5 Tips for Creating a Great Landing Page

As the age old saying goes, you only get one chance at a first impression and when it comes to online marketing, your landing page is often times that first impression. It's your opportunity to tell customers about your product or service and convince them that it's the best one on the market.

If you are able to create and maintain a great landing page, there's no telling how far your business could take you, so with that in mind, here are our five best tips for creating an outstanding landing page.

1. Do Your Research

Before you start to lay out the design of your landing page, do some research on your audience and your competitors. Knowing your visitors expectations will allow you to create a great landing page and ultimately generate higher conversion rates.

A great example of this is how the company Conversion Rate Experts made $1 million for Moz with nothing but a landing page and a few emails.

Conversion Rate Experts simply asked Moz's customers what they liked, what it would take to sign up for the service, or why the service was cancelled and used that to information to create landing page prototypes and shared them with Moz's Twitter followers. After receiving customer feedback, Conversion Rate Experts unveiled Moz's new landing page, offering memberships for only $1. By doing this research beforehand and designing a page that catered to customers' desires, Conversion Rate Experts succeeded for Moz.

2. Create More Landing Pages

Even if you already have one great landing page, you should build more simply because more landing pages results in more leads.

In fact, studies have shown that companies can expect to see 50% more leads by increasing their number of landing pages from just 10 to 15. The reason for this is that more landing pages equals more opportunities to convert potential customers into leads. Furthermore, it will help you build more targeted landing pages that play to the unique interests of specific visitors. As we all know, the more targeted your advertising is, the more likely it is to convert.

3. Avoid the Word "Submit"

Although a good clear call to action button is the best way to convince customers complete your desired action, having a "submit" button has actually proven to turn people away. Even if you've established a relationship with a customer, most of them still won't be comfortable submitting any information right away. So while a call to action button is a surefire way to get results, you should veer away from using the word "submit." Try using call to actions like "Get Your Free eBook," "Subscribe to Our Newsletter," or "Download Whitepaper." Terms like these are not only more appealing to visitors, but they also tell them what they can expect to receive from you.

4. Be Consistent

Being consistent with your landing page is important if you want to see results. One way to stay consistent is by focusing on your call to action and making sure that the message remains the same on both the landing page, and the rest of your site. A consistent and strong call-to-action will tell visitors what you want from them and will also establish trust by eliminating confusion.

Another key part of staying consistent is making sure that your landing page works on mobile devices just as well as it does on desktop--in 2014, this is more important that ever before. More people are surfing the web via mobile devices and if your landing page doesn't work on a smartphone, you should expect to see a loss of conversions. Make sure to optimize landing page for mobile so that it's effective on all platforms.

5. Focus on Design

Design is a broad topic, but it's an essential part of creating an outstanding and high converting landing page. Design doesn't just refer to the color scheme of your page though; it also means that your headlines, images, copy, and form is all clearly presented and appealing. Avoid visual clutter and get to the point. In other words, tell your visitors exactly want you want them to do once they've arrived on your page.

Make sure your design also uses contrasting colors, and remember that when creating a landing page, less is always more. Keep your forms short and ask only for essential information.

This contributed article was written by Murray Newlands for The Offer Machine.