Website design, web design and website development for small business – A Website Designer

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The evidence of theories of persuasion or influence is everywhere in business. However a lot of the time it’s not understood.

For example you know companies choose celebrities to endorse their products. You know brands want you to ‘like’ them on Facebook? You’ve seen shops give you 3 slightly different versions of more or less the same thing. But do you know why? And can you use this knowledge in your own business online.

If not then you will be the end of this 2 part article).

The reasons for all of these things comes back to the laws of persuasion or influence.

Writers such as Kevin Hogan and Robert Cialdini have covered the concepts in depth, starting with Hogan’s 1996 book The Psychology of Persuasion.

These laws (10 of them) are well utilised in every form of business, but how do they look online?

In this 2 part article I’ll present examples of how each of the laws are implemented online to help companies ‘persuade’ buyers to part with their money and how you can do the same.

This article will look at laws 1 through 5.

Law 1 – The law of reciprocity

When someone gives you something of perceived value, you immediately respond with the desire to give something back

You don’t have to look very far to see examples of companies giving away things of value to potential customers.

How I do it

On my site I have written hundreds of articles, ebooks, videos etc and provided them all for free. It’s not just because I’m nice (of course I am) – it’s called ‘Content Marketing’ not ‘Content Philanthropy’. It’s a marketing technique designed to build trust and build on the concept of reciprocity. People who contact me looking for websites are grateful for the stuff I’ve put up on the site and in some way feel a need to reciprocate.

I give a lot of stuff away for free - not just because I'm nice.

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After last week’s post Minimum viable product or excellence? I took the MVP concept to the extreme this week by deciding to start a podcast and then 1 day later having it live. Here is how to do it yourself if you want to do the same thing.

Step 1 – Lower your standards

When I do something I always want it to be perfect. The problem is, if I waited for everything to be perfect I would never deliver anything.

When you are dealing with a new medium like podcasting and you are trying to do something on a budget the absolute most important thing is you ship something.

When I look back to my first videos on this site, they are terrible (see WordPress Menus). I knew they were terrible at the time but I put them up anyway. My most recent videos (see tech tips) are significantly better. They still aren’t perfect but the point is when you are doing things yourself it’s impossible to get it right before you start and still deliver something within a reasonable amount of time and budget. It’s much much easier to improve as you go.

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There are 2 interesting schools of thought going around at the moment when it comes to launching products (particularly software) and businesses.

The Lean Startup Minimum Viable Product

Last year Eric Ries released a book (a movement even) called The Lean Startup.

I tried my best to read it but found like a lot of business books it bored me to death and seemed to spend 300-odd pages outlining one very simple idea that:

Startups should stop trying to build something that’s perfect & instead build the ‘Minimum Viable Product’ and ‘Iterate’ with rapid development cycles until it’s developed into something great.

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Back in January we started our second SEO case study for wedding videos provider Video My Wedding.

We performed SEO work on the site for 3 months in accordance with the notes I made in the first case study post here in the section ‘Our off page SEO work’.

In addition to this, because the keyword wedding videos was showing Google Places results first we optimised their Google Places page in accordance with 4 ways to boost your Google Places ranking.

The results

About a month after performing the Google Places optimisation the client’s page went from not even showing in the first page of Google Places listings (even when searched from his own premises and even when you zoom in closer to his local area) to showing 1st across Brisbane.

This is a ‘complete’ places listing – Click on the image to see a bigger picture of it.

What this effectively meant was for anyone in his target audience (Brisbane) searching for his keyword (wedding videos) Dave’s site would come up first. And not only that, it showed his 5 star rating so it looked more appealing than the other listings.

If you searched from outside Brisbane his natural listing was coming up 7th (and still is) which was an improvement from 14th when we started.

Note I’ve noticed that Google has since stopped displaying places results for this keyword which is something I discuss in  4 ways to boost your Google Places ranking Google can change their mind at any stage and this can have a big impact on your traffic.

If you have any feedback on this case study or suggestions for future case studies feel free to comment below. I am currently working on a case study for my own blog on longtail keywords so stay tuned for that.

I’m really excited today to announce the re-development of our main company website Web Circle. Here is a screenshot of the final site which you can click on to be taken to the site.

The new 'simple' Web Circle site.

In re-designing this site my focus was on simplicity. We started working on it about 2 months ago when I decided I wanted a site that represented the way we approach designing and building sites and apps. I also wanted to do this without overloading the site with content. 

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