Blue Oasis, Online Marketing Greenery

Despite all the huss and fuss of the important people trying to cover things up with lies, and more lies, here’s some facts that really refresh your mind. Click on the following links for more.

http://us2.malaysia-today.net/2008/content/view/10901/84/ (source by Malaysia Today)

I’m not sure how and when they’re going to shut the content down, but as for the time being, it’s viewed and released so that all of us Malaysian know what’s going on.

It’s the Hungry Ghost festival soon. It’s a real irony that human are scared of the non-existence while the real monster is living inside everyone of us. It’s just the matter of how far we’re driven by greed. As far as this matter is concern, they ( the so-called important people ) are those worse than anything else that could be imagined.

Thanks for the info sharing. Tribute to RPK, true Malaysian hero.

I saw this in my RSS feed yesterday morning ” CPI for June surges to 7.7% ” and here’s the full story about it.

A consumer price index (CPI) is a measure of the average price of consumer goods and services purchased by households. It is one of several price indices calculated by national statistical agencies. The percent change in the CPI is a measure of inflation. - Source by wikipedia

That’s the last thing i wanted to know about my living environment. CPI for June surges to 7.7%, and most likely it’ll stay there for the following month. There’s been enough financial pressure and stress for prices of almost everything going over the roof. I know i have to stop whining about things that’s happening now and with the speed of lightning. So probably you guys can suggest some ideas or methods or ways or tips and tricks that can ease the financial stress of everyday’s living? For the benefit of all of us of course.

The first U: Useful

Before there was LonelyGirl and before there was NumaNuma, the web was a tool. The money and time that’s gone into it has paid off because people become more intelligent and productive when they find what they’re looking for.

Guess what? The search engines know if your page is lousy. They know if it’s some sort of dead end trap. They know if people see it and then flee, and they know if it’s actually helpful. How? Because they track how often people hit the ‘back’ button. Because they track how many other sites are linking to you. Because they have thousands (literallythousands) of well-paid people looking out for every trick and scam in the book.

Most people online are trying to solve a problem. They want to know something or find something or buy something. They want to meet someone or learn something. A useful lens solves their problem. It gives them a sense of meaning, helps them understand what’s what.

It’s not just Squidoo, of course. Blogs do a great job of solving problems. Consider this great post from Joel Spolsky about Finding Great Developers.

Or take a look at these two lenses. They seem pretty different, but they both get tons of traffic:
http://www.squidoo.com/turkishhaircut
http://www.squidoo.com/HollywoodDolls

The reason they show up in search is simple: They solve a problem. They solve a problem without ego, without distraction and with authority and confidence. And they solve it better than any other page.

That last part is critical. No one cares if your lens is good. They care if it’s great. Irresistible. The one and only best spot online. Not in your opinion of course, but in their opinion.

Here are three more great lenses. http://weirdest.babynames.ever.com , http://www.squidoo.com/make-lemonade, and http://www.squidoo.com/laptopbag. Notice that if you were looking for information on any of these topics, you’d be delighted to find one of these lenses. Same as great blogs, like boingboing.

I’m actually uncomfortable writing this section, because it feels a lot like say, “if you want to succeed, work hard.” It goes against the grain of the rock-star, shortcut, I’m-in-a-hurry-here’s-some-cash American way. Sorry, but every shortcut I find isn’t really a shortcut.

In fact, it takes more time and effort to game the system than it does to just build something useful.

The second U: Updated

Search engines and blogs are now obsessed with recency. The theory is simple: the web moves fast, faster than any medium ever. So recently updated pages are worth more than old pages, all other things being equal. Sure, there are still classic pages like this: http://www.venganza.org/, but in general, updated, fresh pages beat old ones.

This sounds so simple. It’s actually pretty tricky to do.

If, for example, you have 20 or 40 Squidoo lenses, going to each one and updating it regularly can be quite a chore. You need to do it, no doubt about it, but you also need some help. That’s why user-generated content is such a tremendous asset. If you build a page that attracts other contributors, your content stays fresh.

Take, for example, this argument on Scott Adams’ blog about religion: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-atheist-who.html. The framework gets built once, but the ongoing debate inside of the page keeps it fresh and worth returning to. At the extreme, a site like Digg is changing all day, every day, always staying fresh even though the organizers of the site aren’t writing the content.

Many blogs allow people to leave comments. Squidoo will soon expand on this by allowing moderated discussions (we call them Duels) as well by using a Digg-like feature we call Plexo. Plexo allows your visitors to vote links up or down. So, for example, you could build a page about the top ten candidates for president and let your visitors vote their sites up or down all day long. Even if I saw the page last week, I might want to come back this week to see how my favorite candidate is doing.

The third U: Unique

I saved the most important one for last. In the haystack of the web, there’s not a lot of room for me too. If you build a page and use almost no effort, rely on defaults, write as little as you can, find no original links and copy and paste text from Amazon, don’t be at all surprised if you don’t get any traffic. In a world of millions of choices, you don’t deserve any traffic, do you?

The most successful Squidoo lenses, like the most successful blogs and the best stores, are all filled with unique stuff. Remarkable stuff, even. Stuff worth talking about. Links you can’t find anywhere else. Collections of information that actually make a point. Hand-built organization that teaches. Copy that’s worth reading.

“Oh, boy,” you think, “this is a lot of work.” It is, and that’s great news.

It’s great news because it means that for the foreseeable future, the secret of getting tons of organic web traffic has NOTHING TO DO with who you know or how much money you have. It revolves around a simple truth: great pages get more traffic.

One thing that makes a page unique is that it’s the best in the world on that topic. It is uniquely able to save time, solve problems, expose shortcuts and save money for the user. Or at least entertain her.

Most blogs are boring. Most Squidoo lenses are a little thin, to put it gently. Most corporate websites are selfish, cookie-cutter exercises in committee thinking that no sane person would choose as the best in the world. The more shortcuts you take, the longer it takes to get to where you’re going, at least online.

The Hall of Fame

Have you ever visited boingboing.net? It’s one of the five most popular blogs in the world, and no wonder. It’s amazing. Mark Fraunfelder and his colleagues kill themselves every single day. They create remarkable content, stuff that people can’t help but talking about. They deserve every piece of traffic they get.

Here’s a fairly long lens, but Ronni, the creator, has shown up on a regular basis and improved it. Just a few minutes a day, sure, but it adds up. As a result, it rules the search engines, because if you’ve got a problem that this page can solve (starlings!), you’ll be happy you ended up here.

Or consider this single page post about the new Amazon Kindle. Out of more than a million pages in a search on “Kindle terms of service”, this page makes the top three. Why? It doesn’t follow any of the obvious tactics. Instead, it’s merely updated and unique. It has a point of view. It’s worth talking about.

A lens doesn’t have to take a year to create, and it doesn’t have to be very long, either. Here, for example, is a lens on the best cookies ever. It probably took a few hours to build, but once it’s done, it’s done.

I could probably go on for pages and pages but I guess you get the idea. Find the top pages on most topics and you’ll probably discover that those pages are pretty good. Some of them are astoundingly good.

You have the chance to use your blog or your store or Squidoo to build useful, updated, unique pages that people can’t help but talk about. Once you do that, it seems, traffic follows.

Next steps

Google is on a mission to build a better web. That’s why they encouraged blogs, why they hunt down spam pages (even those with Adsense on them) and why they seek out pages that are unique, updated and useful.

I’m thrilled when I see a great Squidoo page, because it means our platform is working, that people are using it not to game the system or make a few bucks, but to contribute something precious to the conversation. You’re building pages that teach or soothe or inspire… stuff that’s in short supply. So thanks.

If you’re convinced, go visit http://www.squidoo.com/lensmaster/dashboard and update your lenses. Add a discussion or one of our new duel modules. Write a few paragraphs about what you wished you’d known before you know what you know now. Add unique collections of links, or annotate the ones you’ve got. Insert plexo lists so your users can vote. The short version: build a page other people want to see.

Don’t worry so much about the search engines. If you embrace the three U’s, they’ll embrace you. And if you see Mark Knopfler, tell him I said hi.

Seth Godin is the founder of Squidoo.com, a popular site that makes it easy for anyone to build a page about a topic they care about. He blogs at sethgodin.typepad.com. If you type Seth into Google, you’ll see what he means. You can find a list of Seth’s books right here.

Three U’s and the Haystack

After you build a page on Squidoo (or a blog, or anywhere else on the web, for that matter) there’s an almost irrestible urge to panic. Panic, because you’ve put in all this work and then you feel sort of powerless. “No one is looking at my page!”

It’s human nature. We want to be noticed, we want our effort to pay off and we hate to fail.

So, the question: How do I get more traffic? It’s not just you. EVERYONE wants to know the answer to this question. They want to know how to get more traffic to their blog, their corporate website, their Squidoo lens. More.

There are plenty of tactics about how to get more traffic to your pages online. Dozens of blog posts and great advice, easy to find. WARNING: None of these tactics work without the three U’s that are covered in this book.

The three U’s? Yes, it’s simple:
Useful
Updated
Unique

The reason you don’t have enough traffic is pretty obvious but still hard for most people to embrace. The web is a haystack, the biggest haystack the world has ever known. The reason that Yahoo and Google are so important is that they help us find what we want in the stack.

And your lens or blog or page or store is just a tiny little needle.

Of course you don’t show up first in Google. I’d be stunned if you did. With a million matches on a typical term, the odds of showing up first are, ready for this… a million to one.

That means that the search engines can be really picky. Sure, there are ways to trick them (for a while) but pretty soon, the average stuff just ends up somewhere in the middle. If you can settle for this, you should, because the alternative requires some effort. This is a really short ebook about three requirements to avoid the middle, three ways to stand out, three ways to make all those other tactics actually work for you.

You can skip these three and spend all your time and your money trying to beat the system. Or, you can embrace the system and put it to work for you. It’s worked for me so far, and I’ve managed to rank highly for dozens of terms for my blog and my Squidoo lenses.

If you spend any time at Google, what you’ll discover is that the people there are universally committed to making the web better. I can’t remember ever talking to anyone at Google (or Yahoo for that matter) who said, “hey, that’s a pretty lousy page, but we make a lot of money on it.”

Superstition

What people do:

When we see a system we don’t understand, we make up stories. Humans used to think that space was filled with ether, that supernatural beings rode chariots through the sky to make the sun rise and that stomach ulcers were caused by pastrami sandwiches. We saw phenomena that we didn’t understand and made up stories around them.

There’s a lot of stories about search. Certain kinds of content, we hear, gets you banned. Other kinds of link structures always work. There are gnomes at Yahoo with a blacklist. Certain political parties are favored… the list goes on and on. We find a few data points to support a theory and suddenly it becomes a religion. We follow habits slavishly, all hoping to please the search gods.

It turns out that it’s a lot simpler than that. The search engines have been really up front about what they seek and what they link to. I thought I’d give my best shot at explaining it.

A few words about Squidoo

If you’re already a Squidoo lensmaster, feel free to skip this little section. If, on the other hand, you found this ebook some other way, a quick explanation:

Squidoo is a platform that lets anyone build a page about anything. Online. For free. In just a few minutes.

Just to be difficult, we call the pages “lenses.” A lens is your viewpoint on a topic. There are lenses on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the best way to get a dragontattoo and a wide ranging page about digital photography. In fact, there are about 300,000 lenses on just about every topic imaginable. Each hand-built by an individual, like you, for free.

Lenses focus attention, drive clicks and even earn royalties. None of that happens, though, if people don’t notice your lens. Hence this ebook… a way to build pages that get noticed and clicked on. It works for blogs and commercial sites too, of course, but I’ll be using Squidoo lenses as my examples. (Hey, it’s my company and my ebook, so there you go.)

- to be continue -

Don’t design your website just for men or women. Instead, you need to know when women think like men. The NextStage CRO explains.

I’d like to start by describing something that often happens when I talk with clients about gender-based marketing. It has to do with knowing whether or not someone visiting a website is male or female and designing information to appeal to one gender primarily or both genders equally.

Men are men and so are women, sometimes — get over it!
There are certain things that happen in the human mind-brain that are gender-based but have nothing to do with physical gender. It may seem difficult to believe, but it’s true. The human body’s largest sex organ is the brain, and most of the time its being sexual has nothing to do with having sex.

One of the points we stress with clients is that gender-based design and marketing has more to do with someone’s neurology — how they think, how they make decisions, what pulls them in and pushes them away — than their physiology. The way I choose clothes is very feminine, behaviorally. If NextStage technology were on a clothing website and I was navigating the site, the technology would report that I’m using the “feminine” aspects of my brain, not that I’m a woman.

However, knowing that I’m “thinking like a woman” gives the client a great deal of power in the design process regardless of what I’m purchasing. I may be purchasing a monster truck, but if I’m using feminine neurology to make that purchase then the marketing material had better address that feminine neurology to make the sale.

Making consumers change their minds
The next piece involves knowing how to get consumers to think the way you need them to think so they’ll take the actions you want them to take. The human brain-mind is remarkably adept at changing what and how it thinks about things. Have you ever met someone who just wouldn’t change their mind about something?

In reality, that’s simply not the case. Those people are constantly changing their minds. They wouldn’t be so adamant about not changing their minds if they didn’t first switch what they were thinking and second strongly decide they didn’t like that new way of thought. Similarly, people who can never make up their minds are actually constantly making decisions and sticking to them. They simply have the ability to quickly identify best case scenarios and align with them.

What we’re talking about goes back to our old friends, Towards and AwayFrom. The examples here are of people who are AwayFrom (won’t change their minds) and Towards (can’t make up their minds). Normally it’s much easier to work with the Towards kind of people. You can find out what they like, point them towards it, and your work is done. Not so here. This type of Towards behavior means you have to keep pointing them in the direction you want them to go.

AwayFrom behavior, in this case, is the easier strategy to make profitable. Someone comes to your site or booth or whatever and seems very adamant that they’re not interested. The simplest, best and easiest way to start them down a sales path is to ask “What could we change to make you interested?”

This is easy to do on a website and take the form of options such as “Choose Color,” “Choose Fabric,” or “Choose Style.”

Take-away No. 1: If your site isn’t doing the business you’d like, and you’re presenting products without options at the start, put the options up front. Chances are the majority of your visitors are AwayFrom thinkers and providing them options at the start allows them to explore without (as far as they’re concerned) making up their minds.

A minor variation of this method works with the Towards folks, those who can’t make up their mind therefore never complete a sale.

Take-away No. 2: If your site isn’t doing the business you’d like and you’re presenting products with options at the start, start with an optionless product with a link that starts them down the option selection process. Put one option per page. Too many options will stop these thinkers dead in their tracks because, like a crow with a bright-shiny object, they’ll start playing with the options and not deciding which one to go with.

Men move Towards, women AwayFrom
Yes, this is a great generalization, but it’s not true in all gender-based things. Fortunately, it can be a safe generalization that is often true when it comes to designing sites and marketing material that will be used by both genders.

Let me give you an example of an automotive retailer site that also works in print. The goal is to have the visitor purchase a new vehicle. Place an image in the upper part of the screen or print piece. The left of the image is the owned vehicle, the right of the image is the desired or target vehicle. Just right of center is the couple or an individual facing the desired vehicle and walking towards it.

The web’s media capabilities allow the message to get across very well because the couple or individual can be seen actually moving towards the target vehicle. In a static image that implies walking have the right hand swinging towards the target vehicle, the left hand swinging towards the owned vehicle.

Side note: this works well in both the U.S. and Canada, with the exception of British Columbia, but less well in northern Europe with the exception of England (and I mean “England,” not the U.K., not the Republic of Ireland); it works very well in Italy and Spain and poorly if at all in India, China and Japan. Alas, we’re not monitoring enough sites in South America to provide real data or suggestions.

Summary
Gender-based marketing is only gender specific in certain ways.

Women have the ability to think “like a man” far more often and far more easily than men can think “like a woman” (sorry, guys). This gives marketing designers leverage and may account for why so many sites have a male gender bias (based on our latest research).

In all cases, the overriding take-away is simple: know your audience before you design for it. The more you know about your audience the more you can direct them to act as you wish.

For example, NextStage was recently asked to help a financial institution with its website. We asked for all their promotional material: traditional materials like print, TV and radio, as well as links to radio, TV and print media websites in their target areas, plus links to malls. That’s the sort of data you need in order to get a 360 degree understanding of your target audiences and the environments that influence them.

Not having a 360 degree understanding of your audience puts your marketing efforts at risk.

Final note
This will be my last iMedia column for a while. You can keep up with NextStage’s and my research, applications, trainings and appearances by signing up for The NextStage Irregular, a newsletter I’m sending out.

Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He was recently selected as a senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.

Testimonials hurt you when people don’t think they’re real. Anything that sounds vague or cliche can smack of insincerity.

Three traits of strong testimonials :

To recap:

Be specific. Use testimonials that talk about specific benefits or personal situations. Avoid vague testimonials.

Overcome objections. Use testimonials that bring up objections, where customers admit being skeptical. These are the most powerful testimonials out there.

Context is everything. Make sure your testimonials address the questions your customers are asking at various stages of the buying process. (If your customer data’s unclear, just ask your sales/business development people. They can recite common questions in unison.)

Just remember, the only thing better than saying the right thing at the right time is when your customers do it for you–and better.

This great article shared by Eisen Lee. Written by Holly Buchanan.

Whether your site is lead-generation or retail, you probably have a form somewhere. Here are some basic things you can do to optimize your forms.

1.	Indicate which fields are required by using asterisks next to these required fields. Ask yourself if the non-required fields offer enough value. If they don’t, remove them from the form. This could potentially make all fields a requirement — and if that’s the case, the asterisks would be overkill — which brings us to our next point.
2.	Only have them fill in required fields. Asking for too much information on a web form is like proposing marriage on the first date. We would all like to know our customer’s age, work title, phone number and address, but if you don’t absolutely need it, then remove it from the form. This will make the form shorter and less likely to frustrate the impatient, fast-paced visitor who may not feel comfortable exposing their personal info. Don’t let this be the reason why visitors are dropping off.
3. Clarify what you expect them to do. Doostang gives the visitor a dialog bubble explaining each field when the visitor clicks to fill out a field. This removes any potential confusion as to what information is being requested and could lead to a reduction in errors taking place if a field is filled out incorrectly.
4.	Offer reassurances when asking for personal information. Your visitors are concerned about privacy and security issues. You can offer a link to a privacy and security page so that the visitor can click to read and gain confidence.
5.	Clearly state what the visitor will get by filling out the form, and do it at the very beginning of the page. Tell them what the benefits are. There should be no question as to what they’ll expect once they fill the form out.
6.	Don’t ask people to submit. Call to action buttons should clearly state the action they’re about to take. Use colors and shading that make the button stand out effectively and, please, try to not use the word “submit” — it’s generic and misleading geek-speak.
7.	Offer contact information somewhere on this page and/or in the top-right corner of the site (on every page). Give the visitor a phone number and a “Contact Us” link. If they don’t feel comfortable filling out the form, persuade them to call and speak with you directly.

I found this very interesting articles to share.
Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes