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When you first start blogging, it can often feel like you’re having to learn a whole new language! Words like hyperlink, widgets, favicon, and long-tail keyword quickly become a part of your everyday vocabulary.
One phrase that many bloggers have heard but may not understand well is “landing page”. It’s a term that’s been used by online marketers for years – and it’s something that all professional bloggers should understand and know how to implement. In this post, we’re going to talk about what a landing page is and explain how you can use landing pages for your blog.
What Is A Landing Page?
The simplest definition of a landing page is that it is quite literally the page that a reader lands on when they first come to your blog after clicking a “call to action” somewhere else. Technically, any page or post on your blog can be a landing page. But more specifically, it’s a page that’s been explicitly designed to greet targeted visitors to your site and lead them into taking a specific action.
People often confuse landing pages with the squeeze pages, and really a squeeze page can be considered a type of landing page, depending on how it’s used. But the biggest difference is that a squeeze page (also called an opt-in page) is designed to “squeeze” something out of the viewer. In most cases, we’re trying to get their email address in exchange for a free gift of some sort.
You may be thinking “Why shouldn’t I just send people to my blog home page? Won’t they find what they want?”
Sure, you can do that – but the key to a good landing page is to direct your reader to do exactly what you want and get the conversion – either as a sale or a new subscriber OR to lead them to related topics. Your landing page should not have all the navigation that your home page has. With a landing page, you’re giving people a specific choice that you are directing – they can opt in to your email list, or they can click a download button, or they can click a “Buy Now!” button.
I mentioned targeted visitors above; by this I mean the people to whom you target your blog. Any landing page is going to be specifically targeted to a certain type of reader – this is called “message matching”.
Think of it this way: your blog may appeal to a variety of readers. Perhaps you have a lifestyle blog where you mostly write about homeschooling and cooking with real food. People who come to your blog looking for real food recipes aren’t always going to be into homeschooling, and vice versa. If you comment in a food forum, you could link your comments to a recipe-related landing page, because that’s the targeted interest of the people you’re connecting with there.
5 Ideas For Great Landing Pages For Your Blog
There are many different ways you can use landing pages to your benefit – here are a just a few:
1. Welcoming New Readers
Imagine the situation I described above; you could create a page on your blog that welcomes people who are interested in your foodie posts, and has a list of your top recipes or recipe categories. That would be a great landing page for those readers!
2. Social Media
In the same way, you can create a landing page that is particular to people who found your page through social media. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has this page connected to his Twitter account:
It gives new visitors a snapshot of who he is and what he is doing.
Facebook now gives you the option to add “Call to Action” buttons in the header of your fan page. You can add the “Sign Up” button and connect it to a special opt-in landing page just for Facebook readers.
3. Guest Posting
If you do guest posting, you usually get an opportunity to link back to your blog. Why not make a special landing page for people who click through? You can welcome people directly from that site, and point them in the direction of other related posts on your site, as well as add an email opt-in. If they’ve clicked through on your link, they’re already interested in you – it’s the perfect time to invite them to join your list!
4. Marketing Pages
You should never start a new marketing campaign on your blog without having a landing page for it. It could be a blog post where you do a review of the product or service, or it could be a specific page that you’ve made just for that product.
For example, I’m writing a book on email marketing. When the book is ready for sale, I will create a landing page that will have all the information on the book, with a link to the sales page. I can link to that landing page from any social media. I especially love making videos with a quick tip or “how to”, then tell viewers “to learn more, click on the link in the video description!” – and of course the link takes them to my landing page for the ebook.
5. Squeeze Pages
You can also use a landing page to give away free ebooks or other offers with an email opt-in. This is another great page to share frequently to your social media accounts, to help build your email list. You may find that you’ll create more than one squeeze page, if you have more than one thing to give away or if you’re connected with different types of readers.
These are just a few of the ways landing pages can help you grow your readership and increase your conversions. Once you have people’s attention, you need to make sure that you can lead them on to taking the next step, and turn a casual click into a regular reader.
What landing pages have been successful on your blog?
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- Finding Your Friends on Instagram - May 3, 2022
- Magic Mosaic Easter Egg Coloring - Mar 5, 2022
- 11 Recipes For National Peanut Butter Lover’s Day - Feb 24, 2022
- Our Favorite Things – 2021 Edition (Holiday Gift Guide and Giveaways!) - Nov 15, 2021
- Easy Pumpkin Bread Recipe - Sep 2, 2021
- Low Light Photography Tips for the Holidays - Nov 11, 2020
- DIY 30-Minute Thanksgiving Tree - Nov 8, 2020
- The Spanish Princess Part 2 Is Coming - Oct 8, 2020
- Fabric Pumpkins – DIY in 15 Minutes - Sep 9, 2020
- Jack-O-Lantern Marshmallow Pops - Sep 7, 2020
- DIY Mini Herb Garden - Aug 30, 2020
- Step by Step Plan to Drive Traffic to A New Blog - Aug 30, 2020
- Six Tips to Reduce Stress In Your Life - Aug 30, 2020
- How To Take A Food Photo From Good To Great - Aug 30, 2020
Although I was familiar with the way marketers make use of landing pages, I never understood how they could be useful on my blog. Thanks!
They’re fantastic for bloggers – I hope you can put them to use 🙂
Great examples of the various ways you can use landing pages. Something I’m trying to improve on my site.
Good luck! Share and let us know how it goes. 🙂
Great tips! I’ve never thought of using landing pages but now after reading this I am definitely going to start!
Great post! Because I have blogger I don’t tend to do these features. I consider going to Word Press but I don’t want to lose everything I have created. 🙂 Maybe someday I will take the leap.
You can create landing pages in Blogger – depending on what you want them for, it just takes more messing around with codes. There’s a tutorial here that might help you – http://www.twistblogger.com/2015/05/create-custom-landing-pages-on-blogger.html
Thank you for explaining this so well, Kelly. I’ve been hearing so much about lead pages recently, but only had a vague understanding of what they were. Now I know and can start to implement them more effectively on my site. Great info!
I’m glad it helped, Samantha!
I’ve been contemplating this – but never quite sure that I want to do one. But your post is very convincing!
Great post, would love to see a How-to on this!