The best thing about this post was the case-study description of the full, 'first principles', customer development-type approach to landing page optimization including lessons learned from face to face selling, and a handful of very specific surveys and customer conversations. Usually, these kinds of case studies focus on either landing page opt. or customer development, but don't put it all together.

This is one of the best content-to-sleeze-ratio posts you will ever see about Internet marketing.

My favorite part of the whole sale page (that this article did not point out), was the cutesy little "Warning!" at the bottom that tells people they are absolutely going to be OVERWHELMED! by the amount of tools and features they're going to get...

I actually first noticed this sales technique in one of those late-night fat-loss commercials where the chick starts out by saying "WARNING: Hydroxycut (or whatever) is only for people who need to lose a serious amount of weight and should not be used by average dieters!"... absolutely brilliant.

I initially missed it, but the page itself is at http://www.seomoz.org/pro_landing.php

I appreciated the self-referential nature of the page.

1. We created a web page long enough to tell the story

2. We infused the headline with curiosity rather than overt "buy me" language

5. We augmented the message with video

Et cetera.

If it works for SEOmoz and CRE...

Awesome marketing and meta-marketing.

And there is a negative option $1 trial, $79 monthly rebill: stay classy SEOmoz.

We of course knew that a $1 offer would boost subscriptions but the real goal was to keep these users active beyond the trial period.

I suspect it didn't work. I just did a search and I got this e-mail back in February 2009. If the $1 idea had worked, I'd expect them to still be running it. (It'd tempt me to upgrade my account, I think. I've considered upgrading to PRO but keep putting it off as $70/mo is a lot for something I might not have the time to tinker with.. I think I need to get a better "live" feel of it to be sold on the tools.)

This article points out exactly why the "above the fold" debate is an absolute MYTH when you're building a sales page with a specific function.

In my experience length wins out 99% of the time.

I have personally interacted with Conversion Rate Experts and they are a fantastic team, solely dedicated to the art of conversion rate optimization. They do their job excellently and as you can see from this post they write great content too!

Really well done, Karl (from CRE) - if you are here on HN, that is.