Monetize Your Site

Killer Landing Pages that Sell – Landing Page Quick Reference Guide

By: Michael Cordova

A landing page is a special purpose website workhorse page that is produced for one goal – to persuade the website visitor to convert into a customer by converting into a lead. It is the most powerful tool for Pay Per Click advertising campaigns.

This landing page quick reference guide ensures that your landing pages convert at the highest level. It is divided into 4 sections and is intended to be an all-inclusive white paper.

Most importantly, consider that you have eight seconds or maybe less than that to convince your visitor to act. If you haven’t convinced the visitor in this time then your mark will leave to another site to find their solution, since the web has created the most fussy buyer in sales history.

PAGE LAYOUT

• Your logo should be at the top-left of the page. Visitors expect your logo in this position so exhibit your company branding where it counts.
• If the visitor came from a search engine keyword search or a Pay Per Click ad then place the keyword words in bold at the top of the page. This reinforces to the visitor that they are at the right place.
• Always keep the Golden Triangle in mind. It is the most important and scanned part of the page. The Golden Triangle is the area of the web page from the top left of the page to the top-right of the page then moves down to the bottom-left diagonally just above the fold. The fold is the area of a website page that the visitor sees without scrolling down. You should never force a visitor to scroll horizontally to see your message. This means that your landing pages must ideally be able to be seen completely on a 1024 x 768 screen resolution. Place your most important messageM in the middle of the Golden Triangle.
• Contrast your Calls to Action with respect to the rest of the page – use different colors, use round vs. rectangular shapes, straight vs. slanted, cold color vs. warm color, big vs. little. Make sure you can spot the Call to Action from 6 feet away.
• Place assurances, testimonials and guarantees in the far-right column.
• Place the logos from proper associations or online companies on the side or at the bottom of the page to show credibility – BBB Online Reliability, certified by…, Alexa rank (if your Alexa ranking is low), powerseller, 24 hour support, live support, credit cards supported, open 24 hours a day, Hacker Safe, Truste, Verisign, Chamber of Commerce, as seen in Entrepreneur Magazine, etc.
• Don’t place external links on a landing page except for the following – links to your home page, contact us and privacy policy pages. Links to your contact us and privacy policy pages will increase your Adwords quality score.
• Having said the above, always place your privacy policies or a link to the privacy policies page on the landing page. This instills confidence.
• Think of Amazon.com. Their Call to Action is the hotspot at the top-right of all pages – add to cart, one click ordering, etc. Consider a similar tactic.

WRITING STYLE AND CONTENT

• Results of many tests have shown that the most effective tool on a landing page is your offer. Ensure you have a powerful offer that speaks to your visitors benefits – and make sure you test different offers for effectiveness.
• Spend time on your strong points – A Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and set is the core differentiator of a company’s product or service from those of its competitors. Put it into the heart of the Golden Triangle. A perfect one will describe your market and the key difference between your competitors and your own company.
• Write in scannable sections without long paragraphs. Visitors scan pages instead of reading all of the text on them.
• Write with section headers and sub-headers summarizing the text that follows.
• Use bullet points as much as possible so visitors can scan them quickly. Search engines prioritize bullets instead of extended paragraph text.
• If you want to add a picture then ensure that the picture is going to reinforce your message. You can easily lose significant conversions by having the wrong image on the landing page.
• If the landing page purpose is to publish an article or white paper then make an image of the article or paper with large, readable text and place it on the page.

THE FORM

• Keep the number of form fields as small as possible. This is important to getting them to complete the form.
• Add a Comments textbox asking for visitor input. It is key to qualifying leads. Those that describe the services they need should be contacted as soon as possible. Here are some titles you can use for this Comments box:
• What problem can we solve for you?
• What is your projects purpose?
• Please list your goals for this project.
• How can we help you?
• In case your site visitor doesn’t fill-in the Comments box on the first page, add a 2nd page with only a Comments textbox on it requesting visitor comments again. Tell them that if they fill in the Comments box now they will receive an extra free article that is germane to their visit. These visitor comments are important.
• Present the visitor with a checkbox that says something like “YES! Send me the free gift that will change my life.” It is the psychological method of coercing them into completing and submitting the form.
• Prominently list the valuable purpose of completing and submitting the form. Make sure to write in terms of user benefits instead of your service features.
• Ensure you save the form information into a database then send the visitor an email as soon as the form is completed so you can immediately contact the web site visitor. The lead’s effectiveness drops significantly with the passing of time. You should contact your lead within minutes.

LANDING PAGE BLUNDERS

• Text that presses the sale too much
• Landing pages that aren’t optimized for keywords
• Using your website home page as a landing page
• Graphics or text not relevant to the landing page – limit copy to only the point of the landing page
• Long forms with unneeded fields – limit your form to what is completely essential
• Fonts that are difficult to read
• Unnecessary navigation leading off of the landing page
• Placing important persuasive copy below the fold

Author Resource:-> Michael Cordova writes about technology and builds SEO optimized WordPress websites. He has been doing Internet marketing, search engine optimization since the beginning of the Internet. BEFORE YOU GO call Michael at (303) 744-2178 for a free initial SEO website evaluation or contact him from the 21stsoft.com links above.
Article Provided By: Published-Articles.com Article Directory

I have had two recent experiences that point out the value of WordPress in getting things indexed in Google.

I put up a research blog on sub-domain space. While I have owned the domain name for a couple of years, the sub-domain was created specifically for the WordPress installation. From the time that the sub-domain space was created until I was posting to the blog was no more than a couple of hours.

The idea with the blog is to go to Google trends and pick a current hot topic and produce a post. One of the very first posts that I made was indexed and I saw traffic from an international Google site, that turned out to be from Poland, in less than 24 hours. I was checking the traffic log to see if there was bot activity on the space when I saw the referrer link to the Google search. I thought that it was amazing and told a couple of people about the experience, as well as making a blog post on another blog.

I have just been snooping in the traffic logs again. This one comes from a different blog that I have had in operation for a few months. I was checking around Ezine Articles site today. I noticed an article using the same keyword that had brought traffic to the new blog. The article was a good fit for my other blog, on topic and all. I published the article. I logged in to the blog at 9:46 AM to post the article. At 12:25 Google returned search results with my post in the number 4 position and the Ezine original article in the number 6 position. Less than two hours and my reprint of the article was ranked higher than the original.

Looking at the results it is apparent that the reason the reprinted article returned higher than the original was because I had the exact search term as one of the tags for the article. The title and every word in the article was the same, but having the tag that matched the search term made the difference. Never underestimate the value of the tags that you apply to your posts. Think of good keywords that relate to the article or post. Us several long tail tags for the post. Add the tags to your thinking for on page SEO.

It has occurred to me that there may be other things at foot in the observed (subjective) speedup of the Deep Link Engine. At about the same time I noticed that this was happening I also noticed that my blogs seemed to load faster overall. I suspect that HostMonster (my affiliate link) has either upgraded my server or tweaked the database performance. This may be the root cause of my perceived performance increase for the Deep Link Engine. If the server performance is improved it may also improve the performance of programs run on the server.

I have a couple of new observations on the Deep Link Engine.

There have been several updates along the way. The latest update seems to operate a bit faster than earlier versions. I noticed this after the last update, but have not written it up on this blog. It is only an incremental speed up that I perceive subjectively so I did not think that it was worth a whole post.

The observation that inspires this post is something that I have noticed without taking note of what was going on in the past. I was just looking at the referrer search results and the revelation came to me. What I have seen in the search description box is some seemingly unrelated text. These were things that I did not recall having in the post but were showing up in the search results.

This evening I was looking through the referrer results on one of the blogs on which I am using the Deep Link Engine. The search term included words that I did not recall from the post. Then the light bulb lite. Part of the Keyword phrase was in one of the links that the Deep Link Engine had appended to the post, and the rest was in the post title. Google is indexing those links as part of the post. I had seen this before but not made the connection.

This had put the post at #5 on the first page of results. It is an unexpected benefit of using the Deep Link Engine. I don’t know that this plus outweighs some of the minuses from the DLE, but it is one of the first positive things that I have been able to say about the plug-in. I do see the small bump in traffic from the curious blogmasters when I make a post, and there are a few, mostly no-follow, links that appear on blogs that either have a benevolent blogger or the setting allows all comments and trackbacks.

The other side of the coin, as I have previously mentioned, is that the server address will end up on the Akismet black list. In confirmation of that I had linked from one of my blogs to another earlier today. I was telling the story of a page that has been hit with a Google slap on my Hobby Webmaster Blog. When I checked in on the linked blog I found my own trackback in the spam comments folder. Now that I have linked it here I will have to sort out this trackback from the spam comment folder on that site.

So, in this case, a post showed up high on a search result page because of a link that was placed with the post by the Deep Link Engine. This is really an accidental side effect of the DLE, but I had a visitor because of it.