Christopher Jan Benitez — July 11, 2017 
Full-screen backgrounds, recent posts, image sliders – blog owners have plenty of options when it comes to designing their homepage. While these layouts are by no means terrible design-wise, they often fall short regarding generating audience engagement.
Research by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that web users often leave pages between 10-20 seconds. This is mainly due to the lack of a clear value proposition that aligns with their needs or interests.
That said, make sure your homepage immediately gives your audience a reason to stick around. You can accomplish this by designating a landing page, which not only highlights your brand’s unique value propositions but also encourages your audience to take action.
Below are some other reasons why you should create an exclusive landing page as your homepage:
1. Turning Visitors into Email Subscribers
Monetization is the end goal of most professionally-maintained blogs. Whether you plan to do this by selling products or displaying ads, users need to develop trust in your brand before they become regular consumers of your content.
One way to do this is to build a mailing list that allows you to send new content straight to their inbox. This helps maintain brand awareness, bring traffic to published posts, and promote special offers that maximize conversions.
Emails are also an essential aspect of user experience, especially if you can utilize email automation that expedites their journey into making a purchase.
2. Selling a Copy of Your Digital Product
If by chance you offer an eBook, online course, or any other premium content on your blog, make sure your audience finds out about it as soon as possible.
A landing page ensures your offer—along with its list of benefits—are duly emphasized and well-presented. More importantly, it can help the audience take the next step by showing a call-to-action (CTA) button and the necessary input fields.
Apart from making a sale, digital products can also be offered as opt-in bribes or lead magnets. After all, it’s challenging to convince users to buy something on their first visit. Rather than letting potential customers slip by forever, you might as well encourage them to stay in touch by offering an incentive.
3. Showcasing Your Best Posts
A typical behavior of new visitors who come across one of your blog posts is to click back to your homepage – often with the intention to discover what else you have to offer. To make a solid impression, feature your top posts right off the bat or at least within scrolling distance.
You can use Google Analytics to determine your best posts regarding traffic and time-on-page. These are typically the pages that rank well in search engines, so it makes sense to let them be the focal point of your promotional efforts.
Most blogging platforms have the option to ‘pin’ specific content on top of your homepage. For WordPress-powered sites, you can use the Jetpack plugin to specify Featured Content from within the Dashboard.
4. Displaying Social Proof
Social proof describes the psychological phenomenon wherein people embrace something like the “correct” behavior simply because others do it. In the landscape of digital marketing, social proof is cut into five categories:
- Expert Social Proof – When you publicly receive positive remarks from an authority in your niche – be it a thought-leader, industry blogger, or major publication.
- Celebrity Social Proof – When popular people in social media or show business vouch for your brand.
- User Social Proof –When current consumers of your product, service, or content speak positively about your brand.
- The Wisdom of the Crowds Social Proof – When your brand cultivates a community and let the numbers speak for themselves.
- The wisdom of Friends Social Proof – When peers such as colleagues, family, and friends recommend your brand.
To begin leveraging social proof, one strategy is to encourage users to leave testimonials through social media networks. As much as possible, select the most believable, positive testimonials and showcase them in your homepage. This, according to statistics, is far more compelling than branded content such as product descriptions and video ads.
5. Promoting Your Event
To say that experiential marketing raises brand awareness is a gross understatement. With the right approach, it can be singlehandedly transform your brand into an authority that people trust, seek, and buy.
Statistics show that 70% of attendees become regular consumers after a successful experiential marketing event. Some ideas include charity events, competitions, seminars, and activities that leverage new technology like VR and kiosks.
A landing page’s primary objective is to promote your event and drive up attendance. It can also be used to facilitate event registrations when required.
Taking the Next Step…
Just like any other page on your website, a landing page relies heavily on great design to be effective. This doesn’t mean you should turn to jaw-dropping visuals to capture attention. Rather, you need to look for clean, distraction-free themes or layouts that put user experience above all else.
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