Month: November 2010

Categories
Conversion Landing Pages Marketing Tools Split Testing squeeze pages Traffic & Conversion

Very Small Tweaks To Improve Your Website

Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or you sell your own stuff, chances are, your website can make you A LOT more money than it does now.

What kind of difference would a mere doubling of sales do for you? I don’t know your personal situation, but it might mean you’re able to make a MUCH better Christmas for your kids than in years past. Or it might mean being able to expand your business, hire more people, and give yourself a raise.

Or maybe it means you can pay a few bills.

Whatever it means to you, it’s NOT TOO LATE. All you need is a little help.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

The difference between an average or poorly performing sales or squeeze page, and a page that works twice as well might be a VERY SMALL TWEAK. It could a difference of one

Continue reading “Very Small Tweaks To Improve Your Website”
Categories
Conversion Marketing Tools Split Testing Traffic & Conversion

Why Your Landing Page Isn’t As Good As It Could Be

If you’ve ever wondered whether your landing page, squeeze page, or entire website was as good as it could be, I’ve got an answer for you.

IT ISN’T.

And there are two reasons why that’s probably the case:

1) “You’re probably not split testing.”

Split testing is the probably the single best way to improve the performance of your website. If you wanted to get more opt-ins, make more sales, and overall just make more money, split testing can get you there more quickly than any other method I know.

If you’re not split testing, start now.

** ON THE OTHER HAND… **

If you’re already split testing, there is one more demon that may be getting in your way. And that brings us to the second reason why your site isn’t as good as it could be.  It’s that…

Continue reading “Why Your Landing Page Isn’t As Good As It Could Be”
Categories
Bad Squeeze Pages Conversion Landing Pages list building squeeze pages

The Worst Squeeze Page Winner

The last week or so we’ve been talking about bad squeeze pages.

There’s CLEARLY no shortage of them online. Once you learn that step one of internet marketing is to build a list, you decide to build your first squeeze page.

I remember my first squeeze page. It was for a mattress website, of all things. I thought I could sell leads to local businesses — a good business, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing.

Having been a programmer in a past life, I thought I’d design the mailing list system myself (bad idea). It’s much better to use standard list-building tools. They’re ultimately cheaper and easier.

And although I had heard that the best way to build a squeeze page was with no menu choices, no links and no distractions on the page, I had plenty of them all.

It wasn’t pretty, and I don’t think I got a single lead.

Well, I’ve come a long way since then, and I’m sure over time I’ll travel even further. But at this point it’s time to give back a bit, and help others in the same situation.

A bit of advice: Don’t expect that just because you WANT someone to opt into your page, that they will. It’s an odd thing, but we tend to think that the things that we love, are in fact also loved by others, and that’s not always the case — in life and in marketing.

In my last post, I showed you the Worst Squeeze Page Runners Up.

Today, you get the winner (or loser, depending on how you look at it.)

Continue reading “The Worst Squeeze Page Winner”

Categories
Bad Squeeze Pages Conversion Landing Pages squeeze pages Traffic & Conversion

Even Worse Squeeze Pages

Last week, I wrote you about the “worst squeeze page ever,” a post that got a LOT of interest on my blog. I even asked for you to send me your own squeeze page, if you thought it was worse than the one I wrote about.

I thought I’d see some that are bad…and wow are they BAD, each for their own special reason!

As a prize for the loser…err, I mean winner… I offered a web-page evaluation worth about $125. But there were some classic examples of “squeeze pages gone bad,” that I also decided to do a few additional quick reviews for three runners-up because the lessons you can learn from seeing how other people put a page together can be very valuable.

You might be making the same mistakes on your own pages.

One note before you look: I wrote my reviews of the pages very impersonally. I didn’t pull any punches or try to be nice or polite. In fact, in a few cases, I wasn’t polite at all. I just wrote about what I saw, and what I thought about it. My apologies if you’re offended.

So here are the runners-up. Learn from them. The winner will be revealed in my next post.

Continue reading “Even Worse Squeeze Pages”
Categories
Conversion Landing Pages squeeze pages Traffic & Conversion

Squeeze Page Response

A couple of days ago, I wrote a post on my blog called “Is this the worst squeeze page ever?”

Did you read it? If not, go take a look.

I showed you a squeeze page which I thought was pretty darn bad. It actually does have *two* redeeming qualities, but overall, it really looks like a stinker to me.

In response to that blog post, I got a comment from “Lyn”, who wrote…

“For me, the “worst” landing pages are those with video that starts playing automatically. I like to leave browser tabs open, those products that interest me, that I want to consider. And once you have several of the auto playing type opening the browser becomes a nightmare. But that’s from a consumer viewpoint.”

I wrote back to Lyn because I think that her observation was a good one. In fact, you probably agree with it. But that’s only part of the story.

One thing that’s important to keep in mind with respect to Landing Page conversions (or squeeze page conversions, or any website performance metric) is that just because someone

Continue reading “Squeeze Page Response”
Categories
Bad Squeeze Pages Traffic & Conversion

Is This The Worst Squeeze Page Ever?

The thing about Landing Page conversions that most people don’t understand is that it doesn’t matter what you like to look at, it doesn’t matter  what you think works, and it doesn’t matter whether you tell me you won’t opt into a page that looks like this or that.

What matters is whether the page actually works.

So earlier today when I was on a popular internet marketing forum and a member wrote for some “suggestions to improve my conversion rate”, I wasn’t quite prepared to see what I saw.

Now I’ve seen some bad squeeze pages before, but this one was different in an eerily familiar way. In fact, it was downright weird. And bad. Or, I should say it was bad based on the fundamentals of good squeeze page design that I’ve studied and used for the last half dozen years.

The strangest part, though, was that the owner of the site claimed that

Continue reading “Is This The Worst Squeeze Page Ever?”