Testimonials

Using the 140 character social media strategy to create buzz around your books and ebooks … Continue Reading »

Let’s face it, blogs are a popular way to get a message out quickly and publicly. The question is: How can your business benefit from this form of online publishing? To answer this question, we offer some words from the interesting book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs by Paul Bausch, Matthew Haughey, and Meg Hourihan. … Continue Reading »

Justin Custoni of EpikOne explains why Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics work hand in hand … Continue Reading »

How TripAdvisor.com builds brand loyalty by interacting with their community … Continue Reading »

Building or looking to improve a newsletter website? Learn these 8 best practices for building profitable newsletter website templates. … Continue Reading »

10 Criteria for Increasing Open Rates and Conversions on Your Email Newsletters or Promotions … Continue Reading »

Harvard has opted not to use a traditional landing page to sell the Harvard Health Letter.

Instead, the main sales page for the Harvard Health Letter is a minimal transaction page with the barest of copy and graphics, and is devoid of the selling effort one would normally expect when promoting a paid subscription publication online.

Knowing the smart marketers at Harvard, we have to believe that this is a deliberate choice. As we recall, they don’t use this “bare minimum” approach in print promotions: their paper direct mail that we’ve seen consists of strong, long-copy sales letters that sell the publication and its benefits, and sell it hard. Why then would they opt for this “bare bones” approach online? This review really addresses a broader, more important question: are online and offline copy fundamentally the same or fundamentally different? … Continue Reading »

Two standard business models that support the long tail and make money online … Continue Reading »

A review of the B2B Magazine and InfusionSoft webinar “Launch a Webinar Program End-to-End” … Continue Reading »

The casual visitor makes an impression of your subscription website based on numerous factors. Whether consciously to unconsciously, most potential members are looking for certain elements that indicate to them that you and your business are legitimate. … Continue Reading »

How to use social networking sites to create buzz, an online community, and more traffic to your website … Continue Reading »

How publishers are incorporating video where it fits for them … Continue Reading »

Finding your external resources and discovering how they can help you get to page one in Google. … Continue Reading »

The same high quality copywriting and design elements can be used for online, email and postal mail sales pitches.

Multiplatform publishing in the 21st century means offering users many products on many platforms, and using the Internet to recycle, reuse and republish information in many different formats.

This involves taking the same information and turning it into any format a user could possibly want—from e-books to streaming video to email newsletters. Publishers not only save on material costs, but the same information is being cheaply repackaged and sold in a multitude of formats to maximize customer satisfaction and revenue. … Continue Reading »

Sales letter landing pages pre-date the Internet in that they resemble traditional direct response sales letters.

A sales letter landing page is a conversion landing page. Its objective is to convert the casual visitor into a paid customer.

Sales letter landing pages are traditional direct response sales letters designed to maximize the conversion rate for a paid product. Often, the very same sales letter landing page, with minor but significant modifications, can be used in both email and postal direct marketing programs. … Continue Reading »

Some publishing skills have not changed and are not expected to

Publishing’s transition from print to digital has caused a lot of changes over the years. Your office is loaded with computers. You have website, an email newsletter and digital reports. You might not even consider your business a magazine or a newsletter anymore, but a provider of useful information. Has anything stayed the same?

Copywriting, for one, has been a vital skill for decades, and it’s unlikely to disappear or change anytime soon. … Continue Reading »

Internet Marketing 2.0 (aka Marketing 2.0) starts with defining your audience’s needs through research. Are you meeting the needs of your online audience?

As an Internet Marketing Consultant, I seem to spend a lot of time researching Internet marketing questions that, at first, I have no clue how to answer. Often my research leads to even more questions about what exactly my clients’ users are doing online and how we can help them find us and like us. Sometimes it feels like marketing in 2007 is mostly research - and maybe it is. … Continue Reading »

Great testimonials can be very persuasive. The value of member corroboration and its ability to get new subscribers to your membership website cannot be under-estimated.

Know this about the buying process: Whether they know it or not, everybody has a personal strategy for rationalizing his purchase decisions.

All purchase decisions are emotional, but in order to be congruent, buyers need to create reasons for their choices. … Continue Reading »

As an online publisher, part of your job is to make information easier to manage for your subscribers

The majority of membership websites and email newsletters are instructional. Members join or subscribe in order to access content that is not available to non-subscribers. Much of this proprietary information is of the how-to variety.

If you’re a publisher of an email newsletter, and you’re stuck for a story idea, think checklist. You’ll almost never run out of ideas and you’ll provide your subscribers with valuable tools that increase your credibility as an expert. … Continue Reading »

A membership website is a user driven, content-based website satellite that generates the majority of its revenues from user access fees. This website business model is similar to a book club, professional association or user group that accepts little or no advertising, relying primarily on user support. … Continue Reading »

In Psychology 101 we all learned the basic principles of attraction and avoidance. Pleasure and pain. Reward and punishment.Boiled down, I think of it this way: You either want something you don’t have, or you have something you don’t want.If you suffer with back pain, you have something you really don’t want, and you’re not alone. … Continue Reading »

The Mequoda Library recently did an Internet Hub Case Study on America’s Test Kitchen. A brief recap: the company takes the 2.9 million viewers from their TV show, America’s Test Kitchen, and pushes them to www.AmericasTestKitchen.com, a Mequoda Internet Hub, where viewers can get recipes featured on the show for free. … Continue Reading »

If what we learned in Psychology 101 is true, the basic motivators of human behavior are simple: humans seek pleasure and avoid pain. You either have something you don’t want (avoidance principle) or you want something you don’t have (pleasure principle).

Psychologists tell us that everybody wants: food, shelter, health, sex, love, money and general well being. Look at every product you see advertised on the Internet or elsewhere. The ultimate reward to losing weight, finding a better job, buying a better home or car, etc., is finding intimacy with the person of your dreams—your soul mate. … Continue Reading »

The Writer’s Store is an extremely competent site serving a tightly-focused niche market.
Although competent in most areas, a few, relatively easily-implemented changes—described in the Recommendations section at the end of this review—could increase sales by building a stronger emotional bond between the store and its customers. … Continue Reading »

We were first introduced to InvestmentU.com when we interviewed John Phillips, who heads up search marketing for the website. He and his team have done a very impressive job of bringing visitors to the InvestmentU.com site with a combination of organic and paid search. In this review, we look at the landing page that InvestmentU.com uses to convert these visitors to customers for its lead product, The Investment U Course. … Continue Reading »

In a recent landing page review in the Mequoda Daily, John Clausen asks: is there any subject more mulled over and carefully considered than our health and appearance? If you can do something to make the population more slender and likely to live longer, you should be able to make a fortune—shouldn’t you? … Continue Reading »

OK, folks. Bring your seat and tray to the upright position. We’re ready for take off with an incredibly convincing and compelling landing page that shows you the mesmerizing influence of “good old fashioned-take-no-prisoners-suck-out-the-money-from the wallet” copy and graphics.

The secret of creating streams of revenue in a niche business is to identify a problem that keeps your prospect up at night and then give them a real, viable, solution. Now everywhere you go on the Internet there’s always some marketer who says they’ve invented a better “widget” (I’ve never seen a widget, but apparently there are a lot of them out there) to improve every website owner’s quagmire: search engine ranking with the 800 pound gorilla Google as well as with Yahoo, and MSN. … Continue Reading »

A friend of mine sent me a printout of the landing page promoting a copywriting course from American Writer’s & Artist Inc. He wanted to know if it would be worth it to him to enroll in the AWAI course. I was impressed that my friend, a skilled writer who has done national infomercials and other projects, was interested in this letter. It takes a lot of sales skills to tempt a semi-cynical infomercial writer.

I couldn’t really tell him definitively how he would benefit from the course if he took it, but I did decide to put the landing page through the Mequoda Scorecard and see how it fared. The site is a classic in the long-copy tradition. The landing page sales letter printed out to 18 pages. I love long copy, but let’s see what the scorecard has to say. … Continue Reading »

What criteria would four of America’s most successful copywriters use to create better sales letter landing pages? And how would 26 landing pages from a variety of large and small publishers and authors hold up under their intense scrutiny?

Over the past 12 months, John Clausen, Peter A. Schaible, Robert W. Bly and Peter J. Fogel have used a list of 12 guidelines designed to increase landing page conversion rates to critique 26 successful (and a few not-so-successful) sales letter landing pages for a variety of books, magazines and newsletters for Mequoda’s Creating Landing Pages That Sell. … Continue Reading »

A Well-Planned Strategy, Attractive Website Design and Thoughtful Attention to User Tasks Makes GardenGateMagazine.com an Absolute Blueprint for an Effective Magazine Marketing Website … Continue Reading »

This landing page works mainly because it engages the reader, teasing you with their wonderful fascinations, while not overwhelming you with clutter. The copy does a strong job of building your trust and presenting its credibility on its main portal homepage (and subsequent landing pages). If this was a free standing micro site, you’d need more information. Bottom Line presents an overall strong communal feel to its readers on their overall site (not necessarily on this Store page). … Continue Reading »

Unclear Strategic Intent, Non-existent Content Webification and Relationship Building are All Letting Visitors Run Around in Circles on SalaryExpert.com, or Worse, Just Run Off the Site with No Reason to Return … Continue Reading »

Website Design Critique of UsedBoats.com Reveals Functional Design Lacking Personality and Appeals to Loyalty Beyond the Dollar. … Continue Reading »

Doctor Douglass’ Real Health Breakthroughs Landing Page by Agora Demonstrates How Traditional Long Copy, Captivating Headlines and Effective Story Telling Convince Readers to Buy … Continue Reading »

Personnel Policy Service Publishers is Plagued by Poor Organization and Uninspiring Graphic Design, Degrading a Site That Otherwise Offers Both Useful Free Content and Premium Products … Continue Reading »

Learn how one publisher added simple user testimonials and increased landing page conversion rates by 23 percent. … Continue Reading »

Mequoda guidelines outline the 12 characteristics a landing page needs to successfully close sales online. And to incorporate all 12 characteristics typically, at least for a consumer product, requires medium-to-long copy on that landing page. But should you send your traffic directly to that long-copy landing page? Or will visitors be put off by its length? … Continue Reading »

Devoting Too Much Homepage Real Estate to Website Navigation and Graphic Images Demonstrates a Compromise in the Selling Power of Text—a Major Mistake for a Lead Generation Site like CareerCoach.com … Continue Reading »

Integrity and professionalism abound on the Briefings Publishing Group’s website, but their “all business” approach may be responsible for letting a lot of potential business remain unsold. It seems Briefings.com’s future may be based on satisfied readers, not website “sell.” … Continue Reading »

You might know, and subscribe, to one or more products from information marketing juggernauts like Bottom Line Publications, Agora, Healthy Directions or Philips Investment Resources. More importantly, you may study their strategies and creations like an aspiring artist studies the work of the great masters. … Continue Reading »

When you’re preparing a Powerpoint presentation for that important sales meeting, and you just can’t figure how to get your bullets to line up just so, wouldn’t it be great to have the answer at your fingertips? Well, that’s what the Element K Journals website wants to do for you. Whether you are a business professional, a design maven or a technology geek, this site has the answers you seek. … Continue Reading »

Can a person (moi) who has never had a weight problem review a landing page that markets healthy recipes which enable someone to lose unwanted pounds? “Yes!” he emphatically says with a mouth full of rich, calorie-filled cheesecake. Ohannualrecipes.com is the name of this landing page, which belongs to Oxmoor House, a Time Warner Company. … Continue Reading »

It’s really quite difficult to find fault with an organization that devotes its time and resources to helping people train and care for their dogs using natural techniques and products. Dogs are our best friends, right? And who isn’t in favor of natural techniques and products under just about any circumstances?

So it is with the utmost respect for dogs, dog trainers and dog people in general that I unleash the Mequoda Landing Page Scorecard on the gentle folks who wrote and designed the landing page for The Whole Dog Journal. … Continue Reading »

Andrew Harper’s Hideaway Report® is a privately published newsletter dedicated to the discovery of peaceful vacation retreats for the sophisticated traveler. The publication claims 85 percent of its executive subscribers hold the title of CEO/President/Owner/Partner. … Continue Reading »

Cooking Club of America is an efficient, user friendly membership site. We found this site by typing “Cooking Club of America” into Google, and this is the first page that showed up in the organic listings.

While this page serves as the home page of this membership website, it also serves as a rapid conversion landing page, as it immediately offers a free issue of Cooking Pleasures magazine in exchange for a free trial membership to Cooking Club of America. … Continue Reading »

Bottom Line Secrets: America’s best source of inside information is also a lesson on how to sell newsletters online. … Continue Reading »

Giving credit where it is due: a cornucopia of useful information for industry professionals and an exemplary business-to-business website. … Continue Reading »

At first blush, you would probably expect that a world class publication, with all its resources and media knowledge, would have a truly inspiring landing page. They are, after all, The Wall Street Journal. … Continue Reading »

If you divide products into two categories—must-have and nice-to-have—newsletters fall decisively in the latter. No one needs newsletters. As Bill Bonner, founder of Agora Publishing, a large consumer newsletter publisher likes to point out, “Nobody wakes up, taps their significant other on the shoulder, and says, ‘Honey, we need to get some more newsletters today.” … Continue Reading »

“We don’t turn back our odometers.”

When I first logged on to the sales letter at SuperAffilateHandbook.com, I liked the clean design and the bright colors. However, I can’t say I feel the same about the brief, but very negative, intro copy the author offers at the top of the lette … Continue Reading »