There is this thing referred to as Black Hat SEO. The definition is always debated amongst search engine experts. In Wikipedia they define it as the deliberate manipulation of search engine indexes. If that was the case, then all SEO’s and companies wanting to advance in the search engines, would be black hat SEO employers.

I define Black Hat SEO as activities where you automatically steal, hack, generate filthy, link drowning content to support your greedy ambitions in the search engine result pages. Practices such as content scraping, cloaking, comment spamming, database mining, pingcrawl, auto submitters and naturally – hacking of exposed servers, falls into the category.

Beginning my Black Hat Tools journey

I have previously bought links. A practice I recognize as gray. I have never hacked a website, or employed automated link building tools to create serious link influxes to my websites. Yes I have actually automated social bookmarking, but not the nasty kind.

From today, that will all change. I am tired of not knowing, and will start a journey to research which of the tools out there work and which don’t. I have set a budget of $10,000 USD. My goal will be to purchase tools until that sum is spent. Here are my rules:

• The majority of content on the website shall be auto generated
• All back links shall be built automatically
• I am allowed to engage with users in social media, but I am not allowed to generate the content myself
• The domains have to be new
• I am not allowed to break any laws

What tools shall I test?

I have a short list of approximately 10 tools including some I am going to order custom versions of. I suggest you send me an e-mail to jesper.joakim.astrom@gmail.com if you want me to try out your service or if you know of a service you think I should buy and test.

Why do I want to try Black Hat tactics?

First of all I want to know if they make any sense. Can you still spam your way to the top in Google? I want to learn every detail of executing them. I need to know. Then I want to share this knowledge. What works shall be put into the toolkit. What doesn’t work shall be told. If we are to progress, we need to research, investigate and examine.

Plus. I think it will be loads of fun.

Feedback. Anyone?

Today is a sad sad day, but at the same time it is a day to celebrate an idea that will never die. Dare to THINK different, dare to BE different, dare to be YOURSELF. For all the “crazy ones” out there. Steve Jobs lives on in our heart, mind and soul.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

- Apple Inc.

After almost two years as partner and digital director for the ad agency Honesty I have decided to move on. Earlier today, the last details were taken care of and so I am out. It feels weird, but it feels alright. I made my mind up almost 6 months ago when I spent Christmas with my girlfriend. There are simply other things to life than work, and I need to find a way to combine life at work and away from work so that I can thrive in both.

Leaving 2 years of Honesty

Honesty will move on without me and I believe they will find themselves in good shape. I have loved working with Halebop and Pepsi and haven’t ever experienced such strong relationships with clients before. The stuff we’ve made together has been great and although I am always close to criticizing my work, I am pleased. There have been some great results and some great bumps, but we did what we believed in and what was right to do. Many thanks to Christina and Linda at Swedbank, Malin and Ann-Charlotte at Röda korset, Alexandra at Cancerfonden, Johan and all others at PFO, Lena at Grönt Ljus, Hanna at Mediamarkt, HSB, WGP, Apotek Hjärtat and everyone else who have made me bleed from my eyes and eat 10 Excederin Migraine per day for the past two years.

To my co-workers… Love you.

In the end I was not very motivated and I sort of crashed this summer. It was as though my body knew that I was getting out of it and decided to take a break. Started forgetting things, mismanaged myself, didn’t sleep, my bones were hurting to the core, and my head was constantly hurting. In late July I found out I was both celiac, had a bacteria in my stomach and a mouse arm. I’m getting old. My body doesn’t like me anymore.

So what will I be doing now?

I am currently living in the US. For now I will be working with SEO and PPC as well as help some old

friends with their strategy. I will also pick up on my poker career and have planned for two or three bigger tournaments this coming year (amongst them the WSOP in LV next summer). I am not allowed to work over here yet so right now I will be spending my time relaxing and…

1. Finishing my book
2. Building lego and playing video games
3. Travelling and meeting people

In the next few months however I will most likely work together with an old partner to finalize a gamification platform as well as a casting platform that can be used for a new type of recruitment process. We are done with the technology parts of them, but we need to package the deals and create a few more cases than we have right now.

In December or early January we will be launching “a thing” that for sure will make a dent in the current web market. I am talking to investors about it and we should be operational on a larger scale in the end of Q1.

If you want your texts to be readable by many people, you need to write in a way that people understand. Simple enough, right? The easier to read, the more accessible. Simple is better than difficult and short is better than long.

I have regularly fallen victim to my own ego when writing tutorials extending them beyond the limits of what is readable on a regular screen. Thank God for mobile devices making long texts readable again.

In the eyes of Google, the texts on your website are basic, intermediate or advanced. That is, the reading level of them. Yeah, Google actually tries to understand your texts and then categorize them under basic, intermediate and advanced labels.

This is a natural evolvement as Google wants to rank the most relevant content in the top of the search engine.

If a user cannot understand the content Google serves, the search result will be less relevant than one that the user actually gets.

Write for the level of your audience

But hold on. Traffic is really just one aspect of SEO. Don’t rush out and rewrite all of your texts just yet. Traffic might be lower as a result of getting only people with an advanced reading record to your website, but  perhaps it doesn’t make your website less relevant for these users who actually end up there. I guess the thing here is to know your preferred/converting visitor demographics/sociographics and write for them.

Consider a camera retailer. You are selling cameras and you hire the photographer nerd of a lifetime to write your copy. The person will write about the camera knowing all the right jargon. Have a look at this camera description from Amazon below. (click on image to get to site)

The standard camera buyer might not know all the widgets, gadgets, settings and data that needs to be in place for the perfect shot. They might be searching for terms such as cool cameras. As on many camera websites, the only info you get about the camera is this info. I would say it is advanced, and so would probably Gooogle. Thus, although it is long tail, it will probably have a difficult time ranking on its own if there is a page with both this information and less difficult info to grasp. Ie.

• Two pages with the same technical description mumbo jumbo
• The one with the jibber-jabber, extra text with simplification will get more traffic, even for searches of the tech terms

Amazon realizes that it doesn’t have the resources to rewrite all product descriptions in its database and thus it allows for user reviews where the product usage and likability can be discussed. Naturally, the more common the language, the tougher the competition (hopefully) and the more potential traffic. By using both you are covered in the advanced long tail as well as in the common peak.

Now consider poker affiliate, a perhaps more clear example.

• Who is the user that will convert into a regular player?
• Is it the experienced player or is it the person who have watched high stakes poker on GSN on a weekly basis?
• What will they search for when they want to convert into a regular player?
• What is their terminology and what level of understanding do they have of the content you offer?
• Do they really understand the meaning of shove, felted, three bet or position?

Perhaps they are on the level of flop, turn and perhaps river.

When hiring an experienced poker player you might get the attention of the loyal poker elite, but you might not get the attention of the beginner. They might on the contrary be scared by your advanced level and think that it is not for him or her. The reading level of your content thus becomes significant not only for the kind of traffic you get to your website but also what kind of conversion you get out of that traffic.

Does this “REALLY” matter for rankings in the search engine?

So, does reading level have anything to do with SEO and the results in the search engine? Google’s latest update called Panda seemingly punished those who use complicated or more advanced texts and premiered those who used easier language.

The job of an SEO has traditionally been to collect links, and it will probably be the core of the work duties for quite some time on from now. However, since the Panda update I have several tutorials that rank the living shit out of websites that have four or ten times as many links as I do. Perhaps not because the level of the tutorial, but more likely because of their length.

I believe, as I have often argued, that many SEO’s need to update the way they target themselves. From traffic, to conversion rates. Conversion rates are the true measure of content quality and should thus be used as the main metric for relevance. I think that if we shift into measuring conversion rates in front of traffic increases, the content quality – reading level, will improve as a result.

How to find the reading level of your website

In order to find out the reading level of your texts you should write site:yourdomain.com in the search field of a Google search engine. This will list all the pages of your website that Google have indexed.

To get the above percentages you also need click the reading level link which can be found in the left hand navigation of the new search GUI.

//Jesper

Facebook Timeline and Open Graph was released on F8 this week. The return of Timeline is a nice and well anticipated one. Back in 2007 there was a similar function to timeline where you could see a persons activity and information placed on a timeline. This was nice as you could show your previous relationships, work places and other such static data in a way that makes sense.

What is added to this new version is the ability to post interactions with others and apps on the timeline. Also, there are many, quite significant user interaction improvements and design features to it. However, the functionality is nothing new.

Facebook Timeline

The new Facebook timeline will probably give Facebook an opportunity to introduce and reintroduce some products in their marketing portfolio.

• Gifts make sense now that we can create birthday celebration boxes into which gifts, happy birthday wishes and other celebration information such as parties (events), images and other such related material can be stored. The new timeline will surely make way for a new “custom gifts” app where I can create objects I can give to my friends on their birthdays. Facebook will surely make business out of this and offer solutions to their business partners. With 800 million users and an average of 2.3 birthdays per day, a 1 dollar gift can make a lot of revenue for Facebook over a year.
• Promoted timeline box will probably also be included in the offering. Brands can easily fill the void where we do not have words to describe who we are in a group of people. Apple says we care about design and being different. Nike communicates that we are sporty. Pepsi communicates that we are rebels. I am sure Facebook will create a format for promoted timeline boxes where we grow our relationships and show loyalty to our favorite brands.

Open Graph – Facebook Verbs

The Open Graph on the other hand is something which has clear implications on how we treat the web. This is probably one of the most important releases Facebook has ever made. Not only because it makes possible for people to actually express what they are doing rather than saying whether or not they like a thing. No, it also improves the web as it standardizes verbs in a format that makes it able for our applications to understand them and thus interrelate them with each other.

When I make a search today I am unable to do a search such as “books that my friends like” or “books that several of my friends have read that I haven’t read”. We rather have to do a search that focuses on the category of the book or perhaps the title. By opening for a more semantically interrelated web, we can move beyond this and create applications that can truly answer questions we ask.

As a business solution, you know I have wanted a way to use Facebook for agent affiliate for a long time. You know. I plan a trip, an agent markets themselves against people who are planning a trip. They give me a dynamic offer that gets cheaper the more friends I get to buy the same deal. Everyone pays for themselves. Perfect. I no longer have to be the one collecting and never being paid the accurate amount as the social group organizer. This would be a great way for Facebook to earn more advertising money, but also earn CPO money such as Deals was intended to. I have elaborated a bit more on this in my post – what should Mark D’Arcy do on his first day at facebook.

If you ask John Ekman, it does in some cases. As he writes in his blogpost on The Unbounce Blog – Why über-Optimised SEO Titles Kill Click-Throughs & Conversion Rates, sometimes the effort to optimize for the search engine defuses the call-to-action copy needed to actually make the clicks count.

I do not only agree with him, but I would like to take his conclusion one step further and say that any SEO working with broad match keywords to drive traffic is an idiot. Well, perhaps not if they are getting paid to drive traffic, or to rank for a specific broad keyword, just to get the numbers for some half-thick marketing director out there, cause then they’re only doing their job. However, if SEO’s recommend this practice, then they are blunt idiots.

It is nice to get loads of bulk traffic as it is usually easily reported to the client. “Look, traffic is up – YEY – Now pay me!“. However, in the long run, it only hurts the business. If you deliver air and sell it as gold, then the client, or the client’s boss will eventually leave you. What’s worse is that they will probably leave SEO as a practice for marketing in itself. Their conclusion of such efforts will naturally be that “SEO-traffic doesn’t convert“, which is a load of shit.

Understanding the searcher

And it is in the context of this that John’s blog post becomes extremely interesting. No, he’s not calling anyone an idiot, I am. However, he clearly shows more understanding for SEO than many of the “ranking-focused” “professionals” out there. What John’s blog post is about – for me – is to confirm that the correct focus for any SEO should be conversion. Not traffic. And they should be measured on how much they convert, and moreover, get paid great bonuses – long term – for improvements made in the conversion rate of the SEO traffic.

Cause anyone with the right tools can rank a website. You need good, quality content, which can be bought. You need good, quality links, which can be bought. You need accessible technology, which can be bought. But what you cannot buy, is the understanding of your customers and what makes them tic. Sure, you can hire a conversion expert or perhaps a good SEO with a focus on conversion, however, they rarely have the segment insights and knowledge about the clients that you do.

They can at best watch the data and make suggestions on where/what you should rank. Which is actually not a bad practice. But you will have to accept that this takes time if you cannot provide them with this information yourself. And time cost money. If you have it, then good for you. Pay up!! However, if you do not have the money to hire the best in the business, then you’ll probably better off paying to increase sales on existing traffic than paying for more traffic.

80:1 relationship of today’s marketing

Which brings me onto the next topic John’s blog post reminded me of. Today, companies pay 80 dollars to get traffic to a website for every 1 dollar they pay to do something with it when the traffic actually gets there (Omniture numbers). Let’s say it one more time. Cause it is really sickening when you think of it. There is an 80:1 relationship in the spending between getting traffic to a website, and doing something with it once it gets there. Is it just me, or would possibly a better logic be to do the opposite? Perhaps not, but the ratio is simply not justifiable. If the ratio was 8:3, then it would possibly be acceptable, but not 80:1.

The problem with averages

I believe the biggest crook in this whole mess, and the reason of why we are where we are lies in averages. As humans we want comparatives, and since we most commonly like to compare ourselves with people/corporations that are like ourselves, we create industry averages. The problem is that we settle with these averages, and take them as a justified excuse/truth when our pure logic/rational/instinct should tell us otherwise.

For example, we accept a 50% bounce rate as an ok average, ie. we think of it as acceptable that 50% of the traffic coming to a website leaves it without visiting any other page on the website (GA definition). We accept that the average conversion rate (industry independent) is 3%, meaning only 3 out of every 100 visitors of our website buys something. We accept that the opening rate of our e-mails are roughly 20%, which means that 1 in every 5 who have opted in to our e-mail send outs care to open the e-mails we send. Really… why do we do this?

So why is John’s blog post important?

Well, it is evident that John possibly don’t spend hours in the SEO forums reading up on the latest of discussions. SEO’s out there will probably crack down on him for giving them a running nose bleed. However, I believe the topic of CTA’s in titles instead of broad match keywords is probably one that needs some further digging. The reason being, SEO’s out there still do a shit job.

The real problem with any marketing effort today is focus. If sales, downloads, sign-ups, shares or invites is the goal, then focus should be on increasing these metrics. Not on mere traffic. The problem is that nominal traffic numbers generally decrease as a result of such work and since marketing managers are measured on traffic, this creates a problem.

As usual, I don’t know if this makes any sense, but, I found it important to share. Please comment if you got some thoughts or criticism. Am I off beat?

And… ps. sorry John if I “mass-interpreted” you…

Traditionally, there has been something magic with a coupon. Just like a wink of an eye, it communicates a two way relationship between buyer and seller that “hell yeah, we’re loyal to each other“. It is in some way romantic exchange between John and prostitute, when the pimp isn’t looking.

“Oh, wait, I have a coupon for that…“, “Oh, do you now…“, “It is just here in my purse, hold on one sec…“, “Gold memeber, I see… welcome back mrs. Andersson…“, some coupons more embarrassing than others. Hotels had a successful rebranding of the coupons, calling them vouchers. Some even put their coupons into cards, calling them reward programs. *sigh*… The evolution of the coupon is as fascinating as it is sentimentally draining. A deal is always a deal and it touches my heart whenever I see a well phrased offer.

Of late, coupons have started to move into the digital space. Well, coupons have been there for a long time, but not the kind of coupons that you bring into an offline store and hand of in an intimate moment with the cashier. No. As the mobile web expands, these new types of digital coupons have started to overwhelm our lives to a greater extent than the ol’paperback.

On the horizon there are about a million competitors trying to battle it out in being the sole distributor of these digital coupons. Although I believe neither of them are employing a long term successful strategy, I still think that they are the two who will give it a run for the money. Naturally I’m talking about Facebook Deals and Groupon.

#1. The setup of a deal

Facebook Deals is still only available in Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, San Diego and San Fransisco which is a great weakness. Neither Groupon or Facebook Deals allows you to post a deal on your own. Groupon wants to review your deal and contact you “shortly” and provides a silly little non-optimized web form for you to fill in your business story in.

Facebook doesn’t let you fill in any form at all. They simply state that they are currently working with “…aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo, and zozi…“.

According to me, these strategies seem extremely costly and I don’t understand why there isn’t a way to just fill in my offer and then let it sliiiiide through the Internets like a hot piece of cheese on a… hmm… you get what I’m getting at.

#2 Deal display

Here is something both have got quite nicely right. Both of them make a big fuzz about the count down, they both clearly show what you save and they both show the price you pay. The only difference in call to action is that Facebook Deals uses “Buy for $XX” meanwhile Groupon simply uses “Buy” plus the prize to the left of the buy button.

Groupon deal display

Facebook Deals deal display

Naturally, Facebook Deals is superior in the ways you can share a deal. The only thing missing is probably to share it in a text to someone’s mobile or to “people nearby”. Ie. if I am using a deal and want to share it with my friends who happen to be in the same mall as me, or have checked-in close buy, then I should be able to send them a push notification through the mobile.

Groupon however has a functionality that I believe Facebook Deals really should focus on getting as well – Buy it for a friend. As I have written previously, Facebook Deals would be a great tool for group purchases. Ie. if a friend has a birthday, my buddies and I should be able to run a pot of money where everyone could give as much or as little as he or she wants to the pool. As the amount of money grows, more deals become available.

I really don’t understand why Facebook has this already. They used to have it in their digital gifts store in the early days. You remember, when you could buy “megaphone time” and “digital badges” to your friends profile pages. Ha ha… I remember my boss invested a shit load of money into enabling a customized gifts store on our page when I worked at a “large fashion company”… Although the guy was one of the most daring digital personalities I have met in the corporate world, and if we would have just had a bit tinier egos, we would have made a perfect team, that decision was ludicrous.

However, back to the comparison. Groupon has got it right. Gifts is big business online, and they are taking full advantage of that.

#3. Buying a deal

I must say that I prefer Facebook Deals two step approach in the jQuery looking pop-in, over Groupon’s one step check-out. I suppose it has to do with preference in some way, however, the golf balls don’t feel as tasty when I can no longer see them which might impose a slight hesitation when I complete my purchase.

One of the rules of improving conversion rate is to maintain scent. Ie. The user seller should confirm that the user is still on the right track on claiming the purchase they first entered to complete. The scent is built through the use of consistent colors, call to action, price levels, discounts, buttons, and images throughout the complete check out process. If they change too much, a user gets confused and might think that the vendor is trying to fool them or that they have ended up in the wrong place and thus do not complete the purchase. One of the greatest lessons in conversion rate optimization I’ve ever learnt is that customers are stupid and they know it. Thus, they expect to do it the wrong way and try to find every excuse to blame stupidity in not completing the purchase. Thus, over confirm their every step along the process. (don’t misinterpret me there please…)

Groupon check-out

Facebook Deals two step check-out

Step 1

Step 2

Why Facebook Deals and Groupon both will fail

The technology of creating a digital coupon is becoming increasingly available at very affordable prices. In fact, it is free to create many digital coupons already. Distributors of QR-codes and other such solutions have made it extremely simple to adopt the new technology and thus the cost is very limited.

Neither Facebook Deals or Groupon takes on a strategy where they become the distributor of existing deals, but they create unique deals on their platform. Although Facebook has noted they are trying to make their deals more social, I suspect they will focus on the sharing of existing deals, rather than the submission of social deals, ie. an offer that I find interesting to my friends, or an existing offer in a store that needs to be digitalized in order to reach its complete audience.

As a customer I want to walk around town and get ALL available deals in one device. I don’t want to flip around between native apps to try and find what might interest me. Here is a great void in the industry, one I think Google will eventually fill with its superior insight in user search preferences and geo location/maps.

Facebook can still steal this void in front of the noses of the others if they make it possible for me to post my best deals onto my wall. Ie. the deals I find are good offers. That way they will create a natural place for deals in the sharing space. Ie. (loads of the ie.s now…) Users are more likely to look at the deals purchased by businesses if it is mixed amongst the deals friends have posted, or if they are in the same format on the wall.

David Cameron, the UK prime minister has announced that he “is looking at banning people from using social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook if they are thought to be plotting criminal activity“. Fair enough. If you’re a government official and want to crack down on crime, one of the best ways to gain an advantage would be to control their possibilities to communicate.

However, just as my fellow Internet buddy Deeped writes in his blog post, this kind of control comes at a very high price. As he puts it:

Uppenbarligen anser han att fritt utbyte av information bara är gott om det aldrig används till ont. Om det senare görs ska det fria flödet stoppas. Kan inte annat än att säga att det låter inte speciellt demokratiskt. För fortfarande är Twitter, Facebook och alla andra delar ett verktyg. Oavsett om det handlar om att stänga av hela nätverken, eller bara försöka att stänga av personer som anses ”missbruka” dem så skapas nya tjänster som kommer att skapa gömda enklaver vilket endast försämrar såväl transparensen, möjligheten att möta personer med åsikter som behöver lyftas upp och motargumenteras – och det onda blir bara mer och mer starkt i mörkret.

Which in English sort of translates to:

Evidently he (david cameron) believes that the free exchange of information only is good if it is never used for bad purposes. If the latter occurs, the free flow should be stopped. Can’t say other than that this doesn’t sound very democratic. Cause when it comes down to it Twitter, Facebook, and other parts of the social web are still just tools. Despite if the context is to close down the complete networks or just people who seems to be “misusing” them, new services will be created that will put the open debate into hidden enclaves which only worsens the transparency as well as the possibility to debate people with opinions that needs to be aired and countered with the other side of the coin – and the evil is stronger in the cover of darkness.

I fully agree with @deeped that the notion of closing down, or separating some people from the possibility of communicating freely and openly online, will only hurt democracy, security and our possibility to avoid these kind of problems in the future.

As usual, with political leaders all over the world, they seem to have lost track of who they are working for. Although Cameron, possibly, has good intentions with suggesting these types of changes, he is still full of crap for suggesting them. Who is to decide who is likely to plan criminal activities? I who thought that pre-emptive strikes was to take it one step to far. Ie. when you know that someone is planning something, you take action before they have actually performed a hideous crime of some sort.

If I think twice about what Cameron is saying, they want to close the possibility of people accessing these social networks, before they have started planning criminal acts. On what basis? Who makes the profile for who is more likely than another person to become a criminal? Social profiling – perhaps?

Secondly, rioters are in the eyes of the law criminals, but in the eyes of the rioter, freedom fighters. We might not agree with the methods, but they are an expression of a deeper problem in society, one which we cannot turn away from or try to close down. We have to fix it. Not turn away from it. Social inequalities and violence has had a correlated “positive” relationship for years, yet social reform, is still frowned upon by the market, governments and the leading powers of society. I am not saying socialism, but I am saying that we need some world wide change in order for me to be able to enjoy my money, not just have it.

What I am talking about is social liberties. The right not to get judged based on the color of my face, my sexual orientation, my political beliefs or the way that I dress. Those are deep things we need to fix yesterday. It is the social inequalities that are driving our society into these situations where people feel trapped and unable to get out of the shit they were born in.

More directly I am talking about getting more demographic diversity into the leadership of nations, companies and decision making all in all. That is what is going to change the situation. By banning people from expressing themselves will only increase the pressure in a pot that is already at boiling point. It is thus not only a very difficult proposition, it is also the wrong one as it is not the solution to the problem.

I am eager to see how the rest of the “world leaders” are going to respond to what David Cameron has proposed.

I have become more and more interested in the arts of conversion of traffic to some specific pre-determined goal the past year. Although I had worked with conversion previously I didn’t think of that is what I was doing. In the landscape of a social web, I believe we have to start to rethink some of the things we are currently optimizing in order to gain full effect.

Biconic conversion

A couple of months back I was discussing conversion with one of the best in the business – Stefan Helgesson. He was looking into the shapes of the conversion funnel and had registered the domain biconic.com. Our discussions confirmed the notion that conversion is no longer a cone-shaped funnel, but a biconic looking shape.

The conclusion was reached when realizing that if you only focus on the first half of the biconic shape – the traditional cone-shaped conversion funnel, you are missing out on the potential of utilizing existing customers to generate upsales, new clients and “tupperware pyramid” potential.

Think of it this way. The social web has enabled individuals to become agents of any message they want to share with others. If they purchase a product from you, they are likely to desire that product. Otherwise they wouldn’t have bought it. Now, in the classical web technologies, this was all dandy and you smiled, said thank you, and asked them to please come back another time. On the socially enabled web, you are not doing your job if you settle with this. You should take it one step further.

Given the dopamine injected into your customers brain when they have just pressed the purchase button, you should utilize this to give them a referral offer of some kind. The referral can be built up as a promotion “Tell your friends, get $5 of your next purchase” or as a social interaction “Compare your purchase with 5 friends and see who made the best deal“. Both ways work miracles for your net revenue. Not only short term, but also long term.

The reason I would argue long term effects is because of the Consumer Loyalty Index research that’s available out there. Given that you enable people to rate your products or services after using them, you can steadily project your future business growth. The question you should ask is “how likely is it that you would recommend our product/service to someone else“.

However, back to the biconic shapes. When you give your clients/customers the opportunity to share their purchase, and thus attract more business, their purchase is in itself a viral action that creates a biconic shaped effect. My assumption (and studies) show that you only need a conversion rate of 1% to have a never ending series of shares to purchase. If you think you can obtain a higher conversion rate than that, you’ll get the biconic shaped conversion funnel.

Example: Let’s say you let 100 of your customers share their purchase to Facebook. Of them about 10% do share. Ie. 10 people. On average people have 100 friends of Facebook. That means the purchase will be posted to at least 1000 peoples walls. Let’s say one in every 10 people who see the link clicks on it. Ie. 100 clicks, of which 1 decides to buy something. This in effect means that the total value of your 100 customers purchases is no longer 100 units, but 101 units. Thus, the post purchase value of your initial conversion is higher than if you would not use the social referral system/apply the biconic conversion funnel to your analysis.

In the past we have called this organic traffic, but I believe that there should be a difference drawn between organic traffic that comes through eg. search engines and traffic that comes through recommendation. Simply because the latter implies your business is growing because of product satisfaction rather than SEO performance. The above example is assuming that you have a normal click to share ratio and a conversion rate of 1%. In fact, the click to share ratio is somewhat smaller in reality, whilst the conversion rate on referrals is a lot higher, thus this is a careful calculation and not any kind of wishful thinking. I am just too tired to do the math for the real deal.

So is biconic conversion the new black

I would say it is. it gives us an excellent analysis model for creating more business out of existing business and it gives us the tools to convey why social web applications are important to increase wealth and value. When everyone is discussing whether or not to be on Facebook, you should start rethinking what really makes us the dough in the end, namely what makes people buy and how to increase the basket value of their purchases.

Think of it as turning your fully legit business onto the dope of a modified tupperware pyramid. Ie, give people something for sharing that still gives you a revenue margin on the biconic value of the referral. Wow, I can feel I am messy, but I think you get the point. So here are some of the things I think we should start to rethink in order to start thinking fully biconic.

#1. Landing page vs. Through page

Just like a punch you have got to think of your landing pages as “through pages”. This is not the final destination, but they should appeal to sharing. Ie. the user is not done when they hit the buy button and they need to realize this as soon as they arrive. You can attain this by adding ratings and reviews, by adding comments on products, or by adding “loyalty stories” to the mix.

Your through page is the vault through which the user gets acquainted to all of the goodness others think of your products. You are not a retailer, but you are a community of satisfied customers. A customer doesn’t make a purchase at your store, they evolve their user experience and improve their life by sharing the stories about their usage of the products you just happen to sell.

#2. Sales conversion vs. Product adoption

Which brings me onto the next topic. You shouldn’t try to explain your products through offers alone. You should explain to people what king of life they will live after purchasing your products, what kind of person they will turn into. They do this by understanding the “why” behind what you do. Which makes me think of this video.

#3. Customer Relations Management vs. Customer’s Relationship Management

You shouldn’t just build a relationship with the client, but you should let them build relationships through the purchase of your products. They are happy they got to buy something. It is proven, we do get happy when we buy. But you should give them the tools to join and build their network through you, and through purchasing through you. Let them become experts and help others improve their usage, give them social status and let them promote the living crap out of your products and services. They will, because they are happy, when they buy.

Allow people to build relationships through your relationship with them. Be a bystander. Don’t intervene. Just let it happen.

I don’t know. I just had to get this out of my system. Please comment below.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned. Especially when time is limited. Today, we noticed on Twitter that we were spamming people. At first we thought it was another attack, but then we realized that it was actually us doing it.

I had given a poor instruction to one of our summer workers and now I have to pay the prize for it. Naturally, it is not his fault, but it is entirely mine. I am sorry for all of you who have received a spam comment (about 50 people) from me today.

A standard text was written that would be used as a base when contacting bloggers. This was interpreted as being the EXACT text that should be distributed. I was sloppy in my instructions and so things went terribly wrong.

This is nothing we should be doing and it will not be repeated. So bring the heat and direct it towards me, cause I am the one who deserves the beating!

//Jesper