The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 4: Perception is Everything

Feb 10, 2008

The 5 Barriers to Success Series — Part 4: Perception is Everything
by Skellie

Perception is everything.
Photo by froodmat

If you’ve been wondering why your blog or website hasn’t been growing as quickly or steadily as you hoped, you might be encountering one (or more) of the five barriers to success. So far, I’ve covered three parts:

In this post, I’ll be outlining the fourth barrier to success: visitors perceiving your site as low quality, even when it isn’t.

Barrier 4: Perception is Everything

In ‘Why Traffic, Your Subscriber Count and Money Don’t Matter,’ I talked about how the way visitors perceive your blog or website can often influence its reality. A blog that looks and feels unread and unremarkable will often become one. A website that looks slick and popular will often go on to become well-known, even if it’s not highly trafficked in the beginning.

You can expect new visitors to your blog or website to judge it on all the following criteria:

Design — does it look professional or sloppy, clean or cluttered? Most (but certainly not all) quality sites have been carefully designed and well-presented. On a first-impressions basis, visitors often make judgments based on what is ‘generally’ true.
Content — is it gripping? Is it relevant? Is it original?
Subscriber count — is it small or big? How many other people are engaged followers?
Comment count — for new visitors, a high comment count seems to indicate an engaged, passionate readership. A low comment count can make the content seem unremarkable, not worth talking about. Speaking for myself only, when I’m trying to work out at a glance whether a blog is established or not, this is usually the first place I look (even though I know it doesn’t tell the whole story, a visitor doesn’t have much else to go on).
Quality of writing — sloppy writing which hasn’t been polished or proofed can make great ideas seem like mediocre ones.
Usability — most well-loved websites and blogs make all the information a visitor could need easily available. If visitors feel lost, they might wander somewhere else.
Confusion — many blogs suffer from a lack of clarity in the way they present elements. Separate bits of information, links and navigational elements are jumbled together, look messy and are hard to separate. Visitors won’t enjoy interacting with a system like this.

While you have access to email, stats, subscriber numbers, Technorati rankings and monthly earnings figures, your visitors don’t. Your blog or website tells two different stories: one story to you, and one story to your visitors. Visitors are much more likely to give a blog that seems high-quality more chances to impress them. They’ll dig deeper into your articles and spend more time examining what your site has to offer.

You should try to establish these 3 indicators of popularity and quality on your site.

At least five comments on each post you write. If you don’t have a large pool of potential commenters, respond to every commenter and get to know your most regular commenters. All you need is five people who comment on every post you write, or ten people who comment on every second post. You could even work out an arrangement: they comment on every post you write, you comment on every post they write. By commenting on five blogs, you can make your own blog look popular and established.
Only show your subscriber count if it tells the right story. If your comment average is around 1 per post but you have several hundred subscribers, it’s worth showing your count. If you get a lot of comments (10+ average) but have less than a thousand subscribers, I’d suggest not showing your count. In other words, if your comment count makes you look more popular than other blogs in your niche which have more subscribers than you, don’t show your subscriber count. Let visitors assume that it’s a lot higher than it is.
List your most popular posts. Once your site has been running for a while you’ll have a pool of articles you can use as source material for a list of your ‘Most Popular’ articles. You can call the list something else, as long as it highlights your most popular content. The question you should ask when making this list: which five to ten posts would I want every new visitor to see?

If your blog or website looks and feels like it’s established and well-loved, visitors will assume it is, even if the stats below the surface tell a different story.

The fourth barrier to success is the counter-point: if your blog or website looks and feels un-established and unremarkable, visitors will often assume it is. The stats below the surface will usually end up reflecting that reality, unless some radical changes are made.

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41 Comments, Comment or Ping

James Chartrand - Men with Pens

Good one, Skellie. This is exactly why we overhauled our site completely. We redid the design, we changed the whole look, we let a little more of us show and took off the corporate suit, and we even changed domain names to brand ourselves better.

The results were worth it. Nothing has changed about the content, really, except that perhaps we feel more confident and relaxed in our new “home”, but the looks of the site and the way readers perceive us now made a huge difference - and it’s only been a week.

Feb 10th, 2008
Evan

Hi Skellie,

I’m a skeptic about this - or unusual as a blog reader. The look of a blog rates way down how I rate a blog. The number of comments doesn’t really matter to me.

The only things I care about are: have they got the information I want; is it well written?

The only part of blog design I care about is usability. If I can’t get at the information I’ll never go back.

The other things I don’t care about. They may matter to those who blog about blogs or blog designers but to others? I’m not convinced.

I agree wholeheartedly with you comments about the importance of content and quality writing though.

Feb 10th, 2008
Mary Jaksch of GoodlifeZen

Thanks, Skellie.
After every one of your posts I put something new on my blogger’s ‘to do’ list. Your site is my number one blogging resource!

After reading this post I gave myself a stern talking-to. Reason: I haven’t yet implemented a stunning new design for my site that a kind friend created. (I’m not savvy enough to change it myself…)

After this post, implementing the new design is a lot higher on my
list.

Actually, I notice my own behaviour when stumbling sites: I stumble right past ones that have an unsatisfactory look.

Feb 10th, 2008
Corey - Simple Marriage Project

Great Info Skellie. After reading and implementing your ideas, my blog, while still very much in infancy, has gained some momentum. Keep the great content coming. Thanks.

Feb 10th, 2008
Summy

Good points.

As for “indicators of popularity and quality” my site is too new to qualify for your suggestions but you triggered an idea on showing my site as an up and comer: “subscriber growth last week”.

Please check it out and let me know if it’s too ostentatious- it’s toward the top of the page. If people like it they can certainly copy this.

Thanks Skellie.

Feb 10th, 2008
Mrs. Micah

It’s interesting—I’m likely to think that a blogger with great ideas (presented with decent spelling, grammar, proofreading, etc) is a blogger with great ideas. One with great ideas AND a great blog layout and a number of comments is an important blogger with great ideas.

I don’t really know how I react from there on, how much I privilege the “important” one. Haven’t figured it out that far yet.

Feb 10th, 2008
thenewsconduit

Another great article - and I have to agree wholeheartedly with the points you’re making. My blog is basically a barren wasteland at the moment (tumbleweeds included), and I’ve only been able to get one unsolicited (ie, not my real life friends) comment.

But now I’m going to implement the fantastic plan you’ve outlined in your article, with a little extra oomph added to it by yours truly. From now on, for every person that visits my blog and does NOT comment - I’ll kill a cute, fluffy, adorable kitten. So I hope everyone comments, because I think my local pet store owner is starting to get suspicious already…

On a side note, my blog is a wordpress one - does anyone out there know how to find the number of subscribers I have? (Not that I think I’d be wanting to display the number for quite some time.)

Feb 10th, 2008
Catherine Lawson

Hi Skellie - thanks for the great info. I am definitely guilty of not really having an organised layout. I just have way too many categories, and I would advise anyone to keep it simple because it’s going to take a long time to change it now.

Another huge mistake I made was only having a partial feed. I changed it a couple of days ago and a commenter said that he likes my blog, but doesn’t have the time to click through partial feeds to read it.

That picture is brilliant by the way.

Feb 10th, 2008
Ruchir Chawdhry

“At least five comments on each post you write.”

An easy way to do that is by replying to each comment you receive

Feb 10th, 2008
HEATHER FUNK PALACIOS

I keep wrestling with “to comment on comments” or not. I actually fear bloggers knowing my strategy so then my comments becoming disingenuous. Yet to clueless non-bloggers, I know it encourages them. What should I do??

Feb 11th, 2008
Shawn Kinkade - Aspire Blog

Skellie,

Great point - I feel like I’ve done a lot to ‘professionalize’ the look and feel (and actually used a lot of ideas from some of your previous posts), but I do think it’s difficult to account for personal tastes - i.e. I like pictures, but others may find them annoying.

How much do you cater versus to what you think others want versus what your own personal ’style’?

Thanks for all of your thoughts - I really enjoy your stuff.

Shawn

Feb 11th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

Let’s see:

2006: 414 posts, 1327 comments
2007: 159 posts, 285 comments
2008 so far: 63 posts, 105 comments

Oh well..

But I disagree about site design. There are plenty of very ugly, very successful sites - content is what matters. There’s nothing WRONG with being “pretty”, but it isn’t a necessity.

Feb 11th, 2008
Shaun

She didn’t say that design was essential — and no one can deny that it’s important.

Great post, skelliewag. I read all your posts, but often forget to scroll on down and comment. ;-p

Feb 11th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

“She didn’t say that design was essential — and no one can deny that it’s important.”

I do deny that it’s important.

There are dozens of examples of very successful sites with really ugly design and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of beautifully designed sites that are completely unimportant.

Good design is optional. Do it if you want to and can afford to. Don’t worry about it if you can’t.

Feb 11th, 2008
James Chartrand - Men with Pens

I’ll have to disagree with you, Anthony. A poorly designed site isn’t going to grab my attention or keep me reading. I can’t focus on the content because I’m wincing at the screen. A poor design also shows me the person isn’t serious about what they’re doing or lacks the knowledge - which demonstrates a higher risk of failure.

Most people think like me as well. Content is King, but the Emperor does need clothes, because first impressions and perception are everything online.

Feb 11th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@james

Hardly the first thing we’ve disagreed about, right?

Anyway, just two examples of bad design:

http://problogger.com
http://craigslist.com

You want to argue they aren’t successful?

One of the most popular tech sites period is arstechnica - they built that site using an impossible to read black background! Yet because of their content, they became very successful. Long after, they finally got rid of that awful design.

Design is not important.

Funny, in the real world, nobody would dare say that unattractive people can’t succeed. Yeah, it’s nice to be tall, handsome and incredibly intelligent, but the latter will do fine.

Same thing for websites.

Feb 11th, 2008
Hock

Looks matter for about 5 seconds. But on the internet, 5 seconds can be an eternity. If you don’t capture my attention within 5 seconds, the chances of me reading your content will be very low.

If you’ve got excellent content that I want to read, I can forgive the ugly site.

Some of the best SEO blogs that I read are butt-ugly. But hey, they deliver.

Feb 12th, 2008
Bente Lilja Bye

Hi Skellie, yet another useful post.

I’ve said it before; I think design is very important! I support your view on that.

Have to agree with Cathrine Lawson - the picture is excellent. The best I’ve seen here, no less.

Feb 12th, 2008
Evan

Hi Anthony,

I know its emotionally immature but I’m glad you’re saying all the things I want to say.

Feb 12th, 2008
skellie

Thanks for the comments everyone — I’ve enjoyed reading them. One counter-point I’ve seen made is that ‘design isn’t important’, so I want to make my defense of my stance as part of a response to Anthony Lawrence’s comment.

@ Anthony Lawrence: I disagree with your logic on this particular point. The core argument you’re making looks like this:

Some popular sites have bad designs.
Therefore, “design is not important.”

By the same logic:

A runner can still win a race with an injury.
Therefore, full health is not important.

Some successful companies are pretty bad at marketing.
Therefore, marketing is not important.

The logic doesn’t prove that having a good design/good marketing/full health *isn’t important*, only that it’s possible to succeed in spite of not having these things.

The logic doesn’t prove that it isn’t harder to do so than it would have been *with* those things.

Who’s to say that Ars Technica wouldn’t be bigger than Gizmodo and Engadget by now if it hadn’t been handicapped from the beginning? I don’t think any of us can claim to know. It seems a lot more likely that its growth would have been slowed somewhat. Here’s why:

Those who don’t care about design won’t be turned off by a good design. Those who care about design will appreciate a good design. Conversely, those who don’t care about design won’t care if the design is bad. Those who care about the design will be turned off by a bad design. You’re worse off in the second case. You’re losing some people as a result of the design, as opposed to losing none. I’ve spoken with people who refuse to read any website with a dark background, for example.

One thing I’ve learned from the community consultations at ProBlogger is that design matters to a lot of people. Some people have said that they’d skip a blog over completely because the design was so bad.

Yes, it’s possible to measure a badly designed site as being ’successful’, but the amount of people turned off by a bad design is an impossible metric to measure. That makes it easy to claim that because we can measure successes and not losses, then the losses don’t matter. But I don’t think that logic holds water. You can see even from the comments here that there are a number of people for whom design plays an important part in their perception of a site.

I agree, you can succeed with a lackluster design, but it makes things harder than they have to be.

Feb 12th, 2008
Evan

Hi Skellie,

You say:
Who’s to say that Ars Technica wouldn’t be bigger than Gizmodo and Engadget by now if it hadn’t been handicapped from the beginning? I don’t think any of us can claim to know.

But then you go on to claim that you do know.

If it really is impossible to measure the argument is unresolvable.

Feb 12th, 2008
skellie

@ Evan: The only thing I said is that it’s likely that Ars Technica’s bad design “slowed its growth somewhat”. Could you provide the quote where I claimed to know that it would have been bigger than Engadget and Gizmodo?

I think you’ve misunderstood me on that one.

Being unable to measure whether it would have been bigger than those two sites is a minor point — it’s not the center of the argument. For design to matter, I’d need only to prove that at least some people do take design into account when evaluating whether to stick with a site or skip it. I think we can find proof of that without looking too far: right here in the comments section.

Feb 12th, 2008
Evan

OK Skellie,

Here’s the argument.

People often do not behave as they say they have or will. People say they care about design but then flood to blogs with bad design. Take account of this observation. This is evidence. Many of these people may well say they care about design but still go there.

Your claim to knwo is that you claim that things may have been different. Perhaps, perhaps not.

If you can’t measure something how can you know what is more likely or not? You can’t. What is the likelihood? How do you know it is at all likely? This is your claim to know.

If you have the proof provide it. The central point you make is that it matters to the numbers of visitors you get. Provide the proof of this.

If you wish to attack the form of other’s logic I’ll attack yours.

Your argument goes like this:
I feel this
Other people say this
Therefore it must be true.

This is simply not the case. Your argument doesn’t hold water. I don’t think I have misunderstood at all.

Feb 12th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@skellie:

Would you ever dare say that an unattractive person needs to have plastic surgery before they dare to hope for success?

Sites like this and Problogger et al. have a very warped view of reality because you are too invoved with other bloggers. Who are the readers here, the commentors? Bloggers, designers, SEO folk 99.99%.

You are in the pickle barrel. You can’t help thinking like a pickle.

Feb 12th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@Evan

Actually, there is some proof of my pov, and it correlates somewhat with what you said.

“Web Site Usability” (see http://aplawrence.com/Books/webusability.html) studied people’s ability to use websites. the study found that the traditional “well-designed” sites were difficult and confusing for the testers to use, the same testers often reported that they “liked” those very sites! The authors also note that there may be a conflict in that sites that attract attention while surfing seem to have elements that detract from usability, and that sites that do better for usability aren’t “interesting” to surfers.

Of course today “good design” is generally construed to include usability, but here we’re talking about appearance only.

and Skellie? “I think we can find proof of that without looking too far: right here in the comments section.”

Pickles, Skellie, all pickles.

Feb 12th, 2008
Evan

Thanks Anthony,

I’ll look it up.

I think blogging is so new that any solid information is worth its weight in gold.

Feb 12th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@Evan

I agree, but I’ve suggested in other posts that this study is old enough that things may have changed already. The basic human trait to be of two minds (what you say you like vs. what your actions prove) remains, of course. You’ve probably read plenty of psychological studies along that line; if not I recommend picking up “Kluge” by Gary Marcus.

It definitely seems to me that there is a lot of Conventional Wisdom in the blogging world that doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny. This “pretty matters” is just one example.

Of course just because something has been studied well doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and we always have to be aware of specifics: “pretty” probably does matter if you are a blog designer selling services and obviously doesn’t if you are Craig’s List. How much it matters for Joe Blow and his thoughts on politics could go either way.

There’s also the matter that CW can drive reality. RSS subscribers is an obviously stupid way to value a blog, but if in fact that is how buyers measure its worth, the “stupidity” is unimportant and the reality takes over.

The world is always a strange place, isn’t it?

Feb 13th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@skellie

Small point: Gizmodo and Engadget aren’t tech blogs in the sense that Ars Technica is. They are “gadget” blogs, full of shiny baubles with far wider appeal than a true tech blog. Most of the readers here would probably like “gadget” blogs, but few would find Ars Technica of any interest.

Feb 13th, 2008
James Chartrand - Men with Pens

@ Anthony - at the risk of getting trounced by your smarts (mine are low when I don’t have enough coffee in me) and for the simple pleasure of debating with you (you’re fun to do that with!), I’m going to draw in another point:

Human beings are hardwired in their brains to judge on looks.

There is a reason why the pretty people become successful and why women starve themselves to look thinner. There is a reason why aggressive go-getters and leaders are perceived as better people. Society’s perception of what is attractive is very strong. While there are many success stories that don’t involve pretty or strong-minded individuals, most of them do.

(And people, please don’t assume I’m saying that it’s *always* like this. I’m trying to avoid sweeping statements. I really am.)

Looks and how we perceive many things bias our choices. Pretty is a desirable trait and an unfortunate measure of success.

So while less pretty doesn’t mean less potential for success, prettier certainly stacks the odds in one’s favor - simply because our brains tell us that certain traits are desirable ones and these traits are attractive.

*ducks and gets ready for a trouncing*

Feb 13th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

@james

Actually it’s much more complicated than that (and you know it).

Did everyone in your high school pursue the most beautiful member of whichever sex interested them? Or were alliances made because of humor, intelligence, shared interests, family ties and so on? Did the plug ugly star hockey player get a lot of attention? You bet he did.

I could write a full post on this subject alone, but it’s way outside of my scope..

Feb 13th, 2008
James Chartrand - Men with Pens

@ Anthony - Ah, but what people did, and what people truly desired and wanted were two very different things, were they not?

Damn. I think that just adds weight to your argument… I should stop now

Feb 13th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence

Obviously part of the problem here is that this is a sacred cow.

Many of the people who read and comment at sites like this
(blogging advice sites) have vested interests in various things. You, for example, write copy. Other readers design templates. I’d expect both copywriters and template designers to be concerned about appearance.

I’m a tech guy. My interests are much different than yours. If a tech site has information of value to me I’ll ignore atrocious English and garish colors and read it every day - and so will every other person who needs that information.

You wouldn’t - but you wouldn’t read that site anyway.

My site used to be really, really ugly. I mean really bad - hard to read, no attention paid whatsoever to grooming. I cleaned it up as best I’m able, but in fact I had no need to: I was doing fine before I combed my hair and shined my shoes. The “makeover” didn’t increase or decrease readers, and most of them probably didn’t even notice.. because it’s primarily a “tech” site.

Looks matter to people who think looks matter. It’s as simple as that.

Feb 13th, 2008
yungchin

Thanks for a great post. I agree with the points about site design - by the way, this here is one of the best looking / readable blog designs I’ve come across, too.

Having said that, I’ve (strangely) never thought of Ars Technica as an ugly site, even in the old days. I think that is because the old design gave you exactly the feeling that fitted the content well - and I don’t know how to capture that in words… maybe something of a “dark secrets of tech, only for the initiated” idea. They’re still writing some highly technical stuff like that but have also gone more mainstream since - so the change in site design suits that change in focus, too.

And, like Anthony Lawrence mentioned, Ars was never competing with any of those gadget sites, they cater to a completely different crowd. In fact, I’d dare to argue that had they adopted the site-design of Engadget they’d have less users now than they have gathered with their “home of the dark arts” design.

In other words: I think Ars Technica is an example of good site design. There’s no universally good design - you need to consider your audience…

Feb 15th, 2008
CatherineL

Anthony - you’re probably a nice guy. But, I would hate to be stuck in a lift with you.

Feb 22nd, 2008
Matt Livingston

An alternative way of thinking about this could possibly be “fake it ’til you make it.”

Great post. I’m a new reader, but I thoroughly enjoy reading your posts. You are clearly a deep and insightful writer.

Feb 26th, 2008
Ani

I think the most important criteria are content, design, quality of writing, usability. Because they say something about how dedicated the writer is about the website.
Subscriber count and comment count should not be used to measure how interesting and valuable the content is, because every blog starts from zero. If you find content that is useful/helpful, why stop visiting or not subscribing? Especially if it is a niche blog. Just look how much useless content make it to the top. Don’t follow the masses!

Mar 2nd, 2008