optimising your form

An interesting article on NetImperative about how to optimise opt-in forms, which comes in very handy when running online marketing campaigns.

A few good advice in this article:
1) Have a privacy statement: it is common practice, and reaasure the potential prospect
2) The more questions you ask, the less subscribers you'll receive: MarketingSherpa demonstrated that conversion was increased by 50-75% when reducing the number of required fields from 20 to 6. a good rule of thumb is to keep your form to no more than 5 to 7 fields for the visitor to fill out.
3) Test, Test, Test: run split Testing (or "A/B testing") to inscrease the conversion of your form (an exemple of test result here). Don't assume anything, and spend too much time trying to figure out what is the best design for your form - just try a few of them, and keep the winner. If you are running adwords campaigns, you may want to register to Website Optimiser, which is an excellent interface to support your split testing activities.

Web2.0 in video

Nice video explaining basic concept of "WEB2.0", or the evolution of the Internet

marketing his own private life

I came across http://mysuperproposal.com/ recently, run by Rand Fishkin, a SEO expert. I have really mixed opinions about this.

On one end, this is like reality TV. You are embarassed to watch it, but you watch it, and you kind of like it. And when I watched the proposal, I could not wait watching the reaction from his girlfriend.

On the other end, this is even worse than Reality TV. I doubt anything was staged, he is inviting everyone in his living room, in order to get a few links at the end... a bit sad after all.