People want directions. They demand that things be spelled out one step at a time — in the most simplest of terms.

This works out wonderfully for many things. Driving a car. Making a sandwich. Opening a bank account. Creating a Power Point presentation.

In a business environment influenced by rapidly evolving market forces, this does not work out very well at all. Very quickly you’ll discover you are “dumb money.”

Consider this, Bloomberg reports John Paulson is at the top of their best-paid hedge fund managers so far this year. How much has he and his co-manager made this year? $2.69 billion. Thats averages out to about $8 million a day.

Whats the big secret? “Rather than depend on evaluations of mortgage- backed assets by rating companies such as Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s, he and his staff dig into the securities and look at thousands of individual loans.”

Each one of us owns and runs a unique business. We build a body of knowledge, skills, and assets that enable us to approach our market differently from everyone else. In order to discover what works for your business and what doesn’t you need to experience things first hand.

Personally, looking back at my various business ventures, my most profitable ones have involved things everyone said were “worthless”, “too difficult”, or “too much competition.” If I listened to everyone, I would have a college diploma right now

As promised, here is a review for Marketing Sherpa’s Landing Page Handbook Second Edition. I read the entire pdf in about a day, a hard copy is still on its way in the mail. I think that it was released earlier this month, Shawn Collins made a blog post about it and somehow I missed it.

The reviews are trickling in, but I hope this one will be comprehensive enough for my audience. If you have any questions, just ask them in the comments of this post.

For beginners — why landing pages matter a lot

Landing page optimization is the quickest way to increase your web site’s revenues. A visitor arrives at your web site and based on countless variables decides to either buy something or not. A few changes and tests can double or even triple your earnings. This is a heck of a lot easier than doubling the number of targeted visitors arriving at your site. Surprisingly, many web business owners still do not take landing pages seriously.

A landing page isn’t just about making a sale. It is the foundation to all goal driven web sites, be it signing up for an e-mail newsletter, joining a forum, subscribing to an RSS feed, or arriving at a parked domain and clicking ads. Like it or not, your web site is just a bunch of landing pages.

If you are hesitant to spend the money there are lots of free articles and case studies that you can read online. I’d recommend reading this blog post first, which highlights the two simple rules I follow biblically myself.

The best part: ideas

This guide has lots content. Everything is laid out as straightforward guidelines and explanations with extensive charts and data to back it up. Just like with Marketing Sherpa’s case studies you will see images of pre and post-optimized landing pages along with the exact conversion rates for both. (If you want to see some cited case studies used in the guide, check out the links in this post from Jonathan Mendez at Optimize & Prophesize.)

Should their suggestions be memorized and followed exactly? Of course not. What you should do is read the handbook, make note of the new ideas you see, and then test them out. You may very well find that what they wrote doesn’t work for your particular site.

One of the parts I was really impressed with was a radio advertising case studio. I have never done anything with radio, but when I do, I will know exactly where to start. Again, I can run my own tests, but this information gives me a great starting point rather than attempting a blind entry all on my own.

Just as with radio, The Landing Page Handbook is not just about what is on your landing page. The chapters cover how the landing page relates and correlates with your traffic sources — banner, email, search, TV, radio. For me thats a plus, however for others it might be considered filler.

Downsides? While they do mention Google’s quality score, you won’t learn much about it. Given how complex and rapidly changing their walls of “deception” are, its probably better Marketing Sherpa avoids the topic. Additionally, if you are a smaller affiliate marketer, much of this information will not be helpful either since you can not control external landing pages (but thats not to say you will walk away empty handed.)

Final Thoughts

The Landing Page Handbook is just that, a handbook. It is not an end-all source or the holy grail to building landing pages. Anyone from a beginner to experienced web developer/marketer will learn new stuff from reading it. All but the most veteran of experts should be able to grab at least an idea or two from the book.

Just starting out, have no product or traffic? Then it might be best to avoid it and come back later when you do.

If you want to see a detailed table of contents or buy your copy (immediate pdf download with a hard copy following in the mail) check out The Landing Page Handbook’s own landing page. (not an affiliate link, by the way.)

This isn’t breaking news, but I noticed that MarketingSherpa has released the second edition of their very popular Landing Page Handbook. The first edition had been out of print for a while (despite also being sold in an electronic format) so naturally many web entrepreneurs had been searching for both pirated and after market copies. Now you can buy the real thing, and get data that isn’t two years old.

So, is it worth $501? (thats what I just paid.) Its your call. There is plenty of filler here, but as any successful online marketer knows: just a single idea can foot this price many times over.

I just bought my copy 15 minutes ago, a complete report/review will be forthcoming.

I never got around to applying The Four Hour Work Week, but I have followed a few lessons from the book. Most specifically, eliminating distractions and “Become(ing) and Ignoramus.” (page 92)

For a moment lets just forget blog RSS feeds, forums, and CNBC — instead consider your daily personal contacts and work interruptions.

Step 1 — Create an “personal” e-mail address. Its brand new and no one even knows what it is.

Step 2 — Get a new “personal” phone line / number. Again, its brand new and no one knows it yet.

Step 3 — You have two options, either have an employee become your intermediary to filter out the garbage, or give out this personal contact information to only your most important contacts.

For example, a company that you do 5/6/7 figures of business with a month may qualify as high priority. A company that you used in the past does not. This also means from time to time you may need to create a new “personal” contact system.

Have two sets of business cards. If you go to a conference, give one to the people trying to sell you something. Give a second to the important people you need to contact. If you have met me, you know I do not even give out any business cards. I’ll take yours, and contact you on my own time.

Because my company is very tiny (in employee size) I do not have anyone filter my contact information for me. I am sure there are many people who are pissed that I answered their voice mail 2 months after they left it. Thats ok, because if I spent my time reading through every personal correspondence, there wouldn’t be much business left.

Ironically you will notice I have a personal contact email on this blog (as of the time I write this.) Your contact structure does not have to be limited to two tiers. It can be very beneficial to make it multi-channeled. As the business owner, if might be ok for your press contacts to have direct contact information. Or perhaps there is a more “casual” contact point that you can access after work that you know will never contain urgent news to break you away from family time.

Consider these ideas and build yourself a custom solution, if you haven’t already. As always, these aren’t rules; test things out and figure out what works for you.

Big companies rarely have reason to use whois privacy on their domain names. Thousands of webmasters who work out of their homes feel otherwise. Sometimes the reasons are innocuous as avoiding whois harvested junk mail and telemarketers; other times the reasons are far more serious, such as death threats and stalkers.

Some web site developers own hundreds, or even thousands of websites. Old projects are often left forgotten beyond monthly checks from advertising networks.

There is a big downside to hiding your domain name contact info: what if someone wants to purchase your web site? For sole web site publishers, leaving a few thousand dollars on the table is more than worth it for remaining distraction free. However, would you feel the same way if it was tens of thousands of dollars or even hundreds of thousands?

My recommendation — keep your whois information hidden, but leave an open contact email on every site. At the very least, register your domain names under a corporation (or corporations) and not your personal home address.

The “hot” topic of the website development industry right now is the mobile web. Last week Google announced that they would be releasing a mobile operating system, Android. Adwords advertisers noticed this timed nicely with Google’s expiration of free mobile advertising.

Weeks earlier, a TRAFFIC domain name auction set records with .mobi domain names climbing into the six figures. However, controversy quickly followed with personal accusations flying within the domain name community.

From a web site owner’s perspective — mobile web site access is important. Conversion and revenue numbers aside, millions of people do and will continue to access the internet through their personal mobile phones years into the future. However, this alone is hardly a case for investing money in a new domain name extension.

Consider this:

#1 Web sites can automatically detect what platform a visitor is accessing the site through. Go to facebook.com on your phone, you end up at m.facebook.com. Its hassle-free to the end user.

#2 Big brands do not need to spend money or dilute their dot com/net/org/edu by promoting, and explaining their .mobi. Just like a social networking site, domain name extensions become successful when lots of people use them and recognize them. There is a local restaurant that uses .ws, everyone asks what it is — they do not even know its a web site address.

#3 The distinction between mobile browsing and desktop browsing has already blurred. My smart phone has a fully functional web browser, and runs both Opera Mobile and Internet Explorer. The iPhone’s web browser is an excellent example of this (YouTube video.) Additional advancements in Ultra-Mobile Computing (UMPC, for short) make the desktop experience truly portable. In the long term, users will not settle for crippled internet access.

Those pushing the pro’s of the .mobi point out that some big companies are buying and promoting the extension. Domainers today are hoping to bank on the same corporate spending wave that left them with understood and recognizable dot coms after the late 90’s tech bubble deflated.

If the corporate world catches on, and you see .mobi domain names being promoted everywhere offline and on, it might be worth catching a ride. Sure you’ll end up paying a premium, but in this business time is often far more valuable than money.

Here is something funny for the weekend.

I have just returned from Ad-Tech New York. This is the first time I attended, although I was at the far smaller Ad-Tech Chicago this past summer.

Event highlights included the shoulder-to-shoulder packed after party at Pacha sponsored by PepperJam, RocketProfit, and whole bunch of companies which I do not remember. I also managed to attend a networking event for women in advertising, and consequently am now one of a handful of paying male members of Ad Femme

On a business owner to business owner standpoint I walked away realizing a few things:

Premium dot com domains are still significantly undervalued. Are those record breaking sales signs of a speculative bubble, or are buyers getting flea market priced bargains?

The online ad marketplace is going to become increasingly competitive between networks — high quality publishers (and type-in domain owners) will benefit greatly.

Annual internet advertising revenue projections are now moving north of $50 billion for 2011. Fair to say, you are in the right industry, at the right time. Don’t let the boat leave without you.

A month ago I ran a small advertising experiment where I displayed a non-hyperlinked URL. In order for someone to visit the particular site they have to enter the URL by hand (or copy & paste it.)

I am left with some interesting statistics. Out of 4,092 visits, 3,870 were direct visits. The user typed the domain name in the browser’s location field. However, 116 of them, or 2.83%, arrived from search engines. All search engine visits are for the site’s full domain names. This includes domain.com, www.domain.com, and http://www.domain.com, along with a few typos.

Worthless info?

Here is another one. “webpublishingblog.com” and variations only show up twice for the past month’s stats. However, a bunch of other “domain.com”’s are scattered throughout the search traffic data. One of the top search keywords for WebPublishingBlog is plentyoffish.com (due to an interview I did with owner Markus Frind back when no one believed he had a real web site.)

You can draw a few conclusions from this. First, domain names matter a lot whether you are doing paid search or organic search engine optimization. You want your users to find you for your own domain name, and your competitions!

Second, there is a war going on with direct navigation. Toolbars are driving large volumes of visitors who, rather than use the browser’s navigation field, are using the toolbar’s search field. The two largest players here are Google and Ask.com. Considering Ask.com gets their PPC feed from Google, this is all about Google. Microsoft has a home field advantage when it comes to typos, directing Internet Explorer typo traffic straight to their search engine.

Google has a balancing act to play. Google must make as much money as possible while delivering the most relevant results so that one day they themselves don’t become irrelevant. Sometimes they get it wrong.

Finally, this puts domain name parkers at a massive disadvantage. Why? Because they are missing out on all that free organic traffic. When someone goes to Google and types in shoe.com shoes.com ends up being the winner. Domainers are figuring this out (what took them so long?) Be prepared for a lot more search competition when yourkeyword.com swaps PPC parking for content.

How do you visitors find you? No matter what type of web business you are in, the search engines are cashing in on a chunk of your business. You can’t escape it.

Before starting, this is not a post for or against Ron Paul. Rather, I am trying to point out a few things about demographics, something any web publisher and marketer should understand & study.

There has been a general representation, not only in the mainstream press, but also web sites such as Digg that Ron Paul has a very tiny, core group of supporters. These supporters are spamming polls, online and offline to give the illusion that he has a huge backing.

Judging by the comments I have read on various forums & blogs, as well as by statements I have seen on television, there is a perception that Ron Paul’s supporters are imaginary. More than a few bloggers feel that comments supporting Ron Paul are “auto-generated.” Earlier this year there were stories about Ron Paul supporters gaming Digg. Today Wired reported that someone was e-mail spamming messages in support of Ron Paul.

The reason why this appears to be “a Ron Paul fraud” is because the Republican polls are polling registered Republicans. Additionally, the groups polled are samples as tiny as 500 people. The most recent Zogby poll puts Ron Paul far behind at 3%. Thats not the 30%+ number we saw at the end of the last Republican debate.

Lets take a look at what groups can & do include Ron Paul supporters:

-Anti-War. None of the Republican candidates express any views but escalation.
-Pro-Small Government. Again, no other Republican candidates express interest in this, yet the Republican party pushed the concept very hard in the preceding decade.
-Libertarians. This group alone represents probably 2-3% of US voters, they would not be reflected in Republican polls.
-Democrats. Watch a debate. Ron Paul reflects the anti-war position as strongly as the further left Democratic candidates. Democrats watching a Republican debate will either vote for Ron Paul or no one at all.
-Crazy People. People who believe they don’t have to pay taxes, conspiracy theorists, etc. This group is showing support for Ron Paul.
-The Disillusioned & Non-voting. This group can include all of the previous groups. Only about half of Americans who can vote do.

Add all these groups together, and you have a very significant audience. This is far from an illusion fraud created by a tiny, core group of supporters. Certainly you will have rogue individuals too stupid to understand their attempts at gaining influence will actually destroy themselves and damage the candidates they allegedly support.

No matter what market you are involved in, do not buy into the distracting noise and well worn theories. Unlike politics, being #2,#,#4, or even #15 can net you a fortune. Go after the under-represented niches, no matter how loony or lazy they may appear (you may well find that this is a bonus, not a detraction.)

Politics makes for a great study in the dark arts of social engineering and human manipulation. Everything you want to learn about building a fanatical group of followers can be found here — if your not too busy buying in to the stories yourself.