Landing Pages- Can anyone help a newbie?

[venusj13]

I am brand new at this and I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on landing pages. I want to promote an I-pod download site and was wondering if I needed a landing page. If so, what would I include on the landing page (sales letter, link, etc.)? Or do I just need to post my link in the search engine without sending people to a landing page first? Like I said, I am just getting started and would appriciate some advice. Thank you in advance.

[Linda Buquet]

Hi venusj13,

Welcome to 5Star. It's usually best to send people to a landing page so you can do some pre-sell. Testimonials are one of the best ways to pre-sell and typically provide some good content.

What other ideas and tips do you guys have for venusj13???

[bizoppz]

Landing Pages are crucial to your online success. Here are some tips I live by when creating my landing pages:

1. Your visitor, who is a very busy individual, is not very likely to stay for more than a minute if you fail to capture his attention once he lands on your website.

2. When your visitor lands on your page, he or she is likely to have the thought “What is in it for me?” You must be able to capture his or her attention on what is immediately visible before he or spends more time browsing your website.

3. What information you put above the fold is crucial. Above the fold means what appears on the screen in the browser, without the need for your visitor to scroll down or to the right of your sales page.

Here are 6 easy ways to create and improve on your landing page:

1. Consider having an opt-in box or box to capture your visitor’s email contact on the entry page.

It is recommended to have an opt-in box at all cost. Statistics show that your online customer needs to visit your website at least 7 times of exposure before he or she purchases anything.

Therefore, your single most important job is to capture his or her contact information. You can then maintain email contact and remind him or her to visit your website again.

. Make your opt-in box visible. Some examples on how to make it visible include:

* Choose a background colour for the subscription box to make it stand out. You are in fact, creating a visual to draw your visitor’s eyes to the opt-in box.

* Placement of the subscription box should be preferably above the fold or in a pop-up. However, do note that more recently, the latter (pop-up) option has proven to be less effective in getting opt-ins due to over-usage by website owners.

* Offer a freebie to get your opt-in and spell out this freebie clearly near the subscription box. This makes it easier for the visitor to mentally connect the freebie to opting in.

3. Have a killer headline. The headline must promise the single most important benefit to your visitor. Use killer words for instance like amazing, breakthrough, instantly and finally, and make your headline stand out with a bigger font or bolding it.

4. Also, pay special attention to the top few lines following the headline and those that appear above the fold. I suggest that you try having 2 or 3 sub-benefits as your top few sentences, after your killer headline.

5. Use images that help. One example is to include your own photo if you are branding yourself as an expert in a particular niche.

6. Avoid using excessively large image files. I have seen a couple of websites that put in too many images on their landing page and as it took forever to load, I left without waiting.

After creating your landing page, you must continue to keep testing and improving it. It can be changing your killer headlines, the background colour of your opt-in box or even the banner image that you put right at the top. I change my landing page every once in a while, to track responses. I hope you do too!

[StephenR]

Excellent information Linda and Bizoppz. I agree with most of it.

A method I employ sometimes is a little unorthodox but it works in many markets. You'll have to try it with Ipods because I don't know that market.

People are LAZY and really don't read long sales pages. Try some very brief "call to action" ad copy/imagery and only provide a link for your users to add their e-mail address and get on your exclusive list. The ad copy should explain to them they'll receive some secrets to iPod downloads or Ipods in general and draw them to subscribe to your iPod secrets course or something...be creative I'm just throwing this out there.

Have about 4 or 5 good e-mail articles written for you by a ghostwriter from Elance or RentACoder on iPod downloading tips or whatever and load them into an autoresponder. Sprinkle your affiliate URL sparingly throughout each article. Don't use the ugly affiliate URL (i.e ipodaffiliateprogram=user?=ID1234) Upload a page to your domain titled ipod-downloads.html or whatever and then redirect to the affiliate URL from there. You can also use an .htaccess mod rewrite, which is transparent to the end user but harder to implement if your not familiar with .htaccess files.

Usng this method you'll have a opt-in e-mail list for further music promos and are making automated backend sales from the flycatcher page feeding your autoresponder.

You could setup up hundreds of these automated ultra mini autoresponder sites for probably less than $50 a pop and no more than $3 a month for hosting fees.

Just a thought.....

[venusj13]

I really appriciate the information you all have given me. Like I said, I am brand new and need as much information as you are willing to give. If anyone else has anything else to add, please feel free to put your two cents in. I'll continue to check back. Thanks again.