How Purchasing UserTesting.com Could Help WalMart Make Money

30 Aug

User Experience

 

Today, I learned of a new website via an email from AppSumo.com. The name of the website was UserTesting.com. Usertesting.com is a website that  provides test web surfers to visit your website or a website of your choosing. These surfers can provide you with articulate commentary or feedback about the chosen site. They record video of their  screen along with audio and try to do what actions  you have proposed.

Today I noticed something interesting on the demo video that could have helped a major fortune 500 website. The demo video was describing a a website page for Walmart.com. Yep, Walmart.com. The video describes in detail issues with the Walmart website and how it is setup for some product searches. In the case of this it is a Cannon camera purchase. Check out video here.

The video as you now have seen is a great example of how you can use User testing to get quality feedback about users or potential users experiences on your website.

You would think a big multinational company such as Walmart would have seen this video and made upgrades based upon the issues it presents, right?

Now being the curious person that I am I immediately headed over to the Walmart website  to see if the difficulties with ordering a pocket size cannon camera had been fixed.  However, this has not happened as I am writing this post. Here is to hoping someone monitoring the millions of mentions catches wind and fixes it.

 

Looks Like a bit more usage of UserTesting could have helped

 

How much could the simple UX change make to the WalMart website is not known by me. However, I can assume this change could make a good portion of money.  We all know that user experience can play a huge part in ecommerce and this small example shows just that. I  will take notice  on making sure projects that I’m working on  are tested for end users to try to keep abandoned shopping carts, in completed lead generation forms and user confusion to a minimum.

How do you currently track how a users experience is with your projects? Let me know in the comments section.

*Note, in the process of being transparent,  I am not paid by UserTesting, nor are any of the links above affiliate links. I just really enjoyed the product saw it and blogged this. Hopefully you can use the tool to make extra money and get more information that can help your website grow.

 

Image Credit: MollyStevens

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What not to do for Search Engine Rankings: Blog Comment Spam

8 Feb

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  is widely talked about and is something that I spend a large portion of my day to day work activities monitoring. Typically I do not write about SEO as a lot of my favorite daily blogs do a much better job than I about it.  I will have to do a future list of my favorite SEO blogs in the near future.

This evening a great garden blogger that I follow on twitter @MrBrownthumb that has a Garden blog with a PR of 4 and receives a good deal of traffic mentioned that he had been comment spammed by a mid-sized seed company, not once but twice!  Below is a screenshot of the spam comment they left. They have a lot of other options available for them to gain in SEO and I look forward to giving a couple of reasons why they shouldn’t bother with blog comment spam and what they should’ve done instead.

 

Garden Blog Comment Spam

What not to Do

WHY BLOG COMMENT SPAM IS BAD IDEA

Reason 1: Majority of Time It Doesn’t Pass Link Authority

It Doesnt Work. Blog comment spam generally links that are passed are no-follow. The few that aren’t will often get caught as this link was by the blogger. The few that do pass thru are not worth the work the time an effort or and little value they pass thru. Here is an old Youmoz post about it. You could have spent the time working on the

Reason Number 2: Possible PR Damage

The garden blogger wondered why the seed company didn’t reach out to him in first place. In fairness at least this spammer, commented on a topic that was pertinent. I am sure that you have all seen spam that is about a topic that doesn’t fit at all.

Two Easy Options Instead of Blog Comment Spam

Option 1: Blogger outreach

They could have wrote the blogger a short note about an upcoming product or recipe from their website. It likely would have went over well and they could have even asked for the specific anchor text link. This is a timely but a method that works very often.  If you don’t try this method you should.

Option 2: Leave a Meaningful Comment

If the blog commenter would have left a comment of any value, they could have contributed to the blogs discussion and likely kept the blog. However, they did the opposite an immediately let themselves show as being a spammer.

This is an example of what happens far to often, people hustling for links but doing it in a bad fashion that ultimately wont lead up to much.  I know that I have done or paid companies that have done some of this in the past and know that many marketing firms still do this as it does make link counts appear high but does little for search rankings or making your company look good.

How do you interact with blogs and what are easy ways that you get links for your blogs or websites?

 

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Shazam: Showing How Partnerships Can Fuel Awareness

8 Feb

Like most of America, I watched the Super Bowl this past Sunday. The Patriots and Giants were two teams that I enjoy watching, plus Super Bowl ads are normally pretty fun. In between stuffing my face with chips, chicken wings and various other fattening snacks, my good friend asked me “What’s Shazam?”

Shazam Super Bowl Advertise

This Logo and other forms appeared across commercials

I was a little surpised that my friend didn’t know what Shazam was as I am sure I’ve shown him the app, multiple times. Regardless, I explained that Shazam was an app that that many people use to find out a song name or artist. He was impressed by the quick showing of the app again only to be back focused on the game.

Shazam then appeared to be in almost every Super Bowl Advertisement that I saw. The also were pushing free song downloads for using the service. All of these seemed to be a great job of pushing a newer product.  It used the Super Bowl and partnerships in ads to gain access to millions of customers that likely would have never heard of the project. Shazam, seems to think it was a success from this recent press release and plans to do more.

After doing a bit of research, I have learned that Shazam has really been pushing its growth through partnership deals. They have been using partnerships during Bravo TV Shows, and recently  Movie Studios  deals.  This seems like a great way for the the mobile application to be more involved into fabric of a new level of customers. Mobile apps and web companies could all learn a great lesson from how Shazam was able to integrate itself with major brands in a way that brought a new audience.

Have you noticed the Shazam logo in recent commercials? If so, what were your thoughts on it?

 

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