Easy Forms

E-mail blasts are one of the best ways to get people going to your site, but they can also be a great way to generate leads.  Why not link to a simple form what requests the user fill in name and phone number?  Rather than just looking at clickthroughs from an optin to your site, you can now look at how many potential customers you attracted from that optin, real people looking for more information.   It is true that some users are hesitant to fill in their info, but there are some great ways to get around this:

1.     Make the form fairly short – don’t ask every possible question, figure out what the most important things you want to know, narrowing it down to 5 questions will make the completion rate much higher.

2.     Offer Incentives – Offer a giveaway or a discount on your product if they request through the online optin.  Although you might be thinking this could get very expensive, the giveaways can be fairly inexpensive like a $5 t-shirt.

If you’re wondering how to include one of these forms on your site or in your optins, there’s a great website out there called “Wufoo,” they offer a trial that is completely free and the monthly fees aren’t too bad either.   They do all the work for you in helping you build an html form that fits what you need and looks just like your website.  Check them out here. http://wufoo.com/

Alert! Alert!

One of the best ways I keep track of what Google is doing on our site is by seeing what Google Alerts come across.  Google alerts will email you a list of the latest Google results of a specific topic or keyword.  I signed up for Google Alerts for all our website names as well as important keywords that we want to track and see what competitors are doing.  Everyday, I get a list of any new Google listings that have been picked up for the keyword.  To sign up, you just go to http://www.google.com/alerts.

Google Best Practices

Google recently published some best practices to help have your website perform better in organic search listings.  The document goes into a lot of details regarding links, metatags, URL structures, etc, but the most important thing to keep in mind when developing a website is to make it user friendly.  Think about your potential users and how they might search for things in google.  Use those search keywords in your headers, make the website easy to navigate, and keep the content up-to-date and accurate.

Opt-in Tips and Tricks

Here are some optin tips that I’ve found to increase the open and clickthrough rates.

Keep it short – People read emails very quickly, an optin is not meant to tell the whole story, it’s just supposed to direct people to do something.

Links – make as many things linked as possible.  No brainer right? The more links the more chances of someone clicking.  I especially recommend linking all images, this will give you those extra few accidental clicks over to your site.

Subject Line – make it catchy.  If you think about it, what emails do you typically open.  I know I open the ones that

Layout – Be sure to have the important content at the top of the email.  You want to make sure users can get the information without having to scroll.

Call to Action – most importantly; you need a large call to action.  Because optins are online, a call to action like “Click Here”, or even “Fill Out this Form” are quick and easy for audiences.  I don’t recommend making people email in, or pick up the phone to call.  These kinds of things are also much harder to track than clicks or forms filled out.