Feb/100
Drawing In Customers with Landing Pages
Landing pages are used extensively in online marketing and serve a very specific purpose: they prepare the visitor to your site to hear your value proposition – your hard sell.
The landing page is often confused with the “squeeze page” among internet marketers, but in fact the two techniques are quite different. While the former is used to prepare, the latter is used to build a list of prospects.
You want your landing pages to build interest in your website visitors for your company and the products and services it offers. The content on these pages should engage the reader and, instead of trying to get more information from your visitors, it should simply establish future sales possibilities. Use landing pages as gateways to other pages on your site, introducing your company and making readers want more information on your business.
Landing pages are much less direct than squeeze pages, which simply aim to get personal information from website visitors. Squeeze pages are usually straightforward and designed in a very simple manner, without many graphics. Sometimes, these pages try to obtain information from visitors by offering free gifts. They require users to sign up for an email list before they present links to other pages. The entire point of squeeze pages is to get contacts for follow-up marketing.
You can market your website effectively by using a combination of both squeeze and landing pages. Your goal with the latter should be to direct users to pages where they can make a purchase from your company. The former, however, are designed to get high conversions rates by getting visitors to sign up for email lists. Use these pages with your company’s website in order to boost sales and increase conversion rates.
Ray Perry is an Internet marketing executive with more than 25 years of experience. He is the Chief Marketing Officer at Market Blazer, a small business marketing company and authorized Duct Tape Marketing coach. You can get more information about landing pages at www.MarketBlazer.com.
Nov/090
How to Set up Easy Sales Pages with WordPress
A sales page is a page on your website where you send visitors in order to convince them to convert into a paying customer, so that you make money. This in many ways is the essence of affiliate marketing. Now, some of us have different names for sales pages, like landing pages, sales letters, or squeeze pages. But something you may not have heard of is a WordPress sales page, which is just a simple to use WordPress theme that serves as a high-powered sales page, right out of the box. It’s important to use sales pages because if you just send a visitor to your home page you’re going to have a low conversion rate. On the other hand, using a targeted sales page allows you to spend your valuable time on convincing your prospect to buy your product or service, making you money!
Without a sales page theme or template, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time getting your sales page set up and working. First of all, you’re going to have to find some graphics for your page, and it may be hard to track these down. You could hire a graphic designer to make them for you, but that can be a real pain. On top of that, you’ll have to format the page, figure out the H1 and H2 tags, and probably spend a lot more time than you wanted figuring out how to code HTML and CSS. You’re much better off using your precious time and resources on marketing tasks, like finding new products to promote and writing great sales copy.
There’s a million nuisances that pop up when you start trying to hand code your own sales page. How come these graphics aren’t lining up the way that I want them to? How come I can’t get this text to look right? What’s going on with my background. You’re a smart person so you’ll probably figure these things out eventually, but think about all the time you’ll waste trying to create your own page. That’s valuable time and energy that could be spent more effectively on marketing. And that’s why you got into this business isn’t it? To market and to make money, right? So leave the coding and the graphic design to the people who like to get paid by the hour and spend your time on marketing, so you can start making the big bucks and start creating passive income streams.
Now I’ve already hinted at the solution so if you’ve been paying attention, you already know the answer to your problems: sales Page templates. The problem of creating sales pages has already been solved by some very talented and thoughtful people around the web. In fact, many websites already provide free or premium WordPress sales page themes available for download. Utilizing one of these and you’ll have your sales page up and running in minutes.
A WordPress Sales Page theme works like a normal WordPress theme, but instead of the typical WordPress blog design, it’s a sales page! Learning how to set up a WordPress site is very easy, even for someone new to the web, but if you’ve been doing affiliate marketing for even just a month, then it’ll be a breeze. You just set up WordPress on your site, upload the WordPress Sales Page theme, and you’re ready to go.
The formatting and the graphics will already in place for you, you just have to fill out your WordPress sales page with your unique pitch targeted to your customers and you’re ready to start converting your traffic into money!
Want to find out more about WordPress sales page themes, then visit Robert Zanekis’s site on how to choose the best customize your sales page for your needs.
Sep/090
SEO For Real Estate Agents
A variety of techniques will help improve the search engine ranking of your real estate website. I have been successful recently is developing individual search engine optimized sales pages for particular search phrase. A squeeze sheet simply a landing website created to create leads that are optimized for a precise search word. As an example, let’s say hypothetically that you work in Provo Utah and concentrate in executive homes. In addition your website has not come up under the phrase “executive homes” or “orem realtor executive homes” however through your inquiries you understand that individual phrases are often searched and meet your target customers. How you would create and use a squeeze page would be as follows:
* Find a web address that contains your search words. It is important to include your target words as part of the web address. As aside, I have found better luck in not including hyphens, but as an alternative having the word run concurrently in the web address; i.e realtorexecutive.Com instead of realtor-executive.Com.
* For the architecture of the website, you have numerous choices. If you understand web programming in HTML, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Front Page are good tools. If you don’t have a background in HTML, then there is a quick site development tool called XSite Pro that makes developing a keyword optimized site extremely easy with no programming involved. When you develop a squeeze page, create multiple sub pages. By and large the site is required to be more than a single page to get any attention from Google.
* Here are a few fundamental points that you should consider following when creating your site. The first is that for Google, numerous pages with high-quality search phrase content generally ranks better. The second is that a privacy policy is liked by both your visitors and your search engines. The third is that you would like the visitor to take action within seconds of hitting your landing page so have an intense call to action. Fourth, if your sales page is requesting contact information, limit the volume of information that you try to collect and offer incentives for visitors to complete the form. Very often I see real estate agents who post too many personal questions on a website. To maximize your lead capture, initially just ask for name, email address and phone number. You may qualify the prospect later and the additional data you ask for up front, the fewer leads you will receive. The fifth and final rule is that you need to limit your visitor’s experience. For these pages, you want to limit the visitor’s behavior to submitting their information, or learning a little bit more about the offer before submitting their information. Choices equal confusion which results in hesitation and inactivity.
Design each page of your site to be optimized for a single search phrase. Incorporate your lead generating offer on all of the pages and be sure to incorporate a privacy policy. Where appropriate, also link to your home page so that your prospect can get back to your site. This may sound like a lot of work, but if you do this part correctly, you will likely get much more traffic at a lower cost than trying to PPC advertise for your target search term.
After you have created your site, post it online and start getting backlinks to it. It is imperative to understand up front that backlinks directly influence the page rank of your website, and that they are essential to get to that initial page for your specified search term. Fortunately, developing the backlinks yourself are pretty easy. First and foremost, create a link to your new site from your blog. Also, it would be appropriate you to create a blogger blog using the same URL (executivehomesorem.Blogspot.Com for example) and post a link to the new squeeze page from that blog. (Please note that if you create the blog, you will need to post content to it as well.) Post a link to your page from your ActiveRain account, any HubPages or Squidoo lenses that you may have.
William Xyllion is the primary commentator for lockbox and supraekey Visit lockbox and its affiliated real estate resources today.
Sep/090
The First Step To Landing On The First Page of Google
In this piece, let’s explore how to get as many of your entries as possible to the top position in Google. In earlier articles I used the search term “Expired Listing Leads” and the multiple entries on the top page of Google that are directed to my sites promoting the savings on the RedX expired listing lead service through FreeTrainer.Com.
In order to demonstrate the point, I have resolved to share with your in real time, or at least daily posts the basic procedure to get multiple listings on the first page of Google for a particular search phrase. My method is to decide on a search phrase and promote my web links on the web such that a minimum of five of the ten results on the primary page of Google provide a link back to me.
As a first step you need to select a search phrase, I used Google’s Adsense Keyword tool for this project and find what search phrase is going to create the most amount of traffic with the lowest degree of competition. For this project, I am promoting expired listing leads for real estate agents. When you look at the available search phrases, you find that Real Estate is extremely competitive in web promotion so after some digging, I located the term “Real Estate Country” which provides about 1.2 million searches per month and is relatively sparse in the way of competition.
It is also important to note that when you narrow your target geography, the number of available searches will diminish accordingly, the number of monthly searches will be a lot less and much more targeted. In any case, the same logic applies. Select the phrase with the largest quantity of searches that will be made most often by your target customers.
Once you have located the opportune phrase, register a URL with that term included. I have found success with the dot com’s, orgs, net, and me’s and generally try to stick with those web extensions. If necessary, use hyphens to get your desired URL, but your target phrase needs to be part of the primary URL.
In summary, here is step one: Choose a keyword that does not have a lot of competition, but does have a high number of searches. Register your URL with that keyword. We will work on the site in the next discussion.
Blake Xyllion is managing editor and creative manager for lockbox and supra ekey. Property websites dedicated to helping realty professionals find leads and grow their business