Holistic Internet Marketing

Whether you are running pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, other paid advertising, or relying on organic search engine rankings, these tips on optimizing your landing pages will help you to achieve higher conversion rates on your website.

Are you getting traffic to your web site, but finding that visitors are not taking any action? The following suggestions will have you on your way to optimizing your landing page(s) thus, improving your conversion rates:

1. Focus your Landing Pages

Your landing pages should have one offer that you focus on in order to achieve higher conversion rates. If your visitors land on a page where there are many options, with many calls-to-action and paths they can take through your site, you are only losing focused attention on the primary goal. Whether your conversion is completing a lead form, making a purchase, or signing up for a newsletter or membership, make this the main intent of your page. Give your visitors too many choices, and you run a high risk of losing them. This term is called “abandonment”. Abandonment is when your visitors initiate an action, but do not follow through. Look at your landing pages, and identify potential “abandonment points”, and remedy the situation by eliminating them.

2. Present a Clear Call-to-Action

Tell your visitors what you want them to do. If someone is looking at your page, and you have their attention, compel them to take action. Let’s say, as an example, you are an investment broker, and you are looking to attract more clients. You should have a clear call-to-action that makes the user want to proceed, such as “Start Getting Better Returns Now”. As an additional point, you should have only one call to action on the page. In some instances there may be two, such as “Download Now”, vs. “Start your Free Trial Now”. Your one, clear, concise call-to-action should stand out on the page visually. You can do this through different text treatments or better yet, a nice, clean button.

3. Summarize Your Offer

People scan web pages, and decide very quickly whether or not their interest is piqued. Keep your body copy brief - bullet points of the key benefits of your product/offer are the easiest to read. If you need to explain further, summarize as much as possible, trying to have only one to two paragraphs of text on the page. The most important content is that which solves a problem or lets the user know “what’s in it for them”. Try to stay away from sing a lot of “marketing fluff”, and make the best use of all of the words you choose to use on the page.

4. Test, Analyze, Repeat

By A/B testing, you can narrow down what works and what doesn’t with your landing pages. A/B testing is running two landing pages against each other which have minor differences, and then measuring which one converts better. The differences should be minor, and changes that you make can be one of the following: call-to-action text, heading on the page, position of the form (right side vs. left side), bulleted copy on the page, even little changes can make a difference in landing pages, such as the color of the call-to-action button. Make one change at a time, and before you know it, you will end up with great improvements in your conversion rates.

5. Keep Copy and Keywords Consistent

If you are utilizing pay-per-click, link-building, or other contextual methods of bringing traffic to your landing pages, make sure that the ad creative copy is consistent with what the user will get when they come to the landing page. The bait and switch is not a good technique, and if visitors reach your landing page thinking that they are getting one thing, and then see something different, chances are they will bounce very quickly. Try to use the same calls-to-action as in your ad creative to give more consistency to your campaign. This also will save you from spending money on clicks from a PPC campaign that will be wasted.

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Tags: abandonment, campaigns, conversion rates, Getting Quality Website Traffic, improving your conversion, Internet marketing, offer, optimizing your landing page, Pay Per Click, PPC, Search Engine Marketing, search engine rankings, testing, traffic, web pages

Exploring the strategies of bringing traffic to your website, are you looking for tons of traffic, or quality targeted traffic?

Most website owners, if not all would love to see tons of traffic pouring into their website, but one overlooked point is the quality of the traffic you are getting. There is obviously a point to trying to obtain this traffic. If you have a blog, you want to attract people who will find your blog useful, subscribe, and come back often. If you have a business website, you are probably looking to obtain leads, make sales, brand your company or some other end goal. Here are a few tips to get quality traffic vs. a large quantity of visitors.

Target the Right Audience

When you are trying to attract traffic, whether through back linking, social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, or other forms of paid placement, consider how well you are targeting your strategy to the right people. It might not be to valuable to attract visitors to your site about Playstation3 games from, say a retirement community blog. It could, but chances are, this is not the right audience. Think about where your visitors are coming from, and try to adjust your efforts to bring in a more qualified audience by choosing sources that are closely related to your business, product, blog or service.

In order to help determine the quality of your traffic, utilize your website analytics and statistics, and determine what your visitors are doing once they get to your site. Here are a few things to look for when analyzing your website statistics:

1. Bounce Rate - The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that exit your site from the page they entered on. If you have a high bounce rate, obviously your visitors are not compelled enough to venture any further into your site upon entry. Even with landing pages, where there is a call-to-action such as completing a form, or making a purchase, it is not considered a “bounce” if the desired goal is converted.
2. Average Time on Site - Look at the average time people spend on your site. This is a great indicator, as, if you have thousands of people spending 3 seconds on your page, they obviously aren’t interested in continuing further. This could be due to the fact that the source where the visitor came from was not targeted correctly, through the link or ad creative.
3. Conversion Rate - If you are measuring conversion rates for lead form submissions, sales, click-throughs, sign-ups, or other goals, (which you should be), if you have very low conversion rates, it id quite likely that your traffic is not of high quality.
4. Visitors by Source - When looking at your website analytics and statistics reports, most applications will allow you to drill down to compare statistics such as time on site, bounce rate, conversion rate, etc. between your different sources of traffic. If you have horrible stats from one or more particular sources, it is probably a good idea to weed those out and concentrate on more viable sources.

When setting a goal to get a large quantity of traffic to your website, take a look at whether or not it is helping you to meet the goal of your website. Do this through analyzing your visitors’ behavior concerning bounce rate, average time on site, conversion rate, and visitors by source. If you do not currently have or are not utilizing your analytics program, this should be remedied very quickly, as you don’t know success unless you can measure it.

If you need a website statistics and analytics tool, try A. Reis Web Stats FREE for 30 Days.

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Tags: analytics, Getting Quality Website Traffic, Internet marketing, quality targeted traffic, quality web traffic, quality website traffic, Stats and Analytics, traffic, web analytics, web statistics, website, website statistics, website traffic

To gain traffic to your website through the search engines and blog readers, the ability to write great articles is essential. Although it may seem daunting to some, by following some simple guidelines and tips on writing articles, the task becomes easier than it seems.

Dave Foster wrote a great article on site-reference.com on with guidelines to follow for writing articles online, and there are a few tips that even the more experienced article writer may not have thought of, like doing your research for your articles at the library instead of online. With a scalable formula, your online writing should get better and better as well as easier to do each time. After all practice makes perfect.

read more | digg story

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Tags: article reference, article writer, blog, blog articles, dave foster, Digg, Internet, Internet marketing, Marketing, online, online writing, Search, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), search engines, site, traffic, traffic website, web, website, website search, website traffic, writing articles online

Seth Godin re-published “What Do You Know“,  on his blog adding to it after first posting it 3 years ago. As he says, this is still a very important post about what every good marketer knows.  Check it out:

What Every Good Marketer Knows:

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.

• In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
• Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
• You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
• Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

Obviously, knowing what to do is very, very different than actually doing it.

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Tags: blogging, Internet marketing, Internet marketing, seth godin