How to earn 5,000€ a month from your website. (pt. 2)

September 19, 2011

Short-term goal #2: Launch your landing page
Your call-to-action landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The objective of the landing page is to create buzz and collect readers, even before your first post…

 What you should have done BEFORE you read this article.

Based on short-term goal #1: Determine your business model.

  • Determined your business model for your website.
  • Established very specific objectives.
  • Determined your target audience, image, free content, timeline, and sector.
  • Purchased your domain name.
  • Registered your social media sites to create a congruent image.
  • Compared the different website/blog platforms and decided which one you will use.

7. Design a shareable landing page
Your call-to-action landing page is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement. The objective of the landing page is to create buzz and collect readers, even before your first post. Your home page is the front page of your website. If your website is under construction or if you haven’t yet officially launched your website with articles, then your home page should be your landing page.

Depending on the platform you use, creating and launching your landing page is relatively simple and quick to set up. However you may need to hire a webdesigner to create a landing page for you.

You can Google search “landing page” to check out different formats other websites use, however you’ll find that most landing pages follow a similar format:

Your landing page is a simple page which includes:

  • Your logo
  • Your tagline
  • A call to action: “Coming soon… Sign up for our first article release!”
  • An faq page (optional)
  • A call to action
  • A subscribe button for your facebook, twitter, RSS. (established in short-term goal #1.)

All of the important contents of your landing page should be above the fold, meaning the reader should not have to scroll down the page to see and respond to your “call to action”.

In the above example, Barkles landing page is asking for your email address, and they will email you updates leading up to their official launch. Their landing page in itself isn’t shareable (it doesn’t have any share buttons), however above the email box they have links to their twitter, facebook, and tumblr blog if you  want to follow them. They also include their email address if you want to contact them for anything specific.

Matt Darey’s above the fold includes:

  • A rotating banner with links to important information.
  • A ‘VIP’ sign up to collect email addresses.
  • A music widget with over hundreds of hours of downloadable music.
  • Contact for press and interviews.
  • Links to his different social media websites so you can subscribe if you don’t want to become ‘VIP’.
  • Share buttons.

This is a high-quality landing page design.

the controversial manual’s landing page was originally done using weebly, a simple ‘What you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) website designer. It was easy to do and launched within 20 minutes.  My only ‘call to action’ was to sign up to the controversial manual’s facebook page.

Depending on your business plan, as you should have well established when you prepared your business plan in the article Short-term goal #1, you may want the reader to subscribe by ‘liking’ your facebook page rather than collecting their email address.

People generally prefer ‘liking’ your facebook page rather than providing you with their email address, and then having to log into their email to verify their subscription because it’s easier and less intrusive.  In addition, their ‘liking’ your page automatically shares your website with everyone in their network because it appears in the person’s facebook activity timeline, thus potentially allowing the person’s friends to ‘like’ you as well.

8. Create a landing page faq page (optional)
If your logo, name, domain name, tagline, and background photo is sufficient enough for people to understand what your website is for and how your target audience will benefit, then you might not need an faq page. However ask your friends after you launch your initial landing page, and if your trusted friends have more questions than answers, or if they tell you they aren’t compelled to subscribe, or if your marketing attempts aren’t yielding positive results, then you may need to add an faq page to provide more information.

Remember, at this point your only objective is to collect subscriptions, therefore your f.a.q. page should include as few questions as necessary to convince the person to subscribe, such as:

  • Who we are?
  • What do we do?
  • How you will benefit from our website?

9. Choose your color theme.
Pink and blue is a good color scheme for wedding photos, not for a website that review’s cigars. Returning back to the infograph at the top of this article, the colors you choose for your website should be congruent with the image you want to market:

  • Blue is associated with trust, and security.
  • Red is associated with energy and urgency.  Many ‘subscribe buttons’ are red.
  • Yellow is associated with optimism and youthfulness. It’s a good attention grabber.
  • Orange is associated with aggressivity. Many ‘subscribe buttons’ are red.
  • Pink is associated with romance and femininity.
  • Purple is associated with calmness and tranquility.
  • Green is associated with wealth.
  • Black is associated with power.
  • White is associated with innocence, purity, and safety.

10. Install Google Analytics.
This is a simple and very important step because it allows you to:

  • Moniter who visits your landing page to determine how much traffic you’re getting and where they’re coming from. As you notice certain countries, or groups of people are more attracted to your website, you can adjust your marketing.
  • Comparing how many visiters you get to how many people actually subscribe allows you to determine how effective your landing page is. If you you’ve had 1,000 visitors in the past 30 days yet only 6 have “subscribed”, then either the wrong people are coming to your landing page, or your landing page needs work.
  • Monitoring who subscribers allows you to  (re)defined your target audience. If you notice that the people signing up aren’t in your originally defined target audience, then return toShort-term goal #1 and incorporate your findings and adjust your business plan.

Random video #1 about landing page tips:

Random video #2 about how to create a landing page:

11. Begin marketing your website.
Now that you have a registered domain name with a landing page, it’s time to begin marketing

By now you should feel confident about proceeding forward to

Short-term goal #3: Market your landing page.

 Sources and further reading:

Because nobody is perfect…
If you have any sources, links, and advice to add improve this article:

1. Leave it in the comments section below, and
2. Your invaluable advice will be incorporated into the above article, and
3. You’ll be referenced you as the contributor.