Internet Psychologist
Graham Jones 
Probably the most popular question I get asked is “how do I get more traffic to my website?” It is, of course, the wrong question. The real question that people are asking is “how do I get more of the right kind of traffic of people that are going to …
On the way into Reading from my house, there has been an Aldi supermarket trading happily for several years. It has been on its own on the edge of a housing estate and apparently doing well. Several months ago, however, the wasteland next to it started to be developed. A …
The chances are you attend business meetings most weeks, if not most days. You also know the problem, don’t you? Most of those meetings that you visit are time-wasters. You probably sit there frustrated that someone is droning on about something inconsequential. You might even get bored and check your …
Twice this week I have been asked the same question: what should I pay for a website? Twice this week I have given the same answer: that’s the wrong question…! The reason it is the wrong question is that it is treating the website as though it were a “one-off” …
The other day I was lecturing at the University of Buckingham on the potential for new technology to disrupt business. The students are studying for a degree in entrepreneurship, and they are all running “live” companies as part of their studies. They were keen to discover how they could predict …
This week Twitter decided to roll out an experiment in which certain people (I’m not one of them) were provided with the opportunity to write Tweets that are twice as long as normal. The company has increased the maximum length of a Tweet from 140 characters to 280. To understand …
Here in the UK, the coming week is “Recycling Week” where a national campaign will invite us all to recycle more. In spite of increased opportunities to recycle, with more roadside collections than ever before, it turns out that Brits are recycling less. And there is a clear psychological reason …
There is, it seems to me, a generalised air of cowardice on the Internet. This struck me again when I was in a conversation this week with a delegate who had attended one of my masterclasses on web success for business leaders. His company was in a traditional sector. Like …
Email users and businesses agree on one thing, it seems. Email marketing needs to improve.
Social media is full of hashtags – whoops, sorry – I mean #hashtags. But why? Well, maybe a bit of history will help us understand. Many people think that hashtags were invented by Twitter or someone using the network about seven years ago. While that is true – the first …
This week I was with a client when we started discussing a range of services they needed to help them improve their website. “Not more monthly spending,” they said. We chatted for a while about it, and then we realised something. The Internet has quietly crept up on us and …
Three times this week the same issue has come up for discussion. Time. Yesterday, I was running an all-day seminar for entrepreneurship students at the University of Buckingham where we explored how they could cope with all the pressures of running an online business. They realised there was a significant …
This week I was running a masterclass when I asked what I thought was an easy question. I simply said, “What, exactly, are you hoping to achieve with each item of content on your website?” There was a pause, some puzzled looks and then a mumbled, “What do you mean?” …
Online shopping is a minority activity. Forget the “mobile first” nonsense too. Most people want to go to real shops.
This week saw a surprising announcement. The person who told the world back in 2003 that we needed to have complex passwords that we changed every 90 days has admitted he was wrong. Security expert Bill Burr now says he was barking up the wrong tree. He is not alone. …