LANDING PAGES:  TACTICS FOR HIGHER CONVERTING LANDING PAGES

Introduction

Quality, effective landing pages are a crucial element of any successful online business. No matter what type of web property you have, your landing page needs to be properly optimized for maximum conversions.

There is an endless variety of landing pages types and styles, because they are so highly customizable. You can create a landing page that is specifically tailored to your niche, your target demographic, your product, your conversion goals… virtually anything!

In fact, you can even create unique landing pages that will be shown to individuals based on their gender, their country, or one of many other elements!

Your landing page is typically the first thing people see when they visit your website. In fact, depending on your business model, it may be the only page they see. It must be attractive, uncluttered, and most importantly, functional for your purposes.

In this article, you’re going to learn about different types of landing pages, how to use them, and how to create stunning landing pages without a lot of technical or design experience.

Types of Landing Pages

Many people don’t really understand what a landing page really is. They believe it’s just the first page visitors land on when they visit a website. In some cases, that’s all the landing page really is. However those types of landing pages aren’t really effective in most cases.

An effective landing page is one that is geared toward a very specific purpose, and it’s generally the first page people visit after they see an ad you create, read an email you send out, or see some other form of marketing or advertising.

If you want to increase your business significantly, it’s a good idea to start creating landing pages that are specifically geared toward your primary purpose, whatever that might be. Whether it’s to sell an affiliate product, sell your own product, gather leads, gain subscribers, or something else, you should create a landing page that is specifically designed to help you achieve that goal.

Let’s take a look at a few of the most common types of landing pages:

 

1. Squeeze Page – A squeeze page is a type of lead generation page that is designed to collect email subscribers. It’s one of the most common types of landing pages. Typically, a squeeze page asks for a name and email address, and generally offers something free to whoever submits their information to encourage participation.
2. Click Through Page – This type of landing page is very simple and has one primary goal: to get people to click through to another website where they can buy something. This type of page may present a discount offer, bonus offer or some other incentive in order to encourage purchases, or it may just list some quick benefits or a offer a short review.
3. Lead Capture Page – A lead capture page is a type of squeeze page, however it collects more information than a typical squeeze page, which usually only asks for a name and email address. A lead capture page may ask for this information for a specific purposes (such as requesting more information about a home loan) or general (just gathering information for later use.)
4. Viral Page – Viral landing pages are created with the purpose of generating buzz for a product or event. These pages have two major elements: killer content that gets people excited, and a method (or multiple methods) of sharing that content. Typically there will be buttons to allow easy sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and perhaps other networks such as Google+ and Pinterest. These pages may also contain elements of other pages such as squeeze pages or lead generation pages.
5. Product Detail Page – These types of pages are standard in certain markets like the real estate market. They present information about a specific property (or a product, service, etc.) The primary purpose of this type of page is to get the sale or at least to collect leads that might eventually lead to a sale. This type of page is usually created for a single product (where there is only one single item available, such as a house or a car), but may occasionally be used for other purposes.
6. Video Landing Page – Video landing pages are typically hybrid pages that feature elements of one of the other pages. For example, you could have a video squeeze page, or a video lead generation page, or even a video product detail page.
7. Review Page – Review pages present a review of a specific product or service. They are similar to a click through page in that their primary goal is to encourage purchase of a product, however the information is presented in the form of a review. Most other elements of the page will mimic a click through page.

There are other types of landing pages, too, but these are the most common. In fact, any page can technically be a landing page, however you don’t generally want your landing page to be cluttered with a bunch of navigation links and advertising like the rest of the pages on your site might be. Instead, it should be clean and highly-focused on a single, specific purpose. Specificity is crucial with regard to landing pages.

Elements of Successful Landing Pages

Why build a better mousetrap when the one that exists already works so well? Why not just reproduce the success of the original by producing more of them?

Well, that is precisely what you should do when you create a landing page. Don’t copy other people’s pages. That’s copyright infringement. Instead, we can borrow elements from those pages that we know are already successful.

There are a few elements you should focus on no matter what type of landing page you create.

1. Headline – As with any type of page, you need a headline to grab attention and get people interested right away. The headline is the most important element of the page, because it’s usually the first thing people see.
2. Media – You’ll generally want some kind of imagery, whether it is video or image-based. This is usually a picture of the product or a video ad, but it could be any type of supporting media. This is usually the second thing people notice on a landing page, but of these four elements, it’s the least critical. You could still have an effective landing page with no graphics or video, but typically graphical elements and videos capture interest and lead to better conversions.
3. Benefits – Every landing page needs a list of benefits. Whether this is benefits of the product or benefits of your newsletter that you want them to subscribe to, you must give people enough reasons to take action.
4. Call-to-Action – A call-to-action is another vital element for any landing page. You must tell people what action you’d like them to take. This could be something like, “Click here to get your copy of this unique marketing system now!” Or it could be something like, “Enter your name and email address to receive your free copy of this life-changing report today!” A strong call-to-action can mean the difference between getting the visitor to take action and having them leave, so pay close attention to this component.

A landing page can have other elements, as well. Just remember that the four elements listed about are crucial to the success of any landing page, so time must be spent making sure these elements are finely tuned for conversions.

Creating Stunning Landing Pages

Most people who work online actually have little to no technically proficiency and very little artistic experience. This makes it difficult for the average person to create their own landing page, and hiring a designer to create a custom page can become very expensive, especially if you need that designer to add special functions to your landing page.

Fortunately, there are many ways to create truly remarkable landing pages without a lot of technical experience. You don’t have to spend a small fortune to have a custom landing page created unless you have very unique needs. Instead, you can do it yourself and save money.

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can create stunning and effective landing pages with very little technical experience.

WordPress Themes & Plugins

If you use WordPress, there are a number of different ways you can use it to create effective landing pages. These pages can be standalone landing pages, or they can be integrated into a blog or website built on the WordPress platform.

This can be achieved with themes, plugins, or a combination of the two, depending on your needs.

The WordPress Landing Pages plugin is a good place to start. This plugin allows you to make beautiful landing pages on your WordPress site using a visual editor with no code required and built-in templates. You can also track conversion rates, clone pages to tweak for A/B split tests and more.

>> http://wordpress.org/plugins/landing-pages/

JustLanded is the #1 bestselling landing page theme on ThemeForest.com. This theme allows you to create a fully responsive, highly customized landing page in unlimited colors, with your own fonts and styles and much more, and you can also include your opt-in code.

>> Theme Forest Landing Pages

Templates & Systems

Templates are a great way to create landing pages if you have little to no technical ability. There are also full systems that not only contain great designs, but also allow you to easily customize those and have other features such as testing, tracking, social media, and other features built in.

LeadPages is a full system that allows you to create responsive landing pages (as well as launch pages, sales pages, squeeze pages, thank you pages and more) that work on a wide variety of platforms including WordPress, Facebook and most mobile devices.)

There are tons of templates built in that you can customize to create an endless variety of pages. Best of all, you never have to touch a single line of code.

>> https://www.leadpages.net/products/

1MinuteSites allows you to create unlimited landing pages customized using their built in templates in one minute or less. The system is truly that powerful and easy to use. These pages also perform well on mobile devices, and they are hosted on their servers which are known for their speed and reliability.

You can also publish your landing pages on your own site with HTML5, on WordPress, or on Facebook!

>> http://www.1minutesites.com/

One place you can find a great system for both building beautiful landing pages using templates and split testing for the best results is:

>> Frontio.com

Landing Page Optimization

Because your landing page is so crucial, and because, as they say, you only get one chance to make a first impression, it’s critical to ensure that your landing page converts as well as it possibly can.

It’s practically impossible to gauge every element of your landing page against the tastes and desires of your target audience. In fact, there have been times when ugly designs have vastly outperformed beautiful designs, and when copy that cost thousands of dollars from one of the world’s most well-known copywriters failed compared to a quick sales letter written by a product owner.

Sure, these instances could be considered “flukes”, but the fact is, they happen more often than you might expect. This is why it’s important to use split testing in order to optimize your landing page for optimum conversions.

What is Split Testing?

Split testing is basically the process of testing multiple versions of a page, sales copy, or other marketing element in order to increase conversions. You can accomplish this with special software, or you can do it on your own by using multiple pages with your own unique methods of tracking results.

If you use a system like LeadPages or Frontio, you’ll have split-testing abilities built right in. This is one of the things that makes these systems so powerful, because you can test the different iterations of your landing pages without using any additional software or incurring any additional expenses for testing software.

Killer Landing Page Hacks

There are a few things you can do to drastically improve your landing page effectiveness, boosting conversions with very little extra work. Let’s take a look at those things now.

 

Incentives

Incentives are one of the most important tricks in the landing page book, but many people neglect to use them anyway. Used correctly, incentives can boost conversions significantly, so there’s no reason not to use them.

The average person isn’t going to hand over their personal information such as their email address or phone number without some sort of incentive to do so. Not only that, but incentives work even when your landing page is geared toward selling a product, because you can offer a discount, rebate or bonus to encourage sales.

Here are some ideas for incentives that you can choose from depending on the type of landing page you’re using:

• Free report
• Free video
• Free access to a membership site
• Discount off your product
• Rebate on an affiliate product (if they allow rebates)
• Bonus on your own or an affiliate product
• “Top Secret” information of some kind

Social Marketing Integration

Another element that can drastically increase the effectiveness of a landing page is the integration of social media. It’s quick and easy to add buttons to a landing page that will allow visitors to share the page with a single click, and this will help you get more visitors without much effort.

There are tons of social media sites that you could integrate, but here are some of the ones you probably don’t want to forget:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Pinterest

Engagement Devices

Engagement devices are useful for getting people to pay more attention to your message and stay on the page longer, thus reducing bounce rate. (Bounce rate is the number of people who leave the site after the initial landing page without viewing anything else. On a landing page, having a high bounce rate means your landing page isn’t working, because people are hitting the back button rather than taking action.)

There are many ways to increase engagement. Here are a few ideas:

• Video
• Interactive presentations, like those made with Prezi.com
• Quizzes related to your landing page niche
• Simple embedded games related to your niche

Just don’t insert engagement devices solely for the purpose of keeping attention, because if the device doesn’t help further your marketing message and encourage people to take action, it will only distract users from your message.

Conclusion

Creating effective landing pages doesn’t have to be a long, complex process involving hours worth of coding and top-notch graphics design experience. Anyone can create landing pages that are both stunning and highly effective with no technical experience using the methods outlined in this report.

Always keep in mind the purpose of your landing page as you’re creating it, and tailor each element to that purpose. For example, if you’re trying to gain opt-ins for your email list, focus on drawing attention to the opt-in form and on the benefits people will get when they subscribe. Don’t distract them with extra things that will take away from that primary goal.

IMPORTANT: Landing pages should be clean, free of extra links and other distractions, and focus solely on your one main goal!

If you keep these things in mind and use the tips you’ve learned in this report, you’ll be creating stunning, effective landing pages in no time, even if you have no design or technical experience!

 

Good luck!