If you’re paying for click-through’s from Google or another search engine, you want to make sure your investment provides a return. You do that with a landing page.

Searchers click-through to your page because your ad captures their attention and creates interest. Your landing page now needs to build on that interest, turn it into desire and, ultimately, get action.

To be effective, your landing page needs to work like a sales letter. It needs to be designed around a very clear objective - the action you want - and it needs to employ all the motivating and persuasive tools necessary to get the job done.

Whether it actually is a sales letter depends…

YOUR GOAL GUIDES THE APPROACH

You have to clearly define what it is that you want the visitor to do. The format you use to achieve that varies depending on the objective. Even though dozens of variations exist, there are really only two objectives . You’re trying to get the visitor to either…

– Give you their email and possibly other information for your mailing list, or
– Buy

If you want them to buy, then throw all the logs on the fire. Put a long-form sales letter on your landing page that they just cannot resist. Be sure it uses an appeal that matches up to what the visitor was originally searching for. That will increase your chances of making a sale.

But don’t expect a high rate of conversion — even if your letter is strong enough to bend steel. Research keeps telling us that almost no one buys immediately when they’re shopping online. Conventional wisdom says a prospect has to see your message at least seven times!

The reason you won’t often sell straight off the landing page goes back to the very reason the visitor got there in the first place — the search engines. When a visitor arrives from a search, it’s just too easy to back up and compare prices, find other sources, and shop around.

MOST MARKETERS WANT AN EMAIL ADDRESS

Which is why so many landing pages just try to collect email addresses. It’s still not EASY, but it’s eas-ier. And actually, it leads to more sales in the long run.

The tried and true approach is to offer a free “something” in return for signing up for the e-mailing list. It used to be enough to offer a free subscription to your newsletter, but that rarely works these days. Too many newsletters flood the e-waves and few contain any useful information (present newsletter excepted, of course). Seachers realize they’re just signing up to get a lot of sales pitches.

No, you have to offer something more. A book or software or an audio or video tutorial — something with real, immediate value.

And that’s what your landing page copy sells.

YES, YOU EVEN HAVE TO SELL YOUR FREE OFFER

It seems odd that we have to put out so much effort just to give something away - but we do. The only difference is that you can usually make your pitch relatively brief. The key is to have a good giveaway. If the searcher really wants it, you don’t have to say as much.

That’s especially true when you’ve featured the giveaway item in your pay-per-click ad. You can usually just…

– Confirm in your headline that the searcher has arrived at the right place to claim their prize
– Prove it’s worth having with a benefit-heavy bullet list
– Explain briefly that their email address is required because of your delivery method
– Present an easy to use form for them to input their email address.

You can ask for anything on your form, but most marketers restrict the required blanks to capturing an email address and a name. The more you ask, the more you have to sell why you need it.

The actual email form is most often linked to an autoresponder service these days. You use the autoresponder service to handle your follow up and ultimately sell the prospect who’s just been added to your mailing list.

FINAL WORD

To see a good example of a landing page, check out master marketer, David DeAngelo’s minisite: DoubleYourDating.com

You may even want to sign up and get on his email list to see the kind of email marketing campaign he conducts.

It’s a mistake to pay for traffic and then send it to a generic home page. Create a landing page that sells exactly what you offered in your ad.

And if you really want to reach the heights of Internet Marketing achievement, focus on building your e-mailing list. Like the (richest) guru’s say, “the money is in the list!”

Copyright 2005 Ronald A Murphy. Permission to reproduce this article in any form is freely given so long as the text and this credit stays as is without modifications.

Copywriter and Designer, Ronald A. Murphy is an Internet Marketing specialist — on the net since 1996. Murphy writes mini-site sales letters, landing pages and order pages, sales emails and autoresponder copy, online newsletters and articles for marketing, joint-venture proposals, web site content and other marketing focused materials.
One of just a handful of talented web professionals who can deliver both copy and design, Murphy offers clients unique advantages of faster turnaround, lower costs, and easier control because he handles the complete project for them.
For more information on copywriting and design for Internet Marketing, visit his site at RAMurphy.com. There you can subscribe to his newsletter, R A Murphy’s Copywriting and Design Tips. You can also read Murphy’s Blog on Copywriting and Design for Internet and Direct marketing at RonaldAMurphy.com.

Source: High Quality Article Database - 365Articles.com

 What is a Landing or Squeeze Page?
After spending almost 21 years in the computer industry, and the past 12 focusing on the Internet, I still get asked by clients why isn't my site giving me what I need? When I ask what they are looking for, they say: leads, sales, and traffic. Well do you have a landing page, sales page, and autoresponder system I ask them. This is about the point that they either get quiet on the phone, or their eyes glaze over. They tell me they have a website, with all of their products. I tell them that is a great site, but....

 Creating Landing Pages For Google AdWords
In creating a Google AdWords campaign, advertisers often spend most of their time creating their ads and researching their keywords. There is often little or no thought to where the surfer will be sent when the ad does its job and generates a click. Often advertisers send the surfer to the home page of their website, hoping the website will do the rest of the work. These advertisers are neglecting a very important part of their AdWords campaign: the landing page. A good landing page is just as important as a good ad, good keywords and strategic bidding. By creating....

 How To Create A Great Landing Page For Your Website
The landing page or entry page of your visitors is the most important page to your website. This page is likely to be your home page if you happen to be promoting your website www.yourdomain.com more often than your other sub-directory pages as in www.yourdomain.com/sub-directory-page. Your visitor, who happens to be a very busy individual, is not very likely to stay for more than a minute if you fail to capture his attention once he lands on your website. When your visitor lands on your page, he or....

 Consistency Keeps Traffic Returning
To-day we are goig to discuss the importance of having the design of a web site focus on one theme.  This helps to make the visitors feel comfortable and brings more visitors to the web site, because consistency keeps traffic returning. One of the mistakes many online companies make is trying to be too much to too many people. By dividing their websites into different areas, even though they may be related, can cause confusion to the site's visitors and prevent them from returning or in giving a referral to their friends or business associates.By focusing your site....

 How to Know if Your Website is KILLING Your Business
Learn why your website might not be living up to its full potential... Just because you build it, and they come... doesn't mean they'll stay. So you've got Google adwords, banner ads, co-registration and joint venture deals, postcards, print ads, radio commercials, your mother-in-law and everyone else you can bribe, cajole and threaten, driving traffic to your website. Yes! You're an absolute genius at driving traffic to your website.  You're getting a gazillion hits and unique page impressions—every minute! You've got so much traffic, tying up so much bandwidth, that Al Gore is thinking of producing a new movie about....

 5 Steps to Become a High-earning Affiliate Champion
There are basicly only 5 steps involved to become successful and rich as an online affiliate. These 5 steps include: 1. Choose the right affiliate programs. Today there are tons of products that offer opportunities of making money by joining their affiliate programs. How do you single out the real deal out of the millions of scams and silly money games out there? Beware! You may choose the right affiliate have the chance to prosper from the internet or you may be trapped by a get-rich-quick scheme that flushes your money straight down the drain. There is one section in the....

 Pay-per-click
A very important point to keep in mind with pay per click is you must test, test, and test some more. Don't start off with a major investment. Start with the minimum and see how the search engine performs in terms of the traffic it delivers and how well that traffic converts into paying customers.An essential part of your testing is having a method in place that allows you to track your return on money invested. ....

 12 Essential Tips To A Professional Business Website
Here are 12 Essential Tips to a Professional Business Website: 1. Choose a big enough font size. A size 12 is good for easy readability. 2. Maintain a consistent look on your pages. Use the same fonts, navigation bar, general layout, colour scheme, etc. You want to create a “congruous” experience for your visitor by being consistent. 3. Break the content of your landing webpage into more than one table. Many make the mistake of putting all their content into one table. This may take forever to load. Try putting just....

 Five Steps to Profit from Google Adwords
Although I was marketing online since 1997 and was makingmoney on the Internet, as soon as I discovered the famousGoogleCash ebook I was instantly hooked. It seemed so easyto profit from Google Adwords: just join an affiliateprogram, promote it on Google Adwords pay per click (ppc)search engine starting from only five dollars, and watchyour profits soar... However, soon I realized that it was not that simple. Youmust know how to select profitable affiliate programs, howto research keywords and group them in ad groups, how tobid and manage your campaigns,....

 A Beginner’s Guide To Google Adsense
A Beginner's Guide To Google's PPC Program This article explains a few things about beginner guide, google adsense, PPC, make money from google adsense, and if you're interested, then this is worth reading, because you can never tell what you don't know. A decade ago, when the Internet was young, web publishers had but a limited number of choices when it came to making money from their websites. They used to lease out their web pages to advertisers whom they painstakingly sought. The rate of advertising, of course, was for a renewable period and for a sum commensurate....

 Writing Articles for Publication - You Have What It Takes
Writing and publishing articles is the hottest method employed today to get targeted traffic to your website. You may not think you can write to get published, but if you have a computer, a passion, basic grammar skills, and time, you have what it takes to start writing and publishing articles today. If you have done any research on internet marketing, you know that article writing and publishing is the hottest topic today. ....

 Two Sides of the Internet Marketing Strategy Coin
There are essentially two sides of the coin for an effective internet marketing strategy. First, how much traffic do you drive to your web site? And second, what happens when a visitor gets there? An effective internet marketing strategy addresses both of these issues. Here's a metaphor that will explain the situation that many companies find themselves in: imagine that you're trying to put out a fire, but you have two problems – the water pressure is just a trickle, and your hose leaks. Which do you fix? On the web, most companies ‘turn up the....

 eMarketing Basics
eMarketing will save you thousands in advertising your business. How to Apply a Few eMarketing Basics to Improve Business OnlineeMarketing, commonly known as an Internet marketing tool, refers to ‘how' businesses market their services or products online. In this new age of technology, an Internet presence directly affects the success of a business. From an ecommerce site to an informational site, eMarketing begins at your homepage. Utilize a Website Every website has one goal and that is to heighten the interest of the reader. For the homepage to be....

 Search engine optimization guide
On Page Optimization - How to optimize your website for a certain keyword or phrase From the Day 1 guide you should have decided on which keyword or phrase you want to target. This guide will walk you through the process of optimising your website for your target word or phrase. There are various ways of doing this: - Meta tags - Title Tag - Body Text - Headings - Image alt text Meta Tags: Meta tags were used extensively by search engines in order to rank websites in the results, but nowadays they have very little or zero....

 Your Guide to Making Money on the Internet
There are many sites offering you ways to make easy money on the internet but most of them are scams. Even though making money on the internet is possible, it is not in the ways these sites suggest. You will never get rich quick using a scheme which will guarantee success. Don't you agree that if someone knew how to make a fortune overnight they would use it for themselves and not sell it to you for $30? This is how these sites work - they make money on the internet by giving false hopes to the broke or poor.....

Trackback URL for this post:
http://www.problogtips.com/search-marketing-guide-how-to-write-a-landing-page-that-converts/1255/trackback/

Posted by Jaron in the catagory of... General Interest