Marko Hurst

My presentation that I gave to the NY Content Strategy Group on 9/24/09. The presentation covers how you can use search data to improve you content: metadata, taxonomy, ontology, copy, headlines, SEO, SEM, and more.

A very short presentation, actually an excerpt from my talk at the NYC UPA in Feb, on why designers, clients, & UX folks alike need to STOP treating ‘brand websites’ as such and instead understand the 4 basic online business models to improve design, the experience, & show ROI EVEN IF YOU DON’T SELL ANYTHING!!!!

This was my talk give the NYC UPA. It discusses what I call ” Designing Outcomes”, which is a type of ‘backcasting’ that I’ve found works better than other methods I’ve used for determining what steps need to be taken to achieve a specific goal. It does this by starting out with your desired outcome, end state, and moving backwards to the present.

For an example and tool to use this technique download the excel worksheet which shows a real client example from a women’s hair care line from a few years ago.

I picked up this book, Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer, up a few days ago (buy @ Amazon), if you are a fan of any of the other Eisenberg books, you’ll not be disappointed (see below). While a quality book packed with useful tips, tactics, examples, and good mix of strategic & tactical ideas, what I enjoyed most about it is it’s not written for a purely Web Analyst point of view. It’s a great combination of User Experience & Web Analytics/Analyst and this something that is key in our industry today a combination of qualitative & quantitative data, practices, & skills sets.

From the Back Cover
If you want more leads, sales, and profits from your website, then you need to test, test, test. Google Website Optimizer is all about testing, and this book shows you how to use that free tool to discover what is best for your site and your bottom line. Recognized online marketing guru Bryan Eisenberg and his chief scientist John Quarto-vonTivadar explain how to test and get more of your visitors to take the actions you want them to take: contact you, buy something, subscribe, or otherwise engage with your site.

1. Learn to develop a testing framework and establish goals and parameters
2. Determine how well your site calls visitors to take action and learn how to make improvements
3. Discover the best approach for selecting and categorizing products
4. Optimize your landing pages and revise your content with copy that sells
5. Understand exactly which test works best for a given purpose
6. Learn what you need to bring to the testing experience to reap the fullest benefits
7. Learn how to design impactful tests in sales, lead generation, B2B, and B2C situations
8. Get over 250 testing ideas based on all the factors that contribute to a site’s ability to convert online visitors