Voici la fameuse norme aux 124 critères: 

http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000021530180

Il est clair qu’elle peut permettre à des établissements d‘“usurper” leurs 5 étoiles, comme la chaîne Sofitel, intégralement classée en 5 étoiles et n’étant clairement pas au niveau. Le Pullman La Défense a même obtenu 5 étoiles, et il s’agit d’un joli 4 étoiles de chaine tout au plus. Le Crowne Plaza de Toulouse… 

L’instauration d’une catégorie “Palace” ajoutant des notations sur des critères d’agrément et de services serait bienvenue pour continuer l’effort de mise au niveau international de l’hôtellerie française, qui reste insuffisante pour la 1ere destination touristique mondiale. 

Une tentative a été faite en 2011 mais s’est soldée par la nomination contestée de 8 puis 14 établissements. 

Aujourd’hui, 265 hôtels en France sont classés 5 étoiles. Sans surprise, les viles qui en comptent le plus sont, de très loin (et 12 des 14 palaces): 

- Paris: 48 (5 palaces puis 7 avec le Ritz et le Crillon en travaux)

- Courchevel : 17 (2 palaces)

- Saint-Tropez/Gassin/Ramatuelle : 17 (3 palaces)

While I was proud to never have been scammed before 2010, I then was on an almost hilarious roll which ended late 2012 when I returned to France. 

Had I suddenly gotten “ridiculously unlucky” as some told me? was it because I started being well-off and wasn’t really before? each case was more surprising than the other, but there is still some learnings I thought to share. 

Let me start with be2.com.

Look, it’s best to avoid criticizing this or that person publicly, and deal with it. But in this case it’s the “company” itself, and all it represents, including harming the image of web businesses. 

It is strange to me that the founder, who is smart and not a dishonest person, would want to run businesses (they are tied to other similarly shady ventures) which bring nothing to consumers and barely survive by being hardly anything more than a scam. 

For too long, I was convinced this would only be a transition into growth and a “good” business was just about to emerge. But there came a point where I couldn’t stand that the only way this business was surviving was because they forced and tricked users into not being able to cancel their subscription. Not only would the annual fee be deducted right away without it being clear, but to cancel, you had to send a FAX (!) to a foreign number which was down all too often, and 14 days before your anniversary. This with no reminder, and bam, your card would see another €300 charge … for a really poor service!

I mean, look at their product: besides the typos and horrendous design, it’s always been 10 years behind. If 1% of the base is active, that’ll be already surprising. 

For too long, I thought there would be a break on that point too, as product was the focus of so many people. Yet nothing ever came out, and to date I’ve yet to see a more inefficient team! 

Speaking of a team, they’d hired about 10 times the amount of ppl needed to run such a simplistic product, and when I finally arranged to leave, they were also getting rid of half the staff. 

So instead of having to pay me a severance package, I felt like bowing out gracefully, trusted the founder and simply asked to be paid and sign a convention with the French system which would have granted me a % of my salary while I was working on Smartdate. At no cost for be2. 

You cannot imagine how shocked I was, when not only did they not pay me a dime of agreed bonuses, refused the convention, and even didn’t pay last salaries. 

All of a sudden, while we’d been discussing Smartdate on a friendly basis for a year, they thought of saving money by saying “oh actually it’s a problem”. I even offered they’d just pay the last salary… which they even refused. They preferred to hire (great) lawyers, who managed to drag things along forever, and to this date, I’m still trying to recover a small part of what I should have been paid. Not easy with their opaque company structure. 

I really hadn’t expected such a low blow, and that will be lesson 1. In business, you can never, ever trust anyone when it comes to money. There will always be a large proportion of people (the untalented, mediocre ones) who will be so stupid as to ruin a long-time relationship for the sake of keeping some cash. 

In this case, I was also naive: if the founders had no issue running a business scamming thousands of people, why would they bother doing the same to an associate who’s leaving? 

Lesson 2: Think long term, and high-level, and never get involved with people who don’t have the highest moral standards. They never succeed anyways. I feel bad I never managed to convince them to change strategy and leave the dark side of the force. 

Yes, sometimes you have to try shortcuts to get your start up off the ground, be bold and do PR stunts, but they can never be a modus operandi for your revenue model. Stay away from companies who scam their employees and their users like be2. Some e-commerce fake companies like Infurn (who scammed me 6 mo ago) do manage to make millions, and their founders get away with it, maybe forever. It’s the biggest mystery that with the tens of thousands of complaints, all the lawsuits, be2 is still out there. 

But I feel you derive more happiness by being proud of what you do. Plus they don’t even make that much money. 

____________________________________

And when you do get scammed, as you can’t always predict it (even by being the worst paranoid, which I don’t recommend) have a dedicated plan on how to get your money back, stick to it, give up when you’ve exhausted ways, and get it off your mind.

I used to ruminate for hours, but you don’t want to add that to the financial pain! I am now totally indifferent to this one, like the more extraordinary I’ll tell you about when I have a bit of free time. 

Lesson 3: focus on what you’ve learned out of it. You know, the silver linings. Focus on that, even if it’s a tiny lining. 

_______________________________________

FIrst page on Google. Even their self-created Wikipedia mentions they’re a scam… Now that’s funny. Bear in mind they have a whole team dedicated to bury negative comments. 

When I think of it, be2 will soon celebrate 10 years of existence as a scammer. And they never changed the bogus 57% of women. Yet some people still bait. 

Now THAT’s an achievement! 

Wikipedia: 

“This company is by some considered to be a scam^[1]. They are ubiquitous and keep erasing warnings about their extortion of money from people. Warnings about the company can be found in various locations on the Internet, for instance ^[2] and^[3]. According to dissatisfied former customers, it is difficult to cancel a subscription, the cancellation of a credit card being claimed as the only option with collection agencies being a possible consequence.

However, it is not possible to cancel the subscription because there is no email link on the site or fax number. Although the online address makes the company appear to be registered in the UK (be2.co.uk), it is actually based in Luxenbourg. For this reason the company has managed to get away with taking money out of subscribers’ bank accounts without their consent and make cancellations of memberships nearly impossible to achieve.^[10]

In Denmark, the journalist Troels Jørgensen from TV station DR has rated BE2’s matching system as flawed. Wildly different profiles were matched to exactly the same potential partners in a test performed for consumer rights programme Kontant.” 

Flash news: they never managed to build a matching algorythm, and the renewal got them sued in every single country. 

http://www.slideshare.net/fabriceleparc/sd-investor-summary-may-2011

Deepclass : “Join the Luxury e-Retail Revolution” is coming next. 

Found it interesting to see this document as I’m entering the last phase of launching of a very different business, Deepclass. 

A bit the opposite of Smartdate: an innovative concept within an untapped market with barriers to entry and long preparation cycles. On products I’m passionate about. 

As you can imagine I was furious with the whole Smartdate waste, but in the end I couldn’t hope to learn so much. I also thrive in the face of adversity, and sought to confront my tendency to be too optimistic and confident when there didn’t “seem” to be enough of that adversity.

Yes, you need to be furiously optimistic as an entrepreneur - but also (kind of) plan for the 25 other plans after Plan A! 

This time I’ve been preparing for 4 months, while Smartdate was only 10 months old as we were looking for a 3rd round! 

In June 2011 we realized how catastrophic our losses on the US market were due to chargebacks on massive fraud: losing all subs money, all marketing invest, and ridiculous fines. Our payment provider Adyen, while large in EU, had done nothing to adapt fraud screening and flat rejected any responsibility (of course). 

So while I had prepared for a speedy and lucrative exit with one of the US leaders, I hadn’t done thorough research on the risks, and no one involved either - it was all going too fast. 

I wasn’t happy with the product, and already that’s a signal you have to hold off, be more patient. That also made me want to understand product and coding in depth so I would never struggle like that again. Your team is here to fill the gaps and you should focus on your strengths, but it sure helps to know enough in every aspect of your biz. 

We had major “troll” issues (ppl who blackmail you with trademarks, domains, copyrights, patents for a living - nice goal in life I’d say) - and until you’ve seen it, it’s just hard to be ready for such sheer cupidity. 

In the end, don’t loose sight you’re building a business, so cash is king : having such an unexpected, sudden cash flow issue wound things down in just 3 months. I was still thinking of selling, but be it that or a pivot, don’t think twice if things don’t go according to plan! 

Many start-ups end up failing when they run out of cash (not that suddenly I’ll admit) and they’ve sat there doing something that doesn’t work for a year or two, as if some miracle would happen in the meantime. 

No matter your mission, it’ll need constant tweaking with super-fast turnaround times: get your board on board (haha), and, above all, your team. 

No matter your size, you can go down in 3 years, anytime, and that’s getting true for all types of businesses nowadays. When you’re getting started, rather think 3 months. 

Keeping that in mind is is what makes the game interesting! 

Being an entrepreneur has a lot to do with managing the risks you must take, not just taking risks. 

From time to time (well, when I have time), I’ll post a delightful feature found on a US site -  totally unbeknownst to anyone in Europe.

But something which we might get to see in 5 or 10 years when people this side of the Atlantic get closer and closer to the understanding of how much more business you can do by nurturing and pampering your customers.

And no, Amazon does not count (even though they still release 1 year later here): they’re a US company and they use force to have subsidiaries in barbaric countries more or less comply with their standards. 

Today, tracking your purchase on OneKingsLane. 

Believe it or not, I just stumbled upon thefancy.com. Or “Fancy”, although they couldn’t get the domain, which very strangely redirects to some random Portland real estate agency (?!)

It’s a disorganized version of what I have in mind for Deepclass. Very entertaining though. 

They started long before us and have a ton of the hype factors sought after by the Valley investors. The company raised about $30M from anybody who’s “kewl”, from Dorsey to Kutcher. 

http://www.fastcompany.com/1819079/high-end-pinterest-competitor-fancy-launches-commerce-platform-help-jack-dorsey

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-23/tech/31089785_1_users-fancy-groupon

Yet in 15 months, their e-commerce effort to generate revenue vs initial competitor Pinterest (whose traffic exploded for reasons not so clear as both product were identical and launched at the same time) has been pretty good, but not spectacular. 

So I feel blessed to dig into what they’ve done and understand what prevented an even more impressive sales growth. Given all the stars aligned for them I mean. 

From my experience, it’s just too much of a hipster thingy. I browsed for a while but couldn’t really find anything to buy, which is a bad sign since I am the exact target group.

I believe it should be easier to organize and search for stuff to buy and that you can’t put items costing $5 and $145,000 next to one another. 

Not everyone with money is a 20-something who can easily get his head around a Pinterest-like concept, and not all merchants will “get it” spontaneously. 

By contrast, OneKingsLane or 1stDibs have exploding revenue and traditional interfaces, so that leads me to think I’ll keep things more simple for the v1 of Deepclass, and continue to focus on getting merchants on board.

Plus, it lacks editorial content. 

http://socialcommercetoday.com/44m-says-social-commerce-site-fancy-is-the-future-of-the-style-magazine/

PS : Fancy just announced yet another round of $15M right now. 
What happened in the past 6 months? the new round signals it may still be loosing quite a lot.. I’ve seen their ads, also indicating their virality may have stagnated. 

“Dear Mr (Name of CEO), following our exchanges, I have finished my investigation and would like your written confirmation that companies / lawyers / doctors cannot pay your company to delete negative comments. I would also be interested in having more precise information on your business model, as your last email was not specific about how you generate revenue.”

My latest email to Avvo and Trustpilot was blunt, and this time, got no answer in a week.

I had informed both review sites that I was writing an article for the Huffington Post, which will be published, well, sometime soon I guess. Plus it still has to be Americanized a bit as my English is not quite sharp enough for publication yet .

I first got quick responses from their PR, who suspiciously transferred me right away to their “General Counsels”.

I’d say they still have to improve their “journalist inquiry” management process - but it’s understandable, as except for a rather watered-down article from the Guardian, no one in the media seems to care that Avvo or Trustpilot trick thousands of good people a month and trample with no dignity all moral principles - and their core mission and own legal terms none the least. 

How I established both let you alter at wish your “online reputation” was super duper easy as you can imagine.  But I want you to read the article so let this be a quick teeeeaser. 

I felt compelled to offer the story because I was somewhat angered to have lost quite a sum after hiring a remarkably incompetent corporate lawyer with raving reviews on Avvo, and buying from an e-commerce site with thousands of positive reviews on Trustpilot. 

Strangely my real negative and very specific reviews always had some “issue” and were removed about a week after being approved - at some point Trustpilot, who seemed to be lacking further bogus reasons, demanded that I proved “not just with emails” that I had been a customer. 

However, my very fake-looking good reviews were never questioned. How bizarre!  

In the end, it costs from $19 to $49 to remove a bad review, and I’ll spare you for now the details of their “reputation management packages” - which can be very pricey. 

Sadly I don’t have the time or patience to sue these websites, but I do encourage someone (maybe a lawyer listed on Avvo, but a good one) to engage in a class action. 

I’m sure quite a few people would join as simple Google searches on Trustpilot and Avvo reveal scores of people who were not too happy either that their legitimate negative reviews were taken down, after being scammed because of these deceitful websites.

Who, like me, got ripped off not just by the company or individual listed, but with the abetting of Trustpilot and Avvo. 

What’s really unsettling is these websites look very serious.

And most people have had great experiences thanks to Tripadvisor, who, on top of continuous efforts to improve their ranking system, lets you have a decent idea of what to expect - bearing your being patient enough to read a lot of reviews to weed out the overly enthusiastic or abhorrent clients. 

Do any of the following keep you up at night?

• I have no idea what to test, so now I don’t bother
• Our visitors are leaving our website without doing anything
• We blew through our AdWords budget in a day!
• Our market has dried up…

Look, all online marketers have been there. There is no miracle solution but persistence and dedication to basic principles help more than throwing your hands in the air. 

Online marketing has gotten so competitive and intricate that you often get the feeling that you’re doing all that’s humanely possible and get discouraged. 

At some point, I worked with an Adwords genius, and he helped me boost our CAC by 60%. 

Note that landing pages are more useful when you are selling products than just one service, and sometimes info helps conversions. It’s just a matter of responding closely to a query or an ad copy. 

Last, don’t underestimate how difficult email marketing is. This is probably where you have the most room for improvement. 

1. The HiPPOs Are Running the Asylum

I’m not talking about the kind you’d see on an African safari. Rather, the suits in your company, who could be stakeholders, your boss, or senior management. The term HiPPO refers to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, where decisions are based on conjecture or “experience” and are handed down to you to implement without any evidence of their true value.

Back when testing wasn’t an easy process, you’d have to suck it up and run with these ideas, but now (thanks to the advent of many inexpensive A/B testing tools) you can diplomatically reply to such a request with, “I have an idea too – why don’t we test them?”

If you win the test, you’ll be afforded more leeway in the future while educating the HiPPO’s about the value of scientific experimentation & testing vs. random ideas. You’ll also start making more money for the company, which any smart HiPPO would be a fool to argue with.

Just remember though, if you dare to engage a HiPPO without testing, you run the risk of becoming yet another PWTMSMEBNE in the room (Person With The Most Subject Matter Expertise But No Evidence, obviously).

Stop listening to HiPPO’s, stop the assumptions, and start testing.

2. Our Visitors Are Leaking

Sounds like a strange statement to make. Actually, here the term “leak” refers to a “link” that moves your visitors away from a page and your intended conversion goal.

But really, who’s fault is it? My guess is that you’re sending your marketing traffic right to your homepage. Thought so. This is a classic rookie mistake that even seasoned marketing vets still make. Consider the fact that your homepage probably has between 30-60 links, and who knows how many products.

Are you really surprised that your visitors are wandering around like lost sheep? We all know that sheep need a herder. Someone to guide them to their final destination. That’s your job.

One visitor, one goal, no wandering around. That means no leaks.

So how do you plug the holes and stop the leaks? Congrats if you replied “with a landing page” in your head.

Fixing the leaks with landing pages

How do landing pages solve your leakage problems? By sending your marketing traffic to a targeted landing page you’ll reap many benefits including:

• A page designed specifically with one objective in mind, to attract clicks on the CTA that represents your conversion goal
• A message tightly matched to the ad clicked to get there
• A controlled environment that allows for optimization and accurate analytical measurement

3. AdWords Broke my Credit Card

AdWords (or any other pay-per-click platform) is probably the easiest way to blow your paycheck if you don’t know what you’re doing.

There are so many moving parts to a paid ad campaign that you may as well be playing Roulette in Vegas. The ad copy, CTA, destination page, keywords you are bidding on, competing companies bidding on the same keywords etc. – means it’s easy to get it wrong when starting out.

If you want to gain an advantage you need to follow a few key principles:

• Message match for Quality Score: One of the biggest factors in how much your ads cost is the quality score attributed to each ad. This is dependent on several things, one of which being the destination page, and how closely the content matches that of your ads. The easiest way to get a low quality score for a variety of ads is to send them all to your homepage. Not only can there be multiple messages on your homepage, but if you’re targeting different keywords, there’s no way they will all correlate to the content of your homepage. By using a landing page for each ad group, you can match the message of your ad more easily and as a result get a higher Quality Score.
• Message match for higher conversions: There’s also a human factor to consider when it comes to message match. If you read an ad that said “We sell blue apples” and arrived at a page with a headline that said “Welcome to the red apple store”, you’d think you were in the wrong place and leave. A landing page designed specifically for your ad will prevent the high bounce rate associated with this message mismatch.
• Privacy policies for lead gen: If you are doing lead gen and have a form on your landing page, you need to add a privacy policy link to tell Google (and your visitors) that you are trustworthy. Not having a privacy policy can seriously impact your Quality Score and drive up the cost of your ads – never mind the fact that they probably won’t get shown as better quality ads/pages will trump you in the search results. Finally, place the privacy policy link right next to the email form field to give it an extra trust factor.

Again landing pages are the secret weapon that will help you keep both the ad bots and humans happy, and your ad costs and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) lower.

4. Nobody Clicks Our Email Links

Are you telling a big long story in your emails? Paragraph after paragraph about how awesome you are? If people aren’t clicking on your email CTAs it’s probably because they sit at the end of an experience that’s perceived as too much work. People then give up reading and delete your email instead.

There’s a better way to do email marketing, by shortening your emails into succinct and concise messages with a strong call to action.

How to Shorten Your Emails Without Losing the Details

Your email should be a teaser and nothing more. It’s singular goal is to intrigue your recipients enough to get them to click through to your landing page, which is where you place the full details of your marketing campaign. Your landing page is a much more effective place to do the selling after you’ve captured people’s attention. The reason for this is that you’ve got as much space as you need to tell your story.

If you need to showcase your product/service using video, a landing page is the perfect place to do this – again removing the need for a lot of written content in your email.

Shorten your next email and see how your click-through rate improves.

5. I Don’t Know What to Test, So My Tests Don’t Work. Now I Don’t Test.

This is one of the most common problems in conversion optimization, knowing that you should be testing, but not knowing where, what, why and how you should be doing it. I’ll answer each of these questions in the order you should be doing it as part of your testing and optimization process:

Where

You want to start with the most high profile pages on your site. These will depend on your business, but will typically include your:

• Homepage
• Pricing page
• Landing pages that you are using for inbound advertising traffic
• And other high traffic pages (check your analytics)

What

There are some fundamental anatomical elements that are common to most pages, and these are most often what you’ll be testing.

• The core value proposition of the page, usually presented in the form of the page headline and sub-header
• Your call-to-action design (contrast, use of whitespace, size, location) and copy
• Form length, design and position
• Amount of and readability of the page copy (chunk it and use bullets for improved scanning)

Why

A big mistake is when people just try to test something without a real purpose, or a clear understanding of why they are testing. This is where your test hypothesis comes in. A hypothesis is a statement of what you are going to test and your theory behind why it will be a success (and any success criteria you can include). An example hypothesis would read something like this:

“The page does not have a clear call-to-action, and prospects spend too long trying to understand what to do next. Adding a large orange button right under the main benefits will help prospects identify the CTA and get more of them to perform the desired action.”

Once you have a hypothesis you are in a better position to make changes to a test page to compete against your original page in a conversion experiment.

How

Now that you’re ready to run a test, you need to follow a few basic rules to ensure that your experiment is a clean and uncontaminated one.

• Each page in your test – most commonly the original page and one “challenger” used in the A/B test, should receive at least 100 unique visitors and often as much as 500 or more depending on how drastic the changes increase (or decrease) conversions.
• Your test should run for at least a week to account for variances in time of day and different daily behaviors (weekends are often very different to weekdays).
• The statistical significance of the experiment should be over 95%. This is a number that is calculated by the testing software you are using to determine when the results you are seeing are for reasons other than chance alone.

That was a brief intro to A/B testing, but is enough of a framework to stop you complaining that you don’t know what or how to test.

6. My landing Pages Don’t Convert and I Don’t Know Why

The best way to find out why your landing pages aren’t working is to ask. Ask your visitors and customers. Ask whoever is viewing your landing page and ignoring your wishes. The best way to do this is to add a live chat or survey widget to your page.

The information you get from your visitors at the point of conversion can be invaluable in figuring out why they didn’t convert and what to test to improve your landing pages – think of it as if they’re shopping at the Apple store and aren’t quite sure of the benefits of an iMac over a PC. Having someone right there to answer your questions (like live chat) can be the tipping point that encourages a sale.

Once you get feedback from talking to your visitors or asking them survey questions, you are in a much stronger position to create a hypothesis for a successful page. Which comes full circle back to my last point about what to test.

If you want to read more about how to gather and put user feedback into action, read part 4 (or the whole thing) from this case study.

7. Our Blog Doesn’t Drive Many Signups

There are three main points to consider here:

• Your blog is a great source of inbound marketing, and should be considered a powerful tool in establishing your subject matter expertise and thought leadership. This is a critical platform on which to build the trust required to make people believe in you. If they respect your stance on a subject they will also believe that that you know what you’re talking about when it comes to building your product/service.
• Asking your blog readers to register for your blog update emails enables you to leverage the email list by sending more excellent content to them in the future – such as ebooks, whitepapers and case studies. These documents can have subtle calls-to-action in them to turn a reader into a customer – providing an extra acquisition path.
• You can also add a CTA to your blog (in the sidebar or at the end of each post) which will provide a small trickle of new customers. A good strategy for CTA design is to make them relevant to the category of the blog the reader is in. An example being, if they are in an A/B testing category, you would design your banner with a CTA like “Learn more about A/B testing”. This should lead to a landing page with content related to the subject and how your product provides the solution.

So yes, you should keep your blog, and set it up so that it is monetized using these three approaches. And don’t forget – the bigger and better your blog becomes, the wider the reach it will have and the simpler the next point will be.

8. Our Market Has Dried Up

This is a prime time to begin co-marketing with companies that have customers with similar needs as your own. By getting your name in front of a new set of eyes, you can rapidly grow the size your target market. To run a successful co-marketing strategy you need to start by laying the foundation for a smart relationship, and then establish contact with a clear set of possibilities laid out for each partner to do in order to get your/their name in front of each others customers.

Some examples of co-marketing tactics are:

• Sending an email to each others customer list to recommend the other company’s product, and explaining how they work together to provide extra benefit and value.
• Writing guest posts for each other’s blog that shares your subject matter expertise with their readership, while staying on topic with the content of each blog.
• Adding a logo and possibly partner description to each other’s website.
• Exposure to social networks.
• Co-promotion in contests and with special offers.
• Joint webinars.

Once you have an established authority in your market, you can set up a landing page for people interested in creating a partnership. A good strategy is then to have an email autoresponder set up, so that when the prospective partner completes your partnership request form, they will receive the email outlining that a reciprocal use of the prior examples would be how you’d like to move forward (if they are deemed to be a suitable partner).

9. Our Visitors Are Coming for Dinner But Not Eating

In other words, people are visiting your website, but not converting into customers. This could be a messaging problem which you can use an A/B testing tool to optimize, or it could be that your site is designed in such a way that visitors are getting lost or not finding the important information on your pages and as a result, bouncing from the site.

To see what they are doing on your pages, you can use heat map software like CrazyEgg to discover the most often clicked areas of your core pages, and adjust the layout to place the most important elements in the areas with the highest focus.

In the example below, you can see that visitor is jumping all around the page, and ignoring the call-to-action. It’s fairly easy to theorize that the reason for this is that the CTA doesn’t stand out from other page elements (especially contrast and color wise).

A lot of people say that button color is irrelevant, but this a complete falsehood when color contrast is the problem. Yes red might not perform better than green under ideal circumstances, but if the page is dominantly green, then a red button will stand out a lot more than a green one.

If you see something like this, you can improve the placement, contrast, size and whitespace use of your CTAs. If you see people spending a lot of time looking at the navigation or other “leaks” then you know they are confused and are seeking information elsewhere than the current page. Again, if you use a focused and targeted landing page, you can remove the potential for a lot of eye wandering and homepage A.D.D.

10. Nobody Downloads Our Content

You’ve spent the time to write an authoritative ebook or whitepaper, you’ve designed a great landing page to give it away in exchange for personal and business data. You’ve sent your entire email list to the page and shared it on your social networks. And yet, you are getting virtually no new leads from the page as nobody is completing your form to get the ebook.

It’s actually fairly easy to fix this problem. Here are three approaches to building a more effective ebook landing page.

Have a preview

Amazon pretty much invented this concept with their “Take a look inside” feature that lets you read part of the book and check out the contents. Most people are psychologically hard-wired with a sceptical “Try before you buy” mentality (think about how many people steal a grape before buying them! Yes I’m talking about you… and me). If your content is worth providing personal info for, then you should make it fair by showing off how good it is in advance.

To do this, take a portion of your ebook (a chapter for example), and make it available without barrier in one of the following formats:

1. A short PDF document that people can download and read to gauge the quality of your work.
2. An embedded SlideShare presentation that walks through a series of slides constructed using ebook content.

Reduce friction

Friction is the perceived barrier to achieving a given task – in this case filling out your form. The trick here is to balance the level of friction with the “size of the prize” so that you’re offering a fair exchange. Essentially the better your ebook is, the more you ask in return. Just make sure it’s relevant data you’re collecting. Most people won’t part with their phone number to download a PDF, nor should they.

Add a viral traffic feedback mechanism

If you read the case study in part 6, you’ll be familiar with the viral feedback loop that you can use to fuel a continuous stream of traffic to your ebook download landing page. Essentially, you let people get your ebook in exchange for a tweet instead of an email. The tweet contains a link back to your ebook landing page, perpetuating the lifespan of your campaign. For best results, offer both options(PayWithATweet and exchange for an email).

This stunning 10ft wide (3m) desk was made on order by Maxim Old in 1971. 

Intrigued, I paid a visit to the gallery owner, who has no website, does not read email or answer the phone (in a typical old-school French fashion). 

I told him about marketing and the internet and he gave me a brief puzzled look, as if I was talking of a very distant future. 

Anyway, he could “let go of this piece” (which he only took ONE photo of and is not exposed in his gallery) for €20.000. Wait, no, he said, €30.000 ($40,000, yes the price of a house in many places)… “sorry, that would have been a bit cheap, wouldn’t it?”. 

He showed no interest whatsoever in making the sale as he was shouting “280.000€” ($370,000) to someone inquiring about 2 non-distinct armchairs. 

I was really wondering, since he seemed to be doing pretty well, how on earth does he sell such absurdly expensive stuff (besides the few items in the tiny gallery), while not “marketing” them in any way? 

And what would happen if I managed to make a lot of people aware all these objects exist? 

The Desk, he said, has been sitting in a warehouse for 3 years now.

My gut feeling is by featuring his collection on Deepclass, I could decuple his sales overnight (and with a 20% commission, make good revenue). 

Can’t wait to tap in all the hidden treasuries of France and Europe and make them available to foreign buyers (not surprisingly I did not see a French person in that gallery or any of the other surrounding ones). 

However, design is more than just how something looks. At the bottom line, the way it works — the nuts and bolts — what it communicates and how well an idea is presented is the underlying factor to innovation. Design is the process used to solve problems in a creative way, and across a variety of mediums. Rather than help you just decorate your business, project or product, we will help it to communicate more clearly, be more informative, persuade better, be more efficient, increase sales and above all delight.

Just like design is more than just the appearance, development is more than just the plumbing. We carefully craft everything with an “inside out” approach as part of the design process. The pieces that no one sees receive as much attention and articulation as the outer layers. The underlying system and flow of information in our products is efficient and reliable. Our custom administrative systems make managing your site fast and simple.

Designing for the internet and applications has a fast feedback loop, and it is constantly rewarding. It is becoming evident that communicating with your audience online is more than simply putting something up. It is the quality of the experiences that are digitally created that matter, and to be able to create something digitally that engages humanity is a truly wonderful thing.

— A pleasantly written view on webdesign by LaCroix Design, http://www.lacroixdesign.net