Every online business, if they are at all serious about making their website profitable, needs to be thinking about their visitors when they create landing pages. Landing pages are where your users arrive at your website – depending on where individual pages appear in search results, it could be one of a number of pages and not just your homepage. You can more accurately direct your visitors to particular landing pages by using search engine optimisation techniques.
Your landing page (or pages) is the most important page on your website as it is the first moment your visitor gets to see what you are like and first impressions really count online. If you don’t grab them with this page they can easily click away in a split second, never to return again, but if you do grab them, you at least have a chance of getting them to make a purchase. It takes a lot to get a customer from landing page to payment processing, but by putting your best foot forward at the start you multiply your chances exponentially.
Grab their Attention
First thing you need to do is grab their attention. You need to let them know instantly that they are on the right page for what they are looking for and why you are the best and they should stick around and use your services. Create a solid heading which is clear and eye catching that does this then use a sub heading to elaborate a bit more. Having a high quality image right next to or underneath your headings will help to catch the eye and (if the image is right) reinforce what your headings say. Follow this up with some nicely worded copy that offers a slightly more in depth explanation of what your site is for and how it can benefit the visitor.
Reassure your Visitor
If your visitor has stuck around long enough to find out that this site does what they you need it to, next you need to convince them that this is the best site for them to use for this service and that they can trust it. After all they may well have looked at a dozen other similar sites. You can do this by providing good testimonials on your landing page and following it up with security certificates that show your site is safe. You could also include some examples of popular products to try to spark your visitor’s interest.
Get them Moving
Final step: you now need to get your visitor moving forward onto a page with products that they can buy. You can do this by basically demanding that they click on something. By providing a clear, bold and brightly coloured button with an encouraging message on it, you should hopefully get a large portion of your visitors to take the next step into your site and to be on track to make a purchase and make a discernable boost to your internet merchant account.
Statistics recently announced across the national press have shown just how disastrous both the coldest December in 100 years and the lingering atmosphere of the economic downturn has been for the UK retail sector.
Did you know that social media locations have become the number one place for people to spend their time online? As people find staying in touch a more and more enjoyable experience and a better place to hang out than in front of the television most businesses have wised up, got themselves a website and 
It all depends on you really…
With companies such as Google, Facebook, Cisco, Intel and British Telecom all expressing an interest in a newly proposed ‘silicon valley’, now would seem like a great time to be doing business in the UK. The proposal, pitch by PM David Cameron, is based in and around Shoreditch and the Olympic Park in London and is aimed at encouraging a swath of new innovative companies, as well as big name technology brands to set up shop in the UK at a new purpose built global hub.
Google is one of the biggest companies in the world and has a near monopoly over the billions of searches made through search engines every day. This gives them rather a lot of power over the internet. Luckily for us, Google is quite nice and has the philosophy “Don’t Be Evil” which means that they have your best interests at heart.
You may have one of the best websites in the business, with all the latest Flash functionalities and interactive charts rinsed through your site, but if you don’t have an active Twitter account for your business you are already missing out on a significant number of potential customers.
Google’s new way of presenting search results has caused a bit of stir in all areas of online business and web marketing around the globe. Their new ‘faster’ system gives you search engine results as you type. So when you are looking for ‘cheese’ for example – as soon as you type ‘c’ you will start receiving results, then when you type ‘h’ you get more results and so on. Basically Google are trying to predict your search term before you have finished typing it. Sounds good? But what effect will this have on your online business?
With news brewing that Royal Mail, the UK’s national mail service, is in line to be either sold or privatised, this could well spell a boon for online business owners up and down the country. With a large portion of business done by post still, be it mail order cataloguing, direct sales marketing with flyers and leaflets or by sales letter, the fact that it may soon be harder or more expensive to send out large amounts of mail could well have an impact for online businesses.
Net neutrality has been a phrase thrust around the news recently, but what would its demise mean for online business? Well, net neutrality is the principle of user access to the internet being equal for every person surfing the net no matter where they are, what they are doing or who their service provider is. The fear is that internet service providers could throttle their bandwidth, giving some users faster connection than others. This would allow them to give preferential treatment to those who pay for say, an internet TV service, over those wanting to watch a video from a regular website.
