From the joint-horse’s mouth:

“Microsoft and Yahoo! have now received regulatory clearance to form the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance in the United States and European Union. This milestone is an exciting step in our effort to give your business a time-saving and cost-efficient way to connect with a larger combined audience of potential customers.”

Let’s face it, Google could use a little competition.

Our blog post New AdWords Ads Increasingly Getting Stuck in the ‘Under Review’ Black Hole now has 50 comments – the majority of which express extreme frustration. Many AdWords account holders are eager for alternatives.

This could be the start of something interesting.

Hype is a powerful thing, but behind all great marketing has to be (at the very least) a good product. Otherwise it’s little more than noise.

Google Wave set out to be a solution to a problem that most people don’t have.

Which is why, according to Business Insider, web visits to Google Wave have dropped sharply.

Having used it myself, I can understand why. It’s confusing, buggy, and as good as pointless.

Next stop: the iPad.

Google Reader is one of those tools that I like, understand, but don’t really use. At least not until now.

I’ve been using FeedDemon longer than I can remember; certainly long before most normal people had ever heard of RSS feeds. And that’s the root of the problem with RSS: Most people have never heard of it, many of those who have don’t want to use it, and many of those who do find it more than a little frustrating.

The result of this is that until yesterday, the ‘average person’ had little or no use of Google Reader, but their new killer feature will most likely start to change that:

“Feeds make it easy to follow updates to all kinds of webpages, from blogs to news sites to Craigslist queries, but unfortunately not all pages on the web have feeds. Today we’re rolling out a change in Google Reader that lets you create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed.”

In other words you can receive alerts when any web page has been updated. So whether you’re interested in new drivers for your graphics card, whether your local Pizza Hut will finally deliver to your address, what your competition might be up to or even want to make sure that your website hasn’t been tampered with, Google Reader might prove to be a very useful tool.

And the more you use it, the more you’ll rely on it. The more you rely on it, the more you’ll use it. It’s an inspired move by the Goooooogle folk.

Follow changes to any website

It’s 2010. The internet is neither new nor revolutionary anymore. Given this, why is it that so many of the website mistakes that were around in 1997 are still plaguing us today? Should we not know better by now?

1. “Welcome to our web site. We are a company who pride ourselves on our meticulous attention to detail, hard work ethic, and speedy response times.“

Yes. Great. But what can you do for me? What do you sell? How can your product solve my problems or improve my life?

Think about the last time you walked into a supermarket, or any other shop. Were you met at the door by a group of suited people who wanted to talk to you about their company ethos? Or were you perhaps instead greeted by colourful displays of tempting items, special offers, and seasonal goods? I’m betting it was the latter. Your website is a shop, too – if you want to sell your product, you’d do well to treat it like one.

2. “NEWS!  Our software is now Windows 2000 compatible!“

Okay, maybe that is a slightly extreme example. Seriously, though, how often do you visit a website, discover it’s not been updated in a year or two, and leave? It’s a scenario that’s all too common.  Maybe you have been working hard on your software and neglecting your website. Perhaps there have even been a couple of new releases, which a site visitor might discover if they venture deeper into the site. But if your index page has a cheerful little “New for 2008!” graphic and your latest blog post was in March last year, it does not look good.

3. “Contact us at sneakynsuspicious@hotmail.com or PO BOX 123 12.“

You expect people to hand over their money without knowing who you are, and without any real means of contacting you? Honestly?

Online shopping might well be deemed mainstream and safe these days, but that doesn’t mean that your visitors have turned stupid. Far from it – they’re probably savvier than ever.  If they discover that you’re unwilling to provide them with a phone number or a real address, they’re likely to be just as unwilling to provide you with their credit card details.

4. “Yes, I will tell you how much this product costs if you are willing to click your way to the seventh level of hell my website.“

Why are so many people scared of making their product price easy to find? Do they believe that by forcing their visitors to read umpteen pages of empty buzz words, they will then be too exhausted to realize that the $99 you’re asking is actually quite a bad deal?

If it was up to me, the starting price would always be prominently displayed on the index page. Chances are that your visitors are working within a budget, and don’t want to waste their time looking at a $5000 application when they can’t afford to spend more than $50. If pricing is complicated and depends on a variety of factors, fine – but please make sure your pricing structure is clearly displayed and no more than a click away from any given page.

5. “The graphics? Oh yes, I had a lot of help from my cousin, my neighbour’s wife and my pet hamster, but most of them I did myself.”

Of all the places to save money, I am constantly amazed by how many people choose their website graphics. If you use your site to keep a log of petrol costs for your radio-controlled boat, or to share the latest rail-related news with other trainspotting enthusiasts, fine.  Use any old jpegs you find lying around. If, however, you’re hoping to make a serious impression and make some money from your software: use a graphic designer. Today.

A good friend told me that he’d recently been buying a lot of things in preparation for the birth of his first child. And like any red-blooded male, he’s been doing most of his shopping online. The father-to-be that is, not the child.

Following almost every order, the company he bought from sent him an email containing a coupon towards any future purchases. As any parent can testify, buying for your first child is a never-ending task. So it’s no great surprise that he’s already used many of the coupons.

From the perspective of the companies, he’s a pre-qualified customer, so they already know that he has an interest in what they’re selling. This is a beautifully effective form of marketing, that is more targeted than most other forms of advertising.

Upselling after the purchase can convert a one-time buyer into a repeat customer. And if each subsequent purchase triggers another coupon, you may be able to turn the one-time buyer into a customer for life.

A newspaper headline is written in large letters, and is supposed to indicate the content of the article. Front page headlines are the most important, as they need to be eye catching enough to snare the interest of passers-by.

You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Our own company sells services to help (mainly) software developers increase their sales.

Read the above sentence again, and see if that would make a good headline.

Of course it doesn’t which is why our front page uses two brief sentences:

“You write the software.
We help you grow.”

We recently ran some usability tests on our website, and used people with no connection to our company or industry. One of the questions they were asked while browsing the website was “What do we do, and who are we targeting”.

Each and every tester was able to correctly answer that question within literally seconds of arriving at the website.

When I arrive at your website, do I instantly know what you sell and why I need it?

What’s your headline?

Throughout our company’s website we have six navigational elements at the top of each page. Seven if you include the logo that goes back to the homepage.

Websites like MJT Net have eight elements in their main top nav, with more than 30 more in drop-down menus.

Amazon switched from their top nav to the most confusing dynamic nav that I have ever seen. But it appears to work.

And the BBC news website has 30 main links on the left hand side alone.

So how many is too many?

I’ve met people who think that five, six or seven are the magic numbers. They believe that any more than that will overwhelm the website visitors, and leave them unable to find what they are looking for.

Yet websites such as Amazon, CNN, the BBC and hundreds of thousands of other believe otherwise.

The magic number is clearly the minimum that you need in order to serve your customers correctly.

Last year we redesigned our company’s main website to use a new logo, a new look and a completely different layout.

Unlike many companies redesigning their websites, our planning process began by taking a look at the data we already had – through analysing our server log files.

We then took this data and applied it to information gained both from clients and companies who decided not to use our services.

One of the most useful points that we learnt was that our name and reputation were critical factors. Some of our clients decided to try our services based on what they read about our company, and a few specifically recalled one item: “We have been working with software on the internet since 1997, and have had more than 400 clients in over 42 different countries. Many of them have been with us for several years.”

Of the companies who decided not to engage our services, a disturbing number mentioned needing more reassurance about who we are, and none of them recalled reading the very information that our clients mentioned.

As a result, our About Us page is the second item in the top nav, and is now in the top five most popular pages.

Has it affected the number of clients who sign up for our services?

Absolutely.

Steering your site visitors to the information they need is quick to implement, easy to apply and extremely lucrative.

What are you waiting for?

Out with the old and in with the new. Names that is.

Same people. Same owners. Same high standards.

Different name. Different website. Different email addresses.

SharewarePromotions is now SoftwarePromotions.

Hare changes to oft. Everything else remains the same. Aside from a new service that we’ll be launching shortly:

Thought for the day – would you like to increase your conversions by over 400%? If so then you really want to watch this space.

Pulling-in targeted visitors to your website is relatively easy. There’s Google AdWords, AdCenter, press releases, twitter, blogs and hundreds of other opportunities for jumping in front of the right people and waving your arms around so they don’t forget you.

Getting them to stay, however, is more difficult.

Many small and medium-sized companies make the mistake of too many assumptions.

They assume their visitors understand their terminology. Everyone with a slow windows system understands the need for Registry Optimisation and Defragging.

They assume their visitors know the difference between free download and free trial. Then wonder why their download to sales conversion ratios are low, while their AdWords conversion rates are ten times higher.

They assume their visitors have already researched their competition. When their comparison matrix has the highest exit rate on their website, they don’t understand why.

And they assume they understand what their visitors want and how they go about getting it. This, perhaps, is the greatest mistake of all.

My first tip for 2010: stop guessing what your visitors want and start listening to them.

My second tip for 2010: your server logs contain everything you need to do so and more.