Sales Archives - Documentor

10 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Online Product Documentation

May 11, 2017May 11, 2017 Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Documentation of a product is an important area where customers get self-help. Such guides or Knowledge Base helps in reducing support requests by 70% and even help in getting more organic traffic to the product’s page. People usually think that the online guide is just to dump the manual to read, but they ignore all the excellent benefits of having a nice and easy to navigate guides. That’s why I recommend checking some of the best examples of online guides to implement the best practices in your product’s guide.

Guides are helpful in many ways but sometimes you may not be able to find the required or expected help there too.

As a customer of a very popular marketing product, I was browsing their guide and found that the guide was not up-to-date and even the options appearing on the panel were not listed in the guide. That was very frustrating and finally I raised a support ticket. Well, support representative was quick to help resolve the issue but if the document was up-to-date, I would have fixed the issue by myself.

Create beautiful and easy to maintain documentation or online guide using Documentor WordPress Plugin

Common Mistakes in Online Documentation

If you are creating a product documentation, I would suggest to take a look at these common mistakes that people do while creating a guide or a knowledge base.

#1 Product and Guide NOT in Sync

One should release a new guide or update the previous one after releasing a new version of the product. I have seen some online guides explaining the steps as per previous version of the product. If the update was not big enough or not having so many UI/UX changes, then it’s okay but for major updates, the documentation should be updated. Online guide is having the benefit of being up-to-date without much effort and cost.

#2 Only PDF Format of Guide

Most of the physical products come with a user manual or a printed guide. If you will visit the product’s webpage, you may find the PDF format of the same user manual available to download. Even for physical products, I would recommend having a detailed HTML guide as there are many benefits of having HTML page as compared to only PDF.

Here are some benefits of having HTML Guide as compared to PDF only

HTML pages get indexed on search engines like Google
Get more Organic Traffic in product’s page
Receive User’s feedback
Let Users forward a section to someone and have communication on that

#3 Missing Navigation or UI Problems

User Interface is an important element of a documentation. Provide better navigation e.g. link to the parent section or category page to let the user navigate easily. Also provide a link to the product’s page as well as contact page on the guide section.

#4 Spelling Error and Typos

Product documentation should not have spelling mistakes or typos. Such mistakes look unprofessional and also impact the conversion.

#5 Only Text, No Image

People visit the guide page for help on a particular issue or question. It is always better to explain the problem with relevant images or screenshots. Such screenshots allow people to visualize the location and easily follow the steps mentioned in the guide.

#6 No Space for Visitor’s Feedback

Like offline user manual, if company is not having proper HTML guide and only PDF is available, visitors can not submit a feedback about the guide. Feedback is very important as it allows you to understand if the document was helpful or not. Based on these feedback, you can take step and fix the guide or update it.

#7 Missing Guides for Old Versions

Most of the time we update the guide with the information related to the latest version of the product. What if somebody is still using an older version of the same product?

e.g. 0.5% WordPress users are still using version 3.0. It means almost 300,000 websites are still using WordPress 3.0. That’s why it is important for WordPress to have the documentation of 3.0 live so that users can still find the help online.

#8 Social Sharing Options Missing

If someone found a very interesting tutorial on your guide’s page and like to share that with friends, followers or client, a ready social sharing buttons will be helpful. Such sharing will improve the page’s engagement and may help in getting new customers. Make sure to have Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit like social sharing and bookmarking site’s buttons present on the pages.

#9 Code Snippet without Code Syntax Highlighter

If you are having a software or web application as a product, chances are very high that the documentation will have good amount of code snippets. You can place the code snippets just like text but that will not look good and will not be very convenient copy and paste somewhere. Reason to put code snippet is that one can easily copy and use it somewhere. If you put the code snippet with a Syntax Highlighter, users will find the code easy to read and will be able to copy the entire code with single click. They can also find if any syntax error is there in the code.

#10 No Search Option

Search is an important part of the documentation as people will come searching for something and they should be able to put those keyword somewhere. Even if you have provided a very organized guide, there will e scenarios where people will not be able to directly find the relevant page. Search box will allow them to search and find what exactly they are looking for.

Conclusion

While publishing or releasing a documentation, you may have the idea to provide self help to your customers. The sole purpose of an online guide is to do so but there is more to that. Like the product’s reputation, you should maintain same kind of elegance and richness to the guide too. Above listed mistakes impacts the conversion directly or indirectly. If you like to publish and maintain the guides with a solid back-end where you can easily publish new section or page and also update the guide in no time, Documentor does the job for you. It is the most recommended platform to publish and manage online technical guides or tutorials. The platform is powered by WordPress so you get all the benefits of free WordPress Plugins and at the same time, you have an optimized product just to publish and manage a guide. With Documentor you don’t need to worry about above mistakes as these features come loaded with the plugin.

I hope you find the article helpful and avoid having such mistakes or errors on your product’s guide page. Have a nice documentation!

7 Documentation Marketing Tips to Speed-up Sales from Knowledge Base

November 22, 2016November 22, 2016 Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Documentation or knowledge base can boost sale by 70% and there is no doubt about it. If you create a good documentation for your product, your start receiving feedback from existing or probable customers. Those feedback improves the product as well as make your aware about the current requirements. Well, apart from these there are many other benefits of creating a self help guide for products. In this article, I will list the benefits a product based company can take from Documentation Marketing.

What is Documentation Marketing?

After purchasing your product, the very first page that most of your customers visit is the documentation page. It should have all type of content including posts, videos, screenshots, how-tos etc. at one place. It allows customers to use the product in a better way and it also explains the real power of the product. At the same time, you can put more add-ons and side-products in these documentation and boost your revenue further. As your customers are already happy with the sold product because of this guide, they will be happy to use your add-ons too (if required). Such marketing techniques implemented on the product documentation of knowledge base page is Documentation Marketing. A good documentation marketing can increase revenue by 60% (another example) in just a month.

Documentation Marketing Tips

We create landing page for product or keep sending emails to promote that. Many people spend huge amount on ads and social media marketing to boost revenue and growth of the product. With documentation marketing, one can utilize the already created platform and increase sales without spending a single penny. These tips will help in better utilization of the Knowledge Base or Documentation page and get more customers from there.

#1 Guide should have Feedback option

Communication is the key to success. In virtual world, it’s not easy to start the communication with your probable customers. When a visitor comes to your documentation guide page, either he/she will find the useful information or leave. It is very important to start communicating and find out the painful areas, so that you can provide a solution. Feedback form below the guide page works like a charm.

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If the visitor or customer is not happy with the guide, he can fill up the form. Then you receive the feedback via email and reply back with the details. In most cases, you can convert that visitor into your customer by providing good answers and further details.

You can find a feedback form on Google product support, Apple Developer Guide and other popular documentation pages too. All these big players understand the importance of user feedback.

#2 Put Add-ons in Guide Page

do_2 — BigCommerce is promoting other products and services on documentation page.

If your product is having some extensions or add-ons, documentation page is one of the most converting pages for such add-ons. Explain the particular feature or how-to and then put the extension’s link to get more features. If that extension is useful for the customer or visitor, you can sell the main product as well as the extension too. That will boost your revenue further.

#3 Put Detailed Documentation with Search Friendly Links

Detailed documentation is always good for SEO and will help your product’s landing page and other pages rank better on Google and other search engines. If you have more content around the product, it increases the chance of appearing on the first page of SERP. Better rank on search engines mean better conversion and sales.

#4 Videos and Screenshots

If you provide more videos and screenshots in the documentation area, people put more trust in your product. Documentation gives you a platform to showcase all these things and put tutorial and how-to videos. Such transparent details will help in making more sales.

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#5 Put Live Chat on Documentation Page

People are visiting your documentation page because they like to know more about it. If you put Live Chat option on the page, you can interact with visitors and talk to them about the concern. That will help in getting more sales done. Live chat consumes time but at the same time, it increases conversion as well.

If your product’s documentation is on WordPress, you can use some free Live Chat plugins and talk to your visitors real-time.

#6 Allow People to Share the Moment

Imagine a moment when the customer got the solution from help guide. Now if he shares that moment with his friends and followers, that is going to help you for sure. There is no better marketing than getting a good word of mouth about the product.

Download and activate a free plugin named Better Click to Tweet and insert the shortcode at the bottom of the guide page. The tweet should read something like ‘ Documentation of Product X made my day URL #RelevantTag ‘. Such tweets from your existing customer will bring more customers on-board.

#7 Multilingual Documentation

Use Google Analytics to know more about the location of your existing customers. Analytics shows counties and geo-locations of your visitors and customers. If you have good amount of people visiting the product’s page or guide’s page from non-English speaking countries, get ready to make your site or at-least the documentation page multilingual. Install plugin like WPML to make your site multilingual and either hire or DIY the translation of the guide in popular languages. People love to read content in their own language and believe it or not, less than 6% of world popular speaks and understands English. Don’t leave the others at-least when you are helping with so much content for your product.

Product documentation is an important platform to boost sales and increase revenue. Companies tend to ignore this platform but one should not forget that maximum business you get from your existing customers. Create a good documentation or Knowledge Base for product to make it easy to use and to showcase other products and extensions. Documentor WordPress Plugin allows you to create and manage documentation without writing any piece of code and comes with features like User Feedback, Social Media Integrations, Print PDF option and many more.

7 Reasons Why Self Help Guide is Important for Any Business

September 9, 2016September 9, 2016 Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Whether you are running a product based business or a service based company, all kind of businesses need customers. Large companies appoint many employees for lead generation or to bring more customers through advertisements and other marketing techniques. In this article, I will explain how a self help guide of your product or service can help you in getting more customers without spending much.

What is Self Help Guide?

Self help guide is a form of portable documentation explaining everything about the product or service. You can create a self help guide in the form of a Knowledge Base with search capability where visitors or probable customers can read about how to use the product or what to expect from the service. Self help guide can also come in form of a PDF which can be available for offline reading.

How Self Help Guide is Important for Business

All businesses are for revenue and profit, and for more revenue, you need more customers. In the following benefits, I will explain how a self help guide can convert more visitors into a loyal customer and bring more revenue to the business.

#1 Lead Generation – Self help guide or a knowledge base with how-tos and FAQs are one of the most important source of leads. These documents bring more customers as they find answers of certains questions about the offered product or service. If the document is good, visitors will have better picture about the business that he is going to do with your company. Of course, the guide page should have a contact form to proceed with the lead.

#2 Advancement of Products or Services – By reading the self help guide, a visitor may ask counter questions on the provided solutions. Or in certain cases, he may not find proper solution. Sometimes by looking at the self help guide, a customer may suggest some improvements for the product or provided services. All these cases leads to a changelog for the business. Now the business development or product development team should come together and have a discussion about everything suggested by the visitor. Finally based on the feedback, company may improve the product or fix something in the process of service which will improve business in coming days.

#3 User Engagement – Self Help Guide creation tool like Documentor comes with User Feedback option on each section or question. Visitors can tell whether the document was helpful or not. If not, then he may suggest few things or just put a comment. With this feature on self help guide, visitors feel engaged with the product. Now company can contact that visitor with proper answer and in few cases, the visitor may convert into a customer. With self help guide, you can start talking to the visitor either in positive form or otherwise but in both cases, you are engaging the person which is always better for any business.

#4 Reduce Support Requests – This is a direct and quick benefit of having a good self help guide. If your customer or visitor can find most of the answers in self help guide, it is obvious that he will not raise a ticket. That will reduce after sale support on your company’s side which is a very expensive task.

#5 Product Placement – In the self help guide when you are explaining Product A, you can also provide certain benefits of using Product B or your company. Similarly, while explaining about your Service A, you can provide few benefits of using Service B along with A. As this is a guide, visitor will find it helpful and will go over to read about Product B or Service B. This is how you can utilise a Self Help Guide for converting more sales for the company.

#6 Search Engine Optimization (More organic traffic) – If you self help guide is getting indexed on Google and other search engines, it will bring more organic traffic. It is found that guides have better interlinking with the posts or other sections, which improves search engine ranking. If you have more pages with detailed answers, believe more, you will get more visitors.

#7 Feel Good Factor – If a customer finds help in form of an answer in the self help guide, it brings relief to that person as now he is not suppose to go through the long support process. If the customer feels good about your business, he will share good things with his friends, colleague or even with his own clients (in some cases). Good word of mouth is the best thing which can happen to a business. So a good self help guide or documentation or knowledge base can make your customers feel happy and that is the most helpful thing for all business, a happy customer.

It is very easy to create an online documentation using Documentor WordPress plugin. It gives you a great platform to create short, long or any kind of documentation in just few minutes. With ready designs and powerful panel, even non-technical person can create a helpful and easy to navigate guide easily. And the most important things is that it is very easy to maintain too.

45% Improvement Suggestions come via Product’s Guide Page

March 21, 2016March 21, 2016 Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

After a success purchase, most of the customers look for a handbook or guide or knowledge base to learn about using the product. Some of them may have questions related to the basic use of the product but some may have good suggestions. A real user of the product is the best source of input for a product. I am have a pretty good documentation of Documentor WordPress plugin but still people come with questions and even sometimes with eye opener feature request. In last few months, I saw most of the feature requests coming from the suggestion box embedded on the guide page. 5 out of 10 suggestions came from the guide page, rest came via support thread and direct email.

Once the user starts using the product, he starts facing challenges or starts expecting more out of the product. And if he finds certain mentions about the feature in guide, he jumps to the suggestion or feedback form and submit the request (if that kind of form is available). If you have seen the demo of Documentor WordPress plugin, you must have seen the suggestion box at the end of each guide or section. It allows visitors to fill up the form about the guide and ask the admin to either improve the guide page or the product itself.

Once you have the inputs from the visitor or probable customer, you can implement the same in product and get back to the user. Finally that inclusion of the feature will certainly convert a valuable visitor into a loyal customer and will eventually improve the product for existing users as well.

Similar suggestion form is also available in every Google product’s guide. The reason of having such form is same,

Improve the product guide page
Receive product improvement suggestions

My another site which is having premium WordPress sliders is also having guides created using Documentor plugin. I received many suggestions from existing customers or newbies via the suggestion box and it improved the slider products from all directions. Customers felt that we as a team heard their concerns and suggestion and improved the product.

Timely Inclusion of Customer’s Feedback and Suggestion is one of the main reason of success for Xiaomi, a leading mobile brand.

How a Good Product Documentation Improved Sale by 70% in Just a Month

January 28, 2016January 28, 2016 Karishma Sibal Leave a comment

Launching a new product for your business involves the team work, hard work, efforts over months. No matter you are running a small business or a larger one there are lots of hopes and dedication for the same to excel. There are lots of factors that are incorporated to build a successful product. It is also very necessary to take a note of the targeted audience for the product, response channels and their expectations. It is indeed important to take into consideration the goals and objectives before the successful launch of any of the product.

Factors to consider when launching a Product:

Customers Needs and requirements
Unique Features of the Product
Easy to understand
Appropriate Cost
Good Support
Detailed Documentation
Building a Community
Marketing through different Social Media platforms
Strong Product Management
Easy to Customize

All these factors plays a very important role for building a good product but it may vary from business to business.

product1 (1)

Factors to build a Product (christianwig.com)

Though all the above factors plays a very vital role for the product. But I personally feel that Detailed documentation plays a vital role among all. It is one of the key factor that will also effect the other factors and definitely benefit you.

Product Documentation for a Product:

Product Documentation can be considered as a way or language in which the product speaks for you. It is in fact not easy for the support representatives to be around the customers when ever they have a query. There are times when the query is very simple to be sorted, but if they are not getting the timely response for it, there are higher chances for the customers to get frustrated and opt for some other product. So it is necessary to have an alternative so that the clients can go through it without contacting the support. This is the only one scenario that I have discussed but there might be different reasons that are pulling them back to raise their queries. In order to avoid all these problems, It is good to have a detailed product documentation for the customers to refer when ever they require.

Impact of Product Documentation for the Sales:

Being a representative of Slidervilla Sales team, how will the customers get a good user experience is one of the main concern for the Sales. Placid Slider is one of the very important product of SliderVilla that will help to display the responsive logo slider for WordPress with the scrolling images. Our team decided to include the documentation for the slider that will help the visitors to refer it in case of any queries. The documentation of this product was included in October last year. And believe me we have noticed a drastic change over the sales of the product in just 3 months. There was an increase of 40-50% Sales of the particular product. There are many who will feel that How can a product documentation improve Sales of the product? But it is true!

Role played by Product Documentation to improve Sales:

Allows the customers to access the information anywhere and anytime without relying on the support team.
Saves the time of the customers and also reduces the work of the Support team.
Helps in creating a good impression among the new customers.
Making the customer aware and familiar with the product.
When the query of the customer gets sorted easily than they will give a good feedback that will definitely attract more visitors.
It will help the customers to set up the product very easily that will help to avoid the errors initially.
If the document that is prepared is keyword rich than it will help to improve the SEO for it. It will also help to divert more traffic to your site.

Cyber Monday and Black Friday 2015 Special 30% Discount on Documentor Plugin

November 28, 2015November 28, 2015 Karishma Sibal Leave a comment

Knowledge base or Document is the best way that will describe your product in a better way with all its features and functionality. This can be easily achieved by the WordPress Plugin Documentor. It is indeed a great opportunity for all to grab this great plugin at a special Discount on account of Black Friday and Cyber Monday Sale 2015. This is the best chance to give a new look to the document of your website with this Plugin.

30% OFF on Documentor Plugin:

To mark the beginning of the Black Friday Sale we are offering 30% OFF on Documentor Plugin. This is indeed great chance for all those who were waiting for long to get a plugin like this and the thing that was pulling them back was the pricing.

Coupon Code for this offer:

To avail with this offer one can use the Coupon Code BF2015. You can also contact the Sales team in case of any queries and they will revert you on this.

Validity of the Coupon Code:

This great deal ends at Dec 2 2015.

Don’t miss this great deal and get your plugin now to represent your document in a better way for your website!

9 Answers on How a Good Documentation Helps to Boost Product Sales

April 10, 2015May 30, 2017 Sanjeev Mishra Leave a comment

Better documentation is a must for good products.

This simple quote is very helpful for increasing the product sales by a huge margin. As the product developer, you may know in and out of your products which includes UI navigation, usage and features. But even if you have provided a very good UI, people may have so many questions on how to use the product. That’s where the product documentation or guide or knowledge base plays an important role. A good documentation improved sale by 70% in the case of this slider WordPress plugin.

Also Read – 10 Common mistakes that people make while creating Product Documentation

Most of the individual developers spend very less time on product documentation as they find this task a little boring. The reason behind that is very simple, as they are looking into the same product (while developing read as coding) from probably a month or so and they find it very easy to use. Now when it comes to write down the instructions, they usually skip many steps or how to’s (sometimes important ones) or may procrastinate the task too. As the final goal for the product development is reach as many users as one can, and that’s where they fail because of poor documentation.

Better Documentation with Documentor Plugin

If the product is well documented, it engages more users which eventually increase product sales. Here are few points in support of this statement that a better documentation can help you convert potential visitors into a customer.

# Build Functional Guarantee – Product may have so many features but whether it works or not, the documentation can explain that. In a user’s perspective, a good documentation build confidence in interested visitors and eventually tuned that into a customer.

# Clear Idea of Usage – How to use or implement the product’s feature is one of main question that interested buyer have. Better documentation answers such questions and finally that persons ends up buying the product.

# Works as a Demo – Most of the documentation comes with so many screenshots which plays as important role as a demo. Sometimes the screenshots or documentations only give an idea about the protected page or admin area.

# Engages Visitors – Rather than just reading the features of the product and leave, people will stay a little more on your site reading guides or documentation which may convert them into a customer. With features such as ‘Suggest or Submit Feedback‘ in your product’s documentation (available in Documentor) will help you engage with a potential buyer.

# Pitch More Products via documentation – While explaining one product’s instructions, you may introduce another product. While reading the instructions or steps for product A, people may find Product B useful too and that will increase your overall product’s sale.

# Advance users get Power – If your product comes with API or some other advance features, in that case documentation is must otherwise some advance users will not find your product useful.

# Trust Factor – Better documented product promises better after sale support and increases trust factor in the mindset of buyers. It reflects the dedicated f the developer or the company which eventually converts into sale.

# Better SEO and Traffic – Search engine like Google, Bing are of the best traffic source and we all know the important of SEO. Better documented products with indexed URLs appear at good position on SERP. Finally more traffic means more sale.

# Helpful for Clients, Lessen dependency – Imagine a developer who is working on some client’s project. Now if he buys your product and implements the same on his client’s site, at that time he can forward your product’s documentation to his client for future references. It will be very helpful for that developer or freelancer as he doesn’t need to do the documentation in his own words.

A well documented product is helpful for support team as well because it helps in reducing the number of support tickets. Support staff can easily forward the link of the tutorial or guide if the query is well documented as FAQ. Good documentation helps the Online Marketing team as well in better marketing of the product.

How much time should be assigned for documentation?

While creating the project plan for complete development and release of a product, I would recommend to assign 15 – 20% working effort for better documentation. This one time effort and minimal maintenance effort can play an important role in increasing number of sales of your product.

Category: Sales