Author Resource Box Changes

Author Resource Box Changes

What Makes a Good User-Experience? Trust. Readers are savvy. They have intuitively amassed a level of expectations used to determine if the information presented to them is legitimate within 3-4 seconds. 3 seconds! The experiences the reader has had over time, good and bad, will form a collection of rules they will naturally use to define their expectations (their mental model), i.e. what makes or breaks their trust. Traffic, backlinks, click-through-rates (CTR), etc. don't matter if the reader or visitor doesn't trust you as an Expert Author. There is also the transparency principle that search engines believe builds user trust. How can we improve the likelihood the reader can trust you? By continually searching for the methods and the means to help you leverage your credibility and build your reader's trust. "About This Author" Our most recent test was the addition of "About this Author" to your articles, which appeared just above your Resource Box. We made a distinction between your article body and Resource Box and made it clear where your article ended and Resource Box content began. This is NOT a new model. In fact, most competitor sites already do separate the "About The Author" from the article body. Deep down, even if you disagreed with our test, you know this is the right thing to do if user trust over the long-term is important. If you know us very well, you also know we're not in this business for the short-term and we've been improving our model since November of 1999. We know quality trumps all and transparency builds trust over time. Trust comes down to a few crucial elements: Quality, Relevance, and Transparency. A quality article that is markedly original and informative, is benefit-oriented and relevant to the reader, is without self-promotion and is clearlytransparent in intention and objective, will build the reader's trust. If the reader's expectations are already pre-defined by previous experiences and they automatically profile articles into their read or toss categories, we need to draw more attention to the quality of your articles, increase reader focus on relevance, and forge transparency. By clearly outlining the article from the Resource Box, readers can zero-in on the quality, relevant information you have provided in the article to build trust. It also draws attention to you, your brand, and your Call-to-Action in your Resource Box by clearly identifying you as the author, rather than blending the article with your Resource Box. One metric we track closely is your author resource box click-through rate (CTR). CTR percentage is a gauge of how effective your articles are at generating traffic back to your website. The CTR range for our members is between 2-12%. To calculate your CTR, we divide the total article clicks by your article view. CTR = CLICKS / ARTICLE VIEWS Keep in mind, anything beyond 1% is already an AWESOME CTR as most direct marketing vehicles barely come close to a 1% CTR. After our change, we did see CTR decrease but do note that your CTR percentage is not the only deciding factor in whether or not your article delivers a quality user-experience. After all, it doesn’t matter if a reader clicked through to your site only to be disappointed and never return. In addition, article view totals also help narrate the user-experience story. I know I would much rather see 8,000 article views and 240 clicks (3% CTR) versus 2,000 article page views and 100 clicks (5% CTR). A high CTR doesn’t matter if the user doesn’t trust you. Today you may see a high CTR, but long-term results will be less than desirable. For now, the Resource Box changes made last week were reverted a few hours ago. We’ll study the data and look for opportunities to improve trust with our tens of millions of readers while keeping our focus on delivering highly pre-qualified traffic to your site. Over the next week, we'll analyze the data we gathered from this study and share our findings.