Which of these Amazon homepage designs is better?

It turns out it depends what we mean by “better.” My gut would say the one on the right, because the design is cleaner, simpler. Amazon put it to an A/B test and it turns out the one on the left performed better. Orders dropped significantly when Amazon tested the simpler design.

Greg Linden points to a deck of PDF slides by Amazon employees. It’s a couple years old, but has some more good examples of lessons they learned with hard data to back it up.

For a good overview of A/B testing, something most of us can do, check out Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

Tara Hunt says community is not the same as a marketing strategy. She shared 10 simple ways to shift thinking.

1. Be a community evangelist. Get feedback and learn what you can do better.
2. Shift your measures of success. PageViews or signups might not be the best yard stick. Find a way to measure true success.
3. Embrace the chaos. Life isn’t always organized and that’s okay.
4. Find your higher purpose. Know what you are achieving through the community.
5. Understand your audience. Who do we serve? Why do they give a damn?
6. INreach, not outreach. Focus on making your current members happy, not getting more members who will come and go.
7. Design to delight. Determine the optimal experience and include little things to make people smile.
8. Be part of the community. Get in there, talk to people, and get to know how they tick.
9. Marketing is not an afterthought. It’s everything you do. If your product isn’t great, marketing won’t make it so.
10. Have patience. There are no overnight successes.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Heather Luttrell knows all about online advertising. She’s the president of Indieclick, an ad network for online communities. She’s talked to many advertisers, publishers, and community members, and she knows how to monetize without upsetting the community.

Luttrell shared 10 myths and misconceptions about growing and monetizing communities:

1. If we build it, they will come.
2. Member acquisition won’t cost us anything.
3. Bandwidth is cheap and won’t cost any more as we grow.
4. We can add advertising space to the design after we have built an audience.
5. Our audience won’t accept ads.
6. Ads will look terrible.
7. Direct (or indirect) sales will sell our ads.
8. We need detailed data to manage sales.
9. We are getting 1000s of hits. Surely they are worth some ad dollars.
10. Advertising is our only source of revenue.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Marc Levin.)

Josh Spear and Aaron Dignan believe that a good community has a brand with which its members want to be identified. They call this Brand Utopia and they have six rules.

1. Know what you care about. It helps to be passionate. This will rub off on your community members.
2. Do something worth talking about. If nobody cares, then why bother?
3. Be authentic. Put values before revenue, or your community call you out as a fake… or worse, just leave.
4. Let the community create you. Continual feedback is key. Integrate with the community, don’t infiltrate.
5. Operate within the rules of your universe. Your community makes those rules, so gather deep knowledge of your area.
6. Change the world. Consumer are hungry for purpose.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists. Photo credit: Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

Jake McKee wants everyone to go home happy. In a community, that means the members get what they want and so do the hosts. Here are his six ways to make sure everyone goes home happy.

1. Redefine success. It’s more than just membership numbers. Find a way to track real success.
2. Share. A lot. Let people in on your inside story.
3. Constantly adjust. Take suggestions from the community.
4. Skip the NDA. I’d guess this rarely comes up in online discussions, but whenever an NDA is involved, it decreases the amount of real discussion that can go on.
5. Set and maintain expectations. If your site can’t always be free or without ads, it’s important to let the community know.
6. Train your colleages. Share your experiences with the community.

(This is part of the CommunityNext Week in Lists)