In an ear­lier blog post, I talked about the fact that lately I’ve been lean­ing a lot more towards test­ing the reduc­tion in bottlenecks.

Some of the results are staggering!

In short, the more I increase the sense of secu­rity and trust, bet­ter the flow and ease of order­ing, and project a more con­gru­ent and pro­fes­sional image, the more sales I make.

Since that post, some read­ers have asked me for some exam­ples. I pre­fer not to reveal mine as they are pro­pri­etary. But I can say this…

One of the things that I’m start­ing to really like are ecom­merce sites that are less “saleslet­ter­ish” — i.e., less long-​​scrolling copy in a direct-​​mail for­mat, and more clus­tered lay­outs that are reader-​​focused, commerce-​​centric, and action-​​driven.

They still use com­pelling copy and a solid response mech­a­nism. If the user needs more details, a “more info” link then sends them to a typ­i­cal, long copy saleslet­ter. But these sites’ front-​​end are more action-​​oriented than they are scrolling-​​oriented.

I’ve decided to test this with our main web­site at Suc­cess Chef. I still use long copy. But I’ve con­verted the front-​​end into an ecom­merce, multi-​​product, catalog-​​like format.

And the results are in…

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You may have noticed on this blog, either at the end of each post in the “about the author” sec­tion, or about halfway down the right side­bar, that I have a tip jar.

Peo­ple keep ask­ing me, “Do they really work?” You bet!

The tip jar is really a “buy me a beer or cof­fee” Pay­Pal dona­tion link auto­mat­i­cally inserted with the help of this excel­lent plu­gin. And since installing it about three years ago, I’ve been get­ting on aver­age 4–5 tips a month.

Some were meant to thank me for spe­cific posts, par­tic­u­larly my most pop­u­lar arti­cles. How­ever, I must add that the pas­sion­ate rants seem to get the biggest tips.

Nev­er­the­less, I never pub­licly acknowl­edged these peo­ple indi­vid­u­ally, and I didn’t really want to in case some of them would pre­fer to remain con­fi­den­tial. But I wanted to take a moment to say a big “thank you” to all of you who have sent a tip my way.

You guys are awe­some! I appre­ci­ate you.

Your con­tin­ued sup­port and loy­alty means the world to me.

Just a quick note to let you know this blog is under­go­ing some ren­o­va­tions. I’ve just installed Dis­qus (pro­nounced “dis­cuss”) com­ment sys­tem, which will replace the native Word­Press com­ment­ing system.

It takes a while for the sys­tem to import all the com­ments from Word­Press — it’s about 70% done, now — and it should be all back to nor­mal soon. Fin­gers crossed.

Why am I doing this?

I’ve been inves­ti­gat­ing sev­eral com­ment­ing sys­tems, includ­ing Word­Press’ own, Intense Debate. And Dis­qus appears to be the win­ner in many of the reviews I’ve read. I’ve tested it on some of my non-​​public blogs and it works quite well.

This sys­tem allows you to track com­ments, con­verse using threaded replies, rate com­ments, add links to com­men­ta­tor pro­files, and com­ment by log­ging into Twit­ter, Face­book, or Dis­qus Con­nect, or sim­ply as a guest.

Com­ments are still mod­er­ated as before, so your com­ment won’t show up auto­mat­i­cally. If you notice any­thing “wiggy,” please com­ment here. The com­plete tran­si­tion, Dis­qus advises me, should be com­pleted by day’s end. Thanks for bear­ing with me.

I’m in the mid­dle of upgrad­ing this blog’s theme. It’s already two if not three years old, and some of the plu­g­ins con­flict with the theme. Above all, it takes a long time to load.

After some test­ing, I orig­i­nally thought it was my plu­g­ins, or the fact that there are too many of them. But it’s not.

A quick test over at Web​si​teOp​ti​miza​tion​.com revealed that latency was caused by too many uncom­pressed CSS line-​​items and javascripts, too many graph­ics, and the use of tables (rather than using posi­tion­ing through CSS 2.0+).

So after using the theme on Mar​keters​Board​.com by the awe­some design­ers at Inst​ant​Shift​.com (and pay­ing for a license to cus­tomize it), I’ve decided to use it for this blog and redesigned it to fit.

You’ll notice some of the famil­iar ele­ments are still here. But I still need to tweak some of the lay­out issues and col­ors, espe­cially with all the plu­g­ins. So bear with me. It should be com­plete by a day or two. Thanks!

I often get requests from peo­ple ask­ing me what plu­g­ins do I use on this blog. Or, what are my favorite plu­g­ins. Some­times, I post about them. But these lists usu­ally become stale fast, because I test new plu­g­ins and change them all the time.

So I wanted to post an update and list some of my favorite plu­g­ins. How­ever, it was cum­ber­some to pick and choose which ones I wanted to post about because there are so many. So I’ve decided to do some­thing dif­fer­ent this year.

Using a plu­gin that lists all the plu­g­ins in use on a par­tic­u­lar blog (I’ll share that one with you in a moment), I man­aged to print a list of all my plu­g­ins in a sin­gle post.

How­ever, the descrip­tions you will read are those of the plu­gin authors. Some of them are poor and insuf­fi­cient. Oth­ers don’t explain how I use them specif­i­cally on this blog.

So I’ve also added a mini-​​description with addi­tional com­ments to each plu­gin to explain why, how, or where I’ve used it on this blog. I sin­cerely hope this list is use­ful to you. If it is, con­sider it a Christ­mas gift from me.

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After my recent push for Robert Plank’s Speed Copy Secrets copy­writ­ing spe­cial report on how to write copy in under an hour, I wanted to test a few other things from Robert, since he’s a gifted pro­gram­mer and offers some neat scripts.

(Actu­ally, I recently bought every­thing from Robert I could get my hands on, and so far I’m thor­oughly impressed. Specif­i­cally, his “Full-​​Blast PHP” and “Sales Page Tac­tics Vol­umes 1–3″ prod­ucts are fabulous.)

I’m test­ing just a cou­ple of Robert’s scripts on this blog, and early results are stun­ning. Let me share with you a few test results…

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As with sta­tic web­sites, the suc­cess of a blog depends on attract­ing a steady stream of new and return traf­fic. The dif­fer­ence is, blog pro­mo­tion tools are slightly dif­fer­ent, a bit more diverse, and largely much more effective.

Why? Because blogs are designed with inter­ac­tiv­ity and social net­work­ing abil­ity built in. They are ideal both for devel­op­ing rela­tion­ships and for mar­ket­ing your brand.

How­ever, don’t neglect stan­dard pro­mo­tional activ­i­ties in favor of blog-​​only traf­fic gen­er­a­tion meth­ods. You can and should use both.

In fact, tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing can become even more potent with a blog due to its nature.

For exam­ple, and most impor­tant, you will still want to uti­lize your email list, and use your blog to grow it, too. Ask read­ers to sub­scribe, and let them know when you post a new arti­cle just as you would with a new fea­ture or prod­uct on a sta­tic website.

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