Your website sucks! Your mobile experience sucks! Your competitor’s website and mobile experience suck too! Guess what? My site sucks too!

As is often the case when I speak, I tell the audience that their website is like a leaky old bucket with traffic falling out the holes. I let them know we all know their website sucks and mine does too. However, when speaking at ConversionNation (formerly Fusion Marketing Experience) in Antwerp, I was politely shown by my friend Joost de Valk how badly I sucked.

Joost did his presentation after me and decided on the fly, while I was presenting, that he would use my website to show how with a little WordPress SEO (his speciality) and more importantly a little conversion help, I could suck a bit less. I’ll share with you some tips he gave me, but more importantly I’ll share with you why all our sites suck and what you have to do suck less.

As Joost picked through the issues on my blog and speaking page, I didn’t sit back and sulk. I didn’t say that he was wrong. I opened up my WordPress admin and went to work. Before his presentation was finished, 95 percent of his recommendations were in place. I’m always trying to improve. I was thrilled to have the feedback in order to suck less. Like you, I don’t have unlimited time and resources. We all have more things clamoring for our attention that we can ever handle.

However, to be successful today you must adopt a culture like Pixar’s willing to accept sucking and is willing to take criticism from everywhere within and outside your organization. Of course, getting advice from an expert like Joost is priceless and I was getting it for the price of being happily, publicly humiliated.

Your culture gets there by allowing for mistakes, letting people take calculated risks, by having your CEO be the chief experience officer and taking responsibility for your conversion rate, by having an executive in charge of optimization and by putting the tools, people, and processes in place to make quick and agile changes.

So, in order to suck less in 2012, use all the methods and tools available to get insight into your customers’ behavior and purchase processes, gather feedback from them, get some experts to review your efforts, make changes quickly, test, and measure and then respond to make things a little less sucky. According to research, the companies with the highest conversion rates tend to employ the greatest amount of optimization techniques.

Here are some of the tips that Yoast gave me and I’ll keep them general so that you may be able to use them too.

1. Avoid dates in your blog posts. This is especially true if you are not publishing news and your content is evergreen. Or make sure your dates are recent if you want people to click on the links in the SERPs (search engine results pages). In fact, with the release of WordPress 3.3 this week, Joost suggests you remove dates from your permalink URL using a tool to create the redirects for your old posts.

2. Optimize your meta tags not for spiders but to persuade people to click on the result.

3. Ensure that the thumbnails appearing in universal search are the most persuasive. (In the case for my speaking page, he wanted the thumbnail to show me speaking, duh.)

4. Plan for what happens next. I didn’t have a related post plug-in for my blog because when I first set it up, I had very few posts and thought I’d get back to it at some point. I forgot because it wasn’t a priority. So now when people get to the bottom of one of my posts, they are shown two related posts with thumbnails to make them more visually interesting.

5. Don’t make people click to another page to contact you. When I ran an agency, every page of our website had a contact form in the footer. We knew exactly what kind of lift in conversion and data that brought us. However, I didn’t have a contact form on my keynote speaker’s page - it was only on the contact us page. Now that has been added.

I wish you continued success in the coming year. May you suck every day a little bit less!

There was a surprise last minute addition to the agenda at my last presentation.  I keynoted in Oslo for the SEM Konferansen on September 22nd and then was offered an opportunity to present something brand new (lucky I was working on something brand new) to a small group on the last day of the conference. Not many people were able to attend, but  it was videotaped. The presentation you can watch was originally intended to be part of a 90 minute workshop.  The night  before I chopped it down to 45 minutes for this session. The presentation still needs work but the topic is timely so I thought you might enjoy it.

Here is a description of the session:

Think Differently: 10 lessons learned from Steve Jobs and his marketing, retail and customer experience teams

Apple’s meteoric rise to the become the most valuable company in the world has many lessons for today’s marketers. How is it they leaped into the direct to consumer retail environment only over the last few years, yet outsell most of the best retail brands by a factor of 10x per square foot. Why are they among the most loved brands? Bryan will explore 10 insights learned from Steve Jobs and his marketing, retail and customer experience teams and share with you how you should be applying these insights to your business.

View the presentation.

Conversion and testing are what Jeffrey and I have predicted would be sexy since 1998. Luckily, even a broken clock is right two times a day and the recent news around companies we’re invested in: BoostCTR.com, Tagman.com and Monetate.com may finally prove us right (see below). We’re also encouraged by the amount of keynote presentations we’ve had to turn down in the USA and internationally.

Conference season will soon have me missing my family. I love meeting new people, please come introduce yourself, and reuniting with long-time friends. My first event is SES San Francisco from August 16th-18th. Will you be attending? If you are, let me know. I have a couple of seats left for a special dinner being put on by two of the companies I am an Advisory board member of: BoostCTR & Monetate.

There is some big news for both of these companies. Yesterday, Monetate announced that they raised $15 Million for their Real-time Testing, Targeting & Optimization Platform. They have been getting amazing results with their clients and many of them are looking for talented optimization people. If you are one of them – let me know.

BoostCTR is also exploding with opportunities since they announced their initial funding in March. It is a no brainer for clients – BoostCTR crowdsources to their network of expert writers the chance to beat the click through rate or conversion rate of their clients current PPC or FaceBook ads and if they can’t beat it the client doesn’t pay.

The Future Shopper: How Offline is the New Online
Nobody argues about if search, social, and mobile technologies impacted customers’ minds and buying behavior over the last five years. Today companies worry about keeping ahead of their competition; while the truly critical issue is keeping pace with their customers. Technological and social advances are forcing companies to embrace authenticity, improve customer experiences, or suffer the consequences . This session will show you how the convergence of communications, logistics and financial technology continue to evolve, as they always have, in order to reduce the friction in the customers’ buying process. You will understand  all the ways these technologies will change our professional and personal lives in the near future. If  your company isn’t prepared to handle this future, it could be after this session!

Watch this marketing keynote presentation- includes a few attendee testimonials (this is a 45 minute+ presentation, please give the video some time to load):

What trends do you see impacting the future shopper?

I hope you enjoy this version of the presentation delivered January 2011. This keynote presentation is updated regularly as we notice new trends or technology emerge. If you would like Bryan or Jeffrey to be a keynote speaker at your event, please contact us.

The presentation is hosted and available as Flash or HTML5 video by newly released video publishing host Vippy.co. Video platforms like YouTube only allow videos of up to 15 minutes and others like Veoh require you to download their software.

Want to know the first secret I share from my 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites presentation? It’s so simple, so obvious, but yet so many people forget to use it. Do you?

Watch the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want to know the rest of the 21 Secrets? You can find them out on August 17th in San Francisco as I present the 21 Secrets at SES (part of Connected Marketing Week). If you show up and mention this post I’ll give you an extra bonus.

In a couple of weeks, I will be on the road again to help people optimize their Pay Per Click marketing efforts. From July 7-9th, I’ll be in Boston, Philadelphia and New York City for the Online Marketing Summit tour. Here is a description of the PPC Optimization workshop I’ll be doing:

Over $10 Billion dollars were spent on Pay-Per-Click advertising last year. A portion of that came out of your pocket. Are you satisfied you’re getting the maximum return on investment from it? Do you find it more and more challenging to continually increase your PPC effectiveness?

Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian estimates that the average AdWords advertiser sees about $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend. That means that if you have margins of less than 50% on your products, you may be losing money. Only about 2% of Google AdWords advertisers will get the type of return on investment that makes continuing worthwhile. Are you part of that elite group?

PPC management can be costly and overwhelming. Never have 95 characters seemed so simple, yet proven so challenging. In this intensive workshop, you will learn tips, tricks and processes to increase your ROI and make your PPC investments worth continuing.

You’ll learn how to increase your PPC advertising ROI by 3x while mastering:

• The 7 most common PPC mistakes to avoid
• 4 hot metrics you should be monitoring and including in your monthly reports
• A powerful 3 step process to increase Click-Through-Rates (CTR) and relevancy of your ads and landing pages
• How to boost your Quality Score rankings and lower CPC costs
• The simple technique that will make you stand out from your competitors
• A 12-Step process to optimize and improve your PPC management process

Join New York Times bestselling author, Bryan Eisenberg, and Acquisio‘s Internet Marketing Manager, Noran El-Shinnawy, in this fun, fast paced and informative workshop.

I’d love to see you there. You can register today.

In the space of a few weeks I’ve had my material “ripped off” twice. One instance was OK by me, but one instance was not. The differences open up important questions at the forefront of the new rules involving content, sharing, social media, and copyrights.

Today, ideas spread quickly. Volumes of great information are shared through Webinars, e-books, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, and SlideShare. Tracing an idea, insight, or fact back to its original source can be challenging. This is an even bigger issue when these exchanges are occurring among marketing professionals, especially because creating and sharing content has become practically the go-to strategy for driving business and lead generations for many companies. Take creative professionals who make their living from their ideas and content, give them an incentive to share that content openly, and you have a near perfect environment for undue influence and sticky copyright issues.

Like me, I’m sure you have your sphere of influencers. I’ve been fortunate to surround myself with people much smarter than me to nourish my brain. Being influenced by others is a good thing and it’s the reason my peers and I have been sharing our thoughts through (in my case) 300+ columns like these, presentations, and countless conversations. So far, the benefits have far outweighed any dangers or concerns. But as I mentioned, recent events have got me pondering the best ways to manage my future content sharing strategies.

The first instance happened when a student of mine asked me what I thought of their brainstorming session for banner ad ideas. When I saw the list, I asked my student if they were aware of where these ideas came from – or what influenced their ideas. As soon as I asked, they were embarrassed because it was a collection of disjointed ideas grabbed from past and future presentations and concepts I had written about in past columns and had shared with them in conversations we’d had together.

My students felt as though they’d ripped me off and I assured them that they hadn’t. What they had done is something our brains do naturally as we take in, process, and assimilate ideas. I shared with them this fabulous video of Derren Brown and his use of “Subliminal Advertising” to influence the kind of logo and branding advertising execs would come up with for a business he was starting. By manipulating barely conscious cues he provided ad execs, he predicted precisely the kind of logo they came up with. As soon as my students watched the video, they understood how their assembly of my ideas was unconsciously done and felt better about the situation. In turn, I explained how flattered I was, as my goal for the last decade has been to inspire others by sharing my ideas.

Influence Gone Bad

The next instance was not as comfortable for either me or a friend who I “influenced.” Here’s what occurred: This friend shared a presentation on March 1 titled, “15 Secrets of High Converting Websites.” (Follow along and you’ll see why the presentation has since been removed.)

When I saw this presentation, I immediately asked my Twitter and Facebook friends: “What would you do if someone you thought was a friend ripped off one of your presentations without asking or attribution? http://ow.ly/1cOgi”

Here’s the backstory: In just two weeks, I’ll be presenting my “21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites” at SES New York. It’s a presentation that took me the better part of a decade to put together. The presentation had received rave reviews as a keynote speech at SES London, including this tweet from @Liz_Gray: “#seskey Unbelievable keynote this morning from @thegrok! Action-oriented, clear and concise. Everyone with a website – test something today.”

I first delivered this presentation in December 2009 at SES Chicago and then recorded it in January as a Webinar for my conversion optimization students. This is where my friend was “influenced” by my presentation. No other copies of these slides were shared anywhere.

I have shared presentations in the past, but since I am now focused on being a professional marketing speaker, these slides are a good part of my livelihood, and my paying clients don’t want them shared all over the Internet. So when I reviewed this person’s newest Webinar presentation, it was a shock to find that “his” slide titles and content, including many of the images, were essentially the same as mine. That’s when I tweeted the question.

The tweet led to quite a firestorm on Twitter and Facebook as people responded. My friend RSS Ray, a.k.a., Brian Offenberger, who had committed this act, was inundated with e-mails and comments on Facebook. You can read some of the discussions on Facebook here. Two of my MarketMotive students who really studied my presentation shared these comments on Twitter:

Gene Gerwin wrote: “Judging from the slides, it’s such a direct lift that I wonder if mere attribution would have been sufficient…”

And Noran El-Shinnawy wrote: “Hey, @rssray here’s my comment on your blog since you won’t approve it (@TheGrok ) http://tweetphoto.com/12949589.” In a follow up tweet, Noran added: “INCREDIBLY UNPROFESSIONAL: @rssray rips off @TheGrok ‘s 21 Secrets presentation and passes it off as his own http://ow.ly/1cOgi.”

The next morning, Brian pulled the slides he shared from his Web site, posted an apology on his blog, and explained how items from my presentation unintentionally ended up in his. We subsequently spoke on the phone.

I asked him to share with me a list of what he learned from the experience. “I had the importance of checking and re-checking work re-taught to me in the most painful of ways,” Brian wrote.

The Future of Sharing

Some people suggested I sue for damages. I’m not an attorney, but from past legal advice I know that you cannot collect damages for material that is yours unless you have filed for the copyright with the Library of Congress. You can have them remove the duplication just by placing the copyright notice on your material and you can prove it was yours first.

These two situations have left me with more questions than answers:

• Do I feel comfortable sharing my slides any more? I have shared many presentations in the past. Do you?
• How do we prevent ourselves from being overly influenced by others?
• Let’s say someone shares a presentation online through sites like SlideShare and copies a slide or two from others. During the presentation, the speaker gives verbal attribution to the original source of information, but written attribution is not placed on the slide. Is that ok?
• What would you do if you were accused of “copying” someone’s slides? I think Brian handled it as well as anyone.
• How will copyright laws evolve with the times?
• How would you have handled this situation?

Next week I’ll be traveling to Chicago to join hundreds of fellow marketers at Search Engine Strategies Chicago, where I’ll be doing a couple of sessions. There are many new and interesting sessions. I’m looking forward to attending the keynote by Dan Siroker, who led the analytics team for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and is a former Google employee as well. The title of his presentation is, “How We Used Data to Win the Presidential Election.”

I’ve read about it, so I’m pretty sure Dan will discuss how the Obama campaign tracked the success of every e-mail, text message, and Web site visit, capitalizing on the analytics available and how they optimized each one.

In fact, in Edelman PR agency’s report, “The Social Pulpit: Barack Obama’s Social Media Toolkit,” they reported that:

Each ad and e-mail was created in multiple versions (e.g., different headers, buttons vs. links, video vs. audio vs. plain text) to test what worked and what did not. The campaign developed more than 7,000 customized e-mails, tailored to individual prospects, and made real-time improvements to its outreach materials. Adjustments were made daily to improve performance and conversion. It worked. As the campaign progressed, the effectiveness of the e-mail campaign increased and conversion rates similarly improved.

Think about all the processes required to execute on that, what kind of manpower it takes, what types of resources were necessary. There are many businesses that can learn from the campaign in terms of converting visitors to buyers (donors), creating engaged and empowered brand advocates, and effective use of e-mail, text messaging, and online video, etc.

One of my favorite examples is the optimization of the e-mail sign up page. On this page, they experimented with the media/message or benefits of signing up and the button to sign up.

They tried four variations of the button:

1. Sign Up
2. Learn More
3. Join Us Now
4. Sign Up Now

Which do you think performed the best?

They tried six variations of the message (where the words “Get Involved” with the picture of Barack Obama is now). Three of these messages were static words and images and three were with videos.

1. The original, “Get Involved,” you see above.
2. A family image with the words “Change We Can Believe In.”



3. A picture of Barack Obama alone with the words “Change We Can Believe In.”



4. A video clip of Barack Obama.

   
   Download the clip here.

5. A video clip of an appearance in Springfield.

   
   Download the clip here.

6. A video clip the team called Sam’s video.

   
   Download the clip here.

Which media/message do you think was most effective at converting visitors to sign up for the newsletter? Most people do not guess the correct one, even if they are the boss, and that is why you need to let the data help you make decisions.

I won’t spoil Dan’s presentation by providing you with the results this time, but I will share them with you next time. In the mean time, if you have any questions for Dan or I, send them to me and I’ll make sure I get a chance to ask him.

I hope you can join us in Chicago at Search Engine Strategies, and if you are there, please be sure to reach out to me and don’t miss the fabulous SES Pre Game Meetup planned for Sunday night before the conference.

P.S. I’ll also be premiering my latest presentation, “21 Secrets of Top Converting Websites.” I do hope to see you there.

It’s now been almost 2 years since I last did my training session “Call to Action: Conversion Optimization Training”  publicly. If you are looking to improve your conversion optimization efforts you’ll want to be there. I’ll be teaching a Search Engine Strategies Training course on November 5th, at the Downtown Conference Center in New York.

The other course I haven’t offered in almost 2 years is Persuasive Online Copywriting. Well you’ll be hearing more about the availability of that course from your desktop. Copywriter and copywriting teacher extraordinaire Jeff Sexton and I will be teaming up to bring you this course virtually. We’ll meet once a week for 3 weeks, you’ll have exercises and you’ll come out a much improved copywriter, even if you never wrote copy before. Let me know if you want advanced details before they come out later this week.

As many of you know, I have been a faculty member of MarketMotive and have been doing training and workshops for members – well we are getting ready to launch a certification course in conversion optimization in January. They currently offer several certifications in web analytics, search engine marketing and social media. If you are interested in a conversion optimization certification shoot me an email and I’ll be happy to hook you up with a juicy discount.

One of my favorite parts of working with MarketMotive is working with my good friend Avinash Kaushik, author of Occam’s Razor, Web Analytics: One Hour a Day and Web Analytics 2.0. He’ll have some part in this certification course as well. Last time we were together at SES San Jose 2009, the folks from MarketMotive grabbed a video camera and found some people who had questions for the two of us. Check it out! Do you have some questions for us? Let’s also wish Avinash a speedy recovery on his broken arm.

On November 4th, I’ll be at the Ad:tech conference doing some roving reporting and interviews for WebMasterRadio. If you are going to be there, let’s try and catch up. If you’d like to be interviewed by me, send me an email and I will try to get it set up.

Last week I had the fortune to speak at the Arizona Internet Marketing Association. Thanks to their fabulous efforts you can watch my presentation online.

Here is AZIMA’s October 2009 Social Event – Always Be Testing – Marketing Optimization in Challenging Times (link opens a new window – you will need Flash to view the presentation).