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Last time we talked in general about Landing Pages. Today I want to give you a little better understanding about how many and how varied landing pages can be.

First, remember that before you can send anyone to your content from a promo, you must have a place to send them. We call these “Landing Pages.”  Think of landing an aircraft.  You wouldn’t send up a plane from Europe If it didn’t have somewhere to land, right?  Similarly, when you do push marketing (and sometimes pull market), you need to have a destination, a landing page ready to go.

That sounds very simple, but good landing pages don’t just happen, and GREAT landing pages can mean the difference between a sale and no sale, a subscriber and just a visitor.  Now I will be honest. I fret a lot about my landing pages, and I wish I had more technical knowledge to get mine to look like some I’ve seen.  If you’re like me, do your best to make your landing page excellent, and then as you learn more, keep revising.

There are several types of landing pages you will want to think about making.

Website – Although I don’t recommend sending every promo to this landing page, you do want it to be as good and as clear as it can be.  Remember also that most of the time If someone types your name into a search, this is the page they will find.  So does the theme blend with your writing?   Do the colors work with the theme?  Is it pleasing to the eye?  Is the layout clear and straightforward?  When you get your website going, have some friends come and look it over.  Do all the links work and go where they are supposed to?  Watch for misspellings, typos, and grammatical errors.  You are, after all, an author and people expect your writing to be near perfect. Don’t give them a reason to leave in the first 30 sentences.

Book Pages – Book landing pages are usually designed by the book seller—such as Amazon, but sometimes like with Amazon, you have a lot of control as to how “sellable” your landing page looks.  We will go through these points in coming lessons.

Author Central – on Amazon, you want to set up your Author Central page and make sure all of your books are listed.  This can be a great overall landing page.

Blog posts – Blog posts when done right can be invaluable to your promotions.  Remember pull-push?  Well, a blog post landing page can have pics of your books and info about you in a blog column with great content (an article) in the post section, and you can have a push market tag for one of your books at the end of the article.  Best of all, once you set up a blog post, you can point back to it forever!  So remember when you write these to think:  timeless.  You want something that 3 or 5 years later, you can point back to it, and it still has value to visitors.

Guest posts – Being on someone else’s blog creates a great landing page, and again, you can point back to these even after the initial run (so keep a list of them!)  Oh, and this is also a great way to repackage your blog posts and let them go to work for you again.  In fact, one really good article could run over and over again on various blogs indefinitely. Also, although you are not in control of the layout, etc., remember to include a link back to one of YOUR landing pages.  The host should be willing to give this since that is your payment for free content.

Bookshelf  –  Because I have so many books, I like having a bookshelf landing page or one that lists all of my available books.  That way visitors can see they have a wide range of choices if they choose to read my writing.

Interviews – Like guest blogs, these are great.  You do the interview and you can then promo and point back to it indefinitely. After a few days or a week, you can also copy the interview to your site or blog for archiving, which you can then point back to indefinitely as well.

Character Interviews  — If you write fiction, you’re going to want to try your hand at these challenging types of interviews because they seem very popular to the reading public.  Again, if this is a character interview for another website, include a tag!

Reviews – Reviews can be stand-alone landing pages or they can be one element in a great Amazon landing page.  We will discuss reviews in coming lessons.

It is worth putting thought and effort into your landing pages, and we will discuss each in greater depth.  For now, consider where your strengths lie and where you might need to work.  For example, have you done several interviews but you have few reviews?  Or maybe you have never taken the time to get your Amazon landing page in order.   Don’t worry.  We’ll walk you through all of it.  Get ready to have some fun!

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