In the previous article you had a chance to whet your appetite to the flavor of a successful campaign as Frank Rumbauskas a Google-Certified AdWords Professional gave us a number of tips in How to Use AdWords to Explode Your Business. Now we’re going to talk about conversion.

The term “conversion” as it’s referred to here isn’t the adoption of a new religious identity, or a change from one religious identity to another, though for some it does entail the sincere avowal of a new belief system. In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad leads directly to user behavior you deem valuable, such as a purchase, signup, page view, or lead.

How do I create a high quality landing page? First of all, if you’re putting money into driving traffic to a page, whether it’s through AdWords or organic search result (listings in search engine results pages that appear by dint of their relevance to the search terms as apposed to pay per click advertising), wouldn’t you agree that the content of that page should be worth every dollar you spend?

I think we’ll all agree, traffic is absolutely necessary and good in abundance, however, until your visitors actually convert you’re not making any money. In other words, no amount traffic equals conversion if your landing page, simply put, sucks ass! No matter what that conversion happens to be, either sell a product or collect and email address, you want people to take that action.

Clearly then, for conversion to occur the overall aesthetics and user friendliness of your landing page weigh heavily on the success of your ad campaign. With that said, here are the fundamentals.

Your landing page must be super-relevant. For instance, having your keyword in the landing page headline will get the visitors attention. It will tell the visitor the page is relevant to what they searched for. Doing so will more than likely increase your chances of having the visitor remain on your page long enough to read your shpill and possibly convert.

You landing page must have an undiluted clear-cut call to action. Give then only one option, the option to convert. Don’t let them get distracted! Pages that have only one goal outperform the rest simply because of the fact that having two goals requires communicating two messages. Remove any navigation links, outbound links and advertisements from your landing page. Your goal is to convert, convert, convert. Keep it simple and to the point.

Select the right look and placement for your message. Here’s an exercise: think about yourself. Think about your car, your clothes, your favorite brands, restaurants, radio stations and fave sites online. In all that you do, you CUSTOMIZE your life. Similarly, you must customize your web page to speak to your ideal visitor. Keep everything on the page geared toward making that individual feel comfortable.

When at first you don’t succeed test, test and retest. You can use web tools like Google Analytics to track how effective that content is in getting you conversions, but tracking won’t tell you how to make your content more effective. Experimenting and evaluating your results will enable you to identify what users respond to best so you can create a page that will be more effective in getting the business results you want.

So, as my shameless plug, I’m leaving you a link to one of my own landing pages so that you may see and study hands-on how to apply what you just learned. Likewise if you want to discuss your landing page or if you need a quote, or want us to built one, just get in touch.

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In this article Frank Rumbauskas a Google-Certified AdWords Professional introduces you to the many important benefits of using AdWords and offers you tips on how to make your campaign a success by continuously generating new leads.

Personally, the reasons I prefer using Google AdWords over any other type of PPC service are number one, because it grants me access to googles enormous advertising network and also because AdWords charges me only if and when someone clicks my ad, and not just when the ad is displayed. Significantly, however, a click on your ad may not always mean conversion. In online advertising, a conversion occurs when a click on your ad leads directly to user behavior you deem valuable, such as a purchase, signup, page view, or lead.

In other words all the hits in the world amount to nothing if the user is not compelled to take action. Clearly then, for conversion to occur the overall aesthetics and user friendliness of your website play heavily on the success of your ad campaign. In the next article I’ll show you how the right template customization make it easy to increase your site effectiveness and visitor satisfaction, which leads to higher conversion rates and a higher return on your investments.

AdWords, when used properly, will not only grow your business and list exponentially but it is very cost effective as well. There are many people who have tried using a pay-per-click program such as Google AdWords but have failed. Why did they fail?

One of the main reasons that internet marketers fail with their AdWords campaigns is because they are lazy. Honest, but true. AdWords is not a guided missile to riches that you can simply fire and forget. Like all things in life that provide a great reward, a successful AdWords campaign is something that you have to work at.

1.) Understand the Nature of the Beast

The most important thing in a successful AdWords campaign is developing an understanding of the system. It may not be rocket science but it is pretty darned close. Before you begin, head over to the AdWords site and read the FAQ. Then hit the Google search engine and visit some message boards dedicated to AdWords. If need be, pick up a guide and read it as well. The more that you know about the system and how it works, the more you will be able to take advantage of it.

Take the opinions of others into consideration but do not let them guide you. On some of the internet marketing forums you will find that many people are against AdWords and other pay-per-click systems. Many times this is because they jumped in with both feet before they understood the system and therefore they failed. You are not going to fail because you are going to take the time to do your research BEFORE starting your first campaign.

2.) Set Spending Limits

AdWords gives you the ability to set daily spending limits for keywords. Use this feature to control the cost of your ads. If you only want to spend $75 per day on advertising, set that as your limit and the system will stop serving your ads when your limit has been reached.

3.) Create Relevant Ad Copy

When creating an ad the goal is to achieve top placement at the lowest cost. One way to accomplish this goal is to include your keyword in both the headline and body of your ad. This increases the relevancy of your ad and thereby lowers the cost.

4.) Use Different Types of Keywords

How often your ad is displayed and how it is triggered is really up to you. There are 3 main keyword types that you can use.

Broad Match - example: fine dining??This phrase is entered without quotations or brackets. You ad would be triggered anytime a user enters a search string that included the words “fine” and “dining” regardless of order or placement.

Phrase Match - example “fine dining”??Enter this type of phrase with quotation marks surrounding it. Your ad will be triggered by searches that contain the words “fine dining” in that order.

Exact Match - example: [fine dining]??This type of keyword is entered with brackets. To trigger your ad a user would have to conduct a search that exactly matches the keyword phrase.

Use of keywords and match types can help your keep your costs within reason and lead to a successful AdWords campaign.

The 4 topics discussed here are but a few of the many strategies that you need to learn and understand to be truly successful in the AdWords game. Get as much information as you possibly can and use it to explode your business.

About the Author
Frank Rumbauskas is a New York Times bestselling author and a Google-Certified AdWords Professional. He has created several highly successful businesses using AdWords alone. To download 10 chapters of Frank’s AdWords system and get his free AdWords Tips newsletter, please visit http://www.adwordsinsidesecrets.com

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Google offers free webmaster tools to help you check for technical issues that may be barring your website from high natural rankings. Here’s the skinny on what’s available in Google’s Webmaster Tools, and what you can do with them.

Note: To use all the webmaster tools available, you must have FTP/back-end access to your website. This is so you can verify your site on Google and utilize automatic diagnostic features that help you improve the indexing of your site by search robots.

1. Log into Google’s Webmaster Tools with your Google Account info.

2. Type in the URL of the site you want to optimize in the Dashboard.

3. You will now see an Overview page, where you can follow instructions to verify your site by uploading a file to your server via FTP, or adding a meta-tag to the site’s HTML. Verification will unlock diagnostics tools, statistics on your site, link information, and various other tools.

4. Now it’s time to upload a sitemap in xml format to Google. It’s easy to create your own site map online, or learn how to make one yourself using Sitemap Protocol. Once your sitemap.xml file has been created, upload it via FTP to the highest directory on your site’s server. Now go to the Sitemaps section of WM Tools and click on the link to “Add a Sitemap.”

5. After submitting your sitemap, go to Diagnostics > Web Crawl. This is where information is listed about errors or issues impeding Google’s searchbot from crawling any page on your site. This includes any broken links, pages that time out before loading, and any restricted URLs. Using this tool to identify erroneous pages on your site will allow to pinpoint the problem to go in and repair site content.

6. I will skip Mobile Crawl as that is for websites designed for mobile devices - and since this is a fairly new invention, I’m sure this is not applicable to most of you.

7. Now go to Diagnostics > Content Analysis. This page deals with issues to do with the actual content on your site, including meta-tags and title tags. You can drill down and identify pages on your site with duplicate, long, or short meta-descriptions, or missing title tags, and any non-indexable content.

8. I’m honestly not so convinced of the value offered by the Webmaster Tools’ “Statistics” section, but go ahead and poke around if you are interested in general Page Ranking on your site, what search queries are leading to your site on Google, and general info about subscribers (if you have any - though I would recommend FeedBurner for gathering those stats if you’re serious about subscribers), or a list of indexed pages.

9. Ever wonder what pages on your site are being linked to externally? Check out the Links section of Webmaster Tools. You can also find out what Sitelinks appear for your site on Google’s search results pages. For more information on how to get sitelinks up for your site, or what the heck sitelinks are, you can read some theories on how to get sitelinks to appear.

10. Upload a robots.txt file to your site’s server if you want to prohibit Googlebots from crawling specific pages of your site. For example, block the bots from certain secure pages. Remember also to include a reference to the location of your sitemap in the robots.txt file.

11. You can generate and analyze your robots.txt file in the WM Tools “Tools” section.

And that about wraps up Webmaster Tools.

About the Author
Digital Age Dump is a collection of articles and insights on web 2.0, SEO, copywriting, and more to do with the evolving way we connect and communicate on the web.

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Seems like Flash is on everyone’s mind lately, I get so many emails from new designers and do-it-yourselfers whom have purchased a flash template and lo and behold their saying “Please help before I pull the rest of my hair out!” Ouch, that hurts!

Generally speaking they’re having difficulties figuring out this new medium or just trying to make sense of the whole Flash environment. And who can blame them, lets face it Flash is nothing if not a little fickle.

Personally it’s over a decade since I first started fooling around with the stuff, still I do not consider myself by any means to be an expert, but try to share the many mistakes that I’ve made and the things that have helped me and hopefully that little bit on knowledge can help keep whatever’s left on top of your head where it belongs. I’ll admit to cutting some corners, but what you’ll get are 7 nuggets of prime Flash customization advice. With hidden features explained, myths exposed and tricks uncovered, these tips are all designed to address our most commonly asked questions with all the right remedies.

These are just my seven that I thought were the essentials, but maybe there are some you’d like to share, so if you would like to comment by all means, we love to hear from you, feel free to share your experiences leave us your comments. And as always should you wish to acquire more information about our template customization services simply jump on over to the contact form and let us know what you’re thinking.

1 – Flash is an Artful Dodger

Flash has a stubborn tendency for shutting downs always at the worst possible times, although, I must admit it does bear a knack for inspiring sympathy, you see Flash is always very cordial about it. For example it’ll say something like Flash has encountered a problem and needs to close, (cute little guy, poor thing), and that it is very truly sorry for the inconvenience, but there’s no time to waist, it must relieve itself at once. And me being the agreeable person that I am will simply click Ok and watch desperately as all my work just disappears never to be mentioned again. Of course there are lots of other good reasons for remembering to save frequently that one just so happens to be mine.

There are also several options that you can use to save a file: ‘ Save’, ‘ Save As’, and ‘ Save and Compact’. When you save a file, Flash does not analyze all the data before creating an optimized version of the document. Instead, the changes you make to the document are appended to the end of the .fla file’s data, which shortens the time it takes to save the document. When you select ‘ Save As’ and type a new name for the file, Flash writes a new and optimized version of the file, which results in a smaller file size. When you select ‘ Save and Compact’, Flash creates a new optimized file and deletes the original file.

Caution: When you select ‘ Save and Compact’, you cannot undo any changes you made before you saved the file. On the contrary if you select Save when working with a document, you can undo changes made prior to that save point. Because Save and Compact deletes the earlier version of the file and replaces it with the optimized version, you cannot undo earlier changes.

Remember to use ‘ Save As’ frequently and to type a new file name for your document after every milestone in your project if you are not using version control software to create backups of your .fla file. If you encounter major problems while working on the document, you have an earlier version to use instead of losing everything.

2 - Stop Tinkering And Listen

Before we do anything we first need to carefully install all the fonts that came with the template. Otherwise Flash is going to hit us with a “Missing Font Warning” alert message. That means that we have not installed all of the fonts included in the package, and that could result in a host of other issues. Here’s what we need to do.

1 - Choose “Start > Settings > Control Panel” (Note: In Windows XP, choose “Start > Control Panel“)
2 - double-click on the “Fonts” folder
3 - choose “File > Install New Font”
4 - in the Drives list, select the drive and the folder containing the fonts you want to install
5 - select the fonts to install. To select more than one font, hold down the “CTRL” key and click each font
6 - click “OK” to install the fonts.

Quick Tip! A simpler way to install new fonts is simply to drag and drop all the fonts you want to install onto the “Fonts” folder located within the Control Panel directory.

3 – Putting your text in there

First we should open our “.fla” file from our web design template package in Macromedia Flash. Then if not already open we’ll open the symbols library (hotkey “L”) and browse through it to find the symbol containing the text we want to modify.

What’s nice is that all symbols that contain text have appropriate names such as “Company Name” or “About Us” and we can also see them in the preview window at the top of symbols library panel. If we’re unable to see the text for some reason we’ll probably need to change movie background to a different color other than white, as white text on white background stands invisible.

To do that, we’ll need to choose Modify/Document… from the top menu and change background color in popup window.

Once we have what we’re looking for we want to double click the symbols icon to show text symbol in main workspace window. Then we’ll simply double click that text with “Selection Tool” or single click it with “Text Tool” (hotkey “T“) to edit the contents.

4 - Changing images in Flash

A: Open your source “FLA” file in Adobe Flash and press “F11” to launch symbols library. To perform search of a needed image symbol will be easier if you sort them “by kind” simply by pressing “kind” tab at the top of symbols list. You’ll see that all bitmap symbols are grouped now at the top of the whole symbols library.

Browse these symbols to find symbol your want to substitute. You can see symbols preview at the top of symbols library. When you have found necessary bitmap symbol double click the icon on the left of it as to see the symbol properties window.

You’ll see image preview and options there. Check the image size. It looks like 284 x 423 pixels at 32 bits per pixel. To make your image fit the original effects and animation the best way your image must be exactly the same size as in the original image.

You can resize or crop your image using Adobe Photoshop. Open your image in it using “File/Open…” from the top menu. To resize or crop choose “Image/Image Size…” or “Image/Canvas Size…” accordingly. Then save image using “File/Save As…”, for using it in flash choose one of the following image formats: “JPEG”, “GIF” or “PNG”.

Press “Import” button on the left and browse to location of your image file.

At the bitmap symbols properties window you can change the image quality. Make it lower to reduce published file size. Now you should publish your flash movie.

Quick Tip! You can actually publish your movie directly from “Publish Settings” window, see “Publish” button at the bottom. Or you can publish it from every point of Adobe Flash by pressing “SHIFT+F12″ hotkey.

5 - Making The Contact Form Work

This is a real common question but I think I already covered it in detail over on another post so I’ll just give you the link. http://foamers.net/blogger/archives/45

6 – Duplicating symbols

There are times when you need to make customizations to an instance of a symbol without editing the original so that those changes don’t reflect in any other instances of the symbol on your template or affect the symbol in your Flash Library. For example you might want to add a whole new page or you may need to add an extra button etc. Thats when duplicating a symbol comes in handy because it lets you use an existing symbol ( any item in the library) as a starting point for creating a new symbol.

Open your source “FLA” file in Adobe Flash and press “F11” to launch symbols library. From library, what we need to do is right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) the symbol, select Duplicate Symbol and give the duplicate symbol it’s name.

Next, drag the symbol unto the stage and give it an instance name. Note an instance name and a symbol name are tow totally different things. Meaning, that while there may be two or more instances of the same symbol with the same name “symbol 1”, each instance must have assigned a unique identifier (e.g. instance name) for all ActionScrip reference purposes.

To edit the symbol, you simply double click the symbol to access it in the Main Area. Then double click the text area and enter your own slogan. Once you edit a symbol, Flash updates all the instances of that symbol in your document. You can customize all other Flash elements by repeating these simple steps.

7- SEO for my Flash Template

Can Flash really be made to be search engine friendly? Surprisingly the answer is yes in fact all you have to do is follow these 3 simple steps.

Step 1: When you are finished customizing and or coding your Flash template, go to File -> Publish Settings. Click on the HTML tab and check the “Detect Flash Version” option. You should set this to the lowest possible version that supports the code used in your movie (ActionScript 3.0 cannot be lower than version 9).

Step 2: Open up the HTML file in the HTML text-editor of your choice. You will notice that there is a section of JavaScript code that detects the users Flash Player version. If they have a version equal to or higher than the version you specified in your Publish Setting in step 1, the Flash .swf file will play as planned. You will also notice that there is a place in the js code that reads something to the effect of “var alternate content = “”.

If the user has an older version of Flash than specified in step 1, then this content will be displayed instead via JavaScript (remember to escape quotes in the variable using backslashes). This is where you can include the Flash movie’s content in HTML, and it is completely readable by robots and site crawlers.

Step 3: “What if the user’s browser does not support JavaScript?,” you might ask. Well, that base is covered too. Just under the JavaScript section discussed in step 2, there is an opening and closing tag. You can also put all of the alternate (HTML version) Flash content in between these tags. This serves as a second fallback for Flash.

In summary, if the user does not have Flash, or the version of Flash is too old, then the alternate JavaScript content you defined will try to display instead. If the user’s browser does not have JavaScript, then the “noscript” content will display. Moreover, you have the HTML version of your content being read and indexed by the site crawlers twice! This content can also be styled using CSS like a traditional web page. You can even go so far as to use the same CSS stylesheet to style your Flash and your HTML, but that is a lesson for another day (see Stylesheets, Flash and XML for Dummies).

This article was recently dugg so if you’d like to show your support I’d really appreciated.

Special thanks to Aaron Waldon for #7

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