Think of some of the most powerful advertising messages ever: “Just Do It,” “We Try Harder,” or even “I Like Ike.” Call-to-action lines often use the power of 3, as in “Buy It Now” and “One Day Left.”

If you can distill your tagline or call to action down to three words, so much the better. But, don’t just use a three-word phrase because it is a three-word phrase. It must fit your offer, product, or circumstance. You’ll know when you’ve got a winner.

It should come as no surprise that the role of SEO and advertising is vital in e-commerce. The findings from a joint study (available through a Webinar here) reveal that while both branded and non-brand clicks were important to ROI, paid clicks are more likely to convert than natural clicks. One retail study they were involved with stated that in 7 out of 8 categories tested (the exception was home furnishings) paid clicks were 50% more likely to convert than organic clicks.

The study aimed to quantify the value of search clicks in driving online and in-store sales. Google and Compete documented shoppers search behavior to understand non-converting clicks by monitoring clicks to leading retails websites (e.g. Ann Taylor, Zappos, Buy.com, Ikea, Walmart to name a few) and tracking consumer purchase activity 60 days after the of initial click. Some interesting findings from the study include:

• Up to 33% of all visitors to retail sites come from search
• Up to 55% of paid traffic comes from non-branded clicks
• Up to 49% of purchasers using search click on non-branded search terms
• 32% of mass merchants purchases occur more than 2 weeks after the initial search referral  (30% purchase same-session, but 70% purchase later)
• Up to 43% of online shoppers purchase in-store

SOURCE: Website Magazine

Consumers want to interact with your brand. They want to feel a part of the process, that their voice and opinion matters to your company. While blog comments, forums and social networking tools are proven ways for consumers to interact, often times they are wary to participate due to forced registration, disclosure of personal information or simply the time needed to participate. But there are other ways to entice your visitors to interact that don’t require much of an effort from them, or you.

Polls: Polls are powerful. They provide a glimpse behind the curtain of the popular sentiment of a population and consumers use them. A quick click and they’re satisfied. It satisfies their curiosity and reinforces their views and opinions with the larger community. For the website owner, polls can provide a look into everything from the quality of your customer service to ideas for new products or upgrades to existing ones.

There are many free polling services out there and some paid that offer greater detail. Check out Vizu.com, JS-Kit and PollDaddy, recently aquired by Automattic who is behind the WordPress blogging platform and hosting service.

Video and Audio: Nothing is quite as engaging as a well-placed, well timed video. Embedded video is easy for consumers to view - a simple click and they are interacting with your website and your brand, either through your own video or from another source. YouTube is by far the largest library of embedded video options but there are others, including DailyMotion and MetaCafe. Podcasts and embedded audio files provide the same basic function and can be featured unobtrusively in a blog post or in a sidebar.

Photos: Simply adding a photo gallery or photos in your blog posts will get your visitors more involved with your site. Photos can be linked to other, related pages within your site or even to galleries on other sites, including social networking profiles. FlickrIn is a Web app that lets you display tiled photos from your chosen flickr gallery as a small badge that you can embed in your site’s sidebar.

Games: Who doesn’t like playing a good game every now and then? It’s especially interesting to the user if you can find a game that follows the theme of your brand. Sell sporting goods? There are plenty of sport-related games to choose from. Auto parts? Driving games abound. There are even political games, animal-themed games and puzzle games for your thinking audience. Sites like AddictingGames.com, MiniClip and FreeOnlineGames.com all have a vast collection of games that you can embed.

Tickers: This is especially useful in today’s economic environment. You can embed stock tickers, or even a widget with tickers and charts, like this one from Yahoo. But there’s more. Search online and you’ll find sports tickers, entertainment news and tickers that you can customize to include your personal message.

Today, you must bring your new IP address up to speed slowly, rather than sending full throttle right away. If you switch providers, your new ESP likely will warn you about this, but it applies even if you are adding a new IP to your mail stream, such as for sending transactional messages, new Web sites, or e-mail programs.

Spammers usually leap to a new IP address when they get blocked from an old one, then blast out e-mail right away. ISPs get suspicious when they see e-mail volumes spike from unknown IP addresses, so they block first based on sudden volume spikes and ask questions later. This procedure is called throttling.

If you add an IP address to your mail stream, say, for increasing segmentation or volume, your good reputation on your existing IP address won’t automatically transfer to your new one. On the other hand, if you start over after polluting a previous IP address, your bad rep can follow you. That’s why you need to take care with your new one.

Today’s approach is to begin slowly, sending a limited number of messages to small subsets of the best addresses on your mailing list. As you begin to build your reputation, you can start building your volume, but always while keeping an eye on your deliverability reports and spam-complaint rates.

You should be able to warm up your good reputation in about seven days. Depending on your total message volume, it could take a little longer to reach full capacity.

Organizing Your IP Warm-Up Plan

• Get feedback loops established and whitelist requests approved before you start e-mailing, even on a reduced schedule. Also make sure you have updated your authentication records.
• Create a sublist of active e-mail addresses from your mailing list with your most important domains represented. These are addresses with no negatives associated with them. Generally, they’re established but not old addresses, usually 60 days to nine months old and with at least three clicks on campaigns. These usually are your most active and engaged subscribers, who generate the positive metrics ISPs like, such as opens and clicks, adding your sending address to their address books and generating few spam complaints.Avoid both brand-new and older addresses because they can generate more spam complaints. You need addresses that are clearly neither inactive nor a potential spam trap.Use this transition to prune your list of inactive names, too. Simply don’t move the old names into your clean new system. Also, IP warm-up campaigns aren’t the time to reactivate old lists or import poor legacy data. This is your chance to start over, so do it with clean data.
• Send a message that isn’t time-sensitive. Your goal is delivery more than conversion. So your message could be a customer-service or relationship-building message, in which you thank the subscriber for signing up, list other publications you offer, invite subscribers to fill out a survey or complete their profiles, or remind them to add your sending address to their address books, even if you haven’t changed the actual e-mail address. Remember to spell out subscriber benefits and to include a “valued member” reward to reward them for being prized subscribers.
• Monitor your delivery metrics. Your goal with this mailing is to deliver 95 percent to 100 percent of these messages to the inbox:
• Watch your delivery reports for hard and soft bounces.
• Monitor feedback loops for spam complaints.
• Watch all mailboxes associated with your e-mail program, even those that aren’t official e-mail reply mailboxes for comments or complaints.

Your Post-Warm-Up Game Plan

Don’t let your new IP address go cold again. Once you complete the warm-up campaign, begin transitioning older, less-active recipients and begin mailing from your regular calendar. Continue to move these addresses over slowly and to build your sending volume over time.

How long can this transition take? That depends on your list size and the delivery metrics you generate. Watch bounce logs, looking particularly at the big three domains — AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo — and watch for temporary blocking errors due to throttling.

You should be able to maintain consistent high inbox delivery for all messages as you increase volume. If delivery numbers start to slide, slow down the volume again or hold steady for a campaign or two until the numbers begin to improve, then increase volume again.

The warm-up process requires hard work, careful segmentation, good list quality, and, above all, patience. But the reward is clear: high inbox delivery and a great sender reputation, which will ensure future inbox delivery for a long time.

SOURCE: ClickZ - By Stefan Pollard

Be specific
The more specific a landing talks about a certain offer, the more chance there is people will make use of that particular offer. Don’t direct people to a homepage of a website where they have to start looking for the offer themselves. Bring the people as close to an offer as you can.

Make a good first impression
Take a look around at other landing pages and you’ll notice some look better than others. Some look cheap, but on the other hand: something can be too slick as well.  Every offer needs a different approach, but your landing should ooze quality, and an attractive graphical presentation is an important part of that. If you’re not capable of creating something yourself you’re not completely satisfied with, find someone who can do it for you.

Make a page scenario
Some landing pages look like they are trying to attract attention on ten different spots at the same time. Try to create a natural and logical flow into your lay-out, so people simply start at the top and end at the bottom of the page.  Like this they won’t miss any information you’re trying to get across because something at the bottom made them skip ahead.

Test different designs
One of the ground rules of landing pages is that except for using the word ‘FREE’, nothing is certain when it comes to conversions. So don’t just make one landing. Make several, trying outing different images, texts and lay-outs, and trying all of them out consecutively. Keep track of which ones work best. After a while you’ll learn which type of landings work better for which type of offers.

Add testimonials
Try to find positive feedback on the offer from a legitimate source. Ideally your offer has been featured on TV, or on a well known website. If so, include this in your landing page so people will trust the offer more easily. If you find independent websites recommending your offer, copy their content on your landing page and mention the source, but don’t  place links to the recommending sites. A good landing page is a one way street. Don’t give people the chance to get distracted from your offer.

Call To Action
Your landings should make very clear what exactly is expected of your visitors. And don’t try to make something look better than it really is. Honesty about a product or service works better than cheap marketing talk. If you tell people exactly what they’ll get and what they have to do for it, the chance people will recommend your offer to other people will also increase.

Create Trust
The more anonymous an offer is, the less people will be inclined to make use of it. Try to include as much contact information as possible in your landing pages. If you’re marketing for a well-known brand, don’t hesitate to mention this brand. If you add information that will allow people afterwards to comment on the transaction to a real person or company, they will feel more confident to take action.

Compare the results, and find out if you’ve got more tinkering to do or have already made yourself stand out to search engines.

http://tools.seobook.com/general/website-comparison/

For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using the phrases: “Web analytics” and “Web metrics”. The use of the phrase “Web analytics” has increased dramatically over the past four years while the use of the phrase “Web metrics” has decreased.

How can you harness all this data? Suppose you’re trying to figure out which product attribute to emphasize in an ad or on your website? As an example, this tool could help you figure out what’s more important to your audience: reliability, safety or price. Type in your terms, and see which ones resonate more with Google’s searchers.

Need more advice? Google gives you a great how-to guide here.

The AdSense Calculator lets you examine the interplay.

Just fill each of the fields, and it’ll return estimates of your daily, monthly, and yearly earnings and clicks; for making projects (or for deciding whether or not to use AdSense), this can be quite helpful.

Adsense Calculator Tool © SEO Chat™ Page Impressions Daily Page Impressions Click Through Rate Click Through Rate (%) Cost Per Click Cost per click ($) Enter Captcha To Continue To prevent spamming, please enter in the numbers and letters in the box below Report Problem with Tool.

• AOL Hot Searches - Top current queries, or see those in the last hour, last day and within particular categories.
• Ask IQ - See top searches at Ask.
• Dogpile SearchSpy - Choose to see either a filtered or non-filtered sample of top, real-time search terms from this popular meta search service. Sister site MetaCrawler offers a similar MetaCrawler MetaSpy service.
• Google Trends - Allows you to tap into Google’s database of searches, to determine what’s popular. View the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on. Compare multiple terms, as well. See our review: Google Trends: Peer Into Google’s Database Of Searches.
• Google Zeitgeist - What people are searching for at Google and its associated specialty services in a variety of categories. There are versions for various countries, as well.
• Lycos 50 - Long-standing service showing top searches at Lycos each week.
• Yahoo Buzz Index - Shows you what’s hot and what’s not in terms of search topics at Yahoo.
• dWoz Search Phrase Lists - Great directory of services like those above, for search engines large and small, across the web
• Google AdWords Keyword Tool - Enter a term or terms, the use the drop-down box to see the popularity of terms and popularity over time.
• Yahoo Keyword Selector Tool - Formerly called the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the Overture Search Term Suggestion Tool before that, this free service is primarily designed to help advertisers who wish to select terms to target with ads on the Yahoo network. But you can use it to see how popular particular terms are.
• Researching Keywords - For Search Engine Watch members, this provides an annotated rundown on key tools useful for search marketers needing to perform search research for their campaigns.
• Search Term Research and Search Behavior - These categories of Search Engine Watch’s Search Topics area compile articles on the subject of how people search from across the web and stretching back to 1997. Available only to Search Engine Watch members.

DO’S

• Offer a competitive percentage back to your users.
• Use reliable tracking to properly credit your users.
• Make sure to remind users to click on your link before purchase is made to make sure it tracks properly.
• Use offers when available (such as free shipping or coupons).
• If a special offer is available, make the start and end dates known.
• Watch for specific communication from your advertisers concerning your offer and upcoming promotions.
• Offer well converting advertisers on your homepage for maximum commissions.
• Notify advertisers of missed transactions for proper commissions to be paid.
• Notify your specific users that they MUST click on your link before their purchase takes place, to avoid the above issue.
• Work on strategies; E-mail, link, compensation and site layout.
• Most loyalty publishers either do a 50/50 split or a 60/40 split. This means that depending on the commission offer from the advertiser, you will keep 50% of the commission and offer 50% back as a rebate to your member. Or, as in the case of 60/40, you’d keep 60% and offer 40% back as a rebate.

DON’TS

• Do not use incorrect or expired coupon codes or offers such as free shipping.
• Do not state incorrect start and end dates on offers and coupons.