Monday, October 20, 2008

3 ways to not turn your viewers away - give options and get conversions


3 ways to not turn your viewers away - give options and get conversions

There are three ways to turn viewers away:
  1. Poor quality content.
  2. Unusable content.
  3. Unaccessible content.
Let's say that you have the first well in hand. You routinely turn out great stuff.

How do you make sure that your content is usable and accessible?

The chief culprit is bandwidth. While this has been improving, it's still possible for people to have glitches and slows which make your content unaccessible and so - unusable. No matter how great your content is, if people can't view it - you might as well have an oil painting hung in the Metropolitan Museum - only a few people can ever see it at a time. Not useful for Internet Marketing.

Same thing if you only give out a video. Just ran into this for the umpteenth time. No other options to get the data - other than put it into a download queue where is can chew away and not block all my bandwidth. Otherwise, the video is chopped up as it starts and pauses. This degrades an otherwise fine presentation.

The other fault that video shares with podcasts is that it's linear. You have to follow it from beginning to end. A choppy video or podcast interrupts the flow of ideas - and so they can't/don't get your pitch. And won't convert.

Always, always give options.

Slideshare.net offers a nice service for hosting your powerpoint presentation. It's flash based, but is able to be controlled by the viewer, so they forward one slide at a time. Interestingly, you can add notes to each slide as a comment - and so give the audio portion of the presentation as text. You can also marry up the podcast with the slideshow and create a slidecast - higher-quality images without the bandwidth problems of a video.

As well, powerpoints can be converted to PDF, so the same data is available.

That's the point - give high- and low-bandwidth solutions. Offer a free whitepaper which contains the text of your presentation (just format the graphics into the document and output as PDF). Or a PDF of the powerpoint, as above.

My scene today was this: I went to a site to check out their training and found that I could only study them as video's. And their video's took forever to load (remember that 10-second rule when visitors leave???)

Rule is: always give options to make sure your excellent content actually comes across.

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