For years, at the bottom of every single web page on our web design & internet marketing site was a call to action.

Each one of those calls to action was a unique link that led to our contact form.

“Contact us today for a free consultation.”

“Learn how search engine optimization can bring new prospects to your site.”

“Move your static website to a content management system.”

It was fairly effective, but I wondered if there was a way to remove a step and increase our conversion rates. The simple change we made led to a 50% increase in our website conversion rates. 

What was that change?

The change was rather than send people via a link to a contact form, why not just add the contact form to the bottom of these pages? We now call these forms our Action Forms.

While it did add a bit of clutter to our pages, I was hoping that the Action Forms would be a more obvious call to action than just a simple text link. Like a tip jar on the coffee shop counter, it would work as a visual cue to let people know what the expectation was when they finished reading the page.

In the first week we saw a 400% increase in our lead capture forms, which included both the new Action Forms and our original contact form! That was a bit of an aberration, and by the month’s end it settled into a 50% increase over just the contact form alone…an increase that has stayed steady over the years.

While some people may scoff at a 50% increase in leads, especially when you see these crazy numbers some marketers throw around, a 50% increase in qualified leads is substantial for most businesses, and all it took was adding a streamlined version of our contact form to the bottom of our web page template.

It’s definitely something that you or your web developer can do…and if it’s not, it’s probably something we can help you out with.  

So, here’s my challenge to you: put an Action Form at the bottom of your web pages and see what kind of impact it has on your conversion rates over a 30 day period. Good, bad or indifferent, please share your results with us.

Rich Brooks
It’s All About the Conversions

If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know that for the past few years I’ve been running a conference called Social Media FTW with a couple of friends.

We retired that brand after three successful years but I wasn’t quite done.

So this year I started a new conference that would focus on the three most important channels for businesses and organization today: search, social & mobile. These are the Agents of Change.

Earlier today we launched the website for The Agents of Change Digital Marketing Conference.

This all-day conference is happening in Portland, Maine and online on 9.14.12. 

And while the speaker lineup is just getting started, we’ve got some amazing speakers already lined up:

• Chris Brogan, co-author of Trust Agents and Google+ for Business
• Amy Porterfield, co-author of Facebook Marketing All-In-One for Business
• Derek Halpern, brains behind the insanely popular marketing website Social Triggers
• Rich Brooks, who hasn’t done anything, but might. One day.

So, how much are tickets? you’re probably wondering.

The physical ticket is $199 and the digital ticket is $99. The digital ticket gives you access to the live stream and you can watch the presentations over and over again for a full year!

But for a limited time only, we’re offering an early bird ticket: you can get the physical ticket for only $99 and the digital ticket for only $49…that’s over 50% off each!

But wait…there’s more!

If you order the physical ticket by 11:59pm, Tuesday, 5.1.12, we’ll throw in the digital ticket for free! (And yes, it’s still only $99. That’s $298 worth of edutainment for only $99!) Why would you want both the physical ticket AND the digital ticket? So you can watch all the presentations over and over again, or see presentations you may have missed.

If you can’t make it to Portland, Maine on 9.14.12 we’ve still got an amazing deal for you. The digital ticket is only $25 during this 36 hour sale!

Whether you plan to attend in person or virtually, don’t miss this amazing, very limited sale.

Get your tickets now!

Rich Brooks
Agent of Change 

Whether you live in the Great State of Maine or are “from away”, biking in Maine is a beautiful, rewarding activity. 

The new website from the Bicycle Coalition of Maine is here to support you, no matter what you’re looking to do. Here’s just a sampling of what’s going on there:

• Events: Bike Maine puts on a number of great events like the Maine Lobster Ride, the Maine Women’s Ride, and the Great Maine Bike Swap (which I’m looking forward to this year as I’m badly in need of a new(ish) road bike!) You can also find weekly bike rides in Maine and filter by your home town.
• Biking Resources: From a robust list of where to ride to mountain biking resources to maintenance tips and more, you’ll get all your questions answered here.
• Get Involved: Learn how to become a volunteer, become an advocate, or even become a cycling instructor.
• Join Up! You can join or renew your membership in the online store, or grab some great schwag!

This really is just the tip of the iceberg as far as the website goes. Be sure to check it out and start planning your next biking adventure in Maine.

Rich Brooks
Maine Biker

Some people hate Brussels sprouts, others hate stringing words together. That’s what writers are for. But everyone’s a writer, right? With all the slapdash content on the Web, it would appear to be the prevailing opinion. But even if the blank page doesn’t send you screaming into the night, you’re better off hiring a professional. Writers wrestle with words for a living. They’re good at keeping content clean and concise. They’re also good at alliteration.

Your website has the potential to do a lot more for you than look pretty in cyber space. So go be brilliant at the business you’ve created. Let a professional copywriter tell the world about it. You’ll be glad you did, and here are the top ten reasons why:

1. You’ve Made a Significant Investment

You hired a designer to give you a professional look. The programmers are poised to work their magic. SEO is bought and paid for. So, what you gonna do with those keywords? A professional copywriter can deploy them to best advantage in your brand voice. Don’t have a brand voice? A copywriter can help you find it. A copywriter can also ensure that your content is fresh, alluring, properly structured, easy-to-read, and grammatically correct from header to footer.

2. You don’t Know Where to Begin

 You know exactly what you do, and how your company blows the competition away. But getting it down on paper is like performing brain surgery, on yourself.  Copywriters have a way of drawing out the salient points. All you need do is rattle on at length about your product or service—something everyone’s good at. The copywriter will translate it into optimized content with a logical flow.

3. You’re a Prisoner of the Left Brain

Creative headlines command attention and break content into logical chunks. If you’re a left brain thinker, a copywriter can give your content some creative, if not comic, relief. 

4. You Need Marketing Spin

You majored in English for goodness sake, you can write. But chances are, no professor ever taught you how to write benefit-oriented copy, appealing to the hidden urges and desires of a given target audience. A professional copywriter can turn your hard wrought features into irresistible benefits. Pass the spin. 

5. You’re In The Weeds

Despite your way with words and uber-capacity to pile your plate, you’ve missed a deadline or two. And there are other areas in which your expertise is required. Divide and conquer. 

6. You’re Chasing Your Tail

You wade through the 17 paragraphs you’ve just banged out and realize the point you were aiming to convey is a slippery beast. Seventeen more paragraphs aren’t going to bring you any closer to nailing it. You might just be too close to this one. 

7. You’re Up Against a Deadline

Professional copywriters are used to being called in at the eleventh hour. They eat insane deadlines for breakfast. Even if you’re not champing at the bit for your copy, a professional writer is one way to guarantee that your project stays on track, humming and purring to completion.

8. Redundancy, Redundancy

If it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying twice, right? Not so much if you’re a reader with better ways to spend her time. A copywriter can ensure that you make each point once, in the most impactful way. Another word for this is editing.

9.  The Competition Hired a Copywriter

You know you read their site. A good copywriter can help you one-up them. Advantage: you. 

10. You’re a Perfectionist

That’s your name on the website: You want it done right. And you know that means hiring a professional who will agonize over every word, sentence, and paragraph. Not too long; just enough words to immerse the reader in positive vibes about you and get her ruminating on your brand. All typo-free and in the correct tense.

Martha Fenton is a professional copywriter. You can reach her through her LinkedIn profile or call her at 207.773.3703.

Original photo by Joyosity. (If you want the recipe to the amazing looking brussels sprouts above, check out the post Faux Momofuku Brussels Sprouts.

Northern New England Poison Center gets a WordPress Makeover.

Recently flyte launched a website for the Northern New England Poison Center on WordPress.

Visitors to the site can quickly get information on poisons from A to Z or watch presentations from a growing library of recorded webinars, like this one on bath salts. There’s also a poison blog for both the public and health professionals.

The site also offers multiple ways to contact the poison center, from email to live chat. 

NNEPC also wanted to add e-commerce to their new site. While they’re not (currently) selling any antidotes, you can purchase literature, posters and magnets at cost in their NNEPC store.

NNEPC was also looking for some new branding, so they engaged flyte to create a new logo for them:

They also wanted a mobile friendly experience for their site visitors on smart phones:

While I hope you never need the services of NNEPC, you can rest assured that if you do, you can access their knowledge base through whatever channel is easiest for you.

Also, check out this interview with Dr. Karen Simone of the NNEPC on 207 to observe the 50th anniversary of the National Poison Prevention Week:

Rich Brooks
Maine Web Design

I recently discovered that Google Analytics has a tool where you can generate a keyword cloud to display the keyword phrases that drive traffic to your website. However, because it treats each keyword phrase uniquely rather than looking for specific words within the phrase, it doesn’t give you much more insight than just viewing your keywords as a list.

I was looking for a tool that would help me quickly uncover trends and themes within the keywords my prospects were using by amalgamating multiple long tail searches…those very specific terms that goal-driven searches may look for. 

So I took a list of the 500 keyword phrases that drove the most traffic to flyte.biz in the past month, exported them, and popped them into Wordle, a free tool that generates tag clouds like the one above.

Pretty cool, huh?

Two caveats: 

• Wordle only looks at individual words, not phrases, so even “how to” is treated as two unique words. 
• The way I ran the report doesn’t factor in how many times a specific search was performed , rather only by how many times a word appeared in total within the list. I.e., “facebook cover photo” might have driven 50 unique visitors to our site in the past month, but “facebook,” “cover,” and “photo” only get one vote each for that specific search. The terms “business” and “facebook” appear larger in the tag cloud because so many unique searches included those terms. I could have run a scenario where “facebook cover photo” was repeated 50 times before I entered the terms into Wordle to get a better idea of how popular a certain phrase was, but I was looking for trends, not exact numbers.

While this is far from scientific, it does help me get a sense of the biggest challenges our ideal customers suffer from. 

What does your tag cloud tell you?

Rich Brooks
Head in the Clouds 

Dear Rich,

I have a full time job, but I’m very passionate about staying healthy, eating right, and exercising, all on a limited budget.

I want to start a blog so I can share my story, provide tips and advice, and help others. 

I also want to make some money doing it!

Can I have a blog without a website? If so, how can I monetize my blog?

– Monetizing in Machais

Dear Monetizing,

You can definitely have a blog without a traditional website. However, these days the line between blog and website is so blurry as to be inconsequential. Your blog will probably have several static pages, such as an About page and a Contact page at a minimum. 

One way you can make money from your blog is by selling ads. Unless you get a huge following you’ll probably never be able to quit your day job this way, but it will offer you passive streams of income. You could start with Google Adsense, which is probably the easiest way to get going. There are also plenty of blog-specific ad networks out there, including BlogAds.

If you want to increase the money you make off of each ad you’ll have to sell them yourself, which can be more time consuming for both the sales process and managing the ads yourself.

Advertisers will be interested in how many people they can reach through your blog, so you’ll need to build your numbers up. 

You may want to check out 25 Ways to Promote and Market Your Blog to get more traffic.

If you’re wondering what to charge, find similar blogs that take advertising and ask for their advertising rates. (Note: this does require some subterfuge. Try not to mention you’re soon to be a direct competitor. And who knows? If they’re undercharging, maybe you should advertise your blog on theirs!)

Another way you can make money off your blog is through affiliate programs. There are probably plenty of books on Amazon that you’ve read and could recommend through your blog, taking a little bit of each sale through the Amazon affiliate program. Likewise, there may be inexpensive athletic equipment you could recommend. These affiliate links could be within blog posts themselves (although by law you need to mention that it’s an affiliate link) or posing as ads in the side columns.

You should also check out sites like Commission Junction and ClickBank. Through these affiliate marketplaces you can find products with affiliate programs that are in line with your values and the message of your blog.

A third way to make money off your blog is by creating, promoting and selling your own e-product. Maybe you could put together a book of inexpensive recipes or workouts that don’t require expensive equipment or a gym membership. Maybe you could create an e-book called 101 Ways to Get Exercise Out of Every Day Activities or a video program that shows how to exercise using items found around the house.

Using services like e-junkie or 1ShoppingCart you can then sell these virtual goods to the audience you’ve attracted.

Do you have any other ways in which you’ve made money from your blog? Let us know!

Rich Brooks
Blog Monetization 

A few years ago I attended the first Social Media Success Summit (aff). It was a virtual event where you could “attend” from your desktop, watching social media experts talk about Twitter, Facebook and blogging.

As you can see from the video below, I had my doubts of what I could actually gain from a virtual event, but I took the chance and signed up.

It’s no exaggeration that the Social Media Success Summit changed the way I approached social media marketing, and thus the way I ran my business. 

It was the best $300 I ever spent.

So flash forward a few years, and now I’m presenting at SMSS2012. Why they let some guy from Maine speak on the same virtual stage as Mari Smith, Brian Solis, Mike Stelzner, Chris Brogan, Amy Porterfield, C.C. Chapman and like twenty other experts I’ll never know. 

Bottom line is that if you’ve been on the fence about attending the Social Media Success Summit, I can tell you from firsthand experience that it contains amazing content from some of the most knowledgeable people around. Just take a look at the full line up and topics.

If you’re running your own business, or you’re in marketing, or you’ve been recently given the title of social media manager there’s no better resource than SMSS. Take a peek at the video below and I hope to see you in May! 

Rich Brooks
It’s Not Called a Success Summit for Nothing!

To be able to vote for a co-worker’s dog as “cutest ever” or something like that, I had to give 1-800-FLOWERS an unhealthy amount of access to my Facebook account.

Not wanting to disappoint Joan (especially since she has access to a couple of my Twitter accounts and has embarrassing stories to tell about me) I went ahead, giving 1-800-FLOWERS access to everything short of a DNA sample. 

Immediately after voting, I decided to rescind those privileges by removing the app from my Facebook account. However, I couldn’t find how to do it.

After a little research I found out where it was. It wasn’t too difficult…go into your account settings, choose apps, then remove any apps you no longer use or wish to have access to your account.

Or, if you’re visual check out this nifty (short) video I created on How to Remove Apps from Facebook.

That’s it!

Rich Brooks
Like flyte on Facebook! 

That was the question that we pondered as we worked on a pilot program with Braden Buehler of Narrative Design for The Rogers Collection, a Maine-based importer of luxury foods. They wanted to promote Pio Tosini’s prosciutto in an engaging fashion, and build their email list at the same time. 

There are already plenty of fine food importers experimenting with QR codes on product packaging and in catalogs. At Rogers, they decided to engage their customers while they stood at the deli counter, eyeing the prosciutto.

“Pio Tosini Prosciutto de Parma is a premium purchase for any shopper, and with good reason. Their melt-in-your-mouth ham has been hand-selected, deboned, trimmed and cured over 500 days in salt and Mediterranean sea breezes by the Pio Tosini family exactly the same way for over a century.

“You can taste the difference immediately. But how to convince customers to take that first taste, and then to treat themselves?”

(Yes, I totally stole that from Braden!)

To get the QR codes in place they needed buy in from the butcher shops. The good news was that the butchers, shop owners and distributors already swear by Pio Tosini prosciutto.

The campaign was a great reminder to showcase it and talk it up to customers. The Rogers Collection reached out personally to the distributors and retailers participating in the promotion to explain the campaign, and offered discounts and prizes to the locations with the highest participation rates. The response was overwhelming.

The next challenge was to create an offer interesting enough that people would be willing to take out their smart phones and scan the QR code.

Cue the prosciutto. An entire leg’s worth.

That was certainly enough of an incentive. (Unless you are a vegetarian. But then, chances are, you’re not standing in front of a deli counter, drooling over aged cuts of meat.)

People who scanned the QR code were taken to a special, mobile-friendly landing page:

Unique QR codes allow Rogers to track which deli generates the most signups. 

Once the shopper has entered the contest (by entering their name and email) they are directed to a second page with a video and recipe ideas:

The contest is just getting going, but as we collect more data we’ll share it here. 

In the meantime, go eat some prosciutto! 

Rich Brooks
Mmmm…prosciutto.