We’ve recently come across an app that literally brings its users “talking pictures.”

Essentially, Fotobabble attaches an audio caption to any image you can upload. It’s a cute, fun way to share and narrate photos with friends, and could even be useful for certain kinds of online businesses – for example, photographers who wanted to explain more information about a particular shot or online retailers who wanted to give potential customers details about a product. Can Fotobabble accomplish these tasks better with audio than conventional text-based captions do now? Read on and tell us what you think.

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Here’s our example. It took just a few seconds to create.

Currently, users can choose to share their creations across a wide variety of social networks or email; however, autosharing is not built in. The app is available as a web app for PC/Mac/etc. and as an iPhone app.

We do wish that Fotobabble would let users audio-caption pics from Facebook, Flickr photo streams or elsewhere on the Web. Ensuring ownership would be easy enough, as well, through Flickr’s API or Facebook Connect.While we’re on that subject, account creation should be possible through Facebook Connect or Twitter OAuth. Ideally, we’d also want to be able to create slide shows and sets or groups of pics.

What do you think: Can you see yourself using Fotobabble? If so, how would you use it? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Discuss

Google has launched a new product that online retailers may find incredibly useful for improving the product search on their site, and potentially increasing sales and reducing bounce rates. It’s called simply Google Commerce Search. Think Google Site Search, specifically tailored to e-commerce and product sites. Google couldn’t have timed such a release any better with the holiday shopping season arriving. 

Do you think your sales could be improved with a better search feature? Discuss here.

"Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too," Google says. "Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers. Google Commerce Search is hosted by and uses Google search technology to make online retail searching both fast and customizable — visitors to your online store can sort by category, price, brand or any other attribute."

"E-store administrators can highlight special products or connect related ones so searching is easier for their customers," the company continues. "Google Commerce Search includes a built-in spellchecker and synonyms so if visitors can’t remember exactly how to spell the particular toy or perfume or anything else they’re hunting for, Google Commerce Search will make some suggestions. Choosing the right one is up to them, though."

This clip will give you a good idea of how it works:

Customization Features

When a user searches for a product, results can be returned in a user-friendly e-commerce-style product page, where they can simply click the item they want and add it to their cart. The site owner has control over how it looks. You can filter results through parameters like category, brand, or price, and you can sort search results by any attribute.

Results can be viewed in either a list view, which is more like a classic search results page, or grid view, which is more like the product page-style. You can control which product categories are promoted at the top or sent to the bottom of results.

Promoting Specific Items

The product also comes with a promotions feature, which lets you easily promote certain items, and cross-sell related products if you choose. It also comes with automatic spellcheck, stemming, and synonyms, so that if a user doesn’t get their query exactly right, it will help guide them to what they’re looking for. I probably don’t have to tell you that any minutia that you can control in guiding customers through the checkout process can be huge for improving sales and decreasing bounce rate. Speaking of that, you can link Google Commerce Search to Google Analytics, making it easy to track various metrics.

Getting it and Keeping it Running

Google says the product can be deployed in days, and that because it is hosted on the Google platform, retailers can scale to meet their higher-demand periods, like holidays, without having to worry about slowdowns or traffic spikes.

"The hosted factor is a key feature in making GSC easy for administrators to use," Google says. "Because there’s no hardware (or software, servers, operating systems, cables, or any other equipment), admins can upload product information to Google Merchant Center and provide a few extra customization parameters – and Google Commerce Search utilizes that product feed to power their website store search."

The same feed you use for Google Product Search can be used for Google Commerce Search. This can cut down on time and tech costs, as the company points out.

Do you think Google Commerce Search boost your web sales? Tell us what you think.

Related Articles:

> Google Answers Bounce Rate Questions

> Is Bounce Rate a Google Ranking Factor?

> Google Talking Bounce Rate Again

When I first started learning how to make money online, I read that “content is king.” Well, I am here to tell you that “content is not king.” It is an illusion (a mirage) that traps many online business owners in the quick sand of failure.

“Content for the sake of content” is pointless.

Now, don’t get me wrong here. Content is a good thing, so long as it will help deliver a potential customer to your sales page or the sales page of your advertisers. Any content that does not deliver a potential customer to a sales page is content that has not lived up to its true purpose, plain and simple.

A Number’s Game

No web page or website will ever deliver a 100% conversion rate, so it is imperative for a website owner to devise some method for tracking patterns and sales conversion results on their websites.

Many people use and recommend Google Analytics for tracking website sales conversions (http://www.google.com/analytics/). The best benefit of using Google Analytics is the cost… it is free.

Personally, we are unsatisfied with the results that we get from Google Analytics, and we feel there has to be a better way. A few similar products worth considering include:

• http://www.metasun.com/
• http://www.sales-n-stats.com
• http://www.onestat.co.uk/

Real Numbers For Consideration

The Internet Retailer website compiled some interesting information back in 2005 and 2006. You can buy the 2006 data on their website, and they provide a good portion of the 2005 report on their website for free. This information comes from its 2005 report of the Top 500 online retailers: http://www.homebizcowboys.com/2005-net-sales-stats

In 2005, the top 500 online retailers completed 523.9 million separate sales at an average ticket price of $118. This in itself is a number that can encourage smaller website owners to have confidence in their future, but it is not the number I am most concerned with sharing with you today.

This article is about “sales conversion”, so it is imperative that I show you what you should expect from your own sales conversion.

The Internet Retailer report shows us how the top online retailers are performing as far as sales conversion on their own websites. As you will see in this breakdown, sales conversions based on monthly visits (by visitor) varied widely, even within the same industries.

• Chain Retailers ranged from 0.45% to 23% conversion;
• Catalog and Call Center Operations ranged from 0.39% to 23.5% conversion;
• Web-Only Merchants averaged between 0.10% to 31% conversion; and
• Consumer Brand Manufacturers ranged from 0.75% to 20.2% conversion.

Web-Only Merchants stand out in two ways: they scored the lowest conversions and the highest conversion rates at 0.10% and 31%.

Closer To Home

One of our “cowboy” friends has been working on his conversion rates with our help, through his free report and online newsletter. It is always easier to give away information than it is to close a sale on someone’s first visit to your website. So, he has adjusted his approach to build his email list first, and then to use good content to drive his sales down the road. (Yes, good content does have its place in the world.)

He still uses the old methods of promoting his websites that he has used for years. But now, he is trying out different advertising models to strengthen his opt-in numbers.

Banner Advertising

We have all heard about how bad banner advertising is, but my cowboy friend had read someone’s eBook, where they said that they are making tons of money with banner advertising.

Willing to try anything once, my cowboy friend undertook his first banner advertising promotions with the AdBrite Network (http://www.adbrite.com/).

In his first run at the system, his banners only generated 0.0005% CTR’s (click-through’s) to his website. So he readjusted his banners and took another pass. With his second run, he generated 0.0054% CTR’s. Again, he redesigned his banners and took another pass at the system. This third time out, he had managed to raise his banner clicks to 0.0695%.

On his third run of 144,000 banner impressions, he generated 101 clicks to his newsletter sign-up page. By spending one-third less money than he spent on his first run, he generated 100 times more CTR’s than he did on his first pass.

These numbers only reflect how many of his banner displays generated a visitor to his website.

The industry conversion rates shown previously in this article only reflect the actions people took once they were at a website. For my cowboy friend, once people landed on his website after clicking a banner ad, he was able to convert 3% of his visitors to subscribers.

Co-Registration Marketing

Co-registration is a process by which one company will offer a subscription to its visitors, and then on its “Thank You” page, it will offer other subscriptions to similar but non-competing publications.

At the end of my friends’ banner advertising campaign, he started a co-registration campaign. He started running his campaign in small increments, so that he could tweak his system as it progressed.

In his first 5,000-exposure pass, he generated a 0.5% CTR to his subscription page and converted 4% of his visitors to subscribers.

So, he tweaked his landing page and was able to increase his conversions to subscribers to 12% on his next run.

The next time through, he tweaked his co-registration advertisement. He saw his CTR increase to 2%.

He checked his stats, and then tweaked his system again. With the latest tweak, he is jubilant about his results. On his fifth pass, his results were so promising that he kept the system moving forward unabated.

With his last 4926 co-registration exposures, he generated 104 clicks to his website (2.11% CTR). Although he is still running about industry average on his CTR’s from the co-registration page, he is getting a 55% visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate (58 subscribers from 104 visitors).

Good Statistics Are Integral To One’s Success

Without good conversion statistics, it is nearly impossible to know how one can improve their overall conversion results.

Good tracking stats can show you when you have improved your conversions, and they can show you when you have diminished your conversion rates. Every time you make a change to your advertising, you should keep a backup of your original copy, just in case your changes produce poorer results instead of better results. If you see your conversions go down, then go back to the copy you had used prior to your last change.

By using his conversion statistics as a measure of his success, my friend was able to increase his results from banner advertising 100-fold in just a few weeks. When he took the same process to co-registration, he was able to increase his conversion results again, getting 58 times more subscribers for the same cash investment.

Learning From Our Friends…

We are working to duplicate the success of our friend. We had always thought that our own 10% visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate was pretty good, but 55%? Wow!

Going forward, my point is simple. Before investing great sums of money into driving traffic to one’s website, the first and most important task should be to drive enough traffic to your website to get some real conversion data and to tweak and improve your conversion results. Once you know that you are converting well on the traffic you are already receiving, then and only then should you consider stepping up your investment into driving traffic to your website.

If I had called this article, “Increase Your Sales by 5,800%,” you would have assumed me to be a hype-salesman, and you would have skipped over my article altogether. But, if you ask my friend, he would tell you in his own words, “If he can do it, then anyone can do it.” And that includes you, my friend. If he can do it, then YOU can do it too.

About The Author:

Bret Plummer is one of the Home Biz Cowboys. Learn Today, how to successfully start your own Online Business and start generating a sustainable income within a few short weeks. Visit our website now, and sign up to receive our FREE 8-Week Training Course. Be sure to also confirm your subscription right away, so that you will not miss a single day: http://www.HomeBizCowboys.com Read more articles written by: Bret Plummer

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Improved Website Sales Conversion Is The Best Answer

The weak economy is driving online retailers to shift their marketing budgets and cut back on search marketing, according to a study by Forrester Research on behalf of Shop.org.

The study surveyed 117 online retailers in the throes of a relatively abysmal first quarter about how they planned to allocate their online marketing budget. While a third will be spending less over all, over half of them (56%) said they would be scaling back search marketing specifically, indicating a plan to reallocate funds toward other venues like email and social media.

Email seems an especially popular option, with 88 percent listing email as a high priority, the majority of them focusing on segmented emails to customers based on stated preferences or purchase data. Others will be highlighting new products and featuring online promotions via email.

That indicates customer retention as the primary goal and not so much gaining new customers.  "Online retailers are trying to weather this economic storm by doing more with less, making smart spending decisions, and leveraging effective, affordable tactics like email to grow their businesses." said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org.

However, the idea that recession is the best time increase the marketing budget isn’t a foreign one—when there’s less money to go around, it makes sense to be more aggressive, not less. The other (slightly less than) half of that group have no plans to cut back original budgets and will be forging ahead as planned.

A quarter of them will take advantage of others’ decreased search spending by increasing their own budget for search and across the board. Of that minority, 80 percent will increase search, 65 percent will increase email, and 60 percent will increase social marketing.

The increase in social media spending is interesting. For many this arena will be a testing ground, and for others it will be a strategy in lieu of the rising cost of search marketing. However, the numbers to support such a drastic switch aren’t quite there yet, according to Hitwise. Search still drives over 30 percent of traffic to retail sites; shopping and classifieds drives 25 percent; and email drives over 10 percent.

But social networks still account for less than five percent of traffic and are negative in terms of year-over-year percentage change in upstream visits to Hitwise’s Retail 500 Index.

Social media certainly has been under the spotlight of public attention lately with sudden mainstreaming making social media a very attractive target. But social media’s day may not have fully come yet.