Misc

Miscellaneous blog posts.

Selling online with the 10 laws of persuasion – part 1

Posted on May 17, 2012 by in Misc

Click on the thumbnail to check the book out at Amazon (aff link)

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.

Read More…

Leave a comment or share • Continue Reading →

Minimum viable product or excellence?

Posted on May 2, 2012 by in Misc

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. Read More…

7 Comments • Continue Reading →

10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about

Posted on March 27, 2012 by in Content marketing, Misc

I’m not one of those bloggers that believes you have to write to a certain schedule on your blog (i.e. 2 times a week etc). In fact I don’t really enjoy reading, I generally find it boring so when I come across blogs that have been updated regularly with fairly average content they kind of annoy me. That being said there’s not much point in having a blog if you aren’t going to write so it’s always a good idea to have a constant stream of ideas to cover.

Here are 10 things I do to ensure I always have something to write about.

Check out replace your brain with Evernote for more on Evernote

1. Use Evernote

No matter where I am, if I ever have an idea to cover on my blog I capture it straight away. If in on my Windows computer at home, my Mac at work, my iPad at the cafe, my iPhone at lunch anywhere I’ve always got all of my notes and I can add ideas to my ‘blog post ideas’ notebook instantly (even if I don’t have internet access). You can use it to add text, add pictures, record yourself talking, take pics of whiteboards etc. The first thing I do when I want to write an article for the blog is go through this notebook in Evernote and pick my best idea or the one that is the most relevant at the time and start there.

At the moment I have 15 ideas in there that I could write about today if I wanted to. For more information specifically on Evernote check out my post called Replace your brain with Evernote.

2. Monitor my email

When you run a business your customers tend to overlap pretty nicely with your audience on your blog. Which means if your customers are asking you questions then it’s likely that the answers to these questions would be interesting to your readers. I’ve written quite a few posts as a result of emails I have received. Sometimes I might write a post instead of a long email reply and just send them a link to the post instead. Other times I’ll email back and then I’ll realise that the content is suitable for a blog post. A few examples of posts I’ve written as a results of questions from clients are:

23 Comments • Continue Reading →

How to optimise websites for the new iPad

Posted on March 19, 2012 by in Misc

The new iPad is bringing high resolution to the web

*Update 2 April 2011 – We have just updated this post with a few realisations:

  1. Resizing images in HTML works fine on the iPad but makes the image look worse in the browser. So our suggestion of just having smaller images always at twice the size has been removed – we now suggest to use the 2X JavaScript technique for every foreground image. 
  2. The previous post didn’t mention what to do with background images so we have updated it to include how to handle these.*

For as long as the web has been around, web designers have been optimising images for relatively low resolutions due to the limitations in monitors. With the release of the iPhone 4 in 2010 (with high resolution Retina display) it meant you could now view things in a much higher resolution. But while many apps may have been re-developed to suit the high resolution display, it didn’t really force web designers to change the way they build websites. This was because the screen is so small, the amount of pixels shown is only the same as a typical website anyway so by default the majority of websites looked great on them (i.e. website was shown half the size and therefore doubling the resolution was fine).

It was still assumed at this stage that higher resolution displays were some way off appearing in full size screen devices like tablets, laptops and monitors because of the engineering challenges associated with it.  However with the release of the new iPad, the challenge is here now. And luckily we have one and we can start getting our heads around how to respond.

HTML vs foreground images vs background images

First of all it’s important to understand that your site is made up of HTML (headings, text, some graphical elements like borders etc) and images (foreground and background). The HTML is not restricted by pixels so it automatically looks great on the new iPad. However the images have probably been optimised to 72DPI or similar so these images are going to look a bit blurry. Read More…

12 Comments • Continue Reading →

How’s business?

Posted on January 18, 2012 by in Misc

Web Control Room shows 1 page with charts from various sources to give you a full picture of your small business performance.

As a small business owner people are always asking me “How’s business”. But I’ve always felt that I don’t really know the answer to this question. To help me and other small business owners answer this question I have built a free tool called Web Control Room but more on that later.

Why don’t I know the answer?

So why don’t I know how my business is going? Well, sure if I log into Xero and click on enough buttons, I can find out how much I have invoiced for the month. But this doesn’t tell the whole story.

For example I get most of my leads through Google, so while my invoicing might be good this month, they won’t be much good next month if my position in Google has dropped. So I would have to log in to a tool to monitor this as well. Read More…

2 Comments • Continue Reading →
Older posts