Custom Landing Pages Increase Social Relationships

Have you ever gone to someone's bio on social networks and had no idea what they do, what matters to them, or where to find out more? That is a common mistake made even by people who believe they know social media. 

Taking the time to create a custom landing page for social media can pay off. Some go so far as the create separate landing pages for each social network.

Where you send your followers on social networks is part of your all-important personal branding. Social account bios are typically very short so you can't do much more than provide an image, a glimpse into what you do, and a link to where to find out more.

Make the most of this link by sending it to a page that is optimized to make it obvious what you do. While some use sites like enthuse.me as their landing page, creating your own allows you to feature what is most important to you in any format you prefer.

What Should You Feature?

Anyone landing on your page should be able to immediately tell what you're all about and why they would care. Make your page visually appealing. If you have a business you want to feature, brand this page with the same logo, color scheme and design.

Lead with what is most important. If you want to sell services, make that your focal point. Have products in a store? Feature that first. Many will only read the first line or two, so make those count.

Adding a call-to-action or a lead generation forms is always a great idea. Here are a few of the best onlibe form builders for you to try.

How Can You Make Landing Pages?

If you have use WordPress, simply go to pages, add new and create a page there. In most WordPress themes only the pages you add to the menu appear in your navigation. You can make as many other pages as you wish. These can be standalone pages or link to or from the rest of your site.

Think about whether you want your landing pages to be indexed in the search engines. Hiding them from search allows you to measure traffic from a particular source. You may also be testing similar landing pages and want to avoid duplicate content penalties.

If you don't use WordPress, there are many landing page creation solutions that range from free to expensive. Before choosing one you need to decide whether you are going to be doing conversion optimization and split testing or not because most do not include the ability to do testing.

Even if you have never created a web page before, a landing page creator with a drag-and-drop function makes it pretty easy to pick up. One that has been around three years and allows you to create pages for free is IM Creator. This video will give you a good idea how it works:

Creating a page or site is free until you want to put it on a domain. The hosting costs from $5.95-$9.95 per month depending upon whether you pay monthly, annually or for three years at a time. If you're brand new to creating a page and only want a simple information site, choose a simple solution like this one. Their templates are well-suited for visual sites for photographers, artists, and businesses.

Landing Page Creation with Split Testing and Lists

If you plan to be marketing your services or products online, you really should be building your list from the start. You will also eventually want to test different landing pages to increase your conversions. This is more complicated so I encourage you to get a mentor. But if you're the do-it-yourself type who loves to figure things out, check out the new landing page software from GetResponse. 

You can try it free and there are tutorials on YouTube including their Landing Pages 101 Webinar. Instead of having to learn one system for list building and autoresponder setup, another for creating landing pages and a third for learning to split test you only have to learn one to do all four.

Stop Wasting Your Time on Social Media

Every time someone lands on your social media account on any social network you have the opportunity to start a relationship. Are you making the most of those opportunities? Think about the last time you saw a Twitter account with just the default egg Avatar and no bio. Did you follow that person? They are not encouraging follows. In the same way, not having a custom landing page is not encouraging relationship building.

Unless you are capturing visitors to your page on a list and interacting with them, what you do on social media is unlikely to generate leads or sales for you or your business. This is the difference between bloggers and internet marketers who make money and those who don't.

If you want to make money, get serious about list building, email marketing, creating custom landing pages and testing them. Do it yourself or find someone who can - but you must do it. 

Gail Gardner is a Small Business Marketing Strategist who provides services and mentoring at GrowMap.com. Ask her questions about marketing and social media in free Live Chat at SocialImplications.com. Follow her @GrowMap on Twitter.