Search Results for: mybloglog

By Daniel Tynski.

1.) Don’t underestimate the intelligence of your viewers.

It is not an uncommon mistake for many marketers, both on and offline, to inaccurately assess the intelligence of their target audience.  While it seems that bad estimations run in both directions,  it is a grave error to assume you know more about your visitors than you actually do — more than anything, you must not assume your visitors are stupid.  Its easy to clump your visitors into a large nameless blob, to think of them as cattle, susceptible to your clever gimmicks and likely to fall into the traps you’ve set.  The reality is that your readers are individuals.  If anything, they’re especially single minded on the net.  Many people feel empowered by the web, not only to be who they are, but also to assert themselves, their opinions, and their way of doing things.  To this end, your visitors are about as far from a herd of followers as you can get.  And while it may be prudent to make certain predictions about their behavior, it is a major mistake to assume too much about those you intend to draw to your website.  This is why analytics are so important to your efforts. The following sites can help you get an idea about what your visitors are actually doing on your site.

I’ve just removed the external sidebar widgets from Marketing Pilgrim. As much as I loved having them on the site, they just slowed down the page load-times too much.

Looking at the click patterns via Crazy Egg, it appears few readers were actually clicking on them anyway, so why frustrate the 99% of visitors who had to suffer slow loading pages.

As a compromise, I’ve added a “pilgrim’s picks” section to the sidebar, which includes links to the Link blog, MyBlogLog community and job board.

I think widgets are fun for a blog to have, but when they start adding 8-15 seconds to a page’s load time, it’s time to rethink.