The Work Media Internet Marketing Blog

Well-crafted landing pages are critical to the success of an Internet marketing campaign. First, just what is a landing page? A landing page is a special page set up to achieve some kind of action, such as making a sale or getting the visitor to fill in a form, that a visitor arrives at when clicking a certain link. For example, if you run pay-per-click campaigns, you should have a landing page set up specifically for any ad or group of ads designed to promote a certain product or service. Here's a specific example:

Let's say you sell rabbits. Now, actual live rabbits are probably not a good product for ecommerce products, but this is just a hypothetical example. So you run pay-per-click ads that say:

Easter Bunnies are here!
Order now for Easter.
Supplies are limited.

When someone clicks on the ad, you want to take the person to a page set up specifically for this product and this ad. So...your landing page in this instance should emphasize that you have a limited supply of Easter bunnies, and if the visitor orders now, he can receive his Easter bunny in time for the holiday. If the link took the visitor to a general purpose web site, where you sold rabbits in addition to chickens, plants, and various other items, you would be less likely to close the sale. A person clicking on a link advertising a specific product has held up his hand and announced that he is interested in that product. So you need to everything you can to sell him that specific product. If the visitor arrives at your site and does not immediately see where to click to purchase the item, or is confused by copy and graphics relating to other products, then you may lose that sale.

Don't be afraid to use lots of copy on your landing pages. Don't forget - the visitor to the page specifically clicked on a link to find out more information. Give it to him! Tell him everything he needs to know, including the most important thing, how to order! Or how to fill out the form, or whatever it is you want him to do. Give her specific instructions on what to do, and place these instructions near the top of your copy, in the middle, and at the end. And write about the benefits of your products or services. Tell about the features, too, but you must relate how those features can help your visitors. Translate the product or service features into benefits that tell the prospective customer exactly what the product or service will do for her.

To summarize:

• Be specific
• Use lively, energetic language
• List benefits before features
• Give examples and/or testimonials
• Tell the visitor exactly what to do
• Don't be afraid to write lots of copy

If you will follow these guidelines, your online marketing efforts will be much more successful! We'll talk more about landing pages in later articles. Work Media is here to help, so let us know if you need help setting up a landing page or managing an Internet marketing campaign.

I am currently managing the search engine optimization efforts for a large ecommerce site, and I gotta say - it's a mess. My employer paid a large sum of money to a web development firm in Michigan to develop a complicated ecommerce site that is full of bugs and absolutely lousy in terms of web marketing. The pages are overly complex mounds of tables within tables. The main page content is pushed way, way down the file. The site is managed using a proprietary content management system created by the developer, but I've basically decided to build pages outside the CMS because, again, those pages are lousy for ranking in search engines.

A large web site development firm that specializes in ecommerce and has developed sites for some of the largest retailers in the country should know SOMETHING about optimization. This one didn't. And it's probably not the only firm making deals with retailers to build complex ecommerce sites that won't draw any traffic. So...if you are currently in negotiations with a firm to build a web site for you, or if you are about to build one on your own, there are some critical considerations you need to keep in mind:

• How will the pages be constructed? Get someone with experience designing web sites (this needs to be a web site designer, not a programmer) to look at some sample pages. If they consist of tables within tables, run. This is the year 2006 - web sites should not be designed that way, even ecommerce catalogs. Div tags (layers) are the way to go. Layers allow you to position content anywhere on the page, and the actual code for a layer can reside anywhere in the html file. In other words, the layer with the main page content, which you want to be as near the top as possible, can be placed near the top of the file, above all the junk that doesn't help your rankings.
• Does the site design sell? You need to think of your site as a direct marketing vehicle, because that's what it is. Is the site easy to navigate? Is it easy to know what to do? Do content pages allow for keyword-rich text?
• Is the site graphics-heavy? I think excessive use of graphics hurts you in several ways: it slows page load time, graphics do not help with search engine ranking nearly as much as text, and graphics can't sell to prospects like benefit-packed words can.
• How will you measure and track conversion? If you sell stuff on your site, then a conversion will be a sale. If you are a service business, then a conversion might be to fill out a form or download a file. Decide in advance what activity is going to count as a conversion and how you are going to track that conversion. Modern web analytics generally involves the use of tracking codes that report back to a server that aggregates the data so that you can view it in report form.
• Does the site use splash pages and other junk that take away from your core message? Again, you need to think in terms of selling.

This is just a quick list of things to consider BEFORE beginning development of your site. The best thing you can do is hire a professional Internet marketer to be a part of the design process. If my present employer had done that, we would already be driving a lot more traffic to our site and generating a lot more business. But the design process started before I got here, and nobody thought to examine the design from a marketing perspective.

If you are in the process of designing a web site for your business, call Work Media to make sure your site will sell!

No matter how solid the content is on your web site or how optimized your pages are, if you are lacking in "off-the-page" factors, you may have difficulty obtaining high search engine rankings. You need other web pages pointing to your site. Ideally, you want them pointing to your home page, and you want the links on the other sites to contain whatever specific keywords you want to rank for. For example, if you sell garbage cans, you would want links to your site to look something like this:

Shop for all styles of <a href="www.mysite.com">garbage cans</a> at Garbage Cans 'R Us.

If you can get lots of other sites pointing to your home page with a link like the one above, that will cause Google to start thinking that your site must be a strong resource for whatever term is used in the link (in our example, your site would be considered a resource for information on garbage cans). Easy, right?

Not so fast. The problem is not all links are created equal. At one time, you could boost your ranking in Google by participating in link farms, which are just web pages set up explicitly for the purpose of achieving high search engine rankings. That won't work anymore. It could even hurt you. So don't link to sites like that, and don't sign up to have them link to you. Instead, you're just going to have to do the work of locating viable link partners yourself.

So what makes a site a good link partner? It should be a site that is in a related but non-competing business (if you can get your direct competitors to link to you, then that's great, but I wouldn't count on it). You also want to find sites that have a high "page rank" value. Page rank is Google's measure of a web page's popularity based on the number and quality of other web pages that point to it. Based on the scale that is used for the Google toolbar, the highest page rank is 10 (the actual page rank, which we are not allowed to know, could be a number in the millions). A web page with a high page rank value will likely be considered a strong resource on some subject matter. So if that site then links to yours, then your page will benefit. If you can get the site to link to you without your linking to them, that's a lot better. But if you have to link back to them, then so be it.

A quick and dirty way to estimate a web page's page rank is to install the google toolbar. From the google.com home page, click on the "more" link. On the next page, click "Google Downloads". On the next page, click "Download Now" underneath the section labeled "Google Toolbar". After installing it, you will see an icon labeled "PageRank" on your browser header. This is not an extremely accurate tool, but it will give you an idea about a web page's page rank. If you want to get more advanced, install the Firefox browser, and then install a Firefox plug-in that will display a web page's page rank and Alexa rank. The Alexa rank is based on the amount of traffic a site gets. The smaller the score, the better. Yahoo.com has a score of 1, meaning it gets more traffic than any other web site. So if you can find a link partner with high page rank and low Alexa rank, you've got a winner.

Managing a linking campaign is a time-consuming process if done correctly, but it will make a tremendous impact on your web site. If you'd like to talk to us about doing this for you, give us a call! We'll discuss some other ways to get back-links to your site in future blogs.

When you are writing copy and designing offers for your web site, you have got to keep in mind classic marketing wisdom because web copy has the same goal as advertising copy - to get the prospect to take action. This action may be to purchase a product, or it may be to fill out a form for more information, or it could be any number of things. The percentage of visitors to your web site who perform the desired action is your conversion rate. Conversion is extremely important. Up to this point, we've mostly talked about ways to drive traffic to your site. But once they get to your site, the importance of Internet marketing drops off and the importance of sound business marketing kicks in.

You know (or should know by now) that you've got to have copy on your web site to achieve high search engine rankings. But that copy also has to sell. Don't be shy about having lots of copy. True, you should pare it down compared to what would typically be in a sales letter. The main reason I see for this trimming down of copy is due to eye strain from reading a computer monitor. But if you don't provide enough copy to convince the prospect to purchase (or fill out the form, or whatever), then the web page doesn't do you any good, eye strain or not.

The copy should focus on benefits to the prospect. This has been preached by marketing consultants for years, yet few businesses do it, and even fewer do it online. If you have a web page devoted to a particular product that is a list of features (size, color, resolution, terms, etc.), it is likely going to convert poorly. Instead, it needs to SELL! List features, but later in the copy, after you've gotten the prospect's attention. You can convert features to benefits by asking yourself what each benefit does for the customer. For instance, if you're selling 21" computer monitors, 21" would be a feature, but benefits might be less eye strain or more work efficiency because of greater screen real estate. So those would be the things you would discuss first, with the technical features coming later.

You should think of your web site as a sales machine. Think of the web copy as words being said by a salesman. Remember that the point of your site is to get your visitors to perform some particular action. If you don't know what that action is, then you need to step back and decide what you want your visitors to do. Then continue with writing or re-writing your web site copy. And sell, sell, sell.

If copy writing is not your strength, then call or email Work Media today.