Printing a landing page URL on a direct-mail piece, such as a postcard, can be a great way to connect with customers. Using layers of navigation, marketers can provide more thorough and detailed information about a product or service, which the customer can navigate at will. Landing pages are also a great opportunity to digitally capture information about your audience.

Here are four tips on how to profit from landing pages:

1. Use cohesive creative
It’s best to create a flow from the mailing to the website to indicate to prospects that they’re in the right place. Use the color scheme, fonts and any photography or illustration from the mailing on the landing page. To maintain credibility online, be sure the URL and the landing page itself are branded with the company name, offer name or the product name.

2. Provide an incentive
One of the biggest challenges in direct mail-to-landing page offers, is motivating the prospect to visit your URL. That’s asking the prospect to stop what they’re doing, go to the computer and focus on your offer. Try providing a special incentive for going online, such as “Orders placed online will receive an added 10 percent off.” Or you can throw in a free gift, subscription to a digital newsletter or entry into a sweepstakes for those who visit the landing page. That way the prospect is likely to hang on to your mailing and visit your site the next time they’re online.

3. Make the buying path clear
A landing page is different from any other Web page or home page because your goal is not just to provide information, but to get the visitor to take action. Treat the landing page in much the same way as an order form. Reiterate the offer, restate the product benefits and be sure the order form or order button are highly visible and easy to use.

4. Collect data
Be sure to capture as much information as you can about the landing page visitor. Placing a registration code on the mailing that customers can key-in online will help you track response. Using cookies and basic Web analytics you can also track what each registered visitor does once on the site. Do they place an order, browse more product information, leave the site, visit your home page instead? If you ever plan to do e-mail marketing, use landing page campaigns to collect e-mail addresses and build up an in-house e-mail file. E-mail lists from outside vendors are extremely expensive and not as effective as in-house lists.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

For inspirational ideas about marketing, design, small business development and copywriting add these four blogs to your list. Blogroll please!

1. MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
MarketingProf’s Daily Fix Blog comes from the network of professionals who contribute to the main MarketingProf website. The Daily Fix Blog is updated by more than 75 editors and contributors from varied professional backgrounds, and they blog about everything from marketing news and regulations to creative ideas, graphic design, metrics and testing. Commenting and simple navigation by category or writer make this a great resource. Try perusing the archives.

2. Bly.com Direct Marketing Blog
Bob Bly has three decades of direct marketing copywriting experience, and he updates his direct marketing blog almost daily. Bly specializes in business-to-business promotions and has fresh opinions on topical marketing issues and a sea of loyal readers who enrich his posts with lively comments. Bly is fun to read because he’s not afraid to post a controversial argument. For example, one of his recent posts is titled, “Why New Media Evangelists Annoy Me,” and has 15 comments expounding on the points he’s raised.

3. Vertical Response Blog
This blog is maintained by Janine Popick, the president and CEO of Vertical Response, a direct marketing provider to thousands of small business clients. Popick is especially atttuned to the seasonal and cyclical aspects of small business marketing. Reading her blog will give you a heads-up to start planning for back-to-school promotions, or say Valentine’s day, well in advance. There are tons of relevant categories to choose from and the biggest strength of the Vertical Response blog are the dozens of real-life examples and techniques Popick shares.

4. Business Opportunities and Ideas
A gentleman named John Crickett updates this blog from across the pond, sharing inspirational ideas for starting new businesses, running home-based businesses and improving marketing strategy and communications. Cricket shares tips, book and software recommendations and tons of great ideas for evaluating and assessing your current tactics. This site will be helpful to freelance designers, marketers and copywriters looking for ideas to use in their client’s promotions and looking to improve their own businesses.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Here are some of the common errors that I am talking about:

Lose for loose: These two words do not mean the same thing. I can not stress that enough.

Affect or effect: If you do not know the difference between these two, please stop writing and get a factory job. But, here’s a good trick to figure out if you are using the right one: For affect, try substituting the word “influence.” For effect, try substituting the word “result.”

Semi-colons: Semi-colons are not commas, and they are not colons. Please dangle a participle before you abuse the right to add a semi-colon in a sentence. Use a semi-colon between two closely related independent clauses that are not conjoined by a coordinating conjunction, not just because you do not know what else to put there.

It’s for its. It’s is the short form of it is. Its is the possessive form of it. Please stop throwing them together like they are interchangeable.

Their, there, and they’re. The difference is obvious. Please proofread your work before sending it to me.

Then and than. Enough said. Than is a conjunction you use with comparisons, while then is an adverb that refers to time.

If you are having trouble with any of these errors, please proofread your work slowly before wasting the time of some editor or a struggling businessman like myself. My time is stretched already. Reading sloppy work overloads my schedule.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

One way to build SEO and social media programs efficiently is to follow a social media road map:

1. Find the audience; understand their behaviors, preferences, methods of publishing and sharing. Most companies that are involved with the social web in the channels where their customers spend time have a good sense of where to start.

Many companies are ahead of the game by tracking their audience via social media monitoring software that identifies keywords, conversations and influencers.
2. Define your objectives. Objectives are often driven by marketing or sales, and SEO has long been directly accountable to substantial improvements in web sales. Social media is not direct marketing though, so different objectives and measurements apply. The role of SEO in a social media effort is to directly influence discovery of social communities or content via search. Do a search for Zappos on Google, for example, and you’ll easily find more than shoes: Twitter, a blog and a YouTube channel are all on the first page of search results.

3. Establish a game plan. The game plan for reaching objectives in a combined SEO and social media effort will often focus on content and interaction, since it is content that people discover and share. Whether a keyword-focused strategy for reaching goals means publishing new content or creating an opportunity for consumer-generated content, it must involve proactive promotion and easy sharing amongst members of the community.

4. Create a tactical mix. The tactical mix for a social media marketing effort is based on doing the homework of finding where the desired audience spends its time interacting with and sharing content. Whatever the tactical mix is, it’s an investment in time and relationships — not a short term “link dump” to promote optimized link bait. Much of the content creation and promotion for a social media marketing effort happens within the tactical mix and, of course, that means optimizing content for keywords. Whether content is created by marketers as part of a social destination such as a niche community or a promotion vehicle such as an interactive ad, keyword glossaries become useful for writing headlines, deciding on anchor text for links as well as outreach activities such as blogger relations.

5. Measure your goals. Goals measurement should roll up to the specific objectives, both direct and indirect. Leveraging both social media monitoring services as well as web analytics can provide marketers with the insight to improve results. Radian6 and Webtrends have recently announced a partnership that will bring web analytics and social media analytics together all in one interface. In the meantime, marketers can use specific measurement tools to monitor the effect of their social web participation as well as the search engine performance of SEO efforts.

By involving SEO insight in a social media marketing effort and vice versa, marketers, public relations professionals and advertisers can extend the value of their investment. Well-optimized social media content marketing efforts can attract new network participants via search. News content that experiences distribution via social news and bookmarking channels can facilitate links to company website content directly and indirectly. Advertisers that fund social media campaigns can continue to realize the traffic benefit from keyword-optimized interactive content long after the campaign has ended.

Any thoughts?

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Making the most out of combining SEO insights with social media marketing tactics can be accomplished with a road map that identifies the audience you’re after, the goals you’re trying to reach as well as a strategy that sets the stage for the tactics you’ll use to execute your game plan. Read on to get a better understanding of how SEO and social media complement each other and a step-by-step guide for creating a social media road map.
From a marketing standpoint, you can look at the benefits of SEO and social media two different ways.
First, implementing a social media marketing program without optimizing content is leaving money on the table. Useful social content (blog, video, images, audio) that cannot be discovered via search is a lost opportunity to reach an audience that is looking.
For example, The Student Loan Down (http://blog.wellsfargo.com/StudentLoanDown/), the popular blog about student loans and college financing from Wells Fargo, identifies 29 keywords in its keyword meta tag and doesn’t rank in Google’s first page for 26 of them. Those that do rank are variations of the blog’s name.
While there is a generous amount of cross linking within posts, a basic blog template optimization effort leveraging keywords and other minor adjustments could improve search traffic for this site substantially without any compromise in content quality or user experience.
Social interactions and media sharing amongst social network participants create the kind of content that can improve a brand’s visibility within search results through profiles, videos, blog posts or other media. A good example is Stormhoek wine’s first-page Google rankings including blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
On the flip side, implementing SEO programs without leveraging the content distribution and linking benefits of social web participation makes link building for SEO an uphill battle. The nature of the social web encourages participation: sharing, voting, commenting and linking. Popular social content gets exposure, traffic and can result in a substantial number of relevant inbound links. The famous Blendtec iPhone video has attracted more than 6,000 links resulting in a top 10 ranking on Google for the word “blender.”

However you look at it, SEO and social media work well together as long as there is a framework for doing so. In my next post I will go reveal five steps to implementing the things I have discussed today. If you have any thoughts on what I have written please feel free to leave a comment.

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Thousands of free high-resolution photos are available for use, and downloading them is quick and easy.

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What websites do you use to get free high-resolution photography?

©2009 PsPrint Blog. All Rights Reserved.