5 Copywriting Tips for Landing Pages
Landing pages are extremely important for your online business. This holds especially true if you are into affiliate marketing. A landing page is a webpage that you send traffic to in order to pre-sell your visitors. This can take the form of signing up for a newsletter, RSS feed, downloading a free report, checking out some relevant reviews of products, and possibly clicking through to the merchant site where you get commission.
The copywriting on that page should be paid very close attention to. The words you use to pre-sell the visitor will decide whether or not you get the sign up or the sale. But, don’t worry or be too terribly terrified.
5 Copywriting Tips For Increased Response on your Landing Page
Before you begin to think that this is just one more thing that you’ll never be able to learn here’s a few tips to help get you going in the right direction.
1. Grab their attention with a short, to the point headline.
A lot of copywriters and affiliate gurus will tell you that you need a long, drawn out, promise telling, run on sentence type of headline in order to capture the attention of the visitor. Yes, you do need to grab attention, but with a short, clear, and fulfilling headline.
Your headline needs to address an issue and give a solution in a very clear, concise, and to the point way. Put yourself in the shoes of the person visiting. They have a lot going on in their life and time spent on the internet is at a premium. Give that person something quick. Short, clear, to the point.
2. Keep the visitor reading with a strong subheading.
Once you’ve grabbed the attention of the reader you can relax a little bit, but not too much. You still have to get past the fold on the page. The fold is the part that’s hiding below the bottom of the screen. Usually you have a header image, heading text, and enough room for a strong subheading and a few words of text. Use this space wisely.
Your subheading is actually more important than the heading. If you can get your reader to buy into what you want to tell them you’ve made it past the fold. More importantly you’ve got someone who is now almost trusting you.
3. Tell a story to pull in your visitor and create familiarity.
Everyone loves a story. People even love stories that are true. Don’t be afraid to use your own story in the opening of your landing page. Just make sure it’s relevant to the theme of the page. You wouldn’t talk about being down and out if the landing page is for car parts. If you don’t have a relevant personal story then use one from history, a friend, or something you’ve seen in a movie. Just make it real.
Stories have a way of captivating people and helping them feel comfortable with you. It puts them at ease and breeds a little familiarity with you. This can happen also if your story can somehow relate to their life also.
4. Use bullets to help point out the main benefits.
As I stated before, people are very busy and don’t want to waste their time. So what they do, and you probably do this also, is skim webpages. They don’t read every single word. But, they do see the highlights. Those highlights are your bulleted benefits. Make these count. Don’t go over the top with your explanations, keep it real, but put as much excitement as you can into it. Let your passion show in your bullets.
And use them liberally. Don’t just relegate them to a certain part of your page and use the rest up with long paragraphs. Bullet your way down the page.
5. Keep your landing page short.
Your not writing the next Great American Novel here. You’re writing a landing page that will ultimately turn into a new subscriber or customer. To do that you have to, again, think like your visitor. Time is the issue. Not whether or not they need your product. How much time do they have to spend at your site is the pressing issue. If you can give them the information they need in order to pre-sell them to the merchant, you’ve done your job.
Once at the merchant site they will always tend to spend a little more time. Why? Because it’s shopping. And everyone loves to shop online.
Keep these copywriting tips close when writing your next landing page.
I would encourage you to either bookmark this page, star this post in your Google Reader, or print it out to keep close when writing your next landing page. Don’t think you can write one? I know you can. Just start writing, following these tips of course, and you’ll be able to in no time.
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