This week, I attended one of the best webinars I’ve attended in a long time… “60 Landing Pages in 60 Minutes” by Billy MacDonald and Mark Kilens at HubSpot. The webinar was fast paced, and provided a lot of GREAT info, by live reviewing and critiquing 60 landing pages. Below are my tweets of the tips I picked up during the webinar.

• Reduce image on page so it’s not distracting
• Good idea to include photos of people leading your webinar on the landing page
• Less is More!
• Trust symbols are key to increasing conversion rate (Better Business, A+, etc)
• A landing page without branding elements is like wearing old clothes to a job interview. (RT of @admom1)
• Instructor bio helps with credibility on landing page. But don’t include links… distracting
• IF you have a “personalized” or “custom” offer, say that for sure on your landing page… people like that
• Dropdown boxes are better than checkboxes or radiodials, as those make the form seem longer
• Use the form on your landing page as an opportunity to ask a business relevant question to our audience (RT of @AdamLaFever)
• If you have more than one piece of content to offer, have a SEPARATE landing page for each.
• Don’t forget to have branding elements on your landing page!
• Include Facebook Like and Tweet button on your landing page so people will share it!
• Need call to action AND “what’s in it for me” — why would I want to download this, or watch webinar?
• White text on background is tough to read (agree!) – instead, grey background with black text
• Headline shouldn’t be a question… use the action verb instead
• Keep your sales pitch on the Thank You page, not on the landing page
• Remove all links from landing pages, except if it’s the call to action button
• If you DO have links unrelated to your call to action, have the links open in new tab/window
• Have a Thank You page following your landing page. You can have more calls to action on those pages
• Don’t forget to mention the offer in the Headline!! (whitepaper, webinar, etc)
• Form is best on left, so it stands out
• “Blink test” – 5-10 seconds have for someone to understand what the page is about
• Bolding matters
• Good idea to do optional questions… i.e. Biggest Challenge
• Whitespace is good on landing pages — draws your eye to important parts
• Have at least one image in each landing page… should be simple, and include a caption
• Can even have action words on your “contact us page” — “train in 8 months…” — gets people thinking
• Put your form on the left side, to ensure it doesn’t get cut off on smaller screens
• Great idea to have a video sneak preview on the landing page
• Bold your buzzwords on the landing page
• Each landing page should have 3-5 bullets of what’s in it for me and compelling value
• All headlines on the landing page should include a good action verb
• “Top of the Funnel” forms should only have 2-4 fields in the form
• Entire landing page should be above the fold — don’t make people scroll down
• Good idea to include testimonials and credibility (awards, etc) on landing pages
• “Going Naked” – no navigation or other links on your landing pages, so people aren’t distracted
• Have offer in your headline on the page
• Good to add opt-in for your email list; make your “submit” button action oriented

Here’s a link to the slides they presented and a recording of the original webinar.

Do you have any other tips to create a successful landing page?  Please share them in the comments below!

Social Media Examiner (in partnership with BlogWorld) is happy to announce an online event designed to help marketers and business owners quickly achieve blogging success—Blogging Success Summit 2011. It’s a live online conference designed to help you master blogging for business, empowering you to quickly attract and connect with customers (and prospects). The industry’s leading blogging pros will show you how.

Join 23 experts, including Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, Scott Monty (head of social media, Ford), Darren Rowse (co-author, ProBlogger), Brian Clark (Copyblogger), Debbie Weil (author, The Corporate Blogging Book), Douglas Karr (co-author, Corporate Blogging for Dummies); experts from McDonald’s, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, Sony, and Procter & Gamble; plus Joe Pulizzi (co-author,Get Content Get Customers), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Jay Baer (co-author, The Now Revolution), Chris Garrett (co-author, ProBlogger), Dave Garland (author, Smarter, Faster, Cheaper), Mike Volpe (VP of marketing, HubSpot), Rick Calvert (CEO, BlogWorld) and Michael Stelzner (Social Media Examiner)—just to mention a few (scroll down to see full list)!

Event runs February 1 to February 22 (fully online).

If you find yourself in one of the categories below, the Blogging Success Summit 2011 is a fit for you:

• The Small Business Owner: You’re just getting underway with your blog—likely a consultant, coach, local business owner, writer, agent, artist, or general “gun for hire”—and see the potential of blogging, but want to speed your path to success with the least effort and the greatest return.
• The Corporate Marketer: You work for a corporation and have been tasked to manage the company’s blog strategy. You likely face internal battles generating quality content, but you know there’s real potential.
• The Experienced Social Media User: You’ve been running your blog for a while, but want better results. You’re ready to take your business to a whole new level by following the proven tactics of the pros and leveraging new techniques. Better response. Less work. More profitability.

>> REGISTER TODAY and SAVE 50% PLUS GET $794 IN FREE BONUSES!

By attending this online summit, you will:

• Discover the best ways to market your business with a blog! (no guesswork… you benefit from the wisdom of those who’ve gone before you)
• Find out how to build an engaging blog presence(enabling you to directly connect with customers and prospects!)
• Discover innovative ways to generate quality leads and increase sales with your blog (your pipeline will quickly fill up)
• Learn how to drive traffic to your blog with Facebook and other social media platforms (these underutilized principles can quadruple your fan base)
• Discover how to grow a loyal blog readership (you’ll gain raving fans who’ll become your standard-bearers without hesitation)
• See how successful businesses built their blogs and how you can achieve similar results (from both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies)
• Interact live with blogging marketers from recognized businesses, including Ford, Sony,McDonald’s, Cisco, Southwest Airlines, and Procter & Gamble.
• Eavesdrop on the closely guarded secrets of the industry’s top experts (interact live with social media superstars such as Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra, Scott Monty, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark, Debbie Weil, Douglas Karr, Mari Smith, Joe Pulizzi, Jay Bear, Michael Stelzner and many others!)
• Gain a leg up on your competitors, helping you stand out
• Ask live questions and get answers (you speak live to the experts, no chat boxes)
• Learn in your spare time and eliminate travel (you participate via the Internet in live sessions that are spread over multiple weeks—plus recordings and transcripts are included!)
• Network with your peers and share experiences via a private and exclusive LinkedIn group (more than 1500 marketers joined our private LinkedIn group at our last event)
• Become part of a genuine community of marketers and business owners just like you

Prior events have SOLD OUT, so register now!

I will be appearing on the “Mind your Own Business” Radio Show this week talking about my social media consulting business and WebinarListings. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Sunday between 9-11 AM to hear my segment!

Local Stations:

WBNW 1120 AM - Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA
WSMN 1590 AM – Nashua, NH

or stream online at MYOBTheRadioShow.com

Join MYOB on the following sites:

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Last week, I attended one of the best seminars I’ve been to in a long time, the Learn24 B2B Content Marketing Summit. I attended for two reasons: to learn more about B2B marketing, and to learn more about Webinars, given my newly launched WebinarListings business.  What was great about the seminar, is that it was short (yes, that’s important!), and had speakers from different companies who were experts in their area, and were NOT SALESY.  Good for them.  As Patrick Cahill says, it’s important to build trust in order to sell in the long term, and that’s exactly what they did.  Below are some of my tweets from the morning, or you can search for #learn24 on Twitter (or I was incorrectly using #ten24 for a bit too):

“Content Marketing from Strategy to Execution”, Stephanie Tilton, Ten Ton Marketing

• Companies that can become a resource by just promoting their content will become an ally with the customer
• Buyerpersona.com is a great site to help better understand and describe your customer
• Best in class B2B companies are 5x more likely to maintain a library of content that maps to their prospect’s buying stages
• If you create a white paper, think about how you can repurpose it — blog posts, webinars, etc
• Press releases are no longer just for new products. They can be for new content also.
• Progressive prospecting – no registration for 1st piece of content, ask for a bit of info, next time ask for even more
• Think of your content as being your early buying cycle sales person. So, that would also include competitive comparison on your site.
• Content sources – partners, customers (interview for blog posts), analysts, industry thought leaders
• Don’t forget to pull in content from other sources on Internet.
• According to David crouch and Emerge PR, market wire is the BEST (vs PR wire, business wire)
• Don’t forget about guest blog posts as a source of content

“Marketing Content Through SEO and Social Media”, Derek Edmond, Komarketing Associates

• In order to get listed in Google News, one of the important things you can do it to have a 3 digit ID in your post titles.  Not just the title. (see Derek’s comment below for clarification)
• When people see video results in search results, they click on them… good point — create keyword centric PR
• Content syndication tips – keywords in Browser title, headline, 1st paragraphy, body (use http in 1st reference)
• Google’s video guidelines
• Good content throughout the buying cycle:
  • Beginning – ebook, white paper
  • Middle – webinar
  • Later – newsletter
• Have only one call to action per content piece (after ebook, blog post, etc)
• Lookout 4 easy-to-find places that links can be created (profiles, etc) – even if no-follow, still has SEO value (promotion, traffic)
• How do you know if it’s a no-follow link? SEOMOZ or Firefox plugin
• Embed links in each video description on YouTube, not just in your Channel profile
• Use statistics to see where your video is referenced
• The profile website link on Twitter is no longer no-follow (see Derek’s comment below for correction)
• Postrank provides lists of bloggers by categories – sounds great

“How to Hit Your Growth Goals by Running Webinars”, Patrick Cahill, Rally Point Webinars

• Use a webinar to generate trust, not just as a sales pitch
• Same marketing budget is supposed to cover double the leads in this year
• 90% of companies’ #1 focus this year is generating leads
• Those who receive a voicemail about a webinar are 2x more likely to open newlsetter
• Those who received a voicemail and then a newsletter about the webinar, received 8% response rate! Good to combine tactics
• The secret to “guided voicemails”… “Sorry I missed you, I’ll send you an email in the AM”. And make the email look like a personal email, not a template
• The phone service Patrick uses is Box Pilot – $2/call
• #1 way most brands can get in front of prospects is through case studies and testimonials, to develop trust. Not sales.
• 5% of webinar attendees ask 100% of questions… so try to make it more interactive for the people not asking questions
• People feel more uncomfortable in a 1:1 selling situation… group sales are better (i.e. webinar)
• Repurpose your webinar content
  • split it up into 5 minute video chunks and upload to video site
  • make a blog post or newsletter with all the unanswered questions (blog post or email)
  • blow out one question in a blog post
• The average professional attends 4 webinars per quarter
• Give 6 weeks to plan for your webinar:

1. 1. plan
   2. build marketing and content
   3. create alignment
   4. social media and email and personal invites
   5. practice
   6. phone, eblast again

• Webinar tips
  • ensure they are thought-leader based
  • put your short sales pitch at end (not beg)
  • practice
  • ensure your webinar objectives are covered
• Assume 2% of your list will register for the webinar
• 50% of ppl register for a webinar will attend
• 80% of people who register will eventually see the webinar (recorded)
• 25% of those leads generated from your site will turn into short term leads (6 mos)
• 50% of leads generated on your site will become long term leads (6 mos to 2 years)
• Rain Today did a great study on using webinars for lead generation purposes
• Good idea to test your subject line as a tweet and see how many clicks you get for each
  • Good subject line – Hurry, register today OR Register today with webinar name

All the presentations are available online at the ten24 website, and here’s a list of resources from Stephanie’s presentation.

Random thought:  I realized something powerful after the seminar.  During the breaks, almost every person I spoke to was because we connected on Twitter during the seminar.  Just goes to show how powerful Twitter can be at developing relationships, and taking the online world to offline!

If you were there, do you have anything to add?  If not, do you have any questions or comments?

I’m pleased to announce, that in addition to my Marketing and Social Media consulting business, I have now launched a new venture called WebinarListings.  Through hosting a few of my own Webinars (online seminars), I noticed that there was no central website for hosts to promote their webinars, or for people to find out about them.  So, I created one!  Today is the beta launch of my site, and it will eventually be FULL of a variety of Webinars for all interest areas (business, health, technology, etc), in any part of the world. Right now it happens to be focused on marketing, social media, technology because that is where my connections are, but that will soon change. Webinars are a great way to learn new things right from your computer AND are free most of the time.

So, if you’re interested, I invite you to check out the site, and connect with me in any way you choose (many options below!), especially by signing up for the weekly newsletter.  During the beta period, the more traffic and registrations/followers I build, the more interest hosts will have to list their webinars with me… so I’m counting on you! If you hear of any Webinars being put on, please pass them my way so I can contact the host. And feel free to tweet, blog, facebook update, talk, or spread the word in any way.

I’m also running an introduction promotion for this week only (through the 14th) — use promo code “intro50″ for your Featured Webinar listing and get 50% off your Webinar.

I’m really excited about this, as it is really putting to use the skills I have in social media, marketing and Webinars. I’m looking forward to seeing where this takes me!

WebinarListings contact info:

Let me know what you think!  I’ll take all the feedback I can get.

Missed my Twitter 101 Webinar?  You can purchase a copy of the video recording here for $20. This webinar is a great introduction to Twitter, and includes the following:

• General overview
• Getting Started
• How to use Twitter
• Twitter lingo and do’s/dont’s
• What are the benefits of using Twitter
• A few companion applications

Twitter is about connecting to people with similar interests, and can be used for business or personal reasons, including networking, learning information, getting business, finding a job, etc.

If you have never been on Twitter or have not spent much time on Twitter, this webinar is for you!

(after purchase you will be automatically redirected to the video recording)

I was a panelist on this webinar “Facebook for Small Business Lead Generation”, moderated by Eric Glazer from Marketing Studio.

What do you think?  Anything to add?  Was this webinar helpful?