Interestingly enough, in a mad dash to earn money fast, the majority of Internet marketers have completely missed the value of branding.

Rather than branding, most of us simply create a website with a generic name. We assume that brand names and domain names mean nothing unless they have some type of search engine optimization value. Unfortunately, this assumption is extremely misguided.

As much as we might try to persuade ourselves otherwise, Internet businesses function much like any other business – on a primarily reputational model. If your prices are reasonable, your products are good, your design is clean, and your customer service is consistent, your customers will spread the word about your business virally, creating more traffic, which will then build your business further.

This is part of the reason why a “brand” is so important. It assigns a specific personality to your business that sticks in the minds of your customers. Additionally, it makes your business appear to be more professional.

Now, before you begin to brand your business, you will want to consider what personality will best suit your business. For instance, do you want your business to come across as honest, humorous, or gentle? What about “in your face”? Or maybe cool? All of these are potential avenues for branding; however, if the brand isn’t sufficiently reinforced, it will ultimately be useless, as it will never stick in the mind of your customers.

One example of effective branding is Richard Branson and his “Virgin” companies, which are endowed with a “cool,” “hip,” “modern” branding approach. Additionally, some humor is worked into commercials, but it says in line with the cool image.

Another excellent brand is Google. How many companies do you know whose name is regularly used as a verb? Similarly, how many companies do you know of that grow as fast as Google did while maintaining a 60% profit margin?

And we can never forget RichJerk.com. This sales page is amongst the highest branded sites online today. It’s an example of extreme branding put into effective use which ultimately ended up being a huge viral phenomena. Ask yourself this, Would RichJerk.com be where it is today if it wasn’t for it’s “in-your-face”, “put-up-or-shutup” brand that carries through in all parts of its website? From sales copy, to customer enquiries to email marketing, the brand and ‘personality’ of the Rich Jerk is evident in all aspects of the website and marketing.

Just like the Richjerk.com, when creating a brand for your online business, it is important to make sure that it carries over into every facet of how you conduct business. For instance, it should show up in your press releases, your customer service, your advertising, and your emails to your list. If it doesn’t, you won’t reinforce your brand. If it does, not only will you be remembered and marketed virally, but you will be considered a “hit”.

Branding is absolutely crucial to your success as an online business owner. If you haven’t started branding already, it’s a good idea to evaluate your business’s strong points and then develop a concrete brand around them.

Today I will be talking to you about the importance of your background image and the effects it can have on your conversion rates.

Let me start off by telling you that brighter colors are an absolute no-go zone when it comes to your sales page’s background image or color.

Why?

It’s simple really.

The primary focus of your sales page is to draw your readers’ eyes to the ‘meat’ of the page, the ‘meat’ being your sales copy.

If you were to use bright colors and crazy graphics as your backdrop to your sales page then you are pretty much giving your readers an excuse to leave.

Bright colors and graphics take away the emphasis of your sales copy and are nothing more than distractions which will leave your visitors confused and ultimately have them click away.

Another important pitfall you must be aware of is using text in your background image such as your products name. Although you may think this is good for branding purposes it is yet again another distraction from the meat of your page.

You see, if you use text in your background image you are subconsciously distracting your readers’ attention from the sales copy. Our subconscious minds have been trained throughout thousands of years to think in abstract forms, it doesn’t think logically and it will become confused if there is mixed messages within your page.

The good news is there’s a simple technique to capture your readers’ undivided attention and have them reading your sales copy without being distracted from ‘outside’ sources.

The use of grays from #DDDDDD to #555555 are fantastic at not only drawing attention towards the meat of your page, but they’re also very simple and attractive. You can mix things up a bit with these colors as well if you’re not so fond of their plainness, for example, use one shade of grey and blend it into another shade of grey like I’ve done with GraphicsFrog.com

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and don’t be afraid to comment about it in the discussion forums at: http://www.graphicsfrog.com/forum

 Until Next Time Froglets!

If you have a crappy looking sales page then prepare to be smacked across the face with a soggy fish because this article is going to blow you away with three of my closely-held and best kept design secrets of all time.

One thing I would firstly like to start off with is the fact that many people don’t realize that their sales page is there to “sell”, that’s why it’s called a sales page. I know it’s ironic, but many people fail to see the selling purpose behind the old fashioned sales page. It is solely there to sell your visitor a product or service, not make them vomit all over their computer screen as a result of overwhelming ugliness.

Additionally, I’ve been seeing a lot of sales pages lately that are downright hideous. So I’ve written this article in an attempt to somewhat soften the emerging trend of the ‘Ugly Sales Page Syndrome’.

What follows are some tips on improving your sales page design in order to increase your sales and conversion rates. If you find this article somewhat offensive or helpful then don’t be afraid to leave a comment, it is much appreciated.

Font

Your font is an important aspect of your sales page design and it shouldn’t be overlooked. If you whip-up a crazy excuse for a website with outrageous fonts in all different sizes then you can expect to watch your visitors run away like headless chickens.

Nevertheless, you should only ever use a maximum of three different fonts. I would suggest using a dark red and bolded Verdana font for your headlines and either Verdana or Arial for your main sales page content. I would highly recommend steering clear from fonts such as Times New Roman as these types of fonts are designed to be read on pieces of paper, not computer screens.

Graphical Headlines

Another little piece of design trickery that I’ve also seen emerging at a healthy rate is the use of graphical headlines.

“What on earth is a graphical headline?” you may be stupidly asking yourself.

Well a graphical headline is basically using Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro to create a headline that’s a graphic using a different font than your standard set of fonts. This is a fantastic little device because it’s unique, it allows you to customize the font in any way you wish and it also helps to prevent ‘headline blindness’. However be careful not to go overboard because your website loading may also suffer.

The Order Button

You’ve managed to get your visitor to read your entire sales page, you’ve got them to the point of painful excitement and they’re just seconds away from ordering your product… until they are completely turned off by the horrible state of your order button.

The order button is a crucial element within the online sales process which 99.999% of all internet marketers overlook, it should be sexy, inviting and disgustingly attractive.

For example, how would you feel if you walked into a teapot store one day, you were just about to buy a $1,100 teapot and just as you were about to hand over your hard earned cash the store manager slaps you in the face and says “thank you, please come again.” You’d feel insulted and you’d probably never do business with these people ever again. The same principles apply online as they do offline. The idea is to make your visitors feel excited to be spending money, not guilty.

Well that just about covers everything in this article. I have only covered the tip of the sales page design ice berg and will include more articles and tips as Eat My Frog grows.

As a thank you present for putting up with my garbage and reading this article, you can feel free to use the following order buttons in your very own sales pages.

Until then EatMyFroglets

Regards,
Brent I. Turner

Google has finally come out of the closet and revealed that they’re in it for the money! Now before you start whispering “I knew it” under your breath, let me explain.

For what seems to be almost a year now there has been quite a large degree of speculation regarding the launch of a payment processing system that is solely organized and made universally available and useful by Google.

Whether it’s to be called GBuy, GWallet or GBanger, Google was always going to launch some sort of payment system that would compete with the suit-wearing goobatrons found within the upper-class office spaces of Paypal and eBay.

Nevertheless, the funky nerds down at Google towers have finally hinted towards their upcoming launch of GBuy, which is scheduled to make its mark sometime around the 28th of June.

Alongside this, GBuy doesn’t initially plan to be an all-out, fully-blown competitor to the likes of Paypal, however their payment system is more focused towards a Merchant-to-Consumer based system rather than Paypal’s existing Consumer-to-Consumer payment system.

Experts, however, are predicting that GBuy will one day be positioned to take on Paypal as a solid competitor not only in terms of Merchant-to-Merchant payments but also Consumer-to-Consumer payments also. This would, of course, leave the folks down at Paypal pretty pee’d off. (excuse the French.)

Additionally, it is expected that Gbuy will have a stupidly low transaction fee, somewhere between the 0.00% and 0.00% region within the beta testing stages. This could, as you would imagine, leave quite a large dent in Paypal’s existing market share unless Paypal does something to give GBuy a swift kick up the rear end.

Another feature of the GBuy system which all the other news sites and blogs are raving about is the little “Trusted GBuy Merchant” text and logo displayed next to Google’s sponsored advertisers. Wow, this will truly revolutionize the way people do business online. (Sarcasm intended).

But the thing that has really got me excited is the prospect of being able to transfer your Google AdSense earnings directly into your Google AdWords account, will GBuy allow such a thing? Time will only tell.

Until then EatMyFroglets.

Regards,
Brent I. Turner

Yes, it’s official! EatMyFrog.com, the once failed newsletter, has been resurrected again into what many of us now know as the notorious ‘blog’, or in geek terms “weblog”. It happened on the evening of Tuesday the 20th of June. There I was, sitting in my lonesome chair thinking about how I had failed the 300+ subscribers who had subscribed to the original Eat My Frog newsletter… I felt disappointed and ashamed.

Then something incredible happened.

I shot up out of my chair like a speeding bullet, the energy flowing throughout my veins was incomprehensible and I knew that this was the moment that would change the destiny of EatMyFrog.com forever!

Drum roll please….

I would turn Eat My Frog into a Blog. The best frogging internet marketing and direct response design blog in the southern and northern hemispheres. This is not going to be your ordinary blog my friend, oh no! Not even close! Eat My Frog will pick you up, spin you around and toss you out the window, it will make you laugh and it will make you vomit!

It will become a serious addiction for many people… an addiction that will not only be driven by motivation but an addiction that will have you leaving your computer chair in wet hysterics.

So subscribe to our RSS feed, browse our forum and write ‘Eat My Frog’ across your forehead so you don’t forget to check us out again tomorrow.

Until then my newfound EatMyFroglets.

Regards,
Brent I. Turner