A few people have asked me during the past couple of weeks what it’s like to start up a business, and also asked for some tips and pitfalls if they want to set something up for themselves. This is not usually the subject for Kinuvate consulting, but after I had compiled a simple “homework” for the people who asked, I couldn’t resist putting the advice online – also considering Kinuvate is here for Startups and have a few years of experience dealing with this type of questions.

A few important things to consider when starting a blog, a business or possibly any major project in your life:

• Write down a one page document explaining in simple terms the niche you target, including who the intended readers are (be short but specific, try considering at least 2-3 types of people, including their interests and goals in life and probably most important. why they would be interested in visiting your website)  Don’t forget to find a good genre which doesn’t have too much competition. As a help, you can look at available domain names (I use WhoIs), but probably more important look at tools such as Google Keyword Tools to find a niche which has many people searching for it but only little competition (“secret to success”)
• Explain briefly (1-3 sentences per point) your advantages, threats, strengths and weaknesses:
  • Advantages: What are you going to do better than anyone else?
  • Threats: What are others doing better than you can when starting up?
  • Strengths: What are your strengths which will help you succeed? This could be for example your experience, knowledge and passion for the subject
  • Weaknesses: Which inner weaknesses do you find in yourself with regards to starting this?
• Write down a one page business plan specifying your mission, vision, goals, short-term tactics and long-term strategy for the business / website/ blog
  • Mission: Specify why you are doing this and what makes you passionate about it, what will make you continue going if it doesn’t make a grand profit within a couple sof months? How about six month? Will you be able to stick with it long enough to achieve your goals? This is not to say that you should stick with an idea if proven hopeless, but most enterprises take time before achieving their goals
  • Vision: Where will this take you and your business
    • In one year?
    • In five years?
    • In ten years?
    • Will it be a growing startup with massive amount of bloggers or will it be just enough to help you have a relaxed life?
  • Goals: What are your ultimate goals when starting with this?
    • Do you want to become famous, have the most popular blog/service or give other passionate people help as the first step of a hopefully amazing career?
    • “I want the business to support me so I don’t have to work” or similar does not count as a business goal…
    • Also write down a couple short term goals – make this a list of smaller achievements along the way which will support the longer term goals in some way
  • Short-term tactics: What will you do to make people find out about your blog, website and the work you do in the short term, and to help your website visitors convert toward your goals?
    • Are you willing to spend time commenting on blogs, Twitter and other Social Media channels to encourage people to visit your website?
    • Will you pay for advertising on Google and other services?
    • Will you create content which Google and other search engines like?
    • Will you stay updated with your results and continuously try to improve areas in need?
    • Will you listen to feedback from readers and keep a presence on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook?
    • Are you willing and able to hire experts in fields such as Conversion Rate Optimization, Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization, and follow their advice? over the long
  • Long term strategy
    • How will you keep people interested in your service term? Many websites have compelling features to make people stay for the first visit and possibly come back once or twice, but creating a lasting interest is a difficult and time consuming endeavor
    • Will you engage with the community and change your service according to popular demand, or tell them that “you can have it any color you want, as long as it’s black”? Many ‘old media’ people think of the web as just another marketing channel, but with more and more social media integration anyone who doesn’t embrace change runs a high risk of being left behind. However, remember that in a few areas, change can give negative results (usually depending on which type of change though)
    • Will you try to swiftly move in on new services if you see an opening, or do you prefer to keep a narrow niche? Moving into new areas could mean you spread yourself too thin before being ready, but could also mean taking a worthwhile risk to be the first in undiscovered lands which could lead to groundbreaking results and a place in the spotlight
• Write down a description of the people you need to realize the idea, at any mentioned stage – for a blog it might only be yourself, but when/if moving into additional services you need to be ready, and if you have already planned the services coming next, write down the kind of help you would need. If you can think of specific people, it might help you in the planning. Although you shouldn’t expect the specific person to jump on your idea, you would know the type of person and maybe even get some help in finding someone through the person you already know.
• Take time to consider the design of your website – do research on any competition (if there is any), do research on color psychology, usability and perception and write down a few notes on what you believe would be a suitable design both for the blog and for the future additions to the business that you have already considered. However, don’t forget there are experts with titles such as “Usability Expert”, “Web Designer” or “Conversion Optimizer”

When you have a couple of 1-2 summary pages ready try asking a friend to read them and see if anything is unclear. However, remember to try fitting all the information without any unnecessary extras (e.g. excessive information or explanations) if you want someone to read it properly and get a complete understanding of the idea. Also, you don’t need to answer every question from above – many are only samples – but be as specific as you can without adding too much “excessive wording”.

A great rule while writing a document is to write down everything you can think of to start with, then do more research and write down a few more thoughts – this part can easily be done in a mindmap (for example using Freemind on your computer). After you are satisfied with the collected information and research, start summarizing – first set a goal to shorten the text to half (which is usually easy), then try to get down to half of that, and when you have what you think is the minimum amount of text, set a goal for the next day to shorten that down to half again….

Good luck!!

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The conversion funnel for a website describes the steps a visitor must go through from any given page to perform a specific action. The action could be for example signing up for a newsletter, buying a product or subscribing to a blog feed. Analyzing and adjusting these steps can greatly increase (or decrease) the conversion rate of a website.

Notable for successful pages in a conversion funnel is high levels of usability combined with persuasive elements standing out from other content. Furthermore, the conversion funnel contains a minimum amount of steps to complete to finalize an action, and distractions are kept away from important action pages, while forms are continuously tested to remove any confusing and unnecessary elements.

Important drivers for converting visitors to for example long-term users or buyers include relevance, clarity of message and a sense of urgency, while elements giving anxiety and distractions will most often greatly harm your conversion rates. In other words, if you can minimize “harmful” elements and keep a clear path you have a good start.

Things to look for along your funnel steps include:

• Design – Positioning, Colors and Shapes:
  • Color Psychology: Both coloring and shapes have immense impact on how a visitor perceives your website and a single page, and even a minor a change in color theme can make a substantial difference. Make a search for the psychology behind different, colors, levels of saturation etc, and compare to the image you wish to convey and where on a page you want your visitors to focus their attention.
  • Shapes: Make your calls to action stand out on the page, give this important element a color and shape complementing its background. For example, you can see Amazon showing a blue background around an orange button – both contrasting the general white page background, while also complementing eachother and fitting with the general website design.
  • Positioning: For any important element which you want visitors to pay extra attention to, try to put it on a location above the fold for most popular resolutions – in web terms this means a visitor should be able to see it without scrolling in the browser (compare to “above the fold” from reading newspapers)
• Form Size: Consider your own patience when doing something online – do you tend to shy away if a page takes too long to load or if a form has too many fields? If this is true for yourself, you should hold it double true for others. Make it easy to go forward in your funnel by not asking for information you don’t need. Often, you can retrieve more information at another time if you start slow. For example, many websites has a very short sign-up form (or even a one-click solution connected to Social Media services such as Facebook or Twitter) and then let you specify more about your own needs and wants when more convenient.
• Page Speed: Both Amazon and Google have made tests showing that even a millisecond increase in page loading speed can give a substantial decrease in conversion. Ten years ago, people had roughly six seconds of patience for a page to load (especially true for landing pages). Increased average connection speed combined with shorter loading times for popular websites has lead to a decrease in patience for the average visitor, and now you often only have one or two seconds to show something interesting when someone visits your website for the first time.
• Relevance: Make certain that any text, images and other elements are relevant to your strategy and the goals of your visitors. Remember the golden rule to keep online content short – write enough but not too much, make clear divisions with relevant headers between paragraphs and don’t make text and images look like advertising.
• Security & Privacy: Remember that if you need to take information or money from visitors for a conversion goal to be fulfilled, this means you need to ensure them that you care about their privacy, that you won’t sell their personal information and that they can always tell you to remove them from your system. When it comes to eCommerce websites, there are a few additional things you need to make clear, such as having secure payments, secure deliveries (if physical items are sold) and possibly that they have the option not to save payment information. Something to consider here is having genuine reviews by people who has used your services previously – even when a recommendation is coming from an unknown third party, these will be more trusted than an advertisement highlighting positive experience, and in turn make people trust you more.

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Conversion Rate Optimization for your Search Result page should be a simple and straight forward procedure – after all, your visitor has already made a search and thereby expressed a desire to find something on your website. Many website owners are however not doing all they can, or even following the simplest guidelines when it comes to search results.

If you have a big enough budget and come from the eCommerce sector, you might want to simplify this by signing up for something like the Google Commerce Search and use the power of the worlds most popular search engine. This is however not a viable option for most of us, as there is a fee attached to using their service, and the fee higher than most startups are able to afford, especially at early stages. For this reason I will give a few pointers in the rest of this article:

• Show results from all pages: There is no way you can read the mind of your visitors, meaning you should make it easier for them to find what they’re looking for – even if they make a search for your Contact page or who you have partnerships with.
• Show related results: If someone makes a search for a hotel in Tokyo, they might also be interested in a flights to and car hire in Tokyo. Displaying simple links to quickly navigate to related pages scores high on the Usability charts, and often leads both to higher Conversion Rates and to visitors coming back the next time they’re looking for something you offer.
• Show related categories and tags: If a visitor searches for Chardonnay wines, you might show them categories of which these wines are part of – for example give them the option to look at other wines with the tag ‘buttery taste’. This type of results makes yours a terrific recommendation engine, and even if the person making a search didn’t find a suitable wine, he or she might have found a new favourite.
• Show images: Visual stimuli gives people a sense of understanding that can not always be achieved by words alone. Some subjects are of course better stimulated with pictures than others, and care should be taken to use the right image for the right subject. Awakening compassion for charity by showing devastation in a poor country would be a good example to help searchers understand and take positive action, while beach pictures are better than hotel skyscrapers for influencing destination on a travel website.
• Give view flexibility: If you’re showing search results with images, consider giving people an option to switch between an image grid or gallery view and a list view, where the list has wordier information and the grid view shows larger pictures. This could be especially helpful on for example a fashion website.
• Allow sorting and filtering: For any given  websites with a large  amount of search results, giving an option to filter out unwanted results is helpful for the visitor. For example an eCommerce website should have the option to filter on price, a travel website could filter on and sort by popularity and distances from a given point while a fashion website could allow filtering on colour and clothing material. For the sorting, you should keep track of popularity, user ratings, prices and discounts to allow  people to order the results in the way they desire.

Summarized, you should show flexibility without forcing anything on the visitor, give relevant information without giving too much or too little, show images and/or videos where suitable, design for “real people” (start with personas, but ask on Twitter and Facebook), have clear categorization of your data, and of course still keep it visually beautiful without taking away focus from conversion goals…

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Today, I attended the annual eCommerce expo (at Olympia, London), and had inspiration for this post on optimizing conversion rates on websites. Of course, the expo has a purely commercial interest, but the same or similar principles can be used in most settings. To clarify the subject, the conversion we’re talking about here is the one from a visitor entering your website a first time to making him or her take a desired action – this could be for example signing up for a newsletter, buying your product or registering on your site.

In general, there are a few steps and pages a user goes through for the action – for example when it comes to an eCommerce site, the pages could be in the following order:

1. Home page with Search
2. Landing page (any page the visitor can enter from the outside, should also include a search box)
3. Search Results listing (primarily a product listing)
4. Product page with Clear Calls to Action

I will give some specific tips regarding the above pages in the next few weeks – the two most important parts to consider are usually Usability and Speed (which many consider part of Usability). There are quite a few Usability principles many overlook when creating a design and this should be a starting point for anyone wanting to optimize their conversion rates.

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