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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I have talked in the past about the importance of optimizing your landing pages and websites to get the most out of your landing pages. You can spend years learning the art of working with Google Adwords. You can spend a lot of money driving traffic to your website. But if your site is not designed with your users in mind, you may as well burn your money. I hear these low conversion rate numbers from marketers everyday, and it seems people have accepted that you shouldn’t be able to convert more than 4-6% of people who come to your landing page. That could be true but you wouldn’t know it unless you keep testing and optimizing every aspect of your website. Web Design for ROI is a great book that teaches you exactly how to design your website to increase your ROI and get the biggest bang out of each click.

Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads brings to light what many companies have been doing wrong for years. Quite frankly, a lot of large corporations used to not worry too much about optimizing their landing pages. After all, if you have a lot of money, you may want to just throw it at your problems to solve them. But as the economy has hit us hard, a lot of big corporations are now changing their ways. These companies are now learning from their mistakes and wish they had paid more attention to the testing process. This book covers every area that you need to pay attention to to increase your ROI. Here are some of the concepts you should pay extra attention to:

• Mistakes: the common mistakes made by marketers and how you can avoid them.
• Landing pages: how to optimize your landing pages and increase your conversion rates by 3-5%.
• Home pages: how not to treat your home page and get the best out of your home page traffic.
• Category pages: ways to design your category pages to let your visitors navigate through your pages.
• Forms: how to design forms like a pro without turning off your visitors.
• Checkout process: increasing your checkout conversion rate is an art. You are going to learn exactly how to optimize your checkout process and make it easier for your visitors to buy from you.

It’s one thing to know web design. It’s another thing to know how to optimize a page for a better conversion rate. Web Design for ROI provides you with all the tips you need to make the transition from a good web designer to a great web designer who knows how to design pages with visitors’ needs in mind. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to get into the business of web design and landing page optimization.

You want to succeed with your pay per click campaigns? You’ve got to have super campaigns and high converting landing pages. Many marketers have no trouble mastering the first part. There are thousands of blogs that you can read to pick up a nugget here or there. But when it comes to designing or putting up a landing page fast, a lot of marketers have their doubts. After all, creating a landing page from scratch is something only the geek nation is capable of, right? The reality is, anyone who knows anything about the Internet should be able to put up his/her own landing pages fast. These days there are simply no excuses for not being able to launch landing pages for your campaigns. There are just too many solutions out there. You can do it yourself or you can outsource it. What you can’t do is sit around and curse yourself for not knowing HTML.

Here are a few solutions you can use to build and optimize your own landing page:

1. Affiliate Theme: if you are using WordPress for your website, there is no reason not to use it for your landing pages. WordPress is free and so easy to use. All you need is a theme that allows you to put up and optimize your pages fast. Affiliate Theme is a new WordPress theme that makes it so easy to develop all kinds of landing pages. These layouts are all optimized for search engines to give you the highest quality scores possible.

2. Ajax Landing Pages: if you have used those cool looking Web 2.0 sites, you probably heard of Ajax. With Ajax landing pages, you can put up highly interactive landing pages fast. You get over 8000 Ajax landing pages, and that should be enough to keep you busy with your tests for a long time.

3. Outsource: if you don’t want to use the above solutions, you can always ask a freelancer to do the job for you. It won’t cost you much if you use websites such as Rentacoder. Just make sure you check your freelancer’s background before asking them to do a job for you.

4. Landing page optimization: so you have your landing pages up and ready. That doesn’t mean your work is done. You’ve got to test your landing pages to make sure you have the best conversion rate possible. You can use tools such as Long-Tail Magic and HyperTracker to test and optimize your pages. If you slack off here, you are going to end up spending a lot of money and get nothing in return.

5. Ask a Consultant: if you can’t improve your conversion rates all by yourself maybe you should talk to a landing page consultant. There are many of them around. Asking an expert never hurts.

As you can see, there are just too many options available to us marketers these days. Whether you want to create a landing page or optimize it, you can do it all by yourself or outsource it all. There is no right way or wrong way here. The key here is to get the job done!