In the 3rd part of an ongoing series and several hours of research, here are more Lead Form Landing Pages for your design and development inspiration. Online Education is one of the bigger markets for online lead generation, so naturally online education sites have some great examples of how to create great lead form oriented landing pages.

Below are 8 designs that will give you a ton of design and development inspiration for your next Lead Form landing page project. Enjoy…

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Have you ever come across a content page somewhere on the web and thought to yourself “man, this page has everything I need to know for what I’m looking for?” It’s rare I know. But every once in awhile you come across a page like this and naturally you bookmark it, tweet it, stumble it, and share it with your friends on Facebook. The page is so good you find yourself coming back to it more and more to get high quality information. I’m not talking about an entire site. I’m talking about 1 single page that is so good it you are forced to respect it.

How many pages like this have you created? Well there is a reason not every web page you come across is this level of quality, and that’s because they are difficult and time consuming to put together. But those that do are those that get all of the traffic. I call it the “Super-Duper” page for lack of a better name and I would like to show some examples and best practices of what makes these types of pages so special.

1. Apple iPad Tech Specs Page

http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Notice the nice large images of the product. Also notice the “Buy Now” button neatly located at the top right location of the page.

You gotta love how the Apple Web Designers layed out all of these technical specs. A gray line that separates each section with perfect CSS for the UL tags. More images of the iPad product along with some links to other pages of additional information.

More of everything mentioned above. This section of the page also has this cool little paper like image that contains more bulleted information on it called the “Environmental Status Report”.

2. Firefox Features Page

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/features/

Firefox does the same thing as Apple only with way more meat (content). If you look at the source code you will see that Firefox is also running a multi-variate test on the different images to see what helps the page convert better.

Notice the small infographic called “Firefox Performance Test”. This is a genius idea. Try doing what they do and integrate your own infographic within one of your content pages.

A very slick separation of content by creating a separate background color for the “Newest Web Technologies” section. This page really helps the visitor quickly browse the page and take in all the most important information.

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5 landing pages specifically designed for generating leads. In part 2 of this ongoing series of blog posts, I show you 5 specific landing pages that get the job done and look good doing it at the same time. All 5 span different industries. Let’s start with the University of San Francisco.

University of San Francisco

There isn’t really anything too special with the top half of this landing page. But below the fold is a masterpiece. A nice video on the left to show some more visual content. Some good looking icons that help break up the various sections of the content. Some large titles to break out the most important items. Add that to a nice light and clean layout and design and this page is a lead capturing monster!

Alarm Zone

I’m a big fan of tables that contain data. This page does a great job of comparing its services to competitors. This table really helps paint the picture for the visitor of what you get with Alarm Zone and why you should choose them over someone else. Although the page is a little busy, it’s easy for the customer to see that they get free keychain remotes and that it’s easy to get a free quote.

Silverpop

This is a very simple landing page. The tactic I wanted to point here is the concept of using content to help increase lead conversion. Often times people get obsessed with the use of images and flash, but sometimes simple paragraphs of content can perform just as well. Especially when written and broken up correctly.

iContact

A few things to point out here. 1st take a look at the content right above the lead form. “Join 50,960 Customers and 463,970 Users!” This is a great tactic for helping your visitors understand the legitimacy of your product and/or service. If it has legitimacy of course. 2nd thing to point out is the use of a Headline and Sub-headline. This page is a great example of how you can properly use 1 large headline followed up with a smaller headline to help communicate a specific message.

Rackspace

This is one of my favorite landing pages. Every time I look at it I feel jealous that it’s not me who created it. What needs to be said about this page? Nothing really because it speaks for itself. Take a look at it and let me know your thoughts of it. Who wouldn’t hit that green “Begin Free Trial” button? I know I would!

Stay tuned for Part III of this ongoing series. In case you missed Part I you can click here to read the article. Any landing pages for lead generation that you like? Any thoughts?

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What do I mean here? Let me explain. Let’s say you run a website or work for a company that has a website that spends money consistently each month on driving traffic to that website. Let’s step it up one more notch and say that you spend in the thousands of dollars range per month in Online Advertising to push traffic and potential business to this website. These methods could include but are not limited to the following:

• Paid Search – PPC
• Banner/Display Ads
• Social Media Advertising like Facebook & Twitter
• Email Marketing campaigns
• Contexual Advertising like Google Adsense or Kontera
• Partnerships with other websites

In most instances your are spending this money on traffic that will no longer exist once you stop paying for it. We all know that Organic Traffic through Google is something that is much more long term, not to mention free. So naturally we segment a portion of our efforts towards SEO to help improve Organic SERP’s. But what if you could gain SEO strength from at least a portion of the $ you are spending in online advertising?

Another more specific way of explaining this question is, what if you could somehow improve your SEO from the hundreds or even thousands of dollars you are spending in Paid Search? Or what about in Email Marketing? Get my question?

Many medium size players on the web naturally will spend thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per month just in advertising costs on the Internet. This is of course justified by the amount of volume they are generating in return by dumping all this money into the web. But what if you could gain SEO value from your advertising costs while still getting the immediate volume you are after? A best of both worlds type of scenario.

With a little bit of creativity and some elbow grease, not to mention some serious brainstorming (which my tiny little brain can only handle once a week without having an emotional breakdown) I came up with a few cool ideas on how to accomplish this.

Tactic #1 – The “Thank You” Resource Page

The idea of the thank you page is to redirect your visitor to a certain page once they have completed whatever it is you wanted them to do, and that certain page contains valuable content such as a download guide or something like it. Along with this great content you have put together would be some social bookmarking icons so they can bookmark this page and share it with their friends.

Think about it. Let’s say your website’s job is to gather leads. Once a visitor has finished filling out a lead form you have already built up some level of trust with that visitor. Take the time to give them some free stuff that can help them, and in return give them the opportunity to “socialize” that page by sharing it with their friends. This will increase the SEO of that particular page, which if the architecture of your site is sound, will increase the SEO of your overall site.

Tactic #2 – The Tracking Pixel or 301/302 Redirect

One of the confilicts that exists between Internet Marketing and SEO is the issue of the Tracking Code URL. What happens is that in order ot track a specific campaign, internet marketers will work with their web analytics platform and append characters at the end of a page’s URL. For example my homepage with all the SEO value is chasesagum.com. But if I wanted to track the progress of say my Email Marketing campaign, I would append something like this… chasesagum.com/index.php?gty&Email-1_Aweber or something like that.

The problem with this URL is that the whole world see’s it. And I lose all sorts of SEO possibilities to that specific page because if people choose to link to that page, they will naturally link to the URL with all the extra characters at the end. To solve this you have 2 choices. First is the Tracking Pixel that tracks allows your Web Analytics platform to track a specific campaigns data without appending characters to the end of the URL.

The other option is to do a 301 redirect which would essentially redirect your funky looking URL to it’s correct destination, so that the user only actually sees the clean URL. In most cases this one should work but you will definitely want to make sure your Web Analytics platform can handle this.

Tactic #3 – The Hard Link Request

This one may sound simple, but many are letting this SEO benefit slip through the cracks. This involves specific partnerships that your Marketing team is creating. What typically happens here is that a Marketing team will build a relationship with a 3rd party site in order to drive traffic. It could be a banner ad, text link etc. Typically this 3rd party site will run your link through an Ad server on their end in order to track things like impressions, clicks and so forth.

When possible, get a natural HTML hard link from a partnership. Rather than having it redirect through an Ad server, see if it can be a hard link directly to you. The amount of link juice that could be passed on to you from this one link could outweigh hundreds, even thousands of your other links.

Tactic #4 – PPC Display URL Redirect

PPC managers often times use fake URL’s as their Display URL’s. They do this in order to create a better display ad that will improve quality score and increase click-through rates. If the website you are dealing with is big enough, you will be surpised to see how many of those URL’s are being linked to throughout the web, which are of course being reported as Page Not Founds in your Google Webmaster tools.

Solution? Do a 301 Redirect in your .htaccess file for all of these URL’s to the specific destination that you desire. That way any link juice that has been generated will be passed on to the page that you redirect to. Nothing like some nice Free SEO effort from your PPC team.

Tactic #5 – Bypassing Ad Networks

Let’s take a big example here. Google Adsense. By advertising in the Google Content Network, your Paid Search team should be aware of all the sites in the Google Content Network that have your website’s ads in them. What if you could bypass Google on a few of these sites and pay those webmasters directly for your ad? Even better, what if you that ad was an HTML hard link rather than passing through Google’s ad servers?

Doing this with too many sites could potentially cause problems, as i’m sure Google would catch on to what you are doing. I recommend finding 10 or 20 sites with very good page rank in your niche, and building relationships with those webmasters for text links off their homepage.

There you go! If your company spends thousands of dollars per month in Online Advertising, imagine how much you can get out of that for SEO? By thinking this way, you help your company solve a more long term goal which is to have more free, organic traffic be larger piece of the monthly traffic pie.

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Want to know the best SEO advice I have? Here it is. And you’ve heard it before. It’s all about High Quality Content! Sure there are a few other SEO fundamentals that need to be in place. But once the foundation of your site has been laid, your ability to focus your time and resources on creating high quality content that is of some benefit to visitors is the best SEO tip any SEO professional can give you. Let me explain to you my experience with this.

This Blog Has Been A Major SEO Test

When I started writing in this blog 3 years ago, one of the goals I had was to test certain aspects of search engine optimization with the content I was writing. I had been hearing from other SEO pro’s about how quality content can improve your SERP’s dramatically and wanted to test their methods myself. I found the process of link trading and writing “SEO Copy” very trivial. I felt as though it was one big waste of time and that I was trying to game a system (Google) that was much smarter than myself.

The thought was this… instead of putting in extra time into SEO activities such as Link Building or keyword optimization, what if I just spent that time putting together better content instead? With this I had essentially 3 major questions I needed answered.

1. Could great content develop link value on it’s own without me having to do link baiting of any kind?
2. Could these content pages I was putting together rank high enough for competitive terms?
3. Could I get a substantial amounts of traffic from Google Search with this content?

I must admit that this blog has answered all 3 of those questions yes! Other than establishing a good SEO foundation by setting up WordPress and a few SEO related plugins (all of which took me just a few minutes by the way) I have spent 100% of my efforts on my content and not on any SEO related activity in the 3 years I have blogging. The result? For the past 2 ½ years consistently my traffic has grown every single month. Meanwhile, I’ve had a consistent 80-85% of all my traffic each month over those 2+ years that come strictly from organic searches from Google.

This traffic is sustainable. Not once over the past 2+ years have my SERP’s been subjected to a “Algorithm Change” of any kind. My rankings are consistent, my traffic consistently increases the more and more content I write, and it’s fair to say that based off my SERP’s and the rate at which Google crawls this site, that I am making Google happy. A goal of every SEO!

Put 100% Of Your SEO Effort in Your Content!

Once you have laid your SEO foundation, spend your SEO time working on your content. I cannot possibly over stress this point. You will not be disappointed. Ask yourself this question… “If I were a visitor to this page, would I find this helpful in any way?” You could also ask yourself another question… “If I were a visitor to this page, would I bookmark this page and share it with my friends?” Two very simple yet very powerful questions to ask before putting your next piece of content together.

Some content will stick while others will not. But the important thing is that you are spending your time putting information together whether it be text, images, video, or audio that is in some way helpful to someone out there. And that’s what this Internet thing is all about.

By doing this you will let things like Like Building take care of itself. And oh yeah one last very important thing. You will be on Google’s good side, a very good place to be!

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Over the past 2 months, my current employer has allowed me the opportunity to work with both Google Analytics and Omniture extensively. One of the tasks they (my employer) have entrusted me with is Site Conversion and Optimization. Having had experience with this before on much smaller sites, this is my first experience involving a major high-end content site with over 1 million indexed content pages and hundreds of thousands of unique visitors per month.

As you can imagine the task ahead of me is huge to say the least. I’m dealing with huge numbers across the board, where one minor change can be the difference of tens of thousands of dollars. Thankfully, I work with an IT and Marketing staff that are second to none that were smart enough to involve Google Analytics in their analytics strategies along with their Omniture platform. Over the past month I have been building and creating our Site Conversion process. It’s been fun and challenging at the same time. Along the way I have extensively used both Omniture and Google Analytics and have some things to say!

Let me explain to you the 6 big reasons I prefer Google Analytics over Omniture.

1. Simple & Clean UI

The user interface is incredible with Google Analytics. Whoever created it is a flat out user interface (UI) genius. When you get involved in Web Analytics you will quickly learn that you need fast access to the most vital information so you can make quick solid decisions. Omniture suffers in this category, and Google Analytics dominates. Your analytics initial page will quickly show you the vitals. Visits, Page views, Pages/Visits, Bounce Rate etc. Perfect for those us who don’t have time to stare and sift through data all day long.

2. The Absolute Unique Visits Metric

I love this metric. Avinash in his book Web Analytics 2.0 explains in better detail the technical importance of this metric and how Google actually generates it. But this metric from Google Analytics gives you the best true idea of how many people actually visited your site this week, or this month. In most conversion rates that I track, I want to know data based off each unique visitor, not each time a visitor visits the site. Google Analytics provides the best metrics for this.

3. Custom Reports Feature

Nearly every major web analytics application allows you to create your own custom reports. But I just have not found any Custom Report Wizards to be as easy and intuitive as Google’s. From the custom reports page, I can create and save out my own custom reports and group these reports by tabs which in and of itself could have many purposes. I was amazed at how complicated it was to build custom reports with the metrics I needed inside Omniture. I found Google Analytics way easier.

4. The Site Overlay Tool

Omniture has what they call their ClickMap tool, but to get it going you have to install a Firefox Add-on into your browser which then displays a sidebar in your browser that communicates data as you are viewing your homepage. It works just fine, but going with Google Analytics is much more simple. The Site Overlay tool inside Google Analytics simply opens up your desired page in a new browser window inside a type of iFrame, and displays the click mapping to you. No need for installing a Firefox add-on.

5. Synchronized with Google Adwords

Everything works so well within the boundaries of the Google family. By simply having my accounts all under the same profile, all of my data from Google Adwords syncs with my Google Analytics data. What this allows me to do is now see completely accurate data from SEM type metrics involving Google. Because the company I am with are so heavily involved in Paid Search, this allows me to have clean organized data that I can compare against all types of scenarios.

6. Quick Exporting of Data

You are probably just like me! Every second you lose during a work day on the web is like hours wasted in productivity. With my super fast Internet connection at my office, it takes me 10-15 seconds on average to export a CSV file of data from Omniture. And that’s for smaller files. The bigger ones take minutes, and sometimes are too big to be exported at all. With that same amount of data being exported from Google Analytics, my CSV exporting is instantaneous thus giving me better streamlined access to all of my analytics data.

I love Google Analytics! I have a greater appreciation for it now then I did before. It’s so flexible! It’s so robust! In my situation, I am using both Omniture and Google Analytics because of some of the complexities behind what we do on the Marketing side of things. But I find myself relying more and more on Google Analytics the farther along I get in the process of optimization.

Can Omniture provide you with more types of data and metrics for web analytics? Sure! But it’s the simplicity of the metrics and the data that Google Analytics provides that makes it so special. In Site Optimization, you can get over cluttered with web analytics data to the point of “analysis paralysis.” You can tell that whoever worked on developing Google Analytics, spent some serious time understanding what Data is actually important and what is not! Thanks Google!

PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…

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If you are an Internet Marketer of any kind, chances are you are purchasing new domain names from time to time. In this article I am going to quickly show you the process I use to find new domain names to purchase. While there are many benefits to purchasing expiring or auctioned domains, I have always preferred purchasing brand new domains because of their price. The price is always consistent. You know you are going to spend $10 or so through GoDaddy or your preferred registrar.

So here is the process I use to locate the best possible domain names that are available in any industry/niche that I am working with. I hope this process helps you as it has me.

Step 1 – Using the Google Keyword External Tool, do a query using a competitive term in your niche. Hopefully you have already done quite a bit of keyword research in your niche before getting this far.

Step 2 – Using the “Exact Match” metric, we now have a list of key phrases related to your keyword or phrase, with exact keyword data from Google. Remember, you want to make sure to change the drop-down under Match Type from “Broad” to “Exact”. This will give you real traffic estimates to work with.

Step 3 – Take these key phrases one by one and run a search on Instantdomainsearch.com to check it’s availability with .com, .net, and .org in that order. I prefer using Instantdomainsearch.com because it uses some Ajax to display the availability in real-time as I am typing. Pretty cool free tool I must say!

Step 4 – Continue this process with all the competitive key phrases in order to get a full list from Google. After doing this you now have an optimized list of brand new domains to purchase that are directly related to key phrases in Google that show traffic data. Make sense?

Step 5 – These domains now are entered into a Domain Strategy Calculator to prioritize the order in which you would purchase these domains and to calculate the profitability of each of these domains. What is your Domain Strategy Calculator? It’s basically a way for you to rank domains to know which ones to purchase first. More on this in  next post.

The Benefits of this New Domain Strategy

• Cost-Efficient. Because these are brand new, never been registered domains, you are able to purchase them directly from the Domain Registrar (eg. GoDaddy). This means that each domain is between $8 and $10. Sometimes even cheaper depending on your relationship with a Registrar.
• Casting a wider net. Because of the price of these domains, you are able to cast a much wider net of domains across the web. Covering various different market types and keyword strategies.
• Long-tail Domains. This strategy promotes the finding of domains that attract long-tail traffic more than any other domain strategy. This is due to the fact that these domains contain longer key phrases, typically 3-4 words as opposed to 1-2.

The Downfalls of the New Domain Strategy

• Research is more time consuming. Because of the competition in the Domain Purchasing industry, it can be difficult to find domains that match with key phrase traffic in Google. It’s a sifting process through thousands of different key phrases and concepts.
• No proven traffic. As opposed to older domains that have a proven track record with analytics data, new domains have no data and no shown traffic. They also have no SEO value existing on the web. Not to mention the fact that Google has tended to give higher value to older domains.

Conclusion

Rather than purchasing 1 effective domain in your niche for say $1,000, you can instead purchase by a hundred domains for the same price that all individually can have the same effect in your online marketing efforts. This is the strategy that I have chosen and it has worked well for me. I hope it works well for you as well.

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There are 4 open source projects that we need on the web. If these existed I could die a happy man. Hopefully we see some development in these area. Here they are:

1. Lightweight & Highly Extensible Shopping Cart

We all know of the big open source ecommerce platforms in the market. Magento, Zen Cart just to name a couple. But i’m talking about something truly lightweight and easy to use for the common user. Basically the “Wordpress” of the ecommerce world. This project would be licensed under the GPL so that it’s a true open source project unlike the others.

Because of this GPL license more people would contribute plugins to the core, giving the cart as much functionality as a Magento or Zen Cart.

2. Lightweight & Highly Extensible CRM

SugarCRM and vTiger CRM are the two big PHP web based CRM’s on the web today. They are great tools. But frankly they are way too big and heavy. Just like with the lightweight shopping cart that I talked about. This CRM would be the “Wordpress” of the CRM world. Easy to use. And licensed under the GPL to encourage a true open source community.

The core of the app would be very basic. And plugins could be easily built that could extend the functionality. Also the CRM would be very “Internet Marketer friendly.” An example would be to have built in a html form generator for easily placing forms on blogs and content pages that capture leads directly into the CRM.

3. Affiliate & MLM Application

Either one of these exist at all in the open source world currently. And I see these now as two applications that now are one because of the rise of Internet Marketing. An Affiliate App allows a marketing team to setup “Affiliates” and generate ad code that, through a cookie in the browser tracks sales/conversions from each specific affiliate. Affiliate applications are quite common, it’s just that none of them are open source.

An MLM application is a way to manage a “Downline”. These “Downlines” are for Multi-level marketers to be able to manage profits that are shared. I see this coinciding with Affiliate Marketing on the web, and by combining the two could make a powerful application!

4. Social Media Interaction Platform

These would be either a web app or a desktop app. The basic functionality of this app would be to import all your content from all your social media sites. And then through API’s to those 3rd party services, allow you to post updates, leave comments etc. to all social media sites through one application.

By making the app completely GPL you would have so many developers integrating plugins from various social media sites. This one would be GENIUS!!!

If any of you are interested in starting one of these projects leave a comment and let’s talk! If I don’t see some action in these 4 areas soon, i’m thinking of taking some initative. If for some reason I’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere and one of these open source projects already does exist, please let us all know!

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Why Do This?

It’s simple. Doing this will allow you to have a presence on both FriendFeed and Twitter simultaneously with the same amount of effort. These two services communicate with each other in “Real-Time” which means that as soon as you post something to your FriendFeed profile, it’s immediately posted on your Twitter profile.

Considering all of the options FriendFeed gives you of importing other social media, you can see how beneficial this is. FriendFeed essentially acts as a gateway and ties all of your social media activities into Twitter!

Let’s Get To It!

With just a few simple steps you can optimize your social media efforts with FriendFeed and Twitter. In this tutorial I will show you how to forward all posts from your FriendFeed account to your Twitter account. Before following these steps make sure you have an account with FriendFeed and with Twitter.

Step 1. Login to your FriendFeed account

Step 2. Go to the Tools & Widgets page. The link for this is located in the footer of FriendFeed

Step 3. Locate and click on the ‘Post to Twitter’ option

Step 4. Configure settings exactly how I have mine in the screenshot below.

Here is essentially what we are doing here. We are saying that for every post from your FriendFeed profile, the same post will be posted on your Twitter account. We are also saying that we want to post all FriendFeed entires except those from Twitter. The reason for this is because you would have this loop where you would be repeating posts back and forth between the two social media sites. And we don’t want that.

You also want to make sure you “Sign-in” to your Twitter account by selecting that first link on the page. This will effectively give FriendFeed the proper access to your Twitter account so it can post “tweets” automatically for you.

That’s it. Now Friendfeed is communicating with Twitter and you are now able to communicate with your followers on both of these major social media sites.

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I have created my very first Microblog! Over at csagum.com I am using WordPress as my own self hosted Microblog where i’m teaching people how to make money online. It’s all part of a new blogging business venture of mine. But it’s also honestly kind of an experiment as well. Microblogging has become huge in the Social Media world (aka Twitter) where people can microblog and network with thousands of people.

This is a Microblog a little more leaned toward the blogging side. Where connecting with other people is still important, but the content that I deliver still plays a very important role. The microblog is running just a regular installation of WordPress and is using the P2 WordPress Theme. The video below explains how the theme works.

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