How To Create A Landing Page And Build An Email List For FREE
Email marketing is one of the most popular methods of marketing. It is a great way to stay in touch with your customers and keep them updated on your business. Email marketing can be used to send out regular newsletters, send out promotional emails, and even send out automated sales emails. The best part is that you can use email marketing to reach a large audience quickly and easily. But before sending your emails, you need to build your list of subscribers and here comes the landing page.
In this article, we're going to see how you can create a landing page and start building your email list completely for free.
What is a landing page?
A landing page is a web page that is designed to capture leads and convert them into customers. Landing pages are typically used to introduce a new product or service, or to sell a specific product or service.
In our case, we will build a simple landing page to collect emails and build our list of subscribers.
Choosing the niche
This is an important step as you need to niche down your business before taking any action. I'm going to choose the affiliate marketing niche for this tutorial but the process is the same for any niche.
Choosing your email marketing provider
We're going to use Convertkit which is a very powerful email marketing system. and it has a free plan that will let you manage up to 1000 subscribers with unlimited opt-in forms and landing pages which is perfect.
You can get started for FREE. On the homepage of Convertkit navigate to features and then landing pages and click on get started, which will prompt you to log in to your account or create a new one.
Once you're logged in go to grow and then landing pages and forms and click on create new and then choose landing page.
In my case, I want to use an ebook as my lead magnet. so I will choose ebook in the filter by category and I will select this template.
People a more likely to enter their emails if you provide something in return, that's why I've decided to use an ebook as my lead magnet. Just to be clear, your lead magnet can be anything, a pdf file, an excel sheet a video, etc. Now you might be asking, where to get a free ebook to use?
Where to get a free ebook to use?
I will show you 2 places where to get an ebook for free. The first one is the affiliate resources of your offer in ClickBank or any other marketplace for example. The second one is this website freeplrdownloads where you can download free ebooks to use.
You can search for an ebook in your niche and download it for free. I've already downloaded my free ebook on affiliate marketing, so now let's go back and start customizing our landing page.
Customizing the landing page
Customizing the landing page is very simple. Just select the block and you can edit the options on the right sidebar. So the first thing I want to change is the image so just click on it and then click on replace now. You can either upload an image from your device or use Unsplash and get access to a lot of royalty-free images.
In this example, I'm going to use the cover of the ebook I have downloaded. Now I want to edit the headline so, in your headline make sure to write something that will capture people's attention and make them want to enter their email for that free ebook.
For the headline, I will keep it as it is. under the headline, I will put the following:
To get access to the FREE ebook, simply enter your email and click on "Download Now".
The next thing I want to do is to remove the "first name" field. You don't want to overwhelm people with too many fields. Just click on the field and then click on "delete field". For the button, you can customize it as well, but I think I will keep it as it is.
Moving to the testimonial part. I will edit the text and put something to encourage people to enter their emails.
A nice introduction to affiliate marketing and a step by step guide to maximize your profits.
The next block is what you get block. If you want to edit the title just select the text and write your own. In this section, we want to give people an idea of what to expect. For my example I came up with something like this:
A step-by-step guide on how to launch your affiliate marketing business, ranging from finding your niche, and your products to marketing and generating sales.
Now let's customize the last part, in which I will write something about affiliate marketing. The first thing I want to do is to change the title to the following "ABOUT AFFILIATE MARKETING".
Affiliate marketing is an advertising model in which a company pays others (bloggers, publisher websites ...) to advertise their products and services and generate sales.
With that, our landing page is officially completed. The next we want to do is to create a thank you page. It is very simple, just click on add page and a thank you page will be created.
This is the page that we want our subscribers to get redirected to. At this point, we want to inform them to check their inbox to get the ebook.
Now we need to customize the email that we will be sending to our subscribers. Simply click on settings, and a popup will be shown with multiple tabs.
On the first one, we will set where the subscriber will be redirected. By default, Convertkit will display a success message, but we don't want that. We want our subscribers to be redirected to the thank you page we created earlier.
Moving to the incentive tab. Here you can choose to send the incentive email. It is very important to keep this option checked to filter fake emails. It's basically sending an email to the subscriber in which he has to click on a confirmation button in order to be added to your email list.
Now let's edit the email contents. By default, Convertkit has a default template that we're going to customize. So the first thing I want to do is to change the subject of the email to "Get your FREE ebook". Then we want to customize the email text. The purpose of this email is to tell your subscribers what they can expect from you, what sort of content you're going to be sending them and how often you're going to be emailing them.
Now let's customize our button, this button will play 2 roles. One is to confirm the subscription and the second is to download the ebook. Once you're done, click on save.
You don't want to auto-confirm subscribers so keep that option unchecked.
Now let's customize where the subscriber will be redirected after confirming its subscription. This is the place where you're going to upload the ebook. By default Convertkit will redirect to a default confirmation page, so to override this, choose download and upload your ebook.
And that's pretty it, we finished setting up our landing page, and now we can publish it. Simply hit the publish button to get the link to your live page so you can start promoting it.
Conclusion
A landing page is a very important component of any business and any marketing strategy. Building an email list is a crucial step for maximizing profits and building a sustainable business with a steady income. In this article, we went through the process of creating a simple free landing page to collect emails using ConvertKit.
After building the landing page, the next step is to promote it and send traffic to it.
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