Below are some common mistakes that could be hindering your landing page conversion rates from reaching their true potential.

Your Landing Page Does Not Explain The Value of the Offer

Remember that people’s attention spans are short. What this means is that you need to ensure your offer can be understood by your visitors in less than five seconds. In order for people to understand your offer within five seconds, you have to keep your landing page simple and clear. Use the title, text, and images on your page to ensure your visitors easily grasp what you are offering.

Your Headers Do Not Align with your Calls-to-Action

Keep in mind that your headers need to match your CTA text. If your visitors click on a CTA to download a freeguide, then they are expecting to be directed to a page where they can do that. Strive to be clear that they are in the right place when they get to your landing page by keeping your copy and page title consistent.

Your Form is Too Long

Another factor you need to consider is the length of your form against your prospect’s willingness to fill it out. If your form is too long, prospects might not fill it out and evaluate whether filling it out is worth their time. Many companies request too much information and ask tons of questions to their visitors without realising that asking too many questions may significantly lower conversion rates. Try to use shorter forms and only ask questions that are really necessary.

Are you making the following mistakes on your landing pages?

Integrate Videos

If you want your reader to stay engaged for longer periods of time, it will be a good idea if you can integrate a nice video of yourself and the kind of topics you will be covering. By doing this, you quickly gauge your audience’s reactions to video content and then as you go on, you become familiar with the mechanisms for creating and posting video on the web. Remember that you don’t need a fancy video, just record something simple and you should be good to go.

Conduct Interviews

Once you are used to creating and posting videos on your blog, consider interviewing thought leaders, industry experts, and ask their opinions on pressing issues concerning your industry. When conducting an interview, make sure that you avoid scripting all your questions. Though scripted interviews are definitely faster to produce, they are not as interesting to watch and they hinder free-flowing discussions. Don’t be stiff when conducting your interviews, be natural and run it as a conversation.

Don’t forget Humor

Since you are already mixing up different types of content, try to insert a funny blogpost relevant to your industry at least once a week. You may want to look for a funny news story and write a blogpost about it.  Though this may not be focused on thought leadership, these posts are still interesting and may be shared more often than your serious posts which in turn may lead to new readers and visitors to your blog from social media.

How do else do you keep your blog content interesting and exciting? Share your tips below!

Even if you are not new to the social media marketing game, you may also want to do a quick audit of all your accounts and evaluate if you have the essential characteristics of an effective social media account.

4 Essential Characteristics of An Effective Social Media Business Account

1. Have A Clear Purpose for Each Network and Maintain It

Despite the fuzziness of social media marketing, it needs to be approached with an analytical mindset. You may want to figure out how you are going to use each network and how many followers you want to attract in a specific length of time.

Do you want to use your social media accounts as a customer service channel or as a marketing tool? Ask yourself these questions before setting up an account. By doing so, you’ll be able to have a clear purpose for each account as well as maintain focus so as to avoid confusing your followers or fanbase.

2. Determine The Voice Behind Each Network

What do you want your voice to be? If it’s a support account you are establishing, you may want a friendly and helpful voice. However, if it’s an account where you are sharing your content and marketing your products, then you need to make sure that your brand’s personality shines through.

3. Publish Consistent Updates

You may want to check how often your competitors are publishing content and try to match, if not exceed their volume. To be able to do this, you need to make a firm commitment with yourself to produce great content consistently. Once you have established the proper frequency of your updates, you need to make sure that you maintain that frequency.

4. Interact with People

Remember that you are working with social media accounts so it goes without saying that you need to be social! Talk to your fans and tweet with people! Follow people back and find out what their interests are in relation to your industry.

In Summary

Though there are still lots of things you can do in order to have a winning social media presence, the characteristics we have mentioned above are crucial and should be dealt with before anything else.

What qualities do you think is needed for an effective social media profile?

If you think your content is not interesting enough, then you better re-think your approach. Below are some reasons why no one is sharing your blog post.

The Headline of Your Blog Post Sucks

No one likes boring headlines. Keep in mind that the most important part of your post is its headline since through it you create a first impression. Write headlines that are descriptive and one that also sparks a sense of urgency. Your reader’s should be captivated by your headline and hook them with great content behind it.

Your Timing Is Off

Do you know when to publish content in order to get the best results? You may be publishing your posts when your readers are busy with work. It would be better if you can survey your audience and ask when they are likely to read your content. Remember that planning ahead is key. Know when your audience are most likely free and not busy with other things.

You Write About Yourself Too Much

When readers read your post, remember that they don’t care much about you or your company. Readers are after news and information. They like to be fed with information that interests them. How-to articles and lists of tips and resources are good formats to begin with.

You Make Your Posts Difficult to Share

It’s sad how many blogs do not have social sharing buttons. It is quite easy to get so excited in selecting the perfect design for your blog then forget about the obvious and functional elements like social media buttons or subscribe widgets. Try to settle for a design that is simple enough to get the most important features, and plan ahead with your content.

What makes you want to share a blog post? Let us know and leave your comments below!

According to McKinsey & Co, word-of-mouth is a factor between 20 and 50% of purchasing decisions – and the influential generate three times as many word-of-mouth messages as the non-influential. However, it’s not easy to mingle with opinion leaders. Before you try to associate yourself with the influential people in your industry, make sure that you first build your own reputation. Below are some ways on how you can establish your influence online.

Write Content That Resonates With Your Audience

When writing content, focus matters. It is difficult to be the jack of all trades so become known for the subject that is really relevant to your business. It will also be helpful if you know what your readers would like to see. Try to find what their interests are and write about those in relation to what you have to offer.

Increase The Size of Community You Communicate With

Remember that the more reach you have, the better. More people will be able to read your content and the easier you will be able to establish yourself as an opinion leader.

Avoid Mutual Follow Back Schemes

Let your reputation spread and let your audience grow organically. Don’t fool yourself by engaging in follow back schemes. Instead, be active and remember to be constantly engaging with the people you want as your audience.

Interact With People Who Retweet Your Content

If the people who talk about your product or service are opinion leaders then the more you need to interact with them. Monitor your social media accounts for any mention of your brand name and content and engage with people who are mentioning your brand.

How else are you establishing your online influence?

The key is repackaging your existing content and distributing it on multiple platforms in order for you to make the most out of it. Below are some tips on you how you can extend the reach of your existing content.

Blog About It

After you have repackaged your existing content into something new. Make an effort to blog about it. Remember that your blogpost should be in a conversational tone. It needs to encourage readers to comment and start a discussion.

Publish on Multiple Platforms

Think about where you can publish your repackaged content. Try to do some research to find out the most appropriate site to feature your content. For example,  in addition to publishing your new content to your website, you can also publish your content as PDF to Slideshare. By doing so, you are leveraging another channel to reach a different audience.

Re-packaging Your Content In A Different Format

If you have some quotable quotes on your repackaged content, you can again repackage it and create a short video featuring some of your quotes. Remember that people prefer to consume information in a myriad of ways. By constantly changing your content’s format  you reach people who prefer different types of media.

What other suggestions do you have for making the most of your existing content? Let us know!

If you are a marketer, below are some of the basic metric terms you should know in order to track and analyse the progress of your online marketing campaign.

Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings will tell you which of your keywords rank very well and which of them rank poorly. By continuously monitoring your keywords, you ensure that you don’t slip on important ranking changes. Be careful not to get caught up with your keyword rankings though, measure the traffic and leads generated by your keywords too!

Links per Page

If your web page has a high quantity of inbound links, then it has better likelihood of ranking in search. If you think a specific webpage or blogpost is generating a lot of inbound links, then perhaps you should make more content of that type.

Visits per Keyword
 
This data tells you how much traffic a keyword is driving to your website from organic search. With this metric, you will know how often people search for your specific keyword and how well you rank for it.

Leads per Keyword

This metric tells you how well the traffic you generate from a given keyword converts into leads for your business. If a specific keyword and page is driving a lot of visits but no leads, then perhaps you need to optimise your Call-to-Action to increase lead conversions.

In Summary

Though the metrics you should be monitoring are not limited to this list, the above mentioned metrics should still be able to help you understand if the different facets of your marketing are performing well.

What other metrics do you look into that are not mentioned here? Care to share?

Below are some of the content formats that are presently rocking mobile devices.

Ebooks

With the launch and popularity of Kindles and other mobile reading devices, one of the content formats you need to be focusing on are ebooks. With just a little design knowledge, you can easily create an e-book for your visitors which can help you generate even more leads.

Infographics

Infographics translate written content in a visual format which is easier to digest on e-readers, tablets and smartphones. Not to mention, inforgraphics are fun to read so people are more than willing to share it on their networks. Furthermore, the long vertical format of infographics are also ideal for the rectangular mobile screen of tablets.

Podcasts

Podcasts are ideal for mobile devices since mobile devices are not far from a pair of earphones. What’s so nice about podcasts is that it is genuine and just casual meaningful conversations. So instead of a script, all that is needed is an interesting topic to talk about. As your audience grows, so will your reach since people are sharing your podcasts in their network.

In Summary

What’s so great about the mentioned content formats is that they’re not only suited for mobile audience, they can also rock your website for non-mobile users as well.

What content formats do you have on your mobile devices? When are you planning to start creating mobile-friendly content for your audience?

Unless you are doing it wrong!

If you want to leverage your paid marketing opportunities and use it your advantage, make sure you steer clear of the following mistakes some companies make.

No Guidance

Some advertisers do not really give clear direction to readers who are clicking on their ads. Once an ad and its call-to-action grab a reader’s attention, companies need to sustain that attention. The reader should be guided through the next step. Naturally, if the reader does not see any value on the page they have landed after clicking the ad, they will flee. If you want to engage on Pay-Per-Click marketing, be sure that you are sending your visitors to a dedicated landing page with crystal clear instructions about the next step you want them to take. You may want to encourage them to download your e-book, signup for a free trial of your product, complete a contact form or maybe to call your business. Remember that they shouldn’t exit from your site without leaving their information.

Not Delivering on Expectations

Aside from not giving clear direction, another mistake advertisers make is not delivering the expectations they set. If your ad promises a whitepaper then that’s just what you need to deliver and not direct the reader to your pricing page.

Too Many Unnecessary Options

Too often, advertisers give too many choices to readers who click through their ads.  Instead of giving unnecessary options, once a reader decides he is interested with your offer, try to keep his focus on that offer. Don’t distract them is the key.

In Summary

If you want an effective paid marketing campaign, make sure that you avoid the mistakes listed above and improve the performance of your landing page and calls-to-action.

Let’s break down some of the reasons why word count in business blogging is unimportant and let’s discuss the more important things we should be focusing on for our blog.

Word Count Doesn’t Matter, Mobile Optimisation Does

According to a recent study, half a billion people across the world are getting information online using their mobile devices. This number is expected to rise by 2014 and instead of counting how many words you have on your blogpost, you need to realise as early as now that your blog should load to fit screens on an iPhone, Blackberry, and Android device.

Instead of worrying about word count, focus your efforts on writing short-form content that can easily be read by professionals who are using smartphones and tablet devices.

Word Count Doesn’t Matter, But Effective Formatting Does

As a blogger, you should already know by now that people are not reading every word on your blogpost. Readers have short attention spans and they’re probably scanning your post for its main idea. Instead of writing long posts and beating around the bush, it would be a good idea to make it easy for your readers to grasp the main idea of your post by getting really good at formatting. Make sure that your post has images and that you divide content using bullet points and numbers as well as use bolded text to tell the reader where to focus their attention on.

Word Count Doesn’t Matter, But Clarity and Depth Do

Though some topics take 1000 words to fully communicate the idea, great bloggers know how to be concise when it comes to their writing. They only take the main points and only take a couple of hundred words to get across their point and they don’t write for the sake of writing. Before you start writing your post, it would be good if you can first narrow down the scope of your topic and list down the points you want to cover. By doing so, you will find out if your topic is appropriate or if it is better covered in a whitepaper.

Do your shorter blog posts perform better or do your audience prefer your lengthier posts?