The head of the FCC wants to subsidize broadband access for low-income families. The catch? The subsidy is just $9.25 per month---far less than most broadband plans.
The post Why Helping the Poor Pay for Broadband Is Good for Us All appeared first on WIRED.
Have you noticed something about the best decisions you ever made?
They were all BIG decisions. The decision to get married, to start a family, to buy a home, to start a business … these life enriching decisions are huge and come with no guarantee of success.
Our biggest commercial successes also come from making big decisions. As such, there’s a direct link between our willingness to make big decisions and the potential of our business.
It’s also why ongoing business problems can usually be traced back to a tough decision, which is being avoided.
That’s worth remembering, the next time you find yourself plagued with a persistent business challenge.
Tip: Here are 21 powerful habits behind highly successful business owners.
Let's grow your business... together! I can help you build a more successful business, increase your sales and boost your profits. It's you and me, working as a team to help you achieve the results you have always wanted. To find out more, read this!
Have you ever worked with a designer who was more interested in fancy animations and cutting-edge technology than in creating a page that actually resonates with you and your audience?
While I’ve been lucky enough to work with many talented, pragmatic designers, I’d be lying if I said I’d never been frustrated with a designer who I felt was working more against me than with me.
Luckily, Jen Gordon isn’t such a designer. As the founder of Convert Themes, a design service explicitly for landing pages, Jen understands the importance of designing pages that are both beautiful and highly-optimized for conversion.
Hoping to help marketers work better with their designers, she recently hosted an unwebinar with us entitled 3 Tools to Keep Your Designer From Killing Your Conversions — which, of course, came packaged with three tools to keep your designer from killing your conversions.
And while those tools are pretty great, the advice Jen gave on easing the tension between design and conversion was just as valuable. Read on for the distilled insights, or click here to watch the full webinar.
Jen described a situation in which she received a brief for a landing page project. While it gave her basic direction, detailing the offer and the copy, it was left up to her to decide things like:
These are not small decisions to make. Yet they are exactly the kinds of critical decisions that are hoisted upon designers, either implicitly or explicitly. And in a situation like this, designers can be reluctant to ask questions or open a dialogue with the project manager.
But why? What is the root of this tension between marketers and designers?
To answer this, Jen made a word cloud based on the most shared posts on ConversionXL, Hubspot and Unbounce over the past year:
… and then did the same for some of the world’s top design blogs:
Notice that there is very little overlap between these two word clouds. They suggest that marketers are largely interested in results and the techniques that will produce them, while designers are more interested in technology, aesthetics and user experience.
What we can glean from this is that designers and marketers are speaking fundamentally different languages or are, at the very least, interested in completely different things.
And before we can open the doors of communication, we have to better understand where designers are coming from.
Can’t get on the same page as your designer? You just need to speak their language.
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In the webinar, Jen gave an overview of different eras of web design (1990 – present) to show how new technologies can shape forthcoming design trends.
For example, the timeline above shows that what we consider the most crucial elements of modern web design didn’t start to emerge until around 1998. That’s the year that usability research came into prominence and people were given more insight than ever into the behavior of their users.
Additionally, the launch of the iPhone in 2007 — and the release of Android soon after — brought with it the mobile design revolution and a renewed focus on user experience.
Each design revolution was triggered by designers searching for more efficient and more enjoyable ways for users to interact with content.
But whereas this kind of user-centered design focuses solely on a user accomplishing their own goals, conversion-centered design is focused towards having the user complete a single business goal.
This can seem like a huge shift, but the goal is essentially the same: getting the user what they need with the least friction possible.
The difference is that conversion-centered design relies more heavily on the use of persuasion and reassurance; it’s not just about enabling the user to take action, but convincing them to.
User-centered design is about experience. Conversion-centered design is about business goals.
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While you and your designer might speak different languages, you’re both (ideally) interested in the same thing: producing a great design that works for both your business goals and the goals of your visitors.
But if you’re designer is relatively new to conversion rate optimization, there are a few things that you should make sure they understand.
Website indexes/homepages used to be referred to as landing pages — since they were the page one would “land on” when going to the site — but this definition is outdated, particularly since users don’t tend to land on those pages as often as they used to.
Nowadays, a landing page means a page dedicated to fulfilling a single campaign goal. This stands in stark contrast to index pages, which are meant to be generalist and to appeal to a wide range of visitors. Additionally, index pages tend to have an infinite amount of referral sources, whereas you probably have a strong idea of what’s driving traffic to your landing pages.
It’s important that your designer understands this so that they can make sure their design is focused on that single campaign goal, and doesn’t feature any content that could be irrelevant to the page’s audience.
The fact is that design isn’t the primary factor of a page’s success; landing pages can be immensely successful even if they’re pretty ugly. Jen brought up the example of the Super Funnel page, the #2 top-selling page on affiliate-marketing site JVZoo.com.
This is both a blessing and a burden. The core of any landing page is its unique value proposition and it’s entirely possible for a landing page to succeed based on the strength of that alone.
But that doesn’t mean that good design isn’t valuable. It just means that a landing page is made up of various elements that all contribute to its success. A page that’s performing well could still perform better with a smarter design. As Jen puts it:
Your designer needs to understand that the success of the page doesn’t fall completely on their shoulders — that it is a combination of design, copy, traffic sources, the offer, etc. that play into the success or failure of the page.
It’s critical for every designer (and marketer and copywriter) to understand the story of their brand and how customers interact with it, looking beyond the user’s “persona” or how they arrived at the page.
Which is exactly why the Eisenberg brothers — who, in Jen’s words, “have been doing CRO before the acronym existed” — pioneered their Buyer Legends philosophy.
Contrary to personas, which are primarily interested in defining who your customers are, buyer legends are more concerned with their journeys and how they feel. From the Buyer Legends website:
Buyer Legends are not the stories you tell your customers; that’s just promotion. Buyer Legends are stories told from the point of view of your customers; because your brand isn’t what you say it is but what your customers say it is.
You can get an introduction to the concept from Bryan Eisenberg’s CRO Day webinar, and then create your own Buyer Legends with the template than Jen has generously made available for anyone to use.
When a designer gets a brief for a conversion-focused project like a landing page, they may be reluctant to raise their own objections or propose their own ideas, because they worry it’s not their place. As Jen put it:
“These people, they are the marketers, they think they know best, they see me as a designer, I should just do as they say.” That’s what some of your designers are thinking.
But designers have brought the web this far. While CRO may be a relatively new discipline, its ideas are borrowed heavily from the experience-focused trends of yore; they’ve just been shaken up with digital marketing trends and a dash of Big Data.
Designers have their own expertise to bring to your conversion-focused projects. But the door to collaboration needs to be opened wide, and explicitly so. You should actively solicit the feedback of your designers and encourage them to share their ideas. After all, everything can (and should) be tested!
And in addition to talking, you can also use Jen’s free tools in order to more effectively communicate with your designer. In addition to the Buyer Legends template discussed earlier, you’ll get:
Get access to both the full webinar and Jen’s free tools here. Together, they will put you on the path to a more productive and communicative relationship with your designers.
One of the most popular posts I publish are my income reports.
So I decided to round up as many income reports as possible and rank them based on earnings to see how I stack up against the rest.
If you publish an income report on your blog and would like it included in next month’s post then please let me know in the comments!
Here we go-
This was in part to selling another website she ran in order to gain more focus on key projects like her blog.
However she also saw a huge jump in her affiliate income which resulted in her storming the #1 spot this month!
This was largely down to the launch of an exclusive internet marketing deals section & jumps in affiliate income.
I have however being traveling for the past 6 weeks straight into finding & moving house this week, so let’s see how that has affected income this coming Monday.
Interestingly they have handed over the management of their blog ads to an external company. This is something they have experimented with for a while so it will be interesting to see what happens.
There is some great advice throughout their income report as usual, so don’t miss it!
His income is made up from a number of niche sites that are broken down site by site in his income report for you to see.
He also sold his first website this month which led to a huge jump in his income from last month.
However it wasn’t smooth sailing as he spent half of the month with a hand injury, which is pretty important for programming and well – men in general.
But despite that he adjusted how he spent his time and moved forward on organization, research and design which has him primed and ready for his passion project Aeon Chapters.
His new blog has being up and running for a while and gets featured here for the first time, posting a month on month loss unfortunately.
However he has some very interesting projects running at the moment including his product Houdini Act One.
Don’t be fooled though, they are working hard at launching something much bigger than the blog – a dedicated affiliate network.
This is already starting to bear fruit as they forge new deals and continue to grow!
Last month he hammered through 31 posts in 31 days and he is done exactly the same again this month across a range of topics.
Although his traffic dropped he did manage to pickup some mentoring/coaching work which saw his income jump again.
He still continues to invest time with his family and introduced a 4th child to the family this month, a puppy.
His income comes from a mix of sources included amazon niche sites and selling physical products he sourced and placed in Amazons warehouses himself.
While he only managed to write a couple of blog posts this month, he did manage to finish and launch his first Udemy course.
Although the course is available now, he hasn’t properly launched it yet and is building out his launch sequence this month – stay tuned!
This is reflected in the drop in income this month for the blog although he would like to transition to full time blogger one day.
With that said he is wondering about what to do with the blog and it’s future direction.
Traffic is up by 80% and her earnings doubled but most of her income came from the growth of her craft based Etsy shop.
Who would of known that selling Britney Spears costumes (and others) could be so profitable huh?
This was also his first month working fulltime on his web business after quitting his job on the 1st of April – congratulations!
He launched his first free WordPress plugin to build content upgrade popups and continues to grow his blog.
This includes changing the name, domain name and a total rebrand with everything she has learned so far – a high risk strategy!
Unfortunately this will be the last month she posts her income in the reports as she doesn’t believe income should be her focus right now.
He didn’t get to publish many posts or work on his kindle book and traffic dropped by 600 visits month on month.
Still he continues to invest time and money in his new blog and has lots of opportunities to explore this month.
Last month brought 3 new bloggers to the roundup and this month saw 2 more new ones, it’s great to see more & more people publish income reports to track their growth and share their knowledge.
Be sure to check out the reports of some of the lower earners, these are the guys fighting a real fight and you can learn a lot from their experiences.
Last month all of the blogs featured earned a combined total of $74,639.66, but this month that has seen a huge jump to $123,314.81!
The vast majority of the blogs tracked posted increases including some huge jumps by the heavy hitters towards the top of the table.
If you feel inspired to start your own blog then why don’t you start a blog now? It only takes a few minutes!
Get all of my income reports & round-ups direct to your inbox!
I only include the earnings history of the top 10 blogs each month to make the graphs easy to read.
Nancy Lublin's Crisis Text Line has assembled data from millions of messages to show when and where teens are in crisis.
The post Texts From Teens Build Real-Time Maps of Crisis in America appeared first on WIRED.
This episode of Rough Draft is for anyone with limited time and limited proofreading skills. Like host Demian Farnworth.
There’s a common myth web writers fall for: the idea that proofreading online isn’t nearly as important as writing for print. If you believe that, you would be wrong.
Proofreading is essential.
So today Demian is happy as a kitten to introduce you to Stefanie Flaxman, Copyblogger’s Editor-in-Chief, who will help you choose the right words and teach you time-saving ways to improve your copy.
You are going to love Stefanie because she doesn’t consider herself a defender of language … she considers herself a defender of the writer.
That means she’s full of neat tricks and deep wisdom about writing clear, concise, and compelling copy for the web. From the proofreader’s perspective.
In this 16-minute episode of Rough Draft with Demian Farnworth and Stefanie Flaxman, you’ll discover:
About the authorRainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.
The post Solve Your Online Proofreading Problems With This Simple Trick appeared first on Copyblogger.
Getting people to come to your site or app is hard enough. But the first few minutes once they arrive are crucial.
The post Someone Came to Your Site! User Onboarders Get Them to Stay appeared first on WIRED.
Are you comfortable in your own skin? Or do you feel awkward and out of place? If the latter, then today’s episode of Rough Draft is for you.
Whenever host Demian Farnworth talks about authenticity or finding your voice, Erika Napoletano is always his go-to person for someone who’s owned her personality with an unapologetic, straightforward flair.
Don’t let her blunt approach and love of swear words drive you away, though. She is utterly human — full of compassion, humor, and business wisdom.
But she wasn’t always that way.
Her story of getting there is one of heartbreak. And trust Demian when he says you will cry. He did.
And it’s there, with that story, that we open this episode.
In this 20-minute episode of Rough Draft with Demian Farnworth and Erika Napoletano, you’ll discover:
About the authorRainmaker.FM is the premier digital marketing and sales podcast network. Get on-demand business advice from experts, whenever and wherever you want it.
The post The Princess of Profanity on Finding Your Voice as a Writer appeared first on Copyblogger.
When it comes to marketing, success leaves clues. By following these clues and learning from them, it’s possible to significantly improve your marketing.
For example, spend a few minutes thinking about the following:
Each of those examples contains a clue. To uncover the clue, you need to answer this question:
What can I learn from this example of marketing success, which I can adapt and apply to my own marketing?
By studying marketing success, it’s possible to make better marketing decisions. The good news here is that there are examples of successful marketing all around you.
Bonus: You can also learn a great deal by studying terrible marketing and uncovering why it was so ineffective. Knowing what to avoid is enormously valuable.
Let's grow your business... together! I can help you build a more successful business, increase your sales and boost your profits. It's you and me, working as a team to help you achieve the results you have always wanted. To find out more, read this!
Gradberry is on a mission to send companies skilled candidates whose résumés don't drop all the right names.
The post Startup Aims to Make Silicon Valley an Actual Meritocracy appeared first on WIRED.
The "Queen of the Internet" says the growth of the number of users online is slowing down.
The post Mary Meeker: The Internet’s Growth Is Actually Slowing Down appeared first on WIRED.
You know all those blog posts about increasing AdWords conversion rates 572%, getting on Product Hunt 4 times in one day, and securing VC funding by hiring a sign spinner?
This isn’t one of them.
I had hopes of writing one, but what we did instead was a freaking mess.
Well, almost.
As a newborn AdWords focused agency, we wanted to use some other PPC channels to grow our email list and clientele.
Pretty ironic, right?
Now, you may be one of the very few advertisers who have plateaued their success on AdWords and just can’t squeeze any more profit out of the largest ad network in the world.
If so, you’re about as rare as the Taylor Swift “pegacorn.”
For those of you who have no idea what a pegacorn is, it’s a pegasus and unicorn mix.
Yes, they are very rare indeed.
But this post isn’t about AdWords. It’s about the other avenues you can use to drive more leads, conversions, and sales to grow your business; hopefully, by an extra 572%.
The AdWords alternatives we’re going to cover today aren’t exactly search engines. In fact, they’re more like AdWords display network alternatives that get results through demographic targeting.
See, we didn’t want to use the alternatives that people have already talked about. We wanted to seek out some new ad channels that haven’t been written about that much.
Facebook was obvious, so we didn’t want to do that.
Bing Ads was obvious, so we crossed that one out.
In this post, we’re not going to just be looking at 7 AdWords alternatives, but what we did to fail, so you can learn from our mistakes.
Let’s get started.
As with anything marketing, if your offer is crap, then no beautifully designed landing page can save you.
We knew we had to create a lead magnet that would get people excited, and if we’re smart, a lead magnet that hadn’t been created before.
Throughout my years of doing AdWords, I’ve always been asked the question: “What can we do to get more phone leads?”
Since there hasn’t been a lot written on the topic, I thought that was a brilliant idea.
So, we created a guide on how to generate more phone leads with AdWords and Conversion Rate Optimization.
It ended up being 60 pages long, with 32 different ideas on AdWords and conversion optimization.
So, once we had our guide done, we needed to create a landing page.
We studied other guide/ebook landing pages and also read up on Eric Sloan’s “8 Examples of What Not to Do On Your Ebook Landing Page“.
We eventually ended up with this masterpiece of a landing page: http://grow.klientboost.com/get-more-phone-leads/.
With the guide and landing page done, we knew we could make it even more successful if we found a bigger company/partner to help with the promotion.
Since the guide is about generating more phone leads, what better company than a call tracking analytics solution?
In the PPC industry, call tracking has become more and more popular in order to understand which keywords, ads, and placements are making the phone ring.
So, I did what anyone else would do, and got a little ahead of myself.
I started reaching out to all the well-known call tracking companies, at the same time.
It was a huge mistake.
Companies like CallRail, DialogTech (formerly IfByPhone), Invoca, CallTrackingMetrics, Marchex, CallSource, and Century Interactive all got an email from us with a custom made image like this:
Since we’re a small and new company, we didn’t think anyone would say yes.
But, everyone said yes.
We eventually looked at employee counts and funding numbers on CrunchBase to decide who we should partner with.
It wasn’t an easy decision, but we hit it off really well with Invoca and found out they were a nearby company based in Santa Barbara, CA. They also sport some serious clients (which we’ll talk about later).
With the guide done, the landing page done, and the partner done, it was on to the AdWords alternatives:
Reddit has a very engaged and smart community of visitors, but their ad platform is horrible.
Within it, you get to decide which subreddits you want to target (which are smaller, more niche community pages that revolve around certain topics).
For our guide, we decided to target the subreddits of /PPC and /AdWords, but quickly realized that all ad slots were filled for the next three months.
Since Reddit allows only one ad spot per subreddit, the space quickly gets crowded.
We opted for the subreddits of /Advertising and /AdOps.
The results we’re pretty bleak:
We got 43 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $51.14. That’s a $25.57 CPA.
We would’ve spent more if we’d had the chance to target the subreddits that were more relevant to our guide, but it’s hard to do when Reddit doesn’t tell you which days are available or open to advertise.
Now, that doesn’t mean that Reddit ads won’t work for you.
There are some (although few) examples out there of people who’ve successfully used Reddit ads to drive sales and conversions. One who sticks out is Ryan Luedecke.
He catapulted his beef jerky business and made $2,200 in sales from a $400 investment.
The story got shared quite a bit, and after reading what he did, it became apparent that what we were doing with our guide might not ever work if we didn’t get in front of the right audience.
As I mentioned earlier, Redditors are some super clever folks. They can’t stand self-promotion. Reddit ads seem to work the best when they’re not ads at all, but actual helpful content.
We moved on to the next one:
Yahoo! Gemini is Yahoo!’s answer to native advertising.
We’ve had some luck with this platform for some of our clients, so we thought it would be a sure thing for us.
We got 281 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $212.24. That’s a $106.12 CPA.
Within the Gemini platform, you can set your campaign around one of three goals:
We chose “Visit my website” and created an ad we wanted to run.
Then we got to choose the targeting method and opted for People interested in > Business Services > Business Services.
And just to make sure we had a little control, we threw in some keywords for people searching for:
So, what happened?
Yahoo! Gemini ads are not the most targeted ads and, just like Reddit Ads, seem to work best when they fit within the topics on the page being covered.
Obviously, the keyword intent from the Google AdWords search network isn’t the same as this platform’s.
But, with banner blindness doing nothing but increasing, native advertising like the Gemini platform is set to continue to see growth.
Here’s an example of what a Yahoo! Gemini ad looks like
The third time was the charm:
Okay, so we struck out twice, but we were only $263.38 in.
Next up was Twitter ads and, boy, we had a much better experience.
We got 297 visitors and 49 guide downloads for a total of $198.15. That’s a $4.04 CPA.
So, what happened?
What we found was that the Twitter audience was much more engaging and interested in the problem we were helping them solve.
We targeted followers of notable blogs like Unbounce, KISSmetrics, and competitor AdWords agencies. We found that most of the downloads came from other agencies, not client prospects.
So, even though we had a lower CPA, we couldn’t convert those acquisitions into customers, just maybe some new fans.
But, don’t let that stop you.
Twitter ads have been growing in popularity, and it’s a killer ad platform when you focus on leading your ads with education and value.
That’s a steady increase in interest
You’ll also find no shortage of case studies and in-depth posts on how to drive conversions with Twitter.
This is one of the better AdWords alternatives out there.
What was next?
Okay, so we were beginning to see a trend as to why our guide wasn’t performing as well as we’d hoped (we’ll cover that at the end). But, that wasn’t going to stop us from continuing our experimentation.
Next up was the media buying platform of BuySellAds.
BuySellAds allows you to buy impressions on a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bidding basis from high-quality publisher sites that don’t want to be cheaper out from the Google AdSense network.
Since, at this point, we understood that most of our downloads came from marketing agency people, we thought the next perfect targeting would be the Search Engine Journal (SEJ).
We got 321 visitors and 2 guide downloads for a total of $240. That’s a $120 CPA.
It was far from our Twitter ads success earlier.
Here’s a look at the internal BuySellAds dashboard and the low click-through rate:
Now, the cool thing about BuySellAds is that you have a ton of options when it comes to “thought-leading” type of sites.
The downside is that you buy a high-priced, fixed number of impressions that usually work best with low friction/valuable content that gets people into your marketing funnel really early.
Most likely, those people are not in “ready-to-buy” mode.
Something to keep in mind as you’re paying via CPM is to select ad spots that are above the fold.
If not, you stand the chance of racking up your impressions with even fewer people actually seeing your ad.
StumbleUpon is such a fun and awesome site for mindless swiping.
Kind of like Tinder, but for whatever topic you’re into.
The great thing about StumbleUpon ads is that you can really get some high volume visitors and, if you’re lucky, some great engagement.
We got 528 visitors and 5 guide downloads for a total of $100. That’s a $20 CPA.
But, we just didn’t see that engagement.
In fact, the average time on site from a StumbleUpon visit wasn’t even one second.
It was less than one second.
I didn’t even know Google Analytics could be that rude
Was it because our landing page was that boring or because the first impression was that bad?
Or, was it because we shouldn’t expect to use StumbleUpon ads as a conversion tool, but as more of a blog discovery tool, as this KISSmetrics article suggests.
Okay, by this time, we had definitely realized that we might have picked a guide topic that was a little too niche.
But, to give it one last go, we headed over to LinkedIn and tried to target the people who would love more phone leads – sales people.
We got 22 visitors and 5 guide downloads for a total of $113.07. That’s a $22.61 CPA.
Okay, not that bad, but definitely not sustainable either.
Even though the campaign ran for only about a week, we saw decent CTRs of 0.521%, which is pretty high for LinkedIn. Still, it just didn’t make sense to keep running as the cost per click was around $7.54.
So, it was on to the best AdWords alternative of them all:
Remember that I mistakenly asked all the call tracking analytics companies to join forces with us at the same time? And that we ended up going with Invoca?
Well, not only did we create an awesome partnership that could continue to grow in the future, but Invoca sent out our 60-page guide to their entire email list.
Results?
We got 774 visitors and 343 guide downloads for a total of $0. That’s a $0 CPA.
Invoca sent almost 400 downloads to recipients who included marketing department people from companies like PayPal and Allstate Insurance. Those people got on our email lists and are still there, interacting with our emails and our blog posts.
We also secured a speaker for our #CRODay meetup that we held at our office in Costa Mesa, CA.
Who knows what the future will hold.
We quickly learned not to create a lead magnet that fits a narrow audience.
We could’ve created a much beefier guide on AdWords as a whole or some unknown landing page hacks that would appeal to a broader audience.
Instead, we took the route of specificity and didn’t get as many downloads as we had hoped.
Also, because we were so aggressive with so many different AdWords alternatives, we didn’t prepare to create additional unique ad copy or imagery to go with every channel.
I’m sure we could have gotten much better results through iterative testing and constant tweaking.
All together, we got 2266 visitors and 408 guide downloads for a total of $914.60. That’s a $2.24 CPA.
Since many people want to learn something brand new, make sure your content/guide tries to accomplish that, or paints old information in a different way.
Take these AdWords alternatives with a grain of salt and understand that each channel takes time to perfect.
Don’t test the depth of the river with two feet.
About the Author: Johnathan Dane is the founder of KlientBoost, a California based PPC agency that’s on a mission to grow companies. He’s been interviewed by Google and has a German Shorthaired Pointer named Tanner. Connect with him on Twitter.
