Here are some vital rules to landing page optimization that can increase your conversion rates.

1.    Goal – Identify your goal when you create a landing page. Do you want people to make a purchase, fill out a form, or call you on the phone? This goal should be clearly defined and everything on that landing page should work to accomplish that goal.

2.    Headline – The headline of your landing page needs to be short and precise.

3.    Concise Copy – There is only one rule to this:  use the fewest words necessary to get your point across.

4.    Call-to-Action – What do you want a visitor to do on your landing page? This call-to-action should be crystal clear.

5.   Provide Options – If you need a form to be filled identify the mandatory questions and leave out the rest. If you don’t want to necessarily mandate that your visitors fill out a form. Give them options. Place your phone number in prominent locations on the landing page so they can call you, if they prefer.

6.   Testing – A/B test every element of your landing pages. Place phone numbers in difference locations. Change and tweak specific form fields. Change content and headlines. Test and refine.

7.   Provide ‘Retreat’ Offers – If someone doesn’t want to make a purchase on your landing page, for example, give them the option to demo the product when they leave or a coupon

Now that you know what to look for, compare your current landing page to these vital rules. How often are you hitting all seven?

1. Search Engine Optimization

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is refers to improving the rank of a website in search results for a particular search engine. When you conduct a search on Google, two types of results come up: paid and unpaid. Unpaid search results rely on algorithms that determine the relevancy of your website compared to the search terms. Where you land on these unpaid search results depends on search engine optimization (SEO).

2. Pay Per Click Campaigns

SEO activities are time consuming and can be extremely difficult for a certain keyword categories. In such cases, PPC advertising can boost your website visibility and get it above the fold. One thing that you need to be careful about is ROI (return over investment) Always keep in mind the money being pumped into a campaign the result it brings out.

3. Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. are the type of marketing tools that can reach millions of your target market. Even if you aren’t advertising on Facebook, you should to set up a corporate profile page that engages with current and potential customers.

4. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing which simply put is performance based marketing can add significant revenue to your business. Affiliate marketing has soon become one of the most sought after methods in online advertising.

5. Mobile Marketing

While still in its infant stage, Mobile marketing is surely one of the marketing avenues to look out  for in the future. With more and more people spending time surfing the web on their smart phones, mobile marketing & eCommerce are sure to jump in the very near future.

6. Video Marketing

Viral videos are the latest in online marketing. Youtube, one of the most visited websites in the world aids marketers to get those well deserved eye balls for their video ads.

7. Email Marketing

One of the most simple, effective, and sometimes overlooked marketing channels, email marketing is inexpensive and does a great job of solidifying brand loyalty for current customers.

Dozens of email distribution networks offer exceptional services, including free templates, ongoing support, and recommendations for high delivery, open, and click through rates. If email marketing is not something you’ve tried, now is the time to get help and get it done.

8. Display Advertising

Display advertising refers to placing banner ads on other websites to create visibility and drive that much needed traffic to your website. While this is something that larger companies or those with bigger budgets invest – it can be a very effective medium if you can spare that marketing dollar. It also helps with search engine rankings since the ads create a link back to your site, increasing your website’s authority in search engine algorithms.

Get Filmy With .ORG

Read up on the rules and regulations of the contest here - https://platform.votigo.com/sections/showcontestrules/Get-Filmy-with-ORG.

Good luck!

Most business have a simple goal, create sales. No matter what the activity the end goal is to always generate sales.

Here are some basic principles that can actually sell products and services using social platforms.

1. Solve customer queries by creating moments of clarity that relate to your product or service
2. Plan social experiences that provoke customers to respond
3. Discover customer need as it evolves, then apply this knowledge to improve the response rate in your social messaging

Everything you do, everything you post onto social media must do one thing every time: create behavior. That behavior must be part of a grand plan of how to move customers one step closer toward making a purchase.

Speaker and sales conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg has long touted what he calls these micro-actions as part of a courtship between buyer and seller.

“Good content marketing recognizes that we don’t have to close the sale every time we talk to a prospect,” says Doug Kessler of B2B marketing firm Velocity, who’s in agreement with Eisenberg. But this isn’t about agreement so much as it’s about getting better results by creating micro-actions. It’s also about having a plan beyond branding (e.g., creating attention) with social media and doing something with that attention.

Create Response
If you want to create leads and sales, your tweets, posts, updates, blogs, videos, and podcasts should always be designed to induce a response from your target. Each day focus on developing creative, interesting ways that compel customers to take an action.

In other words, don’t ever, ever ask for a “Like” on Facebook without giving your customer a reason to. Honor them. Tempt them. “Liking” you is not compelling. “Liking” you and thereby being entered into a sweepstakes or receiving something of honest value in return is what they want. So give it to them.

The Ethical Bribe
One quick tip that I learned from the people I interviewed in my book is consider how you might creatively bait customers (or ethically bribe them) into discussing or complaining about a problem in their life—one that loosely connects to a solution you provide. That seems obvious doesn’t it? Then just get out there and do it. It works! But don’t forget to also envision yourself provoking an action by responsibly exploiting a complaint and enticing your customer or prospect to take a free trial or something similar that brings them closer to whatever they’re  demonstrating a need for.

For instance, grocery store Harris-Teeter pays customers to ask health and wellness questions of its Registered Dieticians on Facebook. Why would a grocer—or your business—do that? Because helping customers can create a powerful response. Answering questions opens the door for discovery and for your business to make relevant suggestions. Using this approach, it becomes natural to offer a friendly tip or a useful trick. There may also be appropriate times to outline the benefits of becoming a customer, a member, a user, or taking a trial run.

Source: http://www.revenews.com/online-marketing/3-things-that-always-create-sales-with-social-marketing/

• Who’s reading your content?
• Where are they coming from?
• How much buzz are your articles generating?
• Are you getting the required “Likes”?
• Are the influencers onboard?
• Are you keeping your audience engaged

1. Become the expert in your field, keep learning everyday.
2. Write posts that will be readable in a year.
3. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.
4. Announce news.
5. Write definitive posts.
6. Include polls, meters and other engaging activities.
7. Tag your posts. Use del.ico.us.
8. Use interesting terms, coin a term or two.
9. Do email interviews with famous people in your industry.
10. Be sure to answer your email.
11. Use photos.
12. Encourage your readers to share your posts via digg (and to use furl and reddit).
13. Post photos on flickr.
14. Encourage your readers to subscribe by RSS.
15. Include comments so your blog becomes a river that feeds itself.
16. Consider every day as a beginning; you will always have new readers.
17. Write about stuff that appeals to the majority of current blog readers–like gadgets and web 2.0.
18. Have relevant ads that are even better than your content.
19. Keep tweaking your template to make it seem fresh.
20. Digest good ideas of other people and share them.
21. Post as often as possible
22. Don’t include a lot of links, it interrupts the reading process.
23. Dress your blog (fonts and design) as well as you would dress yourself for a meeting with a stranger.
24. Keep editing.
25. Be patient.
26. Give credit to those who inspired you and you can expect the same in return
27. Write about only one thing, in ever-deepening detail, so you become definitive.
28. Don’t be boring.
29. Write stuff that people want to read and share.
30. Participate at Related Forums & Blogs
31. Buy a domain and make sure you DON’T get xyz.wordpress.com or xyz.blogger.com – your own domain will make your blog seem more serious.

Mumbai, November 24, 2011: BigRock one of India’s leading ICANN-accredited domain registrars and hosting companies, today unveiled a complete ‘.com website-in-a-box’ package for small businesses, professionals, and individuals. This complete website package includes a premium .com domain name, email hosting, and web hosting integrated with an easy-to-use interactive website builder. The package has everything needed for a small business to get their own .com website set up in a few easy steps. The entire package costs only Rs. 499 for a .com website and Rs. 399 for a .net website, making it easy and affordable for anyone to get their website setup immediately.

“While India’s internet user base and digital businesses are on a rise, it is vital that they have immediate access to platforms that help them instantly with the basics of setting up a business online. In line with this, we continue to provide our customers great prices, quality support, and rock solid products” said Bhavin Turakhia, Founder, BigRock. “Since the launch of BigRock early this year, we continue to grow organically and have successfully expanded our customer base by over 2000%. In keeping with our vision, we want everyone who is considering a domain name, website, or hosting to come to us at BigRock.”

To promote this offer, BigRock has launched its new integrated advertising campaign with the tagline “Got a Business? Get a website” to drive home the message that every business needs a website. BigRock had earlier announced a Rs. 10 Cr. advertising budget for this year. BigRock ran a highly acclaimed TV campaign earlier this year, which won an Abby for its ad creatives and was recently nominated for Best Internet Business at the World Brand Congress.

Created by Ideas@work the new TVCs continue with the earlier communication strategy through the depiction of unusual businesses: an agency to rent cheerleaders, a budget wedding planner, and a chest hair stylist. The earlier commercials like ‘Savitri Bai maid training institute’ went viral on social media. The current campaign will likewise be supported by aggressive online and social media advertising as well as contests and giveaways.

Talking about how the ad agency conceptualized the current campaign, Zarvan Patel, Co-founder of Ideas@Work and the Creative Director for the current set of TVCs said “We have had a lot of fun working on the current BigRock campaign. Our brief was to make this campaign very engaging and localized in its context. We have continued down the path of highlighting unusual businesses in a humorous light and in a way that connects with Indians everywhere. We are launching the campaigns in 5 languages because BigRock is a well-regarded pan India brand”.

Commenting on the new offer, Shashank Mehrotra, General Manager & Business Head, BigRock said, “Today, only 1 in every 60 SMEs have set up their website which means the Indian market is still highly underpenetrated. With the current offer on a premium .com website-in-a-box, we want to invite anyone who has been sitting on the fence to come and see how easy getting a website is. With a compelling and easy to use web-presence package priced at Rs. 499, we are confident of bridging that gap.”

As per an analyst firm Forrester, the global online population is expected to hit 2.2 billion by 2013 and Asia will continue to be the biggest internet growth engine. India is projected to have upwards of 250 million Internet users by 2014.  However, the total number of domains registered in India is only about 3.5 million versus the 220 million domains registered worldwide. BigRock expects significant growth in this space in the coming 18 months.

About BigRock

BigRock, an ICANN accredited registrar and hosting company, is a leading provider of web-presence solutions to small-businesses, professionals and individuals. We provide our clients a complete suite of products that help them establish & grow their online presence. Our product portfolio includes – domain registration,  web-hosting services, business-class email services (including anti-spam & anti-virus features), website builder products, and digital certificates. Our product platform represents over 10 years of investment in technology R&D and powers over 6 million domains worldwide.

To know more, please visit: http://www.bigrock.com/

So what’s new about the page?

Everything! We have revamped this page not only in terms of layout and design but also functionality. Here are the features introduced:

1. All-new design for a simple, yet better-looking interface
2. Easy access to all of a Domain’s products within the same page
3. More intuitive navigation between sections on the page through a navigation menu on the right
4. Better emphasis on important notices (like renewals, pending payments) about your order
5. Easy, inline renewal management of single orders
6. New Jump to Domain feature on top right that will help you view order details for any domain
7. Easier contact management
8. More intuitive flows, better usability

Here’s what our New Order Details page looks like:

Try it yourself!

Try out our brand new interface by logging into your Control Panel and going to Domains >> List All Orders. Lets us know what you think of it by leaving your comments below, we’d love to hear from you!

This is just the beginning; we’re giving all our interfaces a face-lift and a functionality boost. So stay tuned for more updates!!

Here are some of the key SEO principles you should focus on:

Meta-tags: Your meta-tags should be present in each page of your site starting from the homepage. They are located in the code or HTML of each page and can be customized on a per-page level. You can view a pages meta-tags by right clicking on the web page in any white area and selecting view source from the pop-up menu. There are generally 3 important meta-tags: Title tag, Keywords tag, and Description tag. If you are able to edit the meta-tags on each page of your site, through an admin or editing the HTML by hand, you can really customize each page’s meta-tags to focus in on describing the pages exact purpose. The more focused the better. If you have a blog you may not have the ability to edit the meta-tags on each page/post. You may have to use plugins to achieve individual page meta-tag editing with blogs.

Each and every page of your website can have custom meta-tags and should be optimized individually if possible. You can tweak your meta-tags to try to get the best result and rankings, but the changes may take from weeks to months to show positive results in Google so you have to have patience for the results. If your website is updated frequently with new content, it’s like the search engines are returning frequently, so the updates to the meta-tags and on-page content could yield improvements quicker than a less frequently updated website.

So what does each section of this tag do exactly?

Title Tag: Probably the most important, make sure every page Title in the meta-tags is unique and very focused to what the page is about. Try to make your page titles corresponding to what people are searching for most frequently as it relates to your site and what it’s about.

Description: This provides search engine spiders with a brief overview of what your site is about. Your description tag is somewhat like a thesis for your website. It should be short, but very informative about what your site discusses. Always remember to include relevant keywords in your description, but don’t over do the amount of the same keywords.

Keywords: A list of ten or so keywords that are very relevant to what your site offers. If you are unsure of what keywords to include in this tag, check to see what keywords in your niche get the most search volume.
You can do this using the WordTracker free tool located at: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/ or the Google External Keyword Tool: https://adwords.goog…rdToolExternal.

The robots and revisit-after tag talks directly to the search engine spiders that crawl your site. You want to use these tags to clearly indicate to them that they should index your entire website, and come back roughly once a month to rescan and index your content. But if you update your site or blog frequently the search engines will come back more frequently, so that should be the goal.

Keep in mind that your meta tags are used by the search engine spiders only as a broad guideline as to what your site contains. Your on-page content is what the search spiders are looking at to determine what your site is about. Both factors weigh heavily in how well your website ranks and the individual pages as well, so make sure every page of your site is as “optimized” as possible.

1. A/B Testing – running split testing “experiments” on your website or landing page used to be cumbersome and only for large companies that could afford a good software to handle it. Or they had to build something themselves to handle it. Recently, a software was launched called Optimizely that provides an easy way to run A/B test on your site. All you have to do is drop a piece of javascript code into the page you want to optimize (or your persistent header/footer) and you can run conversion improving experiments by rotating in different versions of the page elements such as: the header, main graphic, Go button, special offer, and any other part of the page’s layout. You can even move things around the page to try different placements. Once you have set-up your experiments, it runs the variations to your live traffic and tells you which converts to sales most frequently, thereby giving you the intelligence as to what is working best with your customers. How cool is that?! In my opinion, Optimizely is a must for any ecommerce or lead generation company looking to increase their conversion rates and maximize their online advertising dollars. It’s my #1 recvommendation to clients and prospective clients.

2. Professional Look & Feel – all the A/B testing in the world isn’t going to make your site more beautiful, so make sure you have a really good web designer working on your site and doing your graphics. Study your competition and emulate their good design ideas, trying to improve upon them. Go for clean and professional looking and guess what: You don’t know what looks good! Have some people outside your company give their opinions on your website’s design and usability.

3. Capturing Information – one of the most frequent frustrations of companies I speak to is: why are 90-something percent of people leaving my website without taking an action? And how do I capture more of their information so they can be followed-up with? The old school answers are to add a newsletter sign-up box or a pop-under box so the visitor can get more information. The new school answer is encouraging them to join your Fan Page or Follow on Twitter. Another amazing newer methods is by using a 3rd party program like Wild Fire App, which allows you to run various contests and sweepstakes through Facebook, which can be promoted on in your site’s layout to capture their information. I am running an iPad 2 giveaway using it right now and it’s working amazingly at gather information and generating Likes to my Fan Page. This has become one of my top recommendations to clients.

5. Trust & Security – In these days of cyber-crime, people want to feel secure that giving you their personal information and credit card info is going to be safe. As a merchant or lead generator, it’s imperative to make sure your site is properly encrypted and safe from hacking. Using companies like Thawte, Verisign, and other secured certificate companies is a must. Displaying trust logos on your site is a must. I like the BBB Online logo as well to emphasize trust with your visitors. The HackerSafe logo is also good to display. A couple important industry logos might be a good idea as well. Make sure all your security logos are up to date and take it seriously.

6. Behavioral Re-targeting – showing people banner ads when they leave your website is known as behavioral re-targeting and has become quite the fad in online advertising. You may have noticed that when you are shopping online and leave the site, you start seeing that companies banners following you around the Internet. Personally, I think this is great for merchants, but a little annoying for consumers. But it does server the purpose of encouraging more of the people not buying on your site to possibly come back and buy. Some of the companies that offer this service are: AdRoll, FetchBack, and Retargeter.

7. Special Offers/Promotions – running special offers on your website is a must because people like to get a deal, especially in this day and age. You should try different deals and run them through split testing to see which ones resonate most with your consumers. Don’t assume you know what special deal with work best, because you don’t know what will resonate best with consumers. Be creative with it…don’t be lame with it surely!

8. Email re-marketing – having really good HTML emails with a good strategy behind your follow-ups is essential to re-marketing effectively to your customer base and the people that have given you their information to be followed-up with. Make sure to review your website’s auto-responder emails and customized follow-ups quarterly to make sure they are well done and reflect your companies current promotions. Test out your subject lines and email copy. Include a special offer in your email follow-up. Encourage people to join your Fan Page in all your site’s emails. Make sure to personalize your emails as much as possible. Always be really friendly and attempt to build rapport with your clients at every turn.

These are some ideas that you can implement to increase your website’s conversion rate. The higher your conversion rate, the more money you can spend on the front-end to drive traffic to your website. If you want to spend in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and on Facebook with the big boys, you need to focus on increasing your conversion rate. If you want to grow a large, productive affiliate program you will focus on increasing your conversion rate. For most companies there is a ton of traffic out there, especially in Search, you just have to be able to convert on it to maximize your overall spend to get more of the traffic, otherwise all those searchers will be going with your competitors and you will be losing the sales.