Q: Why do you need landing page tools?

A: Traffic is expensive.

Paid traffic requires money and expertise in running ad campaigns. With content marketing, you provide great content that is helpful to your audience. Writing and other content creation is time-consuming or an expense to outsource. But you must have content to get SEO traffic.

Traffic is created either through paid advertising or SEO and content marketing costs.

You bring that traffic to your site to get the visitor to perform an action – sign-up for a seminar, select your affiliate CTA, subscribe to an email list, download a white paper, etc. With either paid or SEO traffic, you need to optimize the conversion of these actions that you paid for. Landing pages can do that for you.

There are many potential types of landing pages any blog or affiliate site might have. To give you an idea here are a number of examples.

Go to our content marketing page for more tips.

Affiliate Products and Landing Pages

Many niche marketers are Amazon affiliates. With these sites, you are creating reviews, comparisons articles, information posts, etc. In these type of sites landing page tools are used for e-mail opt-in forms, thank you pages and other marketing interactions. I do also strongly believe that Amazon sites should consider leveraging their authority via other affiliate programs.

Most niches with traffic have other affiliate opportunities beyond Amazon. These are often recurring commission programs and other high-paying offers. With these type of affiliates, your offer pages are treated like landing pages.

Having a broad offering of products for your audience just makes sense. As massive as Amazon is you will find other products that help your audience. Check out our article on recurring commission offers to get some ideas of the kind of products you may want to consider. These are also pages that you would want to consider using paid ads for.

These recurring commission products can make up the low volume, high commission portion of your portfolio. But, you can’t just run ads and send the CTA link directly to the affiliate offer. You really want to send the prospect to a landing page.

Biggest affiliate mistake …

Sending traffic straight to an affiliate offer.

 

Why not?

 

 The traffic is cold. They don’t know you and you have given them no reason to purchase. This will have very low conversion rates.

 You have lost control of the lead after one click. You did not get their email, you did not pixel them for future retargeting campaigns.

By sending the prospect to your landing page rather than the affiliate offer, you have the opportunity to FaceBook pixel them for future targetted ads. You also have the opportunity to get them in the sales funnel via an email opt-in. And most importantly, you have the opportunity to present the product’s features and benefits – to get them to select the CTA.

To maximize your investment, you want to optimize these pages with a landing page tool.

So what is the best way to make these pages?

There are three basic approaches to building a landing page. What makes the best landing page tool depends on your budget and technical abilities …

 

Dedicated Landing page applications –  there are many dedicated products for making landing pages. These include Leadpages, Unbounce, Instapage, Landingi, and many others. All of these products will usually provide integration with your e-mail marketing service. These can typically be published on the tool companies servers or integrated with your WordPress site.

Funnel Builders – these tools provide a complete service for building landing pages, Funnel Builders do it all from landing page tools to e-commerce. The best known of these is ClickFunnels.ClickFunnels will provide everything from hosting to order fulfillment with no external integration. They even have a built-in affiliate system to expand your marketing reach.

Drag and Drop WordPress themes – The drag and drop themes will allow you to create great looking landing pages as part of their core functionality. Themes like Thrive and Divi are well known for landing page capabilities. Like the landing page builders, you are integrating with other parts of your marketing stack like e-mail service providers.

Each category has a number of options but let’s focus on the best from each area and compare them. We will compare InstaPage, ClickFunnels and Thrive.

Landing Page Tools, Funnel Builders & WP Plugins and Themes

The three different types of tools each have advantages and disadvantages. A lot depends on your comfort level with the technologies. If you want everything done in one tool – go with funnel builders. If you want to integrate your marketing tools – Landing page builders will work best. If you are a WordPress user and want to host your own landing pages and have easy SEO and retargeting integration – consider the WordPress option. Personally, I use Divi and LeadPages.

Landing Page Tools

A Landing page tool will  let you quickly create your customer engagement pages from scratch, or more typically, from a template.

  • Integrates with most e-mail service providers
  • Dedicated to Landing Pages – easy to use
  • Drag & Drop design tools
  • Some integrate with eCommerce backends like Stripe and Paypal.
  • Analytics and/or AB testing may require pro license.

LeadPages is a pioneer in this market and one of the best landing page tools at an affordable price.Let’s take a look.

LeadPages Pricing

LeadPages is a typical pricing model for landing page tools. They have 3 monthly pricing levels $25 $49, $199. To give you an idea of details that might be broken out by pricing levels.

leadpages pricing

Is there a trial?

There is a 14-day Leadpages free trial available. It requires a credit card, but you can cancel before the 14 days and have no charges.

LeadPages Templates

LeadPages has over 250 free landing page templates and they have a marketplace where you can purchase templates.

Landing Page Vendors

We used LeadPages as an example but there are many choices. ranging from $37/mo to $129/mo. They all have 20%+ discounts for annual purchases. And all have free trials.

    • LeadPages – LeadPages is a pioneer in the industry. An easy to use drag & drop builder with lots of templates. The templates have been around for a while so be sure to change them up a bit or you make look too familiar. -> $37/mo Free 14 day trial
    • UnBounce– Unbounce is a very interesting product and one I like a lot. The editor is very slick and they make it very easy to connect your domain and manage url/slug.  -> $99/mo  Free 30 day trial
    • InstaPage – Great for teams or outsourced projects. -> $129/mo Free 14 day trial (no credit card required)
    • Landingi – Landingi provides It provides 100+ templates, Image/ icon library, fonts, and more, -> $39/mo Free 14 day trial

Landing Page Tools +/-

Landing Page +

A dedicated best of breed toolset for building landing pages

Easy to build and deploy landing pages

Lots of templates to use as starting point

 

Landing Page -

 It can be difficult to customize with FaceBook pixels etc.

 It can get expensive and is recurring.

Templates can start to feel familiar as many sites use the same templates.

 

Funnel Builders

ClickFunnels arguably occupies the mountaintop of landing page products. They have a decent set of tools for building landing pages. But what ClickFunnels is best known for is their complete solution. ClickFunnels allows you to have an entire sales flow without having any website. They host your pages/funnels, provide landing page creation tools, a complete affiliate system, payment systems and checkout, analytics and A/B testing. Features of ClickFunnels include:

  • Quickly set up new landing pages.
  • Clickfunnels has email autoresponders to automate your messaging
  • A/B testing for every page
  • Create membership sites
  • Clickfunnels is integrated with payment processors like Stripe & Paypal
  • Clickfunnels has an affiliate network for expanding your funnels reach

CLICKFUNNELS PRICING

This is the most expensive option. You also may find yourself buying premium funnels. You should consider the value of your time and the ultimate effectiveness of the tool. If ClickFunnels works for you and is making you money, just go with it.

  • ClickFunnels: (20 funnels, 100 pages, and 20k visitors a month) $97/month
  • Full ClickFunnels Suite: (unlimited funnels, pages and traffic)  $297/month

Is there a trial?

CLickFunnels has the same 14-day free trial and credit card requirement for signup as LeadPages.

Clickfunnels has funnel templates, some are a single page. Many of the funnels are premium priced. They have a marketplace where you can purchase them.

ClickFunnels Templates

Funnel Building Tools

  • ClickFunnels – The original and arguably still the best. The entry price is not too high at $97 but the entire suite will eat into your budget at $297. If it makes you money – go for it. -> $97-$297 Free 14-day trial 
  • Builder All – The up and comer. Both ClickFunnels and BuilderALl have aggressive multi-level affiliates – make good decisions. BuilderAll is very aggressive with their pricing and a good value if the fit is there. -> $29-$49/mo Free 7-day trial (no credit card required)

Funnel Builders +/-

Funnel Builder +

A complete funnel system with end-to-end integrated functionality.

Easy to build and deploy complete funnels.

Affiliate system & e-Commerce backend built-in to expand your marketing.

Robust analytics and testing

 

 

Funnel Builder -

 It can be difficult to customize with FaceBook pixels etc.

 It can get expensive

 There are many features and functions to navigate

 

WordPress  Themes & Plugins

In addition to cloud-based tools for building funnels and landing pages, there are themes and plugins in WordPress that will do many of the same functions.

Themes such as DIVI and Thrive provide drag and drop editing just like the funnel builders and landing page products. They provide A/B testing of pages.  There are many templates available. Optimizepress and similar products will even provide a plugin based landing page toolkit so that you can stick with your existing theme. So why not use them?

Well, you can.

This is a particularly good approach for those on a budget as the cost of themes or plugins are a one-time event – not a monthly expense. But you need to have the technical ability to pull all of these pieces together and you need to be creative enough to build your own templates. If you are creating content and design now in WordPress you can easily create your own landing pages with WordPress tools.

Themes like Thrive have a good track record and can give the best landing page tools a run for their money.  They have over 250 landing page templates. here is a small set to give you some ideas. Thrive has an excellent tutorial on building landing pages with their theme. 

Thrive Templates

WordPress Tools Vendors

Generally no trials on themes and plugins. All provide 30-day refunds though.

  • Thrive – Thrive is focused on conversions. Lots of templates, great drag, and drop editor. For new internet marketers, it is a great place to start. -> $120/every 3 months(quarterly)
  • Divi – Divi is my go-to theme for most sites. At this point, it is familiar and reliable. I can quickly create any page needed. You can get lifetime licensing that includes updates and support, which is great. $99 per year – $249 lifetime.
  • Optimize Press OptimizePress is a plugin, not a theme. The types of functionality including membership sites,  provide make much more sense in a plugin. It will work with any theme. One time purchase plus annual renewals $97 – $197.

WordPress Plugins & Themes +/-

Wordpress Tools +

A low-cost solution with no monthly bills

Easy to use within your existing SEO and marketing toolset.

Easy to add Facebook and other pixels for retargeting

 

 

Wordpress Tools -

 It can be difficult to customize with FaceBook pixels etc.

 It can require more technical skills to integrate the pieces

 It can require more design skills with fewer template options.