Have you ever wondered why you’re not getting the kind of conversion rates other bloggers claim to have on their landing pages?

While a myriad of factors ranging from traffic quality to reader intent could be at play—it turns out there’s a lot you can do when it comes to increasing your landing page conversion rates, simply from experimenting with how your pages are designed.

Check out ConvertKit’s Free landing pages

As a blogger who’s looking to get more email subscribers, generate higher quality leads, or direct readers to a newly launched digital product—you’re much more likely to convert your visitors if you’re driving traffic to a thoughtfully designed landing page, as opposed to a long-form article, a list of all your products, or your homepage.

Landing pages are unique in that they have a single goal: to capture sign ups.

6 elements of an effective landing page

If you’ve already launched your blog and traffic is beginning to flow in, landing pages will become an increasingly important tool for you to wield as you grow your email list and work to monetize your website. Landing pages:

Present readers with a very clear offer (free download, lead magnet, newsletter sign up)
Tell readers exactly what they need to do in order to receive the incentive
Are devoid of distractions like excess content or clickable links to navigate off-page

Here’s an example of one of my most effective landing pages that encourages readers to enroll in my free course about growing a profitable blog, after they’ve already landed on my long-form guide about getting your blog off the ground.

Because the readers that hit this landing page are so well-targeted and already primed for joining this free course, it converts 64.88% of visitors into new email subscribers.

Example of course landing page from Ryan Robinson

Example of a course landing page from Ryan Robinson

You’ll notice that my headline, description, and call-to-action on this landing page are all extremely clear in concisely explaining what action you should take right now—and what you’ll receive in return for joining the free course.

The powerful combination of a straightforward offer and a source of highly targeted traffic that’s getting a free resource to match their exact search-intent is the recipe for a high-converting landing page.

Now, let’s dive a little deeper into what makes for a successful landing page.

How to design a winning landing page

6 key elements of an effective landing page and how to design one for your blog

As we’ve already touched upon, a winning landing page is one that addresses a clear concern, poses a solution and manges to compel your visitors to take action—leading to an increase in conversions. Here are the six elements of an effective landing page, along with clear do’s and don’ts to keep in mind as you formulate your layout.

1. Compelling offer aligned with reader intent

For your landing page to ever work in your benefit, it needs to first pose a relevant and compelling offer (a solution to a problem) that your readers genuinely care about.

The key lies in knowing your audience, understanding what they’re truly interested in, and acknowledging their motivations. Think of their most pressing problems that you can solve with a free offer like an ebook, course, checklist, template, or other digital asset they can immediately access after filling out the form on your landing page.

Here are some ways to determine what a smart lead magnet might be for your audience:

Run a survey of your existing readers using a free tool like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey by linking to the survey from your content, on social media, or within an email campaign that asks readers what challenges they’re facing today.
Use Google’s Autocomplete feature on a given search query to gather insights about commonly asked questions pertaining to your niche or a topic of interest you suspect your readers to care about.
Browse Quora spaces within your niche to discover the kinds of questions people are asking most often as related to a set of common challenges you’re aware of.

Figuring out how to get readers is one thing, but in order to convert your new visitors into excited leads, you’ll have to closely align your offer with the interests of your readers. Once you’ve established that main offer, you need to be able to demonstrate its value and convey how your readers will benefit from it.

Another important aspect to keep in mind is that your landing page needs to very closely match the message that’s being conveyed about the offer on external sources like search engines and social media ads (the sites your readers are coming from). If the messaging doesn’t match up, you’ll get a high bounce rate as readers feel tricked into clicking on your offer.

For example, if your social media post or SEO headline claims that you’re offering a “free demo” of your product from this landing page, make sure the copy on the page clearly communicates that fact.

2. Simple layout that matches your branding

The best landing pages are those that are simple, clutter-free and easy to navigate.

Although most landing pages are created to achieve a single objective, each one is still part of your larger website and needs to be in line with your brand identity, ranging from utilizing your same color schemes, to consistent fonts, layout elements, image styles, and more.

Find ways to integrate the general look and feel of your overall website to offer a unified experience on your landing pages that’ll forge a lasting impression on your new subscribers.

While you may initially feel compelled to communicate a lot of information on your landing pages, offering up too much copy can actually overload visitors with too much information and give them cause to think twice about whether or not they’re ready to claim your offer.

Keep your pages clean, clearly communicate the benefits of what readers will get after claiming your offer—and make the highlights easy to quickly scan.

3. Mobile responsive

Like it or not, mobile is the future. And with mobile devices now accounting for more than 52.2% of all traffic, designing a mobile responsive landing page can no longer be an after-thought.

This means that if you’re using an out-dated content management system, poorly designed WordPress theme or an eCommerce platform that doesn’t allow for the creation of mobile responsive pages, then you’re going to miss out on major opportunities to convert more readers.

Your landing pages need to be optimized for all device types so that they offer a seamless user experience regardless of the size of their browser window—all with the goal of reducing your bounce rate and increasing your conversions.

What contributes to designing a smart, mobile responsive landing page?

Clear, easy-to-read headlines and bullet points of copy
Optimized images or embedded video that load quickly
Simple design using a single-column layout (on mobile)
Place all crucial content and the CTA above the fold
Short sign up forms with auto-fill options enabled

The last thing you want is for your readers to keep zooming in and out and adjusting the size of their screen just to make sense of your landing page. Ensure you take the time to design a mobile responsive landing page that offers a smooth user experience across all devices.

4. Powerful headline that grabs your reader’s attention

Once you’ve managed to direct traffic to your landing page, what happens next depends a lot upon how powerful your headline is to compel your visitors to read on.

The fact that on average, 8 out of 10 people will only read the headlines on a page before making a decision about whether or not the content is for them, makes it arguably the most important single element on your landing page.

You can have the best freebie with the most persuasive copy, but with the wrong headline—many readers will instantly leave if they don’t resonate with it.

A high-converting landing page headline is one that:

Very specifically states the exact deliverable subscribers will receive
Closely matches the visitor’s expectations and grabs their attention
Focuses on benefits and the positive results that can be expected
Appeals to emotion and creates a sense of urgency

I recommend using CoSchedule’s free Headline Analyzer tool to test your headlines and get suggestions on how to improve them before launching new landing pages. Their tool takes these factors into account to help shape your headlines in the right direction.

While a headline does need to be short and succinct, you can consider adding a sub-heading to elaborate on your message and add more context to drive the point home. Consider using testimonials or research data to boost your credibility on-page.

5. Relevant, visually appealing images

Utilizing visuals on your landing page will almost always liven up the atmosphere and serve to better capture the attention of your visitors when they arrive.

Consider using images of people (even yourself if you’re central to your brand) to evoke an emotional connection, humanize your offer and form a relationship with your new subscribers.

It also pays dividends to use an image of the digital product you’re offering—whether that’s an ebook, video course, audio download or otherwise—to make the connection between your landing page headline and the format of your offer. This helps readers visualize the product and makes it easier for them to consider signing up for it.

If you’re including testimonials on your landing page, complement them with pictures of your customers to go alongside their quotes, or consider adding video testimonials to add an even deeper layer of authenticity.

All of this being said, don’t make the mistake of using too many images on your landing pages—to the point of cluttering the layout, distracting the reader or making the mobile version of your page a hassle to navigate. Use visuals sparingly and make them count.

6. Frictionless form with a clear CTA

The entire purpose of creating a landing page on your blog is to get your visitors to fill out the form and take you up on your content offer, right?

After all the hard work you put in to drive targeted traffic to your page, you don’t want to force readers to consider whether or not it’s worth their time filling out a lengthy form.

The more fields you require readers to fill, the more likely they are to abandon the page.

Keep your forms as short and straightforward as possible, by asking for the bare minimum information you need to collect. Ask yourself which data points are absolutely essential to get at this stage from your new subscriber.

For instance, if you’re asking visitors to sign up for an upcoming webinar, you probably don’t need their zip code and the size of their company, do you?

If you want your landing pages to convert well, then get more readers to complete your sign up process by making it incredibly easy for them to do so.

The final important element you’ll want to carefully curate on your lead form, is the call-to-action (CTA) button that visitors will click on to submit their information and claim your offer.

Choosing a color for your CTA button

The color you choose for your CTA button should remain on-brand and contrast enough with the rest of your page elements so that it clearly stands out.

You’ll also want to place it prominently below the form fields your visitors just filled out, so that it’s the natural next step—and use action-oriented language for the button text.

8 do’s and don’ts for designing a winning landing page

Do use target keywords to optimize your landing page for SEO best practices
Don’t overcrowd the page by inserting too much text or too many images
Do use contrasting colors to make your headline and CTA prominent
Don’t employ multiple CTA buttons that could confuse visitors
Do A/B test your landing page headlines, copy and images to improve results
Don’t use generic and ambiguous CTA copy like “Click Here” or “Submit”
Do redirect visitors to a “thank you” page afterwards to set expectations for what’s next
Don’t insert links to other content pages on your landing pages

Now, let’s take a closer look at some more high-converting landing pages.

6 top bloggers share their highest-converting landing page examples

To help bring you a more diverse sampling of landing page examples, I reached out to a few bloggers who’ve been designing (and optimizing) their landing pages for years—across millions of readers that have landed on these pages.

1. Michelle Schroeder, Making Sense of Cents

Making Sense of Cents Cheat Sheet landing page

Making Sense of Cents Cheat Sheet landing page

Michelle Schroeder runs her personal finance blog, Making Sense of Cents, and teaches over 300,000 monthly readers how to do everything from being more responsible with their money, to accelerating their savings, increasing their earnings and more. A large segment of her audience is comprised of bloggers that want to earn an online income from affiliate marketing.

For the right readers who’ve landed on Michelle’s article about how to grow your affiliate income, this free checklist hits the nail on the head in terms of matching the user-intent for those that want to take their learning to the next level.

This lead magnet that I offer through Convertkit has given me tens of thousands of subscribers over the years and converts very well. I think it’s done well for many for many reasons, but largely because the article it’s connected to is genuinely helpful (and not just a fluff piece). The content is over 1,000 words in length and it isn’t just trying to sell readers something over and over again.

The second reason it’s done so well, is the content really gets readers interested in the topic of affiliate marketing and talks about the benefits of what can happen if you take it seriously, which persuades them to sign up for the freebie.

Michelle Schroeder

2. Pat Flynn, Smart Passive Income

Pat Flynn podcasting cheat sheet landing page

Pat Flynn podcasting cheat sheet landing page

Pat Flynn’s blog, Smart Passive Income, and his immensely popular podcast have both become synonymous with covering everything it takes to earn an online income—especially when it comes to generating passive sources of revenue.

Since launching his podcast more than nine years ago, he’s amassed well over 50 Million downloads, and he’s long fielded questions from his readers about how he’s grown his show to such incredible heights. His podcast cheat sheet breaks all of his advice down.

With a very crisp visual of what the cheat sheet looks like right up top, sitting next to the headline and a clear CTA button, this landing page gets high marks for design layout. Couple that with the short, autoplay video below the fold of Pat quickly explaining the benefits of what you’ll get from the cheat sheet, and this has become one of his highest-converting downloads.

This landing page does well for us because it’s an obvious content upgrade, and when I talk about podcasting in my content—it’s an easy win for people to have all of the steps laid out right in front of them in one single place.

Pat Flynn

3. Brian Dean, Backlinko

Backlinko’s SEO tips newsletter landing page

Believe it or not, something as simple as a newsletter sign up page can actually serve as a high-converting landing page to collect new email subscribers if you design it well and lead with a compelling offer. Brian Dean’s world-renowned SEO blog is a stellar example of this in action today.

This landing page converts so well because we make what you get feel more tangible than just a newsletter or weekly updates. Instead, we use terms like SEO tips and strategies that make the value of the newsletter more clear. We also added a second field below the fold and that boosted our conversion rate on the page by about 10%.

Brian Dean

While the success you have in convincing readers to sign up for another newsletter to hit their inbox each week will naturally depend a lot upon how compelling your offer is, you’ll also have to take into account how visitors are navigating to this page—and what their expectations are upon arriving.

4. Bethany Cantor & Ankur Nagpal, Teachable

Landing page example from Teachable’s Women Who Create campaign

Teachable’s Women Who Create event landing page

This landing page example was from Teachable’s Women Who Create campaign that ran in March of 2019, as a 3-day virtual event specifically for female creators. The fact that this offer was so carefully targeted to a specific target audience, helped drive high attendance figures for the event.

This page converted at 60% for us, which may surprise a lot of people given that it was pretty long-form compared to most of our landing pages. It was a unique page we launched for a one-time summit event, and each section of the page had a specific purpose ranging from explaining the benefits you’ll get from attending the free conference, to some focused FAQs and the intent remained clear all the way down the page.

Bethany Cantor

All else aside, there’s an immense amount of perceived value in attending a free virtual summit some of the top women leaders in online business today.

The narrative throughout the page was largely based on improving your marketing skills, in a positive, inspirational tone and the single CTA is clear. We’re asking for your time up front. Then, we take on the responsibility of providing value in the summit.

5. Hiten Shah, FYI

FYI’s Chrome Extension landing page

Hiten Shah’s document search and organization tool, FYI, has minimalistic landing page for their Chrome Extension that converts very well—largely because of the autoplay background video that quickly helps visitors understand exactly what they’ll get.

The key to the page is the animated GIF that highlights how easy our document search is. This type of focused landing page makes people choose whether what we’re providing is for them or not. Since conversion is the goal, we’ve found this approach of a concise page to work better than a long form landing page.

Hiten Shah

In addition to the straightforward, concise headline and CTA, it’s worth highlighting how effective the various product logo images are, when positioned side-by-side with the headline. It makes the instant connection for visitors to understand that this product will allow you to search and organize all of your documents across the various different platforms you’re already using.

6. Jon Morrow, SmartBlogger

Smart Bloggers headline cheat sheet landing page

Smart Blogger’s headline cheat sheet landing page

The powerhouse behind the SmartBlogger empire, Jon Morrow has been teaching hundreds of thousands of writers and bloggers how to become better content creators, marketers, and successful online business owners for the better part of a decade.

His most effective landing page has a clever name—Headline Hacks—and a very simple layout with a compelling product image, bold headline, and clear CTA without any distractions.

Our headline hacks landing page works so well, because it’s the closest thing to a cheat code there is for blogging.

People are looking for fast, easy wins and a fill-in-the-blank headline template fits the bill. It’s also promising a benefit our audience wants: make your post go viral. Put the two together, combined with a simple landing page, and it’s a winner.

Jon Morrow

ConvertKit’s highest-performing landing page examples

If you’re looking to design a landing page for your blog, it helps to take inspiration from other successful landing pages and understand what makes them so successful.

To add to the examples we’ve already pulled from some of the world’s most successful bloggers, here are four high-performing ConvertKit landing page designs to help you get started.

1. Business themed landing page example

Business themed free landing page template from ConvertKit

Business themed free landing page template from ConvertKit

If you’re launching a new course, this business-themed landing page is a great example.

Uses a numbered headline to highlight the value proposition of the offer (email course)
Sub-headline elaborates on how the reader will benefit
Simple form that only asks for essential information (first name and email address)
Prominent, action-oriented CTA that includes the benefit (free course) in the copy
Clear design and visually appealing layout
Creates a sense of urgency (register today, don’t miss your chance)
Uses click triggers to boost conversions (we respect your privacy, unsubscribe anytime)

2. Coming soon landing page example

High converting coming soon landing page example from ConvertKit

Coming soon free landing page template from ConvertKit

If you’re looking to promote an offer before launching it, to gauge interest, or create some pre-launch buzz for your upcoming offer, here’s a coming soon landing page that’ll be perfect for the occasion.

Highlights the incentive (sign up and get 20% off)
Creates a sense of urgency (offer expires December 31)
Outlines the features of the offer
Simple form, asking for only an email address
Hero image that complements the product
Uses click triggers (we respect your privacy, unsubscribe anytime)

3. Free course landing page example

Free landing page example from ConvertKit for courses

Free course landing page example from ConvertKit

Whether you’re launching a free email course or just want to build your list with a more targeted newsletter sign up page, here’s a landing page you can take a lot of inspiration from.

Displays your picture front and center to establish a connection with visitors
Asks relevant questions in the form
Dynamic form fields for collecting multiple types of inputs (I advise keeping it simple)
Action-oriented CTA

4. Lead magnet landing page example

High converting landing page example from ConvertKit

Lead magnet landing page example from ConvertKit

Your chances of growing your email list climb significantly if you can offer a valuable lead magnet in return for a visitor’s email address. Here’s a lead magnet landing page template you can use to get started.

Hero image up top that helps readers visualize your product
Bold headline that describes the offer in just a few words
Copy demonstrating what the product has in store
Simple form with a clear CTA button

Create your own high-converting landing pages

Landing pages aren’t just for big brands and established online businesses with something pricey to sell—they’re equally useful to bloggers at all stages, from brand new to experienced creator.

A well-designed landing page will help you convert more readers into email subscribers, which in turn creates opportunities to eventually generate revenue in a win-win manner, by selling relevant products or services to your audience.

Sure, it takes time to build a profitable business around your blog, but landing pages sit at the center of it all. They’re the vehicle by which you can generate the email subscribers you’ll need to connect with (and learn from) in order to develop genuinely helpful solutions to the problems they’re facing.

And beyond that, when a landing page is paired with the right offer, it also helps you start those new subscriber relationships on a meaningful note by offering something of value right off the bat.

Wondering where to begin?

Try ConvertKit’s landing page builder to create beautiful landing pages in minutes.

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