Ramit Sethi and designer Ben Bleikamp walk through the design choices on iwillteachyoutoberich.com. They show how author photos, Stanford credentials, and press logos build trust, how a running savings counter and comment bubbles create social proof, and why related posts keep readers from hitting dead ends.
Hey guys, it's Ramit from I Will Teach youh Be Rich. I'm here with my designer, Ben Bleikamp. Ben, what's up? We are here at Very Loud Cafe, but I think this will be fun. I wanted to ask you, you designed iwillteachyoubrich.com and there's a lot of stuff going on underneath the hood that people don't often get, but it works. We tested it and it works for a reason. So I wondered if you could kind of walk us through some of the cool stuff that you designed to show people how it works.
Okay. So the first thing is the credibility corner is what Ramit calls it. It starts out with a picture of him. Then you have in the text we made sure to mention that he graduated from Stanford top tier school. And then we made sure to put the logos of all the top tier press he's been in the domain. Sounds like a scam. So the first thing we needed to do was make sure it didn't sound like a scam.
And we needed to fulfill my huge ego.
Yeah. And his ego. So that's instant credibility. He's not trying to cheat you out of your money like the telemarketers are or the infomercials are. It's very simple, but it gets people to stay on the site.
Cool. What's next?
So then the comment bubbles are everybody on a blog and makes sure to keep their comments there. List how many comments they have. Ours are to the left of the title and huge for instant social proof that these posts aren't dormant. This content is always new. People are interacting with them.
It really seems like it's alive when you look at that huge bubble. 51 comments on that one. It's like, wow, I gotta check this out.
Yeah, yeah. So small number. Like a lot of blogs, you'll see like two comments, three comments on a lot of Ramit. So Ramit's posts, you'll see 100 comments, which is. Which is a big deal for a blog to get that high. Okay. At the top of the page there's thousand dollars or million dollar graphic. Just hit a million dollars today, I guess.
And that's how much have you. How much have you saved?
That's how much have you saved? So that's more social proof that he's actually helping people. That came from the 30 day challenge. A lot of people emailed Ramit saying how much they'd saved doing that. And he wanted a way to kind of showcase that he's actually helping people. So it's simple. You can continue adding to it. It keeps growing, so people keep seeing it go up.
So so far we've got credibility because of the scammy name of the site. And then we've got social proof with the comment bubbles and social proof with the last thing you just talked about. What else?
At the bottom of a post on a single post page, you'll see you get, you flow right into related posts. It's kind of like when people are done reading, a lot of people aren't going to be interested in reading comments, they're interested in reading more information. So every post is categorized. We're easy to pull in related categories, pull in popular posts from those categories instantly, send people to the next bit of content, the next savings tip, the next story, whatever it is, it works really well. Probably on the money diaries, just like the sex diaries in New York magazine. People love to keep reading those over and over. And then right after that you get the call to action to the two main products, which eventually will be more and more products. But instantly you're done reading this post. You thought it was good. What do I do next? You buy these products.
So it's interesting. It's kind of like what I like to call user loops. And we've talked about this. You never want to dead end the user. If they finish reading a post, they want to do something else. And what's interesting is a lot of times people get this wrong on blogs. They think, oh yeah, they can leave a comment. But leaving a comment, I mean, very.
High, very high, very high interactivity, leave.
A comment, you gotta say, okay, I have something interesting to write. I'm willing to put my name out there. It's a high barrier, right?
Even I, who do it all the time, like I'll write a comment and I'll be like, oh, that's not worth posting and I'll delete it.
That's because you're a weirdo, dude. That's why you and I get along so well. But like, clicking a link is not that risky.
Yeah, it's pretty easy to do. Yeah, you can always click back in your browser and click a different one if it doesn't work out.
So what's coming next on the site? We just spent about an hour cooking up some new schemes, right.
So we're doing a lot of testing and optimizing now, trying to get increase subscriber counts to the blog and the newsletter track. We're going to basically track everything. So if you look@facebook.com they put variables in all their links, basically. So if you hover over their logo, it says referral equals logo. That way they know how many times people click the logo graphic to get back to the homepage versus clicking the home link, which doesn't sound immediately useful. But for internal statistics to know how people are navigating the site, it's really useful to the User Experience team. With ramit's site, we'll track different versions of different boxes. So we'll be able to put like a version one of whatever box and be able to track which links people are clicking in the boxes, which box got them to click, which text or which graphic got them to click. And we'll be able to know which position it was clicked in. So if we move a box to a different spot, we'll be able to track which position it was clicked in, which version of the box was clicked, and which link within the box.
It's interesting. It's actually very similar to I Will Teach youh Be Rich, the whole principles I talk about, which is first build your infrastructure, build your system, and then once you do that, then you can start testing things and getting down into the details and. Because you've got the big system to work with.
Yeah. So the first thing we did, if you saw this site, we launched the crappy design, reworked the crappy design to be a little bit better, and now we're going to optimize the design to get the most out of it and.
Then we're going to dominate. Yeah.
All right.
All right. Ben Blackkamp. Thanks a lot, Ben.
Yeah.
