I was in Technorati this evening just looking for something to think about and learn. I do that every day, and if you don’t, why don’t you? Mike Paetzold, and old friend of mine and very smart businessperson, told me that he studied something about blogging (his specialty) for 15 minutes every day to learn something new. I took that to heart, and doing that not only increases your knowledge of your niche, but well… it helps you to come up with some cool blog posts, too.

This evening, I was over at Technorati when I stumbled on a post from Conversion Rate Experts, who wrote a post about how they increased SEOmoz‘s income by $1 million. That’s not just awesome, it’s an interesting case study that they posted to their blog. Wow… Great stuff. You can get the whole deal from clicking that link, but here’s the short and sweet of it:

The first thing they did was… to talk to SEOmoz’s customers.  They talked to people who bought and didn’t buy, to people who took a trial and canceled, and to paying members who canceled and CRE virtually became the customer. They broke down what people come to SEOmoz for and what made them stay or leave. This is HUGE. If you don’t know your customer, you can’t relate to them and sell them what they want to buy. Simple.

Then, they made a “wireframe” page of the website and got people to test it for usability from Twitter. Actually, Twitter can be a great testing tool, if you use it this way. You get data — free data, and it doesn’t take a ton of time to set things up. Sweet!

And from all this data, they came away with some very definite action steps:

1. They created a long-copy sales page. No worries about it being too long. They say that a page needs to be long enough to tell the story, and let me tell you, it was a very long, long page.
2. They took the selling language out of the headline and added curiosity.
3. They explained the product and told customers what they got with each level of membership. I mean, they completely spelled it out with a comparison chart. Good move. I always look for one of those when I’m deciding among the membership choices for any site I’m interested in joining.
4. From the outside looking in, they saw things that SEOmoz was taking for granted. Sometimes you can’t see some really great things about your product because you’re just too close to it. This is another item that you should get outside feedback on. Why do people love what you’re doing? ASK them, and use those elements in your sales copy.
5. They added video. Anyone born after the invention of the television is probably going to like this — a lot. We’re used to watching things, rather than reading them. But another cool thing is that by adding video, you’re addressing all three learning modalities (reading, listening, and watching).

And then, CRE tested the offer. They came up with stick strategies, and the whole article is just amazing. If you’re interested in getting your conversions up and creating a website that will make sales and be a site that your customers can use comfortably and absolutely LOVE, then, you should read the rest of this piece. The fact that they lay all of the details out for you is really helpful. You don’t want to miss it.  Here’s the link: http://www.conversion-rate-experts.com/seomoz-case-study/

Related Reading:

Program Evaluation: Methods and Case Studies (8th Edition)

Selling Usability: User Experience Infiltration Tactics

Vivace

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• Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-08-22 #theSEONewsBlog
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