BesideTheSea

#27: Website Optimiser and I Feel like a Million Dollars

Andy White: This is “Internet Marketing.”

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Andy: Welcome back to the show where we give you the low-down, the inside information, the word from the experts, to help you use the Internet as part of your marketing machine. “Internet Marketing” is brought to you by Academy Internet, at academyinternet.com, and Wild World Productions at wildworldproductions.com.

Welcome to episode 27. This is Andy White. And today, we are talking to Daniel about a wonderful invention from Google called Website Optimizer, and we will talk to a lady who has a subscription website, which is making some really nice use of a lot of the things we talk about on “Internet Marketing,” such as audio, email, and affiliate marketing, all coming up on “Internet Marketing.”

But first, over to Daniel, where I discussed with Daniel Website Optimizer, which is a great tool from Google. And it makes this process of making little tweaks to your website in order to change marketing results a lot easier to track and measure. Enjoy the interview. I have to apologize about Daniel’s very echo-y office and the very summary background noise, but I suppose that’s the price you pay for having a really funky office in The Lanes in Brighton. Anyway, enjoy.

Now, Daniel, Website Optimizer; tell us all about it.

Daniel Rowles: This all started, the other day, I was doing some roundtable events and they were on website usability. And website usability, that was my table. There was one on Web 2.0, one on webcasting, one on podcasts. And I was thoroughly expecting my table to be completely empty, because, to be honest, usability is not the most sexy or exciting of issues to deal with online. But it does underline all the other issues, because if your usability’s no good, your website’s not going to work, at the end of the day. OK?

So, key thing was I went over, “OK, how can I kind of get this presentation a bit more interesting? I know a few of the tools. I know the way we’ve approached it before. I did a bit of research online. And I came across something that had just been launched: Google Website Optimizer.

Andy: Tell us all about it.

Daniel: Well, what it is… A lot of the problem with optimization for usability, i.e. making your website easier and better to use, people are more likely to convert into sales or whatever it is you want them to do, you’ll change a page, and then you look at the results and you say, “Oh, results got better.” But you’ve changed the whole page, and it’s quite hard to tell what changes you actually made that impacted that change. OK?

So, more often than not, you’re kind of “um”-ing and “ah”-ing. You’ll change this page, that page. You’ll change a whole section. “Oh, it’s gone up by two percent, but I don’t really know why it’s gone up by two percent.” There’s always been an approach you could take where you could change small elements from a page, but you will have had to put an awful lot of time and effort into it, or buy very expensive software or get an expensive agency to do it for you.

What’s now happened, if you set up a Google AdWords campaign, which is the Google pay-per-click system, go and set yourself a campaign up. You don’t need to actually spend any money, you just need to set the account up. You will get access to a tool on the top bar that says “Website Optimizer.” What this allows you to do is to set up some tools in there. You set up some information in your account details what you’re trying to achieve. You need to install Google Analytics, OK?

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: So you go to Google Analytics–search for “analytics” in Google, you’ll find it–install that on your site as well.

Andy: Actually, it’s that little bit of code that you paste into the bottom just before the closing–is it the closing HTML body tag? It is the body tag, isn’t it?

Daniel: Yeah. To be honest, you can get away with pasting it pretty much anywhere at the bottom of your HTML page. A little bit of code on every page, and what that does, that will give you access to Google Analytics, which tells you what’s going on with your website. OK?

Andy: Yeah.

Daniel: Very useful tool. I’d recommend it. If you’re not using it, you should some form of analytics anyway, OK?

But what this does, this integrates with Google Analytics. And what you can do, as opposed to changing whole web pages, you can set a page up, and you can change: “I’m changing the heading. I’m changing one paragraph of text. I’m changing this border.” And then what it will do is, each time someone goes to a web page, it will send them a particular version of the page, with one thing changed.

Andy: Ah, yeah.

Daniel: What it will then do is when you login to Analytics, you can look your conversion paths, i.e. how many people came to my contact form that came from Google, in this particular example? And you can say, “OK, from this particular version of the page, eight people did; from this version, 10 people did.” And you can work out which one’s working the best. You go with those changes, then you try and change something else.

And you can go through this iterative process of improving the page and improving the page to get better results. The good thing is it works out. When somebody comes to your page, it will say, “OK, this person saw this version of the page last time. I’m only ever going to give them that version of the page, so they don’t get confused.” Because the problem is, if people are coming to your website and seeing four different versions of the same page, it can be very confusing. So it gets around that issue, and that was a problem with a lot of previous software.

So, it’s a really good way of looking at usability, testing pages, making sure you’re making the very best of the traffic you actually get to your website. Because that’s what usability’s all about; it’s all about making the site easy to use and maximizing what you get from your website traffic.

Andy: So, it allows you to make multiple, or presumably, initially just two different versions of your web… I suppose it could be any, couldn’t it?

Daniel: You could have 10 different versions of the same page with different changes going on, and it will compare them like to like. I’d suggest doing a few, first of all, just making a couple of changes, just so you’ve got easy to cope with kind of data. Change the words in the title. Change the words in the headings. Try changing the words on the page. And you will see slightly different conversion rates from each of those pages.

Now, if you can even improve your conversions by one percent–well, one percent more business is a fair bit of business. Then do it by another one percent, and so on and so forth, you start to get a lot more business through your website.

Getting people to sign up for newsletters, that kind of thing. Think of all these different types of conversions: newsletter sign-ups, sign up to be updated on more information, actually buying a product, filling in a contact form, giving your feedback, whatever it may be, and you can try and improve the way people do that and just drive them through to do that.

And it’s a really exciting product, because you can see, “I did this; this is the result.” And you can get some good data to play with. It’s integrated into Google Analytics, as I said. And Google Analytics has just got a whole lot better recently as well. It’s a lot more visual, a lot easier to use.

So, if you haven’t got Google Analytics, go and get that. Get Google Website Optimizer, but remember, you need to set up an AdWords campaign in order to get it for free. OK? And then go ahead and have a play around and see what you can do.

Andy: That sounds really powerful.

Daniel: It is. There’s a Japanese testing principle, which I can’t remember what is actually the name of it, but that has done this exact thing, that you give the same results with slightly different changes and compare them. Now, lots of people have asked me about it, and the only way you can really do that, there’s been lots of software, but it’s very expensive. You have to set it up on your server. It’s quite complicated.

And I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, so please let me know; if there’s any list or there’s any other piece of software that do this, drop us an email. But this one I just found really easy to use. It’s very easy for someone who hasn’t got that much experience to do. You just tag up your HTML, the code of your pages, in a couple of pages, and it will just load the different versions accordingly. So it’s quite a clever piece of kit.

Andy: So there is a little bit of HTML diddling to do.

Daniel: There is. You need to be able to set up different versions of your page and understand how they’ll be set up differently.

Andy: Right.

Daniel: But that can just be literally changing the text. And then all you need to do is just mark, in that page, where the text of the different versions go. So, having an introduction to HTML, you’re going to need it to use this tool, basically. But once you’ve got that, you don’t need that much experience, and it’s a really, really good way of really seeing what’s going on with your website and then understanding how you can improve that.

Andy: So, it’s Website Optimizer from Google; free, if you’ve got a pay-per-click account going.

Daniel: Absolutely. You don’t need to be spending any money, so that’s just how you need to access it.

Andy: Sounds good. Give it a try, folks.

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Andy: Well, there you go. There’s are report from Daniel. Hope you found that useful.

Now, just before we go onto the next segment, I must talk about our main sponsor, Academy Internet, who have been with us from the start. Now, Academy Internet are a full service online marketing agency who cover the full spectrum of online marketing activities and objectives. It’s all about using the technology to make your business work, and they’re happy to guarantee that they will improve your return by at least 30 percent. And you can find them at www.academyinternet.com. Or you can call them on 44, if you’re outside the UK, or 0-1273-733433.

OK. So, onto our next and final segment. Here we have a very interesting lady. I’ve known her for a little while, and she has got a very interesting site that is making some great use of a lot of the things that we talk about on “Internet Marketing.” Let’s see if you can spot them. That’s your homework: spot the things that she’s using. Recorded over Skype, and not a bad interview, I have to say, from a technical standpoint. Enjoy.

OK, so let’s start from the beginning. Heather Berry. Now, you have a website…

Heather Berry: I do.

Andy: And you’ve got quite an interesting Internet marketing model.

Heather: Yeah.

Andy: And I’d like you to just tell us all about it. And I’ll try and understand what you’re doing and then turn it into English for the viewers, although I’m sure you’ll do a very good yourself, turning it into English.

Heather: I’ll do my best, Andy.

Andy: Fire away.

Heather: Right. Basically, where I come from is, I’m a health coach. And the whole thing is that a lot of people who want to get healthy, want to lose weight, know what they need to do. So, they know to eat less, eat better, exercise more, job done. But in fact, people don’t do it. And I realized that kind of what people need to do is they need the ongoing motivation. They need to have somebody kind of giving them a regular kick, because otherwise they just give up.

Andy: Human nature, after all, isn’t it?

Heather: Absolutely. And realizing that, because been there, done it myself, so I kind of realized what people need, and people were asking for it. And then I though, “Well, how can I get this out to as many people as possible, because at the moment, it’s just me standing up in front of an audience doing seminars, trainings and workshops but actually that only gets bums on the seats.

So I need to take this out into the big, wide world and also therefore maximize my income. There’s no point talking to three or four people when you could be talking to three or four thousand people. So that was kind of the start of things.

Also I liked getting information from other people. I’ve been using sites from the states, people giving me ideas and stuff I incorporated into my work. So I was seeing the technology they were using to deliver that. And I hatched onto this thing-audio postcards. And I thought that’s actually very, very clever because you can put bits of film into it-I haven’t quite got to that stage yet but it’s entirely possible. And because it’s the whole thing of that human voice and what that adds to things.

So I could send one out and say, “Hello, Andy, you should be doing this, that and the other things.” But if somebody is just going to read that, it’s unlikely they’re going to respond. People don’t have the time. But if they receive something by audio, it’s almost like having me there. People will probably use earphones to listen to it.

It’s a very personal thing. People that have used it have said ‘it really sounds like you’re talking to me.’ So it really is an incredibly powerful tool but it’s also incredibly easy to use. I’m not Miss Techno Savvy person although I have built the site myself which I’ve very pleased with.

Andy: Before we go any further, what is the name of your company? What’s the name of your site?

Heather: It’s www.ifeellikeamilliondollars.com. Very nice and easy. Does what it says on the tin.

Andy: So if I wanted to participate in this, I would go to the site presumably and fill in some details presumably.

Heather: Absolutely. It’s a very-as I say it’s a site I’ve created and I’ve used the audio email on the home page as just a little blurb to tell you what it’s all about.

Andy: Welcoming people to the site presumably.

Heather: Yes and just to explain my philosophy about health which is all about fabulous real food. I don’t do any of this one bean burgers and all this nastiness.

Andy: And presumably there is some call to action in the audio, is there not?

Heather: Absolutely. Sort of “sign up here.” There are a couple of links to the Sign Up page on the home page. And on the Sign Up page, there is a link to Terms and Conditions. Because we have to tell people to look through the Terms and Conditions because we are talking about human’s health.

Then it’s a very simple process. Sign up here. And it’s reasonable-17 pounds a year-which is very inexpensive because I want to make it as accessible to as many people as possible. Literally it’s sign up and that takes you to a form with all the details and you pay via PayPal.

Andy: Really.

Heather: I’ve set it up very, very simply.

Andy: OK, I’ve now signed up, I’ve gone through the PayPal bit. What am I going to receive?

Heather: Then you’ll receive a message “Hi, Andy, welcome, etc., etc.” As soon as you’ve made your PayPal transaction the default page that it goes to from there is the Affiliate page because what I want to do is build up a huge big network of people who are involved with this. Because the more people who get involved, I earn more which enables me to do a lot more.

As the network of people grows I can create a much bigger business and I can give people a lot more because obviously there’s case flow going on. So the incentive is-as I say as people are signed up and have paid by PayPal it takes them immediately to an Affiliate Sign Up page which costs nothing for them to do and everybody that they introduce-they can then put a link onto their website or into an email and anybody that they introduce via that link, they will earn a little 10 percent commission.

Andy: Sounds pretty good.

Heather: Absolutely. They’re not necessarily going to make their fortune unless they sign up hundreds of thousands of people which would be wonderful, but it’s just an added little incentive for people. So it really is a three stage process.

Andy: So I’ve signed up and gotten a welcome email and then do I get some sort of automated response for a few days and then the….

Heather: Yes, I’ve got an auto-responder set up, the first one of which is a welcome, and I’ve used audio with all of these. Just because I think it gets people used to the idea of audio email.

Andy: Yes, absolutely.

Heather: So the first one on day one, which is automatic as soon as you sign up, which is, “Hi, welcome, blah, blah, blah,” and also what is going to happen next. A little bit of an explanation as to how things will progress.

Then basically for the next eight days, I’ve produced what I call a little audio “e-booklet” which is basically six or seven minutes each day. Day one, day two, etc.

Andy: Right.

Heather: Basically just giving people the guiding principles. This is my approach to health, so it’s a bit about the food, it’s a bit about the nutrients, it’s a bit about exercise, a bit about relaxation, a bit about how you put the whole thing together, etc. So that’s the first thing that you get.

Instead of having to sit there reading a book and delving through it, I’m being very generous and giving it all too you, you just have to listen, engage slightly in the process.

Andy: Yes, OK.

Heather: Ongoing from that, actually the real meat of the program, and the ongoing motivation that I want people to have, is that on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, everybody receives a little audio “motivating moment” I call them. It’s actually a minute to minute and a half, just saying, “Here’s a great idea.”

I generally have a little bit of a theme for the week, because it helps me to create something that’s more ongoing. It means it’s not so bitty for people. They’ve got the theme for the week; it might be around a word or a particular type of food, it can be anything that I choose.

Andy: OK.

Heather: I look at things; so I’ll look at the food, I’ll look at the nutrition, I’ll look at the exercise aspects, I’ll look at the relaxation point of view. So really, all approaches to health because they’re all important. That will be Monday, Wednesday, Friday that they each get their little motivating moment.

Andy: So they’re getting a slice of you three times a week?

Heather: Absolutely.

Andy: Tell us how you’re doing it. Do you create these new on an ongoing basis, or do you recycle any?

Heather: No, the intention is to keep going, creating new stuff, because there will be people who are not going to achieve their goals in six months, they might be a year or two years. But even once you’ve achieved whatever your health goals are, when you get there, you need to kind of maintain it.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: For people like that, they might not listen to every single one of them, but it’s just a quick addition just to kind of keep you going.

Andy: So let me get this right. This comes to the user in the form of an audio postcard, is that right?

Heather: It does. It’s delivered by email. It literally looks like a little post card, it’s very clever.

Andy: So when did you first discover this, because I had heard of them but I never really looked into them deeply?

Heather: It must be about a year ago. It was some American guy, I got onto a mailing list or I picked up something and I got a link through. That was very exciting. What it is, is you don’t actually send it as a big fat file that is going to take forever, all it is is a link.

The piece of audio is hosted on their server, so all you do is click on the link to hear the audio, which is fantastic. It means I’m not sending out vast volumes of space and it’s not taking up lots of gigabytes, all it is is a link. It’s a very simple email that’s not going to get stuck in spam filters and so on.

Andy: That’s right. It’s not going to be huge; it’s going to be an ordinary looking email, html formatted presumably.

Heather: Absolutely. And it goes out as both, just in case people can’t get html, it goes out as text as well.

Andy: Oh that’s clever.

Heather: The other thing I forgot to mention Andy was that people are getting this ongoing motivating bit three times a week. In addition to that, I’ve actually set up an author-only blog, which I am the only author, because I really don’t want to get too involved in moderating too much stuff at this point in the business.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: What it is, I add stuff, I probably update it once a week, and I put on recipes, or I hope to do more things like interviews like you and I are doing now, so record interviews, get other peoples’ input so that people are not just hearing from me, it’s becoming a much broader experience.

That is something that they can link into as and when they want to. I put in a recipe the other day for king prawn alfrezzi or something.

Andy: OK, because your approach Heather is very diet-based. Is diet the right word?

Heather: Ooh, horrible word.

Andy: That’s a horrible word.

Heather: It’s got the word diet in it.

Andy: I feared that might be the wrong word.

Heather: It’s got the word diet in it.

Andy: Is it nutrition based? Is that a better way to put it?

Heather: Nutrition based. Real food. Real Food.

Andy: Real food. OK.

Heather: I’m a passionate foodie. I absolutely adore good, real food. Don’t muck about with things - don’t try and make it taste like chocolate, or taste like it’s got sugar in it. If you want to sweeten it, stick some honey in it or whatever.

There’s so many ways of being healthy without having to resort to very expensive, over processed, completely nutrient deficient, in my opinion, food. Get it as close to the way it was grown, born, or fell out the sky, and go for it.

It means - I think people have come - have moved so far away from what real food is. A lot of people have kind of forgotten what real food is.

Andy: Oh, absolutely.

Heather: And it’s actually - it’s very -it’s so easy to prepare. It actually takes half the time; it’s half the cost. Yet people sometimes think being healthy has to be expensive and tasteless, or just out of the reach of normal people. And it’s not.

I’m very aware that all the recipes that I do, all the ideas that I give, are accessible to people, whether you’re earning 10 an hour or 10,000 an hour. It really is across the board accessible to people.

Andy: Well this sounds absolutely fantastic! Let’s just see if we can summarize what you’ve done here. So you’ve basically — you’re using — I mean your primary tool, if you like, are these audio postcards.

Heather: Absolutely.

Andy: So you’re using audio in a very effective way on your website. You’re delivery channel or mechanism, if you like, is primarily audio over email.

Heather: Yes, oh and…

Andy: Basically, you’re consulting with as many people as possible using this distribution mechanism, which is absolutely fantastic.

Heather: Absolutely, absolutely. And the one thing I forgot to say was actually, in order to get the information out there, I’m using email marketing software.

Andy: Yeah.

Heather: Because, the great thing with that is I can see where it’s gone, you know, who it’s been delivered to. Make sure that nothing bounces and it’s all trackable.

Andy: Yes. So using a list manager.

Heather: Absolutely. And I can see also who’s opened things. So, although I’m not here to play Big Brother or anything, if people have signed up, I really want them to carry on using it.

If I see that people aren’t, I can - it’s just for me, it’s a little bit of market research. I can go back and say, “Is there any reason why you’ve stopped using it? Could we have done something different?” So just, you know, or, “Do you need a little bit of help?” So it really is something - I can enhance my service ’cause I know exactly what’s happening with the emails as well.

So just using - all the technology is there, and it - it doesn’t have to be expensive, either.

Andy: No.

Heather: As I say, I really am doing this on a complete shoestring.

Andy: Heather, can I ask, when you kicked this off and how it seems to be going so far?

Heather: Well, it launched last week, Monday.

Andy: What was the date? Monday, the… It was the end of March, wasn’t it?

Heather: Oh, the 20 something.

Andy: The 20-something-th of March. Yes.

Heather: Of March. Yes. Having had the - just the idea of the concept, obviously lots had happened before and I’m building on other stuff that I’ve done. But the i-the core of the idea, I had on the 22nd of December, so it literally was three months from inception to just - to going live.

Andy: To launch, yeah.

Heather: And there are still little tweaks and so on. I need to make sure when people sign up to be affiliates, my instructions are a bit clearer. They’re a little bit Americanized at the moment. They don’t…

Andy: You got to Anglocize them a wee bit.

Heather: Got to Anglocize them a wee bit so that everybody’s happy.

Andy: Sure.

Heather: But I’ve got somebody who signed up in South Africa.

Andy: Wow.

Heather: I’ve got someone to sign up in Austria, albeit a friend of mine, but you know…

Andy: It’s a start.

Heather: But, the great thing is that the application for this is enormous. I’ve already got a couple of corporates who are interested in adapting it for corporate programs.

Andy: Yeah.

Heather. The potential is phenomenal.

Andy: It is, yeah.

Heather: I’m even going to look at sort of doing it under license, etcetera, etcetera. It’s huge!

Andy: And what’s…

Heather: And incredibly exciting!

Andy: It does sound absolutely fantastic. What lessons, Heather, have you learned doing this, about sort of using the Internet to market yourself.

Heather: I actually just had a conversation with a friend of mine who’s in marketing who was saying very much about the whole idea of your brand and building that and creating something. If we look at things like, sort of - Amazon has created itself as a trustworthy brand. You have to create that sort of trust in who you are.

Obviously this is a website. I could be anybody stuck in a hole in some strange country. You have to deliver. If you say that’s what you’re going to deliver, you have to deliver immediately so that people trust what you’re doing.

I think that’s very, very important to keep moving forward. I remember there were a couple of days that things didn’t quite work, and people were going, “Where are you? What’s going on?” The distrust crept in very quickly.

Andy: Yes, yes.

Heather: So it’s to keep delivering - that was really important. Following up whenever anybody gives you feedback. The feedback can be negative or positive, but always take it on board to go through with that.

There’s lots of sites. Keep exploring ways of doing things. You know, like who are the people who do the audio pace card stuff? There’s one, two, three, four companies I can look at. They all have different costs and offerings. I went to an exhibition in London called TFM, which is “Technology for Marketing.”

Andy: Yes.

Heather: Loads and loads and loads of techie people telling you all these fantastic things, and delivering extensively the same service. It could vary from something like costing me about 50 quid a month to 3000 for exactly the same thing.

Andy: 3000 a month?

Heather: Oh, no, it was 3000 pounds setup fee, which is just outrageous.

Andy: Oh, I see, right.

Heather: But then there was still quite a high cost per month.

Andy: Wow.

Heather: So do your research. There are lots of people out there. Make sure that you’re getting something that can be sustained, that they’ve got good people at the end of their help lines. You do need it. And go for it! I know mine are not quite perfect yet, but I’m going for it, because you only learn these things by actually doing it.

Andy: We hear this a lot from entrepreneurs, don’t we, Heather? Just start, and then just tweak it as you go along.

Heather: Exactly. Richard Branson didn’t walk in with banners flying high and lots of airplanes - he started with one, with an idea, and that was, you know, odd, Richard stuff at first. But you go for it with the idea, because you know it’s good, and you just get out there and talk to as many people as possible.

Andy: Well Heather, it’s a fantastic idea.

Heather: Thank you.

Andy: You’re completely self-funded, aren’t you?

Heather: I am, indeed.

Andy: You’re on sort of a shoestring budget.

Heather: Oh yes, and a credit card.

Andy: You really are an inspiration to us all, and I absolutely wish you the best of luck for this.

Heather: Thank you.

Andy: To anyone that’s listening, the website again, Heather, is…?

Heather: www.ifeellikeamilliondollars.com.

Andy: No spaces… obviously no spaces.

Heather: No spaces, dots, spots, or anything else. All one word. Ifeellikeamilliondollars.com - lots and lots of l’s in it.

Andy: OK.

Heather: It would be great if anybody wants to come in. There is a contact us bit on the website, so if there’s anything you want to see, or any ideas that you have, or want to think about getting involved in some way, please do contact me, because I’m open to ideas, and very much looking forward to expanding this globally.

Andy: OK. Well Heather Barry. What’s the name of your company, Heather?

Heather: “The Vitality Junction.”

Andy: Heather Barry of “The Vitality Junction.”

Heather: And I feel like a million dollars.

Andy: And the I feel like a million dollars… what do you call it? A web service? Motivational service?

Heather: Health motivation program.

Andy: Health motivation program.

Heather: That might sort of ease into something slightly more user-friendly.

Andy: Yes.

Heather: But that’s what it is at the moment. That’s the brand that I am building, the “I feel like a million dollars” brand.

Andy: Well that’s fantastic, and I wish you the best of luck. Thanks for talking to us.

Heather: Thank you very much, indeed.

Andy: Have a great day.

Heather: Have a great day, too. Thanks, Andy.

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Andy: Well, that’s it for this weeks show. I thank you for listening. I do hope you enjoyed it. Now, we would love to hear from you. So if you have any questions or comments that you’d like to have featured on the show, then do send them to info@academyinternet.com. If you want to send a little WAV or MP3 file with some sort of comments or a question, please do so, and we’ll be very happy to play that, as well.

If you’re a subscriber, we’d like to thank you for your valuable time. If you haven’t subscribed yet, there are a couple ways you can do that. Go to iTunes and just search for “Internet Marketing” or go to www.summitsolutions.co.uk website, or the www.academyinternet.com sites, and you can subscribe there. This is Andy White signing off - have a fantastic week, and we’ll see you next time on “Internet Marketing.”

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