I’m just really giving a quick update for all of you who are interested in The Internet Marketer’s Design & branding Bible eBook, and judging by the number of people who have already signed up to my newsletter – that would seem to be an awful lot of you!
It’s good to see how many internet marketer’s realise the big, big advantages you can give your online business by facing up to the design and branding aspects of internet marketing.
Back to the books progress though, it is still very near completion, but as I was writing it I was aware that I could offer something even more valuable, something that would go hand-in-hand with the book – and something that I have decided to include with the purchase of the book… for absolutely no extra cost!
Full details of this secret development will be announced soon… all i will say for now is this ‘extra’ is worth well over £1,000…. and will only be worth more as time goes on… sound interesting? Sign up to my personal newsletter on the righthand side of this page and you’ll be one of the first to know the full details.
As an internet marketer you must already realise the importance analytics plays in refining and optimising your business.
It’s especially important with any online business as you will be lacking that vital face to face contact with your customers where you’d be able to personally observe how they react to your particular sales message or products.
So apart from how many sales you are making, you don’t really have a good way of knowing how effective, or not, your websites and videos are performing for you.
Luckily there are now some really useful tools available that can give you some extremely valuable viewing data about your videos and websites.
Here’s a run down on some of the more interesting options available currently to boost your video and website analytics providing you with data that can really help you make a valuable boost to your business.
www.wistia.com
Wistia essentially tracks all the viewers of your online videos and will then provide you with data about how long each viewer watched your video for, where they stopped watching it if they gave up before the end, and it also highlights which parts of your video were rewound, or rewatched.
It does this by providing detailed heat maps like those shown below.
This is all really useful information for anyone pursuing internet marketing, just imagine being able to see which parts of your videos were skipped, which bits were rewatched, and where they decided they’d had enough. This data should really help you get an overall feel for how effective your videos are, and if they are underperforming you know which areas to focus on and refine.
www.clicktale.com
Clicktale really is big brother in action! It allows you to see every mouse movement and click a user makes while visiting your websites.
You can watch movies of your visitors browsing your sites, view heatmaps that show where visitors are clicking, where they’re hovering, and how far down the page they scroll.
Imagine being able to see that only 20% of visitors made it to the foot of your sales pitch, imagine being able to see where 90% of your visitors were captivated – I’m sure you’ll agree with me that to have this data at your finger tips would allow you to massively boost your conversion rates.
Many internet marketer’s can disregard ‘design’ as unnecessary fluff or eye-candy, more often than not believing that content is where the primary focus should be.
And i’m not about to argue a case against that! Far from it, without excellent content design is pretty much a waste of time.
Design on it’s own can only really look pretty, but design principals applied to quality content can greatly enhance how it is digested and received.
An analogy I like to use to describe how design helps content is that of a F1 car. If the chassis, engine, gearbox – all the working parts are the ‘quality content’, then design is the bodywork, the farings, the aerodynamics.
Yes an F1 car could still deliver a very fast lap even without it’s bodywork, but with it the whole package becomes something far greater – efficient, honed, streamlined, direct.
The biggest problem with not planning out the entire way you deliver your information is you will cause your users to start thinking. Which surprisingly isn’t a good thing!
Let me explain, if you have no consistency, no hierarchy, no underlying design then users will have to break away from the task of reading / watching your content to think about things that are distracting and unrelated to your core message.
It stands to reason that as more ‘distractions’ occur for a user, the less they are likely to forge that all important emotional connection.
There are many important things to take into consideration if you want to ensure you are delivering information as efficiently as you can.
The key part though is consistency. Through your fonts, your use of colours, your links and the way you display your products.
Having consistency will also help to considerably strengthen your online branding.
If your interested in learning more about how to apply consistency across your online marketing business, keep an eye out for the release of The Internet marketer’s Design & Branding Bible early in the new year.
I have read a very interesting article by Dustin Curtis about language and click through rates that’s well worth a look at if you’re an internet marketer.
Worth noticing while looking at Dustin Curtis’s website is that every article has been designed and illustrated to fit each specific story perfectly.
It really is a superb example of how a little bit of design effort can really add something of value to the ‘words’ and transform what would have been a fairly typical blog post into something quite special.
While this high level of polish isn’t necessarily what a good internet marketing blog or website requires, because it doesn’t come across as easily achievable by those you are encouraging into this line of work, I still believe that a lot of the fundamentals can be used to help deliver information in a more effective and powerful way.
Have a good look over his site and see how the choice of fonts, colours, images etc.. helps you to comprehend and add narrative to what you are reading… you might just find a way to bring some of that into your your own websites.
With million’s of different fonts to choose from, selecting the right font for a particular application can be quite tricky.
It’s especially tricky when picking a screen font or fonts to use on your websites, as they are subject to constraints that fonts used ‘on paper’ do not suffer from. For-instance, if a font is to display correctly in a browser, it must be installed and available on the user’s computer. This alone slashes the number of choices from 1,000,000’s to 100 pretty much instantly.
We can narrow down that 100 even more just by asking one simple but important question ….
‘which of these fonts are actually designed for viewing on screen?’
Yep, luckily someone has already done all the hard work for us! Certain fonts were actually developed with the sole aim of working well on screen.
Here’s a short run down on the only one’s really worth considering…
Extremely similar to Helvetica/Microsoft Sans Serif and commonly found on all pc’s and macs, so a very safe font to pick to ensure as close to 100% of visitors have it on their computer. This font wasn’t originally designed for the screen but it does work very well at larger sizes and it is such a well-known and widely used font that I would still class it as an excellent choice for headlines and navigation, perhaps not so much for large blocks of text, if only for the reason that some of the other fonts I am about to mention can be a little easier on the eye during prolonged reading.
Designed in the 1990’s for Microsoft by the then A-Team of font designers specifically to work well on screen. A very safe choice and has been included as a system font on pc’s since 1996. Works especially well at smaller sizes when there aren’t many pixels to work with, staying as legible as you could ever hope for, but can look strange used in a large headline size.
Again commissioned by Microsoft, it arrived on the scene at the same time as Verdana. Another very good on screen reading font, being slightly narrower than Verdana it works a little better for headlines.
Yet another Microsoft commissioned font! Very similar at first glance to Times New Roman but it has many subtle differences which optimise it for use on screen. If your picking a ’serif’ font, I say always go with Georgia for the web.
Some other fonts also worth consideration are;
I hope you have found this post interesting, we have only really scratched the surface of basic typography here but I hope you can see already how important picking the right tools, or fonts in this case, is when displaying information for your websites user’s.
By removing as much friction as possible from your websites, especially when you’re delivering large amounts of information in one hit, you can only help your users to stay focused on the task in hand, which should be getting excited about your sales copy!
Why not try out a few different fonts on your own websites and see for yourself whether one reads any better than the other, you might just find a simple change of font makes a big difference to readability.
Crafting your personal brand correctly has a huge part to play in the success of your online marketing business.
A strong and authentic brand will allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition and deliver your message clearly to your target customers.
To develop your brand always focus on what it is you do that adds real value, then make this the foundation that you build upon in order to show your customer base what it is that you stand for.
Always be relentlessly consistent with the way in which you apply your brand, make people believe in it – and trust in it.
If your brand is clear, distinctive, easy to comprehend, and shows a unique and compelling benefit to your target market you will find it easier to sell yourself, because your message will be uniform and powerful.
So make sure you’re the one who’s emails they read, who’s products and services they buy and have faith in, make your brand the one that promises value and delivers it.
It can be a little overwhelming when you first start using a powerful graphics application such as Photoshop. So to give you a helping hand i’ve prepared a Photoshop DVD case outer wrap and a DVD disc template for you to add your own images and text to help you brand and rebrand your products.
Dimensions of the box wrap template are 273mm by 183mm, which should fit into a standard DVD case perfectly, and it is set to 300dpi (dots per inch) which is the optimum for any print based job as it means it will print out looking crisp and sharp. The spine of 14mm is also marked out for you with guides to help you position things correctly. There’s also a DVD logo on the spine to save you the trouble of finding one. The DVD disc template is 118mm square with a 23mm hole in the middle.
One big thing to always bear in mind when using Photoshop is that while it has a almost endless array of features, the reality is you only truly need to concentrate on a handful of simple techniques to achieve over 95% of your tasks. Once you’ve mastered the basics, and know them inside out, you will naturally keep learning how to do more through just using it day to day.
If it’s something that you do want to learn how to use effectively then The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible is what you need. It covers all the essentials and leaves out everything that’s not important to your online business. When you realise how easy it actually is, I think you’ll be shocked.
Creating professional product images
While we are on the subject of Photoshop, if you want to create mockups of your products that look as realistic as possible, I suggest you take a look at this website: CoverActionPro
There are cheaper products on the market, even some free ones, but if you’re after the ‘Rolls-Royce’ of product simulators this is where I would spend my money.
How much importance do you place on the design of your current online presence? Is it something you have put lots of thought and effort into and still do, or is it something you don’t feel is overly important to your business?
‘Good design’ as mentioned in the title doesn’t mean your sites need to win awards for their aesthetics, far from it, but they do need to project a professional, planned and coherent image – and most crucially not slip into actually being badly designed. With information based sites, bad design hurts you more than good design will help.
Online consumer purchase behaviour is typically driven by four key points – security, privacy, quality of content and design. So design is important, or at the very least not getting design wrong is important.
So have a good look over your own online ‘presence’, is it consistent and considered? Are there others out there you think are doing things better than you? If so, what’s stopping you from lifting the bar?
One of the most important skills in successfully managing the design element of your business is to be able to recognise when and where improvements can be made. And then making them.
If you are perhaps starting to think this might be an area you have underestimated the importance of, keep an eye out for the release of The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible early in the new year.
Here’s four websites that I always find very useful…
1) Typetester – Preview different font styles and paragraph layouts on screen side by side, and then you can even output the CSS style sheet information for insertion into your web page if you write your own html.
2) Dafont – A large library of free fonts & dingbats all arranged into themes and suitable for both mac & pc. This is a site I use a lot.
3) Kular – Another good one to have in your bookmarks, always of great use when your picking colour combinations or just looking for inspiration.
4) BrowserShots – If you design and build your own web pages then it’s always wise to check that they view correctly across all the major web browsers. This website makes it easy to check all those worth worrying about without having to do all the testing yourself. A great time saver.
If they are blue or green or any calming colour then they just might be costing you a sale or two.
Why? Let me explain – people react to different colours in different ways. If you’re currently using a calming colour on a button you want to be clicked it could infact be calming the users desire to click it. Picking a colour associated with passion and impulse – like red or orange – could actually increase the number of clicks/orders you get.
As with alot of these detail based no-cost tweaks, the result may only a very small increase, but the whole ethos of The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible is to bring together as many tweaks that directly relate to internet marketing as possible so they combine to make a very tangible difference to your business.
It now seems that after years of seeing them on the websites we visit, we are now all officially blind to banner adverts.
Not really a big issue you may think, but this has a knock-on effect that we have also become blind to anything that even looks like a banner advert. Now that just might cause some problems.
Take a look at your websites and see if your using anything that could be considered ‘advert-like’ to a visitor. Revising it’s design to sit within the content of the site in a more integrated way may just help to bring more clicks/sales/signups to these particular areas if that’s their original intention.
…is the average time a person spends reading a email newsletter. That’s not much to work with.
What’s also challenging is that readers only fully read 19% of the newsletters they subscribe to, the rest they lightly scan. In fact 35% of the time users only scan a small section or merely glance at the content.
Another statistical bullet fired at the humble e-newsletter is 67% skipped the intro text even if it was only three lines long.
An interesting habit of ‘trading off’ newsletters against one another has also been found to be common, if a better newsletter comes along, then another one will be shown the door.
Facinating findings only made possible by controlled ‘eye-tracking’ studies.
With all high persuasion sales letters, whether online or on paper, you are going to have to draw attention to parts of it to really get across the benefits of what you are promoting while you have someones attention. I regulary see sites that have taken this particular principle, and ran with it. Ran with it just a little bit too far.
Forgetting the fact that you do need to highlight, you also need to remember that ease of reading should never be forgotten in the ensuing frenzy. If your pitch is changing like a roman candle you will at best make it tricky for the reader and at worst break their will to carry on at an early stage.
So if you find yourself trying to pick a colour you haven’t used yet when highlighting parts of a pitch – stop briefly to think over whether what your actually ending up with a series of unconnected shouty sentences or a strong and coherent sales message.
..And remember – if you highlight everything, you actually highlight nothing!
If this is your first visit to this blog – welcome! I do hope that you find lots of useful bits of information throughout it which will prove useful to you and your online marketing business.
The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible was originally conceived to try to help anyone currently trying to forge themselves out a career as an internet marketer manage these two very important aspects of their future business correctly, and without any fear.
By addressing branding and design right from the get go you will give yourself a real fighting chance of making your internet business extremely successful.
Obviously it’s all on your shoulders to get the particular system you are using to work correctly, but with a solid foundation of design and branding theory behind you the world of marketing might suddenly not seem quite so daunting.
The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible will also prove an invaluable reference tool to those who are already running a successful online business. Whether you’ve been trading for a year or a decade, it can be easy to settle into a groove as time passes by, it’s only natural. This book will hopefully show you how to look at your current business with a fresh set of eyes.
It will also hopefully show you how to see what customer see when they are evaluating you and your business – a crucial skill to master if you really want to slice away every last bit of fat.
The Internet Marketer’s Design & Branding Bible is currently in development and undergoing an editing phase before the writing of the final chapters. To be notified when the book is released, please fill in the form on the right hand side of the page, your email address will be treated with the utmost respect – and you can cancel very easily at anytime. You will receive nothing more after that – that’s a promise.
Many thanks for visiting, and please do check back from time to time to catch up on any new articles.
All the very best,
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