Creating WordPress landing pages

In this post I will try to answer the following questions:

- Why should you use a landing page?
- How does a landing page work?
- How do you turn your wordpress blog into an automatic landing page?

Recently I found a technique that everybody can use, even if you are not that familiar with the wordpress codex. I will explain it a little later.

A landing page is the first page your visitors will see when they enter your site. Usually that’s your front page, there is a way to manipulate this, but it only works when your visitors come to your site from a search engine. If your front page is also your landing page, you will need to do something with it. This something is related to the question, why do you have a site and what do you want from your visitors?

If you want your visitors to buy something from you or join your business, you should use your landing page to show your visitors exactly what you are offering them. Usually people use an autoresponder to help them sell, your landing page should then consist of a way for people to sign up for your autoresponder. Your sales message / your autoresponder is the most important message on your landing page. It should be the first thing your visitors sees. If you use your front page as your landing page, you can use a form or a popover to get your visitors attention.

But you don’t want your visitors to only see your sales message and then leave. You want them to find what they are looking for. Ask yourself this, why did they come to your site in the first place? A landing page will not only give your visitors what they are looking for, but it will also give the visitors what you want them to see.

So, how can you provide this information to your visitors using your wordpress blog?

There is a plugin for this called Landing sites (as I write this it´s in version 1.3). What this plugin does is that it takes the search string from the visitor (from various search engines), and the page they arrive at will list a mix of related posts to what they searched for.

This way your visitor will get the information he or she searched for (various posts related to the search). You can test this by doing a search at google with the search term: slymarketing and then click on the one sending you to slymarketing.com. Then you will see that the first posts will be related to the search.

Update: I’m not using this plugin anymore, hence you won’t see any result if you try what I have described at the end of the post.