Build Superior Landing Pages

Imagine running a huge online marketing campaign for your site, complete with all the blog buzz, advertisements and search engine placements. You're expecting tons of traffic to hit your site, you think the job's done, well sadly, not quite. One very important factor many fail to spend time working on - Build superior landing pages. Definitely a very important tool when it comes down to any marketing campaign, if you ask me.

Landing Pages are basically the web page where the visitor reaches, after clicking on a link or promotional ad. Its a page where detailed information about a specific product or service that was mentioned in that link is displayed. At the end of the day, no amount of hardwork put into your marketing campaign will be worth much if there's no conversion! So, create that superior landing page and you're on your way to a very successful site.

Imagine this, your site now gets around 10,000 page views a month and you think, wow, that's a lot of traffic. But remember, that does not promise success, because you could lose all that traffic in matter of weeks if you don't have an equal balance of conversion ratio at your landing page. What do we mean by conversion - Once these visitors reach your landing page, naturally you need them to do something or rather, (like maybe, buy your product, subscribing to your weekly newsletter etc). Once the visitors carry out the desired action similar to this, you've then had, what we call, a conversion. And this ladies and gentlemen, is the sole purpose of having a good landing page. Learning how to optimize the page, is another trick in itself.

Before you begin developing your landing page, consider its real purpose. What do you hope your visitors would do when they reach there? Here are 11 pointers which should help you improve your landing pages :

1. Consider it's main purpose.
   
2. What is your goal? Do you want to sell a product, help people learn about a particular service, do want them to provide you feedback?
3. Content is a vital part of a landing page. Know what to include in, and what not to.
4. Provide detailed information about the said product or service, something which is relevant and focused.
5. Avoid linking to other areas of your site, as you want them to convert on that one page, and not wandering off to other parts off your site whilst being entertained by your fancy colorful animations.
6. Keep in mind who your audience are, make sure the information you provide meets their requirements.
7. Make sure the look and feel of your landing page is consistent with your other marketing materials.
8. Include the keywords or phrases which were used in your advertisement, and add them into your page title and headline.
9. Keep the load times of your landing page under 5 seconds.
10. Routinely update your landing page. If you decide to change your campaign, change your landing page as well.
11. Make sure that none of the links in that page are broken or outdated for that matter.