The Smarter Way To Live Blog

In my last post, I’d promised to follow up with more information on the all important landing page, or the place you are striving to drive customers to.  What I’d found and wanted to share were the 5 tips for designing the ultimate landing page from the copy blogger website.  This is a great one stop shop for all things related to copy writing.  Copy writing in a nutshell is the art of writing effective sales pages.  It also covers a wide breadth of related topics from eBooks to keyword research to name but a few.    

However, you are here to dive into the five tips:

1. Study your competition’s design and organization flow of their landing page.  Essentially the point of this is to learn where you feel the flow of a page leaves you thinking “this isn’t for me”, or seems to lose focus.  If you don’t readily have competition to study, review landing pages for items you’ve purchased in the past.  Really think about what converted you from a prospect to buyer.  Is this page design something you could incorporate into your own landing page?  If so, how?  I think this is a great tip and it will save you quite a bit of time by learning what a good landing page should look, feel, and incorporate to be great.
2. Place your most critical landing page elements in the upper 300 pixels of the page.  This was something I’d never given much thought to, but after reviewing my own habits discovered it was pretty spot on.  The author mentions usability studies demonstrating more than half of all site visitors will NOT scroll “below the fold.”  This is the line breaking your webpage below what is current visible on the screen.  Point being – get straight to the point and cut the warm up.  Again, think about your own habits and review how you navigate landing pages.  Does this make sense?  I’d go further to say many site visitors are scanning a website for information giving you seconds to grab their focus and keep them interested.  This further drives the need to have “laser” like focus at the start of the page.
3. KISS – Keep It Straight and Simple.  Here the tip recommends using a one-column format with ample margins and white space to increase reading comprehension.  Write in short concise small paragraphs rather than large ones.  This means 5 or fewer lines.  In short, strip away all the un-necessary things that don’t add to your message.  Period. 
4. The next tip I REALLY like – BE OBVIOUS.  Here the tip sums it up best with – “No visitor should have to work to use your page or understand your message.”  My version of this would be – write to the common person.  Sure it can be impressive to drop 5 and 6 syllable words throughout your landing page, but you won’t be impressed by sales figures.  Write the way people speak, and you’ll be OBVIOUS. 
5. The last tip offered seems so clear but probably taken for granted to the new entrepreneur launching a new landing page – IT MUST LOAD QUICKLY.  8 seconds or less is the suggested optimal load time by the author of this tip.  I would tend to agree.  This is easy enough to test after composing a landing page.  To insure a fast loading page you will most likely need to focus on text with minimal graphics. 

As I’ve found with most things in life with respect to communications, work, and projects as a whole simple works best.  This also seems to be a consistent them throughout these tips as well.  After all, as you and I race faster into the digital age our attention spans will only grow shorter to process the increased information flow more quickly making those who can convey a message with highest degree of brevity and conciseness at the head of the pack.

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