Vertical Measures » Website Publicity

Where’s the Kindle?! Find it First and It’s Yours!

SarahM — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:00:39 +0000

UPDATE: Lauren, at USO Networks Inc, is the winner of our "Where’s the Kindle" contest. Congrats! She found the icon on our Search Engine Optimization Video page. Thanks to all who entered, tweeted, and helped us promote this contest.

This is the official kick-off of the Vertical Measures “Where’s the Kindle?” contest. We’ve placed an image of the Amazon Kindle logo somewhere on our website and if you find it first and email us to let us know, it’s yours! The only place the image will not be placed is anywhere on Vertical Measures SEO and Link Building Best Practices blog. So, when a visitor finds the image of the Amazon Kindle logo, all they have to do is send an email to the address on the image, provide the page on which they found the image, and of course be the first to send the email. If no one finds the Kindle on the first day, we’ll provide clues on our blog each day until one lucky reader finds it.

Here at VM, we love to run contests and get our participants’ wheels turning. For example, for our Boost Your Juice contests, entrants had to create videos or write an essay about their company and why they deserved some free SEO and website marketing services, or our Ode to SEO Poetry contest in which entrants wrote poems about Internet marketing. While these contests are so much fun to concoct and we get immense joy out of going through all of the entries and getting people excited about Internet marketing, we understand that sometimes people just want an easy way to win something free! It’s a fact: people love free stuff.

Ready, set, GO FIND THE KINDLE!

Just be sure to subscribe to this blog or follow us on Twitter (@verticalmeasure), like us on Facebook (facebook.com/VerticalMeasures) or subscribe to our new LinkedIn group to see official “Where’s the Kindle” contest announcements with important details and updates.

Tweet about the contest by clicking here, or share with your friends on Facebook by clicking the Facebook icon below.

Please Share This:

Analytics and Conversions Interview with Tim Ash

redlincook — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:47:23 +0000

Click the Twitter icon below to tweet the selection as a twote (tweet quote).

For this week’s interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Ash the CEO of SiteTuners.com, a landing page optimization firm that offers conversion consulting, full-service guaranteed-improvement tests, and software tools to improve conversion rates.

Tim is a highly-regarded presenter on topics related to analytics. He is also the chairperson of Conversion Conference, the first conference focused on improving online conversions. A columnist for several publications including ClickZ, he’s host of the weekly Landing Page Optimization show and podcast on WebmasterRadio.fm. He also is the author of the book Landing Page Optimization.

Elise Redlin-Cook: What is the most common mistake you see on landing pages?

Tim Ash: One of the most common problems is visual clutter. Landing pages are dresses up with large graphics, Flash animations, and pictures of people. Usually these page elements have nothing to do with the conversion goal on the page. Visual design needs to be very restrained and minimalist in order to subtly focus the eye on the right parts of the page. It should not be a crowded bazaar with everything competing for your attention. In other words, everything can’t be equally important. It is your job as a marketer to help me prioritize.

Elise: Can you name a couple of tools you use most often to help clients improve their conversions?

Tim:Our newly released AttentionWizard.com software is a landing page visual attention prediction tool. It predicts where someone will look during the first few seconds of their visit and produces a simulated "heatmap" of attention (similar to eye tracking studies but without the huge expense). It produces instant results, and can be used with screen shots of landing pages or even mock-ups of in-progress designs for new pages. This allows you to quickly identify "attention leaks" on your page that distract from your call to action, and to improve your conversion rate. You can get Lite heatmaps daily if you sign up for a free account.

Another great tool is ClickTale.com. It provides very actionable web analytics that help you diagnose conversion issues. You can record user sessions on your site, see which form fields people having trouble with on your online forms, and create mouse-movement "heatmaps" of people’s interactions with your page.

Elise: Have you found more success doing a/b testing or multi variant testing?

Tim: If you have low traffic to a landing page, you can’t do any testing at all in a reasonable time frame, so your only choice is to do a best-practices scrub of your page (via expert consulting like our Express Review service). If you have at least ten conversion actions per day, you can at least do a/b split testing. If you have over fifty conversions per day you can consider some multivariate testing. But even if you have a lot of traffic, multivariate is not inherently a better way to go. We often start with a "radical split test" to create very different versions of a landing page. Often the split test produces the big conversion improvement because it is competing against a bad page, and because we address all known problems in our alternative designs. The messaging of the resulting winning page is then fine tuned through multivariate testing. This allows us to get the right headlines, copy, and calls to action for the intended audience.

Elise: Searcher intent is a critical component of choosing keywords. Do you have any tips to help facilitate finding the highest converting keywords based on searcher intent?

Tim: Keeping your promises is very important. It is not so much about having the right keywords, but rather about making a seamless experience from the keyword, to the search result, and through to the landing page. If I am typing in "best digital camera", I expect a landing page that has comparative information about different models and am in the research stage of the process. So do not try to sell me something and tell me you have the lowest price and free shipping. I have not chosen the product yet, so I don’t care about those things. If my search involves a product model name, then I am further in the buying process and may care about those things. So you basically have to properly manage my expectations and put yourself in my frame of mind to determine the appropriate content for the landing page.

Elise: What inspired you to write Landing Page Optimization?

Tim: There were already books on web usability, copy writing, visual design, testing, statistics and so on. But nothing pulled information together to give a comprehensive overview of conversion improvement and testing. My book was meant to address this. The book has done really well, and I am currently working on a second edition with co-authors Rich Page and Maura Ginty. It should be out early next year and will include over 150 pages of new content and significant reworking of the existing material.

Elise: Do you have any exciting projects that your involved in right now that you’d like to let us in on?

Tim: Since I have a lot of spare time, I decided to start a new conference series. ConversionConference.com is the first event dedicated to all aspects of conversion. It will be held in parallel with the established eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in San Jose on May 4-5, 2010. The show features two full days of sessions and three dynamic keynotes by Bryan Eisenberg, Jakob Nielsen, and me. If you are serious about conversion, you really should be there. The next event is in Washington DC this October, and international versions are also planned starting with a show in Hamburg Germany this fall.

Elise: Wow, that sounds like a really interesting project! I know that you do a great deal of business traveling in general. In all of the places you’ve been, where would you most like to live?

Tim: My home base is San Diego. I came out there to attend University of California, San Diego on a full scholarship, and never left. It is a very livable large city with an amazing Mediterranean year-round climate. I can walk to the beach from my house. I also really like London, and cities in Canada like Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal – but only in the summertime… I love Mexico and all parts of the Caribbean as well.

Elise: So, Tim…Are you driven by any great passions outside of the business arena?

Tim: I studied a martial art called Tai Chi Chuan for several years, and am certified to teach the slow-motion movement "form" by a master in the popular Wu Style Tai Chi lineage. Once my kids get a little older I plan to get back into teaching. I have also been involved in black and white figure photography for a long time, and really enjoy that. But my real passion is my wife and two amazing kids.

Elise: Wow, those are some really unique hobbies. I myself, am a lover of photography and wish I had more time to spend behind the lens.Thanks so much for sharing!

Please Share This:

Nominated For a SEMMY Award

Kaila S. — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 13:15:46 +0000

The SEMMYs, an annual online award event in the SEO industry, nominates posts for recognition on a variety of topics. We’re proud to announce that this year one of our posts has been nominated as a SEMMY finalist in the category of reputation management. Our readers may remember reading the extensive and thorough post "Be Proactive With Your Reputation Management" (posted September 18th) now nominated for the award. We discuss the importance of being proactive with your online reputation management, and give you 16 opportunities to dominate the search engine rankings for your business name.

As a SEMMY finalist our readers, friends, family, and connections are able to vote for our post to win the prestigious award. Voting closes this Friday, and we’d be thrilled if you took a few moments to vote: here. Feel free to pass on the word and help us win by telling your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or via e-mail. We’ve made it easy, just copy and paste: VM made the 2010 SEMMY Awards Finalist list in category: Reputation Management!!! http://bit.ly/SEMMYFinalist Vote 2day!

Please Share This:

Inspiring the Next Generation of Search Engine Optimizers and Internet Marketers

Kaila S. — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:55:32 +0000

Our industry is an ever growing one. With the rapid growth of Internet usage comes expansion in social media, online marketing, and so on. Here at Vertical Measures we feel that it’s important to engage younger generations, and get them as excited as we are about marketing and social media! The more bright minds in our industry the better!!

For this reason we will be rolling out our Valentines Day inspired creative contest, giving away one $1,000 scholarship to a lucky winner, and a $250 second place prize. This contest will be open not just to High School students, but to College and Graduate students too. The winner has the option of choosing an alternate prize of an Apple iPad Tablet (64GB Wifi Model, available in March), instead of the scholarship. We thought this would be a great prize for a future Internet marketer, although money can be just as useful!

The scholarship contest will allow entrants to flex their creative muscles and will encourage research to gain knowledge about key Internet marketing and social media terms. Don’t know much about Internet marketing and terms? That shouldn’t stop you from entering this great contest.

Check back to our blog on February 1st for more details on our Scholarship contest, or subscribe to our blog…..and dust your keyboard off.

Please Share This:

50 Topics to Help You Get Started on Your Corporate Blog

Kaila S. — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 12:01:01 +0000

Adding a company blog is a great idea for many different reasons: internal links, as a communication channel for your company, to show your creativity, create yourself as an authority in your industry, and for brand awareness. And don’t forget traffic: Here at Vertical Measures our blog accounts for almost 25% of our site traffic!

Getting it set up is pretty easy, check out e-How’s guide to setting up a blog. Then the hard part begins: figuring out what topics to write about!

Our list of 50 topics below should help you get started on your corporate blogging:

1.) Use a recent press release

2.) Discuss and review industry best practices

3.) Announce a webinar, tradeshow, presentation, speaking engagement, etc.

4.) Create a how-to post

5.) Explain your corporate culture

6.) Answer a common customer support question

7.) Share a presentation

8.) Publicize a recent charitable donation and your reasons for donating

9.) Highlight a product or service

10.) Review or critique a competitor’s poll, case study or white paper

11.) Announce a recent award or recognition achieved by your company

12.) Make a statement about future trends in your industry

13.) Discussing a recent addition to your staff

14.) Introducing a unique strategy or approach

15.) Announce expanding or renovating your business

16.) Announce sponsoring or hosting a workshop, webinar, or seminar

17.) Put an industry spin on the holidays

18.) Discuss a blog post you disagree with, and why

19.) Make predictions for the coming year in your industry

20.) Recap the previous industry related news for the year

21.) Create and discuss a case study

22.) Make a list of tools you use on a daily basis, and can’t live without

23.) Discuss your budget concerns, and how you are addressing them

24.) Reiterate topics discussed in your most recent newsletter

25.) Announce a company gathering or party

26.) Provide tips on being more productive in your industry

27.) Leverage an industry related event or item in the news, and spin it to fit to your companies goals, ideals, or product offerings

28.) Gather industry related events or news throughout the week and summarize

29.) Showcase your employees (with their permission) in a creative way: their pets, baby pictures, odd hobbies, odd talents, etc.

30.) Create a satirical post with humor and wit about a topic in your industry

31.) Propose a would you rather question to your readers

32.) Discuss a typical day at your office

33.) Share what you learned during the day, throughout the week, or even month

34.) Look at your comments and highlight/answer/discuss a topic your readers are interested in

35.) Review your past work and summarize in one blog post

36.) Invite a guest writer to write on your blog

37.) Provide a top "101" list of the best resources, guides, people, sites, etc. in your industry

38.) Gather images, with attributions to their original source, that are related to your industry

39.) Interview someone in your company, or an industry leader and provide it on your blog

40.) Write a rant about an industry related problem, or solution you don’t agree with

41.) Share blog stats in a case study form on your blog

42.) Ask a question of your readers

43.) Profile an industry professional

44.) Create a post where you pose a hypothetical situation or question

45.) Announce contests or promotions in your industry

46.) Embed videos and summarize the video in your post

47.) Provide a quote from a person in your industry, and discuss the relevance

48.) Ask for help from your readers on what to blog about in a blog post

49.) Highlight free resources in your industry

50.) Discuss your company’s history: how you got started, your founders backgrounds, what your mission statement is, and how you developed it

There are a few things to remember when getting started:

1.) Don’t just write and assume you’ll automatically get traffic. Check out our webinar, "Creating a Corporate Blog That Attracts Visitors" for a few tips.

2.) Update your blog regularly. Here at Vertical Measures we blog at least two times per week. If that isn’t feasible shoot for 1 post per week.

3.) Personalize your blog, don’t sound like a boring corporate talking head.

4.) Assume your competitors will read your blog, but don’t let this prevent you from providing good information. Ever heard of the bikini concept? "You can give 90% of it away, but there will always be people who will happily pay to see that last 10%", discussed in CopyBlogger.com’s post "7 Harsh Realities of Social Media Marketing". While you don’t want to give away your essential trade secrets, you DO want to give some of the information away for free.

5.) In every blog post try to answer a question. Why? Because you don’t want to provide meaningless posts that prove useless to your readers. Provide a valuable source of information.

6.) Don’t be concerned if you need help managing your blog. That’s why there are content development experts out there.

Have some topics or suggestions to add to the list? Drop us a comment below!

Please Share This: