Creating A Landing Page That Wont Tank part 1

Published on April 29th, 2010.

Building your website is a an ongoing process, one of the elements of your website should be the landing page. The landing page is a more compact version of your website less navigation tabs. Each landing page is said to be a doorway for visitors and prospective clients towards your website. The landing page is the one page you would have to direct your links and ads to.

To get people interested in you would depend on how you design, present and fix the landing page. Like a nicely designed home, the door would have to match the design and what the home features are. Just like your website, there are elements to an effective landing page. Any landing page could be good to look at, but not all are effective enough to get conversions.

Research
The research you need to do is about the people you would want to reach, the people who would need your product or the ones who have loved ones and friends who need your product and the ones who are interested in what your product is.

Who Are Your Visitors

Never start at the drawing board. When website owners start at the design and landing page structure, they base it      on better judgment with no consideration or thought about the customer. A deeper understanding about your visitors and future customers is the keystone of every web page. There are a lot of speculations and suggested formulas on how to get to know your visitors and clients. Keep it simple, think of who needs your product and  put yourself in their place and situation. Routine questions about trust, assurance and intangible things aside, focus on what you wold want to see if you were a customer or site visitor. They’ve said it before, we’ll say it again :

Focus on them and not yourself. Picture the ideal client from their state and appearance and their circumstance.

What drives them
A good deal is what keep people hook, to get them to bite on the hook is knowing they need your product. This is easier said than done since there have been numerous articles about it but rarely are they making conversion through landing pages themselves.

How much are you promising them?
In terminology this would be called Value Proposal. This is the element where you would have to work out the value of your product and the add-on value you would  do for clients. Be committed as you write down that proposal, they are not just words but a trust that you solicit from someone over the Internet.

Design
Once you have a better understanding on who the landing page is being made for, you are now ready to incorporate design to the landing page’s visitor data. Some things to keep in mind when it comes to design, there are 3 things that are constant: Company logo, company name, and company colors. People are big on consistency and keeping the basic design of your website helps you maintain your identity. Use images that visitors can connect or identify themselves with. A product and user match should show positivism. Happy and images of contentment convey the outcome and promise of their purchase.

Content
Have useful information but keep what you have to say short and simple. The landing is limited by the space to combine all the elements of your landing page. Go for shorter copy and leave the rest of the space for another aspect of design.

Testing
Once the structure and template of your landing page is complete, you have to test its technical functions. You would have to go with this on a test site or do it live. Do the links work? Is the back button enabled? Are you linking to the pages that are helpful to your visitors? Is the shopping cart link functioning well? Auto-responder messages well written? Is there harmony? Did you leave out something important? Become your visitor and try going through the landing page and take it all in.

By the way, to be able to continue actual visitor profiling and trending, put in a tracking code which shows you the results of the landing page you have created. As you look into the trend of your visitor, you get to know what effectively keeps them coming back.

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Refining Your Google Search (the basics)

Published on April 29th, 2010.

Are you planning to dive into the world of Search Engine Optimization? There is a lot for you to learn, one of which is the very basic : the search. Each website is crawled by bots and spiders and depending on the search engine,  information and data from your site is sandbox-ed and will get listed. Since Google is the frontrunner among the search engines that have made guidelines about how to optimize your weblog or website, we start with the things we rarely use for searches. Using the Google Search bar as a standard, here are several ways they would put forth a search:

Square Brackets denotes a [query]
We are so used to working offline that we carry over several offline practices that may get you inferior search results.

Phrase Search are phrases attributed to “a person” or “part of a title” “words attributed to someone”

The quotation marks would signal that you want  each phrase and a more trimmed down search focused on the phrase itself.

Inside a specific  [site: ]
You know where you found the article on anti-aging cremes, the thing is you forgot what Item code of the Face Gravity crème was in. The braces and the colon before the website name you need to find out about. [Face Gravity crème: anti-aging.com]

Terms not needed [-]
Terms are connected to some other terms that just muddle up your search. The best thing to put is the hyphen [-] for excluding other terms form the search. For instance, you want to find our about the latest Flip camera that has a USB port [Flip camera-HP printer].

Asking the *unknown
This type of query, the  search engine knows what word or words take preceding  among the ones you listed. Other words listed with the *word is there to narrow the search but information
you need is on the ones with the *asterisk before it. The *asterisk works on a word and not a string of words.

[Exact + Searches]
symbol before a word, joins it with the word before the + sign. This makes the search more accurate the. Typing and adding+an typing a sentence or a long-worded query.

OR | Option
Putting OR in caps between 2 sets of information you need enable the search engine to search for wither of the 2 sets of information. You can also use the symbol | which done by pressing at the  shift key and the backward slash key. Some searches though can’t be [exactly] put nor can Google classify the word: or,  in lower case, as a specific alternate search. For the search engine not to misinterpret the query, keep these in mind:

• several words are ignored automatically and are called ‘stop words’. These are ‘the’, ‘a’ and ‘for’ phrases or words which are well known and are normally attributed to the term itself.

ex. (the mentalist) the search will not exclude the word ‘the’ since this is a well known movie turned TV series;

• the term Single Ladies doesn’t need the ‘+‘ or the [bracket] for Google to know it’s Beyonce’s song
• sometimes synonyms may replace the original words you put in the query
• language analysis will refine your searches as long as there is sufficient data that the page is deemed relevant    ex. Casio baby watches will always result to the Baby G-shock watches by Casio

• Unless you would want a to see product by its series number, the $ must always be put before any number if you are searching for a product being sold at a particular price.

• When using the hyphen: a space before and after indicate you don’t want this term searched on the other hand sans space after the hyphen and a space before the hyphen indicate that these words are strongly -connected

This is the way people at Google have thought of refining searches with the use of punctuation or symbols on your keyboard. The first time anyone would ever have heard about this is during a review on Google’s guidelines.There are several search engines empowering people to make use of the Internet as a reference, yet only Google has set the standard of what a search engine can contribute to website optimization and an easier search process.

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Surprising Facebook Revamps

Published on April 26th, 2010.

Just like all successful start-ups, Facebook has evolved to be one of the leading social network in the world. The are an approximate of 400 million active    FaceBook users in the world- believe it! With 400 million people who make FB a part of a daily routine there is no stopping this start-up from developing and introducing additional features.  A better set of social platform have been introduced and some plug-ins which are alternatives to popular plug-ins- they’ve been modified to integrate Facebook’s vision for sharable information.

Open Graph protocol
Out goes the ‘Connect’ button and in comes the Facebook Open Graph which represents a person’s social graph. The platform maps a person’s social relationships and is mapped out to local venues.  Even outside websites are given added access to Facebook’s ‘gated network. ‘

If let’s say John has a social network of 86 friends, John has access to the 86 friends social network too, which multiplies his reach- if he chooses to. While John visits Facebook partner sites, the site finds whom among your friends from the network have visited the site and their activity in the site.

Graph API
A person has a social network which is represented by an  Open Graph that simplifies whole social connection of an individual. While the API Graph is the unique  social ID of a person’s social notwork or simple they get to tag their pages.  According o Facebook bigwigs, this platform initiative is “to make every website on the internet sharable across its network”.

Targeted Search
Similar to  Google’s idea, Facebook revamps its platform to suit a user’s preference which is based on their on site activity. The difference is a person’s  connection with friends, their interests and also their own connections as well.

Privacy Settings
Setting an account to be private is still upheld by Facebook. Yet it is up to the user when they join groups or even click at the ‘Like’ button. The revamp of the Public no longer means  public to just the Facebook community but the whole Facebook ecosystem. The difference is that sites connected to Facebook will get the information you deem worthy to go public. Be warned that before you decide to click at the ‘Public’ option you will be giving away information about you to roughly 400 million Facebook user’s and community sites.

‘Like’ button
The ‘Become a fan’ was changed to the ‘Like’ button. With the simple Like statement, you keep your privacy since this will just appear in your profile and not in the community. Clicking Like Page on the other hand are said to be rolled out by Facebook as community pages.

User Profiles
The revamp actually is Facebook’s way to get you to integrate all your pages. You also get matched to your likes- that is if you haven’t been a fan yet.

New Plug-ins
Both the Open and  API graphs are a user’s social map the addition of new plug-ins like : Recommendations, Like Box, Login Face, Comments, Live Stream and the Activity Feed make it easier to identify and involve  people within these connections.

Facebook credits
These are vital for everyone who would like to purchase things an application .

Docs.com
A cloud based document sharing application that has functions inspired by Google Docs. And like it, Docs.com is an application that enables file sharing on Facebook and run using Microsoft Office. For what it’s worth Facebook is making waves with partner sites that will expand user’s social connections and data sharing.

On the whole there never was anything wrong with change. The only question is : are these innovations and revamps one way to pave the way to monetize Facebook?

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3 Google Searches For Numbers

Published on April 22nd, 2010.

There are a lot of search engines that exist, yet there are only 3 search giants that slug it out for company owners and online publishers attention. Among the 3 search engines, Google has invested time and logistics to get the best people to come up with applications people will actually use.  It is amazing how Google is able to get to the heart of every matter concerning the Internet. Being online is what most people do most of the day. We communicate, shop, make reservations and do business in the online. People have made electronic communication a staple in everyday life.

Being one of the most content oriented search engines, Google sees this trend of dependence on online transactions and information. It;s just like Google to take the statistics and convert into an application for information that makes it convenient for users to use. There are other ways for Google Search to help anybody, one f them is with number searches.

Package Tracking for UPS, FedEx or USPS. Type the tracking number in teh search field and get the details on your package status.

Patent Numbers can be checked by typing : the word patent and  in the search filed. The results come up in seconds,  you get the links to sites that mention the word “patent” and the number you typed in.

Area Code
Letters marked RTS are the ones that get returned because we forgot to write in the zip code. Google has every area  code every number in the world.

Google has gone beyond what a search engine does, aside from giving everyone access to a lot ofwebsites they provide the information you need in just a few  clicks.

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Microsites are Baaack

Published on April 15th, 2010.

Is it me or do internet tactics go on a periodic cycle just like the fashion trends?

Sign-ups for creating several microsites have surged and this trend is catchy that everyone is bound to hitch on the band wagon on an experimental level. Before today’s take on on microsites, it is but right to have a bit of a flashback on it.

Microsites have been with us since early 2004 when power copywriting meant writing content for a long webpage that have several calls to action and sign-up buttons interspersed with special offers and ‘value-off’ on the products being sold..

By 2006 , microsites are mini-sites that draw in traffic to a main website. In several web marketing advice, companies with several different products qualify for a microsite. Around this time microsites are also a literal translation of the term itself. Pages are less than 20, minimal links, front page in 2-scroll downs.

The year now is 2010 and we have Google and other search engines to thank for optimization and marketing techniques that are sure-fire answers to getting traffic and conversions. But with a great deal of competition for keywords and behavioral programs can make reaching potential buyers more difficult than ever. One of the most frustrating things about trying to rank for a keyword is, registering a domain that is far from the keywords you would want to rank for.

Just like the 60′s mini skirt revival- the style comes back but with revisions that makes it more current. Microsites today are still sites that are supportive of the main website. The difference lies in several elements:

Domain name – in order to rank for the popular search term that is within your websites’ niche, buy a domain name for the phrase or word you want to rank in (it has to be sensible though).

ie. chiccousa.com can have chiccobabytoysale, chiccousasale or chiccosale as a domain name for their micro site.

Keywords- both main website and micro website will have a better chance at ranking with the use of the common keywords.

Website structure- before it used to be the longer the better. Today, website structure is equated to a fold: services, prices and features are all involves proper positioning and layout of logo, company name and navigation hyperlinks. A proper site structure is one that makes site navigation stress free.

Shopping cart integration- even if a sale is not imminent, installation of a shopping cart is useful for analytics, customer behavior and customer tracking. Today a microsite can have several of products that are being sold in the main site. Each Learn More or Buy Now button connects the micro to the main.

Then again it is just the beginning of 2010, there may be more changes to come and new trends to follow and innovate.

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