants to increase conversions. Whether it's trying to get browsers in your street level clothing store to buy, or website visitors to add a product to their cart, we're all playing a game of converting browsers into buyers.

Naturally there are some browsers in your shop that are really quite serious and almost ready to buy. And there are also various degrees of browsers. I'm going to bunch all the browsing customers and call them Window Shoppers - ranging from completely uncommitted passers by to browsers in your shop tugging at a new sweater.

Recently I was in a store that I had no intention of buying anything from. As I walked through the store casting my eyes around, I started wondering:

How could this store's owner turn ME into a buyer?

Which leads me to a second thought. If I'm in your store I'm 1000 times more valuable than someone in the street, even if I have no intention of buying today. Why? Because you have my attention. It's your shop, your staff and your message. You should have a pretty good chance of converting me. Maybe not today, but one day. Buying decisions are often cumulative things.

But before we get too deep into this, let's try and get inside the head of a window shopper.

The Window Shopping Syndrome

While this would apply to both online and offline stores, I'm going to focus on ecommerce, or online stores. In this context, a window shopper is someone browsing your ecommerce store.

Window shoppers, the lovable little creatures that we are, share some similarities in the way they think. I've identified two things that are true of online window shoppers (By Greg's hand-waving theory of common sense and reasoning).

They're actually looking for a product they want that you have, but they're not ready to buy yet. This is sometimes called pre-shopping - finding out information and prices etc before the purchase.
They're interested in some information that you have, or just like to look at the latest widget thingy-ma-bob. They're a fan. In any case, they're not buying anything in particular, but you probably sell products or have information that they're generally interested in.

Thankfully when your shop is online your visitors are usually fairly targeted already. You're not so likely to get people wandering onto your website who are just waiting for their tardy friend.

So if that's what they're, how can we keep them happy? How can we convert these browsers into buyers - even though they're not really thinking of buying?

I think there's two things to accept up front:

They probably won't buy today.
They might buy in the future, but you can't be sure.

With that in mind, we've got to come up with ways so that they remember us when they DO want to buy.

3 Tactics to Increase Conversions: Recruit the Window Shoppers

Use Email Newsletters to Snag Future Customers

Have you got an email newsletter? Throughout your site, think about how you can prominently display your newsletter. Explicitly ask your website users to subscribe to your newsletter.

Use wording to incentivize the sign up - remember, you have to answer their inevitable question "why should I sign up? Phrases like "Sign up to receive updates on our products" are okay, but not as good as "sign up and receive discounts inside our monthly newsletter". Make sure you follow up on these promises though!

Give the Fans Even More Great Content

Search engines love content; so do fans. If you have reviews and comments on the latest iPod, it will be of interest to iPod fans. Write honest reviews of your products. Take photos and post them. Make videos showing you using the product or service if possible, and put them on YouTube. These things make your site a hub of information for people, and make you their top-of-mind store to buy their favorite widget from.

Build a Community

People like to hang out. They like to discuss and post their thoughts. Give your visitors a reason to stay! You can use Forums - why not link your forums to your products, so that people can discuss particular products? Or you could simply enable comments on your online store so that people can tell others what they think.

A Final Note

Most of these ideas are easily derived out of four main areas:

Content
Credibility
Conversion
Customer

Remember to keep what your customers are looking for right at the top of your list of priorities, and you'll be heading in the right direction.

Growing Your Business By Solving The Broccoli Problem (part 3)

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:58:00 GMT

I've been writing for the past couple of weeks on a problem I've called the Broccoli Problem. Broccoli problems are everywhere, and if you want to grow your business, you need to find them and remove them. The classic Broccoli Problem is embodied by my aunt and her son's objection to eating Broccoli:

Broccoli may be good for me BUT it tastes terrible.

Last week I wrote about Removing the Negative - how to remove the problem altogether. This week I'm going to discuss my third strategy: how you can simply embrace the problem and move on.

Embracing Your Broccoli Problem

This is probably my favorite strategy. It's super simple: that guy doesn't like the taste of broccoli, no problems. Just go and find someone who does! This strategy is about finding a better target market - the possibility is that you've just landed in the wrong market, and your product is better suited to another market.

This one's rather interesting, because sometimes you don't necessarily need to embrace the problem itself, but rather you need to find people who at least don't care.

Unfortunately though, it doesn't always work; my aunt couldn't exactly go and swap her son. That said, there are many Broccoli problems that can be solved this way. Think about Diet Cola.

Diet Cola may have less sugar HOWEVER it doesn't taste as good as regular Cola.

You can fix this Broccoli problem by simply finding people who care more about the health benefits and less about the taste. Most broccoli problems can be solved this way, although sometimes it's not optimal to do so.

Consider every single statement I've written about in the past few weeks - all of them could be solved by embracing the problem. You just need to find the niche of people who care more about the positive side and much less about the negative side. Problem solved.

Fixing Your Broccoli Problem

So, what's your broccoli problem? Chances are you have a whole bunch of them and they all sound and look different. The key is to pick out the most commonly repeated ones, the ones that you think are holding your business back the most, and address those issues with the appropriate strategy.

Good luck broccoli hunting!

Growing Your Business By Solving The Broccoli Problem (part 2)

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 03:40:00 GMT

Last week I wrote about how you can grow your business by identifying the "Broccoli Problems" in your business. To quickly recap, a "Broccoli Problem" comes about when you're selling your product - the product has an obvious benefit that the prospect accepts. But the prospect also has an objection, which you need to overcome. So for my aunt and her son, the Broccoli Problem is:

Broccoli may be good for you, BUT it tastes terrible.

Now, onto the second strategy for dealing with a Broccoli Problem...

Removing the Negative.

Sometimes you can entirely remove the objection after the "however". This is impossible with Broccoli -my aunt couldn't exactly genetically engineer a broccoli plant to taste like french fries. Generally, you should always consider removing the negativer first, before any other strategy.

Think about this Broccoli Problem:

ABC software will help you grow your business HOWEVER it's difficult to use.

The best way to tackle this one is to remove the "However" factor altogether; fix your software so it's not difficult to use. This requires effort and is difficult and costly, but it's the honest-to-god best solution as well. There is a caveat here however. What about this Broccoli Problem:

ABC software will help you grow your business BUT it's too expensive.

"Ah ha!" one might say, "I can remove that one!"

Whoa. Slow down Tiger.

Pricing is part of a larger picture, with positioning implications and cashflow impact. Maybe you SHOULD make it cheaper, but be careful - perhaps Repackaging the Negative is more suitable.

Overall, Removing the Negative factor should be considered. These factors (the removable ones) are often the hardest to fix and the hardest to even identify, but they also carry the most rewards.

Next week, I'll move on to the third strategy: Embracing It.

Grow Your Business by Solving The Broccoli Problem (part 1)

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 01:10:00 GMT

My Aunt Susan, being a good mother, wants her son to eat Broccoli because it's healthy.

My cousin Ben, being a typical boy, doesn't want to eat Broccoli because it tastes bad.

This gave me an idea, which I'm going to call "The Broccoli Problem". See, my aunt has very valid reasons to give her son broccoli - it's good for his health. But her son resists - also for valid reasons that are relevant to him.

The son will say:

"Broccoli may be good for you BUT it tastes terrible!"

Now... Broccoli problems are everywhere, always contain a 'However' or a 'But' and are nearly always subjective (complete the sentences):

Lower taxes may stimulate a stagnant economy, HOWEVER ...
Your girlfriend may have a wonderful personality, BUT ...
George W. Bush may be a great leader, HOWEVER ...

I'll remain silent on how I might complete those sentences, but here's where I'm going with this: The Broccoli Problem is a marketing problem that you probably need to think about.

Complete this sentence: Your product/service may be of great benefit to the market, HOWEVER ...

That's why I'm writing this post. Every business has, or once had, a Broccoli Problem that they have to solve. So, how did my Aunt solve hers? Easy: she diced the broccoli up and baked it into a tasty Lasagna. To this very day, her son still doesn't realize he's eating a plateful of Broccoli Lasagna.

This is one strategy of dealing with a Broccoli Problem—repackaging the broccoli to counteract the negative after the HOWEVER. I can think of two more strategies and I'm sure there's more:

Repackaging the Negative.
Removing the Negative.
Embracing the Negative.

Repackaging The Negative

This is what my Aunt did - she put the broccoli in a tasty Lasagna, which negated the broccoli's taste while still passing on the health benefit. That's repackaging the negative. In business, a classic case of a repackaging the negative is the age-old payment plan. Think about this Broccoli problem:

"The Prius is an eco-friendly, stylish car, BUT I can't afford it right now."

Imagine you're on the car lot saying this to the saleswoman. She'll shoot back "Ah, but have you heard of our payment plans?" By doing this, she's effectively negated your 'however' factor by repackaging the car in an easy to digest payment plan.

When you repackage something, you're not changing the product itself. You're not changing the broccoli—you're changing the way it's presented, the nature of the deal or how the product is sold. Repackaging strategies nearly always revolve around ideas like:

Cost amortization (payment plans)
Bundling (selling X + Y + Z together)
Splitting (Selling X + Y separately instead of as one)

So you can see we're not changing the product. We're changing the way it's sold. That's repackaging.
Repackaging a Broccoli problem isn't always the best solution, but sometimes it's the only solution you can feasibly implement. That's where the other two strategies, Removing the Negative and Embracing the Negative, come in.

I'll cover the other two strategies in the coming weeks, so stay tuned.

Does your Homepage Engage Visitors? - Judging a Book By Its Cover

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 00:39:00 GMT

We live in a world where first impressions are made in a matter of a seconds. Our lives are completely saturated with media and our response to this information overload is to 'thin- slice' the information to sift through it quickly - we're relying on an almost sub-conscious decision making process because we don't have the time to weigh up all the facts and figures.

Don't believe me? Think about your email inbox, you'll glance at the subject lines for only tenths of a second before binning it and those emails never get given the benefit of the doubt. What about scanning your news aggregators, RSS feeds and even somebody elses blog, how much does it take to make you consciously click-through or even just scroll past the first fold?

That's right! You might've spent a huge deal of effort on your website content and probably lots of money to have it beautifully designed but the attention you pay to your news aggregators is exactly how much attention you're getting from your first time visitors.

Your website is competing with everybody else's website for a smaller and smaller slice of your visitors time to make an impression. And if that first impression doesn't engage you've lost that visitor forever. Despite your teachers indoctrinating you in elementary school with the old saying 'Don't Judge a Book By Its Cover' it's what we find ourselves doing more and more...

Ok, enough of my doom and gloom, I'm not saying we should give up designing websites. There's hope - with a combination of good design and useful content you can make sure that your home page has the best chance of not bouncing visitors by following my 5 small business homepage design guidelines. (By bouncing I mean they're leaving your site right away)

1) Your homepage needs to add value. Immediately.

The homepage is not a company information page. I see a lot of small business websites making this mistake. As a visitor I need to be struck with how you are going to add value to my life.

A spiel about how long your company has been around for, how many employees it has, its mission statement - these are all meant to be locked safely away in the 'About' page that I'll click on later when I want to, after I've seen everything else.

Your website isn't 1990s brochure-ware, it should be a 2008 interactive portal or close to it. I want to see your products in action, I want to know how they can help me, I want to see a portfolio of your work, I want to see what others have said about you, I want to see what you can do for me - not necessarily all at once but you should have 1 or 2 of those elements on your home page.

2) Keep your homepage really simple, here's an example.
See how Apple does it on the first fold of their front page. Ok, so you don't have the marketing budget or Apple's famed reputation but the point is you'll confuse the visitor if you stuff too much content on your homepage. As with presentations, simple is beautiful, your homepage is a presentation of your business.

Some web designers seem to think the way to get around homepage bouncing is to put the whole site on the homepage with a mashup of multiple special offers, product information, company profile, multiple advertisement banners - one at a time they might be good, but jumbled altogether it's a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts!

Ask yourself, what is it about your products or services that you want to draw the visitors attention to first and *focus* on that on your homepage.

3) Sparingly use obvious calls to action.
So you want people to click past the homepage? You're allowed to use some calls to action (not too many otherwise you break rule #2) including but not limited to a limited offer banner advertisement, a free trial button or a "find out more" link for your visitor after they've digested the correct sized portion of interesting content on your homepage.

4) Make sure the site navigation is available and obvious
This ties back to having obvious calls to action. A lot of sites have fancy flash homepages or homepages that are graphics heavy which are hard to navigate (where the hell do I click to move on?). My recommendation is to make your horizontal tab site menu available even on your homepage. This is the current site design trend and it's one you should follow because everybody who surfs the net understands this navigation protocol.

5) Regularly Update Your Home Page
And make sure your visitors can see it's being regularly updated. They'll return if they know there's some fresh interesting content to gobble up the next time they come giving you a bigger chance of getting them past that home page cos they'll be prepped. Maybe you might have some interesting announcements to make like new products, or improvements to your service, price changes - make sure the world can see this!

I hope you're still following, I'm not saying that you have to follow these 5 commandments but you should use them as guidelines for your homepage akin a home page design charter.

Here's some concrete suggestions and examples for how you might design a home page that follows the guidelines...

Put a blog on the home page to make it the focus of your site
Put a big video on the 1st fold
Have a big picture of your flagship product on sale accompanied by its main selling points
Portfolio of Your Work - a concisely written paragraph and a small image for each of your top 4 or 5 projects you've done in the past
Announcements and news and links to Photo Galleries - Turn your home page into a live feed of what's happening at your company.

I'm sure there's plenty more that have come to your mind now that I've got you in the mood. The point to take away is that your homepage is the foyer to your online business. You need to keep it clean, simple and inviting because your visitors are going to judge your book by its cover, don't assume otherwise.

The "All-In-One" Difference

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:32:00 GMT

Last weekend I moved into a new house.

In the usual flurry of last minute craziness, I managed to pack my stuff and get my furniture to the new house. Now I've got a list of things to do:

connect the electricity
connect the phone
connect the gas
connect the internet (most important, of course)
change address with my bank
change addresses for magazine subscriptions
change drivers license address
change health insurance address

The list goes on for about a page!

What if I could do it all in one step?

If instead of calling 20 different numbers I could just call one? Imagine the time it would save!

Now maybe such a service exists, I'm not sure. But since I don't move houses every week this isn't a problem I urgently need solved.

I do, however, need to manage my online business on a daily basis. And unfortunately managing an online business these days requires logging in to many different tools and interacting with them all on a daily basis. So it's a lot like when you move house - but you have to do it all the time!

That's why an all-in-one solution makes such a difference—it's about saving time and being more productive with the time you have.

Running an online business shouldn't be like moving houses

It should be centralized, streamlined to make your life easy and setup to increase productivity.

We hope you'll agree that FluidArc does just that. If you'd like an invitation to the private beta of FluidArc, let us know here, and tell us what you think.