He made everyone admit ‘Their Baby is Ugly!’ and then got down to business!

Tim’s rules for conversion optimization.

1. Have your visitors design your website. Ask them how they want to access information.
2. Subtle changes lead to big gains. There are thousands of on-page variables that affect your visitor’s behavior.
3. Landing Page testing is not Optional. If you’re doing head to head tests you don’t need tons of traffic. Implement AB testing on everything you do. Just because it converts well doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.

The Seven Deadly Sins for Landing Page Design.
1. Unclear call to action.
2. Too many choices.
3. Asking for too much information.
4. Too much text. mea culpa.
5. Not keeping your promises
6. Visual distractions.
7. Lack of trust.

My quote of the day was aimed at site designers: ‘Don’t take your creative urges out at work. Go pierce your nipples or get a tattoo!’

If you think you might be a sinner visit sitetuners.com and check out Tim’s blog!

Many advertisers don’t yet use eyetracking but when you look at the heatmap below ad blogged by getelastic it’s clear that the smallest design change can dramatically increase brand recognition and product visibility.

Spot the design difference?

I don’t know whether Skype intended for this to happen or if it was a big karmic coincidence, but as I was browsing the skype site today I clicked onto a link to turn on Caller ID.

Take a closer look at the picture of the phone.

See how my name was added to the image. That’s a pretty unique touchpoint!

What do you think? I wonder whether it’s a result of:

1. A dedicated CRM effort lead by a highly detailed retention marketing team
2. Jonathan is the most inoffensive name they could find
3. There are more Jonathan’s than any other name – so they just used it
4. The creative guy’s name is Jonathan
5. It’s simply statistically more probable that Jonathan would want CLI

If anybody from Skype would put me out of my misery I’d truly appreciate it!

Until we know for sure, let’s applaud the team at skype for creating enough of a customer connection to get me to blog about them – as if they need the extra free exposure

The only major drawback has been our bandwidth and cost of telecoms. Most people who have what they believe to be broadband are simply gobsmacked when they see what a real T1 connection feels like – even sitting in the W Hotel in NYC will quickly illustrate just how far behind the curve we are on the bandwidth ladder.

That’s why none of our critical systems, servers or infrastructure is hosted in South Africa – we don’t want Americans falling asleep waiting for their stats – now do we

All this changed in February after an epic quest and years of searching. Finally there is Light at the end of my Bandwidth Tunnel!

Those of you that know me and follow my blogging will know that I don’t often endorse companies. I’m always worried that the act of doing so will immediately ruin the service and I wake up imagining 20 angry customers blaming me for recommending them!

I am going to step out on a limb though and tell you to get in touch with Technology Concepts. These guys came in, duct-taped (ok bonded if you want to be technical) all my 4MB ADSL lines together and created a single pipe that simply howls data up and down! Finally we can blog, ftp, download 10 GB, watch affiliate video’s and do all those other things that my American friends take for granted.

Imagine my surprise to realize that YouTube was not a collection of static images and Skype, oh my, Skype. I now get to hear a conversation without delays and if i’m feeling cheeky I can even turn on my video! I may even throw out my telco one of these days!

So, if you’re South African – have a little extra cash lying around, are sick of the #GB limit (yes americanos – they do cap our bandwidth here) then get over to Technology Concepts

If you want to help me test my bandwidth – skype me at jon-forge

yours in happy bandwidth.

Jon

California Bill 178 threatens to change the performance marketing playing field.

This bill, copying a similar one in New York, unfairly categorizing publishers as sales presence for out-of-state advertisers. This means taxes will be levied on out-of-state advertisers, potentially causing them to shut down their publisher relationships in the state (it happened in New York). Learn more at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com

With your help, we have a great chance to kill this bill: the PMA is working with the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Taxpayers Association lobbying groups to fight this bill. These groups have successfully killed similar bills in the past, but the difference now is the precedent set by New York state. They believe the only way this bill can be killed is to have a coordinated grass-roots effort that demonstrates the devastating effect this bill will have on performance marketers in California.

With the support of CalChamber and CalTax, PMA is launching a coordinated grass-roots campaign that targets congressional representatives. We are developing an attack plan that includes sample letters, fact sheets, congressional contacts by zip code, and a “Visit Sacramento” day, to put faces in front of decision makers.

First step: The PMA is extremely fortunate to have the support and experience of Beth Kirsch, a well known industry leader who was formerly a federal lobbyist. She is leading our effort, but we need your help. We are looking for California performance marketers to get involved. The most seriously impacted are California publishers and OPMs.

We don’t have much time – we have until March 31st to make an impact.

As we learned from our colleagues in New York, the passage of this bill could have devastating effects on California performance marketers. If this passes in California, it virtually assures a firestorm of adoption by other states, which could devastate our entire industry. If we beat this bill, it will severely limit the adoption in other states.

To join the fight contact the Performance Marketing Alliance or at the very least, please forward this email to your Californian friends.

For more information:
Rebecca Madigan
Performance Marketing Alliance, Inc.
805.469.1496
rebecca@performancemarketingalliance.com

Both these clients have shown tremendous growth and innovation this year, with MJB adding phenomenal growth in revenue year on year & launching some great social media applications to boot, while Peapod continued its stellar growth year on year with innovative mixed media performance campaigns.

Unfortunately, the Ad-Tech awards site was down again all day so I’m cooling my heels writing this blog post. If I don’t get to enter you for the awards – just a word of thanks to both companies from the team at Forge – it’s a honor to work with great companies such as yourself!

BTW, Same goes for every other client we work for!

Jon

I’ve just been rapped on the fingers by customer support because I had a few people indicate they don’t know me – and now I can’t invite any more people into my network until “the man” clears me ;-(

Here I thought I was being proactive by importing all my contacts into LinkedIn. Okay, I know I have a few hundred active contacts, maybe another few thousand publishers / agencies / service providers we deal with and then of course everybody I’ve ever met at parties, exhibitions or events.

I don’t have the longest attention span in the world, but I’m single minded! So after inviting a few hundred people into my network (and enjoying minute by minute updates as my connections doubled and redoubled) I was on a high! I felt compelled to break the 500 connection mark. I suppose I was swept up in the “old man’s Facebook” hype of wanting ALL MY CONNECTIONS to see my spanking new profile .

Alas, seems there are actually people out there that don’t know me. I’m not sure if I’m contrite at being stripped of my invite-rights or just aghast that I’m not as well known as I thought (LOL)

Ok, if you know me, have earned commission from my company, have been recruited, harassed, cajoled, been hired or hired us, paid us, visited our booth and given me your info, drank my scotch or done business in any way – please accept my humble LinkedIn request.

If you still don’t know who I am – call me! I guarantee we’ll be friends!

Jon

So, thanks to Adam Viener for cutting me down to size an sending me on this blast from the past Billy Joel warped song – which those of us in this industry who are actually over 35 may remember!

At least we can still laugh at ourselves! It’s absolutely worth the download

wireless.itworld.com – Cash isn’t king: Apple limits iPhone purchases

That’s what Apple are allegedly loosing in unlocked iPhones. I don’t see Apple getting much sympathy for this but it makes for an interesting predicament. On the one hand they have obligations to their marketing partners – AT & T are seeing a quarter of a million accounts less than they are expecting to see and cannot be happy about that.

On the other hand, the Apple brand is all but built on consumer perception and sentiment. A large section of their most loyal following are self-professed ‘geeks’ who’d rather die than think of themselves as mainstream conformists. (I’ve always found this pnenomena around Apple rather ironic, given that the Apple design philosophy basically boils down to following the commonest denominator, be it in style )

It’s all about that old notion of being part of ‘the’ revolution, but most of these revolutionaries are armchair revolutionaries – they are paying top dollar to be on the same side as the real revolutionaries. They want to be friends with the guys who actually hack stuff. And this market segment, crammed as it is with technophiles, opinionmakers and product evangelists are the guys that Apple is squaring up to headbutt by only selling iPhones by credit or debit card.

The article doesn’t say what, if any steps will be taken against obvious breakers of the iPhone software and or the terms and conditions, beyond limiting sales to two units per individual.

My guess is not much. Would be interesting if they did though.

From a philosophical perspective the itworld article’s title says more than the entire article; No, cash isn’t king any more, at least not in our marketplace, here accountability is everything.

+1 for tracking.

André SC

When David Lewis sends me an invite for yet another ridiculous app i clap! I toss sheep Passionately and giggle when a cow is flung my way!

I dish scotch out to everyone (OK that one mirrors real life).
point is…..I’m engaged with my community of friends and I LOVE it!

Like any idyllic-scene disaster movie beginning you know that something is about to go horribly wrong. The protagonist is going to have to endure a plot change and his world is about to come crashing down.

My first WARNING was the news this week that Google will be able to search and crawl profiles. No more safe walled garden. No more idyllic playground safe for us to share without thought of consequence.

Can you hear the ominous music slowly building in the background?

It’s the cue for the circling Facebook predators to make their entrance……. (to be continued).

Update Disclaimer: I’m also a marketer and think this move has enormous potential for brands, affiliates and companies to engage with their consumers on a very direct and personal way.

But to coin a phrase “don’t be evil”. How evil is marketing really if it uses contextual targeting when people have placed all this personal information about themselves on Facebook for friends to see. Will consumers revolt if they have the perception that the information now gets used “against” them?

What’s your opinion?