At this point in our plan, the user has seen our ad on Google and clicked on it.  He or she is the directed to our landing page, which is merely a regular web page that has been specially designed to make the user want to sign up for our service and not run away.

Once again, I didn’t know what I was doing, so more research was needed on this.  I learned that the landing page should be clutter-free, the headline of the landing page should match the AdWords advertisement heading that made them want to come here.  If there are images, they should be on the left side of the page.  It should be quick to read and decipher, using bullets and lists to summarize the benefits of the iKollect system.  It should talk about the benefits, not the features of iKollect.com, and it has to be able to convince the user to click on the “GO!” (or whatever it’s going to be called) button within 8 seconds.

I really thought coming up with the keywords was going to be the hard part.  Boy was I wrong.  Writing a page like this is tough!  And the 8 second thing?  What’s up with that?  8 seconds is really not very long at all.  How can someone read a whole page and click on the action button in less than 8 seconds?  I didn’t believe it so I went out to do some research of my own.

I looked at a lot of ads that I never would have paid attention to.  My hunch was correct that not many sites that I found followed the 8 second rule.  In fact, some of those hard sell sites take minutes to read.  But they are really trying to push something  hard.  Like the latest, must-have, “YOU CAN MAKE LOTS OF MONEY ON THE WEB!!!!” sites.  But those sites have very little in common with our site.  Those sites are usually going to ask for a credit card as the next step.  That’s not us!

But I was surprised to find that the really good landing pages did indeed follow the 8 second rule!  I could glance over the page in seconds and decide that I wanted to proceed or bail.  Well that was convincing enough for me.  So I went to work on the landing page. 

The landing page is simple in design as well as wording.  I followed all the rules the best I could, and put some ability to simply track how the user got there.  If he or she came from Google, I would track that in the database.  If it was in search for coins, we would keep track of that also, because we hope to have enough success in generating coin-collectors traffic that we can use it for another collection type (perhaps model train collectors).

I tweaked the registration page to be really simple, and require just an email address and password to get started.  We really don’t want to chase anyone away by asking for too much information.  We figure that since the potential customer may be leery about the owners of the iKollect company knowing every expensive coin in his collection and where he lives, we would avoid asking for too much during the initial sign up process.

I also changed the system a little to make it a little smarter about why the customer came in the first place.  For example, one of the changes I made was to automatically add the coin collection type to the user’s “My iKollect” page, and put them right into the data entry mode.  we don’t want the user to get all the way into our system and then think “awww-jeeez, this is some giant overly complicated inventory system, I just wanted a coin inventory software package.”

Next up is to get the money into place and actually start up the ad campaign.  Wow, I am rather excited!