The new internet marketing sales page

Have you noticed that the long sales letter is becoming a thing of the past? You click on an ad or a link in an email and it takes you to a long web page with lots of excited sales copy. Usually included are testimonials from satisfied customers and a progressively marked down price ending with a big Buy ! button. What do you do when you see such a web landing page? If you are like me, you scroll down, barely reading any of the copy, to see what the price is.

There are a couple of trends moving away from the long sales landing page approach.

• The price isn’t mentioned on the sales page. For higher end products, internet marketers have stopped putting the price on the sales page, you don’t find out the price until you click on the “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” button. This allows the marketer to first build a compelling case for the product before the user rejects the product as too pricey.
• The sales letter is replaced by a video. If you haven’t heard about the explosion of video internet marketing, you have been living under a rock. Most people don’t really read anyway and for close to half of the population the preferred learning style is visual. And people retain more information when there is a mixture of visual and audio, making video a much stronger medium than just text. You can convey a lot more information in a 5 minute video than in a 5 paragraph sales letter.

The recent launch of The Magic Bullet System is a good illustration of both points above. BTW, no affiliate link here. I don’t get anything if you buy this and I haven’t evaluated it as a product.

The Earthquake in Haiti

I don’t support very many causes. But when I was confronted with the scope of the destruction of the earthquake in Haiti I felt I had to do something, so I donated some money.

Right now, unless you are a search and rescue team or have medical supplies, money is what they need the most from you. And quickly. Doesn’t have to be much, just what you can spare.

Here is some places you can donate:

• Clinton Foundation
• American Red Cross
• Mercy Corps
• Oxfam
• Direct Relief International

Thanks to webaddict for his tweet with the haiti 48 hours later link, you’ll just have to look, words are not adequate.

Consistency or Perfection of the Moment?

I have been blessed with some modest athletic abilities. When I was playing a lot of volleyball, I achieved moments of pure perfection on the court. The spike I put away that rocketed past two defenders. The dig I got that ended in a roll, due to the stretch and momentum it took to get there. After that perfect dig one of my teammates said, “That was beautiful”.

These moments are so wonderful when they happen that sometimes they blind us to how to win the game. Which is … consistency and high percentages of not necessarily winners but keeping the ball in play.

Consistency is what we all need to do more with in our jobs and our businesses. Would you rather have a site that was a flash in the plan and earned a lot of money in one week or the site that is a steady if not spectacular earner for years?

Think of this in the context of PPC vs. SEO as a SEM strategy. While arguments can be made to the contrary, PPC in general is better for quick results and SEO is slower and works best with consistent efforts. Which one do you prefer?

Facebook – even your parents use it

It starts out by getting requests from people, at first a few, then more. You give in and build your Facebook page, or recruit the kid down the street to help you do it. Then you start looking at other people’s profiles and see people you know. Next thing you know you are connecting to people you haven’t talked to for years and it all snowballs from there.

It’s no wonder that Facebook attracted 25 million new users in the last month alone.

Facebook, a phenomenon that started with the under 35 set, is maturing in both demographics and uses. Facebook was born in a Harvard dorm room in 2004 and originally only for college students. A year later, high school students were allowed in. In 2006, Facebook got rid of its gatekeepers and began letting anyone in.

Over the next year, it grew from 12 million to 50 million users. Then it launched versions in Spanish, French and German. Today about 175 million people are on Facebook.

While most Facebook users are younger than 35, so many older people are now using it that the portion of the college-age users has dropped to 41 percent. Robert Scoble, a blogging and social media technology expert, says eventually Facebook’s popularity will slow — but not any time soon. And it remains hip with the college crowd.

“Having older people there doesn’t affect your experience,” Scoble said. “It’s segregated. You have your friends and your whole experience there is based on who your friends are.”

Of course some overlap occurs. Parents are finding that Facebook is a good way to keep in touch with their college age children who previously forgot to email or call. Of course some young people in college may be a little wary of their parents keeping tabs on them that way, however most just remove a few pictures that the parents might not appreciate.

The older crowd is here to stay on Facebook, in fact UC Davis is examining the “effectiveness of social media used by the higher education sector to communicate philanthropic news”. In other words, UC Davis thinks there might be enough people on Facebook with enough cash to help fund higher education. Since Barack Obama’s successful presidential campaign, which heavily leveraged social media, it has become acceptable to run social media fundraising campaigns. Entrepreneurs are following suit and are using it to reinforce and create new business connections.

Think about the essence of a marketing campaign. You decide on your messaging and branding and with certain key activities you build momentum and buzz towards your event. This translates well to Facebook. Your Info tab .. or even better your business page, informs everyone about and even brands you and your business and your Facebook activity builds momentum towards the event you are marketing. It’s a natural fit.

Whether you plan to use the internet purely for personal reasons or you are looking for professional networking, Facebook will open doors you didn’t even know were there.

Firefox SEO plug-ins – two to choose from

Do you know what Alexa rank and Google PR (page rank) your website has? How about your competitors? And what is an Alexa rank anyway?

An Alexa rank is a calculated measure of unique visitors and pageviews on a given web site. This may be counter intuitive but the lower your Alexa rank the better. Currently google.com has an Alexa rank of 1,and Facebook 4. Now you will find all sorts of debate online on how accurate the rank is, but everyone agrees it is useful as a rough measure of a website’s traffic. If you haven’t already you should compare your Alexa rank to your competitor’s website. Is yours higher? Then you have some work to do.

Google page rank, which ranges from 1 – 10, 10 being the highest measure, indicates how important and relevant Google thinks your site is. yahoo.com is a PR 9. cnn.com has a PR 10.

There are a number of ways to find out Alexa and Google page ranks. For Alexa, you can go directly to alexa.com and look a particular site up. There are also a number of plugins you can install directly into your Firefox browser (if you needed a reason to switch from using Internet Explorer, these tools might just convince you). If you like simple and unobtrusive check out searchstatus. For a more full featured tool you’ll want to download the SEO toolbar from seobook.com.

Check out searchstatus’s icon for options next to the PageRank and Alexa measures. It will, among other things, give you a list of meta tags for a site. SeoBook’s tool bar installs underneath your toolbar bookmarks and presents backlink information at a glance.