Today, I’m going to shed a spotlight on the topic of content promotion.

It’s one thing to have nobody read that 500 word post you just threw up to meet a deadline. It’s another thing entirely when you invested $1,000 into a world class resource and you’re still seeing a flatline in analytics.

You know you need to be spending more time on promotion, but what the hell are you supposed to be doing?

That’s the question I’m going to answer today. I spent the last month testing out 20 different promotion strategies in a variety of niches, and today, we’re going to peel back the curtain and reveal what works and what doesn’t.

But first, we need to clear up a big misunderstanding that is probably the main reason your long-term content promotion efforts are failing.

Short-term Tactics vs Long-term Strategy

If you’ve spent any amount of time looking for promotion advice, you’re probably frustrated.

All the big, successful influencers tell you the same thing:

1. Just send it to your email subscribers
2. Create some nice images and share on social media
3. Go get influencers to share your content

Yeah, sure… that’s great advice coming from someone with 60k email subscribers, 200k Twitter followers, and a massive network of eager JV partners.

But what about everyone else? What do you do when you are just starting to build an audience?

You’ve done all those things and just aren’t seeing any results. What now?

Here’s where we get to that big misunderstanding. The reality is that what works for someone WITH an audience is not the same thing that works for someone WITHOUT an audience.

There are two distinct categories that are used to promote content:

1. One-off promotion tactics (~growth hacking)
2. Recurring promotional assets (~audience building)

One-off promotion tactics are short-term tactics designed to get quick results. For example, sharing a post on Inbound.org or submitting a Reddit thread are short-term tactics. You are going to get an immediate traffic bump and then, in most cases, you will never receive additional benefit from that tactic.

On the other hand, you can build recurring promotional assets. These are your email subscribers, social followers, returning readers, etc. – a growing base of people who will engage with and promote your content whenever you wish. This is a long-term strategy as it’s benefits can be tracked on an exponential curve. The bigger this base becomes, the more quickly it grows.

When you are first starting out, you will rely a lot on short-term growth tactics designed to quickly get your brand and content in front of as many people as possible. As you build your audience, promoting directly to this audience will become so effective, you really won’t need to spend a lot of time on those one-off tactics anymore.

The 5-Step Process For Creating Long-term Promotional Assets

Before we dive into the short-term promotion strategies I tested, let’s first take a look at the most important part of content promotion: how to build long-term promotional assets.

1. Create Content That Is Worth Promoting

The first step is to create content that is actually worth promoting.

How many times have you received an email from someone inviting you to check out their 500 word blog post rehashing a few best practice tips you’ve seen a hundred times before?

How many times have you been asked to share a roundup post with 50 “influencers” answering a boring question that’s been asked a thousand times before?

Creating content that is actually worth sharing is mandatory if you want to have success with your other promotion strategies.

How can you do this on a practical level?

1. Focus on questions that require in-depth answers and then provide those in-depth answers.
2. Include real examples and data to support claims.
3. Add custom images or illustrations that enhance the presentation.
4. Exceed the depth and quality of your niche competitors.

Creating buzz-worthy content isn’t rocket science, but it does require you to be intentional, strategic, and willing to invest more effort than your competitors.

2. Build Your Email List

Your base of email subscribers will be one of your most important recurring promotional assets. If you’ve ever wondered how popular blogs get thousands of shares the moment they publish something new… it’s the email list.

There are many different ways to build your email list:

• Add content upgrades to each blog post.
• Run a giveaway.
• Create and promote lead magnets on your blog.
• Use popups to prompt new subscriptions.
• Partner with publishers and influencers and tap into their lists.

For a more in-depth look at these strategies, check out my article on KISSmetrics.

As a general rule, the optimal way to build an email list is to have a single personality focusing on a single topic. That’s not always practical, however, so as an alternative, you can attempt to deliver an ongoing narrative through your blog posts and emails. For example, Groove uses the the ongoing story of their own business growth to captivate a massive audience.

3. Build Audiences On Social Media

While social media followers aren’t typically as reliable as email subscribers, they can be a powerful part of audience building for a number of reasons.

1. Social proof
2. Ad targeting
3. Content amplification
4. Direct engagement

For starters, having large social followings provides tremendous social proof. This can be very effective when trying to sell, network, or get media attention.

For platforms like Facebook, direct follower engagement is now a pay-to-play sport, BUT the larger your following, the better your ad targeting will be. This is also true for email subscribers. If you have a big group of followers or subscribers, you can create some incredibly well targeted Facebook ad campaigns.

For other platforms, free engagement is still relevant, and large social followings can tremendously amplify your content promotion efforts. For example, Ahrefs has a relatively small Twitter following at 16,000, and with only a minimal amount of time investment into Twitter, they can still generate 100+ clicks from a single tweet.

4. Join or Build Niche Communities

Honestly, this is one of the most effective promotion techniques I’ve seen in the last two years. Niche communities that engage with each other or directly promote each others content can be a HUGE asset to your business.

One guy who does this really well is Tim Soulo of Ahrefs. Tim is very active on Reddit, frequently providing help and answering questions while only rarely dropping links. You can see some results below from some of his posts.

Tim also spent a great deal of time on Quora before joining Ahrefs, and you can see some of the results below.

Over time, traffic from Quora can grow similar to organic search traffic.

In addition to joining groups or participating in communities, you can simply build your own. Tim has also done just that with an Ahrefs “Insider” Facebook group, now numbering over 3,500 members.

Successfully participating in or building communities revolves around facilitating non-promotional engagement within the group and providing constant value for participants. For promotion to be effective, it has to be infrequent in these settings.

Real Results From 20 Short-term Promotion Tactics

Okay, time for everyone’s favorite part… experiment results.

Over the last month, I tested 20 different short-term promotion tactics on three different articles representing three different niches.

1. Why Entrepreneurs Fail: 18 Business Winners Explain Their Biggest Fails
2. 21 Fascinating Persuasion Techniques That Boost Website Conversions
3. How to Easily Build & Publish An Amazing Church App

These articles represent three different niches of varying sizes. The first and largest is the entrepreneurship niche. The second and still fairly large is the conversion/marketing niche. The third and smallest is the church tech niche.

My goal was to answer one simple question: “Which short-term promo tactics will bring in the most traffic?”

For the purpose of this experiment, I didn’t attempt to utilize my existing network to manipulate results or spend a lot of time building a reputation in the various channels I tested. I wanted to keep this 100% relevant to the reader starting from ground zero.

That said, there are a lot of ways to amplify results from any given channel, particularly with the help of a small team, and I’ll discuss how you can do that on a channel by channel basis as we work our way down the list.

I think it’s also worth pointing out that quality of traffic was NOT measured in this experiment. How well any of these channels convert will be very different from niche to niche, so my goal here was simply to measure what channels send the largest volume of traffic.

Here are the 20 tactics I tested, ranked from least effective to most effective:

1. BlogEngage & BizSugar Submissions
2. LinkedIn Group Shares
3. Linkedin Republication
4. Medium Republication
5. Answering Quora Questions
6. Inbound.org Submission
7. Leaving Blog Comments
8. Leaving Youtube Comments
9. Facebook Boost Post
10. Google+ Group Shares
11. Stumbleupon Submission
12. Facebook Group Shares
13. Start A Fire Curation
14. Taboola Paid Promotion
15. Outbrain Paid Promotion
16. Hacker News Submission
17. BlogEngage Retweets
18. GrowthHackers.com Submission
19. Quuu Paid Promotion
20. Reddit Thread Submission

In order to track results for all these channels, I used Clkim to create around 50 different URLs.

Here are my results.

1. BlogEngage & BizSugar Submissions

Community upvote sites are a pretty common addition to any “how to promote your content” list, and as you may have noticed, quite a few made it on our experiment list.

BlogEngage and BizSugar were both channels I had never used in the past but found recommended on more than a few blog posts. A friend of mine had been able to drive several hundred visitors to a brand new site through one BizSugar submission, so I decided to include it in my experiment.

Only one of my posts fit BizSugar’s guidelines, while all three were submitted to BlogEngage.

Between the 4 submissions, I received exactly ZERO click-throughs.

To be honest, BlogEngage’s free community page looked pretty dead. They have some paid options I tried out as well with better results (which you’ll see a bit later), but I’m skeptical that experimenting with time of day or even getting a team to upvote will make it worth your while.

BizSugar on the other hand, is a bit more active of a community. They are focused solely on small business topics, so if you have something highly relevant to that community, find an optimal time to post, AND get some people to help you upvote your post, it’s probably a worthwhile addition to your promotion process.

Otherwise, skip it.

2. LinkedIn Group Shares

Joining social groups is another common tactic many people use to promote their content. Theoretically, the “right” way to go about this is to join a group, engage with the community, and then share your content.

In practice, I found that Facebook was the only platform where it was easy to find legitimately interactive groups. On LinkedIn and Google+, most every group I came across in the entrepreneurship and marketing spaces was nothing more than a spam channel, and I couldn’t even find a church tech group on LinkedIn.

But unlike Google+, most of my submissions on LinkedIn didn’t get even a single click-through.

After sharing in 4 seperate LinkedIn groups, I received only 1 click-through.

After interacting with 15 different social groups during this experiment, I believe that smaller social groups tend to be the most effective for content promotion. Small groups can support an active community, where people know each other and stay engaged. As groups get bigger, everything tends to become white noise.

From what I’ve seen, the best way to utilize social groups is to start one of your own, like the example we looked at from Tim Soulo and Ahrefs earlier in the article.

3. Linkedin Re-Publication

I’ve had some solid success with republishing content on LinkedIn in the past. One article I republished received nearly 2,000 clicks and a boatload of likes, shares, and comments.

The key was submitting the article to the LinkedIn Pulse team and having them feature it in one of their feeds. Unfortunately, Pulse no longer exists…

As a result, republishing to LinkedIn is now essentially the same as publishing something to your own blog. It’s only going to receive whatever traffic you channel to it. In other words, it’s not really a promotion channel anymore.

My LinkedIn republication received exactly 1 click-through.

LinkedIn has recently changed their algorithm to create better engagement via status type posts on your wall. I recently topped 100,000 views with a post satirizing “influencers”, and I only have around 800 followers on the platform.

I’d definitely recommend exploring the channel, but you’ll need to take note of the type of content that performs well, because you won’t get any results from posting a link and hitting “share”.

4. Medium Re-Publication

Re-publishing on Medium is similar to re-publishing on LinkedIn and gave me similar results. Unlike LinkedIn, however, Medium still has some upside if you are able to get your posts included in a popular category feed or “publication” feed. These function similar to how Pulse used to function, and they can drive a large amount of traffic to your site.

Getting included on a publication requires time and networking (unless you know the right person already), and it’s not something I’ve pursued in the past, so my results were based on a simple republication of content.

My Medium republication received only 3 click-throughs.

Again, the only real potential value here is going to be getting included in popular publications. Measuring how difficult and worthwhile that is will make for a good future experiment.

5. Answering Quora Questions

Quora is another one of those channels that offered a lot of potential for marketers in its first couple years, but the gold rush is over, and it’s not nearly as valuable as it once was.

Simply searching for relevant Quora questions that you can answer and link out from is no longer a viable strategy on it’s own as a promotion tactic.

I provided thoughtful answers to 9 questions and received 4 total click-throughs.

That said, there is still a way to take advantage of Quora, but it involves the same vote manipulation that comes up with half of these channels.

After running this experiment, I talked with people who have had some moderate success with Quora, and in their opinion, it’s not very effective as a short-time tactic. In order to get any sort of meaningful results, you really need to be active on a more regular basis (and preferably beginning 3+ years ago). Results tend to be like a lottery. You never know which thread will skyrocket and start sending traffic, so the more threads you participate in, the better your chance of seeing a return.

6. Inbound.org Submission

If you are in the marketing space, you know about Inbound.org. It’s a community upvote site that has become a mandatory part of promoting any sort of marketing content, and more than a few marketers have leveraged the community to accelerate their websites and careers.

I’ve been using Inbound.org for the last few years, and unfortunately, I’ve watched it’s digression from exciting new community to insiders-only spam channel. At this point in the game, if you want to get results with Inbound.org, you need one of two things.

1. Access to a community moderator
2. A group of people who will immediately upvote your submission

Moderators can easily manipulate results on the platform, and many won’t hesitate to do so. If you know a moderator or are willing to pay one under the table, you can guarantee your post will get pushed near the top of the front page.

Alternatively, you will need a group of people (around 10 is usually enough) to immediately upvote and comment on your submission. This will get it enough exposure to gain some organic traction. You can usually count on anywhere from 500 to 1,500 visitors via this method, depending on how compelling your headline and article topic are.

I haven’t even attempted to submit to Inbound.org without a supporting upvote group in some time, so I decided to try clean submissions for the purpose of this experiment.

My two clean Inbound.org submissions received a total of 6 click-throughs.

So yeah, either collude or don’t bother.

7. Leaving Blog Comments

There are a lot of potential upsides to blog commenting:

• Networking
• Backlinks
• Referral traffic
• Lead acquisition
• Etc.

I know one marketer who built her email list to several thousand subscribers without even having a website. All she would do is guest blog and comment on blog posts with links back to a lead magnet optin page.

There are a lot of benefits to commenting on blog posts, but what I wanted to measure is whether or not I could get referral traffic from commenting on blog posts listed on the front page for my target keyphrase.

In short, the answer is no.

I left 9 blog comments and received 6 total click-throughs.

What I would recommend doing instead is following the most popular blogs in your niche and commenting on new posts as soon as they are published. Make sure you are doing this on sites that hyperlink your username to a URL of your choosing, and then leave noteworthy comments that compliment the author and provide additional insights to the discussed topic.

8. Leaving Youtube Comments

I had never tried this strategy before, but I was very curious to see how posting a comment on a Youtube video would translate to referral traffic.

Turns out, it’s about what you’d expect, BUT the main thing I noticed was that smaller, active youtubers tend to be very engaged with commenters.

Referral traffic wasn’t really anything to write home about.

I left 9 Youtube comments and received 15 total click-throughs.

That said, I think Youtube is worth exploring more as a promotion channel, even if you aren’t creating video content. I plan to spend a bit more time experimenting with it in the future.

9. Facebook “Boost Post”

As we discussed earlier, Facebook Ads can be a relatively cheap way to get significant exposure for a post. It can also be a very efficient way to waste your money.

I spent $45 total on the “Boost Post” option and received a measly 24 click-throughs.

You really need to be willing to spend a bit more money in order to get decent results with Facebook nowadays. You need to spend some money to identify the right targeting options and then spend a bit more money on the post itself in order to start getting a return.

Simply dropping a few bucks to boost a post is no longer a good investment in most cases. It’s also possible that I just have no clue what I’m doing with Facebook Ads, but I’ve had enough success in the past with the platform to feel like it’s not that simple.

10. Google+ Group Shares

Google+ groups are basically the same as LinkedIn groups but with better results. They are essentially just spam communities, but my posts to these communities actually resulted in a few clicks. I don’t really recommend making a practice of spamming groups. It does absolutely nothing for audience building and any click-throughs you do get probably aren’t worth anything, but I wanted to try it out just for the purpose of this experiment.

I posted to 6 Google+ groups and received 26 click-throughs.

11. StumbleUpon Submission

Like submitting to Google+ groups, StumbleUpon is another “click and forget” promo tactic that can potentially result in a few clicks. The quality is likely the worst of any channel here, but whatever… it costs nothing and takes a few seconds.

My 3 StumbleUpon submissions resulted in 44 click-throughs.

The next step would be to add a tracking pixel and see if any clicks result in leads. My guess is that 50 clicks per post over 5 posts is going to result in at least a lead or two.

12. Facebook Group Shares

As I mentioned before, Facebook groups were by far the most interactive I found across the various social channels. There are many groups where link spamming isn’t taking place, and these are the groups where you can get the most traction when sharing content.

They key here is that you can’t spam either. You have to engage with the community and connect your shares to what they are talking about. If you can do that, you will get more out of these groups than all the spam channels combined.

(That said, it looks like I was blocked from one marketing group after posting something similar to the above comment.)

All told, I posted to 5 different Facebook groups and received 62 click-throughs.

For any group that you want to use for recurring promotion, it will be important for you to engage with the group in a non-promotional capacity even more frequently than you share your content.

The best option, however, is to simply create your own group, keep it spam free, and reserve the right as owner to share your own content whenever you want. This is essentially what’s happening in all existing groups, but since you aren’t the owner, you don’t get to share your content as much.

13. Start A Fire Curation

Start A Fire is one of several apps that allow you to overlay a prompt to your own content on an article you share. This allows you to get some additional benefit out of any content curation strategies you are currently using. They just recently shut down after I finished my experiment, but you can do the same thing with Back.ly.

It’s not a bad idea, particularly if you can integrate it with your whatever scheduling tool you are using. Start A Fire used to integrate with Buffer, but that integration hasn’t been working for me lately.

Across 2,085 curated pageviews, I’ve received 68 click-throughs to my own content.

Honestly, that’s not much at all, but it’s better than nothing and it costs me absolutely nothing, so I think it’s a worthwhile piece of automation to integrate with your current curation and scheduling.

14. Taboola Paid Promotion

Paid promotion is consistent, so if you can find a channel that sends quality traffic at the right price, that’s incredibly valuable. Taboola is one channel I’ve been wanting to test out, and I used this experiment to get a feel for traffic volume.

The targeting options on Taboola are limited. You pretty much just have to trust their algorithm and then monitor the results, which makes setting up a campaign insanely easy.

I spent $31.15 on Taboola and received 89 click-throughs.

Similar to Facebook Ads, the more you spend on this channel, the better results you are projected to receive. Unlike Facebook Ads, spending only $30 on an article could potentially be worthwhile.

You’ll need to add a conversion pixel and track conversions to know one way or another, but for a low-cost initial experiment, there were enough click-throughs for me to look at testing quality as well.

15. Outbrain Paid Promotion

Take everything I just said about Taboola and apply it to Outbrain. Testing out this platform was pretty much the exact same experience.

I spent $32.06 on Outbrain and received 95 click-throughs.

With both platforms there was enough volume to look further into them, but the source of the traffic makes me skeptical of the quality. As I’ve said before, with paid pomo, you really need to track conversions as well.

16. Hacker News Submission

To be honest, I’m not really even sure what Hacker News is. It seems to just be a simple, upvote-based news feed that anyone can submit to.

I literally just showed up, submitted one article and left.

My Hacker News submission received 96 click-throughs.

I really don’t have any commentary. I have no clue what the deal is with this channel, but I’ll take a hundred free clicks any day. After talking with other marketers about the channel, it seems that it can be incredibly effective for the right content, but it can be difficult to identify what that content is, and spamming non-relevant links will get your IP address blocked.

17. BlogEngage Retweets

As I mentioned before, BlogEngage’s community submission feed is pretty much worthless, but they also have paid options at around 50 USD per month. One of the features included in this package is that they will retweet your content throughout their network.

Given how Twitter works, I thought it would be interesting to test how many actual clicks I could get through this retweet network, so I tweeted the three articles and measured click-throughs before and after the retweets.

After receiving RTs from the BlogEngage network, my three articles received an additional 145 click-throughs.

Again, I’ll need to measure the quality here in order to determine whether or not the paid membership is worthwhile, but at first glance, I’m very pleased with those results.

18. GrowthHackers.com Submission

GrowthHackers.com is basically Inbound.org without the collusion. You can still get some decent results without needing to manipulate your submissions.

For my clients in the marketing space, GrowthHackers.com consistently drives the most referral traffic out of any promotion channel we use. While I will usually have the client’s marketing team upvote the post when it goes live, for the purposes of this experiment, I simply submitted the post with no vote manipulation.

My GrowthHackers.com submission drove 235 click-throughs (and counting).

The main key to utilizing this channel is to write on topics that the community likes, which is anything related to driving user behavior: conversion, copywriting, psychology, etc. This makes it a very good fit for virtually any marketing blog.

19. Quuu Paid Promotion

Quuu Promote has been an automatic part of my content promotion for several months now, although their recent price increase might lead to me being a bit more selective.

Quuu has managed to have their cake and eat it too by offering a paid curation app on one end of the funnel and paid ad placement on the other end. That kind of pisses me off, but it’s pretty brilliant too, and it will remain brilliant in my mind for as long as the cost-per-click remains solid on 9/10 articles.

Quuu can pretty awesome for content promo. This cost $60:

It can also be shitty. This cost $30:

For this experiment, I spent $90 on Quuu Promote and received 409 click-throughs.

After the price hike, most submissions run in the $40 – $50 range, and the results on my last three submission are averaging only 70 clicks, so the while they heyday might be over already for Quuu Promote, I’d recommend trying 3-5 articles with them and seeing how it goes.

20. Reddit Thread Submission

Reddit was the clicks winner by a mile and a half, which sort of surprised me and didn’t surprise me at the same time.

On the one hand, I know how much traffic and attention Reddit can quickly drive to a site that captures its attention. On the other hand, 9/10 submissions are typically going to be downvoted to oblivion the moment you submit them.

With that in mind, I submitted each article to three separate subreddits. Not a single one was downvoted, and all of them received a moderate amount of traction. I’m a regular Reddit user, so I do know how NOT to piss off the community, but despite this, I was shocked that every single post received some moderate traction.

All told, I made 9 Reddit submissions and received 708 click-throughs.

When submitting to Reddit, it’s important to spend a little bit of time making your submission more than just an obvious promo linkshare. If you can add an element of discussion to the thread, that’s always helpful.

Reddit is a massive community and a great place to promote B2C content in particular if you can be a bit more subtle about it and follow the official and unofficial rules of the individual subreddits you share on. Even then, you probably have a 50/50 shot of getting downvoted, but I think my experiment proves that it is possible to get consistent results with the right approach.

Conclusion: The 3 Winning Content Promotion Strategies

If you were tracking along with the results, you probably noticed that three of the last 20 results were not like the rest. The final three had a significantly higher numbers of click-throughs than the rest:

1. GrowthHackers Submission
2. Quuu Paid Promotion
3. Reddit Thread Submission

I feel like it’s safe to dub these the big winners of my experiment, and I plan to make them a regular part of my content promotion process.

If GrowthHackers isn’t a good fit for your niche, try to find a similar upvote-driven site that is active in your niche, OR if that doesn’t exist, just focus on Reddit “subreddits” which are more or less the same thing.

But enough of that.

I’m not the only one promoting content out here, and I highly doubt I’ve exhausted every content promotion strategy out there, so please, tell me what’s been working for you.

What have you tried? What has failed? What has succeeded?

Let me know!

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology….”
So goes the introduction to The Six-Million Dollar Man, a hugely popular show in the late 70s.
I always think of this line when it comes to optimizing copy, whether I’m working on entire websites, ebooks, or stand alone landing pages.
Unlike the bionic man, though, optimizing landing page copy isn’t about implants and augmentations. It’s about stripping everything down to its core to evaluate what works and what doesn’t.
Sometimes, you still get superhuman results with less, not more.
There are two things to keep in mind when writing persuasive copy:

1. Copy dictates design.
2. Clarity always wins.

I kept these two concepts in mind when I rewrote the main landing page for SolarPulse[1] last year.
The results? A 42% lift in conversions.
Here’s how I did it…

The Original, Underperforming Page

To begin, we needed to understand how people got here, why they were here, and what we needed to tell them.
The original version of SolarPulse’s main landing page (written by their engineers *shudder*) looked like this…

When I put myself in the shoes of a first time visitor, nothing on this page is particularly persuasive, eye-catching or moving. Keeping in mind that a writer IS NOT the ideal customer, I can go meta on the whole thing and start by evaluating my own reactions to the page.

1. The first thing I notice is that it’s way too long. There’s too much copy to read, and it feels like work, so I want to bounce. This is never a good reaction.
2. The second thing I notice is that I don’t know where to look. I’m drawn to the sign-up form, but I don’t even know what it’s for because I haven’t read the copy, so I skip it.
3. The third thing I notice is that there are a lot of footnotes. That feels like legal stuff which makes me want to run.
4. The fourth thing is that I like the icons. They can stay.

Ultimately, I’d leave this page to find a competitor’s page that requires less of me.
If I’m interested in solar and I want more information about how it benefits me (and, ultimately, how to make it happen), this page isn’t making life easy. I’m out.

Now, I know the problems. Next, I have to fix them…

With a project like this, the general framework of the page won’t change. The first thing I do is mock up the general elements of the page in a Google Doc by creating tables and pulling screenshots of the ones I want to keep.
Like this:

From there, I focus on writing shorter, clearer, more impactful copy for each icon. That means I treat each section as if it’s one mini-project, with no regard to the rest of the page (for now). My goals here are two-fold:

1. Lead with the most persuasive benefit available
2. Provide a “quick hit” of information in the shortest, clearest way possible.

Each of these sections has to tell it’s own story while being informative. I treat each icon’s copy separately because someone may or may not go through all of them. I need each piece to carry its weight, regardless. I can’t control how much a visitor will read, but I can control how crisp each one is on it’s own.
The initial result is something like this:

From there, I turn my attention to the lynchpin of the entire page…

The Heading and Subhead

At this point, you know good headings, subheads, and headlines are crucial to improving conversion rates (and A/B testing them is simple), but the actual process of creating the right ones can get messy.
Writing headings and subheads, for me, looks like this:

1. Brain dump
2. Refine
3. Criticize
4. Refine
5. Refine
6. Choose

Sometimes, subheads become headings. Sometimes, headings become subheadings. Sometimes, I chop one in half and add it to another. It becomes a puzzle. My job is to rearrange the pieces until it creates a picture.

Writing Headings

That said, everyone’s approach to writing headings and subheads is different. I prefer a stream of consciousness approach where I write as many ideas as I can for up to 30 minutes. I try to fill a blank piece of typing paper if I can (yes, I do this on paper).
Then, I cull the word-herd down to a handful of my best options.
From there, I get super critical and cut, cut, cut, while keeping in mind I have just a few seconds to get their attention, so benefits needs to be clear. The trick is to cut without losing meaning.

Writing Subheadings

If the heading is about the big idea (sometimes in the form of a question) of the entire page, then the subhead should answer the “what’s in it for me” question.
Since I already created rough versions of my bullet points next to my icons, I can answer this question easily.
What is this section about? Learning more about solar panels for my home. Boom. Subhead options for days. Just play around with the phrasing until you land on the right one.
Unscientific? For sure. Does it work? Absolutely.
Eventually, I end up with something that looks like this:

In the case of this particular project, I looped the designer and the project lead back into the copy so we could work on the heading and subhead messaging.
In addition to making minor design changes, we also incorporated a couple of keywords that were important to the SEO value of the project.
After a few rounds of back and forth, omitting, adding, clarifying, etc., the final version looked like this…

A Final Comparison: Better Landing Page Copy = +42%

As a refresher, here are the two pages, side by side.

You’ll notice how much cleaner and shorter the final version is compared to the original.
I worked hard to convince them to lose all the footnotes, instead working them into the actual text wherever it was relevant. We also cleaned up the navigation bar (in some cases, you shouldn’t even have one) and changed the image at the top of the page.
Minor design changes + clearer, benefits-focused copy = 42% conversion lift!
The final point I’d make here is that I didn’t follow any formulas or templates to get these results.
Did I think my version would be better than the original? Of course! But there’s no definitive way to know how it will perform until you test it. And those tests must be based on the foundational elements of conversion and psychology.
Stick to best practices, and—just like the Six-Million Dollar Man—your copy will be “Better…stronger…faster.”
 
[1] Full disclosure: Despite my results on this and other content on their site, SolarPulse was recently shuttered by its parent company.
 
Chris Cooper is a conversion copywriter and content strategist based in Denver, CO. He owns Real Good Writing where he helps tech and SaaS companies write B2B copy that people actually want to read. When he’s not getting more customers for his clients, he’s fighting a tireless battle for proper use of the oxford comma. Visit www.rgwriting.com or connect on Twitter @ElCoopacabra.

If you’ve ever heard me speak at a conference, you know I like to wear a white lab coat.

It’s not a gimmick, and I certainly don’t wear it because of its slimming properties.

No, I wear it because of science.

There is an area of research called Enclothed Cognition. It is the study of the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer and those around him.

Scientists have studied the lab coat. When someone puts on a lab coat, they score higher on cognitive tests. So, when I put on a lab coat, I will actually make fewer errors than if I was wearing my street clothes.

When I’m wearing a lab coat, I think I’m smarter than I really am.

Scientists have also studied the effect of uniforms and authority. When I wear the lab coat, what I say will carry more weight with you.

Not only do I think I’m smarter than I am, you will think I’m smarter than I really am.

In other words, I am gaining an unfair advantage based on behavioral science. Today, I’m going to show you how your business can gain an unfair advantage in the marketplace using behavioral science.

Why “Creative” Marketing Is A Cover-Up

We tend to have some preconceived notions about what is creative and what is “mathy.”

Beginning in the 1960s, Madison Avenue agencies led companies to believe that the team with the most creative minds would win in the marketplace. Even after these same agencies began installing mainframe computers and monitoring TV viewing habits, they still led companies to believe that it was the creativity – the novelty of the campaigns – that brought success.

No, they didn’t have Google Analytics. Or Omniture. Or brain scans. Or any of the numerous tools that even the smallest business has access to today, but better believe they were using research to make creative decisions.

Yet, when the web became a thing, we continued to embrace this belief that advertising and marketing was a purely creative endeavor.

We do the market studies. We run the focus groups. We send the surveys.

But, ultimately, it is still up to the designers and developers to make the final choices.

Here’s how the typical web design process works.

1. A company hires an agency.
2. The agency does a market research study with lots of insights about who would buy the company’s products.
3. The agency delivers a beautiful report for the executives to ponder.
4. The agency then creates three design options, and it asks the company executives — the least qualified people to make design decisions — to pick the best design.
5. Finally, they eagerly jot down the executives’ changes and publish the new site.

Everyone is getting their “creative” on.

Meanwhile, someone else is tasked with writing the content, and the content is just pored into spaces in the design.

This is not creative. It’s chaos. And worse, it’s waste.

The problem is that, even when we do research, designers don’t really know which design is going to be the best. There are no longer any boundaries on what we can do digitally. I can create anything, any color, any text, any images. I can add video. I can add live chat.

How can anyone decide with so many choices?

The answer is behavioral data.

It’s not about guessing or being creative. It’s about analyzing how visitors are engaging with a site and then turning that data into testable hypotheses that can be measured against the existing site via a statistically valid testing process.

For a long time, collecting and analyzing data was too costly for small or even mid-sized businesses to consider. But today, it is essentially cheaper to collect and use behavioral data than it is not to.

Let me say that again: It is now cheaper to collect and use behavioral data than it is not to.

While most businesses continue doing launch and see design, the marketplace will reward you from taking a data-first approach.

In many ways, it’s an unfair advantage.

The Two Brains That Drive Behavior

Our brains have two very different personalities, these two personalities are said to live in the two halves of our brains. It’s almost like we have two distinct brains.

The right side of our brain is believed to be the home of the painter in us, the musician, the dancer, the writer, the child. Unrestrained by time or place or social norms, our right brain is capable of creating entire worlds from thin air while chasing butterflies and writing symphonies.

This is all very frustrating to the left side of our brain, which revels in process. It values time and order and systems. It delights in giving thoughts expression as it is where speech is processed and created. It catalogs our past and projects our future. It worries about our businesses and our careers. It balances our checkbooks and then worries about what will happen next month.

Together, the two halves of our brains are crayons and calendars, elephants and emails, moonbeams and money…

For the purposes of business, your right brain is the idea generator. It comes up with way more stuff than we could ever process and execute on. And that’s why the left brain excels at throwing stuff away. When the right brain says “butterflies and symphonies”, the left brain has trouble making sense of it and discards it without further evaluation.

This is why we struggle.

Too often, we let our left brain run our business and this creates an imbalance. Behavioral Science will restore that balance.

You might be thinking that anything called “behavioral science” is something that only the left-brain could love.

This is only somewhat true. Behavioral science is like raw meat to a ravenous left brain. It is a way to tell the future, solving one of our left brain’s biggest problem.

But it’s ALSO a way for the left brain to deal with the right brain.

When the right brain says “butterflies and symphonies”, the left brain will now say, “I don’t know what it means, but I know how to test it.”

This is a fundamental shift in the relationship. Marketing, advertising, or any kind of communication is a dance between the creative right brain and the expressive left brain.

When I started Conversion Sciences in 2007, I didn’t have clients with budgets for high-dollar testing tools. My primary service was to facilitate the understanding of the people coming to my clients’ websites. I spent several weeks with their site and their analytics. I interviewed the employees that knew the clients. I scoured their sites for poor practices and itemized them all.

Then I composed empathetic personas, highlighting the struggles of their prospects, spinning the story of their journey to the site and offering solutions that could be implemented on the website. It awakened their right brains and we had meaningful, connected meetings about these people they called customers!

And then…

… nothing changed.

They dried their eyes, shoved my personas into a drawer and dealt with the fire of the day. I had awakened their right brain, but ultimately the left brain won them over. It didn’t know how to use this information to predict the future.

And then AB testing tools became cheap. I still reviewed our clients’ sites, interviewed their employees and composed my brilliant personas.

But then we tested our ideas.

As it turns out, most of the ideas that came from this in-depth work were wrong. The tests revealed that many, if not most of my ideas did not result in an increase in conversions and revenue. It was a very humbling experience.

But more importantly, it allowed us to start getting predictable results for our clients. Nowadays, we never know which change will improve a client’s conversion rate, but we have framework in place that helps us identify the right tests to run and virtually guarantees we get results in the end.

We can consider bigger and more creative ideas. We have the ability to test almost anything our right brains can come up with. Testing has turned out to be the best way to determine which of our amazing ideas work and which don’t.

At Conversion Sciences, we call this rigorous creativity, and it’s the reason our clients see a 20% average conversion lift.

It’s also the reason anyone, including you, can harness your creativity for the purpose of data-driven optimization. But before you can score, you need to first understand the rules.

The 6 Rules of Behavioral Data

We all make decisions every day based on what other people are doing. You are wired to navigate the world using behavioral data.

When you check Facebook to see how many people like and comment on your most recent post, you’re using your built-in behavioral know-how. When you select a movie based on the Rotten Tomatoes Freshness Score, you are getting your behavioral science on. The New York Times Best Seller list, the Billboard Charts, and the laugh track on The Big Bang Theory are all sources of behavioral data that we use to make decisions every day.

If you don’t believe me, let’s use an example. When my son was 14, he built his own gaming computer. He had meticulously researched every component, from the high-frequency monitor to the mouse pad. His last decision was the motherboard, the foundation of the computer that every element plugs into.

He had narrowed it down to two alternatives. They had the same features and were priced within pennies of each other. Reviewers of the motherboards had given one a four-star rating, and the other a five-star rating.

If we didn’t understand the first rule of behavioral data, we would have simply chosen the five-star motherboard. Five stars is better than four, right? But even at the tender age of 14, Sean was smart enough to see how many reviews had fed those ratings.

The five-star motherboard had five reviews, while the lower-rated four-star motherboard had 250 reviews. You have no doubt about which rating is most reliable. Your little brain, like my son’s, is doing the math. We know that the five-star rating is just as likely to be a three- or two-star rating.

The data isn’t in.

You are intuitively calculating what statisticians call n: The Sample Size of the data collected (the reviews). And you know the first rule of behavioral data.

1. Larger Sample Sizes Are Better Than Smaller Sample Sizes
2. Data Over Time Is Better Than Data At One Point In Time
3. More-Recent Data Is Better Than Less-Recent Data
4. Observational Data Is Better Than Self-Reported Data
5. Customers & Prospects Are More Believable Than Pretenders
6. Quantitative Data predicts the Future Better than Qualitative Data

Well designed A/B tests are created to follow all of the rules of behavioral data. They are designed to deliver observational, recent data, taken over time from a statistically significant sample of prospects that can be quantitatively analyzed.

As a marketer, you can tap into this innate scientific know-how, using it to predict the performance of your campaigns and make them better.

For a deeper look at these rules with accompanying examples and case studies, read: The 6 Rules of Behavioral Data Built Into All of Us.

Research vs. Intuition

In 2014, Marks & Spencer redesigned their apparel website. Marks & Spencer is a £10 billion company running food and apparel stores in the UK and Europe. In 2013 13% of their sales went through the web. That’s about $1.5 billion. With a B.

In 2014, they launched a website redesign. The effort cost £150 million. Today that would be about $180 million.

The UX community–and their designers–thought the redesign was “positive.”

More research would be needed for us to give a thorough UX opinion but our first thoughts are that it’s a positive redesign.

— ExperienceSolutions

The customers didn’t agree. Upon launch, the site saw an immediate 8% drop in sales. That’s about $10 million per month in lost sales. This number doesn’t take into account the loss of brand trust.

The best way to build brand online is to deliver what your visitors want.

For $180 million, we expect that they did a great deal of research into their customers and visitors. So what went wrong.

This is the battle being waged in your businesses. Intuition vs. research. Best practices vs. behavioral science. Left brain vs. right brain. Both are necessary. But if you continue to find yourself struggling to get value from the visitors that you pay to bring to your site, there is an imbalance.

Intuition is our ability to apply our experience to new situations. We admire those who can discern the important aspects of something without study.

When behavioral data was expensive to acquire, campaign planning and development was dominated by intuition. If we invested in research, it was done at the beginning. This was primarily qualitative data based on surveys and focus groups.

Then the designers and developers would apply the data to the best of their ability, but relied on their intuition to make the thousands of little decisions necessary to complete a project.

It is at the end of this process that true behavioral data is collected. It’s called results. If the results were positive, then the campaign can be replicated and continued. If the results were disappointing, then the campaign would be scratched, and the process would start over.

This is the classic launch and see approach.

What does a campaign development process look like in an era of cheap behavioral data. For most businesses, it looks the same. But for industry leaders, it looks like this:

Qualitative data is collected at the beginning. But now we can go back and test components of the campaign again and again. And we collect inexpensive quantitative behavioral data.

Intuition has its place and always will. But now we have balance. At several points along the development path, we can answer specific questions about our campaign.

Obviously, it’s important to get this offer right, it makes sense to do a study. I’m going to use this word “study” a lot because it means, “Stop and look for some data.” A study can mean evaluating existing data or collecting new data. It may take months, but can also be done in a few hours.

Offer Selection & Continuity

I’m going to use the term “studies” frequently. A study describes our process of collecting and evaluating behavioral data. Studies are often short processes, but don’t have to be.

We do a study when we ask the question, “Do I have some data to support a decision, or could I collect some data to help me make a decision.”

We do a study when we ask the question, “Do I have some data to support a decision, or could I collect some data to help me make a decision.”

If we decided to do a little study of offer language, where could we look for some behavioral data? Well, any place we make offers.

If you’ve been running ads on Google or Bing, you have a sample of offers. You can compare the click rates and their conversion rates of these ads to learn which offers appealed most to prospects.

For one of our clients, we looked at their Adwords ads and saw that the best performing offered either 20% off or $100 off.

These are what we call “Transactional” prospects. Their greatest fear is paying a dollar too much for something. The landing page used for these ads didn’t lead with the discounts, however.

We focused on the $100 off offer and this became part of the primary offer. This page increased leads by 40% after we made this simple change.

Other sources of behavioral data? How about a study of emails with high click-through rates? What offers get the most clicks in your email? This data is kept in any email service for easy evaluation. Pull them into a spreadsheet and see what offers appealed to prospects.

Your ad and email teams should be thrilled to hear from you. At some point, they may come to you to learn what landing page copy is delivering the best conversion rates. They can do a behavioral study of your landing pages.

Why is this data valuable?

1. First it is behavioral, not self-reported.
2. Second, it is a sample taken from prospects and customers.
3. Third, it’s a big sample. It will typically include a sample sizes of thousands of impressions or recipients, and hundreds of clicks.
4. Fourth, the data spans months or years. If seasonality is an issue, you will want to zero in on a timeframe of data that matches the timeframe that your landing page will launch.

You’re not guessing. And you’re getting value from the ad spend and email outreach you’ve already invested in.

If these sources don’t exist for you — if this is a new offer or product, then your study may include launching several ads to see what works. The copywriter may recommend some images to support the copy. If you leave the images to the designer, they will scurry over to iStockPhoto and populate your page with ineffective stock photography.

Image and Headline Selection

We call this business porn. You can tell business porn is on your site using the caption test. If you can’t write a caption for a picture that makes sense, then it’s probably business porn.

The caption for shaking hands might be, “We want to shake your hand, so we can start sending you invoices.” Headset hotties are all the rage. The caption might read, “I don’t work here, but you should call anyway.” And the caption for a random graph might read, “We don’t know what this measures, but it’s going up and to the right.”

Your visitors know the difference between a studio picture and a picture of your customers or employees. This is a waste of valuable space on our landing pages.

Marketing 101 says, “Show the product.” This is because no one is going to take action on your landing page until they’ve imagined what it will be like to take action. Spend as much time on the images as you do on the copy. Images are a powerful way to advance the value proposition.

You may have several images to choose from. We’ll do a study to help you pick images that work for your copy.

Unfortunately, we rarely know if we’ve chosen the right copy and image.

More likely, we’re struggling with a number of options.

All of these satisfy the offer, but can be expected to perform very differently.

Let’s do a study!

Finding the Right Headline and Hero Image

Why not give ourselves some creative latitude. We could probably come up with some different headlines and images. Why not collect some data on this to narrow down our choices?

We can pretty easily narrow down our choices using a five-second test. This test can be done very inexpensively at UsabiltyHub.com or Verifyapp.com.

The five-second test flashes your page in front of test subjects for five seconds. The subject is then asked questions about what they saw. It’s a good measure of the immediate impact of the copy and images, revealing how well they communicate the offer.

This is a great way to gauge the effectiveness of headlines and images.

Here’s what we learned about a homepage we tested with the five-second test. This is a typical scenario for this company’s products. We then asked them if this company would solve their problem.

It is clear that visitors aren’t getting a clear understanding from the home page. This test took two days and cost about $2.50 for each of the 25 respondents.

We can put several versions of our landing page through the test, different headlines, images and copy. Our landing page doesn’t even need to be functional for this kind of test.

Let’s evaluate this data. Sample size? Small. Little n=25. Strangers or customers? This is a sample of people who aren’t necessarily customers, so their input must be taken with a grain of salt. Qualitative or quantitative? This is clearly qualitative, and we were able to ask several more questions to understand their impressions of the page.

For our landing page, we can use this test to narrow down the best two headlines and best two images. Then we can do a more quantitative, behavioral study with a larger sample size to get our best offer and image. Before we dive into that, there are a couple of other elements we’ll want to include in our landing page before we test.

Understanding our Visitors’ Preferences

What could we add to a page that would enhance our visitors’ perception of our credibility? The folks at Stack asked this question using a Question Test from UsabilityHub.com. They wanted to know what kind of social proof would enhance the perception of credibility for their home page: a testimonial or customer logos.

They created three versions of their home page, one without social proof, one with a testimonial and one listing the logos of their well-known clients. Then they asked the question:

Does this company seem credible to you?

The results favored the logos somewhat.

This information is directional in nature, but it narrowed the choices that could be used in a more rigorous AB test.

This is a great example of using panels to inform decisions. It can be applied to a variety of components of a page.

• Copy length
• Page Layout
• Navigation
• Image choice, size and placement
• Trust symbols
• Proof points
• Headlines

This allows designers to be more creative, since their choices can be easily reduced with a question test.

Helping Visitors Solve Problems

Are visitors finding the information they are looking for on our pages? This was a question that insurance provider RACV wanted to know. It was important that their customers be able to find their roadside assistance number in an emergency.

To gather some data, they did a Click Test from UsabilityHub.com. The click test measures how long it takes a participant to click on the page. In this case, they asked participants to click on the roadside assistance number of their current page. The results showed it took 20 seconds on average for these participants to find and click on the right place.

The click location is shown by the heatmap in the lower right corner of the page.

Clearly, they needed a redsign. Their new design put the roadside assistance number in a band closer to the top of the screen. They ran another click test and reduced the time it took to find the link to 5 seconds on average.

This was a significant win for RACV.

You will use a test like this to determine how your page is functioning holistically.

• What calls to action are most clickable?
• Are visitors able to find the next step in the process?
• Do you have too many calls to action on a page?
• How is your home page helping visitors choose a path?

Answer these questions and you will deliver a better experience.

Studying Page Layout

Notice that we haven’t yet gotten a designer involved yet. There’s a reason for that. Designers tend to add things to a page that satisfy their ego, or that they believe will satisfy you. They want carousels, animated video backgrounds, sliding logos and such. These are all bad ideas, unless you have some data that suggests otherwise.

A professional design is important to credibility, but the primary job of the layout design is to get our visitors eyes to the important information on the page. In this way, we want our designer to be more of a draftsman, using their knowledge of font, color, white space, positioning, negative space, grids, and visual cues to direct our visitors experience. We don’t need designers to be persuasive or manipulative.

Before we call the designers, let’s find out what is wrong with the layout. The more specific instructions we can give our designer, the more likely we are to keep them from going crazy.

Thanks to the amazing increase in webcam resolution and the steep drop in price, we can track where a persons eyes fall on a monitor with surprising accuracy. This means we can do inexpensive eye-tracking studies.

We did an eye-tracking study in 2012. Back then, we needed a special infrared camera and expensive software. We recruited 23 people from around Austin and brought them into a room one at a time. We calibrated the camera to track their eyes and asked them to watch one of three videos while we tracked, and to then fill out a survey.

This took weeks to setup and days to execute. The camera and special software were not cheap, at $7500. All in the study cost $15,000 to $20,000 in time and materials.

In 2016 the I was asked to give my opinion on a landing page for inbound.org. They didn’t have any data on the page, so I asked my friends at Tobii (formerly Sticky.ai) to do an eye-tracking study of the mockup. Their technology used everyday webcams to track the viewer’s eyes. These studies cost around $500.

Here’s an example of what they delivered in about a week.

This view is called a heatmap view. Like rain in a weather report, this tells us where the eyes of 50 test subjects fell most. Red means that many saw that part of page and lingered. Yellow, less so. Green even less. Clear means that these parts of the page got very little or no attention.

This is helpful information when considering layout. From the data, we speculated that the second section was more interesting to the visitors than the hero offer. Few people were being enticed to scroll down the page. And the big screenshot in the middle was acting as a stop.

Watching these interactions in motion can deliver insights as well. Such videos are automatically generated. I wish we had these back in the day.

We may choose to iterate our campaign elements now using usability tests and eye-tracking studies, but at some point we are going to declare a version of this page the control and launch it.

Our behavioral science doesn’t stop there.

After Launch

We are going to use a few tools to give us some very helpful data about how this page is performing with real prospects.

• Analytics database
• Click tracking software
• Session recording software

And if we really want to take this decision to the supreme court, some AB testing software.

Analytics is a large database of behavioral information. It sits behind our website collecting the behaviors and details of our visitors — anonymously. It is the best source of quick studies. This is a topic for another post.

Heatmaps

To increase the size of our samples, we can turn to click-tracking software. Instead of tracking where visitors’ eyes go on the page, this tracks their mouse movements and where they click. We get similar information with a much larger samples size.

Is our copy too long? Is key information being missed? This can be answered easily with a scroll tracking report.

What elements on a page are getting visitors’ attention? Which are being ignored? With click tracking, we can see the interactions of thousands of visitors in a single heat map. Here’s an example of a pricing page.

These are tools that cost a few hundred dollars a month to have running on your site.

Here’s a heatmap we saw on a college website. Why is this one part of the form red hot?

This field is “Program of Interest.”

It seems that the site didn’t do a good job of communicating what programs were available. When we added “Program of Interest” to the body of the pages and took the potential students to the right part of the site, information requests went up by 20%. That’s a big deal when you’re selling something that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The Supreme Court of Data

We have a page that we expect to convert well out of the gate. Our big decisions have been supported by research–an offer study, a copy study, a 5-second test and an eye-tracking study– and have been colored by our intuitive abilities as communicators.

With sufficient traffic, there is another kind of study that we consider the Supreme Court of studies. It’s called an AB test or a split test.

Like our other tools, AB testing tools cost $500 a month or less, and our old data friend, Google, has released a free AB testing tool called Google Optimize.

AB testing tools give us the ability to change just about anything we want on a web page without messing with the backend of our website. In other words, we don’t need the developers’ help. These tools manage everything for you.

They split your traffic equally among two or more variations of your page.

They keep track of which variation generates leads or sales.

They do the statistical calculations for you so you know when your sample size is big enough.

And this data follows all of the rules of behavioral data. It is customers and prospects. The tests are done simultaneously, so the history effect is minimized. The samples sizes are large. The data collected is behavioral, not self-reported.

The only thing we don’t get from AB test results is the deep qualitative insights. That is why we continue to do other studies like site feedback like site surveys.

One of our favorites It involves a single-question popover survey on the thank you page, or the receipt page of the site. A typical survey question is:

“What almost kept you from buying today?” or “What almost kept you from signing up?”

The input is free-form text.

In this example, we asked customers why they chose the Lite version of a product over the Pro version.

The results of this can be very enlightening when asked like this giving us new ideas about what to test.

Designing AB tests is an intensely creative process.

Conclusion: The Gold is in the Data

This is data gold. But it costs like copper.

When you ask every day what data is available to help me make creative decisions, you can be more creative. You can do more with less because you’re not spinning your wheels.

Investing in behavioral data is now cheaper than not investing in behavioral data. Are you excited about behavioral data now?

Many of the results I’ve shown you are from our clients. A Conversion Scientist named Ruth Mayer created them. A year ago, she was working in a flower shop. Today she is is finding revenue at some busy websites.

Do you really thing behavioral data isn’t within your reach?

When it is expensive to do research, we can’t afford to invest very often, but digital data gathering has become very inexpensive, and it allows us to capture what is happening on our websites, advertising networks and mobile apps in real time.

How would a store owner know that people who looked at a pair of shoes also tend to look at a pair of capri pants? They’d have to follow their visitors around with a clipboard. That’s not practical in the real world. It’s common online.

“Market research is for researchers. Behavioral science is for doers.” –BAM

I’m not going to stop until everyone comes to love behavioral data. Like throwing raw meat to your left hemisphere to free up your creative right hemisphere.

Imagine how you would approach the world if you knew you were creating what your audience really wanted.

How will I know if you love data? Let’s do a study…