How to Bootstrap Your Way to an Awesome Landing Page
You don't have investors for your business. You have some cash coming in but just enough to keep everything moving. You are funding your business with your own credit card and you can feel the pain of every little charge. You have figured out that there are many things you can do for free but they all have their limitations (after all, everyone is trying to make money). There are many things you know are important in driving more sales but you have a hard time figuring out what you really need to pay now and what can wait until you have a stronger cash flow.
You heard that landing pages are the key to generating leads, making sales and driving traffic to your website. Yet, is it really necessary to pay for developing a landing page? This is the dilemma that most bootstrapping business owners face — should you use precious cash now in exchange for the possibility of increased revenue?
Luckily, there are lots of knowledgeable people out there that like to give away free advice in hopes of earning your business. There are ways you can bootstrap your way to an awesome landing page.
What is a Landing Page?
Use of landing pages continues to increase. Now is the time to get familiar with how to develop and implement one (or a few) in your business.
A landing page is similar to a website page but it is NOT. I know this can be confusing because you can have a landing page on your actual website. A landing page is a page that is separate from any website page and is used solely for one purpose. You will use it to get email addresses, warm-up a lead or make a sale. The key to remember is that a landing page is ONE page with ONE purpose.
This presentation by Allison Haag at Teachable does a great job of explaining every detail about landing pages and how to design the perfect page.
How to Get Your Own Landing Page
Now that you have gone through the presentation above, you should feel comfortable about what a landing page is. However, if you would like to back it up with some structured training, and an exercise where you build your own landing page, check out this course at Udemy - Landing Page Course: Easy Landing Page Design Without Coding https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-course-on-building-killer-landing-pages/learn/v4/overview.
Hot Tip: Just a little trick on how you can get this course for free or really cheap....If you are new to Udemy, more than likely you will see this course offered as free. If not, create a profile and add it to your wish list. You will start to get emails from Udemy offering the course for a much lower price or free. This is a really good course and you will actually develop your first landing page for free and have a professional review it for you (your professor).
Another option is to create a contest where professional graphic designers compete to design your landing page. Check out a company called Design Contest. You will have fun creating your own contest and getting tons of entries that you can pick from for your new landing page.
If you choose to go on your own, the big website builders (Wordpress, Wix and Squarespace) now have features available to build a landing page. These may require a bit of manipulation but you can develop a few simple pages until you can afford to pay one of the professional landing page builder services the fees. The big landing page builders like Leadpages, Wishpond and Instapage all charge (Instapage does give you a two-week free trial so you should take advantage of that).
Don't Forget
Basic Structure of a Landing Page
- Headline (standouts, shows value)
- Call-to-Action (should be obvious and have plenty of space around it)
- Visual (always focus eyes toward the headline)
- Body (What is the benefit?)
- Social Proof (Why should they trust you?)
The most important thing to remember when you build your landing page and anything you do online — You should always create value!