How to Make A Good Landing Page - A Quick Checklist

Status
Not open for further replies.
Kfleming

Kfleming

Fired as a Mod
Feb 6, 2007
241
0
0
Philadelphia, PA
I just posted this little article on the GetLandingPages.com Blog but I thought that some wickedfire readers might find it useful as well so I thought I would repost some of the checklist on here. I think it really helps when designing and developing landing pages to have a checklist you run through to make sure that you have done everything to make your page convert the best it possibly can. Below are three of the five steps that I recommend checking every time you set up a new page.

DO YOU HAVE A CLEAR CALL TO ACTION?
A clear to action is necessary in making a good landing page. The visitor should immediately know what the page is trying to sell them. Use very clear readable text, large basic fonts work best, however you can still jazz them up and such with unique graphics and icons.


DOES YOUR PAGE MAINTAIN A UNIFORMED LOOK AND FEEL?
Before starting to design a landing page, check the site that the landing page will be sending people to. It’s very important to maintain the same look and feel on the landing page. Try to keep the same colors, fonts, button sizes, etc.


DO YOU HAVE A CLEAN ORGANIZED DESIGN?
When designing the page, try to keep it as clean and clear as possible. With your landing page you are trying to sell products, and to do that you really need to sell people on them. Try using number lists like “Easy as 1, 2, 3” and techniques like that, this way you minimize the amount of information needed to be presented and read for the person to understand what the product is about.

You can see the full checklist here
and Digg it, Here
 


Nice list. I made some of these mistakes when I first started AM. I had too many options for the user, while not defining a clear call to action. I've also realized the importance of keeping the good shit above the fold. The typically google clicker will need to be captured in less than 8 seconds. If you're wasting their time with some unnecessary information, they're gone and there goes your ad click.

The headline is probably the most important thing you'll have on your landing page. A good strategy I've learned is to write out 50 different headlines, and then narrow it down until you've found a few that stand out. Then split these those shits. Headlines are vital.

Also don't model your landing pages after those 8-mile long e-book sales pages. To be honest, I still don't know why they make them that way... but they are selling expensive products so the pre-sell is far more important for conversions.
 
barman said:
Also don't model your landing pages after those 8-mile long e-book sales pages. To be honest, I still don't know why they make them that way... but they are selling expensive products so the pre-sell is far more important for conversions.
Click to expand...

This is a HUGE one. Instead of having a mile long wall of text you want to summarize things and break your information up into number lists and such to get your point across. Even if you have an expensive product, instead of making the page ridiculously long, break it up into multiple pages and make site out of it. You not only will attract more buyers with information thats easy to read and navigate, this will also help you achieve lower bids with Adwords.
 
Can anybody recommend some software to create landing pages? I only have basic html skills, and I have FrontPage which I can't accomplish anything with. I've heard of DreamWeaver is that any good? and how about simple clean graphics? Like the graphics they have on getlandingpages.com How do they get those graphics to get so clean?


Thanks
 
ubaidabcd said:
Can anybody recommend some software to create landing pages? I only have basic html skills, and I have FrontPage which I can't accomplish anything with. I've heard of DreamWeaver is that any good? and how about simple clean graphics? Like the graphics they have on getlandingpages.com How do they get those graphics to get so clean?


Thanks
Click to expand...

We have very skilled designers that use top industry tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash to create the graphics for the landing pages we create. Software wise, if you are going to be creating graphics I would recommend the Adobe Suite which now also includes dreamweaver, however honestly its really not the software that makes your page look better its the ability and knowledge of the person designing it.
 
I highly recommend Kevin's company. They do a really good job. I am looking forward to getting more landing pages from them. I took one of their standard layouts and requested several modifications to my tastes, and it was done amazingly well.
 
Is there an advantage of a landing page over selling within content?

I have a content site and I've woven affiliate offers into the content. I've read that presenting an offer as part of informational content gains trust and conversions in the process. However, I'm not seeing stellar performance so I'm considering landing pages. Is there a good way to mesh landing pages into a content site?
 
ubaidabcd said:
Can anybody recommend some software to create landing pages? I only have basic html skills, and I have FrontPage which I can't accomplish anything with. I've heard of DreamWeaver is that any good? and how about simple clean graphics? Like the graphics they have on getlandingpages.com How do they get those graphics to get so clean?


Thanks
Click to expand...

Weebly is possibly the easiest way to create landing pages... and it's FREE.

Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog
 
Kfleming,

This is something I've wondered about with the service for awhile and never got around to asking, do you also provide content or just the design and are the sites coded?

I could care less if the sites are coded I'm a programmer and can do all that work myself but I really suck at creating kick ass graphics or a design for my landing pages, I get conversions with some of my shitty designs but I think they could do 10x better with some quality graphics I usually buy them from istockphoto.com

Also do you have something where you just design a page, without coding, maybe just provide some graphics and a photoshop screenshot of what it could look like then I can code it all together, or is that type of service out of the question?
 
I think the landing page look should be similar to that of the whole site so that it does not stand alone and outlandish.Also the most important part of landing page is that it should be easy for the people to understand and get what they want.Landing page should be made by hand I mean softwares cannot bring about that quality which a human can.
 
Kfleming said:
The problem is that if your landing page looks too different than the offer page you are sending people too, people will often get spooked and click out or close the window.
Click to expand...

well I'm kinda disagreeing b/c I had a site that was the opposite in colors and design, but I got a $.85 ecpc on the returns. now, since I'm running a new offer the new offer landing page looks a lot like my current landing page. my ecpc is now $.45 :(
 
Landing page should look UNsimilar to merchant's page in most cases

Kfleming said:
The problem is that if your landing page looks too different than the offer page you are sending people too, people will often get spooked and click out or close the window.
Click to expand...

Just like mason, I strongly disagree with this as well, and this has been brought up on WF several times. The problem with a landing page looking too similar to the merchant's page is that people will quickly put two and two together and realize that you are either:
a) affiliated with the product or service and is pushing it for your own profit
b) that you are biased
c) that since you appear to be nothing but a sales representative (with a design/look/feel/colors just like the merchant's) of said product/service, why should they trust your "review" or your "recommendation" of it?

As many people here have experienced, I also recommend to make a landing page that looks nothing like the merchant's page. You want to come across as UNbiased and UNaffiliated with the product (even though you are of course). I've had success with creating independent-looking websites with landing pages that share no visual similarities with the merchant's page.
 
First time chiming in on this forum (i've been lurking for awhile), but I wanted to give props to Kfleming for the list which is spot on.

A couple people took issue with the second point about having a design somewhat similar to the page that you'll be sending traffic to. There's no wrong or right answer to this question, because it's a matter of how you want to be perceived.

If i'm doing a review site, then i'll give it an editorial look so people think it's an unbiased review of products. However, if i'm just doing a landing page to promote an offer from the merchant, than I want it to look and feel similar to the merchant's website design. Early on you want to decide what approach you're going to take with the website's strategy so you can design accordingly.

Also, regarding getting a landing page designed well, I think it's best to have professionals do it. But, if you insist on doing it yourself make sure you put the effort into it. Get a copy of Photoshop and head over to the book store to find some basic books on graphic design so you at least understand the basics. Then go to Photoshop Tutorials, Flash Tutorials and More! P2L Tutorial Search and go through a bunch of tutorials so you can get a good grasp of the Photoshop tools and how to use them.

A little trick I used when trying to learn how to design landing pages was to swipe the code from a really well designed one I would find through a PPC ad, plug it into Dreamweaver, and then redo the graphics in Photoshop based on the same dimensions. You'll learn really quickly this way.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom