Building Your List with Give Away Ventures

With the awareness of the importance of list building, comes a recent Internet Marketing trend which was started just a couple of years ago for the mutual benefits of all Internet Marketers and mailing list owners.

This method is more recognized as a “starting a Give Away venture”.

In a real sense, a Give Away event is much like a big time version of ad swaps. In a nutshell, a group of mailing list owners partner together and pool in their individual gifts in one limited-time event.

Each participating partner contributes a gift to the event. The gift can be a free product, membership pass or a product he is already selling (if he is kind enough to offer into the event).

The participating partner prepares a Lead Capture Page where he gives the gift in exchange for the subscriber’s email address. In other words, in order for a visitor to download the digital gift, he must opt in and subscribe to your mailing list.

When the gifts are pooled together into one event (site), every partner will then endorse the Give Away event to their own mailing lists.

The result: lots of visitors to one event as a collective effort of several participating partners!

With so many visitors downloading gifts from one focused event, it is a true win-win situation. This is because the visitors get to download several free gifts for their own use and every partner gets to build their own mailing list!

You can easily get notified about a Give Away event in the making by communicating with other Internet Marketers often or participating in Internet Marketing discussion and Joint Venture boards.

Dr. Ande
SEO Tips for Small Business

Every Page of a Site Indexed by Search Engines is a Potential Landing Page.

The goal of search engine optimization (SEO) is to leave few landings to chance. The content of the page and/or links to the page are optimized for very specific, carefully researched keywords and phrases. Those keywords and phrases that are of most value for "organic" or "natural" search engine optimization are those most likely to be used by prospective customers in their search engines. Good choices will cause the site to rank higher in search engine results.

For large websites covering many products or many topics, a single home page cannot be optimized for every topic and still be relevant to all. A different approach is needed, a landing page that will not convert a visitor directly. A "hub" page is optimized for more generic, less targeted keyword phrases that have naturally a lower conversion rate than more-specific search terms. Hub landing pages serve as a "mini portal" within a site – the site establishes a number of virtual home pages, each for a broader topic.

There are two types of landing page, reference and transactional.

A reference landing page presents information that is relevant to the visitor. These can display text, images, dynamic compilations of relevant links, or other elements. Reference landing pages are effective if they meet the objectives of their publishers, which may be associations, organizations or public service entities. For many reference landing pages, effectiveness can be measured by the revenue value of the advertising that is displayed on them.

A special type of 'reference landing page' is the 'webvert', the marketing goal focuses on lead generation and interaction with the visitor. A webvert is not 'transactional' in nature. A webvert is a reference based, ethical landing page. The webverts consists of an advert, deigned on the AIDA principle. The traffic is driven from 

Google Adwords and is designed for two specific marketing tactics;

1) To attain high Google Adwords landing page quality scores, the benefit being any Adwords campaign costs are minimized.

2) The webvert has a clear call to action, usually a reply form.

The visitor traffic is immediate as the webvert relies on Google advertising to drive visitors to the webvert.

A transactional landing page seeks to persuade a visitor to complete a transaction such as filling out a form or interacting with advertisements or other objects on the landing page, with the goal being the immediate or eventual sale of a product or service. If information is to be captured, the page will usually withhold information until some minimal amount of visitor information is provided, typically an email address and perhaps a name and telephone number as well – enough to "capture the lead" and add the prospect to a mailing list.

A visitor taking the desired action on a transactional landing page is referred to as a conversion. The efficiency or quality of the landing page can be measured by its conversion rate, the percentage of visitors who complete the desired action. Since the economics of many online marketing programs are determined by the conversion rate, marketers constantly test alternatives and improvements to their landing pages. Some of the testing methods used are A/B testing and multivariate testing.

In online marketing a landing page, sometimes known as a lead capture page, is the page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

In pay per click (PPC) campaigns, the landing page will also be customized to measure the effectiveness of different advertisements. By adding a parameter to the linking URL, marketers can measure advertisement effectiveness based on relative click-through rates.

7 Reasons You Create Landing Pages Specifically for Your Incoming Email or Social Media Links

Why is it so important to create a special Web page for the e-mail reader to visit? Why can't you simply send the prospect to your home page and make the offer a clickable item there?

Well, first of all, if you dump potential customers onto your home page, they could get lost. They could have trouble finding your offer and might give up. Or they might see something else of interest on your site and click away to that. Hey. You don't want them randomly browsing your site. You want them to respond to your specific offer!

The bottom line? When you send the reader to a landing page, you're in control. Which is where a direct response writer always wants to be.

Exactly what should you do on your landing page? Keep reading and I'll share a few ideas with you.

1. Thank the reader for responding.
You can begin your landing page with a brief headline like: "Thanks so much for responding to the e-mail we recently sent you!" This maintains continuity of communication. When they get to the landing page and see this message, they know they're in the right place and that they're at a special page created just for them.

2. Capture crucial data.
The whole idea of lead generation is to get people to raise their hands and indicate some level of interest, however modest. When they identify themselves, by responding to your offer, they enter the sales funnel. Then, you begin the job of converting prospects into buyers. This means that before they get to download your White Paper, your demo, or whatever, they must provide some information about themselves. Beginners think that you should let people take advantage of the offer without having to provide the info you're after. Wrong!

3. Don't ask too much of them.
Ask for the minimum information you need. Maybe name, title, company, and e-mail address. The fact you need to remember is that the more information you ask for, the more you'll turn people off. Never ask people, at this stage, when they're planning to make a purchase or what their budget is. Way too pushy!

4. Provide a promise of privacy and make your policy clear.
For good reason, prospects are reluctant to give up personal information. They know all too well that if they're not careful they may get an e-mail telling them that they're eligible for a share of a Nigerian prince's estate. Have a good privacy policy and make it crystal clear!

5. Keep the copy short.
The landing page is not the place to write a novel. Thank them. Convince them that their data will be kept private. Thank them again. Let them click to the download. Get out.

6. Use different landing pages to test different offers and creative treatments.
You can test variables by sending prospects to unique landing pages. Just measure the click through rate and you'll find out fast what works best. E-mail is much underused as a testing medium.

7. Don't forget to follow up.
After people take advantage of the offer on your landing page, work those leads! You should have follow-up messages ready to roll automatically. The whole idea of lead generation is to capture contact data and then press ahead with e-mail, postal mail, telemarketing, whatever. Failing to follow up aggressively is a big (and common) mistake!

The take-away message? Creating a great e-mail is crucial, but so is providing a landing page that does its job . . . getting the crucial data you need to begin an ongoing marketing effort.