Have you ever stopped and asked yourself just how important landing page design is in improving your internet business? Does it have a role to play in making that sale, or getting your readers’ contact information for your list? Aren’t they all the same?

Well, if you ever did consider these questions, you’re in fact a step closer to improving your business and getting more profit from your campaigns.
The truth of the matter is that a landing page is an essential part of any business, be it online or offline. As such, it may also spell the difference between success and failure to a certain degree.

What is a Landing Page?

Simply put, a landing page is a simple page designed to make a sale or get the names and email addresses of your readers and prospective buyers or clients. It is also commonly referred to as a “squeeze page” or a “lead capture page”.

For those who are still new in the business, getting people to sign up on your list can be as good as making the actual sale. Why? Because “the money is in the list”! But hey, we’re not talking about just any list but a list of highly targeted clients who will be more than happy to receive informational as well as promotional emails from you, listen to what you have to say, and buy products from you!

While every page in your website or blog can be considered a landing page, let us assume that we’re talking about the page where you send your readers or prospects in response to an ad. So basically, people who come to your landing page have already initiated some sort of relationship with you - you just need to “seal the deal”, so to speak.

And this is where your landing page comes in.

Your landing page will ideally provide additional information (such as benefits and features of the product you are promoting) to your prospects and point them to what they have to do next. Remember, your landing page must convert a prospect to a paying customer, now or anytime soon. Anything less than that means that your landing page is not effective and you must consider improving on it.

What Could Have Gone Wrong?

A lot of internet marketers commit a lot of mistakes in designing their landing pages. So, instead of making a sale or getting their prospects’ contact information, they literally drive them away. Some of the most common mistakes most internet marketers make include the following:

* Your landing page is too generic. Remember that your customer reached your landing page because they are interested in what they read in your ads. They might be interested in buying the product you are promoting so give them more information about it ñ after all, that is what they came for. Don’t kill your conversion by offering generic information. This is your landing page, not your home page!
* Your landing page is too cluttered. Keep your landing pages clean and simple. Don’t put in too many graphics, or else, your page may take forever to load and you may lose your prospects altogether. What do you want your prospects to do once they reach your landing page? Do you want them to buy from you, or you just want their contact information for your list building strategies? Make sure your landing page guides your prospects in doing what you want to accomplish.
* Your landing page asks for too many information. Don’t scare potential customers away by asking them a load of information. A name and a valid email address may be enough.
* Your landing page is not optimized for your chosen keywords.

Some Tips for Making Great Landing Page Designs

The typical rate of converting prospects to paying customers only ranges from 1% to 6%. It’s really quite low so you must make the most out of it. How? You can start by following these suggestions:

1. Know your audience. What could your ideal audience be looking for? Concentrate on this as you design your landing pages. This is the first step in getting your landing page right.
2. Spy on your competitors. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Look at what your competitors are doing and improve on it.
3. Put the most important landing page elements above the fold. Most internet readers don’t go beneath the virtual fold (the part that is displayed in your computer screen before you need to scroll) so it is critical to keep the most important elements in this area. Less important elements can go in the sidebar while navigation bars and links to other sections should be totally taken off this page.
4. Choose your design. Strive to create a professionally-designed layout as it can affect your visitors’ decision to purchase your product or not.
5. Mind your copy. A smart design plus good content makes up for an unbeatable duo! Just keep it short and simple and you’re as good as set!

Your landing page design greatly affects your conversion rate so try to make it the best it can be. You absolutely won’t regret making the effort to do so!

Over the years, I have been selling search advertising/marketing and one of the ways necessary to better sell especially to businesses that are new to search is to prove that it is a far more cost effective way of advertising as compared to many other forms of advertising mediums. Not too long ago, I posted a short but important blog post on my company’s blog that search advertising is the most cost effective method of advertising. The study done by Piper Jaffray shows that the cost per lead from the search engines is a fraction of the cost of email marketing, direct mail, online banners or yellow pages.

My company e-channel is now no.1 under Google’s local business listings for keywords such as: search engine marketing Adelaide, search engine optimisation Adelaide, search engine optimisation Sydney, search marketing agency Adelaide & Sydney. This is indeed some great positions to get in Google and an early Xmas present. After some testing and playing around, I have also managed to get my own home address listed in Google’s LBA for the keyword search marketing agency Adelaide. Next posting, I will write up on how to get into the local business results and how to optimise for it after months of experimentations.

Recently, I have been spending a lot of my time over the last few months, researching and experimenting, on how to get on the 1st page of the Google local business results. Many of my successful listings are through constant testing & experimentation.

Google’s local business listings is a great opportunity to get yourself up in the rankings of Google for your relevant geographical keywords much easier and quicker than Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and the best thing of all, it is free!

Here are some proven techniques/ways that I have used to get many of my own and clients’ websites successfully on the local business listings:

1. Get as many free listings in the local directories as possible. One tip to find these local directories is to check the ‘web pages’ under the details of the local business listings. Sometimes these web pages will show you the local directories they are listed on.

2. Optimise the title/name in the local directories for the keyword you want, eg if you want to rank for ‘Sydney Widgets’, have this in your title/name.

3. Same with the above, optimise the company/organization name in the local business centre for your keyword. (I got a successful listing for a couple of keywords just by optimizing the name, of which these keywords ranking for don’t even have a website).

4. Under the address information in local business centre, make sure you have the city location chosen as the city you want listing for.

5. Under the description in the local business centre, optimise it for the keywords you want. Of course, don’t spam it!

6. Under the categories of the local business centre, choose the most relevant category. Also, you can add in manually the category. In this case, add in ‘Sydney Widgets’.

7. When you upload your photos, try to optimise it (name of the file) for the keyword as well (I guess all of what I have mentioned are some basics of Search engine optimization (SEO)

8. Make sure you enter in as many details as possible in the local business centre, example hours of operations, payment options, upload photos & videos if you have, and other additional details as well. The more details you put in, the more the Google local business centre’s algorithm will see you as a serious listing and therefore making your listing more successful.

9. Try to add coupons if you can as this will definitely help. As mentioned before, videos will also help a lot.

10. Reviews seem like one of the important criteria that Google looks at when assigning rankings on the local business ads results. Try to encourage reviews from your customers. Don’t fake it! Google can easily find out and you may get yourself booted out from your local map listings. I have seen in many successful listings where there are no reviews. However, try to encourage reviews anyway as reviews does help promote your site to other potential visitors/customers as well.

11. Obviously, example to be successful in the listings for ‘Sydney widgets’, your site content should be ‘Sydney widgets’ relevant.

12. Basics of SEO - optimise the title, meta description and keyword tags for your keywords.

13. There are occasions where your listing may disappear, log into your local business centre again and update it again (example, re-upload photos, re-edit your description etc) and it should come back up again in an hour or so (from my experience)

14. I do believe that part of the local business listings’ algorithm, Google does look at external links going to your site as well. Example, if you have other sites linking to you with the link text ‘Sydney widgets’, I am sure this will help as well.

Below are some other techniques which I have not used listed by others that have said to improve the local business results:

• Include your phone number whenever you write a description of your company on a third party website.
• Include your address and phone number at the bottom of every page.
• Include the name of your city and state in your website’s content, titles, descriptions and page headers (I reckon this is quite an important component, so try to do it although I haven’t done this)

I found these above points from leveltendesign.com & traffikd.com and they have some very good pointers on how to improve/increase your Google local business listings as well.

We now all know that there is brand increase by using Search Engine Marketing (SEM). This has been proven previously before a report titled brand lift of search conducted by Enquirosearch.com back in 2007. This year Google in April 2008 together with Media Screen has releases a study titled ‘ Brand Value of Search ‘. The study was done on the consumer packaged goods industry and proves that employing search marketing as an advertising vehicle will positively impact a brand’s key metrics.

The key takeaways are: Search build brands

• Brand presence anywhere on a search results page positively impacts key brand metrics
• You have greater control over your message with paid search, especially on a generic search term SERP (Search Engine Results Page)
• Paid search as a branding vehicle: –Drives top of mind awareness for your brand and negatively impacts awareness for your competitive set. –Impressions provide “free” brand lift, without the CPC investment.

I do agree that most of its key takeaways are accurate except for the last point where impressions provide free brand lift. My reasoning for that is your ad might record an impression but it does not mean that the search user will see your ad. i.e. He/she might be looking at only the first 5 listings and if your ad is on the bottom 5; the searcher will not see your ad. Therefore, this impression recorded is not true. So if the searcher didn’t see your ad, why would it provide free brand lift?

While there are differences between Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). There are in fact a lot of similarities between the both of them. I have come up with a comparison table below during my lunch break today on the similarities of SEO and PPC using Google as an example. It is interesting to see the relevance and the linkage Google is bringing to its natural search results and its adwords advertising program. If we look at the comparison table below and think about it. This will allow us to be better search engine marketers for both SEO and PPC.

Video sharing sites for example YouTube and Metacafe seems to be the biggest hits in town especially with the younger and modern generations. These video sharing sites have also become the next advertising medium for many marketers. Marketers have been producing commercial videos for the purpose of marketing and promoting their companies’ brands and products/services. Google, Apple and many other small to large companies have ride on this wave of utilising this new form of advertising vehicle and most have found it to be an effective marketing tool as these video sharing sites have a phenomenal high traffic circulation. Internet Outsider reports that YouTube now accounts for 28% of total minutes spent on Google worldwide and an astounding 35% of global users; This is indeed an astounding level. The biggest success of video sites such as YouTube is because it ‘empowers’ users making them feel that they are content producers themselves. Below is a list of video sharing sites that are popular worldwide now.

Google Video
BrightCove
PhotoBucket
YouTube
DailyMotion
iFilm
Myspace
Vimeo
BuzzNet
Flixya
GoFish
Kwego
Lulu 6
MyHeavy
PutFile
StupidVideos
Vmix
ZippyVideos
CastPost
Dotv
Famster
MeraVideo
Porkolt
VideoWebTown
Vidmax
Metacafe
Blip.tv
Blinkx
GodTube
Ourmedia
Vimeo
Tudou.com (Chinese)

You gotta have a look at this Holland departmental store’s website. Interesting and innovative web marketing. Take a look at HEMA’s product page. wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don’t scroll… the page moves itself…

HEMA is a Dutch department store. The first store opened on November 4, 1926, in Amsterdam. Now there are 150 stores all over the Netherlands. HEMA also has stores in Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany. In June of this year, HEMA was sold to British investment company Lion Capital.

Following are 20 keys to successfully marketing your product, service, and business online.

1. Have a professional, easy-to-navigate, quick-loading design. Hire a professional design firm or at least use a good site template.
2. Have lots of quality related content.
3. Build lots of links to your Web site.
4. Build credibility and rapport.
5. Start an e-mail newsletter with quality content and send it out at least once per month.
6. If you are selling a product, have an affiliate program.
7. Once you have an affiliate program, don’t forget to promote it.
8. Do whatever you can do profitably to attract large affiliates and form key strategic alliances.
9. Position yourself advantageously in the search engines.
10. Use cost-per-click (CPC) engines, but make sure you know the lifetime value (LTV) of your customers and that you do return-on-investment (ROI) checks often.
11. Supplement your affiliate advertising with both online and traditional advertising, but track results and always do ROI checks.
12. Advertise using CPM channels to build brand recognition, but put profitability before brand recognition.
13. Offer yourself as a resource to the media as an expert in your niche.
14. Hire a great publicity firm or bring an experienced publicist in-house.
15. Use autoresponders to maintain constant contact with prospective customers.
16. Remember that business is all about relationships and communication. Always work to build more relationships, and once they are built, make sure you are in continuous contact with your prospects, customers, strategic alliances, suppliers, investors, and the media.
17. Encourage word of mouth among your customers.
18. Have superior customer service and have staff to answer all incoming e-mails within 24 hours.
19. Send out periodic e-mail follow-ups making sure your customers are happy and asking them for feedback on your product and the service your company has provided.
20. Blog frequently with quality content.

from the book Zero to One Million by Ryan P. Allis

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