WordPress has become the “gold standard” tool for building websites and web platforms these days, and it’s really easy to see why.
What originally started off as an open source piece of software designed to help people blog more effectively has grown to become used by hundreds and hundreds of millions of websites all over the world at the backbone of their online universe.
As flexible and as adaptable as any other piece of software ever created (and probably more flexible and adaptable, for that matter), WordPress gives you complete and total freedom to create the perfect online platform for your business or your organization without having to understand all of the technical aspects behind building a website from the ground up.
At the same time, building an effective WordPress platform for business can be a bit more of a challenge than a lot of people think it’s going to be. While WordPress provides you with all of the tools you need to get your platform up and running, you still have to be smart, strategic, and savvy about how you use these tools to build your business as effectively as possible.
We do live in the middle of the most competitive business environment that has ever existed, with online competition crushing in on us from all corners of the globe regardless of the market or the niche that we do business in. You’ll want to make sure that your landing pages are as effective as possible for your prospecting initiatives, and that’s what we hope to help you with below.
Why Do I Need a Landing Page In The First Place?
In the “Wild West” of the online business world – maybe a decade or so ago, really – it was possible to push ice cold traffic (complete and total strangers) to your home page and hope that they would find their own way to your products and your services all on their own and without a proper knowledge in the right direction.
Today, however, there’s just too much competition that’s always a single click and a few seconds away that this kind of approach just isn’t anywhere near as successful as it was before.
A landing page is the page that your visitors initially visit when they hit your online presence. Sometimes it’s a homepage, sometimes it’s a product or service page, but most of the time it’s a completely separate entity altogether that provides ALL of the information they need to know about who you are, what you have to offer, and what separates you from the rest of the pack to get them interested in doing business with you in the first place.
A proper landing page is the first meeting your customers will ever have your business, your brand, your products, and your services. You need to knock this first impression right out of the park.
WordPress can help you do exactly that.
Simplify and Streamline Everything
The very first thing you have to do when you’re getting ready to build a WordPress landing page is understand that you don’t want your landing page to do too many things at once. In fact, the ideal landing page does one thing and one thing only – it gets your prospects interested in learning more about what you have to offer and pushes them to go deeper into your sales funnel.
Some people are going to use landing pages to collect contact information so that a more effective marketing campaigns can be run via email or direct mail (a powerful way to grow a business in a hurry), while others are going to use a landing page to sell as much of a product or a service as possible right there with cold traffic – and some folks do just fine with this kind of approach.
Trying to do both at the same time, however, will kill your conversion and stagnate your business faster than you ever thought possible.
Strip Out All Extra Elements
The second thing you need to do when you’re building a landing page with WordPress is get a completely blank page template to work with. You don’t want navigational buttons, you don’t want links to other pages on your website, and you don’t even want any extra plug-ins, add-ins, or even extra images and videos that do not help you to improve conversions on this single page alone.
It’s best if you think of your landing page as an island completely separate from the rest of your website (while maintaining the same overall aesthetic and branding elements across the board). This page – as we highlighted above – has one reason only to exist, and EVERYTHING on this landing page needs to be there to support this mission or else it needs to disappear completely.
At the end of the day, it’s this minimalist kind of approach provide you with the results you’re after. You’ll want to track your analytics, tinker with headlines, body copy, and graphical elements so that you can come up with a more effective landing page, but with these basics under your belt you should be good to go!
