HOW TO CREATE A KILLER SALES PAGE FOR YOUR PRODUCT

As an online merchant, your efforts should not stop after building your product, then writing a sales letter to sell it and implementing a marketing campaign to direct traffic to your website. You should also pay attention to the conversion rate of your sales page in real time, so you would know how good your product sells. Creating a good product is not all. You need to constantly tweak your product's sales page and how it does its real job to catch the attention of the visitor and sell your product. By measuring a conversion rate of your sales page, you are able to get a lot of valuable information. It can provide you with a lot of benefits including the following:

1.Identifying inefficiencies in layout, web design, copywriting, and other website components

Often people judge a website by how it looks before actually looking for what it offers. A site that is difficult to navigate or is full of crappy content will most likely turn off any potential customers. A sales page conversion rate analysis can give you details on what pages the links directed the customers to.

2.Maximize marketing expenditures

By using information provided in the sales page conversion rate analysis you can optimize the value of your resources. You can focus your resources on aspects of your marketing campaign that need beefing up while improving parts that are already working for you. This way, you can prevent wasting money on strategies that do not work and keywords that do not perform.

3.Increase customer sales and acquisition

Since the conversion rate analysis of your sales page can clue you in on what works and what doesn't, you can expect increase in sales and revenues once the inefficiencies have been addressed and the marketing strategies, refocused.

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EFFECTIVE BUSINESS BLOG DESIGNS --- PART 3

This is the final part in the series effective business blog redesign.You can refer back to part 1 and part2 of the series for more details. Remember this is a republished article originally written by Cameron Chapman.

5. Make Provisions for Other Content

While most business blogs still focus primarily on text it’s important to make provisions for rich multimedia content. You never know when you might want to expand your blog to include podcasts, slide shows or video content. Even something as simple as including images in a post is sometimes overlooked in the initial blog design. Think about the types of content that are commonly incorporated into blog posts and then think about how you can best serve those kinds of content within the design. Even things like making sure your main content column is wide enough to properly display images or video shouldn't be overlooked.

6. Make the blog a Reflection of Your Company’s Values and Personality

The design of your blog should reflect your company values and corporate culture. A company with a traditional take on things should reflect that in their blog design. A company that’s hip and modern should have a hip and modern blog design.

Besides these important points some other key factors to be kept in mind while thinking of blog redesign are:

• Paginate comments if you regularly get more than 10-20 comments on your posts.
• Separate your comments from your trackbacks (incoming links to blog posts from other website).
• Include a gravatar image for your commenters.

Blog designers, however talented, cannot change your corporate DNA. Work with them towards a presentation that is inviting, open and flexible while accurately representing the values and style of your business.

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EFFECTIVE BUSINESS BLOG DESIGNS --- PART 2

This is the second post post in the series "effective blog designs".In the previous post I have discussed the merits of Typography and readability.Here in this post I am going to discuss about nest two important facts:

3. Establish a Hierarchy of Site Elements

There’s a definite hierarchy of design and content elements in any blog design. You just need to make sure that the hierarchy your design establishes is the one you intended. In other words, make sure that the most important parts of your design and content are most prominently displayed.In most business blogs the two most important elements are going to be the main content and the header, which should include branding for the company. Make sure that when you look at the design of you blog that those are the two elements that stand out among all the others. Make sure, too, that hierarchy within elements makes sense. Your blog post titles, for example, should stand out over any subheadings contained within the posts. Elements within your sidebar should be arranged in a manner that makes sense in terms of usability (for example, the navigation of your blog should appear above any blogroll links you choose to incorporate).

4. Don’t Forget Comment Design!

Almost every business blog wants to foster communication and discussion with their visitors. After all, an engaged readership is more likely to come back on a regular basis and more likely to be loyal to your company.The comment form on your blog should be easy to use and make it apparent which fields are required (most often a name, email address, and the comment itself). The comments should be arranged and formatted in a way that clearly separates each comment. Make sure that the typography—the size and contrast in particular—make it easy to read the comments. You’ll also want to decide whether you want your comments to appear in chronological order or in a threaded manner (where replies appear under the comment being replied to). If you want to foster conversation among commenters, then the latter option will almost certainly work better. If you mostly want your commenters to converse with your authors, then the former might work better. Differentiate your author comments, too, to make it easier for readers to see an author’s responses to other commenters. Of course, if your authors rarely or never comment (which isn't a good thing), this becomes irrelevant.

The final part in this series is due next when another two important facts about successful business blog redesign will be discussed.

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EFFECTIVE BUSINESS BLOG DESIGNS---- PART 1

This is a republished post originally written by Cameron Chapman

The design of your business blog has a huge impact on how it is perceived by your visitors. A great design instills trust, makes you more credible and invites your readers to participate. A poor design can make your blog and your company look unprofessional.

Just as with regular website design, there are certain best practices you should keep in mind when working on the design of your blog. The best practices of regular website design still apply, of course, but there are also important blog specific considerations:

1. Don’t Insist on Your Blog Design Matching Your Website Design Perfectly

So many business blogs try to shoehorn a blog into their existing website design. That’s fine if your website has a text-centric design that’s similar to a blog design to begin with. But many great business websites don’t resemble blogs at all. In those cases, it’s important for your blog design to echo your website design, but it doesn't need to match it perfectly. Your blog design should instead repeat elements like the graphics or color scheme, and should incorporate similar typography.

2.Focus on Typography and Readability

Since blogs mostly revolve around text content, it’s important that your design makes that content easily readable. This means using a font that’s suitable for reading onscreen, as well as having proper contrast and a font that’s large enough.As a general rule, dark text on a light background is more readable than light text on a dark background. Just look at white text on a black screen for a few minutes and then look at a light surface. You’ll see black bands super-imposed on your vision for up to a few minutes. The same effect doesn't happen with a light

background and dark text. You also want to limit the number of fonts used on your blog. Ideally, use one or at most two fonts in your design. Instead of using more than two fonts use multiple weights and styles in the fonts you choose to add diversity to your typography.

Next part will reveal the next 2 important details to watch out for a successful blog redesign.

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THE GROWING INFLUENCE OF BLOGS

Blogs have existed for more than 10 years and have become respectable news outlets, vehicles of change within organizations and communications tools for product announcements and updates. They also provide an opportunity to humanize a company to its market.

Every year the powerful blog search engine Technorati publishes a “State of the Blogosphere” that surveys bloggers of all backgrounds for information and trends about the state of the blogging affairs. The latest report has compelling data on the growing impact of business blogging. In fact, Technorati has tracked more than 133 million blogs, an indication by itself that blogging’s impact is not about to diminish anytime soon.

In the State of the Blogosphere, Technorati found that:

• 71% of bloggers are blogging to speak their minds
• 72% of bloggers want to share their expertise
• 61% of bloggers do so to make money or for business purposes
• 53% of professional bloggers aim to attract new clients

Almost all bloggers have found that blogs have made them better known in their industry as a result of maintaining and updating their blogs.The argument for blogging is all around us. We may know a blogger or two. We may know a dozen or a hundred bloggers. And among those we know, we find that many are doing so for business purposes. Whether it is the hobbyist who just wants to make a few cents off Google AdSense or the enterprise social media company that has elected to launch a blog to showcase its expertise in expansive applications, blogging is an affordable way for individuals and companies alike to become a respected voice in an increasingly competitive online environment.

What do blogs do for your business? Like all other means of social media promotion, blogs can:

• Establish thought leadership, which is especially evident by the findings of the Technorati State of the Blogosphere report.
• Increase traffic to websites, since bloggers can optimize for keywords using search engine optimization techniques that will help customers find the business or product that they need.
• Help build links to corporate web sites, which will help people find your business in online searches.
• Build brand awareness, which gets your business known globally or wherever you are looking to be found.

Blogs have done something else too. In the last few years, we’ve seen companies take blogs to make businesses human again. Giving blogs a human face – which should almost be a prerequisite for blogs (an avatar and personal stories are highly encouraged!) – allows readers know that they’re doing business with someone they trust: people like them.

With the right content and approach toward your readership, businesses can develop strong links that will help them build a solid reputation and foundation online. As content is consistently produced and comments are consistently reviewed and/or responded to, businesses are bound to find new readers who will check the site frequently for updates, get new search traffic, and establish visibility in their industry.

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ADVANTAGES OF REGULARLY UPDATING YOUR WEBSITE

Updating information frequently to a website can have a significant increase in the quantity of visitors it receives. Renowned search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN prefer sites that are habitually added with more content.

The benefits of regularly updating your website are as under:

1.Long tail Search Traffic

When a website has regular content it helps in receiving more precise "long tail" keyword searches from search engines that cannot be attracted through regular SEO.

2. Faster indexing

Most search engines catalog news and blog sites faster than normal websites there fore regular updates on websites will determine more frequent traffic and indexed faster by search engine spiders.

3.Generates discussion

Blogs, articles and news often receive comments from interested customers which in turn often creates discussion and user contribution on the website. Comments also become worthy as free content and are often indexed and ranked by search engines.

4. Solicits enquiries

Informative, articulate articles about business, products or services will promote readers to find out about services. This has been a tried and tested method of sales marketing.

5. Promotes community

Comments, inquires on any website encourages interaction between visitors and is often responsible for communities on websites. Visitors will keep coming back for discussion via the website.

6. Repeat visits

When a website has fresh, regular and remarkable content it encourages users to keep coming back. When a website is left inactive there will be no regular traffic.

7. Subscribers

Informative, appealing content on a website can promote subscription to updates via RSS. This makes sure that any new information will mean that potential people are immediately informed.

8. Internal link strength

Regular content will contain links to specific pages which in turn is beneficial to websites internal link strength.

This was the original post posted by Dinesh LG

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