In this ISSUE:

In this issue we will reviewhow WordPress 3.0 (coming in late April) allows you to adjust your menus to deliver popular content, a new, easy way to do optimizations in your WordPress CMS, and how a well-known SEO company optimized a landing page to increase sales by $1 million a year.  Our topics are directly related.  The more ways you can deliver what your visitors actually want (not what you think they want), the more successful you will be.  $1 million.  Can’t promise you that much, but following the techniques given here will definitely increase your conversions — when a web visitor “converts” to a prospect, lead, or customer. And that’s what it’s all about in the Connection Cycle Marketing (CCM) game.  Let’s learn some specifics.

WordPress 3.0 to Deliver Precision Content Delivery via Menus ::::::::::::

Above, note that you will be able to easily create a menu item that links to individual posts, media, categories, and post tags.

Know what your prospects want.  Deliver it. Have you used Analytics to note key content that “engaged visitors” hunt for at your site (“engaged visitors” are those viewing 3 or more pages)?  Once you do, you’ll be able to better deliver it to visitors using WordPress 3.0 enhanced menu options.  Due in late April, this menu option enhancement should prove to be very popular with CMS managers on the WordPress platform.  Why?  For the simple reason it will be easier to deliver exactly the content that visitors seek with the new system.  Imagine a menu link directly to a compelling sales video.  How about direct to a list of post and pages for a popular “tag”?  Good work WordPress core team.

New Visual Website Optimizer for WordPress Plugin ::::::::::::

Above, the Visual Website Optimizer shows you which page variation gives you the best chance to beat the original test version.

Optimize visitor behavior. It’s one thing to get visitors to your site and help them find the content they seek — next you have to convert them from visitors to prospects, leads, and customers.  And, now there’s a helpful plugin from Visual Website Optimizer to help you do just that.  This is good because although Google also makes a Website Optimizer (we like and use it too when its strengths are appropriate), this company provides a WordPress plugin to help you set up the campaign parameters on your site.  We also like its easy to understand reporting charts.  You define a control version of a page, then some variations.  The Optimizer tracks what visitors do, and reports the best variation showing the highest likely improvement.  Always be testing.  Always be optimizing.  Get the plugin here.

How an Optimization company made $1 million for SEOmoz.org ::::::::::::

Million Dollar Case Study: If you’re concerned with SEO, you should be aware of the helpful professional tools and information you can find at SEOmoz.org.  They’re great at SEO — which gets visitors to your sites.  But, the major lesson to note here is that SEO only gets people to your site… you could be leaving literally millions on the table, unless you do what SEOmoz was smart enough to do next.  They optimized, with the as a team effort with Conversion Rate Experts.  Here are the major success points for their campaign:

• They did a lot of listening — to the customer.  Time and again, I see clients making the mistake of thinking that people who know their product and service inside the company… know what to do.  They don’t.  Only your customers know what they need you to do.  SEOmoz, heeded this wisdom, talked with paying and non-paying members, and let their consultants become a customer.  They took surveys and analyzed them.  They listened.  It paid off.
• They used quick wireframe pages to consider new page prototypes
• They ran a series of tests for continual improvements
• They ignored “best practices” and quadrupled the length of the conversion page to better engage visitors
• They explained precisely what customers would get
• They used compelling video to tell the story
• They served customers after subscription (reducing cancellations and charge backs) with a getting quick started guide

Read the rest of the article>>

That’s it for this issue — contact us when you need to Optimize, Connect, and Convert!

SPECIAL: Mention this post to me, and receive 10% OFF on a Social Media Marketing campaign thru June of 2010

WebFadds.com is an agency focused on CMS & Business Blogs, Social Media Marketing, & Landing Page Optimization solutions — a “Connection Cycle Marketing” approach for web mission success. Contact us today for a free quote. And, be sure to download our latest Guide: “Winning Twitter Marketing Tools & Tactics”.

Extending Your Presence Online — How Intense Debate Comments Helps SEO

“He Parlayed his Way to a Million Dollars” – unknown

As I’ve said before, Publishing is the new Marketing, and Marketing via Content now offers continuing new ways to extend your reach and engagement prospects. But you have to foment — that is, promote the growth and development of  your comments, so you can “parlay” your way toward business objectives. One way to do this is with “Intense Debate” — a WordPress plugin that also helps you with SEO.

What is “Intense Debate”? It’s a plugin for WordPress that makes commenting easier to manage and extends your potential reach by allowing your blog readers to choose to tweet their comments. IntenseDebate.com is owned and managed by the same folks that are behind WordPress.com (the remote hosted blogging platform used by millions) and WordPress.org (the software used to create your own hosted CMS and business blog solutions) — Automattic.com.  The company also enables Blogger, Tublr. and TypePad integration.  Features include Comment Threading, Reply by Email, Reputation points and Comment Voting, and Twitter integration — your commenters have the option to send a simultaneous tweet when they post a comment.  Add to that the opening up of the plugin’s API to developers, and I think there’s even more potential to plumb here.  Try it by leaving a comment below.

Above – the Intense Debate comments template allows your commenters to login with Social Networking IDs, Subscribe to comments, and also to post comments on Twitter.

How does Comment Debate help you in SEO? The system provides a very clean, rankable set of Comments on your site, plus gives each commenter the option to tweet their comments when they post them — with links back to your site.

Above, you can manage the comments from more than one blog — all in the same place.

How does Comment Debate help you in Business?

• As stated at Intense Debate — the system serves to bring “quality comments to the forefront”.  And “forefront” translates to engagement with just the right sort of thinkers and prospects for your brand.
• Save Administration Time: Once you have an Intense Debate account, you can quickly manage the comments from multiple blogs all from one control panel online.
• Synergy Loop:  You comment on a post(s) at other sites related to your business mission, and this gets automatically tweeted on Twitter, whereby like-minded people may visit your business blog, comment and have their comments then appear on Twitter with links back to your blog.

Can my business stand up in an “intense” debate? Of course.  This is like asking if your sales force will be able to handle discussion, and even criticism at a trade show.  They can, can’t they?  Good companies will always embrace engaging the market because the constructive criticism will help them perfect products and services.  And great sales people know that debate is an opportunity to present your position which leads to more sales.  Plus, you can always moderate your comment system to weed out spam and destructive comments.

Recommendation: Install IntenseDebate (the WordPress plugin is freely distributed) and add your business blog to the debate.  Webfadds will be pleased to provide this service for you — we’ll be adding it as an option for our Social Marketing Solutions (just contact us at that page).