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On A Page of Your Website, Your Server Sent to Me
Why and How to Create a Cool Twitter Welcome Page
Facebook Is Replacing Google & The Dramatic Shift This Heralds For Marketers (Part 1)

On A Page of Your Website, Your Server Sent to Me

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 04:58 PM PST

On the homepage of your website, the server sent to me:
A Promise That You Ship Free.

On page two of your website, the server sent to me:
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page three of your website, the server sent to me:
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page four of your website, the server sent to me:
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

One page five of your website, the server sent to me:
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!

Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page six of your website, the server sent to me:
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page seven of your website, the server sent to me:
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page eight of your website, the server sent to me:
Eight Spots for AdSense
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page nine of your website, the server sent to me:
Nine CSS Errors
Eight Spots for AdSense
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page ten of your website, the server sent to me:
Ten Hidden Keywords
Nine CSS Errors
Eight Spots for AdSense
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page eleven of your website, the server sent to me:
Eleven Error Messages
Ten Hidden Keywords
Nine CSS Errors
Eight Spots for AdSense
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's
And a Promise That You Ship Free.

On page twelve of your website, the server sent to me:
12 Calls to Action
Eleven Error Messages
Ten Hidden Keywords
Nine CSS Errors
Eight Spots for AdSense
Seven Image Sliders
Six Missing Alt Tags
FIVE BROKEN LINKS!
Four Calls to Action
Three Minutes Load Time
Two 404's

And a Promise That You Ship Free.

Merry Christmas!

From your favorite web site usability analyst.

The post On A Page of Your Website, Your Server Sent to Me appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Why and How to Create a Cool Twitter Welcome Page

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 07:00 AM PST

Cool Twitter Welcome Page Twitter has had a pretty great couple of years. It became the first popular microblogging site on the web. It is a leader in mobile advertising. They are a public company currently worth $25 billion. They have even revolutionized the live search algorithm, hashtag sorting and automatic update feature for social networks. There is a lot they can be proud of.

But they also have the distinction of being equally beneficial for personal and professional uses. While Facebook has struggles to be as important for companies as it has individual users, and Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn are all struggling to get their industry niches down, Twitter is already at that point. Whether it is a corporation or a blog, they have features that apply to and benefit everyone.

One such tool is the Twitter welcome page. A simple concept that has a lot of applications, creating a welcome page for your Twitter profile is one of the easiest ways you can improve your social media standing.

Why A Twitter Landing Page?

Twitter Landing Page You can link a Twitter account to any page you like. Immediately, you are going to want to link it to your business page or blog in some way. But why not create a special landing page just for Twitter users? Not only does it look professional, but it directs them to specific content, and gives them a message tailored to those who have found your through your social presence.

When dealing with social media, you want to target your content as much as possible. A landing page is a great way of doing that.

How To Make A Twitter Landing Page

Making a landing page for a Twitter profile is similar to make a landing page for anything else. Your goal is to customize it to best reach your demographic, and to put across a message. Along with that message could come further links or calls to action that can benefit you and your site.

A couple of ways to structure your landing page are:

Welcoming people to your page. People are not going to immediately know that they are on a landing page. So be sure to let them know in a friendly, welcoming manner. Make it clear that you are happy that they have decided to visit.
Introduce yourself. Part of your welcome should be an explanation of who you are and what you are about. Do you provide a certain kind of content? A service? Break it down for visitors, and be sure to include both your brand name and Twitter handle. Along with this information should be contact information, such as email, address, or phone number. A link to your website it also a good idea.
Have a Twitter feed. Some people will just list some recent tweets, but I have found this to be unhelpful. A much better way to show why you use Twitter is to provide an actual feed. Many plugins will help you do this, putting a feed somewhere on the page for people to view, and even respond to.
Promote other social media accounts. This doesn’t just have to be for Twitter. Though you shouldn’t spend too much time focusing on any of them, you can at least provide buttons that link to each one, and invite others to follow them. Some good network buttons to provide are Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. If you want to get creative, you can link to others like Instgram and Reddit profile pages.
Use a good layout. Nothing is worst than a cheap or lazy looking landing page. Put as much effort into the overall creation of the page as you would any full website. Use a good theme and make it clean. Make sure it is easy to navigate, and not too cluttered. Single page designs that don’t require scrolling are often better than larger ones with too much info. Remember, the goal is to get people to your Twitter page.

Examples

Emma Kane’s “You came from Twitter” page

John Paul’s Welcome Twitter Followers page

Dell “Join the Conversation” page

Follow Sciencebase on Twitter page

Michael Alex Wasylik’s Twitter page

Thanks for clicking over from Twitter

Do you have any ideas for a cool Twitter landing page? Have one yourself? Let us know in the comments, we would love to hear from you!

Image Credits: welcome sign, twitter

The post Why and How to Create a Cool Twitter Welcome Page appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Facebook Is Replacing Google & The Dramatic Shift This Heralds For Marketers (Part 1)

Posted: 23 Dec 2013 06:08 AM PST

Facebook is eating Google’s lunch, which has far-reaching implications for the tactics marketers use, and more broadly has implications for marketing strategy and the relationship between marketing and product teams. Let’s look at this more closely.

When Google ranks sites, it can’t really rank them based on product quality since it has no reliable signals for product quality. Put differently…

Google is an information retrieval service… not a recommendation service.
Facebook is a social network, part of whose function is for people to get recommendations from their friends for products and services.

I don’t just mean showing that friends “like” products – Google is actively copying that, recently introducing +1 buttons to its Adsense ad units.

I mean plain old status updates like the one my friend posted asking for wedding photographer recommendations. Or the friend who asked for a wedding band, or a makeup artist for the bride. Or people wondering about things to do in the city, what new music to explore etc.

These genuine 1-to-1 recommendations are quite literally word of mouth, and Facebook is the platform people are using for that. Facebook is a source for finding quality products and services… and dates, as friends introduce each other as well as recommending certain dating sites over others.

Similarly, LinkedIn is being used for B2B recommendations, whether that’s recommendations on staff to hire inhouse or contractors to do business with. These are mostly connections who know each other leaving genuine recommendations. (There are, though, lots of people ‘connected’ on LinkedIn who are strangers to each other so that their recommendations to one another will carry less weight. Google+ is duplicating this in some industries.

Obviously, recommendations matter more in some industries than in others. And it’s true that personal recommendations can be substituted by people searching for impersonal recommendations aka product reviews, and that ecommerce merchants are increasingly integrating reviews onto their sites. This adds up to meaning that Google’s utility will endure in many categories. Yet even in ecommerce, Pinterest’s public and graphic wishlists / I love my {product X} boards are rapidly turning into recommendation engines that may trump Google as a starting point in a search.

The Practical Impact For Marketers

The above has at least two effects on tactics, and a bigger one on strategy. I’ll save the best for last and perhaps you’ll be able to guess what about strategy needs to change, based on the new tactics you’ll need.

Tactical Impact

1. In those fields where recommendations matter, internet marketers should be thinking about how they can get recommendations to happen on Facebook or LinkedIn.

The B2B field is easier, because affiliate marketing there is more natural than in B2C. In B2B, a good first step therefore is to hire an affiliate program manager (you can try these two companies) and then create an affiliate program.

With B2C, potential affiliates don’t want to get a commission for recommending particular products/services to friends, because using affiliate links with friends may get you called out and your friends will think you used them. The B2B world comes with some expectations of marketing/advertising that are different in this regard.
So in B2C, you should ask for – but not incentivize – recommendations. Another way to make them likelier is to offer a deal for the people seeking the recommendation. E.g. Get people to refer their friends to you by saying “Tell John that you’re my friend and he’ll give you 20 off your first driving lesson.”

2. Another impact is in metrics, monitoring and analytics: you will need to measure how often you’re being recommended. How do you do that?

One simple step is to do satisfaction surveys for all your clients once the service is done. People recommend (i) good services, where the staff are (ii) friendly and (iii) kind.

What good are these customer satisfaction surveys?

You can combine them with your web analytics data on Facebook traffic and conversions, as well as with data from offline responses to the question “How did you hear about us?” The result is that you’ll see an estimate on the correlation between satisfaction numbers and recommendation numbers.

You’ll be able to project how many customers served, at what satisfaction rate, gets you the most recommendations.

And most importantly, you’ll be able to optimize your satisfaction rate and generate more recommendations.

Strategic Impact

3. Product Team = Marketing Team = Product Team = Marketing Team…
To get recommendations, you need a good product/service in the first place. This is driven by marketplace demand and problems, the discovery of which is essentially the first step of the marketing cycle, regardless of what channel you’re using. I’ve only been working with IMN for a few months, and already I’ve recommended specific product developments as part of the client’s SEO strategy many, many times.

You can rank a second rate business #1, but a competitor delighting customers will leapfrog you via Facebook. Your product and marketing teams need to integrate into one, if you want to get found in tomorrow’s recommendation engines.

Next time, we’ll discuss other sites and tools that are replacing Google, and what they mean for marketers. Amongst these “new” contestants: Amazon, eBay, Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, forums with/ classifieds, Apple, Kobo, Wikipedia, Meetup, and more.

The post Facebook Is Replacing Google & The Dramatic Shift This Heralds For Marketers (Part 1) appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.