Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Thursday, 20 of December , 2007 at 9:59 am
Are you planning some landing pages? Here are five QUICK design tips for speeding up the process and creating better landing pages.
Did you notice what I did with that preamble? That ought to give you an idea of what this article is about.
- Use a style sheet - CSS is popular for a reason. If you don’t know how to make a style sheet, go to Amazon and buy a book. It is easy to learn and one of the most important aspects of modern web design.
- Use fixed width columns - Monitors now come in all shapes and sizes. A big part of landing page optimization is the visual optimization. Fixed column widths let you know exactly how the page is going to look on your visitors’ screens.
- Use a quality page editor - I am partial to Dreamweaver. A good web page editor is expensive, but has a lot more versatility. Your pages should end up optimized for both IE6,7 and Firefox.
- Get colorful - I like a simple color scheme with my landing pages. I usually use red and blue for keywords. I am also partial to text highlighting, for which I use yellow.
- Optimize your images - Make sure that the images that you use are optimized. Dreamweaver does most of this for you, but you will need to manually enter a title for each image.
Category: Landing Page Optimization
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 11 of December , 2007 at 8:06 am
Landing pages are a great way to drive traffic to products that you wish to promote. They are marketing tools and to the vast majority of us they look ugly, maybe even a little spammy, but they move products like there is no tomorrow. A quick landing page optimization checklist is below:
- Did you work from a style sheet?
- Is the content entirely original?
- Are the images optimized?
- Is the material sales oriented?
- Is it longer than 250 words but to the point?
- Did you make an effort to highlight keywords and key phrases that you want your visitors to read?
- Does it flow logically from one section to another?
- Does it include a purchase button?
If you answered yes to all of those questions then you have at least come close to making a good landing page. There are a few things that you need to remember. Keep the content simple, don’t overwrite it and do not try to make it seem too sophisticated, it is a landing page and most people will see it for what it is. Make use of different headings and text effects. A popular landing page optimization technique is highlighting key words and passages in yellow. It looks like you ran a highlighter over the text. It makes some sections really stand out.
If you are interested in more tips and techniques for landing page optimization, then please contact us at Brick Marketing. We are happy to offer you our professional advice.
Category: Landing Page Optimization
Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Monday, 26 of November , 2007 at 2:11 pm
If you are selling products that might appeal to more than one target market you can build a landing page for each target market and optimize each landing page around a specific keyword. For instance, let’s suppose you are a work-at-home mom who knits bobby socks by hand and sells them on her website - bobbysocks dot com. Perhaps you want to bring back the bobby sock as a fashion trend and you make bobby socks for different markets.
Here are your identified target markets for your hand-knitted bobby socks:
- Young girls who like to look cute (we’re talking kiddie age here)
- Teen age girls who like to feel “classic”
- Grandmothers who wore bobby socks “back in the day”
- And the mothers to the teens and daughters to the GMs who didn’t like them before but now think they’re cute
You want to sell the “bobby socks are cute” mentality to each target market, but you know that each market has special needs and will be spoken to differently. So you decide to set up a sales page that identifies with each specific target market and their needs. Here are the keywords you might use:
- Kiddies - Cute socks. Knowing that little girls aren’t going to know what bobby socks are in the first place, you decide to just sell the concept of “cute socks.” But it isn’t the little girls who will buy them. It’s their mothers. It is likely that Mom has never worn bobby socks because she wasn’t born in the 50s when bobby socks were popular and when she was a little girl there were different trends. Now that she’s older she can see the cuteness in the socks and wants her little girl to look like a 50s cutie-pie. You can say they’re bobby socks on the sales copy, but it isn’t necessary to make “bobby socks” so important a word that the page is optimized around it.
- Teenagers - “Classic bobby-style socks.” Your teen age beauty queen is different. She has some autonomy, but not complete autonomy. She likely makes her own decisions regarding the clothing she wears. She may or may not have purchasing power. Either way, you still have to “sell” her on the idea. Remember, you’re selling benefits, not socks. The benefit to the teenager is that she will look “classically cute.” She will be as cute as the teen girls were in the 50s. The same ones who wore “the original” bobby socks.” It’s OK to call them bobby socks to this market because the class style might be known to her. Her grandmother likely wore them and maybe even her Mom, so she’ll know what they are by the stories told her by the older ladies in the family. But simply calling them “bobby socks” might be a turn off because she isn’t her Mom or grandmother. She’s different and she knows it. You need to sell her on being “classically cute” and not just classic or cute.
- Grandmothers - “Bobby socks.” Grandmother wore bobby socks in the 50s. She liked them then. She likes them now. The problem is grandmother is getting old and she can’t dance any more. But she remembers what it was like to cut the rug in her cute little pink bobby socks. She wants to feel that way again. What she wants is the feeling of being young even though she knows she isn’t. What better way to feel young again than to have your own personally hand-knitted pair of bobby socks? Nostalgia is a benefit too.
- Moms - “The socks your mother loved.” Now you’re talking to the toughest market of all. Mom rebelled against her mother’s fashion statements. Bobby socks were “so old-fashioned” when this girl was a teen. Now that she’s all grown and has teens of her own, she realizes how bad she was rejecting her mother’s trends. They may not have been “the best,” but they weren’t so bad after all. She cares a lot more for her mother’s approval now than she ever did. And now that her mother is getting old, nothing would make her happier than to see her now grown daughter accepting the trends that she made a big deal about rejecting 20 years ago. Why not try it out now that you’re pushing 40? These are “the socks your mother loved.” Now you can love them too.
I hope this little illustration will show you the power of using specific keyword phrases to target a specific market. Same product. Different markets. Different keywords. Separate landing pages. Close the sale.
Category: Landing Page Optimization, SEO
