When I wrote the first edition of How to Develop a Landing Page in 2002, there was scarcely anything in print about the subject. Today there are a number of books and hundreds of articles that will guide you through the process.

So is there really still a need for this book? Yes. While there are several excellent books on the topic, they tend to be complex -- written for the kind of professional marketers who inhabit Fortune 500 companies. This book, on the other hand, is intended to be a simple though comprehensive overview of what we know about landing pages, conversions, and testing, written with small to medium businesses in mind. This book is designed to bring clarity to the overall process and distill the wisdom of hundreds of practitioners. If you want to dig deeper in the endnotes, you'll find many references and links to articles.

Back when the Web was young, building a landing page was what experts did for their clients. These days, building effective, high-converting landing pages is often performed by a team of experts working together:

• Copywriters, who apply the science of direct marketing to writing copy intended for web sales,
• Graphic and web designers, who provide an attractive webpage layout with appropriate graphics that lead the prospect to a sale,
• Conversion experts, who fine-tune the elements of landing page design,
• Usability testers, who observe actual shoppers to make sure the landing page is easy to navigate, and
• Web analytics experts, who test various elements of a landing page to optimize it's conversion rate.

You may be about ready to throw up your hands in despair at this point. Don't. It is possible for a person or two to gain the knowledge and develop the skills to build rather effective landing pages. Yes, it is a major project, but hundreds of thousands of small businesses all over the world are doing it -- and getting better at it all the time.

Even if you decide to outsource landing page development and optimization to an outside firm, this book will help you understand the process so that you can know what questions to ask so that you can screen potential vendors -- and once you've settled on one -- give a vendor the kind of information it needs to do the best job for you.

Landing pages are used to motivate customers to take particular actions: purchase a product, fill out a form, subscribe to a newsletter, download a whitepaper -- you name it. This particular book focuses on e-commerce sales of products and services, though the principles are quite applicable other types of landing pages.

I've designed this book to flow easily:

1. Introduction
2. Customer research
3. Copywriting
4. Design
5. Testing, tracking, and refining
6. Segmenting and directing traffic to sales paths

The book concludes with two appendices -- a list of resources, articles, and books, plus a landing page checklist that you can print out and check off as you've completed various steps.

Whether you're building landing pages for the first time, or fine-tuning landing pages that you've used in the past, it is my prayer that this book will help your company succeed abundantly.

God bless you,
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Loomis, California
April 15, 2008

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