A landing page is the web page that appears when a potential customer clicks on a search engine results link or an advertisement. Without effective landing pages, you’re wasting time and money. A finely-tuned landing page can boost conversion rates to 2%, 4%, even 10% for some products and services.

A landing page should display content that is a logical extension of the search engine results link or advertisement, and is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines. In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page can be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements.

When building a landing page, focus on getting the visitor to take one action. Do you want them to sign up for a newsletter, buy your product, enter a contest, or give you feedback?

Don’t complicate the landing page by attempting to do too much at once. Focus on the desired action, and use everything on the page to drive your visitor to take that action. Make sure the navigation is not distracting or overpowering. Keep the process simple, and remove all clutter that distracts from your focus.

It’s not easy to get high conversion rates. It takes knowledge, careful design, and then testing to optimize each important element on the page.

A “call to action” is one of the most important concepts on a web page. After you have established you have something of value to offer, and you are the perfect choice, you want to ask your prospect to take the next step. You need to deliver a “call to action.”

A call to action should…

•  Be action oriented and positive
•  Be very simple and easy to understand
•  Be visual and pop
•  Hyperlink both the image and the text in the offer

A call to action should spell out what your prospect is going to get and what action they need to perform. A person looking at the page only a few seconds will understand the offer and know what action is expected of them.

What makes a good offer for a call to action? It’s simple, what’s in it for me? Make it obvious what the person will get from the offer. Free trials, try before you buy make great offers.

Newsier, by a nose | Rafe’s Radar – CNET News | Source: news.cnet.com

Differences in the beta version of Google’s new search engine are only noticeable if you squint. Read this blog post by Rafe Needleman on Rafe’s Radar. Click here to see the post.

Search Marketing is becoming an essential marketing medium for a successful company. If a company can successfully market their products and services online they open the door to many new sales leads and customers. There are two primary options for search marketing – Search Engine Optimization
(SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Why Search Engine Optimization is better than Pay Per Click.

1 – Search Engine Optimization is a long term strategy compared to Pay Per Click. Once the campaign has been completed and your website is ranking in the search engine free results (as a result of your Search Engine Optimization campaign) every click or visitor to your website is free. And if done correctly you will see results for many years.

2 – With Pay Per Click you pay for every visitor delivered to your website. Pay Per Click benefits stop as soon as you pause or stop your campaign.

3 – Pay Per Click Fraud. In a recent report released by Anchor Intelligence they say 25.6% of clicks in the US are suspected click fraud. This could be your competitors clicking through to your website.

4 – The psychology of clicking on paid links. If your website appears in both the paid and unpaid search results you will see about 80% of your website traffic coming from the free results. There is a psychology associated with consumers clicking on paid advertising links especially if they are labeled as such. (In Google the paid links are labeled “Sponsored Links”.) Searchers see straight through this and know it is a paid advertising link. Consumer preference is placed on the free generated results.

Over a period of one year, the investment for setting up a Search Engine Optimization campaign will outperform an equivalent investment in a pay per click campaign, and the Search Engine Optimization investment will continue to provide a return for many years.

A well executed Search Engine Optimization campaign will get your website traffic. Of course selling your product or service is then the responsibility of the website, so make sure you couple your Search Engine Optimization with good design and clear and prevalent calls-to-action.

Zeno Blue eMarketing will be conducting a series of educational Internet marketing workshops. The goal of the workshops is to help others grow their business using Internet marketing.

Whether or not you understand how it works, internet marketing produces results. It’s hard to argue against fully utilizing a medium when 80% of your target market uses it to find local businesses and for initial research. More than 80% of the United States population uses the internet on a daily basis.

The first in the series is an Internet Marketing Fundamentals Workshop. There are a lot of buzz words related to Internet marketing; Twitter, Facebook, online communities, blogging, digital video, SEO/SEM, social media. What do these terms mean to you as a business owner or in-house marketer? The workshops provide participants knowledge strong enough to understand how their organization can tap into the benefits of Internet marketing.

Find out more about the workshops hosted by Zeno Blue eMarketing at Zeno Blue Training.

Below is a very interesting article by Christine O’Kelly at Online PR News. What a great way to make your business stand out.

Online PR News – Users can now pack more visual interest and information punch into their press releases with embedded Slideshare Slideshows at the multi-media press release submission site ‘Online PR News.’.

Everyone from businesses to bloggers can submit online press releases to spread the word about new products, services, and events happening within their company.

“The ability to embed a Slideshare slideshow directly into a press releases offers another way for businesses to quickly capture the interest of their target audience in a world where the public’s attention span is rapidly decreasing,” says Christine O’Kelly, co-founder of Online PR News.

“Slideshare slideshows can enhance the influence of a press release by bringing a visually stimulating, interactive element to the press release. Press release publishers can expand on the message in their press release with ‘how to’ slideshows, product feature demonstrations, image slideshows, or product or service tutorials,” says O’Kelly.

Online PR News has also added YouTube and Google embedding.  Video and slideshow embedding capabilities are available as part of the SEO press release submission site’s $6 SEO press release upgrade.

Printed from

5 May 2009

Warren Buffett may have sagely advice on investment in any number of fields, but one area he says he won’t touch these days is the newspaper industry.

‘The Oracle of Omaha’ made these remarks at the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. shareholder meeting last weekend.

Though his Berkshire Hathway still owns Sun Newspapers and the Buffalo News, the world’s top money manager views the future of the newspaper industry dismally.

“For most newspapers in the United States, we would not buy them at any price,” the world’s second richest man was quoted as saying. ” They (newspapers) have the possibility of going to just unending losses,” said Buffet.

As long as newspapers were essential to readers, they were essential to advertisers. But now news is available in many other venues.

Referring to the Washington Post, Buffet said “the company has a solid cable business, a good reason to hold on to it, but its newspaper business is in trouble,”.

Charles Munger termed newspapers’ woes “a national tragedy.” “…these monopoly daily newspapers have been an important sinew to our civilization, they kept government more honest than they would otherwise be,”

One of Buffett’s first jobs as a child was delivering newspapers, the journal said of his old links to the media industry. “An Omaha newspaper Berkshire owned, Sun Newspapers, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 based in part on a tip Mr. Buffett provided.

By Sid Kirchheimer,  May & June 2009

When asked how you pinch pennies these days?  Thousands of people responded…  Below are the top three.

1.   Quit idling “To save gas, UPS drivers plan their routes to avoid tie-ups at left turns.  So now I plot out my errands so I’m not zigzagging around.” — Sue Foster, Titusville, Florida

2.   Hoard your Lincolns “I tuck the $5 bills I get back in change in my favorite piggy bank.  At the end of the month I deposit them in my ‘$5 Account’ at the bank.   I’m able to save anywhere from $150 to $300 a month. It’s always a blessing to know that if an unexpected repair or expense comes up, you have a little stash to use instead of a credit card.” —  Janet Sinclair, Boston, Massachusetts

3.   Drive a search engine “I am very fond of Google Product Search, which lets you sort the results from low price to high.  And I have always saved a ton of money by buying on eBay.” — Teri Beahm, Cypress, Texas

Click HERE to read the article.

(We Already Have an Ad Agency)

Real (SEM) search engine marketing involves a lot more than making sure your ad is on the web. A classified ad in the local paper doesn’t meet the marketing needs of a business, so why would a pay-per-click campaign be enough to promote your online presence? Many web marketing companies only provide the paid search part of search engine marketing. Successful and growing businesses need a comprehensive web marketing solution. Search marketing agency work with the marketing department and the web team to cover all the bases.

Effective (SEM) search engine marketing is radically different from traditional marketing, even though the goal of both is to drive prospects toward becoming customers. A search marketing company can create rapid and iterative change, to maximize the results from search traffic, and help you understand how people interact with your site to get the information they need to make a buying decision. Importantly, your web marketing agency can deliver motivated prospects with a much lower cost per acquisition than traditional ad agencies or direct marketing firms.

How can a Zeno Blue eMarketing solve your marketing problem?

• Audit to really understand what’s going on
• Research and competitive analysis: where are your opportunities?
• SEO for organic visibility
• PPC management for truly effective campaigns
• Sales flow optimization
• White papers, press releases, optimized PR
• Social media and 2.0 integration
• Monitoring and reporting
• Iterative improvement

Professional search marketing goes beyond advertising to actually solve your search problem

Zeno Blue eMarketing is proud to be a web marketing company that provides customized, strategic internet marketing solutions for our clients. We provide excellent ROI and measurable results for both organic and paid search, plus we can provide other elements of your professional search engine marketing solution—white papers, optimized press releases, pod casts, blogs, video testimonials and so much more.

According to the American Marketing Association (from Wikipedia)…

“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.  The term developed from the original meaning which referred literally to going to market, as in shopping, or going to a market to buy or sell goods or services.”

Marketers have a fascinating yet challenging jobs the essentially boils down to making business work.  The above tasks are by no means easy, especially now during our less than stellar economy.  Below are a few things that marketers can do to help improve their game and wanted to share those things with you.

1. Stay up with technology

Technology is shaping how we market to and build relationships with our users.  We have tools that let you communicate to the world instantly, social networks that allow you to build fan pages, applications that can tell what store carries a particular product and for how much, etc.  As a marketer you need to be aware of the new technologies out there and how they could potentially impact how you do business.

2. Create conversations

Broadcast messages are dead, they are just too easy to ignore and tune out.  Instead of focusing on creating broadcast messages to large groups of people, shift strategies and try to create conversations with your marketing tactics.  The more flow of information you can create the better.

3. Communicating the new

It’s no secret that the marketing landscape is changing.  It’s not enough to just want to be a part of the new type of marketing.  You have to be able to understand why you want to be a part of it and how to communicate that to senior execs.  Take twitter as a simple example.  Would you be able to justify using twitter for business to your boss? Part of marketing is being unique and standing out, being the “purple cow;” the other part is communicating why and how you are going to become that “purple cow.”  Desire and ideas will only get you so far, you have to back up your actions and decisions.

4. Metrics and measurement

Part of being an effective marketer is the ability to show results.  How do you do this? by identifying metrics that tie in with your marketing objectives and then showing those metrics increasing.  How do you justify the cost of Search engine optimization?  How do you justify a pay per click campaign or creating a facebook fan page or a twitter account? Learn how to use online analytics and measurement tools and make sure you understand how to correlate your metrics with your actions.

5. Listening and responding

As a marketer you should be keenly listening to, observing, and engaging in the conversations and discussions that are going on around your product or service.  Pay attention to what your users want and don’t want what they like and don’t like.  Technology has created virtually free ways for marketers to monitor their brand and create online focus groups.  Much of the information a marker needs can be found online for free (or can be gathered). If your customers complain, listen, if they talk to you, respond.  This is how you can keep your conversations from turning into broadcasts.

Source: MarketingProfs. Click to read the article.