Today we’ve put together a kit of free white papers that you can download to become a more efficient creator and marketer of information products.

First on the list is 5 Deadly Membership Website Mistakes.

If you are currently operating or are looking to start a membership website, this white paper will show you what every magazine, newsletter and book publisher needs to know before launching a membership website. It is based on our 12 years of experience with more than 100 successful membership websites.

Next on the list is How to Write a White Paper That Sells.

Creating and selling blockbuster digital white papers, special reports and handbooks is a core skill for many successful online publishing companies. With low production costs, no inventory and higher price points, these digital downloads are a key product strategy. This free white paper will show you five best practice guidelines for selling online white papers, special Reports and handbooks.

Third on the list is Digital Media Strategy 2010: The Only 3 Ways to Make Money Online Now.

On the Mequoda Digital Media Pyramid, the online publisher’s periodical website (or blog) and email newsletter (which is tied lockstep to the blog), are both free. They are the marketing arm of the online publishing enterprise, designed to build an audience. Once you have used your free products to build a robust email subscriber list, you can then create new products, such as digital events, live events, subscriptions, memberships and more. This white paper will show you how to build your Digital Media Pyramid and discover where your opportunities for product growth lie.

Last on the list is our newest and most robust white paper, Creating Sales Letter Landing Page Templates that Sell.

It’s great if you have an information-packed membership website, or you can publish a world-class white paper, but it’d be even better if you could sell them. Do you know how to write, design and create sales letter landing page templates that convert visitors into buyers? In this free white paper, we’ll show you how.

Download these four white papers today – they’re free! For more downloadable white papers, check out our Free White Papers archive.

Honest Seduction is a compilation of ION blog posts and articles over a period of two and a half years.  Here’s a great take away from Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers.

Nine Rules for Making Landing Pages That Sell:

1. A web sales path should not be truly linear. Of course there must be the obvious ”NEXT’ type choice, but don’t forget about floaters, OFIEs, OFINs, free form fields, and “choose A or B” fields. Limit the number of choices and outcomes without limiting their involvement.
2. Exude speed and efficiency. If your screen loads fast and looks clean and simple it screams, “I promise not to waste your time.” Who doesn’t appreciate that?
3. Get smarter at every click. The customers’ choices should narrow the selling message.  Make your questions smart enough so that you learn something valuable.
4. Be clear and don’t ask unless you need to. Don’t ask your customers anything irrelevant. It wastes their time and they’ll question your motives.
5. Stay focused. Don’t distract your customers. Resist the temptation to go into every detail.
6. Don’t ramble or waste their time. Limit the number of screens in your path – three for simple products and no more than seven for complex or high ticket products.
7. Be honest and up front. Build trust by clearly displaying where they are in the process and what step  they are on in your path.
8. Barter for information. Build trust and equality into the relationship by giving something in exchange for the information they provide.
9. Sincerity wins the day. This is an extension of a real, flesh and blood relationship. Trust and mutual respect need to come across on every screen. Don’t be the used car salesman.

Testing – One, Two, Three

If you have been reading Mequoda Daily for a while, you know we are big proponents of testing.  There’s micro-level optimization and macro-level concepts.

Micro-level focuses on aspects such page orientation testing, shuffling minor variations of content to see what flows best.  Macro-level looks at the big picture, the structure of a sales path – not just a single landing page.  One test is never enough.  Using both multi-variant (MVT) and multi-step A/B testing requires more strategic and tactical input, but the results are worth it.

Read more from Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers by Scott Brinker, Justin and Anna Talerico at Amazon.com

Do you routinely delete unopened email messages after reading only the “subject line”?

Studies show that most people decide whether to open and read an email message based entirely on a quick glance at the sender’s address and the email subject line.

When you register for the Email Subject Line Smackdown: Test your Email Subject Line Prowess Against 3 of America’s Top Copywriters Webinar on November 24th, you can submit one of your best email subject lines to our panel of copywriting experts, which includes Peter Fogel, Peter A. Schaible and Mark Johnson.

Each member of our copywriting panel will individually — without collaboration — write an alternative subject line that he believes has a chance of beating your control.

That’s why we’re calling it a smackdown. Each of our copywriters will submit a challenge — his best wordsmithing effort at creating an email subject line that he believes will perform better than yours.

We’ll pick only 12 subject lines that are representative of the most popular email subject line archetypes.

The sooner you register and submit your favorite email subject line, the better the chances are that yours will be chosen for the Email Subject Line Smackdown.

Each of our copywriters will explain his “challenge” email subject line and why he thinks it will win.

As a participant in this live event, you’ll have about 60 seconds to decide your favorite and vote — right online.

Even if the subject line you submitted isn’t chosen for the challenge, you’ll vote to help determine the winners. So, you’ll have an opportunity to test your skills and judgment against all the other online seminar participants.

We’ll immediately tally the votes, display the results and declare the winners.

You, and the other members of our live webinar audience, collectively will determine which subject lines are most likely to have the best open rates.

Who knows? Perhaps they’ll choose your control. And if they choose one of the subject lines written by a panel member, you’ll want to test it against your control.

Learn more about our Email Subject Line Smackdown on November 24th

When writing a Targeted email subject line, the goal is to be as direct as possible to identify your intended audience.

There are pro’s and con’s to this type of email subject line. If you are deploying email campaigns to very targeted lists, this method will work very well for you. For example, if you are segmenting your email lists by geographic location, this subject line might work very well:

• Attention Bostonians Who Need to Lose Weight

However, if your lists are segmented by health issues (for example, weight loss) and are using this subject line to promote a clinic or workshop in the Boston area, this isn’t ideal.

Why? Because saying “Bostonians” tells your readers that this email doesn’t apply to them if they aren’t from Boston.

Other examples of Targeted email subject lines:

• For Investors Who Hate Paying Commissions
• Are You a Sales Pro Who Wants to Close More Deals?

Variations include:

• What Every Investor Must Know about IBM
• To the Road Warrior Who Hates to Travel
• For Mature Women Only
• Confidential to Corvette Owners

Be forwarned, the Targeted email subject line will have less clicks but a higher conversion rate. When you are looking to get more clicks, you would want to use a more broad subject line (take a look at our 13 Best Email Subject Lines) and use more Targeted subject lines when you want higher conversions.

Want to test your subject lines against copywriting experts? Join our Email Subject Line Smackdown on November 24th.

The problems with SEO training, especially online SEO training, are complex.

• Search engine optimization training is too often vague or based on guesses.
• SEO courses are sometimes questionable, unethical, or flat out inaccurate.
• SEO campaign management best practices change faster than most SEO training courses can be updated. By the time most SEO training videos are produced, the search engines have already changed their algorithms.
• And the biggest problem with most SEO training seminars is that no one knows exactly all the criteria search engines use to rank web pages.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO Campaign Management 2010 is unlike any other SEO training program you’ve ever encountered.

It’s not deceptive, fraudulent or unsubstantiated. It’s not based on theory or guesses.

This online training program is based entirely on painstaking research, accurate metrics, and a continuous process to meet the demands of an ever-changing Google search algorithm.

Learn exactly how to conduct an effective SEO campaign (see steps below), backed up by one full year of additional online Q&A support and new research when you subscribe to Mequoda Pro, our online training library.

The Ultimate Guide to SEO Campaign Management 2010 starts with nine online training modules and two illustrative case studies delivered in a 90-minute video.

Here’s what the initial 90-minutes of The Ultimate Guide to SEO Campaign Management 2010 covers:

Module #1: Using SEO to Make Money Online

Discover how to make Google your partner, sending you lots of traffic — the key driver for every online publishing business.

Module #2: Researching Keyword Popularity

Discover the scientific method for researching and choosing the right keyword phrases. It’s not guesswork when you use this strategy.

Module #3: Quantifying Keyword Competition

Discover how to use the Google Keyword Competitive Index (KCI) to determine the relationship of demand to competition. Virtually no one else will teach you how to do an analysis of your competition. Now you can target keyword phrases with precision.

Module #4: Building your Keyword Universe

Discover how to identify the most popular keyword phrases that web surfers use to find information about your niche topics and rank them in importance.

Module #5: Targeting the Best Keyword Phrases

If your SEO keyword strategy is to target only highly popular and competitive terms, your odds of SEO success are minimal. Discover why you might want to aim at easier targets that yield higher returns.

Module #6: Titling and Creating your Free Special Report

Discover how to recycle and repackage content into downloadable special reports as part of your marketing program. These keyword-rich “white papers” with enticing titles can produce a steady stream of loyal, new subscribers.

Module #7: Writing and Designing your Rapid Conversion Landing Page

Discover how to offer your free special report with a keyword-rich, search-optimized, rapid conversion landing page that Google will index and send lots of traffic, based on as many as 20 keywords.

Module #8: Marketing your Free Reports

Discover numerous strategies for motivating your professional colleagues to recommend your free report and link to your offer, resulting in a higher Google listing.

Module #9: Tracking your Results

Learn how to monitor and measure your SEO campaign for maximum results.

You have two options for getting this online training package. You can buy it on CD for $197 or claim our “Webinar on Demand” package, which allows you updates to the program for a full year. As a bonus, you’ll also gain access to over a dozen additional webinars on demand, plus several transcripts, spreadsheet calculators, tools and white paper downloads – one year of access all for only $297.00!

Get INSTANT-ACCESS to The Ultimate Guide to SEO Campaign Management 2010 when you join Mequoda Pro today

In an article called 55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love in Search Engine Journal, Richard Burckhardt says “If content is king, then links are queen”.

This is one of the most important things that many publishers miss the boat on, when they are developing their own SEO Campaigns. It’s just as important to write content that is pleasing to your readers and to search engines, as it is to make sure that people are linking to it.

At PodCamp Boston 4 back in September, speaker Chris Penn told the audience that “if your goal is to build incoming links, you should set yourself a goal of generating 10 inbound links a day. It can be your own links that you drive from third-party websites or social networks, but they should encourage re-posting and links back”.

If your goal is to build 10 inbound links a day, it might seem like a daunting task, but it’s not impossible. It’s easy to leave a valuable comment on a blog that links back to a free white paper or article on a relevant subject.

If you’re answering a question that the blogger is asking, you’re giving yourself a valuable inbound link back to your site.

If your goal is to distribute a free report and build your email subscriber list, make sure that you’ve written and distributed an online press release for every report you launch. This builds inbound links back to your website in no time with less effort than writing compelling and persuasive blog comments.

Other places you can build links include: your LinkedIn or Facebook profile status, in book reviews on external websites (only in books you’ve read and only if your report is directly relevant), on Twitter, on related social networks and forums—the list goes on.

Try compiling your own list of link hotspots. Don’t partner with those spammers who will contact you for a link-exchange. Or if you do, make sure to check out their website and find some kind of reference of legitimacy. Google will dock you points if they think you’re exchanging links with a “link farm”.

For a 90-minute training session on building links, search engine optimizing your landing pages and launching your own SEO campaign, watch SEO Campaign Management right now in Mequoda Pro, or order the CD.

Today we’re launching a new FREE white paper called Creating Sales Letter Landing Page Templates that Sell.

This 43-page book is a condensed and fully updated version of our Creating Landing Pages that Sell book that we used to sell in the Mequoda bookstore for $197.

Do you know how to write, design and create sales letter landing page templates that convert visitors into buyers?

Among other factors, the art of creating landing page templates that sell is all about optimizing your landing pages by creating irresistible offers and making it easy for your visitors to order.

As a general rule, commercial websites should use the “real estate” of their landing page templates conservatively. Your landing page template needs to be tightly focused on a single intention—getting the reader to take action.

Most people arrive at a website and within less than 10 seconds can determine whether it’s clean, professional and worth their time. Your landing page delivers the first impression. It’s usually the most important page on your site. It needs to be a fast, effective messenger.

With a quick glance, visitors to your site should know exactly what your site is all about or what your business does.

Determine what image and message you want the customer to “get” in those first few seconds, and design your landing page toward that objective. Anything that distracts from the central message or image you wish to project should be eliminated.

The Mequoda online marketing experts have developed 12 guidelines for optimizing landing pages that support getting the order, and they’re all here in our new Creating Sales Letter Landing Page Templates that Sell which you can download today.

We all have varying training needs when it comes to the success of our online publishing and marketing programs. Because of that, we are presenting the Mequoda Summit in an entirely new format for 2010.

Attendees will now have the option of training with us for 4 days, where they can attend their choice of an in-depth pre-conference workshop on Tuesday, their choice of an in-depth post-conference workshop on Friday and the main two-day conference.

A 3-day pass will also be available for anyone wishing to attend just one pre or post-conference workshop.

The two-days in the middle of the event will be jam packed with educational sessions for online publishers that all registrants of any pass will attend.

Break-out sessions vs. “Innovation Roundtables”

Within those two days, there will be general sessions for everyone, as well as break-out sessions where attendees will have a choice between learning the basics, which will involve very instructional, step-by-step information, vs. attending a series of “Innovation Roundtables” where thought leaders will gather for topical discussions and personal case studies.

Each roundtable will include three to five high-level industry experts who will share their good as well as their not-so-good experiences and solutions. This will be the chance to learn from the experts in a smaller setting and share experiences as well. It’s peer-to-peer participation and sharing at its finest. The Roundtables are designed to attract attendees who might be more advanced in certain aspects of online publishing and marketing and are looking for the next best idea.

With more than 10 hours of networking opportunities built into the Mequoda Summit program, you can get as much from personal, one-on-one encounters with your peers as from the formal interactive program and expert panelists.

Our picturesque venue in the heart of Napa

The Mequoda Summit Napa Valley 2010 will take place for the third year in a row at the beautiful Silverado Resort Napa Valley. This year we’ve secured hotel rooms for our attendees at $159 a night for a one-bedroom suite. $159 for a suite! SA-WHEET! It’s the most incredible deal we’ve seen in a long time, especially for that time of year. It’s GORGEOUS in Napa in April.

If you’ve never been, be sure to stay the weekend. The resort is located parallel to the famous Silverado Wine Trail in the lush hills of Napa. It’s one winery after another. And we love it. The resort also has two 18-hole golf courses and an on-site spa.

So mark your calendars and budget for 2010 – the Mequoda Summit Napa Valley takes place on April 6-9^th. If you’re ready to register now, or want more details on the topics and help customizing the program to meet your specific needs, call Kim Mateus at 401 396 9677.

Hope to see you there!

Your website is your chance at delivering a powerful first impression. If you’ve been playing your cards right, you have landing pages set up that are driving traffic into your website that offer something for free.

The reason why we stand so strongly behind “the power of free” is because simply… it works.

Entrepreneur.com agrees:

If you think it won’t work with your product, consider Debbie Fields. When nobody came into her first store in Palo Alto, Calif., she put her product on a tray and walked around the mall handing out free samples. What happened? You’ve heard of Mrs. Field’s, I assume — more than 30 years later, they’ve got nearly 400 stores.

We just had a client report that they released two “freemiums” in the last three weeks. Together, these two freemiums have already resulted in 6200 new email subscribers.

To put more emphasis on the fact that they’ve done their job with SEO, they’re reporting that they have five pre-existing ebooks that have only been downloaded a combined total of 2100 times. The difference? These two new ones have search engine optimized landing pages and the other five do not.

What’s in an email list?

Not that often, but often enough, we’re asked why an email list is so important and why we don’t spend more of our time optimizing landing pages for paid products and PPC rather than free products and organic SEO.

Here’s why: driving traffic into a paid product is either black or white. Either a person buys or they don’t. If they don’t, they’re gone and you say farewell, maybe forever.

However, when you’re giving something away, you can have a conversion rate of 30-60% simply because the product is free.

Obtaining an email address means that you will have plenty of opportunities in the future to sell a product, while the alternative—paying for PPC traffic to a paid product—only gives you one shot. And you’re paying for it whether the person buys or not.

How are you doing converting visitors into email subscribers?

Most publishers we’ve studied are only implementing one basic email capture on their website. They use a box on their homepage that says “Sign up for our email newsletter” or “Stay updated”. Thus, they are only seeing a 0.1 to 0.2% conversion rate.

Find out your site-wide and landing page conversion rates:

Divide the total number of new email subscribers you acquired via your website in one month by the total number of unique visitors you received in that month. This will give you your site-wide conversion rate.

If your landing pages are up, you can discover those conversion rates by setting up goals in your analytics program to see exactly how many people hit your landing pages vs. how many hit the thank you page after submitting their email address.

I can tell you with 100% certainty that your landing pages will get a better conversion rate than a vague box on your homepage that asks for an email address. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “I need more email newsletters!”

Your website and email newsletter are the free products in your Digital Media Pyramid. Call it Karma, but it’s OK to give away things for free. If you’re delivering something valuable, your subscribers will trust you enough to buy something from you in the future and move further up your product pyramid into more expensive products.

Over 50% of employers prohibit the use of social networking sites by employees while on the clock.  Are they missing the boat on a valuable source of referrals? Maybe, but for online publishers and marketers it is another important way for users to find and share your content.

The majority of content discovery, as much as 70% according to Nielsen, are referrals from search engines and portals like Google, Yahoo and MSN. With social networking sites like Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and blogs making up almost 20% of users relying on social media sites to find reliable information.  This is too large a number to ignore.

What are “socializers” searching for online?

A socializer, according to Nielson, spends over 10% of their online time on social media, feeling that there is too much information online.  They’re using social media as a guide to navigate through the abundant information available on the internet.

We thought you’d like to know what socializers are searching for online.

According to Chitika, Twitter users are searching for 1) News, 2) Movie, 3) Tech and 4) Medical websites.  Facebook users were clicking through to 1) Tech,  Lifestyle and News tied for second, and How-to sites came in third.

Linked from Twitter

Linked From Facebook

This is where niche online publishers can stand out in the crowd. As a small niche publisher, the competition may too great to achieve a page one Google rank on your own. This is where word of mouth (and inbound links) take on new meaning.

How can you tap into that additional 20% of users relying on social networking sites to find reliable information?

It is vital to get on the social networking bandwagon if you haven’t yet.  For B2B publishers, Twitter and Linkedin are great places to start. For B2C publishers, Facebook and Twitter can be easily incorporated into your social media strategy.

With so much information available, users have begun to use social networking sites as a filter.  In short, they trust what their friends have to say, are more likely to believe it, and more importantly, follow through to content they are recommending. This also creates a better quality referral.