Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 27
January 7, 2015
10 Ways to Generate More Leads With Lead Magnets
With tens of thousands of businesses diverting their lead generation budgets towards areas like content marketing and marketing automation, there’s more competition over capturing email addresses than ever before.
As such, marketers are having to step up their game and create increasingly compelling lead magnets to persuade users to hand over their email address.
Lead magnets come in many shapes and sizes. From free online tools to free shipping coupons, their scope covers anything designed with the intention to attract and capture the contact details of a potential lead.
Below, I’ve listed some of the most effective lead magnets and acquisition techniques to help you boost your website’s rate of lead signups.
1. Offer your readers a ‘content upgrade’
One of my favourite tactics for capturing more leads from blog content is to offer a content upgrade through a tool like Leadpages or Unbounce.
Essentially, if you’ve written a post on ‘10 Tips to Grow Your Small Business’, you could create a content upgrade, like the one displayed below, enabling readers to access another 5 tips if they enter their email address.
When Brian Dean tested this tactic on Backlinko, his conversion rate of readers to subscribers increased from 0.54% to 4.82%.
2. Build a lead capture tool
Free tools are one of the most underused tactics for capturing leads. While it might seem expensive or complicated to build a tool, you can usually get a basic algorithm and working tool built on Odesk for $100-200.
Hubspot’s marketing grader is a great example of this tactic in action. After entering your website’s URL and email address, the tool generates a report on how you can improve your website.
3. Offer a free-trial or sample of your product
If you have a service that delivers an electronic product (e.g. an audit, checklist, or proposal), you could capture leads by offering a free sample of your product sent to their email address.
The Bidsketch website does this particularly well by offering a free sample proposal as a lead magnet to capture potential customer’s email addresses.
Another common technique, particularly in SaaS, is to offer a product demo. In the financial industry, most trading platforms offer demoes that allow you to test drive their platform by investing with fake money.
This is a great way to kill two birds with one stone, as it shows off your product while also capturing a potential lead’s email address.
4. Give your visitors expert advice
If you offer a service, or are positioning yourself as an expert in your field, you could experiment with creating a lead magnet that offers your visitors the opportunity to receive a free expert review.
One of the best-executed and most unique examples of this that I’ve come across is from Unbounce’s webinar Page Fights. The webinar is basically a chance for webmasters to have their landing pages critiqued by a handful of smart CRO experts.
As you can see below, the opportunity to have your website featured on the show is used as a lead magnet to capture email addresses for Unbounce.
5. Uses quizzes and surveys as lead magnets
Why do site like the Oatmeal and Buzzfeed feature so many quizzes? In short, they generate huge amounts of social engagement and are great for capturing email addresses.
Once a user has taken a quiz, they’ll likely be willing to hand over their email address to receive their results.
In fact, from the comfort zone calculator that I built a few years ago (which uses a 3-step survey / quiz to generate a user’s results) we found that 84.3% of users who start the survey enter their email address to receive their results.
6. Offer a free guide with an exit-intent pop-up
If you’ve spent more than five minutes reading digital marketing blogs over the past year, you’ll likely be familiar with the exit-intent pop up.
This type of pop-up detects when a user is about to leave your website (based on mouse movement) and then displays a pop-up encouraging them to download something in return for their email address.
You might be wondering, isn’t this ludicrously annoying for users? It’s hard to deny that these pop-ups are a bit annoying, but they do seem to perform well.
Mauro D Andrea shared a case study on Unbounce showing that he was getting a 14.47% conversion rate from popups, which is unheard of from most standard web signup forms.
It’s important to be cautious with this strategy, as it can easily tarnish your brand if done too aggressively.
7. Create a video series or mini-course
Another powerful idea for a lead magnet is to create a mini-course or video series that provides a solution to one of your customer’s main problems.
Here’s an example of a 7-video course lead magnet that Timothy Sykes uses.
8. Give away free shipping or discount coupons
Increasingly, I’ve noticed more and more Ecommerce websites offering free shipping or a discount coupons as lead magnets to capture their visitor’s email addresses.
While promo codes and free shipping have been used as a basic component of Ecommerce marketing for over a decade, the idea of making a visitor ‘work’ for the discount by entering their email address is interesting, and provides a powerful hook for Ecommerce sites to build up a mailing list of potential customers.
9. Run a Competition or Giveaway
One of the most straightforward ways to capture a potential lead’s email address is in return for an entry to win one of your products.
10. Use Social Contests
There are few lead acquisition techniques as powerful and cost effective as running a social contest on Facebook. A few months ago, I wrote about how we ran a contest for a client that captured 681 email addresses, 78 of which signed up for their $10/month service, for just $37.
If you haven’t experimented with using Facebook contests as lead magnets, it’s worth a try.
The post 10 Ways to Generate More Leads With Lead Magnets appeared first on Venture Harbour.
January 6, 2015
23 Reasons Why You Should Use Marketing Automation
If you’re considering marketing automation for your company, it’s important to have a good understanding of what to expect, and what the key benefits are before you begin comparing the various tools.
At a fundamental level, marketing automation is about optimisation.
From optimising your staff’s time, to optimising which customers your sales team focuses their effort on, the scope of marketing automation goes way beyond simply automating your marketing department’s repetitive tasks.
We’ll walk through many of the ways that marketing automation can be used throughout this post, but let’s start off with some of the macro-level benefits that marketing automation has on the business as a whole.
How does marketing automation benefit a business overall?
These are, in my opinion, the five key company-wide benefits of implementing a marketing automation solution.
1. Reduce your staffing costs
Using marketing automation software, one employee can compete with a 50-person marketing and sales department. How? By setting up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on certain criteria.
After a few months of building these automated campaigns, your business might be sending out thousands of personalised emails each day on autopilot.
2. Increased revenue and average deal size
By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you’ll likely notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with better lead management and prioritisation, it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI.
Virtually all of benefits outlined in this post contribute to increasing revenue and deal-size in some way or another.
3. Improve accountability of marketing & sales teams
Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to having clearly defined processes, and birds-eye view reporting of the company’s pipeline.
If marketing is capturing hundreds of leads, but none of them are being nurtured to become ‘sales-qualified leads’, the marketing department will receive instant and impartial feedback that they need to improve their nurturing campaigns.
This feedback system not only reduces tough conversations and company politics, but also improves accountability of staff and departments to ensure that their part of the system is performing effectively.
4. Be more effective
No matter how large or small your team, you have a finite amount of resources to grow your business. Marketing automation enables you to squeeze more juice out of the hours available to you.
5. Less repetition, more creativity
When you replace manual repetitive work with automated rules and campaigns, you naturally free up your staff’s time to focus on more creative tasks.
While this has clear benefits of staff productivity and effectiveness, there’s a softer and less tangible benefit on creativity and overall happiness that comes from focusing your staff on varied creative work instead of mundane repetitive tasks.
How does marketing automation benefit the marketing team?
In this section, I want to focus specifically on how marketing automation enables marketers to be more effective and generate a higher ROI on their activity.
6. Refine your marketing processes
One of the nice side effects of implementing marketing automation software is that, if you haven’t already, it requires you to visualise your customer journey and marketing strategy to create processes around them.
While this might not sound riveting, creating processes around the customer journey enables you to gradually refine how you target and nurture your leads.
Here’s an example of one of my friend’s lead nurturing sequences in Infusionsoft. While it’s a bit small to see, each box represents a separate campaign or action that is triggered when a lead reaches that stage of the customer journey.
This sequence can be visualised in a funnel, which enables you to see where leads are falling off in your nurturing process, and make refinements in those areas.
7. Target potential customers across multiple channels
One of the powerful benefits that marketing automation offers marketers is the ability to reach customers in a personalised way across different online and offline channels.
When you’re creating a marketing sequence like the one displayed above, you can choose to send customers an email, postcard, text message, tweet, or phone call when they reach certain stages of the customer journey.
Some marketing automation tools have more options around this than others with multi-channel targeting. While most will enable email, social, and phone calls, only a few tools (e.g. Ontraport) enable text message and postcard targeting.
8. Never stop A/B testing your campaigns
Unlike traditional landing page or email A/B testing, where you might split test a campaign once or twice before sending it out to your mailing list, marketing automation tools make it easy to run ongoing A/B tests.
Imagine having an A/B test running on every campaign and at every stage of your marketing process all the time. Over time, the incremental improvements across your marketing activity will generate a significant improvement in your funnel’s efficiency.
9. Boost customer lifetime value through up-sells and cross-sells
How much revenue does your business leave on the table by not remembering or implementing a series of up-sells and cross-sells?
With marketing automation, you take the human aspect out of up-selling and cross-selling by creating a series of automated rules. Let’s say you run an Ecommerce business that sells bicycle gear.
On top of generic up-sells, like reminding customers to order new tires, or inspiring them with popular Christmas gift products, you can also set up highly personalised up-sells.
For example, if a customer buys a bike model that has an optional gear upgrade, you might want to automate an email campaign or text message telling them about this upgrade 30 days before their birthday.
Over time, the impact that this type of marketing can have on your customer lifetime value can be quite dramatic.
10.Take your marketing activity to an ultra-targeted level
The ability to create targeted marketing campaigns at a huge scale is one of the biggest opportunities available to marketers today. Because, as taught in marketing 101, the more relevant an offer or product is to a potential customer, the more likely they are to hand over their money.
Never before have we had the opportunity or privilege to reach 1,000 different leads with 1,000 different messages in a fully-automated way.
I’ll leave the possibilities of this to your imagination.
11. Save time managing your social media campaigns
Most marketing automation tools allow you to manage all of your social media campaigns from within one dashboard, and post to multiple accounts in one go. While this has been easy to do with tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite for years, it’s powerful to have it connected to the same system that you use to track leads.
12. Schedule posts and campaigns ahead of time
Marketing automation tools make staying organised easy by enabling you to schedule your campaigns and social media posts ahead of time.
While this functionality has been around since the early days of email marketing and social media marketing, the added benefit of doing this from a marketing automation tool is that you’ can easily schedule different posts to different segments of your audience, based on data from the CRM system.
Instead of scheduling one message to your whole database, you could, for example, schedule five slight variations to five different segments of your audience, all a bit more personalised to their needs and interests.
13. Reduce the time it takes to create campaigns
Most marketing automation tools have a drag and drop interface, enabling you to build email campaigns, landing pages, and social campaigns with no technical or design expertise required.
By not having to schedule time in for your web design or graphic design to create campaigns, you can execute marketing campaigns more efficiently (while saving time for the design team).
14. Repurpose existing content to nurture leads
If your company has a blog, it’s quite likely that once you’ve written a blog post and shared it from your social media profiles, you do nothing.
Through marketing automation, you can give your existing content a second life by setting up automated rules to recommend content that educates your leads and customers over the customer lifecycle.
A few months ago I wrote about a company called Ezanga, who used automation rules to send emails like this:
This is a great way to generate return visitors to your site and ensure that you get the most value out of your investment in content marketing.
15. Better reporting on what’s working and what’s not
By working with the data in your CRM system, your marketing automation software won’t just tell you which campaigns worked, but what type of customer they worked for.
The level of information enables you to create in-depth reports and have a greater understanding of where you should focus your effort.
16. Reward your most loyal customers with a referral program
If you use a marketing automation tool like Infusionsoft or Ontraport that enables you to create and sell products, you’ll be able to setup a referral program that rewards customers and affiliates when they promote your products for you.
How does marketing automation benefit sales?
While you’d be forgiven for thinking that marketing automation is a tool for the marketing team, some of the greatest value comes from combining CRM and marketing data to help your sales team be more efficient.
Let’s look at some of the ways your sales team can benefit from implementing marketing automation.
17. Taking the guesswork out of lead scoring
When you setup your marketing automation software, you’ll need to create a set of rules and criteria that automatically scores incoming leads based on the lead’s actions and information.
In most tools, leads are prioritised on a scale of 1-5, and then categorised as either ‘marketing qualified leads’ or ‘sales qualified leads’ or MQLs and SQLs. If a lead is classed as an MQL, it remains in a nurturing campaign until it becomes an SQL.
This means that your company’s sales team are only ever focused on converting pre-qualified SQLs, and not wasting their time on unqualified leads.
18. Prioritise your leads with lead scoring
On top of knowing whether your leads are sales qualified or not, you’ll also be able to priortise your leads based on how likely they are to convert, or the size of the deal.
If you’ve been using a CRM system over the past few years, this is hardly revolutionary, but still very valuable to ensure that you start the day focused on converting your best leads.
19. Keep your CRM data up to date
Building a CRM database is incredibly valuable, but it can quickly diminish in value if information isn’t kept up to date.
By connecting your CRM system with your marketing automation tool, you can gradually capture more and more information about your leads over time, while confirming that their key information is still the same.
20. Know exactly when to call
Along with lead scoring and prioritisation, you’ll also be able to see when a lead is thinking about your company or solutions, by tracking when they visited your website.
You can even set up alerts to see which pages they’re looking at in real time. This insight enables you to pick up the phone to qualified leads at the exact moment that they’re thinking about your company.
21. Reduce lead conversion time
By making your sales process more efficient and effective, you reduce the time it takes for a potential lead to become a customer.
When Thomson Reuters implemented marketing automation software, they found that their lead conversion time dropped by 72%, contributing to an 175% overall increase in revenue attributed to implementing the software.
22. Automatically follow-up with leads
A few years ago, a study on the Harvard Business Review suggested that you’re 60x more likely to qualify a lead if you follow up within one hour, compared to waiting 24 hours.
With automation, you can ensure that every hot lead is followed up with straight away. Whether it’s at 8pm on a Friday evening, or 6am in the morning, your automation system can be hard at work when you’re not.
When Capterra implemented marketing automation software, they found that their sales qualification rate went up by 400%, largely due to a combination of faster follow-ups and their sales team being more efficient with what they focused on.
23. Never make another cold call
If you’re not a fan of cold calling, marketing automation will make this almost obsolete – providing the marketing department deliver enough sales-qualified leads!
With the amount of data captured by automation tools, you’ll have plenty of information on your leads, from what their challenges are, to what pages on your website they clicked on and when.
In Summary
The fact that marketing automation software is so comprehensive is a blessing and a curse. While it can cause quite a few headaches in researching whether or not it’s right for you, you’ll be glad of it if you do end up biting the bullet.
Hopefully this post has given you a better understanding of how you might be able to use automation software.
If you’ve decided that it is something that’ll like benefit your business, the next step is to choose which tool is the best fit for you – which I’ve written another in-depth post about here.
If you have any questions, or can think of any benefits that I missed, feel free to post them in the comments below.
The post 23 Reasons Why You Should Use Marketing Automation appeared first on Venture Harbour.
August 3, 2014
The Definitive Guide to Starting an Online Business
Over $3 trillion dollars change hands every single day.
It’s estimated that over $650 million of this is exchanged daily between online businesses and the 2.9 billion internet-enabled people on our planet.
Over the next decade, another three billion people are expected to gain access to an Internet connection, and begin contributing to this online economy.
The post The Definitive Guide to Starting an Online Business appeared first on Venture Harbour.
July 14, 2014
How to Get a Free Domain Name in 60 Seconds
“If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” – Derek Powazak
When it comes to domain name registration, there is no such thing as a free lunch. That said, there are ways to get a domain name without having to pay.
Sound like an oxymoron? Almost.
Many companies will give you a free domain name, as they profit from you indirectly. For example, web hosting companies like Bluehost give away free domain names to customers who host their websites with them. The cost of the domain name is then recouped from the hosting fee.
Other companies will offer a free domain name in return for displaying adverts on your site. Others will do it as a way to gather personal information that they can then sell on to advertisers.
The latter methods are not worthwhile, in my opinion. The $10/year saving you make will cost you much more in the long run. The former method, however, is one that I use for virtually every website I setup.
Here’s why.
Web hosting is something that you will inevitably have to pay for when building a website. While there are a handful of free web hosting companies out there, they really… really should be avoided.
We’ve talked about the benefits of using a good web hosting service in great detail before. In a gist, good hosting will make it easier to grow your website, provide a good user experience, and prevent a lot of painful headaches. Trust me on that one.
So, if you’re going to pay $5/month to host your website with Bluehost (or whichever hosting company you choose), you might as well claim a free domain name.
But, what if you want to change hosting companies?
I used to use a web hosting company that offered free domain names, but only for as long as you were their customer.
This is totally unethical. Your domain name should be owned by you. If you don’t have full control over it, you’re asking for trouble further down the line.
Thankfully, Bluehost are a bit different. Here are what their terms say about domain ownership when you register a free domain with them:
“If you’re dissatisfied with your experience at Bluehost, you won’t lose your domain name. You’ll be free to transfer it or simply point it elsewhere at your convenience. You retain ownership of your domain until the end of its registration period, unless you elect to extend it.”
If you want to register a free domain name with Bluehost, you can do so here.
The process is really simple and only takes about 60 seconds. If you want to know how to install a WordPress website on Bluehost, we’ve written a step-by-step walk through here.
What other ways can I get a free domain name?
The method described above is the only way I know of registering a domain name for free without making any compromises.
Next, we’ll explore some of the other methods, and why they should be avoided.
Free ccTLDs – There are some services that offer free domain names, providing you use a specific TLD (top level domain). The TLD is the bit at the end of your domain name. Venture Harbour’s TLD is .com.
These services should be avoided as they typically offer obscure ccTLDs (country code top level domains) like .tk (Tokelau) or .cf (Central African Republic). Not only do these look unprofessional, but they’ll make ranking in Google much harder.
Earning your domain as an affiliate – Some domain registrars allow you to earn your domain name by referring other customers. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this, it’s probably more hassle than it’s worth.
Using a free subdomain – Lots of free website builders and services like WordPress.com will provide your with a free subdomain like ‘yourwebsite.wordpress.com’.
There are a few reasons why I’d recommend avoiding this. First of all, it means that you do not own your domain name, WordPress (or whoever you build your website with) does.
Secondly, it looked unprofessional and is harder for people to remember.
Thirdly, you’re limited to using the website builder platform that gives you the subdomain. Often, free website builders are extremely limiting, so this makes growing your website’s audience a huge challenge.
Paying for your domain name with adverts – Some hosting and domain registration companies will offer you a free domain name in return for allowing them to place banner ads on your website. Not only does Google frown on this, but what if your website generated a million page views, and you didn’t receive a penny? If you’re going to have adverts, you should be in control of them.
In Summary
I want to keep this post short, as it’s a simple question with a simple answer. If you want a free domain, but don’t want to pay the price further down the line, you’re best off getting one free with your hosting.
I highly recommend avoiding any offers that save you $10/year in exchange for relinquishing control over your website. In the long run, it will cost you much more in time, energy, and money.
If you know of any other methods of registering a domain without compromising your website, please share them in the comments below. Also, if you have any thoughts on any of the points above, please feel free to share them.
The post appeared first on Venture Harbour.
July 13, 2014
The Science Behind How Fonts Impact How We Engage With Content
A few years ago, researchers at MIT confirmed that fonts impact our emotions when reading. A bad font can make us unconsciously frown, while a good font can make us feel good.
Last week I decided to conduct my own experiment to see how much impact fonts and font sizes have on reader engagement.
Experimenting With Fonts
First off, I wanted to see which font generated the most clicks from my content. Using VWO, I tested three different fonts; Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.
Arial
Georgia
Verdana
I anticipated that Georgia would be the most engaging font. After all, Georgia is used by many of the most ‘readable’ websites, such as Medium.com and Signal vs. Noise. I expected Verdana would perform poorly, as… well, it’s a bit ugly.
While I was correct in guessing that Georgia generated the highest rate of click engagement, I was wrong about Verdana. In fact, Verdana out performed Arial by 29.1%.
Of course, not all clicks are created equal. What if all of the Verdana readers are clicking to get away from the ugly font?
Nope. Using heatmaps and click maps I was able to compare what people were clicking on. With Verdana, 5% of clicks indicated that the reader had lost interest, while this number was around 13% with Arial.
Verdana vs. Arial
We found that the intensity of clicks on the Verdana and Georgia variations were higher further down the page than with Arial. This suggests that people were reading for longer on the Verdana and Georgia variations.
So, I changed VentureHarbour.com’s font from Arial to Georgia. It’s too early to come to any hard conclusions, but I’ve noticed that our bounce rate and average time on site have both improved by a noticeable margin.
Experimenting with Font Size
After confirming that Georgia was the best performing font for this site, I wanted to know what size the font should be to provide the best readability and engagement.
Logically, I expected the larger the font was (until a point), the more readable it would be.
Wrong, again.
First I tested 14px vs. 15px vs. 16px. Using the same methods outlined above, it turned out that 14px generated the highest level of engagement.
Note: I also increased the line height by one pixel for every pixel increase in font size.
This was surprising, as I’d previously read studies on how larger fonts increase emotional and attention cortical responses. Anecdotally, many websites that are considered highly readable are using fonts over 20px in size.
To double check the accuracy of my results, I ran an identical experiment testing 10px, 14px, 18px and 21px.
Again, 14px won.
To me, this suggests what every experienced A/B tester will tell you. What works for one person, may not work for someone else. For this blog’s design, and the font we’re using, 14px seems to be the sweet spot.
Line height, line width, letter spacing, colour & more
There are so many other aspects to your font that affect how your readers interpret your content.
Right now, i’m running tests around line width to see how much impact this makes. While the results are inconclusive, it’s becoming clear that nothing is insignificant when it comes to choosing your font.
What impacts how we feel about fonts?
Our preference for certain fonts is partly due to our socialisation and partly due to objective readability.
In England, Serif fonts are often used by authoritative newspapers, while block fonts are more typical with tabloid newspapers.
In the United States, the font Helvetica is used in Government tax forms.
As such, we learn to associate certain connotations of trust or mistrust with different fonts.
For example, the Queen’s official webpage uses serif fonts almost exclusively. But look what happens when we change these to fonts typically used by tabloids. Immediately, the content feels less trustworthy.
Then there’s objective readability.
Serif fonts like Georgia were originally used by the print press, as the serifs are proven to help the eye move from letter to letter faster.
When the first PC’s were launched, screen resolutions were low. Serif fonts had to be created using vectors, which just didn’t look right with the low number of pixels. So, designers began to using sans-serif fonts for web pages.
Since then, our screen resolutions have come a long way.
There is, of course, no such thing as a best font. However, some are better than others due to the connotations we associate with them, or their objective readability.
The post The Science Behind How Fonts Impact How We Engage With Content appeared first on Venture Harbour.
How Does Your Website`s Font Impacts Reader Engagement?
A few years ago, researchers at MIT confirmed that fonts impact our emotions when reading. A bad font can make us unconsciously frown, while a good font can make us feel good.
Last week I decided to conduct my own experiment to see how much impact fonts and font sizes have on reader engagement.
Experimenting With Fonts
First off, I wanted to see which font generated the most clicks from my content. Using VWO, I tested three different fonts; Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.
Arial
Georgia
Verdana
I anticipated that Georgia would be the most engaging font. After all, Georgia is used by many of the most ‘readable’ websites, such as Medium.com and Signal vs. Noise. I expected Verdana would perform poorly, as… well, it’s a bit ugly.
While I was correct in guessing that Georgia generated the highest rate of click engagement, I was wrong about Verdana. In fact, Verdana out performed Arial by 29.1%.
Of course, not all clicks are created equal. What if all of the Verdana readers are clicking to get away from the ugly font?
Nope. Using heatmaps and click maps I was able to compare what people were clicking on. With Verdana, 5% of clicks indicated that the reader had lost interest, while this number was around 13% with Arial.
Verdana vs. Arial
We found that the intensity of clicks on the Verdana and Georgia variations were higher further down the page than with Arial. This suggests that people were reading for longer on the Verdana and Georgia variations.
So, I changed VentureHarbour.com’s font from Arial to Georgia. It’s too early to come to any hard conclusions, but I’ve noticed that our bounce rate and average time on site have both improved by a noticeable margin.
Experimenting with Font Size
After confirming that Georgia was the best performing font for this site, I wanted to know what size the font should be to provide the best readability and engagement.
Logically, I expected the larger the font was (until a point), the more readable it would be.
Wrong, again.
First I tested 14px vs. 15px vs. 16px. Using the same methods outlined above, it turned out that 14px generated the highest level of engagement.
Note: I also increased the line height by one pixel for every pixel increase in font size.
This was surprising, as I’d previously read studies on how larger fonts increase emotional and attention cortical responses. Anecdotally, many websites that are considered highly readable are using fonts over 20px in size.
To double check the accuracy of my results, I ran an identical experiment testing 10px, 14px, 18px and 21px.
Again, 14px won.
To me, this suggests what every experienced A/B tester will tell you. What works for one person, may not work for someone else. For this blog’s design, and the font we’re using, 14px seems to be the sweet spot.
Line height, line width, letter spacing, colour & more
There are so many other aspects to your font that affect how your readers interpret your content.
Right now, i’m running tests around line width to see how much impact this makes. While the results are inconclusive, it’s becoming clear that nothing is insignificant when it comes to choosing your font.
What impacts how we feel about fonts?
Our preference for certain fonts is partly due to our socialisation and partly due to objective readability.
In England, Serif fonts are often used by authoritative newspapers, while block fonts are more typical with tabloid newspapers.
In the United States, the font Helvetica is used in Government tax forms.
As such, we learn to associate certain connotations of trust or mistrust with different fonts.
For example, the Queen’s official webpage uses serif fonts almost exclusively. But look what happens when we change these to fonts typically used by tabloids. Immediately, the content feels less trustworthy.
Then there’s objective readability.
Serif fonts like Georgia were originally used by the print press, as the serifs are proven to help the eye move from letter to letter faster.
When the first PC’s were launched, screen resolutions were low. Serif fonts had to be created using vectors, which just didn’t look right with the low number of pixels. So, designers began to using sans-serif fonts for web pages.
Since then, our screen resolutions have come a long way.
There is, of course, no such thing as a best font. However, some are better than others due to the connotations we associate with them, or their objective readability.
The post How Does Your Website`s Font Impacts Reader Engagement? appeared first on Venture Harbour.
How Does Your Website’s Font Impacts Reader Engagement?
A few years ago, researchers at MIT confirmed that fonts impact our emotions when reading. A bad font can make us unconsciously frown, while a good font can make us feel good.
Last week I decided to conduct my own experiment to see how much impact fonts and font sizes have on reader engagement.
Experimenting With Fonts
First off, I wanted to see which font generated the most clicks from my content. Using VWO, I tested three different fonts; Arial, Georgia, and Verdana.
Arial
Georgia
Verdana
I anticipated that Georgia would be the most engaging font. After all, Georgia is used by many of the most ‘readable’ websites, such as Medium.com and Signal vs. Noise. I expected Verdana would perform poorly, as… well, it’s a bit ugly.
While I was correct in guessing that Georgia generated the highest rate of click engagement, I was wrong about Verdana. In fact, Verdana out performed Arial by 29.1%.
Of course, not all clicks are created equal. What if all of the Verdana readers are clicking to get away from the ugly font?
Nope. Using heatmaps and click maps I was able to compare what people were clicking on. With Verdana, 5% of clicks indicated that the reader had lost interest, while this number was around 13% with Arial.
Verdana vs. Arial
We found that the intensity of clicks on the Verdana and Georgia variations were higher further down the page than with Arial. This suggests that people were reading for longer on the Verdana and Georgia variations.
So, I changed VentureHarbour.com’s font from Arial to Georgia. It’s too early to come to any hard conclusions, but I’ve noticed that our bounce rate and average time on site have both improved by a noticeable margin.
Experimenting with Font Size
After confirming that Georgia was the best performing font for this site, I wanted to know what size the font should be to provide the best readability and engagement.
Logically, I expected the larger the font was (until a point), the more readable it would be.
Wrong, again.
First I tested 14px vs. 15px vs. 16px. Using the same methods outlined above, it turned out that 14px generated the highest level of engagement.
Note: I also increased the line height by one pixel for every pixel increase in font size.
This was surprising, as I’d previously read studies on how larger fonts increase emotional and attention cortical responses. Anecdotally, many websites that are considered highly readable are using fonts over 20px in size.
To double check the accuracy of my results, I ran an identical experiment testing 10px, 14px, 18px and 21px.
Again, 14px won.
To me, this suggests what every experienced A/B tester will tell you. What works for one person, may not work for someone else. For this blog’s design, and the font we’re using, 14px seems to be the sweet spot.
Line height, line width, letter spacing, colour & more
There are so many other aspects to your font that affect how your readers interpret your content.
Right now, i’m running tests around line width to see how much impact this makes. While the results are inconclusive, it’s becoming clear that nothing is insignificant when it comes to choosing your font.
What impacts how we feel about fonts?
Our preference for certain fonts is partly due to our socialisation and partly due to objective readability.
In England, Serif fonts are often used by authoritative newspapers, while block fonts are more typical with tabloid newspapers.
In the United States, the font Helvetica is used in Government tax forms.
As such, we learn to associate certain connotations of trust or mistrust with different fonts.
For example, the Queen’s official webpage uses serif fonts almost exclusively. But look what happens when we change these to fonts typically used by tabloids. Immediately, the content feels less trustworthy.
Then there’s objective readability.
Serif fonts like Georgia were originally used by the print press, as the serifs are proven to help the eye move from letter to letter faster.
When the first PC’s were launched, screen resolutions were low. Serif fonts had to be created using vectors, which just didn’t look right with the low number of pixels. So, designers began to using sans-serif fonts for web pages.
Since then, our screen resolutions have come a long way.
There is, of course, no such thing as a best font. However, some are better than others due to the connotations we associate with them, or their objective readability.
The post How Does Your Website’s Font Impacts Reader Engagement? appeared first on Venture Harbour.
July 11, 2014
How Much Traffic is Free Web Hosting Costing You?
Why pay $5/month for something that you can get for free?
When I began building websites this was my perspective on free web hosting. Since then, i’ve learned that free web hosting is never free. While you won’t receive a monthly invoice, you will pay the price in other ways.
If you don’t buy that, take a look at the traffic for a website that I recently migrated from a free hosting company to Bluehost. We migrated the website on June 1st, and 3 weeks later our pageviews had increased by 1,100%.
Did we know we were missing out on all of this traffic due to our free hosting? Of course not. Also, the extra advertising revenue from that increase in traffic has already covered the cost of our hosting, so ironically our hosting is essentially still ‘free’.
So why should free web hosting be avoided like the plague? I’ve boiled it down to four reasons.
#1 Free web hosting is bad for user experience
When you visit a website and the first thing you see is this, what impression do you get?
Pretty unprofessional. For years, I was reluctant to promote this website too much as I knew the user experience was pretty bad due to our hosting.
Most free web hosting companies will slap their ads on your website. Whether it’s a banner ad at the top or a popup, you’re likely to have something. Even web hosting companies that claim to not display any ads often do. They get away with this by placing a clause in their T’s and C’s along the lines of ‘we won’t place ads until you exceed X amount of bandwidth’.
But it’s not just the ads that provide a bad experience.
It’s also the slow server speed. With web hosting, you get what you pay for. If you pay nothing, your website will be put on a slow server that was likely a hand-me-down from the free web host’s sister company (almost always a paid host).
Here’s what happened to our bounce rate when we moved to Bluehost. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
The combination of slow loading times and adverts were causing 94% of our visitors to leave our site without visiting any other pages! This dropped to 53% the day we moved to the paid hosting.
We noticed a similar trend with the average number of pages viewed per user. We increased the average number of pages viewed per visitor from 1.3 to 4.5, over tripling our page views.
#2 Free web hosting is bad for SEO
Your web hosting has in indirect impact on many factors that Google take into consideration when ranking search results.
In 2010, Google announced that page loading speed is a ranking factor. Free hosting is, unsurprisingly, one of the slowest varieties of web hosting.
Since Google introduced their Panda Update, user experience has also played a much larger part in how Google ranks pages. As we saw above, free hosting provides a pretty awful user experience.
On top of this, free web hosting is often less secure, which means you’re more likely to have vulnerabilities in your site. Being hacked and having malware injected onto your site is a surefire way to lose your rankings.
Finally, Google looks at the neighbourhood of websites that your site is hosted with. As spammers tend to use free web hosting, you’re also more likely to have your website associated with a bad neighbourhood.
Google has hundreds of individual ranking factors. This list could go on and on, but suffice it to say, free web hosting will cost you traffic.
#3 Free web hosting is unreliable
If you use free web hosting, you’ll soon become nicely acquainted with this page!
Free web hosting companies tend to use outdated servers that are coming to the end of their days. As such, they’re pretty unreliable.
Combine this with the fact that you will be sharing a web server with thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of other websites. If one website on that server gets attacked or receives a spike in traffic, it can take every website on the server down.
Because free web hosting customers are less important to the company than their paying customers, servers take longer to get attended to. This ultimately means more down time for your website.
On top of this, customer service reps cost money. Free web hosting companies tend to have less representatives, yet more customers having issues. This can result in queries going unanswered for days at a time.
And when they do respond, it’s usually with some variant of “please upgrade to our paid service”. Which brings us onto our final reason for why free web hosting should be avoided like the plague.
#4 You will eventually have to upgrade
How is it that free web hosting companies stay in business? After all, servers cost money.
Free web hosting companies are owned by paid hosting companies, and they rely on upgrading free customers to paying customers. How do they do this?
Most free web hosting companies deliberately run on outdated software. I’ve spent hours trying to install plugins and WordPress themes on free web hosting servers only to be told that the theme or plugin requires the latest version of PHP to work. Of course, they will then tell you that you must upgrade to their paid plan in order to make your website work.
They will also likely restrict your bandwidth and web space. Once you exceed these limits the web hosting company can do one of many things. They may take your website offline, or perhaps display more ads. They will of course convince you that you need to upgrade.
What’s a better (and cheap) alternative?
You can’t go wrong with hosting your website on Bluehost.
Their hosting is extremely affordable at $4.95/month, which includes a free domain name. We use Bluehost for virtually all of the websites in our portfolio, and they’re very fast and reliable. In fact, Bluehost are the only hosting company recommended by WordPress.
Another alternative if you have a lot of websites is to hire a VPS (virtual private server) with Bluehost. This is what we do, and it costs about $30/month. For this price we can host as many websites as we want on this server. I believe we currently have about 8 websites on there, which works out at $3.75 per website per month.
If you’re unsure about which web host is right for you, we’ve written a guide on what to look for in a web host here. Whatever you do though, learn from my mistakes and avoid free web hosts like the plague.
The post How Much Traffic is Free Web Hosting Costing You? appeared first on Venture Harbour.
4 Reasons Why Free Web Hosting Should Be Avoided Like the Plague
Why pay $5/month for something that you can get for free?
When I began building websites this was my perspective on free web hosting. Since then, i’ve learned that free web hosting is never free. While you won’t receive a monthly invoice, you will pay the price in other ways.
If you don’t buy that, take a look at the traffic for a website that I recently migrated from a free hosting company to Bluehost. We migrated the website on June 1st, and 3 weeks later our pageviews had increased by 1,100%.
Did we know we were missing out on all of this traffic due to our free hosting? Of course not. Also, the extra advertising revenue from that increase in traffic has already covered the cost of our hosting, so ironically our hosting is essentially still ‘free’.
So why should free web hosting be avoided like the plague? I’ve boiled it down to four reasons.
#1 Free web hosting is bad for user experience
When you visit a website and the first thing you see is this, what impression do you get?
Pretty unprofessional. For years, I was reluctant to promote this website too much as I knew the user experience was pretty bad due to our hosting.
Most free web hosting companies will slap their ads on your website. Whether it’s a banner ad at the top or a popup, you’re likely to have something. Even web hosting companies that claim to not display any ads often do. They get away with this by placing a clause in their T’s and C’s along the lines of ‘we won’t place ads until you exceed X amount of bandwidth’.
But it’s not just the ads that provide a bad experience.
It’s also the slow server speed. With web hosting, you get what you pay for. If you pay nothing, your website will be put on a slow server that was likely a hand-me-down from the free web host’s sister company (almost always a paid host).
Here’s what happened to our bounce rate when we moved to Bluehost. Bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page.
The combination of slow loading times and adverts were causing 94% of our visitors to leave our site without visiting any other pages! This dropped to 53% the day we moved to the paid hosting.
We noticed a similar trend with the average number of pages viewed per user. We increased the average number of pages viewed per visitor from 1.3 to 4.5, over tripling our page views.
#2 Free web hosting is bad for SEO
Your web hosting has in indirect impact on many factors that Google take into consideration when ranking search results.
In 2010, Google announced that page loading speed is a ranking factor. Free hosting is, unsurprisingly, one of the slowest varieties of web hosting.
Since Google introduced their Panda Update, user experience has also played a much larger part in how Google ranks pages. As we saw above, free hosting provides a pretty awful user experience.
On top of this, free web hosting is often less secure, which means you’re more likely to have vulnerabilities in your site. Being hacked and having malware injected onto your site is a surefire way to lose your rankings.
Finally, Google looks at the neighbourhood of websites that your site is hosted with. As spammers tend to use free web hosting, you’re also more likely to have your website associated with a bad neighbourhood.
Google has hundreds of individual ranking factors. This list could go on and on, but suffice it to say, free web hosting will cost you traffic.
#3 Free web hosting is unreliable
If you use free web hosting, you’ll soon become nicely acquainted with this page!
Free web hosting companies tend to use outdated servers that are coming to the end of their days. As such, they’re pretty unreliable.
Combine this with the fact that you will be sharing a web server with thousands (sometimes tens of thousands) of other websites. If one website on that server gets attacked or receives a spike in traffic, it can take every website on the server down.
Because free web hosting customers are less important to the company than their paying customers, servers take longer to get attended to. This ultimately means more down time for your website.
On top of this, customer service reps cost money. Free web hosting companies tend to have less representatives, yet more customers having issues. This can result in queries going unanswered for days at a time.
And when they do respond, it’s usually with some variant of “please upgrade to our paid service”. Which brings us onto our final reason for why free web hosting should be avoided like the plague.
#4 You will eventually have to upgrade
How is it that free web hosting companies stay in business? After all, servers cost money.
Free web hosting companies are owned by paid hosting companies, and they rely on upgrading free customers to paying customers. How do they do this?
Most free web hosting companies deliberately run on outdated software. I’ve spent hours trying to install plugins and WordPress themes on free web hosting servers only to be told that the theme or plugin requires the latest version of PHP to work. Of course, they will then tell you that you must upgrade to their paid plan in order to make your website work.
They will also likely restrict your bandwidth and web space. Once you exceed these limits the web hosting company can do one of many things. They may take your website offline, or perhaps display more ads. They will of course convince you that you need to upgrade.
What’s a better (and cheap) alternative?
You can’t go wrong with hosting your website on Bluehost.
Their hosting is extremely affordable at $4.95/month, which includes a free domain name. We use Bluehost for virtually all of the websites in our portfolio, and they’re very fast and reliable. In fact, Bluehost are the only hosting company recommended by WordPress.
Another alternative if you have a lot of websites is to hire a VPS (virtual private server) with Bluehost. This is what we do, and it costs about $30/month. For this price we can host as many websites as we want on this server. I believe we currently have about 8 websites on there, which works out at $3.75 per website per month.
If you’re unsure about which web host is right for you, we’ve written a guide on what to look for in a web host here. Whatever you do though, learn from my mistakes and avoid free web hosts like the plague.
The post 4 Reasons Why Free Web Hosting Should Be Avoided Like the Plague appeared first on Venture Harbour.
July 9, 2014
How Installing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Improved My Site Speed by 30.2%
Last night, I ran an experiment to see just how much impact installing a CDN would have on improving page loading times. I’d heard that they can save up to 60% bandwidth, but how would that translate into actual page loading times?
I’ve split this post into three sections. First, we have the case study. Then i’ve compiled a comparison of the two major CDN services, and finally there’s a guide on how to set up your CDN. If you want to skip past the case study section you can use the following links.
The Comparison: Which CDN Should I Use?
The Setup Guide: How to Install a CDN in Under 10 Minutes
The CDN Experiment Results
Installing a CDN on VentureHarbour.com took about 20 minutes.
Below are two screenshots taken before and after the CDN installation showing the page loading time of a particularly slow page on our site (it’s 4,000 words and has over 110 images).
Before CDN Installation:
After CDN Installation:
Not bad for 20 minutes work. I also measured a variety of other pages on VentureHarbour.com to see whether some pages improved more than others.
Web Page
Before CDN
After CDN
Change
109 Premium Responsive WordPress Themes
7.43s
5.93s
20% faster
How to Build a Website in WordPress
2.88s
1.81s
37% faster
19 Tips to Reduce Your Bounce Rate
2.63s
1.53s
41% faster
Deconstructing How Mashable, ProBlogger & KISSmetrics Reached Millions of Readers
2.06s
1.97s
4% faster
Blog Home Page
4.74s
2.32s
51% faster
As you can see, there was. Some pages improved by as little as 4%, where others improved by as much as 51%. While not exact, it seems that pages with more large images seemed to benefit the most from installing the CDN.
Overall though, we saw a 30.2% decrease in page loading times across the website. According to Cloudflare, they have saved my 14.3mb worth of bandwidth in the past 24 hours too.
I should also note that I chose to have the bear essentials with Cloudflare to isolate the effect of their CDN alone. They have many additional features for speeding up your website even further, but I didn’t want those features clouding this analysis.
Comparison: Which CDN Should You Use?
There are countless companies offering CDN services. However, there are only two that you need to be aware of.
MaxCDN, and Cloudflare.
I’ve used both, and they’re both excellent. To be honest though, comparing them is a bit like comparing apples and oranges.
MaxCDN is a ‘full’ CDN. Whereas Cloudflare is a hybrid that combines a CDN-like service with security and optimisation features.
In short, if you absolutely care about performance and speed, go for MaxCDN. They have more data centers around the World, and are more dedicated to improving your page loading times.
If you’re more interested in something that will protect your website from DDoS attacks, while improving your page loading times a lot (but not as much as MaxCDN), then Cloudflare is worth consideration.
Pricing wise, they have very different models. Cloudflare offers a free limited service, while MaxCDN does not. MaxCDN’s plans are based on how much bandwidth you use, while Cloudflare charge you depending on what features you need.
MaxCDN starts at $9/month for 100gb worth of bandwidth. Even a terabyte is only $79/month!
Cloudflare’s pro plan starts at $20/month. If you require any of their advanced page speed or security features this increases to $200/month.
Some people like to use both in tandem. You can use MaxCDN as your main content delivery network (where you host your images, JS, and CSS files on a different subdomain), and then use Cloudflare on your root domain to protect against DDoS attacks.
I’ve read a few articles from people who’ve taken this approach, and the general gist seems to be that you’re better off just using MaxCDN. In theory it’s a good idea, though.
How to Install Your CDN
With both MaxCDN and Cloudflare, getting set up should take less than half an hour.
MaxCDN is a little bit more complicated to set up, as it’s a proper CDN service that requires you to create new subdomains to host your content on. Cloudflare, by default, doesn’t do this.
How to Setup MaxCDN
Once you’ve created an account on MaxCDN, you need to create a ‘pull zone’. Here you enter your domain name and your chosen custom CDN subdomain e.g. cdn.ventureharbour.com. Once you’ve created this pull zone you’ll receive a URL that you’ll want to copy into notepad to use later.
Once you’ve created your pull zone, you need to then create a content zone. Go to your dashboard and click the ‘manage’ button next to your pull zone. Click on the settings tab and then enter some subdomains into the custom domain boxes.
For example, you may want to use something like:
cdn.ventureharbour.com
cdn2.ventureharbour.com
cdn3.ventureharbour.com
cdn4.ventureharbour.com
The next step is to change your CNAME records. Go to your web hosting or domain registration and open up the DNS editor. In the CNAME field, enter the URL that MaxCDN provides (the one that we said you want to paste in your notepad earlier). Repeat this process for all of the CDN subdomains you created above.
If you’re using WordPress, the next step is to configure your files to be hosted on the subdomains. There’s a great guide on how to do this with the WP Total Cache plugin here.
How to Setup Cloudflare
With Cloudflare, you just need to create an account and punch in your domain name. Once you’ve done this, you’ll end up on a page that requires you to add all of your DNS records.
They’re pretty good at finding most of these, but there are usually a handful that they miss, so make sure they’re all in there.
Once you’ve done this, you’ll need to choose your initial settings and payment plan. This is also where you choose what level of security and performance you’d like.
Finally, you’ll reach a page that tells you to change your nameservers. Log in to where you registered your domain name and enter your new nameservers. This can take up to 24 hours, so once you’ve updated these you will likely need to wait for the changes to propagate.
That’s it. All of your website’s traffic is now being passed through Cloudflare’s data centers. This means that Cloudflare can now deflect any traffic that they believe to be suspicious, while serving normal visitors a version of your files from the nearest data center to them.
The post How Installing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Improved My Site Speed by 30.2% appeared first on Venture Harbour.
