Tag Archives ⇒ blog

List Building – Landing Pages

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure that you have seen quite a few landing pages throughout your Internet travels, but maybe didn’t know what they were called. Or maybe you did, but didn’t understand the importance of these pages.

What is a landing page?


Simply put, it’s a page you land on after clicking a link. This sounds easy enough, but deep down, every little detail you incorporate (or don’t) will affect the quality and performance of this page. So what are they for? When an advertiser is promoting a product or service, they will create a static page on the Internet somewhere that showcases this product or service and is essentially the make or break presentation.

They are commonly used by affiliate marketers as a means to send their visitors to the advertiser’s website to gain a referral bonus. Here’s an example of a successful landing page.

Why is a landing page important?

From an advertiser’s point of view, your landing page should be designed to sell. Unlike a face-to-face sales pitch where you can gauge things like emotion, customer response and even overcome objections, a webpage is a one-shot deal. If you customer lands here and loses interest, they leave the page and your sale is gone forever!

Just like creating effective advertisements like Google ads, banners, etc. you want to keep people interested and above all, you want to make them want your product when they’re done reading the page.

From a visitor’s point of view, your landing page should be straight forward. It should sell the product well and sell it fast. Pre-answer everyone’s questions up front and add just enough visuals to keep people interested.

How should I design this page?

The design should be non-intrusive, but visual enough to maintain interest. For content, some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use a targeted landing page (see below) to promote or discuss anything other than what product your selling. Others might tell you to use landing pages as opportunities to upsell other things you might be offering.

Types of landing pages:

  • Targeted – These pages may be part of your website, but they look nothing like your site because they are only there to promote one item. The entire page is written only for this item and does not contain any other links, pictures or “plugs”.
  • Dynamic – This type of page can be mixed with other types. Essentially a dynamic page, much like any dynamic webpage, will allow you to create custom content based on a referring site or affiliate link. An example would be in the landing page made references to the site you came from, so it appears as though that site heavily endorses this product.
  • Static – This is your average landing page and it can be a page build specifically for a product, or it can simply be a static page located within your site that helps promote the product. Using this type of page may detract a little form your intending purpose, but it could open doors for promotion of the rest of your business.

My suggestion is to go with a page that only focuses on one thing. The reason for this is that you’ll be advertising this page through a PPC network and the traffic generated from these networks is very targeted toward a particular niche. So if you landing page was selling auto-blogging software, you would only be targeting web traffic that was looking for auto-blogging software and therefore you would not want to fill this page with information on other software you’re selling.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is gather your ideas. Think about what you want to accomplish with your page, who you’re advertising to, how they are able to buy your product and what would make them interested. Once you have these basics down, you should have a clear understanding of how to setup your page.

Just keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is to convert sales quickly. The people that will be clicking through are not there to see your site. They were advised by someone else to click on that link and you need to be there to present them with a valid reason for staying.

Increase effectiveness

Here are some tips on how to increase the overall effectiveness of your landing pages:

  1. Create concise text without being too short. Find that perfect balance so you’re not overdoing or underdoing it.
  2. Add a FAQ to try and answer questions you might already know will probably be asked by your visitors. This way, they don’t need to take time to find out how to contact you.
  3. Keep the content search engine friendly and make sure you’re not using duplicate content on multiple landing pages.
  4. Make sure the page loads fast. Nobody is going to wait for your page to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds.
  5. Consider adding a video clip of the product in use or you explaining your service. Even a video of you reading the same content that’s already on the page will be highly effective.
  6. Add some social media links to increase your exposure. Use sites like Twitter and Facebook so people can readily find you if they’re really interested in what you offer.
  7. If you have a few customer praises about your products, put them on there to let people know what others think of you.

Testing your landing pages

In researching this topic, I found a great site that talked about testing landing pages. Originally I wasn’t even going to mention it because it’s one of those things that webmasters usually do naturally by reviewing page stats and click-through ratios, but this site brought up a really good point.

Michael Bloch from TamingTheBeast.net mentioned that to test a landing page, you should send 5 of your friends to the page without telling them what the page is about and have them look it over for about 5 seconds. When they’re done, instead of asking them “Does it look good?”, ask them what they remembered about the page. Don’t get too specific with the question. Just have them spit out key things that they remembered.

If they can’t even tell you what you were selling or what the page was about, then something is very wrong! Their input might be able to help you pinpoint areas of the page that need improvement.

Further testing is easily done with the web statistics I mentioned, but don’t just look at counters. Look at how long your visitors are staying on the page. If you read your own page from top to bottom, how long did it take you? Are your visitors staying for at least that long?

Further reading

This post was just to touch some key points on landing pages and is in no way intended to be 100% thorough! There are countless possibilities to creating, promoting and using landing pages and your results will vary greatly based on your industry and web skills.

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List Building – Demographic Info

· Brandon Hann

Have you ever watched tv at certain times during a day and wondered why the commercials you see are so different than what you see at night? Or how about a magazine about cars–why are all the ads related to car parts? Of course the second example is more obvious, but the point is that every media outlet has demographic requirements that it must follow.

Your website is no exception. There’s no sense in promoting your products and services to people who have no interest in using them. Learning your demographics for your niche or market will help you find people in particular age groups, cultural societies and various interests groups that fit your ideal customer. Knowing this information will help you better serve your customers and allow you to market specific segments of your business. The hard (and expensive) part is finding out who your customers really are.

As a small business or even smaller website/blog owner, you will likely not be able to afford a big budget market research campaign, so what options are you left with in discovering who your customers are? I found an interesting blog post on Sean Jordan’s website that discusses just this question. I’ve outlined and summarized a few of the important points here.

Finding your demographic

  • Competitors – A perfect way to start out with any area of your new business is to look at what your competitors are doing. It might sting a little to see other businesses doing what you plan to do, but the best part is that you can learn from their mistakes or take the high road and do things better/differently. In terms of demographics, you can sometimes find this information in media press kits or by searching online.
  • Census Bureau – To find your own demographics, it might help to view the demographics of the country, or your local area. This will tell you who lives around your business and can point you in the right direction to finding out who you’ll be marketing to.
  • The Internet – Searching online can yield tons of information about loca demographics. A lot of real estate websites offer basic information to inform potential home buyers. There’s a website called Claritas that allows you to search your own zip code to discover what kind of demographics there are in your neighborhood.
  • Small Business Administration – This website is not just for locating demographic information, but also for starting a new business or growing an existing one. There is a TON of free resources on this site and it should be explored from top to bottom.
  • Existing reports – Most likely, you’re operating in an industry or field that already has some extensive market research reports already created, so why not use them? This will save you so much time and possibly even money in the long term although these reports can cost quite a bit up front.
  • Hire someone – Undoubtedly this is the most expensive approach to market research. You hire a large firm that specializes in such areas and allow them to do the footwork for you. This option is probably not the best approach for a small business because even once you have the results, you may not have the financial requirements to properly manage your marketing campaigns.

Why is this information important?

As an example, your business sells computer games. If you found out that the majority of people buying computer games are between the ages of 13-26, but your local demographics show you that the majority of people in your area are between the ages of 35-55, would you go door to door offering to sell computer games? No. Had you not known this information, you would have exhausted precious time and resources to gain no additional customers.

Running a business online is a little different because you have the whole world at your fingertips, but it would still be beneficial to know how to market your website to get better response to your products.

This has been an extremely concise article about locating demographics, but my purpose was to emphasize how important it is to know your customers. If you’re faced with this issue right now in your business, I’d strongly suggest you begin a search online to explore these topics in depth.

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Web 2.0 – Fan Pages

· Brandon Hann

Fan pages can be any general webpage that is created by yourself or someone else who’s a fan of your site/business, but it this case, we’re talking about Facebook fan pages. I was searching for a straight-up comparison between fan pages and group pages only expecting to find limited information, but I found a blog post over at Search Engine Journal that gave me what I was looking for.

What is a fan page?

Facebook has two options for promoting and networking people with your business, website or blog. You can create a group which is basically a discussion page while pages are like Facebook profiles, but for an entire company. Even if you’re just a one-person show, you might still want to create your own Facebook page. This way, you can still have your personal profile and not have to mix in your business.

The breakdown

This is the informational breakdown chart as found on Search Engine Journal:

Key Feature Facebook Page Facebook Group
“Ugly” URLs No Yes
Hosting a discussion Yes Yes
Discussion wall, and discussion forum Yes Yes
Extra applications added Yes No
Messaging to all members Yes (via updates) Yes (via PMs)
Visitor statistics Yes (“Page insights”) No
Video and photo public exchange Yes Yes
“Related” event creation and invitation Yes No
Promotion with social ads Yes No

My two cents

As I mentioned earlier, setting up a Facebook fan page creates the same functionality as a standard Facebook page, but with the added bonus of being separate from your personal profile. In my case, I decided that I’d operate two blogs–one for my self and one for my business venture. Since this site was automatically posting my new articles to my personal Facebook profile, I can now move them over to the fan page I created and have my personal blog post to my actual profile. Make sense?!

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Using digital barcodes on your business cards

· Brandon Hann

I was sitting here the other day thinking about creating business cards for myself and I started thinking of a unique way to provide the same information that every business card offers, but in a way that people are more likely to remember. As I was thinking about this, I was playing with my iPhone and an app called RedLaser. This app allows you to scan the barcode of any product and it automatically searches the Internet for competitive pricing.

Anyway, I thought about how great it would be to have a business card in hand and rather than typing all that information into your phone, you could just scan a simple bar code on the card and have the information sent right to your contacts list.

Photo from NevilleHobson.com

I began a search to see if someone else had a similar idea and I found Neville Hobson’s blog and he had a post a while ago discussing just this topic! Well, without the iPhone app per se…at least in the incarnation I envisioned.

Essentially what he was talking about was that business cards have been a huge part of social interaction in the last some-odd number of years, but they suffer in today’s technological world–and frankly, I couldn’t agree more. When someone offers me a business card, I’m forced to comprehend the information it contains and then write it manually into my phone or other device.

Subconsciously, I also tend to “size-up” the person based on the design of the card. Too much flash and I’m thinking they spend more time on their image than on their business. Too little and maybe they don’t care enough. Now, if someone handed me a business card with bar code on it, this would make me feel like they’re on par with today’s technology. I feel much the same way when someone is able to offer me a v-card for download.

In a perfect world, business cards would be gone and vcards and iPhone apps like Bump will be the mainstay. But let’s face it…not everyone has an iPhone or even a smartphone and there’s something to be said about the old school business card–it still works.

In fact, people expect them when you’re at a conference or meeting with customers and not having one could mean a loss of business for you. What people don’t expect (at least now anyway) is the ability to copy your information simply by scanning a barcode right off your card.

How do I get this?

It’s easy and cheap to get cards printed, but here’s what you need to get barcode images printed out so you can integrate them into your card design. I wrote a separate post all about Microsoft Tag that goes into much more detail about their service.

  • Know your codes – There are different types of bar codes out there. You’re probably more familiar with the standard barcode you see on everyday products, but these won’t work because they can only store small amounts of data–namely numbers and a few letters. What you need are the kinds that shippers like FedEx and UPS use. The two most common are QR and DataMatrix. Microsoft offers a new color barcode called High Capacity Color Barcode that allows up to 3,500 characters to be displayed per square inch.
  • Get software – You’re going to need software to create the barcodes. If you want to make the Microsoft color tag, simply go to this website. Other barcodes have to be made using barcode software. Do a Google search for some.

Test it out

I created a tag that takes you to my website using the Microsoft Tag site and it only took 3 seconds! First, you need to jump on your mobile phone and visit this website: gettag.mobi. It’ll redirect you to the right software based on your phone. iPhone users: there’s an app for that. Once downloaded, you can load it up and take a snapshot of this picture:

It will automatically take you to my website! Isn’t that crazy?? As you can see, it works right off computer screens, so it’ll work anywhere you can print it–including business cards. To read more, check out my article about how to use Microsoft Tag on your business cards.

UPDATE – November 18th, 2010

I just wanted to update this post to include a picture of the business card I made for myself that includes both the Microsoft tag and a QR barcode on the front. Alongside their functionality, they also look great within the design. Originally, I planned on adding the barcodes to the back of the card, but I figured who looks at the back?! Check it out and let me know what you think!

Brandon Media business card
Brandon Media business card

Microsoft also introduced the ability to create the Microsoft tag in black and white as seen above. More on that over on my article about the Microsoft Tag!

Web 2.0 – Tribe Marketing

· Brandon Hann

Tribe marketing is more of a descriptive title rather than an official name. In a sense, being tribal just means that we as a society take our cues from the group (or tribe) that we most relate to. For example, if you’re close to the entertainment industry, you’re more likely to follow trends that current celebrities are following or creating.

In terms of websites and/or blogs, it’s important to know what tribe you belong to or what tribe you’re creating. For a website example, lets look at my site. The most closely related tribal group I can relate to would be business owners, bloggers, website developers and Internet marketers. What this means is that my content will strike a chord with people in these groups and they’re more likely to respond to my offerings.

What is tribe marketing?

As with any marketing, you want to focus your attention on your niche group(s). Although one of your primary goals is to get as much traffic to your site as possible, what good is a bunch of visitors looking for ways to soup up their hotrods when your site is based on search engine optimization? Your site however, would be of some use to the person running a site about hotrods.

Because people are “tribal” by nature, they are looking to fit in with people who share the same interests and want the same things in life–as well they should be. Your goal is to maximize your site’s potential using these groups of people.

Ways to market

In the next few sections, I’ll be exploring ways to accomplish this goal, but here’s a quick snapshot:

  • Create a forum – Using a forum (message board) allows you to interact with your visitors as well as letting them interact with each other.
  • Blog comments – Allow visitors to comment on your posts to create dialog.
  • Use groups – Use web groups all over the Internet that group similar people together to promote your website to.

If you have passion about your website, you’re probably already doing these things and understand the value of them. Think about it this way: if you went to an online store that sold something you can’t buy anywhere else, how much better would it be if you went to the product page and right alongside the standard description, you got to see other people’s opinions on it, some forum posts about how to customize that product and even a live contact link straight to the owner!

Not only would this make you feel better about the product, but you’re likely to come back and buy other things as well.

My two cents

Utilize the way people communicate and interact with other people. You’d be surprised how much more 100 visitors of targeted traffic is worth compared to 1000 random visitors. Spend your time looking for people that are looking for you and don’t get so caught up with just trying to get your traffic numbers up.

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Web 2.0 – MyBlogLog

· Brandon Hann

This one is mainly for those running blogs. However, this doesn’t limit you to personal blogs. A lot of businesses are now using blogs to promote and sell products. If you can imagine a Facebook geared specifically for blog sites, then MyBlogLog is what you get.

What is it?

MyBlogLog is now a Yahoo! service after being acquired in 2007 for around $10 million. Blog owners can download a widget to put on their blog that connects other blog owners with each other based on content and keywords. When you create your free account, you are creating a blog community for your listed blog(s). This community is then searchable, shareable and subscribe-able by all users of MyBlogLog. See what I mean by going to my MyBlogLog community–you can join right from this page.

This service is a great tool to continue spreading the word about your site. One thing I really like about sites like this and Technorati is that they are designed for bloggers. Getting listed in Google is great, but your site is thrown in with the masses and is compared to all other web-types out there. When your blog is within a blogging community, you’re undoubtedly going to be better embraced.

Widgets

There are website widgets available to place on your website that extend your site’s functionality for your account. Widgets allow you to display recently viewed pages on your site as well as recent members who visited your blog. This allows you to show your MyBlogLog visitors to your own visitors. All links are based on related content and doing this creates a much deeper network within the community.

Another widget, which is actually a WordPress plugin, called Just for You goes a step further in connecting people based on interests. What’s really cool about this one is that it displays related content on your site based on whether that visitor is a MyBlogLog member or not. If your visitor is a member, they’ll get to see related posts on your site based on the tags they have in their account. If they’re not a member, they will see related posts based on recent member’s tags.

Other widgets allow you to display your current statuses and updates to your blog alongside countless other services and features that you integrate into your MyBlogLog account.

My two cents

The goal for your blog or any website that you’re building is to get it out in the world as much as possible without spamming or doing other “shady” practices. This site allows you to just add one more way to get your content in front of others that are looking for it.

If you’re looking for another similar service that is not part of this series, check out my article on Arkayne. There’s a video that explains it all!

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Web 2.0 – Authority Hubs

· Brandon Hann

Originally, this was just going to be a topic header, but I felt like you should become familiar with the term hubs and authorities first. This terms is also defined as the HITS algorithm. It is generally thought of as a precursor to Google’s PageRank and operates in a similar fashion. By ranking websites based on the amount of links it has throughout the Internet, you generally get a few that float to the top. These sites become authoritative in their subject matter and are considered higher ranking sites because of this.

When making your own website, becoming an authoritative site is not that easy and should not be one of your starting goals. In time, you may get there, but for now, your focus should be on utilizing existing authority websites. The ones I break down on my site are just two of the more popular “hub” sites that specialize in exactly this purpose. However, any website with a high authority score can add huge benefits to your site. An example would be WikiPedia.

Wikipedia is considered a HIGHLY authoritative site given the vast amount of information it contains. If you were to provide a website or blog that contributes important information, you might be able to score a link from a Wiki article. Even though WikiPedia uses the rel-nofollow tag, it would still provide a substantial increase in traffic for a trending topic.

Getting links

I wrote a detailed article about the various types of links and how to get them for your site, so I won’t go into it here, but I did want to to mention a couple of things. Getting backlinks to your site is very important. Hub authorities are great for this because they allow you to interact with users that share common interests while also providing them with information that they can subscribe to.

Generally speaking, you want to maximize your coverage for your website. There are tons of services out there that allow you to share all sorts of information. Obviously, not everybody uses the same services, so you want to spread your site across as many as you can handle to ensure that everyone can search for and find your information. More traffic=more income.

Services

Authority hubs are similar to social bookmarking sites, but since I have a separate section planned for that, I don’t want to confuse the two. Take a look at the next two pages to see the two service sites I use for my site.

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Site Creation – Memberships

· Brandon Hann

You’ve seen them before–store memberships, clubs and mailing lists. It seems like you can’t go anywhere these days without being offered to sign up for this or sign up for that. As much as this might be irritating to you, don’t take it personally. These businesses are not out to steal your information or upset you in any way. They’re practicing a great business technique that really works!

Offer member incentives


When you run a business, especially one online, you have a unique opportunity to increase customer retention when you offer your them the ability to become members of your website or blog. They not only feel like they belong, but you are able to offer them the latest news, product updates, special discounts and everything in-between. As an example, on my site, you can sign up to the newsletter that I offer. This allows me to communicate just about anything I think you’d be interested in later on down the road.

The reason this is so important is that you may not come back to my site for a long time because you’re not a regular reader, but if you get updates through email, you’re not going to miss anything. Plus, I can offer you the latest tools right when I find out about them.

If you run an ecommerce site, you really want people to become members of your store because you’re inventory is most likely always changing, so it’s even more important for you to get those updates out. This will increase sales and make the customer feel more important. Offer people discounts, free stuff, special “members-only” items, etc. and you’ll win a customer for life!

Managing members

Every site structure is different, so managing your members can be everything from easy to difficult. What you don’t want to do is mis-manage them. This is especially true of email subscribers. You never want to given the impression that you send spam email. You also don’t want to have a huge list of members only to sit on it and not do anything for them.

Staying connected means sending out information, promotions and updates regularly. You’ll need to cater specific needs to your members based completely on the industry that your business is focused in. For example, if you’re in the clothing business, you’ll want to make sure that your updates and promotions are geared around style trends and seasons. You can offer great deals on summer clothing in the winter and vice versa.

Notes

I use a company called Aweber to manage all of my newsletters and mailing lists. Not only do they manage all of your members, but you can create any type of marketing materials you want! You can also setup automatic messaging to send out emails whenever you choose.

Do not waste any more time on this topic! You need to start turning your customers and web traffic into members of your business today!

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Site Creation – Security Roles

· Brandon Hann

No matter how large or small your company is, security should be a top priority. While you might not be managing hundreds of thousands of user’s credit card numbers, it is important to protect what data you do manage. When you run a website or a blog system, there are various security roles you need to configure.

What are security roles?

Some systems refer to them as user roles or membership roles. Essentially, when you have multiple people working on single items or a website as a whole, everybody is responsible for specific duties and tasks. For example, you would not want a blog contributor to have access to edit user accounts. Speaking of blogs, let’s take a look at the security roles in WordPress:

  1. Administrator – This user role has complete access to the entire system. Admins can do anything within WordPress including adding, deleting and changing all user accounts, blog posts, comments, links and pages. This is usually the blog owner and should only be access by use or someone you trust.
  2. Editor – Editors have complete control over all content such as links, categories, comments, posts and pages but they have no configuration access for the blog system nor can they create or delete user accounts. This role would usually go to someone who’s just there to moderate your blog.
  3. Author – Authors can write and publish posts without review from an Editor, but can only edit the posts they’ve created. They can also only manage the comments left on their posts. This role is designed for users which need to publish blog posts, but do not need to manage content they didn’t create.
  4. Contributor – Contributors are similar to authors except they cannot publish any posts. They can only submit posts for review by either an Editor or an Administrator. If you would like people to be able to submit their own writings to your site, give them this access.
  5. Subscriber – Visitors to your site can register (provided you allow them to) on your site and this account role will give them access to leave comments on any posts and modify their own user profile. Subscribers have no other access to the blog. There is an option in WordPress to force users to register to leave comments.

You should become familiar with each of these roles and what permissions they give to each user. You don’t want to be surprised later to discover that one of your users has more access than they need.

Benefits

If you’re the only person running your business/website, you will not see any benefit in creating various security roles. However, it’s important to understand your backend system and what types of controls you have over it because in the future, you may expand and require the help of others to maintain everything.

More often than not, you find in businesses where users are sharing their usernames and password to various systems to gain more access when they need it. This is very dangerous because all it takes is one person who knows what they can do with that access and your entire company can come down in one fell swoop.

Just like you lock your doors at night, never take for granted the security of your website and system software. It could mean the difference between a secured business and no business.

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Site Creation – Ruby on Rails

· Brandon Hann

Ruby on Rails is another programming language for faster web development. It is also known as Rails or RoR and is the newest programming language as of this writing since it first came out in 2004. The purpose of the Rails project was to make the process of creating web applications much easier and less time-consuming. This is accomplished by using the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture to organize application programming.

By using various packages like ActiveRecord (an object-relational mapping system for database access), ActiveResource (provides web services), ActionPack, ActiveSupport and ActionMailer, Rails make programming a web script very easy. In fact, when I was researching Rails, I found a video on their website that shows a blog being made in 15 minutes! If the video is still online, you can view it here. Unlike Java, Rails requires a web server to run on, which makes it a great choice for building web apps.

Rails Resources

  • Official Rails Website – There’s no better place to start than here! Get all the latest news and updates from the developers. Get screencasts, code and documentation as well.
  • Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheet – To get a nice little quick reference guide for Rails created by AddedBytes.com, go here. You can print out this one-page guide to aid you in your Rails programming ventures.
  • Rails Tutorials – There are three really good tutorials on this site that go into depth about how Rails works and how you can get started.

Who uses Rails?

The biggest site known to use Rails is Twitter! I’d have to say that for a website as large as that, Rails must be pretty useful, not to mention stable. Other known sites are BaseCampHQ and Shopify.

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