How to create a landing page

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If you want to rent land, or sell other products or services, you need a landing page.

A landing page is a page that converts someone who is vaguely interested in what you are offering into an actual customer. The effectiveness of your landing page is known as the conversion rate.

If you’re selling on the Kitely Market, that’s easy — just send people to your Kitely Market product listing. You can let Kitely worry about their conversion rate. After all, the more products you sell, the better they do, as well, so it’s in their interest to make these pages as effective as possible.

But what if the landing page is on your own website, blog, or social media channel? Now, it’s up to you to make the page work.

Here are some tips.

Make a new landing page for every ad

This is really important. A lot of advertisers skimp on this, and just use their home page as the landing page. That’s not a good strategy.

Say your ad says, “Get a free starter OAR with your new region!” The buyer loves the picture of that starter OAR, they’re salivating over it, they click their ad… and they come to your grid’s home page. Now they have to hunt around for that free OAR. Is it on the land sales page? Is it mentioned in the blog? Is it somewhere in the image carousel, and they have to wait for it to come around? Are they supposed to use your support page or contact someone in-world for the OAR?

Many people are going to give up and just go away. And you won’t know that it happened, because you don’t know whether they came to your website because of the ad, or because of something else.

So set up a new landing page specifically for the ad. Make the headline of the landing page similar to the ad’s headline, so people know they’ve come to the right place.

Then set up Google Analytics or a similar service so you can track how many people came to that page, so you can see whether it’s working for you. Your conversion rate is the percentage of people who bought your product or subscribed to your newsletter or signed up for your service, divided by the total number of visitors.

You can have more than one ad with more than one landing page for the same offer, and see which one works best.

Make things really clear

Test your landing page out on a few people. Is it really obvious to them what they’re supposed to do?

If there are a lot of hoops to jump through, you’re going to lose customers.

For example, some grids require that people sign up for a user account, log in, and decide on map coordinates before they can get a region. Even if someone already has a user account, if they have to log in before buying they might say, “Oh, I can’t remember my user name and login password right now. I’ll look it up later.” And they never come back. Nobody who thinks they’ll come back later ever comes back.

Why do you care if they’re a registered user or not, anyway? Their money is just as good as anyone else’s. Put that PayPal button right there on your landing page, take their money, and then get all the details from them later.

Some grids also put a million — okay, a half-dozen — options on their land sales pages. That’s fine for a general rental page, but you want to make things easier on a landing page. If the ad is for a 5,000-prim starter region, make the landing page for a 5,000-prim starter region. If the ad is for the new lesbian vampire avatar, make the landing page for the lesbian vampire avatar. You can always include a link to the pages with all the other options at the bottom of the landing page, for those people who want something different.

Be trustworthy

If you want people to give you their money, or sign up for your newsletter, or whatever it is that you want them to do, you have to convince them that they can trust you with their money or email address.

That means that you use a design that looks like a real design, not something made by a teenager in the 1990s.

And you might want to include some validation, such as the real names and photos of your company owners, or actual testimonials from actual customers, or links to write-ups in the media. If you’re registered with the US Copyright Office, include a link to your registered agent page, to prove that you’re serious about protecting content. (It costs just $6 a year, and all grids should do this to protect themselves against lawsuits in the U.S., including foreign grids.)

If you’ve done well in Hypergrid Business surveys, say that. If you have a million followers on your Facebook page, say that, too. If you support a well-known charity, mention it. If you’ve been around for a long time, say that. If you were the fastest-growing grid last year, say that, too.

The more proof you can offer that you are a trustworthy, reliable, respected organization, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Show a video

Whether you’re selling virtual clothing or renting virtual land, a nice video can help make the sale — and increase your conversion rate by up to 80 percent.

Now, creating a compelling video is not easy. You want the picture to be bright and in focus, which can be tricky when the viewer takes a long time to load the textures, and puts labels everywhere to clutter things up.

One way to create an easy and compelling video is to pick the most scenic spot and a couple of very attractive avatars, use the Phototools feature, wait for everything to rez, hit the record button on your video recording program, and slowly move your camera across the landscape. Show cool people doing cool things with your cool content. Don’t just show a Ruth avatar on an empty plot of land with the bland, default camera settings.

A default “Ruth” avatar on an empty region. This probably won’t help conversion rates.

Resources

There are a lot of guides out there on the Internet for how to create a landing page. My recommendation is to find an example of a successful landing page that you like, that fits your style, and use that as a model.

For some ideas where to start, check out the following articles:

Maria Korolov
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