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Jeanne Jennings offers this great list of what makes a good landing page. A landing page of course if the page that you sue to have people “land” on when they click on an add, either AdWords or not. If you do not follow some kind of rules as the ones that are set out here you risk losing the conversions from your hard earned clickthroughs.

Great e-mail marketing doesn’t involve e-mail alone. Usually, it also encompasses the Web pages people land on when they click through from the message to follow the call to action. You can get a great open rate and a very impressive CTR (define), but if the landing page doesn’t carry the reader through to the goal, it’s pointless.

Here are some tips for creating more effective landing pages.

Don’t Just Send Them to Your Home Page
Yes, this is what’s easiest to do. But in most instances, it’s not best. Especially when the product or service you’re promoting in the e-mail doesn’t appear on the home page (I’ve seen it done). Don’t make people search for what you’ve told them is there. Take them straight to it.

Don’t Be Redundant
We’ve all seen landing pages that tell you exactly what the e-mail told you — no more, no less. Why land readers there and make them click through to the next step? Send them to the next step directly from the e-mail.

Match Your Landing Page to Your Call to Action
A good e-mail engages readers by telling them about something, then setting an expectation for what they’ll find when they click through. If you’re promoting a new product with a link to “learn more,” readers expect to land on a page with more information. If it’s “order now,” they expect to land on a page to begin the order process. If it’s “read the full article,” they expect to land on a page with the full article. Be sure you deliver on the call -to -action’s promise.

Another note on calls to action: It’s fine to include multiple calls to action in an e-mail. With clients I often place “learn more” right next to “order now” to see if we provide readers with enough information in the message to go directly to the order form. Just be sure all calls to action lead down a path to the end goal. There’s no need to send readers to an “About Us” page if there’s no direct link there they can order from.

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More and more webmasters have the recurring dilemma on how to increase the flow of traffic in the websites. During the past few years many methods that been developed to solve this predicament. While most of them would work there are those that would not make even a small impact.

One of the methods that have spawned many success stories in driving traffic into websites is viral marketing. Viral marketing makes use of the tendency of a person to share something to find informative, entertaining or amazing.

Many companies bank on this behavior to spread their products and increase the popularity of their company or their website. Viral marketing makes use of many mediums in enticing this behavior. It might be in the form of an interesting story, an addicting flash game, an amusing video and many others that may catch a person’s fancy.

This ingenious form of marketing is typically low cost and is a wonderful tool for any company to utilize. The benefit greatly overshadows the cost or efforts to initialize this marketing scheme. Any website would greatly benefit that viral marketing.

Tell A Friend Script

One of the easiest methods in viral marketing is using a tell a friend script. This is a simple programming script that you can attach to the programming of your website. Generally, tell a friends script are installed in pages where a media is placed so that a person can easily send the media to any of his friends or his family members.

The basic concept of a tell a friend script is a script wherein a person may input his name, e-mail address, the recipient’s e-mail address and send the media to the intended recipient much like an e-mail with an attachment. As the recipient receives the e-mail he wouldn’t think of the mail a spam mail because he would see the sender’s name as someone he or she knows and trust.

Tell a friend script eliminates greatly the chances of being blocked because they use the information inputted by the sender. This allows for wider spreading of this marketing method. It can be quite sneaky but it is very effective.

With the e-mail sent and opened the sent media will either be read, viewed or played. Also along with the mail would be a brief description of the company or site that sponsors the media sent. This allows for the introduction of either the site, company name or its products. The along with it is another tell a friend script.

Then the process begins again. As more people use the tell a friend script, more and more people will know of the existence of the sponsoring company or site. People who read the ads inside the mail who liked what they see would go and click on the link and visit the site. This drives traffic into the site resulting to great number of potential customers.

Tell A Friend Script Availability

A tell a friend script is very simple and does not require a complicated method of programming. In fact, you can copy paste a script and simply put it on an intended page. Finding one is even simpler. All you have to do is go to a search engine and type in the search box “tell a friend script” then press enter or click go.

In the search results page you will see many links that will direct you to a site where you can get a tell a friend script. It would just be a simple matter of looking and searching for the script and copying it to your intended web page.

With a tell a friend script viral marketing strategy you can drive traffic into your site which could potentially spell profits. This is a simple harmless script that offers great benefits for low cost paired with great creativity and foresight.

It is imperative that you have patience in using a tell a friend script. If your chosen media doesn’t get the mileage that is expected of it, it may take some time before it gets spread or shared. But surely many people will see your ads and there is great probability that they will visit your site increasing your traffic flow.

Overture or now known as Yahoo because of Yahoo’s takeover, was the original inventor of the use of the P4P or Pay for Performance. Overture saw that the internet was fast becoming the easiest and most convenient way to shop, and advertising was going to hit at an all time high because of the many businesses in the arena.

To get a person to go to a site than others, it needs to be very visible. Providing ads that could direct potential consumers and costumers to their site would allow them to have an increase in traffic as well as sales. Yahoo provides a service that can put a site or company’s ad in their sites that can be shown when certain keywords are inputted.

Yahoo offers a chance for any company to increase their traffic by using their services. With more people being aware of your site, there would be more traffic and visitors to your site given the chance to view your pages as well as your products. With even a small percentage of successful sales, with a high traffic volume this could still be a substantial figure for your company.

Getting a consistent substantial flow of website visitors is every company’s goal. Many methods are devised and utilized to ensure that there would be more people to boost the sales and to be aware of the existence of such a product or service. Website visitors are potentially the life blood of your internet based business.

Yahoo/Overture utilizes the same principle as Google’s Adwords. In fact, they are very similar to each other that they use keyword and keyword phrase searches and to determine which ads to show per search. When a person types in a keyword or keyword phrase to search for anything, the search engines gives out the results in a page. Then at the right side of the page, you will see selected ads that have paid for their ads to be viewed with certain keywords and keyword phrases searched.

For example, Lets say you run a car parts retail/wholesale site. You choose keywords that can prompt or trigger your ads to be shown in the page when a keyword is searched. When a search engine user types in Honda Accord, your ad may come up if you have designated that as one of your keywords. You don’t need to fully optimize your site with Search Engine Optimization methods and techniques.

While some labor so hard to make their site one of the high ranking sites per keyword search, you get the chance to be on the top of the list or at least in the first page of a search result increasing your chance to be clicked on. With that, you drive traffic and website visitors to your site a lot faster.

You will have to pony up some cash when using this service though. There are different ways Yahoo/Overture will charge you. It may be in the number of Keywords or Keyword phrases your ad uses or in the many times your ad is clicked on. Others offer many other services like having your ad show up not only in the search engine pages but also with some third party sites.

Third party sites support ads that have the same theme or niche as them. With more areas your ad is shown, you increase the chances of people knowing about your site or product. With more website visitors you increase the sales of your site which makes your investment with your ads a wise one.

With so many competitions in the internet based businesses, it is necessary to take a huge leap forward from the pack by advertising. Yahoo/Overture will be a great place to start. Many have utilized their services and have reaped the rewards of this decision. It’s a marketing strategy that will increase your website visitors as well as increase your sales resulting to profit.

It takes money to make money, while there are some methods that are basically low cost or free, using a marketing service such as what Yahoo/Overture offers will provide results faster and on a larger scale. Many businesses have learned this the hard way, don’t be counted with them.

I just read an entertaining post about clarity in marketing. It seems the writer of the post years back wrote clever ads that he and his customers liked but the problem was that they did not sell. Rememver who you are marketing to and sell to that person using verbage and a style that will sell them and that they can relate to.

Also remember as the article points out, that you have to sell the features…more probably the benefits to your customer not the great thing that you are as a top Realtor.

Michel Fortin is a fantastic web copywriter that I believe has very important things to say as far as how the text on a web page should look. Micheal is one ofthe big proponents of those big long sales pages that you have probably seen a lot in the past. I am not sure if I agree with him on that but I do not want to digress too far from what his post today was about.

One of the thing that Web usability experts preach is consistent look to all web pages. Micheal says that one of the really impoortant things that you can do is to change your font by bolding, italicising and changing colors of fonts to make your point. I am not talking here about just making ugly pages but it is important to use text in such a way that you can set the tone and get your message across.

Making these changes makes it a little harder for your readers, they can not now just skim over the words but you can now do a better job of getting your message across

This is a great test to see how well you have built your web page, or hopefully how well someone has built your site for you. Take the Blink Test. Successful blog has a great article and link to how you should look at your page only after it loads or look away from the screen and note what the first thing your eye navigates to when you look back at your website on the screen.

Is what you see important and what you want your customers to focus on first? Or do you notice some kind of advertising first. You have to make sure that your customers see your message as soon as they see your page or your site may be forgotten forever.

Google last year bought a company that helps webmasters track stats on websites. A couple of months ago they opened this service up and called it Google Analytics, offered it for free for just a couple day sign-up and not I have found an article stating thatGoogle Analytics may be coming back.

I never signed up for this service before but a a keen watcher of my stats and am looking forward to another method of finding website stats.

Keeping track of stats will allow you to see where your clients are going on your site, where they are coming from, what pages are popular and unpopular and also most importantly how many people are going to your site in the first place

Doug Towes has pointed out in one of his blog posts that 30% of web users are not using Internet Explorer. I think the number is closer to 20% when I go through my logs but it is still important.

Over 30% of Your Site Visitors Are Not Using MSIE

One of the things that is important to do, I feel, is to make sure that you use a fairly simple layout for your webpage. Another thing you should do is to download the latest copy of Firefox and test seeing what your website or weblog look in that browser.

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Here is a link to a great online keyword analyzer

Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing: Marketing Tools - Keyword Density Analyzer

All search engines have their own way of deciding what pages are the most important on a given search. What every search engine uses as one of it’s criteria is the percentage of time that the searched keyword exists on a page.

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This is a great primer on how to make sure that you sales letter is top notch. A sales letter can be your web page, flyer, weblog article or even your personal brochure. I found this information from Sean Burns, a great copywriter and hope to include more good copyrighting articles in the next little while.

If you sell a product online, there’s a good chance that you have a sales letter for it. Hopefully you’ve got a great headline that grabs people’s attention and then sales copy that states the benefits of your product and is designed to convert visitors to customers. There is a good chance that you have an affiliate program for your product and you may even have organized some joint ventures to promote it.

What about the search engines?

Optimizing sales letters is quite a difficult process and it’s something that many people ignore when they set up a site to sell their product. The purpose of a sales letter is to sell a product, not to get traffic. Therefore, they should be written in a way that specifically targets sales. This can often mean that the search engine friendly parts of a page are not targeted. So, what should you do?

The simple answer is that you should not change a sales letter to try to please the search engines. If you were to do that, you may end up getting more traffic but less sales. Getting phrases that people search for into a sales letter may detract from it’s overall message and this will often prove to be the case if you try to get keywords into the key parts of a page.

Technorati Tags:realtor, sales letter

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