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Landing pages have the ability to grab and hold us like flypaper or repel us like jumping on the trampoline. The question is - what impact does your landing page have on the people who visit your website? As I talk to people who are just getting into SEO (search engine optimization), all they focus on are rankings in traffic. We have to remember that “rankings” and “traffic” are not the end but a means to the end. That end is visitors to your site that take advantage of the solutions that you offer. We can have a lot of traffic to our website but if no one is sticking around long enough to see if our solutions can solve their problems then that traffic does not mean anything.

Your landing page has to do one thing, answer the questions that the searcher had in mind when he typed in his key words. The searcher type in his search terms because he has a problem, needs a solution or is in some kind of “pain”. You have about two seconds to convince him that you understand what he is going through and what he needs. The last thing a searcher wants to see is that you can jump higher, run faster and do it better than the competition. He just doesn’t care (yet). Besides, most of the websites that he already visited probably stated that they do that. The challenge is to show the searcher that you have the answers to his needs. How do we do that?

1. Think of as many questions as you can that might be on the mind of a visitor to that specific landing page.

2. Choose one of the questions to be the title of that specific landing page. Use the other questions as sub points or topics in the outline of the page.

3. The content underneath each heading will be a description of the problem. It is very important that when you describe the problem you do it from your client’s perspective.

4. After describing two or three scenarios that your client may fall into closeout with the paragraph that describes your qualifications for dealing with the above scenarios. This is where you put in how me years of experience, the combined experience of your team or your experience in the marketplace.

5. The last thing is to have a call to action. The idea is that if your client falls into one of the scenarios described it would be natural for them to do the call for action to get help with their problem.

For example, if someone is doing a search on long-term care insurance they may only have a general idea of what you’re looking for. When they come to a landing page that has a question like “what happens to your nest egg if you suffer an illness or an injury that requires long-term care?” Then in the description of the problem they read that one year of long-term care can cost between $90,000 and $130,000 and as a result of this high costs it will either force you into bankruptcy or dependency on your children or family to take care of you. (Not a pretty picture.) After you add your qualifications, whatever they are, you put in your call to action. It could be something like “for a free quote and help in understanding what your options are fill out form below and one of our experts will contact you within the next 48 hours”.

So the question remains, are your landing pages flypaper or trampolines? If you are not sure call us on 1300 468 462 and our experts will do a free evaluation of your site. This will help determine whether or not changes are in order. Need a new page? Call us and get a professionally designed landing page including an inquiry form for a standard rate of only $500.

All the products that you want to sell online are ready. You have already signed up for a Google AdWords campaign. Your mind is now set to being the next most successful online businessperson. Is there anything else that you might have forgotten to prepare? Maybe none. But how about your landing page? Is it all set for your business?

What is a landing page?

Landing pages are simply web pages where visitors are directed to whenever they click a result in a web search or whenever they click a web ad. Landing pages are, at most times, nothing really different from other web pages in a particular website, especially if the said website is an e-commerce site. Some online businesses would even use the homepage of their websites as the landing page for their ads. Are these businessmen making a big mistake? Or should you follow their method in creating landing pages for their ads?

Do you need a landing page?

Well, you can always follow what most online retailers do, directing their potential customers to the homepages of their websites. But if you want to achieve something more from your online business, and if you want to earn a lot of profits, you better create a special landing page for your web ads. Why? Here are a few reasons why you need to use landing pages for your web ads and why you need to create a great landing page.

Reason no. 1: It is the only way you can track conversions.

With an Online Marketing campaign, you pay on a pay per click basis. Basically, all you have to do is sign up and let your supplier create an ad for you, based on the right keywords. Your ad will then be shown on the relevant search engines, eg Google and Yahoo. Whenever your ad is clicked, a visitor will be directed to your landing page and you will have to pay for each click.

You have to determine what counts as a conversion for your business. Is it an enquiry? A sell? A visit? Having determined this, you are faced with the question how to track these conversions. Does your website offer an enquiry form, or even something as simple as a phone number at first glance? If not, you won’t know what your visitors did when they visited your site.

Your advertisement may be enticing enough to encourage people to purchase a product, but without the landing page, how will they know how to purchase the product?

It is therefore important to have landing pages for your ads because it is the only way for you track conversions. Without landing pages, you might end up spending money without knowing what you are getting in return.

Reason no. 2: Other web pages may just not be enough.

Many people make the mistake of using their website’s homepage as the landing page for their ads. The same is true for those who make use of other pages like a “contact us” page or a product page. Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contain a lot of links to other pages or to other websites.

When choosing a landing page, you must always have the customer directed to the exact page that sells the specific product or service. Therefore, your landing page must be relevant to the keywords and the contents you placed on your ad. It is also important that the landing page can induce your visitor to take action β€” that is to purchase your product or at least provide leads for potential customers.

Final Word

You probably entered into a Google AdWords program with these things in mind: to save on advertising expenses and to gain more profit. But if you get into Online Marketing without actually having a landing page, you’ll end up paying too much without getting anything in return. So if you still don’t have a landing page for your ads, you better start creating one now. Make sure it’s a great landing page too, to ensure you provide your potential customer with a call to action.

Need help? We create custom designed landing pages that work – for only $500! Call us now on 1300 665 491 or visit our website for more information and examples!

Setting up a website is the very first step of an Internet marketing campaign, and the success or failure of your site depends greatly on how specifically you have defined your website goals. If you don’t know what you want your site to accomplish, it will most likely fail to accomplish anything. Without goals to guide you in developing and monitoring your website, all your site will be is an online announcement that you are in business.

How successful is your Website?

If you expect your site to stimulate some form of action, whether it is visitors filling out a form so a representative can contact them, or purchasing a product, there are steps you can take to insure that your website is functioning at peak efficiency. One of the first indicators of how well your site is working for you is finding out the number of visitors in a given period of time. A good baseline measurement is a month in which you haven’t been doing any unusual offline promotional activities.

It’s all about conversion

However, just because hoards of people have passed through your gates does not mean your site is successful. Usually, you want those visitors to actually do something there. It is equally important to monitor the number of visitors to your site who made a purchase. This figure is called the site conversion rate, and it is an essential element of the efficacy of your website.

To find the site conversion rate, take the number of visitors per month and figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action your site is set up for. For example, if you had 2,000 hits to your site, but only 25 of them purchased your product, your site conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of buyers and divide that figure by the number of visitors. Then multiply that result by 100.

If your website is set up to get visitors to fill out a form, make sure to then figure out what the difference is between your site conversion rate and your sales conversion rate. This is because not everyone who fills out your form will actually become your customer. However, whether your site is set-up to sell a service or product, or to get the visitor to fill out a form, the site conversion rate will measure the success or failure of your website whenever you make changes to the site.

What next?

You may find that you need to implement some additional marketing strategies if you find that traffic to your site is extremely low. There are several effective methods to improve the flow of traffic to your website, particularly launching a search engine marketing campaign. This campaign is targeted at increasing your position in paid search engine results so that consumers can find your pages faster and easier. You can either research the steps you need to take to improve your paid search listings, or employ a Pay Per Click (PPC) company to do the work for you.

Make it easy

Another factor to examine is how easy it is for someone who visits your website to accomplish the action the site is set up for. For example, if your goal is for the visitor to fill out a form, is this form easily accessible, or does the visitor have to go through four levels to get to it? If it’s too difficult to get to, the customer may just throw in the towel and move on to another site. Make sure your buttons are highly visible, and the path to your form or ordering page quickly accessible.

Professional Evaluation

Finally, have a professional evaluate the copy on your website. The goal is, of course, to get your visitor to make a purchase or fill out your form. Website copy must be specifically geared to your online campaign and not just a cut and paste job from your company brochure. The right copy can make the difference between profit and loss in your online campaign.

If you are not sure, call us on 1300 665 491 and our Online Marketing experts will do an evaluation of your site. This will help determine whether or not changes are in order. Do you want to run a specific campaign without changing your website? Call us and get a landing page including an enquiry form for your Google AdWords campaign for a standard rate of $550.

Ladies and gentlemen, coming to you live from the Internet Arena: the WWW Client-Conversion World Championship.

This month, we’ll uncover the best tool for making the transition turning visitors into customers seamless by pitting the E-Mail Link against the Contact Form in the ultimate face-off.

A 7-Round Showdown: Forms vs. Links

In the red corner, the former featherweight junior runner-up: the E-Mail Link.

In the blue corner, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world: the Contact Form.

Let’s get ready to RUMBLE!

Round 1: Spam

Posting an e-mail address can invite spam. Spammers write software that works the way search engines do: they “scrape” the Internet looking for e-mail addresses. When you use a form, the e-mail address isn’t visible; it lies within programming code that spammers can’t grab.

Round 2: Specific info

Wouldn’t you like to know more about your leads from the get-go? What are their interests and concerns? Do they prefer phone or e-mail contact? You can gather key information from Web site leads if you just think to ask. An e-mail link doesn’t make requests, but a form can ask for anything.

Round 3: Saving

Ever had a problem with a misplaced e-mail? Did it get blocked by your filter? Problems with your disk quota? Server issues? E-mail just isn’t 100% reliable. But everything submitted on your site can be saved. It’s a great backup. Every now and then, you can take a look and make sure you’ve seen every entry.

Round 4: No e-mail program required

We’ve all done it: You click on an e-mail link from a computer you don’t usually use, and an unfamiliar e-mail program pops up on your screen. Suddenly, you feel out of place. You close the program and forget the idea of contacting that Web site. A form, on the other hand, requires nothing beyond a browser. It’s a friendly, functional tool for any visitor working from any computer.

Round 5: The thank-you page

When a visitor fills out a form and clicks Submit, you can show your gratitude with a thank-you page. This is another chance to mention your company’s products or services. But beyond the opportunity for additional marketing, this feature makes something else possible:

Round 6: Tracking

How many visitors clicked on that e-mail link? Hard to tell. How many visitors filled out that form? Just look at your traffic stats. Every visit to your thank-you page started as a submission to your contact form.

Round 7: Polish

Any high-school kid can make an e-mail link. But established, qualified firms do things right. A form is a clear, clean way to establish your professionalism and simplify communication.

Do you smell what the Form’s got cookin’? After all, while the Contact Form may not be the most important page on your site, it is the page that pays the bills. It’s the hinge point where visitors are converted into clients.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have our winner. And the next move is yours: scrap the E-Mail Link, enlist the almighty Contact Form, and smackdown your competition.

A question we are constantly asked by our customers is: What is the difference between Pay-Per-Click (PPC) or AdWords, and Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO? Please download the following document to answer that question with a minimal amount of jargon and in an impartial way.

Can you get a client to enter your premises for $1? Can you get a client to visit or ring you from a mail campaign for $1? Can you get 300 visitors to your web site for a $300 ad in a paper? I can’t! With our Googleβ„’ AdWords service, our customers pay on average about one dollar to bring a visitor to their site, who is specifically looking for their products or services. I do not know any other way that you can get this type of potential customer.

We currently manage more than 3.4 million ads each week on Google in Australia. Last week we sent more than 40,000 customers to our clients’ websites! We did this with an average position of between 2 and 3 for all clients at the very top of Google search on every search, every hour of every day. It’s simple.

With Google AdWords, only the people who want your services click your ad, and are delivered to your website! We set a daily budget, so you never spend more than you want.

Would you like to know how your web site will get on the front page of Google - from just $25 per week? Call one of our AdWords Professionals on 1300 665 491 and get on the front page of Google search in 48 hours, at the position you need, and at the budget you can afford. It’s simple… it works!

Many people don’t protect their website name. If you don’t, what can go wrong? People might search for your business but misspell the name, use a close competitor name by mistake, or type e.g. www.hotgoana.com into a Google search bar instead of in the address bar at the top of their browser. Therefore, it is VITAL that you get those clients who KNOW YOUR NAME, to your website quickly and efficiently. The last thing you want is to not to be easily contacted by someone who has heard about you.

Over the past year, we have been running our own ads on various mixes of Hot Goanna. Hotgoanna, hotgoana, hot goana, www.hotgoana etc. These ads have cost us between 28c to 34 c for top position on page one. In that time we have received over 200, yes, 200 click throughs to our site. Also, before we trademarked Hot Goanna, we made sure that we had top spot on our own name, just to keep the competition at bay. It works. If you are loosing 200 clients who are looking for you each year, why would you not choose to bid on your name? It should be a part of every AdWords campaign for businesses.

Like to double your business overnight? You can! No, this is not a get rich quick scheme, its pure math.

Do me a favour, go to your business web site and find out the number of unique visitors that you received in 2007. A couple of tricks with this: you don’t want to look at β€œhits”, these are just file and image requests from visitors viewing pages on your site. Find the list of UNIQUE IP or IP Addresses. If you can only view these statistics monthly, then you need to add them all up.

Then, find your own IP address, it is probably the one with the most visits each month, as every time you or your staff view you web site, it counts as a visitor. Take this number away from the totals and you get a real idea of how many people came to your site last year.

Now, lets use some figures from a website as a reference for you to double your business this year. Last year this web site, less visits by staff, generated some 12,000 real visitors. These visitors came from the following means:

• Radio Advertising
• Newspaper Advertising
• Magazine Advertising
• Trade Show stands
• Algorithmic listings

As you can see, there was no PPC traffic, as this site did not use Google. So, we can see that all of these forms of advertising spend generated 2,400 visitors per month. The web site, in this case, generated 50% of the sales that this business enjoyed last year.

Our scenario, is to find another 12,000 visitors to the web site, over and above what they are achieving now. If we do that, then, ergo sum, we should see a mirror doubling of their sales directly from the web site.

If you look at our AdWordsβ„’ Calculator on the Hot Goanna web site, you will see that if we budget $1 for each click, then we can see that it will cost $12,000 for this firm to double their visitors for a year. If the web site continues to perform at its historical levels, and if the quality of the visitors from Google AdWords is the same as their traditional marketing responses, then this business will double their sales this year.

Can you do it? Yes you can (apologies to Bob the Builder, I borrowed that line)

So, your new years resolution is simple. Count your visitors from last year, tally up your sales from website visitors, then use Google AdWords to double your visitors. All the indications are that search and online commerce will grow in Australia by more than 20% this year. Are you ready to cash in? If not, then you will see your market shrink as more of your competitors take up Google AdWordsβ„’ with Hot Goannaβ„’, Australia’s Authorised Google AdWords Reseller.

by Mark Tull, Hot Goanna

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Why you should have a Pay Per Click campaign to bring your business on the front page of Google:

β€’ Australians currently spend more than $1 billion per month with their credit cards online
β€’ 72% of all Australians have used the Internet in June 2007
β€’ Google reached 81.33% of all Internet users in October 2007
β€’ Over 2.6 million searches per day for products and services!

Call us now to set up a Google or Yahoo! account, individually managed** by Google certified and experienced personnel. Pay NO set-up fee when you sign up before the 31st of January, 2008 – and save $199! Our Online Marketing packages start from as little as $5 PER DAY!

Sign up now for Online Marketing – and make your business visible! Call us on 1300 665 491 or visit our Online Marketing section for more information.

The TPP Team wishes you a Merry Christmas!

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