Today’s makeover is for Mike Glanz. He’s looking to energize and increase his ROI for his site, HireAHelper. This site is all about finding local help for lawns, moving, cleaning, and the other kinds of chores that are necessary but a drag and drain on most busy homeowners.

Unlike high-priced companies or taking a chance on what you might find on craigslist.com, HireAHelper provides reviews, a secure method of payment, and a list of qualified helpers. Sounds like a neat service, but Mike tells me that visitors who are coming through his PPC ads don’t seem to understand the site concept once they get there. They are unsure or uneducated about ordering local services online.

And that must be so because Mike writes that his conversion rate is .9%. Value to Mike is $15-$20 per sale.

Let’s see what the Copywriting Maven can do to help Mike move more local services to more people.

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Today’s makeover is for Victor Holtreman’s ebook, The Last 10 Pounds. He’s sold 1,000 copies at $12.95 each, but conversion lately has been lacking at just .87%. He’s looking to pop his conversion rate and sell more books.

Here’s the background:

• The Goal
  Increase conversion rate from less than 1% to 3%.
• The Problem
  Previous page(s) were more successful than current efforts. Several attempts, including restoring the original page, have not been effective in recapturing the conversion rates of the past.
• The Current Landing Page
  http://www.last10pounds.com
• Page/Ad that Generates the Click-Through
  Click here to view

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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

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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.

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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?

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This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work.

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.

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