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Archive for the ‘Experience’ Category

The Wild Investor Undergoes Redesign

One of the biggest projects at ASANT Media is a stock market blog called The Wild Investor, and, with the need of some changes and the year coming to an end, we felt it was the right time to release the 4th version of The Wild Investor.

Right off that back there were a couple things we wanted to attend to:

  • Make archive content easier to access.
  • Easier ways to change ad banners from admin panel.
  • Liven up the website with color.
  • Create a “Trading Handbook” that lists all resources, articles, and products good for traders.

As part of any redesign/face-lift project, there is a flow that ASANT Media always follows:

  1. Requirement gathering – lists exactly what needs to be done.
  2. Archival of previous design – package code snippet of different features for use on future projects.
  3. Wireframe - mockup a layout in Photoshop. Basically the blueprints of the new design is created here.
  4. Coding - Ensure the design is created as specified while paying attention to search engine optimization standards.
  5. Implement – Publish design, make sure design is supported in all popular browsers, and make any tweaks as needed.

As part of the redesign, new features include:

  • Enhanced admin options to change look and feel of website directly from the admin panel and no need to dive into the actual code.
  • Use of jQuery to display Trading Handbook.
  • Increased usage of the Menu functionally released in version 3 of WordPress.
  • Turned current Archive page from list format to calendar display.
  • Added more green color to the design, emphasized sidebar content, and freshened up logo.
  • Added individual information pages for affiliated programs. In progress
  • Create “bookshelf” page to display all book reviews. In progress

Some before and after screenshots can be seen below:



What about you? How can we help you with your redesign?

How To Engage All Your Customers

Every 6 months I gage my email subscribers to see what their needs are, what information they are looking for, and how much do they actually know about all my services. The responses to the latter question was somewhat shocking.

For this particular project, I have a website, a Twitter account, and an email list. In the survey I asked the email subscribers do they visit my site more than once a week and do they follow me on Twitter. The responses were 60% don’t visit my website more than once a week and 80% of list doesn’t follow me on Twitter.

What does this mean?

Don’t assume your visitors know about all your services and actively visit the ones they know about.

Promote, promote, promote.

Somebody who signs up for your email list may not know anything about your Twitter account. Somebody who follows you on Twitter may have no idea you have an email list. Make sure you actively engage and notify all mediums of any new content otherwise you might leaving a big bulk of potential customers in the dark.

Learn more about email marketing.

Project Debut – Stock Brokerage Reviews

Over the past month, I have been working on a couple different projects.. 3 main ones to be precise. I’ll be sharing all of them over the next couple of weeks; however, the first one I can talk about today.

In the whole online marketing/make money online field, you can never stop learning and adapting. Because so much of it deals with how people use the internet, understanding social tendencies is a great concept to grab a hold of.

There is definitely no shortage of business models to make money online. Of the top of my head, you can sell an information product, create a membership site, run a blog, or create a review site. My latest project, Stock Brokerage Reviews (SBR), fits under the review site category.

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Case Study: How To Attract People To Your Site

Because there are so many different niches, markets, and demographics, there is no an exact science to find out what will attract people to come to your site; however, you can always try to list out some of your more popular pages and figure out what made these sites pop.

In this following list, we will be looking at some of the more popular articles throughout ASANT Media’s portfolio of sites, and try to figure out what exactly made these pages popular… (no specific order)

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Stumbling Across the Optimal Ad Spot

Over the last couple of weeks I started to notice an interesting stat when it came to my Adsense placements. The slot that seemed to bring in the most money was the 468×60 campaign located in between the actual post and comments section.

I first noticed the change once I altered the look of the theme on my stock market site. The 468×60 ad now seamlessly blends into the theme, but instead of just putting it at the bottom the location is even more specific.

I placed it right under the post, and then have it followed by the article meta information and related articles. Because of this placement, I think many people often think it is either part of the site and/or they see something interesting and click on it. The clean look also gets the ad to stand out.

This placement is also working well with other types of ads that I have tried, but they need to be very targeted ads. That is why I think the Adsense campaign works so well there. Creating custom post templates will help with targeting your ads.

You can see a picture of the placement:

Bottom Ad Placement

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