Adding new pages to your website certainly can be a major pain. For many of us, this involves tracking down a webmaster and competing for their time. Once your page is finally up, your site can quickly become cluttered and unnecessarily complex as you add more and more pages over time.

Landing pages are a great alternative that let you deliver a great message without adding extra bulk to your website. By creating a unique page dedicated to a specific campaign, you have a much better chance of keeping visitors focused on the message you’re trying to get across. Best of all? They’re really easy to set up!

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a great way to inform people about a specific event, promotion or product. It consists of one page with information and a single action that a visitor can take.

Let’s say that you’re a freelance graphic designer and have a website showcasing your portfolio. You then may decide to make a landing page focused exclusively on your work with newspaper ads — something that is just a small fraction of your overall portfolio. The landing page could showcase your best newspaper ads and a write-up all about your love of newspapers. You then can accompany all of this information with a contact form for people who are interested in hiring you for designing their newspaper ads.

One of the best parts about a landing page is that because it is focused on a single message and outcome, you have a much better chance of effectively speaking to the right people. Once you’ve identified a niche audience, you can custom-tailor your message to speak most efficiently to that group. Plus, your landing page doesn’t have to have the other links found in your site’s navigation bar, so you’re able to keep their attention focused exactly where you want it.

Creative Ways to Use a Landing Page

Before you even think of logging into your CMS, here are some reasons why you should use a landing page instead:

Promote Something that Will Expire

It’s great to have seasonal promotions and limited time offers, but what happens after those events come and go? There’s no point having someone land on the section of your website urging them to sign up for your awesome Y2K party. With a landing page, you can easily delete it once your campaign is done and it’ll be like it never happened.

Prove a Concept

Thinking about launching a new service? Before you go and change your whole site’s design to promote your recipe blog’s new catering service, use a landing page to make sure that people actually want it. If you get dozens of form submissions then you probably have a viable idea; if it’s been 3 months and no one has reached out then you can get back to the drawing board and think of your next great idea instead.

Test Ideas for your Main Site

Another way you can use landing pages to improve your website is by A/B testing. Does “give us a shout” get more signups than “speak to a representative”? What about a big high-res image compared to no image at all? Test them out on landing pages and then put the winners on your main site.

Speak to a Niche Audience

It can be hard to tailor your website to effectively target the many different demographics that visit your site. Instead, you can create many unique landing pages that speak more efficiently to niche groups and send that traffic to those pages. When people fill out the contact forms on these pages, you’ll also have a way better idea of what they’re interested in and how you can best help them.

How to Get Started

If you’re ready to start making your own landing pages, we’ve partnered with our friends at Unbounce to help get you going. Just click this link to try them out and get 50% off for 3 months!

And of course, be sure to give your landing page a great domain from Hover: