Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
The fundamentals of user experience, landing page optimization and buyer psychology will always be in style, though the details of how to achieve your goals may differ from year to year.
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They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But online, a picture can be worth a thousand kilobytes or more! HTTP Archive shows that images make up 64% of a web page’s total size on average. Given this, image optimization is key, especially considering that many users will abandon a request if it doesn’t load within a few seconds.
The problem with image optimization is that we want to keep file sizes small without sacrificing quality. Past attempts to create file types that optimize images better than the standard JPEG, PNG and GIF formats have been unsuccessful.
The post Guide To Using WebP Images Today: A Case Study appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Guide To Using WebP Images Today: A Case Study
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Present Darren Rowse Video.
New mobile content discovery option offers linked “cards” for tickets, songs, merchandise or other content.
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Want to learn more about how analytics can strengthen your marketing strategy? Take a look at the analytics and marketing columns our readers were most interested in this year.
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A company proves that it has a strong creative process by developing successful products repeatedly. We see this in companies like Apple, BMW and Google. Founders such as Steve Jobs formed a corporate culture with an intense focus on creativity and design. This culture highlights two core elements in the creative process: the ideas and the team.
The creative process can be described in one sentence: Ideas begin with a small team of creative people at the heart of the company who communicate easily with each other.
The post Design Principles To Evaluate Your Product appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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MarketLeverage BlogWorld Interview Darren Rowse.
These days, agencies tend to get caught up in near-constant talk of creativity, innovation, and disruption. But all that noise can drown out the real reason you’re in this business: to make money.
The truth is that you’re trying to make a living — for yourself, your family, and your employees. And no matter how hard you work to serve clients, when you don’t make money, it’s pretty tough to sustain enthusiasm.
Even when you are making money, this is a tough business. That’s why it’s crucial to avoid certain catastrophic mistakes agencies make every day.
Even smart agency owners make some of these painful mistakes. They don’t willfully sabotage their own efforts, but they fail to realize the long-term impact these seemingly innocuous decisions carry.
You might even recognize yourself in these five financially draining errors — and not realize how harmful they are to your bottom line.
Nine times out of ten, agencies present clients with a single price and package. However, when you do this, nine times out of ten, they’ll push back.
Instead, always give them three options. Build the middle option first because this is the one they’re likely going to choose. This option should be your ideal sale and what’s really best for the client. According to a study on the center-stage effect, consumers feel that options put at the center of a range of options are the most liked.
Once you’ve constructed your “middle” option, strip some of those deliverables away to create a first option. This bare-bones option is priced about 20 percent to 25 percent lower than the middle option.
As for the third option, add some bells and whistles — not ones that are meaningless to the client, but factors that take things above and beyond the minimum standard. Price it about 30 percent to 35 percent higher than the second option.
When you present these three options, more often than not, clients will talk themselves into the second option. What’s beautiful about it is that they feel like they have control over their budgets and over the work.
Virtually all agencies have a gaping hole called scope creep: allowing the scope of a project to get larger without the price rising accordingly. If we could control it, we would all be driving nicer cars and taking better vacations.
I’m not suggesting you nickel-and-dime your clients to death, but you do have to plug that hole. Of course, we can look at our clients and be frustrated that they keep asking for more and more. But the truth is that the blame sits squarely with us.
Often, your scope documents are too vague, failing to define deliverables in a way that leaves no room for interpretation. Or maybe they’re too broad, without any boundaries.
If you have account people managing client project budgets, they may not understand agency math. You expect them to be good stewards of your profitability, but they don’t understand the game they’re playing — no one has taught them the rules.
In most agencies, leaders never take the time to teach employees how an agency makes money. Thus, they fail to understand that everyone, every single day, either makes the agency money or costs it money by over-servicing clients or not negotiating better with vendors.
When employees don’t understand that, they believe their jobs are not to make money, but to keep clients happy. Naturally, the easiest, fastest way to do that is by over-servicing clients. Voilà: scope creep.
Don’t take my word for it: It turns out that by overservicing just once a week, an agency can give away a whopping seven figures of essentially free work.
When your scope documents are too vague, you’ll get clients exceeding them in no time at all, asking for the 12th or 13th revision. Yet chances are good that no one will issue a change order. This is especially true if your scope documents are loose because you know you’re standing on shaky ground.
However, the biggest reason is that by the time you’re far enough along to consider a change order, your account executive is thinking, “The client wants to make a minor change. By the time I calculate the change order costs, write up a document, send it to the client, and get him to sign off on it, we could have just made the change. So why waste more time and irritate the client by issuing this change order? Screw it. I’m just going to make the change.”
Here’s the easy fix: In all of your scope documents, include language that describes a flat fee for changes beyond the number of changes allowed. Clearly define the deliverables and the timetable.
If, for instance, you’re working on a brochure for a client and you’re going to give the client four revisions, include this: “With this estimate, you are going to be granted four revisions. Any revisions after the fourth revision will cost a flat $250.”
You’re so busy running around with a fire extinguisher, chasing after the drama of the day, that you don’t really have a vision for how you want to move your agency forward. How do you want it to be different a year from now?
If you really do want to grow your business — not necessarily in the number of bodies, but in fulfilling your vision for your agency — it won’t happen without planning.
Have you ever caught yourself saying any of these phrases? “Well, we grow based on referrals.” “We’re going to hire a guy.” “We’re just too busy taking care of clients to chase after clients.” “We’re really lucky the phone is still ringing.”
If so, you don’t have a plan. Sure, all of that may be true today, but if you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know it ebbs and flows. That’s why you need a consistent new business program to keep your sales funnel full. It’s getting tougher and tougher to find great client prospects, and the time period between meeting them and signing them is stretching out.
If you don’t drum up new business now, chances are you won’t start until the minute you get the sense that your most valuable client — your gorilla — is unhappy. Or, even worse, the dread will strike the minute you get the phone call that he or she is done. By then, it’s too late. New business is a muscle you exercise every single day, no matter how busy you are.
If you’re the agency owner, new business should be your primary responsibility, taking up 40 percent to 60 percent of your time. You’re not always out pitching or calling on prospects; maybe you’re writing content. But not spending time on new business is a big money-sucking mistake agencies make every day.
Above all, make sure you’re constantly evolving, growing, and refining. Even at the best and most profitable agencies, there’s room for growth and improvement. Whatever solutions you’re using now, different options will exist a year from now. Our world is changing too fast for us not to keep up with it. And that doesn’t happen without a plan.
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From the Avoiding Disaster: How Not to Use Social Media panel at BlogWorld08, Jason Falls asks Darren Rowse what are some of the differences between online c…
This is a guest contribution from Jade Craven.
The blogosphere has changed so much over the past decade. I curated Bloggers To Watch column here on Problogger for four years and it is phenomenal how much has changed since I wrote my last post in 2012.
In that time, popular bloggers have pivoted multiple times. Social platforms have risen and fallen. It is a fascinating time. So fascinating that I asked to compile another list of bloggers that haven appeared on my radar.
This post features bloggers who have gotten my attention over the past year. It doesn’t reflect the top bloggers online. Rather, it’s a list of bloggers that have sparked my interest and is heavily biased towards the marketing niche.
Sol Orwell is someone that has gotten a lot of attention in the entrepreneurship space over the past 2 years. To quote from Smart Passive Income:
Sol’s built his career across a dizzying number of spaces. He’s a master at building authority in a niche, identifying community pain points, and crafting businesses that meet those urgent needs
His latest project, Examine.Com, garners around 70,000 visitors a day and is a seven-figure business. Normally, such figures would put me off recommending him. However, his work stands out and he can teach you a lot about networking and selling products. His post about How I made my guest post a massive success [CASE STUDY] blew me away when I first read it.
It is refreshing because his work doesn’t repeat the passive income rhetoric. If anything, he rebels against many of the common themes in the marketing niche. To quote from his about page:
Having a one-time launch of $50,000 does not make you a guru, nor does making $2k/mo from your websites make you a passive income genius, nor does getting 2000 visitors a day to your site make you some kind of traffic genius.
You can learn more by checking out his blog at SJO.com
Ryan Holiday is a writer and media strategist. I initially discovered him via his first book Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, where he shows how blogs control and distort the news. As a blogger, I found it useful to learn how I was being manipulated.
He’s written extensively about his business experiences. The following posts have helped me immensely:
Lately, his work has focused on what we can learn from philosophy. I believe everyone can learn from the principles of Stoicism, which he explores at Daily Stoic.
You can learn more by visiting his blog at RyanHoliday.net
Emilie Wapnick wowed attendees of the 2106 Problogger Event with her talk about bringing multiple passions/interests into one blog. In 2015, she gave her TEDx presentation about why some of us don’t have one true calling. I believe that was her reaching her tipping point. Since then, interest in her work has exploded. The release of her book, How To Be Everything, this year will spread that even further.
You can check out her top resources for multipotentialites at her Start Here page.
Ramit Sethi is a New York Times bestselling author and founder of iwillteachyoutoberich.com. Over 1,000,000 people read his material to learn how to use psychology and systems to live a Rich Life. His work has helped me change my relationship with money.
His work has been featured here in the past via two guest posts by Michael Alexis.
His blog posts are brilliant but I also love it when he is interviewed. Here are a few of my favourites:
Now, he’s helping his readers create a low-risk and automated online business at his new site, Growth Lab. I highly recommend following it.
Sujan Patel is a leading expert in digital marketing. He is the co-founder of WebProfits, a growth marketing agency, and is a partner in many software companies.
It is so easy to be intimidated by Sujan’s experience and breadth of knowledge, especially if you are at the start of his blogging career. Don’t be. He is a prolific writer and content curator and shares so many useful resources via his Twitter account. He contributes regularly to Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and Inc.
Some of my favourite posts include:
Find out SujanPatel.com
Neil Fahey is one of my favourite Australian bloggers. He created Bushwalking Blog in 2008 to provide detailed reports of his hikes. In 2011 he expanded the scope of Bushwalking Blog to cover all things hiking, from how-tos and trip reports to news, outdoors photography, safety, and gear reviews.
What I find fascinating is how he leveraged his growing popularity in the outdoor niche into other online businesses. In 2013, he launched a hire service for personal locator beacons – a product that many hikers need but can’t afford to purchase outright. Later, he created an online booking site for nature-based walking tours at AussieHikingTours.com.
So many bloggers look at traditional methods of monetization such as advertising, affiliate income and developing online products. Neil has taken a different approach to meet the needs of his audience. I think we can learn a lot from his experience.
I featured Alexis as one of the 20 Bloggers to Watch in 2012 describing her as a “publishing powerhouse.” Well – I was right! She has blown me away with the work she has done since then.
Mid 2013, she launched her new blog The Write Life. She shares more about the behind the scenes development of this site in the bottom half of the websites about page. The site has since become one of the premiere destinations on the web for writers.
In 2015, her content marketing company was acquired by Taylor Media, the company behind the popular The Penny Hoarder blog. She became the Executive Editor, running the editorial side of the company. In 2016, the site was named the #1 fastest-growing private media company by Inc. 500.
I believe she will be accomplishing great things in the coming year, and beyond. You can follow her journey at AlexisGrant.com
What bloggers are you watching in 2017? Any trends piquing your interest? Please share in the comments.
The post Bloggers to Watch in 2017 appeared first on ProBlogger.
Bloggers to Watch in 2017
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Excuses are what you offer when you do wrong but don’t really care.
Excuses are the shoulders of the junior on your team.
Excuses are the lame attempts to cover your tracks.
Excuses are the charlatan’s way to pull the wool over our faces.
Explanations, however, are the truths behind the excuses and the steps you’re going to take to avoid having to make excuses in the future.
Which one do you think we prefer?
Excuses and Explanations originally appeared on Danny Brown – – all rights reserved.
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ProBlogger Darren Rowse offers a tip for photographers wanting to make the most of social media, based on his personal experiences from when he was starting …
Columnist Chris Liversidge shows how a streamlined, data-led process can be used to set clear priorities and objectives that drive both social and SEO performance over time.
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This video will show you how you can associate your youtube channel with your adsense account. click for more http://youadsense.blogspot.co.uk/ for tips rega…
Facebook launches Messenger multiple accounts feature… and SMS testing for Android; Instagram introduces video views; Twitter incorporates a GIF library; and Shopify finds a way to embed product listings into any social conversation you please. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
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The search and native ad marketplace has also expanded its partner network.
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BlogWorld & New Media Expo is the first and only industry-wide conference, tradeshow and media event dedicated to promoting the dynamic industry of new media…