You’ve Created Your Landing Page - Now What?

Great Ways to Promote to Your Landing Page

Part 1: Social Media and Paid Advertising

Ever been in this situation before? Your product is ready to sell. Your landing page is built and published to the Internet. All of the links go to the correct places. Your email service provider is set up and standing by, ready to collect your leads. Your lead magnet is made and ready to be sent out. Your payment system is ready to accept your first sale. Now what? The fact is, the fun part of your work has just begun. Now that you’re set up and ready to go, the next step is to drive traffic to your landing page. Landing pages exist in a vacuum if you don’t do this next step. So how do you find people to visit your landing page if you don’t already have an audience? You promote your landing page. “But how do I do that?” I hear you cry. Don’t worry, over the next few weeks I’m going to give you several different ways you can start promoting your landing page. The two methods in today’s post are things you can do right away. You should start seeing results fairly quickly using both of these techniques. You don’t have to implement every single one, but I do recommend testing out two or three, so you have that traffic coming in. After all, your landing page won’t convert any leads if no one knows it exists. So, without further ado:

What You Need to Know to Start Driving Traffic To Your Landing Page

First, a few very basic rules that you should follow for all of the methods I’m covering in this series of blog posts. These rules may apply more to some promotion methods than to others, but in general, they’re really good things to keep in mind whenever you’re driving traffic to your landing pages. Rule # 1: Make sure you’re sending people to a landing page that matches the ad, post, tweet or other link they’re seeing! A lot of business owners, and major companies, use their homepage as a landing page. This can frustrate visitors as they’re expecting to see one thing and end up seeing something else entirely. The vast majority of visitors won’t go hunting for whatever it is your ad, post or tweet promised them, so it’s very likely you’ll lose potential customers. Rule #2: Make sure everything is actually working before you start driving traffic to your landing page. Test everything. Try out all of the links, all of the delivery systems, all of the payment systems. Also, if you used a test mode to try out your links or payment system, make sure to take your page out of test mode before launching your campaign. Rule #3: Always, always give something of value when you’re promoting your landing pages -- even if it’s the content you’re giving away on your landing page. Remember that people who are responding to your methods of promotion are giving you their time. You should give them something worthwhile that they enjoy, find helpful and will benefit from. This makes them more likely to opt-in or buy. They’re also more likely to recommend you to others. Rule #4: Don’t stress out. This can take time. As you push more and more traffic to your landing page, you’ll see better results. If you’re a Leadpages member, you can take comfort in the fact that your landing page is optimized for conversion. This means as soon as you start getting site visitors, you should see results. And now, on to the methods...

How To Use Social Media to Promote Your Landing Page

According to WeAreSocial.net, there are more than 2 billion active social media accounts in the world. Many people use social media to get recommendations from friends on various products, services and solutions to their problems. You can use social media to get your product in front of the millions of pairs of eyeballs staring at their computer screens or mobile devices. Believe it or not, you don’t want that. Please pay very close attention to this. You don’t want millions of random people to see your posts on any social media platform. You want the people who would be interested in your product to see your posts. Unless you’re in the marketing department for McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, you don’t need everyone in the social media world to see your landing page, because many of them won’t want what you have to offer. So how do you drill down to get to the people who would find your product appealing?

Research Your Audience!

First, figure out where your customers hang out on social media. For example, your ideal audience may have a larger following on LinkedIn than Facebook, or Twitter rather than Pinterest. You need to know this so you aren’t wasting your time posting on social media platforms that yield little to no results. Next, look at your current followers, friends and contacts on the social media platforms you currently use. Are any of them likely to be interested in your product? Would they share the information with friends of theirs who would be good prospects? Most likely, they would. So make sure you use your current networks to get the word out about your new venture. Every social media platform has some sort of “groups” function. Many of these are public, which means you can join in, even if you don’t know anyone there. Each of these groups tends to have a topic. You can find groups focused on just about anything on social media, from science fiction conventions to health and business to golf. When you find the groups that can benefit from your product, using them to build a good relationship with the group users and posting about the benefits of your product can help drive traffic to your landing page. If you’re not sure which platform your potential customers use more, try posting on several and see which ones get a better response. Important tips:

• Make sure the group doesn’t have rules against promoting products. You will be removed by a moderator if you do this in a group with these rules.
• Always contribute something of value to the group, along with (or instead of) promoting your product. (There’s more about this below.)

While you're building your overall social media strategy, think about creating more than one landing page to post for your different social media platforms. Also, don't forget rule #1: Every post you make on social media should correspond to the landing page you're linking to. You want to make sure that when people go to your landing page, they see what they’re expecting to see. For instance, if you want to create an offer that you’re only going to promote on Facebook. Build a landing page that talks about this “special giveaway for Facebook users only” and then post a link to this special offer in your Facebook news feed. In LeadPages™, you can duplicate any of your existing landing pages so you can quickly and easily modify them to fit these situations.

Help, Help, Help, Sell

This is an idea that copywriter Nick Usborne always recommends. You don’t want to be that pushy, annoying person who only communicates about himself and his product. Instead you want to be the helpful, trustworthy, respected expert who everyone turns to for advice. This means you have to do more than just promote your own landing page and product on social media. You need to offer useful information to your followers and friends so they come to see you as helpful and look forward to reading your posts. For example, if you find a cool article about something related to your product, retweet it or post it in your news feed so your followers can learn about it too. Write posts that offer genuine advice without referring to your product all the time. And yes, advertise your product, but make sure you show how it can actually solve a problem your followers might have.

Images Matter

People are naturally drawn to images. You’ll notice I use them in this post. In the same way, you should always use images in your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Instagram posts. Don’t despair. You don’t have to be a designer, photographer or artist to do this. Instead, look to your landing page. You probably already have an image or two somewhere on your landing page, right? So use those. For that matter, take a screenshot of your landing page (or the top of your landing page if it’s a long one) and use it as an image, like Chris Ducker did in the example below. [caption id="attachment_4990" align="aligncenter" width="596"]

Chris tweeted this image that he took from…[/caption] [caption id="attachment_4991" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

This landing page featuring a webinar that he’s promoting with Pat Flynn.[/caption]

Hashtags

Just in case you haven’t been paying attention to the social media world for the last eight years, a hashtag is the pound or number sign on your keyboard. If you’re a musician, it’s the one that looks like a sharp symbol. (A friend of mine who is a music teacher is forever correcting her students who ask about the hashtags on their sheet music.) These little #s have become incredibly powerful in social media, because they make it very simple to sort through social media for specific topics. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, you might do what LeadPages™ user Wilton Brown did here in this Tweet. [caption id="attachment_5008" align="aligncenter" width="591"]

Wilton Brown uses the hashtags #marketing and #realestate to help people find the link to his landing page.[/caption] Search for hashtag results that are related to your product and use those hashtags in your posts. You can also create your own hashtag and encourage others to use it. Please note: don’t overuse the hashtag. Limit yourself to one or two hashtags per post at most. Otherwise your social media posts can look spammy. Also don’t string too many words together when you make your own. You want it to be easy for others to search and find.

Frequency Matters

With over 2 billion users, social media is a constant flood of information. This means you can't simply post on social media once about your product and hope your followers will find it. Our feeds get filled up with new stuff all the time, so you can’t expect that the people you’re targeting will actually see your post, unless you post it multiple times. Posting once or twice a week is totally reasonable, doesn’t take a huge amount of your time and won’t overwhelm people and cause them to ignore you. I also recommend using a program like Hootsuite, Buffer or Edgar to schedule your posts in advance so you can keep up with this level of frequency.

Tips for Specific Social Media Platforms

Facebook: If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest country on earth, according to a January article published by Huffington Post. Facebook now has more than 1.4 billion users. Somewhere in that mass of humanity are people who have problems that your product can solve. Here are some simple, free, things you can do on Facebook to promote your landing page:

• Post in your own news feed.
• Create a landing page for your product and promote it to your friends.
• If you use Leadpages, you can publish your landing page as Facebook tab. Then you can post that in your news feed and drive traffic to your tab.
• Leadpages members can use our One-Click Facebook Registration feature on their landing pages. This feature auto-populates your Facebook email address on your webinar registration pages or opt-in pages, so your subscribers can opt-in with a single click. This is a big deal, because most people use their best email address for Facebook

Twitter: Twitter lets people sum up their lives, opinions or whatever else they want to talk about, in 140 characters. It’s great for grabbing attention quickly and directing people to landing pages and more in-depth content. Twitter has more than 288 million users and was the first social media platform to use hashtags. Here are a couple simple, free things you can do on Twitter to promote your landing page:

• Tweet regularly; Depending on your content strategy, you could tweet anywhere from 10 to 30 times a day. Again, this is about providing value, so you should be tweeting about more than just your product. Share blog posts, trainings, ideas, articles, quotes and other engaging information that your target audience will find interesting. This is how a lot of people develop a following on Twitter.
• Add the URL for a landing page designed to collect leads in your description on Twitter. This is a great idea because it’s the first thing people see when they go to your Twitter profile. We have to give credit to LeadPages member Ian Brodie for this idea. He created a specific landing page for his Twitter profile, which you can see here.

Before you do this, please make sure the link is live! You don’t want to drive people to a broken link.

Google+ (G+): Google’s social media platform was designed to compete with Facebook, but people use Google+ very differently than they use other social media platforms. There are a lot less pictures of cute fuzzy animals and a lot more groups of like-minded people who are interested in the same things. Here are a few simple, free, things you can do to promote your landing page on Google+:

• Post in your news feed.
• Join Communities that might benefit from your product. For instance, LeadPages™ has a Google+ Community page just to answer your product questions.
• Host a Google+ Hangout and talk to people about your product. This is great, because it gives prospective customers a chance to ask you questions and you get to answer them directly.

[caption id="attachment_4997" align="alignnone" width="932"]

Bob The Teacher uses our Google+ Community to promote a checklist and webinars he's promoting.[/caption]

Pinterest: Pinterest remains popular with a lot of people, who use it for everything from showing off their latest knitting projects to marking interesting articles so they can find them easily later. Businesses use Pinterest to get their products in front of these people. You can find just about anything “pinned” to someone’s Pinterest board. We even found a board of LeadPages™ landing pages. Here are a couple simple, free, things you can do to promote your landing page on Pinterest:

• Create a board for your product.
• Create a board for things that are associated with your product.

[caption id="attachment_5024" align="alignnone" width="1024"]

This Pinterest board post goes to...[/caption] [caption id="attachment_5025" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

This landing page for a Montessori crash course.[/caption]

LinkedIn: This is where the businesses and professionals hang out. LinkedIn is designed for networking more than it is for sharing daily life. Lots of companies look for new employees here and a lot of freelancers drum up business here. For your own business, it's also a great place to start promoting your product -- especially if you're in the B2B market. Here are a few simple, free, things you can do to promote your landing page on LinkedIn:

• Post information about your product in your news feed. Yes, LinkedIn has a news feed and this will broadcast the post to all of the people who follow you.
• Join groups and talk about how your product can help group members (along with other helpful advice, of course.)
• Message your connections. You have the ability to send a message to everyone you’re connected directly with on LinkedIn (1st connections). Reach out to them and let them know what you’re doing.
• Write an article and put a picture of your landing page in the article. Kevin Kermes of “All Things Career” did this and we were so impressed, we put it in one of our Landing Page Roundups.

Instagram: Instagram is where everyone is posting their photos these days. The nice thing about Instagram is, you can sync your photo sharing with other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, so you only have to post once. Lots of businesses are using Instagram to promote their products through pictures and with hashtags. Here are a few simple, free, things you can do to promote your landing page on Instagram:

• Take a picture of yourself and use to send people to your landing page.
• Take picture of your landing page and send people to it.
• Make a short Instagram video of your product and use it to send people to your landing page.
• Use hashtags to make your images more searchable.

[caption id="attachment_5002" align="aligncenter" width="1024"]

Homegrownfit uses this great image, along with hashtags, on Instagram to promote their landing page.[/caption]

Go Forth and Post!

These ideas ought to get you started on ways to promote your post via social media. I would like to thank the fabulous Kat Von Rohr, our Social Media Manager and Head of Promotions for all of her insights in this section. When you post your new LeadPages™ landing page, make sure to Tweet her at @LeadPages and let her know what forms of social media you're using to promote it. Now, on to...

2. How Start Driving Traffic With Paid Media

Paid online advertising ranges from the posts that pop up in your Twitter and Facebook feeds to the ads in the sidebars or at the top of search engines and web pages. Using these methods can get your product in front of a lot of potential customers who have never heard of you or your business and can increase conversions. Yes, paid media advertising can be expensive. However, if you do it right, it can pay off quite well. Here are some important things to remember when using paid media advertising.

Where to Advertise?

The top four places to advertise these days are:

• Facebook ads: These are the small advertisements that pop up in your sidebar or show up randomly in your Facebook news feed. As I mentioned earlier, Facebook has more than 1.4 billion users. Not all of those people will be your potential customers. Facebook has its own system that helps you drill down to find those people. Our Marketing Educator, Bob Jenkins, created an awesome Facebook Advertising System Course, which I highly recommend you check out if you want to advertise on Facebook.
• Twitter: Advertising on Twitter is ridiculously easy and very reasonably priced. It can also get your ads in front of a lot of new prospective customers. Like Facebook, Twitter has good ways to help you advertise to folks who might actually be interested in your product.
• Google Ads and PPC: These are the paid listings that show up at the top and on the right side of your search engine results page (SERP). You bid on keywords and the more you pay, the more often your ad shows up.
• Display or Banner Ads: These are paid advertisements that can appear in multiple places on websites. Often when you visit a particular website, you'll see display ads for that website in multiple places online for a while. It can feel like these ads are following you around online (it's because they often are). These are known as retargeting ads. As a marketer, they are a great way of getting your brand or product in front of many potential customers.

All of these places are very effective for paid advertising. You don’t have to do all four, but choose at least one if you have the budget.

Be Targeted

Unless you have an unlimited budget it’s important to create targeted ads that are directed at the right audience. Fortunately, paid media platforms have made this pretty easy for you. They have lots of ways to help you get your ads in front of the right people and spend your budget wisely.

• Search terms: Also referred to as keywords, these are the words a paid media system uses to associate your ads with different words people enter into search engines or to associate with various display ads. When you enter your search terms into a given system, don’t try for the high-level terms, like “weight loss.” The competition is intense for these keywords and you’re going to pay a lot and get little return. Instead, drill down to the core of what your product actually is or does. For instance, you could say “weight loss using diet and exercise” or “weight loss for diabetics.” If you have a local business, try using your zip code, city or neighborhood as part of your search term, like “weight loss clinic in 60611” or “River North weight loss clinic.”
• Interests: Most paid media systems let you specify interests as part of your targeting. So if you’re selling a fitness product you can target people interested in exercise, yoga, weight lifting and more.
• Demographics: This lets you drill down even further into who your best prospects really are. If your fitness product is really for women, you can target women who are 20 to 40 years old, married and living in a specific city or region.
• Associations: You can also target by people involved in certain associations. For instance, I am a Celtic musician, so I would use this feature to target people who are involved in various Irish and Scottish associations to advertise my music.
• Look-Alike Audiences: Once you have proper tracking in place, some systems allow you to find traffic that "looks like" your current website visitors, customers and social media followers. These are people who have similar interests as your target audience, but may not know about you or your product.

Just so you know, LeadPages™ has landing pages specifically to use with PPC (pay per click) and Google Ad campaigns. These pages fit any restrictions these systems may have on landing pages associated with these ads and they are fully optimized for conversion. We also have a Facebook Ad landing page coming out in the next few weeks.

Set a Budget

All paid advertising systems will let you set a specific daily, weekly or monthly budget. Once your budget is spent, your ads don’t show up until you change something in the system. “So how much do I spend?” you ask. I asked Andrew Scherr, our Paid Media Manager that question and he said, “Whatever makes it profitable for you. You can spend as little as a dollar a day or as much as a million dollars a month. It just depends on what one customer is worth to you.” When I pressed further, he said that between $100 and $500 a month is reasonable for a small campaign. Fortunately, all of the paid media systems have a manual bidding system and a built-in optimization system in terms of when your ads run, how much you pay, etc. Especially if you’re a beginner, take advantage of this. It will make things much easier for you.

Use What You’ve Got

You don’t have to labor over every single ad. If you’ve already tweeted to your Twitter followers or posted to your Facebook wall, use that post and make it into a corresponding ad. As I said above, use the imagery from your landing page as part of your ads. Use text from your landing page in the ads as well. This helps people connect what they’re seeing in the ad to what they see on your landing page. [caption id="attachment_5010" align="aligncenter" width="482"]

An example of a LeadPages™ Facebook post for our Webinar Funnel System course where we used an image from our corresponding landing page.[/caption]

Use Images and Text

Facebook and Twitter are great for images, so you should use them whenever possible. That being said, make sure you include text as well. Pictures may speak a thousand words, but a good call to action will get you more conversions. The headline on your landing page makes great text, as does a compelling part of the text on the page. Depending on the medium, some of the banner or display ad systems won’t let you use images in your ads, so always have a text back-up. The system will automatically substitute this if images aren’t allowed. Google AdWords Search ads must be all text and should be short and compelling. There are plenty of books out there on how to write PPC ads, but the most important thing to remember in all of your advertising is to answer the question anyone who reads your ad asks: “what’s in it for me?”

How Hard is it to Run a Paid Advertising Campaign?

Setting your target audience and making your ads can be the most time-consuming part of running a paid media campaign. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help you with this. Bob talks about some of these in his Facebook Advertising System Course, so I do recommend you check it out. Once you get a campaign up and running, you can check it every few days to make sure things are going smoothly and you’re getting the results you want. If you’re not getting good results, you will want to change things to improve your conversion rate. Some people set up their advertising campaigns and only check them occasionally. Others like Andrew, check them eight or nine times a day. It really depends on what you’re trying to do and the results you want to achieve.

How Do I Know If It’s Worth It To Keep Going?

This is another question I asked Andrew. He said, “If you’re one or two sales away from being profitable, optimize your ads until you reach that profitable point. If it’s more like six or seven sales away, turn off the campaign and try again.” Ultimately, this will come down to “how much is one customer worth to you?” I know of solo practice lawyers who spend $50,000 a month on Pay Per Click (PPC) ads like Google Ads and similar systems on other search engines. That may seem like a lot of money, until you consider that one good case can make them hundreds of thousands, to millions of dollars, depending on the type of case and the type of law they practice. You need to consider the same thing for your business. Think about what you would have to earn on a single ad to be profitable.

Can I Hire Someone to Do This For Me?

Of course you can. If you’ve got so much going on that you just don’t have the time, delegate, delegate, delegate. Here are a few tips on hiring a paid media manager or agency:

• Never spend more money on paid media management than you spend on your campaign. If someone promises you the moon for a small ad budget, but charges you an arm and a leg, you’re not going to break even, and you’re probably not going to get the results you want.
• A percentage of what you spend on your campaign is a good measure for what to pay for this service. So if you spend $5,000 a month on a paid advertising campaign and your paid media manager gets $500, that’s pretty fair.
• Use online reviews to help you choose a provider. If you do a search for “paid media agency reviews” or “paid media manager reviews” you should come up with quite a bit of useful information. If you’re looking for a paid media manager, you can always list your request on our Jobs Board. Freelancers with many talents look for work there.

Paid media campaigns can be incredibly effective to build your list and to sell your product, even if you’re just starting out. Each system has lots of information, tutorials and guides to get you started and to get the best results from their particular system. My profound thanks to Andrew Scherr, our Paid Media Manager. His help was invaluable in writing this section.The information he provide here will give you a great start in getting into this area of promotion.

This Should Get You Started

These two methods ought to keep you busy for at least a week and start driving traffic to your landing page. I sincerely hope you have what you need to start successful social media and paid media campaigns to promote your landing page. To help you with each of these methods, we've created an easy-to-use checklist so you can keep track of all of these steps. Click on the link below to download it.

In the next post in this series I’ll be talking about blogging, for yourself and as a guest blogger, and using search engine optimization (SEO) to drive organic traffic from search engines. What do you do to promote your landing pages? Please use the comments section below to let us know your best tactics. Let me know if you’ve used any of these methods and how they worked for you. If there is something specific you want me to cover in this series, please leave that in the comments section too.