Image by ZeroOne

A few weeks back, during our Facebook event, I outlined how to create a landing page for your Facebook Fan Page. I feel like at the time, we didn’t delve nearly far enough into exactly what a landing page is or what it can do for you, and today I’m here to rectify that problem. If you’ve ever wondered how a landing page might help you boost your online sales, or your number of Likes, or your newsletter membership numbers, you’ve come to the right place.

What Is a Landing Page?

There are many different methods you might use to direct traffic to your website: a Google Adwords or Facebook ad, a tweet, an item in your newsletter. If you’re using your calls to action, most of these links ask the viewer to take a specific action: “Buy my E-book,” “Sign up for my newsletter,” “Listen to my new single!” Your landing page is the page that link directs your visitor to; it’s your pitch for why your new visitor should take the action you are requesting.

But Why a Landing Page?

This may beg the question; why bother? If you’ve written a convincing enough ad/tweet/link that it garnered a click, why not just send the visitor to your home page? That way, they can see everything you have to offer, instead of just one little piece.

That’s fair enough, but I would counter-argue that if a brand-new, has-never-visited-you-before-and-may-never-again visitor taking a look at your website and maybe selecting one of the many, many options available there (signing up for your newsletter, subscribing to your RSS feed, reading your blog, viewing your About Us page, etc) is more valuable to you than if they accepted your call to action… You may want to rethink your call to action.

Your landing page is all about sending a focused message. It’s about reiterating and expanding upon your original request. Ultimately, it is about increasing the number of conversions (clicks that result in your desired action) who take the action you want them to take.

Designing a Successful Landing Page

Here are a few tips regarding the actual content of the page itself. Creating a successful landing page is a long, trial-and-error process (see below), but keeping these few things in mind will put you on the right track:

• Keep Your Focus- It’s really tempting to dump all your relevant links and information on the visitor now that you have her eyes, but stay focused.  Remember that your landing page has a purpose, and stick to that purpose. Any extraneous information or links is likely to decrease your conversions.

• A Relevant Header and Supporting Media- Your visitor was interested enough to click on your link, but you have a very short time to reward his click and re-capture his interest before he moves on. The text in your header should be very similar to the upstream text (where your visitor clicked), to reassure the visitor that this page is what he thought it was. Expand upon that idea with some supporting text. Ideally, anyone who glances at your page for just five seconds should be able to tell you what it’s about and what it wants the visitor to do.

• Clear, Repeated Calls to Action- Bookending your supporting text, include a link, or ideally a graphical button, to draw the customer’s attention. Don’t be obnoxious about it; fiery, blinking, red buttons will look cheap and make your page look like a scam. Pick a color that complements, but is not a part of the rest of your page design. For example, an orange button on a mostly black and blue page.

• Multimedia- A picture of your service or product being used is great. Pictures that include people are even better. If the gaze of those people is directed towards the button you want your viewer to push… better yet. For the trump card, include a video. Video is passive, much like watching TV, and will draw your viewer in. Keep it under three minutes to ensure the entire video is viewed, and your entire message is received.

Impriving Your Landing Page

When your landing page is launched, the work isn’t over yet. Entire books can and have been written about what makes a successful landing page, but there is only one way to know for sure what works for you: trial and error.

The best method for constantly improving your landing page is known as A/B testing, and it usually starts with one point of uncertainty. For instance, will my “subscribe now” button get more clicks if it’s blue or red? or would this shorter ad copy be more successful? The method is actually very simple: you don’t make the choice at all, but instead make two different versions of the landing page; one with the red button and one with the blue (this works best if you work on only one significant change at a time).

Once both pages are made, you direct half of your traffic to one version and half to the other, using a tool such as Google Website Optimizer. Then, you monitor the performance of each page with your analytics tool of choice until one significantly out-performs the other. If there isn’t a clear winner, it may simply be a change that doesn’t affect your traffic one way or the other.

Either way, you’re still not done. Pick the winner (or your favorite), and create a new variant. Constantly testing and improving your landing page in this way can have a huge impact on its success.

Coming in for a landing

Your new landing page will be a fantastic addition to your overall campaign, and I encourage you to use this method for each of the calls to action you plant in cyberspace. It’s a tough seed to grow, and it will need quite a bit of attention before it comes to full bloom, but the rewards you’ll reap will be well worth it.

Okay, time to shamelessly self promote! Give us your call to action and link to your landing page in the comments, but be sure to give us at least one tip about why your landing page is successful!

How to Leverage the Most Underused Page on Your Blog or Website

Image by: Roberto Verzo

You’ve noticed it as one of those ubiquitous links that is always at the top of blogs and websites. You may have even clicked on it at some point. If you have one of your own, chances are you aren’t quite sure what to make of it or how to put it to use.

I’m talking of course, about the good old About Us page. Too often is the About Us page filled with some meaningless corporate-speak about how the site will “synergistically systemise excellent catalysts for change and simulate paradigms to improve value-added content”. Or, on the smaller individual-blogger level, a quick one-paragraph description of the author next to a generic silhouette picture that means the author never uploaded a picture of his or her own.

If either of these sounds a little familiar (or if you don’t have an About Us page at all), don’t fear. Today, we’re going to discuss how to create an About Us page that will be a valuable asset to your website or blog.

Our Model- The Dust Jacket Blurb

So, what exactly should an About Us page be used for? (And let me say just once that the page could be called “About Us”, “About Me”, “About This Site”, “About Fat Dude”, or any number of things). What exactly is the point of even having this page? And what should we put in there?

I want you to take a trip with me. Imagine getting in your car and driving to your favorite place to pick up a new book; your local library, Borders, that funky little second-hand bookshop downtown, whatever. We’re going to wander through the stacks until you find your favorite section, and then we’re going to pick a new book. And here’s the catch, you only get one; Uncle Fat Dude says so.

How exactly do you go about it? You might find an author you already know, or find titles and cover art that you find interesting. But you only get one, so you’d better be sure. How do you know what the book is really about, or whether the author is someone you might connect with? You crack the cover and check out the… dust jacket blurbs. Bingo.

Okay, time to come back. We found what we need. The dust jacket blurbs! Knowing what section of the store we’re in helps, and seeing the titles, the art, the authors’ names, it all helped us zero in on a few choices, but it was the blurbs inside the dust jacket that helped us pick our book.

And that’s our About Us page.

A good About Us page begins by taking the model of the typical dust jacket blurb. Well, blurbs, actually. You usually see two, right? In the front of the book, some text about the book itself; and in the back, about the author. This is where we’ll make our start as well.

About Your Site

The front flap of a book’s dust jacket is usually devoted to a blurb about the subject of the book, and we’re going to follow that model. Use the first section of your About Us page to tell your visitor exactly what your site is about.

Remember that less is more. Take a look at a dust jacket blurb and you’ll see it will usually run 2-4 short, descriptive paragraphs. Remember this is just a quick introduction to your site… if the visitor was interested in reading a large block of text, she would simply browse through your site to find out what it’s about.

Also remember that  you have the full potential of an interactive medium at your disposal. Include links to your most popular content. Issue a call to action and get the customer to sign up for your newsletter.  Provide a link to your site’s RSS feed. Include images of any relevant features that you’d like to point out. More than anything else, this is your elevator pitch for your site: sell your visitor on why she should stick around and check out your site… and why she should keep returning for more.

About You

Flip to the back dust jacket flap, and you’ll find a blurb about the author: afew notes about what makes him interesting, maybe a line about some other books he’s written or why he’s qualified to write this one. And… you guessed right, that’s what we’re going to do here too.

As you write a brief biography of yourself here’s a few questions you should answer:

• Why should I listen to this person? Just as you sold your blog’s content, so should you sell your own expertise. You don’t need to be an expert to write a blog or maintain a website, but you should give your reader some reason to listen to what you have to say. If you’re not experienced, maybe you’re inquisitive, or outgoing, or funny, or ready to make (and document) a bunch of mis-steps. Whatever it is, find your hook and let us know what it is.
• Why should I care about this person? While you’re selling yourself, don’t forget to be yourself. It’s okay to include your own personality and some information about yourself in your About Us page. In fact: I’d say it’s essential. A sometimes-reader is more likely to become a Constant Reader if they feel like they know (and like) not just your content, but you. Go ahead and let us know about your cats or your kayaking hobby, just keep this last question in mind…
• Why am I still reading this? If there is any chance whatsoever that your visitor may have occasion to think this thought, your bio has become a full fledged, capital-B, Biography. Don’t go crazy here. Keep this section short, but memorable, and personal
• What’s a good question about writing in the first person? Okay, I honestly couldn’t think of one, but this needs to be said: Write this section in the first person. “Sarah is an accountant at Earnst and Young who moonlights as a violin player…” has already put us to sleep because it sounds like a bad Playbill bio. “I’m an accountant, but what I really love to do is play the violin,” is the beginning of an engaging personal story that you are telling to your audience.

You, Beautiful You

That personal connection I mentioned for your bio section can be strengthened tenfold by including a warm, personable photograph of yourself. Don’t be shy about this. Yes, it’s the internet and we all love our anonymity, but if you want to be anonymous, you shouldn’t be reaching out to an online audience. Being able to see your face is huge in strengthening your reader’s feeling of familiarity with you and will go a long way towards drawing in your audience.

Bells and Whistles

Once you’ve accomplished all the above (no small feat in and of itself, I know!), you have a very respectable About Us page that is certainly better than 70% of what you’ll find out there, but why not spiff it up a little more? Here’s some ideas:

• Video/Audio: A picture goes a long way but multimedia, especially video, is an almost unfair advantage. Consider filming a brief introduction to yourself and post it along with, or instead of, your headshot.
• A Social Media Hub: I’ve gotten this far without linking to my own About Us page, but there you go. The three-column layout I set up gave me a lot of empty space beneath my picture, the perfect place to drop all my relevant social media links, as well as links to my other websites. You might want to even consider adding your blog or Twitter feed if your site is not already content-heavy.

It is really easy to just slap up an About Us page that is filled with nothing but so much filler, so you can get on to the more interesting parts of blogging or website development. But, if you can take some time to follow these tips and build a useful About Us page, it will be a true asset to your site.

What other opportunities are commonly wasted? Give me some ideas in the comments!

Increase Clicks, Likes, Comments, and Buys with a Call to Action

Image by: Duchamp

Your mother always told you to ask for things nicely, and it turns out she may have been right after all.

You’ve honed all of your product descriptions. You’ve posted a sparkling resume. You’ve put together an extremely attractive homepage for your demo tape. Your portfolio is spotless.

But did you tell your visitor to do what you want them to do?

Believe it or not, it works.

Browsing through the web, combing through Facebook, scanning our Twitter feeds, we all consume so much information online that we’ve become unaware of how much of it we don’t consume. For every line of text we actually concentrate on and read, we probably skim past another ten. Friend feeds, RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, comment feeds, we have to get full eventually! Any advertisement or request or other promotional text you post online is just as likely to get skimmed over unless you present your visitor with a clear call-to-action:

Our new single is on You Tube. To listen now Click Here.

Request a Free Quote Today.

Contact Me for Availability.

Don’t get me wrong, you’re not hypnotizing your site visitor with this text; this isn’t the magic answer to getting every new visitor to buy your e-book or subscribe to your newsletter. What it does do is grab your visitor’s attention with a short, simple request. They may not heed your request, but you can make sure they see it.

What easy text changes can you make on your site to increase visitor response? This is especially easy with link text. Here’s a few examples of changes you might be able to make:

Jason’s Resume —> View Jason’s Resume

Kelly’s Paper Roses —> Buy One Of Kelly’s Paper Roses

Download Link —> Download Now

Pricing Information —> Get a Free Quote

Demo Tape —> Listen to Our Demo

Book Excerpt —> Read An Excerpt from my Book!

Another great use for a call-to-action is to elicit a response from your blog readers. Ending each of your blog posts with a call to action instead of just a high-school-lit-class-style conclusory paragraph* is a great way to get your readers participating in your comments section.

*(Anyone else remember “Tell ‘em what you’re gonna tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em, tell ‘em what ya told ‘em”?)

How will you get your viewers to respond to your content better with a call-to-action? Tell us in the comments!**

**(See what I did there? )

3 Ways to Stay Active on your Facebook Page, Away from Facebook

Image by mistress_f

Or, Phoning it In

Now that you’ve implemented your Facebook Fan Page, added Static FBML, and maybe even placed a Facebook Ad to bring in new traffic, the number one thing you can do to maintain and improve the health of your Page is to keep it updated with new content.

But, for the love of social networking, don’t stay cooped up in front of your Facebook page all day! Here are three ways you can update your Facebook Page’s wall without needing to log in to the Mothership:

Mobile Updates

Facebook offers a number of great ways to change your Wall status and even add pictures and video from your mobile phone.  Cruise on over to your administration page by clicking the Edit Page link beneath your profile photo, and click ‘edit” on the Mobile menu item to view these options.

Here, you’ll find a unique email address you can use to upload photos and videos to your page. This is a great addition to interact with your fans even when you’re at, say, a trade show or a performance. A quick and dirty backstage, behind the scenes, or from-the-trade-display videocast can be very interesting and drive some traffic on your page.

If you’re a little too busy on-the-go for that kind of interaction, you can follow the Send Text Messages link for a quick and easy setup that will give you a number you can text message to change your Wall status. Now you can update from everywhere, but be sure to practice safe texting… your Uncle Fat Dude can’t be responsible for what might happen if you hold up the Starbucks line tapping away at your phone…

Selective Tweets

In an earlier post, we covered adding applications to your Facebook Page. A Fat Dude favorite is Selective Tweets, which allows you to change your Facebook Status by tweeting. The great thing about Selective Tweets is that you don’t have to send every tweet to your Facebook Page, but only the ones you choose by adding #FB to the end of the tweet.

You can view and set up Selective Tweets from their Facebook Page.

Tweetdeck

If you are social networking on several different fronts, Tweetdeck can be a lifesaver. Available for your desktop, iPhone, or iPad, Tweetdeck gives you one place to update Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, and Foursquare all from one user interface. On the Facebook front, you can share photos, links, wall posts, comments and status updates directly from the TweetDeck interface.

Tweetdeck is hugely customizable, allowing you to add columns to track multiple accounts from each supported service as well as searches, trending topics, and more.  As your social networking train really gets rolling, it’s a huge help to have one place to keep track of and update multiple networks.

As you become more and more successful building your online network, you’ll find that it becomes more and more work to maintain. Any tool or trick you can find to make keeping connected easier and quicker will help you focus more on your business and less on pulling out your hair.. And if you’re anything like your uncle Fat Dude, you may not have that much left to spare.

What have I missed? Chime in in the comments and let me know what other tools you use to ensure a simplfied, streamlined Facebook experience.

Quick Tip: Filter your Facebook Wall Posts by Location or Language

If your fan base gets large enough, you may have fans covering a large geographic area. Or, you may find yourself needing to post in two or three different languages to include your entire fan base. Facebook has an interesting tool for either of these situations that will help you stop spamming your fans’ feeds with posts that don’t apply to them.

You’re probably familiar with the padlock icon that appears when you are posting on your Wall. On your facebook profile, this allows you to restrict who can read your post: everyone, just friends, just these people, not these people, etc. This is used as a privacy tool.

The same icon appears when you post on your Page’s Wall, but when clicked, the options panel looks like this:

Now, if you will be at a craft fair in North Hollywood, California, you don’t have to spam your Chicago, Illinois fans with the details. Or if you’re reposting something in Spanish, you can send it specifically to your Spanish-speaking fans.

Less clutter on your feed means less annoyance to your Fans. An annoyed fan can become a no-longer fan, so this easy adjustment can go a long ways towards fan retention.

What do you do to keep your fans happy? Let us know in the comments!

Careful Out There: Scammers Want to Hijack Your Twitter Account

Ben Parr over at Mashable has some very important words of caution for us today regarding Twitter:

We’ve received multiple reports (and multiple direct messages) that phishers are trying to steal account info by appealing to your lust for money. We’re seeing multiple DMs with phrases such as “I made $426.23 online today with [link]” and “I make money online with google. i learned how here [link].”

For the uninitiated, here’s what this means: There are bad guys out there trying to get you to click on their links. When you do so, it directs you to a site that tries to fool you into giving up your Twitter password. When you do, the spammer takes over your account and then uses it to spread the link. It’s a little like the zombie outbreak that we’ve been planning for for years.

It’s really too bad. Between this and people who spam random links to their businesses and products to everyone who follows them, direct message on Twitter is pretty much useless. If you are able to eke some functionality out of it, please remember: this is no different than email. If someone sends you a link, and you don’t know and trust them, DON’T click!

Read the full article here:
WARNING: Twitter Money Scams Spreading Through DMs (Mashable)

Facebook Fan Pages: Adding Value With An Oversized Profile Photo

Previously, we discussed getting started o a Facebook Page for your Brand, art, business, etc. If you’ve gotten started, you may have found that starting a Page is a little like falling down the Rabbit Hole.  Facebook  has not always been known for being endlessly customizable, certainly not compared to theme-heavy Myspace, but there are a ton of  options for personalizing your Page!

Today, we’re going to start with one that isn’t readily apparent, but is a lot of fun and adds a great, professional touch to your Page. It’s a technique used by Victoria’s Secret, Fat Dude client Perfectly Paper, and… yours truly (Why yes, we are accepting new fans! Thank you so much for asking, Mr Shameless Q. Pluggerton!). The technique is a little-known feature that I call the Oversized Profile Photo.

The Oversized Profile Photo works like this: Facebook Pages will allow you to upload an image that is up to three times as tall as it is wide, display the entire image on your Wall, and then select a square-sized portion of your profile picture’s thumbnail. The end result looks like this:

What you end up with is a box roughly twice the size of your profile picture (or a little less, I prefer a nice separating strip of white space), right at the top of your Wall sidebar, to fill with anything you want. Fill it with a blurb about your Brand like I did, or fill it with a picture of your best product like Perfectly Paper did. Heck, if you want to fill it with a European lingerie model like Victora’s Secret did, I wouldn’t say no to that either.The possibilities are limitless…. almost. You can’t link this image to anything because it’s already linked to your Facebook photos page (I’ll teach you a way around that a little later).

So, how to get started? By using a handy-dandy template designed just for you by your uncle Fat Dude, of course! The Photoshop templates below will put you on the right path. Notice the margins layer; Facebook clips the sides of your thumbnail image a little and this will keep your content inside the final box. Be sure to hide this layer in your final product.

Oversized Profile Template 1 – Logo box on bottom

Oversized Profile Template 2 – Logo box on top

Once you’ve uploaded your new supersize profile pic, you may find that your mini pic that appears right before every one of your wall posts may not look exactly as you planned:

You’ll want to mouse over your big profile picture there on the left until a popup appears that says “Change Picture.” select that, and a menu will appear. Choose “Edit Thumbnail”

From there it’s just a matter of moving around the selection box until you’re satisfied, and… congratulations! You’ve made a very attractive and useful addition to your Facebook Fan Page. What will you do with your new personalizable ad space? Tell us (or give a link and show us) in the comments.

If I’ve lost you because you don’t have Photoshop or you’re just not sure how to proceed with an oversized profile photo, head on over to Fat Dude Design or drop me a like at thedude@fatdudedesign.com, and I’d love to help.

Quick Tip: Market Your Brand Through Your Email Signature

Image by; Hammer51012

Get Your Content Where it Belongs With Posterous

Image by: adobemac

Maintaining an online marketing plan of attack can be hard. Keeping up with all the places you should be marketing yourself (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, your blog, your LiveJournal), can go from hard to overwhelming  fast. That’s where Posterous comes in.

Getting started on Posterous is a breeze. Take something you want to share (some photos, a video, a blog post) and email it to post@posterous.com. Boom, Posterous responds with your custom http://_____.posterous.com address, where your content is now online and ready to share. But, you’re just getting started.

The real magic at Posterous begins when you claim your account by going to Posterous.com and signing up. From there, you can link your account at 25 different social networking sites, including those linked above, plus your Facebook Fan Page which is a huge bonus. Now, when you post to Posterous (via Posterous.com, email, or text) Posterous will analyze what you’ve sent and automatically publish it to the appropriate accounts. Videos go to YouTube, Pics to go Facebook and Flickr, the subject line of emails go automatically to Twitter. Posterous is now your digital intern. Give it your content and it will figure out where it goes.

Or, if you’re a micromanaging control freak (like me), you can go one step further. Name a specific service in the posterous email address(twitter@posterous.com. flickr@posterous.com) to post to that service. Or, name more than one (twitter+flickr@posterous.com). Email posterous@posterous.com to keep it just on your posterous page.

Posterous is a fairly new service, and doesn’t link to as many services as, say, FriendFeed. But Posterous’s unique ability to dole out your content to many, if not all, of your social networking profiles is a lifesaver when you’re pounding that digital pavement.

Posterous user? Or do you use a similar service that you like better? Let us know in Comments.

Share and Enjoy with Creative Commons to Boost Your Brand

Image by: Hightech.Blogosfere

What is Creative Commons?

Okay, here’s the boring version: Creative Commons, founded in 2001, is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping authors of creative content work work with copyright to share their work in the matter they choose. Through free-to-use legal tools, content creators share their work, under limitations or no, with others.

Here’s a more fun (and perhaps relevant) way to look at it: Through Creative Commons, artists can safely share their work with other artists to gain visibility, network, and even offer their work to be altered and included in new works (usually requiring attribution and/or a share-and-share-alike clause).

Creative Commons can be an invaluable tool to the online self-promoter, and here’s how:

Sharing your work on Creative Commons

Creative Commons offers a simple tool on their website to license your work for sharing, and it’s up to you if you want to allow commercial use or modification of your art. You won’t actually be hosting your content with Creative Commons, but the tool will provide you with the html you’ll need to add to your website to display the terms of your new license.

Once that’s done, you may also want to consider hosting your content on a site that builds Creative Content licensing (and searching) directly into their front end. The wiki over at Creative Commons hosts a list of such sites, which can get a little overwhelming from the sheer volume. Here’s a list of sites FatBlog recommends to get you started:

Jamendo (Music)
Sevenload (Video)
Flickr (Images)
DeviantArt (Images, Text)
Lulu (Text)
everystockphoto (Images)

The question this all begs, of course, is why? Why list your work on Creative Commons? Besides the altruistic sharing-for-art’s-sake angle, or the creative I’d-love-to-see-what-others-do-with-this angle, this is a perfect opportunity to let your work speak for itself to draw in new audiences. Every Creative Commons license is alike in the fact that it requires attribution; meaning that the user must attribute it to you in a manner you’ve specified. Every person who uses your work becomes a new advocate of your brand

Using shared works from Creative Commons

Creative Commons offers a pretty decent springboard to finding licensed content, and much much more can be found via the links above. The potential to strengthen your own work by letting someone else’s strengths fill in your weaknesses are almost limitless. Use art or photos for the cover of your new album, or to spice up your blog posts; FatBlog uses Creative Commons -licensed photos from Flickr on almost every post. Use music to spice up your website or podcast; again, you’ll hear Creative Commons -licensed music in our podcast.  Who knows? Mashing up licensed images, video, text, and music could be your next great work of art.

If you haven’t already, check out Creative Commons, and tell us what you think in the comments. Or, let us know how you’ve already strengthened your brand with licensed content!