October 12, 2011
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Company Culture
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Scott Martin
How many times has a marketing expert recommended that you create a landing page to generate leads, prospects and new customers?
When you even think about what could be involved in creating a landing page; writing persuasive sales copy, hiring a designer to create the graphics, hiring a programmer to code everything and then ultimately hiring an analytics expert who can help you figure out the most effective design for a landing page. All of this becomes overwhelming and potentially expensive. And so...you do nothing.
After today, you’ll have no more excuses. I’ve pulled together some wonderful tools that will not only help you write, design and upload an effective landing page—it won’t cost you a fortune either.
Simply see which of these situations sounds like yours, and pick from the options. It’s that easy.
If you have a WordPress blog
Premise is a wonderful WordPress tool from the team at Copyblogger. If you are running on a WordPress platform and would like to create landing pages by simply creating a new page on your blog, this is the tool for you. I’ve already purchased the unlimited version and have found it fantastically easy to use.
This is the ideal choice if you struggle with what to put on a landing page. Whether you want a sales page, opt-in page or pricing page, they have all the basic choices laid out for you. All you have to do is click and pick one.
There is also copywriting advice throughout the plugin that will virtually hold your hand throughout the process. You will have to invest some time in working out the details of inserting your form. But the plugin works well with the most common e-mail marketing resources out there such as Mail Chimp, aWeber and Constant Contact.
If you want to create a landing pages without knowing how to write code
Unbounce is a great WYSIWYG application. It’s completely online and there is nothing to install. They will even provide you with a URL so that you can forward your domain or existing URL easily without messing with your existing site(s).
Unbounce has pre-designed templates that you can customize (or not) depending on your expertise. Simply select a template, insert the copy in the spaces provided and go. Yes. It’s that easy. Unbounce also works with the standard e-mail marketing services. So if you are using Constant Contact or Mail Chimp to manage your lists, you can easily integrate those. It was so easy, even I could do it—and that’s saying a lot.
The other cool thing about Unbounce is that you can create variations of landing pages to do A/B testing. Unbounce will track your conversion rates and show you which landing page variation is more effective. This means that you don’t need to be a Google expert and set up goals or Google Optimizer pages.
Formstack is another terrific tool for those of us who are HTML coding challenged. You can add content, blog feeds and also do A/B testing. You will, however have to use their e-mail marketing lists and forms. Some other interesting features of Formstack are that you can do event registration as well as online surveys. It’s ideal for the small business owner who has a combination of online offers and events.
If you’re focused on optimizing your landing pages
InstaPage claims that their landing pages optimize themselves! All you have to do is add different variations of your Web page into the system and InstaPage automatically rotates them. You’ll get thousands of permutations of your Web page that will be tested and optimized based on which variation gets the best results.
Optimizely assumes that you already have a web site up and running and gives you the ability to make slight changes in copy and design right on your page. This tool also doesn’t require any HTML coding. Optimizely lets you quickly test different images, copy and layouts. Optimizely is a good tool for beginners as well as advanced developers because it also gives you the ability to edit HTML code if you like.
You can’t afford NOT to create landing pages anymore
Normally, I’d recommend all kinds of market research before you launch a product or pick a price for a new product or service. But with all these tools, the best kind of market research is the actual results you’ll get based on how your target audience reacts to the landing pages you create.
There are no more excuses for not having a landing page. Use these easy and cost-effective tools and you’ll be creating a 24/7 sales force in the form of a landing page.
Check your balance, review recent transactions and pay your bill on the go.
Scott Martin 4 months ago
I'm a landing page copywriter so thanks for posting these resources. Many thanks.