Landing Page for Freelancers: 9 Tips
Many (potential) customers prefer to find freelancers online rather than call them personally. Special landing pages are ideal for converting visitors after they click on an advertising banner or a search engine entry. It’s particularly important that your website looks good in this case. Otherwise the visitor will be gone faster than you can say “new customer acquisition”. Here are the best tips for a good landing page to ensure you attract customers.
Tip 1: State a Clear Goal
The aim of a landing page is to speak to the visitor and encourage them to take a certain action. In short, the goal of a landing page is conversion. In order to move the potential customer to do something, however, you have to be clear about what exactly they should do. That’s why it’s imperative to define what you hope to achieve with the landing page before designing it: Should the interested party subscribe to a newsletter, download something, buy a product or use a service? You can only motivate the customer to take the next step if you know what this next step is supposed to look like.
Tip 2: Clear Call to Action
Once you have defined the goal, it also needs to be immediately clear to the visitor what to do. The call to action should immediately catch the visitor’s eye both visually and linguistically. For example, a large coloured button with the text “Register for the newsletter here”, “Buy product XY now” or “Request an offer now” could be used.
Tip 3: Clear Layout and (Corporate) Design
A landing page has to be clear and not contain too many elements. The visitor should be able to see what is going on as quickly as possible. This includes graphics, photos or videos, crisp headings and short paragraphs as well as lists. The “main photo” of the product or an explanation of the service in a video, the so-called hero shot, should be placed in a particularly prominent place.
The landing page also has to adhere to the corporate design. When the visitor clicks on an ad and is directed to the site, they should immediately recognise they are in the right place. The presentation of the advertisement or the banner (font, colour scheme, design, slogan) therefore needs to be reflected on the landing page.
Tip 4: Be Succinct
You don’t have much time to convince the visitor on a landing page. So it’s important to use short and crisp text and to describe the advantages of the product/service concisely. Slogans like “welcome” or “we’re pleased you’re here” are superfluous on a landing page. The headline of the landing page should already clearly formulate the advantages of the visitor becoming a customer.
Tip 5: Don’t Distract Visitors
On a landing page, the customer should only ever have one option and not be confused by multiple options. For example, if the landing page is selling a product, there shouldn’t be references to anything else there. Likewise, the visitor shouldn’t be asked to subscribe to a newsletter or like a Facebook page first.
Tip 6: Build Trust
Most of the time visitors won’t be familiar with the company or service yet. That’s why it is important to build trust. This includes answering the visitors’ most important questions immediately. It’s also important not to immediately “collect” all personal data from the potential customer and to make it clear that their data will be handled seriously.
To create trust, customer reviews, guarantees or quality seals can also be easily integrated on a landing page.
Tip 7: Short Loading Times
If the landing page takes too long to load visitors will leave. A mobile website that loads in 2.4 seconds has an average conversion rate of 1.9 percent. If the website loads one second slower, the conversion rate is already reduced to 1.5 percent. With a loading time of 4.2 seconds, it falls below the 1 percent mark (Results of a study by Soasta). That’s why you should definitely ensure short loading times on a landing page. You can analyse the loading times of websites with PageSpeed from Google.
Tip 8: Avoid Pop-ups
The call-to-action is presented through pop-ups on many landing pages. Unfortunately that means the potential customer is constantly bothered and distracted. So avoid annoying pop-up windows!
Tip 9: Testing, Testing, Testing
Only around 50 percent of companies test their landing pages. If you don’t test you can’t be sure it will work even if you follow all the important marketing tips. So test your landing page! A/B tests are ideal for this. 50 percent of the clicks are directed to an advertisement on landing page A and the other 50 percent on landing page B. In the beginning, sites A and B are exactly the same. One of the pages is then changed step by step; for example a button is placed elsewhere or the font is changed. After each step, a web analysis is used to examine how the conversion rate has changed compared to the unchanged page. This is a step-by-step way to creating the optimal landing page.
Here is an Example of How a Landing Page Can be Structured.
Don’t Forget Your Insurance
With the perfect landing page and a chic website, freelancers can really get started with their business and present themselves and their services and products in the best light. But mistakes can also happen on your own homepage, which can quickly become expensive - for example, if you violate copyright by using a photo or there is an accidental error in the legal notice. You might quickly face legal action and expensive compensation claims. With Professional Liability Insurance from exali you have the best coverage if something goes wrong in your daily business.
In the event of a claim for damages, the insurer first checks whether the claim is justified and, in the event of a legitimate claim, takes over the payment. During the entire process, you always have a personal contact, without a call center and queues.
Calculate your premium and get your professional liability insurance online in just a few steps here:
Formerly Chief Editor
Who am I?
After a traineeship and a few years in corporate communications, I now work at exali as editor-in-chief of the online editorial department and am responsible for all content.
What do I enjoy?
Summer, travel, good food and football.
What do I dislike?
Travel by train, Brussels sprouts and slime.