Author: Alex Becker

Exhibiting at a trade show can be costly, but for the world of me, I fail to understand what most companies are thinking when they bring a whole team or hire temporary “booth babes” but have absolutely no clue or a game plan what they want to accomplish. Without proper and effective training, some booth staffers may not realize how some inadvertent actions can impact an organizations reputation and potential business. Below is a Top 10 list to keep in mind before the next show.

Top 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Exhibit at an Affiliate Marketing Conference

1 ) If you “ran out” of business cards on Day 1.  Time and time again I constantly hear, “Oh I am sorry, I ran out of business cards.” Really? You spend all this time and money and forget something so simple but critically important?

2 ) If the first words out of your mouth are, “Where are the parties tonight?”  While parties are a great venue to network and drum up some business, it should not be your sole motivation to attend.

3) If you find texting more exciting than the people waiting for you at your booth.  You can’t begin to imagine how many booths I visited at the Ad-tech and what % of the employees were on their phones texting. Forget the employees; I saw numerous C-level execs doing the same.

4 ) If you prefer talking on the phone while people are waiting for you at your booth.  See comments to bullet 3 above.

5 ) If you prefer eating while people are waiting for you at your booth.  We all get hungry while manning the booth – but schedule a time with your team where you get a break and go eat in a designated area.

6 ) If you prefer “passing” the card to someone not present to follow up.  This is a favorite of mine. I am at your booth, ready to give you some business but what do I hear, “email us at affiliateservices@mycompanydoesnthavethetimetotalknowandwearewaytoobusytexting.com and we will have one of our dedicated reps contact you.”

7 ) If you prefer talking to your neighbor more so then potential customers.  See point 3 above.

8 ) If you are late to your meeting appointment.  We have numerous meetings lined up at these shows and often times they run a bit longer than expects – and that is perfectly fine. But extend the courtesy of emailing, calling or texting the next appointment that you are running a bit late and let them know.

9 ) If you are more concerned about giving your pitch rather than taking the time to find out my needs.  Often times I hear companies ramble on and on about how great they are but not for a sec take a moment and ask what it is that I truly want.

10 ) If I know more about your company than YOU do.  This has to be my all time favorite. Most of the staffers have absolutely no clue what their company truly does, what their benefits are relative to their competition, how they can help me achieve my goals. If you are going to be at a booth – take the time to learn some basic concepts such as (I am sure they may be difficult for some of you): CPA, CPL, CPS, Affiliate Marketing, PPC, SEO, PPV, Co-reg, etc. See where I am going with this?

—–
Ricky Ahuja is the CEO of Affiliate Venture Group

ADOTAS – As a publicist working predominantly in the online advertising space, a good indication I get regarding what’s happening in the industry is from the new business prospects that come my way. First of all, good things are happening in the industry, based on the quantity of leads my peers and I are receiving. Beyond this, one trend that is clearly growing is affiliate marketing.

A decade ago, the affiliate marketing industry had a reputation of being the response-based, sales-driven, “non-creative” end of the online advertising world. But as more and more established brand marketers embrace affiliate marketing, the industry’s reputation (and share of the ad budget) has improved. Add to this all of the niche-based ad opportunities which social media and the blogosphere have provided for affiliate-based advertising – where affiliate-based ads for a fast moving consumer goods products make perfect sense on a Mommy blog – and you have an industry that is gaining strength.

And here are a few trends which are contributing to the growth of affiliate marketing:

1. The rise of social networking functionality like Facebook’s new Sponsored Stories, which enable an advertiser to sponsor a users ‘Like’ OR check-in, are basically turning all of us into affiliate marketers for the brands which choose to support. Couple that with the growth of Word-of-Mouth marketing, and we’re starting to experience a new and more personalized form affiliate marketing, not unlike one envisioned by Heather Locklear in this commercial for Faberge Organics commercial from the 1980s.

2. The increased acceptance of activity-based compensation, including revenue share deals and cost per action, has made it more acceptable to work with affiliate marketers who work almost exclusively with activity-based compensation.

3. Affiliate marketing is sometimes referred to as performance marketing. After 2009, who doesn’t want a campaign that can be monitored and measured on a performance basis (well, accept for the creative director)?

4. A final trend I’m seeing which is impacting affiliate marketing is re-targeting. With re-targeting all about converting shoppers who previously visited a website, arming affiliates with the ability to retarget was a logical conclusion. Today, companies like myThings (disclosure: myThings is a client) are bringing affiliate marketing to affiliate networks and their affiliates (publishers) and merchants (advertisers).

This isn’t the death of the 30-second TV commercial (or the Internet banner ad), but affiliate marketing tactics are going to be implemented more and more in online (and offline) advertising campaigns.

—–

Uriah Av-Ron works for Oasis PR and is based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In recent days, there has been a virtual maelstrom of outcry and heated opinions on Google’s recent algorithm “shift”. Nowhere else has this controversy manifested itself more than in the article marketing space.

In January, EzineArticles, the largest, and still most authoritative article directory online, cracked the coveted 100 most popular web sites in the world, serving 57 million unique visitors that month. Then, striking with the suddenness of a vicious lightning bolt, on Thursday, February 24, Chris Knight, CEO of EzineArticles, confirmed they lost 11.5% of their traffic and the following day, Friday, another 35% of their traffic vanished.

Later the same night, Chris made a blog post at EzineArticles saying that next month (March 2011, that is) their traffic may fall to half the levels it achieved in January.

What is going on? Does this sudden, swift, and dramatic decline signal the death knell for article marketers everywhere? Especially those that have come to rely on EZA primarily as the vehicle to deliver that laser targeted search engine traffic to their web sites?

Opinions are heated and varied. On EzineArticles’ blog, as of this writing, Chris’s post has garnered over 250 responses. Similar heated debates are popping up on the Warrior Forum, and, of course, AssociatePrograms.com’s own Brad Hauck discussed the duplicate content issue with respect to article directories such as EZA in the most recent newsletter.

After running an affiliate training service for almost 3 years that revolves around article marketing, and living and breathing the space, my answer to the questions posed above is both yes and no – that is, some article marketers are in for a rude awakening, while I smell opportunity for others.

Let me explain.

Chris Knight on his blog post mentioned various ways EZA intends to tighten up their rules even further. Here’s the crux of his argument: “We’ve been both quietly and publicly at war with a small percentage of our membership who aim to use our site to game the search engines with what we refer to as ‘article vomit’ or thinly-crafted software-spun articles.”

EZA will now spend more time on quality checks – format, grammar, spelling, and consistency – and has increased word counts to 400 words minimum for acceptance. Other possible actions include requiring articles submitted to them to be unique only to them (no longer allowing the same article to be submitted to various article directories), and more.

On Saturday, after I had time to read the various threads, Chris’s comments, EZA’s possible impending changes, I then performed a thorough review of the traffic being generated by members of my article marketing training service.

The good news is we, as a group, were not negatively impacted even though article marketing is the traffic source we most rely on to generate affiliate sales.

The real question is: Why?

The short answer is we keep things “legit” and “real.” It doesn’t matter if you’re in my training service or not. If you want to persevere and prosper with your online affiliate endeavors, I believe the same lessons will apply to you.

For example, from the outset, I have always advocated my members do the research for the industries and products we are promoting and learn to write the articles themselves under our guidance. Anyone in my service will vouch for the fact that I have always severely cautioned against using article spinners, and PLR services.

Well researched, authentic, meaty content
As a result, our members overwhelmingly produce well researched, meaty, authentic content in the niches we target, providing real value to people who come across those articles. In fact, one of the long standing perks of my service is that I personally review the first few articles students write to give them feedback on how to improve their writing – or point out things they are doing wrong.

As a corollary, because our articles tend to be highly informative, it’s with very rare exception that members of my service ever write articles under 400 words as well, thereby already protecting them from “sweeps” of thin content articles that EZA is already in the process of implementing.

Because I also foresaw some potential issues with duplicate content penalty, several months back I also initiated a preemptive protective action in my service to allow any member (new or longstanding) to obtain unique, original copy for their affiliate presell web site so that no two students would have duplicate content that appears on their sites.

In addition, about half of our members build their own presell web sites, and, as a whole, do a fantastic job of keeping their content original because it’s in alignment with the way we teach and do our article marketing – we don’t believe in or advocate derivative material. On this latest Google shift, I checked out some of their web sites and noticed their results were still strong, often claiming top rankings for desirable keywords.

Bad news for some affiliatesN
ow, the bad news. If you were the type of article marketer who was churning out hundreds, if not thousands, of short (250-300) word articles quickly, and using article spinners, and PLR services, your days are undoubtedly numbered. In fact, in the days ahead, it’s likely you’ll see most of your articles wiped clean out of EZA directory, if it hasn’t happened already.

However, if you target true evergreen products, do real research, and keep your content valuable, you’re actually going to find the latest changes to your benefit in the fullness of time. As the thin content article marketers get cleaned out, I strongly believe the result will be less competition for not only members of my service but legitimate article marketers everywhere.

In addition, EZA may also be reducing the number of Google AdSense ads they serve on pages of their site as well. If they do, this should translate into an even higher click-through for legitimate article marketers who stick it out because probably the biggest diverting factor from getting the readers over to your presell site was losing them to a Google AdSense ad served on EZA’s site itself. Of course, this is how EZA keeps their service free, but it’s still worth pointing out this potential upside to us article marketers beginning in the near future.

Recommended changes
Having said all of this, I am advocating certain changes to my members (and to all of you). First, I believe you should write only unique content for each article directory. If you write an article for EZA, that article should not be submitted to other article directories, and vice versa. EZA may or may not implement this rule, but I think you should be doing it anyway.

Moreover, whereas I used to think it was OK for someone to add articles they’ve written and own to their own web sites or blogs, I no longer advocate this. Perhaps I am being paranoid, but you never know just how far Google is going to go with the “duplicate content” thing. I suggest that members now keep their article marketing content unique and different from the content that they create on their blogs and/or presells.

Lastly, I think the days of “bum marketing” are coming to a close. “Bum marketers,” as near as I could tell, tended to focus on fad products. They did some quick, superficial research, blasted some article marketing to those fad products using thin content for a while, then rinsed and repeated the process for the next hot product of the month. Indeed, on EZA’s blog post on this issue, they mentioned that sweeps of certain areas have already happened, acai berry being one example they listed – and which also happens to represent a perfect example of a fad product.

Bum marketers, by their nature of constantly jumping around and promoting new things, never really develop deep knowledge in the niches on which they are writing. They also almost never use the products they are promoting, either, and this clearly shows in the content they create. By contrast, a significant portion of the members in my training service, through the knowledge they acquire, come to believe passionately in the products we promote and end up as consumers themselves, which, in turn, creates a genuine experience and furthers their knowledge, which manifests itself in their content.

In conclusion, life throws us all numerous challenges. It’s always how we react to circumstances, even if we cannot control them, that counts in the end. Of course, it’s always helpful to be keenly cognizant of potential issues before they crop up and nip them in the bud.

I believe one reason for our enduring success as an affiliate training service is because we have tried to anticipate potential issues before they have arisen, just as you must, and taken action accordingly. Of course, I’m also quite certain we’ll face issues in the future we had not anticipated, but our resolve will be to solve those problems when and if they arise.

The ability to adapt to change is one of the hallmarks of leading a successful and productive life, and in the Internet marketing space, change happens much quicker than it does in many other fields. If you expect to endure as an affiliate marketer for the long term, as I have for 9 years now on a full-time basis, you must always stick to creating content and promoting products worthy of longevity. Attempting to make the “fast buck” today may mean making no bucks later, whereas building a proper foundation, even if it’s a bit slower out of the gate, may mean a passive income that sets you free in the years ahead.

—–
Dan Ho is a super affiliate and the founder of AffiliateArticleWriters.com, a training service to build lifetime & passive income.

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“I didn’t sign up for this!” An impulsive and angered hand clicks the “Mark as Spam” button.

Spam complaints can tell you a lot about your email marketing campaigns. One thing they can indicate is that it’s unclear to your subscribers what they are signing up for and how when they’ll receive your messages.

So how can you minimize spam complaints from the get-go?

Keep reading to find out how a few of your fellow email marketers do it by setting expectations!

When evaluating the cause of a spam complaint, the first step is to take a look at your web form.

It’s absolutely crucial to set expectations throughout the life of your email campaign, starting with your web form.

Your web form must explain exactly what your subscribers will receive, the benefits of subscribing, and when subscribers can expect to receive your messages.

Let’s take a look at how Print It Party, a party decor site, sets expectations with their web form:

To make certain that important details are not overlooked, they place information not only in the header of the form, but above the form as well. With your own form, if you can’t explain in full detail what subscribers will receive in just the header, include a description near the web form on the page.

This web form includes the benefits of what the subscriber will receive – “free printables and contests, extra-hip party tips and secrets and new products alerts.” They make their newsletter sound special and exciting while describing exactly what is to come.

Using a subscriber counter has shown to be a successful tool in gaining subscribers. A potential subscriber viewing the counter will see that others are benefiting from your newsletter. This establishes your information as a reputable source.

Battlefield Equipment, an equipment rental site, sets expectations using this method.

Battlefield Equipment’s subscriber counter builds trust and sets expectations about the quality of their “Battlefield Equipment eNewsletter.” Potential subscribers can see Battlefield already has a significant following and they will be more inclined to trust that the messages and content they will receive are valuable.

Just as Techbite describes when subscribers will receive messages, Battlefield notes that subscribers will get “seasonal” specials. If you do not send each week or month on a specific day, you can still use detailed words to describe “when” messages will go out.

Including an image on your email sign up form can increase recognition and help you to maintain consistency throughout your campaign.

Take for example the web form on the homepage of the brain games and fitness company, Braintraining. Braintraining’s form includes imagery and lets subscribers know they respect their privacy.

Their attention-grabbing lightbox form includes an image of the Brain Training Power Pack. Including this picture allows subscribes to visualize what they are going to receive.

The form also contains a link to Braintraining’s privacy policy. Include a link to the privacy policy in your own web form to assure subscribers that you are sending a safe and private newsletter.

These forms do not simply say “Sign Up for My Newsletter.” They include valuable and descriptive information to begin an honest relationship with subscribers.

You can see a little detail goes a long way in setting expectations. To prevent potential complaints, make it your priority to set expectations right off the bat.

How do you set expectations at sign up?

Brought to you by Aweber

I have a client with a deep-pocket online media budget. Google Adwords PPC, banner ads on major news sites. We’re talking some sizable money to generate traffic and turn that traffic into customers. I bet you’re thinking a big part of their budget was earmarked for landing page development and testing. I would have thought so, too, before they became a client. But what I quickly discovered was this – there wasn’t a series of landing pages. There wasn’t even one landing page! All of the clicks, all of their costly PPC traffic was being directed to the homepage.

Literally, their best prospects were being dumped off at the front door with little direction or guidance as to how to proceed. Yikes.

Now just to be fair, literally any page of your site or blog is a landing page of a sort. To my mind, every page should be optimized to move your visitor along whatever path you’ve set forth toward a sale, a newsletter or blog subscription, what have you.

But for the purposes of this post, I’ll confine myself to those landing pages where your prospect initiated some sort of response to an ad. This could be a PPC (pay-per-click) ad like Google Adwords, a banner or text ad, or even an email. In this scenario, your prospect has initiated some sort of relationship with you. Your landing page acknowledges this and provides additional information – benefits/features – and a clear path to the next step.

So let’s look at 10 key steps to writing and designing a landing page that will help get you the results you’re looking for:

ON WRITING

1. Make sure your headline refers directly to the place from which your visitor came or the ad copy that drove the click. Match your language as exactly as you can. (Close is good, exact is best.) This way you keep your visitor oriented and engaged. This is by far the most important part of your landing page.

2. Provide a clear call to action. Whether you use graphic buttons or hot-linked text (or both), tell your visitor what they need to do. I use a minimum of 2 calls to action in a short landing page, 3-5 in a long landing page. Copy tests here will give you the biggest bang next to testing headlines.

3. Write in the second person – You and Your. No one gives a rat’s patootie about you, your company, or even your product or service except as to how it benefits him or her. (The bigger the company the more time I spend rewriting their stuff from We to You.)

4. Write to deliver a clear, persuasive message, not to showcase your creativity or ability to turn a clever phrase. This is business, not a personal expression of your art. (Every copy coaching student hears me say this at least once.)

5. You can write long copy as long as it’s tight. I always err on writing a little long on the first drafts because it’s easier to edit down than to pad up skimpy copy. Your reader will read long copy as long as you keep building a strong, motivating case for him/her to act. However, not every product or service will require the same amount of copy investment. Rule of thumb: Think longer copy when you’re looking to close a sale. Think shorter copy for a subscription sign-up or something that doesn’t necessarily require a cash commitment..

6. Be crystal clear in your goals. Keep your body copy on point as a logical progression from your headline and offer. Don’t add tangential thoughts, ancillary services, and generic hoo-hah. (Hoo-hah makes the client feel good but wastes the readers time.) Every digression is a conversion lost.

7. Keep your most important points at the beginning of paragraphs and bullets. Most visitors are skimming and skipping through your copy. Make it easy for them to get the joke without having to slow down.

8. In line with #7, people read beginnings and ends before they read middles. Make sure you keep your most critical, persuasive arguments in these positions.

9. Make your first paragraph short, no more than 1-2 lines (that’s lines, not sentences.) Vary your paragraph line length from here. It helps create visual dissonance and makes it easier to read your copy. And no paragraph should be more than 4-5 lines long at any time.

10. Write to the screen. Take a piece of paper and frame-out where your text, buttons, and design elements will go. Consider how much of your content will be seen “above the fold” or at the first screen. You can still go long and have visitors scroll downward. If so, you’ll want to make sure you repeat essential calls to action, testimonials and other components so no matter where your visitor is, an ACT NOW link or button remains is visible.

3 BONUS TIPS:

11. Remove all extraneous matter from your landing page. This includes navigation bars, visual clutter, and links to other sections. You want the reader focused solely on your copy, your supportive visuals, and the offer you’re making without being tempted to wander around the room.

12. Don’t ask for what you don’t need. Ask for only enough information to complete the sale or the desired action. This isn’t the time to conduct a marketing survey. Every question you ask, every piece of information you require will chip away at your response. Be judicious.

13. Assume nothing. Test everything.

These tips and techniques will get you started, but they just scratch the proverbial surface. Design elements are critical, too — color, images, layout — as well as video, audio, and other interactivity elements whose purpose is to more deeply engage the reader and boost response. They all merit a deeper look and testing where it makes sense.

Recommended Resource: The one book I recommend without reservation is Landing Page Handbook, How to Raise Conversions — Data & Design Guidelines. Published by Marketing Sherpa, this is a compendium of everything “landing page” that copywriters and designers should heed and study deeply. Not a cheap reference at $247, it is, however, the one to own if you’re serious about learning the science and technique behind great landing pages. (Alternatively, Try this Book by my friend Tim Ash)

Get more from Roberta Rosenberg at her blog, The Copywriting Maven.

Free Traffic Here.

Landing Page Optimization techniques and teaching.

Summary:
Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.

In Web design, there’s much confusion about the “page fold” concept and the importance of keeping the most salient information within a page’s initially viewable area. (That is, in fact, the definition: “above the fold” simply means “viewable without further action.”)

During the Web’s first years, users often didn’t scroll Web pages at all. They simply looked at the visible information and used it to determine whether to stay or leave. Thus, in usability studies during that period (1994–1996), sites often failed if they placed important information below the fold as most users didn’t see it.

This reluctance to scroll made sense at the time, because people were used to having computers show all their choices. Dialog boxes, CD-ROM multimedia shows, and HyperCard stacks all worked that way, and didn’t require scrolling. (Although users sometimes encountered scrolling text fields, they didn’t need scrolling to see the commands and options, and could thus make all decisions from the visible info.)

In 1997, however, I retracted the guideline to avoid scrolling pages because users had acclimated to scrolling on the Web. This was a rare case in which usability guidelines changed quickly. Typically, usability findings are stable across many years: 80% of Web usability guidelines from the 1990s are still in force.

Today, users will scroll. However, you shouldn’t ignore the fold and create endless pages for two reasons:

• Long pages continue to be problematic because of users’ limited attention span. People prefer sites that get to the point and let them get things done quickly. Besides the basic reluctance to read more words, scrolling is extra work.
• The real estate above the fold is more valuable than stuff below the fold for attracting and keeping users’ attention.

So, yes, you can put information below the fold rather than limit yourself to bite-sized pages.

In fact, if you have a long article, it’s better to present it as one scrolling canvas than to split it across multiple pageviews. Scrolling beats paging because it’s easier for users to simply keep going down the page than it is to decide whether or not to click through for the next page of a fragmented article. (Saying that scrolling is easier obviously assumes a design that follows the guidelines for scrollbars and such.)

But no, the fact that users scroll doesn’t free you from prioritizing and making sure that anything truly important remains above the fold.

Information foraging theory says that people decide whether to continue along a path (including scrolling path down a page) based on the current content’s information scent. In other words, users will scroll below the fold only if the information above it makes them believe the rest of the page will be valuable.

Eyetracking Data

Last month, we conducted a broad eyetracking study of user behavior across a wide variety of sites. To investigate whether the “fold” continues to be relevant, I analyzed parts of the study with a total of 57,453 fixations (instances when users look at something on a page, typically for less than half a second).

To avoid bias, I only analyzed data from 21 users accessing 541 different Web pages, even though our full study was much larger. To convince you that I didn’t limit the data for nefarious reasons, let me explain why I excluded some parts of the study from the present analysis.

Because our research goal was to generate fresh insights for our annual conference seminars, we targeted large parts of the study to test:

• sites with novel navigation features for the IA courses;
• corporate blogs, interesting FAQs, etc., for the seminar on Social Features on Mainstream Sites and the two-day course on Writing for the Web; and
• Web-based apps for the Application Design seminars.

For each specialized topic, it’s perfectly valid to target a study and test sites that have features that we want to investigate. For example, to gain insight into carrousels for our navigation seminar, we should track users’ eyes as they encounter carrousels. To do this, we simply ask them to use a site that happens to include a carrousel, but we don’t draw their attention to that design element.

When we deliberately ask people to test sites that contain particular design elements, we can’t conclude that their behavior is representative for average sites. Sticking with the carrousel example, people might well scroll less often than normal if the carrousel successfully keeps their attention on the upper part of the page.

Our study also featured a component that let users go to any site they wanted, for the sake of our broad-ranging seminar on Fundamental Guidelines for Web Usability. These non-constrained tasks are the source of the data I’m analyzing here, because they tested the regular websites people use, as opposed to sites we picked for their design features.

Attention Focused at the Top

The following chart shows the distribution of user fixations along stripes that were 100 pixels tall. The bars represent total gaze time, as opposed to the number of fixations. (In other words, two fixations of 200 ms count the same as one fixation of 400 ms.)

Even though 5% of users’ total time is spent past the 2,000-pixel mark, they tend to scan information that far from the top fairly superficially: some pages are very long (often 4,000+ pixels in my sample), and thus this 5% of user attention is spread very thinly.

In our study, user viewing time was distributed as follows:

• Above the fold: 80.3%
• Below the fold: 19.7%

We used an eyetracker with a resolution of 1,024 × 768 pixels. These days, many users have somewhat bigger screens, and we’ve conducted many (non-ET) usability studies with larger resolutions. Although using a bigger monitor wouldn’t change my conclusions, it would somewhat increase the percentage of user attention spent above the fold simply because more info would be available in the initially viewable space.

Scrolling Behaviors

Sometimes, users do read down an entire page. It does happen. Rarely.

More commonly, we see one of the two behaviors illustrated in the following gaze plots:

Gaze plots showing where three users looked while visiting pages during three different tasks (one test participant per page). Each blue dot represents one fixation, with bigger dots indicating longer viewing time.

On the left, the user scrolled very far down the page and suddenly came across an interesting item. This viewing pattern gives us many fixations that are deep below the fold. We often see this pattern for well-designed FAQs, though the best FAQs present the most frequently asked questions at the top (so that many users won’t need much scrolling).

The left gaze plot also illustrates another point: the last element in a list often attracts additional attention. The first few items are definitely the most important, but the final item gets more views than the one before it. (That’s also why the bar chart shows more attention to the 701–800 pixel area than to the 601–700 pixel area: the bottom of our study monitor fell within the former area.) The end of a list’s importance is further enhanced by the recency effect, which says that the last thing a person sees remains particularly salient in the mind. (We discuss the design implications of the recency and primacy effects in our seminar on The Human Mind and Usability.)

The two other gaze plots show more common scrolling behaviors: intense viewing of the top of the page, moderate viewing of the middle, and fairly superficial viewing of the bottom. (I picked examples where users scrolled more or less all the way down — often there’s no viewing of the bottom because users don’t scroll that far.)

It’s as if users arrive at a page with a certain amount of fuel in their tanks. As they “drive” down the page, they use up gas, and sooner or later they run dry. The amount of gas in the tank will vary, depending on each user’s inherent motivation and interest in each page’s specific topic. Also, the “gasoline” might evaporate or be topped up if content down the page is less or more relevant than the user expected.

In any case, user attention eventually peters out, and the further down the page users go, the less time they generally spend on each additional information unit.

The middle gaze plot shows a category page with 50 sofas:

• The top 2 rows get about 5–10 fixations per sofa.
• The next 4 rows get around 2–4 fixations per sofa.
• The next 8 rows typically get 1 fixation per sofa.
• The bottom 3 rows get 2 fixations for one sofa and no fixations for the remaining 7 sofas.

This is only a rough pattern, and users will deviate depending on the content. For example, the Cameon Loveseat and the Custom Hugo Loveseat both get 4 fixations despite being 2,750 pixels down the page. Presumably, the user found these two sofas particularly appealing.

Design Implications

The implications are clear: the material that’s the most important for the users’ goals or your business goals should be above the fold. Users do look below the fold, but not nearly as much as they look above the fold.

People will look very far down a page if (a) the layout encourages scanning, and (b) the initially viewable information makes them believe that it will be worth their time to scroll.

Finally, while placing the most important stuff on top, don’t forget to put a nice morsel at the very bottom.

Check out CPAWAY: The Leading Affiliate Network doing it Your Way!

—–
Jakob Nielson is the leading expert in Internet Usability

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A landing page is a place you send traffic when you really want some action. And no, this has nothing to do with Craig’s List personals. It can be a sales page, an email opt-in page, a video landing page, or even a content landing page designed to rank well in search engines. As you might have guessed, there are a lot of ways to screw these up. Here are five of the most common mistakes people make with their landing pages. More importantly, I’ll tell you how to avoid making them yourself.

1. Blowing the headline

Landing pages live or die by the quality of the headline. It’s your two-second chance to overcome the swift and brutal attention filters we’ve developed due to information overload and poorly-matched promises.

Often, a better headline alone will boost the effectiveness of your landing page, and even overcome some of the other mistakes below. Split-testing different headlines is relatively painless, and can bring you much higher conversions compared with multiple other tweaks.

2. Using your regular site design

Most of us who use content marketing as an attraction strategy use a content management system, such as WordPress. That means we’re using design themes for the visual presentation of our sites.

While your typical sidebar and header approach to a blog post is fine, when it comes down to traffic hitting a landing page with a singular focus on specific action, all of that extraneous stuff causes confusion, distraction, and reduced conversions. Lose the clutter and create the cleanest page possible when you want some action.

3. Asking for more than one thing

The idea that more choices make people happier has been proven to be a psychological fallacy time and again. This “paradox of choice” reveals that when given multiple options, the decision ends up being not to choose at all.

An effective landing page asks for one specific action, and that’s it. And don’t forget to actually clearly ask for that one specific thing, which is an even bigger conversion killer if you don’t.

4. Ignoring basic aesthetics

Why is it when some people decide to ask for some action, they lose their minds on the appearance of the page? Bad fonts, garish colors, cheap highlighting, and silly clip art do not make for better conversions in most cases. What they do is crush your credibility.

While using your standard blog theme is distracting and confusing in the landing page context, there’s no need to become the typographical equivalent of a carnival barker, either. Great landing pages use fonts, colors, and visuals that are tailored specifically to the audience and action you desire, thereby enhancing the experience and boosting conversions.

5. Being lazy

Did you know that web users spend 80% of their time above the fold? Does that mean people won’t scroll down the page? No, it just means you can’t take it for granted that they will (instead of leaving).

Don’t be lazy about grabbing and holding attention. Don’t assume everyone instantly “gets” the benefit of your offer the way you do. Don’t overestimate your credibility. In short, don’t drink your own Kool-Aid. Think about it from their perspective, and you’ll realize you might not be all that (until you unequivocally prove you are with compelling copy).

Learn how to get Free Mass Traffic

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About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Copyblogger Media. Get more from Brian on Twitter.