Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, speaks about web marketing and social media

Jason Jeffries, Blenderbox CEO, was a featured panelist discussing web marketing and social media for a Small Business Networking Event sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.

The Panel was moderated by Peter Shankman, and also featured Robert Hordt, Managing Editor of Crain’s New York Business and Charlotte Eichna, Executive Editor of Our Town and West Side Spirit, part of Manhattan Media.

The “tight collaboration” that created TimesPeople

Khoi Vinh on getting good ideas out faster by collaborating closely:

TimesPeople is the result of a tight collaboration between a small team of our technologists and designers and, for a new feature on our site, they managed to launch it in something like record time. It was actually a lot of fun bringing it to life, but the really important thing is the try-it-and-see approach that drove it. Rather than spend months and millions on creating the ‘perfect’ social networking addition to our site, we decided to take a good idea and get it out as quickly as possible. It’s certainly not perfect, but we’re hoping to learn as much as we can about how social networking makes sense in the Times environment.

From “People Wanted” (subtraction.com)

A brief overview of website optimization

Courtesy of the Google Analytics blog, an introduction to website optimization and how (and when) you should use it on your site.

In summary, here’s how to optimize a poorly performing page on your website:

  1. Find your high value landing pages
    What pages on your site have high entrances and high bounce rates? These are the “high value” pages that are begging to be optimized.
  2. What’s the desired goal (or conversion) for the site?
    In other words, what is the ideal outcome of a visit to your site? Some common online conversions include account signup, new lead generation, joining a mailing list, or purchasing a product.
  3. Set up a goal in Google Analytics to track how well your landing page is funneling people toward your desired conversion
  4. Create a new design for the landing page you want to test
  5. Test it!
    We were told at the LunaMetrics training session that you can expect actionable results within about a month, depending on the traffic to the page being tested. You could see statistically significant results in as little as two weeks in some circumstances.

Talk to Caleb or me if you want to know more about website optimization or if you have questions about the jargon. We’ve been scouting a few pages on our sites in need of optimization and could always use more practice.

Finally, the Website Optimizer team has a blog that’s worth a look. I recommend starting with this case study, in which conventional wisdom about the use of imagery on the homepage is tested.