This is one mistake that I did on my early blogging days. I wanted to experiment with paid advertising, so I created an AdWords account, and purchased a couple of banner ads as well.
I pointed all those ads to my homepage, put in the money, and crossed my fingers for the results.
After a month or so the traffic was coming, but it was not sticking around as I would have expected. The paid visitors were visiting few pages around the blog, and the conversion into subscribers was very low.
Then I thought: “Hmmm. There must be something I can do to improve the performance of those ads.”
After thinking and researching around a bit I came to answer: use a landing page!
Landing pages are as old as the Internet, I know, but somehow I was missing this key step, and I see many bloggers and webmasters doing the same mistake these days.
Whenever you buy advertising or plan a special event, it is essential to have a custom made landing page, tailored at the visitors that will be coming and structured with your goals in mind. This simple tweak can do wonders to your conversion rates.
Once I started using the landing page for my ads, twice as many paid visitors would end up subscribing to my blog.
If you want to check an example, you can find one of my landing pages here. There I have put a brief explanation of what the blog is about, an invitation for the visitor to subscribe, and a showcase with some of my best content.
As you can see, that page is much more friendly to a first time visitor than my homepage is.
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About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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