Posts Tagged ‘successful’

Yahoo’s Conversion Tips: Optimize, Navigate and Track

Monday, July 14th, 2008

Over at Yahoo’s Search Marketing blog, Marketing Communications Manager Roger Park is offering up tips on converting your search ads. He breaks down a bunch of best practices principles to three main steps: Optimize, Navigate and Track.

Optimize

Optimizing your landing pages is crucial to a profitable search marketing campaign. Park advises:

* Have a “deep link” to a product on your site
* Offer several contact methods
* Online shopping carts should be secure and easily visible
* Remove broken links
* Have good server availability

Navigate

Park encourages site owners and developers to put themselves in the shoes of their web site visitors. I personally have found that many of my clients have a difficult time being able to do this. They’re just too close to their business. So, it was nice that Park also served up some tangible tips:

* Create an obvious pathway to the product that the visitor searched for
* Don’t have too many layers between the landing page and the end goal - no more than 2 clicks
* If the end goal is sale, move non-commercial content below the fold

Track

Successful marketing campaigns are built on solid data. Consistently evaluate your data and tweak your paid search campaigns accordingly. Yahoo’s conversion-only analytics tool can help you do that. The tool can help you analyze keywords, tweak landing pages, and improve under-performing ads.

Does Your Website Have a Purpose?

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Web sites are all the rage today, it seems more companies and professionals have decided they need them and have put plans in place to build a site for their business. Unfortunately outside of the basic notion that a site is needed most businesses don’t plan out what a web site will do for their business. It becomes a situation where you want one because “they” have one, but unfortunately without purpose and planning neither your site nor theirs will be successful.

A statistic regarding web sites is that over 1,500 new web sites are launched every day somewhere. With that many new sites being created every day to make yours stand out, much less provide value it has to have purpose. Here are four steps to creating a stronger web site for your business.

Know your Purpose

Is your web site designed to sell products online, build your prospect list or serve as a vehicle for information fulfillment? It could be one of these things it could be a combination of them. However even if it has more then one purpose then answer the question what is the primary purpose of the site? Rank your priorities in order of importance from first to last. Once you know the purpose you can focus the site on achieving this goal.

Build Your Site Around the Primary Purpose

Build your web site around your purpose. For example, if you goal is to build a site that grows your prospect list then you need to focus on creating ways to get visitors to give you their contact information. You could do this through an online newsletter, free reports, giving away products or consultations and other methods of giving value to a user that will trade that value for their contact information. Your site navigation, color, overall design, copy and organization needs to be built around achieving this goal.

Offer value

If your web site is a basic brochure about you or your company that ranks very low in terms of providing true value to a visitor. If you can offer articles, free reports, fresh updated content, checklists, links to other sources, a current blog on your expertise, etc. you give people a reason to explore the site and share it with others. You also create a reason for the visitor to come back to your site and expose them to your message and marketing again. If you don’t offer value and instead just have a site all about you and your company you may get visitors once, but soon your traffic will start declining. You want to create a site that is vibrant, alive and a destination for visitors, one that they will willingly come back to. The key to getting this interaction with your visitors is value, offer it and they will come.

Measure progress

Once you have something of value to offer now you need to measure how successful it is. However measurement of useless information isn’t going to help. Figure out what really constitutes a useful measurement. Is it sales, visitors or names for your list? Whatever “it” is be sure you not only know and measure it, but have the goal in mind of what this measurement needs to be to constitute success. There are several great management tools that can give you web statistics on your site, but without the right stats and goals that information is about as useful as ice in Antarctica.

It is too easy to build a web site today, so easy that most become a failure. Don’t let your site become a failure because of lack of purpose and planning. Know why you need it and what the goals and plans are to achieve the “why” then like any good plan execute it and measure your progress. If you apply this strategy your site and business will be much more successful.

JavaScript Forms

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

Being able to successful create JavaScript forms isn’t a difficult process but it may be one that you are unsure about. The common misconception that creating web pages takes an expert computer programmer just isn’t true. While you will use HTML to create JavaScript, you need to realize that they aren’t exactly the same.

With JavaScript you will have several different handlers that the user can click on to perform the necessary actions. This is very important because the easier your web pages are to navigate the more interested consumers will be in them. Some people are very new to using the internet and others are experts so you want to be able to appeal to the level of skill of everyone.

The various JavaScript forms that you create will have coding inserted behind the scenes where the consumer can’t see them. For example your site may have an opt in form for the user to complete. At the bottom they simply click on the form that says SUBMIT. The codes you have entered behind the scenes work to process the information that they have provided.

In order to have a successful JavaScript form called a widget, you need to have several elements in place. They include the form name, the action you want the user to be able to perform, a method for that information to be processed, and a value for each of the JavaScript forms.

There are many different ways in which you can set up JavaScript forms on your web pages. While a simple box that they click is the easiest you may want to offer a radio box or drop down menu if there is more than one option they can select from. You can also offer a text box if you want the user to be able to type in various information.

Before you put your web pages up for consumers to look at, you want to take the time to validate all of the information you have placed into the various JavaScript forms. The goal is for everything to work exactly as it should on the first try. If you come across JavaScript errors you should check each field of entry again. It is going to take some time to master JavaScript but once you do it will become one of the most valuable tools you have to offer.