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How do I create a landing page for my website?

What are the criteria to host a landing page on your main website Vs creating a dedicated domain/minisite?

  • I'm working on a few things I want to create a landing page for: * an ebook * a video series of interviews * a mini course they are all related to the stuff I write about on my website and I'm debating if I should host the landing pages on a dedicated domain or not. I'm mostly wondering if having additional domains with specific urls including relevant keywords is going to help SEO and conversion rather than having them on my own site mixed to everything else. At the same time since the content is related I'm worried about diluting my brand unnecessarily and complicating things to just host a couple of static web pages.

  • Answer:

    After doing some research I found zero evidence that one option is better than the other. In fact it seems that the decision is mostly driven by operational issues. For example if you don't have much flexibility on your main site and the landing page needs to look completely different then a minisite might be a better option. On the contrary if you can't quite afford to setup a new site or don't have the resources to deal with the additional overhead you can use your own domain. SEO wise advantages seem to offset each other, especially if the content of the landing page is tightly related to your main domain picking a new domain containing special keywords is of little help. On the other hand there is indeed a risk of diluting the brand and potentially confusing people. But again, once you list all the pro and cons I don't see any clear winner. In the spirit of Lean, since I have a couple of projects starting soon, I will try to test this and do one landing page on my current site and a minisite and see what happens.

Spike Morelli at Quora Visit the source

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There are advantages to all three approaches. Creating a custom domain for your campaign This might be worthwhile if the campaign is large enough to merit the effort. We, for example, wanted to create a home for our mini-course on landing pages. So we published the landing page and materials to a separate site: http://landingpages107.com.  This way we can just send people a shorter link to the class that's more memorable. Of course we also sign people up directly on our product home page with a widget.  Using a sub-domain to manage pages Check out what KissMetrics does with the "grow" subdomain and their landing pages. http://grow.kissmetrics.com/measure-what-matters They are simply giving away one ebook.  The main domain is still theirs... but the dedicated sub-domain creates a separation so they can easily manage all of the giveaways... rather than having to shoe them into their primary www website.  It also makes it easy for those pages to be managed through a 3rd party landing page provider.  (Which is something we do.)   Using your main website For simpler campaigns you could also choose to leverage your own site. We do that here:  http://www.kickofflabs.com/lp/writing-landing-page-copy The challenge here is that the conversion is competing with your primary navigation and it makes it harder to deviate from your primary site design.  The benefit is, of course, that the page could be more SEO discoverable. But when it comes to SEO... For the types of campaigns you are talking about SEO is going to be the last driver. You'll always drive more traffic to specific landing pages through campaigns, links from your blog, newsletters, etc. I would honestly choose based on what's easiest for you to manage and create the best customer experience around for the goals of your specific campaign.  Does that help? Thanks, Josh Ledgard Founder - KickoffLabs http://www.kickofflabs.com

Joshua Ledgard

I can advise you with one thing, DO NOT create a brand new domain name and redirect it to an affiliate link landing page. Google will NOT index your new website.

Ned Danouma

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