By, JR

There are millions of websites out there with LAME landing pages, that do not provide clear and enticing marketing messages that keep visitors and these websites will lose lots of traffic and therefore lots of money!! DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!

This post continues a series on landing pages as promised in my previous post: What is Your Landing Page Doing? Part 1 of 4.

One of the most important parts of a good landing page are headlines and welcome messages. A landing page is an important Internet Marketing Strategy as this is the first impression visitors will get of your site and that marketing message can make or break you.

Headlines and Welcome Messages are the first things that a visitor sees when they get to the landing page of a website or blog.

Statistics show that a website has 5-10 seconds to engage the interest of their visitors before they exit the page, and headlines are they way this is accomplished by grabbing a visitors attention and announcing the “theme” of the website/blog.

It is important to remember that the headline and or welcome message must match the Title and Description from your Meta Tags and fulfill the promise in search results. Not being consistent in this is the best way to say bye-bye to your visitors.

A Powerful Headline:

Are You Losing Weight the Right Way? If Not you May be Risking your Health and Affecting the Rate of Pounds Lost! Learn How a Personalized Diet Plan can Optimize your Weight Loss and at the Same Time Maintain a Top Level of Health.

This headline is very effective because it contains the three components that a headline should have.

Component 1 - Ask a Question

As I previously mentioned in my post: Are you Writing Garbage?- Keys to Writing Great Articles. In any title or headline, a question is a powerful method of grabbing the attention of a reader.

Are you Losing Weight the Right Way? will entice people to keep reading, because an open question drives humans crazy and makes them wonder what they are missing.

Component 2 - Provide Doubt or Uncertainty

If Not you May be Risking your Health and Affecting the Rate of Pounds Lost!

This statement creates more doubt, engages visitors emotionally, let’s them know that they maybe missing out on something important or that there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Component 3 - Provide a Solution

Learn How a Personalized Diet Plan can Optimize your Weight Loss and Allow you to Maintain a Top Level of Health.

This component let’s visitors know what they can expect to get from your website and most importantly that you will provide the solution to the question, the doubt and the problem. This is the most important part of the headline.

Sample Landing Page Headlines:

Looking to Trick out your My Space Page? Choose from over 1,000 themes that Will Make you a MySpace Superstar.

Want to Grow your Music Collection? Tired of Paying $20 for an Entire CD when you only want one song? Save your Money, and Download Individual Songs from over 1,000,000 artists.

Is Acne Ruining your Social Life? Are you Staying Home Saturday Nights Because of Nasty Zits? Find out how to Control that Acne and Say Goodbye to Zits Forever!

A simple headline can also deliver a powerful and convincing message as to why the visitor should stick around. One of the best examples of this is on Aaron Wahl’s SEOBook site:

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Aaron’s marketing message is made clear by the Headline in three words. Learn - is the service the website provides. Rank is the end goal and Dominate is the payoff.

He supports his headline further by elaborating more on what he provides and the payoffs in the message further down the page:

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Welcome Message of a Landing Page:

A Welcome Message is another way to create a connection between you and your visitors and let them know what they can expect to get from your website. A welcome message can be used in combination with a headline, or by itself.

Here are some examples of Great Welcome Messages:

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Affiliate Website/Store Welcome Message:

If you have an Affiliate Marketing Website, such as an eBay BANS store, or maybe an Amazon Affiliate website, then the welcome message can give you a chance to convince the visitor why they should shop through your website instead of going to the source, here is a welcome message for a BANS store.

The line “The User-Friendly eBay Discount Digital Camcorder Store” is a great way to convey the benefit of visiting your site rather than going straight to eBay.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of Landing Page Optimization.

Let’s talk, what works for you on your landing pages?

If you love the content buy me a coffee.

I titled this post Part 1, because I am going to be doing a series on the how-to’s of Landing Page Optimization, but I wanted to do a quick write up because of some bad experiences I had this weekend while surfing some websites and blogs, and because this is so crucial to your online business success and Internet Marketing efforts.

While surfing for some information I landed on a couple of websites and within 30 seconds, I was thinking “WTF??”

I clicked on these sites because the Title and Description in search results promised to provide what I was looking for, but once I landed there, that dream was dead.

I could not find a hint of the promised land, and on one of the sites I got bombarded with at least 50 units of Adsense before seeing a glimpse of relevant information, and I quickly clicked off and moved on.

The landing page is so crucial for visitor retention, not to mention their return. A landing page is the page that visitors first land on when visiting your site either from search results, or from any backlinks to your site. Usually the landing page is the home page, but it’s actually any page that is linked to and from where visitors can get to your website.

What happened to me today has happened to all of us more than once, and there is no bigger turn off.

Also, it is important to realize that we are experienced webmasters, (or getting there ) we understand websites and navigation on a deeper level, BUT you have to assume that all of your visitors are complete novices, and they need obvious and clear indications of what is on your site and how to navigate it.

The landing page is really the “first impression” of your site and its content. What is your Landing Page doing?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Is your website clearly defining what you have to offer?

2. Is there some kind of welcome message that explains what’s there?

3. Is the content relevant to the title and description?

4. When visitors land on your page, are they easily able to navigate to different sections and pages within your site?

5. When they land, are they met with valuable relevant information or do they have to muddle through a ton of Affiliate adds, like adsense and banners?

If you answered NO to some of these questions then you will have problems with keeping your visitors and you can bet that they will not return.

Remember that the Internet revolves around the ease of getting information, if a surfer has to jump through a thousand hoops to find what their looking for on your website, believe me, they won’t, and why should they? There are millions of other sites where they will find what their looking for with ease.

This is especially true for bloggers, I surfed about a hundred blogs this weekend and found many whose landing pages were just awful. One of which is actually a high traffic “guru” blog. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, BEWARE of GURUS their not always right…but I digressed.

Because blogs do not usually have the same navigation layout as websites, instead of pages they have posts, they should be even more diligent in the landing page layout and navigation; especially since posts are THE content of a blog and so they should be placed at a top spot, with a proper header, like “All Posts” or “Recent Posts” where individual post titles are listed for easy access and navigation. A visitor shouldn’t have to spend 1/2 hour looking for posts and believe me they won’t.

Don’t let a bad landing page and navigation set-up affect your online business, affiliate marketing websites and Internet marketing efforts.

Please subscribe to updates and stay tuned for more on this vital issue and specific how-to guides on Landing Page Optimization.

If you love the content buy me a coffee.