Google again has a great video to celebrate Valentines Day when you go to their search engine.

Here are some interesting facts about how we search on Valentines Day provided by Hitwise:

• 6.7 million UK Internet visits were made in the category ‘Flowers and Gifts’ in the week ending 11 February 2011, amounting to 830,000 hours
• Although Valentine’s Day is an important period for online florists, in 2011 there were 4% more visits to florists online on Mother’s Day than there were on Valentine’s Day
• Valentine’s cards are the most searched on item with five times as many searches as flowers every year
• While Valentine’s Day is all about love, February was one of the worst months of the year for visits to dating websites in 2011
• 3% of all Valentine’s searches are for poems
• There were 65 unique search variations in the four weeks ending 11 February 2012 relating specifically to Valentine’s chocolates and sweets.

So how could you share a little love with your Valentine online? Here are five ideas for you:

Lidl Ireland have a Facebook competition where not only can you personalise a video message for your Valentine, you also get the chance to be entered into a competition.

Innocent Smoothies have a Valentines app where you can personalise the label to print our and then pass your Valentine a healthy drink. A great idea if you could get the app to work (which unfortunately I couldn’t).

Ted Williams, the voice of KRAFT Mac and Cheese will record  your Tweet to your Valentine – you can Tweet #voiceoflove and for each one KRAFT will donate 100 boxes of mac and cheese (up to 100,000 boxes)to Feeding America a hunger relief charity. You can see the video messages on their YouTube channel.

Find out who you ‘love’ on Twitter to send them a personal Valentines day message using the Twit Amore app – I should also mention that this was developed by Irish web developer Lee Monroe. Using the Twitter API, it looks up who you follow, reviews your timeline and your favourite tweets to determine who your Twitter Valentine is.

And of you can not stretch to buying a dozen red roses, why not give your Valentine what everyone should own – a ‘dot me’ domain to help them represent their personal brand online –  the every inventive Blacknight Irish hosting and web domain provider has the solution for you at their newly launched site BeMyValentine.me promoting the .me and .eu domains.

What other examples have you seen of digital apps to help you celebrate Valentines Day?

Valentines Day digital data and digital apps to share the love is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

As we approach the end of the first month of the year how are you progressing with your objectives and goals? The chances are you started off the year with great expectations of all the things you wanted to achieve in the first quarter of the year, but one or two things have not gone to plan.

Many of us find ourselves in the situation where we want and need to be more productive – in fact I don’t think I have met anyone in the last 3 years who has not remarked that they have to achieve more with fewer resources.

One of the people I know is constantly researching and applying tips to be more productive is Keith Bohanna. We met several years ago and while we don’t see each other often, I know that this is a passion for him.

Late last year I noted Keith was offering ‘taster workshop’ on the subject of productivity – something he does along side his consulting assignments and his postion as Chair of the Irish Internet Association.

So I thought who better to share with us tips to ensure that we keep the achievement of our goals on track by increasing our productivity. Here are the questions I asked Keith and his responses.

Krishna: One of the challenges many of us have is the issue of email overload. Can you share with us tips to manage or email inbox more effectively?

Keith: Here are four actions you can take immediately.

1. Close your email client and only check from hourly to twice a day. It’s not urgent, no one will notice. Except you – because you will become a lot more focused on your work.

2. Create ‘rules’ for your email folders. If you are in a corporate environment consider an inbox rule which automatically moves into a folder all emails in which you ar receiving copies of emails (where you are included as a ‘cc’). Follow this tip for a month and see if you miss anything important to getting your job done.

3. Use an alternative tool to email. Consider introducing a tool such as Chatter (from Salesforce) or Yammer. They are highly effective for the non-urgent, random, “water cooler” and group list emails from others within your business or organisation. For smaller groups or sole traders you could use these tools for projects that you collaborate on with others.

4. Read each email once and immediately decide what to do with it. That means actually reading it. Slowly. Not skimming over it and hoping the contents get magically “absorbed” into your head. The decision should be:
a)   it needs action – move the email into your project/to-do system
b)   no action required – delete or archive the email
c)   reference – move the email into your reference system.

Krishna: With many people using social media as part of their communications tool kit, what recommendations do you have to ensure that people manage their time effectively in these chanels?

Keith: Social media platforms can be managed effectively and here are three recommendations for you.

1. Make good use of your smart phone. Take the opportunity to install social media applications on your phone and use the periods you have ‘down time’ for the casual interactions.

2. Use tools to manage online mentions. Be methodical around monitoring mentions of your business or brand by using free tools (for example Tweetdeck and Hootsuite are two popular tools) and do so two or three times a day. Once you are happy you have set the search terms,  this will save you time.

3. Establish your social media goals. Have clear objectives for your use of social media (unless it is purely personal or useed for peer to peer contact). Record those measures and track them weekly and monthly.

Krishna: Many people communte to work or travel a lot for business meetings. Can you share with us tips to stay productive when travelling?

Keith: I travel for business and and I find these tips help.

1. Use Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) email and not Post Office Protocol (POP).  With POP you may read and sort all your new mail on your mobile device, but when you log back into your computer you will be presented with a full inbox of unread messages that you have to re-read and re-organise. This can be very frustrating. You will need to speak to your IT department (or if you are a solo preneur speak to your IT savvy friends) to put this into practice. If you use Gmail you can find out more details here.

2. Get in sync. You need all of your contacts, calendar and key documents to be identical or able to be accessed on every working device you have. Evernote and Dropbox lead the field here with their ability to keep everything you need accessible to you everywhere and without thinking or active effort – thats the important bit here!

3. Make use of your ‘down time’. Whether you are travelling by train, plane or car, you can take the opportunity to do tasks which you do not need to be in the office to undertake. For example, doing a review of your projects is perfect for a train or plane where you have minimal interruptions and a chance to focus. In your car listen to podcast materials relevant to your work or of interest to you.

Krishna: Can you recommended resources or applications to help us be more productive?

Keith: There are a large number of apps and services which can help you – which you choose will depend on your personal circumstances.

1. For Outlook users consider Getting Things Done® Outlook® Add-In  by Netcentrics – it layers GTD functionality over the usual Outlook interface. Getting Things Done (or GTD) is a productivity approach pioneered by David Allen.

2. For Gmail users I recommend you try Active Inbox – it is a free plugin that installs into Chrome and Firefox, which helps you manage your email tasks and projects supporting the Getting Things Done appoach.

3. For a tool independent of your email client check out Remember The Milk. It is a free task manager application and a firm favorite in the ‘ThinkProductive’ office and runs across apps on all platforms for example Apple, Android and Blackberry.

Krishna: You have shared thirteen great tipsso perhaps you can share a fourteenth tip for those readers who prefer even numbers! Can you share a bonus tip of something that you are working on to help you be even more productive in 2012?

Keith: My final tip is all about Focus. It is not about ‘doing stuff’ (and definitely not about compiling lists of things to do).

The secret to making 2012 great for us all is to ‘pull up’ out of the day-to-day and give ourselves time to get clear on the key projects that will make a real difference.

Once you have identified those projects, then you can start to shift your ‘day-to-day activities’ to favour those projects. Even if you cannot do so immediately, you should make significant progress over a couple of months.

I do hope these tips help you be more productive in 2012. Thank you Krishna for the invitation to share these tips with you and hope they go some way to making 2012 more enjoyable for your readers!

A SPECIAL OFFER TO HELP YOU BE MORE PRODUCTIVE IN GETTING THINGS DONE IN 2012

If you want to learn more about beoming more productive and explore the setting-up of a personal productivity system, I highly recommed that you check out the forthcoming workshop that Keith will be facilitating for ThinkProductive, “How to Get Things Done”. It takes place in Dublin on 7 February 2012.

You can find out more details on the Think Productive website and Keith has generously offered a 15 percent discount to anyone who books using the code Krishna15 when booking your place.

Note – this is not an affiliate programme so I don’t get a referral fee – it’s a kind offer from Keith tmy Biz Growth Community.

14 tips to help you be more productive ‘getting things done’ in 2012 is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

As part of the preparation I also had the opportunity to get involved in Irish research developed for the conference and in collaboration with Rachel Dalton of RD Communications and Oisin Byrne of iReach. Here is a summary of the Irish research I presented.

• We explored the categories that female Irish consumers research after receiving a recommendation for a product or service – the most popular being holidays (78%), electronics and household appliances (62%), PC’s and technology (59%) and entertainment e.g. movies and restaurants (58%)
• We found that men search online more than women in the categories of automotive, electronics and household appliances, technology and telecommunications
• 87 percent of female Irish consumers research online before making a decision to purchase a product or service
• 84 percent of female Irish consumers indicated they are more likely to purchase when they can find recommendations about products and services online (this was 92% for the 18-24 year old age group)
• Overall, 70 percent of female Irish consumers who comment that negative information online has made them change their mind about purchasing a product or service recommended to them
• Overall, 80 percent of female Irish consumers who comment that positive information online has reinforced their decision to purchase a product or service recommended to them
• When researching to make a purchase, the majority of female Irish consumers start their search with a search engine
• When researching to make a purchase, for female Irish consumers, the next most popular place to start a search is a retailer site
• When researching to make a purchase, a minority of female Irish consumers search on a manufacturer’s site, with this being more likely for an older consumer
• 47% of female Irish consumers had used a daily deal or group buying site to make a purchase in the last 3 months.

I also talked about global research in my presentation (which you can download here) and summarised my session with the following seven points:

1. Learn about your own consumer – what do they search for when looking for your products or services and what device do they use
2. Extend your marketing personas – include digital insights about your consumer
3. Integrate mobile marketing – include mobile marketing and mobile commerce in your marketing plans
4. Meet consumers where they are online – experiment with social commerce and look for ways to build engagement in Facebook with the development of apps
5. Hyper-target and personalise your communications - ensure that your adverts and your marketing message is relevant to your consumer and target audience
6. Invest in your website – search engine optimisation is critical and consider integrating the ability for consumers to leave reviews
7. Proactively manage your online reputation – invest resources to track brand mentions and use the information to enhance products and services alongside your sales and marketing processes

In these challenging economic times remember that price and value for money, service and quality will help you retain your customer and attract more word of mouth referrals.

I hope this research inspires you to further understand the female consumer who in Western Europe and the US strongly influences consumer purchases.

I will be publishing the extended research report later this month, but in the meantime, if you have any questions about marketing to women using online or offline communications don;t hesitate to post them to my Facebook Page.

You can see my presentation about marketing to women in the digital age below.

Digital Influence And The Female Irish Consumer

Marketing To Women: research about digital influence and the female Irish consumer is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Then here is a book I highly recommend that you read – and make sure that you read to end of this article as for today only you can access the book at NO COST.

The book is called “Twitter for Good: Change the world one Tweet at a Time” and is authored by Twitter’s own Claire Diaz-Ortiz who leads social innovation and philanthropy.

I was delighted to receive access to”Twitter for Good” from Claire’s publisher Jossey-Bass and found it to be a great, accessible read in which Claire shares her tips for your Twitter communications plan which she describes as T.W.E.E.T and covers each area in depth with lots of Twitter case studies of non profits using Twitter effectively to achieve their organisations goals. T.W.E.E.T stands for:

1. - Target
2. - Write
3. - Engage
4. - Explore
5. - Track.

In “Twitter for Good”, Claire covers what she sees are the three most common types of Twitter accounts used by organisations:

• Information accounts – providing information and resources around a given subject matter
• Personalised accounts – putting a human face to the business or organisation
• Fund raising account – where the goal is accessing donations.

In my experience there are a number of organisations who are also setting up accounts for their non profit which represent the PR or communications team where they post official information and press releases and are the account that connects with journalists and the media.

Of course if you are a commercial organisation you may have Twitter accounts for a specific brand, product, service or campaign and of course one for customer support and even an account for recruitment and hiring.

I highly recommend “Twitter for Good” as helpful resource for your non profit, providing you with lots of examples of case studies that you can be inspired by.

But here is the really great news – for the next 24 hours (starting midnight Pacific Time on 6 September) Claire and her publishers have made it possible for you to access the book at no cost!

You can find Twitter for Good online in the US at:

• Amazon in the Kindle bookstore
• Apple iBookstore
• Barnes & Noble
• Google eBookstore
• Kobo
• Sony.

You can find Twitter for Good online in the UK at:

• Amazon UK in the Kindle bookstore
• Apple iBookstore
• Kobo.

NOTE: you don’t need to have an Amazon Kindle to read your Amazon ebook – you can access Kindle ebooks on your computer.

Be sure to Tweet that you have accessed “Twitter for Good” and tell your network on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – and if you are using Twitter use the hash tag ‘#Twitter4Good” – and don’t forget to leave a review of the book on the online bookstore you access it.

And if you enjoy reading “Twitter for Good” why not buy a copy and pass it to a friend in your network of non profits to help them build visibility, awareness and attract volunteers and donations to their organisation?

If you are having great success with your Twitter campaign for your non profit, please do leave your tips below or post them over at my Facebook Page.

Book Review: Twitter for Good – Change the world one tweet at a time, an essential guide to Twitter for non profits is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Tweets don't have a long shelf life – just take a look at the analytics of your Tweets is you are using a tool to track the number of click’s on your links in Twitter and you will no doubt see a sharp spike on ‘click throughs’ around the time you send out the Tweet.

Research has been done that demonstrates that you can get additional traffic by sending out your Tweets multiple times – in fact Guy Kawasaki talked about this on American Express open Forum back in 20009.

If you prefer not to re-post your content on Twitter but want to extend the life of your content then I suggest you explore the online tool and Twitter content curation application Twylah.com. – you will need to apply for beta access but it is a free service.

This video explains how to use Twylah to attract more traffic to your content online – or watch the video on my BizGrowthTV channel at YouTube on using Twylah to get more traffic.

As I cover in the video tutorial, Twylah also presents a great opportunity for use if you are using Twitter in your conferences and events to pick up your Twitter archive.

You can find me at http://www.Twylah.com/KrishnaDe

My one request of Twylah would be that you could decide on the key words that you want to appear – rather than their automatic suggest – perhaps this will come in a future version.

But for the moment you will need to consider the key words that you want to appear in your Tweets if you want them to appear in Twylah.

How many times do you re-post your Tweets? What recommednations do you have for driving more traffic to your articles and blog posts with your Tweets?

Don’t forget you can access my other articles and tutorials about how to be effective with your Twitter marketing here.

Using Twylah to attract more traffic from Twitter to your website or blog is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Last week I ran a full day workshop about using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook in your business and we had over 100 people attend. At the end of the session I hosted a break out group specifically about using these tools to help the delegates in their job search and one of the key themes I covered was the importance of integrating your networking plan across online and offline groups and associations.

Many of us spend our time in the ‘real world’ not the ‘digital world’ and it is therefore important to make connections between our online networking and offline networking be that for professional success or job search.

That is the principle behind the new book by Heather Townsend called “Business Networking – how to use the power of online and offline networking for business success” published by Financial Times Prentice Hall (an imprint of Pearson).

“Business Networking” covers:

• the importance of networking
• tips for networking online using Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogging
• essential networking skills including how to make the right first impression and how to work a room
• tips for developing your networking plan.

If you are someone who likes practical actions steps you can take, then this is a great book for you – Heather summarises each chapter and provides a check list of action points you can take.

In todays global economy it’s good to see a few pages in “Business Networking” dedicated to networking across cultures – though I would recommend that if you are starting to work in different countries to invest in some books to learn more about that specific culture and business etiquette that applies to that market. If you are in the UK, you might want to check out the cultural awareness and global mobility programmes organised by Farnham Castle (we did this when first leaving Europe to live and work in Asia).

Heather share her approach in “Business Networking” to what she calls her FITTER networking plan which stands for:

• Follow up
• Introduce yourself with impact
• Target specific people
• Turn social conversations into business chat
• Engage
• Research.

I think you will especially get value out of the last part of the book about creating your business networking plan which covers:

• setting your networking goals
• identifying who you need in your network
• analysing the state of your network
• analysing the state of your relationships
• deciding where to network
• measuring your effectiveness
• and writing your networking plan.

Yes there are a lot of books about building your business through networking and I have written featured them over the years and interviewed authors of networking books such as in the podcast with author Ivan Misner, and the online radio interview I did with Liz Lynch author of “Smart Networking how to attract a following in person and online” back in 2008.

That said, if you are looking for an up to the minute book to help you integrate networking into your business development plan and appreciate practical tips, then I recommend you take a look at “Business Networking” by Heather Townsend.

As an aside, the book has just twenty one pages dedicated to online networking using LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and blogging so if you are looking for specific guidance and ‘how to action plans’ about online networking you would need to supplement your learning through workshops or further reading.

What business networking books have you read recently that you recommend?

Book review: Business Networking – how to use the power of networking for business success by Heather Townsend is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Well I upgraded mine today expecting that enough time has passed for all the bugs to have been ironed out.

However I ran into a problem. You see the problem I encountered was that the visual editor did not work with the upgrade.

It seems I am not note in this problem and here are three discussion threads with details of the solutions people have taken:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/visual-editor-text-not-visible-displays-html-when-highlighted

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/new-install-no-visual-editor

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/upgraded-to-32-visual-editor-buttons-missing

I tried checking all my WordPress.org plugins for conflicts, checking the site in different browsers and also reinstalling WordPress 3.2.1 – and none of these worked for me. I also worked through the solutions listed in the discussion forums above.

I could go back to a previous version, however I decided to stay with the newest upgrade.

The temporary fix I have made is to install a WordPress.org plugin that over writes the standard visual editor in the hope that a solution will be found in the next upgrade.

Have you had similar problems with your upgrade to WordPress.org 3.2.1 and if so how did you rectify it?

Photo credit bobgmac

WordPress.org 3.2.1 visual text editor bug – tips on how to fix it is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Then you are probably like me and spend time searching out WordPress.org plugins to use.

NOTE: Don’t worry if your business is not powered by WordPress.org, as I have another low cost effective solution for you if you are a small or medium sized business without a budget to develop a new mobile friendly website.

This week there was a great reminder of the importance of making your website accessible to mobile browsers with the results from comScore research which stated that across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK the number of smartphone users accessing online retail sites has increased by 80 percent over the past year.

I had been using a terrific plugin to make this site accessible, however with a recent release of the plugin, it was no longer working on my site as there was a conflict with other plugins.

The alternative mobile plugin I had enabled was just not user friendly, so I thought it was about time to do some online research to find some alternatives.

I have not been able to check my blog on an Android phone just yet, but what became clear to me in my testing is that what looks great on one phone just doesn’t on another – even when the plugin is mean to be compatible with multiple phones.

So my recommendation is to checkout the 5 free resources that are detailed below to make your WordPress.org website or business blog mobile friendly.

And I have also listed some bonus resources for you – yes I have also listed 13 additional WordPress.org plugins that are worth exploring so that you:

• rank better in the search engines
• improve the search experience of your visitors
• build visibility on Facebook through adding the Facebook Comments facility
• get value from your past content through automating the Tweeting of past articles
• enable your visitors to share your content to their social networks which in turn can bring you a flood of inbound traffic
• can add a customised Google +1 button to your articles
• encourage people to follow you on Google Plus by adding a button to sidebar to enable people to follow you on Google Plus.

WHAT IF MY WEBSITE IS NOT BUILT ON WORDPRESS.ORG?

Don’t worry – a resource that I recommend if you are a small or medium sized business that will enable you to quickly create a mobile version of your website with the key elements that your customers and prospects want to access on their mobile phone is GoMobi.

They work with partners, but for example you can test the service for a 30 day free trial after which if you use Name.com for the service the fee is currently just US$5.99 a month or US$49.99 for the year.

Access the list of WordPress.org plugins I suggest you check out below.

Remember to leave your recommendations for WordPress.org plugins and also the tools you use to enable your website or blog to render for the mobile web to support your mobile marketing plan. Leave your comments below or at my Facebook Page.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES YOU WILL FIND OF ASSISTANCE

How to add the Facebook Send button to your website or business blog

Using Tynt to create inbound links to your website or business blog

Creating PDF downloads of your blog and website articles with JoliPrint.com

Five WordPress.org plugins to make your website or business blog mobile friendly plus 17 bonus resources to boost your online visibility and lead generation is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

Curating content has never been easier – you no longer have to take a screen shot of content and then add it to an article or blog post.

Yes Twitter has enabled a way to embed Tweets using their Blackbird Pie functionality which you can see in action here from back in 2010 when they released this tool.

You can also use these additional ways to embed Twitter into your blog or website:

• Add the WordPress.org Blackbird Pie plugin
• Use Publitweet who have created a Blackbird Bookmarket to curate the Tweets
• If you use Google Chrome then you can use the Blackbird extension.

However a very simple tool that you can use is called Keepstream which I came across today thanks to Richard Binhammer on Google Plus as he was sharing some content from someone in his organisation (Dell) who had captured the Tweets shared at one of their employee events.

You can watch a video of how Keepstream.com works either on YouTube or below:

You can see an example of what I curated on Keepstream to demonstrate the tool below:

Keepstream.com will let you bring in your Twitter posts, your Twitter lists, your Twitter favourites and importantly when attending conferences or participating in Twitter Chats you can search on Twitter for example for Twitter Hashtags.

Keepstream also enables you to annotate the content and reorder the content that you curate.

They have a bookmarket tool which I was able to get to work on Firefox but not on Chrome which provides a handy way to record content as you are surfing the web to add to your Keepstream curated content at a later time.

What I didn’t like was the fact I could not find a way to delete content that I had bookmarked and then had decided not to use.

Once you title your Keepstream curated content you are invited to share it on Facebook and Twitter or you can take the embed code to add it to your website. And if you want to make changes to your stream of content you can go back to edit it later.

Keepstream is definitely a way to curate your Twitter content.

ALTERNATIVE TOOLS TO KEEPSTREAM TO RECORD TWITTER CHATS AND CONVERSATIONS

1. An alternative tool you could you could use to curate a Twitter list is Publitweet

2. To record a Twitter hashtag from a conference or Twitter Chat you could apply to access the beta version of Hashtracking – note that the free version only records the last 1000 Tweets in the last 24 hours – there is a paid service if you want to access a report on a month to month basis

3. You can create a PDF document of a Twitter hashtag stream for a conference or Twitter chat using
Tweetdoc – a great way to keep a permanent copy that you could then upload to Scribd.com or SlideShare.net if you do not want or can not host it on your own site.

4. My favourite tool however is Storify which has a lot of functionality enabling you to easily archive not just Tweets but other content from across the web and also allows you to have a visual identity for each Storify you curate.Take a look at how this has been used by The Guardian newspaper in the UK and also by the Foreign and Commonwealth office in the UK. You can see my curated stories on Storify here and also see an example of how Twitter is being used by journalists here.

What other tools do you like and recommend to archive content online be that your Twitter chats or conference and live event hashtags?

How to archive your Twitter Chats and conference hashtags using Keepstream.com plus eight other Twitter content curation tools is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.

It’s critical to ensure that we optimise our online adverts to attract targeted leads, but how do we ensure that we are as effective as possible in turning those leads and inbound traffic to solid leads. We need to encourage the people coming to our website to take the next step.

That might be phoning you to book an appointment, opting-in to a form to access a white paper, discount coupon or more information about your product or service, or of course making a purchase online.

In our digital marketing and social media workshops, I will often invite the attendees of the programme to share their landing pages so that we can evaluate how effective they are. With restricted budgets, many marketers don’t have the budget to create new templates for their website nor do they have the technical skills to do make the necessary changes themselves.

If you are using a business blog as part of your online marketing programme, you can purchase premium plugins to help you create landing pages for your site. But what if you have a traditional website?

That’s where services like Unbounce can support you.

Today I noticed an advert on LinkedIn from Dublin City University – the goals of the advert was to drive traffic to a web page to find out more about their M.B.S. in Human Resources programme.

Let’s take it that they got their targeting of the ad on LinkedIn correct – they were probably targeting people with the title of Human Resources in their LinkedIn profile and way back I held Senior Vice President and Director roles in Human Resources.

Clicking on their LinkedIn advert, I was taken to a landing page that was created using Unbounce. You can see an image below and you will notice that they have a simple call to action to request more information about the M.B.S. programme.

Eight Key Benefits of Creating A Stand Alone Landing Page Using Unbounce

Why will this landing page created using Unbounce potentially attract more conversions of their traffic than taking people to their DCU website?

1. As this is a ‘standalone’ page, then one of the benefits is that there is no navigation to other parts of the website which means that visitors to the page are not distracted and wander off to other parts of the website, failing to take that next step in your lead generation process

2. In addition, there is one singular call to action – if you clicked on the LinkedIn advert as you were interested to learn more about the M.B.S programme there is only one thing you can now do – provide your details to receive information about the programme.

3. Using Unbounce you don’t need any technical skills as they provide a variety of simple to use templates and the pricing

4. Your landing page will be hosted by Unbounce – so in fact you don’t have to involve your webmaster or IT team at all!

5. You can access real time metrics so you can see how your landing page is performing and even integrate Google Analytics

6. You can easily do A B split test to explore which copy or call to action proves to be the most effective in coverting your inbound traffic

7. To reflect your online brand, you can use your own custom domain (though DCU did not use this feature)

8. The Unbounce service starts at just US$25 for 1000 unique visitors per month – in fact there is even a 30 day free trial.

My only wish is that Unbounce integrated with other shopping carts and email services as the shopping cart ad autoresponder tool I use is not included in their integrations.

So why not explore Unbounce the next time you are considering a landing page for your product, service or programme? It’s so cost effective and looks very professional it has to be worth investigating.

If you want to earn more about effective landing pages, make sure that you register for this weeks ezine where I will be going into further depth about landing pages and will also be sharing details of my next free webinars about how to drive targeted traffic through Facebook Advertising.

What tips do you have for developing an effective landing page for your products, services or programmes?

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

Read this article about 16 resources to help you with your website conversion rates

Listen to this webinar which covers how to write more effective online copy – including how to write effective calls to action

Register for my forthcoming FREE webinar about how to optimise your Facebook Advertising – just sign up for my ezine to find out all the details of how to join the event

How to improve the effectiveness of your online advertising with a focused landing page is an article post from: Biz Growth News – please do share the article with your network if you found it of value. Remember to join our Facebook Page to access 5 marketing tutorials.