Six Tips For Landing Pages

The key to doubling or tripling the effectiveness of your advertising efforts is to set up great landing pages and invite people to your landing pages instead of your website's home page.  Landing pages are the first page a person sees after clicking on a link to your site.  The better the landing page, the more likely the visitor will take the steps to purchase from you.

As website owners, we spend a lot of effort inviting people to come to our site to take some action (such as to purchase a product).  We use newsletters, paid online ads, search engine optimization techniques, blogging, tweeting, building connections with others, etc.  However effective our efforts are in getting people coming to the site, our efforts can be wasted if the visitors get confused or don't know how to take the step you invited them to take.

For example, if you are advertising baby quilt patterns, set up a flatpage on your site that talks specifically about your baby quilt patterns, and direct all of your advertising to that page.  That will be a lot more effective than sending people to your home page and making them hunt for baby quilt patterns.

The following six tips should help you with creating landing pages:

1. A Clear Headline
   Your landing page should have a clear headline across the top that invites people to read more.  Headlines such as "Announcing The Most Popular Baby Quilt Patterns" will be more effective than "Baby Quilt Patterns".
2. Write Easy To Follow Copy
   Your paragraphs of text should be easy to follow and read.  People tend to read the first and last paragraph, so keep the middle interesting by using bullet points or photos with captions.  Use second person language (you, your), as it is more inviting.  Bold, italicize, or highlight important words to make scanning easier.
3. A Call To Action
   A landing page without a call to action isn't very worthwhile.  Ask your visitor to do something (click on a link, fill out a form, etc.).  The call to action should be very clear and obvious.  A call to action may be a link to another area or areas of your website.  It can also include an add to cart button or a form people can fill out right there on the spot instead of going to another area of the site. 
4. Photos / Videos To Demonstrate The Product
   Pictures and videos can tell a story a whole lot better than a screen full of text.  Use them as much as possible. 
5. Make The Page Load Fast
   They say you only have three seconds or so to make an impression on your landing page.  Do what you can to make the page load quickly.  This might mean cutting down on the use of photos (sounds contradictory to Tip #4!) or optimizing / compressing the page to load very fast.  Help people find the information they're after quickly.
6. Test Variations
   Try different versions of your landing pages and track results.  You might be surprised that a different headline or different photo might double the number of people that sign up for your service.

Comments

• I found this advice to be very useful. By using the landing pages, we have been able to better monitor the number of visits we are receiving or the result of particular ad campaigns. We found that visitors can find information more easily by referring them to a landing page, rather than just our homepage. Great info! Thank you!
  by Jon on 29 January 2010 at 12:12 p.m.

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