Conversion rate is a measure of your ability to persuade visitors to take the action you want them to take. It’s a reflection of your effectiveness and customer satisfaction. For you to achieve your goals, visitors must first achieve theirs. There are several ways you can use this metric to improve your performance. For example you can monitor the path visitors take when navigating your website and see which paths lead to sales and find out why. One of our key strengths here at SoliTech is to help our customers really make sense out of this and other metrics and convert this data into measurable performance gains.

To truly measure a gain in performance, first we need to determine where your website stands now and then set realistic goals to where it can go. The table below shows the conversion rates broken out by industry and gives a fairly good indicator of where your conversion rate should be at.

Now that you know where your website should rank, it is time to take action! Stop wasting the traffic you worked so hard to get in the first place and start giving your customers what they are looking for and start increasing your online success.

Before, I would have to zip up the web files, download them, upload them, and then unizp. Now I can accomplish all that with just this simple command.

rsync -avzh –rsh=’ssh -p1234′ user@old_server.solitechgmbh.com:/var/www/ /var/www/

you can also use –stats –progress to get some visual feedback

I also use this just for regular offline backups of the server and it works great!

These platforms have huge communities behind them, they are robust, and they are more importantly community tested. Any custom piece of software is prone to bugs and will break when faced with unforeseen circumstances. These platforms have been around for a while and have been through pretty much everything the web can throw at them. They are sill not perfect but pretty close and getting closer each day.

They have sophisticated admin interfaces and are for the most part fairly easy to customize. Since the pieces are mostly all there, you can see great results with very little spent. Even better, there are companies specializing in customization of these frameworks so you get good quality and good prices. You will also save in the long run since the framework lets you make edits easily often without requiring to know programming. This will also make your site more easily updatable and more attractive to search engines.

I have had very pleased customers with either WordPress or Zen cart. As the name implies, WordPress is a publishing interface used by blogs and ZenCart is an online store software but do not box them in just yet. The beauty of these frameworks is their flexibility. You can use WordPress to create a regular static website or you can make everything completely dynamic and content driven. You can also start static and add features such as Facebook integration as you go later. Same goes for the ZenCart software. You can start with an average shopping cart and add regular website content as you go.

There are lots of other benefits that I won’t go into detail about right now such as one click SEO optimization, automatically updating plugins, twitter module, facebook module, one click install of thousands of extensions and much much more. Each one of these probably deserves their own article.

To demonstrate the power of these platforms, I will be adding some case studies of some clients in the future so you can see what just a few hours of work can do. Stay tuned!

A good example would be bands and their use of MySpace profile pages. An up and coming band is looking to do two main things, get their music out there and grow their fan base. MySpace does an excellent job of this by offering an easy to use interface to edit your profile page and upload songs. The main draw is that bands will be instantly part of a community of millions and can have an attractive looking “website” in just a few short hours. MySpace also offers custom URLs so it is easy to remember and easy to distribute to your fans.

There are a number of other reasons why bands choose this route so you ask why don’t I just create a page for my business? Because of the crowd using MySpace. Although the millions of high school students and younger are exactly what a growing band needs, they may not be interested in your company and you may not want your company associated with them either. For a more sophisticated crowd you can try Facebook, but then again, it all depends on what you are looking to do online and who you are looking to engage.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. will tell the same story, they have a great set of tools for doing a certain activity online, you just have to decide if it is what will grow your brand best. Keep in mind that unattended Facebook pages will cause you more harm then good in the long run. So in short, yes, you can be very successful just using the social tools mentioned above as long as you use them the right way.

I think what really matters is your Click Conversion Rate (CCR). How many people who come to your website end up reaching for their valet. How many of them are willing to buy your product during their first visit to your website? Depending on what you sell, how many people are willing to give out their hard earned dollars on something they may never have seen in person. Your site must be able to accomplish this at a high rate or else it doesn’t matter how much traffic you get, you will never make much money.

Today, the sky is the limit as far as advertising costs go. You can spend as much as you like on pay per click, banner ads, or social media campaigns. Each visitor can cost you anywhere form a few cents to over a dollar. What good will all this traffic do if the majority of them bounce, meaning they click once to your website and leave right a way, or click around a few times, get bored, then leave. On average, if a new browser comes to your site, you will only have a few seconds to capture their attention and convince them that your company’s product is exactly what they need.

To get your click conversion rate for the month, you just divide the monthly amount of visitors you have with the number of sales you get. These numbers are easy to get if you use some sort of tracking software on your site. There are several free services you can use that help you track your progress and measure all kids of useful metrics.

A well optimized website should be able to get their clicks to convert at a rate of 1-4% depending on what they sell. Niche websites will get even better. If the site is very well optimized for a very specific niche, you can get 10% or better. Just think of what this will do to your advertising budget! You can get the same amount of sales on the fraction you are spending now. Lets just take a look at the math quick.

If you spend $5000 a month and get 100,000 clicks where 100 people buy, meaning 0.1% of your visitors actually buy something. A 0.1% CCR is considered very poor so if you are willing to invest just one months worth of advertising expenses and raise your rate to just 0.2%, you just doubled your sales. These optimizations can be done piece by piece so next month you decide to do some more optimization and now you are up to 0.3% and so on.

As you can see, lots of traffic won’t do you any good if your site is not converting well. Optimizing your click conversion rate offers a huge payoff by exponentially boosting your sales, reducing your advertisement needs and can be done incrementally.

To use it, create a file called random_helper.php in app/controllers/components and copy the following code.

<?php
class RandomHelperComponent extends Object {
 
/**
 * Random string generator function
 *
 * This function will randomly generate a password from a given set of characters
 *
 * @param int = 8, length of the password you want to generate
 * @param string = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz all possible values
 * @return string, the password
 */     
	function generateRandomString ($length = 8, $possible = '0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz') {
		// initialize variables
		$password = "";
		$i = 0;
 
		// add random characters to $password until $length is reached
		while ($i < $length) {
			// pick a random character from the possible ones
			$char = substr($possible, mt_rand(0, strlen($possible)-1), 1);
 
			// we don't want this character if it's already in the password
			if (!strstr($password, $char)) { 
				$password .= $char;
				$i++;
			}
		}
		return $password;
	}
}
?>

make sure you include it in the appcontroller as such

var $components = array('Auth','Email','RandomHelper');

then you can call it as follows in any function

$password= $this->RandomHelper->generateRandomString(4,'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz');

Enjoy!

Living on the edge

Living on the edge means living a dangerous and/or unusual everyday life. People who live on the edge are very frequently exposed to phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the edge:
Extreme-sportsmen, gamblers, policemen, thiefs, human-rights-activists, rappers, etc.
-My friend John is living on the edge.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he cleans windows of high office buildings.

Today, I am officially coining a new term called “living on the point” … see when you live on the edge, you got an infinite amount of points to live on. All the sudden you realize that the edge is not as extreme as you may have thought before.

This is where the point comes in. When you live on the point that’s all you got. One single point, making this life style the most extreme. A definition for such life style may sound something like the following. Perhaps this will be on the urban dictionary soon.

Living on the point

Living on the point means living a life more dangerous and/or unusual than you can humanly understand. People who live on the point are in constant extreme phisical, psycological, economical, lawful or other kinds of dangers.

Examples for people who live on the point:
Extreme-extreme-sportsmen, gamblers (playing poker in tank full of sharks), policemen (performing riot control on tigers), thiefs (stealing unstable dynamite), etc.
-My friend John is living on the point.
-Oh yeah? He is a gambler or something?
-No, he jumps off of high office buildings with nothing but a small zip-lock bag and dental floss.

I personally like them because of they offer a nice API and statistics all for free. It is a pretty quick service too. You can generate hundreds of URLs in just a few seconds. All you have to do is register and you get a username and API key which you will need in the following section.

Here is the code … As you can see I only implemented the shorten for now but I will probably add some of the other stuff later. For some reason WP won’t let me post curl_exec( so be sure to remove the extra character.

class bitly {
	/**
	 * A PHP class to utilize the bitly API
	 * through the Bitly API. Handles:
	 * - Shorten
	 *
	 * Requires PHP5, CURL, JSON and a Bitly account http://bit.ly/
	 *
	 * Bitly API documentation: http://code.google.com/p/bitly-api/wiki/ApiDocumentation
	 */
 
	protected $appkey;
	protected $login;
	protected $version;
 
	/**
	* Contruct the Bitly Class
	*
    * @param string, your Bitly account key
    * @param string, your Bitly account login
	*/
	public function __construct($login, $appkey, $version='2.0.1') {
		$this->login = $login;
		$this->appkey = $appkey;
		$this->version = $version;
	}
 
	/**
	* Retrieve a shortened URL
	*
    * @param string, url to shorten
    * @param string, version of Bitly to use
	*/
	public function shorten($url) {
		//create the URL
		$api_url = 'http://api.bit.ly/shorten?version='.$this->version.'&longUrl='.urlencode($url).'&format=xml&login='.$this->login.'&apiKey='.$this->appkey;
		//call the API
		$curl = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $api_url);
		curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
		$response = curl_ex_ec($curl);
		curl_close($curl);
 
		//parse the XML response and return the url
		$xml_object = new SimpleXMLElement($response);
		return $xml_object->results->nodeKeyVal->shortUrl;
	}
 
}

If you want to use this in CakePHP … you will want to do something like this.
Put this line before the class … I actually use this in a helper since this is a view level class

App::import('Vendor','Bitly', array("file" => "bitly/bitly.class.php"));

Now you can just invoke it in one of your functions somewhere with two simple calls!

$bitly = new Bitly('username', 'your_API_key_here');
$short_url = $bitly->shorten($long_url);

Simple as that … oh and one more thing. Be sure to have CURL installed else this won’t work.

http://www.rewardchamp.com

Reward Champ offers an easy way for you to turn your social network into a cash network with just a few clicks. You can use your social influence to your advantage and promote products and services that your followers might find useful. They have a large set of social publishing features on all offers so you can reach your friends on all major social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, etc. You will be credited for each offer they complete with points you can use for cash payments or gift certificates. By using your social network you can make hundreds of dollars, or even thousands each month and significantly boost to your monthly budget with just a few clicks a day. Making money from home made easy through social networking, and social media marketing.

Registration is free and you also get to compete for a weekly cash drawing on top of all the points you earn already. What do you have to loose?! Try social media marketing.

What good is it you ask? You can use it to pull in information from any RSS feed and do what ever you want with the data. For example I use it to pull the RSS feed from my blog and display links to my latest posts on http://www.rewardchamp.com You can see it on the bottom of the page.

CakePHP makes this way to easy! First you need to download the MagpieRSS files from the link above and then extract to your vendors folder.

You need to put this line at the very top of your controller file you want to use RSS with. Before the class declaration

App::import('Vendor','Snoopy', array("file" => "magpierss/extlib/Snoopy.class.inc"));

Now inside a function you want create a new Snoopy object. I use Snoopy because I’m lazy … MagpieRSS is not constructed as Classes like CakePHP would like it to be … Snoopy is. Snoopy will return XML for you which you can make into an easily usable object with SimpleXMLElement. You can var_dump to see what exactly is in this object. You can figure out what to do from there.

$snoopy = new Snoopy();
$snoopy->fetch('http://www.solitechgmbh.com/your/feed/here');
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($snoopy->results);
return $xml->channel->item;

Something like this will get you the title for example.

echo $item->title;

Happy coding!