Group items tagged

The keys to good landing pages is helping the visitor to decide what to do and what is important. Color and shape are two ways to announce visually what matters. I love this selection of tools (though I hate MS Paint). Even a marketer that is mocking up pages can use these tools to emphasize what is important for a designer. New tools for the conversion lab.

I rarely find "Top Ways" lists for which I agree with everything. This one is spot on, 12 times out of 12. If you are running a blog, these are the things to look at (and I need to make some adjustments to The Conversion Scientist blog).

If you run a blog, you'll really enjoy this critique of Jay Baer's Convince and Convert blog by Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com. Great ideas include: Simplify your landing pages, make your most imporant conversions most prominent, add a call to action after the comments (I call this a "dripping pan"), and more.

Google+ is affecting search rankings for authors on the web, so we need to make sure we're playing the game. This article from @AjKohn of tells us how to establish ourselves as the masters of our content in the eyes of Google using the "rel" attribute in our links.

 @ReelSEO Having just completed my first two videos for my up-coming book, I was grateful to have these nine reminders of what makes video convert.

It's about time I started investing in video. The research and case studies I've read show that video is a powerhouse conversion tool, in almost all industries, B2B and B2C. Video isn't to boost your ego (although I like putting a little of myself in the footage). It has a job to do. These nine will help you get results.

Friction is something I haven't written about much. Friction is anything that keeps a visitor from scanning and understanding your page. From a conversion standpoint, it is anything that makes it unclear what a visitor should do. This article really is enlightening about four  Originally from Austin McCraw of MarketingExperiments

I recommend a kind of social media strategy that we call "Content-oriented" social media. This strategy revolves around creating content and sharing it with your social networks. If it gets shared around, you generate more qualified prospects to your site to convert. Clicks are measureable, which we like at Conversion Sciences. Here are nine errors we make that limits the amount of sharing that goes on around our content. NOTE: In #8, the writer defines six sharing personas. Note that 7 of the 8 prefer email as a tool of their sharing. This is an article on social media. The insinuation is that email is a social media tool. You may know that I call email the largest social network on the planet. Just saying...

A new tool for our online conversion lab! Facebook is apparently going to give us more insight into the behavior of individuals on our Facebook pages. The more we know about the success of these pages, the better decisions we can make about spending our marketing time and dollars on social media.

Despite all the hype, social networks are not a panacea for businesses, and many are putting too many resources into them without knowing the payoff.

Once you've blown your Web development budget on look and feel, you often find yourself short on the most important aspect: content; lead generating, social media supporting, expert making content. This is a great list of ways to generate and reuse content.

This article is almost impossible to read because of an animated image in the center of the text. Fortunately, this is not a mistake. It underscores that adding motion to your pages makes it hard to focus on the message of the page.

I hope you'll get a chuckle from this as I did.

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 @bennyblum We don't champion conversion for the fun of it, although it is fun. We do it because it makes us money on the bottom line and gives us leverage when finding more traffic.

Marketing Land's Benny Blum lays out the things you should do to find this leverage for your online advertising, SEO and PPC. Determine: What's a visit worth? Design for Conversion Get Your Message Right Establish an Organic Strategy

Slideshare is great for delivering pithy advice that slowly coalesces into understanding. That's why I love slide decks like this one.

You may not be able to implement these tips tomorrow, but you will begin to think about at online marketing differently.

And that can make all the difference.

Take a look at content marketing through the eyes of several experts, including me.

You may believe us, but does your boss?

As you know we believe that dedicated landing pages are one of the most powerful ways to increase revenue and leads online. It would be best to have a special landing page for each offer you make in an ad, email or on your site.

But who has time to build all of those pages??

If you knew that more landing pages meant more money, you might be able to get your boss to give you more resources.

This post from Hubspot may have the data you need.

The last one on the list can really make a big difference.

7. Conduct user research or share findings with developers

It isn't hard to get user input thanks to inexpensive and easy-to-use services like UsabilityHub.com and Verifyapp.com.

Learn more about how and when to use tools like this in our free Everyday Behavioral Science training.

The steps we take as conversion optimizers look suspiciously like designers. Each of theses steps can use more data, though:User PersonasJob StoriesUsability TestingAffinity Mapping2x2 AnalysisProblem DefinitionIdeate & CreateMockupsPrototypeValidateOur task is to execute on this with high frequency and make small changes as we go to learn what moves the needle.

If we think using unfamiliar words makes us sound smart, @GuyLigertwood has broken the spell. We've been talking alot about behavioral science and the data that drives it. Now you will know what we say with 52 explanations of the terms we tend to bandy about. It's just enough explanation to "get it" and you can drill down into the liked videos.

Everything we do as marketers or salespeople is about story. Our content and conversations should excite the imagination and make others curious about the characters in our story - and perhaps see themselves in it. A.I. and other tech innovations will allow us to get closer to the characters in the stories we tell.

There are sevreral items in this list that are important for conversion optimizers to take note of, things to try. Mobile-first design: I surprised to learn how many leads and sales are now coming from the mobile web. Skeleton screens: Far better than some spinning animation for decreasing both load times AND percieved load times. Photo-cenric Menus: Try these for ecommerce sites. Scroll-triggerd animations: ONLY FOR STORY TELLING! Animated Call-to-action Buttons: Try those that shimmer without interaction. Hand lettering: Be careful not to make things hard to read. AI for design: I just have to try Grid.

Have you considered trying any of these. We would love to hear what you found.