Hartley Brody

Whether you’re trying to grow your newsletter, convert more customers, or put out an offer, it’s important to understand the dynamics of a good sign-up page.

To marketers, these are usually known as “landing pages” since they’re the first page someone sees when they “land” on your website after clicking an advertisement or call-to-action.

The entire point of a landing page is to convince a visitor to give you their private information in exchange for whatever you’re offering. While it might sound fairly cut and dry, there are lots of useful tactics to help convince more of your visitors to give up their information.

A lot of people are skeptical about giving up their email address or other private information on the internet these days, so a good landing page should aim to ease that anxiety and smooth the conversion process.

One of the few high school lessons that has stuck with me came from my 9th grade English teacher. “Every sentence in your essay should be somehow tied to proving your thesis statement,” she told me. “If a sentence doesn’t support your thesis, remove it.”

She then went through with her red pen, whittling down my 4-page report to a meager 1-½ page skeleton. It was a fantastic (but humiliating) lesson in persuasive writing.

Since then, I have come to learn what a powerful and necessary tool a thesis statement can be. It’s a single statement that provides focus and clarity, and helps the reader know what’s coming. It organizes thoughts in a way that supports the argument you’re trying to make.

But most importantly, it helps you – as the writer – figure out exactly what facts you should present, and which you should leave out.

Your resume is essentially a one-page essay entitled “Hire Me.” In order for it to be persuasive, it needs to have a strong thesis.

It seems like everyone is peddling marketing advice these days. When to tweet, how to write a catchy headline, what color your CTA button should be.

Stop. Stop all of it. We as marketers have lost our way. We’ve forgotten what our jobs truly entail: going out in the world as stewards for our respective companies, delighting customers and earning a respected and trustworthy name for our brand.

As a 21-year-old about to finish school and join the workforce full time, I’ve started coming to terms with the fact that I’m becoming a grown-up.

And while that is cool in a lot of ways, it’s also really terrifying. I mean, grown-ups are just so… old, and no one wants to get old.

It’s gotten me thinking about the stuff I’ve been doing since I was a kid, but that grown-ups don’t seem to do as much of.

I made a list of what I came up with, to help remind me of all the things I should do every year until I die – no matter how old I am.

I’ve made this list mostly for myself – to help keep me defy that whole “getting old” process. But I figured other grown-ups out there might value from this as well.

For most people, any sort of public speaking can be a bit frightening. This is especially true if you don’t have notes or lots of time to rehearse.

One of the most common faux pas that inexperienced speakers make is to say “uhh” or “umm” between sentences, while they’re trying to gather their thoughts.

But there’s a little trick that you can use to turn those awkward filler sounds into a powerful rhetorical tool. Simply ask your audience, “Right?” whenever you need to stop to gather your thoughts.

If you have a business or organization that you’re trying to promote on the internet, you’ve probably heard of “link building”. The basic idea is that, if you want your website to rank highly in search engine results and get a lot of traffic, it needs to have links that point to it from other websites. But how do you get other sites to link to you?

If you’re ready to invest a little time into it, building great links is easy.

There’s a great video from Matt Cutts – head of the web spam team at Google – where he outlines several easy steps to get inbound links for free!

It’s a great summary of the basic tactics to start building links to your website. The video is 8 minutes long, so I summarized the main points here.

There’s lots of conventional wisdom out there about how to get a job. Dress nicely. Smile widely. Nice, firm handshake.

As I watch my friends and fellow seniors prepare for their post-college careers, it amazes me how many hoops you have to jump through to get a job offer. First, you have to sit still without squirming through an info session as an HR representative explains her company’s dental coverage and career growth opportunities.

Next come the resumes. Trying to squeeze your most important life accomplishments onto a single page can be almost as stressful as realizing that all of those accomplishments actually only take up half a page. Yikes! No one enjoys writing these, but they’re a necessary evil if your employer hasn’t heard of LinkedIn.

Then there are the cover letters. Don’t just copy/paste, they’ll know! If they call you back and setup an interview, congratulations. You have hours and hours (and hours) of interview preperation ahead of you.

The problem with all of this is that it’s incredibly standard. And with incredibly standard advice comes incredibly standard results.

I’m going to say something you don’t hear very often: I LOVE the new Facebook changes.

Here’s why.

People ask me for help a lot. Whether they think their computer has a virus or they want to learn more about SEO or they want to get involved with startups, people bring a lot of their questions to me.

And it’s great, because I love helping people and being seen as a resource for friends and coworkers. I try to make myself available for anyone who thinks I can help them. It makes me feel good knowing I saved someone else hours of frustration, and I can only assume they enjoy that outcome as well.

But it got me wondering: how did I come to be in this position? After all, I wasn’t born knowing any of this stuff. Why do so many people seek my help every day? How did I come to be perceived as omniscient?

Maybe if I discovered the magic habit or characteristic that put me in this position, I could help empower others to solve their problems more easily. I could raise my kids to become full of knowledge. I could help others learn the skills I’ve taught myself.

While I was doing some research earlier today, the answer suddenly came to me: I click on every link I find.

Pricing is always something that’s fascinated me. In my economics 101 class, I learned how price affects supply and demand. But in the real world, things aren’t nearly as neat as they appear on that simple two-axis graph.

Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot of internal debate around pricing at HubSpot, and I’ve also seen a flurry of articles on the topic from companies like Mailchimp, Rapportive, Performable and JibJab.

When you’re launching a new product, especially one where there’s very few competitors in your space, it can be hard to know what to charge. If you pick a number that’s too big, you’ll make it harder to sell and scare away a lot of customers. Pick a number that’s too small and you could find yourself struggling to stay afloat.

Here are the five factors you must consider when choosing a price for your product.