StartupStats

These Shoes Just Went Viral. You Won't Believe What They Look Like!

Tue, 01 Jul 2014 20:58:39 +0000

Can you imagine what it would look like if you took a piece of felt and wrapped it around your foot? Well, the designers at the Unbelievable Testing Laboratory in Las Vegas apparently envisioned a shoe so simple that it practically has no design at all. Introducing, The Ninja!

The shoe has managed to attract nearly $140,000 and will most likely surpass that amount over the next day. Despite the deceptively simple design, the biggest draw of the shoes is how incredibly light they are. At only 130 grams, it will barely feel like you are wearing shoes when you slip them on!

Interested in getting your own pair of ninja shoes in order to feel like you are floating on air? Go check out their Kickstarter campaign before it ends tomorrow.

Google Webmaster Tools

Thu, 29 May 2014 14:51:05 +0000

If you want your site to be properly indexed by Google, you need to set up Google Webmaster Tools with your site. It’s not optional. Adding this will enable you to unlock search queries that drive people to your site within Google analytics.

Webmaster tools enables you to submit your site’s sitemap. Additionally, you can configure settings that enables Google to access blocked off content on your site. If you want to enable rich snippets and have other important pages show up within Google search, Webmaster Tools is for you. If you don’t know what rich snippets are, here’s an example:

Want to learn more about Google Webmaster tools? Head over to their site.

Google Analytics

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:14:59 +0000

Currently the holy grail of website analytics, Google Analytics is a tool that every digital marketer relies on. While the company’s continuous upgrades of the product can leave end users frustrated, it remains to be the best free tool for tracking how users interact with your site.

Whether it’s tracking inbound keywords, conversion funnels, advertising performance, demographic data, or more: Google Analytics is the tool for you. Anybody that has a site needs to install it immediately.

Head over to the Google Analytics site to learn more.

Wordpress

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:14:13 +0000

Powering literally half the internet, Wordpress has become the pre-eminent online publishing platform. Whether you want to run a blog or a massive content site, Wordpress is the go to tool. While developers will hoot and holler about the horrible code that powers Wordpress, that doesn’t matter for marketers.

With countless plugins and other add-ons, it’s the easiest way to develop a site and attract people to your business or yourself. This site is proudly powered by Wordpress and it’s clear that we’re not the only ones that have caught on the power of it’s platform.

Google+

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:13:23 +0000

Let’s be honest, Google+ isn’t every marketer’s dream but it surely can help you get more traffic on Google. Through Google Authorship and an additional distribution channel, Google+ is great for content marketers. Best of all, most people don’t take advantage of Google+.

If you take the time to leverage this channel, it can pay dividends.

Calendly

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:12:13 +0000

You may be thinking to yourself “yet another scheduling tool?” I’ve tried a bunch of scheduling tools in the past but what made this tool click for me personally (Nick O’Neill) was how effectively it can be integrated into your sales process. I first saw it used by Jayson Gaignard of Mastermind Talks. He implemented the tool to effectively set up sales calls with potential attendees of the event.

Imagine going through the process of applying to attend an event and then having those potential attendees interview with you to ensure that you are getting a quality audience. That’s what Jayson does and he used Calendly incredibly effectively as part of this process. The brilliance of calendly is that it’s so simple. You send out an email with a link and the recipient selects when they’re available.

It really is that simple!

Use Cases For Calendly

The best use cases I’ve seen for this product are for marketers and sales people looking to schedule sales calls. Another that makes a lot of sense to me personally is customer development calls. People are being gracious enough to give you their time, make sure you honor their time as much as possible by making the scheduling process almost immediate.

Firing your assistant is another great use case! O.k., I’m actually joking, but isn’t this one of the most common use cases of an assistant? I personally hate having to go back and forth with assistants. Skip that process with Calendly.

Pricing For Calendly

This is mind boggling but right now the product is completely free. My guess is that in the future the company will begin charging based on the number of meetings you schedule using the tool. Or maybe they are looking to just collect an infinite number users, who knows!

Want to know more? Check out the short recording I made below. Also, be sure to head over to the company’s website to learn more.

Hubspot

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:09:12 +0000

Hubspot has become one of the most popular inbound marketing platforms. In contrast to many of the simpler marketing tools, Hubspot is an all-in-one solution. It includes just about every aspect of digital marketing that you can imagine: analytics, search engine optimization, automation, email marketing, social media management, blogging, lead management, landing page optimization and more.

ToutApp

Thu, 29 May 2014 00:08:21 +0000

ToutApp is an increasingly popular sales email tool. After starting with email templates, Tout has rapidly evolved to provide a robust set of features including open tracking, click tracking, search, a live feed, and more.

Incredibly simple, yet powerful, Tout continue to build out their platform with CRM integration an more.

Landing Page

Wed, 28 May 2014 23:54:14 +0000

A landing page is simply a web page that a visitor arrives on after clicking a link on another webpage. In digital marketing, most landing pages are designed around completing a desired objective. This could be entering an email, clicking a button, purchasing a product, or any other type of action. So if we were to summarize this into a single definition, it would be the following:

A landing page is any page on the web which has an action that is supposed to be completed by the visitor. This action is frequently referred to as the “conversion goal”.

Landing pages typically fall into two categories: click-through pages and lead generation pages. Both of these page names refer to their desired conversion goal and are relatively self-explanatory.

Click-through Landing Pages

As it sounds, a _click-through landing page is designed to have the user click on a specific button that will result in an action. This could be adding something to a shopping cart, downloading a PDF, download a mobile application, drive the user to a registration page, or more. The general concept behind these pages is to educate the visitor.

If you’ve ever visited a mobile app company’s website, you will probably have seen a download link. Below is the screenshot of an incredibly simplistic click-through landing page for the application Yo. The goal is to get the user to download a mobile application from iTunes or Google Play.

While short on information, it’s effective at illustrating a landing page with a simple click-through purpose. All the visitor to this page needs to do is click on one of the links provide. If the visitor clicks the link, then this landing page will have “converted”.

Lead Generation Landing Pages

A much more common type of landing page is lead generation pages. These pages are focused on one thing: collecting leads. If you take a look at the landing page for our upcoming event [SaaS Masters, you would see that there is information about the event along with a form field to collect the visitor’s email address. Once the visitor enters their email, the page will have converted.

Summary

Whether the purpose of the landing page is to click a link or to enter a form, both types drive the visitor to some pre-defined action. Landing pages are often at the core of many digital marketers efforts. Due to their tendency to have a singular focused action it becomes easy to test objectives with the assistance of tools like Optimizely, Unbounce, Visual Website Optimizer, Google Analytics, and more.

To learn more about strategies to increasing landing page performance, check out the Holler Blog.

Synonyms: Squeeze Page

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Attention Ratio

Wed, 28 May 2014 23:51:39 +0000

Popularized by Oli Gardner of Unbounce, the term has to do with the number of distracting elements on a landing page. More specifically:

The Attention Ratio is the ratio of interactive elements (links) on a page, to the number of campaign conversion goals (which is always one)

The main point of this term is that the more links you have on a landing page, the less likely a conversion goal will occur. Conversion goals are typically form submissions or button clicks. Whatever the goal is, you are less likely to have that event to occur with each additional outbound link that you add to the page.

Here’s a page that Oli Gardner offers in this entertaining guide:

Wherever there is orange on this page, there is a link. In this case, the attention ratio for this page is 56:1. That’s because there are 56 separate links that the visitor could click other than the desired call to action. In order to see an improved performance on this page, it’s always best to lower the attention ratio as much as possible (by decreasing the number of links).

It’s as simple as that!