A great presentation by First Rate (a New Zealand Internet Marketing agency), highlighted the following important success factors for moving your website visitor through the funnel and how to ensure your site performs optimally:

Acquiring Customers could include the following elements:

• Affiliate marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Search Engine Marketing
• Email marketing
• Directories
• PPC advertising (Pay Per Click)
• Directories
• Portals and Publisher sites
• Banner ads
• Traditional marketing elements such as TV, Radio, Print and Direct Mail
• Branding and offline campaigns

Here’s how you could get visitors to interact with your site:

• Additional search features
• Breadcrumb navigation
• Auto login
• Usable navigation that makes logical sense
• Depth of content
• Branding and design features
• Promotions on your home page

Get others to recommend your site:

• Competitions
• Gifts
• Refer a Friend
• Tell a Friend
• Content worth sharing

Many happy returns - make your site sticky:

• Welcome email
• Product and event notifications
• Competitions
• Coupons
• Loyalty program
• New product launches
• Newsletters (sent to a targeted, segmented base)
• Personalised site (with personalised content)
• Promotional offers
• Exclusive content

Persuade visitors to take action:

• Provide deep content
• Show best sellers
• Customer reviews
• Fast payment
• FAQs and support
• One click buying
• Live chat assistance
• Offer a variety of payment methods
• Contact details and physical address
• Recently viewed items
• Recommended products
• Returns policy
• Shipping costs
• Supporting product information
• Targeted promotional offers
• Customer testimonials

Fulfill the order with the following elements:

• Gift cards
• Gift wrapping
• Inserts
• Order status and tracking
• Order history
• Order follow up
• Great packaging
• Feedback via survey
• Reserve a product

• Surveys and polls

Examples of sites that do this really well include:

Amazon.com

Ebay.com

Overstock.com

BlueFly.com

Next.co.uk

VictoriasSecret.com

Definitely worth watching if you are in the online business world and want to improve your ROI.

View the free webinar here.

Omniture provides Web Analytics and Online Business Optimization Platforms.

You may pay through your nose for your PPC campaigns, but it’s all for nothing if your landing pages do not convert well. Digital Web has some great tips on how to improve your landing pages.

A landing page is the page visitors arrive at after clicking on your promotional creative.

Your landing page has to convince the visitor to stay and (depending on your goal):

* Fill out a form (but people hate filling out forms)
* Provide personal details (but people hate getting spammed)
* Buy something (but people hate being scammed)
* Read a lot of information (but people really hate reading)

As you can see, there are some major obstacles to getting visitors to do what you want on your landing page. You have to convince people to do things they hate.
11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages

1. Define Your Conversion

Before you start to design your landing page, define that page’s conversion activity. For a newsletter landing page, the conversion activity is entering an email address into a form and clicking “Accept.”

2. Do a Little Research

A little demographic research goes a long way. Figure out what your visitor is looking for and what offers work. Build a profile of your ideal visitor. Keep this person in mind when creating your landing page. Do not construct the page for anyone else—generic and broad pages are proven to fail—and keep everything “on target.” Your ad campaign already funnels traffic to your landing page, so visitors are expecting a very targeted message. Tailor the pages to them.

3. Eliminate unneeded Elements

Distractions kill conversions. Strip any unneeded elements from the page. This is not your home page. Anyone who comes to your landing page has already been screened by your ad. They expect a very specific message.

4. Match the Creative

The landing page and creative should match. The easiest way to clue visitors in that they have arrived at the right place is to use the heading from your ad creative.

5. Remove Navigation

If you can, remove the navigation bar. Of course, don’t remove it if it is essential to the conversion process. Remember your message, and if a link has nothing to with it—chuck it!

6. Stay Focused

Avoid the urge to promote or link to other areas of your site. The point of the landing page is to prevent your visitor from wandering. You want them converting, not clicking around to other parts of your site and marveling at your Flash animations. Imagine if GAP encouraged shoppers entering their stores to leave and walk around the mall. Once they stop thinking about your offer, you’ve lost them.

7. Important Elements Above the “Fold”

Pay attention to the virtual fold (the bottom of the screen before scrolling). Place enough content above the fold to allow your visitor to make a decision about continuing on the site. If a visitor has to click or scroll to figure out what your site is about, the only thing they’ll click is the back button.

8. Provide Conversion Exits

Make it easy for your visitor to convert. Place conversion exits above the fold and at every scroll-and-a-half of screen space.

9. Lead the Eye

Use typography and color to your advantage. Lead the eye along the page towards the conversion exit. Thoughtful use of whitespace, large copy and graphics can make a long page seem much shorter than it really is. Be careful though—a great image will demand a lot of eye time and if misplaced can ruin the flow of your message.

Place the important stuff (whether it’s your copy or your image) close to the middle, and never distract your user from that focal point. Avoid putting interesting material in sidebars. This pulls the eye away from the main body. If it’s interesting and valuable, keep it close to the center and use it to direct the eye.

10.Fix Forms

Optimize your forms. Make the input cursor hop to the next field after a user finishes the current field. Allow the user to tab around fields. Auto-populate any fields you can.

Remove all unneeded fields. Don’t ask for city/state/province if you ask for a Zip or postal code. Focus on the essentials.

If you’re asking users to register for a newsletter, ask for only an email address. You don’t need their name now. Get rid of the reset button. It’s dangerous for both the user and you.

11.Test, Test, Test

After you have finished the design of your landing page, test it with a small user group. Go over a checklist with your design team:

* Is the whole page focused?
* Does the message match the advertisement?
* Have you reduced all distractions?
* Is critical information above the fold?
* Are there enough conversion exits?
* Does the page enhance your brand?

Signing up as an Amazon Associate is easy to do. The harder part is making it work. Luckily Amazon understand this and have compiled a few tips to help you get started.

Here are a couple related to Search Engine Optimisation:

1. A good domain name is vital: simple, easy to understand and short works best
2. Use key-word rich titles on your pages: this makes it easier for a search engine to find you. Don’t simply use “home page” - be more specific and relevant
3. Don’t ignore the importance of meta elements throughout your site. Be sure to use unique meta data for each page
4. Add readable, usable, relevant copy to your website
5. Build links to your site - through many different means
6. Register your site with the major search engines
7. Be persistent and patient, and keep researching to find out how to optimise your site even more

Good luck!