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Beginners’ Guide to Landing Pages

February 17, 2011 by 1 Comment

What is a landing page? Typically it is any page on your site to which you want to drive traffic to. It can be your first page or index page or any other page.

You do so because if you are running an e-commerce site, or selling any products or services from your site, you want your visitors to sign up for the products that you sell.

If you do not have any commercial activity on your site, still you want your visitors come to this page to sign up for your newsletters, or anything that you think are important for your site.

Simple Steps to Drive Traffic to a Landing Page

There are several ways to drive traffic to your landing page. The first step is to optimize your landing page for your niche keywords and phrases.

You must also make the page more important by getting your landing page linked by various other sites through inbound links, using onsite SEO by most other pages or posts in your site linking to your landing page.

Then you shall be targeting this page in your email marketing campaigns or newsletters, PPC programs like Google AdWords and other advertising campaigns so that every dollar spent on ads bring the maximum return on investment (ROI) and conversion.

You shall also be asking your affiliate marketers, link partners and business associates to link to your landing page.

Yet another relatively easy and no-cost means of promoting your landing page is to ask your friends and followers on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. to link to your landing page from their accounts on such networks.

Untargeted or Organically Resulting Landing Pages

These types of landing pages are naturally resulting landing pages from organic searches and links from other sites. This kind of pages are usually observed in the case of sites like blogs, recreational or networking sites, etc. in which the site owners do not have any business interests.

Organically evolving landing pages are an important indication of what your visitors and readers like the most in your site.

If you use this information effectively to create more content on the topics of these top-level organic landing pages (example: as indicated by Google Analytics), the results will be highly encouraging and your traffic will increase many fold within a few days or weeks.

This type of your organic landing pages can be a surprise to you because these sometimes are the least important to you as you may have one or two random articles, not even related to what your site or bog is all about.

Multiple Landing Pages

Though most experts emphasize on single landing pages, practically you will have many more landing pages ranking next to your main landing page.

If they are a reality as your statistics show, the best thing is to make them more optimized and make them as effective as your single, most important landing page. This strategy is especially recommended if you have many products to sell, or you have multiple choices for your visitors.

Also, you can redirect your visitors from these pages by just providing links to your main landing page or just adding a phrase or sentence to prompt your visitors to ‘READ MORE’, ‘LEARN MORE’, etc. at the end, and linking them to your main landing page.

Make Your Landing Page Clutter-Free

Usually seasoned, successful marketers remove all distracting links, and even menu links to other pages and sidebars to make the visitors concentrate on the contents of the landing page and prompt them to “action”, or “buy” “or signup”. That is the very purpose of your site or blog.

So, remove all other ads, links, etc. to other sites and your own pages from the main landing page. The visitor can return to other pages after signup, or a single link saying “No Thanks”, “Later”, “Not Now”, etc. will take the reader to your other pages.

Testing the Effectiveness of Your Landing Page

The highly paid content writers, successful marketing professionals, etc. use a Split Test (also called A/B test) or Google’s Webpage Optimizer, to determine which the most effective landing page is. You too can use such tests to enhance the conversion rates of your landing page. (Conversion rate is the percentage of buyers or signups at your landing page.)

Dilute the Ad Concentration of Your Other Posts and Pages

As most of you have observed, some bogs and sites, especially those created by non-professionals, startups or beginners, are heavily and irritatingly loaded with several banner ads, links to other sites, etc.

These are usually seen at sites that want to earn from affiliate marketing or selling ads. My intention is not to discourage earning, but to encourage you to earn wisely and smartly at higher rates, and more.

How do you earn more with lesser number of ads? The logic is very simple.

Just check which affiliate banners and links paid you in the last weeks or months. You will be surprised to see many of the ads did not produce any results, while one or two brought to you some revenue.

Just remove the unproductive ads and watch how the total earnings are influenced. The results can be a huge surprise for you because the few remaining ads will bring you much more income than before, as they have lesser competition from unproductive ads and links.

Plus, with lesser number of ads and banners, your page loads faster, create the lesser user-distraction, become user-friendly and helps you earn more income. Additionally uncluttered pages and posts greatly increase the overall performance of your entire site and your landing page will start producing more revenue than before.

Filed Under: Blogging, marketing, SEO Tagged With: beginners' guide, blogging, how to, landing pages, marketing, ROI, SEO

A new insight on email marketing

January 30, 2011 by 2 Comments

Watch this highly informative YouTube video on email marketing that shows you how you can use email marketing campaigns a powerful tool and bring high returns on your every marketing campaign spend.

When social media marketing was picking up momentum with the advent of services like Facebook, Twitter, etc. there were intense debates going on in marketing discussion forums and all sorts of media in general. There were even marketing pundits predicting the death of email marketing for websites. But time and again they were proved wrong. Email marketing continues to be backbone of any successful marketing campaign.

There are many advantages and disadvantages to email marketing. But the disadvantages outweigh the advantages and almost all disadvantages and stumbling blocks can be overcome by strategically planning your marketing campaigns. Come back for more highly useful email marketing tips and suggestions to improve your return on investments (ROI) to a very higher level.

Filed Under: marketing, video Tagged With: email marketing, marketing, return on investment, ROI, video

European banks may need to raise €240 billion a year

February 22, 2010 by Leave a Comment

Citigroup analysts including Stefan Nedialkov have warned that the biggest banks in Europe may need to raise €240 billion (£211 billion) annually for the next three years to fund the existing and new businesses, according to Telegraph.co.uk. They said the 24 European banks that account for almost 70 per cent of the banking sector’s assets will face an increased need for funds, because of the volatile bond markets and the banks are required to work within the new Basel III capital regulations.

In order to avoid a repeat of the credit crunch and to lessen the banking industry’s cyclical instability, the Basel Committee of central bankers and financial supervisors seek to implement their Basel III proposals on the quality of banks’ capital.

According to the analysts, in Jan 2010 the banks issued €56 billion of long term and medium term funding, but the investors’ appetite for new issuance has fallen in February because of the concerns over the state of the European economy has grown. Also there are disturbing reports about credit markets flashing the hottest warning signals since the current economic crisis evolved. There are also reports of many shares falling on the news of fund-raising questions.

In volatile market situations like this, the banks will have to offer better returns on investments attract investors in future. Also, the Citigroup estimate that the impact of increased funding costs on banks earnings may reach 10 per cent in a worst case scenario. Also, funding availability is not likely to be a major issue for most of the banks before 2012, and the new stable-funding ratio regulations from Basel only appear onerous for a relatively small number of banks, the analysts said.

The analysts also said the Franco-Belgian financial services group Dexia, the Belgian banking and insurance group KBC, and Britain’s largest retail banking group Lloyds Banking Group will see the highest impact to normalized earnings and funding needs from higher cost of raising funds and the new regulatory requirements from Basel. The impact is likely to be less on Citigroup’s key ‘buy-rated’ stocks, which include Spain’s second-largest bank BBVA, Greece’s largest lender National Bank of Greece, Asia-focused bank Standard Chartered, and Swiss banks Credit Suisse and UBS.

Though there were initial fears in early 2009 that the stress of the recession that began in 2007/2008 could lead to the break up of the Eurozone, the Euro’s value actually strengthened by end-2009. Helping the poorer performing economies of Eurozone countries, bond yield spreads between Germany and the weak economies eased the strain on them. It may be noted, for the turn around in fortunes, the European Central Bank (ECB) injected €500 billion into the banks in June.

But in early 2010, fears of a sovereign debt crisis loomed over countries such as Greece, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, leading to a crisis of confidence, and widening of bond yield spreads and risk insurance on credit default swaps between these countries and other Eurozone members, especially Germany and France. After the government bond auction in Portugal, there are fears that sovereign debts may kick of new global pressures. These fears also weakened the Euro and triggered a widespread global stock and commodity sell-off in February 2010.

Filed Under: economy Tagged With: assets, banks, business, capital, credit, debt crisis, economy, euro, Europe, eurozone, insurance, investors, markets, news, recession, ROI, shares, stocks