Our third landing page makeover is for Helen Graves, a business coach who works with solo entrepreneurs, mostly female in the 30-50 age bracket. She would like to increase the sales of her CD info-products to her newsletter subscribers and site visitors.

Here’s the background:

• The Goal:
  Sell 50 CD-info products within a single 4-week period. (Without accurate traffic numbers, this may be an unrealistic goal.)
• The Problem:
  Current promotions - solo email, ads in newsletter, and site link - have generated a total of 5 sales. (Tracking statistics, however, are currently unreliable.)
• The Current Landing Page:
  http://www.helengraves.com/createsuccess.htm
• Page that Generates the Click-Through:
  http://www.helengraves.com/resources.htm

Continue reading →

Our first makeover focused on the high visibility SEO-focused site, SEOmoz.org. Rand was looking to generate paid subscriptions from “cold” prospects, visitors who generally didn’t have a SEOmoz relationship already established.

Today’s makeover is for Brian Armstrong’s book, Breaking Free. Although his page is converting at a pretty respectable rate, he’d like to sell more books, and why not!

Here’s the background:

• The Goal:
  Increase total ebook and print book sales of Breaking Free. (The author didn’t give me a specific here, so let’s use a modest bump of 1%.)
• The Problem:
  Of the total visitors to the website, only 0.24% purchase. (However, 7.6% of those who actually visit the landing page do, in fact, purchase.)
• The Current Landing Page:
  http://www.startbreakingfree.com/breaking-free/
• Page/Ad that Generates the Click-Through:
  There’s a link to “Book” on the blog.

Continue reading →

We’ve spent a lot of time exploring the copy and design techniques that drive successful landing pages. But do you know how to best measure your success?

That’s the focus of a most excellent article I read in Practical Ecommerce, Measuring Conversion Success: What are the key areas to watch when trying to keep visitors’ attention?

Continue reading →

At long last, after much thinking, the day has arrived. I’m thrilled to announce that Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz agreed to step up and subject his landing page to scrutiny as my official makeover candidate. I’ve outlined the basic background information below. The 10-point critique and bonus recommendations follow.

Continue reading →

“Oh, the humanity …”

The folks at SilverPop recently published a study, “Eight Seconds to Capture Attention: Silverpop’s Landing Page Report”, where it reviewed the email campaigns of 150 top online companies. Long and short? They discovered that email campaigns that opened with promise and decent click through ratios generally died on the vine with ill-conceived, poorly designed or just plain, lazy-ass landing pages. Bored, confused prospects quickly took their conversion clicks — and wallets — elsewhere.

Continue reading →

We’ve spent a lot of time covering the conversion landscape through the multitude of landing page tips and techniques available - and we’ll continue to do so in future posts. But for now I want to take a step back and examine a deeper perspective.

Do you actually believe in what you’re selling or promoting? Is your interest genuine or merely a way to make a buck?

Continue reading →