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To ensure that you get results, you might want to give your clients that nudge at specific times, such as when:you’ve solved their problemthey’ve achieved success through your offeringthey express that they’re happy with your workthey thank you profuselyyou successfully deliver a product on time

Of course, most of your clients will be busy people who don’t have much time set aside for tasks like this. That’s why it’s your job to make it easier for them. One way to do this is to provide them with a few sample questions in your testimonial request email. Here are a few that you might want to put to use:What prompted you to seek [your/your company’s] services? What situation or problem did you need to solve?Why did you specifically select [you/your company] for this project?What made you believe that [you/your company] was the best for achieving your desired result?How did you benefit from working with [you/your company]?What are the two most significant improvements that have resulted from your work with [you/your company]?What exactly did [you/your company] do to contribute to the outcome you wanted?What were the results of working with [you/your company]?Describe why you feel that working with [you/your company] was successful.In the future, what type of businesses would most benefit from working with [you/your company]?If a potential client was on the fence about whether to work with [you/your company] or not, what would you say to them?

Letter to a client whom you’ve asked to write a testimonial:Dear [Client],Working with clients like you makes my business a great joy. Thank you for agreeing to provide a testimonial. Your story will help inform our potential clients why it’s good to work with us and how they can benefit.To help you get started, I’ve included a few questions, but please feel free to write whatever you like.[Include two to four questions, using the above list as a guide.]Thank you for your time and kind support. We value your business and look forward to working with you again in the future. Please let me know if there is anything further I can do for you.[Your preferred closing],[Your name]

The question The main question in play here is: How thick should clients be? Let me define my terms: I define the Client as the thing which is used by exactly one user, which interacts directly with that user, and which is probably physically close to that person. I define the Server as the thing which is shared by multiple users, which interacts directly with the Client, and which could be physically located anywhere. I define the Pipe as the connection between the Client and the Server. I define the notion of a Thick client as a relative term. Thicker clients have more app-specific code and are less dependent on the Server. Thinner clients leave more of the app-specific work to be done on the Server. There are two main variables in decisions about the thickness of clients: The quality of the Pipe: This includes bandwidth, latency, availability, reliability, and cost The Client side costs: This includes cost of hardware, software development, deployment, upgrades, and maintenance. And, there are two laws which apply: As the quality of the pipe goes up, the client can get thinner. As the client side costs go down, the client can get thicker.

why does the thickness of Clients vary? Because varying Client thickness creates opportunities to compete in the marketplace. You can differentiate yourself from your competition by making your Client thicker (more expensive) and talking about performance and a better user experience and stuff like that. Or, you can differentiate yourself by making your Client thinner (less expensive) and talking about lower Total Cost of Ownership and easier installation and stuff like that.

This issue is not new Back in the 1960s and 1970s, when we only had mainframes and minicomputers, there was a distinction between smart terminals (thick clients) and dumb terminals (thin clients). In the 1980s, we got workstations (really expensive thick clients, purchased by people who perceived them as cheap compared to the mainframes and minis) and microcomputers (far less expensive thick clients, purchased by people who previously didn't have a computer at all). In the early 1990s, the high cost of workstations gave rise to X terminals, thin client devices which couldn't do much more than display the graphical user interface. My manager bought one of those fancy new 19.2k modems and actually tried doing Motif widget development from home. In the mid 1990s, web browsers appeared. For a very brief time, this technology was regarded only as a way to collaborate on hypertext documents. This phase of the web lasted for most of an afternoon. Meanwhile, back in Champaign, Illinois, the Unsung Hero and His Eminence were busy building a web browser which had more "stuff" in it. What kind of stuff? The sort of stuff that made web browsers into a platform for delivery of apps. And the technologies of the web have been moving primarily in that direction ever since.

1. 80/20 rule from Noah Kagan Appsumo’s founder, Noah Kagan, notes that one rule of thumb that they follow is to use 80% of their marketing budget for things that are working and 20% on newer marketing initiatives. One more thing: they go all in when they find marketing channels that work. You can watch one of his presentations where he shares his experiences of growing Mint, Facebook, and AppSumo here.

2. Communicate, communicate, communicate At Treehouse, we work remotely and as you might imagine. There are some that think there is no replacement to working in person while others support it. For us, we’re half and half – we have an office in Orlando and we also have a team up in Portland. The rest of us are distributed. But hey, it works because we communicate a lot. If you don’t feel like you are running enough A/B tests, speak up about it. If you feel like the team needs more developers, speak up. If you feel like an executive decision is going to cost the company money in the long run, talk. People might not always agree with you but it’s your job to communicate. You’re doing the company a disservice if you aren’t being honest. To get you started, here are some tools we use to communicate: Campfire Skype Google Chat Google Hangout GoToMeeting – we use GoToMeeting for our leadership meetings. It’s very simple to use and the video quality is pretty good.

3. Be a voracious reader Although there’s a lot of crappy content circulating the internet, there’s always going to be someone you can learn from. The key is being able to discern signal from noise. For example, if I’m looking to learn more on conversion rate optimization, there are great blogs such as Unbounce, ConversionXL, KISSmetrics, SEOmoz, and more. Just look at the detailed blog posts that they write: 10 Useful Findings About How People Use Websites – ConversionXL 5 Landing Page Conversion Killers – Unbounce The Ultimate Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization – SEOmoz If your goal is to squeeze every penny out of your website, you should be reading conversion rate optimization articles like the ones above. They cost no money to read and stand to help create original ideas that will eventually create more profit for you. This applies to any topic you’re interested in. Using the right tools can go a long way in helping you save time. If you’re on the go and don’t have time to read, you can use Pocket. To help you find relevant topics/articles via Twitter, you can grab curated lists using Listorious. Finally, I like picking off interesting topics from Inbound.org or Hacker News. Key takeaway: don’t read every single blog out there. Find the ones that actually add value and follow them.

Ramit:  I want to emphasize a couple of things you mentioned. One, if you’re charging 5, 10, 20 bucks an hour, it’s very, very difficult to go from that to charging 200, 300 an hour or 10,000 a week.  It’s very difficult to make that transition. If you do it when you come in, that can happen. But going from one level to another is extremely difficult.

Thumbnail sketch: You can get from $20 to $100 by getting serious as a professional, and you get from $100 to $200 by getting really good as a professional (or working in a high-demand speciality), and then somewhere between say $150 and a weekly rate in the tens of thousands you probably repositioned your offering such that it is no longer directly comparable to what you were doing before.

Can you sell Rails at $50k a week?  I'm going to go with "almost certainly yes."  I think there are probably people who do that, and if you listened to them pitch clients, they would speak a language that holds very little in common with what you hear from a $100 an hour Rails developer.  Want to speak that language?  Keep reading for some thoughts.  (It will also help to get pretty darn good at Rails... though I think most people in my audience probably overestimate how skilled you have to be to move up that ladder.)]

1. Good copywriting is underrated: Compelling copy is key to conversions and also making your brand human, friendly and fuzzy. Developers can’t write copy that well, that’s what marketers are for. Lesson: Great copy is a huge differentiator. It connects your audience to your brand and it has a direct impact on retention and engagement. “Copy is so important because it communicates your vision and helps you solve your products,” said Isenberg. “If you can’t do that right you’ll have little conversion rates and your not going to have a consistent brand image.”

2. Influencers are a big deal: Scale users quickly by onboarding communities. Isenberg worked with schools, trading rooms and blogs. Influencers hold the key to these communities. Lesson: The best way to onboard influencers is the old school way by building a real relationship. Pick up a phone, email them or best yet, take them out for drinks. “I love sitting behind a computer because it’s my safe haven, but the truth is that relationships is key to getting these people involved,” he said.

5. Distribution, distribution, distribution: Strategic alliances with partners helps create value-add for their user base and helps you get traffic (and SEO juice). Lesson: Embeddable widgets that allow users to distribute content across the web are particularly powerful when it’s the strategic partner’s content. “Find your most compelling feature that can be embeddable and do deals.”

Which questions are the most important for your company? That’s a question only you can answer. To give you some ideas, these are the questions that I use: Name – This indicates who filled out the form. Website – This documents which website was worked on. What service did you have completed? – This records which service the testimonial is for. Are you happy that you had this service completed? – This indicates whether or not the customer was satisfied with the service and provides a lead in to the next question. If yes, why are you happy that you had this service completed? – The answer to this question provides the first paragraph for the testimonial. Instead of asking someone to simply “write a testimonial or recommendation,” I ask a specific question prompting the answer that I’m looking for and leading the customer down the path I want them to take. Wufoo forms also allow you to provide explanation text on the right side as another way to lead customers down the right path. I like to use this text to provide a sample of the kind of content that I’m looking for. (An example of this can be viewed here.) On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely would you be to recommend this service to a friend or colleague? – This question provides the most relevant customer satisfaction data, according to a post from KISSmetrics.com titled “Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys Aren’t Useful and What To Do About It.” It also serves as a lead in for the next question. What would you tell them? – This question once again leads customer to provide the content that I’m looking for in a customer testimonial by asking a specific question. Once again, you can also use Wufoo forms to provide a sample testimonial for this question. What suggestion(s) would you give as a way to improve our service? – This question is the most helpful for customers who were dissatisfied for one reason or another, but the answers have to be taken with a grain of salt. Sometimes dissatisfied customers won’t be satisfied no matter what you do. It’s best not to make changes based on every answer given to this question. It’s necessary to ignore some suggestions because you can’t keep everyone happy and can’t implement every suggestion.  However, in some cases the answer to this question could lead to valuable insight on improving your offering. Do you mind if your name and website are shared on my customer testimonial page? (i.e. Do you mind getting a free link back to your website?) – This question asks for permission to share the customer’s testimonial, and it’s always a good idea to get permission before sharing something like this if your privacy policy doesn’t already include it.

p.s. If you’d like to check out my form to see how it works, you can view it here.

I personally prefer to ask as few questions as possible for any survey I create.

when it comes to Web­site opti­miza­tion, the three fun­da­men­tal ques­tions pretty much never change: Who is com­ing to the site? How did they arrive? And what are their goals? What’s the next step for­ward for them both in terms of their goals and your con­ver­sion funnel? What do they need to under­stand, believe, and feel in order to con­fi­dently take those next steps

under­stand WHY web vis­i­tors do what they do. Ana­lyt­ics can tell you what vis­i­tors are doing, but you’ll never really fig­ure out WHY they’re doing it until you get a grasp on these questions.

Designing Basically, designing means how your software looks and how it works. The purpose of designer is to make software that's better than what already exists. A designer makes sure that a software is as simple to use as possible, execution is smooth and bug-free, and user never has any confusion in achieving his goals when he uses that software.

So, here are some skills and qualities that may help you in having a better life as a programmer. Social This is probably the most obvious one and that's why it's highly ignored. I can tell this from my personal experience. Whether you are in college or a company, being social always works in your favor. Often times, we ignore small things like saying a simple 'Hi' to a coworker or greeting them with a simple smile. I had this problem during my school days, and also for some part of college life. 

A programmers aim shouldn't be to simply write good programs, rather it should be developing really great products. Even the basic knowledge of designing can help a long way in accomplishing that. Recommended book : The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman.