Creative Traffic Builders

Since starting my Email Marketing Business Series, I’ve received a lot of emails asking about optimizing the Landing Page I created and about their own landing pages:

• Why should I optimize my landing page?
• Your page looks so basic! How will graphics affect my landing pages?
• How do I get started with Google Web Optimizer?

In the rat race of life, a percent can be the difference between 100 Sales and 200 Sales, so by optimizing your website to acheive the highest rate possible of visitors to customers is one of the most important, daily activities you should be doing for your Email Marketing Business. Again, optimizing your website to acheive the highest rate possible of visitors to customers is one of the most important, daily activities you should be doing for your Email Marketing Business. It’s THAT important!

With Google’s Web Optimizer, you can pretty much test anything you want on your page from new taglines to new graphics to new promotions. Basically, if you have any idea, Google’s Web Optimizer gives you and opportunity to test your ideas in the real and live market without sacrificing much of your business.

So, to give you a better understanding of what I’m talking about, let’s optimize the landing page I created and work on the tagline today:

Now that you know where the tagline is, we will go to our Adwords account and Click on the “Web Optimizer” link near the top of the page. Now, click on “Create an Experiment” and we will come to this first page. Make sure you have created a Landing Page and a Confirmation Page as instructed by AWeber or Intellicontact:

Now Google knows which page you would like to optimize, it is going to ask you to place code into your landing page so that i can change and track the performance of each tagline you wish to test.

The most important piece of code in this process is making sure you place the code around the correct part of the page you wish to test much like how I have done here:

All your pages should be coded correctly, so the next step is to tell Google what taglines you would like to test out. In my previous post, I mentioned 3 taglines I was considering to use:

• Learn How to Win your Fantasy Basketball League Every Year
• Make Money Playing Fantasy Basketball
• Learn the Secrets of Fantasy Basketball Champions

With Google Optimizer, I can now test and see which tagline truly performs the best instead of relying on my gut instinct:

Once you have set your variations, you now have to determine how much of the traffic you receive will you use to test the taglines you’ve created. Personally, I just let it run at 100%, but it really depends on what the traffic is worth to you, so it will be different on a case by case basis.

Just click “Launch Now” and then let it run.

I usually like to check back once a day or until I receive about 1000 visitors for each tagline which is tracked on the far right column (Conversions/Visitors). Once I’ve finished testing, I can choose which tagline I would like to keep within the Google Web Optimizer Process. Of course, after I find out which tagline performed the best, I will take a look at that tagline and try to replicate it’s “theme” to create more taglines for me to test against. I’m telling you, it never ends, especially if you have fresh new audiences coming through your marketing efforts!

Hopefully, this has given you a better idea of how you can best optimize your website. I would love to hear back from you on what you have tested and how each one of your ideas worked.

In my previous posts, I talked about starting and setting up a email marketing business, which mainly involved the landing page of your website. In this post, we’ll get to the heart of the business and begin to develop your newsletter campaign by properly your outlining newsletter campaign.

To build a high quality newsletter campaign, you must first write up an outline of the information your newsletter is going to provide. For my fantasy basketball newsletter that I’ve been using as an example for this series, here is the very short outline I have made up:

I. Learn properly prepare for your League Draft

a. How to take draft correctly according to league rules
b. How to factor in injured players and rookies
c. How to draft according to where your draft spot is

II. Learn the fine art of combing the waiver wire during the preseason

a. How to factor in preseason game stats
b. How to study trends of new coaches on new teams

III. How to get ready for the long grind of the season

a. Use these tools to quickly gain an advantage on the waiver wire
b. Rotiesserie vs. Head to Head
c. Timing the right weeks to load up on games

IV. The Spring to the championship

a. Using the Waiver Wire to Load up on Games
b. Timing your transactions to cripple your competition
c. How to use the playoffs to take advantage of your keeper league.

As you can see, this outline provides 12 solid articles for my readers to go through and use for their fantasy basketball season. If I plan on sending the reader one newsletter a week, that’s a 3 month window to sell them on some of my affiliate items. 12 is the key number here as the optimum time to sell to a subscriber is within these 12 newsletters. Don’t get impatient though and cram 12 newsletters into two weeks. You don’t want to turn your readers off by bombarding them. I recommend one week intervals, but of course each topic is different, so testing is also very important.

Key things to remember when writing your outline:

• Remember to follow a natural path of progress, much like how I followed the natural path of the basketball season.
• Another key thing is to know who you are writing to. For example, I know that the readers of my fantasy basketball newsletter already have a good idea of how to join a league and setup their team. What they’re looking for is the edge to beat their competition, so I’m not going to waste their time by writing articles on basic how to’s of fantasy basketball.
• Think about what kind of article topic you should plan after one another to maintain the readers interest to keep them around til next week.

The main goal of any newsletter is to maintain the interest of your subscriber to keep your unsubscribe rate down. By properly outlining your newsletter prior to launching your business, you will build a solid foundation for your readers and for yourself to monetize your traffic as best as possible.