Well, it’s not! People are very wary of giving their email addresses away, thanks to all those lovely princes of Nigeria who would like to send us money if we would be kind enough to send them a few hundred dollars first. Of course, we never sell or rent the email address of anyone who signs up for our list, but other, less savory companies do. So I don’t blame people for being a bit hesitant before giving up their email address.

The challenge is to convince them that we do, in fact, offer an informative and entertaining service. And that convincing is done almost solely through good marketing copy. It’s been my experience that copy is drastically more important than design when it comes to landing pages, partially because you want to keep your landing pages as simple as possible, to draw the user into the one sole action on the page they can perform: Signing up for your mailing list.

This is when Google Website Optimizer steps in. Once we have a new landing page put together, we’ll run it for a few weeks, as a control test of sorts, to see how it performs. Then we’ll load it into Google Website Optimizer and feed it a few variations. This can be anything from changing headlines around, to using a different image.

Next, Google works its magic by creating the necessary number of combinations based on the different variations you gave it (if I paid more attention in statistics, I could tell you this formula off the top off my head). Then it presents a different combination to each visitor of your page.

Here’s an example of the current test we’re running, with the actual numbers blurred out to protect our marketing director from receiving even more requests for work than he already does:

In this test, we are only trying out different headlines. But you can tell even from the graph how big of a difference a few words can make.

My favorite example of this was a landing page we did a few months ago which referred to the “#1 Stock” We tested this phrase against “Number One Stock”, and found that actually spelling out the phrase increased the conversion rate by 5%!. When you are paying for each and every visitor to your page, that increased conversion rate can mean thousands of dollars saved.

So if you haven’t tried out Google Website Optimizer yet, I urge you to give it a try, even starting with a simple A/B split test to get a feel from it. And if you have used it, I’d love to hear your success stories.

The company itself has, at least in my opinion, progressed very nicely in terms of embracing the internet revolution. Being a publisher, they were quick to see and take advantage of electronic communications. Not only do we send the majority of our newsletters via email, but we also are much more successful with our digital marketing campaigns than we are with our direct mail ones.

But while the company has progressed with the times, our customer base has lagged behind a bit. Of course, I can’t really blame them: We have several nonagenerians (yes, I had to look up that word) in our ranks, and the fact that they are even using computers is quite impressive.

Last year, we started a free e-letter. It is written in a narrative format that makes it really perfect for a podcast, so for the past few months we had someone create 10 minute podcasts from each issue, and notified our over 100,000 subscribers of this service.

And each issue, we received about five listens.

What went wrong? We definitely marketed the heck out of the thing, mentioning it in almost every issue, and making clear links to it on the website. We hired a skilled artist to record the podcast, so they sounded good. Lastly, the material really did make a great podcast.

The problem was that we were forcing some of the newest of new media on our subscribers who were just getting the hang of email.

We’ll be revisiting the podcast in about six months, in the hopes that as our business continues to grow, our subscriber demographics will as well.

It is an interesting approach to colleges embracing the overwhelming social web 2.0 culture that their applicants grew up on. The colleges that do this type of thing say that while people could find these types of blogs on their own, putting forward their own official versions of these blogs show that they are not afraid to broadcast their students’ lives to prospective applicants.

I checked a few examples at M.I.T., and these definitely look to me like your average college student blog, complete with grocery lists and complains about classes. Of course, you probably won’t find nearly as much mention of the excessive drinking and other activities that unofficial blogs might talk about, and I can’t blame the colleges for asking their bloggers not to mention that type of thing. Of course if I was in college and being paid $10 an hour to blog, I wouldn’t have much of a problem pruning my content either.

It seems great that admissions offices, which are usually pictured as stuffy and bureaucratic, would be willing to embrace such an unedited medium.

Thus ends marketing 101. Before using website optimizer, on my company’s site, we would manually create two versions of a landing page, and then tell Google to send half the people to one page, half to the other. We would then measure the amount of people who subscribed, and compare the two numbers. Not a bad way to do it, but a bit limited, and it also took a fair amount of time to setup each test.

Google’s website optimizer makes this much, much easier. You first setup a control – the basic version of your landing page, which you will run your other variations against. Then you define different sections for which you will test different layouts or content with, such as a header image, headline, content, etc.

So the neat thing is that instead of just doing a literally A/B test, where you have two versions of a page, you can give Google a few sections, and a few variations on those sections, and have 20, 30, 40, 50 different combinations which it will automatically test for you!

I can’t wait to start some of these tests and see what kind of numbers we get back.

It sounds exciting though. For those of us without GPS units or who don’t want to pay Verizon $15/mo for web browsing on a 1.5″ screen, a free mobile 411 service sounds pretty intriguing – especially when it’s powered by Google. I’ll certainly give it a try, and Google will make me a customer of yet another one of their products, along with GMail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, and Analytics.

Except … I’m not really a customer, am I? I definitely don’t actually send Google money for any of these services. I don’t even view ads on any of these services (though that may be due to the fantastic Firefox plugin, AdBlock). I’m sure Google collects some nice statistics from me using their Analytics code on my websites, but besides that I’m not sure what they get besides my continual use of their services. Then again, maybe that’s all they want.

Of course Google isn’t the only one doing this. I use traffic.com fairly often, including in the car when I can call up their free number, name them one of the routes I’ve drawn out on their website, and get the latest traffic report. I’ve begun using Jott to send myself reminder emails when I’m at a bookstore and see an interesting book I’ll check Amazon for. Most recently, I’ve used Highrise to keep track of all my contacts – for free.

All of this reminds me a lot of the internet heyday in 2000, when you would actually get paid for most of these types of services. Does this type of this confirm that the internet really has made a comeback, and that web 2.0 is here to say? Time will tell, as they say, and I’ll be curious to see in six months if I’ll still be making such great use of these free services.

Why is it then that the equivalent is so hard to find here in America? Do a Google search for nearby places to eat, and I bet that more than half (not counting chain restaurants) will lack any type of website, let alone a menu. From a marketing standpoint, I can’t understand the reason. It’s not the cost, because a simple web page costs pennies. It’s not the time investment, because placing a menu online is as simple as taking two minutes to scan it. My only guess is that it’s being technologically oblivious – a scarily common occurrence even in 2007.

To me, it just seems like marketing suicide. I may be in the minority, but I will rarely drive to a specific restaurant without knowing ahead of time the menu options and costs. A lot of this is influenced by two factors: My wife is a vegetarian, and I don’t like spending more than $13 a plate. By looking at an online menu I can quickly decide if a restaurant is an option or not. If I do a search and can’t find one real result from that search, I’m extremely hesitant to eat at that restaurant unless it’s been highly recommended. It’s not just because I can’t see the menu either. In this day an age, any company which doesn’t show up on Google makes me question their validity. I mean come on, with people spending thousands on “Hacker Safe” logos on their websites to make them more trustworthy, the least a restaurant can do is have an actual website!

One thing I’d like to see more of are websites like Foodler, which offer online ordering for a variety of restaurants, without any surcharge. This is yet another concept which really needs to catch on, as it again costs the restaurant next to nothing yet provides a huge boon to the consumer, and will make them more inclined to eat at that restaurant int he future (assuming the service works!).

Ah, how wrong I was. This is a prime example of why it is always good to research these types of products before dismissing them. What ScanAlert does is perform a somewhat routine daily inspection of the client’s web server. As long as everything checks out, they provide a small logo which the client can then place on their website, shopping card, landing page, etc which proudly proclaims their site as being hacker safe.

At the start of my research, I was fairly pessimistic both about how thorough a security check ScanAlert actually does, and how much an effect this logo actually has. I became even more weary when I found out the whole package costs nearly $2000 per year, for what basically seemed to amount to a port scan and 150 pixel image. I combed through forum posts, and found several on Webmaster World. Throughout the post, naysayers laughed at the prospect of people actually paying that much for such a service, though they mostly seemed to question how truly “hacker safe” this would make a server. Yet in between those posts were people who claimed that the placement of this logo actually had a noticeable impact on their conversion rate (conversion rate simply means the percentage of people who arrive on a web page and complete the goal that would make them a consumer, such as purchasing a product or signing up for an email list).

So slowly, the techie in me dwindled, as the newfound marketing side of me had had his interested piqued. Could a simple logo really increase sales by 5, 10, 20, even 35% as claimed through ScanAlert’s site? It seemed that might be true, both from the official testimonials as well as as nearly a dozen separate forum posts seemed to claim.

The question was, assuming a lowly 5% increase in our conversion rate, would the cost be worth it when compared to how much an extra 5% subscribers via Google’s PPC? Turns out yes, by tens of thousands of dollars (unfortunately I can’t get into specifics here, but I was stunned when I ran the numbers).

In the end I gave a strong recommendation to my boss, and we ended up purchasing Hacker Safe for three of our sites. Unfortunately, it’s going to be a little tricky to track as we can’t do a true A/B test on our main sites. However, we’ve already noticed a spike of orders over the weekend, and while we can’t directly attribute those orders to the placement of this logo, I wouldn’t be too surprised if that was the cause.