At the earliest, when you’re in high school. Early in your career is best though.
Why?
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie will help you understand why, despite their best intentions, people sometimes do not do what you want, or ask them, to do. Recognizing this will help you get ahead in personal and professional situations.
Best Quote
Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.
Review
I didn’t want to read How to Win Friends and Influence People honestly. The title makes it sound way too much like a stereotypical self-help book. “Do good things and good things will come to you,” “Think positively, and you’ll have success,” etc. Thankfully, it was not like that at all.
How to Win Friends and Influence People is one of the most valuable books you will ever read. Applying the principles you learn in this book will help you be perceived as a more sympathetic person, make better decisions about people’s motives, and have greater insight into interpersonal dynamics.
Without giving too much away, here are a few highlights of the book:
Criticizing others will always come back to bite you. Use metaphors to call out others’ flaws and mistakes. This will help them see their own problems without feeling like you’re saying they have a problem.
You can’t influence others by telling them what you want. Ask questions. Get them to want to do what you want.
Most people have a huge need for sympathy from others. Fulfill that, and you will get their sympathy and attention.
Final Word
The most valuable thing you will learn from How to Win Friends and Influence People will be how to be a happy, healthy person that has happy and healthy relationships that lead you more quickly and easily to success, and while the title might make the book sound hokey, I wholeheartedly recommend that you get it and begin reading today.
Are you wondering why your website seems doesn’t convert more people even though you’ve been putting more time into it? It’s time to go back to the drawing board and evaluate if what you’re doing to draw more people to your site is having any effect on getting those visitors to convert. This is the start of conversion rate optimization – CRO.
What is CRO?
A conversion can simply be defined as the successful completion of a specific action on a particular website by a visitor. These actions include online services such as buying products or acquiring services, signing up for online media services such as an e-newsletter, submitting forms and other kinds of services that the website offers. A conversion rate is then defined as the total of your conversions divided by the total number of visitors visiting the website.
CRO can be defined as the process of carrying out a comprehensive analysis of a website and coming up with improvement strategies and testing the strategies with the aim of increasing your conversion rates. It involves identifying possible reasons why visitors are not converting, then coming up with a solution that will fix the problem. The solutions are then tested to ensure that they satisfactorily solve the problem before they can be permanently employed. This will necessitate a thorough study of the visitor behavior and expectations in order to understand specific visitor needs and lay out strategies to meet these specific requirements.
Research has found CRO is particularly important because a slight increase in the conversion rate can yield huge profits in some websites with large volumes of traffic. However, if your site registers low traffic, then the profits could be less but still significant to allow you operate smoothly and increase your market share power.
Reduce Conversion Killers
The key to reducing conversion killers lies in the ability to identify them and coming up with appropriate strategies to mitigate them.This will involve identifying where the visitors find it difficult using the site and establishing the reasons as to why they may not take the desired action.
A good first place to look is your web analytics package. Google Analytics and other software will show you what are your most common exit pages, time on site, and you can even set up tracking to find out if people fill out the first 3, or 4, or 5 fields in a sign up or check out form and then abandon the process. This data is extremely vital as it helps in determining the performance of your website and enables you to make the proper adjustments to effectively realize your goals.
Once you are comfortable with Google Analytics, it’s time to try out a tool like ClickTale or CrazyEgg that will show you heat mapping of where people spend the most time on your pages and more. These tools help to identify where your visitors are looking or not so that you can see if that really cool graphic you put up or that super simple sign up form or anything else is actually having a positive effect on conversions.
Offer Compelling Content
To influence your visitors in a positive way, you have to give them the content they want, when and where they want it. This doesn’t always mean giving them a blog post to read. Sometimes, it’s putting your call to action in a new spot based on that particular visitor’s behavior or offering a how-to video right when they’re wondering how your product actually works. To do this, I recommend surveying your users. You can use a pop up, a post check out questionnaire, an email to visitors, or even a somewhat larger scale approach.
When the visitors visit your website, you should never leave them clueless on what is going on your website. It is for this reason that you should include a call to action that should be clearly visible and informative of what you want them to do at your website. You need to do this discreetly by reducing distractions such as too many links, unnecessary text, and images that is likely to distract the visitors.
Above all, your customers should be able to trust you. To do this, offer credible services and products so that your customers can trust you and feel comfortable to conduct business with you.
Create an Action Plan
To successfully implement any proposed changes aimed at improving conversions, an action plan is necessary. The action plan should help you identify the areas that need change, provide solutions on how it should be done, identify the individuals capable to aiding you in completing these tasks, and create a more refined website that compels the visitor to make a conversion. However, when creating an action plan, utmost caution should be taken to ensure that no loopholes are created, as they will make it difficult for the team to identify potential conversion killers.
Most importantly, creating a plan and projections for outcomes helps you measure and continue to improve. Like most things in life, it's not likely that you'll get this perfect the first time around.
Summary
The most important things in CRO are to learn to identify conversion killers, create a plan for how to remove them, and measure the outcomes so that you can continue to improve. Simple changes to your design, contact, calls-to-action and more can result in huge increases in revenue and more.
In 2010, Seth Godin wrote about hourly work versus linchpin work. Essentially, his thesis is that you should pay someone a fair hourly rate when there are substitutes for what they do – his example being when you need to see a podiatrists and there happen to be 6 good ones in town – and that you should pay someone for the value (to you) of the work being done when there are no substitutes regardless of how much time it takes them to do the work.
The problem that you and many others encounter is that you never know whether there are really substitutes because you typically outsource work that you do not know how to do yourself – coding, design, copywriting, accounting, etc. If you don’t know a lot about how to do the work, how do you determine whether or not there are really substitutes? If you for example need a website designed for your suede shoe company, can you hire any good web designer or do you need someone that has specific experience in your vertical?
via INTVGene
Find an outsourcer marketplace
If you don’t know what something is worth and whether or not there are substitutes, find comparables by going to a marketplace. If you need a design, visit 99 designs and search for your type of business and the deliverable you need. If you need articles written, go to 101 Content or Textbroker or any number of other places where writers of all levels spend their time. Find people in your industry there and ask them what their experience was. Doing this will save you a lot of heartache as you might be able to avoid their missteps.
Business people love fixed costs
Entrepreneurs especially love knowing they’re getting something for a certain amount regardless of whether it’s a fair price or not, and often, they’re way too high or way too low, which results in either wasted budget or such low quality work that you end up having to have someone else redo it or you yourself spend hours and hours making up for the crap you just paid someone to serve you.
via Nicola since 1972
My experience with an outsourced website
At one point in my past, I had to create a website for a business. None existed before this. Unfortunately, the person that held the purse strings had a very specific idea of how he wanted things done. Design, coding, and implementation were to be split up, and we couldn’t spend more than $2,000 on design. Coding and implementation would be figured out later.
I begged, and I pleaded. Having developed websites myself and managed people that did the same, I knew that having a combined team – or even individual – of designer, coder, and implementer would be best as it would keep costs down and ensure that we had no transitional problems, no finger pointing with one person saying the previous person did bad work, and so on. Alas, I lost that battle. I also made my case for a larger design budget because I had been through similar website development projects and knew that this business needed a design that would top $2,000 by quite a bit. You can guess how that argument, I mean discussion, went.
Not being the ultimate decision maker, I found a designer that fit the budget and spent hours upon hours upon hours explaining and re-explaining what we needed and why the designs weren’t quite right. One thing you’ll also find when you pick the wrong type of worker – on the low end – is that you often end up questioning why they did not make the changes you made explicit… no matter how many times you state them. The additional $1,000 or $2,000 that I would have liked to have spent on a better fitting designer was easily spent on my salary for the time I had to devote to the project.
You know what happened in the end with the design? It was just okay, and who took the bullet for not having a spectacular design?
via Gideon Tsang
You guessed it. I did.
Then came time for someone to code the website, and again, my budget was $2,000, but this time around, I got lucky and found someone that was a good fit for both the budget and the job needed, but when it got to implementation, things went south again. Due to frustrations over the design and the fact that I had maxed my budget, implementation was brought in house and would be done by people that had almost no experience with website development or server management.
It was at this time that I started to want to shoot myself. When the coder handed over the site, everything worked perfectly. For weeks and then months after that time, the site proceeded to break every time we tried something new just in the testing phase, and our guy – not knowing much about website development – couldn’t tell us if it was him, our coder, or a ghost in the machine.
In the end, we spent $4,000 on outsourced labor, used at least160 hours of my time, and dedicated another person to the project for well over 300 hours… all because we made bad decisions about the value of what we needed and whether or not there were substitutes.
via Sean MacEntee
If I could do it over
I would have made a stronger case for the special needs that we had. It as a unique company in a vertical that was accustomed to world class website design – not $2,000 design. I knew we needed a great designer and that we needed a team or an individual that could do the project end-to-end to ensure quality, but I didn’t do my research to the extent that I could show data, which is what I needed. There’s no guarantee that things would have been any better if I had made a stronger case, but looking back on this, I know that it was my mistake to not visit a marketplace, gather numbers, and get supporting evidence. Unfortunately, my lack of foresight on the project led us all to waste hundreds of hours in order to save a few thousands and only in the end come out with a mediocre product.
Should you pay outsourced workers hourly or by deliverable?
Do your research. Get your data. And, make your decision based on the needs of your own project and circumstances – not based on budget or preconceived notions from people that don’t know anything about what you’re working on.
Anyone interested in people, power, or politics, and anyone interested in 50 Cent.
When?
No rush.
Why?
In a similar way to how a well written biography is intriguing, this book is also an intriguing examination of the power principles that supposedly underpin 50 Cent’s life.
Best Quote
By a paradoxical law of human nature, trying to please people less will make them more likely in the long run to respect and treat you better.
Review
To me. The 50th Law is Robert Greene’s best book. The 48 Laws of Power comes across as too much of a laundry list, and The Art of Seduction made me feel slimy. I want to note though that the narrator/reader of both of those audiobook did not help at all though. This book shares a lot of characteristics with those books, but has a central character that is at least intriguing and in the public space, so reading this book makes you feel a bit like you’re getting a little insider information on 50 Cent.
I do not fully agree with 50 Cent’s worldview, but clearly, he is highly accomplished, apparently very smart, and has experiences that I will never get close to, so whether you agree with how he views the world should be a second consideration after the fact that you can easily learn a lot about how people very different from your view and experience life just by reading this book.
One of the main things that stuck out to me in this book was 50 Cent’s view of fear. Fear makes you weak. It causes you to make bad decisions, not take chances you need to in order to succeed, and take chances that you would have been better off passing on. This is one reason that 50 Cent has focused so much time on learning from others very different from him, doing things that make him uncomfortable, and not accepting weakness in those around him. Letting fear reside within himself or people around him creates more opportunities for failure.
Last Word
As I said, I don’t really view the world in the same way that 50 Cent does, but there’s a lot that you can learn from The 50th Law, and at the very least, I think that you’ll enjoy the writing and personal stories woven in.
Even the best communicators have things they could work on, and honestly, can you say you’re a great communicator already?
Best Quote
People who are skilled at dialogue do their best to make it safe for everyone to add their meaning to the shared pool–even ideas that at first glance appear controversial, wrong, or at odds with their own beliefs. Now, obviously they don’t agree with every idea; they simply do their best to ensure that all ideas find their way into the open.
Review
I really, really liked the information shared in this book, but hated the format. It’s written as if you’re watching examples being played on on video or on a stage, so it’s very dialogue heavy with bookend analyses, and being an audiobook person, the fact that they have voice actors playing it out really rustled my jimmies.
This book really helped me to deal with some tough conversations that I was avoiding, and I wholeheartedly believe that it will help you. Start with Heart, Learn to Look, and Pool of Shared Meaning are some of the easiest concepts to remember and apply, and in just the few months since I have read Crucial Conversations, they’ve had an impact on me.
Last Word
Honestly, this is one of the better business books that I’ve read in years. It’s not revolutionary. It’s not going to bring anything to light that you shouldn’t already know, but it will give you a great walk-through of successful tactics for dealing with your own conversational difficulties and those of others, so I say got out and buy Crucial Conversations now.
If you are interested in business strategy, military strategy, personal dynamics, or leadership, read this book.
When should you read The Art of War by Sun Tzu?
Early in your career. I recommend reading this in college or early into your first post-college job.
Why should you read The Art of War by Sun Tzu?
You can learn a lot about positioning yourself in your company, your group of friends, and even within your family.
Best Quote
Because it seems particularly relevant to current times:
No long war ever profited any country: 100 victories in 100 battles is simply ridiculous. Anyone who excels in defeating his enemies triumphs before his enemy’s threat becomes real.
Review
The Art of War by Sun Tzu is an ancient military treatise. As such, it uses the language of battle to impart lessons that apply to many of life’s situations. The text itself is thirteen chapters, each focusing on a different style of military engagement. In the version that I read, ancient stories highlighting the strategies from each chapter break up Sun Tzu’s original text. If you are like me, this helps significantly because it is not particularly easy to relate to Sun Tzu’s text by itself, and the stories help you to work out the value of each of Sun Tzu’s teachings.
The Art of War can teach you a lot about business strategy and workplace dynamics, but the things that really stuck out were:
Choose your battles.
Find where others are weak and exploit that.
Don’t fight someone head to head if you can help it.
A little bit of brain is worth quite a bit more than a lot of brute force.
You’re not going to sit down for an afternoon and lazily thumb through The Art of War. Sun Tzu does not give a lot of explanation for his strategies and approaches, and the copy can feel very dispassionate so it’s also not going to be something that you can sit down and understand without really focusing.
Final word
I recommend that anyone interested in improving their personal or professional relationships or in working on leadership skills read this book. If you are like me, you won’t find it to be the most thrilling, but it is worth your time if you apply what it teaches you.
