Managing Director, Tippingpoint Labs. Reprinted with the author’s permission.

If you are spending money on Search Engine Marketing (SEM)/ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and focused on traffic targets rather than conversion rates – STOP.

Put that cart back behind the horse. Instead of buying the keywords for a specific search term and sending traffic to a page with low conversion rates, drive traffic to valuable content with higher conversion rates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web No Comments »

Chief Content Officer and Founder, Tippingpoint Labs. Abridged and reprinted with the author’s permission.

The art of storytelling has been around since the dawn of humankind for good reason – people love to be engaged and entertained.  The essence of good content often falls back on a good story.

You can tell a good story if it ….

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web No Comments »

The future of publishing is taking shape on the Web, and it is a mega mall.

The Nieman Marcus of the high end sites is Danilo Black, which designs and produces digital magazines. A co-venture of eminent designers Eduardo Danilo Ruiz of Monterrey, Mexico, and Roger Black of New York, Danilo Black has introduced “dynamic media” for a handful of publications. The showcase is FLYP (pronounced “flip”), which dazzles readers with video, photography, and good writing in an array of subject areas. FLYP has been called the LOOK magazine of the Internet.

FLYP is reportedly put out by fewer than 20 people. They probably could afford to hire more, but according to Danilo Black, the magic in dynamic media is to conceptualize the story concurrently in words and pictures. Not that many people have those skills, although the best print designers have advocated the approach for years. If only more publishers had listened to them, we might see a future for print media.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Marketing and promotion No Comments »

Writing good headlines for the Web is hard work. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains in a recent Alertbox post, successful online heads must be:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web No Comments »

Users typically read only the first couple of words of a website’s links or headlines when they appear in lists, such as search engine results, tables of contents, or product listings, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. In other words, most of the time they simply scan the list.

To learn how well readers comprehend what they’re scanning, Nielsen and his colleagues tested links from 20 websites representing a wide range of sectors: business-to-business, e-commerce, financial institutions, government, health care, and technology. Users were shown the first 11 characters of each link and asked to predict what they’d find if they clicked on it. They were also shown each truncated link mixed into a list of ten and asked to pick the one that would get them some piece of requested information. For example, one of the ten links led to Ann Taylor’s e-commerce site and users were asked to “purchase an Ann Taylor gift certificate.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Marketing and promotion No Comments »

Potential donors know what they want to see on the Website of a worthy cause. Yet fewer than half of nonprofits put that information on their home pages.

Those are among the key findings of a recent study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. If he is right, nonprofits leave a huge amount of money on the table. Today, they receive about 10 percent of their donations online, a figure destined to balloon to over 50 percent by 2020, by Nielsen’s estimate.

Nielsen paired similar nonprofits’ sites and observed how users interacted with each of them as they decided which should receive their donations.  Those observations revealed that by far the most important factor in users’ decisions was whether or not the organization offered a clear explanation of its mission, goals, objectives, and work prominently on its home page.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Industry trends, Marketing and promotion 1 Comment »

Gyutae Park is an Internet entrepreneur and professional search engine optimizer. This post originally appeared, in a longer form, on his blog Winning the Web.

What’s the best frequency that will yield your blog the maximum results?

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Marketing and promotion, Technologies for publications and Web content No Comments »

Dan Kohan, you sly devil.

The proprietor of Sensical Design, a frequent collaborator, took issue with our recent post about Amazon’s wireless reading device, Kindle, and its pro’s and con’s versus traditional print publication. His comment chided us for neglecting the self-publishing option and its many advantages for certain writers. As an example, he cited a classic in the field, the Complete Guide to Successful Publishing by Avery Cardoza (3rd ed. 2003).

What Dan didn’t say is that, if you explore Cardoza’s career, you quickly discover the true secret to successful publishing. It’s finding your niche and taking total control of it. Avery Cardoza, a mathematical wizard from an early age, began building his empire in 1991 with The Basics of Sports Betting and The Basics of Bingo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web 1 Comment »

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
– A.J. Liebling

What can one person accomplish using the Web? It’s astounding.

The American Society of Business Publication Editors proved it in a recent Webinar packed with tips from two pioneers of the do-it-yourself Web world.

These two each started successful Web-based businesses essentially on their own although with support from heavy-hitting collaborators who had come to know them in their earlier 9 to 5 lives. Their message: you—or your small organizational unit—can do what they did. Do it right, and your readers will do our jobs better and see the world more clearly as a result.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Marketing and promotion 5 Comments »

Almost from the beginning, the Web promised cost savings in the time-honored way: labor automation. A recent study by usability authorities at the Nielson Norman Group and summarized on Jakob Nielson’s site under “Design Quality” shows how we all can do more to collect on that promise.

The study examined state Web sites, but the results are broadly applicable. Commissioned by the Pew Center on the States, Being Online is Not Enough: State Elections Web Sites asked whether governments were realizing the most basic of returns on investments in usability: less time on the phone answering questions. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web No Comments »