How to Choose Colors for Web Design

One of the real (unfilled) market niches in web design is a designer that knows how design affects conversion -- ecommerce conversion, lead gen conversion, home page bounce, etc. When I hire someone to design a website, I'd love it if they were aware of the following sorts of considerations, and had well-grounded opinions on how to use design to address them:

• How different colors encourage or discourage people from buying, or even from sticking around for a second click.
• How images (of people, of products, of pets) affect whether people will buy, register for my site, click on a link.
• How design affects download time for webpages, and how download time affects people's willingness to stay on a site.
• How a/b or multi-factorial testing works, and why that matters for a designer.
• How to balance the SEO value of actual text, vs the "it looks pretty" value of images of text.

And there are a thousand more issues like this. None of the designers that I've ever worked with have ever even thought these issues were important, much less thought that they were a fundamental part of their job.

Anyway, end of rant. But here's a useful article that talks about some of the implicit meanings of color.

Develop many "thin sites" or one deep site?

Just thought I'd give some link love to Andy Sweet, who's wrestling with some interesting issues related to simultaneously developing an entire portfolio of domain names.

Free as in Beer

I've been meaning to talk about my friend Jonathan's new startup DealLocker.com, which is sort of Delicious meets coupons. Let's say that you're about to register a domain name at GoDaddy, but you can't remember that coupon code that saves you 10%? Go to DealLocker.com and search for "godaddy". Better yet, they have a little javascript bookmarklet that you can install in your bookmarks toolbar, which will tell you if there are any deals available on the website that you're surfing.

It's social, because you can store your own coupons there, record whether or not a deal code worked for you, etc. I've been saving $5 - $10 a month with it for the last few months, so I think it's worth your time to take a look.

And, finally getting back to the title of this post, Jonathan just posted a great deal for free Guinness in Boston on Oct. 11, 12 and 13 in Boston.

If only Ask.com's traffic was as good as their support...

I must say, I'm impressed with Ask.com's support folks. I bought 183 clicks from ask on a very competitive keyword. And the average user that came from their network of sites viewed exactly 1.0 pages. Not 1.06 pages, not 1.3 pages, 1.0 pages. During the same time period, the rest of the traffic that came to the site averaged more than 3 pageviews per user.

If you know anything about buying traffic from second tier sources, you know what this means: click fraud. (Someone set up a site, displayed my ads on their site, and then had a bot click on the ad. They got paid, Ask got paid, I lost money.)

Now, this is not a post about the evils of click fraud. As John Battelle would say, it's simply a tax, and if you want to play this game you pay the tax.

But Ask did the right thing when I complained. They researched it, they blocked traffic from that site, they refunded my money and they called me to explain the situation.

The most interesting lesson learned? If you want your ads to appear on Ask.com for competitive terms, buy AdWords ads. Ask backfills their own search results with AdWords. Think about that for a second.

This is no longer the Talkr Blog

So, it's official. If you want to latest news on Talkr, you'll need to go to the new official Talkr blog: http://blog.talkr.com.

I have completed Talkr's sale to LiveOnTheNet.com. You can read the press release here. That's a smart bunch of folks over there, and I think they're going to do great things with Talkr and with the other tools that they're working on.

If you're still reading, here's the sort of stuff that I'll be posting on this blog: experiments in search engine optimization, link-building, and improving monetization. If you have a sneaking hunch that the world already has enough blogs on these topics, you may be right. Here are a handful of blogs that I read religiously:

• SearchBlog (John Battelle)
• Matt Cutts
• JenSense
• linkbuildingblog.com
• ShoeMoney
• Cost Per News

Still reading? Really?

Okay, then I suppose I should tell you what I do. I build content websites that have old-fashioned, useful content on them. Then I drive traffic to them. And then I monetize that traffic. Doing that successfully is all about testing -- A/B testing, multivariate testing, back-of-the-envelope "does it feel like this works" testing. So if you continue to subscribe to this feed, that's what you'll find. Lots of analytics, lots of testing. If that gets your motor running, stay tuned. If not, point your browser to blog.talkr.com.

An Update on Talkr's Sale

I've had a number of interesting phone calls in the last few days. If you are planning to wait until the last minute to place a bid on Talkr (in hopes of avoiding a bidding war) I would encourage you to call me instead: (603) 397-3935.

Professor Larry Press blogs that Talkr's sale "illustrates the attraction and risk" of web 2.0 startups.

Bloggers that have mentioned Talkr's Sale

For those of you "avidly" following Talkr's sale, I thought I'd point to some of the bloggers that have written so far.

Read / Write Web (a long-time user of Talkr) provides the most in-depth post and suggests that Talkr may not be the last Web 2.0 company on the market. Emergency Trap wonders whether Talkr is giving up too soon. 21Talks hopes Talkr will find a buyer. Tycoon's Row provides an alliterative title and describes Talkr as "outstanding". One by One Media suggests that someone with deep pockets ought to roll up Talkr and several other Web 2.0 companies for a later buyout.

Of course, these are just quick summaries -- several of the posts (and comments) offer measured doses of criticism as well.

I'll continue to summarize posts over the next few days.

Talkr is up for sale

This has been a tough decision, and perhaps one that has been long in coming. But, Talkr is now for sale.

I began work on Talkr in March of 2005, and after nearly two years of banging on this idea, I have decided to try to find it a permanent corporate home. I strongly believe that Talkr will thrive as methods of monetizing podcasts become simpler and more robust. Bloggers will provide content and distribution and Talkr will provide increasingly sophisticated text to speech, and ad integration.

However, the companies that monetize podcasts effectively today have full-time ad sales forces. And, although I have immense respect for the people that spend hour after hour on the phone selling ads, it isn't a skill that matches my skillset.

In the meantime, the bloggers that use Talkr deserve better support than I can offer them. They deserve new features, better voices and they deserve to be paid for their time. Since I haven't been able to successfully monetize Talkr, I can't offer that to them.

Thank you to the countless bloggers that have offered support and encouragement. Your excitement and support have kept me going for almost two years. Talkr is still checking feeds and creating audio, so you don't need to make any changes to your site. I'll give you an update next week about this new phase in Talkr's life.

Google's AdWords for Audio comes one step closer

Mark Ramsey at Hear 2.0 has an interesting post on Google's new "Ad Creation Marketplace". Google is accepting applications from "audio ad specialists" to create a searchable directory of professionals "to help AdWords advertisers to create radio advertisements".

Although AdWords for Audio has the potential to dramatically mature podcast monetization, there are difficult issues to address: How would ads be targetted? By channel, like existing RSS ad networks Feedburner and Pheedo? Or contextually using speech-to-text conversion? How would the ads be sold? CPM? Cost per acquisition in conjunction with pay-per-call?

Here's where I'd place my bets: AdWords for Audio will release without support for podcasts. Google's timeline is already rumored to have slipped a couple of months. Why deal with the headache of supporting podcasts when the money in the offline radio market is orders of magnitude larger than the money in podcasting? Support for podcasting will come -- but it will be months down the road. My guess is that Google won't offer ads in offline podcasts -- instead, they'll make a Flash mp3 player available, so that podcasters can monetize listeners that consume their podcast in-browser. The mp3 player will include a text or image ad related to the audio ads, so that listeners can immediately take action on the ad that they hear. Ads will be targetted contextually against the website on which the audio is embedded -- not against the audio itself. This allows Google to play to all their strength -- deep analytics, existing click-fraud protection, the existing pay-per-click pricing model and the existing AdSense contextualization technology.

So is AdWords for Audio good for podcasters? Absolutely. Is it a short-term fix for podcast monetization? I wouldn't balance my checkbook on it.

Slight interruption in Talkr's Service

You may notice a slight interruption in Talkr's service today. We need to tweak the text-to-speech server, so you won't be able to create new audio files for a few hours. Apologies for the inconvenience.

And, we're back. Everything should be back up and running. Please let me know if you run into any issues.

Make it easier for people to find your Talkr Feed

Talkr's latest release makes it easier for people searching for podcasts to find your Talkr feed. If Talkr creates a podcast from your feed, log into your account and describe the topic of your feed, assign categories that explain the basic subject matter that your blog covers and specify keywords related to your feed.

(If Talkr doesn't create a podcast from your feed yet, what are you waiting for? Create a free podcast now!)

Why is this a big deal? By providing this information to Talkr, we'll make it easier for people to find your feed and for advertisers to advertise in your feed. Once you provide customized information, we'll generate an iTunes-friendly version of your podcast. What's more, advertisers looking to advertise in a particular category can see which categories your feed belongs in! And that means more listeners and more revenue.

Speaking of advertising, we've added a new option in your Talkr control panel to give you more control over how advertising is used in your podcast and feeds. Log in to your account and click on the "Make Money" tab.

We've released a number of bug fixes and back-end improvements which should create a better user experience:

• We have had some complaints from bloggers that our crawler wasn't consistently pulling their feed. We've released a new version of the crawler that resolves these issues.
• We've also fixed a handful of bugs in the code that allows your readers to listen to your blog within their web browser.
• Finally, we've made some look and feel changes which should simplify site navigation.

We are always interested in hearing your feedback (especially the stuff where you tell us how to do a better job)! Please feel free to leave comments on this blog, or email them to: support at talkr daught com.

A couple of Interviews about Talkr

If you want to hear the latest on Talkr (and my brilliant, eloquent and prescient explanations of where podcasting is headed) you might enjoy these two podcast interviews:

1. Internet Marketing Voodoo
2. Eric Mattson's Marketing Monger

I always enjoy these sorts of interviews, although I sometimes think my mouth outruns my brain....

Talkr now support Atom feeds

Talkr now supports both Atom and RSS feed formats. This means that folks that use Blogger or other blogging tools that only provide Atom feeds can use Talkr without needing to use an intermediate service such as FeedBurner to convert their Atom feeds into RSS.

Talkr launches reporting functionality

We're providing a limited release of our reporting functionality today. This allows partners to check how many times their audio has been downloaded from the "Listen to this post" links on their blogs. You can view the number of downloads by date as well as by story. Multiple downloads of the same story from the same IP address are reported as a single download.

We have not yet integrated statistics on the number of downloads by podcatching clients.

To access your statistics sign in to your Talkr Partners account and choose the "Reports" tab.

Quick update

Just a quick note -- we've been working on improving Talkr's stability, and have begun to add a few new features. As we mentioned previously, Talkr had some problems with downtime in October and November. Since then, we've spent a good deal of time figuring out what caused the downtime, and we've added scripts to address those problems. We have also added an automatic site monitor, and negotiated the system administration services of Todd Finney, aka Boy Genius. With the exception of a bit of flaky code on January 17th, we've had a very nice month, thank you very much.

We've also started coding a set of feature improvements: first up is a long-overdue tool to allow bloggers to force a refresh of the audio that Talkr has created from their blogs. Just login to your free Talkr Partners account, and click on "Refresh this feed". Much more to come.

Talkr hires its first investor...

I'm proud to announce that Talkr has added its first employee. Or, perhaps that's more accurately phrased as: Talkr has acquired its first investor. Dave Liloia has agreed to come on board as Talkr's Director of Network Development. His job will be to work with the bloggers that use Talkr's services to improve the existing feature set and bring in new ideas.

Since Talkr is a small, unfunded company, Dave has agreed to work part-time for Talkr in exchange for equity. That's a good deal for Talkr, because Dave is fantastic (he's the guy that came up with the tagline "Letting blogs speak for themselves") ; and hopefully, it will end up being a good deal for Dave as well. (It also fails to break the bank, which hiring Dave with cash most certainly would.)

Speaking of hiring, Talkr still needs more help. In particular, we need some Perl geeks that are interested in working on cutting edge problems. (I may have an announcement to make in this area in the near future, but I'd be happy to make two or three announcements.) If you like what Talkr does; if you're comfortable working with the LAMP stack; and if you'd like to help make Talkr better, please send me an email at cbrooks@talkr.com. Please include a couple of specific ideas for how to improve Talkr, and give me a sense of your Perl chops.

A long-overdue update on Talkr

My apologies to folks that use (or are simply interested in) Talkr. Over the past two months, the service has had several outages, and has provided a complete lack of new functionality. I'd like to make a confession in this post, and then give you a general update on the site.

First, the confession -- if you envision Talkr as a hip, venture-backed Silicon Valley startup, complete with chefs, foozball and offices, you will probably be sorely disappointed. (Don't get me wrong, of course, Talkr _is_ hip.) ;-) Talkr has to this point been the work of one person (me), plus some paid and unpaid consultants. Talkr is really a "virtual" company. Our entire office fits inside the knapsack that I wore today, and physically consists of two laptops, a surge protector and a microphone / headset to allow Skype calls.

The service itself has been spotty because, over the past two months, my family and I have prepared for (and now largely completed) a move from Durham, NH in the USA to Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica. We are now living where the jungle meets the Caribbean beach, where the vast majority of people don't have computers, and people look at you kind of blankly when you ask about a "fast" internet connection. (Thanks to the wonders of satellite internet connections, I have now found a provider, "Jungle Internet" which can provide me with a 128 kbps wifi connection.) This is a really exciting opportunity for my family -- three of our four children are now attending a Spanish-only school here, and this is going to be quite a formative experience for all of us.

So, what does this mean for Talkr? First, I should have more time in the coming weeks to make sure that the existing service is actually available. My most sincere apologies to people that have signed up for Talkr, but been unable to use it. In addition to my own time, I'm also hoping to announce some additional help in the near future. That help will allow us to begin to roll out a host of requested features that I will write about soon.

So, thank you for your patience, and please don't hesitate to write (cbrooks@talkr.com) if you have any questions or suggestions.

Lancerlord demos new features from Talkr

Lancerlord has created a demonstration of some of Talkr's most advanced new speech features. We're very proud to link directly to the audio. The comments to Lancerlord's post are both thought-provoking and true. We recommend that you read them in their entirety.

On hitting important milestones

The following represents a bit of shameless promotion of some of the milestones that Talkr has hit since our launch in May.

Perhaps most importantly, Talkr has signed up more than 350 partners in the past 2 months. These partners hail from more than 40 countries, including such far off places (at least relative to my current latitude and longitude) as Sweden, Japan, Cambodia and Middle Earth.

On the content creation side, Talkr currently tracks just under 1000 feeds, and has created more than a quarter of a million audio files. (If you read that sentence twice, and then wondered if there was a mistake, the answer is no -- those are accurate numbers. Some of these feeds are updated frequently. Of the nearly 1000 feeds that we track, 143 have more than 250 posts. The three most frequently published feeds account for nearly 75,000 posts since late April 2005.)

On the listening side, we're averaging between 1000 and 1500 downloads a day. The majority of downloads come from readers that listen to audio directly from our partners' sites, or through talkr.com. The remainder represent files downloaded by podcasting clients.

Thanks for suffering through that onslaught of infoporn. We have a lot of development going on now, and plan to announce new functionality in the near future.

Talkr denies rumor that it will debut new features at Web 2.0

For immediate release.

"We vigorously deny the rumor that Talkr will debut a fascinating set of new features at the Web 2.0 conference this year" says Chris Brooks, CEO of web 2.0 company Talkr.com. "However," Mr Brooks continued, "We are planning the release of some really cool stuff at about that time. It's just that we aren't sure that the Web 2.0 conference would be the proper venue."

He later retracted that statement, saying "Okay, okay. Yes. Actually, the Web 2.0 conference would be the perfect venue. It's just that, on moral principles, we are completely opposed to that sort of blatant self-promotion."

Mr Brooks continued, "In fact, we would like to explicitly discourage anyone with an interest in Web 2.0 from suggesting to the conference organizers that they should include Talkr in the agenda. Please do not read John Battelle's blog entry asking for input from the community, and please do not use the web page provided explicitly for this purpose to request that Talkr make a presentation. Thank you. We appreciate your complete lack of support."