How to Extend Your Blog Using Landing Pages
22. May, 2010 
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During your time perusing the Internet or wandering around your social media circles, is your blog paying attention to and enticing your visitors to click in? If not, your blog isn’t working hard enough for you or your business.
Most blogs hanging around the blogosphere tend to only have one ‘landing’ page, which is typically the home page consisting or the most recent posts and whatever other content that is made public. However, in some cases, just throwing your visitors right in the middle of your output stream without much introduction to your blog may have an adverse affect than what you had anticipated.
Landing pages have several different uses whether they be used to promote a new product or service that you are providing, a link to an affiliate program that you are supporting or just an overall summary of the main purpose of your blogging passion. Where some opportunities may fall through the cracks of your own blog, again, is if you’re only promoting your blog through your home page. In most cases, new visitors are finding your blog from some other outlet that you have hooked your blog into such as: Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn and so on.
Personalize Your Landing Pages
One of the most powerful signs of appreciation you can send to your readers is your willingness to show that you truly appreciate them putting forth the effort to click over to your blog. Therefore, why not go that extra mile to show how serious you are about your own online presence and branding to create landing pages that are specific to whatever external source your blog is connected to? Many online entrepreneurs rely on what is called, the “Sales Funnel”, which is where visitors may start to buy into the services or products that you have to offer and that’s where the online income streams come into play.
However, before your visitors can even fall into that Sales Funnel, you have to first build a Blog Funnel, which will start to bring readers and visitors to your blog to begin with. Again, adding that personal touch for your new visitors can make the difference between buying in, or clicking out only for your blog to become a lost link in a browsers long lost history.
Use the “Hub and Spoke” Method for Online Presence Management
Essentially, no matter where you end up on the social media avenues, you want to leave a path back to your blog. Whether you are participating in online forums, subscribing to YouTube channels, visiting and commenting on other blogs or have your social media profiles set up, always include an end point back to your blog. Yes, this seems like common sense, but what I’m also asking you to do is, create a separate landing page per “spoke” that you are managing outside of your blog.
As an example, I have a specific landing page for those visitors that come into the blog via Twitter that doesn’t just slam them into my blog stream, rather, it offers a quick bit of information about me and what my intentions are with the site overall. The main information on that page revolves around such tasks that I’m working on, who I am and why they should invest their time on my blog. Since the landing page is a direct connection from Twitter, I talk about how I use Twitter right there on the page to keep the connection flowing between the landing page to the rest of the site.
Do this for each hub that you are connected to and offer as much information as you can about how and why you use that particular hub. If you rely heavily on YouTube for video blogging, create a landing page specifically for your YouTube activity, then lead them into the rest of your site from that landing page. Forcing people directly to your home page can almost be traumatic as your visitors are dropped right into your most recent activity without being given much of an introduction. Lead them in slowly, pass off a cigar or a cocktail and a comfy chair before putting them in front of the flow of information you’re putting out there.
What Say You?
Landing pages are typically used in the “Sales Funnel” process in order to promote your available products, which is perfectly fine but do you think that adding another layer of cushion for your readers or potential clients/customers may add to your trust, or hurt it?
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