I spent so many hours working on them. I also spent hundreds of dollars paying to have custom designs and logos made. I kept thinking that if I could just do this one thing or that other thing, then they would start paying off. It felt like I was on a mouse wheel, always running, but never getting anywhere.

No matter how much effort I put into them I just couldn’t get the traffic I wanted. Even the traffic that I was getting didn’t convert into revenue. I suppose I made a few pennies a day from adsense, but nothing substantial

As my frustration mounted, I started to look for information that would help me finally get my websites converting. I literally spent thousands of dollars on programs, videos, books, coaching, etc. I studied everything from product launches to mass control to video.

I was getting tired and running out of resources.

One day a friend of mine told me about some free training called the 30 Day Challenge. He asked if I was going to follow along with it. My first impression was “no way”. I figured that if the information I had paid thousands of dollars for didn’t get me where I wanted to be, then a free program certainly wouldn’t. I was a bit jaded about some of the programs I had purchased and the lack of results

He kept asking me about it and so I finally took a look at it. Then I decided to give it a try, so I registered a brand new domain name, runningshoesexpert.com, and decided to follow along with the 30 Day Challenge. I also found a buddy to work on it with me.

I was astonished at what happened!

I literally just set aside everything that I knew and followed the instructions given during the 2008 Challenge. Step by step. My buddy and I just did what the videos told us to do. That included everything from how to structure the blog, choose the keywords and create backlinks.

Within a few weeks I was amazed to see that our brand new website had taken the #6 spot for a rather competitive keyword. By the end of the challenge that year our site was getting an average of 180 visits per day.

Fast forward a few years now and that website is #1 on Google. It gets 1200 to 1500 visits per day and generates enough revenue to pay a mortgage payment, every month.

Just in the last year I’ve repeated that first success again and again for other keywords and sites. But it really started with the Challenge and Ed Dale back in 2008.

He’s at it again. It’s still free. It still works. And you can Learn all about the Challenge here.

If you decide to do the Challenge this year, leave a comment below and tell me how it goes. There’s nothing like making your first dollar online (except maybe making your second

I’ve built a lot of membership websites in WordPress, and perhaps the most frustrating part is getting the video right. Video is one of the key components to communicating with your members. In fact, video should be used throughout the membership process, including:

• Landing page for optin conversion
• Sales page to increase sales conversions
• As member content to increase retention and effectiveness

With the advent of mobile devices, like Apple’s products, more and more people want to consume their content on the go. That can mean that many of the more traditional ways to deliver video content just don’t work. There are already many services that will offer to get your video up and running in HTML5, but none of them are easy, so I created two plugins for WordPress that accommodate two spcific uses of HTML5 Video. Here’s a video that shows you how they work.

One thing I didn’t mention in the video, is how my HTML5 landing pages ROCK THE WORLD in terms of optin rate. I created special landing pages for two JVs that wanted to offer the optincrusher to their subscribers and clients. When I got around to checking what the optin rate was, I almost couldn’t believe it. Especially because some of those unique impressions are me checking the page occasionally. Here’s a snapshot from my aweber account:

That’s 42.6% optin rate for one site and 81.0% for the other. How does that compare to your optin rate? You can even see my blog optin rate sitting at 5.9%, which still isn’t that bad for general traffic.

Here are the takeaway points (as I see them). I want to make sure targeted traffic sent to a landing page has the following experience:

• They can see the video (yes, especially on mobile devices)
• There’s a clear call to action
• There aren’t any distractions

It turns out that my HTML5 landing page does all three very well! At the moment I don’t have a timeline to publicly release my HTML5 video plugins for WordPress, but if you think you’ve got a site that would really benefit from them, leave a comment below or shoot me an email. I would love to hear what you think and where you would use them.

UPDATE [9/1/2011]: This plugin is now available for download. Get details and training at http://mobilevideoforwordpress.com/

After completing that integration, I thought it would be useful to offer some background on why it’s so important, and how you can approach list segmentation in your business.

Segmentation defined

My first encounter with segmentation came as I marketed a product to owners of SUVs back in the mid 1990s. I discovered that there are companies whose entire business model is to maintain large lists of individuals, addresses, phone numbers and so on along with a type of meta information, such as where they shop and what car they drive. They even claimed to tell me that I could target owners of a specific model SUV within a zip code region. Wow.

In internet marketing, segmentation takes many forms, including targeted search traffic, strategic joint ventures and, quite importantly, segmenting your own email lists. The most successful marketers manage their email lists in such a way that they can send different messaging to each lead, prospect and customer.

Desired benefits of segmentation

Profit should be the focus behind segmenting your email list. When done properly, segmentation can allow you to craft messages and offers that are most likely to be accepted by a group of people.

Many of the best sales people will tell you that every pitch is individual. While that’s not possible (strictly speaking) in direct marketing where an offer is being presented to thousands or even millions of people, the aim is to get ever closer to a customized pitch for each prospect.

Technology

Technology is becoming more and more sophisticated in its ability to deliver unique, personalized messages to each person on your list, which gets you closer and closer to the individual pitch that sales professionals know closes more sales.

At the same time, you run the risk that you’re messaging becomes unnatural and contrived. Just because technology allows you to insert customized variables, such as name, email address, dates and so on, doesn’t mean that it will enhance your message.

Always run your messaging through your ‘real person’ filter. By that I mean that technology should enable communication, not define it. Don’t do something just because you can, make sure that it ends up looking like something that one real person would actually send to another person.

Two extremes

As we look at the spectrum of uses of technology, there are extreme cases. Some marketers put everyone that ever showed interest in their product on a single list. Whether they buy one offer or another, they stay put on that one single list. Other marketers create labyrinthine frameworks that infer interest based on every click in an email, thereby changing the future messaging for that individual.

Neither extreme strikes me as being effective. In the simplistic single list case there are many missed opportunities where individualized messaging might better resonate with a group. In the second case there is an assumed intimacy that rarely exists between a marketer and a group. In other words, it’s difficult to verify that what you assume an individual is thinking when he clicks one thing and not another is accurate.

Problems with multivariate testing

Which brings me to the vagaries of multivariate testing. In it’s simplest form, testing takes on an A/B question. Two options are presented to large populations and whichever form, A or B, produces the highest response is considered the winner. Typically an A/B test will involve the change of a subject line or an image with all other elements remaining fixed.

On the other hand, if you attempt to test a simple combination of Headline and image, assuming you have two of each, you now have four possible combinations. With four possibilities, the number of people that see each one shrinks. Smaller groups make the results statistically more difficult to distinguish. As a result, the more intricate your triage process the more opportunity for error.

Autoresponders

The good news is that most autoresponder services provide built in mechanisms for sorting through your lists and communicating in both broad and specific ways. When you’re evaluating email services, make sure that the type of segmentation you want is easily accommodated with the solution you choose.

Conclusions

Email list segmentation is an integral part of effective marketing. Finding the proper balance of segmentation and ensuring that your criteria for sorting an individual into one group as opposed to another are effective will require finesse and careful attention. In every case, the outcome is almost certain to be market dependent and so for each new market approached you should expect a settling time to find an effective groove.

Membership websites

As I mentioned, my reason for writing this article is that I just finished extending one of the better membership frameworks available for WordPress to accommodate segmentation. Segmenting visitors, from free members from premium members is a key component to building an effective sales funnel and retention strategy for any membership website.

I recently developed a tool to increase the optin rate on my websites (and for my clients). During development I got to work with nearly all of the major email service providers. While many of them are very strong and offer some clever tools to make marketers more successful, iContact stood out with a special 2-for-1 offering of a combined email and survey service. Let me explain why this is such a powerful combination and then I’ll show you a tool that can make it even better.

Utility

Email services are what I like to call a utility service for marketers. It’s like gas and electricity for a home. You can’t go without them and really have a decent quality of life, and when they flake out, the pain is felt almost immediately. The good news is that nearly all the email services have a rock solid platform that’s fast and reliable.

As I integrated each of these services, there were some features that started to jump out to me as being extremely useful. One of the services that I think did the best job with this was iContact, and to understand why I say that, it’s important to review the advice I got as a beginner to email marketing.

I heard from Jeff Walker, Ed Dale, John Reese, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan and just about everyone else that you have to do these two things with your list:

• Ask them what they want
• Build a relationship

That’s why most of these marketers use surveys in various ways to accomplish both of these tasks. But they use a combination of two separate services to get it done. That means their email list and communication are in a database independent from survey results and respondents. As it turns out, that can present a big challenge when processing survey results and conducting follow up.

2-for-1 email and surveys

The first thing I noticed about iContact is that they put those two services in one integrated package. I can only imagine how much easier it becomes for new marketers to survey and interact with their lists, not to mention the efficiency gains that more experienced marketers get. I should know since I’ve spent time working through the details of not having an integrated email and survey service.

The integration is great and opens many possibilities, however it’s also important to know that each service can be used independently. That means you can publish a survey and link to it from your website without an email, or include it in an email broadcast or an autoresponder sequence. It’s very flexible.

Leverage the combination

Since this was the only truly integrated provider I found (some parent companies offer both as separate labels so they can charge more, but they don’t integrate like iContact) I decided to publish a customized version of the optincrusher software. I called it ioptinboost.

The reason I decided to create a separate piece of software is that I could integrate the survey function in directly. So with ioptinboost you can run a survey on your site, the same way you would an optin form. It will get your visitors attention and tell you loads about the traffic you’re getting to your site.

If you structure your survey correctly, you can even provide an incentive and get them onto an autoresponder. If you’ve followed Eben Pagan for a while, that’s very similar to what he did with the Psychic Sales Letter. There’s some very powerful psychology at play here, and as a smart marketer, you can leverage it like never before.

Free Softare

Just like the optincrusher, I’m releasing ioptinboost for free (as of right now anyway). That won’t last forever, but today you can download it here:

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If this article has piqued your interest, you can try the icontact service for free. They have great live support, so it’s very easy to get your first survey or campaign up and running quick. Of course I created HD videos showing you how to do everything you need to do on http://ioptinboost.com/

Leave a comment about your experience with iContact and how you use their service to improve your marketing.

As he woke that morning his keen young eyes quickly took in the color of the sky and he thrust his hand through the small square hole in his wall to feel the air outside.  Rain would come soon and allow the ear of the wheat fill out.  He concluded that “it was as if Heaven had chosen this day to wish him well.  Earth would bear fruit.”

Throughout the book Pearl Buck masterfully portrays the value of the land, the soil and the ability it has to give life.  To accomplish this she contrasts the poor farmer Wang Lung to the mighty House of Hwang.  The juxtaposition of wealth and poverty, work and idleness, beauty and strength, is powerful and provides a very poignant perspective on what constitutes real value. The question never asked, but ever present: “Is there more value in the land or in silver?”

The final scenes in the book show a wealthy and old Wang Lung. Through hard work and discipline he had traded places with the House of Hwang. They forgot the value of the land and sold it to him in pieces, until he owned all that they once had. When he was finally too old to work the land, he returned to spend his final days away from the luxurious courts he had acquired. He moved back into the small three room stone house where his life began. He spent his days with bare feet in the soil. He loved to feel the earth.

In the puzzling way that values occasionally get lost before they can pass from one generation to the next, Wang Lung’s sons couldn’t see the real value of the land. Rather than growing up in the fields, working the land, they grew up in schools. They could calculate and barter better than their father, but they didn’t value the land.

In the final agonizing scene he quietly approaches his sons who came to visit him and he overhears them planning to “sell the land” to raise money to pursue other interests.  He chokes and stumbles and his sons catch him to hold him up.  In desperation with tears on his cheeks he tells them:

“It is the end of a family – when they begin to sell the land.  Out of the land we came and into it we must go – and if you will hold your land you can live – no one can rob you of land -

“If you sell the land, it is the end.”

His sons reassure their old dying father that they wont sell the land as they smile at each other over the top of his head.  They had lost track of the value of the land, just as the House of Hwang had done.

Where’s the value in internet marketing?

Wang Lung lived in the soil.  He also knew that he could die by the soil.  He understood the important relationship between the sky and the earth; the rain and the harvest.  He didn’t have the luxury of sitting idle or waiting on someone else to do his work for him.

As internet marketers do we understand the relationship between testing and profit; value and benefits? How many ‘would be’ internet marketers have been raised in schools, rather than in the field of knocking doors and producing content. They know the talk, but haven’t walked the walk.

Amid the din of discussion in the internet marketing space (which in the better circles focuses on time-tested direct response sales techniques), the best copywriters struggle and toil to teach the difference between features and benefits. It’s the tendency of newer marketers to place an emphasis on qualities and structure; features rather than benefits.

As marketers mature (they do this by reading the best books and working the field) their language naturally moves toward the concept of benefit. In the beginning it can sound a bit hollow.  The beginner’s efforts to identify benefits is quite often just a renaming of features or a correlation between features and benefits. This seems a good place to start, but it’s easy to spot, because there are many misses, and it still doesn’t talk to the heart of the consumer.

What are they missing? Could it be that they’ve never put themselves on the other side of the desk to consider life as their consumer? Just like Wang Lung’s sons that had no value for the land because their feet and hands had never worked the soil, many internet marketers have no respect for the consumer and the character of real benefits because they haven’t worked the tests and numbers necessary to find a winning combination that really strikes a chord.

Get your feet dirty

Ed Dale loves comparing internet marketing to farmville on facebook. The people that put in the hours move up in the world. They accumulate both experience, wisdom and, in the end, profit. The marketer that sets himself down to the grind of content creation and then judiciously distributes it in a way that permits proper testing will get the traffic. He’ll then be able to test offers until he finds one that’s a match for the niche or eliminates it as unsuccessful and moves on to the next.

Just as Wang Lung understood about the land, a bad crop doesn’t always mean a bad farmer and the necessity of success for the support of life doesn’t leave any time to sit around and complain. Whether the rain falls and the seeds grow into fruit bearing plants, or whether a drought prevents success one year or in one field, your work is the same.

Along the way you’ll come to appreciate the real value of content and the need to put in your best effort for it. Then the trick will be passing the internal substance of that value assessment on to the next generation of internet marketers so that they can produce for themselves.

I’m still working on the first part.

The reason I wanted to post it here is that it turned out to be a good tutorial about using a fantastic free tool (Inkscape) to create graphics for your website. I actually show you how to use Photoshop too.

You can download the HD version below the video. If you watch it on the page, click the full screen button so that you get all the details.

Download in HD

He was describing the mindset of the opposing parties in the revolutionary war. War seems ever present in our world, whether you look at nations, or, as Steven Pressfield puts it in the War of Art. Whether in your mind or on the ground there are two beliefs that prevent us from establishing realistic expectations.

First, he points out, is the belief that the conflict will be short. Second is the belief that the moral superiority of ones position will bring success. As it turns out, they’re both lies, and they may even keep you from achieving your highest priority goals. Let’s have a closer look.

The conflict would be short

I’ll relate this first point to marketing your products on the internet. Many entrepreneurs (myself included) harbor the belief that some innovation, tactic, campaign or other mechanism will bring them fast and effective results. The only problem is that they just haven’t found it yet.

These people understand that you can’t plant a seed one evening and expect to wake up the next day to a blossoming fruitful tree. They know that you have to water it and wait. Even after it starts to grow you have to nurse it and harden it until it has strong roots. So why do they think that somehow their business will blossom overnight?

It is simply not realistic to expect that any one tactic, product or offer will shorten the road to a thriving, successful business. Just like a seed, it requires the investment of time and effort. And even then, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and you have to plant another seed or even change the ground where you’re planting it.

Did you know that to plant an orchard takes years? Literally. After you finally get trees growing, you have to pluck all the fruit off of them for the first three years, while you continue weeding, fertilizing and pruning. That doesn’t include the years before that bringing the tree from a seed, to sapling and on to the point where you could plant it in the orchard.

From a seed, you might be five or six years out before you get a piece of fruit that you can actually eat. Sure you can shortcut that and let the fruit grow sooner, but you actually decrease the lifetime output and effectiveness of the tree. By taking too soon, you limit your overall returns.

The conflict will not be short.

Raw Undisciplined Recruits vs. Veteran British Soldiers

The next mental plague that threatened the continental army from the outset was the belief that untrained, undisciplined militia could triumph over well trained, well equipped British regulars, simply because the virtue of the cause that inspired them was morally superior.

However appealing this argument may have sounded, the fact of the matter is that discipline, training, equipment and compensation play an enormous role in the potency of an attack (or even a defense).

If you’ve convinced yourself that your better idea or refined tactic will give you the upper hand against someone who’s willing to slog through three hours of content, create 50 backlinks and make 10 JV calls per day, then you’re fooling yourself. Victory favors the person that puts in the hours and is well trained.

Weekend Warrior’s Fail

Are you a weekend militia man in your business or are you a well trained, highly disciplined British regular. If you think that success will come because you deserve it, or because your idea is better or any way other than discipline and follow through, then you should think again.

The quality of your ideas, your ability to write or even the contacts you have aren’t often the most significant factors in who wins the race. The difference between you and the guy that makes it work often comes down to discipline and work.

Ditch the Two Seductive Illusions

If you really want to win this game, then learn from history and don’t give into these two seductive illusions. The conflict will not be short and you must approach your craft with discipline and training.

P.S.
If you’re looking for a roadmap of exactly what to do, then you should really consider following along with this years Challenge (Ed Dale and his gang). You can find it here: http://www.challenge.co/

Leadership defecit

I’m not sure that he had in mind to point out that there’s a significant leadership deficit right now in America (both business and politics). Some people blame this on our academic system or use of standardized tests where an artificial bar of excellence has been established and everyone is taught from age five to measure themselves against it (and nothing higher). Others argue that TV and movies and other popular media discourage us from reading classic books, which is how character and values have been taught for centuries.

Whatever the true cause of the deficit, there’s little doubt that it exists. Rather than making difficult choices, like sacrifice, discipline and hard work, we seem to be a generation of entitlement. Everyone wants “their fair share”. No wonder Ed Dale and Frank Kern have been heard to lament that the one thing they can’t sell is the “do” part of what they teach.

Leadership vs. Management

One comparison that he uses throughout the book, which I think highlights the leadership deficit, is manager vs. leader. A manager’s job, he suggests, is to maintain the status quo. He isn’t there to innovate or to change. He has the sole purpose of ensuring that production of X goes on according to specifications. Leaders, on the other hand, define specifications.

While I don’t care for his use of the word heretic throughout the book, I think I see what he’s getting at. In this book I think a heretic is someone who challenges the status quo. The reason I say that I don’t like his use of the word is that I doubt most leaders would self identify as a heretic and by choosing a recalcitrant word, they might discount some of the strength of his arguments.

I believe that many leaders rise to their position not because they want to oppose established authority, but instead because they find their backs against the wall. For example, I think that many people would agree that the founders of the United States constitution were effective leaders.

Amid the din of patriotic praise for what they did, we might think that the government they established was heretical for it’s time. That’s not true. In fact, many of them tried (for many years) to reconcile their differences with Britain. They tried as hard to resolve the conflict beforehand as they did to establish independence afterward. They were also very well educated in matters of politics and familiar with the forms of government that have existed throughout the ages.

A leader doesn’t have to fly in the face of established patterns in order to lead. Sometimes to lead means to confront mutiny and maintain order according to specification (or the status quo).

How to identify your tribe

One significant question that the book doesn’t answer is “how do I identify my tribe”. This might have been his intention. After all, how do you teach someone where to go to look for people that might be interested in what you do? The fact is, you just have to make some noise and see who raises their hand in interest. In many cases, the people that compose your tribe may surprise you.

One aspect of identifying your tribe, that I think he understood to be implicit, is that you need to have a deep, burning passion for what your doing. Someone that lacks that all consuming drive for change will rarely be generous, selfless and enduring enough to inspire allegiance from their tribe (all qualities he attributes to leadership).

Noteworthy quotes

Here are a few quotes that I really enjoyed. By the way, I bought my copy on Amazon.

“great leaders don’t try to please everyone”

“the new thing is rarely as good as the old thing was. If you need the alternative to be better than the status quo from the very start, you’ll never begin”

“Don’t mortgage today just because you’re in a hurry”

“It’s a myth that change happens overnight, that right answers succeed in the marketplace right away, or that big ideas happen in a flash.”

And of course, he has a blog: Seth Godin. Go subscribe now.

Geeky looking actor #2: “Watch me turn this wrigley’s gum wrapper, a AAA battery and some titanium shavings from my laptop case into an instant bypass of this multi-million dollar security system”.

Don’t you love the movies? They rock. Some total stud and a complete geek get together and decide they’re going to save the world by breaking into the pentagon or CIA and getting access to top secret files. There’s actually a good reason these persona’s exist. It’s because you want them to exist.

It’s really a funny quirk about human nature that we tend to think that everyone else has a “secret” or “discovery” that we don’t. That’s why headlines like “1 Secret to a Flat Belly” pop up all over the place. It’s not because they really have a secret, other than do tons of exercise, stop eating like a garbage can and get plenty of sleep. It works because way too many people assume that the hot girl with the sexy abs is eating twinkies and sitting in front of the tube six hours a day, just like us.

Enough about twinkies. What has this got to do with internet marketing technology?

Programmers have to follow the rules

Many people really believe that somewhere in the world there’s an omniscient hacker who can break into computers at will and reads top secret files like I read my email. They really believe that if you know enough about technology then you can control any computer in a matter of minutes. Here’s a news flash for you. HE DOESN’T EXIST!

Yep. Sorry to burst your bubble. Even the guys that design the programming languages understand that there have to be rules. They define how things are ordered, loaded, protected and so on. You might even think about it like gravity. You can sometimes find ways around it (like an airplane), but as soon as the engines cut out you remember really fast that it’s there working like always.

Remember that programmer? Yeah, the one that you wanted to build your website for $300 and you’re always mad that he didn’t get it done just the way you dreamed about it and that it took more than two days time. He has to follow the rules too.

And if you want the guy that can actually perform “miracles”, keep in mind that he’s worth a lot more than $300. Yep, it’s true: you really do get what you pay for.

The “REAL” secret: Quality comes with time and iterations

Another thing that the movies have ruined is the reality of developing through iteration. Since they only have a two minute montage to show you how they break in to the Oval Office or the FBI mainframe before getting back to the story line, it’s easy to think that real programmers should be able to write a perfect program the first time.

That’s not actually true either. In reality, the best software is the result of iterations! Period! This isn’t just limited to programmers. Look at cars, buildings and architecture, plumbing and even your favorite pancake recipe. This applies equally to the creative design process and shopping at the grocery store. It’s a universal constant.

The bottom line is that if you want something to be top quality then you have to plan for iterations. The first revision product is going to be limited, clunky and might even work (with a little skill and luck). Give yourself and your programmer time and budget to get through a couple of iterations if top quality is your goal.

Did I mention the power iterations

Why are iterations on a project so important? For the same reason that a baby’s first step usually isn’t followed by an immediate second step. Even the unbelievable human nervous system requires many, many failures and falls before all the neural connections function well enough together to enable us to walk. That’s not to mention the building up of strength in the legs.

Programmers are the same way. The more iterations you go through on a theme, the easier it becomes. Even to the point that some tasks may go off just like walking. We don’t really think about walking (I mean lift leg, lean forward, place foot, ensure balance, shift weight, lift other foot, etc.). Some programming tasks can get to be that way too, just like walking, but it’s only after many iterations and failures.

Marketers call this split testing

This is actually an old concept in advertising. Direct response marketers call this split testing. Interestingly, many programmers hold a similar myth about the omniscient marketer. They really believe that there’s a sales guy somewhere that can sell anything to anyone, whether or not they have a need or desire for the thing.

There is no omniscient marketer either.

In reality there’s no direct sales guy that can magically whip out the perfect headline in a matter a minutes based purely on his genius. The best copywriters will tell you that research is the key to good copy. I would add that research must be coupled with many iterations of split tests to identify an optimal headline and offer.

Stop the cycle of first version paralysis

Rather than get hung up on why your programmer or marketer friend isn’t able to pull out the hollywood version of the website or sales offer that you need right now to become an instant millionaire, why not just take a stab in the dark and call it a first iteration. If it’s useful then pat yourself on the back and get back to work!

I promise you the next iteration will be even better than the first.

SEO

I’ve discussed these criteria in a previous post, but it’s worth going through them again here as they apply to Thesis.  First off is SEO.  SEO is tricky for a few reasons. 1) No one really knows Google’s algorithm except for Google.  Meticulous testing has revealed many of the details, but it’s a stab in the dark or a good guess in many cases.  2) SEO and design don’t always agree with each other.  Designers want to make things look good to humans and SEO experts want to make things look good to the search engines. Both are necessary and there’s a trade off involved.  3) SEO is a moving target.  Google and other search engines are constantly making adjustments to their methods and so to maintain rankings and search engine position requires continual vigilance.

In terms of SEO, Thesis has a few advantages. The core development effort is aware of SEO best practices and has made it a focus from the beginning to balance SEO with good design. The large install base for the theme and the caliber of the blogs that use Thesis provide feedback to the developers which improve the core even further.  Finally, the proper use of css and XHTML (standards compliant) ensure that automated bots (from the search engines) can find the keyword information you include in your posts easily.

Speed

One of the most significant factors in the success of WordPress as blogging software has been the theme and plugin architecture.  You don’t have to be a programmer to understand how appealing it is to be able to modify a WordPress blog without having to do a lot of programming.  One problem that comes with this flexibility is that there are a lot of poorly written themes and plugins.  Each task that you want your theme or plugin to do requires processing, which can potentially slow down your website.

Here again, Thesis does an amazing job because it was a focus from the beginning.  The core development effort is aware of how WordPress is supposed to work and they have made very deliberate choices to make the theme as fast as possible.  This has two outcomes.  First is that visitors to the site have a better experience.  Research has shown that faster sites get more clicks.  People are more willing to explore the site when each page loads quickly. The second is that you can accommodate more visitors to your site without performance degrading.  I suppose a third would be that Google has just announced that the load time of a website is now a factor in ranking, which means that a fast theme brings SEO benefit too.

Usability

When a user comes to your site, they want to find the information that’s most relevant to what they’re looking for.  The Thesis team has found a great balance between design and SEO that gives the user a very clear path to the information that’s of greatest interest to them.  In addition to good design, they fully support the customizable widgets that are built in to WordPress.  This gives you ultimate flexibility when tweaking your site to increase conversions.

Productivity

Finally, the breadth and quality of the customization options available in Thesis means that you don’t have to fight with your blog or know how to code to get the results you want.  You’re productive from the first moment using nothing more than your web browser to configure your site.  This may be the most immediate benefit to using Thesis.  You get to stop thinking about how to do this or that and instead focus on your content.  Thesis gets out of your way and helps you do what you do best.

My sites run Thesis

I’m a big fan of Thesis and use it for my own websites.  In fact, my first blog ever runs Thesis.  Have a look at these links for a couple of examples:

• Exercise Log Blog
• Choice Software Zone

To see even more examples of how to use Thesis and see some great videos about how to use it, head over to the official site: