With any type of advertising campaign the less clutter you have on a page the better. This is why it is beneficial to use Landing Pages for your offers paid or free. A landing page is a simple page that encourages the visitor to perform an action. This might be filling out a form, watching a video, providing you with their email address or liking your fan page on Facebook.

While a good landing page is often small and unobtrusive there is more to this than meets the eye. It takes time and effort to create a landing page that works.

First your landing page should have a good headline or title. In this headline you want to catch the visitor’s attention and make them want to know more. Often a good image or even a video is used to entice the visitor to stay on your page longer.

Research shows that you have approximately 5 seconds to get your visitor to take the appropriate action, otherwise they will click away and you will have lost them.

This is why it is important to have your action box above the fold. The fold in internet marketing is the portion of a website which is displayed when a site loads onto your browser without having to scroll down.

After your headline you need to have the benefits and features of your product listed. This does not have to be a lengthy explanation instead it is better to use a bullet list of the features. Often 5 or 6 benefits or features are good enough.

Somewhere on the page will be the action box. This could be the link to Like a Facebook Page or an opt in form that needs to be filled out. Many marketers find that asking for less information sees more results. So it is suggested that you only ask for an email address, this makes people more likely to subscribe. When you ask for more personal information this can be off putting and people tend not to fill it out anyway.

Color is important on your landing page and you will find that many designers use red for their headlines and subtitles. You can experiment with various colors on your landing page. It is often a great idea to use more than one landing page and then rotate how often you use them. This way you can see which one brings you the best results and then use that one to generate leads for your business.