Last week, Roberta Rosenberg at Copyblogger authored a piece that offered some terrific advice for SEOmoz's premium membership landing page. We wrote about that entry and mentioned that we'd like to be able to improve the page's current, relatively dismal conversion rate. But, that's not the whole story...

Here's how it really happened:

1. Brian Clark, Seth Godin & Darren Rowse launched the Copyblogger Copywriting Contest back in May
2. Despite an excellent competition with some very cool results, they were all a little disappointed that the contest couldn't actually test and measure the effectiveness of the various submissions
3. Enter Rand & SEOmoz - on a phone call with Brian & Roberta several weeks back, we all stumbled onto the idea of launching a competition that would test, under real world circumstances, the quality and effectiveness of landing pages - a real life, multivariate test on a live website with everyone's submissions in the running. 
4. Roberta first reviewed the site to illustrate the current problems it faced, and now, we're opening it up to anyone and everyone - ladies and gentleman, start your keyboards :)

Now, here we are, ready to launch a competition 3 months in the making - a chance for SEOs, marketers, copywriters and landing page specialists everywhere to test their mettle against one another. Jeff Pollard, one of SEOmoz's talented developers, has put together a submission page where you can go to create or link to your own landing page submission for the competition:

 To whet your appetite, here's a few of the details:

• Prizes! - The winning entry will receive $1,000 (by check or Paypal) and our first corporate membership (which provides access to SEOmoz premium content for up to 5 members of the same company). Second and third place will also receive 1-year free premium memberships (if you're already a member, we'll add this on to the end of your stint).
• Respect (& New Business) - Your fellow marketers will be able to see at the end of the contest whose entries had what conversion rates (for the top 5 entries) and we'll provide links and information about each of the top submissions. This is an amazing opportunity to promote your company's services to lots of folks who are desperate for exactly this type of assistance.  As testimonials go, they don't get much better than this.
• High Quality Testing - the contest will feature multivariate testing using software from Offermatica. We'll judge on conversion rates, not number of conversions (to make it absolutely fair) and test over 3 weeks. We've also got some advanced analytics on the page to ensure there's no cheating or manipulation.

Big or small, well known or relatively anonymous, this contest is a great tool for any consultant or business seeking notoriety and recognition for their excellence in landing page optimization. But... it's also a great tool for those of us on the sidelines.

As an example of real-life testing, landing page authoring and what makes for great conversion rates, it doesn't get any more transparent or fascinating than this. The contest is a real opportunity to observer the conversion process in action and the results should be educational to online marketers of all stripes.

We'll be accepting submissions from now until Tuesday, July 24th (8 days away), then running the multivariate testing from July 25th to August 14th (3 weeks). The winners will be announced at the end of that week, along with all of the data from the competition including impressions, paths, conversion rates, etc. We plan on pulling back the hood all the way on this one.

Many thanks to Brian, Roberta and my hard working team (who helped put this together over the weekend).

BTW - The contest submission page has many more details including access to assets, information on rules, how to get access to premium content, etc.

UPDATE: Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now (and Grokdotcom) emailed to say that they'd like to additionally provide the top 3 winners with signed copies of their book on landing pages & conversion funnels - Call to Action - as well as one seat at their upcoming Call to Action seminar (to the 2nd place winner). It's hard to say no to such generous offers :)