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5 of the most exciting landing pages ever created

If you don’t have a good landing page, you might as well close up shop and find another business to be in.

Landing pages are what people see first when they come to your site – hence the name. When visitors see a well-designed landing page, they are more at ease, things seem intuitive, and visitors are enticed to sign up for an offer or make a purchase. With that said, designing a good landing page isn’t easy. Simplicity is actually quite difficult because most webmasters are obsessed with doing something “cute” or “neat.” You have to be willing to commit image suicide if you want your visitors to convert into cash. Here are some excellent examples of companies that know what they’re doing:

Useit.com
Jacob Nielson is the king of usability on the Internet. He has devoted his entire website to making other peoples’ websites more usable. His own site is an example of the principles he teaches. The reason his landing page works is because it’s simple. There’s not a heck of a lot of choices on his site. When you land here, you can browse through what he calls “permanent content” and “news.” The “news” section is obviously recent updates while the “permanent content” is stuff that is evergreen. You can also search his site, but oddly enough the search feature is almost invisible. Maybe he thinks it’s just “conveniently out of the way.”

The page is also divided by color. It’s very easy and clear where each section of the site is. By redesigning your site to follow Nielson’s example, you’ll end up with a very simple site. You don’t have to make it ugly, necessarily. Simplicity and ease of use are the takeaways here.

Apple.com
Apple has a knack for creating beautiful and user-friendly products. However, they also have good web designers. Apple’s site is a model of simplicity. What makes this site works is the centerpiece of the landing page. With every update, the center image on the site changes. This center image is dominant and showcases the company’s latest product offering. The image is also always clickable, taking you to a dedicated page where you can learn more about the product or service. This is something you can incorporate into your website very easily. Make the most important element of your site stand out. Users will notice.

Twitter.com
Twitter has overhauled their landing page so that it’s pretty obvious what you’re supposed to do. The reason Twitter’s landing page works is because they really only give you two options: sign up or log in. This works for a site like this because Twitter’s draw is really inside the site. Showcasing how cool it is isn’t really that important at this stage in the game. If your company is well-known, you could implement a variation on this type of design. It will force people to do one of two actions or leave your site. People who leave are probably not great candidates for your product or service anyway.

Virtualprofitcenter.com
This site is obviously built for sales. The reason it works is because of it’s bold colors and very obvious arrows pointing to a sign up form. Red has been demonstrated in some direct marketing campaigns to increase sign up rates and click-through rates. If you’ll notice, the privacy policy, earnings disclosure page, and all other links are almost invisible. This naturally draws the user’s attention to the big, red, bold lettering and the sign up form.

Marketsamurai.com
Market Samurai is an SEO tool that’s used to help users uncover profitable keywords for their niche. The site’s landing page works incredibly well because it places the sign up form dead-center of the page. It does have other link options on the site, but these are not as prominent as the red lettering and the sign up form. Also, users can read more info by scrolling down the page. However, at the bottom of the page is another sign up form. This is key. If you have information that you need to present to users, offering two opportunities to sign up may increase opt-in rates. Users often have short attention spans or might be too lazy to scroll back up to the top of the page (as hard as it might be for you to believe). Having two opt-in forms means that you have two opportunities to capture their name and email rather than just one.

Guest post contributed by Peter Nevis, on behalf of Orange Line Marketing. Peter contributes to various websites, he’s a marketing expert and enjoys writing articles about SEO & online marketing strategies.

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Google Analytics | Scheduled reports updated

If you’ve been using Google Analytics to monitor your website’s performance for a while now, you may have recently received an email similar to the one below asking you to update your email reports.

You will have received this because you are being emailed scheduled reports, and as Analytics migrate to their new reporting system (as part of a wider upgrade of their system) you will no longer receive these reports

The email includes instructions on how to migrate to the new reporting system although I can arrange this for you for a modest fee.

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WordPress Basics | Keep your site updated & out of strife

WordPress is my absolute favourite Content Management System (CMS)

It’s simple, has an amazing range of free and low cost plugins that can provide amazing functionality and the core system is free. I typically use it in my own web space, but you can also use WordPress hosting if you choose including free options.

Unfortunately WordPress is not a set and forget type of website and there are a couple of important routine tasks that  need to be carried out, particularly to keep hackers at bay and.

Updates
WordPress is a sophisticated system which is continually evolving,  so there is a stream of regular updates to correct minor issues, to introduce new functionality and even to protect us all from hackers.

A typical WordPress installation also has plugins and a theme and these elements may have updates from their creators  from time to time as well.

In WordPress’ standard form, you’ll need to log into your WordPress site from time to time and check for any available updates.

Goto Dashboard | Updates to see a summary page of any outstanding updates

You can click on any or all to perform the updates quickly and easily

NB Its important that you backup your site before you perform updates so that if it all goes astray you can roll back to a working website

Smart Updates
Performing updates is made very easy with the use of the Plugin Central plugin which shows all updates in your Dashboard – nice!

If don’t login on a regular basis  the WP Updates Notifier Plugin is for you.
It will send you an email if there are any updates waiting for your site – Very handy indeed!

So updates are easy and can be made even easer with these smart plugins

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New AdWords Ad Extn | email subscription built in

The adwords team are trialling AdWords ads that enable a prospect to subscribe directly to a Newsletter etc.

I believe these will be called ‘Communications Ad Extensions’ and look like this one I stumbled over recently

This ad picked up my Google ID and pre-populated the email field with it making it a one click process for prospects to register for a newsletter.

The Communications Ad Extension is another Ad Extension in an increasing portfolio being offered by AdWords

Are your ads using Ad Extensions to maximise your online  advertising ?

Cheers

Pete

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Google AdWords | Auto-spell checking your keywords ?

Google Adwords has introduced (yet another) feature this time to deal with typos and spelling errors in your clients searches

Typically if you use Phrase or Exact versions of keywords, you’ll miss out on typos/misspelt versions of these terms

The alternative is resorting to using broad match which introduced its own issues

Adwords has now introduced a ‘feature’ to match these typos with your  target terms, but presumably without the broad search ugliness*.  Here’s how it should work:

Read more here:  https://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en-GB&answer=2537522

Ill watch with interest to see what happens

* Broad term ugliness experiment
Add a term into Adwords with no match syntax
Let your campaign run for a week or so
Prepare yourself for Ugliness (ie take a seat; suck in a breath; grit your teeth)

Go to Dimensions   |  Search Terms (in dropdown menu)

The page  will reveal the ACTUAL search terms being searched

Make a note of the plethora of seemingly irrelevant terms that have wasted your click budget

At this point bemoan the ugliness of broad matches
Use negative keywords and apply a cold compress to forehead

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Want a slice of this for your business ?

Turning over around $30M a month in Australia at the moment the group buying phenomenon is showing little signs of abating.

The main players (in order of market share and with approx deals sold figures in brackets) are -

Living Social / Jump on it – 25% (168,000)

Scoopon – 17% (102,000)

Spreets – 14% (82,000)

Cudo – 13% (77,000)

Groupon – 10% (figure not avail)

Our Deal – 7% (50,000)

If you are considering jumping on this very popular bandwagon here’s a few tips to ensure you grow your business rather than lose your shirt (both are possible)

1 – restrict your discount to an amount that at least allows you to break even on every sale

2 – negotiate an income split of around 40/60% (that’s 40% for them and 60% for you of course) – the reputable ones will allow this

3 – ensure your offer allows for add on sales (products, connected services etc, anything that allows you to make a profit from each customer)

4 – be clear about who ‘owns’ the customers details (if not you make sure it is collected at the point of visitation so you can market direct to them in the future

5 – provide each customer with an incentive to return to purchase from you direct (this usually requires some form of price discount offer)

And remember, not all group buying organisations are equal – some are there to help you others to help themselves !

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Tips to help you survive public speaking

Does the thought of standing up and speaking in public send shivers down your spine?

An American survey last year found that over 70% of respondents would rather die than speak in public (no, it doesn’t seem logical to us either). But what’s the worst that can happen ? Spontaneous combustion, loss of bowel control, frozenitis ?

Here’s a few quick public speaking tips to help to settle your nerves -

1 – the audience are as nervous as you are (that’s why hardly anyone sits at the front unless it’s full)

2 – most audience members can only absorb around 30% of what you present (this actually leaves plenty of room for error – and without being noticed)

3 -using a visual aid can avert attention from you (involving the audience is an even better way of moving the spotlight from you to them – done well it can also be great fun)

4 – the audience want you to succeed not fail (they want to be impressed not bored)

We hope these simple tips help.  But if you want to learn more or enrol in our corporate presentation workshops just send a message and we’ll forward some info.

Don’t let nerves get in the way of your inherent ability to communicate, educate and entertain – anyone can do it (ask Ricky Gervais !)

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Thank god you’re not a procrastinator like everyone else

Happy New Year !

No, we’re not late we’re just preaching to the procrastinators. You know the other people in business that constantly put things off or make excuses about why everything can’t be done or won’t work.

But that’s not you of course.  You have already …

- developed your annual sales plan
-  reviewed last year’s promotional program
- audited your customer/client database
- created a new marketing message
- rewritten your online strategy

And it’s only just turned February.

Thank goodness you’re not a procrastinator, like everybody else.

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Understanding Analytics reports

If you run a business that relies on your website then its absolutely critical that you know what’s going on in your website.

Just knowing how many visitors you have is not enough.  Website metrics can tell you if your visitors are engaged, how are your visitors finding your site and where do they come from. Analytics provides deep information on what your visitors are doing and how engaged they are, and the new Google Analytics has even more sophisticated analysis tools built-in.

The problem many business people encounter is that there’s too much technical/web information and its difficult to correlate this data with business goals and sales objectives, so way back in 2009 I wrote Interpreting Analytics

Please feel free to download this, but if it doesn’t answer your questions, please  let me know what other information you think it should include…

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Online Shopping stats reveal interesting changes

There’s  some interesting stats about online shopping

Mobile Retail
Google’s Mobile Ads senior marketing Manager Johanna Werther provides stats to project 44% of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices this holiday season based on historical growth rates.

Better Consumers?
 Google research has revealed in the US customers check on average 10.7 sources when making a buying decision   - double the rate of 2010

Does that mean it s getting harder to sell online ?
Google are promoting this as  Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)

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