Landing Pages: What, Why and How?

Admit it! You’ve probably invested already a lot of money and effort in creating your website. It’s got everything in it: quality, content-rich pages, an eye-catching home page, “call-to-action” buttons, the whole shebang. Yet, your conversion rates are far from ideal.

Unfortunately, not all websites can sell a product or service effectively. If that’s your case, your potential visitors probably don’t fit into the “single-buyer” profile. In other words, your potential customers are looking for more than just the products or services that you are offering.

Even if you are targeting a specific niche, your content might not satisfy their need for information. While your home page promotes your company, that doesn’t necessarily mean you can meet the standards of your buyer profiles and turn them into buyers immediately.

This is where making use of landing pages come into play.

Landing pages (sometimes known as “squeeze pages”) have been designed to address the need of website owners, online businesses owners, marketers and bloggers, to address specific demands as well as to grab the attention of audiences enough to keep them on the site. Think of them as pages that are focused and customized, with the specific objective of getting your visitor to take a desired action. They are also as an extension of your upstream advertising (paid search and banners), that has the ability to increase your conversions rates compared to the effectiveness of a campaign that doesn’t use them.

As the company determines its buyer profiles, a landing page can help address these issues regarding the company services without subscription or payment required.

Three Reasons Why You Should Use a Landing Page

Landing pages are highly relevant for pay-per-click ads, although there are other ways to drive traffic to them. These pages have the ability to simply increase your conversion rates.
It allows you to add unlimited offers and contact forms based on a particular query or user intention.
Landing pages can be much more detailed than other web customization tools.

Benefits of Good Landing Pages

These pages often contain links to websites, optin forms, call to action, etc. When a visitor clicks a link to check out a product, he/she will be redirected to the desired page you want them to go. A landing page is similar to a product’s main page. Most online marketers, in fact, use their home pages as their squeeze page.

Conversion-friendly – Affiliate site owners increase their earning potential through conversions. This is when a customer visits the website and purchases the product immediately or takes a specific action you desire, like opting for your list. This is only one of the few reasons why making use of landing pages is very important.
Profit-friendly – Creating landing pages allows marketers to place themselves in the shoes of their customers. A lot of successful online businesses started small from building a squeeze page as their home page. But according to some business experts, this strategy is not effective. For affiliate marketers, a landing page can only be profit-friendly if it’s separated from the home page. What do you think?
Creating Landing Pages can be Costly – These pages can be costly to create, specially if you don’t have the tools to do it. This reason is why having the adequate tool t help you create landing pages is crucial.

The next obvious question, would be, what tool should I use to create landing pages? Well, for WordPress business users, fortunately, there are plugins specifically designed to help you get there. One of the most popular ones is OptimizePress. There are other options out there, such as pre-designed templates (good but lacks flexibility), and more recently, a new rising star, Instabuilder. The latter is what I will be focusing on at this time.

What is InstaBuilder?

Not so long ago, a WordPress plug-in was created for bloggers to set up marketing pages in a simple and very short period of time! Although relatively new, InstaBuilder has been compared to OptimizePress which earned mix reviews because of its ease of use and pricing.

In this aspect, InstaBuilder (aff) is more than just a plug-in. As the name suggests, it also allows WordPress users to create and use landing pages on any site that is powered by WordPress.

Some Features:

Mobile and SEO-friendly templates
Customizable scripts
Viral downloading capability or the ability of visitors to access specific shared content
Social sharing options
Comment options that allow site owners/bloggers to moderate comments from visitors
Re-direct features and many more.
Ability to use it on pages, posts and widgets, including shortcodes
Integrate optin forms
Include videos
and a lot more…

Creating a landing page with Instabuilder is quite simple. With just a few steps, you can have a landing page up and running in literally under 5 minutes, after installation and activation. Check this simple landing page about Photography Tricks, that was created with this plugin in a short period of time. You can also see DiTesco’s toolbox, created recently form the same plugin.

Here’s a quick presentation of what Instabuilder is all about:

As you can see, it is a handy marketing tool to have in your arsenal. Sadly, this plugin is not free, but the investment is worth it, as new features are being released by the developers regularly. In addition, they have an excellent training videos, where you can learn how to create compelling landing pages in no time. Lastly, you can also be an affiliate of the product, where you can earn money and recover your investment. Now that’s cool!

[note]UPDATE: Version 1.12 has just been released in a direct response from users requests…[/note]

Change Log/New features for v.1.12 include:

New blog widget: Sidebar Optin with Facebook Connect
New blog widget: Countdown Timer
New blog widget: Viral Download Lock on Sidebar
New blog widget: Tabbed Content
New blog widget: Embed Video from Video Sharing Site
New blog widget: Display Video With Flowplayer of JW Player
New blog widget: Pop Up Content on Sidebar
New blog widget: Pop Up Image on Sidebar
New blog widget: Social Share
Add ability to auto-check for new InstaBuilder version
Add ability to auto-update InstaBuilder from your WordPress Dashboard
Add ability to display video on Mini Squeeze Page
Add Timezone attribute setting to Countdown timer shortcode

As I mentioned before, there are obviously a lot more options to create a landing page. The first thing you should determine is whether or not you feel that having one is something that will benefit you. IMO, it will, provided you know how to create one properly. Make them simple, send the message and guide them to the “action” you want. Good luck and to your success!

What about you? Are you using any specific marketing tool to create your landing pages? Which one? Are you satisfied?