Get Rid of the Google Landing Page Blues: 5 Tips for Increasing Online Sales with a ‘Portal Site’
Whether you are a massage therapist, dog trainer, executive sales coach, event planner, or someone else, if you are selling information products online, or are thinking about doing it, you might already know how hard it is to get your visitor’s undivided attention.
Your website visitor, who must be convinced to buy a product they might have never heard of, is a little different from the customer who goes to Amazon.com to buy a copy of Seth Godin’s latest bestseller-something she already knows she wants. What you must do, then, is persuade her to buy your product.
On a large, multi-page website, your reader has many choices: click here, go there, do this. If you have several products (e-books, DVD sets, audio recordings, etc.), your visitor can easily become overwhelmed.
To attract visitors and convince them to buy, consider creating landing pages. Also called micro-sites, landing pages are really just sales letters posted on the Web that allow you to target the very people who are most interested in what you are selling, the people most likely to buy.
Great idea. Except for the fact that Google recognizes landing pages as sales letters and does not rate sites with sales copy very highly. So you don’t get nearly as much organic search traffic. Many online marketers get around this by creating a portal site, one central place with valuable free content for the search engines and links to their individual landing pages.
5 Tips for Increasing Online Sales with a ‘Portal Site’
- Create a simple URL/address for your portal site. It helps, especially as you begin to sell more products, to have a simple, central site. When someone asks what products you offer, it’s easy because you just have to remember one site address and direct them to that.
- Create links from your portal site to each of the landing pages for your individual products. You will want to send people to separate landing pages for each product, each with its unique domain name. Choose names that are easy to remember.
- Create sections of your site where visitors can download free content. This is key because it will increase your organic search rankings and drive traffic to your site. Because Google loves content, especially fresh content, include articles, special reports, and other information that is timely and helpful and will bring you lots of visitors. Valuable content will also establish you as an expert and build the reader trust that leads to sales.
- Include a sign-up for your free, opt-in e-newsletter and links to your blog and other social media profiles. It’s a great way to build your list organically, find quality prospects, and get your content out to more people.
- From your portal site, send visitors to separate landing pages with their own unique domain names. Make each page simple, with no menu bar, no confusing options. You want your reader to focus on the reasons she needs to buy your product right now. So just include your sales letter and link to a form where your visitors can buy your product.
A well-thought out portal site linking to landing pages with amazing copy that sells your unique products will go a long way in pumping up your online sales.
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WordPress 2.8 is Officially Released
As of Wed., June 10th, WordPress 2.8 is out. There are some nice new features, nothing major, but worth checking out.
If you are on WordPress.com, you are updated automatically.
If you have your WordPress on your own server, when updating, remember to:
- Backup your database and files before updating.
- If you are using a free theme or a paid premium theme, find out if they have made it WordPress 2.8-compatible. If they haven’t, try the update, but again remember to backup. If your theme has issues, upload the old files again and wait till your theme is updated before going to 2.8 again.
- If you do need to update your theme, and you had someone customize it, talk to them before installing the updated version of your theme.
- After updating, if your blog or website starts having problems, deactivate any plugins one by one to see if that is what’s causing the issue.
- Check your widgets and make sure they are working with the new version.
And finally, don’t feel you have to update right away. Make sure you eventually do it, but you don’t need to be the first one on your block!
If anyone else has suggestions or insights, please feel free to comment.
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Great Form Plugin for Wordpress
I have dabbled and tested several different form plugins for WordPress and found cformsII to be one of the best. Especially if you are looking for something versatile and that you can customize.
What cforms II does is allow you to create all sorts of contact forms, with how many fields you desire, and with several types of input boxes. Which means you can use single text inputs, check boxes, select boxes, radio buttons, password boxes, file uploads and a heck of a lot more.
Additionally, you can also customize the messages, the fields that are required, the email addresses to be used, and even create different contact forms to be used in different locations of the site.
If you want a form plugin that will kick butt, and allow you to create multiple, user-friendly forms on your blog or website, cforms is your choice.
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