21–30 of 75 posts
Instead of spending valuable resources tweaking the wording of your links, why not just channel that same energy into providing excellent content, and let the rest take its course.
That's why I follow you in the first place.
Pardon me for the blasphemy, but if I wasn't already following your writing and didn't know better, this whole post would strike me as a little "mail order sleezy". Instead of spending valuable resources tweaking the wording of your links, why not just channel that same energy into providing excellent content, and let the rest take its course. That's why I follow you in the first place.
I've read in the past that telling people to do something isn't as effective as telling them that everyone else is doing it. I wonder how a phrase like "most people who like my blog follow me on twitter" would fare?
I posted an article with questions about Twitter earlier today.
So now I have ten or twenty followers.
I mean this in a nice way, but -- so what? What do you do when you get followers? Sell them stuff?
Seems like twitter followers are like blog readers. It's great to have them, but you have to act like they're not there and concentrate on content quality. Or maybe I missed something.
Why did you link the word "Twitter?" My impression upon seeing that is that the link would take me to twitter.com, not perform a follow action. I would wager that the third message would fare better than the fourth (of the examples you gave) if you rephrased: You should follow me on Twitter to: You should follow me on Twitter
The conversion for "follow me" as the link during my one test was 9.22% compared to the "twitter" link, which was 10.09%.
I'm not sure why it performed (very slightly) worse. It might have to do with the link being in the middle of the sentence (you have to go back and click the link) rather than at the end, where you finish the sentence and click the link.
Pardon me for the blasphemy, but if I wasn't already following your writing and didn't know better, this whole post would strike me as a little "mail order sleezy". Instead of spending valuable resources tweaking the wording of your links, why not just channel that same energy into providing excellent content, and let the rest take its course. That's why I follow you in the first place.
Resistance is futile.
Ok. I posted an article with questions about Twitter earlier today. So now I have ten or twenty followers. I mean this in a nice way, but -- so what? What do you do when you get followers? Sell them stuff? Seems like twitter followers are like blog readers. It's great to have them, but you have to act like they're not there and concentrate on content quality. Or maybe I missed something.
I've read in the past that telling people to do something isn't as effective as telling them that everyone else is doing it. I wonder how a phrase like "most people who like my blog follow me on twitter" would fare?
Here are the other 49 tricks, briefly summarized: http://www.moskalyuk.com/blog/yes-50-scientifically-proven-w... (This link is via HN, naturally: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=613402 )
Some of the tricks are really narrow and so they aren't all that useful themselves (e.g. to write post it notes and put those on interoffice forms and surveys for a better response), but with the theories you can make better extrapolations.
Ok. I posted an article with questions about Twitter earlier today. So now I have ten or twenty followers. I mean this in a nice way, but -- so what? What do you do when you get followers? Sell them stuff? Seems like twitter followers are like blog readers. It's great to have them, but you have to act like they're not there and concentrate on content quality. Or maybe I missed something.
I don't the link's particular destination here matters too much. His main point pertains to the increase of clickthrough rates of (any) link by changing the language of and around its text.
Given that piece of information, applying some of the practices of persuasion mentioned in other posts starts to make sense, but without understanding the transaction, I'm not sure what his point is. Just to get people to click a button? Surely there's more to it than that. (Although I _do_ get the A/B kind of discussion, just wanted to move the discussion towards a "what's in it for me" vein if I could)
EDIT: Instead of all this A/B crap, how about just honestly tell the reader why they want to do this? Is that such a crazy idea?
I've read in the past that telling people to do something isn't as effective as telling them that everyone else is doing it. I wonder how a phrase like "most people who like my blog follow me on twitter" would fare?
I thought about this. But there's a fine line between being tacky and being efficient. When I read bandwagon phrases like the one you propose, I always cringe. It's just not genuine.
I have a similar reaction to "you should follow me on twitter". Before knowing about this test, it possibly made me a little less inclined to like/trust you than otherwise. (I think it did, but I don't know how to measure that.)
I wonder if that's a common reaction: maybe there's an uncanny valley-type effect, where more efficient phrasings become turnoffs? Does the high conversion rate come at a cost of slightly alienating a subset of your readers?