Being an artful guy, I tend to want to WOW visitors to my blog with creative illustrations, motion graphics and colorful arrays. I’ve learned that it’s really stupid to loose customers and prospects over useless clutter and landing pages with stuff that doesn’t relate to our purpose or call to action.

Simplicity is often overlooked when designing websites for business.   If your objective is drive a certain behavior, then it’s critical to be very specific about what you want a person to do once they get there.  First of all, don’t send people to a general company website if you’re trying to build a subscriber list or sell a specific product.   This is all too common and creates confusion in the mind of your prospective client.

Create separate landing pages with unique domain names that are descriptive of the product or service they are looking for.  Yes, I said “they.”  The page is about them, not us.  The old axiom; “what’s in it for me.” always applies in web marketing.  Your page must be benefit driven, simple, and easy for them to make a decision. Best of all make them want to “share it with others.”

Here’s a list of really important “Simple” principles for your landing or squeeze page design.

• Focus on one objective for each page. Define your objective and drive everything on the page to it.

• Sales pages should flow vertically focused on the center of the page. Vertical single-column copy through the center of the page according to the experts consistently performs better than other layouts.  Left or right columns should be used to support movement toward the objective such as testimonials.  Testimonies can help validate and reduce a buyer’s anxiety, helping them respond to the “Call to Action” and push the order button.

• Get rid of elements that distract from the flow toward the objective.   If photos, fancy fonts,  and graphic images don’t move your prospect quickly to the desired action then dump’um.    Size, motion, colors and shapes can either distract or draw attention toward the call to action.

• Avoid using off-page links.  This is critical! By providing off page links, you’re committing marketing suicide and sending your prospects off into cyberspace to fend for them self.   Keep their attention focused on the page or you’ll loose them.   Also eliminating the number of clicks it takes to act, you keep a visitor longer and more engaged with your message.  Videos are great ways to increase your “time on page” and improve your SEO rankings.

• It’s Smart to Share. We all learned in our childhood the merits of sharing with others.  So why not make it easy for someone to share your product or service with the push of a button on Twitter and Facebook?  The more the merrier.  This can be done on the page or on the back-end within your auto-responder email.  As Seth Godin relates in his book, Idea Virus, make your page simple and easy to spread like a sneeze.

In conclusion: Test, test, test.  It’s OK to test a few different landing pages with unique SEO enriched domain names that actually describe what’s on the landing page.    The main point is to clearly define your objective and keep it simple stupid sweetheart.   That sounds a lot nicer.  Make it a great day!      Mark