Starglider Systems Blog
In the article 5 Businesses That Used A/B Tests to Lift Conversion Rates by up to 216% , Unbounce lists a few instances where A/B Testing and careful improvement of landing pages allowed a large improvement in conversion.
Worth looking for ideas for your own pages.
Personally, my favorite A/B testing service is Optimizely, but Unbounce looks very good for the non-technical users.
I have released STGThumb 3.30 yesterday. The new, exciting feature (to me, at least) is the new Flux Slider based slide show mode.
It features great looking 3D and 2D transitions between photos, including hardware acceleration if your browser supports it.
It looks great, and I posted a new demo to show it off.
You can also see the documentation for more details.
I have just read Understanding Plots and Sub-Plots When Writing Salesletters. If you ever write, either as a professional or on your personal blog, this article is worth reading and keeping in mind.
I've had this problem myself before and it can really drag the quality of your article down, and at the same time getting you frustrated because you are trying to juggle a bunch of sub-plots at once.
Really recommended.
AWeber posted an article – 3 Psychological Strategies That Help Reduce Unsubscribe Rates – about techniques on how to reduce unsubscribe rates.
I particularly liked the one of using Quit and Give Up as unsubscribe buttons/text.
Using your brand name on the subject seems to make sense, but I was a bit surprised to see how big the improvements were. (I have always used Starglider Systems News – Month Year as my subject)
Recently I decided to give out an extra to STG Picture Merge users if they Liked our Fan page – Extra filters.
It was so easy to do so using Static HTML (the Facebook app), that I just had to mention it here. I had looked at a couple of other ways, but they all looked like they'd take a ton of time.
With Static HTML, you can really get it working on a few minutes. Recommended.
I have just released STG Picture Merge 2.
The main addition to this version is effects . You can now set effects for each of the pictures.
The regular download comes with 2 effects (Convert to B&W and Negative), and you can get 10 more for free.
You can see samples of the effects on the Image Effects on STG Picture Merge page.
It is easy to get it for free – just click on the button below
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Mailchimp just launched some extra customization options for their automated video conversion.
That certainly saves times compared to getting a snapshot of the video (which at least I can get with pixel precision with Ashampoo Snap, so I don't have to actually edit it), uploading and using the image for the link.
It also supports converting videos out of RSS feeds – which is conceptually useful for me because both this blog and my personal blog are automatically e-mailed through their RSS feeds, without me doing anything.
I have also just changed the feed to this new server.
This weekend I have moved this blog from my main site – STGSYS.COM – to STGSYS.NET.
The main reason is simple – on the other server, WordPress was horribly slow. Several times I was unable to fix errors or add information in posts, because the server would time out.
Even when it worked, it still took a long time to get anything done – and sometimes, to load any page. As an extra minus, looks like several plugins were not made to handle Windows servers, and just failed.
I have to say that Crystaltech support (or whatever their name is now, it keeps changing) was quite helpful on the several times that I contacted them. But just moving the blog was way easier.
Since I had to make changes, I switched the theme from Aspire (which was very buggy for me) to Inspire. Inspire has nice documentation, and is fairly well behaved. I also like how it looks.
Last week I tried a simplified version of my page for Print Folder tool – STG FolderPrint Plus – using Inspire, but A/B testing on Optimizely gave me terrible results, so I'm shelving that for now.
Mailchimp has a new, neat integration with Digioh that allows you to share files with your newsletter audience.
It also generates unique links so that you can track exactly who downloaded your files, as well as other stats.
I have just finished watching How to Create an Awesome Demo Video for Your Business , by Miguel Hernandez.
Miguel Hernandez' company is GrumoMedia. They have an interesting style for their videos – they are at the same time fun to watch, informative, and they sell the product very well. You can see the sample below. The course purpose is teaching you how to create your videos – the Grumo Way.
Course Sections
Conclusion
I enjoyed watching this course. It covers all the steps of making a video, from the script to promotion.
The style of the videos is very friendly, and covers all subjects in a simple language. I really like that you can download the videos- several video players can play at a faster rate, which can really save time. I watched several of the lessons at 1.6x.
I have made a couple of videos before, but the screencast kind (see my Print Folder video for an example) – just a plain display of an application at work with text explanations. I do believe the kind of video they teach in this course can get better conversion rates, and is much more likely to be shared.
Personally, I think that the course is a little expensive (I only got it because of a promotion at Appsumo), but if you really plan on making videos for your business or AS a business, that price will probably pay itself back very soon.
[big_button color=”blue” url=”http://ude.my/zJy33X” desc=””]See a free video from the course[/big_button]