Conversion Matters

It really fucks up the writing editor.  I wondered what was going on just now…

I’m off to Europe for a month next week, and consequently I’ve been looking for travel insurance and it’s really the first time I’ve had to look for insurance - Aside from student insurance for uni!I figured it would be pretty pointless searching for ‘cheap travel insurance’ or something similar as all I’d get would be a load of hyper-optimised crap.Consequently I thought I’d give the aggregators a shot. I tried MoneySuperMarket, confused and something called SquareMouth.

SquareMouth

SquareMouth, weird name by the way, where who I looked at first. It was super quick getting my quote but they were ridiculously expensive? One was £307.80 ?!?! That’s almost as much as my month long interrail ticket!

So they ruled themselves out instantly.

The site reminded me of an OS Commerce site or something too, maybe a directory, I’m not entirely sure but it feels pretty dated.

Confused

I was pretty annoyed with the confused website.

Firstly, the quote form was in a popup. How unnecessary is that? I’ve got about 50 tabs open. I LIKE having it all in one window.

They also insisted that I had to give them my email address, “no we’re not spammers, honest gov”. Yeh so I’ll be expecting lots of ‘reminders’ about their ‘great offers’ and other crap.

The email thing was particularly annoying as the other sites I looked at didn’t ask for my address.

Their tab indexing was all over the place! Yeh so, maybe you should try tabbing through your quote forms next time you change the order of the questions…

Some people have a phobia of using the mouse - it’s trackpad at most here…

MoneySuperMarket

Onto the most offensive site but also the one, ironically I’m likely to get my travel insurance from.They have the most god-awful quote button I’ve ever seen. Did they get a 3 year old chipmunk in on work experience week? I could have puked a better button myself. It’s like < blink >BUY OUR QUOTE< /blink > but worse.

Check it out:

These pictures don’t actually do the badness enough justice, I can assure when it’s flashing every half a second it’s the worst eye sore.

I can’t believe that such a massive, successful(?) company can employ designers/project managers who think that kind of button is decent and is going to help increase conversions.

What the fuck were they thinking? Have they just come back from 1999?! They might as well add a background .wav file or something too..

All things said and done though, their quotes were by far the cheapest and they’ll probably be getting my business.

Inspired by a post over here I present 500 keywords people have used to find this site for your general amusement and amazement!

adam taylor
setting up a blog
conversation matters
harry potter porn
adding google analytics tracking to 1shoppingcart
the big social media marketing myth
1shoppingcart google analytics
google analytics tutorial
conversion matters
google ecommerce
setting up google analytics
facebook dying
google analytics 1shoppingcart
google analytics ecommerce tracking
tesco compare
checkout conversion rates
google ecommerce tracking
seo trends
tesco compare advert
google analytics utm:t
harrypotterxxx
harrypotterxxx.com
adam taylor facebook
beginners guide to making money online
facebook is dying
google analytics howto
http://www.shepetivka.org.ua
is facebook dying
setting up blog
starting a search engine
harry potter porn”"
analytics _udn site
exclude social media filter
google analytics e-commerce tutorial
google analytics ecommerce
google analytics ecommerce tutorial
google e-commerce tracking
relative vs absolute links
tesco price comparison advert
adam taylor”"
checkout conversion rate
(more…)

I bashed up a quick mad-lib perl class for use in some future scripts. If you don’t know what mad-lib is it’s basically a function that when given an input such as us:we:i:them:she:he will select one. Given a whole block of text with multiple parts to be ‘mad-libbed’ it can crank out many chunks of readable, unique content.

#!/usr/bin/perl
package madlib;
use Moose;

## Fields for madlib objects
has 'phrase' => (isa => 'Str', is => 'rw');
has 'debug' => (isa => 'Bool', is => 'rw', default => '0');

## Function to select a random word from the phrase
sub madlib() {
my $self = shift;
if ($self->debug) { print "Phrase = ".$self->phrase."\n"; }
my @words = split(/:/,$self->phrase);
my $length = @words;
if ($self->debug) { print "Length of \@words = ".$length."\n"; }
my $rand = int(rand($length));

return($words[$rand]);
}

return 1;

=head1 NAME
madlib - A class to perform 'madlib' function.

=head1 SYNOPSIS
use madlib;
my $object = madlib->new();
$object->phrase("some:phrase:to:madlib");
$object->debug(1) # to get some debugging output
print $object->madlib();

=head1 DESCRIPTION
This class provides the ability to 'madlib' a phrase/string to create unique content variations.

=head2 Methods
=over 12
=item C
Returns a new madlib object.
=item C
Returns a random word from the specified phrase.
=back	

=head1 AUTHOR
Adam Taylor - http://www.conversion-matters.co.uk.

=cut

Won’t do much on its own but used within some other systems it could be quite useful. I’m thinking directory submission, social bookmarking etc..

(Yes it displays wonky; apologies…)

I was in the shower and an idea popped into my head, not something I’ve heard explicitly talked about before. I can only assume this is due to one of the following:

1. It could be a completely rubbish idea
2. It may be being used by sneaky people who don’t want it revealed
3. It could be a unique and creative idea not thought of before (unlikely but one can dream.. ha!)

Eitherway, I don’t have the required skills to test the technique so I’ll just talk about it and let other people decided whether it’s awful or not.

I saw a tweet by Lyndoman about a piece of link bait he’d written on the subject of credit cards that hit the front page of digg.

Then my brain went on a random path of thoughts, something like:

‘eh front page digg -> wonder how much he makes -> maybe he should bait and switch or use social media to promote his own affiliate sites; could make some nice extra dough -> hey, how about bait and cloak?’

Introducing Bait and Cloak

I imagine someone has already thought of this idea but it’s just possible that it has never been executed; the time and effort required to pull it off would probably off-put many black hats who might be tempted to try it.

What’s the frigging idea Adam?!

Everyone’s heard of bait and switch I assume: essentially writing link-bait and then 301 redirecting to another page. The problem is, if people notice, some of them get a bit pissy with you.

The bait-cloak idea’s simple:

• Start a blog
• Write quality link bait for 3-6 months on various topics: credit cards, gambling, travel etc.
• Start redirecting the post to highly targeted, niche affiliate offers to googlebot (based on IP of course) and to people who arrive via Google.

After many successful front-pages, the domain should have built enough trust and authority to be able to rank for these offers.

Also this way people visiting from ‘citations’, or from Digg/Stumble etc. still see the linkbait but others see the affiliate offers.

Someone would no doubt notice eventually, but if you keep it quite niche/long tail you could probably keep this going for quite a while (long enough to turn a profit I reckon).

Give it a go Lyndoman or Graywolf - I know you love the link-bait and the shadier side of SEO ;).

Good idea/rubbish idea? Your thoughts welcome as ever..

A fair few weeks ago I wanted to see if I could still code any Perl, which I’m glad to say [I think] I can, so I decided to port a little php script to Perl. For some reason I can’t access the original post/script anymore, but it was deStone’s delicious referral spammer - if you can get the link to work, your computer is better than mine!

So all it does is load up a list of keywords, go through each of the associated tag pages and then visit each site with any refer URL you want to promote.

It’s pretty pointless, I can’t imagine too many webmasters still look at old school stats packages, but I could be wrong.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

&main();

sub main {
	my $throttle = 10;
	my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
	$mech->agent_alias( 'Windows IE 6' );

	## get our list of keywords from the dictionary file
	open (KEYWORDS, '/Users/adam/Documents/Perl/dictionary.txt');
	my @tags;
	while () {
		my $tag = $_;
		chomp($tag); push(@tags,$tag);
	}
	close (KEYWORDS);

	my $url;
	my $result;

	## grab del.icio.us url for each tag
	foreach my $tag (@tags) {
		print “$tag\n”;
		$url = “http://del.icio.us/tag/” . $tag . “?setcount=100″;
		print “$url\n”;
		$mech->get( $url );
		$result = $mech->content;
		&process($result, $mech);
		sleep($throttle);
	}
}

## scrape del.icio.us for urls
sub process {
	my $result = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my @urls;
	my @links = $mech->links();
	foreach my $link (@links) {
		if ($link->url() =~ /^http/g && $link->url() !~ /del.icio.us/g) {
			#print $link->url() . “\n”;
			push(@urls,$link->url());
		}
	}

	&ref_spam(@urls);
}

## hit up each site with our url to promote as the referer
sub ref_spam {
	my @urls = $_[0];
	my $mech = $_[1];

	my $promote_url = “http://www.test.com”;
	$mech->add_header( Referer => $promote_url );

	foreach my $url (@urls) {
		$mech->get($url);
	}

}

[I’m aware it displays a bit messed up - you’ll have to deal with it.]

This no longer works for me ‘cos I’m in halls and would need to add proxy support, but I think it worked ;)!

Play around with it if you want; I’m not advocating any particular uses for it or being massively helpful on how to run it - deliberately.

I’m sure it could be improved upon - to use proxies, threads or made more OO but I only hacked it up to check I could still code Perl.

Here’s the dictionary file and the perl script (rename to .pl).

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, feel like saving myself until I have something unique to say, anyway I need a job in July so I thought I’d pimp myself out on my blog for a start.

So briefly:

I spent a year as a ‘Junior Web Developer’ at a UK search conversion agency in London, where I was taught Perl, MySQL, Linux etc.

I’m currently a first year undergraduate student at the University of Durham studying Computer Science where we’re being taught Java, SQL, computer systems and lots of maths.

I’m also interested in analytics, blogging, social media and search engine optimisation.

I can work in either London, Newcaslte/Durham or around the Bath area.

I’m not hugely hopefully about getting a decent job just for a month (especially just through my blog) but we’ll see. It can only be for July because I’m at university until the end of June and then I’m going to go interrailing around Europe in August.

If anyone wants anymore information just drop me an email using the contact form.

I just spent £10 on magazines - quite excessive for a poor student! I bought .net as well as a few others because a featured article caught my eye - ‘The hottest SEO trends. Starring: Google’s Matt Cutts, SEO Guru Danny Sullivan…’ (not to mention there was something about ‘Porn 2.0′ - porn and SEO, could you ask for more..?!).

Anyway, what do they think are the hottest SEO trends.? It’s pretty standard stuff really:

• Matt talks about social media being important and therefore content needs to be interesting. He also thinks in the future blackhats are going to become (h/cr)ackers - I assume he means inserting links maliciously via XSS and other exploits.
• Danny says that “having a blog is very important”. He also mentions the importance of social media for increase brand awareness and backlinks.
• Links. Links are also important. And you can help boost your PageRank (who cares?) by submitting to geographic or industry specific directories.
• Glossary pages, forums and YouTube marketing can also help.
• Don’t rely on automated SEO tools.
• ‘Ensure your site is uploaded to Google Sitemaps’.

What not to do

• Don’t cram your text into one page
• Don’t focus on too many keywords
• Don’t be insular

Okay so it really wasn’t that interesting or ground breaking but thanks anyway Mark Buckingham, gave me a break from my assignments.

I guess if you want to read the whole article you better buy this months .net but I wouldn’t suggest going out of your way to find it.

A few weeks ago I received an email asking if I wanted to review a new internet marketing product, The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link] and I figured I may as well.

Essentially the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is an informational product designed to teach a beginner about internet marketing. It covers a wide variety of topics and is quite a comprehensive package.

It was created by the people at Purple Internet Marketing a British internet marketing company.

What’s included in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan?

In the box you get four workbooks, four DVDs, eight CDs, a poster and a tshirt.

What does the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan cover?

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan is broken down into four main phases:

1. Website Structure - this covers the planning and creating of your website: keyword research, site architecture etc
2. Automation & Launch - this is about blogging, building email lists, and using press releases and pay per click to market the launch of your website/product.
3. Broaden Your Base - this phase is pretty much all about link building: directories, forums, articles etc. Pretty standard stuff.
4. Broaden Your Horizon - the focus in this phase is social media, widgets and other marketing techniques.

Is the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan any good?

In a word: yes. The DVDs are essentially a video of a training seminar where David Bain is teaching a group of business men and women about internet marketing. It is slickly produced. There are no wobbly cameras or dodgy audio in the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan and it covers a lot of topics.

The target audience will be absolute beginners to online marketing as it is all fairly straight forward stuff that you could easily learn from blogs and forums but it’s convenient to have it all in one easily accessible format.

The workbooks are transcripts of the DVD with space for writing notes. Which is nice for reinforcing what you’ve watched on the DVD.

There were a few things I thought were a bit odd about it, for example, there is quite a long section about wordpress and blogging which goes as specific as to discus plugins yet fails to mention plugins I see as being essential, like the All-In-One SEO Pack. Also the whole thing felt not very cutting edge, information wise. It seems to be all the same things that have been said over and over: create great content, submit to some directories, write some articles, start a blog, participate in forums social media…. etc etc but I guess you could argue not much has changed?

Summary

If you’re new to internet marketing and want a convenient, easily accessible introduction to the field you could do far worse than purchase the 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan [aff link], which I should mention is retailing for £399, however, if you already have an idea about internet marketing and are reading some of the top blogs then you’ll be fine without it.

I may have suggested you should consider Aaron Wall’s SEO Book but he has recently changed his business model and is no longer offering the ebook.

The 26 Week Internet Marketing Plan probably fills a void in the market, not replacing SEO Book, but offering an alternative, which, money-wise, is probably more viable than something like Internet Marketing Ninjas (although they’re all slightly different products).

Photo Credit.

Every other day there is a post about the top 10 webmaster/SEO/webdeveloper [insert person here] toolbars/addons etc. that people use and it does, admittedly, get a bit boring. However, I thought I’d quickly share with you what I have and why because I actually find them rather useful.

Firefox Addons I couldn’t live without!

I have a few addons which I don’t really use but here are the ones that are actually useful:

• Web Development
  • Web Developer Toolbar - this has soooo many features that it is an essential toolbar for any webmaster or geek interested in web development. Think it was one of the first firefox addons I installed.
  • Firebug - similar to the web developer toolbar this is another one that is really useful for web developers/designers, especially if you do a lot of JavaScript. It is a really powerful tool if you learn to use it properly.
  • Cookie Editor - again probably more useful for the web developers out there but never-the-less worthy of a mention. It allows you to quickly edit/delete cookies.
  • IE Tab - this is pretty simple. Allows you to render a page as internet explorer would without needing to leave firefox. Really, really useful.
  • Live HTTP Headers - allows you to see all the individual header requests, status codes etc. as you load a page. Very useful.
  • Colorzilla - so you’ve just setup a new template and are heading off to set up some blended adsense units but have no idea what the colour codes are on the site? Well this handy plugin has an eyedrop whatsit thing that allows you to get the code for any colour on a web page. Great time saver!
• SEO
  • Search Status - this is quite handy, shows PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete rank as well as allowing you to check a load of things about a page.
  • SEO Quake - turn this on to see lots of useful information about a domain/page when searching in Google etc.
  • User Agent Switcher - want to see what Googlebot sees? Then use this plugin to easily change your user agent.
• Social Media
  • Stumpleupon - a social site that’s fun, interesting and a great time waster!
  • Del.ico.us - don’t lose that interesting page; tag it with del.icio.us instead.
  • Social Media For Firefox - the concept behind this is great: shows you how many times a page has been dugg/stumbled/redd/del.icio.us’d. From my experience, doesn’t appear to be entirely accurate but it should still help with working out what to submit where.
  • Twitterfox - this makes keeping up and replying to tweets dead easy, they just popup while your browsing.
• Misc.
  • Down Them All - ever wanted to download all the .jpgs/.mp3s etc on a page quickly? This addon allows you to do just that. I think it supports regex too!

Web apps/sites I can’t live without!

• Facebook - yes some people don’t like it but it’s undoubtedly my most visited website (probably because I’m a student..)
• Google Reader - couldn’t live without this, it’s how I keep up to date on all blogs I read.
• Twitter - ok so I used to not see the point in Twitter but it’s actually really good for having short conversations, sharing links etc. You’re definitely missing out if you don’t use it.
• Stumbleupon and del.icio.us - you may have guessed from the addons above that I really like Stumbleupon and del.icio.us. I use Stumbleupon because I find it interesting and fun and I’m trying to build up more of a power user account there because I feel it’s the social sharing/bookmarking website I enjoy the most and one I actually waste an hour or so a day on! I use del.icio.us because it’s useful to have a central repository of all my bookmarks. I mostly just tag interesting blog posts that I’ve read but will probably forget about.

Applications I couldn’t live without!

There is only really one application I would say I can’t live without and that is: Launchy. What is it? Well it’s a free launcher application so basically you hit Alt-Space and a little box pops up and you start typing iTun.. and then you can load iTunes. Much quicker than the start menu/desktop etc. Massive time saver.

Actually that is a lie, I couldn’t live without MSN Messenger either. Everyone I know (pretty much) uses MSN Messenger. With a mix of messenger/facebook it pretty much negates the need for e-mail amongst my close friends.