“How would you feel if you clicked on an ad selling your favorite new widget and then you have to wade through 4 pages to even find the thing?”

Makes sense to me. I read a forum recently that talked about Google Adwords giving certain landing pages low quality scores because they didn’t contain enough content. In our experience, as long as the landing page’s on-page content, URL permalink, and tags are all in alignment with the text of the ad, it’s easy to get a high quality score for Adwords.

The Circle Click post goes one step further:

“Google and other search engines have trained us well! They have trained us to respond to effective landing pages and to get annoyed with tombstone business cards masquerading as corporate websites.”

They’ve got this right: a succinct landing page with a clear value proposition is much more useful than a bloated corporate website full of marketing speak and written-by-committee product and service descriptions.

That sounds pretty do-able, and even believable. Especially since we want to believe it so badly. The trouble is, just because we want to believe, it isn’t necessarily true.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
- George Bernard Shaw

Well, old GBS may as well have been talking about landing pages, because apparently there are still people out there who think you can actually perform such a feat.

Technically I suppose it’s true that you can Create a landing page in minutes. You can put together a headline, a picture, some sales copy, and a form and call it a landing page. The thing is, what you’ve got at that point is sort of like a car without an engine – it looks good, but it’s not going anywhere.

To add an engine to your landing page, here’s a list of Some of the things that need to be done. The to-do list is actually long enough that it can be divided into three categories:

Landing Page To-Do’s

1. Prepare your whitepaper or other giveaway document.
2. Create an image of your whitepaper cover for use on your landing page – letting people see what they’re getting has proven to increase conversions. (Interestingly, pictures of attractive, smiling human faces also boost conversions).
3. Upload your whitepaper to a server where it can be downloaded by subscribers.
4. Create a couple of carefully selected links where people can find out more about your company if they really want. While it’s true that landing pages are intentionally designed to minimize off-page links – you’re not doing yourself any favors if you completely eliminate the ability to link to your company. A small link in the page footer works well for this.

Confirmation E-mail To-Do’s

1. Set up an auto-response email process in which visitors who sign up (we’ll call them subscribers for now), receive a message that
   • Confirms receipt of their completed form
   • Provides instructions on what to do next, e.g., how to download the whitepaper or other giveaway
   • Provides contact information and a reinforcing sales message.
2. Test the confirmation email to ensure delivery against spam filters.
3. Confirm that the “send from” address is one that you like. Some landing page providers let you put your name on the From line, but the email address is something like [yourdomain@landingpage-provider.com].

Reporting To-Dos

1. Set up a web based report where you can view and export subscriber data.
2. Create a process for following up with prospects, either by feeding them to your CRM system, or starting an email drip campaign.

As you can see, building in a landing page “in minutes” is only part of the story. Making it work is, well, a bit more work – and you’ll be less frustrated if you understand this before you get started.

The bait provides a WIFM (What’s in it for me?) for visitors. The real reason visitors provide their contact information is because they want your bait: your whitepaper, your newsletter, your free product trial. The more compelling and valuable your bait, the better your conversion rate.

Why is that large shadowy object hovering over this tasty-looking worm?

The landing page, meanwhile, is like your fishing boat. It’s essential for getting your bait in front of prospects, but it’s not what causes conversions. The biggest challenge for a fishing boat is going unnoticed; if it’s too big, bright, or noisy, it can scare the fish away.

So, like a fishing boat, a big part of your landing page’s job is to perform its function (getting your bait in front of visitors) without scaring them away. If it lacks professional design or loads too slowly, visitors are subconsciously thinking, “I really want that bait (whitepaper, newsletter, etc), but this looks like a schlocky outfit – I’ll probably get spammed if I give my email address. I’m outta here.”

So what about landing pages elements that should draw attention to themselves, like testimonials, trust badges, and client logos? Again, these elements don’t actually cause conversions. Instead, they simply reduce fear, helping to eliminate one more reason for your visitors to “scare away.”

Keep this in mind when putting together your landing page. Spend just enough time on your landing page to be sure it doesn’t scare your visitors away. Then, if you’re going to spend time and money “optimizing” anything: spend it on offering tastier bait.

Essentially, landing page optimization is the process of testing two pages against one another to see which one converts the most visitors. Then, you take that better-performing page, change one or more elements – like the headline, image or offer – and repeat the process.

Apparently, you just keep testing this way until at some point your page is converting visitors like crazy.

Meanwhile, your new optimization software shows you detailed visitor reports: numbers, locations, times, browsers used, and on and on.

This approach kind of reminds me of the infinite monkey theorem which, according to Wikipedia, states that:

A monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.

Certainly most of these web-marketers are better than monkeys at throwing together landing pages.  But telling people that optimization software will result in a great landing page is kind of like telling them that using a word processor will result in a great novel.

Before you start testing, why not put some work into creating something that is at least very good, before you try to make it great. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time tweaking a piece of crap – only to end up with a marginally better piece of crap.

How do you create this first, very good landing page? Well, it takes some work. The single most important thing you can do is to improve you offer (or as we like to call it, your bait). For example:

• Make your whitepaper more compelling
• Don’t just offer a product demo, make it a 30-day free trial
• Create buyers guides, that demystify your industry

With a little work up front, you can make it more likely that when you do start optimizing, you’re improving a product that’s way better than a monkey’s.