Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers. While a great looking website  can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-ngine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here’s 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

• § Relevant Content
  A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.
• § Multiple Landing Pages
  A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.
• § Focus on Functionality
  More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.
• § Call To Action
  You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear a highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.
• § Send a Clear Message
  Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.
• § Offer Incentive
  Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more then your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials.
• § Make Visitors Stay
  Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.
• § Simple is Better
  Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.
• § Power of Freebies
  Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.
• § Testing
  In a recent post I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion. Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean website’s success or failure.

Do you want to start your own best internet business? Are you planning to start a best internet business and make truckloads of cash starting today? If you answered yes, this article will give you a step by step formula to do the same…

STEP 1 – Research Your Product Idea.
STEP 2 – Remove 5% From Your Product Idea.
STEP 3 – Setup a Follow-Up System.
STEP 4 – Create a Squeeze Page.
STEP 5 – Create a Salescopy.
STEP 6 – Traffic.
STEP 7 – Follow-Up.
STEP 8 – Newsletter.
STEP 9 – Backend.

Lets get down to dirty details…

STEP 1 – Research Your Product Idea.

For best product creation you should research the idea of the project. You have to see whether the idea is feasible or not, will there be demand for the product, which are the competing products, who will be the competitors, who will be the target market etc. You will have to find answer to many questions. Collect the research data and analyze the results.

STEP 2 – Remove 5% From Your Product Idea.

Remove something out of your product and create an e-course or a report to give your visitors for free. E-courses are excellent sales tools and a great way to get your knowledge out there. It is very simple to create your course and either sell, or give it away as a ?give-before-you-get? sales technique. If your course is designed to be a freebie, you’ll want to give a portion of good information; but don’t tell them everything or they’ll have no reason to make a purchase. If you are selling your course, make sure to jam pack it with everything you know, that way your customer will feel like they are getting a lot for their money (depending on how much you really know.)

STEP 3 – Setup a Follow-Up System With An Autoresponder System.

Make sure to create follow up emails that has solid content and blast them to your list on regular basis. Once you have a follow up system in place your visitors will be marketed with your autoresponder automatically. Create a quality ecourse with quality content and load them in your autoresponder. Your visitors will visit your salesletter on continuous basis and trust you for your efforts. They will prefer purchasing your product in future if not now. Create broadcast emails to promote your products.

STEP 4 – Create a Squeeze Page.

The purpose of squeeze pages is to “squeeze” the information you need from visitors to your website. The end result of a squeeze page is a list of potential customers that you can market to by emails. On your squeeze page, one of the easiest ways to get customers to give you their information is to offer a free incentive in exchange for their name and email address. You can set up an opt-in box to make it simple for customers to do this. You should use a professional looking template when creating your squeeze page to make it appear legitimate and trustworthy. Customers will be more likely to take your offer seriously if they believe you take your business seriously. You can also create more than one squeeze page for each website that you have in order to market to different types of people in your target audience. Make an effort to drive traffic to these squeeze pages, because you will get the best results when you have large volumes of traffic to your squeeze pages.

STEP 5 – Create a Salescopy. 

The next step you need to do is to setup your salesletter. Focus on benefits and highlight problems and solutions of visitors in your niche. Include the testimonials you collected, give them some bonuses and create a strong guarantee. This will boost sales of your product.

STEP 6 – Traffic.

Targeted traffic is the quality of website visitors you drive to visit your squeeze page. Your aim should be to get the exact audience who you need to visit your squeeze page to patronize you. You need to do this using traffic generation techniques such as use of keywords to locate your squeeze page. The methods that works in line with this is search engine traffic, article marketing, and pay per click advertising. Sometimes Ezine advertising can be used in a targeted ezine newsletter.

STEP 7 – Follow-Up.

If you want to keep your business thriving, you need to ensure that your customers are contented with your services. Try to entice your customers by giving special offers. You can attract your customers to your products and services by giving a special offer or two. You can give them offers like discounts or free services to attract them to your products and become your permanent customers. Another great way to keep your customer base alive and thriving is to arrange special events for your clients. You can arrange a seminar or a presentation on something that is related to your products and services and then invite your customers. In order to further establish your relationship with your customers you can even host luncheons and dinners. Such interactive platforms will help you keep your clients satisfied and your network stable. A good follow up of your products and services is very important. After you have sold something to the customer, you need to be there and assure your customer that in case of any problem, he or she can fall back on you. Try to send follow up emails or make follow up phone calls in order to build up the trust. 

STEP 8 – Newsletter.

A weekly newsletter is an incredibly powerful component to your overall marketing efforts. Not only will your subscribers view you as an expert in your field, they will begin to trust you over time and that is the most valuable aspect of making sales and generating affiliate commissions online. You should set up your newsletter to cover the theme of your website. If your website revolves around affiliate marketing, than you will want to send your subscribers affiliate marketing tips and articles on a regular basis. With every issue, you should be sending your links to products and services throughout the copy of your newsletter. At the beginning of your newsletter, give them a way of just clicking the link in case they are in a hurry. Add your website link in the bottom of the newsletter with your name. By implementing a newsletter your affiliate profits will increase as you get more subscribers to it. It is an incredibly powerful tool to help you earn as an affiliate.

STEP 9 – Backend.

The backend is where the biggest profits are. Basically, the backend is sales you make after the initial contact or after the first sale. These are your backend sales. Create a marketing system that allows you to maximize the lifetime value of your customers. Most experts agree it’s easier to make a sale from your existing customers than it is to find new customers. So spend lots of time in developing an effective follow-up system that offers related products to your prospects or your customers.
Very simple, get started right now…

Social sites have become a popular, affordable way for internet affiliate marketers to draw guaranteed website traffic. Creating a Squidoo lens to promote your affiliate programs can help you reach your target market and magnify your client base without breaking your budget.

When you participate in a free social site such as Squidoo, it is a budget-conscious way to boost your sales without spending money to buy targeted traffic. By using Squidoo, you can create a profitable interaction between your articles, your blog and your Squidoo lens.

Here are the suggested steps to take in order:

1. The whole process begins by choosing a popular keyword to represent your affiliate marketing endeavor.

2. Create your own Squidoo lens based on this keyword and also create a blog focused around the same keyword.

3. Submit both your Squidoo lens and your blog to multiple search engines and blog directories.

4. Write an article featuring your chosen keyword and submit it to popular article directories such as EzineArticles. Before you submit your article to directories, however, make sure to include a bio box that links to your blog and Squidoo lens.

5. Link your blog and your Squidoo lens to your article.

6. Set up an RSS feed for your blog within your Squidoo lens.

7. Post to your blog regularly with posts centered around your chosen keyword.

8. Ping the blog directories for your lens and your blog every time you post a new entry.

Because Squidoo has modules with RSS reader capability, it is simple to add RSS feeds to your lens and this way your lens is automatically updated whenever you add content to your blog. For example, when you post a new blog entry, your Squidoo lens is automatically updated.

By following these steps, your Squidoo lens, blog and article all work together to draw in a growing flow of traffic and significantly boost your search engine ranking.

Bonus Tip: If you have a mailing list, you can send a link to your latest blog entry in an email – and some email programs do this automatically for you. This is particularly useful if you are reviewing a new product and want to drive traffic to your offering to make sales.

By creating one simple article, a Squidoo lens and a blog, you can give your search engine ranking a major boost for significant affiliate marketing profits.

Albert

StumbleUpon is one of the biggest social networking sites. The innovative function in StumbleUpon is a special tool that allow surfers to expose sites related to theirs interest. Also participants have ability to thumb up or thumb down particular website, it’s simple rating. It can be a great free traffic opportunity for you as StumbleUpon is generating for me the most traffic over other social networking sites. In this article I would like to share with you most effective tools to gain more traffic from this site.

Where to start in StumbleUpon?

Go to StumbleUpon.com and register an account. Also install toolbar to your web browser for faster bookmarking. When you will install it you can go to your site and click icon I like it! It will open a new window where you can write your site review, tags.

What are the benefits of using StumbleUpon?

This social networking site can bring you massive traffic to your site in a very short period of time. The main benefits are: generate immediate traffic to your website, attract readers to your blog, free backlinks.

What kind of traffic can I get?

StumbleUpon can offer you very targeted traffic because of tags you place in reviews. It will reach people interested in topic that your site is about. The thing is that most stumble uponers spent no more than 10 seconds on you website. Proper and clean design can attract more people. Also you will get long term traffic, even from weeks in past.

How to increase subscribers using StumbleUpon?

StumbleUpon have really big potential to do it over other social networking sites. The main things that will help you are: quality content, free bonuses with subscription, many comments under your blog posts.

How many visitors can I get daily?

It can vary but between 100 to few thousands is quite honest answer. There are many things that determine how much traffic you will get from one bookmark. When you will stumble a new site, certainly you will get much more traffic one time.

How to get more traffic from StumbleUpon?

First will be your rating, how many people thumbed up your bookmark. This is one of the most important factors. Your network in StumbleUpon also plays a key factor. More friends will help you get more exposure. Also not every user thumb up is counted the same, quality of user is important.

So to increase traffic you will have to get more other StumbleUpon users, also broad tagging can help you to get more traffic. Add more friends to your profile, comment other people bookmarks and participate in community. Write quality content on your site.

Albert