Betsey Kendall writes: “The Web Show was the first place I ever saw you without your bodyguard so I patiently waited in line to ask you a question but then I got interrupted by a phone call.  When I turned around, you were gone! We are struggling with our project list.  You said in your seminar this is a common problem and that ‘90% of your stuff should be axed.’  Can you talk a little bit more about that? Your point about emails was VERY well taken by my team.”

Hi Betsey –

My bodyguard?  You must mean my friend, Cristina.  Yeah, she’s tough.  Not physically. She can’t hurt a flea but that one-eyebrow-raise of hers?   VERY. SCARY.

Glad you took my point about emails seriously.  It blows my mind how many people spend 10-15 hours on a single thrust email, moving things back and forth two pixels – COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME.  If you’re spending more than a couple hours on any email, you need to rethink your strategy.

As for the axing….  Everyone and their brother – whether they have a full-blown ecommerce site or a blog — has a HUGE list of things that they want to do.  My experience is that the majority of that stuff is not going to make a difference — nor will it ever really get done.  So the best thing to do is put your list into a spreadsheet and then rank it.  (At Eight By Eight, these are one of the most popular things we do for clients.)

So, for example, let’s look at one item:

AREA:                                   Improve product detail pages

INITIATIVE:                  Develop recently-viewed items banner (so users know what they’ve looked at)

PRIORITY:                        1 (we rank things 1-3 with 1 being the highest)

EASE TO CHANGE:     1 (we rank things 1-3 with 1 being the easiest)

COST:                                    L (we use high, medium and low)

ROI:                                       M (we use high, medium and low)

TIMING:                            S (we use short and long-term & we define the days associated with each, for example, short-term in this case might be 120 days)

We may also add internal time, date completed and who is responsible.

After everything is put on the list, we sort by rank and then the appropriate (ease to change, cost and ROI) field(s.)

This sounds boring as Hell but it’s one spreadsheet and it makes things super easy and VERY efficient.  All the low ROI items?  You guessed it.  They get sorted right off the list!  And for most companies, that accounts for about 90% of the stuff they want to do!

Is this system perfect?  No.  But it works.  A lot of web stuff never gets done (i.e., improving your internal text search or testing email pop-ups) because the project itself seems too big.  So, we take care of the easy fixes like changing colons to semi-colons that Customer Service is nattering about instead.  Sadly, even though that kind of stuff seems productive, it usually doesn’t result in more sales or leads.

Have a question about your project list?  Jot it in the comments below or send me an email to info@amyafrica.com.

The other day, my schedule got jacked and I ended up working out at my chi-chi-la-la gym in the evening.

This is the kind of athletics club where the women spend an hour BEFORE they break a sweat (cough) applying fresh make-up and readjusting their barely-there string tops and Spandex low-rise shorts.   (It would irk me except that none of the bimbelinas use the free weights side of the room so it’s basically estrogen free and sans drama. Just the way I like it.)

On this particular evening, there was only one 40-ish year old female along with her trainer on the side I frequent.  The woman had more plastic than a Mattel fashion doll and was wearing a faux cashmere get-up that made her stand out like a sore thumb in this crowd.  (Read: when you work out here it’s assumed that you’re available, you needn’t plaster JUICY all over your flipping a**.)

Barbie (not her real name) was being politely reprimanded by Ken (her trainer’s real name) that she was being unreasonable about the speed in which she was seeing results.

“A pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of fat” he exclaimed rather righteously.

Ahh, the lies personal trainers tell their clients so they don’t get fired, I thought. 

Yes, a pound of muscle take up less space than fat but last I knew, a pound weighed a pound, no matter what it was comprised of – water, muscle, fat…

As Barbie pouted and contemplated the complex math equations she had been presented, I reflected on a conversation I’d had earlier in the week.  The guy was very, very, very smart and based on the questions he was asking, I knew he was being bamboozled by his internet marketing consultant who was helping him with his platform upgrade.   It’s no secret that most of the consultants in this industry take a percentage of the action, so they often have a vested interest in the packages and add-ons their clients use.  (For the record, we don’t take a penny.) 

He had been told an internet consultant’s lie – on part with Ken’s personal trainer lie – that it’s best and most efficient to do everything at once.  “Saves time!  Saves money!  It’s more efficient! ”  Many consultants cry.

On what planet? I ask.  The one where a pound of muscle weighs more than a pound of fat?

Whether you are a blogger or a multi-billion ecommerce company, the rules are the same.  You need a good foundation to have a great house.  

The key to the most successful internet companies is that they focus on the things that are important to the user.  They know what they need and what they don’t.  And, most of all, they constantly read and react to their results.   

I understand what Ken was trying to tell Barbie – that as she was building more muscle, she may not have the weight loss that she was expecting short-term. But, in the long-term, she’d catch up because muscle burns more calories than fat.

That’s the same thing that happens with your website.  If you have a solid foundation, you will make more money than one with a weak foundation and a lot of bells and whistles.   Yes, the new forms of dynamic personalization are very sexy but if your checkout or lead forms suck, it’s not going to make a damn bit of difference.

What things make up a good foundation?  Easy.  Solid entry pages; the perfect checkout/lead forms; good navigation (including text search function); and aggressive e-mail programs (thrusts and especially triggers).   Those are your muscle.  Do you have those elements perfected?  Or do you need to work on strengthening them?

One of my clients e-mailed me this quote the other day.  He found it on Adam Kmiec’s blog and thought of me because he knows how much I LOVE RAIN (especially HUGE thunderstorms and puddlejumping with the terrorists) and he felt it summed up a visit I’d had with his team the previous week.

The nanosecond our meeting started, his folks started passing me their individual Wish Lists.  Pages and pages of paper with things that they wanted to do on their next resdesign.

Over eighteen hundred items (and at least one dead tree) full of things they’ve been wanting to but haven’t done yet.

Shockingly, some of the items had been on the list for over two years.

Two years?

In internet years, that’s at least three lifetimes!

Here’s the thing…. 

The internet is not paper.  (Thankfully.)  What you put on your website today is not permanent.  You can change it any time you like.  Right this very minute in fact.

Yes, I realize that everyone and their brother already knows that but do companies act like it?  Not.  So.  Much.

The majority of folks are still treating the online world like the offline world – they put together a big list of stuff for the next major website revision and then they work to that specific date six months out.  Just like they would a catalog or a television commercial.

Or, in other cases, a couple changes snowballs to become a website overhaul, not a website refresh.   The screaming girls get ignored in favor of typo changes on pages that are never viewed.  People move at the speed of a bicycle, not at the speed of light.  It’s a problem and it impacts your bottom line.

You need to learn to dance in the rain.

The company I was visiting had almost 2,000 items for their next relaunch?  Nobody, and I do mean nobody, is ever going to get 2,000 items done and done correctly in a website relaunch.  It doesn’t happen and frankly, it shouldn’t.  If you have 2,000 items to do, it means you don’t know how to prioritize and prioritization is THE key to your web success.   (It’s sort of like dressing for the weather. You don’t want to wear a bikini in a blizzard, right?)

The storm never really passes on the internet because the internet is THE storm.  It’s never going to be over.  (And if you’re clueless enough to think it is, tell me what you’re doing with mobile, ok?)

My suggestion to you….

Throw away this whole “complete redesign” process.  Start looking at daily and weekly changes, not changes six months out.  

Focus on what’s important.  Not to you but to your users.  Figure out what they want, what they need and how you can better give it to them.  All too often these things on your wish list are just that, YOUR wishes, not your users’ wants and needs. 

And above all, measure what matters.

Valerie Vince-Vaughn writes: “My boss heard you speak and now he is your biggest fan. Personally I think you are way too against social media to be respected. Do you think it’s your age?  Your bio says you’ve been doing this for a long time.  Maybe you’re just out of touch?”

Dear Valerie –

Out of touch?  I’d say that hyphenating a name like Vince-Vaughn may be a case of pots and kettles, but there’s a benefit to being ancient, one of which is you better learn to ignore the idiots.

There’s no doubt that I am a social media skeptic.

Yes, I endorse things like marketing with videos, using ratings and reviews, and even advertising on Facebook  but from a social media purist (cough) perspective, I imagine I’d be perceived as against it.

Why?  I am a realist.

I know that not all forms of social media are created equal. 

Nor is social media right for everyone.  For example, if your site completely sucks and you couldn’t convert your own mother, driving a bunch of traffic isn’t necessarily going to make you an overnight success.

For the past couple years, social media “experts” (most are about as skillful as a surgeon with tremors) have been telling us that social media is the second coming.  According to many of them, it’s right for everyone, every time, everywhere and if you don’t jump on the latest and greatest sharing site immediately (hello Quora), you’ll be sucked up by the blackhole of death in exactly 2.2 seconds.

Here’s the thing….  There are pieces and parts of social media that will work for you but they will NOT all work for you, no matter how much money you put into them.

Take one of my closest friends for example.  He is a mucky-muck VP at a $500+ million company.  Last year, he spent over $500K on social media with three different outside consultants before he hired one that told him exactly what I’ve been telling him (for free) all along.  Their audience wasn’t using Twitter or Facebook.  Sure they had over 5,000 fans and followers between those two properties, but very few of them were active.  (When they really dug deep into their stats, they found that only 17% of their Twitter followers tweeted more than once every two weeks.)

You can’t scream at a rose to force it to bloom.  Well, you can, but you’ll waste a whole lot of time screaming and it’s an exercise in futility. 

A rose blooms when it’s ready.

If you want to use social media efficiently, figure out where your customers are.   Don’t determine where you want them to be – find out where they are now.   Talk to them there – on their turf.

If they’re not actively using Facebook, no matter how much you try to promote Facebook through your e-mails and sharing tags on your site, it’s not going to make a whisker of difference.  Yes, you may increase your like/follower numbers but last I knew, those weren’t accepted at financial institutions.

On the flip side, you can decide that you don’t care about your users at all and just develop your social media program for the SEO benefits.  (And yes, I am a VERY big fan of this particular strategy.)  Michael Gray (@graywolf on Twitter) recently had an interesting blog post about this and just today,  Jennifer Sable Lopez (@jennita on Twitter) wrote the Social Media Marketer’s SEO Checklist on the SEOmoz blog.   Both are worth reading.

So Valerie Vince-Vaughn, am I dated?  Perhaps.  But so is money.

Tim Seidel says “We’re a mid-sized e-commerce business ($135 million) that sells both B2B and B2C. 2010 wasn’t a great year for us.  In fact, it was terrible.  Therefore, we are going to need to cut our already-miniscule marketing budget for 2011.  What would you suggest we spend our monies on? Should we spend it on driving traffic or fixing our abysmal site?”

Thanks for writing Tim.  

I’ve been getting this question a lot over the last three weeks.  Seems like a lot of folks are struggling with this very same issue. 

You need to study YOUR analytics but my feeling, from looking at hundreds of companies last year, is that the majority of companies get more than enough traffic, they just don’t know how to effectively convert it.  If you know me, this isn’t “news” per se – I’ve maintained this sentiment for a few years now – but 2010 seemed like it got worse.  Much worse.

Look at your traffic carefully – be sure to separate the different types of traffic you get into buckets – you’ll want to pay special attention to the direct/no referrer traffic versus the other traffic (which should also be broken down into major categories: PPC, organics, affiliates, thrust e-mail, triggered e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.)

Next, look at the conversion rate of each segment.  Contrary to popular belief, conversion rate is not an end-all-be-all stat.  In fact, it’s very dangerous to focus solely on conversion.  (If you want to increase your conversion, you can block/eliminate all your garbage traffic.  Your conversion will go up but your bottom line won’t necessarily follow.)  With that said, you’ll want to know what’s working and what isn’t.  For example, if you have an Ordering from a Catalog? section on your site and it’s not converting at 75% or more, you have problems in River City.   (Remember, every segment of your traffic will likely convert differently so you’ll need to determine what kind of traffic you need more of and what you need less of to improve your business.)

Last, you’ll need to figure out if you need more traffic if you need more conversion.  Every company has different benchmarks for success but it’s pretty easy to find out what will work best for you.  Look at how much more traffic you’d need to make your new (read: ideal) sales goals and then weigh that against how much you’d need to improve your conversion to make the same sales goals.  It’s all a numbers game.

If your traffic is there but your conversion isn’t, look at where you’re missing the boat.  Are you losing people in the checkout or are you not getting enough adoption-to-cart?  Adoption-to-cart (ATC) is one of the most important stats you can measure, yet very few people do it.  You want to know how many people are putting stuff in their basket.  (If you are in a lead generation business, ATC is critical for you too.  Instead of folks putting stuff in their baskets, you’ll want to look at how many people start filling out the lead forms for your white papers, webinars, etc.)

If the traffic isn’t there to support your goals, it’s not worth it to overhaul your site, no matter how “abysmal” it is.  Granted, you may want to do some tweaking, just stay away from complete redesigns.

Best of luck in 2011.

What does leading-edge look like?  How about state of the art?  Innovative?

How do you see streamlined?  Pioneering? Revolutionary?  Integrated approach?   

***

Yesterday I blogged about the old brain (aka the brain that buys) being visually oriented.  I got several e-mails (yes, e-mails – I get less than 1% of my response in the comments) defending words and how important they are.  Not surprisingly, these e-mails weren’t from copywriters but from SEO’s but I digress…

There’s no doubt that words are important.  I am not debating that.  Words are critical.  However, it’s important to note that, by all accounts, language was “invented” approximately 40,000 years ago.  Written language came about 10,000 years ago.  No matter what your theory of evolution is, you know that the brain has been around for millions.  (Over 450 million to be precise.) 

The old brain – which is also the brain that makes your buying decisions — sees things in pictures.  It’s not qualified to process written language.  Yes, it does it but it’s s-l-o-w — and words – especially complicated ones – make it even s-l-o-w-e-r by pushing the decoding process onto the new brain, which makes you want to “think about it” instead of act.

With that said, words ARE important because that’s how people find you in Google, not to mention how they find stuff on your site.

So, what’s the #1 key to online wordsmithing?

Technically, there are two.  First, is the word connect.   The second is truly one of the biggest secrets to your success and that’s to write in pictures.

At the beginning of this post, I asked you what a bunch of words looked like.  I pulled all of them from the home page of a heavily trafficked B2B site.  Frankly, it’s almost impossible to picture any of those words.    Why?  Because they’re not tangible.  The buying brain likes tangible words (red hat, for example.)

So, after you write your sales copy, edit it.  Eliminate – or at least reduce – the words that would make you “think,” thus slowing down the sales process.  Your users — and their actions — will thank you.