Create your first landing page in 5 easy steps

How good are you at converting your social media followers into paying customers? Today I’ll be letting you in on everything you need to know to create stand-alone web pages that turn your audience into email subscribers and paying customers. We’ll cover a simple five step process you can use to build awesome landing pages that help you meet your business goals.  Don’t worry you don’t need to be a developer or desinger and you probaboy already use or pay for a tool which provides the service. I’d suggest listening to episode 10 if you want a quick overview of the basics of what a landing page is. 

Choose a goal for your landing page

Think about customer behaviours.  Will they buy immediately? Or do you need more nurturing? What can you offer to build the relationship or gauge interest? A free download is a really good idea, and you can follow it up with an email sequence that helps people get to know you better and to understand your offerings. There are other things you can offer, a free video or webinar, a discount code, a mini course, a pricelist, a secret facebook group –  whatever you think is going to work for your business at that exact point in your customer relationship.

Tools for building landing pages

This will depend on your goal, but I expect you already have at least one tool at your disposal to help you make a landing page.  If you’re confident, you can do it right on your website – especially if you have templates to work with, or a lot of experience. For most of us though, it’s can be quicker and easier to use a tool specific to our goal. So if the goal is to get someone to download a freebie that puts them on the mailing list, then your email programme’s landing page tools will be the best option. If it’s to get someone on to a free mini-course, or even a full, paid course, then your landing page could be built in your course platform, if that’s an option. Try Teachable, or Kajabi if you’re looking for a tool that does this. You can also work in other tools like Lead Pages, or Instapage, or Click funnels – these let you set up landing pages independently, although they may also overlap with your other tools.  Go for something you have already, especially if it’s built into a tool you already pay for – get that value for money!

Choosing a landing page template

Go into your landing page platform and, with your goal in mind, have a browse through the landing page templates. Different tools offer different customisation options. The layout is often fixed, but font size and colour, background images, and all the text, should be customisable on most platforms. Explore some of the different templates and their functions before choosing what you like best. If you find a really good template then you can adapt it for other landing pages in future, to give customers a consistent experience.  

Create content for your landing page

You want to make sure the landing page has on it all the information someone would need to know in order to sign up to download the freebie (or whatever else the offer is). These are the kind of questions they’ll be wanting to answer, but there may be lots of others too.

• is it for me?
• how does it benefit me?
• what can I do with it?
• how long will it take me to use this?

Balance the need for information with the need for clarity and a nice look – too much information can overwhelm and clutter the page. Include a thumbnail of the worksheet, if that helps people understand what it is, without giving the whole game away. And make sure you use similar design elements, and it matches the style of your social media content – you want it to look familiar and to speak to your brand.

Test that your landing page is really working

Now you need to make sure the landing page does the thing you need. If you’re sending out freebies, for example, you’ll need to customise the email someone receives when signing up, so that it includes the link or button to access the freebie! If there’s any other information they need right away, be sure to include that too. You should also think about what will happen next – maybe you want to create a nurture sequence, or invite the person to book a discovery call. If you have an active and effective email list already, where you send out newsletters regularly to an engaged (even if it’s small) audience, then you might not need to add anything extra, just make sure the person gets subscribed to the newsletter. You’re not done until you’ve tested your live landing page with a new email address. I use Mailinator for email address for testing, as you don’t need to register for anything! You can also create testing emails from your own Gmail account. Simply type in your email address as normal but add + and some identifying text right before the @ sign. For example your.email.address+test1@gmail.com. Whatever you add after the + will be visible to you in Gmail so you can see which test has worked as well.   Make sure you unsubscribe any test addresses after you’re finished, so you don’t have emails sending to places where your real customers won’t see them.

Get your landing page questions answered

I’d love to feature more listener questions in the podcast. Drop me an email! I’d love to hear from you if you have any feedback. And of course you can subscribe to Whin Big on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a review.