This morning I woke up to find a glittery new crown unexpectedly on my head. Dianna Huff's B2B Marcom Writer Blog named me one of the smartest businesswomen on Twitter. (Actually, I'm #1 on the list, but she's careful to note that it's in no particular order so it's not worth mentioning ... except I just did.)
As a "very smart businesswoman", I can tell you I manage to the bottom line pretty carefully. In other words, I'm cheap. Which is why I bought the stripped-down-model laptop without any bells and whistles. This is proving to have been a not-smart decision because there's no webcam built in and now I've seen test data showing that way more businesspeople may sign up for your email list if you have a talking head on your site to persuade them.
I'm launching another new site in the next week (more news later) and naturally I thought, 'Got to get a talking head on my home page to rev up those opt-ins!' But avatars make my skin crawl a little, so I decided to go with a little video of me talking. I just bought the best web cam I could find at a discount sale (of course) and spent this morning struggling with it.
Here's the stupid thing. I can't even get the dumb thing to clip onto my computer, or anything else for that matter. It keeps slithering down and/or randomly tilting over. I've told my husband after lunch we're going to get a level and nail the d**n thing onto the wall over my desk. Then I get to fumble-fingers figure out how to work it. My step-children who are in their early 20s and use their PCs' built-in webcams as easily and frequently as they breathe, think this whole thing is very funny.
My glittering crown is slipping.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Monday, July 20, 2009
Stressing Out and Calming Down
I said I'd start small. Focused. A little project. I'd still be home to cook a nice lunch for my European husband who deeply appreciates such things. I'd pop up a Web site or two, you know, just to keep my hand in.
And then it got bigger fast. Now, just a handful of months in, I have busy employees. I'm riffling through contracts. I'm chasing deadlines. I'm balancing books, and they don't balance enough yet. I'm grabbing a sandwich for lunch when I remember, and barely getting dinner on the table by 8pm. Not to mention considering working weekends. Now that the sun has finally come out. Now that we're in the only two-three months of the year with any weather worth being outside in.
I forced myself to relax all weekend. To do a little housework, a little cooking, a little weeding, and a lot of lying around on a hammock with a Peroni.
I realized I was getting all stressed out for really no good reason. Mostly, in fact, from habit. Creating another, albeit far tinier, version of the situation that made me want to retire early in the first place. Dumb. Life patterns are magnetic to us no matter how much we want to avoid them.
Should I wind things down and quit entirely? I wondered. Then, I picked up my mystery novel. There on the first page was a quote from good old Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who knew what real work stress was like. He wrote, "Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it..."
He's right. I truly do love my trade. The trade I spent nearly 25 years living and learning. If I set it aside completely, I'll set aside a wellspring of joy and contentment.
I just have to learn to live with it in a calm sort of way. Calm publishing, calm marketing. Gotta be a way to do that, and cook lunch too.
And then it got bigger fast. Now, just a handful of months in, I have busy employees. I'm riffling through contracts. I'm chasing deadlines. I'm balancing books, and they don't balance enough yet. I'm grabbing a sandwich for lunch when I remember, and barely getting dinner on the table by 8pm. Not to mention considering working weekends. Now that the sun has finally come out. Now that we're in the only two-three months of the year with any weather worth being outside in.
I forced myself to relax all weekend. To do a little housework, a little cooking, a little weeding, and a lot of lying around on a hammock with a Peroni.
I realized I was getting all stressed out for really no good reason. Mostly, in fact, from habit. Creating another, albeit far tinier, version of the situation that made me want to retire early in the first place. Dumb. Life patterns are magnetic to us no matter how much we want to avoid them.
Should I wind things down and quit entirely? I wondered. Then, I picked up my mystery novel. There on the first page was a quote from good old Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor who knew what real work stress was like. He wrote, "Give your heart to the trade you have learnt, and draw refreshment from it..."
He's right. I truly do love my trade. The trade I spent nearly 25 years living and learning. If I set it aside completely, I'll set aside a wellspring of joy and contentment.
I just have to learn to live with it in a calm sort of way. Calm publishing, calm marketing. Gotta be a way to do that, and cook lunch too.
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Saga of Webinar Registration Landing Pages
I've always obsessed about order form design. In my early 20s, madly in love with my career in direct response for a publishing company, I used to stop by city newsstands late at night and furtively riffle through magazines 'stealing' all the subscription order forms. Honest to god. I had a whole collection, alpha organized in cardboard boxes by publisher name, filling up my tiny efficiency apartment.
You can imagine how happy it made me years later when A/B and multivariate testing on the Web proved that even tiny tweaks to forms can lead to tremendous differences in response rates. So my obsession wasn't so weird after all - ok maybe still weird, but definitely not unwarranted.
Cut to my new WhichTestWon site, which I launched last month to try to educate and inspire other marketers about testing. A big part of the project is a new webinar with a different guest star each month revealing some cool behind-the-scenes testing tips and stories.
Turns out most, if not all, webinar platforms force you to use their forms for registrations. You can 'customize' the form to include your logo, webinar name, and dates and stuff. But, you can't customize the forms for USABILITY. You can't make most of those design and layout tweaks, that mean the world to me and to registration conversion rates.
Agony. There I was, the weirdo queen of form-design-obsession, forced to use a form I would not ever want to be seen with in public.
In reply to my polite-but-anguished email, the webinar people very nicely agreed to see if they could upgrade their forms in the future. In the meantime, I've jerry-rigged up a form of my own integrating FormSpring with my site. It's still not perfect, but it's so much better that now at least I can sleep at night.
Unfortunately, the webinar people don't allow you to integrate any other form-sources or to upload an attendee list to their system. That means I've actually got an employee now whose job it is to check for new FormSpring registrants twice daily, and then one-by-one manually stick their info into the Webinar company's form. It's the only way attendees will get their personal log-in link for the event.
This laborious back-end process shouldn't be visible to attendees. They'll just see my more-optimized registration form and then 4-12 hours later get a confirmation email from the webinar people. I think it will be ok. Cross your fingers the registration rate goes up enough to make up for the extra work and expense. Thanks.
BTW, my lovely new webinar registration form is here. Please do NOT sign up unless you honestly care about A/B and multivariate testing. Thanks -- Anne
You can imagine how happy it made me years later when A/B and multivariate testing on the Web proved that even tiny tweaks to forms can lead to tremendous differences in response rates. So my obsession wasn't so weird after all - ok maybe still weird, but definitely not unwarranted.
Cut to my new WhichTestWon site, which I launched last month to try to educate and inspire other marketers about testing. A big part of the project is a new webinar with a different guest star each month revealing some cool behind-the-scenes testing tips and stories.
Turns out most, if not all, webinar platforms force you to use their forms for registrations. You can 'customize' the form to include your logo, webinar name, and dates and stuff. But, you can't customize the forms for USABILITY. You can't make most of those design and layout tweaks, that mean the world to me and to registration conversion rates.
Agony. There I was, the weirdo queen of form-design-obsession, forced to use a form I would not ever want to be seen with in public.
In reply to my polite-but-anguished email, the webinar people very nicely agreed to see if they could upgrade their forms in the future. In the meantime, I've jerry-rigged up a form of my own integrating FormSpring with my site. It's still not perfect, but it's so much better that now at least I can sleep at night.
Unfortunately, the webinar people don't allow you to integrate any other form-sources or to upload an attendee list to their system. That means I've actually got an employee now whose job it is to check for new FormSpring registrants twice daily, and then one-by-one manually stick their info into the Webinar company's form. It's the only way attendees will get their personal log-in link for the event.
This laborious back-end process shouldn't be visible to attendees. They'll just see my more-optimized registration form and then 4-12 hours later get a confirmation email from the webinar people. I think it will be ok. Cross your fingers the registration rate goes up enough to make up for the extra work and expense. Thanks.
BTW, my lovely new webinar registration form is here. Please do NOT sign up unless you honestly care about A/B and multivariate testing. Thanks -- Anne
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
