You may have seen the term “landing pages” come up a lot in marketing articles, but what are they? Basically, they specialized pages that visitors are directed to after they have clicked on a link from an outside source. These pages are focused on the product or service being promoted, with the intention of getting the reader to either make a purchase or at least do something to get them closer to a sale.
Now, some marketing experts will tell you that a landing page should only have one offer on it and nothing else. You will find others who think it is good to provide easy access to other areas on your site, even mentioning other offers in case the visitor doesn’t really want the main offer. The only way to tell what works the best is by trying both ways. However, if you want to drive people to a certain offer, it is best to stick with only that offer on the landing page. Since PPC ads are usually very targeted, traffic will be quite focused anyway.
So how do you create a landing page? You first need to think of what you are offering, who you wish to attract, why they would be interested in the offer, and what they need to do to purchase or participate? You should write down all of your ideas, and then narrow it down to the core elements. You want to make this as motivating as possible, but be careful not to hype it up too much.
Your landing page is basically a summary of all the other pages connected with the service or product you are offering. Remember, the goal of this page is to attract the visitors to either purchase or take action to do so.
You should always have a call to action around the top of your page. However, don’t just put one call to action in here. They should be scattered all throughout the page, as different points will trigger many different people. The visitors that are already familiar with what you are offering may click at the top, but those who aren’t may need to read more before they click. This call to action should be linked to the order page or subscription form. Be sure it doesn’t link to an irrelevant place. They are clicking on the call to action to take action now!
On a landing page that is focused on one offer, you don’t need to have too many sentences. It should be brief and to the point. Basically, you want bite size chunks of information that are easy to follow. Now there will always be visitors that are more inquiring than others, so you should offer a way for them to communicate with you if they want more information.
Unlike the content on your page, the length of the page can vary greatly. However, the more costly an item is, the more content will need to be on there to convince the reader to buy.
As you write your page, be sure that you have all major questions that someone may ask answered. You can even write a few questions yourself with an answer. Do be sure that you don’t bounce around from point to point. You want this page to flow sequentially.
The way that your landing page looks is extremely important. With the Internet today, there are so many ways to get great headers and pictures for your page. The more text, the more boring and dull it looks. Also, be sure to use blank lines to organize the text. This makes it look nice, neat, and organized, which is better for those reading it. You also want to use attractive colors together. Just black and white will bore people. Do remember, however, that images are usually the first thing a reader looks at, so you want to place them strategically. For example, if the image is on the right hand side of the page, the reader has to use more effort to look back to the left where the text is. This may not seem like such a big deal, but every second counts when trying to convince a potential client. You definitely don’t want to have any unnecessary images to detract them.
When creating more than one landing page with only small variations in text, you should be sure to keep these pages away from search engine spiders. Your general-purpose landing page should be available for indexing, but use a robots meta tag or robots.txt directive to leave out the other pages. This way, the search engines won’t think you are trying to spam their listings.
You should always test your landing pages. A good way to do this at first is to ask friends and colleagues to look at the pages for about 5 seconds. Be sure they don’t know what the page is about before they look at it. Then, don’t ask them if they thought the page was good, but rather, what they remembered about the page. You want to know their idea of the message you are attempting to convey. If this ties in with what you are offering, you are on the right track.
Remember to always have a well-focused landing page. Put in the effort and direct visitors to where they will find the offer, not a general product or home page. You will reap the rewards.
Carrie Harris is an expert at internet marketing and a business opportunity enthusiast. To find out how to work less and make more, visit http://www.thewinningbusiness.com/
