Building Your Landing Page

Cover Story:

If you're selling a product, whether a book, an e- book, a workshop, a CD or DVD, or other product, you need a Landing Page. As usual, the topic of this month's newsletter is something I'm working on learning and implementing myself. But also, as usual, I want to share with you what I'm learning so you can put it to use yourself and so we can progress together along this writing journey. So here is what I know so far about building a Landing Page.

What is a Landing Page?

I'm sure you've seen them. When you read a piece of advertisement online and it's something you're actually interested in and it says "for more information click here," and you click, and you land on a page with all the information about the item, that's the landing page.

I'm sure marketing people get paid and lot of money and companies spend a fortune to have some expert build their landing page. But as poor, starving writers who can't spend a fortune and therefore want to build our own landing pages, what can we learn from observing the landing pages of others?

A Landing Page is many things. It is advertisement, and it is persuasive. Even if you don't think you want the product, by the time you read the Landing Page to the end you might well be convince you need or want that product after all! A Landing Page also tells you what your options are to get the product and makes it easy for you to act. A Landing Page's purpose is to sell your product.

Examples of Landing Pages:

I suggest that you find one or two landing pages and use them as your template. Here is one example from Terry Whalin's product Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams.

Another place we can find examples that I believe we can follow is not online at all but in our regular snail mail. The next time you get one of those big, colorful envelopes with an advertisement in the mail, instead of tossing it in the trash unopened, open it up and take a look. A few days ago I got an envelope from a popular general-market women's magazine. If I renew my subscription by a certain date, I'll get the opportunity for a "FREE PREVIEW" and "FREE GIFT" of their new cookbook! This envelope had several pieces of paper in it, including these:

1. a letter to "Dear Reader" with some peel off stickers, 
2. a colorful letter on slick paper to "Dear Smart Cook,"
3. a beautifully designed half-sheet flyer called "Kitchen-Tested & Tasted,"
4. a couple of free recipes,
5. a response card with instructions to paste the peel-off stickers from the letter on it and mail it, 
6. and a colorful piece of paper that unfolds to a large page with lots of beautiful pictures of their wonderful food along with a photo of a page of their cookbook with arrows pointing to the different parts of the page, including these: 

• Cooking times!
• Time-saving tips!
• Prep times!
• Low-fat recipes!
• Full-color photos!
• 8 1/4 x 11-inch hardcover
• Helpful hints & historical tidbits!
• Nutrition facts!
• Meal-planning menus!

I didn't add those exclamation marks; I just typed it as I see it.

This envelope full of advertising is basically the same as a Landing Page.

Parts of a Landing Page:

So from my observation, a landing page or advertisement comes in several parts and we can mimic those and build our own landing pages.

I've observed that online Landing Pages have multiple "breaks" as you scroll down, often between different parts. Take a look at Terry Whalin's Jumpstart Your Publishing Dreams page. Every so often there is a break where you can order either the paperback book or the e-book and a "Buy it Now" button. The breaks between sections are often opportunities to buy the product. That way, if you're already convinced you want the product, you have opportunities to act immediately without having to scroll to the bottom or trying to figure out how to get it.

Building Your Landing Page

So now that we have some basic information, let's begin building our own Landing Pages. Build a Landing Page for each of your books or products.

Where and how to start? The other day I took a piece of paper and did some brainstorming on what the different sections could be of my Landing Page for my book Deliver Me. Some of my ideas were inspired by the cookbook advertising. Here are a dozen ideas to inspire you:

1. The cookbook advertising letter to "Dear Reader" started with this: "When I walked into Susan's kitchen, the counter was piled high with magazines. 'Where is it?' she wailed. 'Where's that...recipe we love? And the Best-Ever Chocolate Cake recipe John told m never to forget about ... company's coming and I CAN'T FIND THEM!' "  That opening inspired me to think about the person my Deliver Me book is written for and how they feel panicked about their unplanned pregnancy or the hopeless feeling some have about the decisions they made in their past. Who is your book for and what are they thinking that you can voice for them and then show them how your book is their answer?
2. What are the Features of your book? If you didn't recognize it for what it is, the list above of the different parts of the cookbook is that book's "Features." Features are tangible. My Deliver Me book has lists of interesting statistics and helpful resources. My Prophecies Fulfilled books have Bible readings and application questions. What "Features" does your book have?
3. What are the Benefits of your book for the person who reads it? What will it gain them to have read your book? What will it help them with?
4. Who can use this book? And how? Is it for individual readers? For book groups? For Bible study groups?
5. Give something free. Offer a download of a free excerpt, perhaps a chapter or a portion that is helpful to the person reading your Landing Page.
6. Give some compelling quotations from your book.
7. Colorful photos, such as your book's cover. You can also use photos of you at a book signing or speaking engagement with your book.
8. Special offer: Are you running a special on Kindle? A special price for bulk orders? Can your book be a "Value Added" opportunity for an organization? For example, can an organization buy a bulk order of your books and give one to each person who comes to their conference? Tell them about any special offers or create a link to another page with that information.
9. Give some testimonials. Take a few quotes from your Amazon reviews, reader's comments, or endorsements from inside your book. Notice Terry Whalin has testimonials running down the left side of his page.
10. Links to author interviews you've done or guest blog posts you've written on the topic of your book. Make sure your links open in a new window so no one leaves your site. An alternative may be to include quotes or snippets from these other sites.
11. A video or your book trailer. Don't have one? Make your own 30-second book trailer free using Animoto.
12. Thank your reader for visiting or, if appropriate to your product, offer a money-back guarantee like Terry Whalin does for his product at the very bottom.

Now, write each section. Keep it short -- probably no more than 100 to 200 words. Then insert your divider with a link to where readers can buy it in between each section.

Where to put your Landing Page

This is kind of a problem for me. I use Expression Web to build my websites and it is ridiculously difficult to add a page. I finally learned how add a page but have yet to figure out how to add new pages to my menus. It's possible I might make my Landing Pages (one for each of my books) in Word, save it as a PDF, and then load that document to my web site and link to it. That's a round-about way to do it, but the advantage to me is that I know how to do all that.

An alternative, or more likely in addition to, that option is to put my Landing Pages as pages on my blogs. Drawbacks here are that I'd end up with so many pages and tabs on the menu bar that it might be too much and too confusing. (I now have four books out with a fifth coming next month.) Maybe I should make my one "Dianne's Books" page (see the tab at the top of this blog) simpler and just have a link for each book to the aforementioned PDF Landing Pages, which would be loaded on my web site. I'm still trying to figure out what to do here. If you have ideas or suggestions, please leave a comment below.

No Hype Needed

I have a low tolerance for hype. I suppose we each have different tolerance levels for hype or high-pressure selling. I also supposed it is used by the experts because it works. However you feel about this, build your Landing Page accordingly. In my opinion, nobody has to use a lot of hype or high-pressure selling to sell their products. Just be honest, tell people why they need your book or product. Give them the benefits they will gain by reading your book. Tell them the features you included and how they will interest or help them. Give them good, solid information that is interesting. Add some testimonials.... In other words, just tell them about your book and let those truths do the selling.

How to Use Your Landing Page

Once you have your Landing Page written and posted on the internet, use the link to that page not only on your sites but also in your Twitter and Facebook posts. (See 3 Parts to a Great Tweet in the July newsletter.) Any time you have the need or the opportunity to tell someone where they can find more information about your book, send them to your Landing Page.

September 2012: Make Your Own Book Trailer - Easy and Free!

Announcement: My new book is out!

I'm so pleased to show you my newest book! Grandparenting Through Obstacles: Overcoming Family Challenges to Reach Your Grandchildren for Christ released in August from Pix N Pens Publishing.

GTO features twenty true stories which depict challenges grandparents face in influencing their grandchildren with their Christian faith plus how they are overcoming those challenges. Includes stories about when the grandkid's parents are not walking with God; long-distance relationships; non-traditional, blended, or single-parent families; and partnering with the parents.

Includes resources, discussion questions, "Grandparents in the Bible," "Points to Ponder," "Steps to Take," "Scriptures to Study," and "One Way to Pray."

306 pages. $15.99. Order from your local bookstore. Also available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all online outlets. On Kindle and Nook.

A great resource for Christian grandparents. Makes an excellent gift for National Grandparent's Day on September 9th, 2012.

Cover Story: Make Your Own Book Trailer - Easy and Free!

With the release of a new book, I was thinking I needed to have a book trailer for it.

If you don't know what a book trailer is, it's a short advertisement and teaser, like a movie trailer. You can find lots of them on YouTube.com if you want to see some examples.

I'm constantly thinking when I'm writing this e-zine/blog that a large portion of this audience may not think the topic of the month applies to them. But I hope you think otherwise. Even if you're not writing books, use your imagination (You're creative! You're a writer after all...) and think how you might use this idea or technology to get you closer to your own writing goals. Or use it just to have fun. For example, this month even if you're not a book author and have no desire to be one, you might use this same idea to make a video of your photos for your family. Or if you're a magazine writer or blogger, use it to "advertise" where your writing can be found so readers can find you! If you're a magazine editor (and we have some of those in our readership), why not make a video to advertise your magazine and draw in more readers? Anyway, on with the topic...

My first book trailer was for Deliver Me, and I had it professionally made. See my Deliver Me Book Trailer here. It cost me several hundred dollars, and that's with me doing my own voice-over. I'm not at all sure it has helped sell enough books to be worthy of what it cost. However at the time book trailers were a lot newer idea and making them yourself wasn't as easy. So with a thousand other things to do, and no idea how to make one myself, I forked out the bucks.

Recently, in and article titled "5 free and easy ways to promote your book" by Erika Dreifus in the September 2012 issue of The Writer magazine (page 37), I read about www.Animoto.com. I'd never heard of Animoto, but I checked it out.

Like most things these days, you can have a free account and do limited stuff. You can do more if you pay. I decided I would sign up for the free account and make a trailer (a short video) for each of my three books before I paid anything. It took a couple of hours to read and play and figure things out, but by then I had a short trailer for my new Grandparenting book. I also had partly made a second trailer for my first book, Dear America. The next afternoon it took me no time at all to make a third trailer, this one for Deliver Me.

Here's the first trailer I made for Grandparenting Through Obstacles. It runs about 30 seconds, so if you want to take a moment to watch it please do. But then keep reading below it because I want to tell you more...

With the free account at www.Animoto.com you are limited to about a 30-second video. If you want a longer video, you'll have to pay. But really, you can buy the next level for $30 for a whole year, so that still sounds like a deal to me. (It says $5 per month, which is $60, but then offers half off for a year.) (BTW, I'm not getting any commission from them. I just think this is a good and useful--and FUN!--web site and wanted to share it with you.)

I'm sure you're probably thinking I'm a genius for building all that fancy stuff with all the boxes flipping around and the pretty colors, but--though I hate to dash your image of me--Animoto did all that for me. They have a bunch of 30-second videos all set up and waiting for you. You just choose some photos and text and music and it's all done!

The tricky part is that with the free account and only 30 seconds, you only get about 7 or 8 "slides" (meaning a slot for a photo, video, or text) and then you're done. So while I set out to tell what was in my book, I found I didn't have the time or slots for that. I ended up simply saying basically my book title, buy it here! This will take all the tight-writing skills that you've accumulated.

I know what you're thinking. I just mentioned you can insert photos, text, and video. Yeah! Cool, huh? I used a piece of Animoto's stock video in my Dear America trailer. This one runs 34 seconds. Watch it here:

The video clip originally 5 seconds and bounced two of my other slide out because it took up so much time. But then I discovered I could edit it to 3 seconds and fit my photos back in.

While Dear America has been out for ten years, it was just released on Kindle for its tenth anniversary in March 2012. I've never had a trailer for it. Because it was written after September 11, 2001, and has that theme running through, I really wanted to let people know about it for this anniversary of September 11th. The book talks about getting through grief, knowing God in the hard times, and more that are timeless topics. I really wanted a trailer for it to advertise it this September, and now I have one.

The first thing you choose with Animoto is the style of video you want. (The colorful unfolding boxes in the Grandparenting trailer. This Dear America style is called "Air.") After that you get to choose your music. After I signed up for the free account and began making my first video, I was delighted to discover the large selection of Christian music available. All three of my short videos feature Christian songs.

Once of the nicest things about Animoto is that they've already taken care of all the licensing for you. Unlike royalty-free music sources on the web, I could use some very popular music through Animoto.

The last step in making a video on Animoto is choosing your photos and inserting your text. Like the music, they have a selection of photos you can use, or you can upload your own. I found the upload process a little temperamental, but I was able to upload my book covers from Facebook. I didn't want to mess with trying to find royalty-free photos, so I used what Animoto has on their site. These were quite limited. For the Grandparenting trailer I would have liked to have photos of grandparents with grandchildren but they didn't have any so I ended up using baby pictures. It works, though it doesn't fully communicate the theme of the book as I wanted it.

I also used some of the same baby photos in my new Deliver Me trailer which you can see here. It runs 38 seconds.

I was also able to upload the "2012 Book of the Year" logo for this video, which I thought was a good way to let people know the book won that award.

Once you have a few photos selected, you have precious little room for text so you're going to have to be brief! But it's a good exercise in figuring out how to communicate what's really important quickly and powerfully. The text boxes limit you to just so many characters, so it can be a challenge to make things fit.

The Animoto program will limit you to how much you can add to your video (unless you pay--then you can make longer videos). When you have too many photos or text slides to fit with the 30 seconds of music, it tells you. You simply drag and drop the pictures and text to move things around. Then you can play it to see how it looks. Then you can edit and drag and drop and rearrange and then play it again. When you're satisfied, you "publish" it. At that point you can put it on YouTube.com and other places.

So once you have a book trailer, what do you do with it? You can get links to put in your e-mails or Twitters. And you can embed it in your web site and blog. Next I'd like to figure out if I can put all my videos on a thumb drive and have them play continuously on my netbook computer. If I can figure out how to make that work, I'd like to have my little netbook sitting on my book table at signings. Wouldn't that be fun?

One more tidbit of information that will help you: You may noticed I've put all three of my new book trailers on this blog at the right, but they are much smaller. When I embedded them there, they were too large for the column I had them in. What to do? Here's the answer: When you embed the code into your blog, you can see the HTML code. (That's what you copy and paste.) I know enough about HTML code to have recognized the "height" and "width" numbers. Those are pixels. I simply changed those numbers to reduce the size of the video so it would fit in the column. You want to reduce the height the same amount as the width to keep it proportionate. How? First I divided each number by four and put those numbers into the code. That made it really tiny (one fourth the original size). So I tried making it one third the original size (divide each by 3) and that fit pretty well. It makes the text really small, but what can you do? If the video catches their attention, viewers can see the larger ones elsewhere on this site.

I hope you'll stop by Animoto.com and trying it out. I had a lot of fun with it and I know I'll be making more videos there. I have new books coming out--one for Christmas! (Please visit my new "Coming Books" page!) So I'm looking forward to making videos for those!

Have fun with Animoto! And if you make a trailer, share the link to it in the comments section below so we can all see what you've created!

Resource:

I know there are other ways to make book trailers too. After they saw my Animoto efforts, somebody shared this article with me, but then you have to get your own photos and find royalty-free music. Still, I may give this a shot sometime when I have the time and energy: Create Your Own Book Trailer Free

Please Check Out:

• My new "Coming Books" Page. (Click the tab at the top.)
• My new "Dianne's Events" box in the column on the right at the top.
• And don't forget to check out the "Writing Opportunities" Page. There are some exciting opportunities there.