How To Create A Highly Effective Landing Page

A landing page is a page on a website designed specifically to sell a product. Its sole function is to try and promote conversions, such that the visitors who end up there will be more likely to want to buy whatever product that is being promoted. You can then find various ways to link people directly to that page and watch as the money rolls in – especially if you have a good payment system set up and are selling a digital product.

But in order for a landing page to be successful, you need to understand a little about sales, a little about buying psychology and a little about content writing. When you bring all these things together, you should end up with a page that is expertly honed for capturing the attention of your visitors and then motivating them to click the ‘buy’ button.

The Layout

The most important thing for a landing page is to ensure that all focus is carefully directed. That means you need to design the layout in a certain way and avoid all possible distractions. This is not a page where you should be putting adverts for other products or even navigational elements that will only take visitors away from your page. Instead, you should make the content and the checkouts the only things that stand out.

This is one of the reasons that many great landing pages use long and thin layouts with nothing other than text. This keeps all attention firmly on the matter in hand, while at the same time getting them to scroll down a lot psychologically taking readers ‘deeper’ into the content and getting them to invest their time into the site (thus making it feel like a ‘waste of time’ if they don’t buy something).

Coloring

Most landing pages utilize the color red in an effective way. The idea behind this, is that the color red encourages people to take action. Simply looking at the color red will increase your visitors’ heart rates and studies suggest that a donate box gets more money if it’s red in color. There are other colors that encourage action too, learn them and use them!

Content

The most important part of your landing page of all though, is undoubtedly the content. Your aim here is to attract attention and then ‘draw’ your readers in. The best way to do this to begin with is with a strong opening statement, which often works best as a story. Your aim is to sell the ‘value proposition’ which should have emotional resonance with the reader.

For example, telling someone how you used to be poor and how you struggled ‘just like them’, but that you then found a great money earning technique and are now living in a mansion will help them to imagine what that product could do for them and will keep them reading. We are naturally inclined to listen to stories and find them easy to associate and empathize with.

Your content should also cover the four basic steps used in sales: Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action (AIDA). What’s also important is the use of headings, these should tell enough of the story that someone simply skim reading will still know everything they need to know. Blocks of text don’t work because they don’t get read.

Interestingly, it is possible to mimic the effects/test the effectiveness of a landing page even before you’ve built one. See this great post on ‘wantrepreneuritis’ for more on that.