The landing page is the first thing that any visitor which clicks on your ads will see. As such, it is most important that you make a good first impression with your visitors from the very beginning. After all, if they don’t like what they see, many will simply leave right from the start. However, there are a couple of very simple things that you can do to make your landing page a successful and high converting one.

The first step would be simply to ensure that your landing page is relevant to what you are saying in your ads. So for example, if you are having a certain promotion where customers get 50% off a certain product or service that you are selling, make sure that your landing page shows this in a prominent manner. Because if a visitor clicks on your ad and then doesn’t see anything related to what they just saw on the ad they’ve clicked, they would think the promotion is finished, or feel misled and then leave the page.

Including a strong call to action is an important thing if you want your landing page to be successful and bring you the conversions that you need. At the end of the landing page, you should tell the reader what they should do and include a “click here” type of button to make them continue to the specific page on your website. So for example if you are running an online apparel store and you have a 50% off promotion on pants, put a button on your landing page that will redirect the visitor to the pants section of your website. This is a lot better than simply having one which will just continue on to the main page of your site.

A good landing page is one that is cleanly designed and that is specific to a certain promotion, or product that you would like to showcase. For this reason, you should avoid having any elements on the page that are not related to what you are promoting in your ads. While you may think that this could increase sales, in reality it will not, as it can simply lead to confusing the visitor even further if you overwhelm them with information right from the start. This is not to say that you shouldn’t try to up sell or cross sell with your site visitors. However, this should be done later on in the buying process and not simply on your landing page. If you have several different items that you are promoting, then it is better to make separate landing pages and ad groups for each of them, instead of putting everything together on one landing page.

The final piece of advice when it comes to constructing landing pages is that you should always want to test out a few designs first. Split test your landing pages to see which ones would produce the best results and bring you the most conversions.

Starting your own web marketing agency and acquiring clients who will pay you for your services is not as difficult as it seems like in the first place. You can start this with just a part-time, one man operation and then scale things up when business starts picking up later on. Now we’ve already covered the basics on what you need to get started in the previous post. It’s now time to actually put things into action and get going.

First thing you need to do is to build your website. Just a simple one will do, all you actually need is to describe the services that you are offering as well as give customers your contact information to get in touch. Putting in a simple contact form works well too.

Now some of you may be wondering here: what kind of services will you have to offer? The short answer would be everything needed for a business to maintain an online presence and make profit from it.

The first thing you would need to do is to offer basic web site creation. If you are experienced in building multimedia, flash websites, then you can offer that too. However, all that is really needed is the ability to create a functional website for a business that will showcase their products/services, give background information on their company, and allow customers to contact them. You can either opt to host it on your own hosting account (it’s better to use reseller hosting, so that the client can also log in and make changes to their site). Or you could have the client sign up for a web hosting plan with your affiliate link and manage their own site after that.

What you also have to offer is web promotion services. How will you make this happen? Easy. You will need to offer a combination of various ways to attract traffic to your client’s site. Here are some:

Classified ads

Very simple to do and practical. A lot of small, locally owned businesses use these sites to advertise online. All you would have to do is post ads on a regular basis for the client, based on their specifications.

Social networking

Here, you will create a social media page for your client. Again, nothing complicated. All you would need to do is create a page with information about what they do, their products, current promotions that they are running, etc.

SEO

Optimize your client’s website so that it gets a decent rank for relevant keywords. Depending on competition in the niche that they are in, this could vary in difficulty from easy to quite hard. Follow best practices for SEO, create and upload original articles to high traffic sites which have a link back to their site, etc.

Paid ads

You could also create a pay per click, or media buying campaign in order to attract traffic to your clients sites if you are experienced in this method of advertising. You will simply charge them a bit more than what you are spending on advertising to make profit.

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Your landing page is the first thing a new visitor to your site is going to see, so it’s important that your landing page follows a few simple rules that can help you make the best possible first impression on a new customer.

Make sure your landing page is delivering the correct message. If, for example, you’re running ads for a new promotion, make sure your landing page has been changed to reflect the new promo, instead of an old one. If a customer clicks on an ad expecting one promotion, only to be delivered another, they’re going to feel lied to, or at the very least, confused about what’s going on.

It’s also important to make sure your landing page has a call to action. Don’t assume your customers are going to know where to go once they have visited the landing page, it’s up to you to point them in a direction. Include a large button that sends your customer where you want them to go. For example, if your landing page talks about a sale on all products in a certain department, you might want to add a “click here” button that sends them right to that department.

A simple landing page is an effective landing page. Don’t clutter up the page with unnecessary information, or multiple offers or promotions. If you have different deals you want to showcase, consider making different landing pages for each. If a landing page is too busy, it will confuse the reader, and ultimately your conversion rate will drop.

In addition to cutting clutter, it’s also important to keep the amount of text on your landing page to a minimum.  Try to get your message across in as few words as possible, while still making your message clear. If your new visitors are presented with a wall of text when they hit your landing page, they won’t take the time to read all of it. In fact, chances are they’ll just leave the page after skimming it briefly.

last but not least, it’s important for your landing page to make you look trustworthy. If you put a lot of pop up ads on your landing page, or if the page looks unprofessional, visitors will not trust your site, and they won’t click through your landing page.

A clear, concise landing page that stays on point is an extremely important tool in bringing new customers to your site. Be sure to follow the tips above, and you won’t be disappointed with the results.

One of the most overlooked aspects of working online is hiring a contractor.

Let’s face it, not everyone can do everything online, and if they think they can they are joking themselves or they are taking way to much time to get work done because they are having to learn/struggle with every single aspect of web design, article writing, SEO, or some other area that is outside their expertise and they are spending way to much time on tasks that they are having to learn as they go or just take them a long time because of inexperience.

My niche is article writing. I was never found of writing in school, but I learned very quickly online that I was meant for it. I can write decently fast, not 90 words per minute, but I am able to get my ideas down on the “paper” as fast as I can think of them. I learned that when writing about subjects I enjoy I can write almost all day about them, hence why I write only on my niches I like to work on.

It could be different for you, maybe you love SEO, and playing the search engine game. That’s fine, it’s great even. Or maybe you are an awesome designer and just love creating useful art for websites, etc.

Whatever you do almost can be utilized online, however trying to learn everything else can be a mistake.

If you are a great web designer, why not hire a great copywriter to help you sell your services to potential clients instead of struggling to create website content to showcase your work?

If you are an SEO expert throw up a WordPress blog and hire a designer to create you a temple to showcase your SEO skills.

For me, as an article writer I am a bit SEO (but not all the way) with my keyword density, but I could hire both an SEO expert to get my on page SEO down and a designer to create my website for which I write.

Instead of trying to do things halfway, it is a lot easier and will save you a lot of time by simply hiring an outsourcer to do the work for you. Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of money, because if the contractor is worth their weight, they will provide you with returns long after the work is completed.