Landing Pages Exposed!

Those of you that have heard about landing pages but are not quite sure what they are or for those of you already using landing pages but are wanting to make yours better then please read carefully.

A landing page is the first page a user sees when they click on one of your advertising links. Some people believe that their home page is their landing page, however this is not necessarily the best approach. A landing page should be tailored towards one of your products or services. It can be a page from your website or separate to your website, even hosted on a different domain if you like.

The main goal of a landing page is to produce a conversion, whether it is a sign up, a sale or even just a lead.

Let's say you are a real estate agent dealing in the rental and sales of houses. Imagine you have designed a Google advertising campaign tailored towards your rental properties. Would you send users to your home page, your sales page or your rentals page? Of course you would prefer people going to the rentals page as this is far more relevant to the advertising.

Have a look at this landing page http://www.ineedmoreclicks.com/advertising-new/. It was designed by ineedhits to advertise one of its services and has helped to greatly improve conversion rates. There are several key areas we consider when creating our landing pages - here's our 3 golden rules:

1. Keep it simple, straight to the point, not too cluttered.

2. Include elements of the advertising used to drive traffic to the page. For example advertising used to get them to the page was "guaranteed traffic" you would want to include these words somewhere on the page.

3. Strong call to action - Include your phone number and email address or make sure you have a form to collect users information to follow up later on.

Here are some common mistakes of landing pages - make sure to avoid these:

1. The page is too cluttered - this is distracting to users and may harm your conversion. Try to keep it to 5 main points max.

2. The page is too broad - Users must be able to see what you offer within the first 5 seconds of being on your page.

3. Too many links away from the page - don't have links to other websites and especially keep advertising to an absolute minimum.

Landing pages can be a great way for your business to grow and increase sales, however remember that a poorly designed page can also do the opposite. If you design your page carefully, keeping it simple and to the point, you may be surprised at the results that you can achieve through a highly targeted landing page.

Posted by Jamie Olsen at 6:36 AM GMT