Let me give you a little background before I get to the Floating Window Review. I finally decided to succumb to the will of the marketing Gods and go back to putting pop up subscription forms on many of my websites… which increased my subscription rate by 200% by the way!

Popups are something that I used to do, but stopped because I hate them so much as a consumer. Well, they work – so I made the business decision to go back to them.

The technology behind popups has changed quite a bit since my last dealings with them, so I did a little investigating into the ones that produce the best conversion rates and checked out some of the newer types of popups like the peel away corners or peel away ads (great for sales pages) and the ones where the background fades away (that’s the one this website uses).

Any of these types work well with my blog and sales websites, but they won’t work with my SBI websites because SBI doesn’t allow ftp access to the server (a real bummer sometimes, but other things about SBI make up for it!).

So I needed a solution that would work with SBI… and I found Floating Windows and decided to give it a try… That’s where this Floating Windows Review finally comes in.

I have to admit that my reason for trying it was more than it’s compatibility with SBI… their website is pretty slick too. Floating Windows has nice graphics, examples of both entry and exit popups, and two nice videos that show you how it all works. Their sales letter is pretty effective (you should check it out if you keep swipe files!).

Cool! I’ll give Floating Windows a shot!

Read the rest of this entry

When Aweber first posed the question, “Can you get more readers by displaying your subscriber count,” on their blog, it got me to thinking about some of my niche businesses. I use email marketing extensively in my business, so anything that will increase my subscribers is a good thing.

The general idea here is that you may be able to turn more of your website visitors into subscribers if you can prove to them that many other website visitors have made the same choice. Marc Kline puts it like this:

Just because someone else does something, doesn’t mean you should, does it? Maybe not, but from infancy all the way through adulthood, we take cues from others on what is worth our attention.

To test the theory, Aweber makes it possible to display a chicklet that shows your website visitors how many others are benefiting from your email newsletter… in other words, the chicklet shows your current subscriber count under your subscription form.

It’s a nice little setup because all you have to do is insert the code and Aweber keeps track and maintains your subscriber count for you. No fuss, no hassle.

So I decided to test out the whole social proof theory with a couple of my niche websites that offer newsletters.

Read the rest of this entry

When people start analyzing their website traffic, one of the statistics that’s always included is unique visitors. In other words, your traffic statistics always includes the number of people who visit your website for the very first time.

For a lot of websites, this number can look very good until you dig a little deeper and find out what your bounce rate is. A bounce is when a visitor lands on a page on your website and never clicks through to any other pages before leaving. Therefore it follows that a bounce rate is the percentage of website visitors who land on one of your pages and then leave without going any deeper into your website.

Unless you’re talking about a landing page that’s designed for a specific purpose, like sending visitors to an affiliate website, then a website that has a high bounce rate is highly undesirable. I don’t know about you, but I want my unique visitors to come on in to my website, take their coats off, and stay awhile. I want them to click around and visit several of my pages, subscribe to my ezine, make some comments on my blog, and generally make themselves at home.

I’m betting that you feel the same way.

Read the rest of this entry

Ch…ch…ch…changes! As you have probably noticed, iMarketingWatch.com has a completely new look!

Although several people warned me not to change our look and feel when the blog is soooo new, I just had to do it. I never liked the stuffy corporate/business feel of the old layout… it just wasn’t me.

I wanted something that more accurately captured my personality, showed a little energy, and looked sharp at the same time. Hopefully I’ve managed to accomplish all of that!

Advice I Received…

It really surprised me the other day when I received several comments on Twitter that blog skins and themes really don’t matter. Here’s one comment:

“I spend a lot of time on themes, yet I’m not sure it always matters. Content first baby!”

Although I agree that content is definitely first in a blog, I still think the overall look and feel is important too. In my experience on other blogs and websites, the look and feel of the website contributes significantly to the ROI and conversion rate. In addition, it helps to brand you in your niche, gives your website a distinct personality, and encourages repeat visitors… and who doesn’t want that.

Believe it or not, I had someone else on Twitter suggest that I should just find a blog I liked and copy it!

Obviously, I didn’t follow that one… this blog is completely custom.

More Planned For The Future…

I’ve got lots of plans for the future of this blog… but I’m trying to take it one step at a time, think before I leap into new things here, and take my time to develop it. I’d really like to make this much more of a visitor driven blog. In other words, I’d like to add features you want, add content you’re looking for, and provide the information you really want.

So let me know what you think about the changes I’ve made so far and feel free to tell me what you’d like to see in the future.

I look forward to hearing from you!