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Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert

Design To Sell: 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert
Advertisement As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. A great-looking website may achieve the goal of shaping and delivering a strong brand, but its good looks alone aren’t enough to sell the products or services on offer. You may want to take a look at the following related articles: 1. Research shows that objects and images you see around you can prime you for certain behaviors. LegacyLocker features a photo of a happy family on its landing page, presumably to evoke in visitors a warm feeling for its product and a desire to care for their loved ones. When choosing images for your website, think carefully about the message you’re trying to send. 2. There is a phenomenon in marketing known as “choice paralysis.” The Highrise pricing list shows a set of monthly payment plans. 3. People make judgments based on what products look like. 4. 6. 7. 8.

30 Ways To Drive Traffic To Your Website Are you looking to increase traffic to your website? There are many ways to increase traffic to your website. Majority of people believe the only way to driving traffic will cost them money. There are different methods of driving traffic that you pay for, and the majority of them are free. Increasing traffic to your business, website, or blog is the key to building a larger audience. I have enlisted in this post the top ways to increase traffic your website. 1. Squidoo.com Hubpages.com Isnare.com Goarticles.com Getarticlesdone.com Ezinearticles.com Articlecity.com Technorati.com Buzzle.com Suite101.com Seekingalpha.com Associatedcontent.com Examiner.com Articlesbase.com Xomba.com Flixya.com Bukisa.com Triond.com Hellum.com Oondi.com Shetoldme.com Digitaljournal.com 2. 3. Twitter Pinterest Facebook Google + MySpace StumbleUpon Reddit Delicious Digg Tweetmeme Fark Slashdot Friendfeed Clipmarks Newsvine LiveJournal Meet Up Orkut MyLife Ning Tagged Deviant Art 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

30+ principles to a better landing page design | Landing Page Optimization After hundreds of landing page optimization projects, we wanted to share few of the lessons we learned when creating a successful landing page. We hope that you will find this article helpful. Also, please consider subscribing to our RSS feed or leaving a comment. There are four basic components to a successful web page design: Research; Design; Copy and Testing and Modification. 1. 2. The topic of customer research is beyond what we cover in this post. 3. 4. The value proposition will help establish trust and gives a sense of congruency throughout the page. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Six Blog Post Templates That Highly Effective Bloggers Use | Linchpin Bloggers I follow several blogs quite closely. I call them my “linchpin bloggers,” as they provide me valuable content on a consistent basis. It is my quest to become one of these linchpin bloggers. And so naturally I have been studying their blogs. Particularly, I have studied the anatomy of their blog posts and have observed a basic structure emerge. Besides Michael Hyatt and Chris Brogan, who actually share their blog post templates, I have constructed what I believe to be the general framework for their posts. Please don’t assume this is an exhaustive outline these bloggers always use. Having said that, using these templates can not only increase productivity and make you write faster and more effective (something I’m always trying to do), but they can help you maintain consistency too. So without further ado, I give you six blog post templates that highly effective bloggers use: 1. Michael Hyatt uses the SCORRE™ method from the Dynamic Communicators Workshop (DCW) to prepare every post. 2. 3.

7 More Useful Tips To Help Your Site Convert Advertisement Last week we presented 8 Useful Tips To Help Your Website Convert – we discussed various rules and guidelines from marketing, such as subliminal suggestion, prevention of choice paralysis, AIDA-principle, attention guide and the Gutenberg rule. The main idea was to help designers and developers create a design that would help the site to grow and become a success the financial point of view. As we see more and more businesses move their services online, and even more that begin their life on the Web, a greater need arises for websites that are designed and built to sell. This article presents further principles and rules that will help your site convert. 1. There is no reason to stop developing your website once you’ve come up with a design that you’re happy with and that you think best sells your product. You can tweak your website using what’s called A/B testing (also known as split testing). Google Website Optimizer 2. A typical feature description on Apple’s website. 3.

The Foolproof Formula for Writing a Solid Blog Post [Template] You know blogging is critical, paramount, indispensable to the success of your marketing. Without it, Google will stop crawling your site; your SEO will tank; your social media accounts will run dry; you'll have no clout with your leads and customers; and you'll have fewer pages on which to place calls-to-action and collect new and reconverted leads. This all sounds like a marketing disaster . So why, oh why, does almost every marketer I talk to have a laundry list of excuses for why they can't consistently blog? Maybe because, unless you're one of the few people who actually like writing, business blogging kind of sucks. The time for excuses is over. The Blogging Formula A comprehensive, high-quality blog post doesn't have to be long. Introduction The introduction sets the stage for the problem you're about to solve. Have you ever tried to ___________? But do you see why that structure works for an introduction? Body Make sure your ____________ lets you _______________.

14 Instant Landing Page Upgrades Landing pages are a great way to generate sales from pay-per-click ads and e-mail campaigns. Folks click the ad and get a page tailored to their exact needs: You get more conversions, the customers are happy. Remove unnecessary fields. [Bonus: Use analytics. Related Posts Book Review: The 2008 Landing Page Handbook Multivariate Testing: Why You Need It Internet Marketing Case Study: Testing Works 5 Headline Templates That Grab Readers | Michael Hyatt - Intentional Leadership Your readers decide whether your blog post is worth their time within a few seconds. Most of that decision is based on the post title (or “headline”). Some of the highest paying work in the copywriting business is creating headlines for magazine covers and tabloids. Think about it. Aren’t you sometimes at least tempted to pick up those magazines in the grocery store line? The “How-To” Headline.The key to making this particular headline work is that you need to tie it to a benefit your reader cares about (related to your content, of course). One final piece of advice. Using these five headline templates, you should have more people reading your posts and commenting on your blog.

10 techniques for an effective 'call to action' Design: The estimated time to read this article is 7 minutes Jeff from Brighton recently wrote to me asking: Occasionally I hear you talk about the importance of having a call to action on the show but you never go into much depth. Having an effective call to action is an essential part of any website. A call to action provides… Focus to your siteA way to measure your sites successDirection to your users How then do you create an effective call to action? 1. Before a user is willing to complete a call to action they have to recognise the need. You also need to communicate the benefits of responding. Take for example the VoIP service Skype. Make calls from your computer — free to other people on Skype and cheap to phones and mobiles around the world. They clearly explain what the user will get by downloading Skype. 2. Sometimes you may have to sweeten the deal to encourage users to complete a call to action. Incentives could include discounts, entry into a competition or a free gift. 3. 4. 5.

Business Model versus Business Plan In the last few years we’ve recognized that a startup is not a smaller version of a large company. We’re now learning that companies are not larger versions of startups. There’s been lots written about how companies need to be more innovative, but very little on what stops them from doing so. Companies looking to be innovative face a conundrum: Every policy and procedure that makes them efficient execution machines stifles innovation. This first post will describe some of the structural problems companies have; follow-on posts will offer some solutions. Facing continuous disruption from globalization, China, the Internet, the diminished power of brands, changing workforce, etc., existing enterprises are establishing corporate innovation groups. But paradoxically, in spite of all their seemingly endless resources, innovation inside of an existing company is much harder than inside a startup. A company is a permanent organization designed to execute a repeatable and scalable business model.

Basecamp home page redesign by Jason Fried of 37signals A few weeks ago we decided to take a stab at redesigning the Basecamp home page. We liked the current design, but we wanted to see if we could do better. Specifically we were interested in more visuals, less text, and a generally simpler and less dense presentation. Started with a sketch As we usually do, we start with a very low-fi sketch of the big idea behind the design. From this sketch we ended up with something that looked like this: We messed around with the words, subheads, and other copy. So we decided to replace the phrases with icons representing the major features/benefits of Basecamp. After a few rounds of tweaks, we ended up with this: After we were pretty happy with the top, we moved down the page and redesigned the rest. A/B test Once the page was ready, we decided to run an A/B test against the current (now the old) design. The new design sent 14% more people to the signup page. Back to back For reference, here was the old design: And here’s the new design:

How we made $1 million for SEOmoz—with one landing page and a few emails When we first published this case study, Moz was called SEOmoz. Even though the company has since rebranded, the techniques described below are still as relevant as ever. In this talk, Moz’s CEO, Rand Fishkin, raves about the work we did, explaining how the money that we generated enabled Moz to develop from a membership site into a web app. Overview Moz is one of the world’s largest providers of tools and resources for online marketing. The company was already highly successful, having a list of Fortune 500 clients as long as your arm. Nevertheless, in the first split test that Conversion Rate Experts conducted for Moz, we generated a 52% improvement in sales. Within the first four months of work, we increased annual revenues by $1 million. Phase I—analyzing the business and designing a more effective landing page We’ve all heard the business principle of “listen to your customers.” After all, it takes time, effort, and money to bring visitors to a website. A wireframe of the page. 1. 2.

Landing Page Optimization For Dummies Cheat Sheet Cheat Sheet Landing page optimization means that you strategically craft your landing page — with images, layout, language, and links. By optimizing landing pages and the consumer experience, you can turn good search engine placement into sales conversions and real money. Common Landing Page Optimization Terms Landing page optimization terms such as conversion and SEO may look familiar but remain a mystery to you. Before trying to optimize your landing page, get to know some common landing page optimization terms: Benefit statements: Benefit statements show how your product or service solves an immediate problem. Essential Landing Page Optimization Tips Follow these optimization tips to keep visitors who land on your Web page from moving to other sites. Choose keywords carefully. Web Resources for Landing Page Optimization Want to find out more about landing page optimization? SEO Chat: Use this site to check out the keyword density used on your site and the competitor’s site.

Split-testing 101 Includes a list of 108 ways to increase your website's profits Here’s how to get lots more customers—free—using split-testing software. Using split-testing software is a powerful way to increase your website's conversion rate (that is, its ability to turn visitors into customers). Many of the web's most powerful companies, including Amazon and Google, use this technique. First, what does split-testing software do? If you had two possible headlines for your webpage but couldn’t decide which one to use, you could run an A/B split-test in which Half of your visitors would see Headline A, andThe other half would see Headline B. You could then tally the orders for each headline and determine which headline brought you the most. The split-testing software lets you carry out tests like this, although such tests often take several weeks to finish. Multivariate testing, however, allows you to carry out many such tests concurrently! And we would be testing these variables all at the same time! 1. 2. 3.

31 Conversion Optimization Tips – How to Increase Conversion Rates Over the past few months, I’ve tweeted daily Conversion Optimization tips, which have been very popular and allowed me to share ideas quickly. Since there seems to be an unending interest in recommendations to improve conversion rates on landing pages and websites, here are 31 of the recent Conversion Optimization tips in under 140 characters each. Keep in mind that Conversion Optimization tips and “Best Practices” only have limited value and should always be tested in your particular situation. We’ve often tested elements lift conversion rates wonderfully in one situation, only to find that they don’t work at all in another. These tips should not be taken as recommendations, but rather as ideas that you could test. For even better results, your conversion optimization testing should solve for real conversion problems. With that said, here are… Have you tested your Call-to-Action on right vs. left side of the page?

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