Would you like a 14.56% Conversion Rate?

Mother’s Day is here! So as a tribute to all those wonderful mothers (thank you very much) who put their time, sweat, tears, and passion into bringing up the next generations of entrepreneurs, CEO’s, professionals, teachers, doctors, engineers, mothers, fathers, etc. here are some cool blogs that have been dedicated to you.

Are you a last minute shopper? You have until 5 pm to enter this Sephora competition to win a free gift for your mother!

Don’t know the origin’s of mother’s day? Well our friends at How Stuff Works can clue you in with this nifty video presentation.

For design gurus out there Linda Bustos pointed out this neat gallery to mother’s day homepages for ecommerce sites.

Andy Beal gives parents tips on how to avoid getting your teenagers to hate you.

John McCain’s mom gives the details of his debut into the world 60…err…70+ years ago!

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY TO ALL!!!!

Posted in Miscellaneous

Linkedin is a great networking tool that connects businesses, entrepreneurs, executives, and individuals on a daily basis. It’s a wonderful tool, but only when you can access your account.

The strangest, most bizarre occurrence happened when I received 11 simultaneous e-mails notifying me that inmails, messages, and group submissions were terminated because of a severed connection by either party.

Continue reading Linked OUT?

Tags: linkedin, linkedin problems
Posted in Business

We’ve addressed an entire section in our recently released landing page handbook to explaining the difference between exit rate and bounce rate. When each of these terms is explained, it’s very easy to assume that they are the same number, but each calculates when visitors leave a site at a different point.

A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that leave a website within x number of seconds without visiting any other page. So if you were to search for the term “baby party favors” on Google the following would be the results:

Clicking on the first organic result would land you on the following page:

This site may look too “kid” focused and not specialized enough towards babies. So if I was not satisfied with what I initially see and close the page then I would be someone who ‘bounced’ out of the site because I didn’t navigate away from the page I landed on.

An exit rate on the other hand is the percentage of visitors that leave a website after visiting other pages on the site. So the main difference between the two is when they leave the site. So looking at our previous page, I may be intrigued enough by what I initially see to take a look at what types of baby favors they offer so I click on the top “party favors” button and am led to another page:

I like what I see so far, and am curious to see what the “Babies” section has so I click on that button and am led to:

So at this point I found what I’m looking for, but it’s a bit pricey for my budget, so I decide to exit the page and start a new search. At this point, since I’ve visited a page other than the landing page I would be calculated in the exit rate.

Both bounce rates and exit rates are very important numbers and tell you very different useful information about your site. A bounce rate is an extremely important metric to measure how well a landing page on your site does. If people are clicking on a ppc campaign or an organic search result and landing on your site but leaving before navigating to any other page then you know right away that there is a problem with your landing page and can address that.

An exit rate helps determine where there are other problems on your site. For example, if visitors click from your landing page to a category and then to the product page but before making a purchase leave, then you know that there must be something preventing them from completing the process.

Landing page optimization: The complete guide goes into detail on how to improve both your exit rate and bounce rate to improve your site performance and ultimately increase your conversion rate.

Tags: bounce rate, exit rate, Landing-Page, optimization, ppc campaigns
Posted in Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Email marketing offers a great opportunity to connect with current customer as well as potential prospects. Compare for example traditional website visitors to subscribers of an opt-in mailing list. Site visitors include those who land on the site by mistake and may not be interested in what you have to offer. An opt-in mailing list on the other hand provides a segment of visitors who are interested in a particular topic who actively chose to subscribe to your mailing list.

Continue reading 8 Best Kept Secrets To Fine-Tuning your E-mail Marketing Campaigns

Tags: conversion rates, email marketing, statistical significance, testing
Posted in Business, Conversion Optimization, Sales & Marketing

Two of our friends made some changes in the last few weeks:

My friend Steven Bradley, AKA Vangogh, moved his blog and site to a new domain with a lot more focus on the great skill set he brings to the table. Yellow house hosting is now Van SEO Design. If there is one post you should not miss in April, it is Steven’s SEO monthly wrap up.

My friend Steven Snell from Vandelay Website Design started a new website, Traffikd, that focuses on marketing and social media. I read anywhere between 100 to 150 blogs every day. Every now and I then I find a blog that is packed with useful and “new” information. But that is exactly what Steven delivers in Traffikd.  From Traffikd comes, Long Term Results of Social Media Success: Increased Search Engine Traffic

Continue reading From around the blogosphere

Tags: DIGG, SEO, SEO Design, worth reading
Posted in Blogging, Business, Miscellaneous

Social media sites can provide great exposure and traffic. Since we released “Breaking the Digg Code” report, I was looking for ways to spread the word about it. One of the things I experimented with is running a StumbleUpon campaign that directs visitors to the report main landing page. The landing page offers subscribers the option to download the report if they subscribe to our RSS feed.

Traditionally, StumbleUpon campaigns and traffic do not have great conversion rates for pages where you have to subscribe to download a paper or a report. When we first ran the campaign, our conversion rate 5/66 = 7.5%.

Continue reading How to increase StumbleUpon Campaign conversion rate from 7.5% to 37.87% in one day

Tags: StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon advertising, StumbleUpon conversion rate
Posted in Conversion Optimization

There are some rules for optimization that should not be ignored, like having a meaningful, clean URL. But some companies take this a bit too far. In an effort to stick to their company name or offerings, these URL’s are explicit in more than one way.

Caution: Material is “graphic”

These are the top 3 that I found “interesting”:

1. The designers at Speed Of Art have made an effort to have a great looking site, too bad for them that the scent is stronger than I can bare! www.speedofart.com/

2. Having issues? Well you can find a therapist that will help you resolve some of the struggles you have suffered throughout your life (or suffer more issues) at www.therapistfinder.com/ .

3. A great place to find all your software questions, needs and errr…urges is www.ipanywhere.com/

Just please practice caution when coming up with URL’s because as you can see, they can be misinterpreted and misrepresent what you’re all about! Any wacky URL’s you have seen lately?

Tags: optimization, URL
Posted in Miscellaneous

1. Set Expectations from the first day: Nothing will bring your project down more than wrong expectations from your staff or client team members. Make sure that everyone involved in the project understands the goals, deliverables, what is included and not included in the final solution. Client management should also understand the time and resource commitment they will be required to invest in the project. Successful projects require clients to provide feedback on deliverables within a reasonable timeframe, so make certain that this is communicated to the client team members at the beginning of the project. Your own staff must understand what is expected from them, how their performance is measured, and what they should expect if they achieve or miss their goals.

Continue reading 10 Essential principles of successfully managing a web project

Tags: project management, scope, successful projects, web projects
Posted in Business, Technology

Just a few weeks ago we published our Landing Page Optimization Book, over 120 pages filled with tips and techniques to optimize your landing pages. The book retails for $95. Since its release, the book has sold close to 500 copies.

This Monday, we released the report Breaking the Digg Code, a step-by-step instructional program to get on the first page of Digg in 4 weeks or less.

The feedback on both the book and the report has been great. But we want to get more feedback from you, the subscribers and readers so we are offering a special deal: Write a review of Breaking the Digg Code and your name will be included in a chance to win one of 5 free $95 copies of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide.

If you write a review of the Breaking the Digg Code report on your blog you will get

• A link back from our blog to your review
• A possible quote on our testimonial page along with another link
• A chance to win one out of 5 free copies of Landing Page Optimization: The Complete Guide

To be part of this, please contact us [or email khalid at invesp dot come] to let us know that you have completed the review.

Ideas for what you might want to write about

• What did you expect from the report before reading it?
• Did you hesitate to subscribe or download the book?
• Did you find the instructional report useful?
• Did you mention the report to anyone else?
• Do you think it would be easy to follow the program?

Looking forward to reading your reviews.

Tags: DIGG, landing-page-optimization
Posted in Miscellaneous

If you just subscribed to our RSS feed, we would like to thank you by taking a quick moment to introduce you to our most popular blogs:

Online conversion 101: The bottom line to every online activity is converting the casual visitor to a customer, a lead, or even a subscriber. Learn how you can increase your online conversion rates in this 8series tutorial

Personas 101: The problem with the traditional approach of knowing your customers is how generic it is. This series will take through the process of creating personas for your specific site, product or service. Persona development will help you see significant increases in conversion rates as well.

Viral Marketing 101: The web revolutionized marketing as we know it. It is no longer enough to create a marketing message and hope that people will respond. Consumers are talking about your products, services and company. It’s up to you to engage the power of consumers based marketing if you want to gain an advantage over the competition. It is the age of consumer to consumer and the evolution of word-of-mouth.

10 Most expensive mistakes of consulting companies: This is a must read if you run a consulting company, deal with clients and team members.

9 Clueless manager stories from hell: This is our most visited page. If you work long enough in consulting, I am sure you have your own list to share.

9 sure ways to increase your website traffic: One of the most commented upon blogs has created a buzz amongst our readers who offer plenty of additional ways to increase traffic.

Hooking the Headline: Six ways to Catch a Reader: One of the first elements a reader will see is the headline whether it’s on your blog, homepage, product pages, or landing page. If crafted and written correctly, your headline can be the hook to gauge your site visitor.

You can always follow me on Twitter or connect to me on Linkedin.

Tags: blogs, Conversion Optimization, RSS subscribers
Posted in Miscellaneous