Jan 10
6
A good landing page is crucial to persuading visitors to take action on your offer.
The landing page is where a link in an ad, email or article directs a visitor. It is usually the visitor’s first impression of your site. Studies have shown that when visitors arrive at a website, they’re asking themselves, “Is this what I’m looking for? Is this going to waste my time? Is this trustworthy?” A large proportion of visitors leave a website within eight seconds.
The next group of visitors leave when they decide that what the page offers isn’t relevant to what they want. A smaller group leave when they attempt to make a purchase or sign up for a newsletter and fail. And the rest “convert,” or take action on the offer, whatever it is.
From my own website searching and purchasing habits, I know that I fit into those categories, too. If a website looks like the wrong place, I’ll click off right away. If I can’t find what I want, I’ll move on. If I want to make a purchase but can’t find the “buy now” button, I’ll go elsewhere.
Here are seven tips for designing or redesigning a landing page to increase conversions.
1. Decide the one thing you want your visitor to do. When you create a landing page, you might want people to sign up for your mailing list, click through to a product offer, or make a purchase. That one thing is what we mean when we talk about “conversion.” Each landing page should have one thing that it asks the visitor to do.
2. Focus the entire page on that one thing. Every element of the page should relate to it. All the copy is about the one thing. All the images relate to the one thing. It’s a place for personality but not digressions.
3. Eliminate distractions from your one thing. Eliminate the navigation bar, unless it’s specifically relevant. Don’t have prominent links back to your website. Don’t link to another offer somewhere else. Don’t try to raise a few pennies in Google ads. There’s a place for a selection of various bonus offers, but it’s not the landing page. Some landing pages have an email list opt-in box. It’s important to build a list, but you don’t want to distract people from your product or affiliate offer (if your conversion thing is an email list, there’s no conflict). If you decide to include an opt-in box, you might want to test the page with and without to see how it affects conversion rates.
4. Know your customer. Who is buying your product or service? Study the demographics and then pick someone, as specific as possible. If your topic is weight loss, then decide whether your target audience is a 300-pound 30-something man or a middle-aged woman in the range of 150-190 pounds. You simply cannot talk to both of those people with the same web page. Solve that specific person’s problem. Write the page to that person.
5. Match the promise that brought your visitor to the page. If the ad says, “Lose 30 pounds in 30 days,” the landing page should tell how to lose 30 pounds in 30 days. It should not tell how to have long-lasting health or six-pack abs or eliminate cellulite forever. Even a catalog of all those things will lose the visitor within those crucial eight seconds.
6. All the most important elements should be “above the fold” — or on the first screen of the page. In that first eight seconds, your visitor will glance around the page in an F-shaped pattern. If they don’t see what they want, they will bail. If they have to scroll down even once to get to the thing that will persuade them to keep reading, they will never see it. This affects how tall your headline is, what your header looks like, what images you will use at the top. A good landing page has a mix of these things, but how you mix them successfully depends on your “one thing” and on your audience.
7. Therefore, you need to test and track. The elements of a landing page that have the most effect on conversions are the following (in order of importance): headline, offer, lead (first paragraph), benefit bullets, images, “look and feel” (people are wary of a site that feels unprofessional). Tweak these one at a time and compare your conversion rates, then go with the better one.
The difference between a landing page that converts and one that bumps visitors off to the link down the line is well within your ability to control. Refine the elements. Track and test. Refine some more. GoDaddy.com increased the conversion rate of its landing page by 400% by focusing on these six elements. You can, too.
Here is more information about how a professional landing page can be your key to success in affiliate marketing.
WritingRoadToWealth.com
