Example of a personalized lead capture landing page

A landing page is just the page people land on because an ad or email directed them to that specific page as opposed to your site’s homepage.

Effective landing pages make it very clear what a visitor is going to get from a page and how to get it. That’s it plain and simple. There are many great articles on how to create better landing pages (including this one from Unbounce) but today I want to focus on why you need to create and use landing pages as a core online tool

Local content

One of the best ways to get your site to rank higher when people search locally and on mobile devices is to have lots of local content. Creating landing pages that feature very localized, down to the neighborhood perhaps, content is a great way to start building the local content and link necessary to have your pages move up in the search index for local search.

Social content

Sending your LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook connections to landing pages that are personalized to each network is a great way to deepen the connection. By running Twitter and Facebook feeds on these pages and acknowledging the connection with those that come from those networks you will also find a much higher degree of engagement in those networks.

Smart content

By creating landing pages that address the specific market segments, product segments or key content segments for your business you can begin to better funnel people to the specific types of content they desire. Using a tool like Survey Funnel in conjunction with your landing pages could allow a visitor to tell you what they are looking for and be directed to specific content based on their choices.

Lead capture

Landing pages are your lead capture workhorse. If you have a great eBook or free workshop to promote you may want to create signup forms for most of your web pages, but your signups will soar when you create a page that details, sells and demonstrates the benefits of acquiring your free report. A landing page with video, audio, images, descriptions and very intuitive call to action is a must for lead capture campaigns.

Advertising conversion

Any form of advertising will be much more effective if it is targeted to a page that contains nothing but content that supports the message in your ads. The more relevant the page to the ad, the more effective. Smart marketers constantly experiment with ad and landing page combinations, including creating keyword optimized pages for specific groups of PPC ads.

Get Premise

There are many resources geared towards helping you create landing pages, but my favorite at the moment is Copyblogger’s Premise. I run my entire website on WordPress and Premise is a WordPress landing page plugin that gives me total flexibility in the creation of landing pages. The tool includes predesigned configurations for sales pages and opt-in pages and is very easy to configure and style. A tool like Premise is a must if you plan to take today’s advice to heart.

Comments

In this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Austin Kleon, author the book Steal Like An Artist and certainly the inspiration for the title of this post.

As I shared with Austin I don’t believe entrepreneurs are any more creative than other people, I believe they just view the world, concepts and ideas through this lens that forces them to ask – “How could I take this and make it better?”

Kleon’s book, subtitled 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, started out as a presentation given to a group of students and grew to be a bit of a movement.

The book’s main premise is this: Creativity is in reality a form of “remixing.” According to Kleon creativity isn’t some flash of brilliance, but more of a collaborative process of combine existing ideas into innovative ones.

To me that’s about as close to the definition of the art practiced by most entrepreneurs as I can summon.

Note that the kind of stealing Kleon refers to is not the same as copying. Copying only allows you to create an inauthentic replica of something that already exists. The creativity that Kleon refers to is the kind that is inspired by others but becomes authentically your own.

This practical, stylish, dare I say, hip book offers even more entrepreneurial advice and truths about creativity: Nothing is original, so embrace influence, collect ideas, and remix and re-imagine to discover your own path. Follow your interests wherever they take you. Stay smart, stay out of debt, and risk being boring—the creative you will need to make room to be wild and daring in your imagination.

There you have it, go ahead and steal like an entrepreneur.

By the way, check out Kleon’s first book too. Newspaper Blackout is a book filled with art created by simply blacking out words in an article to come up with a creative saying. The image in this post is from the book.

Marketing podcast with Austin Kleon (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

Comments

The concept made complete sense, but then something really big happened.

The relationship that our prospects have with our marketing communications has changed dramatically. Marketers are no longer in control of how a message is consumed, who consumes it, when they consume it or even who produced it in the first place.

Social media, search, TiVo, and little things like the “do not mail” list altered the practices of lead generations through broadcast marketing forever.

As marketers started to discover the new reality of the need to be found, a new word started to creep into the marketing lexicon – optimize. The term itself has been with us since the dawn of search and has been mostly applied to the practice of search engine optimization or SEO.

But now it must be applied more broadly than the notion of keyword rich content and high quality backlinks.

Today, every element of our marketing must be optimized to take advantage of the fact that it may indeed need to work in isolation.

This doesn’t throw off the notion of integration; every element of your marketing working in tandem is still a good thing. It adds, however, the reality that much of your marketing may be encountered in ways that you no longer control and every element must be able to do the job of moving a prospect forward on its own.

• Today’s marketer must rely on outposts, such as social media networks, to open up new paths of entry for a prospect.
• They must rely on educational content to draw the attention of those researching online.
• They must participate in communities that exist for the sole purpose of building trust and providing proof.
• They must optimize every brand asset and put them in places where prospects might stumble upon them.

Few marketers online have shared my longstanding belief about the optimization mindset so thoroughly as Lee Odden, publisher of the Top Rank Blog. Lee has been urging SEO types to embrace the marriage between search, social and content for as long as anyone I can remember.

This month Odden released what I think is an absolute must read for anyone that wonders about the practical realities of the new world of marketing. The book is simply titled – Optimize.

Optimize introduces the concept of the optimized mindset and in opinion says just as much about how you need to think about your business as being a guide for how to turn practical social media and content marketing advice into action.

Odden stopped by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast to talk about Optimize and the future of marketing online.

Here are just a few things that you need to consider in the optimized mindset:

• Your listening, especially to your customers, must be optimized
• Your brand assets, such as images and videos, must be optimized
• Your content, tailored to serve specific purposes, must be optimized
• Your customer experience, beginning with the end in mind, must be optimized
• Your social media participation
• Your product and service delivery
• Your customer service
• Your store or office
• Your advertising
• Your referral generation
• Your public relations
• Your sales system
• Your partnerships
• Your analytics

You see, integration isn’t enough anymore – Today’s marketing requires the optimization of every element and it’s a mindset as much as it is a tactic.

Marketing podcast with Lee Odden (Click to play or right click and “Save As” to download – Subscribe now via iTunes or subscribe via other RSS device (Google Listen)

Comments

1. Increase the transaction value of your existing clients. In other words, sell them more products or services each time they buy from you.
2. Increase the frequency of your clients purchasing. Instead of them buying from you 4 times a year, allow them to buy from you once a month.
3. Attract more clients.
4. Increase your prices or fees.
5. Retain more clients (also known as attrition management.)

Marketing is more than just attracting new clients

Most small business owners focus on number 3 and  number 4. They are always looking for new clients and ways to increase their fees, unaware that they can massively increase their revenues and profits, from their existing client base.

In working with my clients, I have helped some develop their existing client base to the point where they have increased profits by over 700%, without them having to win a single new client.

For example, you can develop additional products and services, which compliment what you already offer. This allows you to bring greater utility to your clients and as a result, additional revenue streams to your business too. It’s quicker and easier to sell additional products or services to existing clients, than to people who don’t know you. It’s usually more profitable too, as the lead-in time is shorter and the potential for non-payment almost nil, as you already know their payment history.

Increasing the purchase cycle

Business owners often limit their revenues and profits, by sticking to needless purchasing cycles.

For example, I recall a DIY company that made the massive majority of it’s sales from a bi-annual catalogue. They had always done things that way and were used to having 2 busy months each year, which sustained the business. By simply turning that catalogue into a quarterly publication, they were able to almost double their sales.

Client retention and acquisition

Another benefit of building your service, so that it’s of greater value and of greater utility, is that you will encourage clients to stay with you for longer. This helps take care of point 5 on the above list; client retention. When clients are getting a better, more inclusive service from you, it makes it harder for a competitor to win their custom. Similarly, the increased value and utility of your service, will make it more attractive when you market it, which will help you attract more new clients too.

Yes, it makes perfect sense to attract new clients and look for ways to offer a better service, so you can charge stronger prices or fees. But never underestimate the potential for huge windfall revenues, when you focus on delivering excellence and increased utility to your existing client base.

Comments

If you just answered yes to either of those questions, you may find this post useful.

So, exactly who is your ideal client?

When I work with a new client, one of the first things we work on is to build a clear picture of exactly what their ideal client profile is and what these high quality prospects need to hear. This allows us to produce powerful, compelling marketing messages, which inspire the right people to take action. It also eliminates the kind of scrambling tactics you see every day, from small business owners who use all the latest online tools, with no idea why it’s failing to generate bankable results.

Here are just a few, very common signs that you need to make your marketing clearer and more relevant to the right people.

Vague networking: You will find yourself developing networks, with the wrong type of people. If you have hundreds or maybe thousands of ‘followers’ on social networking sites, yet you attract few clients, introductions or referrals from all those people, it’s likely you are connecting with the wrong people and missing the right ones.

Poorly targeted marketing messages: If your marketing is failing to generate enough sales or inquiries, it’s a sign that your marketing messages either lack clarity, are being seen by the wrong people or both. For a marketing message to work, you have to know exactly who you are writing for and what they need. Your marketing should offer a targeted message, to the right person, with a compelling reason to get in touch with you. When you do that, it works. This is why I focus on it so heavily with my clients. The results are immediate and measurable.

Attracting cost conscious or fee sensitive leads: If you find prospective clients are particularly cost conscious when you speak with them, it’s a sign that you are attracting the wrong people. Even if you offer exceptional value, by failing to target your ideal profile of client, you will find yourself regularly speaking to those looking for a bargain basement provider. Remember, one of the qualifications needed for someone to be your ideal prospective client, is the ability to pay you what you are worth!

The good news

If one or more of the above applies to you, there’s some good news. When you develop the right strategy, which eliminates all that fuzzy marketing, everything changes.

Get specific

You’re not going to find the strategy you need from any form of general information, such as books, blogs, seminars or courses. These are designed to be of general use to a wide number of people. Your unique situation, resources, marketplace, goals and even your approach to business ALL need to be taken into account, for this to work.

If more than one of those warning signs earlier related to you and your business, I strongly recommend you speak with a proven marketing professional. Start by asking your friends and business contacts if they know someone they can recommend to you – especially if they have worked directly with the person. Alternatively, if you find my work here useful and would like to find out about us working together, you’re very welcome to email me here. You may also find this useful. I’d be happy to share my most effective marketing strategies with you and show you exactly what you need to do.

Comments

It continues to baffle me. SEO is proven to work, and with a local focus, is a really cost effective way to drive customers to shops and businesses. Yet business owners continue to throw money away at antiquated marketing strategies and ignore SEO.

I can only put it down to fear and lack of understanding.

So hopefully this post will reduce the fear and help people understand how to do their own local SEO.

In terms of SEO, a locally focused campaign tends to yield much faster ranking results as there’s often less competition in cities, suburbs and neighbourhoods. Less competition also means it’s easier and cheaper to achieve the results you need.

So here goes:

Picking your keywords
The first step is getting your keywords right. There’s no rocket science here. Just find the best keywords that describe your shop, products or services and add “local” extensions.

e.g. “cheap shoes” => “cheap shoes pasadena”

And explore suburb level search terms. They might not be massive traffic terms, but they’ll be easier to rank on, and will often be used by people who are more likely potential customers.

Optimising Your Website
Once you’ve got your keywords selected, it’s time to do your on page SEO. Now I’m not gonna go through a full lesson on how to do on page SEO – we’ve blogged about that many times before, but here’s some obvious ways to boost your local keyword focus:

• Contact Us Pages – Make sure your target terms are featured here
• Website Footer - Your footer is featured across your website, so placing your target terms will reinforce the focus across your whole website.
• Title Tags – Title tags are still a very important on-page SEO element, so make sure your relevant pages have “local” terms included.
• Location Specific Pages – Consider creating web pages that focus on specific areas. You can include information on your experience in the area, why you’re the business to choose there etc.

Building Your Links
As per all SEO campaigns, link building is the foundation of your success. While you should follow all conventional link building techniques, Local SEO offers you some additional link building opportunities.

Local Directories
There are several web directories out there that target specific areas. As Google’s looking for relevant backlinks to measure your authority, seek out the local directories that focus on your area and ensure your business has listings in them all.

Regional communities
Many local and regional areas have groups that feature local businesses. Whether it’s a local chamber of commerce, or a community group, get involved in what they’re doing and try to get your business listed in their site. It’s local focus will help deliver a strong link to your business.

Business Review Sites
There’s plenty of business review and directory sites out there focused on local. Try to get your business featured in all the ones relevant to your industry. E.g. if you’re a restaurant, you might look at adding your business to urbanspoon, or if you’re an accountant, get a link from your accountant association.

Expanding Your Search Profile
While the key is to rank your website for your target search terms in Google, it also good to have other web properties you own rank for those terms also. It’ll help ensure potential local customers find your business.

Google Places
Google Places listings feature at the top of the search results for most local searches. It’s critical that you have a Google Places listing for your business. Within this listing, make sure it include the search terms you’re targeting in your business description.

Social Media
Most businesses are embracing social media in one way or another. So make sure that when you do you consider your local seo when posting information and links back to your business.

And if you needed further convincing the Local Search is important – here’s a handy infographic that details how Local Search has grown and why it’s such an important strategy.

Infographic by MDG Advertising
Comments

It seems that staying focused on priorities is one of the toughest jobs we all have.

Several readers correctly identified that while I had outlined the path for staying focused, I hadn’t addressed just how you stay on that path. So, that’s what I want to address today.

By dividing my week into specific kinds of work I get more done

There are lots of time management systems out there and I don’t profess to claim that my adopted method is anything more than the cobbling together of systems from some terribly genuine and creative people like Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and David Allen of GTD. I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with both and credit them with a great deal of my thinking on managing myself.

I will say that, like any good hack, I have my own take and it starts with a focus on managing energy and the whole person over managing time. I wrote specifically about energy here.

People constantly remark that they have no idea how I get so much done. While it does involve mirrors and an incredible spouse, a great deal has to do with an organic system that I’ve used for years and have only recently been able to articulate.

The basic unit of my time and energy management tool and the thing that allows me to stay on important stuff done path is the week.

I divide each week up into days with a specific type of work plan. Each type of day plan has a unique emphasis that is biased towards a certain type of work. I have Intention Days, Attention Days and Ascension Days.

Intention Days are set aside to concentrate on my big ideas, my own personal growth and in some cases renewal. I take my higher purpose into these days and allow myself the luxury of dreaming.

At the risk of getting too personal, these are days where I often spend a lot of time alone and reassess meetings and feelings and words I’ve used wisely and unwisely. These are days when I forgive myself and forgive others. This type of renewal allows me to tap that little flicker of creativity that I so often attempt to extinguish.

While I intentionally protect my thoughts and actions on these days I don’t go as far as banning all digital activity, I simply make certain that I witness my thoughts and spend time doing things I wouldn’t normally do. I go to art museums and read books about architecture and geometry.

Attention Days are set aside to spend as much time as possible making money. Now, this may sound a little too focused for some, but what I really do is spend time doing my three or four highest payoff activities. The kind of stuff that either makes me money now or lays the foundation for meeting objectives down the road.

For me that’s writing, creating products or courses, working with sponsors and customers or writing an email that entices people to sign up for a workshop.

I typically plan these days with my staff during our weekly all hands meeting and take them outside of the office to limit the temptation to stray from full attention.

These days are easy to plan as I limit them to just a few items. In some cases I may only get to creating a PowerPoint Deck and writing one article, but I know it’s the right work and I know it’s time well spent.

Ascension Days are days spent climbing the hill. It’s when I get to those meetings, interviews, WordPress plugin tweaks, accounting reviews, inbox emptying parties and pretty much everything else screaming in my ear.

Maybe one day I’ll get to the point where I never have these kinds of days, but I doubt it. Ascension Days are like physical therapy, you’ve got to do this work so you can grow and get to the high payoff work.

All of these types of days, in fact, all of this type of work, is important, but my experience tells me that if you don’t carve out and make time and space to dream and create and focus on priorities, every day will turn into a climb the hill day of stirring the noise.

My pattern for these days can change depending upon what’s going on around me, but I typically try to take one Intention and two Attention Days a week and it’s the thing that keeps me most sane.

Comments

But here’s the thing. Normal is a trap. Normal is the business you ran from to start this business. Normal is the last three businesses that choked and spurted and collapsed under the weight of management. Normal is a poor imitation.

Businesses that run so smoothly as to seem self manage aren’t normal. In fact, they are terribly counter intuitive, but terribly simple it turns out. The key is a tremendous focus on three things only – clarity, culture and community.

Clarity

Until you can get excruciatingly clear about the one thing your business really does that no one else does and, perhaps more importantly, the handful of high payoff behaviors that you the owner of said business must to spend as much time as possible immersed in, you will have a very difficult time practicing anything that looks or feels like art.

Until you can feel why you do what you do and use that as your guide the road ahead will always seem uncharted.

When you are clear about the one thing everything just gets so simple. You don’t even have to think about decisions anymore because you have the perfect filter and the filter runs the business.

If clarity for your business means earning a referral from 100% of your customers everyone know what to ask, how to greet a customer and who owns the result.

Culture

If a business is to mange itself a culture of ownership should be the sole objective. This must come at the expense of hierarchy and the assertion of autonomy. Every business, regardless of size has a culture. The only question really is whether or not it serves the business and the people that come to work there.

I’ve worked with business owners for years now and in my experience control, or the inability to give over control, is the greatest threat to business growth. Until a business can extend trust to those around him and give up control, there will be little more than constriction and contraction.

This means that you must also be able to communicate your sense of clarity and package it in a set of core values that when practiced in action become the road map for culture and the mantra for “this is who we are.”

Community

There was a time when community meant only customer. Today the customer is the community and that includes its customers, employees, mentors, vendors, advisors and even competitors all conspiring to advance and influence the business ecosystem.

When there is a clear picture about what the business stands for and the people that fill in that picture are given the freedom to manage their outcomes, the creation of a strong, vibrant and supporting community is a natural outcome.

A fully alive, self-managed business is little more than the sum of these parts orchestrated with total purpose.

Comments

Many bloggers are talking about it in the same giddy ways reserved for the last few next big things, but let me offer some relief. Pinterest is an interesting site with some real, immediate applications for online retailers and Etsy merchants, but the site itself offers little for most typical businesses and it’s certainly not the next big thing. (I wrote about it late last year if you want some information on Pinterest for Business)

I usually know that once small business owners start asking me about a strategy for using some new tool it’s time to speak up.

In fact, it’s the search for the next big thing that is hurting many businesses. You know what the next big thing for every business is? Find a way to clearly differentiate what you’re doing and how you’re doing it and why you’re doing it from everyone else that says they are doing what you’re doing. That’s the next big thing. Pinterest then might actually be used as a tactic to support that, but never the other way around.

I think the thing that leads to so much confusion and frustration for business owners these days is that there’s an entire generation of online pundits (generation is about every three years in online punditness) that missed out when blogging tipped and that weren’t at SXSW in 2007 when Twitter raced on the scene, so by gosh they aren’t going to miss the next big thing and are willing to proclaim – “this changes everything” about any tool that gets a little white hot.

Here’s the thing. I kind of like Pinterest, I kind of like Foursquare, I kind of like Twitter and on and on, but the main thing I like about every new tool is what it can teach us once it develops buzz and users. So you see, I’m not opposed to anything other than people selling tools as strategy.

The great learning from playing with Pinterest and even exploring ways to use it to help support your objectives is that you get to witness how important visual stimulation and social sharing is in the  grand scheme of attracting interest. I’ve had the opportunity to study how some early Pinterest adopters use the tool and it’s a fascinating study in the behavior of online users.

Like the entire category of infographics has done, Pinterest has plenty to teach us about how to create interest on our own website, in our own presentations and in the stories we use to attract potential clients – that’s what makes Pinterest worthy of the investment in time and not some magic fairy dust promise of traffic and riches.

In fact, I would suggest you look into some other sites employing visual scanning and visual stimulation to actually make money. There may be greater learning to be had at sites like The Fancy, Fab.com, Visual.ly or Polyvore.

The big message in all of this though is clarity of purpose. Until you’re clear on your marketing strategy every new tactic will sound like the next big thing.

Comments

Twitter has been quoted, “Soon, small businesses based in the United States will have the chance to take their Twitter marketing efforts to a new level. Starting in late March, we will introduce a new advertising offering that makes it simple for companies of any size to grow their businesses using our Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts products.”

The automated system is only available to advertisers who use or accept American Express cards. It has been devised that American Express will buy $100 in Twitter ads for each of the initial eligible 10,000 card members/enterprise owners that sign up. The automated system is quite like Google as the advertisers get to decide the amount they want to spend and also the placement and exposure they want to give their ads. Also the text of the ad will be written by business owners in not more than 140 characters.

The advertisers will be charged only for the ads that get clicked or the user follows the business, retweets the message or clicks on a link. Industry experts believe that Twitter coming out to sell ads through a self-service system will require the company to find a way to deal with spammers and scammers.

Interested US businesses can participate in the initial introduction of this new offering via ads.twitter.com/amex.

Twitter is very much like Facebook and takes its time in rolling out ads to avoid annoying users. That is why it came up with pages for business only recently and has received a positive response from brands dashing up to take their pages on the network.

Comments