Doing some simple math, the sun is 93 millon miles (92,955,887.6 miles for you geeks). The speed of light is 186,282 miles per second. This would mean that Sunlight takes about 8 minutes and 19 seconds to reach the Earth (based on the average distance).

Whoa.

So the sun gives you more than 8 minutes to make your next move, but your landing page gets less than 10 seconds. The connection is weak, but the 8 minute sun thing is a bit scary huh? tick tock…:)

The point (is there one) is that you have very little time, you must really think clearly about your message. We find that most people (read marketers) miss a critical step; digital space is almost free. The cost to host one page, is the same to host 1,000 pages…or 93 million.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could land every customer on a page that they love so much that they would signup for whatever mojo you are offering them. MOJO = the featues, advantages and benefits of your product/service.

Why not do this…
(1) build many, many, single topic, specific pages
(2) optimize them for long tail SEO
(3) link them to “single phrase keywords” adword ads
(4) with an OMG compelling offer.

Saying it different….you wouldn’t land a Giants fan on a Patriots page…but most marketers land them on NFL.com. Doesn’t make sense.

8 minutes left..tick tock. You’ll never look at the sun the same again (disclosure..don’t look at the sun).

The approach is this; your product should be so simple that it doesn’t need an explanation, nor does it need instructions. The fact that it might be fun and a stress relief is a totally different challenge.

A few design approaches
1. Less is More – cut what you have in half, then cut it in half again.
2. Delete what you most care about – Your passion will get in your way.
3. No Flaming Logos – Don’t do cool, do what people want.
4. My Favorite – Show your spouse, the only true opinion.

Go create a checklist and follow it.

Wikipedia Reference – Awesome!

Yeah, we agree, makes no sense.

The recipe for success, no matter how simple; butter, cheese and pasta, take out the cheese and it fails.

Now that we are working with clients with budgets not based on fantasy or variable based on Vegas odds, we find high expectations; more for less. Now we all know that is not abnormal, the part that is interesting is that our clients think they want to spend money only in one place. We advise them against this. Do they have money for branding only? no, we get that. But you have to spend marketing dollars on the entire process.

Spend money on traffic only, you’ll lose lead conversion and sales conversion; take one out and it will taste bad. Sure, you’ll get your clients all excited about the traffic, wow huh? look at those graphs. In the end, if there is no sale, two things are true; (1) you’ll pay the price at the end of the month and (2) as a marketer, you are making a bad meal.

I guess that might be overusing this silly analogy; maybe. We just see it so much.

Online marketing, in it’s most basic form is simple to understand; bring traffic, convert traffic, create customers. Take out any of these pieces, and you fail.

If you are a online marketing specialist, or a business looking to get started in 2011, here are some questions to think about and answer.

What are my measurable goals?

8ONE8 Tips
- Impressions turn into clicks, clicks turn into leads, leads turn into sales.
- Measure your visitors; please do this.
- Calculate conversion at each step of the process and between the beginning and end. e.g. How many impressions (x) to create sales (y).

How am I going to maximize conversion?

8ONE8 Tips
- Landing Pages – Don’t drop people to your home page..ugh. please do this
- Analyze your past conversion. Any marketer who drives traffic without fixing conversion is wasting your money. Not kidding.
- Use Testing to know, don’t guess. Start with A/B…then quickly move to multivariate. Improvements can be in the 100+% range.

How do I avoid failure?

8ONE8 tips
- Measure
- Test
- Evolve

Graphics, Shawdow boxes, expandable content tabs, menu links, call to action, wow.

Simple, Secure Call to Actions.

Powerful blog with website updates using category based triggers.

Easy to edit pages, without the need to code or wait for your programmer to call you back.

Mp3 Playback Integration.

Mp3 download integration, tracks all stats.

Go to a local fair, the longest line is at the funnel cake mobile bakery on wheels. Dough, fried, with powdered sugar, easy to understand, yummy to eat. We like it too, but 100% of the people know it is not good for you.

Internet marketers are lazy. We know that makes some people upset. It is hard work to get the right set of keywords, get on page one of google for keywords you care about and painful to know what is ‘in’ or ‘out’ on the home page. It took meetings and months to make those choices. We know, we sat in those meetings (pssst…sometimes even led them..doh)

Why is it wrong….poor conversion. You likely somehow live with a bounce rate (fear rate) greater than >30% and a conversion of less than <10%. So out of 100 people, 30 don't do a thing and only 7 of the remaining people who did something, actually did what you wanted them to do. This is why the funnel method (see 'A' above in the drawing) is horrible, because it produces bad results. That simple; like Funnel Cake, feels right, but bad results.

The cost of every 'lead' is going up, in SEO effort and adwords click price. This means, without change, your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) is going up with more work...ouch. Fix it, build silos.

Build ‘silos’ to connect your customers with the right landing pages. If you sell personal water craft, you wouldn’t market to a person from Minnesota the same way you do someone from Florida? but you do, internet marketers do. Instead build ‘silos’ which connect your target market with an optimized landing page, for that customer type.

Your SEO and adwords campaigns will be more targeted, lowering your bounce rate. Your landing page will be more targeted, increasing conversion. And here’s the best part, the overall work is less and the costs are less. This will drastically reduce your CPA.

This approach is work. It takes a lot of work to set this up, and little work to maintain it. It is a scalable approach as new silos can be created quickly, current silos can be split into smaller ones to focus on conversion (lower bounce, higher capture). Since it is work, most internet marketers don’t do it, they are lazy. Sorry, we were once lazy too.