Developing a landing page for desktop computers is a science and an art. But you can’t always use the same approaches for your regular landing pages. Google wants to help businesses develop higher quality landing pages. That’s what its Google Sites Mobile tool offers. It is a simple tool small business owners can use to develop decent looking landing pages for mobile devices (iPhone and Android smart-phones). (more…)
So you have created a brand new product and want to promote it on the Internet? You are going to need a mini portal or at least a decent landing page to get the job done. The good news here is WordPress is a very versatile platform and has many premium themes marketers can take advantage of to create a mini portal for their product fast. These 5 WordPress themes/plugins can help:
Max Landing: a powerful plugin that makes creating landing pages using WordPress platform a piece of cake. It comes with 12 landing page templates to get you started.
Productz: one well designed mini portal theme for WordPress that can be used to promote single or multiple products. Its home page is fully customizable and allows you to test some different things to increase your conversions.
Platform Pro: one of the most versatile WordPress themes around. It can be used for portals, blogs, and everything in between. It has a drag and drop interface. (more…)
A/B testing may not be the most sophisticated testing one can perform for websites. Nevertheless, it is still quite effective in improving your results. If you are running your business using WordPress, chances are you have always wanted to test your landing pages and offers. Max A/B is a powerful plugin that makes the process a whole lot easier. Max A/B can handle 3 variation pages and a conversion page. The conversion page can be on a whole different domain.
Credit: Max Foundry
Paying a fortune to get your ads to show up in front of as many people as possible is one way to grow your business. If your landing page is not optimized for conversion or does not leave a good impression on your visitors, you will leave money on table. Many small businesses may not have the resources to develop their own landing pages. That’s what premium landing pages are for. If you are looking to promote your new product and need a decent landing page, these 6 premium pages should help:
Conversion: a premium HTML template with 5 different designs to give users flexibility to test different things. It has a tableless layout and compatible with most modern browsers.
App Bundle: an attractive landing page for those promoting multiple products and bundles. It has 3 colors for you to choose from and provides video support.
App Theme: an awesome WordPress theme for anyone thinking about promoting an iPhone application. It is easy to customize and has an attractive look and feel to it. (more…)
One can have the best advertising campaign but without a decent landing page, it is hard to achieve great results in conversion. Many landing page experts make a living out of changing small little details about the pages they work on to increase conversions. Your headline, the colors you use on your page, your links, and your call to action all matter towards helping you get better results from your landing pages. These 2 infographics summarize this perfectly:
The Anatomy of a Perfect Landing Page: a powerful infographic by Kissmetrics that shows you all the elements on your page you need to work on to make your conversions go through the roof. Of course, that won’t happen over night. You will have to test all elements on your page (multi-variate testing) to find the best combination for your business. (more…)
Designing your landing pages is a must if you intend to get decent results with your PPC campaigns. There is more to testing than just A/B testing. But if you have not made a career out of testing your designs in the past, it’s never too late to start. A/B Theme Testing Plugin is an awesome plugin for WordPress that lets you test multiple WordPress themes to find out which one is working for your website the best (as far as your conversion rate or # of leads per campaign are concerned).
There has been a lot of talk lately about how Google has changed the search engine optimization landscape by adding speed as an organic ranking factor. There have been a lot of cries about the ramifications of this move. Everybody who has worked with Google knows that Google is a big business’ business. Sure, it allows millions of people to bring their ads to Google and get traffic through paid and organic search results. But the treatment that the big boys get from Google is not comparable to what others’ get. That is certainly not a problem if you are a small business taking steps to move to the next level. But unlike what Matt Cutts suggest, this latest move will essentially give Google the blank check to give a boost to those companies with big pockets. There are many ways to improve a website’s speed and having a big budget can certainly help.
I won’t go into why I believe this move can backfire on Google big time. But I do agree with Matt Cutts that faster sites make for better experience and better conversions. Have you ever gone to a small website to shop for something unique only to leave frustrated due to the site being too slow to get anything done ? As a marketer, you should not put all your eggs in one basket. There are plenty of people who are complaining about how they trusted Google and went with its recommendations only to be screwed this time around. In reality, you should spend your time and effort to speed up your website to improve your conversions. Sure. Your search engine rankings matter too. You can have all the traffic in the world, but if you are not converting, you are wasting your time.
Many online marketers make a living out of promoting other people’s products and reviewing them to save others time and provide them value in the process. This whole tactics has been around for years. It’s the oldest trick in the book. You want to promote a product, a comprehensive product review can help you increase your conversions and make some revenue in the process. The FTC is apparently aware of some of the issues that is going on in the affiliate marketing industry. PPC affiliates have been getting away with a lot in the past few years. When you do make a claim about a product or give it a rosy review, you better have purchased the product and put proper statements of disclosure on your landing pages. While the FTC won’t shut your business down with one violation, you certainly want to stay in the good graces of the FTC.
One way to make sure your disclosures are all in order is by using services such as CMP.ly. These services are designed specifically for anyone who is promoting and reviewing products online and want to have a way to differentiate between their relationships on their various landing pages. Sometimes you are promoting a product because you are an affiliate. Other times, you are getting freebies and other incentives to promote a product. Whatever the case, you are going to need to have proper disclosure lines on your website.
As someone who has worked in the advertising space in the past, I can tell you that a lot of people are hurting by all the changes that Google has made to its Adwords program. We are not talking about the major changes. Everybody knows that your ad ranking depends on your CPC and your quality score. We also know that there are plenty of things that Google doesn’t tell you when it adjusts your quality score or slaps your campaigns altogether. But most often, people are blaming Google or keyword tools for things they are responsible for.
A lot of people believe Google Adwords is some magic service that will help drive traffic to your website and convert them at the same time. So they don’t pay enough attention to how they are putting their feet forward with their landing page. Getting slapped by Google can be an eye opener for a lot of folks. I have seen so many companies that have poor quality flash landing pages up and hope for some miracle. Some companies don’t even have a product yet, but they don’t even use their landing page to collect names or give people a way to find out more about their future products.
There are a lot of marketers out there who prefer cutting corner and taking short-cuts to achieve their business goals. You may be a gifted marketer and manage to make a decent living online without getting down to the nitty gritty with your online marketing campaigns. But if you are working for a large corporation or are accountable for someone else’s results, you are going to have to deal with the issue of landing page optimization sooner rather than later.
Businesses are not in it to make $10 profit per transaction when they can make $20 profit doing that. So landing page optimization will have to be at the top of your agenda if you want to keep your CPA manageable and keep growing business for your employer or clients. By improving your conversion rates, you can not only lower your costs but increase your profits as well. So it’s a double whammy.
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