2011-11
24

3 Steps to an Awesome Website Landing Page

Category: Web Design Help | Comments Off

Building landing pages is a fine art. One that might seem easy on the outside, but once you’re deep in the trenches it’s not so easy. I want to give you 3 steps that you can use to help create an effective landing page for either your next website you create or for clients. All you need is a printer, marker and a bit of time.

Let’s get started.

For an example we’re going to use a fictional test market “best wrinkle cream“. I choose this market because I know it’s competitive and if you follow along when reading this you’ll be sure to find some great landing pages to examine.

1 – Find some landing pages: Before I sit down with Photoshop, Dreamweaver or even my wordprocessor to write some copy for a landing page I always see what my competitors are doing. For our example marketing I’d go to Google and search for ‘best wrinkle cream’. I’d then take 2-3 paid ads and print of their landing page and 2-3 (usually the top ranking sites) and print of their landing pages. 

2 – Examine, Critique and Circle: There is no perfect landing page but there are perfect elements. Take those pages you printed off in step one and now spread em out on your dining room table or large desk. You want them all side by side so you can examine them all. Take maybe 15-20 minutes and make a check mark with your market beside elements you like (i.e. headlines, bullet points, graphics, calls to action) and make an X beside stuff you don’t like. 

The key here is to pick out the elements you believe to be effective that your competitors are already using and we’re going to integrate that into our own landing page design in step 3. 

For our example market you might circle stuff about benefits of particular wrinkle creams, buttons for free trials or images of women that are the right demographic for the products target customers.

3 – Let’s Build a Page: Alright armed with your sample pages of what you do and don’t like from your competitors you’re all set to start designing your own landing page. This will take time but remember building something that works and is worthwhile takes time.

Incorporate the visual elements you liked (i.e. images, buttons, colors) into your layout. When writing your copy focus on the bullet points and such you liked from your competitors sites. 

If done right this exercise will yield you an excellent first draft of a landing page to test out.

2011-11
20

Home Business for Stay at Home Moms

Category: SEO Web Development | Comments Off

Finding jobs for stay at home moms isn’t the easiest thing to do especially if you’re just starting out. Many stay at home parents would love to be able to do something from home where they can make some sort of income. There are actual jobs you can find if you know where to look. However, why not create some sort of a business online instead?

There are a lot of benefits to doing this like the ability to create some passive income and the possibility of making a lot of money. So what do you need? There are lots of things you can do to earn some money and one way to do it is to create a website. The important thing with this type of business is getting traffic. What products you should sell or services you should offer is up to you but without traffic, you won’t get very far.

One way to drive traffic is to use SEO strategies. Everything from the look of your site, the name of your site, and what words you use will make a difference in your results. You can learn more about how to start a home based business online by doing some research online.

2011-11
9

Getting Paid in Your Passive Income Web Hosting Business

Category: Website Solutions | Comments Off

I’m a lazy git and I prefer passive income opportunities to actually having to do the hard work. Unfortunately there are very few truely passive forms of income – though web hosting business owners do have the opportunities for both active and passive Income opportunities.

The problem for many web hosting resellers is that its either feast or famine – either everyone wants their website redeveloped this week or no one does! If you get a sold base of people just paying for the hosting then at least you know some money is going to hit your bank account – shortly after you invoice them! Whether you invoice every six or 12 months is up to you and your cash flow requirements – but one thing that you should always do is invoice in advance – that way there is NEVER an issue about getting your invoice paid within your required 7 days (you did put that on the invoice didn’t you?)

Why? Quite simple – most people want their website to remain visible – if you don’t get paid as the host – you take the website down – quite simple. Warn them first, then disable the website – you’ll be surprised how fast your account gets to the top of someone’s to do list if you do that!