Nobody in this industry has been in the conversion rate optimization game as long as my brother Jeffrey and I have. Yet, brothers Matthew and Jamie Roche are responsible for many organizations beginning to test. They founded Offermatica (which is today’s Adobe Test & Target). So when the Roche brothers decided that they were ready to start their next project, BO.LT, you assume they’d  know something about speaking to their audience and converting them into customers; especially since the product was free.

The launch plan:

Basic mechanics:
When people came to BO.LT, it was a closed Beta, and they left their email address to receive invite codes.  They were told that their code would be sent over in a few days, but that it would come faster if the invite were shared.  This is a fairly standard, and effective, mechanism to increase viral demand.

What is BO.LT?
BO.LT lets you remix pages and share them with the people you want to reach. Once you BO.LT a url they make a copy of the page and run it on very advanced content delivery network that is tuned for incredibly fast page serving and incredibly fast editing and sharing. When you put a page on BO.LT, it is a copy. Don’t worry, the original page on the original site is still safe. Your page, however, is nimble, changeable, and completely under your control. The service includes fabulous analytics as well. This is a great way to launch new landing pages or make changes to existing pages for A/B testing.

The BO.LT launch twist:
You could use the “RED” BO.LT editor to remix the invite prior to retweeting or sharing to increase its odds of being shared.

Social Conversions:
The results would seem to show us that when it comes to social conversions no one knows their audience better than the members of that audience.

Would you have predicted that this would be one of the best performing pages?

The Darth Vader version was the top invite: http://bo.lt/cqpzs was shared 617 times.

The top converting page was a remix that converted nearly 8x better than the original page designed by BO.LT. 100% of the top ten most shared invites were remixes and within the top 100, 60% personalized.
About 6% of all invites were remixed. At least 700 invites were forwarded at least once.

BO.LT had versions of their page that were translations into Japanese (at least 5 versions), Chinese, Russian, Vietnamese, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Tagalog (Phillipines), and more. Translated pages had 2x  the conversion rate of un-remixed pages.

Check out some of the other great BO.LT remixes:

• http://bo.lt/1tjei   (Magna Carta)
• http://bo.lt/8hlb4   (just look at it…)
• http://bo.lt/aqxao   (John Battelle/Franzen)
• http://bo.lt/w4z9    (Lucas is inviting!)
• http://bo.lt/7qeai   (Experimenting with bolt!)
• http://bo.lt/anv4    (subtle complaint – “I don’t, so get with it bolt”)
• http://bo.lt/hx260   (descriptive)
• http://bo.lt/gq18e
• http://bo.lt/d845g
• http://bo.lt/emyst or http://bo.lt/fpdld (Japanese)
• http://bo.lt/hyh54 or http://bo.lt/izq3x (French)
• http://bo.lt/2slif  (Dutch)
• http://bo.lt/92arl  (Norwegian)
• http://bo.lt/9z9j9  (Chinese)
• http://bo.lt/5s3g7  (Russian)

Does this have you rethinking your social conversion strategy? I suggest it should.

Is yours the typical company launching 2-5 tests a month, struggling to eke out more from your marketing optimization program, and wasting critical marketing resources of your team and website traffic? That’s the result of not focusing in on the Big Idea!

How much should you be testing?

A mid-size company can easily handle 30-50 tests a month. The reason most companies never get there is because they waste so many cycles on what I call “slice & dice” optimization on poorly designed landing pages.

Let’s consider the following test which I found “in the wild” — and which I find ironic because it is for a service offering a marketplace of landing page designers.

Version A

Version B

Depending on how you want to define your testing variables these two landing pages have around a dozen changes. I hope this is not what you want from your landing page designers. You don’t need someone to create endless variations of every variable in order to succeed in your marketing optimization efforts.

Can you identify all of the variables being proposed for testing? (I’ll share with you my list next time.)

For now, let’s assume that for each of these variables on these landing pages, you test just 2 variations even if more may be warranted. I’ll show you what the problem with that approach is. (Note: I’ll make use of Google’s Website Optimizer “Test Duration Calculator” to estimate the numbers, but you could easily do this by hand or with a calculator or simple spreadsheet):

I don’t know the true stats for this page but they don’t really matter in order to illustrate the challenge.

That means it take more than 108 days — over 3 months! — to complete this test for these simple landing pages. That’s a whole-heck-of-a-lot of visitors and a whole-heck-of-a-lot of time consumed to get one test completed.

Testing Landing Pages: A More Efficient Way

The way we teach testing, there are probably 3 variables worth testing (variables that communicate to a visitor) on this page. Let’s assume the same 2 variations for each, though to be frank, for one of the variables I would want at least 3 or 4 variations if we were doing this test for an actual client. But for the sake of simplicity let’s keep everything the same.

This test would be over in just under 18 days, a scant 2 ½ weeks.

Which way seems more efficient?

Suffering from Conversion Optimization Fatique

Should you test for variables that seem to really matter to visitors versus testing virtually random variations of elements in the hope something gives you a little lift? You may achieve some gains — that’s why this practice is so common — but you’ll burn out waiting for the results. This is why so many marketing optimization efforts fizzle out over time.

Next time I will share the variables I found comparing these landing pages and discuss the 3 elements I would test on this current page.

In order to give you a leg up on identifying the variables on your own, I’ll give you a question as a framework. When was the the last time you looked at a page and said to yourself, “The layout is horizontal and not vertical, so gosh darn it, I can’t buy from this page?” Vertical vs. horizontal layout on landing pages could matter as a display of information issue if you are trying to change a lot of what is above and below the fold. But that really wasn’t the case in this example. It’s just a waste of time and effort unless or course you have no real idea what will move the needle for customers – and in that case ANY test is better than nothing. Maybe.

Instead of trying to test endless variations of minutiae we teach companies to look for the big ideas that impact customer experience and buying process. The smaller variations we can always come back to after the Big Ideas establish directionality.

Can you find the big ideas for optimization (or that should be tested) in this example?

No question FaceBook advertising bears little resemblance to Search Advertising.  However, we are starting to see some great success stories of companies success with FaceBook advertising.  Nevertheless, FaceBook’s advertising model may be seriously flawed.

If you ever accessed Facebook using one of their mobile applications; perhaps you noticed something missing. There are no ads.

Most 30-40 year old women (one of the most coveted and powerful consumer groups) access their Facebook accounts usinge their mobile device.

While I agree that FaceBook needs a native iPad app, for the sake of their business, I think they first need to find a way to make sure all those current mobile users interact with ads.

As my good friend, Avinash pointed out in his 11 Digital Marketing “Crimes Against Humanity”, there are 6.9 billion homo sapiens on the planet and 3.7 billion of them actively use 4.3 billion mobile phones.

You hardly ever have to worry about keeping up with your competition if you keep up with your audience. Facebook is not keeping up with their audience and all companies do this at their own peril.

So do you agree that there might be a problem here?

After the first dot-com bust, “content is king” was the rallying cry of any competent Web worker. Back then this revelation was novel online. Soon after, this mantra became a cliché. As it often goes with clichés, they start out as something true and meaningful. Eventually, the words become common, outlive their value, and are so overused that they’re easily ignored.

Saying content is king is the equivalent of saying money is valuable; it’s true but obvious. Tell that to the even the most mentally challenged Web marketer today, and you’ll likely get a, “Duh, where have you been?” in return.

Nobody needs to be told content is of value. But how valuable is it?

Because there isn’t a $1, $5, or $10 denomination stamped on the front of Web content, it’s often difficult to know exactly how valuable content is to your company. Also, knowing content’s value isn’t the same as knowing how to create it, market it or even how to use it.

What Is Content?

This is a critical question that often goes underexplored. If you ask most marketers, they’ll answer that it’s the copy on a Web site. While this answer is certainly true, it’s inadequate. Content is more than copy.

We can debate the nuance of the possible answers to this question. But a good starting place is to think of Web content as the public conversation that happens between you and the visitor, whether the conversation is one-way (from you to the visitor), two-way (between the visitor and you), or conversation among visitors.

Content includes but is not limited to:

• The copy on your Web site
• Blogs and reader comments
• Content widgets
• Product/service reviews
• Forums
• Videos, demos, and animations
• Tweets
• Facebook/MySpace fan pages and groups
• E-mail newsletters
• Articles and other intellectual property or knowledge sharing
• Whitepapers, case studies, Webinars

The more this content causes, persuades, or woos visitors to take a profitable action on our behalf, the more valuable it is. If it doesn’t do this, it’s more like bad entertainment.

Content Now Worth More Than Ever

The economic forecast remains challenging for at least the near future. It’s easy to make a case for leveraging existing content for all it’s worth. I would also encourage you to determine the costs of content creation strategies (if you have in the past, revisit them now). You’ll likely find that content creation is becoming more affordable. Many of our clients are easily making room in their budgets to try at least a few content-centered marketing tactics.

Using content as a marketing tool is obvious for those with compelling intellectual property, but it isn’t just for those types any more. Almost any company or service can find a content-marketing strategy that will work for it.

A former employee of mine has been looking for a home in a new area, and was impressed to find a few Realtors tweeting. He followed them. He was able to meet with one, walk through a property, and find he was from the same area as the real estate agent. Since he didn’t yet have a Realtor, whom do you think he is going to choose?

Getting Started With Content Marketing

• You don’t have to start from scratch. If you have content already, look to your analytics to identify popular content and find other uses for it. Rewrite it, update it, and send it as a newsletter. Even tweet it as an oldie but a goodie. Or have it formatted for mobile browsers.
• Crowdsource. Sometimes your customers will create better content than you can buy from a content creation firm. Why not use specific reviews or forum posts as landing places for campaigns or even as ads?
• Find the passion. Somebody in the company interested or fluent in a particular social media, or has been itching to write a company blog? Now is the time to let him loose. Let his passion be a lighthouse for potential customers. While it may not be polished or on message, it is likely not going to be sterile and flat like most polished, on-message marketing efforts. To get a sense of what this evangelist might do for you, check out my interview with Betsy Weber, chief evangelist of TechSmith:part one and part two.
• Let content come from your company’s strength. We had a client where almost everybody in the company participates in the forum. Every employee is knowledgeable about the service offered, and they all become part of the marketing vehicle, giving tips and comments and escalating customer issues. Not only is it transparent, it’s content marketing at its most organic.
• Content marketing should ultimately be a two-way conversation between you and your customers. While an e-mail newsletter or a static Web page with persuasive copy is technically one-way, it shouldn’t sound like it is. Talk more about them and what they get than talking about yourself. Those who do nothing but talk about themselves just end up “wewe-ing” all over themselves.
• Don’t be pressured to reinvent the wheel. If you don’t already have one, start a simple e-mail newsletter or blog. Don’t feel forced to pick something new and shiny like Twitter or the latest social media frenzy.
• Content that isn’t relevant to at least one profitable segment of potential customers isn’t content, it’s spam. Spam is boring. Creating relevant content often requires planning.

Final Say

Ultimately, content marketing is about optimizing the dialogue between a company and it customers. The better, more interesting the conversation is, the more attention it attracts and the more your customers are compelled to talk and buy.

How is the conversation going with your customers?

With Major League Baseball’s spring training under full force, it inspires me to look at how we approach our “online marketing game.” We can learn a lot about winning “conversions” from how the game is played. Most baseball people will tell you that you can win the game with the “long” ball or with the “short” game. When you convert a visitor to a sale or to a lead, hopefully you have scored a run your competitor won’t. Pete Rose liked to say  “Somebody’s gotta win and somebody’s gotta lose and I believe in letting the other guy lose.” You should adopt the same philosophy.

Pete received the nick name “Charlie Hustle” for his unique playing style. He may not have been the athlete with the most talent but he worked harder than anyone. It is about getting rock solid on the fundamentals and executing regularly. Even when being walked, Rose would sprint to first base, instead of the traditional trot to the base. Rose was known for sliding headfirst into a base, his signature move. He played his heart out and would do anything to score runs on the board. Pete understands what it takes to be a winner. Some of his accomplishments:

Major League records:

• Most career hits – 4,256
• Most career games played – 3,562
• Most career at bats – 14,053
• Most career singles – 3,215
• Most career runs by a switch hitter – 2,165
• Most career walks by a switch hitter – 1,566
• Most career total bases by a switch hitter – 5,752
• Most seasons of 200 or more hits – 10
• Most consecutive seasons of 100 or more hits – 23
• Most consecutive seasons with 600 or more at bats – 13 (1968-1980)
• Most seasons with 600 at bats – 17
• Most seasons with 150 or more games played – 17
• Most seasons with 100 or more games played – 23
• Record for playing in the most winning games – 1,972
• Only player in major league history to play more than 500 games at five different positions – 1B (939), LF (671), 3B (634), 2B (628), RF (595)

When he struggled, he’d continuously experiment with his technique until he would find a winning combination. Businesses and especially marketers love the excitement of the home run. Hitting the long ball is definitely one way to win ball games. Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, by Michael M. Lewis, published in 2003, looks at the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager, Billy Beane. Its focus is the team’s modernized, analytical approach to assembling a competitive baseball team despite Oakland’s disadvantaged revenue situation.

Rigorous statistical analysis had demonstrated that on base percentage and slugging percentage are better indicators of offensive success, and the A’s became convinced that these qualities were cheaper to obtain on the open market than more historically valued qualities such as speed and contact. I think the same is true today in online marketing. It is not about having the greatest creative talents and who can hit the most home runs but who has the ability to keep moving runners to the next base. This is about consistent, and persistent execution.

In more than a decade of helping companies improve their marketing and increase their conversion rate, one of the key characteristics that determines success is the ability and speed of execution and change plans on the drop of a dime. It is better to get some thing up and out the door even if it is flawed (and it always will be) than to wait and deliberate and evaluate to consider doing something. You can win games even if your are less innovative, less powerful and less talented just by mastering the hustle.

Get things done. Continuously optimize later.

So which organization would you rather have, a team of high paid superstars who don’t deliver consistently, or a bunch of charlie hustles?

If you need some guidance on what tools, talent and techniques you need, we’d be happy to coach you.

Often times, marketers approach me to tell me they think something is wrong with their page but they aren’t sure how to convince their designer or management that their are any issues.

In this four-minute video, I share a simple technique and how to use attention mapping software like Feng-GUI.com to prove to your designer that they are costing you money.

Attention mapping software uses software algorithms to create heat maps based on how people would engage with your Web page or ad within the first five seconds of interaction. Of course these tools aren’t perfect as they can’t predict what is driving a person’s motivation but from a pure design perspective you can see if you are in the right direction or not.

Watch this video to see a specific example of a page – before and after – and notice the difference in heat maps and page effectiveness.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is just a snippet of what I will cover on my MarketMotive webinar on January 18th, EyeTracking, Heat Maps and Visual Clarity, Oh My! You can register for free. As a bonus, I’ll be joined by the CEO of Feng-GUI, Rafael Mizrahi. He and I will take volunteer websites or landing pages, run a heat map analysis on them and provide feedback at the end of the webinar. Register now to get your page analyzed.

P.S. This video column was created for the celebration of the 10th year anniversary writing my column for ClickZ.

1. MobiReady
More and more visitors are arriving to websites using mobile devices today. Is your website ready for it? Evaluates mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards.

2. Treepodia
Other than mobile, video has been the other big demand from customers. Treepodia alows you to submit your XML product catalog feed to them and they will then turn that feed into automated video (with music or voice overs), submit those videos to sites like YouTube, FaceBook, & MetaCafe and them generate a video sitemap. These videos often show up pretty high in the search engine results page and are pretty effective at engaging your visitors and converting more of them into buyers.

3. UserTesting.com
UserTesting.com has built a large panel of users who will record their on-screen actions and voice as they use your website. For each user’s test session, you get a video and their written summary. It costs $29 and is typically ready in one hour. The users are pre-screened to ensure they can follow instructions, stay on task and verbalize their thoughts. UserTesting is fast, easy and inexpensive. Users are prescreened and rated by previous clients so the quality of feedback is pretty good. It can also be quite valuable to see how your site runs on various users’ computers. The control panel is limited, however, so you can only specify age, income, gender, and computer/Web experience. If your target audience is very specific, you might want to run tests with your own customers. UserTesting.com allows you to do this but it’s a bit more work.

They just launched A Quick & Cheap Way To Fix Blind Spots in Your PPC Efforts.
You can get 3 independent people (the testers) to search for your main key phrase (with product ads or not) for just $75.

Each tester will do a search for your phrase and;

• evaluate which 4 ads they would be most likely to click on and;
• evaluate each landing page for 5 seconds to see if the ad met their expectations and;
• also provide their first impressions of the page.
• After all that, each tester will dig deeper into each of those sites to see if they would be comfortable buying from you or one of your competitors.

4. BoostCTR
BoostCTR is a tool for advertisers to outsource ad writing and testing. Sit back, and let their writers compete to improve your ads. You choose how many ad groups you would like to improve. BoostCTR guarantees that their expert writers will continue to write for these ad groups until they beat the performance of your best existing ads.

5. WordStream Keyword Grouper
Keyword reports from Web analytics and Search Query Reports from Google AdWords often contain tens of thousands of search queries – this valuable information is very difficult to understand in such a raw format. Generally, making sense of huge lists of keywords requires importing keyword data into Microsoft Excel and trying to organize the data into columns or different worksheets.

The process of manually organizing huge lists of website keywords to find a valuable grouping can take hours, even days, using typical keyword tools or spreadsheets. WordStream’s Free Keyword Grouper automates that process – just paste in up to 10,000 keywords and the tool finds the most profitable keyword groups for you to target in just seconds. The keyword groupings that you discover are incredibly valuable for informing and optimizing both SEO and PPC marketing.

6. KISS Insights
Ask a question (or two) and your customers will see it slide up from the bottom right-hand corner of your site. You can read a review of how to use KISS Insights from one of my MarketMotive conversion certification graduates.

7. WordCounter
Ranks the most frequently used words in any given body of text. Use this to see what words you overuse (is everything a “solution” for you?) or maybe just to find some keywords from a document.

8. Clue
A fun and easy way to test what people remember on your website by answering some question after viewing your website for 5 seconds.

9. Bounce
A fun and easy way to share ideas on a website. Upload a screenshot, add notes by clicking and dragging. Collaborate with friends & colleagues.

10. Graybit
GrayBit is an online accessibility testing tool designed to visually convert a full-color web page into a grayscale rendition for the purpose of visually testing the page’s perceived contrast.

11. Silverback
Silverback is an application for Mac computers that also records a user’s screen and voice as they browse a website. The interface is extremely simple and meant specifically for moderated usability testing. The program carries a one-time fee of $49.95. If you have easy access to people with whom you can test your site, and a Mac laptop, this is a great solution. You simply arrange to meet somewhere with Internet access and run the test. You end up with a recording that you can easily edit and post on the Web. The software even enables webcam use to embed the user’s facial expressions in the corner of the final recording.

12, 13. Ethnio + Morae
Ethnio enables companies to recruit their own customers for testing. Add the Ethnio JavaScript to a Web page and it automatically launches a periodic pop-up offering a reward for participating in a usability study. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and use a screen sharing service like Morae to record the session. Ethnio costs $400 for 200 recruits and a UserVue subscription is $149 per month.

This is an ideal combination because you get real users and you can ask questions during the session to better understand user behavior. The drawback is that this solution is more expensive and quite time consuming. Don’t forget, you’ll need to offer some sort of compensation to the users.

14. 5 Second Test
5 Second Test allows website owners to upload images that will be reviewed by random Internet users. Users view the image for just five seconds then click on the screen to indicate areas of the images that caught their attention. Using text fields provided on the screen, they describe what they saw on the places they clicked. This is a free service. 5 Second Test is useful for understanding users’ first impressions of your site. You’ll need to review others’ sites in exchange for your review.

15, 16.FeedbackArmy & Mechanical Turk
Quickly and inexpensively get workers at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to provide written answers to questions about what they think about your site. It costs $10 for 10 reviews.

You could go to Mechanical Turk (mturk.com) directly and save a little money but FeedbackArmy is easier and still very inexpensive. The quality of responses varies dramatically, so you won’t necessarily get 10 helpful reviews for your $10. The advantage here is that you can get a higher quantity of responses — look for repetitive feedback. This is a bit more quantitative approach than watching a video of each user where you might find problems that even the user doesn’t realize they are uncovering. FeedbackArmy has two similar competitors, EasyUsability.com and 3rdPartyFeedback.com.

17. GazeHawk
Study participants view your page and track their gaze with GazeHawk’s software. You get heatmaps which show how the users interacted with your site.

18. Seevolution
See a detailed, real-time traffic breakdown of your website’s visitors compiled and displayed immediately in a movable, transparent heatmap overlay on your website.

19. Feng-GUI.com
Feng-GUI uses software to analyze uploaded images and provide image owners with heat maps, symmetry analysis, and focal center/attention information. Their software does not track mouse movement or clicks (instead relying on a predictive algorithm), and the free version does not offer face or text detection. Price ranges from free for a standard heat map on an uploaded image, to $1,000 for 700 images. By paying for the product, you receive premium analysis, including customization options for the reports.

20. 3M Visual Attention Service
VAS accurately indicates what design elemnts people are most likely to notice in the first 3 to 5 seconds.

21. Olark
Chat with visitors on your website from your desktop, your laptop, your iPhone, or your Blackberry. They work with standard chat (IM) clients (like iChat, Pidgin, and Meebo) and services (Google Talk and Jabber) which means YOU get to decide what software to use. Can be used with multiple operators too.

22,23,24,25.  ClickTale, UserFly, ClickHeat, Clixpy
Both ClickTale and UserFly offer silent movies of your users’ interactions with your website. You place JavaScript on your Web pages that causes users’ mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes to be recorded. The result looks like a screen cast of the user’s screen. ClickTale also provides a written report with detailed information including heat maps, link analytics and form conversion rates. ClickTale is free for up to 400 page views and then pricing gradually increases to $790 per month for 240,000 page views. There Form Analytics will help you optimize all those forms that people abandon on your landing pages and websites. UserFly ranges from free for up to 10 page views per month and gradually increases to $200 for 10,000 page views. ClickHeat is an OpenSource software, released under GPL licence, and free of charge.

26. BT Buckets
Engage your users with a free segmentation and behavioral targeting tool.

27. 4Q from IPerceptions
When evaluating how you website is doing obviously it helps to get your customers’ opinions. This free tool helps you answer four important questions:

* How satisfied are my visitors?
* What are my visitors at my website to do?
* Are they completing what they set out to do?
* If not, why not?
* If yes, what did they like best about the online experience?

28. What’s the Buzz?
a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword. To do that, it does five things:

* It displays the Technorati Blog Popularity Chart, showing how popular the keyword has been blogged about in the past 90 days
* It displays the Google Trends chart for the keyword
* It finds blog posts tagged with the keyword
* It finds blog posts containing the keyword (a straight-forward search)
* It finds social bookmarks tagged with the keywords

29. Bad Neighborhood Link Checker
scan the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, and flag possible problem areas.

30. Sency
To use Sency, simply enter in whatever you want into the search box and click search, and you’ll get real time results powered by real people. The first tab allows you to search what people are talking about right now. The second tab, to the right, allows you to search today’s most shared links on the real time web. Also, on the Sency home page, they have highlighted topics which may be of interest to you. You can look at what’s going on right now, which shows you the hot topics of this instant. You can also see the most popular topics over the past day via the what’s going on lately box. In addition, below the what’s going on boxes, they show you today’s top links which give you prominent link topics that are being shared today by real people on the real time web.

31. Webbed-O-Meter 2.0
can help track how effective you are at inspiring consumer generated content online, call it buzz marketing, social media marketing or viral marketing.

32. Website Grader
provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.

33. Spider Simulator
help you find out for yourself how a search engine reacts to your pages and what can be done to boost your visibility.

34. Spider Test
Shows the source code of a page, all outbound links, and common words and phrases. used on a page.

35. Google Talk Chatback
Chatback uses the web-based Google Talk Gadget so your visitors don’t need to download anything. It opens in a new window so they can keep chatting with you even if they browse to other pages.

36. Google Analytics
web analytics with “enterprise features” and a ton of plugins and hacks.

37. Yahoo! Analytics
still in beta, but incredibly powerful. It is currently available with Yahoo! Merchant Solutions Standard, Professional, and Yahoo! Store plans.

38. Google Website Optimizer
Free A/B and Multivariate Testing. I’ve written the book on it, Always Be Testing.

39. Optimizely
Create an experiment in minutes with our easy-to-use visual interface with absolutely no coding or engineering required.

40. HiConversion
adaptive multivariate testing solution requires dramatically less visitors than any other solution. This enables you to run a fairly large multivariate test with relatively small number of visitors. As a result, you will be able to explore the largest number of new ideas within shortest period of time.

41. Piwik
This is an open source web analytics solution.

42. Linkscape
allows access to link information on more than 30+ billion web pages across 200+ million domains.

43. BacklinkAnalysis
Get a look at what keywords websites are linking to you with.

44. Trifecta
Measures metrics to estimate the relative popularity and importance of Page, Blog or Domain.

45. Google Webmaster Tools
see which phrases you’re ranking well for, what pages are causing problems for Google when crawling your site, which pages are getting the most links, rss subscribers, etc.

46. Morgue File
offers free high resolution digital stock photography for either corporate or public use.

47. OpenAds
for sites that want to serve and track advertising.

48. Sitescore
analyzes the quality of incoming and outgoing links, keyword density, page titles, plagiarism, popularity rank, the usage of popups and the effectiveness of site’s structure. Sitescore also grades the printability, readability, spiderability and usability of the page as well as spelling and W3C compliance. This is no longer available for free, sorry.

49. mon.itor.us
use this to monitor uptime, website performance and other hosting abnormalities.

50. Orangoo Spell Check
spell check your website.

51. The Scrutinizer
offers 283 tools to test your website in one place.

52. Product Indexation Check
use this handy tool to check how many of your category or product pages are included in the major search engines.

53. Kamplye
allows your visitors to give feedback on your site, via a little button that sits at the edge of each webpage. Also offers Google Analytics integration.

54. Google’s Free Custom Search Engine
create your own custom search engine, indexing your website or add additonal websites as well.

55. Microsoft AdCenter Search Funnels
Customers often perform searches by typing related keywords in specific sequences. This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers’ search sequences.

56. Crazy Egg
track what visitors are doing on particular page and shows you what links they clicked via heatmaps and various overlays.

57. Loop11
run online, unmoderated user testing. It is designed to essentially replicate the process of lab-based user testing, albeit online and unmoderated.  The primary purpose of Loop11 is to facilitate the collection of quantitative usability data, something that is otherwise considered too expensive to gather.

58. Scrutinizer browser
a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

59. Firebug
this plugin for Firefox provides a number of development tools. For the purposes of analysis, Firebug will allow you to monitor and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within your browser.

60. Web Page Analyzer
Spiders your page to determine page load time and offers detailed recommendations.

61. Yahoo! YSlow for Firebug
Using Firebug plugin, it shows you the impact of objects that slow your website down.

62. Page Speed by Google
Similar tool to YSlow plus lots of additional resources to speed up your site, including how to optimize your code.

63. Site-Perf
get an accurate, realistic, and helpful estimation of your site’s loading speed. The script fully emulates natural browser behavior downloading your page with all the images, CSS, JS and other files – just like a regular user. A unique feature is that site-perf.com allows to measure packet loss ratio with reasonable precision.

64. Smush.it
Online image optimizer if you want to learn how to speed up your website and optimize images you can read about it in one of my previous posts.

65. Dynamic Drive
Shrink the size of your images.

66. Web-Resizer
another online image optimizer.

67. SEO Blogger
Optimize Your Posts As You Write with this FireFox plugin from WordTracker

68. WordStream’s Free keyword research tool
Nice interface to do keyword research

69. LotusJump
SEO tool that provides you an ongoing task list of what you need to do to improve your Search Engine Rankings.  It breaks down the tasks by:

• Social Profile Tasks
• Q&A Tasks
• Social Bookmarking Tasks
• Buzz tasks
• Content Generation tasks
• Competitive Backlink tasks
• Directory submission tasks

70. SiteYogi
examines how well optimized your site is for search engines as well as the number of backlinks you have, various social media rankings, whether your code is valid, and how well ranked your site is.

71. Notify.me
It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are delivered to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application.

72. Crowd Science
An online measurement service that builds detailed reports on the demographics of your website audience.
Using site-centric research techniques and some cleverly constructed technology, Crowd Science helps website owners and marketers drive ad sales, direct content creation, and reduce the time and money spent on research.

73. Google Ad Planner
a tool that gives fantastic insights into understanding behavior of visitors to your website in context of the broader ecosystem. My friend Avinash, wrote a great primer on how to use it for competitive intelligence.

74 + 75. Google Trends for Websites & Google Insights for Search
compare volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties.

76. GobbledyGook Grader
evaluates your written content (press release, brochure copy, etc.) and checks for use of gobbledygook, jargon, cliches and over-used, hype-filled words. You’ll receive a grade together with a full report.

77. AdQuants
is a tool that offers competitive research related to any keyword or URL you provide. Similar to Spyfu.

78. Camtasia and now Camtasia for Mac
Make screencasts of your products, demos, etc. The power of videos to persuade should not be underestimated.

79. Concept Feedback
Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept (a website, logo, advertisement or other.

80. Chalkmark
Quickly run a test on your UI prototypes to answer any nagging questions about usability.

81. IfByPhone
Ifbyphone’s Call Tracking solutions helps marketers measure, manage, and automate phone calls in order to track phone call conversions to the keyword-level, manage the way phone call leads are distributed to your sales team, and automate immediate follow-up to web form leads

82. Mongoose Metrics
provides phone call analytics for both online and offline marketers. Customers use our service to better understand which of their campaigns drives phone calls and to see phone call reports directly within their web analytics package of choice.

83. ClickPath
tracks all conversions generated from your online advertising, including phone calls, and ties them back to the exact keyword or ad source.

84. PaymentCentral
Offers an automated service that allows customers to complete their online transactions by telephone. I blogged about someone who does something like this, in Sorry, I don’t give my credit card online.

85. GoingUp!
With an AJAX-rich interface, GoingUp! combines powerful web analytics with top notch SEO tools… are you GoingUp?

86. MockingBird
Create, link together, preview, and share wireframe mockups of your website or application.

87. MockFlow
Design, collaborate (in real-time) user interface mockups for your software and websites.

88. Tynt
Each time a user copies content from your website and pastes into an email, blog or website, Tynt automatically add a URL link back to your site’s original content. When someone clicks that URL, they are directed back to your site and see the original content.

89. Yahoo! Clues
Lets you visually explore how people are using Yahoo! Search. When you enter a word or phrase in the “Search Term” field and click Discover, you’ll see information about that search term’s popularity over time, across demographic groups, and in different locations.
You can also enter a second search term in the “Compare With” field. This will show you information on both search terms, side by side.

90. Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer
This tools help you determine the backlinks of your website and link text used by your backlinks to Link to your wesbite.

91. Attracta
Crawls your website finding all of its pages, including pages that can’t be found by search engines’ crawlers, to create an XML Sitemap and SEO dashboard report. They submit your XML Sitemap directly to the XML interface of major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and Ask— plus help you find and fix SEO errors.

92. Google AdWords Modified Broad Match Keyword Tool
This simple modified broad match keyword generator will add a + sign in front of each “word” which comprise your keywords, or in front of those specific keywords you indicate.

94. RSS Grafiti (FaceBook Application)
RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify.

You can get any feed written on any wall. In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.

95. EverNote (use this on all your devices)
A. Capture Everything – Chances are, if you can see it or think of it, Evernote can help you remember it. Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe.
B. Organize It – Everything you capture is automatically processed, indexed, and made searchable. If you like, you can add tags or organize notes into different notebooks.
C. Find It – Search for notes by keywords, titles, and tags. Evernote magically makes printed and handwritten text inside your images searchable, too.

96. iMockup (iPad App)
Mockup your app ideas in seconds and iterate on them faster than ever.

97. Analytics App (iPad, iPhone App)
The Analytics App interface makes it easier than even using your computer’s browser to check and analyze your site stats! You’ll find yourself checking your stats with Analytics App not only on the go, but at your desk as well!

98. iCardSort (iPad App)
Visually organize ideas quickly and easily. iCardSort allows you to group, order, and explore your possibilities. Then, when you are ready, share it with everyone involved.

99. MarketMotive
Tools are great, but you need to know what to do with them. Learn internet marketing from the basics to the bleeding edge, through online video, weekly webinars, conference calls and anytime-Q&A with the top minds in Internet marketing, including, Greg Jarboe on online publicity, Avinash Kaushik & John Marshall on web analytics, Todd Malicoat on SEO, Matt Bailey, Jennifer Laycock on social media, site usability & architecture and myself on conversion optimization.

What are some of your favorite free or low cost tools to make websites better?

Yesterday, Google announced that all advertisers now have access to product ads. This presents a great opportunity for advertisers. The user tests I have been involved in recently show that searchers eyes are certainly drawn to those ads before they are drawn to the standard blue links. This is just one more recent change Google has made to their search results page (SERPS) and understanding these changes have a true impact on how you market on the search engines.

When was the last time , if ever, that you played voyeur and watched someone perform  a search for one of your key phrases? Here is a snippet from a user test video of someone searching for “black diamond earrings.”

What did  you take away from this 1 minute clip?

Did the advertisers have the best possible images in place?

My client and I learned many things from watching the rest of the test (that footage not provided) and others was that many searchers don’t click through to see if you have any other products that might meet their need if they don’t think the product ad meets their expectations.

If you haven’t been watching how visitors search for your products using some kind of user testing and have been only relying on your standard click-through rate/conversion metrics you are probably missing out on a large opportunity and you may be effectively blind to the entire search process.

What it takes to be enlightened:

How about 10 minutes and $75?

You can get  up to get 3 independent people (the testers) to search for your main key phrase (with product ads or not) for just $75.

• Each tester will do a search for your phrase and;
• evaluate which 4 ads they would be most likely to click on and;
• evaluate each landing page for 5 seconds to see if the ad met their expectations and;
• also provide their first impressions of the page.
• After all that, each tester will dig deeper into each of those sites to see if they would be comfortable buying from you or one of your competitors.

The insight you get is invaluable. It would be worthwhile if only to find out what you competitors are doing right in searchers eyes. This process used to prohibitively expensive but at these prices there is no reason that you can’t work on at least one  different important ad group every month.

If you’d care  to see more of the insights I’ve gleaned from watching many of these user tests then please et me know and I’ll post more.

[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.