04 Oct 09 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 she is likely to have the thought 'What is in it for me?' You must be able to capture his or her attention on what is immediately visible before he or spends more time browsing your website.

So what information you put above the fold is crucial. Above the fold means what appears on the screen in the browser, without the need for your visitor to scroll down or to the right of your sales page.

Here are 6 easy ways to create and improve on your landing page:

1. Consider having an opt-in box or box to capture your visitor's email contact on the entry page.

It is recommended to have an opt-in box at all cost. Statistics show that your online customer needs to visit your website at least 7 times of exposure before he or she purchases anything. Therefore, your single most important job is to capture his or her contact information. You can then maintain email contact and remind him or her to visit your website again.

2. Make your opt-in box visible. Some examples on how to make it visible include:

*Choose a background colour for the subscription box to make it stand out. You are in fact, creating a visual to draw your visitor's eyes to the opt-in box.

* Placement of the subscription box should be preferably above the fold or in a pop-up. However, do note that more recently, the latter (pop-up) option has proven to be less effective in getting opt-ins due to over-usage by website owners.

* Offer a freebie to get your opt-in and spell out this freebie clearly near the subscription box. This makes it easier for the visitor to mentally connect the freebie to opting in.

3. Have a killer headline. The headline must promise the single most important benefit to your visitor. Use killer words for instance like amazing, breakthrough, instantly and finally, and make your headline stand out with a bigger font or bolding it.

4. Also, pay special attention to the top few lines following the headline and those that appear above the fold. I suggest that you try having 2 or 3 sub-benefits as your top few sentences, after your killer headline.

5. Use images that help. One example is to include your own photo if you are branding yourself as an expert in a particular niche. 6. Avoid using excessively large image files. I have seen a couple of websites that put in too many images on their landing page and as it took forever to load, I left without waiting.

After creating your landing page, you must continue to keep testing and improving it. It can be changing your killer headlines, the background colour of your opt-in box or even the banner image that you put right at the top. I change my landing page every once in a while, to track responses. I hope you do too!

About the author: Evelyn Lim is the publisher of weekly newsletter "Mapping You to Success". She aims to equip her readers with skills to acquire multiple sources of online income. To subscribe to her newsletter, please visit http://www.e-BizMap.com . Or, read her blog "Online home business journals from Singapore" at http://www.EvelynLim.com for more information