How to Create a Landing Page Easy (Step-By-Step) From Scratch

Have you ever wanted to launch a quick marketing campaign but didn't want to bother creating or updating your own website?

In that case, you may already know the solution to launch this campaign without having to worry about your website: landing pages!

Whether you're looking to sell products, generate leads, or promote an event, landing pages give you all the capability and flexibility to launch your campaign in moments.

Landing pages are a marketer's best friend. But only if you know how to create them effectively. Not quite there? No need to worry! In this article, I'll show you how to create a high-converting landing page from scratch in nine easy steps.

If you need a refresher or are looking for some additional guidance, consider reading our article explaining what landing pages are (and how they differ from your website), and this one detailing best practices for landing page you should follow if you want maximum results.

How to create a landing page in 9 easy steps

• Specify a goal for your landing page
• Research your market and competitors
• Research what appeals to you visually
• Choose your landing page builder
• Choose your web host
• Choose your domain name
• Add your content and customize the layout
• Connect your tech stack
• Preview and publish

1. Specify a goal for your landing page

If you want to create a landing page effectively, you must first specify the purpose of your page.

Although landing pages can serve many purposes, marketers typically use them to achieve one of three goals:

• To generate sign-ups or leads
• To promote a product or service
• To drive click-throughs to another page

Once you know the goal you want to achieve, finding the right template and preparing the content to feature on your page will be much easier.

Different pages can serve different goals.

2. Study your market and your competitors

After specifying the objective of your landing page, it's time to research your market and your competitors.The aim of this research is to discover:

• What information are your potential customers interested in?
• What content your competitors have posted to capture them

Keep an eye on the language your target audience uses and the questions they ask when talking about your topic. This will help you create a more compelling landing page and overcome any fears or objections from your potential customers.

When researching your competitors, note the type of information and content they use to drive conversions. See if anything stands out that will resonate with your audience, such as customer reviews, customer photos from social media, trusted logos, or a countdown timer increasing the sense of urgency.

Landing page example from Snappr including a great headline, supporting subheading, clear CTA, trust signal, and social proof. For more ideas, check out these landing page examples.

3. Look for what appeals to you visually

Now is the time to find a template that will match your audience and help you achieve your goals.

There are three main ways to find good landing page templates.

The most obvious is to search for them on Google or Pinterest. To save time, you can narrow your search by specifying the type of landing page template you're looking for. For example, ebook landing page templates.

Search results for the term “landing page templates” on Pinterest

The second way is to go to a website like Envato Market or Template Monster. There you will be able to filter your results based on your type of business, the content management system (CMS) you want to use to manage your landing page (e.g. WordPress) or individual features your page should have.

Envato Market showing the available landing pages for various platforms.

And finally, if you are already considering using a particular landing page builder, you can view the available landing pages in their gallery.

This is often the best option if you are less technical or want to build your landing page efficiently. Using these tools will allow you to skip the manual process of uploading, importing, then updating your template every time something new pops up in WordPress or whatever CMS you decide to use.

Below you can see the free landing page templates available in GetResponse website builder. They're fast, modern, and you can also fully customize them to match your brand.

Free landing page templates available in the GetResponse Website Builder.

4. Choose your landing page builder

Before we go any further, let me admit that it is actually possible to create a landing page without an actual landing page builder.

If you're a web developer or someone with a knack for design and HTML/CSS, you'll be able to create a great landing page without the need for external tools (you'll still need to host your page destination somewhere). But I do not recommend this approach, even if you are a technician.

The idea behind using landing pages in your marketing campaigns is to be able to publish them quickly. You want to be able to create your landing page and drive traffic to it in moments, not months. A good landing page builder will help you create a landing page hassle-free and in no time.

Most landing page tools, including the free website builder GetResponse, offer a variety of features that will help you set up landing pages quickly and with confidence. These include:

• Prebuilt landing templates
• Design and styling options
• Free hosting and SSL
• Mobile optimization
• Free stock photos
• A/B testing
• Performance metrics
• Optimization features for search engines
• Integrations with analytical tools, like Google Analytics
• Integrations with marketing tools, like webinar or email marketing software

To choose the best landing page builder for your business, I recommend looking back at your research results from the previous steps and thinking about what other marketing tools you'll be using with your landing page.

You can create high-converting landing pages with any landing page tool. But you want to make sure that the platform you choose not only offers great landing page templates, but is also user-friendly and works well with your existing marketing tech stack (or matches to the one you want to create).

If you want to see the GetResponse free website builder in action, check out the video below:

5. Choose your web host

Most landing page builders offer free hosting, so if you've decided to work with one of the best tools, you can browse this section.

When you create a landing page yourself, you also need to decide where it will be hosted, i.e. where all your files and images will be stored.

Choosing the right web host is important for several reasons:

• Your hosting will affect your landing page speed and performance, which is essential for high search engine rankings.
• This can help ensure that your landing page is secure and able to withstand any potential threats.
• It can help you save your files and the whole landing page so that it is not lost due to unforeseen circumstances.

That said, I know most marketers don't create landing pages to rank well on Google. Instead, they publish these pages to convert traffic from marketing campaigns (most often paid advertisements) into leads or sales.

While organic ranking isn't as crucial here, your landing page speed will still have an effect on your campaign performance and conversions. After all, users are impatient these days. If your landing pages load slowly for them, chances are they won't even consider your offer.

6. Choose your domain name

URL structure explained.

It's time to choose a domain name - the URL - for your landing page.

For websites, the domain name is essential. It should be reliable and memorable because most people will type it directly into their browser to get to your page.

With landing pages, the domain name is a bit less important. In many cases, marketers are focused on driving traffic to their landing page from paid channels, and they're less busy with people typing in their domain name by hand.

That said, it won't hurt to have a good domain name, unless you specifically want people to enter your page other than through a direct link. And even then, I would say that a good URL can have a positive impact on the performance of your paid ads.

So how do you select a domain name?

If you already have a website with your own URL (e.g. website.com), you can publish your landing page to a subfolder of your main domain (e.g. website.com/landing-page) or a subdomain (e.g. promo.website.com/landing-page).

This is a popular approach and also used at GetResponse to publish our landing pages. By using a subdomain, we are able to publish an unlimited number of landing pages, just making sure that the subfolder part is unique.

If you don't have a website or don't want your landing page associated with your main page, you'll need to register a new domain or use a free domain offered by your landing page tool.

Using GetResponse Website Builder as an example, this means that your landing page URL can be assigned to one of the following domains:

• YourCompanyName.grwebsite.com 
• YourCompanyName.grweb.site
  

Keep in mind that some landing page builders will charge you for assigning your own custom domain. That's not the case with GetResponse, because we want your brand to shine, even if you're using our forever free account.

Connecting your own domain name in the GetResponse Free Website Builder.

The process of assigning your own domain/subdomain to use with your landing page tool is probably the most technical we'll discuss here. Luckily, we've covered it in our detailed tutorial here.

7. Add your content and customize the layout

Customizing your web page

It's time to put all the pieces together and create your high-converting landing page.

Select your landing page template and start customizing it using a drag and drop builder. You'll want to make sure all the necessary items are in place:

• A catchy title and a complementary subtitle
• Accompanied hero image and other visuals referring to your offer and its context of use
• Landing page copy highlighting your unique selling proposition
• Call-to-action clearly indicating what the visitor should do on your page
• Social proof, including customer reviews and testimonials
• A registration form or a contact form
• Symbols of trust such as the logos of companies you have worked with
• Additional elements such as countdown timers or pop-ups that increase the sense of urgency

Additionally, you need to add your page title, meta description, and social sharing images that will appear when your landing page is shared on social media sites like Facebook or LinkedIn.

Seeing the number of elements on a simple landing page, you may worry that this step is complicated. It's true that this step is critical, but that doesn't mean it has to be difficult.

My best advice is to only customize the content of your landing page and not interfere too much with the layout. The reason for this is that most landing pages were designed by people who specialize in design and UX and know a lot about what drives conversions.

I've seen way too many landing pages that don't work because the content or offer wasn't the right fit. But because the landing page didn't provide a good visual story, visitors would intuitively follow.

That doesn't mean your landing page has to look like a premade template. It should always follow your brand's visual identity, including custom artwork, company logo, brand colors, fonts, etc. But it doesn't have to violate landing page best practices or UX design rules.

8. Connect your tech stack

Now that you've finished designing your landing page, it's time to connect it to your other marketing tools.

After all, you don't want to start driving traffic to a page that doesn't push your contact information to your email marketing platform or CRM.

You will need to confirm that the following connections are in place:

• You've added your Google Analytics ID or GTM Container ID to the landing page so you can track your visitors more accurately
• You have tracking pixels installed, like Facebook Pixel, so you can easily retarget non-converting visitors
• You've connected your signup form to your email marketing or marketing automation software so that each new contact can automatically enter one of your email sequences
• You've connected your opt-in form to your CRM so your sales team can quickly follow up on any promising leads

9. Preview and publish

You're almost there! Before you publish your first landing page, perform a final round of checks to make sure everything looks, feels, and works well.

Here are some of the things I like to review before posting:

• The landing page looks great on both desktop and mobile devices
• It contains all the information I wanted to add and not placeholder text
• All calls to action, links and phone numbers are correct
• Page title, meta description and social sharing image are filled in
• The registration form sends the contact information to my email marketing tool
• The email marketing tool automatically sends the welcome email with the requested content
• And/or the thank you page contains the link to the requested content

Once you've gone through this list, you can confidently publish your new landing page. And if you missed something or want to make final edits, you don't have to worry. All landing page builders or CMS will allow you to quickly edit your page even after it goes live.

Get inspired by these landing page templates

Free templates inside GetResponse Free Website Builder.

Now that you know how to create a landing page, there's nothing stopping you from launching your marketing campaign within an hour.

At first, it may seem like this process is a bit long. But the more you go through it, the less time it will take you to publish your pages.

For example, for every webinar campaign we run here at GetResponse (we run webinars every two weeks), we publish three individual pages: the webinar registration page, the thank you page, and a webpage that attendees see after the event.

Here is an example of one such page:

Landing page example from a campaign we ran at GetResponse.

Most of the time, we reuse the same models. This means that all we have to do is change the copy, images and make sure the page is connected to the correct webinar.

All of this takes us about 30 minutes and that includes testing the entire setup.

Now imagine if we had to ask our web development team to launch three new pages for us, every two weeks.

Remember when I told you that landing pages are a marketer's best friend? That's precisely what I meant.

So, are you ready to publish your first landing page today? If so, consider trying GetResponse free website builder.

Source: How to Create Landing Page