Landing Pages
Okay, let’s talk about landing pages. Now don’t get freaked out on me here. I know this is a little more advanced in our self-publishing indie author world. But trust me. We all can learn how to do this, okay?
Maybe you’re wondering why we need to learn how to do landing pages. Well, the answer is simple. For most of us, our website is too complicated. Wait. Let me back up for a second. First of all, people may not even know our website exists. And if they do land on our website, they may not know what you want them to do. It’s complicated for them. A landing page can help with both of these problems for us authorpreneurs.
When we blast out enticing offers to our prospects mentioning only one thing with a link on the bottom for them to click on, some will click on it and find our website. These people now become website visitors who we probably wouldn’t have had otherwise. This is a good thing.
Also, when these people do click on our link from our email blast and land on our website, this time, they won’t land on our website’s homepage. Instead, they will be directed to a particular landing page. This landing page has specific content that only relates to the one thing we want them to do at that very moment.
This simplifies the journey for them and helps us a lot in moving them along in what we want them to do. If we already have a sales funnel established, this could help them step into the front entrance of our sales funnel. This, too, is a good thing.
It’s a win-win. It simplifies things for our prospects. And it helps them do what we want them to do, which is also good for them and good for us.
The problem with some landing pages is that they don’t always have high conversion rates, especially if you’re new to the game. A poorly designed landing page doesn’t get many clicks on the bottom of the page. Thus their journey in our authorpreneur world dies there, and they never get to see how great it could have been if they had traveled further with us.
A good rule of thumb for landing pages is to keep them as simple as possible. A good landing page should have a lot of white space. The page shouldn’t look cluttered. It shouldn’t look confusing or busy. It should be very roomy and clean. We should use bullets to help us limit the amount of text we put on the page.
Keeping our landing pages very simple helps us get the message across to our prospects and helps them do the one thing we’re asking them to do. When a visitor lands on our page, the last thing we want them to be is confused.
If they have to think about what this is and what they’re supposed to do, we will see paralysis by analysis from them. They simply won’t act. They may not even know how to act. If they don’t get it within a few seconds, they will click off our page, and their attention will go elsewhere
With a very clean and simple landing page that makes it very clear that we’re only asking them to do one thing, we’ll have a much better chance of getting them to take action and to click on our next link. Perhaps we want them to click on a “Buy My Book” link. Or maybe we want them to give us their email for our next free offer. Whatever it is, it has to be simple and just one action that we want them to take.
Remember, confused people do not take action. And lack of action from them means very few books sold for us authorpreneurs. And that is not a good thing. So let’s go the extra mile to make sure our landing page visitors are not confused one iota.
In addition to keeping our landing page uncluttered by using less text through bullets, we could also use arrows and a thing called line of sight. There are ways to put in big arrows pointing right at the next link we want them to click on. This will make what we want them to do very obvious. Furthermore, those arrows add a little more persuasion to the mix.
Next, we could add some pictures of people to our landing page who are looking right at the link we want people to click on next. The link is right in their line of sight. They’re looking right at it.
And you know how that works. When someone is looking at something, we get curious, and we look at it too. Hey, we can’t help ourselves. We want to know what they are looking at. What if it’s a sabretooth tiger or something? If they see a sabretooth tiger coming, we want to know it so I can run.
In this case, though, thank God it’s not a sabretooth, it’s just a link. And that seems harmless enough to look at and click on now, especially if there is a free offer for something they want on the other end.
So get out there, my authorpreneurs, and create your first landing page. And remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect. We’re all on life’s learning curve. So, don’t sweat it. You can go back later and make your landing page better. And from what you learn, you can apply to new landing pages. But, if you don’t ever take that first step of creating a landing page, then you’ll never get the chance to learn how to use this incredible tool to sell more books and make more money.
*Check out the free video lesson on this chapter!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6scwA8jyLg&list=PL_-39bUXJitwL8cHUpiZ5mO0-JJuaPOVl&index=63