Month: September 2015

Homemade Taco Seasoning Recipe

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I haven’t posted any recipes recently, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been cooking! Here is a taco seasoning recipe I like to make. It seems spicy given the large amount of chili power, but it’s not – most toddlers can handle it easily. And you can add 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper if you want to make it have real heat.

Also note that I’m a big cumin fan, so this may be more cumin heavy that what you are used to. If you aren’t sure, use 1 teaspoon vs. two.

Healy Jones’ Homemade Taco Seasoning

1 tablespoon chili powder
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon onion powder
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon dried epazote (substitute oregano if you don’t have epazote, which is available in most Mexican groceries and Whole Foods.)
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 teaspoon sea salt (use lemon salt if cooking for fish)
1 teaspoon black pepper
2 teaspoon dried cilantro

Simply mix all of these spices together, then use as a rub on the grill or add to ground beef when cooking on the stove.

About Healy Jones

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Howdy folks, I’m Healy Jones. I’m a former venture capitalist who now enjoys startup and growth stage marketing. All comments are my own and do not reflect any opinions of Kruze Consulting, and I am not offering any stock advice or investing advice!

I haven’t published in a while – been really busy – but am hoping to create content on a more regular schedule.

More on Healy Jones

I realize that I don’t have a great “about” section on my blog – you can find out a lot about Healy Jones on my Linkedin profile.

A basic summary:

I now run FP&A for Kruze Consulting, a leading provider of finance and accounting advice to venture capital funded startups. I was with ForUsAll, a venture funded FinTech company based in San Francisco. I ran demand generation at Sunrun, and I kept a large and growing sales team busy. Previously I’ve worked with a couple of smaller startups, Boundless and OfficeDrop, both of which have been acquired. The first ten years of my career were in finance – mainly private equity and venture capital.

Healy Jones image

4 Great website testing ideas

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Optimizely has a solid list of 71 different website testing ideas – check it out here. (Side note: this content has existed for a long time, but they recently re-shared it with me. Re-sharing solid blog content like this is a great nurturing tactic!)

I have tried a number of these 71 tips with varying levels of success. Below are the top four that have worked for me. What works on one site may not work on another, users’ behaviors change over time, and mobile will have totally different success than desktop (and don’t even get me started on tablet.) So even if you’ve tried some of these before, it’s worth considering retesting at some point.

Here are the four most successful testing tactics that I’ve found, as listed on the Optimzely blog post:

“Buy Now? Purchase? Checkout? Add to Cart? Change the call-to-action (CTA) text on your buttons to see which word or phrase converts more visitors.” I’ve had success with this sort of a test every time. You never really know what a visitor is hoping to see, and different CTAs on particular pages may improve conversion too. Matching CTAs with on page content often is helpful.

“Test multiple CTAs per page against one CTA per page.” I sometimes joke that every other line of copy should be a CTA button… that’s extreme, but having different CTAs in different places on the page may help a visitor find the ‘thing’ that entices them to move forward in your funnel.

“Test different types images on your landing page. People versus product is a good place to start.” Sometimes this fails for me, but recently I’ve had good success. Always worth a test, but sometimes the results are so small there is no statistical significance. Big tests are often better here, so I’d start with huge differences in images before testing if the female customer beats the male, etc.

“Test removing navigation to any pages outside the checkout funnel.” I call this a prisoner page, and it works for SEO and other bottom of the funnel pages… but it can also backfire if someone isn’t ready to commit. Sometimes adding high conversion navigation links (vs. what you may have on your regular site nav) can help the prospect find out more info, but also stick to pages that convert, keeping the conversion rates high.