A blog about smart marketing and conversion optimization.

Ok, so Pinterest is blowing up. In this post, three contributing authors explore what the site is all about and what it can (and cannot) do for your business from a marketing perspective.

First, we’ll dig into the facts behind the company.

Pinterest’s growth big for social bloggers

With social bookmarking a past invention, one could say that Pinterest’s first few months were destined for failure.  Digg, Stumbleupon and Del.icio.us were past projects that involved sharing websites and pictures for the world to see, so, what was going to make Pinterest so much better than previous lackluster efforts?

Simple: engagement.  The previously listed social bookmarking websites may be ones of interest for sharing articles, websites full of pictures and even keywords yet they lacked real engagement from their participants.  Pinterest has changed this by heading back to the basics in marketing: simplicity creates publicity.  There is nothing exceptional about the design of Pinterest; in fact, it would appear like the website platform – script aside – took about an hour to create.  However, two years from the launch of the beta site, Pinterest now shares company with social media giants you’d think would have dominated them.

Pinterest growth facts

If the amount of time Pinterest retains its viewership weren’t enough, we’ve compiled more data that will make you wonder why it took so long for a concept such as Pinterest to become developed.  First, we’ll throw out some facts on how Pinterest has grown in membership and unique visits over the last two years.  Hold your applause until the end, please.

• Pinterest became the fastest website to hit 10 million unique visits.  That means faster than Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook.  In January, the total current unique hits count was roughly 11.59 million.

• The company currently employs 16 workers at this time, an amazing number considering the visitor volume.

• In order to offset expenses and turn a profit, Pinterest will alter affiliate links to capture payments that would have normally gone to an affiliate marketer.

• The company currently has a net worth of $200 million, although they’re reporting no significant revenue.

• 20% of users who have connected Facebook profiles to their Pinterest account comprise the daily visitor tally of Pinterest.

• Pinterest has three times the ability to retain readership and engagement as Twitter, by some measures.

• The Midwest comprises the largest concentrated area of Pinterest users with many coming from Mississippi and Kentucky.

• Whereas most United States visitors are sharing their crafts, hobbies, paintings and houses, United Kingdom visitors are more geared towards sharing pictures for website optimization purposes.

• In just 6 months, daily visitors went from spending 14 minutes on site all the way up to 98 minutes, an increase of 700%.

• Was named the top startup company for 2011 by website technology site TechCrunch.

For a website that simply shares photographic items, the numbers are tremendous and continue to push the website rankings to new levels.  Current U.S ranking puts them 16th in Alexa, still trailing the likes of LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook yet remaining firmly ahead of Tumblr.

Pinterest’s financial growth

Pinterest currently does have an estimated worth of $200 Million dollars yet doesn’t seem to have much oomph as of yet to turn a profit.  Though you’ll not find paid advertising slots on their website at the time of writing, their general means of keeping above water was the aforementioned affiliate link ‘snatching’ strategy.  Although many challenge the legality of this maneuver, they’ve yet to get taxed for doing it.  Social bloggers can enjoy the future of Pinterest as it appears to be in strong hands.

What is Pinterest all about?

For those who somehow missed the appearance of Pinterest, it’ll be useful to understand what the service actually is. Pinterest has been initially designed as a collection of pictures of people, places or things, either self-uploaded or found on the Web.

Web photos can be added to your collection in a click, if you have added the “Pin” button to your browser. You can also enter a URL, and Pinterest will define all available photos on a certain page.

The service has now become much more than just a user’s digital photo-album with separate groups of pics (called pinboards). The service is also a simple and convenient way to increase the popularity of your brand and earn more by attracting your target audience to your business.

How should I promote my business on Pinterest?

The simplicity of Pinterest is, actually, one of its most essential benefits, as it won’t take much time or effort to start pinning the most inspiring pictures related to your company or the product you’re offering.

The experts recommend taking several important aspects into account. These are:

• quality of the pinned images;
• topic of each photo.

Major Do’s…

Generally speaking, there are several groups of photos which should be pinned when you own (or promote) a brand or a company.

Here, it would be useful to pin:

• corporate photos (e.g. funny photos of the team members, snapshots from office life or corporate events);

• photos of products associated with the brand (logos, corporate mugs, etc. not just the company logo);

• infographics illustrating your work, or those associated with the sphere you are engaged in;

• inspirational photos, aimed to evoke users’ positive emotions (enchanting scenery, smiling people and so on).

Major don’t’s…

The key recommendations for how not to lose your audience in Pinterest include the following:

• Avoid posting overly promotional pics.

These might be taken as spam and can cause negative reaction from the side of users, rather than eliciting positive feedback.

• Don’t copy your competitors.

Although it often seems like others know better, you should make your Pinterest account really unique to impress your users and attract more customers.

Exceptions and other Pinterest marketing avenues

If a particular company offers a service to its users, rather than a product, e.g. a file storage service, like 4shared, there’re also ways to market such a business via Pinterest.

You can promote your virtual business by pinning photos from the site of your service. This will drive more traffic to it via backlinks.

How to increase sales with Pinterest

Similarly to its younger rival Fancy, Pinterest has introduced the special “Gifts” pinboard, where users can buy certain products directly, usually at a discount.

Use the “Gifts” pinboard to encourage your customers to get a discount and purchase.

Does Your Business Need a Pinterest Page?

Many businesses will not benefit from a Pinterest page.

Social media is vital for an effective online marketing strategy, and Pinterest has been generating a lot of good press lately. I’ve seen a ton of how-to posts explaining how to set up a Pinterest page for your business, what Pinterest can do for your marketing efforts, and how to maximize the effectiveness of your Pinterest page.

Pinterest is huge. It’s true. But I don’t think every business needs to create a Pinterest page just because it’s popular right now. Before you sign up for a Pinterest account, the first thing you need to ask yourself is “How will my business make more money from using Pinterest?” If you’re unsure, or don’t have a clear idea of what direct financial benefit your business will see from using Pinterest, why are you considering signing up in the first place?

When it comes to social media, you should only use sites that are right for your business. If you run an e-commerce site, Pinterest is ideal for you. Pinterest provides a great platform for advertising new products and howing off features of your items. It’s also great for promoting sales, discounts, and other special events.

If your business is a SaaS application, or another form of business that doesn’t translate well to easily shared images and videos, Pinterest may be a waste of your time. The time you spend trying to think of ways to make Pinterest fit your business model could be better spent using Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or another social media outlet.

Signing up for social media accounts isn’t enough. In fact, signing up for a Pinterest account and letting it gather dust while you spend more time on Twitter or Facebook is worse than not signing up in the first place! Social media provides a perfect means of engaging with users, and a lack of social media engagement tells potential users you don’t care about that platform. Linking to your site from Pinterest is valuable, and the traffic you could see from popular pins are even more valuable. But it’s more important to provide value than to have a social media presence. You should only create a Pinterest page if you plan to post information users will find relevant.

Take Wayfair, for example. Wayfair is a home decoration e-commerce store, and has made tremendous use of Pinterest for marketing purposes. Wayfair has been able to leverage Pinterest to increase traffic and drive sales.

However, like any other marketing effort, traffic from Pinterest isn’t worth much on its own. It’s going to be up to businesses to make the most of this potential source of new, interested traffic. The short answer is: if you’ve already established yourself with Facebook, Twitter and Google+, are you really going to have time to put into developing a presence on Pinterest?

Proper use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest can produce a tremendous increase in traffic, as well as better visibility in SERP placement. But your site doesn’t need to belong to each and every social media site that pops up, no matter how popular that site becomes.

The value of social media for marketing and SEO purposes is nothing compared to the value of engaging with your users in a way that makes sense. Twitter is perfect for quick customer service, and broadcasting news to a wide range of people. Facebook is great for holding contests, finding new customers, and measuring user engagement with your brand. Pinterest is still the new kid on the block, but so far it’s proved to be a fantastic source of traffic for many businesses.

Still, if Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or the next big social media site that pops up aren’t going to make you more money, why waste your time?

This is a guest post written by contributing authors Tyler M., Greg H. and Andy S.

Andy S. is a blogger interested in the best new apps and startups in the marketplace.

Greg H. is an internet marketing professional from sunny California. His company helps people find email addresses and look up cell phone numbers.

Tyler Moore works at Expected Behavior, a web development firm from Indianapolis who runs a product called DocRaptor, a web application used to write PDF files from HTML.

Before you even think about implementing an A/B test or a design change you must have a strategy behind it. This is the difference between success and failure in implementing your conversion rate optimization campaign. By having a well thought out strategy or a structured plan; you will know exactly what you’re doing in a controlled manner. By following the steps below you will be on your way to creating the perfect strategy for you to implement.

Analyse

The first part of the strategy is to analyse your current site. Don’t just jump right in and start creating tests; find out exactly what needs to be improved and where your weaknesses lie. Analysing your data will help you find out:

• What are your KPI’s? (Key Performance Indicators)
• Which traffic sources / pages have poor conversion rates?
• How visitors interact with your site, what paths they take?
• How different visitor types navigate throughout your site (e.g. new v returning)
• What parts of your site are underachieving?

By analysing your site through tools such as Google Analytics, you will start to realise that different visitor types navigate throughout your site in different ways. You should also notice that visitors from different traffic sources will also interact with your site differently.

Understanding how visitors navigate from the point of landing to converting (or exiting) can be achieved by looking at visitor flows and funnels, these can be found within Google Analytics (I am assuming that you have your goals and funnels already set, if not you will need to set this up if you want to fully understand your visitors and their chosen paths).

First, look at your traffic sources and visitor types to see which landing pages are performing below par and which need to be improved.

Then, recognise which pages visitors are dropping off or exiting whilst navigating through your site. Once you have this data you can start to raise questions as to why, on both a landing page and navigational page level.

Once you have understood your sites performance throughout these different channels, you will have a good understanding of the certain areas that need to be improved and throughout which traffic sources.

The key point to take from this is that visitors react differently depending on what type of page they land on and what type of traffic source they come from. I must stress this point, as your strategy will become flawed if you read your data incorrectly.

Now you have got actual data from your site, you can go down another route and analyse the usability of it. One of the best ways is by simply browsing through your site, you can notice things like:

• Site speed issues
• Pop ups / error messages
• Missing / incorrect data

No doubt you’re doing this anyway (as you probably use your site everyday) but it’s always good to reset and approach your site in ‘new visitor’ mind set.

The last part of the analysis is to benchmark. Whatever data you collect, make sure you record it in a spreadsheet. This will then help you to set goals and look at past results in the future. A good tip is to record as much information as possible as you don’t want to miss any key information that you may need to look back on in the future.

Research your competitors

Sometimes you can hit a bit of a stumbling block when you’re only looking at your site so my advice is to go out and research. Research best practises and studies as these will give you a different overview of sites like your own. Look at your competitors to discover how they set the page layouts and checkout process, as you might just recognise an element that your site is missing or something you can improve on.  Find out what users are saying on review sites  by creating surveys, as you may discover a group of visitors don’t like things like welcome screens, pop-ups, etc.

One word of warning on this: don’t assume that just because something worked on one site it will definitely work on yours. Every site is different and the research is to give you an idea of what other people are doing out there.

Sites such as FiveSecondTest.com can give you a great insight on what users think of your site and help you avoid key user experience mistakes. Basically, you upload a screenshot of your desired page; add some questions you want answered and then random users have five seconds to view your screenshot before they have to answer your questions. Check it out and see what people think of your pages.

Set targets

With the data you have collected, start to think about your short term and long term targets. First look at your short term target: how much do you want your conversion rate to improve in the first month? Then your long term target: how much do you want you conversion rate to improve in the first year?

Targets can also be set for specific tests or specific pages, it’s up to you so think about what you want to achieve.

The reason we set targets is so we can determine if a test or a campaign has been a success.

Solutions

With all of the above data collated, create lists of your sites/pages issues and how you our going to improve them. Make sure you list what tests you’re going to run and the targets you what to achieve, as well as research tools that will help you run the test, like Google Website Optimizer and Clicktale.

Be creative in your solutions as it’s always good to try something unique so you stand out from the crowd.

Finally, prioritise your list so you can start with the ‘big win’ pages or ‘urgent attention’ pages.

Testing and development

Now you have reached the fun part. With your solution list at hand, start to run your tests!

Review and analyse

With your tests and developments completed, start to review the results. Have you met your targets or your desired goals?

If you have:

• Can the change be applied to the page/site permanently?
• Can it be further developed?
• Can it be applied anywhere else on the site?
• Do you need to re-run the test again?

If you haven’t:

• Try again, don’t just give up.
• Think of new solutions and new ideas that you can implement.

One good idea is to list of all the things that worked and didn’t work from the results. This is for future reference.

Conclusion

If you’re building a strategy for CRO (conversion rate optimization) for the first time, it isn’t going to be perfect. But the more times you repeat the process, the more you will improve.

One final note: improving your site’s conversion rate should always be ongoing, so make sure you keep improving and repeating your conversion rate optimization strategy.

Daniel Whittaker is the Website Content Administrator at CartridgeMonkey Ltd, one of the UK’s major suppliers of Ink Cartridges. Daniel is a writer keen on SEO, Data Analysis and Website Optimization.

What’s this user testing thing all about? It sure seems to come up a lot. Let’s briefly explore what user testing is, and why companies are doing it.

User testing is a method of developing and improving a website’s design and overall user experience through careful study of real live user sessions conducted by people who could conceivably be a prospective customer of the business in question.

It manifests in different ways. For example, some user tests will be more scientific than others. Some will focus more on qualitative data and feedback from users; others will be more quantitative in nature. At the end of the day, though, the objective of user testing is, quite logically, to find guinea pigs in the actual potential customer base and have them interact with your site in an effort to ensure the site caters to their actual needs and expectations.

And even though many sites have never adopted user testing, it’s not surprising that lots do invest in it. Imagine you were a head chef at a well-known restaurant here in San Francisco — would you start serving up a brand new dish without first testing it out on at least a few close friends?

What’s useful about user testing?

1. Find out why prospects leave your website

2. Uncover potential areas of confusion

3. Shed light on bugs and faulty functionality

4. Get a fresh set of eyes on your content, message and processes

5. Get feedback from people who actually fall into your target demographic and understand how they uniquely see things

Ultimately, the answer to “why user testing” is simple. Everyone has ADHD when it comes to the Internet. Our attention span is about 4 seconds. When you test the critical elements of your site against the real-life experiences and expectations of prospective users, you uncover what turns them off and what empowers them to get sh*t done on your site quickly and effectively. You get answers to the questions, “What will keep my visitors here and inspire them to convert?” and “What aspects of our design will send visitors running for the hills?” If your site visitors translate into revenue for your business — and for most of us, that is the case — those are very important questions.

Why don’t more companies conduct user tests when developing web pages?

1. It can be expensive, both resource-wise and cost-wise (of course, it can also be tremendously inexpensive if you find the right tools).

2. Designers, developers and project managers have a vision for their site and don’t always want to “muddle” it with user feedback. CEOs certainly tend to have a vision too.

3. User testing can lead to feedback the team doesn’t want to hear. Pulling on a single thread can unravel the entire sweater… sort of thing.

I won’t list all the technologies out there, as there already exist several perfectly good articles describing the top user testing software. Businesses can conduct these tests at different levels, too — you don’t have to go down the road of hiring a professional team and investing months to test the crap out of your site from every angle. But whether you choose to employ an online usability testing tool or simply record user sessions to see how they use your site, something is better than nothing. Put energy and thought toward this early on, and your website will reflect the needs of your customer base. And that’s more “cha-ching” coming your way.