How to Write Effective Landing Pages

Grab Their Attention & Keep Those Prospects on Your Webpage!

Landing pages are very important web pages for your internet marketing website. Why? Because these pages serve as clear and concise pieces of “call to action” information for your website visitors. Landing pages are responsible for helping your visitor decide to engage an initial conversation with you, so they can investigate a specific product, or service, or free offer, etc. that you are promoting.

It is a proven fact that your website has a large influence over prospective clients and customers in deciding if they want to make the next step and learn more from you. A landing page is a vehicle that gives specific information on one topic to your prospect.

However, more times than not, most of the internet marketing websites that I have visited or have been hired to help improve, have poorly focused landing pages. The content is written in a manner that causes the visitor to end up either overwhelmed with too much non-specific information, or deciding to leave the website because they couldn’t find what they were hoping to find.

Write a Landing Page that’s Focused and Specific to Only One “Call to Action”

Without an effective landing page for each and every ad campaign you undertake, you’re wasting money and customers. As examples, whether you’re trying to build up your mailing list by offering a free download or promoting a special “Get to Know Us” discount on your professional services, the bottom line is all the same. You want positive results. You want prospects moving forward in their decision making process, not clicking off your website.

So, while your ad, special offer, etc. attracts your prospect’s interest, the landing page is supposed to pick up where the ad leaves off. It should lead the prospect to complete the desired transaction . The time it will take you to write clear, concise and compelling text for a landing page is an investment in success. There’s no getting around this fact.

Don’t think that landing pages are only limited to sales pages. They also include pages designed to get visitors to subscribe to an e-mail newsletter or to leave contact information on a lead generation page. A/B split-testing can also be employed to determine usability, to refine elements of a home page, or to develop a navigation system that visitors can understand.

Create a Great Landing Page to Capture the Attention of Your Prospects

Stick to one theme, one offer, one message: The tendency of most internet marketers is to say “Hey, I got them to my website, why don’t I give them information on all of my different services, or tell them about all the clients I’ve serviced in the past, or I think I ought to create links to all my other web pages”.  You get the idea.

Your landing page should have one specific action that you want the prospect to take. To register for an event, or complete an information request form, or download a whitepaper, etc. Distracting prospects with other information or additional offers will drastically reduce the number of leads you are able to capture.

Create a clear call to action. Do not hide the call to action at the bottom of the page, making the prospect scroll down to get to it. The action you want them to take should be the main focus of the page. Create a clickable button beginning with the action word corresponding to what you want them to do – register, contact, download, buy, etc.

Prominently place this button above the fold on the page as well as in various places as they scroll down. The call to action button should be visible at all times as the prospect scrolls down the page.

Capture your prospect’s information! Regardless of the offer, create a response device to capture the prospect’s information. For instance, if you are offering a free downloadable eBook, also create a short form they must complete before they can proceed with the download.

If the prospect is interested in what you have to offer they will be happy to exchange a small amount of information about themselves.  Normally all that is requested is their name and email address. I’m sure you’ve filled out many of these simple email “capture forms” yourself when registering for a free product; more information; free webinar, etc.

Additionally, those visitors are pre-qualifying themselves as interested prospects giving you legitimate reason to follow up. Do not ignore this valuable marketing step! Depending upon your offer, it might be something as simple as a “Thank You” email with a link that points back to your website. Or your follow-up might be a once-a-week for seven weeks email course.

I use and recommend Get Response autoresponder email system to all my clients. It’s  affordable and not to hard to learn how to use.  It allows anyone to easily capture their prospects information and also set up all different sorts of email campaigns. A serious internet marketer cannot be without an autoresponder system!

Match your ad campaign with your website copy. Make sure the look and feel of your landing page is consistent with the marketing piece that drives the prospect to it. If possible, use the same images, design elements, and colors. Repeat the copy and offer. This helps to build credibility, reinforce your message and the benefits, and increase awareness and conversions by reassuring the prospect that they are indeed in the right place.

Keep your prospect on your landing page. Keep navigation and links to a bare minimum if at all possible. Once they’re on your landing page, the last thing you want a prospect to do is click out to another page on your website without completing the desired action.

To help curtail this, simply strip the page of main navigation and keep the amount of links to a minimum. Only links directly relevant to your offer should be included. If you do offer the option of directing them off your landing page, allow the link to open up another browser window. Keep that landing page open!

Search Engine Optimization Considerations for a Landing Page

As a final note I must touch upon the SEO strategy for a landing page. Simply stated, definitely keep your landing page keyword focused and written with compelling copy. Make your visitors and the spiders happy.

However, there are many times when a landing page is a temporary situation, such as when you are offering something for a very short period of time and there would be absolutely no way search engine rankings would materialize in that limited time frame. In this situation, still utilize the targeted keywords throughout your copy and stick to sound content writing principles. Why not? It just makes good sense.