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- Four Reader Myths You Can Safely Ignore
In blogging, we often talk about the reader or the visitor, and what our audiences like (or don’t!). A lot of blanket statements are made around the ways we approach and connect with our audiences. But many of these ideas are little more than myth.
Let’s look at four of the most common myths—and why you can safely ignore them.
Myth #1. Readers don’t like to read
This is one of the most common reader myths. It’s true that readers may have limited time and attention spans, and may feel a lot of pressure or be juggling distractions when they’re online. They may arrive at your content wanting to simply get answers and get out. But next time you’re on a train or bus, look around and count how many people are reading on their smartphones or tablets. (Some may even be reading printed material!)
Internet users read all day, every day. But different audiences—which really means people with a specific need that relates to your blog—read differently.
Take imaginary web user Todd. Todd’s main passions include cooking and hiking. When he’s looking for a recipe online, he scans images and ingredients lists before deciding whether to read the recipe right through.
If he likes the sound of the ingredients, and the image is good, then he’ll speed-read your catchy introductory paragraph and all of the procedural instructions you’ve included in the recipe. His main goal at this point is: get the meal on the table, so he skips from scanning to speed-reading, and may only read in detail as he’s preparing the food itself, using the recipe. That said, if your writing style speaks to him on some level, he may bookmark your site for future reference.
On the other hand, reading other peoples’ hiking adventures is something Todd does in his spare time, for pleasure. He’s a fan of a few blogs on the topic, as well as some special-interest sites, and he’ll easily read three or four 1500-word-plus articles on different hike locations and trails, hiking stories, and hiking gear each week.
Todd reads, but he reads differently for different purposes—and differently on different sites. Working out how your readers read on your site is a crucial first step in understanding your audience and producing content to suit them. And on that point, keep an eye out for a post by James Chartrand, of Men with Pens, that explains how to produce paragraphs that readers will stay glued to … all the way through.
Myth #2. Reader’s won’t scroll
This is a hangover myth from the early days of the web. While it’s true that if readers don’t see a thing that captures their attention above the “fold” (in the first content view that appears on their screens) they may not bother scrolling, it’s erroneous to assume that readers don’t scroll.
Again, look at those smartphone users on your commuter service. If they didn’t scroll, their smartphones would be useless. Perhaps it’s the prevalence of smartphones that’s encouraged readers to “rediscover” scrolling; perhaps not.
Whatever the case, we can rest assured that readers do scroll—provided the content interests them, and they can see that it does. That comes down to things like headlines and subheads, intros, images and, of course, titles—the easily scannable components of the content. And, as we saw above, when Todd was in recipe-searching mode, scrolling is necessary for readers to see and assess those elements.
The tone and rapport your establish through those components will also influence some readers, so the more your images, image captions, subheadings and so on can be made to resonate with readers, the better.
Myth #3. Readers need to be hooked with a story
Sometimes, readers just want answers. They don’t want a lengthy story that gives context—they have their own context, understand their problem, and just want a solution.
Todd’s just finished reading a great, story-style post about a hike he’s planning with some friends in the Spring. He looks up from the screen, dreaming of the sensational view from a lookout they’ll reach on the journey. Then, he spots the clock: it’s nearly five. His sister and her partner are coming over for dinner at seven, and he bought a duck to roast. The only problem is he’s never roasted a duck before! He jumps onto a search engine and looks around for a decent-sounding duck recipe.
As you can imagine, he doesn’t want to wade through a lengthy story about the time you cooked this very special recipe to mark an anniversary with a loved one, or as a bracing salute to the end of duck season, or even that time you’d shot the thing yourself.
What he wants to know is:
- what it’s meant to look like
- what he needs to make it
- how long it’ll take.
In this case, Todd doesn’t need a story. He needs answers, and he needs them now.
Myth #4. Readers don’t want to be sold to
Readers may not want a sleazy sales pitch, but if you’re expecting them to part with their money, you can expect that they’ll want to know what they’re buying. And while, yes, that does mean they want to know the product’s benefits, sometimes it also means features.
Todd’s found a cool-sounding croissant-making workshop that he’s thinking of attending. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to bake his own, professional-standard croissants? Yes it would!
He’s reading that sales material, and he’s considering each of the benefits of the course. It’ll give him skills that’ll wow his friends and family! It’ll give him a good reason to get up every morning! He’ll earn a croissant qualification from the International Institute of Croissanteurs! Great!
But he has questions related to the course features. Will he be able to transfer the skills he learns to other types of bread- and pastry-making? Does he need any existing skills or experience? How big will the class be and will he need to bring his own equipment? Is there a gluten-free option (this is particularly important because he’s dating a coeliac, and we all know that the way to a new love’s heart is through his or her stomach!)?
Many sites answer these feature-related questions in an FAQ page or something similar, but far too many leave these questions entirely unanswered, on the basis that the benefits—in this case, bakery prowess—are all that matter. Your readers need to understand why your offering is different from or better than your competitors’, and that depends on how it meets their specific needs.
Todd wants to buy your course, so long as it meets his specific needs. If you don’t sell it to him—if you try to ride on the cachet of the IIC and the incredible promise of a shower of accolades from breakfast-eating friends, you’ll likely lose him.
Write for your readers, and their needs
Every site has a different reader set, and those readers have different needs. Don’t simply accept the common mythology around reader behaviour. As we’ve seen here, each individual has varying information and entertainment needs, so if you take the common readership rules of thumb as gospel truths, you may be selling yourself, your blog, and your readers short.
Do your readers read? Scan? Scroll? Want to be sold to? Tell us what you’ve learned about your audience in the comments. And don’t forget to check out James’s post on perfect paragraphs later today!
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Four Reader Myths You Can Safely Ignore
Переслать - And the Winners Are … #QldBlog
As promised earlier in the week, today I’ve got great pleasure in naming the winners of the Great Barrier Reef Queensland Blogger Correspondent competition.767 bloggers entered the competition. They came from an amazing array of counties (52 in all)—from the US, UK, Germany, Australia, Spain, Malaysia, Belize, Netherlands, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Italy, France, Brazil, South Africa, Israel, India, Romania, Argentina, Phillipines, Indonesia, Hawaii, Pakistan, Lithuania, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Denmark, Nigeria, Kenya, Thailand, Belarus, Ireland, New Zealand, Portugal, Sweden, South Korea, Costa Rica, Moldova, Japan, Kuwait, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Chile, Mauritius, Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Finland, UAE, Hong Kong, Ukraine, and Greece.
Interestingly the vast majority of entries were from those in the USA, and from women. This is reflected in the winners list.
Choosing the winners was no easy task. The entries were of a high quality, from some amazing people, and many of the submissions were very attractive to the judging panel who were seeking to find bloggers that they felt were a good “fit” in promoting the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland.
We saw some very creative submissions and I myself spent a whole day looking through them all—and loved the experience! But without further ado, here are the winners:
- Rebecca Cooper (Canada) of Simple as That
- Tsh Oxenreider (USA) of Simple Mom
- Chantelle Ellem (Australia) of Fat Mum Slim
- U Mei The (Malaysia) of CC Food Travel
- Katja Hentschel (Germany) of Travelettes
- Stuart Flatt (UK) of Average Joes Blog
- Kara Williams (USA) of The Vacation Gals (see her announcement post here)
- Jodi Friedman (USA) of MCP Actions (see here announcement post here)
- Jackie Hutchings (UK) of Scubadviser
- Elizabeth Hooper Alton (USA) of PolicyMic
Thanks again to those who entered and to Tourism Queensland (connect with them on Twitter here or on Facebook here) for their sponsorship of the competition. This experience has been a lot of fun, and you’ll hear more about it in June when the above crew gather together in Queensland with me to have an amazing five days together.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
And the Winners Are … #QldBlog
Переслать - Unearthing Your Blog's Money Pages
This guest post is by the Web Marketing Ninja.
Earlier today, Greg explored the question of pricing products that you’re creating for sale on your blog. Setting the right price for your products is extremely important, but I wanted to take that discussion one step further for those who are already offering products on their blogs and want to take their conversions to the next level.
When I approach conversion optimization on websites, which in most cases is simply cash optimization, I stick to a few golden rules:
- Think in people, not pageviews.
- People are looking for a reason not to buy—don’t give them one.
- Go for biggest bang for buck.
- Test everything!
I’ve already covered points 1 and 2, so in this post, I wanted to export number three, going biggest bang for buck.
If you’re trying to figure out how to turn some money into more money without creating new products, campaigns, or deals, you need to unearth the pages on your site that are going to give you the greatest return from an improvement in conversion.
…and for that, I have a three-point plan.
1. Understand where you money comes from, and find your influenceable end-point
Now, being the smart bloggers I know you are, you should know where your money comes from. Your income might be derived from ads, affiliate income, or product sales—among others. And I’m sure you’re able to identify your top-level driver of that income—the last point in the conversion process that you can influence. Here they are:
- Product sales = successful checkouts
- Affiliate sales = clicks to affiliate site
- Ads (CPC) = clicks on ads
- Ads (CPM) = page views
- Subscription = activated subscriptions
- Service = contact form submissions
Whatever your strategy, knowing your influenceable end-point enables you to set some specific goals on key metrics for your blog (for example more sales, more clicks, more pageviews).
2. Set yourself up to track those end-points
Whilst it can be a bit of a challenge initially to set up measurements for your blog’s conversion goals, without them, you’ll never really know where your money comes from at a granular level.
For most, a well configured Google Analytics setup is all that you need, as it has goal tracking built in.
If checkouts are one of your goals, then ecommerce tracking is what you need. If your ads are sold by CPM, then you’ve got it easy—you have the data already. If your goal is clicks, that presents a slightly bigger challenge. Let me explain.
In Analytics, a goal is measured by successfully reaching a page on your site that you’ve specified. When a click takes a visitor to another site, Google Analytics sees it as a visitor that exits to another site rather than a successfully reached goal. To solve this, you can use any of a few options.
- If you’re using AdSense, you’re fine—that’s already integrated with Analytics.
- Use a redirect page to collect goals. Instead of sending users straight through to the advertiser or affiliate, you can send them via a page that automatically redirects the user, but includes the analytics goal code to track.
- Use a paid service like Kiss Metrics … but even that can be a bit tricky to set up.
I’m really hoping that at some point Google’s ad manager, Double Click, will integrate with Analytics so this issue is rectified. But even if it’s a little bit of a hassle for you to set up right now, it’s a hassle that’s worth going through in order to understand just how good—or bad—your conversion performance is.
So after a bit of research, action, and maybe fumbling, you’re now hopefully able to track the conversion rate of your commercial goals (whatever that are) and you’re ready to move forward.
3. Think in one-percents
The final step in identifying biggest bang for buck is to put a dollar conversion vale against all your pages. All this takes is a bit of simple math.
Page X
- 10,000 page views
- 100 sales
- $4000
Those figures give us a conversion rate of 1% and an average income per sale of $40. If I increase the conversion rate itself by 1%, to 1.1%, my sales will total 101, and my income will be $4040. I’m up $40.
Page Y
- 100,000 page views
- 50 sales
- $1000
So this page has a conversion rate of 0.05% and an average income per sale of $20. If I increase this conversion rate by 1%, to 0.051%, my sales will total 51 and my income will hit $1020. I’m up $20.
As you can see, there’s double the return for a 1% improvement on Page X, as compared to Page Y. So Page X the one I’m going to focus on. Not the one with all the page views: the one with the greatest return.
Obviously, on your blog, you’ll have far more than two pages to pick from, but this model will allow you to rank them in order. Make sure you don’t forget to include your checkout process as pages in this analysis, as well. You might be surprised by how they stack up.
And just in case the figures of $20 and $40 don’t get you motivated to do any testing, remember that variances of over 100% are common across different variations of a page. So add a couple of zeros … feeling motivated now?
The three-point plan
So just to summarise, your three-point plan to unearthing those money pages is:
- Understand your last influenceable conversion metric.
- Start tracking those points in the sales process.
- Stack all your pages together and find the one that’s going to give you the biggest return for a 1% conversion increase.
…and that’s how you can unearth the pages that are going to give you the biggest bang for buck.
Stay tuned for more posts by the Web Marketing Ninja—author of The Blogger's Guide to Online Marketing, and a professional online marketer for a major web brand. Follow the Web Marketing Ninja on Twitter.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Unearthing Your Blog’s Money Pages
Переслать - Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product
This guest series is by Greg McFarlane of Control Your Cash.
If you're late to this particular party, we've been spending the last few weeks examining ways to monetize your blog in an era when readers are holding onto their wallets more tightly than ever.
Sure, you can make money by selling ads if all you care about is revenue. Any link farm can do the same thing. But by extending one's blog into different media, a diligent blogger can create and sell products that no one else can duplicate.
The process we’ve stepped through so far has been fairly straightforward. First, coldly assess what makes your blog distinctive. (If the answer is anything other than "Nothing" or "I don't know", proceed to the next step.)
Next, create something identifiable with your blog and your style—a video lecture series, ebooks, online classes, personal coaching, podcasts, whatever. Budget the requisite time to create your products, plan far enough in advance that your blog won't be compromised in the short run, test-market your products, then make them available for sale. Couldn't be easier, right?
This is precisely where many would-be entrepreneurs get smacked in the face with the harsh truth of the marketplace: putting a dollar figure on that product.
How much should you charge?
Not to turn this into a university-level economics lesson, but the tricky thing is to set a price that maximizes revenue. Sure, you can sell your ebook for 10¢ and theoretically reach the widest possible audience. But if you could charge three times the price, and still retain half your audience, wouldn't that make more sense?
Ideally you're doing this to turn a profit, which isn't necessarily the same as generating as much revenue as possible. You also need to factor in your expenses. Otherwise, this is just a pastime or a vanity project. Creating products certainly requires time, and possibly requires materials.
That means that before you sell your first unit, you'll already have spent money that you'll need to recoup.
Say you've spent 30 hours writing a plan for a coaching program you plan to sell via your blog. Is $20 an hour a fair assessment of your worth? (That is, could you have earned that much doing something else?) Then you'll need to sell a single copy for $600. Or two for $300 each. Or three for $200. Or…
You can see where this is going. It's tempting to lower the price as much as possible, in the hopes that every reduction will attract more buyers. That's largely true, but a) the relationship isn't linear and b) there's a limit—otherwise, you could give your product away and an infinite number of people would use it.
Finding the balance
How many unique visitors do you have? If you don't know, Google Analytics can give you an idea. What proportion of those are invested in your blog and read it regularly? And what proportion of those will cough up a few minutes' worth of wages in exchange for the promise of you enriching their lives somehow?
On the flip-side are blogging entrepreneurs who charge too much for their services. They're like the commission salesman who wanted to get a job at Northrop Grumman, selling B-2 Spirit heavy bombers at $1 billion apiece. ("People have been slamming doors in my face all week, but I get 10% of each sale. And all it takes is one.")
To avoid this, you need to find a comfortable medium between how much you're willing to accept, and how much your product can realistically benefit its user. That sounds obvious, but most sellers don't even bother weighing those variables. They just conjure up a price and hope for the best.
What does your product do … for whom?
Be honest with what your product can do. It won't make the blind walk and the lame see. But will it show readers how to declutter their lives once and for all? Can it teach them how to change their car's oil and tires themselves, instead of relying on costly technicians? Can it help readers travel to strange places inexpensively, and does it include an appendix that will teach those readers how to keep their cross-border hassles to a minimum?
Then say so. You don't have to work miracles. You just have to make some aspect of your readers' lives easier, less complicated and/or more fulfilling.
More to the point, remember who you're selling to: your readers, not yourself. No one cares how much asbestos you inhaled in the mine, they just want the diamond. It's a cardinal rule of civilization that results count, not effort.
One famous globetrotting blogger has recently diversified, and now sells a guide that ostensibly tells artists how they can throw off the shackles of poverty and start making money. He's certainly appealing to his clientele's emotions—what's a more accurate stereotype than that of the starving artist?
Never mind that this blogger is not an artist, and that his background consists of little more than that educational punchline, a sociology degree. His blog's sales pitch details how many painstaking hours he spent writing how many words and conducting how many minutes of interviews in the creation of his guide, as if any of that matters to an artist who just wants to know how to locate buyers for her decoupage and frescoes.
Keep scrolling down and you'll find out that for just $39, you'll receive "15,000 words of excellent content". No one buys this kind of thing by volume. Xavier Herbert's Poor Fellow My Country runs over 850,000 words. That's 90 times longer than Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which sold far more copies and was far more influential.
Don’t hide your price!
That brings us to another thing not to do: treat the price as fine print. Which is to say, don't build to a crescendo and make your readers sift through paragraph upon paragraph of hard sales copy before finally deigning to tell them how much your product is going to cost them. To do so is insulting. It's the tactic of someone who has something to hide.
(There's one exception to this rule. That's when you're using the late-night infomercial strategy, saving the price of your product until the very end because it's so shockingly low. That almost certainly doesn't apply in your case. You're not an experienced marketer with a reputation, hawking indestructible knives and superabsorbent towels that suck up ten times their weight in liquid. You're a blogger looking to turn your followers from loyal readers into paying customers.)
Getting back to the real blogger in our example, if you spend another $19 on the deluxe version, he'll throw in three more audio interviews. There's nothing quantifiable here, just a collection of messages that differ by media. (Incidentally, I asked this blogger how what kind of volume he does. I wasn't expecting an answer and didn't receive one, but it was important to make an effort to see if his methods worked.)
Given the choice, I'd rather take my chances giving my money to a blogger with authority and experience, who's offering me something believable, and who's not afraid to tell me how much it'll cost me and how much it'll benefit me. Is that you?
One more thing. If you're creating a series of products in which each builds on the previous ones and no individual product can stand alone, you're putting yourself in a fantastic position. You can give away the first and then start charging with the second. If you do, that'll give you an accurate gauge of how many people are legitimately interested in your product, as opposed to just being curious.
Accounting for expenses
Once you make the decision to sell, and to price, you'll have to account for expenses you'd never imagined. Maybe you'll need to move from a shared host to a dedicated one. Or pay for a business license in your home jurisdiction. Or hire a graphic designer after concluding that your own Adobe Illustrator skills are wanting. A few hours of planning and estimation now can save you weeks of frustration down the road.
Speaking of quantifying, here’s a sample budget (in PDF) that you can adapt for your own use. Be conservative with your revenue estimates, liberal with your expense estimates, and you can get a better handle on how much you should charge when your products finally make it to market.
You might also find the formula presented in The Dark Art of Product Pricing useful. It integrates many of the considerations I’ve outlined here but, like this post, that one can’t definitively tell you what you should charge either. Ultimately, that’s up to you.
Key points
- Cover your expenses. Don't set your prices so low that you're losing money on every sale.
- Don't set your prices so high that you need to camouflage them, either. Be direct.
- Honestly assess what your product can do for your customers.
- Explain to your customers what they'll get for their money.
- Like anything else, first plan, then execute.
Next week, we'll discuss how to increase your potential clientele beyond its traditional bounds.
Greg McFarlane is an advertising copywriter who lives in Las Vegas. He recently wrote Control Your Cash: Making Money Make Sense, a financial primer for people in their 20s and 30s who know nothing about money. You can buy the book here (physical) or here (Kindle) and reach Greg at greg@ControlYourCash.com.
Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger
Build Blog Products That Sell 4: Price Your Product
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