Jakob Nielsen

I was reading an article by Mauro D’Andrea on KISSmetrics the other day where he wrote that: most blog adopters were successful because they adopted content marketing early on. They anticipated a trend at a time when few others did and were able to stand out and be noticed. Today, content marketers face competition in every segment of the economy, and many aren’t accomplishing it in a great way.

You and I? We’re a little late to the party, at least I am.

Content creation is a core component of inbound marketing and, hands down, one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website. That said, doing so effectively is really difficult. Outside of coming up with things to write about on a regular basis and actually writing, you’re clamoring for attention amongst a countless number of distractions whether that be Facebook, Candy Crush Saga, Amazon, YouTube, Reddit, possibly even your local competitors.

According to MBAonline.com, each day, two million blog posts are posted, enough to fill Time magazine for 770 years, and 532 million statuses are updated. Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter, revealed that 400 million tweets go online daily.

So how does that bode for those trying to break through the noise? Not great though the task is certainly not insurmountable. Whether you’re launching a new blog or getting back on the horse, here are tips on amplifying your message.

Users Can’t [Don’t] Read

They skim. At least that’s what Jakob Nielsen has said time and time again. To summarize the latter study, when supplied with a dataset detailing nearly 60,000 page views provided by Harald Weinreich, Nielsen found that as users encounter pages with ever increasing amounts of information, they’d expend an average of 4.4 seconds for each additional 100 words. And since the average reading speed is estimated to be around 300 words per minute (WPM), an additional 4.4 seconds would net 22 of the 100 words meaning that readers would only consume 22% of additional information shown. Nielsen used 250 WPM as his benchmark and landed at 18% hence the variation.

While one takeaway might be that the average web user has little or no patience, another might be that we, as content providers, are failing to provide things worth spending time on. Instead of trying to skirt this by pruning copy, prioritizing information above the fold, A/B testing, calls-to-action, etc., we should aim to optimize the experience as whole.

Remember: humans are visual creatures and while exceptional content is paramount, content takes form in different shapes and forms outside of text (e.g., pictures, tables, infographs, videos, etc). Switch things up to take full advantage of each medium’s strengths and to play them off one another. Pamela Wilson has an excellent article on Copyblogger with simple tips to get more people to read your content.

Share Your Content on Channels off the Beaten Path

Next, if you’re sharing content via Twitter, Facebook and Google+, you’re on the right track. But you can also use Reddit, StumbleUpon and Pinterest to supplement the process. According to data released by Shareaholic, Pinterest “continues to outpace Yahoo! organic traffic and hold its spot as a significant traffic driver.” StatCounter ranks it as the second most frequently used social site just behind Facebook.

If you’re employing StumbleUpon, use the su.pr URL shortener so that when users click on links, they’ll see the StumbleUpon dashboard where they’ll have an option to give you a thumb up. In turn, whatever you originally shared will then be shown to other users with similar interests. Free traffic? Yes, please. After tinkering with a few mediums, you’ll know which ones to invest in more heavily when searching through your referral traffic on Google Analytics.

Network or No One Will See Your Message

And last but certainly not least, you need to expand your network by interacting with other bloggers and readers, prospective or otherwise. That might mean grabbing coffee with people who might help you further your message, regularly commenting on blogs, going to conventions or just providing answers to questions on Yahoo! or Quora. Though it might pain you to resist going to completely obscure conventions and/or answer random questions, neither are likely to help your content marketing efforts even if they are hilarious.

I wanted to touch on this point because even if you are sharing your content via social media, without a following, you’re really just screaming into the abyss. It took me forever to figure out that by tweeting random followers back and forth and by failing to form real relationships, I wasn’t setting Bravo Design, Inc. apart from any of its competitors. It was just this weird dance, and I’d like to help you avoid making that mistake if at all possible because it can be a huge time suck.

TL;DR (Because You Skim)

I hate to end this entry with a quote, no less a long one, but Seth Godin capped this off so succinctly in an article on Fast Company. In it, he wrote: “I’m driving through France with the family. And for the last 12 and a half hours, there’s been nothing but a ruckus. Suddenly, it’s quiet. My kids are transfixed, looking out the window at these beautiful cows. Then it’s a ruckus again. Because cows are boring. If you’ve seen one cow, you’ve seen them all. But what if one of the cows were purple?

Purple cows are remarkable. At least for awhile. Remarkable means two things. One, it means cool, neat. Two, it means worth making a remark about. If you make stuff that’s worth making a remark about, you’re 99% of the way there.”

We challenge you to be purple cows. In the comment section below, let us know how you engage and share remarkable content with your audience!

While this should go without saying, your website has a huge impact on your sales and the number of clients you can, and will, close. How your website looks and performs will determine how the public perceives you and your business and can decide how successful a new marketing campaign can do post-implementation, so design is an essential part of any marketing campaign and a necessity to compete in a media driven world.

Furthermore, it will serve to develop your authority as a trusted provider. Whether you actually sell your products and services online or not, your website exists to initiate and catalyze visitor conversion. This might take the form of an actual checkout, the filling out of a subscription form or a free quote. In any case, conversions are taking place on your site.

If you’re considering a redesign, this blog should supply you with some of the considerations necessary to making the decisions that will facilitate an overhaul while positively impacting your overall profitability.

The usability and user experience (UX design) both affect the conversion rate of your site and will directly have an impact on revenue generated. Neither hinges completely on specific details like color theory or font selection as much as it does aspects like cross-browser and mobile compatibility, content management systems, site architecture and so forth. The scope of the UX is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used” (Norman).

UX design begins by learning about a business, doing market research to understand its users and understanding how a service can be developed that would affect them in a meaningful way. Thus UX design has become a critical turning point in defining business strategy and provides a baseline for said decisions, but a UX driven process doesn’t end at implementation. Its focus extends into ongoing testing and continued development down the road. The easier potential clients find it to connect to you, the more likely they are to turn to you for their needs.

Moving forward, below are simple tips to better usability and UX.

1. This point should be the most intuitive. Critical elements; especially, those that aid navigation, should be emphasized. The site’s capabilities and limitations should be easy to discern. High contrast between text and any background used should increase legibility. That typically means using dark text against a light background.

2. While being unique and standing apart from the crowd is normally considered good, sometimes you have to follow conventional wisdom and do what everyone else is doing. Usage patterns, behavior developed from extended web use, expect that links be blue. It expects for navigation to be straightforward. Users should be able to find information quickly and easily despite the length of a document. This can be utilized with search functions, indexes, table of contents and so forth.

As a sidebar, Jakob Nielsen performed a usability study on search boxes. While this might not sound fascinating, it found that the average search box length is 18-characters wide, and that 27% of queries were too long for it. Extending it to 27-characters would accommodate 90% of queries.

3. White space, or negative space, improves comprehension and builds hierarchy between elements on a page. As information gets densely packed into a document, it can become difficult to comprehend and/or unreadable. What is a cipher eventually leads to abandonment. Employ margins, padding, scale and spacing. When repeatedly and effectively utilized, it helps develop an identity and rapport between you and your user.

4. Usability testing and diminishing marginal return tie in together on this point. A second study by Nielsen found that five test subjects would reveal around 85% of all problems with a website. It would take an additional ten testers to reveal the remaining quirks. In the smaller group studies, it was found that the first one or two users discovered the larger problems. The other testers would find smaller ones and confirm what the first one or two had already found. While the biggest delta is going from zero to one tester, any testing is better than no testing.

Michael Smythe, winner of the Designers Institute of New Zealand Outstanding Achievement Award, gives this definition for design, “Design is an integrative process that seeks resolution -not compromise- through cross-disciplinary teamwork. Design is intentional. Success by design simply means prospering on purpose.” In the long-run, effective design is an investment that increases the bottom line by capturing new market share and bolstering customer retention.

If you have any questions as to how Bravo Design, Inc. might contribute to your growing business, please visit us at http://www.bravodesigninc.com/contact/ or leave a comment on this page, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Donald Norman: Invisible Computer.
Jakob Nielsen & Hoa Loranger: Prioritizing Web Usability.
Jakob Nielsen: Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.

Bravo Design, Inc.

Design Studio in Los Angeles, CA

Ergonomics and the User Experience