Although the Great Recession has officially ended, most consumers don’t yet believe it, and they certainly aren’t seeing any tangible evidence of it.  So it’s understandable that retailers are approaching this holiday season with something like fear and trepidation.  The big news from the 2009 holiday season, however, is that online did really well, and the prediction is online will grow again this year.

So it’s important for every business concerned with sales during the holiday season to leverage online in a big way.

Since it’s getting late, we’ve assembled a three-part series on things you can still do to make the holiday shopping season a big one for your business.

In part one of our series we cover some basics – things you can do this week that will ensure you’ve got a good foundation for all your online holiday promotion and sales efforts.

First: Integrate offline and online.

Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL.  This includes printed flyers, print publication ads, outdoor ads and any sponsorships of local events, charities or organizations.  If you’re into social media (and you should be), include your Facebook and Twitter URLs, too.  If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page on your website where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

Second: Join the conversation.

Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Page, a Google Places page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone or iPad app.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence (make sure you follow all the prompts around adding your contact lists so you develop a good list of followers or friends, also making sure to follow / friend folks in return), reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.  You’ll also help your website’s SEO prospects.

Three: Test, test, test your infrastructure.

In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.  This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your website and holiday campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

Four: Look at last year’s performance.

Check your weblogs or Google Analytics to see where your peak days online were during the last holiday season:

• What sources were the best generators of your traffic last year?
• Look at which pages got the most traffic.
• Note which promotions worked, on which days and why.
• If you had already integrated a blog and other social media components during the last holiday season, understand which of these seem to drive the most traffic and conversions.
• Look at the keywords people most often used to get to your site via both organic and paid search sources.
• Evaluate your landing page performance—see which of your landing pages produced the best conversions. If possible, look at how the traffic to that page got there and learn from that click behavior: what inspired the click; which source generated the click; did a promotion or pricing strategy have any impact.

Learn well from the past and repeat what worked this holiday season.

Five: Implement efficiency measures for the management of your efforts.

Technology is a beautiful thing and many of the marketing, promotion and sales tasks that make up your online holiday effort can be made more efficient and effective with automation.  Businesses are able to reduce labor cost, increase sales, and improve overall operational performance using Web applications like ours and many others.  Don’t let aversion to technology or Web-based applications keep you from trying tools and solutions that can potentially make the difference between an okay holiday season and a blow-out one.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.

Jamie O’Donnell of SEO-PR interviews Matt Malden, CEO of Yield Software and an exhibitor at last month’s SES San Francisco 2010.  Here’s a synopsys of Jamie’s reporting:

Yield Software’s Yield Web Marketing Suite handles three aspects of automated web marketing. It has a pay-per-click (PPC) bid management module that includes spending on the three major search engines, Google, Bing, and Yahoo.  Second, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers automated SEO or natural search engine optimization. Using the Yield Web Marketing Suite, Web marketers can get higher organic search rankings for their important keywords and learn how to improve their landing pages, link building, on-page and off-page optimization. Finally, the Yield Web Marketing Suite offers Web marketers a landing page optimization module. Using Yield, marketers can conduct complex multivariate testing of landing pages, using a visual drag and drop interface to automatically implement recommendations.

Yield Software is great for advertisers who want to be more effective in the search space, particularly medium and large-sized companies. Yield Software has also been adopted by digital and interactive media agencies that are conducting bid management, natural search optimization and email campaigns in order to help them generate better search marketing results.

Yield Software empowers any organization in the world to attract high-value customers at the lowest cost. Using advanced algorithms and techniques, the Yield Web Marketing Suite optimizes internet marketing expenditures, attracts visitors to a web site and tunes web page content to have the greatest impact.

For more information about exhibiting at SES, please visit: http://searchenginestrategies.com

Check out the Googleplex’s Innovations in Web Marketing

Google announced today a new “lab” site where you can find all the beta products they’re testing relating to Web marketing.  Google has done this for its other lines of business (apps, YouTube, etc.), but this is the first time they’ve aggregated all their marketing product innovations in a single location.

It’s definitely worth checking out.  Here’s a sampling of what Google’s got brewing in its Web marketing lab:

Product Listing Ads (Search Advertising / PPC)

Product Listing Ads are search ads that include richer product information – including product image, price, and merchant name – without requiring additional keywords or ad text.

Above-the-Fold Advertising (Content Network)

A statistically driven solution determines whether impressions on the Google Content Network will show ads completely on-screen when a user’s browser window loads.  By excluding the “below the fold” category in your AdWords account, ads in your Google Content Network campaign will only be eligible to appear when a placement displays your ad fully upon page-load, with no scrolling required.

Remarketing (Search Advertising, Content Network)

Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web.  When you use remarketing, you’ll tag pages of your site that correspond to certain categories you want to promote. For example, you could add a “TV” tag on all of the pages where you sell televisions. You can then create an AdWords campaign to show highly relevant messages (such as ads displaying a special offer on TVs) to people who’ve visted these pages as they browse sites across the Google Content Network.

Click-to-Call Phone Extensions (Search Advertising)

When people search for goods or services using their mobile phones, they often prefer to call a store rather than visit that store’s website. Now you can make it even easier for potential customers to reach you by adding a click-to-call business phone number in ads that appear on mobile devices with full internet browsers.

There are still other innovations for you to explore.  Obviously, as these become fleshed out Yield Software will look at how best to integrate such services into our Yield Web Marketing Suite over time to complement our Paid Search Optimizer, Natural Search Optimizer and Landing Page Optimizer.  In the meantime, you may want to play with one or more of these innovations to see if there are any positive impacts on your overall Web marketing strategy.

We recommend starting small when testing new or evolving Web marketing services, though Google has an excellent track record of releasing Beta products only after extensive testing, so you’re on pretty solid ground.  Still, if something looks right for your strategy, carve out a small part of your larger Web marketing budget and a constrained segment of your target market, and then see what sort of results you’re able to produce.

Do share with us your experiences – and what you’d like to see integrated into the Yield Web Marketing Suite.  We’d love to get your insights at suggestions[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com.

Rather than spend money in these tough times, consumers are saving it (savings accounts are the new black). Instead of resigning yourself to a red holiday season (in the bottom line sense of the word), now is the time to gear up and make the most of the holiday season.

And you can – with a few well-thought out strategies that I outline in this, Part II of Web Marketing Holiday prep. (If you missed Part I, wherein I talk about aligning online and offline strategies, you can find it here.)  This week: getting your online house in order!

First: Ensure your site is extra secure for online transactions.

I visited the website of a financial institution recently and was appalled to note that the little “lock” icon was missing from the right corner of the Web page AND the secure “https” was missing from the URL.

Even worse, this site wanted me to log-in to my account using my social security number. Bad news, people! According to SSL.com, if you’re asking for customers’ sensitive information, i.e. credit card numbers, your website should be super secured using SSL.

Having a secure website eases customers’ fears about ordering from your site – and it gives you a leg up over those clueless retailers who leave security to chance. In fact, it’s probably a good idea to educate consumers about how you’ve secured your site as many people don’t know about how online security works.

Second: Help buyers compare similar items.

In a recent trip to the mall, I was pleasantly surprised to see the parking lot full and the mall crowded with people. It’s not that people aren’t spending money – it’s that they’re comparing products and prices and often visiting two or more retailers to find the best deal. (In fact, consumer spending data shows that debit card use is up – an indication that people are using cash versus credit.)

Online retailers have a real advantage over their bricks-and-mortar colleagues because you can develop Web pages that compare your products with your competitors’ products, including features and pricing.

Such information saves consumers time and helps them making buying decisions – especially if they’re in a hurry and need to make a purchase, like now.

Third: Let consumers see if product is in stock.

One of my Yield Software co-workers visited Best Buy in her town in order to purchase one of those cool netbooks. First she had to put her name on a list to even get waited on, then when her turn came, she found out the retailer was out of stock of the netbook. Grrrrr!

So she went online to Staples and in a few clicks saw that a store near her had the netbook – and plenty of them. Thirty minutes later, she was the proud owner of one.

Again, you’re saving customers time and money – both of which are in short supply – by providing your customers with an online inventory database. Balking at the cost? Remember, consumers are buying your goods with after-tax dollars and using cash, meaning they have fewer dollars in their wallets. Your cost for creating an inventory database is a business expense on pre-tax dollars – so do it. Your bottom line will thank you.

Fourth: Make it easy to contact you and return product.

I once bought the wrong power cord for my laptop from an after-market retailer, and found out, much to my chagrin, that I had no way of contacting the online retailer in order to return it. The site lacked an email address and phone number!

You can give consumers confidence when purchasing from you by including your contact information – and return policy – prominently on your website.

Fifth: Update your homepage, product pages and your blog.

If you’ve been putting off website updates — including content, navigation or back-end technologies — now is the time to draw up a to-do list.  Think about who is best able to make the changes you need, consider any budget-related impacts, and assign them their duties and deadlines.  Now is not the time to put of until tomorrow what you can get done today.  If you’ve been neglecting your blog lately, start reinvigorating it now — you’ll want to reawaken search engine crawlers to the fact that you’re regularly updating your website again.  (In the final post in this series, we’ll address these issues again as they pertain to SEO, PPC campaigns and landing pages.)

Finally: Take advantage of trends.

Eco-friendly. Organic. Green. Energy efficient. Consumers are hot for these trends and will spend hard-earned cash if they believe they’ll some positive impact in the long run (and believe me, consumers are becoming much more savvy about how their purchases affect the environment).  As I’ve already hammered-home, frugality is the order of the day and trumps all other trends (with luxury brand categories a possible notable exception), so you should also be sure you’re highlighting how it is your products and services saves money, time or other resources.  Think about two-for-one or gift-with-purchase promotions.  More than anything else, shoppers want to see value in their purchases.

Instead of offering products (such as robotic singing elves whose voices make you want to commit suicide) consider offering products such as wooly blankets made from free-range sheep. Your customers will walk away with a good conscious and they’ll stay warm over the winter to boot.

In part three of this series, I’ll cover how to prepare your landing pages, paid and natural search keywords, and PPC campaigns for the coming holiday rush. In the meantime, if you haven’t yet checked out how the Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you better manage your search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns, now is the time (before the holiday season rush gets underway).

Sign up for your free, no-obligation 30-day trial – and see how Yield Software can help you achieve better ROI this holiday season.

I know, I know: every day it seems you hear news about the dismal sales climate in the US. And it’s true: consumers are sitting on their wallets.

However, with a little strategic planning and creative thinking, you can help ensure that you finish the year with a bang. In this three-part series about prepping for the coming holidays, we’ll cover how you can drive traffic to your site and increase conversions.

And the first step is ensuring your holiday campaign components work – not just in driving traffic but actually work together without glitches and snafus.

Case in point: A few weeks ago I visited Williams-Sonoma at my local mall. While ringing up my purchases, the sales clerk informed me of cooking classes the store was holding – and gave me a flyer listing the class topics and dates.

Cool! I’ve always wanted to learn how to make pasta dough from scratch. However, while in-store cooking events are a great tactic for getting people into the store (and buying things), Williams-Sonoma made a big error: people interested in the classes have to call the store to RSVP. Even worse, the flyer from my store didn’t list the store’s phone number, a URL for online information or an email address.

Many Williams-Sonoma stores across the U.S. are holding these cooking classes – and a quick search showed that people are posting videos to YouTube about them and talking about the company on Twitter – yet W-S doesn’t incorporate these consumer-generated videos on its own YouTube channel or website, and it seems there are at least a couple Twitter feeds: the Santa Monica, CA store has a Twitter feed but is not following its fans; and a corporate Twitter feed that has a few hundred followers, but only follows a few dozen in return, and that has a tweet in August that obliquely refers to cooking classes in the stores this weekend (with no link to calendar listings).

It should be said that I am a HUGE fan of Williams-Sonoma (my kitchen is testimony), and so it gives me no joy to use them as an example of poor marketing integration strategies.  But by not integrating its campaign components, W-S is losing some serious buzz opportunity!

Whether you’re a pure e-tailer or a bricks and mortar business with an online presence, consider the following strategies when planning holiday campaigns:

First: Integrate offline and online – Make it easy for people to do business with you. All printed promotional materials should, at the very least, include your phone number, email address and website URL. If you’re hot into social media, include your Facebook and Twitter URLs.

If you’re holding an event – whether virtual or face-to-face – develop a special landing page where people can sign-up and use this URL on all promo materials.

W-S, for example, does have a Facebook Fan Page but doesn’t list events on it. On top of that, the paper flyer the store gave me lacks any contact info, making it difficult for people like me to register for the cooking classes (now I have to go online, find the store, look up the phone number and call – not convenient).

Second: Join the conversation – Whether you like it or not, people are talking about your company and its products. You can either ignore this conversation or promote it. When the group Msyto & Pizzi did a video to the Geico theme song, rather than ignore it Geico added it to their website.

If you haven’t already, develop a Twitter profile, a Facebook Fan Page, a YouTube channel, a blog – or even an iPhone app. Reserving your profiles now, even if you’re not ready to use them, is important because cyber-squatters are stealing brand names.

Once you’ve developed your social media presence, reach out to the people already talking about your company. Retweet their tweets, thank them for their contributions, promote their videos, and even ask them the write guest blog posts. You’ll create more buzz – and more sales.

Three: Test, test, test – In his book, “Slightware: The Next Great Threat to Brands,” Kenneth J. Weiss talks about how poorly branded and badly-executed software-powered applications negatively affect your customers and your brand.

This includes landing pages where the order process is broken (or those e-tailers that make people register before making a purchase – my pet peeve!) or even something “small” like making people call to RSVP for an event versus signing up online.

Once your campaign components are in place, test them – and have your family members test them, too, from their clunky home computers and smart phones. What works? What doesn’t? Listen to feedback from your testers and fix the bottlenecks.

In my next post, I’ll cover strategies you can use to increase traffic and conversions for the holiday season.

If you haven’t already, be sure to download our free e-book, The Link Economy: Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses.  In it you’ll learn why integrating your campaigns is important and how our Yield Web Marketing Suite can help you manage your search marketing campaigns.

Comprehensive Strategies for Growth

All of us here at Yield Software have worked hard to provide useful, easy-to-understand information on the full range of Web marketing possibilities on this blog, through our tweets on Twitter and the like. And, based on feedback, it seems the many small and growing businesses we serve (and tons more we don’t) really appreciate the information.

Which is why we were inspired to pull together our first eBook, “The Link Economy and Why It Matters to Small and Growing Businesses,” a limited-edition print run of which will be distributed from our booth at the annual Search Engine Strategies (SES) 2009 Conference & Expo August 11 and 12, 2009 at the San Jose Convention Center.

Addressing the concerns of business leaders who have limited or no experience with Web marketing, our new eBook provides an introduction to the Link Economy; the ways any business can plug in; and ways to best leverage Web marketing to expand business opportunities. If you’re not able to visit us in person at SES this week, free downloads of our new eBook are available here on our website.

We’ll also be on hand at SES to demonstrate recent upgrades to our Yield Web Marketing Suite. By combining and automating the three key elements of search marketing – paid search, natural search and landing page optimization – within a single, secure system, the Yield Web Marketing Suite enables novice to advanced marketers to optimize campaigns on Google, Yahoo! Search and Microsoft’s Bing – all via a simple and user-friendly interface.

Recent upgrades and new features include:

A new campaign creation wizard for businesses starting search engine advertising for the first time, which guides the creation of budgets; keyword lists, including suggested keywords; and text ads, including suggested copy points;

New informational widgets added to the campaign overview Dashboard, including a new “What’s Yield done for me in the last 24 hours?” widget providing a snapshot of computational and transactional work system algorithms perform “under the hood”;

Point-of-impact access to impressions, clicks, cost and conversions metrics, to make quick evaluation and performance reviews more convenient and robust; and,

Complete support of Microsoft’s Bing.

Yield Software offers all new subscribers a free 30-day trial. No downloads or systems integration work is required, and there are no contracts. Following the 30-day trial period, promotional pricing starts at $129 per month for up to one full year.

My co-worker, Jenae, recently sent me this email:

“I can’t tell you how many calls I have with folks who are hung up on cost per click (CPC). It’s the main metric they focus on when they start to dig into their campaigns and what they think they want to use Yield Software to optimize. It takes me a couple of discussions and lots of detailed examples to help them understand that while CPC is a tempting metric, having a low CPC doesn’t necessarily translate into a successful campaign — especially if you want conversions or are more ROI-driven.”

Search engine marketing comprises a number of tactics – online and offline – including pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, organic search, branding, and the various methods used to funnel traffic to your Website landing pages.

Too often, however, businesses of all sizes tackle only one aspect of an online marketing campaign without considering the costs of the entire campaign. And the one metric they often focus on, to the exclusion of everything else, is CPC.

Due to this narrow focus, we found that clients have a tough time answering this very basic question: “Is your PPC campaign making money or losing money?”

So, while driving down your CPC is good (and our Yield Web Marketing Suite is fully capable of delivering on this objective), focusing only on this metric may not help you achieve real return on investment (ROI) – nor will it show you how much it cost to achieve those clicks.

Which is why we counsel customers to focus on CPA – or cost per acquisition.

You’ll find lots of definitions for CPA, but in a nutshell, CPA is the amount you pay in total to acquire a customer or online order.

Notice, I did not say the amount you pay per click, but the amount you paid in total to acquire a customer or online order. This total dollar amount should include all of your marketing-related costs for a particular campaign including: branding and advertising, SEO, inbound customer support, and PR, to name a few things.

Only by looking at CPA can you determine if your cost is too high (compared to industry or internal benchmarks).

Let’s say you’re a shoe manufacturer that sells shoes in bricks-and-mortar stores and online. To build brand awareness, you must advertise — whether online, in print, or on TV. You may build mechanisms for capturing Website visitor information (i.e. via newsletters, contests, PPC ads). And you’ll likely need analytics that let you slice and dice data to determine who your target customer is, how she found you online, which products she’s ordered in the past, and when she likes to be contacted (to name a few things).

You may also develop email campaigns promoting your shoes, hire an agency to oversee these campaigns (if you don’t do it in-house), develop landing pages, etc. etc. etc.

By now it should be very clear to you that solely focusing on reducing CPC is not the best tactic. This is because you could be getting a ton of untargeted traffic that doesn’t covert – and reducing CPC won’t don’t anything to increase campaign ROI.

Put another way, which would you prefer:

100 clicks at $0.10 per click, resulting in 1 conversion, at a $10.00 cost per conversion; or

10 clicks at $1.00 per click, resulting in 5 conversions at a $5.00 cost per conversion?

(I know which outcome I’d pick!)

The key, then, is understanding how many clicks – and what kind of clicks – you need in order to convert one sale. Then you can understand what the cost is of getting those clicks. But as I’ve pointed out, you must consider a whole host of other variables before deciding that CPC is too high.

The reason so many small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) become befuddled with regard to campaign ROI is precisely because of the sheer number of PPC variables. Once you begin focusing on CPA, you may go through a period of trial-and-error in order to arrive at the exact right results.

Sadly, time (and its corollary, sustained investment) is not something most SMBs have on their side… which is why we suggest you start in a more limited way: focus on optimizing three elements of your marketing strategy in tandem – paid search, natural search, and your landing pages – and focus on driving down your overall cost to acquire and convert one visitor.

By optimizing natural search you can improve your page rank in the leading search engines, thereby driving more free traffic to your site. Similarly, by optimizing your paid search campaigns by focusing on your best-performing keywords (in terms of generating conversions), you can drive more of the right kind of traffic from paid sources. When combining the cost of acquiring your paid search visitors with those visitors you acquired through natural search, you effectively lower the cost of acquisition overall.

And because you’re also looking at optimizing your site’s principle landing pages, you increase the likelihood that those visitors will convert.

Small plug: Doing this all on your own, with disparate systems or consulting specialists, can be time-consuming and costly. Which is why we designed our Yield Web Marketing Suite to simultaneously optimize paid search, natural search and landing pages in one fully automated solution. Using our system can help you grow your business and keep it sensibly focused on driving down CPA.

For instance, instead of spending months in trial-and-error approaches, our Yield Web Marketing Suite tests multiple variables across your PPC campaigns and favors the best converting variables in real time. To learn more, sign up for our free, no obligation 30-day trial and see for yourself how you can reduce your CPA efficiently and quickly.

In my last blog post, I covered how to develop a landing page that increases conversions by limiting people’s options to explore other areas of your Website.  As I discussed in the post, you have many elements on the landing page that can make or break conversion rates, and one of those elements is the headline.

In his book, Tested Advertising Methods, John Caples explains why headlines are so important:

“In most advertisements, no matter how striking the illustration, the headlines are critically important. The majority of the public reads little else when deciding whether or not they are interested.”

The same holds true for landing pages – which are basically direct response ads designed to get people to take some sort of action.

So how do you add some muscle to your flabby headlines? Whole books have been written on this topic – so there’s no way I can cover everything. What follows are five basic strategies for more muscular headlines any company can quickly implement:

First: Spend more time writing them. Tom Ahern, expert fundraising consultant, speaker and author, says people will spend hours writing copy and only two minutes writing the headline – if that.  Usually written at the last minute, headlines, he says, are given very little thought – and it shows in the weak anemic headlines that populate fundraising materials. His advice? Spend more time on the headline and less time on the body copy.

Second: Write multiple headlines. Instead of writing one headline, brainstorm multiple headlines. The more you write, the more ideas you’ll come up with – and the punchier your headlines will become. If you have only one offer, consider writing multiple headlines that “pitch” the offer in different ways. For example, if you have a white paper offer, write headlines that present the offer as a “white paper,” “guide,” or “e-book,” and test to see which draws the best response.

Once you decide on a headline, don’t throw your discarded headlines away. You can use these to test against your main headline. Who knows – one of your “trashed” ideas could draw stellar response rates!

Third: Get input from others. Don’t rely on your own imagination only for a great headline. Solicit the opinions of others. One small change can turn a good headline into a response-busting headline.

Fourth: Include a time-based call-to-action. “Conference Registration Now Open” is a so-so headline. “Early Bird Special: $200 off Registration!” is better. Changing it to “Save $200 When You Register by June 15!” gives people an incentive to take action now.

Another incentive is the word “free,” which has been proven time and again to increase response rates. So use it if you have a free offer – i.e.: “Free Webinar,” “Free White Paper,” “Free Demo.”

Finally: Test your headlines. Components to test include color, size, and copy.

Test colors – What happens when you put the word “FREE” in red? How about the entire headline in red? Or blue?

Test font size – Increase the font size so that you have only one or two words per line. Does this increase response or lower it?

Test copy – And of course, test different headlines to determine which one delivers the best response.

In the old days, you used to have to test these things manually. Now with our Yield Web Marketing Suite, which includes a Landing Page Optimization Module, you can quickly test headlines, including color, size and copy – and see results in real time. (The module includes an easy-to-use wizard that guides you through the creation of multiple versions of your standard landing page.)  Our multivariate testing engine automatically serves up the best performing page to your visitors over time – improving your conversion rates while saving you considerable time and money.

If you’re testing headlines, let us know how you do. We’d love to feature your success story. You can send me an email at press[at]yieldsoftware[dot]com.

Transactional landing pages have one purpose only: to get people to take one specific action, whether it’s filling out a form for a white paper, purchasing a product, or even subscribing to an e-newsletter.

Yet many companies lower landing page conversion rates by providing opportunities to browse for related goods and services or offering all kinds of back-up information to support their offer.

In other words, if you’re trying to get people to sign up for your Webinar and on your landing page you have links to your Website, YouTube video, and white papers, you’re encouraging people to click away from your landing page – perhaps never to return.

I call this “Distraction Interaction.” Think about what happens when you go online to do something:

Initially… you open your email client to send someone an important email, but first you read your new messages and find an interesting newsletter, which you click open to read.

Then… within the newsletter are a few links to blogs and articles, which you read. An industry guru wrote one of the blog posts and you see her Twitter handle, so you open TweetDeck in order to follow her and then get sucked into Twitter . . . .

An hour later… you come up for air, completely forgetting you were supposed to send your customer that important email.

This exact process is what happens when you include links to additional information on your landing page!

To significantly decrease Distraction Interaction and increase conversions for various types of landing pages, consider the following tips:

Eliminate ALL links to your Website, blog, etc. – Eliminating links discourages people from clicking off your landing page and falling into a rabbit hole on your Website. If you want people to visit your site, give them a link on the “thank you” page once the transaction is complete.

Keep forms simple – A MarketingSherpa report on white papers revealed that people do not want to fill out long, complicated forms. On another note, have people outside your company test your forms before they’re live; you want to ensure they work smoothly and that your spam filter isn’t gobbling up the response emails.

Focus on one objective – The objective of the landing page is to get people to do one thing. Whatever your objective, ensure all landing page components support that objective, from the headline and body copy to the design and graphics.

Don’t “bait and switch” – If you’re using PPC, SEO, or other “inbound” methods to get people to the landing page, make sure the headline and the offer match what people are expecting to get. Nothing is worse than getting to a landing page that’s offering something completely different then what the ad copy proclaimed.

Include a “hero shot” – If you’re offering a product, white paper or other tangible item, include a graphic of the cover, a headshot of the Webinar presenter, or a photo of the item.

Once you have these elements in place, you can then begin testing headlines, images, form and copy to see what increases or decreases conversions, some of which we’ll cover in subsequent posts to this one.  And remember that our Yield Web Marketing Suite includes a landing page optimization module that enables real-time multivariate tests of landing pages. Our wizard takes you step-by-step through a process of creating test pages from your original; serves different versions as people click on links to your landing page; and automatically begins to favors the page that converts best overtime, improving your conversion rates in real time.

Do you have other suggestions for improving landing page conversions? Send us a tweet via Twitter at @YieldSW.

Building a sustainable program of communications with your customers and your prospects is an important strategy for continually driving traffic, leads and / or sales. But I often hear from small business owners they just don’t have the time to do the necessary legwork to foster a multidimensional program.

The good news is technology and web-based services are changing so rapidly, there are lots of great ways to create multiple outbound communications that get the results you’re looking for without a huge investment of time or money.

What follows are ten tips, tricks and strategies for effectively communicating with your prospects and customers.

#1: Produce Once, Reuse Many. Many small business owners fall into the trap of believing every form of outbound communication must be wholly unique. While it may be important to adapt headlines and content length depending upon the medium, it is perfectly acceptable to, say, take a blog post you’ve recently written and use it in an upcoming email newsletter you’re preparing. While there will be some audience overlap, most people are forgiving on this front and you shouldn’t encounter much in the way of objection for re-purposing content across multiple communications channels.

#2: Start an Email Newsletter. Using low cost or free newsletter services such as Constant Contact is a great way for you to stay in touch with both prospects and existing customers (I use Constant Contact for the Yield Newsletter). Be sure to give visitors to your site a visible and easy way to sign up for your newsletter – newsletters are most successful when folks voluntarily opt-in to receive them (for instance, if you look on Yield Software’s Community Pages, you’ll see sign-up boxes on the top and bottom of the page). Sending newsletters to folks who don’t ask for them not only irritates them, it could be breaking the Federal Can-Spam Act. Take a look at newsletters others put out so you can get a sense of what works and what doesn’t from your own point of view. Using Constant Contact, you can set up a simple and attractive template for your newsletter. Try sending a newsletter out every two weeks or so. They don’t require a lot of writing, and you can certainly re-purpose content from your blog, or point to other sources of content you find interesting or useful. And, of course, you should also highlight any special promotions or special offers you have — and link to those pages. (Small pitch: be sure to use the Yield Web Marketing Suite to optimize all your landing pages to ensure you’re getting the best possible conversion-to-sale you can.)

#3: Sign Up for HARO – Help a Reporter Out. This terrific service, founded and run by the highly energetic Peter Shankman, helps to connect reporters and writers working on stories with sources or subject matter experts. Typically, Peter distributes two-to-four emails per day showing the most recent reporter entreaties. Peter also hosts periodic conference calls where he goes over best practices for responding to reporter queries and how best to incorporate PR strategies for your own business. It can be hard to get, but landing a mention – or better yet, a full feature – about your business in a story can drive great awareness about you and traffic to your website.

#4: Set Up a Blog. I’ve encouraged you to do this in other posts and so I’ll say it again: start and maintain a blog. Ideally your blog will be integrated into your main website and URL structure (and not hosted on separate blog hosting platform with a unique URL.) There are enormous SEO benefits to maintaining a blog and it’s a great way to continually reconnect with your customers. Blog posts don’t have to be long and involved – a paragraph each day or two with updates, or links to relevant news or information, or highlighting one of your customers or employees is all it takes. Throw in a few photos from your company’s Flickr stream and before you know it, you’ll be a bona fide blogger!

#5: Set up Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook accounts. If you haven’t already, bite the bullet and do this. I guarantee you that your competition either is or very soon will be using these platforms for their business communications. (Take a look at ours as an example – the links are in the right-hand column of our Community Pages.) Some people choose to keep their professional and personal lives separate for each of these services, which is totally fine. Doing this adds a level of management complexity, which is why I don’t distinguish between the two, but I understand why people prefer to keep things separate. Each of these platforms provides excellent networking opportunities for individuals and businesses, and standing on the sidelines looking in just isn’t an option any longer.

#6: Connect Twitter with Social Network Updates. Be sure your Twitter account is linked with the social networking platforms on which you’ve established a presence (i.e. Facebook). A great way to do this is using FriendFeed, which asks you to put in user information for each service. Then, when you post updates to your Twitter stream those same updates will then automatically appear in your Facebook and other update streams. This way, no matter how your customers, friends and family may follow you, they’re getting the same update. And because Twitter enables you to post your updates via your mobile phone, you can be highly efficient with this activity. (Just remember: this is a form of mass communication. Once you’ve hit the “enter” button, you can’t take what you say back!)

#7: Install a Twitter Monitoring Application. While Twitter on its on own is a terrific service, a number of other companies have sprouted up to make using and getting the most out of Twitter a breeze. The two leading desktop apps, TweetDeck and Twhirl, do this using a dashboard feature that enables you to not only do your updates but also to keep track of all those you follow; save searches for your own or your competitor’s business; and monitor tweets pertaining to a specific set of keywords (for instance, if you’re baker, you may want to follow all tweets using the word “bakery”.) I personally use TweetDeck but Twhirl is also hugely popular, too. Both are free and both get better and better each passing month. HootSuite is a Web application that enables you to manage multiple Twitter accounts (for instance, if you keep your personal Twitter account separate from your business and other accounts). HootSuite also allows you to schedule tweets for later broadcast and a bunch of other cool things. If you have an iPhone, check out a cool little app called Tweetie; like HootSuite, it allows you monitor and update multiple accounts via a single interface on your iPhone. Check out each of these and pick the one that feels right for you.

#8. Sign-up for a Press Release Distribution Service. Though most small and growing businesses very rarely issue press releases, when this makes sense for you, a distribution service like BusinessWire or PRWeb is a great way to distribute your release. While not free, the most basic service for each is pretty low cost for local distribution (i.e. San Francisco Bay Area) and hits the major online news sites – which, frankly, is almost all most small businesses really need to do. Distributing the occasional release (which should have real news in them) can be great for SEO and building link-love to your company’s website. Additionally, well-written, relevant and timely releases can capture the attention of reporters and bloggers. Releases can also generate new traffic to your site, so be sure the release includes links to relevant pages on your website that pertain to the news you’re announcing. Ideally there will be a special promotional offer for these visitors.

#9. Use Screencasting. Screencasts are digital recordings of a computer screen. They enable you to capture the interactions you undertake on a website or a Web application as a way of providing a demonstration. Screencasts can also be promotional in nature, highlighting the best places on your website that folks should be sure to check out during their next visit. Most screencasting software not only captures your interactions as they unfold, but also capture your narration – the audio – as you take folks through your online tour. One of my favorite blogs, Mashable, did a great job of listing the leading screencasting tools, most of which are very, very affordable.  Because I use a Mac, I use IShowU, which is a great piece of software for Mac users. Creating screencasts can be fast and easy, and you can create new ones whenever you’d like. Then, feature these on your website, via your blog posts and in your newsletter. You can also send out tweets via Twitter when a new screencast becomes available.

#10: Set Up a YouTube Channel. Anyone can make videos. Even you. Small business owners, in fact, often do so with the help of their kids or close friends. Tape an interview with one of your customers, for instance; or a trip to source new products to sell on your site; or the manufacturing process for your cool, totally unique little doodad. If you’ve created screencasts, you can feature them on your YouTube channel, too. You can then feature the videos in your channel, as well as those from others, on your blog and throughout your website. With quality video recording equipment getting less and less expensive by the day, and with the availability of high-quality, low cost editing software, video production is now a DIY (do it yourself) endeavor. (Buy a Macintosh computer, for instance, and it comes bundled with iMovie, which is a nearly professional, yet easy-to-use video editing software included in the price of the purchase.)

Your time is precious and limited – I understand that. But by choosing the right collection of outbound communications tools for you, it’s very likely you’ll be able to efficiently and effectively stay in touch with customers and prospects. Try starting small and adding new elements to your strategy over time – I think you’ll be pleased with the results.

For more blog posts in our small business marketing strategies series, go here.