3 Games That Will Improve Your Business Skills

Posted: 29 Jan 2013 06:03 PM PST

As I mentioned on this post, one must work hard but also play hard. In other words, you need to have fun regularly if you want to stay sane and be able to work hard when it comes to it. But what if you could have fun and improve your business skills at the same time? Even better, right? Below you’ll find three games which I think achieve this purpose.

1. Chess

The king of strategy games, and also the game of kings. Chess dates back to the 6th century, and today it’s played by millions of people around the world. When playing the game you need to protect your resources (pieces), to find the right balance between offense and defense, to lead your opponent to make mistakes, to know when to sacrifice things and so on. As you can see, these are valuable skills to the business world as well.

In my opinion the best place to play online is Chess.com. Their technology is top notch and there are thousands of expert players around, including many national and international grand masters. You’ll also find tutorials and tips there.

And here’s a challenge to DBT readers: if you beat me on the 1-minute bullet game I’ll mention your name on a future post! If you are up to it drop me an email and we’ll play one of these days.

2. Poker

As you probably heard by now, poker is not gambling. Sure, there’s some amount of luck involved, but the results of the game, especially if you consider the long term, are based on your skills as a player.

A good poker player must base his game on two building blocks: mathematics and psychology. You’ll need the maths part to figure out the odds of winning with each particular hand, the odds of your opponents having a hand that beats yours, the optimal bet size, the long term return you’ll get by playing in a specific way and so on.

The psychology, on the other hand, will be used to analyze the behavior of your opponents. You need to read when they are strong, when they are weak, when they are bluffing and so on. You also need to know when to bluff yourself, when to represent something you don’t have, and so on. Again, all skills that you can use on business situations. In fact many successful people are also poker players, including Bill Gates and Barack Obama.

I never played online poker, because I find it boring. At least once a month we gather some friends and play at my house, though. One day I also want to play at the World Series of Poker, in Las Vegas.

3. Starcraft

I no longer play computer games, mostly due to lack of time, but back in the day I used to play a mean Terran in Starcraft. I played some Starcraft 2 when it came out as well, and I still watch some pros playing once in a while on YouTube.

Out of all the computer strategy games Starcraft is by far the most sophisticated one. The breadth of strategical choices you have is amazing. You pick one out of three races, each with pros and cons. Then you must manage your resources, workers, structures, army units and so on, with the objective of destroying the enemy troops.

The similarities between war and business have been studied for centuries, and that’s why by playing this game you might end up improving your business skills.

Over to the readers: What other games do you think can improve one’s business skills?

Original Post: 3 Games That Will Improve Your Business Skills

“7 Old Post Revival Techniques You Won’t Believe You’re Overlooking” plus 1 more

7 Old Post Revival Techniques You Won’t Believe You’re Overlooking

Posted: 29 Jan 2013 11:07 AM PST

This guest post is by Ahmed Safwan of To Start Blogging.

Do you have hundreds of posts in your archive?

Most of them receiving a big zero in traffic?

You aren’t the only one who has this problem. Most of the bloggers, even pro ones, have this problem. That’s why this post was created.

Your old posts can generate additional visitors for you. Let’s see how.

1. Create internal links

You’ve heard me talk about internal linking before. This is because it’s very important.

When you link to your old posts, you are giving more value to your readers and also to Google itself.

You will be able to get traffic to your old posts, decrease bounce rates, increase average time on site per visitor, and increase your rankings. All this from just linking to your old posts!

So, whenever you write a new post, remember that your old posts can also give value, and link to them in your new post.

2. Update your old post and republish it

Do you notice how CopyBlogger republishes some of its old articles from time to time?

Doing this will let you catch a break, and also get a raft of traffic to your old content while making sure that content remains current over time.

3. Spread it on social media

Social media can also send more traffic to your old posts. Tweet more than one post each day, to get the best results.

As well as scheduling tweets for the upcoming week, see if you can’t theme your old post tweets around events that are happening in your niche, or the world in general. Depending on your topic, a post you wrote six month or a year ago may provide an interesting coutnerpoint or reminder for readers.

4. Create a follow-up post

Maybe you have an old post, but something has changed around that topic. Great: create a follow-up post that shows what’s changed since you wrote that old post, link back to it, and you will get traffic to it as well.

This can be especially effective if there are valuable comments on the old post, and you can pick up on those in the new one. Tactics like this, which weave the posts together, give readers a solid reason to look back at the past post.

5. Use a “related posts” widget

When your readers reach the end of a post, they want to know what to do next. Show them related posts from your archives. This revives your old posts and provides more context and information to your readers.

Remember, they can be your loyal readers forever, so always try to provide them with the content they need. Your archives should be chock-a-block with it!

6. Use cornerstone content

Do you have a number of posts on a similar topic? Create a single post that contains all of these posts, as a one-stop resource for your readers.

This way, you’ll get more traffic from search engines, and show your authority on this topic—which can only help build loyalty among the visitors you help.

7. Link to your old posts in an email series

Last week, I received an email from Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income. It’s an email that’s sent to all new subscribers after a given time, and in the email, he was promoting an old post. What a great idea.

Create autoresponders to send weekly to your new subscribers. In these emails, you can include links to your old posts and relevant tips. This is a great way to create a richer relationship with your new subscribers.

Do you have any other ideas?

These are the common ways to promote your old posts. If you have another idea, share it in the comments!

In addition to being a successful blogger and a talented freelance writer, Ahmed Safwan is on a mission to help bloggers who want to succeed build the blog that can help them to do so. If youíre one of them, check out his blog for more Blogging Tips that Help you make money.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

7 Old Post Revival Techniques You Won’t Believe You’re Overlooking

How to Use Multivariate Testing to Build the Ultimate Opt-in Form

Posted: 29 Jan 2013 05:06 AM PST

This guest post is by Adam Connell of Bloggingwizard.com.

There’s a testing technique out there that’s not being used to its full potential—or even used at all by most website owners.

Today I want to show you how you can use it to create the ultimate high-converting opt-in form.

So what is multivariate testing? It's essentially very similar to split testing. The difference is that it takes into account a lot more variables.

Many site owners avoid multivariate testing as it seems overly complex, and most of the services on the market that provide multivariate testing are paid services, which leaves bloggers unsure of the potential ROI.

In this post you will learn how you can use Google Analytics content experiments to conduct multivariate testing on your own opt-in forms in an easy and controlled way that will allow you to maximise your conversions.

Why multivariate testing?

In early 2012 Econsultancy.com and Redeye conducted a survey http://econsultancy.com/uk/reports/conversion-rate-optimization-report that yielded some interesting results.

Multivariate testing came out as the most valuable testing method for improving conversions, despite only 17% of companies stating that they used it.

According to the same report, taking the leap from A/B split testing to multivariate testing can help you improve conversions by an extra 15%.

This shows a huge opportunity for those site owners and businesses that come on board and start using this testing method.

So let’s see how it’s done.

Step 1. Break down your opt-in form

In order to conduct any worthwhile experiment you need a plan and identify all of the different variables; but in order to come up with a complete list of variables you need to break your opt-in form into its various elements.

Here is a combination of the typical elements you may find in an opt-in form:

headline
subheadline
additional text
image/video
name capture field
email capture field
buttons
background.

Step 2. Define your variables

Now that we have all of the elements of your opt-in form mapped out, we need to break each element down further and plan out how we might want to vary each one.

Please note, the list below is not exhaustive, nor do you have to vary all of these when you come to experiment. The point is to show you all of the possibilities.

You may think some of these are minor changes, and they are. But the impact of some of these changes can be enormous.

For example, some marketers have tested opt-ins with name capture and email fields against forms with just an email capture field, and have managed to increase conversions by 20%. So it all makes a difference!

Headline: font, text size, text colour, capitalisation, alignment
Sub-headline: font, text size, text colour, capitalisation, alignment
Additional text: yes/no, font, text size, text colour, capitalisation, alignment, bullet points
Image/video: yes/no, image size, image content, video size, video content, video audio, video type
Name capture: yes/no, text in field, icon to the left
Email capture: icon to the left, text in field
Button: size, shape, text colour, text font, text size, background colour, rounded edges
Background: border, image, drop shadow, border.

Step 3. Plan the test

This is where it starts to get a little bit more complex: you need to come up with the original control version of the form for your test, and as large a number of variations as possible.

The downside to Google Analytics content experiments is that you're limited to nine variations plus the original (or control) version.

You also need to be able to keep track of the variations and changes that you're making; you can't just throw something in and hope for the best.

To make this easy for you, we’ve put together a Google docs spreadsheet that will allow you to keep track of all your elements and variations.

Click here to access the spreadsheet

Please note: you must make a copy of this spreadsheet before altering it, otherwise everyone who visits will be able to see your testing plan!

Due to the number of variations that may be needed in the future we’ve broken the document down into controlled groups.

Now just add the variations, which may look something like this:

At this stage it's important that you only fill in the variations for group A as you need to use the results of each group’s test to inform the variations you select for the next group.

Step 4. Gear up to test group A

Now that you have planned out your variations for group A, you're ready to get the test underway.

The setup process here is fairly straightforward:

Set up a new page for each variation.
Add the pages to Google analytics content experiments. Log in to your account, then navigate to standard reporting > content > experiments.
Set your goals. Note: the easiest way to do this is to ensure your opt-in form directs users to a thank you page, then find the URL and add this as the goal URL.
Add the content experiments code to your pages.
Let the experiment run.

It's important to let your experiments run for as long as possible, so you can get data from the largest possible amount of traffic.

The more traffic you run this experiment on, the better, but if your blog doesn't have as much traffic, then you will need to run it for even longer.

You are just looking for conversion rate here so, strictly speaking, you can run each test on different numbers of traffic. You need a statistically significant result for each test; you don’t need every test to involve the same amount of traffic.

Step 5. Review results and prepare to test group B

By now you will have had the results from group A, which means you can start thinking about the group B tests.

The first thing to do is to take the best performing variation from group A and add it as the original for group B (don't forget to update your main page on your website at this point).

Now it's just a case of rinsing and repeating the process above, tweaking and coming up with new variations to test each time.

A potential 15% conversion boost

Using this guide you will be able to create additional experiments for other parts of your sites, not just opt-in forms. You can easily tweak this method to use on sales pages, product reviews, squeeze pages, ad layouts or anything else you can think of.

The important thing is laying out your variations and keeping track of them. Then, just rinse and repeat.

Are you using any form of testing at the moment? We would love to hear about which methods you're using and how much you've managed to increase your conversions in the comments.

Adam Connell is an internet marketing and SEO nut from the UK. He can be found blogging over at Bloggingwizard.com. Follow him on Twitter @adamjayc.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to Use Multivariate Testing to Build the Ultimate Opt-in Form

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