Sometimes a video landing page is better than a text only. With a short video, you can demonstrate your service, product or tell your story much better than text can.

Today's tutorial shows you how to create an elegant, but minimalistic video landing page. The page is mobile friendly by being responsive and it is highly effective when implemented correctly.

The tutorial is below, includes a video and written tutorial. Then you'll find links to all the different resources I use and the Youtube embed code for the landing page.

Questions or comments? Please leave them below in the comment section.

Creating a simple video landing page with a call to action.

The call to action can be to opt-in to sign up for your email list, or to send the visitor to another link. I show you both methods in this tutorial.

Video Tutorial

Text, step by step tutorial

First login to your Leadpages account and go to the templates section.

In the Template section look for the template labeled: G+ Hangout Page (Doubles As A Sales Page or Opt-in Page). You could use a number of other templates available. There is one specific template called Video Landing Page. I wanted the two calls to action to be big buttons.

And I want the ability to find out which is a better landing page, one with the social media icons and one without it. In the future I would A/B test this feature.

For now, we want a simple video landing page. No fancy stuff, no social media, no thrills, no frills.

Once you select this template and go into edit it, you will notice it looks a whole lot different than the finished product that we want. This is what the original template looks like the screenshots below (click  to enlarge).

What we really want is to make it look like this page here (opens in new window) the video will autoplay. That is simple and direct. There is a headline that pitches the offer, then a little bit of instruction. Then the video follows and it autoplays while showing the minimal number of distractions.

There are two large call to action buttons, one immediately after the video and one after the text box that follows the first call to action button.

Please note: For the sample landing page I showed you above, I just took one of my Youtube videos and made the page as an example for you. It's just for demo purposes.

Why so simple?

If you want your visitor to take action on your landing page, then the page needs to be clean, organized and it needs to have a clear and single purpose. That's why I created it so simple.

To clean up the template so it looks like my sample, you just need to go through the elements we don't want on the left hand side. You can use the "eye" icon to remove them.

In my example, I removed a lot of elements from the page starting with the top logo, most of the middle box stuff and a few other things. Here's what the list of elements looks like on that page.

Notice the highlighted green box shows the eye-icon when it is active so the element which it indicates is visible and the red box indicates what the icon looks like when it is hiding an element.

Adjusting the call to action

Once you get it to look clean, the way I show in my sample, you need to adjust the call to action. In some cases, you will leave the call to action connected to an opt-in form where the visitor enters their name and email and they get added to your Aweber email list. But what if you don't want to do that?

In some cases you want the call to action to be a simple link to another page. To do this you just need to adjust the settings for the call to action. Mouse over the button and a small cogwheel will appear on the top right hand corner of the button.

When  you click on that, you will see a the "link options" action menu, click on it.

Then you simply change the option from "Show Opt-in Form" to "Go to a URL." Enter the URL under the Target URL field.

Fill in the Text for the button or link and whether you want the link to open in a new tab, or use the nofollow option.

Click on done. Save the page and publish it, and you're ready to go. You can then use direct link from Leadpages to plug into your traffic source (ad, solo ad, social media). Or like I showed you in the example above, you can connect it to your WordPress website using the Leadpages plugin for WordPress.

I use three tools to get this video landing page done

Leadpages. Get your account at Leadpages setup here (affiliate link). I have the Pro level account because I like to do A/B split testing. I recommend you get that as well.

Aweber. My go to email list service. They recently revamped their entire operation and I really like them. You can get started for free for the first month (affiliate link).

Youtube. You should have an account there already but if you don't, go get one. Every internet marketer needs at least one youtube account. You could also use Vimeo, but I don't cover that in this tutorial.

If you don't have a Youtube account, here is a video explaining how to get a Youtube account.

Youtube Embed Code for Leadpages

If you're looking for the code to use on your own landing page, this is the code I used for my Youtube embed video on the tutorial. I use some of the options that the youtube player provides.

If you copy and paste this, don't forget to change the video id code so it works for your video, I explain that in the video tutorial.

<iframe width="857" height="482" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/kecoShfR1Nc?controls=0&showinfo=0&rel=0&autoplay=1&autohide=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Youtube embed code documentation

For a full list of the parameters you can use on a Youtube embed video, you can review the official documentation here.

Youtube embed codes have 2 main parts. One is the address of the youtube video and the other is the parameters instructing Youtube how to play the video. These parameters work with values, like this: parameter_name=value.

With these commands, you can hide most of the player controls, autoplay, loop the video, etc. In my code example above, I use a few different parameters to customize the youtube video. Let me explain them:

controls=0 - This means that the play / pause controls will not be shown

showinfo=0 - This means that the video will not show all the details about the video as Youtube normally does

rel=0 - This means that when the video finishes, it will not show related videos like Youtube does normally

autoplay=1 - This instructs the page to automatically start playing the video. Please notice that autoplay does not work on most mobile devices.

autohide=1 - This means that all the stuff that is shown when you hover your cursor over the video will disappear when you move your mouse away.

Wrapping things up

This is just one method of creating a video landing page. Keep in mind that a good video is important as well as a good pitch. You can have the best looking, fastest loading, simplest page in the world but if your ad copy sucks or your video is not good, you will not convert traffic into sales.

Do  you have any questions or comments? Let me know below.

The post How to Create a Simple Video Landing Page appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

I talk about list building and how it is similar to dating. I also talk about the infamous "free, just pay shipping and handling" method.

List building is essential to any business, the tactics change over time, but the goal doesn't. You need a list and at least two segments, buyers and leads. You can always segment more beyond that and you should, but you need at least two main groups.

For the lead generation part I use two programs. But at the very basic level, you need just the second one.

#1 Optinmonster, because it integrates with WordPress beautifully. It creates intelligent lead generation boxes and helps you retain more traffic on your WordPress blog. Rumor has it that it will soon be platform agnostic so I highly recommend it. You can get Optinmonster here.

#2 LeadPages is the other app I use. This has entire websites that you can build as landing pages and they are some of the best out there. They are mobile friendly, easy to use, and will work with any website you already have or will host them for you in their blazing fast hosting service (included in the price).

They are the leaders in creating squeeze pages and I highly recommend them. You can check out Leadpages here.

#2.5 ClickFunnels. Since I first wrote this post, I've added ClickFunnels to my daily toolbox and I recommend it as well. This is a more robust platform than most other SAAS. You can create squeeze pages or landing pages, or entire funnels with A/B split testing plus they have Actionetics and Backpack. The closest to an "all-in-one" solution. Watch the webinar here.

And of course, as I have mentioned before, I use Aweber to maintain my list. Both Optinmonster and Leadpages connect with Aweber seamlessly to make my life easier. Aweber is available now with a totally free 30 day trial and you can check that out here in this link.

If you can't afford Optinmonster or Leadpages, you can still use Aweber on its own.

Aweber has built-in lead capture forms and you can even create simple squeeze pages with it. I just prefer to use better tools for that, but if you just need to start somewhere, start with Aweber for free.

The post Driving with Oscar – Episode 3 – List Building Tips appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

It's pretty awesome and I've been using it for the better part of 2 years now. They keep adding new useful features but one of the things that sets them apart is their speed.

You have also heard of WordPress, I hope. WordPress is a content management platform that lets you create landing pages, blogs, pages, forms and more. It is free to use but you have to pay to have it hosted somewhere.

Both Leadpages and WordPress are standalone products and both can do some similar things, but they also work together if you use the Leadpages plugin in your WordPress installation.

Leadpages lets you use their full infrastructure to create and promote your landing pages, but you can also make it work with WordPress so your landing pages are inside of your domain even though Leadpages is hosting them.

Take for example my new landing page for my book. Here are two examples of pages that illustrate what I said before.

1) Using ONLY Leadpages: https://websystem.leadpages.net/work-anywhere-profit-online-free/
2) Using Leadpages on my own domain: notagrouch.com/work-anywhere-profit-online-book

Those two pages are identical except for one thing. One of them is displayed through my Leadpages account, while the other one is displayed here on my notagrouch.com domain.

The benefits of using option 1 is that you don't need a website of your own. You pay for Leadpages and you can start building pages immediately, like option 1. The downside to this is the URL branding; notice it says "websystem.leadpages.net." Some people would prefer to have it like option 2, under their own domain.

The key benefit of having your pages hosted in Leadpages exclusively is that you'll get the fastest speed possible. When you use the Leadpages WordPress plugin to bring in your landing page under your own domain, like option 2, then you will give up some of that speed.

In my testing, the speed difference has been significant, between 1 and 1.5 seconds.

One or two seconds may not seem like a big difference but in the world of websites, speed can make or break your business. Most people will wait about 3 - 4 seconds for a page to load, that number is decreasing fast as websites improve. It is critical for your pages to load as fast as possible.

Check out the test between the two different methods of loading the same page.

Method 1, Leadpages directly.
Load time 1.99 seconds, size 729.3, grade 86/100

Method 2, Leadpages using WordPress plugin.
Load time 2.74 seconds, size 756.6, grade 86/100

Almost a second slower when using WordPress. This could be for a number of reasons which we won't get into, but the important part is that Leadpages is built for speed; use it for your most critical time-sensitive pages that need to be served fast.

Use Leadpages with WordPress when you want to extend the branding of your own domain to your promotions, but a slightly slower speed may not be a big deal.

Overall in a simple test like this, page to page I have found Leadpages Always performs faster than Leadpages with WordPress. If you think you want to check out Leadpages, I would recommend it for sure. I use it and recommend it to most of my clients.

The post Is Leadpages faster than WordPress? appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Who should watch this? Anyone that is learning internet marketing. This is particularly useful for members of the My Top Tier Business program, My Online Business Education, and other affiliate marketing promotions. It follows basic principles of marketing and it can also be aligned with my Internet Marketing Basics Sales Flowchart.

You'll need two tools if you want to do what we talk about here. Head on over to get your landing pages here, and you'll also need an email autoresponder which you can get here for a buck!

The post Landing Pages and Email Generate Sales appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

Take a look at the chart below, and I'll explain it after (click to enlarge).

First things first

In the diagram, each of the purple boxes represents a landing page. Each one is titled differently, but they're all technically landing pages. Some may be sales letters, thank you letters, long-form sales letters, or squeeze pages.

Creating these pages is fairly simple if you use a service or outsource them. I would recommend you take a look at Leadpages as the best service to create these pages for you. They create mobile-friendly, responsive, Facebook-friendly, WordPress compatible, easy, painless, and compatible with Aweber.

First, we will start with the landing page. We are assuming you have traffic going to the landing page. The traffic could be sourced from any type of advertising campaign, social media campaign, word of mouth, or any other method you can muster. We'll cover traffic in another blog post.

Once the visitor gets to a landing page, and the visitor enters the required information, a confirmation page is presented. This page will explain to the visitor to check their email address and click on the confirmation link. This is pretty standard stuff and it relates to that double opt-in process I talked about on my previous post about the email system.

First major step

The visitor now has two options, to confirm the link or to ignore it. For now, let's assume that yes, they click on the confirmation link. This will take the visitor to the Thank you page. The thank-you page may contain the sales letter and offer and most marketers I think would suggest this option.

In the flowchart, I chose to put the sales page as an additional step to illustrate it clearly. Both options are valid, but keep in mind that every time you present an option to click or not to click to continue you risk a percentage of the visitors to not continue. Also note that the Thank you page is presented from the previous email. At this time, another email is also sent. This email tends to mirror the thank you page and sales offer. We'll come back to the email part in a couple of paragraphs.

The sales page needs to present the offer. The offer must be clear and simple to complete; don't overcomplicate the options the visitor has. Present the offer, make it irresistible and make the next step loud and clear. That step is to buy.

To buy or not to buy

We are now at another decision, the customer will decide if they buy or if they save their hard-earned dollars for another day. Let's assume and continue with the positive response flow and assume they purchased your product. Success! this is awesome and you're on your way to earning a living online. At this point, you use another landing page to present them with another offer, another product, perhaps an upgrade to what they purchased. The cycle starts over at that time.

Now let's go back to the thank you email/sales link. At this point, you present the sales offer via email as well as on a website. The email, like the website, provides information about the product. The email serves as a reminder about why they need to buy your product now. They can save the message, reply to you and ask questions, re-read it, forward it, this is why you do both a webpage and an email.

After the first email, you present the follow-up sequence. Opinions differ on what is the right amount of emails in a follow-up sequence, but facts show that constant reminders and relationship-building emails work best as opposed to infrequent ones. Most successful internet marketers will advise you to email your customer every day they haven't purchased your product.

Tie in the email messages to the sales pages

Each email you send gives you an opportunity to expand on the benefits of the product. You can showcase success stories or testimonials. You can present new offers, OTOs (one-time offers), or LTOs (Limited time offers) to encourage them to buy. Then the cycle continues. If you want to be more sophisticated, each email message in your follow-up sequence can send the customer to a customized landing page specific to that offer instead of the same sales page you've used in previous instances.

Now, let's go back to the first choice where the customer didn't confirm the link. For most internet marketers, this step is unorthodox. I add it to my own sales process because I think it is important and we need to account for a few possible scenarios.

The follow up is key

It is important to follow up manually because it gives you a chance to connect with your potential customer. There is also the chance that maybe something went wrong with the email subscription, maybe they didn't get the email, maybe it went to spam. The way to follow up, if you are using aweber, it is easy. Go to your list and look for the unconfirmed email message and manually send the person an email from your email. Introduce yourself, tell them why you're emailing them and help them get through whatever obstacle may be in the way of confirming their request for information via email.

So that's it

There are many ways to follow this model and variations can be endless. The only real way to find out what is the best way is to test each step yourself and see how your product or service performs. You can use a link shortener to easily do A/B testing for example. You can also create several landing pages in just a few minutes in order to test a short sales page vs. a long sales page. It's also easy to move a subscriber or potential customer from one list to another when you're using Leadpages and Aweber; they work together flawlessly.

This process can be applied to almost any type of promotion online. Doesn't matter if you're trying to sell a product, service or just increase the readership of your blog. It even works for a church if you want to increase your congregation. You just have to think out of the box and understand that a product is anything you want someone else to use, and a sale is made anytime you persuade your target customer to buy. Get it?

The post The internet marketing basic sales flowchart appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.

First let me tell you why I'm posting this.

Responsive design lets you design one website and adjust its elements so that when the screen used to view the website is larger or smaller, the website reformats itself to fit that screen.

You should do this kind of testing when you're building landing pages too, but there is no need to do too much testing. Remember, done is better than perfect.

So as I mentioned in my previous post. Realfreewebsite.com was almost ready, but my buddy John said that I had to make it more personable. The stock photo wasn't going to cut it. I agreed with him for the most part, but last night I just had to get it done.

I'm using LeadPages to create my landing pages, and Leadpages takes care of the responsive design layouts. So I just needed some good photos instead of the stock photo I was using. Not that there's anything wrong with stock photos; they have its place but John was right on this one.

Today we went out to lunch and he snapped some photos with me and Claire and some of them came out really well. So I'm going to try using one of those now. Here's where the testing comes into play. Take a look at  the first screenshot.

This was the full size image and so it didn't look really well. In fact it was kind of bad because Claire's face is blocked with the opt-in box and my finger never really points to the box... no matter what size screen I emulate.

Even after I tried a few different sizes and the issue is still there. Too much blockage going on. Even though Leadpages is responsive, no amount of responsive design is going to compensate for an image that is the wrong size or has the subjects placed on the wrong side of the photo.

Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.13.34 AM Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.13.12 AM Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.13.05 AM

Notice the three other screenshots all resize and responsive design kicks in but the photo still doesn't fit quite right.

I needed the right photo first.

What I needed here was an image that had me and Claire positioned way towards the left. So I fired up photoshop and placed the image in a placeholder of the size suggested by LeadPages (1440x1100).

Then I added a thin white gradient to the right of Claire's arm to eliminate the hard border of the picture and voila. I had a wide photo with us on the left side and just white space on the right side.

I had to test it again. I uploaded it to my Leadpages landing page and it worked great. I still had to test it however, because when you have a 27 inch display you tend to forget that most people still have smaller screens.

Check out the different screen sizes I tested with and how they all fit. Well, mostly. But this is good enough. Keep in mind some of these screenshots were bigger than they're shown in here but you still get to appreciate the dimensions and placement of the opt-in box, my face and Claire's face. I reduced them in size so that the page wouldn't take a month to load for you.

Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.27.36 AM Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.27.30 AM Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.27.17 AM Screen shot 2013-07-30 at 12.27.12 AM

Most of the sizes fit and help me get the message across. I'm a real person, inviting you to get a free website. I'm still pointing to the box or pretty close to it and Claire is still visible in the picture. This should work!

Now, an easier way to test than by just resizing the window by hand.

There are several tools out there that help you resize your browser accurately. One of the ones I use quite a bit is called WebDeveloper Toolbar and it works with Firefox. It lets you create different sizes so that you can resize the window of your browser to the exact dimensions you need to test.

Using Webdeveloper is very convenient because with the resizer tool you can quickly switch between sizes and make sure you're still on target to build something that most of your audience will be able to use and enjoy.

If you want to install this, head over the the extensions repository for Firefox and search for Webdeveloper, then you can install it. Or you can find Webdeveloper Toolbar here. Once installed, it is easy to create new sizes for the resizer tool.

As you can see, I have many sizes already defined. You can create whatever size you want. But Webdeveloper goes one step further. If you notice on that dropdown menu, the very last option is an option to "View Responsive Dimensions." This is a really cool tool that will reload whatever page you're looking at but in a single browser window where you can scroll through and view all the most popular responsive layout sizes in one click.

But Webdeveloper does a whole lot more than just resize your window. You can debug your HTML code, test CSS, test links, play with cookies and other really advanced stuff. Don't let this scare you in your journey to make money online, it's nice to test sizes but not a requirement.

It's nice to be able to test window sizes when you're creating your first landing pages. Anyway, good luck and I hope this is helpful. You probably don't need this right away, but it's good to know because sooner or later you'll need something like Webdeveloper. Good luck!

The post Testing Your Landing Page With Different Screen Sizes appeared first on Digital Marketing Through Content & Influence.