marți, 26 iunie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


The Ultimate Muscle Building Guide for Beginners [Infographic]

Posted: 26 Jun 2012 12:50 PM PDT

For beginners, there are a few really big mistakes that occur when it comes to building muscle. Hardly anyone ever gets started on the right foot, at least initially.

For many, a first attempt to build muscle means thumbing through the latest bodybuilding magazine and picking the 6-day body part split being promoted by the cover model.

The problem with this approach is that these routines for building muscle (aka hypertrophy) are far too advanced and unnecessary for the budding beginner and most won't need a routine like that for a long time, if ever to reach their muscle building goals.

So here's the JCD Fitness Muscle Building Guide For Beginners, by JC Deen and Jordan Syatt.

Click on Image to Enlarge.


Starry Night - Vincent van Dominogh

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 10:33 PM PDT



Domino artist FlippyCat recreated the iconic Van Gogh painting Starry Night in dominoes -7,000 of them! Watching the build process is a real treat, although I'm glad it was sped up.


Coolest Hybrid Animals

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 10:12 PM PDT

What's your favorite animal: lions or tigers? What's cooler: horses or zebras? Stop! Why choose one over the other when you can have both at the same time? We're talking about hybrid animals, animals of a same genus but different species producing offspring. Some of these animals you may already know, but others may surprise you.

Zebra + Equine= Zebroid


Lion + Tiger= Liger


Buffalo + Cow= Beefalo


Camel + Llama= Cama


Leopard + Lion = Leopon


Serval + Domestic Cat = Savannah


Donkey + Zebra = Donkra


African Serval + The Asian Leopard Cat + Domestic House Cat = Ashera


Polar Bear + Brown Bear = Grizzly Polar


Sheep + Goat = Toast of Botswana


Midas Cichild + Red Devil fish = Blood parrot



Golden + Amherst Pheasant = Hybrid Pheasant



Dog + Wolf = Wolf Dog


Domestic Tamworth Pig + Wild Boar = Iron Age Pig



Bottlenose Dolphin + False Killer Whale = Wolphin


Bengal Cat + Ocicat = Cheetoh


Yak + Domestic Cow = Dzo


Zebra + Horse = Zorse


Bengal Cat + Tabby Cat = Toyger


St. Bernard + Basset Hound = St. Basset Hound


Expectations VS Reality: Cell Phone Pictures

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:45 PM PDT

Cell phone cameras always take pictures that do not match our expectations at all, and here are the most disappointing examples everyone can relate.




















Via Buzzfeed


The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization


The SEOgadget Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 02:04 PM PDT

Posted by richardbaxterseo

You are missing out on extra sales! So, my awesome team at SEOgadget have crafted up a handy infographic for you on how get started in Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO, and that's "optimisation" over here in the UK) to get the best ROI from your hard earned traffic. 

We've developed and applied this methodology to help struggling businesses out of financially difficult situations all the way to adding hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue, per day, to become some of our largest clients.

We believe there are two paths to Conversion Rate Optimization. When we see companies fail in CRO, it’s because they’ve adopted random testing, guesswork, “best practice” changes and most fundamentally, they’ve chosen to avoid proper testing. We call this the bad path (queue Darth Vader’s Death March Theme…).

To get good at driving real change, you’ve got to define a CRO methodology. The real trick to improving your conversion is pretty simple: identify, and target the core barriers to conversion and then, scientifically test the changes. This is the good path (queue The Star Wars Force Theme)  and the path that we advocate for all inbound marketers to follow…

Here's A Spiffy Step-by-Step Infographic

Check out our beautiful step-by-step guide in glorious technicolor. Would you like to see it in even more super-glorious HTML-O-Vision?

Check Out The Full Guide in HTML Here!

CRO infographic

Embed this infographic on your site

So, What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Just think of CRO as detective work. It’s a lot like using a fine comb to pick off the weak points in your site’s conversion funnel, while building on its strengths. At the heart of conversion rate optimization is the notion of removing barriers to conversion. These are the forces stopping your site from converting visitors into sales.

Barriers to conversion can include usability errors, weak persuasive techniques and often, page relevancy issues. By learning about your customer’s objections – “barriers to conversion” you’re addressing the real reasons why people don’t convert. The most important part: CRO is a scientific process of diagnosis, hypothesis and testing. Why bother guessing when there are tools to really help you learn about your customers?

Why doesn’t guesswork, work?

Let’s say you own a store on the high street. You’re keen to increase your sales, so you paint the front door a different colour. That’ll improve things, right? Of course not! You’re not addressing the real reasons why customers aren’t buying your stuff.

The same applies to websites, changing the colour of your buttons will have no effect if people find your website lacking in credibility. Targeting the root cause with security logos and social proof (for example, reviews, accreditations, and association) is a much better solution.

So, here’s how we do it at the GadgetPlex:

Step 1 – Set up Funnels

Setup your funnels and analyse the points where your users enter, until the point they exit. Try to identify the “missing links” or barriers to conversion. Find out where they abandon and create benchmarks for improvement. Tools such as Google Analytics, Omniture and Kissmetrics are great for creating conversion funnels. If you rely on phone conversions then tracking phone calls is pretty important. Tools such as Adinsight and Mongoose Metrics are pretty comprehensive at phone tracking.

Step 2 – Analytics

Find out what’s actually happening when people land on your site, analyse what they do, what keywords they discovered you for and where they land. Obviously, tools such as Google Analytics are great at telling you this, but think about digging deeper. What browsers are your visitors using? What screen resolutions are most popular?

Usability tools such as ClickTale are also great for funnels and their form analytics reveal where users drop off along your forms. CrazyEgg is another simple and effective tool that we use for click density analysis. Usability testing tools such as Usertesting and Whatusersdo are a great way to see videos of people using your site and where they hit conversion barriers. Ethnio is handy at recruiting your own site visitors to participate in usability tasks.

Competitive data tools such as Hitwise and comScore can be really useful but come at a cost.

Step 3 - Barriers

To identify barriers to conversion, you’ve got to build up a profile of people’s objections and opinions.

Tools such as Kissinsights (Bought out by Catchfree, who are awesome), Pop-Survey, Kampyle are really good for page level surveys and pretty simple to setup. Live chat tools such Olark and LivePerson are useful for dealing with user problems instantly. Other survey tools such as 4Q survey, Survey Monkey and Survey Gizmo are really useful at discovering what your users are saying.

When it comes to using these tools we’ve found that all you really need is one question. Allow users to really express themselves by asking them an open-ended question. Acquire their email address (optional) for those that want their feedback to be responded to. Collecting an email address and promising a follow up really improves response rates, which allows you solve any objections early on.

Step 4 – Go Offline

If we know our target then the objective becomes easier. Study your website and understand your customers.

Speak to sales staff to learn the likely barriers they face when they sell and use the site. Your sales team deal with customers every day and uncover objections and seek to solve them in order to close the deal. The first time we did this we were surprised at just how useful this can be for exposing problems on your site.

Become a secret shopper and create scenarios i.e. rude customer vs. extremely polite vs. technically challenging - test how your staff deal with each scenario.

Finally, try actually phoning your own customer service number and see what happens. Test your customer services aggressively, as they can be the difference between retention and people going to your competitors. A 5% increase in retention can have an uplift of around 25 – 85% in profitability (Treytl 2002).

Step 5 – Prospect for Missing Links

It’s all about wheeling and dealing, discovering those hidden gems within your company and using them to grow sales.

When you apply for a job and have to send a CV or fill out an application, the employer knows nothing about you other than what is on that piece of paper or application (unless they’ve checked you out on Facebook). If you don’t sell yourself and mention all of your achievements, they won’t easily learn about you. The same rule applies for websites.

If you have loads of testimonials and expert reviews but don’t shout about it, then how will your potential customers know? Treat your website users like they’re the employer and impress them, tell them why they should buy, making the value proposition crystal clear.

Study your website carefully and consider what you’re missing. For example, showing expert reviews, customer reviews, testimonials, or even taking the time to build a community (just look at SEOmoz for inspiration).

Prospecting is really about selling your site to your users and using clever mechanisms to grow conversion rate and sales.

Step 6 – Strengthen Average Order Value (AOV)

There are so many ways to strengthen your AOV, which Fabian covered beautifully in this blog post.

As an AOV strategy, bundles work amazingly and it doesn’t even matter if you’re not strictly a retailer. Look at Unbounce for inspiration. They offer conversion bundles on their products joined with offerings from other companies which is a clever technique to offer a cost saving and acquire additional sales.

unbounce conversion bundle

 (Unbounce use “conversion bundles” as way to boost AOV and get more leads)

SEOmoz have a Pro Perks store (check it out).

Not all competition is competition, strategic partnerships can be a great way to grow and gain maximum exposure especially for start-ups.

Step 7 – Wireframe the Solutions

As soon as you’ve got a plan, list and prioritise the main conversion killers and derive solutions on how to fix it and increase conversion.

We use tools such as Balsamiq and Cacoo to wireframe the solutions and then prepare hypotheses for testing. Test scientifically, the most important thing to take away from testing is to learn what works and what doesn’t and to keep building structurally to increase conversion rate. No guesswork!

Step 8 - Testing

“One accurate measurement is worth more than a thousand expert opinions” - Admiral Grace Hopper (Wikipedia)

We love this quote because it really captures what testing is all about, forget about guesswork, opinion and egos (think: HIPPO) and instead, test your variations accurately.

We primarily use Google Website Optimiser (which is now becoming content experiments) and Visual Website Optimiser. There’s loads of split testing and multivariate software. But remember: it’s not the testing tool that increases your conversion it’s the ideas you put into it.

What we’ve learnt is don’t test too many things, instead create a clear structured hypothesis. Attach CrazyEgg or ClickTale to your variations to monitor the difference in click density and interaction between your pages. If you’re optimising forms then applying ClickTale to your variation pages is really useful.

Try running page level surveys on the variations and original page, ask the same question, and monitor the difference. Always test your variations in multiple browsers. Browsershots are pretty good for this. For mobile testing we use Mobile Moxie’s excellent phone emulator, which is really handy at testing across different phone operating systems and platforms.

Step 9 - Review

Review your test, analyse the analytics, click density and form analytics (ClickTale) and compare it to the original page, check the difference.

Tracking AOV and revenue is so important when testing. Structure your follow up tests and build on your success, or failure. Failure doesn’t always mean the test was wrong, it means the original is doing something really well, so learn and iterate. Apply your winning test candidates to other pages on the site (we always like to test these usually via a multi-page multivariate test), and then consider applying your learnings to other media channels such as magazines, adverts and brochure ware.

Step 10 – Rinse & Repeat

Repeat the process and keep building successful tests. Each time you test and find winning variations, you build up a portfolio of increases. Conversion rate optimization is an iterative process, which builds on the success of the previous test.

Follow this methodology and it will be extremely hard not to increase your site conversion. That’s how to get more happy customers and more happy customers equals more bang for your buck.

I hope you enjoyed our epic guide! Do check out the full HTML version of our infographic - and, in the meantime I'd love to hear how you're working CRO into the inbound marketing process! I'd like to say a special thanks to Fabian for his hard work on making sure this post happened, follow him on Twitter here!


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Photo of the Day: President Obama Eats a Hot Fudge Sundae

The White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

 

Photo of the Day: President Obama Eats a Hot Fudge Sundae

Photo of the Day, June 25th

President Barack Obama eats a hot fudge sundae as he talks with patrons at the UNH Dairy Bar on the University of New Hampshire campus in Durham, N.H., June 25, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

In Case You Missed It

Here are some of the top stories from the White House blog:

White House Office Hours with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is joining us for special session of White House Office Hours on Wednesday, June 27th at 2:00 p.m. EDT. During a live Q&A on Twitter, Secretary Duncan will answer your questions about college affordability and the administration’s education policies and priorities.

Help Us Shape Our Strategy for Intellectual Property Enforcement
Submit your ideas to shape the future of intellectual property enforcement.

Would You Qualify for Refi? Find Out
Enter a few basic facts about your mortgage, and this tool will help you figure out if you currently qualify for easy, low-cost refinancing -- or whether, like millions of families, you need Congress to act to help you lower your interest rate.

Today's Schedule

All times are Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).

9:05 AM: The President departs Boston, Massachusetts en route Atlanta, Georgia

11:15 AM: The President arrives Atlanta, Georgia

11:30 AM: The Vice President delivers remarks at a campaign event in Waterloo, Iowa

1:25 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

2:10 PM: The President attends a campaign event

3:35 PM: The President departs Atlanta, Georgia en route Miami, Florida

5:10 PM: The President arrives Miami, Florida

5:45 PM: The President attends a campaign event

8:30 PM: The President delivers remarks at a campaign event

9:45 PM: The President departs Miami, Florida en route Joint Base Andrews

11:55 PM: The President arrives Joint Base Andrews

12:10 AM: The President arrives the Ellipse

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5 Ways to Use Negative Targeting on the Display Network

5 Ways to Use Negative Targeting on the Display Network

Link to SEOptimise » blog

5 Ways to Use Negative Targeting on the Display Network

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 06:43 AM PDT

If you advertise on Search, you should already know how important it is to find negative keywords – they stop you wasting money by stopping your ads showing on irrelevant searches.

But if you're on the Display Network, things are a bit trickier. You still want to avoid wasting money showing ads to people who aren't interested (and you want to avoid unfortunate appearances), but negative keywords don't work as well. For best results you'll need to look at all of the negative targeting options.

  • Placements
  • These are websites you exclude. If a placement is a domain, that stops your ad from showing anywhere on that domain (or its subdomains). You can also specify subdomains or subfolders, or even individual pages.

    Unfortunately there isn’t an ‘exact match’ for placements, so you can’t block a site’s homepage while still showing ads on deeper pages.

  • Topics
  • Topics let you exclude swathes of websites according to theme. Google's categorisation isn't perfect, but excluding a topic is more powerful than just excluding a keyword or individual site.

    To get an idea of what websites are in a Topic, use the Placement Tool.

  • Categories
  • They aren't available for positive targeting, but if you scroll down to the Exclusions section of the Display Network tab you'll see 'Categories'. If you want to stop your ads appearing on sexually suggestive content or pages about death and tragedy, go here. You can also see how you perform when your ads appear in videos, or on pages with videos, or in games. There are also particular types of website, like forums and parked domains.

So now you know the negative targeting options, how do you work out how to use them? What placements, topics and categories do you exclude?

1. Allow for Ambiguities

Think about what your terms could mean.

Say, for example, you want to sell apples. Think of what the word 'apple' can mean: a fruit, a tree that produces that fruit, the company who make iPads, early computers made by said company, the corporation set up by The Beatles, an episode of Star Trek, and many more things.

You can then work out what keywords and Topics are related to these alternative meanings, and exclude them. To continue the apple example, you could exclude Topics like 'Computers & Electronics > Consumer Electronics', 'Arts & Entertainment > Music & Audio', 'Arts & Entertainment > TV & Video > TV Shows & Programmes > TV Sci-Fi & Fantasy Shows'.

2. Speculate on Situation

Consider context. Some sites may be about your product, but read by people who have already purchased (although these may be opportunities for cross-selling). Some sites may be purely informational, like dictionaries.

Remember to check performance data before making decisions, as sites may have more than one audience: a 'how to' guide might be read by people researching before purchase as well as people needing help with what they already own. People may look up apple pie recipes because they intend to buy apples or because they already have apples they want to use up.

3. Consult the Contextual Targeting Tool

This will give you an idea of what websites Google will show your ads on. You might go for the keyword 'apple fruit', but the predicted placements include annoyingorange.com and farmville.wikia.com which you might not deem relevant to your fruit shop. You can then either use different keywords or continue with 'apple fruit' but with the suggested placements as negative placements.

It can also be useful for keyword research, helping you find alternative meanings for your terms or new areas to advertise on. Remember the Wonder Wheel? Turns out the Contextual Targeting Tool uses the same engine.

4. Ponder your Placement Report

This is the most obvious place to look if your Display Network campaign is already up and running. I recommend looking at both domain and URL level. To see the latter: go to the Dimensions tab, view Automatic Placements, then go to the columns settings and make sure it shows URLs.

Don't just exclude sites without looking at them – see what they're about. This is another way to find ambiguities.

5. Watch Out For These Websites

Some domains are specialised; some are not. A page in Wikitravel.org is going to be about travel; a page in Wikia.com could be about anything.

Here are some particular websites or types of websites you should be careful with, because they can cover anything and so could advertise anything.

Newspapers

Newspapers could cover anything – and if your term does appear in a newspaper, it could be in many different contexts.

If a country is mentioned in the News it is likely to be in a different tone than if it appears in the Travel section: if there's a tragedy it's more likely to be in the News section. It's also more likely that someone reading the Travel section will be interested in buying a holiday than if they're reading about the country's politics in the News. In some ways newspapers are like several different sites, all with their own angle and audience.

Generally different segments will be in different high level folders: looking at a newspaper's homepage should give you a good idea what sections they have and what URLs they use. For example, if you wanted to advertise the Guardian, it has various folders and sub-domains, such as:

  • Television (www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio)
  • Travel (www.guardian.co.uk/travel)
  • Jobs (jobs.guardian.co.uk/)
  • … and several folders containing News (www.guardian.co.uk/uk, www.guardian.co.uk/world, www.guardian.co.uk/global-development etc).

So if you're advertising jobs you might want to target just the jobs subdomain, or if you're advertising DVDs you might want to target just the TV and film sections. If you're advertising apples you may only want www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/food-and-drink.

YouTube

The problem with YouTube is that you can't tell anything from a video's URL.

You could exclude individual videos, but this is often too precise: you can exclude http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ but you'll still turn up on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okqEVeNqBhc, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGhExssWyE0 and other such videos.

There are placements for YouTube that specify what category the video is, such as 'youtube.com » Entertainment 300×250,Middle right' and 'youtube.com » Film &Animation 300×250,Middle right'. Look up youtube.com on the Placement Tool to find these. These can't be used as negative placements, but you could exclude youtube.com from your purely contextual targeting ad groups and then have a YouTube only ad group with just the relevant categories as positive placements.

About.com

About.com handily organises itself into subdomains. A lot of subdomains. There are a mere 11 on video gaming, and around 75 on sports. There's an alphabetic list here.

If you're trying to exclude a particular topic, you can look up subdomains by category.

So if you're advertising apples and want to avoid Apple Inc, you'd look in the Computing and Electronics categories. You'll want to exclude the subdomains on Macs (macs.about.com), iPhone / iPod (ipod.about.com) and iPad (ipad.about.com) – but you probably also want the unbranded subdomains like PC Hardware / Reviews (compreviews.about.com) and Cell Phones (cellphones.about.com).

You might even be better excluding about.com from purely contextual ad groups and having an ad group that only targets the most relevant subdomains.

IMDB

The Internet Movie Database is all about films, TV, video games and actors – but as films, TV and video games can be about anything it can still stray into your placements.

Scanlation Sites

These are sites hosting translated scans of manga (ie Japanese comics). As there's usually one page of manga per webpage, people will view many webpages fairly quickly, so there'll be high impressions. And as manga can be about anything, the ads could be about anything.

You may spot some if you look through your automatic placements for URLs with 'manga' in them.

Gmail

Mail.Google.com is a black-box – keywords go in, impressions and clicks go out, but you've no idea what happens in-between. You can't see what emails are causing your ads to trigger, so you can't tell if your ads are showing on unrelated topics.

It's generally worth having mail.google.com as a manual placement, so you can lower its bids. If you have it in its own ad group, you can then see keyword level data which may give you some clue what's going on. Also there are some tactics specifically for Gmail – for example, PPC Hero suggests using keywords matching the subject of standard emails.

Anonymous.Google

When a publisher doesn't want advertisers to know their site's details, it will turn up in placement reports as something like 0906e2412d37878f.anonymous.google. You can't see the actual URL.

While anonymous placements will appear in the Placement Tool's results, you can't use the anonymous placement as a search term. So unless someone feels like searching through every category and recording what anonymous placements turn up, you've no clue what type of site it is.

All you have to go on are performance data. So feel free to presume that an anonymous site with high impressions and no clicks is irrelevant to your ad, and exclude it.

Conclusion

Moral of the story: advertising apples is harder than you think. And remember to look at all the negative targeting options – placements, topics and categories as well as keywords – to optimise the Display Network.

Have you any tips for Display Network targeting? Any particular sites that turn up again and again in your Placement Report? Did I succeed in Rick Rolling anyone? Share in the comments.

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. 5 Ways to Use Negative Targeting on the Display Network

Related posts:

  1. What's Going On with the Google Display Network?
  2. 8 Best Ways to Find Negative PPC Keywords
  3. 9 Ways to Sharpen Up Your Paid Search