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

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

If there were official 10 commandments in Search Engine Marketing, this post by Brian Carter on the Fuel Interactive Blog would surely be close. I think this is a great foundation to officially start the SEM 10 Commandments. But really, I wholeheartedly agree with these, and find them very valuable. My personal favorites are numbers 4-6.

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF SEM 2.0

1. Thou shalt test everything everywhere; test thy messages, offers, and appeals in social media, on thy site, in thy ads, and in thy search listings.
2. Thou shalt win friends and influence people via Social Media; thou shalt turn competitors into allies via networking and SM.
3. Thou shalt not beg, cajole, or threaten people to give you links for thy networking and value surely shalt bring thee more links (blessed are the poor in links who deserve more links)
4. Thou shalt create valuable content and useful tools that people will want to use, link to, and share.
5. Thou shalt use analytics to discover which keywords, placements, ads, offers, and audiences get thee the results thou needest most.
6. Thou shalt use lessons from each of these three channels: social media, SEO, and PPC to doest better in the other two.
7. Thou shalt use thy seo wisdom on landing pages to increase thy PPC quality score.
8. Thou shalt re-optimize and re-strategize based on clues provided to thee by thy analytics.
9. Thou shalt monitor what people are saying about thee, stay up to date on thy competition, and watch for new competitors.
10. Thou shalt attain wisdom from pre-internet marketing and PR books and teachers and test them in thy SEM efforts.

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Tags: 10 commandments, allies, audiences, blog, brian carter, Interactive, Internet, internet books, Internet marketing, landing pages, marketing books, marketing pr, Media, network, networking, personal favorites, placements, PPC, quality score, Search, search engine, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, search listings, SEM, SEO, site, Social, social media, useful tools, wisdom

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the practice of achieving traffic to your website through search engines by methods including: Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media Marketing (SMM), Blogging, Affiliate programs, Email, and link-building, to name a few.

Search Engine Marketing can be broken down into paid and non-paid methods. A good mixture of both is ideal, as it may take some time to acquire traffic through natural or organic SEO.

Non-paid or SEO includes the following methods:

• Web site optimization
• Blogging
• Link Building
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory inclusions

Paid methods include:

• Pay-Per-Click
• Pay-for-Performance
• Affiliate Programs
• Targeted Ad Placement
• Paid Placement Inclusions

A good SEM plan involves a solid strategy and approach, as well as identifying the results you wish to achieve with your SEM campaign. Are you looking for traffic, leads, sales, branding….all of these and more? In order to measure how successful your SEM campaign is, you must first determine your goals, and have a way to measure them. This, in turn, gives you a benchmark in which to figure out what works, and what doesn’t.

If you are attempting SEM without using a professional company or individual, choose a couple of the free methods to begin with, and as your budget allows, give PPC a shot. This should be enough to give you a start, and be able to test these methods on your site without becoming completely overwhelmed.

If I were to choose 2 methods to begin with, I would start with SEO on your website, and one of the 3 PPC programs )Google, Yahoo or MSN). After getting your feet wet, and seeing the results, you can then progressively add methods. Once this gets to be more time consuming than your business can handle, I strongly recommend hiring a professional. This will give you more time to focus on your business, and a better chance at being successful.

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