5 Steps To An Effective Landing Page

You’ve invented a product. Had it produced. Opened an online store.  You’ve built the mom entrepreneur’s “Field of Dreams”.  So why aren’t they coming buying?

Let’s look at your landing page, or “where it all begins”. A landing page is defined as “Any page on a website where traffic is sent specifically to prompt a certain action or result.” For our purpose, we’ll say that action or result is the sale of a product, and that your home page is your landing page.

For a landing page that successfully drives your visitors to buy, you should follow these 5 steps:

1. Define your sales goal: What do you want your visitors to buy when they reach your landing page?

2. KISS: Once you’ve defined your sales goal, keep things simple, stupid sister.  Eliminate distractions, clutter and off ramps.

• Remove external links & “Links” pages — the last thing you want to do is send your visitors to someone else’s site. “Reciprocal” links are stupid — they drive potential customers away. Get rid of them. Now.
• Say sayonara to social media links — do you want your visitors to buy your product or follow you on Twitter? That’s what I thought.  Remove them altogether or move them to the deep south.
• Unless you’re generating a four-figure or more income from Google Ad Words, ax them from your landing page.
• Remove polls, ads, images & text that do not direct visitors to your sales goal.

3. Put the blinders on: Everything on your landing page should channel visitors to your sales goal.

• Text, images and video should clearly show the benefits of your product and move visitors to your buy page.
• Place sales text, images and video above the fold — this is the upper part of your site, before a visitor has to “mouse”, or scroll down.
• Sidebars should contain links to pages that help a visitor move quickly & confidently to your sales goal — “Testimonials” ease buyer anxiety, “Press” proves that your product is adored by the public, “About” shows that you, the product creator, identify with your visitor, “Buy Now” drives them to duh, BUY NOW!.

4.  Help visitors buy easily, dammit: Once you’ve convinced them that they absolutely cannot live without your product, don’t lose them with a clumsy buying page.

• Display your Buy page prominently — and make sure you have one! Don’t lose potential buyers because they can’t find your damn buy page.
• Let your buyers feel safe buying — make sure you use a secure shopping cart or Paypal.
• Make your input form fast and easy, not frustrating — only ask for the minimum information required to complete the sale, enable tabbing from field to field, and allow buyers to save their information for future purchases.

5. Put it under the Googlescope: Now that you’ve created a killer landing page, measure its’ effectiveness with Google Analytics.  What should you analyze?

• Monthly visitors — how many potential customers visit your site each month?
• Traffic sources — where are your visitors coming from? What sites are sending them to yours? What keywords are they searching on to get to your landing page? What ads have you placed on other sites that are driving visitors effectively?
• Bounce rate — the percentage of single-page visits.  Are your visitors clicking around and making their way to your Buy page or are they leaving immediately?
• Exits — where are your visitors leaving from? Your landing page? Where to buy page? Buy page? This will help you see potential cracks in your landing page.
• Conversions — you can set up “goals” on Google Analytics, a chain of actions that leads to a conversion, a sale. Then, you can see how many conversions you have per month. Again, this will tell you just how effective your landing page is at driving visitors through the chain of actions that leads to a sale.

Have you followed these 5 steps? How are they working for you? If you haven’t, implement them now–then test them out and come back to tell me the result they have on your bottom line.

As always, if you need assistance with any of these steps, I’d be happy to help.

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