Related Podcast Link: Listen to Episode 111!

When you talk about online marketing, a phrase you hear a lot about is landing pages and creating effective landing pages. If your new to the online advertising or marketing game, this phrase might be a new one for you so let me break it down.

Landing Pages 101

A landing page would be a special page (or series of pages) that you create on your web site for a certain audience or set of visitors.

Lets say I started an advertising campaign with Web Hosting Talk. Now I could have them all come to my index, just type in WebHostingShow.com but that wouldn’t give me a chance to sell myself to them or to see how effective this advertising deal really was.

Instead I would create a landing page with maybe some of my most popular podcasts, some of the best interviews and sell myself a little more than I would on the other pages. I would want to make people feel like, “hey, I’ve found a good deal here and I’m coming back!”.

Reference and Transactional Landing Pages

For the most part there are two types of landing pages out there. A reference landing page would be like the one I described above. You highlight some of the best, sell yourself and hopefully you’ll hook a few new visitors or clients. The second kind is transactional landing pages. The transactional landing page is created to help you complete a step of some kind. From that page I want you to complete a transaction, such as going through a sale of a product.

For an example, for web hosts you could put your hottest plan on your transactional landing page, have the form there to put in the domain, client information and more and then to move on to step two all they have to do is hit that “order now!” button.

So hopefully that now gives you a better handle on what landing pages are and why you might want to look into setting a few up for your next advertising campaign.