Today is Leap Day, which is an extra day added during Leap Year, making the year 366 days long instead of the usual 365. Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun.
Leap Day as a concept has existed for more than 2000 years, and is still associated with age-old traditions, folklore and superstition. One of the most popular traditions is that women propose to their boyfriends, so all you dating guys get ready out there. 
If you’ve visited Google.com today, you’ve seen the doodle they posted today that is a mash-up for the late Italian composer Gioachino Rossini’s 220th birthday and Leap Day.
One great benefit of having Leap Day occur this year is that you have 1 extra day to participate in BoostSuite’s Refer and Win Program! So get out there, help us find more test users, and increase your chances of winning a Kindle Fire! Thank you!
Two weeks ago, we talked about reviewing why your company has a website. We explored why your site exists, what will get someone to visit your site again and again, and how you will measure success.
There are really two parts to any of the aforementioned website goals, 1) figuring out a reason to get a person to visit your site in the first place, and 2) having that visitor complete an action. Let’s explore this second point in more depth. Completing an action can take many shapes and forms. This could be anything from filling out a contact form, subscribing for an email newsletter, volunteering for an event, or if you do sell a product online, to put something in your shopping cart and checkout.
Each of these can be called a “Call to Action” (aka CTA). The “Call to Action” brings together the goals of the site by providing something that is measurable, provides a destination for a visitor and really brings focus to the website experience.
But how do you get someone to complete your “Call to Action”?
- Make sure its highly visible. Put it on every page.
- Bring focus to the CTA. Make it a colorful link or button to draw attention to it. Put white space around it so it stands out.
- Keep your CTA in the same general space and near the top of the page. Don’t force your visitor to scroll all the way to the bottom to find out what to do.
- Do not have more than one or two CTA’s on any given page of your site. You don’t want to confuse the visitor with too many choices.
- Use words that encourage action (verbs like “Call”, “Buy”, “Subscribe”) and avoid cliche terms like “Click here”.
- Create a sense of urgency and a need to act now with terms such as “for a short time only” and “offer expires mm/dd/yyyy”.
- Be sure to clearly communicate what the user will receive when they take action. If its a newsletter, describe the frequency, if its a file download, tell the user the size and the file type.
- When your CTA is a form, make sure you only collect the data your really need. Each additional form element can reduce responses by more than 10% each in some cases.
- If you do have a CTA that requires a lot of time or monetary commitment, have a secondary CTA that is easier for a visitor to take action on like signing up for a newsletter.
- Provide a small incentive for your CTA. Give a coupon or special whitepaper.
Have you implemented a “Call to Action” that was particularly effective? Let us know what has worked for you.
If you would like to learn more about our next generation tools for website success, called BoostSuite, sign up here and be entered for a chance to win a Kindle Fire.
Two weeks ago, we announced the new version of Eden Platform, called BoostSuite. We presented the Presidents’ Day offer to win a Kindle Fire yesterday and so far, we’ve had a great response.
BoostSuite is the next generation of website optimization tools and it will change the way you acquire new customers online. BoostSuite will work with any website, not just sites built on Eden.
In preparation for the upcoming launch of BoostSuite, we are asking for your help to find new users who need BoostSuite the most. We are looking for your friends or colleagues who have websites and want more revenue for their businesses or organizations.
When you refer new users to BoostSuite they’ll receive a free account and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a Kindle Fire. We will track each referral and give you credit for everyone you refer that creates a free account.
If you’re interested in participating in the BoostSuite “Refer and Win” Program, please follow these instructions.
- Go to http://signup.boostsuite.com.
- Enter your email address into the signup field and Click “Go”.
- On the next page you’ll receive a custom invitation link you can use to share BoostSuite with others. Send your custom link to your colleagues and business contacts who would be interested in increasing the amount of leads and revenue they get from their websites. You can use the tools on this page to:
- Send an email that contains your invitation link
- Share your invitation link with your Twitter followers
- Share your invitation link with your Facebook friends
- Share your invitation link with your LinkedIn contacts
- Get a personal referral code
We will send an update in Mid-March to let you know how you are doing and we will announce the Kindle Fire winner on April 1st.
Thanks again for your support!
Happy Presidents’ Day to you all! If you work in government or finance, we hope you’re enjoying your day off. Today’s holiday is intended to honor all the American presidents, most significantly George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, but mostly goes by unnoticed with the exception of some time off and retail sales.
The marketing phenomenon of Presidents’ Day is one where advertisers seek to capitalize on the opportunity for three-day or week-long sales. When we posted for Abe’s birthday two weeks ago, we talked about how Eden provides web marketing understanding and knowledge, not just indecipherable data.
Eden Platform gives you data that’s easy to understand and act upon when deciding the topics to optimize your next piece of content on. It is a perpetual holiday that keeps on giving! On that note, we’re not one to simply let this Presidents’ Day go by without a special offer of our own.
The next version of Eden is called BoostSuite, and we’re looking for some special people to become our first free users. We’re running a special offer to find users called the “Refer and Win” program. You can win a Kindle Fire by referring new users for free BoostSuite accounts. Each referral is another chance to win.
So how does the “Refer and Win” program work?
- Go to http://signup.boostsuite.com.
- Enter your email address into the signup field and Click “Go”.
- On the next page you’ll receive a custom invitation link you can use to share BoostSuite with others. Send your custom link to your colleagues and business contacts who would be interested in increasing the amount of leads and revenue they get from their websites. You can use the tools on this page to:
- Send an email that contains your invitation link
- Share your invitation link with your Twitter followers
- Share your invitation link with your Facebook friends
- Share your invitation link with your LinkedIn contacts
- Get a personal referral code
We will track each referral and give you credit for everyone who signs up for a free account. For every referral you send our way, we will enter you for a chance to win a Kindle Fire. We will send an update in Mid-March to let you know how you are doing and we will announce the Kindle Fire winner on April 1st.
Contact us if you have any questions. Thanks for your help and support! Good luck!
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how Southern Energy used The Eden Platform to optimize the middle and bottom of the conversion funnel. I received a lot of great questions from customers on this article and that got me thinking about the reason businesses have a website in the first place.
Many companies have not spent the time to properly define the business objectives and goals of their website. They put up a site, cross their fingers and hope for the best. However, having a successful website starts with defining why you have the site and where you are trying to go with the site. Lets dig into these areas a little more. At the end of this article you should be able to provide a clear statement for your business on what you are trying to do online with your website.
Having a website for your business means being able to answer the following:
- Why does your website exist?
- What will get someone to visit your site and to return to your site?
- How will you measure success for your site?
Why does your site exist?
Describe in one or two sentences what you are trying to do with your site. It could be to sell things, provide support for a product, etc. Be as specific as possible.
The Preation website exists to help educate visitors on The Eden Platform and to turn those visitors into trial users.
What will get someone to visit your site and to return to your site?
Describe why your site will be different from all the others. Give a few compelling reasons why your site is the place to go, over and over again.
The Preation website will offer access to the most affordable and effective tool to acquire more leads and customers from a website.
How will you measure success for your site?
Describe simple metrics that are easy to measure. Set growth objectives in weekly, quarterly and yearly segments to see how your site is doing in both a short term and long term view.
The Preation website will be measured in terms of page views, conversions to Eden trials and the quality of the visitors (btw, all of these are success metrics that The Eden Platform does for you).
Take some time to answer these questions and write down your answers in a place where your computer is readily accessible. Whenever you make an update to your site, add a page, create a new blog article, etc, make sure you do a quick review of your objectives to ensure what you are doing works toward your website’s goals.
Meeting website goals doesnt need to be hard. You just need to start with a little planning and great tools like The Eden Platform to help meet your objectives.
Did you have your website objectives written down already? Tell us how your experience putting pen to paper went in defining the goals for your site.
If you would like to learn more about our next generation tools for website success, called BoostSuite, sign up here for our upcoming preview.
It’s Valentine’s Day again! It always seems to me that this holiday was created by the candy, jewelry, and flower industries putting their heads together in some secret board room; thinking of how they can make their Q1 (or annual) sales numbers and make single people feel that much more alone for a day. But don’t worry, we’re here for you. We have a special present for you that doesn’t include Tums flavored heart message candies, zirconium jewels, or fake carnations.
We’re offering the gift that keeps on giving all year, The Eden Platform. The marketing automation features within Eden provide users with all of the information they need to maintain a healthy website relationship. Whether it’s the on-page optimization feature, the Offers feature, or the Keyword Report, Eden has you covered. You’ll no longer have to worry about confusing web analytics because Eden tells you exactly where you stand.
You’ll see that many companies using Valentine’s Day as an up-sale/promotional opportunity. For example, Redbox is allowing their users to send a free DVD rental as Valentines to their friends via Facebook. This is a perfect way for them to get free, word-of-mouth advertising, which we all know is as good as gold. Another example is FTD.com. They went with a Groupon, allowing folks to spend $20 to get $40 to spend on their website. The Groupon was sent out weeks before the big day to allow us procrastinating men (you know who you are out there) to take care of this well beforehand.
These items are great for driving traffic to your site. Once website visitors get to your site, what incentives are you using to drive conversions? The Offers feature in Eden is a great tool for testing marketing language and optimizing the middle to the bottom of the conversion funnel. A visitor has a higher probability of becoming a lead if they are given some sort of incentive to either purchase something from you or try to contact you. Remember how Southern-Energy Management increased their on-site conversion percentage by 419%? They did it using the Offers feature.
Are there any other web marketing tools that you’ve checked the hypothetical “yes” checkbox on the “Do you like me?” note? Tell us about your “crushes” in the comments below!
Are you interested knowing more about the next version of The Eden Platform, called BoostSuite? Sign-up here today.
With Honest Abe’s birthday coming up this Sunday, I was thinking about all of the great things he did for our nation. Our sixteenth president led our country through a great constitutional, military, and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and promoting economic and financial modernization.
If President Lincoln were alive today, I’m sure he would have his own opinions about our nation’s current economic and financial situation, but I’m sure he would also be impressed by the progression of technology and how it relates to online marketing.
He would most certainly be inspired by the Eden Platform and how it helps users understand exactly what is going on with their websites’ results, without the use of traditional charts and graphs. There’s no guess work regarding your marketing efforts. You know exactly where you stand. Eden is honest, just like Abe was! You don’t need a degree in statistics to know if your site is performing well or not. And you certainly don’t need to pay a so called “search engine marketing professional” to tell you what these metrics mean. You can become a web marketing pro in your own rite just by using Eden!
Eden tells you exactly what keywords your visitors are using to find your site in the search engines as well as which keywords are resulting in the most conversions (leads). Eden tells you how qualified your visitors are based on your Quality Score. Eden even ranks your keywords by value and opportunity so you know which ones to focus your optimization efforts on next when creating new website content.
If that gets your blood pumping, we’ve got some even more exciting news to share with you. The newest version of Eden is called BoostSuite and it will completely revolutionize the website marketing automation space by completely liberating you from the traditional analytics data you’re used to. No more charts and graphs! Huzza! You can be one of the first to experience BoostSuite. All you need to do is sign up here to stay in the loop – http://boostsuite.com.
What are your experiences with website analytics data? Whether positive or negative, we’d love to hear about them. Drop us a note in the comments section below!
I just returned from my cousin’s wedding in Houston, TX this weekend. Everything was wonderfully done. The ceremony, beautiful and emotional. The reception, a blast. The food and cake, delicious. The company, warm and loving. On the flight home I started thinking about what marriage means and how that relates to what we’re doing here with The Eden Platform.
After just getting married myself last October, the vows and promises are still fresh in my memory. Marriage is a two-way street, a relationship based on give and take. When both parties work together, the possibilities are endless and the results, generally positive.
These same values hold true when you start talking about your website’s content and data. An effective marketing website cannot be run without having both content and marketing data. Even more importantly, the data must be easy to understand and act upon. We see too many Google Analytics users coming to us who haven’t logged into their account in ages because they simple do not know how to read the data they’re provided with. If you can’t read the data, then how do you know what you’re going to do next? How do you know how you’re performing currently? How do you know what effect your work is having?
Our goal is to provide our customers with the data directly within their accounts and tell them what they need to do to optimize their sites with small, actionable items. We abide by the KISS model, or “Keep It Simple and Straightforward”. Online marketing shouldn’t be so hard for small businesses to excel at. We aim to free our customers from their data and turn them into professional website marketeers!
What are you experiences with marketing data like? Is the relationship of your website content and data in need of some “counseling” to help keep things amicable and productive? Then give Eden a try today.
I recently had the pleasure of working with Logan Butler, a Criminal Defense lawyer in Cumming, GA. Logan signed up for a free trial of the Eden Platform on the 8th of January. I gave Logan a call and we conducted a quick Eden walk-through together. That’s when I noticed how much work he had already done with his Eden site! He was able to change his theme, upload his logo, and start adding/editing/optimizing content. I helped him with a couple of miscellaneous items he was looking for assistance with, but after our call, Logan was able take the reigns and complete his content entry.
The result was Logan being able to take his completed site live merely 5 days after signing up for the trial! Logan’s experience exemplifies Eden’s ease of use. I asked Logan how his experience has been with Eden so far and he was more than willing to provide me with the following feedback:
“Thanks you for taking the time to provide me with a personal tutorial on the Eden Platform during my trial session. The Eden interface is incredibly easy to use, especially with the online support articles provided by Eden. I was able to transfer my web site to the Eden Platform and immediately begin upgrading my site within a few hours of beginning my trial session. Your interface allowed me, a complete novice, to build a professional looking website that is SEO optimized without spending a fortune on a web designer. I have upgraded my account and look forward to utilizing Eden to keep my site optimized. Thanks for providing such a great, productive and easy to use web site builder.”
Logan, on behalf of the entire Eden Platform staff, thank you for such a positive review and for being an Eden customer!
If you’re in need of legal representation in the Cumming, GA area, here’s a link to Logan’s Eden website – loganbutlerlaw.com
Today is Leap Day, which is an extra day added during Leap Year, making the year 366 days long instead of the usual 365. Leap Years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the Earth’s revolutions around the sun.
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