I am reblogging this post because it is an example of a big idea.
What would more traffic to your blog post mean to you? Image source. What would 100,000 views on a blog post mean to you? Depending on the goals of your blog, it could mean thousands of new subscribers and fans. But it could also mean new customers — big traffic means big exposure and big…
via How to Get 100,000 People to See Your Blog Post — Unbounce
Black Friday 2010 brought e-commerce sales of $648 million (Comscore). In 2016, that figure rose to $3.34 billion (Adobe), a 415% increase. Mobile has played an increasing role on Black Friday. It accounted for 36% of this year’s online sales.
Back in 2010, I was impressed when a retailer had a mobile website. I led a study with Luth Research that revealed only 22.8% of top retailers had them.
I kept some screenshots from my 2010 study. I have put them side-by-side with screenshots from today. Oh, how mobile commerce has changed!
If you walked by my office in 2015, chances are you would overhear me saying, “It is ok, doctor, that you have this 1 bad review—”
Perfect 5 star ratings are not believable. Now, I have proof! Thanks to Nick Kolenda in What I Learned from Analyzing 12 Million Customer Reviews.
The Tipping Point is a business book that sold 2.5 million copies. In it, author Malcolm Gladwell pitches a theory on epidemics called the Tipping Point. This blog post attempts to reverse engineer the process Gladwell took to explain his idea.
Explaining an idea is hard. My favorite articles on the Engel Journal blog are ideas, and readers often ignore them. Reflecting on my work, I asked, “What can Gladwell teach me about selling my ideas?” I found the answer in the opening pages of the Tipping Point.
Here are three steps Gladwell took to lead readers through his theory on epidemics:
Continue readingAccording to Quantcast, Yelp is the tenth most popular website on desktop and the second most popular website on mobile in the United States. With so many sites out there, why is Yelp so special?
My theory involves Yelp’s use of identity. Identity is central to the human experience. One of the first things we learn is how to say our names, “I am Eisaiah. I am Susie. I am Peter.”
Yelp’s users call themselves as “Yelpers.” Top users are called “Yelp Elites.” Businesses identify themselves with stickers that say, “People love us on Yelp.” In the video above, there are 41 pieces of my identity attached to my Yelp profile.
My friend Nicholas Mac Connell says that, “People read to answer questions.” Maybe this also explains why people visit the 10 most popular websites according to Quantcast.
Here are the questions that I think the top 10 websites answer.
| RANK | SITE | QUESTION ANSWERED |
|---|---|---|
| 1 |  google.com |
What answer? |
| 2 | youtube.com |
What story? |
| 3 | facebook.com |
What person? |
| 4 | msn.com |
What news? |
| 5 | bing.com |
What answer? |
| 6 | yahoo.com |
What news? |
| 7 |  amazon.com |
What tool? |
| 8 | twitter.com |
What person? |
| 9 | ebay.com |
What trade / deal? |
| 10 | yelp.com |
What opinion? |
After adjusting for duplicates, we get the seven (7) most popular questions in the U.S. that drive people to websites on both desktop and mobile devices:
The phrase “Barnacle SEO” means riding along on another website’s SEO.
I just created the writing app your content marketing team needs to create thought provoking blog posts that stand apart from your competition. My app, named Rudyard Kipling after the system of writing, frees up your company’s experts to focus on sharing insights while writers focus on wordsmithing.
The writing app works by dividing the labor of writing an article into six steps:
Here is how Paul O’Neill introduced himself to a crowd of Wall Street investors when he became the CEO & Chairman of Alcoa in 1987:1
“Today, I want to talk to you about worker safety… I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for 0 injuries,” he told the Manhattan ballroom.
– The Power of Habit
The investors were dumbfounded because he did not talk about profitability – only safety. A year later, Alcoa’s profits hit a record high. When O’Neill retired in 2000, Alcoa’s market capitalization had increased by $27B. Someone who invested $1M in Alcoa would have earned $1M in dividends, and the value of the shares would have been $5M when O’Neill left.2
24-year-old me:
“This gold pixie dust face cleanser is great, but there’s just one problem.”
Skincare promoter at a mall outside of Vegas:
“What is that?”
24-year-old me:
“I am not a consumer. So, naturally I would not buy this.”
Skincare promoter at a mall outside of Vegas:
Dear Skincare Promoter, if you are reading this, I have had better quotes since then! Besides the emotional intelligence faux pas, the statement “I am not a consumer” is factually wrong. I am a consumer every time I make the simplest purchase like gas or a 1970s bamboo bracelet.