Q&A: Landing Page Best Practices For Musicians
In today’s Q&A we were asked by one of our subscribers about what we feel are some of the best landing page practices for musicians.
If you’ve been following Music Marketing Manifesto for any stretch of time, you know that we feel the absolute best landing page practice is to use what’s known as “squeeze page”.
In it’s simplest definition, a squeeze page is a page that offers something of value in exchange for a person’s contact information (name and email), so that we can follow up with them and build a relationship. In the case of musicians, you would be offering music downloads in this exchange.
Typically a squeeze page will be a simple page that has a strong headline and supporting text to communicate your offer, a place for people to submit their info and accept your offer and a strong call to action that tells them what to do to accept your offer.
While we have found that some of our subscribers are initially resistant to using a squeeze page because a really good squeeze page only gives visitors two options: Sign up or leave. This can sometimes have musicians on edge about losing the traffic that they’ve generated and they are therefore hesitant to use a squeeze page.
However, a good number of our students and subscribers have seen first hand just how powerful a squeeze page can be when used as a landing page. They can see the bigger picture and are ready to dive right in. Such is the case with Dave, who wrote us today asking us about some of the finer points of using a squeeze page and wanted to know what truly are the best landing page practices.
Let’s take Dave’s questions one by one.
Q: Should the squeeze page have a link to the personal website ?
A: As we mentioned above, the true purpose of a squeeze page is to turn visitors into subscribers with your free offer. When you start giving visitors other options to click around, there’s still a chance they might subscribe, but chances are they will eventually satisfy their curiosity and leave for good, without signing up. For this reason, we would advise you not to provide them a link to your personal website until they are in your follow up cycle. A link is a distraction from the conversion goal. Generally speaking, the more distractions you offer the lower the conversion rate.
Q: Can you keep just one url (say personal website), and have the squeeze page be the first page that is seen on the website with a link that can take someone to the personal website ?
A: Again, providing links to other pages gives people a simple out. If you were given the choice between giving up contact information or simply clicking a link, chances are you’ll take the safe and easy step every time. This will only defeat your squeeze page and not help you generate subscribers. We do not recommend it.
Q: What url should be listed on your business card? The squeeze page or personal website, or both? Same question if someone asks what your website is .. (squeeze page or actual website? )
A: This really depends on who is asking you. If it’s a potential fan or customer, always send them to your squeeze page. If the person is a colleague, friend, or someone with industry ties, you may want to take a different tack and send them to your content site. But as a general best practice, all “cold” traffic should be directed to your squeeze page. This is especially true if you are paying for traffic.
Q: As far as existing fans who already know your website, what’s the strategy of getting them to the squeeze page?
A: If you have old fans on a list inside your free mail account and are trying to switch them over to an autoresponder like we recommend you do, you can casually send your current list an email with a link to an exclusive free offer squeeze page, just for them and try to migrate them that way. You may lose a few people this way, but if they are not interested, then they aren’t likely to buy any of your music later on down the line anyway.
Dave also was keen to pick up on the fact that John uses two separate domains for his squeeze page and his personal site. The reason is that if you were to host the squeeze page on www.yourpersonalsite.com/squeezepage , it is really simple for someone to just erase the “squeezepage” out of the url and go straight to whatever is on the top level domain.
Because we feel that a sucessful online marketing strategy for musicians hinges solely on your ability to build and communicate with a growing list of people, the last thing you want to do is undermindthe effectiveness of your squeeze page. This means removing all options, distractions and loopholes.
And that’s what we feel is absolutely the best practice for your landing page. See an example of John’s squeeze page below.
I recently started listening to your podcasts and am in the middle of restructuring my website to implement some of the techniques you talk about.
The information is very helpful and I’m looking forward to testing the methods for higher conversion rates in the near future. 🙂
THANK YOU FOR WHAT YOU DO!
david
Hi David,
Great! I’m glad you are getting some useful info out of the podcast, as well as the Q&A posts. I really appreciate your interest.
Let me know if I can ever help with anything else.