[standing up] My name is Bryan and I am a screenshot addict.

When I fall off the wagon, it happens every so often, I pick a keyphrase and start clicking through PPC ads and their landing pages taking screenshots of the entire experience. It’s hard to imagine how often the experience from keyword to ad to landing page is broken. I fight the urge to call them, yell at them, and beg them to stop throwing away money. I don’t do it; but it’s so tempting.

After a few weeks or months pass the same advertisers, the smarter ones it turns out, drop those ads or pause them because their Quality Score is too low.  I can just hear their internal discussions as they analyze their metrics and rationally conclude that keyphrase X doesn’t convert for us.

(Maybe we should start the Internet Marketing Darwin Award for PPC ads.)

No, no, no, no, no! It’s not the keyword’s fault.

Keywords don’t fail to convert!!! It’s us who fail to convert visitors for that keyword.

Do or did you believe the keyphrase you chose is relevant to your business? If it is, then it’s  your responsibility is to show every visitor how that keyphrase is relevant to their needs. Every visitor that comes to your site is not completely unique. They have various, but mostly foreseeable,  motivations persuading them to buy and various foreseeable objections that would keep them from buying. Ask yourself:

• What is their intent in using those keywords?
• How does your PPC ad address the intent for all the keywords (and potential search queries) in your adgroup?
• What need or desire are they trying to fulfill?
• What is their goal?
• How do we align our goals to meet theirs?

PPC ads are just like tapping someone on the shoulder. PPC ads are only meant to grab attention not to convert. If you want to convert your visitor you need to work on the rest of the experience (the conversation) beyond the click.

Do you make any money when a visitor just clicks your ad? No. I don’t think anybody does.

So instead of thinking of PPC as pay-per-click start thinking of it as pay-per-conversation.

Devote some resources to optimizing your conversations.

How to Get Started Optimizing your Keyword Marketing

1. The first thing you need to do is bucket your keyphrases. Start with the first 100 or so top phrases that drive traffic to your website. For each one of those classify the terms by phase in the buying process. Does the keyphrase apply in the early, middle or late stage of the buying process?

If the term is driving traffic to your site but not really relevant to your business put it in a disqualified bucket for now.

For example: Someone is planning to buy a new television set. Early in their buying process they might use phrases like LCD tvs, best LCD tv, or LCD tv reviews. As they progress to the middle stage you might see keyphrases like compare Sharp and Sony LCDs, LCD tv 1080 dpi and then move on to specific models in the late stages like Sony KDL-52XBR6.

2. Define and realign your goals with your visitors. Would you expect every person you went out on a date with to marry you at the end of the first date? So why do we expect every keyword to convert visitors to our ultimate goal, the sale or the lead? Our job is to get them there, but based upon their buying preferences, they may not be able to move any faster than they are prepared to.

Start planning micro-goals along the way to your macro-goal (sale or lead). Someone earlier in their buying process might not be ready to commit on their first visit. Plan smaller milestones or micro-goals that may lead that person to convert at a later point in their process.

Why don’t many more early or middle stage landing pages have some easy way to capture a visitor’s email address with some kind of offer? I wish I knew.

If your web pages were sales people, how many of them would you fire or at least get trained?

Don’t pay for a keyphrase or a date if your only expectation is a full commitment at the end.  You need to romance them and show them all your best moves. (Warning – this is conversion advice and it works but I’m no dating expert, just ask my wife.)

Some examples: Maybe you can offer them a buyer’s guide download, a coupon for their first time purchase, an offer to see a webinar about how to choose the product/service they are considering or a price alert notification if this item goes on sale.

Every keyphrase should have a goal that is in alignment with the visitor’s stage in their buying process.

3. Measure your success and build confidence. Respect and support your customer’s journey along their buying process by pulling them along instead of trying to push them to commit too fast. That is the friction that is caused by your sales process colliding with, instead of aligning with, their buying process. This is what creates cognitive dissonance. What you need to build is confidence. Your visitors need confidence that you are there to support their buying process and confidence in your ability to address all their needs and wants in order to convert visitors at all stages.

Start tracking and evaluating your keyphrases and landing pages by how well they support moving visitors through the buying process.  Analyze these micro-goals and continuously optimize the experience to move further and further along so that you keep them on target. Every step closer to the macro-goal is a success, every visit that bounces is a failure.

Please let me know what is stopping you from taking these steps right now?

Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled conversions based on the advice we gave him. However, he said he had an unbelievable battle to explain and use an obvious technique: leveraging his company’s point-of-action assurances into the shopping cart.

Maybe I can spare you that grief.

What Are Point-of-Action Assurances?

At the point when a visitor is ready to take action, to fill out a form, to click on a button or link, they are at a seductive moment. It’s a delicate place. It’s at that point they could lose confidence in their decision and not take the action you want them to take. That’s why you must provide messaging to bolster trust and confidence.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this can be done.

One of the earliest tests we ran over a decade ago was adding the words “we value your privacy” near newsletter subscriptions boxes on several clients’ websites. We placed those four simple words near the e-mail form field and the button used to submit the subscription form. It often doubled the conversion rate from visitors to subscribers.

If you want to take this to another level, check out what my good friends and screenshotaholic enablers at TechSmith do on their forms with a reaffirming message from their president.

Point-of-action assurances allow you to handle the possible objections or concerns your visitors have just as they are ready to complete an action and without them having to go anywhere else on your website to look for the answer.

Take a look at the download button from Firefox as an example of adding point-of-action assurances on a graphic button. Notice how they tell people how large the file is, what version, etc.? You could do the same thing if you are asking people to download white paper docs, PDFs, or any other type of files.

Amazon used this strategy for years on its “add to cart” buttons. Even though they removed it, we have still used it quite successfully for clients recently. Notice how Amazon used the words “you can always remove it later” on the button and the use of the lock graphic and the additional words “shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.”

You can also use point-of-action assurances to help retail visitors overcome their shopping fears and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Notice the use of the lock and the “Shop with Confidence” messaging alongside the credit card input fields in CafePress.com’s shopping cart? This point-of-action assurance helps visitors feel more secure about entering in their credit card information.

The folks from 37signals use this well-designed strategy quite effectively in order to get their visitors to provide them with credit card information to set up a free trial account for their Basecamp product.

Visitors to retailers often have other questions that should be answered as point-of-action assurances inside the cart, instead of making visitors search your website for answers to your return, shipping, or guarantee policies.

Notice how Shoeline.com spells out its policies from the shopping cart page all the way through the final checkout page? This is how it lets visitors know that all its products are guaranteed and that visitors can return products within 30 days for a refund or exchange.

So You Want More Leads, Huh?

Well, this strategy of providing point-of-action assurances is a must, then!

Keep in mind that, according to studies, a lead loses six times its effectiveness within the first hour of contacting you. So an effective strategy is to set expectations of how you handle your leads, what will happen after they fill out your form, and when and how you will respond. Take a look at what Rad-Direct.com is doing on its Web forms:

First, it sets expectations about what you can speak to a systems engineer about. Then, above and below the form, it lets you know that it will respond to all inquiries within two business hours (it also has the point-of-action assurance about respecting your privacy):

Use this simple and powerful technique of point-of-action assurances that direct marketers have been using in their work for years and watch how your visitors reward you with more actions taking place.

In January, I was able to offer a couple of websites free conversion optimization consulting from my MarketMotive certification students. Those students had some terrific successes with our volunteer websites. For example, one retailer increased their conversion rate by 132% and one lead generation website increased their conversion rate by 111%.

I need more volunteer websites to work with my students.

In order to achieve their certification, my students must perform a certain number of successful improvements for a website. Some of these students work for very large companies, that don’t make it easy for them to test on, while others their own sites may be too small in traffic and conversions to finish the tests on time. So…

I am looking for a couple of volunteer websites that want to improve their conversion rate that will allow my students under my guidance to analyze their website and set up a few tests. If you have a website, either retail or lead generation, and you have a good amount of traffic and conversions but want more please contact me so we can see if we have a match.

Think of it as money falling from the sky

* image courtesy of Shutterstock

Janis Lanka (@janislanka, manages front-end development for Elastic Path Software and was responsible for testing on the Official Vancouver 2010 Olympic Store.

1.    What were the precipitating events that caused your company to start testing?

1)      We knew there were areas of the site that could use optimization: our homepage could be less busy; our product details page could better display key information; our checkout process could be shorter (too many people were abandoning the process mid-way). However, since these were “opinions,” and nobody had answers based on facts, we decided to quickly validate the various theories, just in time for the Winter 2010 Games buying season (this deadline was a serious one!).

2.    When deciding to test you had the option of doing it in-house or finding an agency (you do both). What led you to your decision to hire an agency and what was the criteria you used?

2)      We didn’t have sufficient experience with testing to do it in-house. Thus, we looked up a local agency that would help to guide us through this process and help us understand it better. There was no official selection method and we selected Wider Funnel because of personal relationship with Chris Goward. After couple of meetings with them we gained confidence in their knowledge and agreed that they can be great fit for what we needed.

3.    What were some of the greatest surprises learned from your testing?

3)      Issue with reaching statistical significance. We didn’t have much time to test (b/c of major deadlines), and thus had to make decisions on various additional data points like variation conversion rates, bounce rates, etc. Starting this, our assumption was that each test would quickly show which route we have to take, but in reality it required much more analysis.

4.    What kind of impact has your successes in testing had on your organization?

4)      Since we began engaging in testing and optimization, we’ve noticed that opinions expressed in meetings were now being complemented with facts, new feature implementation processes have better structure, and team members had a renewed trust in each other because decisions were now data driven.

5.    How can others in your position help convince management they should be testing? If you were speaking directly to managements what would you say?

5)      Data focused decision making is key to be communicated to management. Get permission to try a low-budget pilot project that would show actual benefits in terms of generated revenue and management will support you in any further tests. Very clear monetary benefit shown through testing low-hanging fruit helped us to pilot this and get all necessary buy-in.

P.S. Don’t miss my free webinar with WiderFunnel on June 1st, “Activate the 10 Steps to a Higher Conversion Rate.” Please register now.

A few weeks ago MarketMotive, the rest of the faculty and I announced a contest to award a scholarship for a MarketMotive certification training. We received several fantastic submissions and it was very difficult to choose a winner. However, Evan Hinkle, “a 20-year-old, high-functioning individual diagnosed on the spectrum of autism” stood out for his wonderful submission that you can read below. Congratulations Evan, and thank you to all those who submitted an entry. I wish I had awards for all of you.

————————————-

My name is Evan Hinkle and I would like to be awarded a scholarship for certification for MarketMotive.  I am a 20-year-old, high-functioning individual diagnosed on the spectrum of autism. I would like your consideration in awarding this course so I may continue to study in this field.  I have aspirations of someday employing high-functioning individuals with autism and others, so that all can work together, regardless of any existing disabilities.

Many individuals on the spectrum of autism are extremely smart, focused, detailed oriented and can stick to a tasks like none-others. In fact, Specialisterne , an extremely successful business in Denmark, currently employs software engineers where 75% are diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome (on the high-functioning end of the spectrum).  Their business model reports 27% more efficiencies and accuracy than those engineers that are atypical.

The other hard facts are that even those high-functioning individuals that manage to graduate from college end up unemployed, or, at the very least, holding jobs far beneath their level of competency and understanding.  Compared to adults with disabilities in general who demonstrate a 75% unemployment rate, autistic adults demonstrate a 90% unemployment rate.  This is just too high! With 1 in every 110 families having a child being diagnosed with autism, this challenge is an epidemic.  These children grow up.  I wish to not only help others now, but well into the future as well.

I already have some experience in the social media marketing realm and have just completed the Social Media Marketing University (www.smmu.com) 16 week course of study where I received a certificate for successful completion.  And, I need so much more training to be able to accomplish my goals!   I hold a part-time job working for the International Association for Life Quality (www.ialq.org) a TERI, Inc. initiative (Training, Education and Research Institute, which is a 501 c3 agency helping those with disabilties). I am responsible for converting written training materials into Elearning modules, as well as handle a small amount of technical support for their online university students studying to become Special Needs Life Coaches.  I also manage content for this site, as well as gather, and post content in their research and information section (www.ialq.org/research-infomration/ )

Although I am not a “charity”, I am very hard pressed to be able to afford the master Certification I seek.  Right now I work part time directly for other non-profits (TERI, IALQ, Meals-on Wheels Greater San Diego, Inc.) giving back and would like to continue to expand my knowledge to help these organizations grow and be able to pass along affordable fees in a support and advisory role. I then wish to expand my services by hiring and training other high-functioning individuals.

Awarding a scholarship to me in this area will:

Help me expand my knowledge and expertise

Help other non-profits I currently work for and hope to help them grow

Help employ others that are having difficulties acquiring employment on the spectrum

Improving Conversion Optimization Plan

I plan to use the knowledge I obtain from the scholarship course to improve the conversion rate for IALQ wanting to sign up new students for their Special Needs Life Coaching classes.  Currently IALQ is trying to acquire their customers through PPC campaigns on Facebook offering free webinars.  The ads drive potential customers to a landing page to sign up.  The webinar is presented and then the attendees sign up for the class ($3,500). I know this overall campaign can be improved in many ways.  Currently they have tested 2 campaigns. One test involved 18 different ads and approximately 15 different landing pages, the other campaign tested approximately 15 different ads and one landing page created to the target those markets that responded best on the to their first test.

Here are the areas I would like to learn from the experts on help to improve IALQ’s overall results:

Overall Goal:

Improve Testing, Landing Pages, and Optimization of Copy and Analysis to Increase Sales and, Ultimately, Graduating Students to help those with Autism

Action Items to Achieve Goals

1. Consider PPC and other ad campaigns on sites other than what is being used currently (Facebook)
2. Review the conversion rates from past campaigns to gather additional insight
3. Test other information tools besides webinars (video, research papers, etc.)
4. Test properly and review results to plan future campaigns that have the best chance for success
5. Consider other ways to drive people to landing pages (besides ads), such as email campaigns, other partnerships, social mentions, blogs by IALQ leaders, etc.
6. Find out ways to improve overall conversion rate that would be explained in Improving Conversion Optimization Course – Implement
7. Understand and develop content and copy for the landing pages that will improve sales – “telling a story that sells”
   1. Review headlines, verbs and overall content and Implement
8. Analyze how the “hand off” works between leads and sales and if this can be improved in any way with steps outlined in course
9. Improve credibility factor of IALQ as they are a fairly new association with a new covering and yet they have over 30 years of experience. This will be accomplished though content and advice gathered from class.
10. Review the www.ialq.org site and landing pages for keywords and identify any additional tools to be able to do proper evaluations and define future action needed
11. Include testimonials and reviews on the IALQ web site after understanding the principals to be outlined in class

Of course it is difficult to say what other areas I would like to implement for IALQ as I have not learned all the great information that will be offered in this course to be able to put this into a plan.  However, this cause is something I plan on supporting for a long time to come, as well as be able to go on to the other courses to make sure I can help IALQ and others to the very best of my ability.  It’s doing good work, for good people, that do good work.
I appreciate your consideration and hope to hear from you soon as I wish to obtain the same knowledge the analysts that work for Brain Eisenberg already have, continue my work with other non-profits and be able to start a business of my own in this area.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Evan Hinkle

I look forward to seeing what Evan will do with his new knowledge of conversion optimization.

Last time, I shared with you the 10 landing page elements, such as the call to action, that make up the anatomy of a landing page.

Once you have identified your elements, there are five dimensions to evaluate if the elements will work at converting your visitors. The five dimensions are:

• Relevance
• Quality
• Location
• Proximity
• Prominence

Relevance

Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.

First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.

Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.

Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.

Quality

The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.

Location

Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.

Proximity

Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.

Prominence

Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizard from fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.

These five dimensions of the 10 landing page elements, in conjunction with some testing, can help you have the most effective landing page for converting your visitors to take action. In my next column, I’ll share with you the seven factors of form design that are critical to your conversion rate.

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. For example, I had one of my students do a fabulous job critiquing websites at SES New York during a conversion clinic session and many of my students have been doing amazing work increasing conversion rates on their own sites and on several of the sites that volunteered to have our students work with them. In fact, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students.

Listen to What They Learned: Live!

After 12 weeks learning “at the knee” of some of the industry’s best and brightest, these Internet marketing students are set to graduate… if they can just earn their faculty’s endorsement.

Four times a year, Market Motive offers intimate, faculty-led web-based courses in Internet marketing from All-star faculty members teach the certification courses: Dave Szetela, Matt Bailey (Fundamentals), Jennifer Laycock (Social Media), John Marshall (Web Analytics), Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics), Greg Jarboe/Jamie O’Donnell (Online PR and Video marketing), Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Optimization), Michael Stebbins (Email Marketing) and nailing down PPC Advertising. This time around, final project defenses are open to the public.

Since January, the all-star faculty has been shepherding this semester’s class through the latest in cutting edge trends and tools for SEO, Web Analytics, Social Media and Conversion Optimization.

But receiving a Master Certification from Market Motive requires more from students than just watching streaming videos and passing online quizzes. It also requires hands-on projects that reflect the kind of work they’ll do in the real world.

Those final projects are presented to the faculty in live screen-sharing webinars by students studying SEO, Conversion Optimization, and Social Media. This semester the public is invited to listen in by webinar.

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, I want to offer this framework for understanding the 10 key elements of a landing page.

Not all of the following elements always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

In my next column, I’ll explain the five dimensions of landing page element design that impact its effectiveness.

If you would like to see some of these elements in action, you can sign up for an upcoming Webinar I am doing on April 1, 2010 – “Don’t Be April’s Fool: Proven Techniques To Maximize Your Advertising ROI.”

This is a copy of the letter I asked my friend Brian Offenberger to draft about the lessons learnt from a situation that led him to share a copy of one of my presentations.

“The recent situation with Bryan Eisenberg concerning my duplication of his material in one of my presentations was quite a learning experience.

I walked into my office Monday afternoon, only to be greeted by an associate saying there was a firestorm of activity on the internet claiming I copied parts of a presentation by Bryan.

I immediately did two things within 5 minutes of hearing about the situation:

• Searched for Bryan’s presentation online to check for similarities
• Called Bryan to apologize for what was happening

The only thing I could find online concerning Bryan’s presentations were blogger’s summaries of it.  Bryan was not available to take my call.

It was apparent though from blogger summaries the similarities between presentations were more than coincidental.  They were alike.

I then immediately posted to the thread on Bryan’s Facebook page.  It was quite a long thread of people responding to Bryan’s question about what they would do if a friend ripped off their material.  I posted my response, informing Bryan I was trying to reach him.  This happened within about 10 minutes of me becoming aware of the issue and buzz surrounding it.

I continued to search for Bryan’s presentation online to compare it with mine for similarities.  I couldn’t find it.

I then posted a comment on Bryan’s Facebook page (which was about 45 minutes into my knowledge of what was happening).  My comment responded to the questions raised by comments on Bryan’s Facebook page.  My posting simply stated that I would not knowingly claim Bryan’s work as my own and that I was investigating how the duplication occurred.

That posting seemed to stop the negative comments about me on Bryan’s Facebook page (with one exception).

I then began to read in detail the numerous blogger summaries about Bryan’s presentation.  The consistency in the summaries made it clear that my presentation contained duplicated portions of Bryan’s.  At this time however, I was still unsure how this duplication happened.

Upon further research, I found that Bryan had delivered his presentation just a few times.  One of these times however was during an online presentation January 7 for Market Motive.  Bryan’s presentation on this day was the source material for my duplication.

Although there were no slide copies of Bryan’s presentation available any where online, one of my staff member’s had attended Bryan’s January 7 performance.  This staff member was one of two I use that help me prepare presentations and speeches I deliver.  I mistook their learning notes from Bryan’s presentation as working notes for one we were preparing.  The result was a duplication of Bryan’s material in my presentation, without proper attribution or permissions from him.

Within 4 hours of learning of this situation, and after investigating it, I wrote a detailed email to Bryan.  In it, I apologized for the situation.  I assured him the duplication was not malicious or intentional.  I asked for his forgiveness and outlined to him the actions I would take to rectify the situation.

It was well after 11pm East Coast time on the day of the event.  I drafted a statement of apology to Bryan to place on our blog.

Bryan emailed me early the next morning, saying he was tied up but would be calling.

I sent Bryan my public statement of apology.  I placed it on my blog, removed my version of the presentation in question from public access and placed a comment on the thread concerning the issue on Bryan’s Facebook page.

I continued to pursue speaking with Bryan.  I felt it important to discuss with him my actions, intentions, and remorse.  He was most gracious during the conversation, even asking me to elaborate on this situation and what I learned from it.

The learning experiences have been many.

I had the importance of checking and re-checking work re-taught to me in the most painful of ways.  I had input from 2 of my staff members on the presentation containing Bryan’s work.  In my haste in running my small business, I got in a hurry and didn’t have either of my associates check the final product.  That was a critical mistake, one I will never make again.

We’re clearly labeling “learning notes” from “working notes” in my office.  Learning notes are notes we take when researching something or attending a lecture.  As we host a weekly radio show and twice a month webinar series, we’re often taking notes for content purposes.  Working notes are internally developed source documents, ones we can rightly claim as our own.  Our belief is labeling can help avoid potential problems.

I’m also personally researching online any presentation I do prior to delivery.  Although I know my intentions to be honorable, and I trust those that help me prepare, this situation has taught me you can never be too careful.  The thing that’s really critical is to research a topic online prior to actually delivering it.  At my business, we do marketplace research prior to developing presentation topics to avoid duplications.  The flaw with my approach is it may be three months or longer from concept to completion and lots can happen during that time.  A re-check is prudent and necessary and that check will be done by me.

It’s important to respond quickly.  I knew that.  My mother taught me as a kid that’s it’s never too early to right a wrong.

I learned to do a better job in filing preparation materials relating to the presentations I do.  In the past when I’ve finished a speech or presentation, I’ve often destroyed the notes and reference materials to avoid clutter and save on space.  This situation has taught me the importance of keeping those notes for a reasonable period as one never knows when they may be needed.

This situation also reinforced the importance to me to focus on what is happening in a crisis, not why it is happening to me.  To dwell on my honorable intentions and concerns about how this happened wasn’t helping Bryan.  To focus on what I was going to do about it would bring value to the situation.  I feel it best to focus on resolution rather than dwell on “why me?”

I got comments from many.  As one might expect, those that know me were supportive.  Those that don’t were vicious.  I learned that many speakers receive staff assistance in preparing presentations and speeches.  Several wrote of their concern about one day facing a situation similar to mine.

Finally, I had re-enforced the importance of the telephone in today’s business world.  It’s amazing the understandings people can reach during a good, sincere call.

RSS Ray, CeM

(a/k/a) Brian Offenberger, CeM

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Anyone who has read my “69 Free or Low Cost Tools to Improve Your Website” post knows that I love tools. This past week I was excited to see a new list of tools with the just published “Which Multivariate?” a multivariate testing tool comparison guide. I’m happy they beat me to the punch in putting this list of tools together, because many people have asked me about the various testing platforms and tools, and I haven’t had a chance to get to it.

The Critical Parts of the Testing Equation

When it comes to a choice of testing tools, you can see there is a variety of testing software available other than Google’s Website Optimizer and Omniture’s Test and Target. When you finally decide to start testing, the tool should not be the first part of the equation. It’s like being an emergency room doctor and having lots of crutches around and trying to use a crutch to solve every one of the issues you face. It just won’t solve the problem.

1. You first need to understand the business goals and problems you are trying to achieve.
2. Then you must choose the right tools for that job. To select the right one, you have to weigh your needs and your company’s level of sophistication when it comes to running experiments against price, and keep in mind that the tool you start out with today may not be a good fit to solve all the challenges. So flexibility is key.
3. The last critical part of the equation is: do you have the knowledge internally to decide what to test (things that really will move the needle) and do you have the resources to get the tests executed?

As you can see steps one and three are the most important to your success, the tool is just a tool.

What to Do Is More Important Than How You Do It

A MarketMotive conversion optimization certification student of mine, Philip Anderson, and I were chatting about this when he reminded me of this classic story. Ever heard the story of the giant ship engine that failed? The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure out how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a youngster. He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. When he went down to the engine room he felt the pipes with his hands, took out a stethoscope, listened to the pumps, and finally placed one of his hands on one of the gauges with his eyes closed. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed! A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for $10,000.

“What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”

So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.”

The man sent a bill that read:

Tapping with a hammer: $2.00

Knowing where to tap: $9,998.00

Effort is important, but knowing where to make an effort makes all the difference.

Can You Get It Done?

Once again, to mitigate your risk and achieve the best conversion rate lift, you want to work with someone who has a demonstrated track record of using a variety of tools: reputable, on-demand testing tools that don’t rely heavily on software license revenues and will allow you flexibility to change the software as your needs evolve and your testing needs become more complex. As important as knowing what to do is, it does no good if you can’t do anything about it. It was obvious to me and anyone who saw me that I needed to lose weight, but if I didn’t put the resources and effort in place to do what needed to be done I wouldn’t have lost 70+ pounds since April of last year (you can see a recent picture of me here).

You must have resources in house or else hire an independent firm or contractors to either plan, set up, or execute the variations and creative for your tests. They should be able to fill the gaps you have internally in order for you to continue improving your business goals continuously. Testing is not a one-time event you check off the list. It needs to be part of your everyday culture to succeed.

I heard Guy Kawasaki say, “Execution is not an event – a one-time push toward achieving goals. Rather, it is a way of life.” The reason testing is so critical today is because the other business constant – change – is occurring at a pace much faster than ever before. If you can’t develop the corporate metabolism to test, change, and execute rapidly you are going to be left behind like the horse and buggy makers were by Ford. In the academic world they say “publish or perish,” but in today’s marketing world it is “test or die!”

P.S. Don’t miss my webinar on April 1st sponsored by testing services firm WiderFunnel: Don’t Be April’s Fool: Proven Techniques To Maximize Your Advertising ROI