How to you encourage more people to fill out your landing page forms?
Vast.com tested a form using a narrative format and presented input fields to people as blanks within sentences, Mad Libs style.
I haven’t done MadLibs since elementary school, but it worked: they realized an increase in conversions of 25% to 40%.
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This must be the largest company in Ferndale, a rural town near where I went to university. The town is small enough to have less than 10 traffic lights, and depending on the wind you can smell the nearby dairy farms. It is also the headquarters of the largest semi automated press release organization in the world.
PRWeb helped customers achieve more than 77 million impressions of their news across the web in January 2010. Hopefully you will be responsible with this service and only send out relevant, informative and helpful information. Please don’t use this powerful service to spam the news indexers with unimportant info.
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The creation, organization and refining of landing pages is the key to pay per click marketing and online lead generation. Landing pages are audience specific, and an automotive site landing page that converts 10% of users cannot be copied to a campaign selling insurance.
Users respond differently based on the time of day, offer, price point, demographic, education level, style preferences and past experience with your brand. Thankfully we can test and design for most of these variables.
Your landing page, or squeeze page is useless if the visitor can’t immediately find what they are looking for, and take appropriate action. The page needs to be scannable, use visual elements and be well organized.
There are several essential elements that make up a successful and effective landing page and increase your conversion rate.
Simplicity
The visitor must be able to understand the content of the page in less than 10 seconds, preferably 5. The longer s/he must try to comprehend your offer, the less likely they are to complete it. Your landing/squeeze page needs to be appealing to your visitors without distracting them from the goal.
Legibility
The text should be easy to read and the correct size for your audience. Text should be broken up and use lists. Some people prefer long sales pages, others prefer graphics and minimal text. Test this on your products to see which one works best for you.
Contrast
Create high contrast between background and text because to increase legibility, but be mindful of flashy backgrounds. A landing page is not a banner ad. It is a focused message encapsulated in a single page.
Links
Most landing pages have no navigation, and no extraneous links on the page. This gives the visitor only 2 options: complete your action or click the back button. You have a 50% chance of success.
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com is a great free service that does just what the domain name says – it lets you know if your site is up on the internet. This is very useful, as my ISP often has local caching problems that affects websites I work on (thanks Verizon).
DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com was created by Alex Payne and recently purchased by Bweeb, Inc. Site5 as a social media marketing tool and this is a great business move. For a very low cost, this web hosting company gets a new stream of quality traffic to their site through a highly viral site.
This represents social media at its finest, and this small website turned from a hobby into a nice payout for the developer. Traffic was up to 80,000 unique daily visitors.
View this simple but effective service www.DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com
I have a suspicion that Twitter.com is one of the most searched for websites, as the site went down back in November when it was experiencing uptime issues.
Think of a similar widget you could build to naturally drive traffic to your site, or download the source code and create your own uptime checker.
I received an email from Google Adwords with 20 promotional coupons for new client acquisition and each offers $100 in free clicks. These are all valid codes at the time of this posting, and are offered on a first come first served basis.
I received these Adwords coupon codes a while ago but unfortunately my Google Professional certification expired and now I cannot use them for existing clients.
These Adwords promo codes also only work on new accounts, so it may be worth creating a new account to utilize these free clicks. These are my gift to you for the new year.
Adwords coupon codes are below:
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Expires on 12-31 Terms and Conditions apply – see our FAQ for more details, including instructions on how to apply the credits.
What are the best web design conversion elements to implement on your website?
I’m looking to compile a great list of conversion elements that can be included in a website. This is not for landing pages (although it could be used for them) but regular site pages, with emphasis on the homepage.
I approach every site design with conversion in mind – your design should help the visitor take desired action on your site. Keep out the fluff that will distract or alter the focus of your visitor.
Actions
I am defining conversion elements as anything that will strongly persuade a visitor to remain on your site and want to learn more about you.
Conversion Elements
For shopping sites that sell products directly, the required elements to gain users trust are more specific. Below are elements that increase online sales in descending order of importance.
E-commerce Elements
The above list is from the e-tailing group/ARS ecommerce
Twitter is a great tool to connect with friends and facilitate business. However if used indiscriminately it can be a waste of time and possibly hurt your reputation.
Here is how twitter helps me with my business
Everyone is getting into the twitter game, see how Dilbert convinces his boss to use it.
This is a resource of websites, Firefox extensions for SEO and competitive intelligence.
Find extensions and tools to help in organic SEO campaigns.
SEO Tools
SERP Rank Checkers
There are other search engine optimization tools available, but these are heavily used and will help your natural search campaigns by providing clear data on the direction of online marketing. Focus on the right keywords and you have won half the search engine battle.
Using photos is on of the most underrated method of search engine optimization I have seen. Lots of good quality images not only help sell products to customers, they also will get you more search engine traffic.
Image search engines, particularly Google’s, send some of my sites 50% of all traffic. So imagine if you had no images on your website, you would be loosing 50% of potential visitors.
For SEO it really isn’t important how you organize images, set alt tags or place them in pages. It is important to link each image – either to a larger version or a specific page. Images get much higher weight if they are linked.
For e-commerce stores, images will set you apart from the competition.
Show the back & sides of the product so I can see the connections for electronics, and so I can see if the furniture is hollow or solid, or the pattern is continued on the back. Newegg.com is a leader in this field.
Show how large (or small) the product really is. Display a product in its actual environment or placed next to another object of known size for scale. (We used to do this in geology field classes all the time, without an object in a photograph rocks can seem impossibly large)
Display the side view to relate the product’s “heft.” Show me the top of the monitor and I can see if it’s made of thin plastic and will fit in my TV cabinet. Show me how thick the sole of the shoe is and how it will affect my height.
Does the electronic product have rubber feet? Is it a gloss or matte finish? How many buttons does it have? Is the on screen menu easy to see and use? Will the remote fit easily in my hand?
Show the item in action, either with video or through action shots, and how it will interact in my home. Create an image of the single coat paint covering an old wall in one smooth paintbrush stroke.
Pictures and product videos are important because they quickly answer customers questions and concerns through visual images. These action shots will reduce uncertainty and remove barriers to purchases.
The more pictures you show, the more your customers will show you the money.
Read more about optimizing photographs at Grok.
Resources to submit press releases have been around since the age of the internet, but they are no less important. News sites and industry publications still rely on press releases to acquire new information and maintain corporate communications.
Some of these PR distributors are free, many require a payment.
Good PR distribution sites
PRweb.com –PR Web is not free but it is the largest and best press release distribution outlet available. PRweb packages start at $40 and are definitely worth it. If you take the time to write an interesting and helpful press release, your 40 bucks will go a long way.
1888PressRelease.com – Free distribution, paid services gives you better placement and permanent archiving.
24-7PressRelease.com – Free release distribution with ad-support
ClickPress.com – Distributs to sites like Google News and Topix.net, Gold level will also get you to sites like LexisNexis.
EcommWire.com – Focuses on ecommerece and requires you include an image, 3 keywords and links.
Express-Press-Release.com – Free distribution company with offices in 12 states.
Free-Press-Release.com – Easy press release distribution for free, more features for paid accounts.
Free-Press-Release-Center.info – Distributes your release, offers a web page with one keyword link to your site. Pro upgrade will give you three links, permanent archiving and more.
I-Newswire.com – Allows for free distribution to sites and search engines, premium membership differs only slightly in adding in graphics.
NewswireToday.com – All the usual free distribution tools, premium service includes logo, product picture and more.
PR.com – Not only will they distribute your press releases, but you can also set up a full company profile.
PR9.net – Ad supported press distribution site.
PR-Inside.com – European-based free press release distribution site.
PRBuzz.com – Completely free distribution to search engines, news sites, and blogs.
PRCompass.com – Distribute your press release with a free or paid version, others can vote it up ala Digg style.
PRUrgent.com – Not only distributes your release, but attempts to teach you how to write one, and even offers downloadbale samples for you to work with.
Press-Base.com – Submit your release for free and get on their front page and the category of your choice.
PressAbout.com – A free press release service formatted as a blog.
PressMethod.com – Free press release distribution no matter what, but extra services based on the size of your contribution.
PRLeap.com – Free distribution to search engines, newswires, and RSS feeds. Fee based bumps get you better placement.
Pressreleasepoint.com – free press release distribution and submission to topical news aggregators.
PRLog.org – Free pr distribution to Google News and other other search engines.
TheOpenPress.com – Free distribution for plain formatted releases, fees for HTML-coded releases.
Inspired by the Mashable list of Press Release Distribution Sites
Have a good PR site that is not on this list?
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