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This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work. Daniel Heuman’s software helps writers, editors, translators, and proofreaders prepare error-free documents with greater ease and speed. He tried and abandoned PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, as he discovered the folks who clicked through weren’t his best prospects. (That’s a technique that almost certainly deserves some more thought and attention another time.) Daniel is now marketing directly to prospects via email and showing some success, but he feels more can be done. Let’s see what we can do. The Goal: Generate enough free-trial downloads to sell 3 licenses a day. The Problem: If folks are downloading a free-trial and not converting, it’s a product vs. value problem. If the problem is growing the numbers of prospects to take the free trial, that’s a traffic problem. If interested prospects are visiting the site or landing page and not engaging with the message, that’s a conversion problem. The Current Landing Page (homepage): http://intelligentediting.com Value: $90.00 Click image for larger view The Maven’s 10-Point Critique My personal take is that Daniel needs to generate enough traffic – via organic, SEM and social media channels – to grow his own mailing list to which he can continue marketing to his heart’s content. A stronger, more effective homepage would offer an overall boost to his ongoing marketing efforts. #1– Make your case in the first screen with a strong, provocative headline. Why would a professional writer or editor pay $90 for additional proofreading functionality? The rational reason: Cleaner, error-free documents. The emotional reason: To look better in the eyes of a boss/client/customers. Sloppy work reflects badly on the writer and the company represented. Clean work makes everyone feel good and confident. So while the current headline: “Proofread Faster, Proofread Better” is a clear statement, I’m wondering how we can juice it up a little? How about: Just One Typo Can Rob You of Credibility and Cash You’ve just gone from “reasonable” to “irresistible” with a provocative headline that resonates emotionally with the visitor. #2 — Add more oomph to the tagline. Again, your tag is very clear on the most basic of benefits: Cleaner, Smarter, Better Documents That’s a good start, but then I’m thinking … why and for what? A great exercise for headlines and taglines is to take your basic feature or surface benefit and “Why? Because!”or “So what?” your way through it until the core emotional truth is revealed. Try working these words (or their variants) into your tagline: polished presentation reflection #3 — Invite your visitors to take your video tour from the get-go. You already have a nice little video, yet you’ve basically hidden it from view. Slap it on your homepage and do a voice-over track. I found watching the material without a guiding voice unnerving. Your voice-over would allow you to expand on the action in the video and highlight those areas of greater interest. Don’t hide the good stuff. Warm it up and share it. #4 — Be upfront about who this product is and isn’t for. The only place I see “MS Word for Windows” is in teeny type under your box illustration. I’d give this more push so Mac users can grunt and grumble under their collective breath and move quickly elsewhere. #5 — Keep sprinkling the goodies that keep visitors thinking “This is for me!” Highlight the product’s ability to proof both British and American English. This capability strikes me as huge benefit for writers/editors working internationally. You also have a strong guarantee. Get it on a homepage badge and show it off. And you make customized versions — another wow, especially for those working in big organizations. #6 — Rework your navigation for greater clarity. You’ve hidden a lot of the product goodies in secondary position in terms of your primary navigation. I suggest the following revisions: Primary navigation HOME Features Success Stories (Testimonials & Case Studies) Reviews Resources Download & Pricing Contact Us Secondary navigation: About Us — FAQ & Tutorials — Forum — Blog — Support #7 — Build your traffic organically with smarter SEO. This is your current title tag for search: Intelligent Editing — Cleaner, Smarter, Better Documents A tagline, though, isn’t necessarily a good meta title — and it’s the title tag plus the content that Google sizes up and determines your topic and site relevancy. So let’s adjust and get some primary keyword phrases in the front of the title like this: Proofreading & Editing Software for MS Word Documents :: Intelligent Editing I didn’t do the research to determine if these are indeed the best keyword phrases , but you get the idea. Frontload the terms that your prospects are using to find you … and add the product name, too. #8 — Build your mailing list with a newsletter and a blog. Since your email campaigns have been pretty effective for you, that means you need to add more names to your list so you can continue doing — and expanding on–– what works for you. Add a newsletter sign-up and offer one or more of your current resources as a bonus for subscribing. Add a blog, too. It doesn’t have to be fancy or involved. See tumblr.com or preposterous.com for some easy-to- implement ideas. #9 – Connect with your prospects with social media. Build your authority in this niche space on this niche topic via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. If there are writer/editor specific social media venues, make sure you have a presence there, too. Social media is a long-term strategy to building credibility and a fan base that trusts you and ultimately your products for purchase #10 — Tweak your homepage with one big Call to Action. Click image for larger view I’ve tweaked your current homepage to reflect and illustrate the suggestions I’ve made here. (I know you didn’t want me to, but honest, I just couldn’t help myself. ) You could easily flip the placement of the video and headline/bullet/call-to-action sections. (Mea culpa for the incomplete sentences, dangling participles, and other little idiosyncrasies that make editors weep and gnash their teeth. All I can say in my own defense is this: “I’m a copywriter.”) My thanks to Daniel Heuman for his patience and support of Heifer International. Look for my next makeover in approximately 4 weeks. About the Author: Roberta Rosenberg is The Copywriting Maven at MGP Direct, Inc . Find her @CopywriterMaven on Twitter. If you’re interested in a private page makeover, site audit, or other services, please email Roberta directly .

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Landing Page Makeover Clinic #28: IntelligentEditing.com

Via TVBR.com Optimedia US has unveiled findings from Content Power Ratings 3.0, its third annual report that ranks network and cable programs across TV, web and mobile platforms. A proprietary media metrics system, Content Power Ratings goes beyond traditional audience ratings to measure a show’s true commercial value and footprint. It factors in total cross-platform audience size, advocacy and involvement—providing the industry’s only TV ranking system across three screens. New to the study this year are two additional streams: Facebook fan count and Nielsen BuzzMetrics, both of which quantify unique aspects of digital activity: the number of “friends” TV shows have on Facebook, and the sentiment of conversations on blogs and chatrooms related to those shows. How Optimedia US creates its Content Power Rankings: Using data culled from the agency’s own primary research, as well as from Nielsen Media Research’s NTI database, Nielsen Online Video Census, Nielsen Mobile, comScore’s Media Metrix, Facebook, Nielsen’s BuzzMetrics, E-Poll’s FastTrack™ Television, Google Trends, and Dow Jones Factiva, Optimedia’s Content Power Ratings value programs using three key criteria: 1. Audience Delivery – including average audience impressions across TV, Web and Mobile platforms 2. Involvement – overall awareness of and loyalty to program; including index of Google search volume and effort made to watch the show 3. Advocacy – overall levels of conversation and PR activity– including press mentions, recommendations and general “buzz,” in addition to personal recommendations Content Power Rankings If only the shows with high content power rankings could further capitalize on the equity their products hold beyond their primary television distribution channel.

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Content Power Ratings

Text Messaging has become the centerpiece of communication for American Teens. From the Pew Research Center: The mobile phone has become the favored communication hub for the majority of American teens.1 Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, with cell calling a close second. Some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones, up from 45% in 2004. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns. Fully 72% of all teens2 — or 88% of teen cell phone users — are text-messagers. That is a sharp rise from the 51% of teens who were texters in 2006. More than half of teens (54%) are daily texters. Among all teens, their frequency of use of texting has now overtaken the frequency of every other common form of interaction with their friends (see chart below). Teen Texting Fully two-thirds of teen texters say they are more likely to use their cell phones to text their friends than talk to them to them by cell phone. One in three teens sends more than 100 text messages a day, or 3000 texts a month. Learn more about teen communication behaviors and trends from the Pew Research Center .

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Teens And Cell Phones: Text Messaging Tops Usage

A 40 year-old unsolved murder mystery. Strange cryptic codes in a bible. Sweden, sandwiches, and many, many cigarettes. The badass-est female protagonist since . . . forever. And an author who has, posthumously, caused quite a ruckus in the book world and in the minds of conspiracy theorists everywhere. Yes, I’m talking about The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo . If you haven’t heard of it, the rest of us are inviting you to come out from under your rock. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy ( The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest) is topping bestseller lists as we speak and the theatrical release of Dragon Tattoo hits the U.S. next week. I had the good fortune of screening an advanced copy and, of course, my mind went blog, blog, blog . Because that’s what blog obsessed people like us do. So here are the blogging lessons I learned from this tattooed ‘girl’ . . . Gasoline feeds a fire, but first there has to be a spark At one point in the movie, a man lies under a car. Having just flown off the side of the road, both he and the car are demolished, gasoline is spilling out everywhere . . . and he waits, watching, trapped. Finally there’s a spark . . . and then fire, total combustion. So often we have all of the ingredients, right? The design is just right, the writing is perfection, the research says that there’s a need for the content . . . but then, nothing. No traffic, no comments, no buzz. No combustion. What’s missing? There has to be a spark. Maybe it comes in the form of a new partnership, a referral, or an outside event (like a shortage of light bulbs) that makes your product (candles) suddenly burst into high demand. Maybe you have a life-changing event that triggers your passion. Maybe you read a book that causes something to click in your brain or your heart. And then, there’s no stopping the heat. Nothing more, nothing less Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo, is a woman of few words, but they’re always the right ones. She communicates through her gestures, carefully chosen words and even her silences. To some people around her, this is maddening. But others totally get it and they pay incredibly close attention to her. They listen closely . . . and they also watch. As a blogger, what you don’t say can be as important as what you do say. Do you find the positive in challenging situations, gleaning lessons and inspiring others? Or do you bitch and moan, spreading negativity? Do you stick to your topic? Or is your blog scattered, full of everything under the sun? Do you promote everything that could be remotely related to your blog? Or do you bow out of a big launch that, for one reason or another, isn’t quite right for your readers? What is the significance of what you leave on the blogging room floor? Document everything In the movie, as Blomkvist and Salander try to solve the mystery, they are aided again and again by the record-keeping of other characters, the police, the newspapers, and themselves. It’s the last, ‘themselves,’ that holds the lesson. Working to uncover this decades-old secret, the investigators look for the needle in the proverbial haystack. With so much unknown, their path to discovery lies in documenting every thought they have, literally pinning them to the wall for examination — and never, ever brushing aside even one moment of insight or possibility. Ideas for blog content, joint venture partnerships, promotions, ebooks — and even tweets and Facebook updates — often shoot through our brains at a fast and furious pace. Blogging fodder is everywhere. It’s in the conversation you have with the souvlaki guy outside your building every day at lunch, it’s in the color of the car that just drove by, it’s in the ad that you saw for hairplugs. If you don’t grab these ideas as they fly by, they will keep flying. Trust me. Write it all down. Nail it to the wall. Even the thoughts that seem impossible, unreachable, or just plain ridiculous. The clue to your own success will lie in your own observations and insights. Don’t lose them. It’s hard to be brilliant all by yourself The story’s protagonists bounce their ideas off one another — and often hear brilliance in their partner’s ramblings. Blogging is about community. Who can you bounce ideas off? Who might hear your mumblings and, in turn, grab you by the shoulders and tell you that you’re actually onto something? Who can you help by being a sounding board? You might have someone’s missing piece in your back pocket. Like a tattoo, things are permanent on the internet Lisbeth has many tattoos, including a dragon covering her entire back. Getting ink like that is a serious commitment. Yes, you can have laser surgery to get a tattoo removed, but from what I can tell, it never completely disappears. A scar is left behind. And I’m told the process is neither pleasant nor easy. If we really want to get deep here, we can go so far as to say that your memory of the tattoo can never be removed. Blogging is also a commitment. We commit our time, we commit our creativity, we commit our resources. And every time we hit ‘publish’ we commit to our ideas. The internet is a pretty permanent place and it’s hard to ‘take it back’ once the words are out there. Yes, you can go to the trouble of having something uncached — but again, it isn’t pleasant or easy. People will remember your post, they may have even printed your words on paper. We’re time-stamped and cached, linked to and quoted, and even scraped. Be as sure as you can be each and every time you share. Don’t underestimate anyone Played perfectly by Noomi Rapace, Lisbeth is mysterious, tattooed, and pierced. She’s also tiny, often mistaken for a skinny, 14 year-old boy and underestimated because of her small size. But she’s able to fight off grown men — both physically and mentally — time and again. I believe the appropriate term here would be scrappy ass-kicker. And it works to her advantage. She has surprise on her side and she’s impressive, even to those who don’t particularly like her. With a blogosphere more crowded than a Twilight premier (and some days with just as much screaming), it’s a phenomenal idea to stand out. It’s the old case of man bites dog. What can you do, how can you say it, where can you share it so that it lands like a snowman in a cranberry bog? (That is: with a splash, much coolness, and bright by contrast.) Lisbeth is also the underdog. To be honest, she’s the runt. But a few people look beyond that (or don’t even see it at all) and take a chance on her. It helps her, of course, but it also helps them. They don’t see her size, her income, her appearance, her odd personality, her history. They see her skill, her brilliance, her dedication, her inherent goodness. How many Top 10, 25, 50, 100 lists have you seen that tout the best bloggers, the best writers, the twitterati? Sadly, many people get caught up in these lists and think that these people are the only ones to do business with or read, because they look good on paper. But we all start somewhere. Chris Brogan just wrote that it took him 8 years to get 100 subscribers on his blog — and look at him now. As bloggers we can only help each other and the quality of the blogosphere by discovering new talent, sharing what we know and giving people a chance. No matter how small and skinny . . . no matter how many tattoos. About the Author : Julie Roads invites you to join the Dragon Tattoo Blog HUNT — an internet wide scavenger hunt tied to the feature film launch of bestselling book The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. You can win great prizes — free movie tickets, books, movie soundtrack, posters and more. To join the contest, start at the beginning of the HUNT by visiting www.dragontattoofilm.com/contest for full details and the first clue. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is in theaters near you starting March 19th. THE NEXT CLUE: Rachel Bilson & Christina Ricci are celebrity supporters of this national network that fights violence against women. Their strong volunteer program just goes to show that when kindness RAINNS , it pours.

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Blogging Lessons from The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I sent the note below about why a small town should consider applying for Google’s Fiber Trial via email to a small town resident yesterday: I thought the following might be of interest to you, your company, your contemporaries and the City of X. “New computing cycles create / destroy material wealth.” Morgan Stanley Research I read several weeks ago about how Google is planning on awarding an Ultra High-Speed Internet infrastructure project to a small number of trial locations throughout the US. googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-our-experimental.html At the time, I didn’t think much about their announcement. However, yesterday I read about how Topeka, KS is planning on submitting an application and then I learned Duluth, MN plans to apply as well. forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/02/28/technology-technology-hardware-amp-equipment-us-topeka-google_7393887.html This morning it occurred to me “your city” would be just as good a trial location for this project as any of the other cities who have publicly announced their intent to apply. If your city were to apply, the application alone would reflect positively on the city’s leadership. Winning a project like this would also surely help the city’s employers attract and retain talent while also insuring future investment and development in the community for years to come. There probably aren’t any of our towns applying… if any were  – why not yours? Broadband and speeds throttle productivity. America needs to upgrade our network access speeds to compete with those countries who had the foresight to understand increased and superior network speeds enhance a country’s global competitive advantage.

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Why A City Should Want Google’s Fiber Trial