Once you have your website up and running, and once you have some traffic & attention to it, you must think about some ways you can get folks to take action on your pages.  Traffic to your website with no/little action serves nobody well.

A good landing page tries to convey (quickly) to the user; a clear action step. You can think of it this way: “what is the one thing I would like them to do next?”. We call this the most-desired-action (MDA) on the page.

Top Five Tips for Creating Effective Landing Pages

1. Relevance. Design landing a page(s) that is directly related to the link or ad that brought the visitor here.
2. Credibility. Establish credibility and create trust through a clean, professional appearance. Eliminate all grammar, spelling, spacing, formatting and design errors.
3. Navigation. Provide minimal or no navigation buttons. Every link is a temptation to leave your landing page.
4. Brevity. Keep text brief, simple and to the point. Text that is technical, confusing, long-winded, or gets sidetracked will bore visitors and drive them away.
5. Call to Action. Tell the visitor exactly what to do and how to make a transactions. If they can’t figure it out, they’ll leave.

Please note – while these are great starter principles for good website landing pages, you must always test this. For example, we often see simple designs outperforming flash, complex ones. Why is that? Answer: you let your users tell you, by testing the pages. (Tip: Try Google Web Optimizer!)

ACTION: Go to your page/website right now. Can you make some changes as per the list above? Do it – and you’ll have results in by tomorrow.

For even more tips, check out “Web Design for ROI” by Loveday and Niehaus, or “The Landing Page Handbook” by Marketing Sherpa Publishing.

P.S.

Here is a list of great landing page examples that you can get started with.