Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads
Before I carry on I’ll just explain what ROI means (I’m sure you already know, but it doesn’t hurt to have a reminder). ROI stands for Return on Investment, which (quoting Wikipedia) is “the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested”. So this book is about making your website as effective as possible so that you make the best return on your investment in it. To use some more jargon, it’s all about improving your conversion rate – i.e. increasing the number of visitors to your site which take a desired action, whether that is buying something from your online shop, signing up for a newsletter or making an enquiry about your services.
This is a book that I’m going to come back to again and again. I’ve already picked up a lot from it and I’m sure that I’ll learn a bit more each time I read it. Can you tell that I enjoyed it? Seriously, it’s making me think very carefully about what makes a persuasive and successful website.
The book has a very informative and persuasive introduction to what ROI is all about in the context of a website, and the benefits of improving your site’s conversion rate over throwing more money at advertising. It then has a chapter for each of the important sections of a site:
- Landing Pages
- Home Pages
- Category Pages
- Detail Pages
- Forms
- Checkout Process
Finally, there is a chapter giving further resources (books and websites) for those who want to read more.
I thought this was an excellent book – I found the writing style very easy to get on with and feel inspired to put some of the concepts into practice.
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The New Rules of Marketing & PR
Why’s that then? Why aren’t I skipping off to my computer right now to market my business? (Oh yes, I’m already at my computer…) I’d say that the book is definitely food for thought. There’s no doubt that it helps you look at things with a fresh eye. But…
… I find myself left thinking “now what? now what do I do?”. Yes, it’s given me a lot of theory but nothing that I can really get my teeth into. I find books like that frustrating. It’s like I’ve asked a cook “how do I bake a cake?” and they’ve replied “in an oven, you can make chocolate cake, or carrot cake, or coffee cake, it’s great”, when what I really wanted to know is how much flour to use, how to compile the ingredients and how long to cook it for. Do you know what I mean?
So, I would say that if you’re interested in reading up on the theory of using the web to market your business then this could well be the book for you. But if you’re after a step-by-step guide to putting the theory into practice then you might not get so much from it.
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Press Here! Managing the Media for Free Publicity
Press Here!: Managing the Media for Free Publicity
I particularly liked the case studies at the end of each chapter. The author used three different scenarios – two businesses and one freelance journalist – and followed their stories throughout the book. Absolutely brilliant. They reinforced the advice given in a very accessible way, showing how it could be applied in a real situation. It was also very useful to get an insight into how a journalist thinks and the pressures they are under – somehow makes contacting journalists seem less daunting.
Definitely a book to refer to again when I’m ready to launch into some PR.
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Get into Bed with Google
The book is Get into Bed with Google
What’s this nonsense about if you do a Google search you get ‘about 12 results per page’. Eh? Google displays 10 results per page by default and you couldn’t even change it to 12 if you wanted to. Couldn’t he even be bothered to count? I know that’s a minor detail but it is a book about Google!
My advice is to steer clear of this one unless you’ve got an SEO expert to hand to check your facts with.
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Confident Networking for Career Success and Satisfaction
The book easily passed the ‘easy to read’ test – it grabbed me straight away and kept me interested throughout. I liked the way that it didn’t jump straight in with the ‘you need to talk to as many people you don’t know as you can’ kind of stuff that usually goes hand in hand with networking advice. It acknowledges that not everybody is comfortable in networking situations and offers practical advice for how you can feel less daunted by it. I was also pleased that the authors recognised the value of online networking and offered some advice specifically about that (though best to ignore their description of ‘forums commonly known as blogging’).
What I wasn’t so satisfied with is that I didn’t feel like I came away from the book with a solid plan of action. I could go back through it and work through the different pieces of advice to slowly increase my confidence and skills, but the book doesn’t offer a particularly structured approach to this. Maybe I’m wanting to have my hand held a bit too much, but I do like it when practical books set you particular goals to achieve.
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Get Clients Now!
The book acts as a kind of cook book for putting together your own tailored program. You choose what you want area you need to work on (filling the pipeline, following up, getting presentations or closing sales) and the ingredients you’re going to use and then form a plan to follow daily for 28 days. Brilliant! There’s nothing like having a solid written plan to follow.
I’ve read the book twice and put it into practice once and would highly recommend it. In fact I’m gearing myself up to have another go. Marketing is one of those activities that keeps getting pushed to one side while I tackle the day-to-day running of the business, but I find having a defined number of tasks to complete each day really helps me find the time for it.
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Google Advertising Tools
Firstly, it doesn’t seem to know who exactly it is aimed at. It is split into four sections:
1. Making money with your site, which contains just the sort of information that I was looking for. It’s ideal for someone looking to set up a website that aims to make money through advertising. There is a small amount of technical information but I would say it’s still suitable for someone who is new to websites.
2. Getting the most from AdSense, which follows the first section well. It provides a good overview of using AdSense, including information on setting up an account. Again seems to be aimed pretty much at the beginner.
3. Then we come to Working with AdWords, which is about using Google AdWords to advertise your website. A bit of a departure from making money from a site as this involves spending money on advertising yourself. However, it’s still relevant as to make money from a site you need to attract visitors and this is one way to do so. The level is very much the same as the first two sections, giving you practical advice about setting up your AdWords campaigns.
4. Using the AdWords APIs. Now this is where I start to have a real problem. The previous sections appear to be ideal for somebody setting up a money-making website for the first time. However, it then leaps into APIs which is full-on programmer territory and useful for someone managing a large number of AdWords accounts. Eh? If sections 1-3 are for you then you’d find yourself lost in section 4, but if you are a web marketing professional looking to utilise AdWords APIs in managing your accounts then sections 1-3 would be way too basic for you. I’m somewhere between the two – I have experience of web marketing and therefore am familiar with quite a lot of the concepts in the beginning of the book but am new to using advertising on a website so found that information invaluable, however I’m not a programmer as such so found it difficult to follow section 4 (in fact I have to admit to giving up on it).
So who exactly is the target audience of this book?
Secondly (sorry, it’s a long time since the ‘firstly’), as someone with an in depth knowledge of how websites are put together and experience of web marketing, I had issues with some of the information given in the search engine optimisation (SEO) bits of the book. Some of it I would say is wrong or at the very least not the best approach.
To sum up I would say that the book is worth a read but do consider what you want to get out of it first, and do take care about which SEO techniques you apply – if you’re unsure read up on them elsewhere first.
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