I am assuming that your blog is not just for personal expression, but you’d like it to create a stream of income. If you’re looking for a way to convert your daily visitor traffic into productive leads, then a tried and true way of going about it is to create landing pages.
There’s no point spending a tremendous amount of time and money designing the perfect website, putting up articles, and posting ads if you have no way of converting the traffic into actual clients. Here is a Marketing 101 primer on what these pages are that convert browsers into your list.
What Is A Landing Page?
A landing page, also known as a lead capture page, is a web page that has been optimized to convert as much of the incoming traffic as possible into an email list or sold leads. It’s often used as a page people go to in response to an ad or some kind of promotional copy. Users who are attracted by something in the ad are transferred directly to the page where they can act on the offer.
Even though it’s a common practice with many websites, landing pages don’t have to be the first page of a website. Some sites are all landing page. Others have lots of content in addition to pages that are specifically designed to convert visitors.
To increase the amount of traffic that comes to them, landing pages should be optimized using good SEO, and we have talked about that in several other posts. Unlike a page or a post, landing pages aren’t primarily designed to encourage visitors to explore a site. Instead of leading to other pages, most the links on these pages are used to convert incoming traffic.
What Is It Used For?
There are many practical uses for a landing page. Converting traffic and generating hot leads are broad terms. Specifically, a landing page can be used for:
- Building an email list
- Create specific interest-based lists within your website niche
- Building membership lists
- Selling your services or products
- Long sales pages
- Showing of presale videos
- Driving traffic to your Facebook page
- Asking your readers questions with surveys and polls
Why Would You Want A Landing Page?
The right question is why wouldn’t you? Unless your website has no commercial purpose whatsoever, a landing page makes a lot of business sense.
Think about it.
Why invest so much into advertising your services or product only to watch your potential customers click away to another site? Having a page dedicated to converting your traffic reduces the amount of leads that you lose. Instead of you reacting to your visitors, a landing page gives you the chance to have control over your traffic.
Advertising is all about reducing missed opportunities. Many companies make the mistake of directing the bulk of their incoming traffic to the homepage of their website. The problem with this is that many of the people who land on the homepage may not be sure of what to do. If there aren’t specific instructions and obvious buttons that they can click on to subscribe, most of them are likely to simply leave the page and you have lost them.
Having a landing page allows you to take charge of the sales conversion process. Instead of leaving your surfers to figure out what they need, you show them exactly where they need to go and what actions they need to take. Sending your traffic to a landing page that is constantly prompting them to act on an offer dramatically increases the chances of you converting your visitors to leads. Within a few weeks of adding a well written landing page to your website, you should notice a significant improvement in your sales conversion ratio.
Create Landing Pages for WordPress
Creating a landing page powered by WordPress isn’t difficult. There are several ways of going about this.
The time intensive way is to design your own landing page from scratch. You’ll need to be fairly proficient in HTML, CSS and a little PHP to achieve this.
If you’re not too comfortable with your technical knowledge of web scripts, an easier alternative is to edit a customized template. There are dozens of useful landing page templates that you can easily modify to suit your needs. One of the benefits of using WordPress when creating a landing page is how easy it is to insert and edit your content.
You can hire an outside provider to create a website for you. Elance is our go-to place for outside help.
There are also useful WordPress plugins for creating, enhancing and managing your page. One of these is Premise by CopyBlogger Media. We will soon have a separate post that describes the benefits of using a landing page plugin like Premise.
Some of the additional things that you can do to ensure that you get the best value with your WordPress landing page include:
- Providing useful content. Your landing page should deliver substantial value to your surfers. If your audience is impressed with what you have to offer, they’ll be more willing to opt into your offer.
- Don’t make it too long unless it is a comprehensive sales page for a series of product offers. No one likes a rambling page. So, generally, keep your landing page short. This will make your lead conversion progress a lot more effective.
- Add opportunities for social media sharing. This will give your visitors a means of sharing your site with many of their friends.
- Don’t add too many exits. Landing pages are designed to attract visitors. You don’t want to lead them away. Keep your audience on your page by minimizing the amount of links that you place on your page.
And the last point: Test your page. And then test and test it again.
Sources:
Hubspot – What Is a Landing Page and Why Should You Care
WebDuckDesigns – Landing Page
WordPress.org – Creating a Custom Landing Page
PushingSocial – 10 Ways Savvy Bloggers Use Landing Pages
About Mike Kelley
