Real Web Marketing Blog

Handling the Local Angle

by John Eberhard

One of the issues that many companies have to deal with when they are laying out a website marketing strategy, is the issue of geography. Where is the business located? And where does it do business? Is it a local business servicing people in one metro area? Is it a business that does business in one entire state? Regional? National? International?

Many of the online marketing actions you can take are NOT limited in their geography. In other words, they get the word out nationally or internationally. So if your business is a local restaurant or home improvement company, servicing people only in a small area, those strategies aren’t necessarily the best for you.

For example, I was recently approached by a firm that wanted to target prospects in southern California. But they wanted to do search engine optimization and link building to get their site ranking high in the search engines. This is all well and good. But I was envisioning where this was going to go, and even if we clearly stated on the web site that we service people only in southern California, I could see getting lots of leads from out of the area. I could even see getting only a minority of the leads from the target area.

You can always target keywords that include the name of your location, but this only works if there is some decent traffic associated with those localized keywords.

Google has recently announced a new feature on search called “Nearby.” If you go to the main Google search page, then type in some search, right near the top there will appear a link for “Show options.” Click on this and a column will appear on the left. A little ways down the page it will say “All results” in black and “Nearby” underlined in blue. If you click on “Nearby” then all the results will be geographically nearby.

This is a nifty feature that perhaps Google should have offered a long time ago. But it’s sort of hard to find. So for the time being until this feature becomes easier to find and more widely used, Google’s main search results are not local.

So let’s talk about the various website marketing methods and whether or not they can be used to target locally.

1. Search Engine Optimization: Doing SEO on a site is designed to help with getting the site to rank well in the search engines for certain keywords. So unless you have some keywords that include names of cities or towns near you, and those keywords have some decent traffic, doing SEO does not allow you to target geographically.

1. Blogging: Having a blog, posting to it regularly, and including links within your post going to various pages in your site, is a great way to generate traffic to the blog, and also builds up links to your site. And sending a notification to the blog search engines after each post is what drives traffic. But once again unless you are including the name of your location in your blog posts (in the headlines, links etc.) you will be attracting visitors from all over.

1. Optimized Press Releases: Sending out press releases optimized with your target keywords is a great way to build quality links to your web site. My thought on press releases is that they generate some traffic, but it is more of a method of building links. So I think it does not matter so much if the business is local.

1.  Article Marketing: Submitting articles to article directories, also called content hubs, remains one of the best ways to build up quantity links to your website. But again, unless you are sprinkling the name of your location throughout the article, you will tend to get readers from all over. But again this is mainly a link building action, so my thought is that this works equally well for local businesses, because we’re mainly looking to create links.

1. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC): Pay per click advertising with Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center allows you to exactly target where your ads will appear. So if you only do business in Glendale, Pasadena and Burbank, California, then you can set it up so that only people living in those cities will see your ads. They will not appear to people searching in Florida. You can pick the whole US, individual states, or other countries. So for a local business that only does business in a certain geographical area, PPC is the best way to drive a lot of traffic that is restricted to one geographical area or zone. As I have mentioned in other articles, PPC is not a good fit for every type of business, because the cost can make it not viable for low ticket items (under $100). But if you selling a high ticket item, it’s usually a great fit.

So in summary, for the local business, pay per click advertising is often the best fit in terms of driving local visitors to your site and generating local leads. That may change as Google makes their “Nearby” feature more prominent and it becomes more widely used. But for now, PPC is the best tool for targeting the local customer.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Yahoo and MSN Combine Forces on Pay Per Click

Here's some important news from MSN and Yahoo on their combining their two pay per click ad programs. Note that they say this will not go into effect until the end of 2010 or beginning of 2011.

A powerful new choice in search is coming

The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is a major initiative between our companies to create a competitive choice in search for advertisers and consumers. The combined scale will assist both companies in speeding the pace of innovation to improve the search user experience, as well as help advertisers get better results and help improve monetization for partners. 

When the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance is implemented, both companies will continue to have differentiated consumer search experiences. However, Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results. 

Yahoo! and Microsoft will each provide customer support to different advertiser segments: Yahoo!’s sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients. Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

More volume, less effort.
Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft, and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace, giving advertisers of all sizes access to a combined audience of nearly 577 million searchers worldwide.¹

Timing
Our aim is a high quality transition of advertisers and partners in at least the US prior to the 2010 holiday season. However, we may wait until 2011 if we determine this will be more effective.

Paid and Organic Traffic

by John Eberhard

When a website owner wants to increase traffic to his website, he doesn’t particularly care how it is done – he just wants more traffic.

Pay per click advertising (PPC), through Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Ad Center, is a great source of traffic for many companies. For companies where pay per click advertising is a good fit, I recommend a two-pronged approach, namely:

1. Get a pay per click campaign going on Google and/or the other providers. This will provide immediate leads coming in the door.
2. While the PPC campaign is getting in leads right away, start a longer range campaign to increase organic (non-paid) traffic.

Organic traffic is defined as traffic that comes through any non-paid means, i.e. not from the pay per click providers. So how do you increase organic traffic?

There are two primary means of increasing organic traffic: 1) raising your rankings in the search engines for the keywords that you are targeting, and 2) putting up a strong and continuing presence on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Raising Your Search Engine Rankings

I have stated in the past that you don’t just generally rank well or poorly on a search engine. You rank well or poorly for specific keywords. So it is important to do keyword research and figure out the best keywords to target. You have to find keywords that have good traffic, i.e. lots of people searching for them, but that do not have a ton of sites competing for them. If there are too many sites competing, you will not be very likely to be able to rank well for those keywords. So you have to find the gold nuggets: high traffic, low competition.

OK. Once you have figured out your list of target keywords, the next step in raising your rankings in the search engines is to do link building. The best ways to do link building are:

1. Article Directories: Writing articles and submitting these to article directories, also known as content hubs. I’ve been doing this type of link building for about four years and it is extremely effective in increasing the volume of links to a website. For reasons I don’t understand, link building with article directories is virtually ignored by the plethora of Internet marketing and search engine optimization websites, blogs and experts out there. One friend of mine thinks this is because the public at large can use article directories effectively, thus leaving the “experts” out of the loop. Whatever the reason that the so-called “experts” never mention it, I know that it works in building hundreds or thousands of links, because I’ve done it and seen the results.
2. Optimized press releases: These are press releases that you write, including 2-3 targeted keywords per release. We then put these up on the client’s blog, on our Client News blog, and submit them to several online PR sites. These online PR sites tend to rank very well on search engines, so these press releases create high quality links. The article directories create quantity of links, and the press releases create quality links.
3. Blogs: Both articles and press releases can be put on a blog or series of blogs (I create 6 blogs for a client and then post each item on all 6), with links within the post back to the client’s main web site. And what text do we use to link? Our targeted keywords of course (Did you guess that one? 10 RealWebMarketing.net points). Each article then counts as more links to your website. Don’t forget to send a notification called a “ping” to all the blog search engines after each post.
4. Squidoo and HubPages: You can take articles and put them up as pages on Squidoo and HubPages, with links coming back to your site. HubPages has a bit of an “anti-marketing” attitude and will only allow one link per article, while Squidoo allows you to put in as many links as you want per article.
5. Social Media Business Directories: You can create listings on social media business directories such as Hotfrog.com, Aboutus.org, Plaxo.com, Plurk.com, etc. These all create good quality links.

Once you start a link building campaign, I recommend checking your rankings in the top three search engines each month for your entire list of targeted keywords. Use software such as Market Samurai or Internet Business Promoter. Then count up how many #1 keywords you have, how many top tens, top twenty, top one hundred, etc. By doing this you can really see your progress month to month. Be prepared to stick with a link building program for at least 6-12 months.

Social Media

Another way to increase organic traffic to a website is to set up accounts on the big social media sites: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and MySpace. Then you have to spend some time on there and add lots of friends (Facebook, MySpace), followers (Twitter) or connections (LinkedIn).

Once you have a decent number of friends/followers/connections, you have to post updates on what you are doing. I do this regularly using a site called Ping.fm, so that it posts my updates to all of the sites above. So I only have to post from one place.

So what do you say in your updates? Well of course you have to make it individual for you. But I have found good success in just posting a quick note about what I’m doing. Such as “Working on a new web site for a dentist client,” or “Working on pay per click advertising campaigns for clients,” or “Posting client press releases on blogs.” What this does is that it creates an awareness out there that I am an Internet marketing consultant. People know I am that guy who does that Internet marketing stuff. So when they need that stuff, guess who they call? You can do the same.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

No Longer Recommend TweetSpinner

On this blog in the past I have recommended the website TweetSpinner.com as a great free site for increasing your followers on Twitter. No more.

The site just changed their offering. They used to have a free service that was quite good, plus an upgraded paid service with more features. I had used the free service to grow my Twitter followers from several hundred up to over 3,000.

But they just changed it so their free service only allows you to do 2-3 actions per day, making it useless. I wrote to them about it and they said "Thanks for the feedback."

Hard and Soft Offers

by John Eberhard

When engaged in some kind of promotional activity, whether it is an ad, or pay per click ads, a direct mail piece, or even a web site, you have to have an offer.

What is an “offer”? It is the thing that you are offering to the public to get them to respond. But some companies have a fixed concept of what the offer is. As your local educational marketing guru, I am going to expand your mind and expand your concept of what an offer is. What many companies think of when they think of what they are offering, is known in marketing parlance as a “hard offer.”

Your marketing guru

In marketing technology, there is a scale of offers, from “hard” to “soft.” A “hard offer” is defined as an offer that is basically to buy the product or service right now, a discount on the price of the item, or something that leads directly to a sale, such as an appointment with a salesperson (whatever you might call it, i.e. “free consultation,” “free inspection”).

A “soft offer” is any kind of offer that gets the person to respond right now, but does not lead directly to a sale right now. About the softest offer you can get is for the person to be entered in some kind of sweepstakes. Some other types of soft offers could include:

• An email newsletter subscription
• A special report or “white paper” on some specific topic
• A free software demo (for software sales)
• A free software utility that does something useful
• Attending a free webinar or teleseminar
• Attending a free in-person seminar
• Some inexpensive gift, like a free T-shirt, pen, hat, etc.

The concept of a soft offer is that you get more people to respond than would have responded if you only had a hard offer (“Call now to buy this product”). The idea with a soft offer is that you are collecting identities on a list, and that you can then use that list to develop and strengthen the interest of that person until he buys.

By doing these things you are building your email list, and you now have a sort of captive audience, that has expressed interest. And you can send repeated communications to that audience, for free. You can send them all an email newsletter. You can send them emails pitching books. You can send them emails right before the some new service is offered. You can send them emails pushing any special offers or discounts you have.

This also fits with some marketing experts who say that it usually takes 5-10 contacts with a company before someone will buy something from it.

You are working to develop these people. The analogy is you pick the low hanging fruit, those are the people who reach who are ready to enter a sales cycle now. But the other people who are interested but not ready to buy now, those are fruit that have to be ripened.

I suggest a bit of caution in what you offer as a soft offer. Stay away from sweepstakes and free giveaways that cost money such as T-shirts or hats (except at trade shows). Generally you want to offer something that only a real prospect for your products or services would be interested in. That’s why I really like soft offers like an email newsletter subscription or a free report (also called a “white paper”). With a free report or white paper, make it on a topic that only your prospects would be interested in. That way you’ll be attracting people and building a list full of people who really are prospects.

You can still have your hard offer for those people who are ready to buy right now or talk to a salesman right now. But with the soft offer, you are collecting names for your mailing list. Then you can repeatedly offer them things to buy.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Marketing Attitude

by John Eberhard

I have been doing marketing for 21 years. I really love marketing for a couple of reasons.

First of all, when I was a kid I really loved all the creative arts, including music, photography, painting, writing, etc. So I love marketing because it offers the chance to be creative, especially with copywriting and design.

Secondly, I love the fact that with marketing, I can craft a message and design a promotion, then send it out to thousands or millions of people, then move hundreds of people to respond. It’s like I can reach out to all those people and cause a response, i.e. create a large effect. It’s a very powerful medium.

One of the first jobs I had in marketing was at a medium sized software company. The whole team would work hard on doing surveys on our target public (IT Managers), then design the ads and write the copy. Then we’d draw pictures of what we wanted to use in the ad, then take them out and show them to IT Managers and make sure it communicated the right thing. Then we’d have the pictures created in final form by a pro illustrator, photographer or computer graphics artist, then send out the ads. Then hundreds of responses would come in, sales would boom, and the company would make millions of dollars.

So I saw how powerful marketing was and it was and is exciting to be part of that.

One of the vital components of doing marketing is that you take one communication, and you send that communication out to hundreds or thousands or millions of people. Each company has a certain target public who can potentially buy their products or services. This may be a certain type of person or it may be limited to the geographical area around the business if it serves the local public. But within that target public, you want to send out your communication as broadly and to as many people as possible.

On social media networks you can apply this principle by getting as many followers or friends as you can. Apply some sort of criteria to who you befriend or follow, so that your friends are your target public as much as possible. Also on social networks be aware of the fact that you can’t pummel people with “buy my stuff” messages all day long, because it is a social network. You have to observe the etiquette and follow the way other people communicate on the network.

In recent years I have seen certain attitudes creep into the collective consciousness that it is somehow bad to communicate a commercial message.

For some strange reason, in the IT field there is a pervasive “anti-marketing” attitude, the idea that to market some product or service is bad.

Another of these is the idea that it is not OK to send out commercial emails, or elaborate ideas of how much permission you have to have in order to send someone an email. To be sure there has been a lot of abuse on commercial email lines, and the volume of email today is high.

But my attitude is to go for it and just make sure you follow the laws. Don’t do anything deceptive in your emails, put your street address in it, include an opt-out option and take people off your list within 10 days when they request off. And don’t get into a propitiative attitude with the public of “Oh please Mr. Public, is it OK that I send you something? Are you sure it’s OK? You won’t be offended, will you?”

One boss of mine used to say that it is easier to get forgiveness than get permission. I like that idea.

Another of my former bosses said that his policy with the mailing list was to continue mailing to them (this was before email) until one of three things happened: 1) they died, 2) they asked to be off the list, or 3) they bought something. I loved this aggressive attitude and have continued in this vein throughout my marketing career.

The moral of this story is that being aggressive is the way to go in marketing. Follow the rules of the road, but don’t buy into the idea that you shouldn’t communicate. Get your ideas out there, as widely as possible, get your responses, and flourish and prosper.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

One Size Does Not Fit All

by John Eberhard

I have observed a couple other companies that are marketing Internet marketing or social media marketing programs that are the same for everyone, regardless of the type of business. In other words, the marketing program is a template, and everyone is sold that same program.

Although this approach may simplify selling the program to prospects, I do not think this approach will work in the long run or get good results for the clients. And when I say “good results for clients,” as usual I am referring to leads or sales for the client. As why else would a business pay money for marketing online?

I believe that each type of business requires a different approach, and that one has to consider such factors as the price of the product or service, the target public, what other marketing media work well for this product or service, how much traffic the web site is getting now, how technologically savvy the target public is, what other competing web sites are doing, whether the business targets a local, regional or national area, and other factors.

In my experience, each type of business requires a different mix of Internet marketing actions. For that reason I design a customized Internet marketing program for each client.

For instance, pay per click (PPC) advertising is not appropriate for each type of business, especially if the price of the product is low, like under $100. But it works great if you are selling something that costs say $1,000 or more. PPC also has the added benefit that you can target exact geographical areas. So it tends to be a good fit for businesses that are servicing only a local area, that are selling a high ticket item, such as home improvement businesses. I have seen the effectiveness fall off for luxury type home improvement products over the last few years (due to economic factors), but for things that people really need for their homes, PPC is extremely very well right now.

As another example, link building, through article marketing, press releases and blogging, is very effective in raising your search engine rankings. But it takes time, like 6-12 months of consistent work, to get real results. So a company has to be able to afford to do that longer term building. And I usually pair it with something to get results more quickly, like pay per click advertising.

I have also observed that social media is more appropriate and effective for some types of businesses than others.

So is it more work to design a customized program for each client or type of client? Sure. But that is the route to real results. And if a company is selling the same package to everyone, they might sell some packages. But in the end I believe the results will not be good. And that muddies the field and the subject for everyone. The route to real results is a customized program for each type of business.

Tracking Your Search Engine Ranking Success

by John Eberhard

So you’ve done keyword research and found the best keywords to target. Then you’ve done search engine optimization on your web site. Then you’ve started link building, with blogs, article directories and press releases. So how do you know when it’s all working? How do you track your success?

Well fortunately, as with many things on the Internet, in this case it is possible to track your success very closely.

Basically what you want to do to track your success with search engine marketing and link building, is to track two things:

1. The traffic you’re getting monthly from the big three search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN
2. Your site’s ranking on the big three for each of your list of target keywords

The first thing is probably pretty obvious. Because the more successful you are at SEO and link building, theoretically the more traffic you should be getting from the search engines. That’s the goal of the whole process. You can check this by having Google Analytics or any other quality web statistics program on your web site.

But why do you care about your ranking on search engines for all the keywords? Because the whole process of selecting keywords, doing SEO on your site, and then doing link building with blogs, articles and press releases, has as its goal: raising your rankings on the search engines for your targeted keywords.

The higher you rank for each of your keywords on the big three search engines, the more traffic you will get. The thing is, it will really start happening when you break the top 20 for a keyword, and especially when you break the top 10, i.e. on page one. That’s when you’ll start seeing real traffic from search engines.

The way you check your ranking for a list of keywords is not to do it manually by going to each search engine and entering your keywords. You can do it that way, but it takes forever. It’s better to do it with software that checks your rankings for a list of keywords. There are two excellent software packages that I have used for this purpose: Internet Business Promoter, and Market Samurai.

In the last six months or so I have started using Market Samurai, since I did Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge training program in August 09. It’s great for keyword research and will also do search engine rank checking for you. I like Market Samurai because it will check your rankings down to the 500th place.

So let’s say you have a list of 100 keywords that you have selected and that you are targeting with your various actions. By using one of these software packages you can get your ranking for each one of the keywords.

I do the reports for each of Google, Yahoo and MSN, then put the results into a table, once a month, like this:

Keyword – Monthly Searches	Google Dec 09	Yahoo Dec 09	MSN Dec 09
Keyword 1	Not top 500	326	153
Keyword 2	Not top 500	52	Not top 500
Keyword 3	Not top 500	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 4	372	19	109
Keyword 5	18	Not top 500	Not top 500
Keyword 6	5	35	185
Keyword 7	227	117	Not top 500
Keyword 8	6	1	5
Keyword 9	41	14	73
Keyword 10	37	27	140

The above is an excerpt from one of my clients’ monthly report, with the actual keywords taken out of course.

Then I add up all the #1 keyword positions, top ten positions (including the #1s), the top 20 (including the #1s and top tens), top 100, and top 500. Then I track it monthly like this:

Number 1 and top 10 positions	Aug 09	Sept 09	Oct 09	Nov 09	Dec 09
Keywords with #1 position	1	3	4	4	6
Top ten keywords including #1s	3	4	9	11	23
Top 20 keywords including #1s and top tens	n/a	8	26	29	41
Top 100 keywords including #1s and top tens, top 20s	19	33	57	67	81
Top 500 keywords including #1s, top 10s, top 20s, top 100s	36	65	69	88	102

The above is actual data from one of my clients where we are doing aggressive link building. Note that over a 5 month period we are seeing good progress. Note also that it doesn’t happen overnight.

So if you mainly get traffic from search engines when your keywords reach the top 20 or top 10 positions, why do I track or care about the top 100 or top 500? Because, as I do more link building a blog posts and so on, more and more keywords will be added to the list of ones that are ranking. But they won’t start out in the top 20, they’ll start out way down the list. So I believe this is an effective way to track what we’re doing with link building. The monthly totals really tell the story, and tell us whether the strategy is working.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous

Conversions with a Web Site

by John Eberhard

You work hard to get traffic to your web site. That’s great.

But now the job is to get conversions. In other words, you want a good percentage of your visitors to either:

1. fill out a form to give you their name and email address, or
2. become a lead, or
3. buy something

If they give you their name and email address, you can email to them in the future repeatedly and market your products or services to them. If they become a lead you can call them and sell them. If they buy something from you online, great.

Let’s talk about each of these items above separately.

Filling Out the Form

Years ago web designers used to put up “guest books” to try to get the name and email of web visitors. But in today’s world, people get way too much email. So they are very selective in giving out their email address. That means you have to come up with items of real value that they want, and then require that they give you their email address in order to get that item.

So what do I mean when I say “items of real value” that will entice the visitor to give you his email? I’m talking about information products. Things like an email newsletter. Or white papers, i.e. reports on some topic related to your business. If you’re a software developer you can offer software demo downloads.

I have used email newsletter subscription offers, and free report or white paper offers, with great success on the web sites for a variety of companies.

The trick with a free report or white paper is to come up with topics and titles that will appeal to your target public. You can apply quite a bit of ingenuity to the creation of a white paper or coming up with a great title, and this can make quite a bit of difference in the response.

The trick with an email newsletter is to decide on a schedule (weekly, monthly, etc.), stick to that schedule, and come up with articles of interest each time.

Partly what you are doing with either a newsletter or white paper is establishing yourself as a source of helpful and accurate information. As a trusted source, the reader then feels confident in buying products or services from you, because he can see that you know what you’re talking about.

I use autoresponders when someone responds. When he signs up for the newsletter, he gets an email back right away saying “thanks for signing up.” When he requests a white paper, he gets an email right away that says “click here to download the white paper,” and “by the way, we’re also signing you up for our newsletter,” and “you can unsubscribe at any time.”

Leads

If you are using the web site to do lead generation, then the lead is your highest quality conversion from the web site. This allows your sales team to contact him. But don’t forget to automatically add him to your email newsletter list. This is for two reasons. One is that, in case he doesn’t buy right away, he can still be receiving information from you regularly and will this not forget about you. And the other reason is that if he does buy right away, the newsletter keeps your name in front of him for when he is ready to buy again.

Sales

If you are selling products directly on the web site, make sure you make it easy for the prospect to find them. You should have a “buy” button, or “shop” button or something of this nature on every page of the site. Your prospect could decide to buy at any time. Make it easy on him when he makes that decision.

Web Statistics

I recommend Google Analytics as a great, free tool offered by Google that allows you to know how many web visitors you’re getting weekly, where they are coming from, what keywords they typed in on a search engine to find you, what pages they visited and so on.

You should look at these statistics once a week (I graph them). Then look at how many conversions you’re getting weekly, i.e. how many people are filling out a form to request one of your free offers, or asking for more info and becoming a lead, or buying something online. Divide the conversions number by the total number of visitors, which will give you your conversion percentage.

So the million dollar question is – what’s a good conversion percentage? That depends. If you are just selling products on the site and aren’t offering any free offers, then the percentage will definitely be lower. Online marketing guru Ed Dale says that 0.5% is an acceptable conversion percentage for selling products. I would say that for sites with free offers, I have had as high as 50% conversion, but that’s unusual and with a really great offer. If you are not getting at least 3% conversion, you should work on your site and come up with ways to increase it, with new offers, bright buttons, etc.

Good luck.

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Landing Pages vs. Landing on Your Home Page

By John Eberhard

I started doing email marketing about 10 years ago, and started doing pay per click advertising about 5-6 years ago. One important element of each type of marketing is: where are you going to have people land on your site?

I noticed 10 years ago and still notice now that many people just automatically have visitors land on their home page. But is this the best way to go? And when I say what is the best way, let’s clarify that the goal is to get the most leads or sales from the campaign.

I developed a technique of making a special, customized landing page, for use in both email marketing and pay per click. This landing page:

1. Has sales text and pictures, of varying lengths
2. Has a form at the bottom of that page for people to become a lead or buy something. Also has a phone number in case they want to call in.
3. Has no navigational buttons
4. Often has a video or audio clip on it
5. Has some kind of compelling offer

Over the years I have tried this type of customized landing page on probably over 100 campaigns.

One of the advantages of both email marketing and pay per click advertising is the ability to track the results extremely well. For example, with Google AdWords, you can have what is called an “A-B” test, where half of the people who see your ad will go to landing page A, and half will go to landing page B. And you can see in great detail, after a week or two of testing, whether it is better to have people land on your home page or on a customized landing page.

Sometimes when I have described the customized landing page concept to clients, they have been skeptical. They have sometimes said:

1. “I wouldn’t like that if I came to a site like that.”
2. “That would piss me off if I came to a site like that, I would want to surf around the site.”
3. “People want to surf around the site.”
4. “Anyone with any web smarts would just back up to the main domain name and then be able to navigate around the site.”

While I can’t particularly argue with whether any of these statements is true, what I can do is say that over the last 10 years, the customized landing page, with no navigation, has worked better in 80-90% of all cases.

When I say that it has worked better, I mean that a customized landing has in 80-90% of all cases worked better in terms of getting more conversions. And by conversions, I mean leads or sales. The customized landing page got a higher percentage of people going to that page, converting to leads or sales than when landing on the home page or any other page of the site with navigation buttons.

What about that other 10-20%? I have seen it work better to give the visitor the option to tool around the site, in rare cases, such as when the product is very visual, such as certain home improvement companies (landscape, paving stones, ponds), where the most highly trafficked pages of the site are generally the photo gallery pages.

For the rest, I recommend leaving the navigation off.

My theory for why this works better, is that letting the person wander around your site is not as focused an experience. They wander around and they leave. But if the only option for the person is to fill out the form or call you, they do, at least in higher percentages.

If you don’t believe me, test it.

Posted via web from Realwebmarketing's posterous