How to use this Page

This is just a quick tip on the importance of a simple website. I found the webpage below through a Tweet. I clicked on the link because I wanted to read the article, but guess what? The crazy-hectic background and left sidebar made me look here, there . . . I didn't know where to look. And, that was it for the article. I quickly exited the site. The article may have been exceptional, I’ll

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How do you create a marketing system that converts, and one that keeps working without any effort after the initial setup? It’s called the ‘evergreen system’ or the ‘autopilot system.’ And, it involves email marketing and autoresponders. I’m in the process of creating this type of system. I’m hoping to have it up and running in the new year. Interestingly, each pro marketer has their own

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According to Hubspot.com, “A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor's information through a lead form.”

Copyblogger.com says, “A landing page is any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result.”

So, landing pages are designed for specific purposes, such as a selling page for a product or service or for an email opt-in. But, no matter what the purpose is, it must be focused.

The page itself can be a separate website or a page on an existing website. But, since you want it completely focused, without distractions, a separate website usually works better.

It’s this landing page focus that allows for better conversion.

An effective landing page is designed and focused on a target market. This means if your site pertains to a specific cancer or illness, your content, opt-in, and any products you’re selling should focus on people dealing with this particular health issue. That’s your target market. And, your keywords should also reflect the page’s purpose.

If your site is about baseball, the same holds true. The landing page design, content, and any products or services being offered must pertain to baseball.

The landing page is kind of like a path on which there’s no way to stray off or be distracted. It’s intended for visitors to read exactly what you want them to, guiding them to say YES to your offer. There are no other pages for them to click on and hopefully no sidebar to be distracted by.

While inbound marketing strategies will get the visitor to your landing page, it’s the copy or content that will motivate him to follow the path and be responsive to saying YES.

Your content needs to be conversational, effective, and provide the WIIFM (what’s in it for me). People are overwhelmed with the amount of information being bombarded at them and with all the offers for books, ebook, and products. You need to write copy that (1) quickly lets the reader know what you’re offering, (2) lets the reader know exactly what the benefits are, and (3) lets the reader know what you want her to do.

Landing pages are no place for guessing games. They need to be fine-tuned, to the point, and simple. The more hectic you make the page, the more anxiety it will cause the reader. Anxiety isn’t good for conversion. Simple always works best.

You should also create separate landing pages for different offers or purposes. In other words, you don’t want to explain why a visitor should opt into your mailing list on your book selling landing page. And, you shouldn’t sell books on your subscriber opt-in page. Focus is a key element to motivating or leading a visitor to go through the necessary steps to saying YES to whatever it is you’re offering.

Bringing traffic to landing pages is done through inbound marketing strategies, such as email campaigns, special offers, guesting posting, and press releases. Other inbound marketing techniques include pay-per-click, ad banners, social networks, and affiliates.

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Another tool to boost conversion is marketing with video. If you have an information email or information product, or if you are selling a book or service, the most effective strategy for conversion is videos. Speedy Web Videos is an ecourse that teaches you, with step-by-step instructions, to create your own videos. Check it out today - CLICK HERE!

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MORE ON ONLINE MARKETING

Do You Have an Online Marketing Focus?
7 Elements of an Effective Landing Page Designed to Increase Your Mailing List P1
Text and Images – The Perfect Combination

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To keep up with writing and marketing information, along with Free webinars, join us in The Writing World (top right top sidebar).

Karen Cioffi
Award-Winning Author, Freelance/Ghostwriter
Author Online Presence Instructor

Create and Build Your Author/Writer/Home Business Online Presence
http://www.karencioffi.com/author-online-presence-ecourse/

Karen Cioffi Professional Writing Services
http://karencioffifreelancewriter.com/karen-cioffi-writing-services/

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Today's guest article is about creating domain names for specific landing pages on your websites or blogsites, and it's by Dana Lynn Smith. This is something I'm still working on.

Off we go:

How to Choose and Use Multiple Domain Names for Your Author Website or Blog 
By Dana Lynn Smith

A domain name is the address that's used to direct others to your author website, and it's usually preceded by www. For example, my main website and blog is at http://TheSavvyBookMarketer.com.

One of the first decisions authors must make in setting up an author website or blog is what to call the site and what website domain name to use for marketing purposes. But it may be a good idea to purchase several domains and point them to your home page or to different areas of your website. Below are some examples of domains commonly used by authors.

Choose a domain that matches your book title and point it to your book sales page. For example, SavvyBookMarketer.com points to the sales page for my Savvy Book Marketer Guides.

If your book is not yet published, you may want to make sure the domain name (or an easy variation of it) is available before you decide on the final title. Depending on your business strategy, you may also want register a domain to match your publishing company name.

For branding purposes, get a domain that matches your author name and point it to the "about" page or media page on your site. If you have written several books, you can use your author domain name for your main website. You may have to be creative to register your own name – try using a middle name or initials, adding another word such as “author,” or using an alternate extension such as .net instead of .com.

If you have multiple websites, you can create a personal website using your author domain name and link from that site to your other sites. For example, DanaLynnSmith.com points to a website that contains links to all of my other sites.

If you’re a fiction author planning to publish multiple books, consider using a domain name related to your genre for your author website, such as RomanceAuthorJulieJones.com

For search engine optimization, buy a topical, keyword-rich domain to point to your home page or book sales page. Look for domains that contain keywords people are most likely to search for when looking up information about your topic. For example, SellingtoLibraries.com points to my sales page for my book, The Savvy Book Marketer's Guide to Selling Your Book to Libraries.

According to Search Engine News, a domain name that exactly matches the keywords entered into a search engine tends to give that domain an advantage in the search results. Having keywords in the domain name also increases the chance of the searcher clicking on your link when they see it on the results page. The Google Keyword Tool is a good place to research the best keywords.

When choosing a domain name for your author website, watch out for potential pitfalls such as words or letters that look or sound bad when strung together. In your marketing materials, capitalize the first letter of each word in your domain name – it makes it much more readable. Here are some other tips:

•  Try to get the .com version of the domain name if possible
•  Don’t use hy

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Hey, everyone,

So this is my second SCBWI Summer Conference-related post. I've been meaning to post this for a while.


Lisa Yee's Monday afternoon keynote: "Ethnic Diversity in Literature: Should Who You Are Determine What You Write?"

As usual, Lisa Yee kept her audience in stitches

I was especially looking forward to Lisa Yee's talk on this all weekend because, about a year ago, I had left a comment on Lisa Yee's blog that touched on the fact her characters were Asian American. Then I'd freaked out an hour later and deleted it instantly. I was hoping this talk would enlighten me as to whether I could have left that comment up or not.

This is highly unorthodox, seeing as how Lisa Yee and I are LJ neighbors (as is Linda Sue Park from my last post, for that matter), but I can tell you exactly what that comment said. I'm going to post it again now, in this blog.

Hi, Lisa Yee,

Last night I was reading Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time when my husband asked what the book was about. I said, "Oh! This is Stanford Wong Flunks Big-Time, by Lisa Yee! It's the sequel to Millicent Min, Girl Genius, which won the Sid Fleischman Humor Award at the SCBWI conference a couple years ago. It's a really interesting way to do a sequel, too, because it takes place during the same time as the first book but follows the point of view of one of the other main characters, so you can really see all the places where the stories connect."

My husband looked at me blankly.

So then I said, "It's about an Asian boy who's really good at basketball and gets the cute, white girl."

Suddenly he reached for the book. "Really??" he said.

You really know your audience. ;)

Thanks for this,
Rita

I wrote this comment, and it seemed pretty funny to me. Then I went into my kitchen and made tea. Suddenly I found myself racing back to my computer and deleting the comment posthaste. What was I doing?? What was I thinking?? I didn't know where Lisa Yee stood when it came to Asian American identity! Who was I to be all, wink, wink, nudge, nudge?? If there's one thing working on Cooleyville had taught me, it's that no two Asian Americans are at the same place when it comes to what can be joked about and what can't. I didn't know if Lisa Yee shared any of the same cultural assumptions as me. I didn't know what cultural assumptions her readers were bringing to her blog.

Had I just revealed too much about myself??

Could I have left that comment up or not?

Well, now I've listened to Lisa Yee's talk, and in terms of the comment, I still don't know. I totally related to everything she said—delivered in her endlessly hilarious, truest-truth way—and most especially the way she introduced herself as having "only become Chinese recently." Everyone cracked up over that—except, perhaps, me. I didn't laugh out loud, because in that moment I was struck by knowing exactly what that meant. At one point I'd definitely felt more Chinese in a hurry, and that's exactly how I'd expressed it, too.

Once upon a time a friend tried to relate to me on the level that we were both minorities, and I had to confess that growing up Asian American in Orange County meant I had never felt marginalized. Which is not to say I felt marginalized later; but after a certain life-changing summer program in Taiwan and all the new friends I'd made and the Chinese pop music and my sudden willingness to speak Chinese (which I can do, if you trick me), I grew a lot more aware of how I thought about The Issues. I remembered thinking at the time (and it was definitely funny to think this way) that I'd become a lot more Chinese than I'd been, say, six months earlier. And once the process began, it never stopped.

I love that.

I'm not going to say this is "just like" how Lisa Yee's awareness heightened during reaction to her first book. (She started out thinking she had written a mainstream book with Millicent Min, and the reviewers seemed to agree, but her thinking was challenged when it was proposed they change the ethnicity of the character for a TV show.)

But.

Her talk got me flashing back all over the place, so that half of me was taking in everything she said, and half of me was remembering and thinking exactly how it must be.

Afterward, I still didn't know whether I should have posted the comment. Actually, now that I look at it, I'm sure I shouldn't have. There are too many ways it could have been misinterpreted. But I spent so much time thinking about it, I decided to go ahead and post the whole thing here.

For anyone interested, here is what I meant.

All the Asian American guys I know are obsessed with basketball. They love to play, they love to watch, and, most especially, they love to play. They play all the time, as much as they can, which is multiple times a week even now, when we're near our mid-thirties. They're very much like their junior high and high school selves that way. In fact, when we were out of college I used to make fun of my then-boyfriend (now-husband) and his friends for thinking it was okay to wear basketball shorts all the time, even to the grocery store, which is not how I'd ever thought my "dream guy" would dress.

(They don't do this anymore, but they still deny there's anything wrong with it.)

So I didn't for one second question the truth of Lisa Yee's depiction of Stanford Wong that way. I didn't even realize how refreshing it was to see that in print until I'd made the comment aloud to Damon. Once I had, however, I was like, Huh! You know...??

So the first misinterpretation I'd want to avoid would be if someone thought I'd meant making an Asian guy a jock was an "original," "creative" idea, i.e. going against type. No, that's not what I meant. The type is so natural to me—with basketball in particular—I didn't even realize it was missing from children's books until Lisa Yee wrote Stanford Wong. claps hands "Of course!"

The second half was acknowledging that most Asian American guys I know have a common, grudging awareness that Asian males, in media, are never depicted as getting the girl—most especially if the girl is a white, romantic lead. Asian males can be good or bad guys, usually cast in minor roles (if they can get those); and my friends are fairly divided over whether they like seeing themselves depicted as scientists or doctors. (Of course, you can think up isolated, sort-of exceptions to this "never" rule, which we can spend all day debating.)

In my comment, I wasn't saying Lisa Yee was acknowledging or bucking or doing anything deliberate regarding this issue. In the book, it's not an issue. Stanford and Emily like each other. My comment was meant as gentle ribbing over how an Asian American guy might take an interest in knowing this "miraculous" event had been depicted in a book. In a successful, popular one!

But that's a lot to expect people to get from my comment. The worst interpretation would be if people thought I meant my husband had an undue interest in white women. Good grief.

I saw Lisa Yee at the conference, and we've met a few times, so I meant to ask her about this in person (after I heard her talk). But she was so besieged with fans right up to the very end of the autograph party, I didn't have the heart to take up her time with such a long, potentially vague question.

I guess I wanted to know if she would have known what I meant—and whether she ever thinks of Stanford Wong as giving Asian American male readers what they've been missing. I know she said she didn't become aware of herself as "an ethnic writer" until reception of her first book—and that she had become aware by the time she wrote Stanford Wong. That's when she brought out the theme of Stanford's resentment of Millicent for playing to smart Asian type, for example (which I greatly enjoyed). But these other points of Stanford's character—the basketball, the struggling in school, the getting the girl; and even the resentment of Millicent—were already set in place by the end of the first book. So does she think of these other elements that way now?

Or is that all so natural, she still doesn't?

I'm just curious.

(No, it doesn't actually matter.)


If you had seen my comment on Lisa Yee's blog, and had not read any of what I just wrote, would you have known what I meant?

Would you have made one of the misinterpretations I suggested above?

Love,
Rita

P.S.
I should probably mention—

When I say "Asian," in this post, I mean Asian American. I don't usually say the whole thing. In the context of my life, American's just implied.

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