5 Ways to Create Trust to Improve Conversions

by Mark Faggiano on August 26, 2010

trust icon

Which icons best promote trust?

Conversions. There’s a lot to discuss. So I’m going to try and keep this simple and stick to one small contributing factor.

A couple of the most recent Internet Marketing consulting gigs I’ve been involved with have been focused on improving conversion rates. Both are websites that don’t struggle getting a decent amount of traffic. The problem is that too many people leave without converting (in both cases the goal is to get people to sign up for a free trial of their service).

In each case there were multiple culprits contributing to low conversion rates. One of the biggest mistakes was the failure to gain people’s trust. Nothing, on either website, told users that the site was legitimate, safe, and could be trusted.

Check out the 5 trust icons…

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Three Keys to Being a Subject Matter Expert on Twitter

by Mark Faggiano on August 17, 2010

not a perfect tweet

Status updates don't equal quality for SMEs

I’ve talked about my take on Twitter before. My biggest complaint/knock is that there are millions of people Tweeting but far less people listening. Bottom line: too much noise and not enough value compared to other ways to invest time and money in Internet Marketing.

That being said, I’m not totally against Twitter. I’ll agree that there are some ways to put Twitter to use effectively (more on this in a second), but just a very small percentage of Twitterers use the tool effectively.

Up to this point in time, one of the best uses of Twitter is to establish or enhance a brand’s perception by playing the role of a subject matter expert (SME). For example, a real estate broker in a crowded marketplace could differentiate him or herself by avoiding the temptation of tweeting endlessly about their own listings and instead offering helpful content to homebuyers and sellers. Twitter users in that marketplace who subscribe to the broker develop a sense of trust about the broker, making them more likely to be clients. That should result in more business for the broker (a nice ROI).

The benefits of being an SME depend on the specifics of the industry, but the universal benefit is differentiation. And differentiation usually equals more business. For example, it could mean more leads or the ability to charge a higher hourly rate for consulting, speaking, or training.

Find out the three keys…

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“What’s your take on…”

by Mark Faggiano on August 16, 2010

I love chatting about search engine marketing and social media with people. It’s one of the more fun parts of my job. In almost every conversation I have with clients or potential clients, I get asked for my take on one thing or another. I realized that people that I talk to are asking these questions, then people I don’t talk to directly (but they look at my website) probably have the same questions. I put up a page with my up-to-the-minute Internet Marketing philosophies on the most sought after areas in Internet Marketing (at least they are the areas that I get asked about the most).

My opinions on these things change from time-to-time (for example, my opinion on Foursquare changes every few days), so I’m going to do my best to keep updating this.

Of course I have more to say about each area, but it’s designed to be used as my high-level thoughts on each topic. Let me know if you have other areas you’d like me to address.

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How to Evaluate A Website’s Performance

by Mark Faggiano on August 11, 2010

website evaluation checklistHere’s a list of basic questions I use when performing a website evaluation or audit on a client website. It gets more technical and geeky than this, but my hope is that this fives you a good idea of some of the things I do to help turn websites around.

GENERAL: questions I ask directly of the owner, or team that runs the website
1. What are the goals of the website? I want to hear from the website’s brass what they are trying to accomplish. It’s not always obvious. And it’s not always what they should be trying to accomplish. Often time there aren’t even any goals.
2. What the history of the website? Tell me specific details about sales (or membership) trends?
3. What’s the history of the site’s SEO strategy? What effect has that had on the site’s performance?
4. Have there been any major traumatic events (like de-indexing or site outages)? How have those affected sales and performance?
5. What’s your keyword strategy? If they have a strategy, I’ll ask to see the latest data they’ve accumulated about what keywords they consider to be most valuable.
6. How well has the stated keyword strategy been implemented on the site?
7. What is your content strategy?

Read the rest of the checklist…

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