A few days back I was reading this interesting post on BloggingTips.com on how to plug an eBook on your blog and I instantly remembered all those ugly looking eBook sales/landing pages that you STILL find all over the Internet, like we’re still way back in ‘98.

Do you have a good product to sell on your blog? Then why not give it a real chance. Why tell your visitors straight from the sales page that they are either stupid (“Please X, let me buy your book for only $29.99!) or that your have no idea how to make a unique presentation for a unique item!

Yes, I’m sure that almost every internet marketer will tell you how those ugly pages are effective, and how their “call to action” phrases and messages are really effective. Allow me to disagree! I hate them. You hate them. We run away the second we land on them!

A sale is not make by the number of colors and fonts you use on your landing page. It’s not made by the number of screen scrolls a user has to make in order to get to the part where the “call to action” makes him feel small and stupid compared to you, the big internet marketing guru!

A sale is made based on the quality of your products and ease of the (guided) buying process!

How can ClickTale help?

I discovered this tool (ClickTale) while working with one of my studio’s customers and i was impressed by how easy it is to use it and how much useful information it provides:

• Record and watch actual user browsing sessions (real-time);
• Link analytics;
• User behavior: click heatmaps, scrolling heatmaps;
• Form analytics;
• and more…

Here’s a quick presentation of the tool:

So, there you go. A good user tracking tool that will give you enough insight on your visitor’s behavior and will help you discover which are your sales/landing page weak spots. And the best part? There’s also an option of signing up for a FREE account (of course with limited capabilities).

Also, if you’re looking to go pro with this tool, the guys over at ClickTale have a damn good offer of 20% off for a 6-month plan and 40% off for the annual subscription.

Go, take a look at ClickTale, test it out and say NO to those ugly looking sales pages!

This post does NOT contain affiliate links and it’s NOT a sponsored post.
It’s a post about a tool which I believe will help you improve your online sales!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

A while ago I wrote about a cool project that allows users to check how their blogs and websites stack against their competitors, Review My Web. Today, I’d like to present you with another free (and so useful) tool, from the same developer: RockinSEO.com.

Free Keyword Tracker

Yes, that’s what you get with RockinSEO. You get to track your website’s results in Google, Yahoo and the recently released Bing for up to 20 keywords, for free. More than that, for the same keywords you can compare your results with those of up to 3 competitor websites or blogs.
The results are easy to read and interpret as you can see in the following screenshots:

Track search engine keyword position

Check keywords against your competition

As you can see, the tool is really useful and simple to use, and any blogger interested in his blog’s position in the most relevant search engines should give it a try. And if you decide to do so…

Get Blogsessive’s Coupon and track up to 50 keywords!

Yes, that’s right. Even if the tool comes with a limit of 20 trackable keywords, the author, @Terry Novak has been kind enough to offer a special coupon to all the readers of Blogsessive who sign up for FREE until the end of this Friday. Use it and increase your account’s limit to 50 keywords.

Coupon code: blogsessive50

Now, go sign up and start optimizing your blog to number one!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

Yesterday, Fi (Fantasy Interactive) sent out alpha invitations to their new product, Kontain.

This is one product I’ve signed up and (not very) patiently waited for its launch, as it should be pretty revolutionary in terms of user-friendliness. Basically, it’s the first Flash-based blogging platform open to world wide free public access.

Here’s how the folks at Fi describe Kontain:

Kontain is a free destination for users to media blog and share photos, videos and audio with friends, family, colleagues and even beautiful strangers. The core of each user's experience is media-driven and Kontain takes the everyday concept of blogging to a wider audience by making it easy for users of all demographics to "kontain" and share their life online. Simple enough for Mom and Dad, yet flexible and sophisticated for a web veteran, Kontain aims to be the Internet's premier destination for user-generated content.

The Alpha launch features (which would soon be backed up by a lot more features that are currently under development) as listed on the Kontain website are:

• Easy to Kontain your life
• Upload Photos, Videos and Audio
• Explore Kontain’s most popular
• Search the media way
• Personal dashboard
• Ratings and Popularity
• Commenting
• Basic privacy settings

A look into what’s in development shows us high resolution media uploads, galleries and collections, messaging, groups, subscriptions, stats, possibility of having your “kontainer” embedded on other websites, multimedia comments, rich(er) text editing, notes over multimedia and many more features.

Here are a few screenshots to help you familiarize with Kontain:

Get your Alpha account!

By the time I’m writing this post, there are still 8.500 accounts available (out of 10.000 a few hours ago) for this Alpha version of Kontain. If you are interested in this service, just go ahead and sign up for a free Kontain account.

My only worry for the time being is the SEO value of this platform and how will Google approach Kontain blogs, but I’m sure that the experience Fi has in the interactive media field will be put to a good use search-engine wise.

Kontain your life!

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

One of the best learning methods is from experience, but sometimes, our own experience fails to provide us with what we need to know. That’s the moment when we need to look and learn from other people’s experience.

ReviewMyWeb.com is a fairly new website competitive analysis tool, but one that with a bit attention can turn into a very useful one.

Review My Web let’s you analyze your blog against two competitors and gives you access to a competitive report, covering:

• Traffic Rankings;
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO);
• Social Media / Blog Coverage;
• Detailed Website Analysis;

As an example, I decided to analyze ProBlogger.net against JohnChow.com and ShoeMoney.com. You can check out the results in the following screenshots.

Competitive Traffic Rankings

One thing that I’d love to know is how are these rankings calculated. It’s not specified in the report, but I have a feeling that Alexa is included, and I, for one, don’t place a lot of trust on Alexa lately.

Competitive Search Engine Analysis

This report focuses on backlinks and the current indexing levels, number of indexed pages and their quality and position. Considering the fact the ProBlogger delivers more (on topic) information, the number of backlinks seems pretty fair, against his 2 competitor, and with it, the “almost 5″ star ranking in this category.

Competitive Social Media Analysis

This report is based on the number of reactions in Google’s Blog Search and Technorati and it also provides a graph to compare your ranking against your two competitors. Again, ProBlogger’s more focused content gives him an edge, hitting a 5 star rating.

Detailed Analysis Results

Based on the about intermediary reports, a detailed analysis is generated, explaining the previous graphs and offering advice on what can be done to improve rankings in each area. Of course, this report can be better and cover more aspects, but I’m sure that with time, the application will be further developed.

Overview

My first impression on this tool is that while the intentions are good and helpful, this is only the first step in its development. There are many more topics and rankings that can be covered in order to generate a truly in depth competitive report, but that’s why I decided to feature it on Blogsessive, so that through exposure, it will get quality feedback that will lead to further improvements.

As an alternative to this tool, you can also check out HubSpot’s Website Grader.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive

You’ve finally got your WordPress blog online and your hopes up. You’re writing articles and expecting readers to drop-in soon, but time passes and nothing happens. You know your articles are a good reading, so why aren’t readers showing up? That’s because you need to improve your online visibility, your WordPress SEO score.

In my past article, Better Blog SEO Plugin, I’ve presented a tool to help you easily manage your SEO needs. Now it’s time to explain how to test the results, and if the results are not as good as expected, how to update your content and SEO accordingly.

Let’s say you’ve optimized your home page and/or post page for some keywords, but still search engines refuse to index you higher and searches for those keywords aren’t providing you with any visitors. Most probably, that’s because your content is not relevant in relationship with the provided keywords. At this time, you have 2 choices:

1. Rethink your website’s keyword list and meta tags

Scan through your posts, find the most common and relevant keywords and modify your keywords meta tag accordingly. Use these keywords in the page’s title tag and for the description try to get a small paragraph that uses in a logic and readable way the provided keywords. The closer this description comes to a text paragraph available on the page, the more relevant it will be.

2. Rebuild your most recent content around the old keywords.

This option is the most time-consuming, but if you know you’ve got a good keyword list, with good search engine results (only not for you), then it should worth the effort. Always keep in mind how much competition you have for that keyword list, and how powerful that competition is. Otherwise you’re efforts will be in vain. It’s always better to fight for 1.000 relevant results and get the most of it, that for 10.000.000 results and get none.

Once you’ve done one of the above steps, the best thing you can do is to check the results with one of the following free available online SEO tools:

DomainTools.com – The Whois tool available on this domain provides users with a SEO rating of the queried domain, as well as with a SEO browser to analyze you page from a search engine’s point of view. It also makes suggestions on the things that still need to be done to increase your SEO score.

SEOCentro.com – SEO Centro provides user with a very helpful, free online meta tag analyzer. This way you can learn more about your meta tags, their relevance and also the most popular keywords found in your blog’s content.

There are of course many more online SEO tools, but these 2 should be enough to help you find your way around your blog’s SEO.

Free PDF eBook: Corporate Blogging Guide by Blogsessive