David Mercer
- How to design a great landing page for WordPress
- SEO marketing with hosted WordPress blogs
- Business blogging 101: How to deal with public reactions to your content
There are three main aspects to any good marketing campaign:
- Drive traffic
- Convert traffic
- Analyze refine
Obviously, without the ability to get eyeballs on your content, you aren’t going to generate a lot of revenue, or gather a huge following for your blog or site. By the same token, there’s also no point in generating huge volumes of traffic, when your blog or site isn’t designed in such a way as to convert those visitors into followers or customers.
Effective landing pages
There are plenty of good landing page designs out there, but it’s not always easy for WordPress users (in particular, wordpress.com), who aren’t familiar with HTML or CSS, to emulate these professional, visually appealing landing pages. Here’s a short list of effective landing pages to give you an idea of what I am talking about:
Landing page design considerations
Each of these landing pages takes into account the three categories of visitor that you need to cater for in your own landing page:
- Early adopter – someone who likes to jump in without needing too much info
- Curious – someone who likes to understand a bit about a product or service before buying
- Cautious – someone who wants to know everything before making a move
By quickly getting your message across, preferably in a visually attractive setting, you cater for early adopters. Adding a lead paragraph or primary marketing message helps curious people to get the information they need. Links to more information, detailed pricing plans, and so on, provide the in-depth data that cautious people like.
Landing page design with WordPress
When creating a new landing page in WordPress, do the following:
- Click on Add New Page under Pages
- Select One column, no sidebar from Template under Page Attributes
- Add images
- Use concise, descriptive headings
- Add a primary marketing message
- Add a lead paragraph
- Make it easy for visitors to convert
1) The first option is fairly self explanatory. Use a page instead of a post since you are doing something out of the ordinary that requires a few specialized features.
2) Landing pages should not have too many distractions. You want the visitor to take action – specifically, to make a purchase or convert in some other way. By using a template that removes the sidebar, you take away all those links to other blogs, etc, that might otherwise make it easy for customers to simply leave.
3) A visually descriptive or striking image can help communicate your message quickly and effectively to a potential customer. Study any of the landing pages listed earlier to see how they have made effective use of images.
4) Effective headings can take a bit of time to work out. They have to be short, easy to understand and convey just the right message. It takes a bit of time to find the right words.
5) Can you describe your product or service in one sentence, in a way that is engaging and exciting. If yes, congratulations, you have your PMM (primary marketing message). If no, keep trying. It’s not easy, but it is effective and helps you to understand your own value proposition much better.
6) A lead paragraph should encourage curious people to convert, and cautious people to want to find out more. It should accurately describe what the customer will get – in more detail than the PMM.
7) It is vitally important that once customers have decided to make a purchase, they can. Make it very easy to convert. After all, that is the whole point of a landing page. Don’t be afraid to add purchase buttons or sign up links to several parts of the page. At least one should be large and visually prominent immediately – for the sake of the early adopters.
Analyze and refine the performance of your landing page
Creating a perfect landing page almost never happens in one go. You have to look at who visited it, what they do while they are on it, and how often they go on to make a purchase (or convert).
By using site stats or an analytics program like Google analytics, you can be sure that you will understand enough about your traffic and conversions to make enhancements and increase your conversion rate. This, in turn, will increase your revenue and the ROI (return on Investment) of any paid advertising or marketing you do to drive traffic to that page.
Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-design-a-great-landing-page-for-wordpress-2011-8