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Wow. 2010. Another year gone, but with that, another year of great website optimization posts from around the web!

Therefore I decided to pick out some of the most useful blog posts of the year from website optimizers and online marketing experts to help you kickstart your website in 2011. I hope enjoy these and that you have a fantastic 2011!

1: 7 Habits of a Highly Effective Landing Page

Hubspot’s blog is one of my new favorite online marketing blogs that I discovered last year – this was a great short and sweet landing page article from them in particular.

2: Your Landing Page Sucks! Here are 10 Examples That Don’t

Here are 10 great examples of landing pages that don’t suck – some great inspiration from Oli Gardner at Unbounce (which is a great new website optimization tool worth checking out).

3: 17 Ways to Minimize Friction in the Sales Process

Linda Bustos keeps cranking out some amazing ecommerce optimization posts over at Get Elastic. This was one of my favorites from her blog last year.

4: The Truth About Conversion Rates: What You Really Need to Analyze

A bit of shameless self promotion with this one … but I was particularly proud of this post by me that reveals some other important website success metrics.

5: 10 Secrets of a Winning Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Fan Pages exploded in 2010 and should now form a vital part of your online presence. Here are some great tips from Justin Palmer to optimize your Facebook Fan Page.

6: 99 Free (and Low Cost) Tools to Improve Your Website

There are now so many tools that you can use to help improve your website – here is a quick and dirty list of tools to help improve your website (some old, but many new).

7: 3 Landing Page Teardowns for Inspiration

The folks over at Conversion Voodoo did a great series of landing page teardowns to help inspire your optimization efforts. This one was my favorite, with some great examples from Intuit, Mailchimp and Lotus Notes.

8: The Four Pillars of Online Trust

Tim Ash. Enough said. In this great post from his keynote speech at the SES conference earlier this year, the guru of website optimization reveals how to build all important trust with your website visitors.

9: 10 Useful Tips for Creating Mobile Landing Pages

Mobile phone web browsing grew to even greater heights in 2010 – its now even more critical to make sure your landing pages work well on them.  The folks over at Ion Interactive put together a few great quick tips to help you with this.

10: 15 Things to Test in Your Email

Despite the growth of social media in 2010, email still is often the highest converting traffic source – if you know what you are doing. Anil Batra put together a quick list of things you should test to help increase conversion rates of your email campaigns.

So there we have it. Hopefully you will find those 10 posts valuable, and help kickstart your website optimization efforts in 2011!

There are many ways to optimize your website to convert more and increase your sales. One of the most effective but often overlooked ways is to test elements of your pricing strategies. So I decided to put together a guide to help you test your prices and convert more, thus generating you more sales. These tips are particularly effective for websites who sell their own products or services and have more control over their prices. All you need is a testing tool like Google Website Optimizer or Optimizely, and a willingness to be flexible with your prices. So let’s get started:

1. Don’t be scared to test your prices. This may seem like a no-brainer, but many marketers are often too worried about the possible negative effect of testing prices. By testing your prices though, you may actually end up making more profit. Go ahead, try making your product 10% higher or lower and see the impact on sales. You can also try testing odd ending numbers for prices (like using 7′s instead of 9′s or 0′s, e.g. $19.97 instead $20 or $19.99), as this often can have a positive impact in the minds of potential buyers. Don’t forget to also put test code around the hidden attributes of a product’s price that get submitted after adding to a cart, otherwise your visitor will see the test price on your product page, but then see the normal price in the shopping cart.
2. Remember lower prices don’t always mean higher profits though. Ideally, you want to maximize your revenues – making your product cheaper may result in more sales, but may not result in as much profit for you. Try increasing the price first and see how much profit you make in 2 weeks. Then lower your price below the original and see how much profit you make in 2 weeks – continue to refine until you hit the magic price point where you optimize your profit margin. Remember also that lower prices are also often associated with low quality – particularly for things like ebooks or services.
3. Test showing the amount saved and the percentage saved. Prices by themselves don’t mean as much without context – something that costs $100 but is usually $300 will sell much more than something that simply states that it is $100. Same applies to percentage saved – showing that something is 50% off will usually result in more sales than without showing the savings. Therefore, if your product is on sale, or cheaper than regular retail price, you should state both savings and percentage saved next to your price. You should also show the original list price and put a line through it to help the visitor understand the price difference. Amazon.com do a particularly great job of this (including mentioning item qualifies for free shipping right next to the price).
   
4. Try different font styles for prices. The color of your prices often has an impact – negative or warning colors like red should be avoided (even though many retailers use this like Amazon.com), instead you should use more emotionally positive colors like orange, blue or green. Be sure to make the price color different than your regular font color too – it will make the price stand out more. The size of the font often can make a big difference too – try avoiding very small font size in particular (less than 10 point size). Font styles usually don’t impact things too much though, unless the font is very hard to read.
5. Test different pricing offers. One of the best ways to reduce the negative impact of possible high prices is to offer risk reducers. This can be achieved in numerous ways, the most basic of these is to test offering some kind of money back guarantee, for example offering a 30 day 100% money back guarantee – this sounds expensive for you, but in reality most buyers rarely hate your product enough to ask for their full money back. Other ways to reduce risk are to offer a free trial of your product (like a 7 day free trial), offer free shipping (often with a minimum purchase level like Amazon.com do), or ‘buy now and pay later’ payment terms.
   
6. Test getting their email address before revealing price if its expensive. This works particularly well if you have an expensive product or service – give them something for free in exchange for their email address, like a whitepaper, buying guide, or a free series of related email tips. This way after you have their email address, you can communicate with your prospective buyer and slowly convert them over a series of emails.
7. State your price is a time limited offer. This ploy has been a great marketing tactic of companies for years – in particular you should state what the price will be after the offer has ended, state the time and day that the offer will expire, and show the time remaining of the offer. This will add an urgency to the purchase of your product that many visitors will not want to miss out on.

So go ahead – revisit your website pricing strategies and try testing some of these best practices to increase your website conversions. Hopefully your visitors and your bank balance will be better off for doing this!

You don’t like to be annoyed right? Who does? Unfortunately though websites seem to be strangely great at annoying their visitors (often without even realizing it). And annoyed visitors are visitors who don’t engage with your site, don’t buy or sign up for things on it, and ultimately rarely come back.

So I thought I would put together a list of 50 surprisingly common ways to really annoy your website visitor, so you know what to avoid and what to fix.

And don’t just read this – actually use this as a checklist to make sure your website isn’t guilty of any of them, and if it is, fix them! Trust me, your website visitors will thank you for it, and come back more often too! Let’s start revealing them… Continue Reading »