“Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event” plus 2 more |  |
- Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event
- Boost Conversions Step 1: Review Your Offer
- Conversion Optimization: Our New Series
| Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event Posted: 29 May 2012 11:59 PM PDT I’ve been excitedly sitting on this one for a while now and am relieved to finally announce a new ProBlogger event that is coming up for Melbourne Food and Wine Bloggers (and anyone else who wants to travel to Melbourne for an evening). The event is being held in collaboration with my good friend – Shane Delia – an amazing chef and co-owner of restraints including two of my favourites – Maha Bar and Grill and St Katherines Kew. Shane and I have talked for some time now about organising an event for bloggers and are today releasing tickets for the first of what we hope will be a series of events for foodies. We have lined up what we hope will be a fun and informative evening that will feature 3 delightful speakers, an insightful panel discussion and a delicious 3 course meal from the team at Maha (including wines to match each course. Here are the event details:
Our speaker lineup for the event draws on 3 fantastic people from different areas of the food and wine writing fraternity in Melbourne. We’ve chosen a Wine writer and Food writer and a blogger. Here’s who who’ve lined up: DAN SIMS, THE WINE GUIDE
Dan's excitement for good wine is palpable whether in front of a camera, or in front of a room full of bloggers, and his even handed approach to wine has drawn plenty of praise from the press and trade. Dan will share his insights on how his no-nonsense approach to writing can be applied to your own blogging. More about Dan | @dansims | Facebook  "JETSETTING JOYCE", MEL: HOT OR NOT
When Joyce returned to Melbourne 2009 she was going to quit blogging…but found that it'd become quite an addictive habit. So MEL: HOT OR NOT was born and has continued to thrive for over 3 years with Joyce's honest and informative reviews about everything Melbourne – restaurants, bars, theatre, festivals, events, shops and businesses. All written with one decisive criteria in mind – is it HOT OR NOT? Joyce's blogging addiction has meant she now also writes TOT: HOT OR NOT, a blog about parenting which started in August 2010 with her first pregnancy, plus a blog filled with cycle chic inspiration as part of her online bike shop CycleStyle. She fits all the blogging around her day job as an intellectual property and IT lawyer. (Yeah, she's a busy lady!) Joyce will share her learnings and successes and how she's applied them to her blogging career. More about Joyce | @jetsettingjoyce | Facebook  HILARY MCNEVIN, BROADSHEET, THE AGE
Hilary has reviewed for and sub-edited The Age Good Food Guide 2008 and 2009, and continues to review for the guide. She is a reviewer for The Age Cheap Eats, The Age Good Cafe Guide, Good Food Shopping Guide and Good Bar Guide. She is the restaurant reviewer for The Moonee Valley Weekly, a Fairfax publication and is a contributing food writer for Broadsheet.com.au. She contributes regularly to Winestate magazine and the James Halliday Wine Companion magazine and in July will begin writing Melbourne food news for Delicious magazine. Hilary had her first book Guide to Fish: Choosing and Cooking Sustainable Species published by Fairfax in October 2008. Hilary will share her extensive experience in writing reviews, providing key "journalism" hints and tips on the fine art of review writing. More about Hilary | @hilarymcnevin Tickets are Limited: Get Yours TodayThis evening is going to be a lot of fun. Not only will you hear from these panelists (and Shane and myself) you’ll have the opportunity to connect with 100 other Melbourne foodies (and might even get the opportunity to meet Mrs ProBlogger who is eying off a ticket too).’ Tickets for this event are limited – so register today to reserve a spot yourself and your friends (a maximum of 4 tickets per person). PLEASE NOTE: Registration is free via eventbrite but will reserve your ticket only. Your seat at the venue will only be confirmed once payment is collected. A representative of Maha will make contact with you to confirm your payment details once you have reserved your seat via eventbrite. View more event details and a list of attendees via http://probloggerfoodwine.eventbrite.com/. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Melbourne Food and Wine Blogging Event     |
| Boost Conversions Step 1: Review Your Offer Posted: 29 May 2012 10:08 AM PDT This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant. A few weeks ago I was sitting down to dinner with my big sister, and talking about one of my web businesses. “What’s your quotation success rate?” she asked me with a face full of pizza. “Pretty good,” I replied, sounding—I admit—pretty stupid. “Find out exactly what it is,” she came back. My big sister, the psychologist-turned national-sales-leader for her real estate company, then went on to explain to me how she knows exactly how many quotes she has to send out in order to make a sale. She knows how many phone calls it takes on average, what delivery method is most successful, and when to follow up the client with a phone call or an email. And she’s constantly trying to improve that quotation figure by getting feedback on her failures. While she was telling me all of this a penny dropped: this quotation (or conversion) rate applies to blogging, too. Sure, knowing why people buy your product or sign up to your email list is important. But perhaps even more important than that, is this: Find out why people don’t buy or sign up. The first of four stepsIf one of your blogging goals is to boost your conversion rates—for sales, subscriptions, downloads, or some other action—you don’t need to just consider your successes. You also need to look at your failures. Boosting conversions isn’t just about doing more of the good stuff. it’s about identifying the bad stuff, and doing less of that. But this is just the first step in the process. Over the next four days, ProBlogger will walk you through a process that will help you to boost conversions—for sales or signups—on your blog. In it, we’ll cover these steps:
It’ll be quite a ride—so I hope you’ll join us for three posts that will follow this one! But now, let’s get started, and consider the question: Why aren’t people converting through your sign up or sales page? Getting startedBefore you can really understand your audience, your product, and where things might be going wrong, you’re going to need a few tools in hand.
Armed with these three things, we’re in a good position to help grow our conversions. Conduct a conversion reviewAs I said, my sister knows exactly how many quotations she has to make to generate a sale. In blogging terms, she knows her conversion rate, and she’s always looking to improve it by seeking feedback from failed quotations. So let’s look at three key questions that you can ask to better understand why your blog’s readers and visitors aren’t converting on a given offer (paid or free). Once you understand this, you’ll be in a much better position to dramatically boost your conversion rate. Question 1: How well does my offer suit my audience?The first thing you’ll need to do is make sure your product or free giveaway is well-matched to your audience. Pitch the wrong product to the wrong audience, and you’ll find it extremely difficult to boost conversions—that is, if you can generate any in the first place. Let’s consider the Mercedes Benz brand as an example. This is a high-quality, luxury car brand with a higher price tag than the average motor vehicle. This means their marketing methods need to be tailored to the right audience. For example, you’ll never see and ad for Mercedes in a magazine aimed at the teen girls market. However, you might see one in a golfing magazine. Why? Because the latter is read by older men who have disposable income and a desire to communicate a certain status with their car. Obviously, teen girls don’t have either of those things. This is fine for a offline brand, but how can you make sure your product is matched to your audience? Study your traffic stats. This image shows a few weeks of traffic from some old guest posts I did here at ProBlogger. As you can see, the red arrow shows a post that had a bad bounce rate, and the green arrow shows a post with a better (lower) bounce rate. As you can see, even traffic coming from the same source can vary wildly in terms of expectations and satisfaction levels with what the users find on your site. Fortunately, we have other metrics to review. A key metric is your users’ demographics—you’ll need to know how old your blog’s users are, whether they are male or female, where they live, and so on. While this basic information may seem elementary, you’d be surprised how often bloggers find new data hidden in their user stats—data that can point to fairly obvious changes that can help to boost conversions. For example, if many of your blog’s readers come from an area that’s suffering high unemployment at the moment (for example, Spain), you might need to consider changing your pitch for a product to make it either seem more relevant and valuable, or more affordable to your target audience. You might consider lowering the price—so that more people can afford your product—or increasing it, to create a stronger impression of value and ensure that you get a better margin on the sales you do make. Don’t go making any decisions yet, though! We still have some more reviewing to do. Question 2: Are customers happy with your current offering?The next thing you’ll need to do is to ask for feedback from satisfied and unsatisfied customers. You absolutely need to find out whether your offering is hitting the mark. While conversion statistics are one thing, they don’t give you a clear idea of what the customers who did convert actually wound up thinking of the product or service once they used it. If you don’t seek their feedback after the point of conversion, all the hard work you do with product creation and conversion optimization could be going to waste. Here are just a handful of the steps you can take to tap that information from your customers:
Now, this all sounds great, right? Well, here’s the problem: sometimes people don’t know what they’re talking about. More specifically, they say one thing, but mean another. For this reason you have to be very careful about the questions you ask readers through any kind of survey. For example, if you ask a generic question, you probably get a generic—and inaccurate—answer. “Did you like my eBook?” The words “good” and “yes” here tell us nothing. This feedback doesn’t mean that the user shared your offering with their friends. It doesn’t mean that it totally blew them away and they’ll be a loyal subscriber forever. It means nothing. People have changed their careers after reading Pat Flynn’s free ebook. People share it around and talk about it constantly on his Facebook page. That’s the kind of feedback you want. And to get it, you’ll need to ask more specific questions, like these:
You could also considering surveying customers about the conversion funnel itself, with questions like these:
At least with questions like these, you’re going to get some clear feedback on which aspects of your offer work, and which don’t. Question 3: How might you use this information to tweak your offering?The next step is to tweak your product or offering based on the lessons you’ve learned. Now, I’m not talking simply about matching your offer to your audience here. Rather, you need to look at ways to improve the quality and presentation of your offer, based on what your target market is interested in, and what you know is and isn’t working for the members of your current audience. Recently on my blog we talked about whether or not the free ebook giveaway is dead or not. Most people agree that it’s not, but we all agreed that the poor quality ebook is dead. People are looking for better and better quality all the time. This is where the psychology of marketing comes in to play. Here are two examples in which we can look at the behavior of an audience and try to better shape our offer to suit them:
As you can see, it’s not just about aligning your offer with your market: it’s also about making sure your product pitch, and presentation to your target market. For example, your offer might be an ebook. Great. Now, let’s imagine you’re targeting the younger male audience segment mentioned above. Tweaks you might make to your product and its pitch include:
By this point, you should have a list of potential ideas that you can use to try to boots conversions by tweaking your offering. Trial and continuous reviewThe most important thing that I learned from my sister is that we should be constantly assessing and changing our product and pitch. Trends change, competitors come along, and people’s interests shift. You probably won’t make all the changes on your shortlist of ideas for improving your offer. That’s fine—you can test the ones you feel will give you the best impact, then check your results and consider the rest of your list (which you may have added to!) in light of those results. How can you choose which elements to change? The feedback you obtained from existing customers, coupled with conversion and market data, should give you a push in the right direction, but often these decisions come down to your own intuition or “feel” for your target audience, and what they want, like, and need. Don’t be afraid to change aspects of your offer, and don’t be afraid to ask people hard questions about your product. The best products in the world have all got there because of constant improvements. Once you have your new product and offer prepared, you’ll need to tighten up your funnel to ensure you’re not leaking potential conversions. Tomorrow, Darren will take us through that process. But for now, I’d be interested to hear what you’ve found out about why readers aren’t signing up for your product or service offering. And if you made tweaks to it, what did you change? Share your stories with us in the comments. The Blog Tyrant is a 26 year old Australian guy who plays video games at lunch time and sells blogs for $20,000 a pop. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Boost Conversions Step 1: Review Your Offer     |
| Conversion Optimization: Our New Series Posted: 29 May 2012 07:01 AM PDT Of all the topics that bloggers ask me about, conversion optimization is among those at the top of the list. All of us have conversion goals of some sort. It doesn’t matter whether you’re aiming to make money blogging, or you’re in it purely for pleasure, you’ll probably want to grow a subscriber list at the very least! Some of the blogger’s most common conversion goals include:
These days, competition within the blogosphere is only getting stronger, and readers are only getting more savvy. Most of us have good data on our blog usage, but of course boosting conversions isn’t just a matter of statistics. From your audience to your offer—and everything in between—there’s a lot to consider. So, for the rest of the week, we’re dedicating ProBlogger to the challenge of boosting conversions, with a series that’s been put together by some of your favorite experts. This series assumes that you have some kind of conversion goal, and some tools in place to make that happen—even something as simple as a Sign Up form in your sidebar. We’ll take you through four steps to improving those conversions, as we look at:
We’ll be publishing just one post a day, since each one is fairly detailed, and you’ll probably need some time to digest them. The first one, by The Blog Tyrant, will publish later today, so don’t miss it. Before that, I’d like to hear from you. How are your conversions looking right now? What tactics have you used to improve them? What’s worked—and what hasn’t? Share your experiences with us in the comments … and keep an eye out for the first part of our series a bit later today. Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger Conversion Optimization: Our New Series     |
A fresh perspective on wine writing Cool, calm and collected without pretentious frippery is how Dan likes to keep the world of wine. An award winning Sommelier and the engine room for many of The Wine Guide's clients and for their events that happen around Australia and beyond.
Successes and learnings from my food blogging journey Jetsetting Joyce started blogging in 2007 when lived in London. Back then, LDN: HOT OR NOT was a simple Blogger template with hardly any pictures and maybe one or two paragraphs about where she'd eaten, what play she'd seen, what shops she'd visited and places she stayed. It was a way of keeping in touch with family and friends and was more of a travel diary than something meant for a wider audience.
The art of writing a review: expressing your opinion, with context and effective, thoughtful communicationHilary McNevin worked front-of-house, managing restaurants and studying wine in both Australia and the UK for 15 years before shifting careers. She studied Professional Writing and Editing at RMIT and during her study and since finishing the course at the end of 2007, has freelanced for Epicure in The Age as a regular contributore and fills in for senior reviewer Larissa Dubecki on the Espresso column.
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