4 Questions to Ask Yourself When Creating Your Squeeze Page

You’ve done the hard work and developed a great product. Now it’s just a case of getting people to opt-in to your offer. Here are four questions to ask yourself when developing your squeeze page that will help you fine-tune it and improve your opt-in rates.

Are you being a little too obvious?

We all know the value of building an email list, but are you harvesting email addresses as effectively as you can? People download PDF files and view videos online all the time without needing to be sent a link by email first, which is a method that is very popular with internet marketers. Now there is nothing wrong with this method, but it is pretty obvious that you are harvesting their email address, and in some circumstances some people will be put off by this.

Sometimes it pays to think about what you are doing and make what you are offering match the medium that you are offering it on. What does this mean? Well, it means repackaging what you are offering in a way that the customer will find much more justifiable. Why not offer the content of your PDF or video in the format of a video or email course to be delivered by email on a regular basis? This way, the giving of the email address is completely justifiable and the customer will like it more because they may not want to watch a long video or read a lengthy PDF. Offering it in small, bite size chunks is much more appealing.

Are you giving away too much?

With the explosion of content marketing, there has been a trend to give away more and more content in an effort to build customer value. This means that many marketers are giving away lots and lots at the opt-in stage, in the belief that the more you give the customer, the more value they will perceive they are getting. This may be true for some people, but for most, you risk overloading them with information. Faced with a mountain of videos and content to read, many people will feel overwhelmed and simply go away.

What to do then? Simply offer less and emphasise how easy to digest what you are offering is and how easy it is to put into practice. Simply throwing everything you know at your customers is infinitely inferior to giving them EXACTLY what they need. Nothing more, nothing less.

Do you need more than an a name and an email address?

So many marketers when they place an opt-in form on their website have several details that they are requesting. Email address, first name, surname, telephone number and occupation being just some of them. But do you really need all these details? You don’t, and your prospect knows it.

Essentially, all you need is an email address, and that is all that you need if you want to strip it back to be as efficient as possible. However, you may choose to ask for a name as well, as many marketers like the way this can help personalise their emails to their prospect. It all depends on what your product is, but if you are asking for more than an email and a name, you can expect to send lots of visitors away from your website without opting in.

Pop-up or splash page?

Yes, pop-ups do work and I mean the type that load over the existing site content. But the fact is they are generally disliked by the vast majority of people, and they can affect not just their opinion of your product, but you as a brand.

However you have to think about maybe having the pop up appear at just certain times, and with most softwares you do have this option. I believe a pop up works well if it appears at the end of a blog post – after all if someone has read right to the end of your content it appears that they are interested in you, so would not be as bothered by a pop up.

Another good way to be less annoying with pop ups is to have an exit intent pop up. When someone goes to leave your site you could have a pop up that appears offering a coupon code or special deal, making the reader think twice.

Additionally you can usually set the pop up to only appear every few visits – this means that you do not risk annoying your regular visitors and they would not see the pop up on every visit.

Alternatively, have you considered a splash page? This avoids the negativity of the pop-up but still gives you the opportunity to capture your prospect’s email address when they first arrive on your site. Together with a ‘No thanks, take me to your main site’ button, you’re making things nice, easy and transparent for them. Your splash page should only appear before your homepage, because using one if a prospect clicks on a link or article will just serve to alienate them.

These are just some of the ways to optimise your opt-in rates. If you’d like further help, we’d love to hear from you, or if you have any ideas of your own, it would be fantastic to hear them.

Till next time…

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Google+ And The Benefits It Has On SEO

If content drives your marketing, then it is vital that the content you are publishing is found on the internet. You may already be doing this through social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter, but are you actively pursuing a strategy to rank better in Google? If not, why not?

Take a look at these statistics from Quicksprout.com:

• Number of internet searches every day – 3.6 billion


• Google’s market share of the search market – 65-70%


• 75% of internet users NEVER scroll past the first page of results


• Search drives more than 300% more traffic to content sites than social media.

If you’re not fully utilising search into your site’s marketing then you are missing out on a huge amount of traffic that you could be converting. There are many facets to successful SEO, but one of the major ranking factors that people are not aware is Google+.

Because of Google’s total dominance of the search market, any successful SEO strategy has to be focussed on ranking well in Google, and that means optimising according to to what Google likes. And guess what? With Google+ being Google’s own social network, your website will get a lot of Google love and see a healthy boost in its search engine rankings if you utilise it correctly. Here are 4 ways that having an active and fully utilised Google+ account will benefit your SEO.

It’s great for getting links

In the past, SEO was fundamentally about link building. Because this was abused by a lot of webmasters, Google made several changes to its algorithm. Now, other factors such as content play a big role but links are still important, but only good quality and relevant links.

This is where the power of Google+ comes in. Because you can curate focussed communities through the use of Google+’s Circles feature, it means you can share extremely relevant and focussed content to those followers. Consequently, this means that they are much more likely to link back to the content than your followers on Twitter or Facebook which will both be far less focussed communities.

Circles

As well as Google+’s Circles being a great way of getting links, it is generally regarded amongst most SEO professionals that Circles are themselves an SEO ranking signal. If you and your business’ profile is popular and lots of pertinent users are adding them to their Circles, then Google is going to take note, and your website will see a boost in its rankings for relevant keywords.

+1

We’ve already seen how important links are in SEO, and how Google now likes relevant links from good quality sites. But do you know why Google sees links as important? It’s because a link is effectively an acknowledgement of a website’s authority and usefulness. If you’re writing an article or blog on your website and you want to share with readers an example of something or cite an authoritative reference, you’re not going to link to any old site are you? No, you’re going to link to a high quality authoritative site. Google therefore sees such links as votes of confidence and the site will receive a boost to its search engine ranking.

So what about the Google+’s +1 button? Well, just like a link is a vote of confidence in a website, having a +1 button on the pages of your site enable users to show their like of your site. Each time somebody presses that +1 button, it’s a direct signal to Google that your site is ‘liked’. Get a good number of these and you will certainly see your ranking rise.

Local

Because Google is always trying to make its search offering better and more relevant to users, it has turned its attention to them with much more personalised results. For example, if you are searching for (local town) plumbers, you’ll see on the first page a list of Google Local results showing plumbers in and around that town, along with their contact details. These haven’t got themselves on page one for that search term through a big investment in SEO. No, they’re there because they have registered their business with Google My Business, which is interlinked with the Google+ network. If you have business, service or product that is geographically based, having a Google+ account and registering with Google My Business is vital to seeing it on page one for relevant localised search terms.

If you want to drive more traffic to your website and you’re not utilising the full power of Google+ then you are missing an important and valuable tactic. Start engaging with Google+ and you will begin to see the beneficial effects it has on your traffic.

How about in your part? What benefits can you get from Google+ for your business?

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Why Google+ Is The Place for Content Marketing

It’s easy for many people to dismiss Google+ as just another social media platform. There are already a host of others out there like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, so for many Google+ seems somewhat redundant. But if you want to be a shrewd user of social media and exploit its power to the fullest, then you’re going to have to start engaging with Google+. You’ll soon see its exciting possibilities.

What is Google+ for?

For most social media platforms, it’s relatively straightforward to see where they can fit in terms of marketing:

Facebook - By far and away the most popular social network, it’s not the best for organic sales generation as its primary use is personal and social, but it is great for brand awareness thanks to its sheer volume of users.

Twitter - Twitter is a fast paced social media platform that is great for engaging with people interested in your niche, fellow industry professionals and influencers. Like Facebook, it is also good for brand awareness, but limited due to its 140 character limit.

Linkedin - THE social network for business professionals, Linkedin is purely business and features very little ‘personal’ engagement and posting. Linkedin can be useful to network and reach out to potential business partners and associates, but reaching out to users you don’t know can sometimes be frowned upon.

Google+ – So what about Google+? Well the great thing about Google+ is that it combines the best bits of all the other social networks. What underpins Google+ is content, and because it is full of useful and engaging posts, it makes it the number one place to market your product or service. People are so much more receptive on Google+! The way it is designed makes it so easy to network and connect with like minded individuals, as soon as you start using Google+ you’ll be glad you did.

Google+ lets you curate a targeted audience

With Google+, to be as effective as you can, you need to define your target audience. As Google+ is THE place for content marketing, then relevancy is key. Who do you want to reach? What sort of themes and topics will they be interested in? What are their demographics? The more focussed you can be at this stage the better.

Now you need to reach out and grow your targeted audience. Search for hashtags related to your industry and engage, engage, engage! Add people to your circles and you’ll often find that they will add you back. I use Circloscope to help with my circle management, which is very similar to Manage Flitter for Twitter. There’s a lot of hard work involved in curating a targeted audience, but in the long run it is worth it.

Zero in on that target audience

Perhaps THE most powerful feature of Google+, Circles allow you to categorize your followers. We’ve already said that Google+ lets you curate a targeted audience, and Google+ lets to focus this even more. When sharing your content, you can choose which Circles to share it with, which means you can give each kind of follower only content you know that will be relevant to them and will be interested in. If you have more than one product or service to promote, Circles are a great way of zeroing in on your target audience.

Action rather than reaction

Content marketing is all about relevancy and keeping up with the latest trends in your industry, and there’s no better way to do this than by using the ‘What’s Hot’ button. On the main Google+ dropdown menu, ‘What’s Hot’ lets you see what topics are trending and lets you search by hashtag. It’s really way of being proactive with your content marketing, rather than being reactive all the time. If you see a relevant topic trending, if you’ve got some content that is relevant to it, then get sharing and reaching out. We’ve already said that Google+ users are so much more receptive, and this is a great way of building relevant followers.

Engagement

If you’re really passionate about content marketing then you will know that for to be at its most effective, then it has to be engaging, and what better way to engage with people than to talk to them directly? With Hangouts, you can chat directly with 10 people and have an unlimited amount of people watching live. This personal touch can mark out your content marketing as being hyper-relevant and you will soon begin to see the results.

Convinced? We’re not saying that Google+ is here to replace all other social media channels, they all have their unique place and use. However, if you’re not using Google+ as part of your integrated content marketing campaign, then you’re missing out on a fantastic opportunity.

So, how about you? Why do you think Google+ is the place for content marketing?

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2 Recent Facebook Changes You Should Know About

Facebook this week announced 2 important algorithm changes which impact the types of content that show up in your news feed.

The first one is click- baiting

But what does that even mean?

We have all seen those posts that state some outrageous claim – for example – you will never believe what happened next, or, what happened next blew my mind.

Then you click through and it is just an ordinary story and the headline was just used to get you to click through hence the term click baiting.

The fact is that people want the headline to help them to decide whether they want to click through to read more, and they do not want to be misled. Facebook are very clever in that they know which posts get clicked on, and then they also know whether people actually stay on the site they have clicked through to, or click away straight away.

Facebook will penalise the ones who use misleading headlines to get the clicks by not showing those posts as much in the news feed and they know who they are because people will not stay on theses sites after clicking through.

So make your headlines enticing but accurate, and not sensational to get the click, because that may well backfire and result in a reduction in the reach of your posts.

Next link posts

We all know that Facebook organic reach is down for a lot of pages.

“Statistics show that text only posts get greater reach on Facebook, while images get greater engagement.”

Greater reach for text only posts means that some people have been posting text only or removing the image that Facebook pulls through from the link, in an attempt to get greater reach.

Or some have been sharing a large image and attaching a link within the description again instead of using the image pulled through with the link to get more engagement.

However Facebook now say that these tactics do not increase clicks on the link – rather the reverse and links shared with the pulled through preview get double the clicks.

Remember the difference between clicks on the photo and clicks on the link. The latter is preferable because it takes readers to your website.

Now Facebook will be favouring links that use the standard image that is automatically pulled through with the link, rather than with an attached photo, because that is the way that gets the most clicks and gives the user what they want which is Facebook’s objective.

So what does all this mean for you?

Study your Facebook insights to see which type of post does best for you.

If you tend to use this method of sharing images with a text link, then think about going back to sharing with the pulled through image.

Test for yourself – it does not mean the images will no longer perform but test to see what work best for you.

Personally I will continue to share large images for my own posts because I get better engagement that way, but also if I am sharing an article from another site then I will use the pulled through image.

It is all about testing to see what works best for your fans.

So, what do you think about the new Facebook changes?

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