When you are setting up your own work from home business, it is important that you have a well designed and easy to use website for your customers to visit. Let's assume that your website is ready, all the products or services that you want to sell online are in place and you have an advertisement set to go to drive traffic to your website.
The next thing that you need to think about is your landing page and your squeeze page.
Although similar, there is a slight difference between the two. When marketing online, a landing page is a single web page that will usually have targeted sales copy that is an extension of an advertisement or link.
A squeeze page is a page created to obtain opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers and may not necessarily have any direct information about the product or service, other than hint at what is yet to come. The sole purpose of a squeeze page is to capture information for follow-up marketing.
Connections to both of these two types of pages are often linked to social media, email campaigns or search engine marketing.
These pages are slightly different to the main part of your home business website as they should only contain the information that is relevant to the advertisement or link that the visitor clicked on.
Some work from home business website owners direct their potential customers to the homepage of their websites. Homepages are often designed to serve multiple users and contains a lot of links to other pages, other products and services or even to other websites. There is not a clear 'call to action' and the visitor may leave and never return.
Your home business website is there to establish you as an authority in your field. It will have details about your products and services and why people should by you. Also, there will be links to other pages on your website and other general information.
This is why a landing pages and squeeze pages are important. They provide specific information that a visitor was looking for. When creating a landing or squeeze page for your work from home business, you must always design it with a clear focus on the customer directed onto that page. Therefore, it must be relevant to the contents that you placed on your ad or in your email link.
When to use a landing page or a squeeze page
As these two types of pages are quite similar, it can be a little confusing to know when to use one or the other. As a general rule, you would use a squeeze page for traffic that is generated from paid sources – such as banner ads or pay per click advertising. This is traffic that you control and the primary objective is to obtain the contact contact details so that you can contact them with follow-up marketing.
The page should have a brief summary of the benefits of your product and service and must offer something of value to the visitor in exchange for their name and email address. There should be no links to any other web pages or offers that you may have as these will distract the visitor.
You would use a landing page for your exiting contacts, ie, people who are already on your email marketing list. Again, the page should clearly outline the benefits of your specific product or service that you are offering but should contain more detail than a squeeze page. Remember that because this person is on your list, they have already expressed an interest in your products and services, so you can go into much more detail and seek to persuade the visitor to complete a transaction for an immediate or temporary sale.
Remember that people will buy from your home business when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell – so it is important to refine and amend your landing pages and squeeze pages to suit the specific audience with a specific product.
You can also see how successful your pages by gauging the conversation rate of your pages. This is done by comparing the numbers of visits to the page (or the number of times your ad or link was clicked) to the number of people who then took action, ie, entered their name and email or purchased a product.
To obtain your conversion rate, divide the total number of opt-ins or sales by the total number of clicks and multiply by 100. For example, if your ad had 500 click-throughs and 100 opt-ins, your conversation rate would be 20 % (100 divided by 500 multiplied by 100 = 20%).