Why You Shouldn’t Write Your Own Landing Pages Content

You have a product or service to sell and you have a website. Now what? Well, now you need to have landing pages. Many new businesses make the fatal mistake of thinking they can save money by creating their own landing page content. Though the upfront cost may be saved, the overall cost can hurt.

The sites mentioned below are all great sites. We do not mean to call them out; they just had the awesome luck of being the first ones we saw that made the mistakes we wanted to point out. Remember, these mistakes are common throughout landing page content creation. We are not bashing these sites – they excel in many areas, however, they could use improvements in the areas mentioned.

Mistake #1 – Not Actually Writing Content

There is something to be said about mystery. However, when you have a landing page, you want your potential customers or clients to actually understand what you are all about. Sure, videos are great, but having quality text on your landing page is crucial. Swagbucks, for example has a one minute video, a registration, and that’s about it. There’s a little bit of text here and there, but there is nothing to really tell you what the site is or how it works.

Mistake #2 – Putting the Real Information Under the Fold

Ok, so you have written the content you need, now you have your landing page up. However, you simply do not have it formatted well. You need to make sure that information is above the fold. Everything that gets the customer interested needs to be immediately visible, before they have to scroll. Vantage Point has a variety of great services that they offer, but you don’t see that until you scroll down the page.

Mistake #3 – Having the Same Content as Everyone Else

Have you ever done a search for weight loss pills and opened the first five or so links? Go ahead, we’ll wait. You will find almost the same content on all of them, even though they are landing pages for different websites. Though most of them have different text, which is great, they all use the same images or videos. And even when the text is different, it is almost always very similar. When you are researching how to write your landing page, you are likely to write it how you see others in your industry write. This will make you forgettable.

Mistake #4 – Using Too Many Colors, Fonts, Etc.

Simply put, too many colors, styles, and fonts get distracting and confusing. Take a look at the image above. There are upwards of five image styles and eight colors. That’s if you don’t include the gradient on the page title. This is really distracting and will pull potential customers away from the focus of your site.

Mistake #5 – Grammar, Punctuation, and Capitalization Mistakes

You are great at what you do. That means you will put the passion needed into your landing page. However, without having a professional go over your landing page, there are likely to be a slew of errors. In the image above there are spelling errors, punctuation errors, and capitalization problems.

When you want your website to stand out, make sure you don’t write your own landing page. Get an objective eye that knows how to market your site to give you a hand.

By Jon Correll