What is a Landing Page? Well, you’ve likely visited one a million times and didn’t know it. A landing page is a page on the internet that houses a limited amount of information, and is designed simply to link you to another page. Think of it as a middle ground between two points, or a short stop in between websites.
Landing pages have a variety of uses. For example, they can be used to unite your content online. If you have work that’s being published elsewhere on the internet, but you also want the people who check your personal website to know about it, using landing pages may come in handy. Just make a blog post with a photo, a quick blurb, and an external link to your offsite content. This way you’ve made sure your work appears on your site, while simultaneously promoting your content that may be housed elsewhere.
There are additional advantages to creating landing pages that you may not have considered. Having an extra page online means more tags, more links, and your name appearing in more locations. With that comes more search engine hits, more people clicking your links, and more revenue being generated for your content.
You may use a landing page to lure in traffic from new places. Tweeting out a link to a landing page is a great way to promote two things at once – your site and the site you’re linking to. Landing pages can also be used to help get a better idea of who is visiting your site, by providing a controlled way in which people can enter. Additionally, some marketers will create landing pages and fill them with ads, just to get a sense of how effective the ad may be in the future. You can learn a lot from a click.
But landing pages aren’t all great – you have to be smart about them. Posting too many ads, linking multiple landing pages together, and otherwise annoying the crap out of your visitors are never good ideas. If you’re going to start using landing pages, make sure you’re being smooth about it. Don’t turn them into a hassle; after all, you want people to come back to your website in the future.
The key to success is to keep your landing pages short and sweet. Tease your content with them, but don’t give too much information away until after they’ve clicked the next link. Think of a landing page as a cover to a book – you want people to open it, so the cover has to be inviting. But don’t spoil the ending until after people have finished clicking.
