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marți, 21 septembrie 2010

Damn Cool Pics

Turbo Hamster Crashes!
50 Hilarious Album Covers
30 Funniest Pope Protest Signs
The Hottest Bollywood Actresses
Weight Loss Success Story
World's Strongest and Strangest Beers

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 08:53 AM PDT

Crash happens, even to the best of hamsters..

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 07:01 AM PDT

A collection of the worst album covers. These musicians might play good music, but looking at these covers, it doesn't really make you wanna listen to to their songs.

30 Funniest Pope Protest Signs

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 05:44 AM PDT

Nearly 20,000 people participated in an anti-Pope protest in London. Abstinence, Gay marriage, and abortion seem to be the hot issues of the day. Here are the 30 funniest signs.

The Hottest Bollywood Actresses

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 05:28 AM PDT

The Hindi-language film industry Bollywood based in India, just like American Hollywood, has many hot and sexy actresses. The most interesting fact about these photos is that many Indian celebs try to copy the style of their California collegues. But they still look fantastic!

Shilpa Shetty

Sonal Chauhan

Eesha Narang

Nisha Kothari

Mallika Sherawat

Kaveri Jha

Nena Dhupia

Raveena Tandon

Kim Sharma

Riya Sen

Deepika Padukon

Celina Jaitley

Bipasha Basu

Priyanka Chopra

Lara Dutta

Ayesha Takia

Amrita Rao

Malaika Arora Khan

Ameesha Patel

Weight Loss Success Story

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 04:14 AM PDT

Ben's weight was 358 pounds on January 1, 2009. But Ben had a life goal to lose extra pounds. So he started running and exercising. In 2009 Ben ran 983 miles, and by September 2010 he added to this number another 376 miles. In the middle of September 2010 he weighed 248 pounds. This means that in a year and a half Ben managed to lose 110 pounds in total. Excellent results! See how this man's weight was changing every month, and don't forget to watch the video inside this post.

Similar life stories:
Lisa McKay's Weight Loss Success Story

Year 2009

Year 2010

Ben's results

World's Strongest and Strangest Beers

Posted: 21 Sep 2010 04:01 AM PDT

Beer is the world's most widely consumed and probably the oldest of alcoholic beverages; it is the third most popular drink overall, after water and tea. It is produced by the brewing and fermentation of starches, mainly derived from cereal grains—most commonly malted barley, although wheat, maize (corn), and rice are widely used. Most beer is flavoured with hops, which add bitterness and act as a natural preservative, though other flavourings such as herbs or fruit may occasionally be included.

Some of humanity's earliest known writings refer to the production and distribution of beer: the Code of Hammurabi included laws regulating beer and beer parlours, and "The Hymn to Ninkasi", a prayer to the Mesopotamian goddess of beer, served as both a prayer and as a method of remembering the recipe for beer in a culture with few literate people. Today, the brewing industry is a global business, consisting of several dominant multinational companies and many thousands of smaller producers ranging from brewpubs to regional breweries.

The basics of brewing beer are shared across national and cultural boundaries. Beers are commonly categorized into two main types—the globally popular pale lagers, and the regionally distinct ales, which are further categorized into other varieties such as pale ale, stout and brown ale. The strength of beer is usually around 4% to 6% alcohol by volume (abv) though may range from less than 1% abv, to over 20% abv in rare cases.

Beer forms part of the culture of beer-drinking nations and is associated with social traditions such as beer festivals, as well as a rich pub culture involving activities like pub crawling and pub games such as bar billiards. (Source: Wikipedia)

Click to Enlarge.

Source: termlifeinsurance

SEOmoz Daily SEO Blog

How to Convince your Boss that CRO is a Win

Posted: 20 Sep 2010 04:20 PM PDT

Posted by Jamie

Today I’ll talk about one of my favorite topics, Conversion Rate Optimization (or CRO). I won’t be speaking about tools, case studies, or tips on what layouts or buttons colors work best; Dr. Pete, Paras Chopra and Oli Gardner have written some excellent blog posts on these topics recently. Instead, over the next several weeks, I’ll be posting a few lessons I’ve learned from doing CRO successfully (and unsuccessfully) for a variety of organizations. These are things I wish I had known when I got started.

Today’s post will focus on how to convince your organization to do CRO.

Make the Case for CRO using Simple Math

CRO may be popular on online marketing blogs, but I’m always surprised to learn that most organizations aren’t doing it. At the recent SEOmoz PRO Training Seminar in Seattle, conversion rate guru Tim Ash asked the audience how many of their companies were doing CRO. Of the 300 or so in the audience, only a few dozen individuals raised their hands. Of all the things I’ve worked on in online marketing, nothing has delivered a higher ROI than conversion rate optimization. And yet, it remains less popular than it should.

One explanation I’ve heard is that it’s difficult to get started. But with free tools like Google Website Optimizer, and affordable, yet capable services like Unbounce and Visual Website Optimizer, this excuse is quickly losing ground. The best explanation I can venture is that CRO doesn’t happen because it’s difficult to prioritize against the stack of urgent projects that marketing teams tackle each day.

Your first job should be explaining the potential return-on-investment of a CRO project. If your marketing team, boss or client knew the estimated ROI of CRO using metrics from their own business, they’ll be more likely to prioritize it ahead of other projects. So what’s the best way to make the case for CRO?

Use simple math. Take the numbers of conversions/goal completions from key process of your website, and show what would happen if they performed better. Imagine saying this to your boss or client:

The above example was generated using a simple Excel spreadsheet I created. Download the worksheet and just fill in the white cells with blue text (further instructions are later in this blog post). The spreadsheet will calculate a simple ROI and provide an easy, yet surefire argument.

The boxed quote above reflects the outcome of a retail web site example that has 632 sales a month with an average transaction size of $40. See the details in the screenshot of the spreadsheet below:

What to enter into the spreadsheet:

Experience Name
A friendly name for the User Experience you are considering optimizing using Conversion Rate Optimization. For this example we are using the Checkout Page of an typical retail e-commerce website.

Monthly Visits
I’d recommend the number of total Visits (for an average month) to the first page of the user experience you’d like to optimize using CRO. In this example above, this is how many Visits occurred on the checkout page of a given month. I believe Visits are better than Unique Visitors as they take count someone who visits twice during the same day as two distinct visits. I wouldn’t recommend using Page Views in this cell, since page reloads and other behaviors can make this number larger than it should be.

Monthly Conversions
The monthly conversions or successful completions to this user experience. In this example, the number of times a purchase was made from the Checkout page. For simple websites that have a single purchase experience, this is usually an easy number to determine. If not, make a best guess.

Average Cash Per Conversion
This is how much money you make on average for each conversion that is completed. An optional, but desirable field. A monetary estimate makes for a more compelling argument. For the example above, the company makes an average of $40 for each transaction. If you are a subscription business, this is where you would enter your customer lifetime value.

If you don’t have easy access to monetary values like average purchase size or customer lifetime value, just use the raw number of conversions to make your case. Using the data entered above, that would be the following (note that the Excel worksheet provides both):

Conversion Rate Increase
The estimated improvement that might be achieved using Conversion Rate Optimization. What percentage increase should you use? It’s up to you, but I like to estimate 10% improvement, because it’s believable and if your user experiences are not already very well optimized, this percentage is usually easy to achieve. But in my experience, if executed well, your first test will do, much, much better.

Keep it simple.

This is a simple ROI calculation. Some may argue it's too simple, but it makes a compelling argument that's easy to grasp. The key lesson here is while 10% may not seem monumental, when you see the expected ROI, it often is. And for a low effort with a big reward, it’s a slam-dunk. Use simple math to make your case and you'll have a better chance of getting your organization on board with conversion rate optimization.

What's worked for you?

What’s helped you convince your organization or client to start doing conversion rate optimization? Please let me know in the comments!

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Jamie Steven is the VP Marketing at SEOmoz, and a lover of pumpkin-flavored beverages including lattes and beer—both excellent choices for chilly fall weather.

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