There are changes afoot in Internet marketing.
As the masses jump onto the wave of Web 2.0, it’s time to separate the “men” from the “boys”. Google’s taking leads and prospects away from the slow-adapters and the mindless Web 2.0 marketers.
And guess what? They’re being thrown in piles at the feet of smart Internet marketers who understand the changes.
Why Capture Pages Are So Over
In the old school, Internet marketers create one-page websites with few words and no outgoing links. The website is designed purely to collect leads.
Internet marketers love them but now they’re far too common and your prospects are really starting to hate them.
But we kind of knew that already, didn’t we?
If you’re trying to optimise your site for search engines, you’ve been told to stay away from capture pages. Google in particular wants websites with lots of “content” and connections to and from other pages.
Do you know why?
Because search engines have to give users what they want–only the very best content that answers their research questions.
Capture pages don’t have much content at all and Google’s squeezing them out of even the SPONSORED pay-per-click results. Yes, Google HATES your capture page even when you’re paying to advertise it!
Have you woken up one day to find your very best performing and cheapest ads disabled? Has Google asked you to raise your 5 cent bids to $10 per click instead?
The Internet is changing. And today Google is squeezing your marketing capture pages OUT from both the right side of the search results as well as the left side of the sponsored results.
So how do we as marketers continue to get leads to sell our products while staying on Google’s good side? I’ll tell you in a minute, but first let’s talk about the end of another era…
The Era of “Mindless” Web 2.0
In the old-school, a business would create a 15, 20, or even 100 page website, optimise it with the right keywords, and get a #1 listing in the search engines.
That was their best free source of advertising and that’s how they got visitors to their site and customers for their business.
As more and more businesses and personal websites started competing for the same keywords, search engines had to give “authority” to sites with more content–say 1,000 unique pages of content. (Ouch!)
So you could either be an authority or be associated with one. If an authority site like ezinearticles.com pointed a link to your capture page, you became “associated” with them and ranked well with Google.
Well just like anything else that involves effort, smart business owners realised that it was way too time consuming to build up thousands of pages of content on their own. And so began the age of “outsourcing” and the birth of Web 2.0.
The secret to getting infinite content (and more visitors) is to get your site’s current visitors to contribute the content. After all, a business may take a few months to produce a 1,000 page web-site, but 1,000 visitors each contributing a single page of content could do it in a day.
That’s an old and effective concept that pioneers like eBay and Amazon had come up with years ago.
While smart marketers BECAME the authority with 1,000’s of pages of content–others just jumped media. And so began the age of “mindless” Web 2.0.
Mindless, I call it, because it’s a bunch of novice marketers running around from social network to social network, without any kind of strategy posting advertisements, testimonials, and self-serving reviews. Dirty marketing messages in a SOCIAL medium.
How many of them got rich over-night? None. And that’s why it’s mindless.
Marketing With Google’s Blessings
Like I said earlier, Google doesn’t like capture pages any more. It’s not capturing leads for your business they have a problem with though. So what’s Google’s problem?
OK let’s say you’re marketing using Adwords. Obviously since you’re paying for it, you’d like the page your prospect lands on to quickly capture their email address before they get distracted and leave. You’ll get around to giving them content later, right?
The problem that Google sees is that your awesome 20% Opt-In Rate capture page is getting visited by 100 people and 80 of them press back within seconds of arriving on your site.
Google doesn’t like that. When a user presses the Back button on their browser seconds after clicking a search result, they’re automatically giving feedback to Google’s bot that they didn’t like the page recommended by the search.
To make Google happy, you have to have a website that makes your site’s visitors disappear into the vacuum of cyberspace.
And so we enter the age of the “Web 2.0 capture page”.
The Web 2.0 Capture Page
Whether you use paid advertising like Pay-Per-Click or free advertising on Search Engines, your WEBSITE needs to be engaging. Notice I said website, not landing page.
Here are some pointers for creating capture pages that Google will like:
-Get a blog on your site and post religiously to it. By having a blog, you easily have a website that you can add content to quickly.
Blogs allow user contribution as well and that can quickly turn yours into an authority site.
Blogs are also well connected allowing search engines to easily crawl all the pages of your website.
You can add a mini-capture page as a supernote (a kind of popup). The difference now is that you are required to give helpful information and value up-front and THEN ask for a contact.
This kind of mini-capture page is perfect for article marketing and other SEO-based efforts.
-Create a standard capture page for your Google Pay Per Click ads but include your marketing message in Video or Audio form. Make it autoplay as well.
What does this do?
It grabs the attention of your visitor fast, of course. But it also makes them stay at least long enough to hear or view your audio message. Now Google won’t complain about your page because the prospect stayed there for a little while listening or reading. Google assumes the user was happy with the page it recommended to them.
-Link from your capture page to your blog to let Google see you have more pages on your site.
You can easily put the link to your blog right at the foot of your page in a small font. Don’t try to change its colour to match that of the background or Google will think you’re cheating.
But having the link out of the way makes it less obvious for your user to see it and get distracted by it. At the same time, the search engines will still follow that unobtrusive link and find you have many more pages on your website.
-Create one page per Adwords Adgroup to boost correlation between your ad and your capture page while showing Google that you have a multi-page site.
I actually recommend you use dynamic capture pages if you know how to implement them because they’re easier. Dynamic pages are made up of a single script that generates multiple pages with different content depending on how you call them.
When the capture page closely matches the content of your ad and the keywords you’re advertising on, Google will reward you with cheaper click-cost and higher rankings.
Of course you engage your visitor very quickly when you use the same words they speak and show them exactly what they want. You automatically reduce your “buck button push rate” by closely matching what the user wants.
-Create interactive pages that keep your visitor moving from one part of your site to the other.
I’m talking about anything that gets interaction from your user, a flash quiz, a game, a “test”, or something like that. Having a capture page that allows your user to interact gives you a chance to engage them long enough to keep Google happy.
How to Get Away with Marketing on Web 2.0 Websites to Get Free Leads
For the few smart marketers who understood Web 2.0 and its important link to Search Engines, there were millions of leads and customers–Seemingly, over-night.
Here is a quick list of tips for marketing your Home Business with Web 2.0:
Create useful or entertaining content that people will want to read, view, or listen to.
If you have a useful or entertaining factor, your profile visitors will refer their friends and their own social network to you. As a result, more people are exposed to your marketing.
Your visitors will also view your profile to learn more about you and add you to their network of friends. This shows off your profile to their network who may explore your profile and add you as a friend in their network.
Create your content to build so much curiosity that people want to visit your website.
Sometimes it’s enough to just put out one really funny video. Anyone who views it will usually want to see more and they’ll happily go to your main website to get it–even if they need to opt-in.
Particularly with video, if it’s instructional, occasionally it makes sense to cut it off at a critical place and then ask users to visit your website to get the rest.
Socialise and be an active member of the social network.
Don’t just submit your own articles to Digg and bookmark only your content with del.icio.us. You can’t make friends by being a marketer, you have to be a part of the community.
Digg the articles of others, bookmark other people’s sites, explore the bookmarks of others, comment on the videos of others (without signing off with your capture page URL!), actively participate in forums, etc.
By being social and participating in discussions you’re exposing your profile to an even larger audience of users. People begin to like you or trust you because you are like them, and they will view your content on your profile.
Leverage other social networks to boost your search engine rankings.
Don’t use mass submission software, it’s a waste of time and internet space. Get a proper understanding of the need to have multiple links from different sites going to the same single page.
Use other social networks to point links back to your profile, videos, or articles in other social networks. This will compound the “importance” factor with search engines rather than scatter millions of duplicates of the same content all over the internet.
Jim Yaghi, author of 8 Days to Cashflow in MLM is a professional internet marketer who trains Home Business owners to build their own cash-flow streams on the internet. Check out our video to learn how we’re using a Web 2.0 twist to Home Business marketing.
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