There are 285 varieties of cookies in a Supermarket!

Too much choice leads to stress and indecision. Ever find yourself staring at the shelves clueless on what to pick?

We worry about what we might miss (opportunity cost), and we struggle to make decisions in the abundance of choice.

You can make your audience happy by limiting choices on your website, and have one main choice/goal available on each page/section of your website. Tell them exactly where to go next, and let them know it’s the BEST choice.

If you think of each page on your website as having one primary goal then you will be much more effective at engaging your audience.

Google is a great example…
- The ultra clean homepage calls you to search
- The results page calls you to click on the result which gives you the best answer, and tells you what Google thinks the best choice for you is.

There are other options, but they are hidden away, not too many, and just there if you need them.

What can should you do?

Think about each piece of content/page/section you produce for your website as having ONE primary goal that you want to get.

These might be:
- Social Shares
- Join your Fan Page
- Other bloggers/Journalists to link to it (backlinks)
- Email Opt-In
- Build Trust & Loyalty
- Pre-qualified clicks on affiliate/promotional links
- Product purchase
- Recommendations to friends

Secondary Aims

This doesn’t mean you can’t have smaller secondary aims, but I suggest keeping those to a minimum, and in some cases not having them at all (such as with paid traffic).

The secondary aims on your website should not distract from the main goal, and only be there as an option for them AFTER they complete the first goal, or if they DON’T complete the first goal at all.

The lesson?

Too much choice leads to inaction.

Keep it simple

Something I was thinking about last night…

The attention span of your audience is largely out of your control, no matter how awesome you treat them.

This is just something we have to accept. Of course you get the rare hardcore true fan if you are good, but the average person will drift off no matter how awesome you are.

My personal experience is that whenever I buy someone’s product that person/company has got my full attention, be it Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Jeff Walker, Apple or some other guru or product.

But my attention fades whether they reach out to me (i.e email me) daily or once a month. I learn from them but eventually

• feel the need to move on and learn from others,
• just get bored, or
• the stage I am at in my business or life moves on and what they discuss now doesn’t apply to me so much

Eventually I may unsubscribe, or just only check their emails very very occasionally as I become programmed to ignore them. Only a major announcement gets my brief attention.

Recapturing Attention…

However, when those people launch a new product I am keen to see what it is because I liked their first product. I’ll probably buy it based on my previous good experience. By buying I make a commitment to read/watch/use it, at which point they recapture my attention all over again.

I go through the cycle again of paying attention and gradually drifting off (just probably quicker).

Therefore the best way to recapture the attention of your audience is to launch a new product. It refocuses the attention of your existing subscribers, as well as bringing in new ones.

In essence you have to keep re-creating news. Just like people will pay attention to a celebrity when something news worthy is happening, but they’ll lose interest when nothing new is happening.

You have to keep creating news and drama. For product vendors the new product launch is the best way to do that.

If it works for Apple, it will work for everyone else!

The perpetual launching of new products is built into our psychological make-up and is ingrained in our society.

Just like the government has to keep launching new politicians into the scene to takeover from the predecessor, and a new cell phone model seems to launch almost daily, we are addicted to the new!

Perpetually launching products is a robust and proven business model. Keep launching or your audience will get bored!

Google’s recent Panda update upset a lot of people, it was the biggest and nastiest update in a couple of years. It literally put some websites out of business.

On the surface it seems like just another tweak by Google to improve relevancy, but under the surface something much deeper may be happening, a shift in Google’s fundamental principle on what makes a site rank.

Learning From Russia

Google has not been able to compete very well in Russia against the leading Search Engine Yandex. At first it was because Google didn’t grasp the uniqueness of the language and served bad results. They got that sorted, but still were not able to deliver better results than Yandex.

Yandex works very different to Google. It mainly uses machine learning to decide what sites are worthy of ranking. This simply means seeing how users rate a site, and then identifying what metrics good sites have in common.

If your site has those metrics, then it ranks high, if not, it doesn’t. Links are a lot less important in the machine learning model. What the user thinks is important.

What did Google do in the Panda update? It used machine learning to tweak its results. With the launch of the Google +1 button, paying attention to what users think is good, and devaluing the power of links, might be the direction Google is heading.

Watch the video to learn more…

Chris Ingham Brooke is a talented young entrepreneur, starting from just 19 he has built one of the most popular online environmental resources from the ground up, EnvironmentalGraffiti.com. His new project, Scribol, has launched with intense success also.

Chris Ingram Brooke: Born 1987
Projects: environmentalgraffiti.com, scribol.com, pixdaus.com
Traffic: Over 18 million unique visitors per month
Specialty: An eye for great content, and getting it seen.

Munchweb had a chance to interview this successful bootstrapping entrepreneur about the successful launch of Scribol, which in a matter of months it hit 30 million page views a month (15 million unique visitors) according to Chris.

Scribol is a mixture of recommendation engine and a traffic exchange system, it was launched in October 2010. Bloggers and online publishers can place a Scribol widget recommending popular content from around the web. Scribol has a strict editorial policy so only great articles are shown.

Publishers using the widget provide their readers with links to great content around the web, and being in the Scribol system, means they get their own content advertised on other high quality sites, helping them reach new eyeballs.

So over to Chris…

Please give me a quick bit of background on how you got started online.

In 2007, at the ripe old age of 19, I started a site called Environmental Graffiti and grew it to be one of the biggest environmental blogs. It was back-breaking work – however,  it lay the foundations in terms of connections and experience that allowed me to start Scribol. I still run it and it’s still one of my babies.

Scribol’s growth has been immense and you’ve signed up some high traffic partners from the outset. What was the key to your successful growth?

I don’t think there has been one magic bullet as such. One area we focus on in everything that we do is quality – from the design and technology of the site, to the caliber of the publishers, we’re trying to push the envelope. We’re not going after growth per se, we’re ensuring everything works at a small scale and then ramping up. We’re also working really long hours!

What sort of percent return are your traffic partners getting now?

On average, we’re sending publishers 350% back of whatever they send in. So for every click they send us, we send them 3-4 back. We believe we have the highest percentage return in the industry and that’s because of our extensive landing page tests, which we’re constantly trying to improve upon.




Where did you get the idea and how was the project funded?

Scribol started as a way to leverage all of our properties’ traffic. It was a simple idea to exchange audiences and to share great content.  We never intended it to become a business in it’s own right, but as soon as we had a few large sites signed up with us, it just took off. The business is funded entirely out of cashflow from our other businesses: Environmental Graffiti and Pixdaus.

Traffic exchanges have been around for a long time, but most fail. Why is Scribol different?

Traffic exchanges have indeed been around for a long time and you’re right to point out that most fail. However, although we’re sometimes guilty of describing Scribol as a traffic exchange, we think of Scribol as an engine that recommends content to the people that want to read it i.e. We’re connecting audiences together. Most traffic exchanges work on the premise of the webmaster having to view a number of websites.  We work on the premise of sharing awesome content and if people want to click it, they click it.

You main competitor is currently 2Leep, what sets you apart?

I wouldn’t really say 2leep or similar services such as MGID are our main competitors. Though at first glance the sites may appear similar, we’re really focused on working with high-end publishers. We have sacrificed a short-term burst of scale for quality, because we believe that once you start opening the floodgates and allowing any old publisher to sign up, there’s a limit to your growth. We’ve also strayed away from adding lots of new features because we’re mainly trying to improve our algorithms so our content recommendations are the best. In that respect therefore, I’d say our main competitor is something like StumbleUpon.

What’s next?

Now that would be telling