Landing pages are a wonderful marketing strategy – one that can be used by every vertical and in every situation. Here’s the low down on this killer marketing strategy!

What is a landing page?

First, let’s get clarity on landing pages. Landing pages are no more than simple HTML web pages – synonymous with squeeze pages and capture pages. The purpose of a landing page is to acquire visitors’ emails (and possibly other demographics).

Why use landing pages?

There are two main reasons:

1. When you advertise your business, you want to have some accountability for each of your advertising partners. Are they delivering a return? Do you even know? Landing pages are an excellent way to monetize your advertising campaigns. Because you can track each campaign with a unique landing page, for a very minimal cost, you have absolute figures without relying on some third party to monitor your advertising stats.
2. You want to appeal to your target ed audience as much as possible, so by setting up a landing page for each campaign you are able to co-brand your landing pages with the same look and feel of the referring publisher site, or simply cater to or leverage the language used in your ads. You will be able to test your landing pages as well to achieve optimal results.

Why build a list?

If you setup your pages properly, and consistently drive traffic to them, you will find your list growing steadily. But why have a list at all? Let’s start simple – would you prefer to end out an email once a month to 300 people who “might” be interested in what you do or sell, or, send out that email to 3000 prospects that put THEMSELVES on your list?

So now this is common sense, right?

How do I get them on my list?

Glad you asked! There are a ton of tools out there to help with your email marketing efforts and really, that’s another subject for another time. Basically, you would setup an account, create a form and copy/paste it onto your landing page – that simple, seriously.

Here’s two list building automation resources we recommend:

When should I use landing pages?

Excellent question! All the time! Every marketing campaign you send out and every marketing strategy you put together should always loop around to a landing page, if possible.

In your radio ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/radio.
In your magazine ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/mag.
In your television ads, send traffic to www.yourdomain.com/tv.

I think you get the point… If you are trying to determine your ROI for each of your media placements, then be sure to use simple, affordable landing pages to segment your leads and track each campaign independently.

Since Twitter API hit the scene, there’s been a huge influx of new Twitter tools on what seems like a daily basis!

It can be confusing at times, not knowing which tool to use and, more importantly, how to use it. I’ve tested nearly 50 Twitter tools that have had at least decent reviews, but I want to share the top 3.

First and most impressive, in my humble opinion, is HootSuite:
http://hootsuite.com/

For Twitter tools, this one is a stand up tool – it allows you to manage and distribute tweets across multiple twitter accounts. That’s just for starters – it also has a built in URL shortening service ow.ly (cute name too). Last but certainly not least, you can setup your tweets for timed distribution.

Since having niche twitter accounts is a great strategy for making money on twitter, you can really leverage this tool, together with the two below, to grow your online business or rise awareness for your cause fast!

Next, is Twollow:
http://twollow.com/

Twollow is a neat app, as it allows you to save hundreds of hours of searching for people tweeting about the things that interest you most. You can set the process up for each of your twitter accounts and assign niche phrases for the service to automatically follow. The more phrases, the better you results will be.

When it comes to following people, you want to spend your time communication with a list of followers that care about your content and with whom you can engage in conversation with. It may take you a week or so to find out just how powerful this tool is – but you can also take the shortcut can check your phrases against the twitter search (search.twitter.com) to see how many and what kind of results are coming up.

Lastly, we’ll look at TwitterFeed.
http://twitterfeed.com/

While at times this thing can be annoying, due to high frequency – you can setup twitter feed to post once an hour, or even better, 4 times a day (every 6 hours). This allows you to have relevant and valuable content flowing through your twitter accounts. Just like HootSuite, you can manage all of your twitter account under one Open ID login, which is very cool!

Imagine, having 10 twitter accounts for differing niches and keeping relevant content flowing through each of them, daily.. this tool is more for the twitter fanatic and it truly takes some common sense, otherwise you can fall into that spammer category real fast.

Five words of caution: Low Frequency, Nice Feed Content.

There are a ton more tools, as I mentioned I tested nearly 50 of them this past year. These are the cream of the crop to me. There are some honorable mentions though, and in no particular order, they are:

TweetLater – Great service for sending automated and timed direct messages and managing follower karma. http://tweetlater.com

TwitterCounter – A useful tool for doing some research into your new followers, competition and sharing your twitter profile on other websites with it’s embedded tools. http://twittercounter.com

Twellow – A twitter yellow page directory that allows you to seek out and follow people – it also has a great expanded profile feature when you confirm your twitter profile listing. http://twellow.com

I hope you got some value from these 6 tools and my brief review of them. I encourage you to test out new and emerging twitter tools as well, and post a comment with anything spectacular you find!

Copied with permission from: Joshua Jones

One of the best marketing strategies ever has been the use of websites to serve information and transact business or lead prospects and clients through a guided, and often automated, process.

Setting up a website, though, can be a daunting task for most.  Not so with WordPress.

WordPress is a blogging framework that gives you a real website with a database to store information. The framework allows you to scale your online presence and content on the fly, without having to be a webmaster or html expert.  The beauty of this framework is the fact that open source and free for use on any scale.

Because of how WordPress is built, you can utilize this framework to setup a blog, website, landing page or any other web presence you can imagine.  It is a fully extensible platform allowing savvy developers to make massive applications in record time and amateurs to create money making websites on the fly.

Take a moment to visualize your website before you begin this process.  In terms of strategy – be sure to research your market and search trends before you get started.  See how you will deliver your content to your audience and plan ways to leverage that traffic (ie: newsletter signup, affiliate promotions, advertising, etc.).

Having a clear picture in advance makes this process a lot smoother!
Don’t forget to write your thoughts down.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Have your web hosting setup ahead of time.
2. Purchase your domain name.
3. Setup your MySQL database on your web hosting.
4. Get over to WordPress and download the latest release.
5. Unpack the contents into your website root directory.
6. Run the installation.
7. Locate, download and unpack the theme you want to use.
8. Install the plugins you want to use.
9. Edit the settings for your site, theme and plugins.
10. Organize your categories, pages and links.
11. Start writing content!

There is a lot more we can fill into these steps and even some steps you need to have done beforehand.