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.

Remember, when someone comes to your website (and it might not be your HOME page by the way) they perform an instant assessment. Among others, they ask themselves two questions,

• “Does this website offer what I’m looking for?”, and
• “Can this website deliver?” – in other words, “Are they full of crap, or are they legit?”

One of the most effective ways to give potential business a quick answer to the second bullet is by using trust icons. These are visual cues that all, in their own way, add the perception of legitimacy and trustworthiness to a website.

Here are my top 5 that I recommend using on your website:

1. Better Business Bureau Accredited Business
If you run a website that does any business in the US, this is the best trust icon. It screams legitimate business. Best of all, it links to the businesses profile and rating with the BBB. If your company doesn’t have a good rating, get that taken care of first before adding this icon to your website. Posting a link to a C+ rating will do more harm than good.

Details: a company must be more than a year old and its website has to have a privacy policy prominently displayed before being considered for the icon. In my experience, as long as a company has both the BBB will “pass” the website. This is a premium seal, so you’ll need to pay an annual fee to be part of the program.

2. Associations / Trade Groups / Memberships
Any business that is part of a larger association or group of companies should leverage that membership and feature that icon on their website. For example, let’s say you’re a realtor. I would recommend having the National Association of Realtors icon on your website. Number one, it’s a quick sign that your firm can be trusted. Number two, I’d be willing to bet it’s a differentiator with your competition. If someone comparing your site to a close competitor sees that icon on your website and not on the other, that may be enough to call you and not the other firm.

Details: it depends on the association. Some will offer an icon with a membership. Some memberships are free and other paid.

3. Payment
If your website processes payments, then it has to have an icon saying that their information will be safe. Examples of icons for payment are PayPal, Authorize.net, Thawte, and Verisign. Each example, in their own way, tells the user that they can feel good about taking their credit card out of their wallet and forking over those hard earned dollars to buy your product or service. Like #2, the biggest error is in this category is the error of omission. When a website doesn’t talk about how payments are processed safely, that’s when a red flag goes up.

Details: in most cases these icons are free. Many payment gateways (like Authorize.net for example) make it really easy to add their icon to your site (because they get the added benefit of an inbound link).

4. McAfee Secure
This one should look familiar because it’s seemingly everywhere. It’s becoming so prevalent that it’s almost a “must have”, which is why it made my list. These days it’s weird when websites don’t have it (btw, great business model for McAfee). This icons says to people that the website can be trusted because it is safe.

Details: this is another premium icon. It’s close to $1,000 per year, so it’s not cheap. The requirements for getting the icon are relatively easy as long as the site is hosted with a legit hosting company. This does work with hosting on shared servers, so you don’t have to have your own dedicated machine to get this.

5. US Flag
Your first instinct might be that adding the stars and stripes is a cheesy 1997 website move that doesn’t belong in today’s real-time web. I’d say you’re wrong. There are plenty of industries where consumers feel better knowing that the website is owned and operated in the US, and not in Europe or Asia. For example, the tax industry. I know from working with clients in that industry that there are companies based in Eastern Europe that perform all kinds of tax preparation and accounting tasks. Think about it, would the average US taxpayer want someone in Europe storing their data and advising them on tax issues? Probably not. But those sites based elsewhere do every well. No one ever thinks it might be operated out of the country. The flag is a subtle way of showing that a business is based and operated in the US. If people assume that means it’s more safe or legitimate, then why not take advantage of that?

Details: there are no requirements (other than being honest about the business being located in the US). And it’s free! I’m sure you are resourceful enough to find the flag somewhere on the web.

The last thing I’ll say is if you buy into the trust icon theory, then don’t hide your icons. Make them prominent so people can see them.

What are your thoughts on trust icons? What do you think my list? What’s missing? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

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.

I’m a proud EVO 4G owner. I’ve had it for just over 2 months now and I love it. It’s allowed me to be much productive when I’m away from my office.

Of the few complaints I have about being a ‘Droid is the lack of solid information about the best apps. The Android Market website is lacking at best. It doesn’t make me want to download any apps and can make the most useful ones hard to find.

All of the apps I have now are recommendations from friends – which is the best/most trusted source for this kind of information. But I don’t like having to constantly ask people and be asked what apps I use the most.

In the spirit of sharing, here’s my list of apps that I have right now on my phone:

• Bump - I find this more useful for sharing images and apps than contact info. The biggest downside so far is that I rarely run into someone that I want to exchange contact info with that also has this app downloaded.
• Dropbox - this is on my “can;t live without” list. This is an awesome way to share files.
• Evernote - people rave about this one. I use it to notate things I don;t want to forget, but haven’t become a rabid user yet.
• Finance - perfect for keeping an eye on the stock market. Needless to say it integrate perfectly with my Google Finance portfolios.
• Foursquare - not 100% convinced this will always be on the list. I’m still in test mode.
• Fring - it’s downloaded and ready to use. None of my friends have it, so I’m still waiting to use it.
• Google Sky Map - very cool app. Would be even more cool if it weren’t foggy in San Diego every single night.
• Yahoo! Messenger – I use Yahoo! IM a lot in my office. This works well for getting in touch with international colleagues. I refuse to spend money on texting people with international phone numbers.
• Open Spot - I can see the potential value in this, but I don’t live in a crowded metropolitan city, so I’m not the ideal user.
• OpenTable - the best way to make a dinner reservation.
• Pandora – perfect way to listen to the exact music I want.
• ScoreCenter – the easiest way to keep up with my hometown teams.
• Seesmic - the best Twitter app for Android that I’ve used yet. I’m still waiting for Tweetdeck to give a damn.
• Shazam – I use this all the time to find songs I want to put on my iPod.
• Google Voice - I’m easing my way into this one. Right now I’m using it to screen calls and have custom voicemails for groups within my contacts.
• Waze - a real-time crowdsourced traffic app. I love this concept and I’m doing my best to help these guys through their BETA phase. I think this has tons of promise.
• Zillow - what better way to find out what practically any house is worth.

How does this compare to your list? What am I missing? I would love to get your feedback in the comment section below.

Last week Majestic SEO posted a really cool table that you probably didn’t see unless you regularly read a lot of SEO blogs. The table is made up of the Top 200 domains ranked by referring domains. (Majestic, by the way, is one of my favorite SEO tools.)

For those of you unfamiliar with SEO fundamentals or the basics of  search engine optimization, this table lists the websites from around the world that have the most unique domains linking back to their site. So, for example, let’s say your website has a two websites linking to it. One of them is WebsiteA.com and the other is BWebsites.com. That would mean your site has 2 referring domains. Not to mention a lot of work to do to get on Majestic’s next list!

For me – an Internet Marketing consultant who helps companies get more links through content strategies – here are five interesting tidbits I noticed while perusing the list:

1. Volatility isn’t limited to the stock market.
Admittedly, we’re dealing with huge websites and tremendous link volume, but the table shows that things will happen to cause even the biggest websites to make significant moves up or down the list.

Take a look at the biggest movers up the list:

• dot.tk moved up 187 spots from #200 to #13
• verizon.net moved up 117 spots from #183 to #66
• t-online.de moved up 114 spots to #3 from #117
• gmgp.org moved up 83 spots from #128 to #45

Other than the endless rumors about the Verizon iPhone, it’s not obvious at first glance what caused these other movements. We could, however, find out more with a more in-depth competitive analysis. And while we’re on the topic, look what all of that chatter about a product that doesn’t even exist yet did for Verizon…it gave them tons and tons more links!

Flip around the numbers and look at the sites that have fallen down the list. Xanga.com, for example, fell 82 spots to #160. Keep in mind this doesn’t mean xanga.com all-of-a-sudden suffers from worse search rankings now than they did two years ago because they didn’t build links as fast. They could still be a dominant player. It does mean they didn’t build links from new domains as aggressively as the other sites on the list. So this is a good reminder that we can’t rest on our laurels and stop trying to build links. That’s the worst Internet Marketing strategy. We gotta keep building. And building. And building.

2. What happened to eBay?
Ebay’s move downward is worth noting on its own. The auction giant moved from #4 down to #31. You have to wonder what happened there, especially when you see that the other players at the top of the 2008 list (Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, YouTube) all stayed in the Top 10. Why is eBay building links at a far lesser rate now than they were 2008? Or did they do something to lose a ton of links over the last two years?

3. The BBC is tops for media.
I thought this was sort of a surprise. The BBC’s website, bbc.co.uk, is the top-rated media website at #24. (By media I mean a site run by a traditional media company.) Cnn.com is the next highest at #26 with nearly 125,000 less links than the BBC. The NY Times’ website, nytimes.com, is ranked #34. I’m surprised because New York is the #1 media market in the world, and the Times is supposedly the most revered newspaper in the world.

Other things interesting about the media-related sites:

• Foxnews.com (CNN’s chief rival) ranks at #121 with nearly 800,000 less domains referring links as CNN
• The Wall St. Journals’ site, wsj.com, ranks at #82
• Despite the flourishing state of the so-called celebrity media, none of tabloid sites for gossip made the cut. I would expect that to change in the next two years as more people start to get their news from sources like TMZ.

4. School websites rake in the links.
Out of the top 200 sites listed, 11% are domains for schools. And just about all of them are the big brand names in education.

Here are the top 5 schools on the list. Just for fun I’ve listed the school’s rank in endowment (PDF) in parenthesis to see if there’s any corollary between wealth and domain referral popularity:

1. mit.edu: #73 overall (6)
2. stanford.edu #79 overall (3)
3. berkeley.edu: #83 overall (78)
4. harvard.edu: #87 overall (1)
5. cornell.edu: #124 overall (18)

Way to go Berkeley! They are raking in the domain referrals despite not having huge endowments like the others in the top 5. By the way, MIT’s website ranks ahead of sites for entities you’ve probably heard of like NASA and weather.com.

Biggest surprises on the list? How about Yale at #167 despite having the second largest endowment? Or the school right in my backyard, UC San Diego. They make the list at #197 despite having the 175th largest endowment.

5. Link-building technique don’t have to be obvious.
Ever hear of  #64 on the list, homestead.com? On the outside it’s Intuit’s answer to a Blogspot (#7), Macromedia (#16), WordPress (#17), and Joomla (#52) – a product that builds websites for small businesses. Some might wonder why the heck Intuit offers a such a product. Well, this lists tells you all you need to know. It’s for the domains referrals and links! I’m assuming that every site built using their software links back to Intuit. This may not be a huge revenue generator for Intuit, but it’s a gigantic SEO score for them. It’s a good lesson in how creativity goes a long way to getting links.

Lastly, while a lot of companies would be happy with 50 quality referral domains, the lowest amount on the list has more than 229,000 different domains linking to it. Of course all of these sites are huge sites for big brands, but it’s a good reminder that enough is never truly enough. Never be satisfied with the amount of referring domains and links coming in to your site. Keep striving for more. Your site probably won’t ever make this list, but there’s a huge difference between 50 quality referral domains and 150. Go for it!

What else do you notice on the list? Let’s discuss in the comment section below.

Ever wonder how much monthly traffic a website gets? C’mon, you’ve got to be curious about what kind of visits your competitors get. If you’re not, you should be!

Well, there’s a FREE and easy way to check, just use Compete. It’s really simple. I should note that I am not being paid to make this recommendation.

Here’s a graph of Compete.com’s traffic for the last year:

Once you get to the home page, all you need to do is choose the “Site Profile” tab and type in the domain name (i.e. yourdomain.com) of the site for which you want to see stats. You can also select the “Compare Sites” tab and enter in as many as three domains to compare numbers. That can be very helpful if you want to see how your site stacks up with the competition.

Cool, right? I use this all the time, especially when I get a call from a new lead. It’s a super-quick way for me to get a sense of what theyr traffic load is like. In most cases, poeple are calling becuase they’ve seen a big drop in traffic and want to know how to fix it.

I will say this – don’t take the data Compete displays as gospel. For instance, there is a disparity when I compare the numbers for my site from analytics program to what it says on Compete. But it’s not large enough for me to use another service. One other thing I have noticed is that the oldest data being displayed seems to be more accurate. For example, the data older than the previous month is more accurate than what I typically see for the previous month. So keep that in mind.

One clarifier about where the data comes from. According to Compete, they have a consumer panel of about 2 million users. Here’s what they say, “our online panel is comprised of a statistically representative cross-section of consumers who have given permission to have their internet clickstream behaviors and opt-in survey responses analyzed anonymously as a new source of marketing research. The Compete panel is several times larger than traditional panels, which means that we help clients measure and benefit from more insights.”

I’ve never had a reason to try the premium subscription, but it offers a lot more data. I’m not sure this makes sense for the common webmaster or business owner.  If you love stats, give it a shot and let me know what you think.

Add Compete to your toolbox and let me know what you think.

Ever wonder if anyone clicked the link you included in a Twitter post? Wonder no more. Try bit.ly.

bit.ly is an extremely simple-to-use tool that shortens URLs. As a result, it makes sharing links via Twitter or Facebook even easier. That’s valuable because sharing quality and helpful content is important for your credibility. Best of all, it allows you to track have many people clicked on your link and if they have reTweeted your Twitter post.

Here’s an example of how and when to use bit.ly. Let’s say I wanted to publicize my latest blog post over twitter.

The real URL is this: http://www.brand5.com/blog/best-wordpress-plugins.

If i go to bit.ly and paste that URL into the “shorten” box at the top of the page, bit.ly will shorten the URL to something like this: http://bit.ly/pLtfh.

You’ll notice that both links go to the same page on my blog. By shortening the link to my post, bit.ly saved me a whole bunch of characters to write more in my Twitter post – which is crucial when I am limited to only 140 character per post.

But the coolest part of bit.ly is the tracking feature. After I create a link, I can tell how many people clicked it and if anyone else reTweeted my link through their own Twitter account.

Here’s an example of a tracking report from a Twitter post we did for a client of ours, Easy Estimated Taxes right around the September 15 estimated tax deadline:

This report shows that Twitter post received 141 clicks. It also shows the breakdown of those clicks by day. If someone had reTweeted this post or if it had ended up on FriendFeed, I would have seen it on this page under “Conversations”.

So from now on, every time you want to share a link, track it through a bit.ly account (setup an account).  Then keep an eye on how many of your readers click and circulate your links.

Watching your clicks will help you do two important things:
1. Learn what topics your audience wants to know more about. High click amounts will tell you what’s popular.
2. Write more enticing Twitter posts  – you’ll determine what makes those links attractive enough for people to want to click. That’s a skill. No one will click a link unless they think there’s value for them at the other end.

Let me know how what you think of bit.ly.

In case you aren’t one of the cast of thousands (slightly exaggerated) that regularly reads the great content we generate here, a blog adds a lot of SEO value to your website. If you don’t have a blog as part of your current content strategy, then you need to set one up. As always, I recommend WordPress.

Once you have a WordPress blog, I highly recommend you socialize it – make it easy for people to spread your content virally through social media. If you don’t socialize your content, it’s going to sit on an island waiting for the search engine to rescue it. Socializing can bring your blog traffic it probably wouldn’t otherwise get.
Think about it this way – most social media sites (Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon) have way more users than your site ever will. Don’t try to compete. Instead, make your content available to more people through those different mediums and bring in extra traffic.

Besides this blog, we’ve setup some other blogs for clients (here’s the most recent). In doing so, we’ve had a chance to try most of the plugins available.

Here’s a review of some of the ones we’ve used:

Disqus Comment System (download)
From my experience, this is the best commenting system available. If you want comments on your blog, you need to use this. There are a lot of features, but the coolest part is that it integrates with Facebook and Twitter. That means that commentors can elect to have their comments automatically post to the Facebook wall or Twitter account.  From a moderator’s perspective, you can either approve all comments or let them all ride. You can also build your own commenting profile that works all over the web on other sites that use the same commenting system.

TweetMeme ReTweet Button (download)
I rank this plugin as a “must-have”. First of all, Twitter is the hottest thing out there and is not going away anytime soon. If your readers are on Twitter, this is the most effective way to make your content re-tweetable. What’s cool is that you can easily see who else has ReTweeted your content by just clicking the grey box. This week they just added an analytics program (with a 30 day free trial) that sounds like it might be valuable.

Facebook Share Count (download)
I first saw this being used on Mashable. It’s just one click to post a blog entry onto your Facebook wall. And the counter updates pretty much right away. Out of all of the Facebook plugins I’ve tried so far, this is the best one.

ShareThis (download)
This plugin adds a little button to the beginning or end of your blog post that allows people to share your content with virtually any bookmarking or social media site available. I used to think this one was really cool because it’s so comprehensive. But from what I’ve seen, it offers too many choices. Plus, only really techy people know what it is (and click on it). Also, this one is kind of a pain to install. You need to wait to get an email from the developer and then paste some code into the settings in WordPress. For these reasons I have switched to Sociable.

Sociable (download)
This is my pick of the moment for plugins that allow you to share your content. I like it’s simplicity. As a reader, you see the logos of the site you want to share it on, and click it. No scrolling to find the one you want. This too has the option to add share buttons for seemingly every single bookmark website out there. The difference between this and ShareThis is that it’s way easier to pick which ones you want included on your lineup.
Give these plugins a try and let me know what you think. I’d also love to hear about any other you’ve tried and either liked or disliked.

This is a quick follow-up to my last post about why your website needs a blog. There are a lot of tips I could write about blogging. Here are some of the most basic, and valuable, tips I share with business owners who ask me about blogging.

If you are planing to add a blog, or even if you have a blog already, keep these tips in mind:

1. Allow and encourage commenting. It’s the best way to get to know your readers. Remember, they may very well be potential customers or future partners. I highly recommend a comment management system called Disqus.

2. Treat comments like a conversation. Don’t let comments sit unanswered. Thank people for commenting and give them feedback. After all, they’ve taken time out of their day to write something for you to read.

3. Pay attention to your META data. Just like you already do on the rest of your website, be sure to use your most valuable keywords in each post URL.

4. Get on a regular content schedule. The worst mistake you can make is start a blog and then ignore it. Start off small, maybe by posting once a week, and expand as much as time allows.

5. Be social. Make sure you give your readers a way to follow your blog through an RSS feed (Feedburner is great). Also, give them a simple way to virally spread your post via sites like Twitter, Facebook or Digg.

I hope these tips are helpful. Good luck with your blog!