Landing Page Best Practices: Remove Distractions, Be Bold & Tell a Story TweetTweet Last Friday, Oli from Unbounce & Peep teamed up for the second episode of Page Fights where they tore apart contestants landing pages & give them actionable advice & best practices on how to make their landing pages better. The winner of Page Fights gets 1 free year of Unbounce’s Pro 99 account, a half hour private consultation with Peep & free early membership into the ConversionXL self study course. In this second episode, they reviewed 5 different landing pages with the page owners & went into more detail than Peep normally does in our regular website reviews, so hopefully you’ll find more value in it. In case you don’t have time to watch the full 39:00 minute video, I’ve included the main takeaways as well as included links to helpful landing page best practice content from here & around the web. Finalist 1 – Paul Jarvis, Write & Sell Your Damn Book What’s interesting about this page is that it uses powerful copywriting to draw visitors into the page. Oli’s Feedback: Takeaways
5 Essential tools to attract a relevant audience to your blog It is not difficult to drive traffic to your site but what’s the point if visitors don’t stay around and read your blog post, sign up to your email list or buy your product or service? We’re all familiar with the following saying: Well, maybe you’re not familiar with that saying because I just made it up. But it does make sense! Let’s look at five great social media tools to ensure you attract a to your blog posts. The people that follow you on Twitter are some of the most likely targets for your blog post but you need to have a strategy for reaching them. SocialBro is a social media management tool. At 8am only 31% of my followers are actively tweeting but over 77% are active at 3pm in the afternoon. I’m based in Europe but focus on the US so it makes sense that more of my followers are online in my afternoon which is the morning in the US. When you are searching through Google for content you often see the authors picture displayed in the search results:
10 writing tips from renowned authors Just because you're writing blogs or website content doesn't mean you can't learn a few things from the great writers of yesteryear. In looking at the tips below, you might be surprised at how relevant and timely their advice can be. Here are 10 ways to improve your writing, online or otherwise: 1. Write, write, write. "Quantity produces quality. You know what they say, "If you want to be a writer, write!" 2. "When you do a thing, do it with all your might. If there's one thing that separates good writers from great writers, it's passion. 3. "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." It's one of the oldest pieces of writing advice there is and for good reason. 4. "Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, which you are used to seeing in print." The first phrase that comes to your mind isn't always the best—in fact, if it's the first phrase that comes to your mind, it might be the worst one to use. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
4 attention-grabbing ways to open a blog post It doesn't matter how good your blog posts are. If their introductions don't grab your readers' attention, you wasted your time writing a post no one will likely read. Your opening statement should leap off the page and engage readers. It's the first thing readers see—other than your title—and should give them a clear idea of what to expect from the rest of the article. After all, what's the point of tweeting a post if no one gets past the first couple sentences? To ensure people read your posts, here are a few tips to get that opener to work for you—not against you. 1. Have you ever found yourself completely caught up in an article? See what I just did there? Questions immediately engage readers and get them thinking. 2. "Ninety percent of all statistics on the Web are outdated," says Abraham Lincoln of Springfield, Ill. This funny little "fact" works as a solid opener because it has a few things we look for in fact statements. 3. 4.
Why Content Goes Viral: the Theory and Proof The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Not all great content goes viral, but (with the exception of awesomely terrible videos) content that does go viral is great. No one can guarantee that any piece of content will take the web by storm, but we can make sure that a piece of content has what it takes. Long-time citizens of the web can often tell from a first-reading or viewing that a piece is going to explode, but why? Opinions about what it takes to be viral are easy to come by, but let’s look at the facts with data to prove it. Write long, in-depth posts In a scientific, statistical look at what makes content most shareable online, two University of Pennsylvania professors looked at the New York Times’ most emailed list to see if they could determine what cause people to share article. The first finding is that longer articles tend to be shared far more often. Inspire anger, awe, or anxiety
The Most Entertaining Guide to Landing Page Optimization You'll Ever Read The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Landing pages rule. Blah. Homepages suck. Blah. Do some A/B testing. All of those statements are true. If you want to be a non-lame marketer, it's really easy. Be warned, however, that I may descend into telling bad jokes in the absence of witty metaphor and charming anecdotal rhetoric. The experienced adult readers amongst you might remember that "Shit. But first. The start of the best part of your day begins now with this table of contents: First I'll give you the only rationale you'll ever need to explain why landing pages are to marketers, what Immodium is to an astronaut with diarrhea. Challenge laid down. Chapter 1: Why landing pages rule, and why you should never send campaign traffic to your homepage If I've got your attention thus far, it's probably because you can't bear to tear your eyes away from my enchanting prose. Got your attention, right?
How To Collect Email Subscribers With Landing Pages That Convert At 50% Using a dedicated landing page for an email marketing list can lift conversion rates up to 50%. That’s an impressive figure! Better yet, a landing page per list, or per campaign, gives you the power to maximize the effectiveness of each individual funnel. Perhaps best of all, dedicated email landing pages allow you to use all of the great conversion optimization techniques that usually apply to your landing pages, so you can use the same tactics in relation to email marketing. This post shares examples and provides guidance on how you can use dedicated landing pages to increase your subscriber conversions rates. The Rise Of The Dedicated Email Marketing Landing Page Over the last 12 months, there seems to have been a big lift in the number of online businesses using dedicated landing pages to drive an increased number of leads into their email marketing funnels. Take this example from Unbounce for its dedicated educational course on better landing pages: 1. 2. 3. People hate missing out!
Why creating beautiful, responsive emails is not a waste of time Sometimes I have to explain why it’s important to spend the time and money on creating beautiful, robust, responsive HTML email templates—and this blows my mind. To me, it seems obvious that well designed, well built emails should be what everyone is aiming for, all the time. To convince others, a graph is required. Blue Hornet’s latest study, Consumer Views of Email Marketing (PDF), was a study of 1,000 US citizens who were asked about various aspects of email marketing. 1. 2. 3. About Nicole Merlin I'm an HTML email designer and developer from Melbourne, Australia.
7 Reasons Why Your Email Marketing Program May Fail Simms Jenkins | May 2, 2013 | 1 Comment inShare56 Make sure there is clear value to your subscribers, you're paying attention to the right metrics, and leveraging the tools you have. The problem with mediocre email marketing is it often still works. No clear value to your subscribers. What have you seen make an impact to prevent the email inertia that often rears its ugly head this time of year? Bad Email image on home page via Shutterstock. Simms Jenkins is CEO of BrightWave Marketing, North America's leading email marketing-focused digital agency. Jenkins was awarded the prestigious AMY 2010 Marketer of the Year from the American Marketing Association for being the top agency marketer and the Email Marketer of the Year at the Tech Marketing Awards held by the Technology Association of Georgia. He has been featured in Fortune Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Adweek, Bloomberg TV, Wired Magazine, and scores of other leading publications and media outlets.
Six tips for landing page user optimization that will drive conversions Published on Whether a given landing page explains demand for business’ services or acts as a search-friendly hub that lists your products and services, it’s crucial that it is optimized to its full potential – not only to show up and compete in search engine results pages but to also retain visitors and minimize your overall bounce rate. So how do you optimize your landing pages? Some might think that satisfying Google’s technical SEO guidelines is the ultimate be-all and end-all of optimization. It’s important, but understanding who your readers are and catering to their needs is just as important as indulging Google’s spiders with proper metadata and inbound links. In fact, promoting user-friendly pages is a goal of all the leading search engines. But let’s take an even further step back: The whole reason you want landing page visibility is because you want people to find these pages and do business with you. Why reader-friendly content promotes online visibility for landing pages 1.