Why Landing Pages Are the Perfect First Copywriting Projects

If you’re looking for a way to get started with a potential client—or, perhaps, a good piece of value to bring to a potential client to convince them to work with you—landing pages might just be the perfect place to start.

What’s a Landing Page?

Landing pages are where a visitor “lands” after taking an action like clicking an ad or link or opting in. Landing pages have exactly ONE purpose: to get people to take the action on that page.

Most often, landing pages are used to get people to sign up for a freebie—an e-book, a webinar, a free training, or some other giveaway. (If we’re going to get technical, sales pages are landing pages, too, but they’re a specialized subset.)

People land on the page and the owner of the page hopes that the copy will be convincing enough to get people to sign up for the freebie.

Easy, right? People love “free!” And they do love “free,” it’s true, but that doesn’t mean that people will sign up for something just because it’s free.

People still need to be sold on getting free stuff.

After all, it’s free, but there’s still a transaction of sorts: People have to be willing to give their email address to access the freebie. Or, if it’s a free training or webinar, they have to be willing to give up their email address AND their time!

Writing Landing Page Copy

What all of this means is that landing pages need exceptionally great copy.

When people land on a landing page, they take only a matter of seconds to decide whether to stay on that page or not. And I’m just talking about staying on the page and reading further—not even deciding if they’ll opt in yet!

This means that the headline and the subhead on the page need to be super compelling to get the visitor to immediately say “Oh, wow! This might be something that I want/need” and then get them to read on.

Now, some people will say that the “best” landing pages are just a headline, subhead, and button to opt in, but as with anything online, results vary widely. In fact, anytime anyone tells you there’s one “best” way to do something, run for the hills.

My feeling is that if you have more information that will get people to want to sign up, use it! You can dig deeper into the pain points and/or the benefit to make the reader understand that your client understands them. Include info about what they’ll get in the freebie and how each of those features will benefit them. Create a bio about your client. You can include testimonials about working with your client. If you’ve got compelling elements that will help entice someone to sign up, use them!

The goal of the copy on a landing page is to make signing for the freebie an absolute no-brainer—they’d have to be crazy not to sign up. It’s so beneficial for them and it’s so valuable that it’s irresistible. So use the information at your command to craft copy that makes that clear.

Why Landing Pages Are Great Copy Projects

So now, why is a landing page a perfect first project—or a perfect project to pitch a client about? Because almost everyone who has a freebie (which is pretty much every online business owner) has an opt-in page, and if they don’t they should. And most of them could use a lot of improvement.

Even better, it’s easy to directly measure the improvements your copy makes. With a landing page, business owners are measuring how many people opt in to the freebie. It is NOT how many people click through to the page—that’s affected by the ad or the way that they got to the page, not the page itself.

When you rewrite their copy and improve it, that increase in the opt-in rate is entirely attributable to your copy!

Landing pages are also a great project because they’re just the very beginning of a customer journey. A visitor lands on the landing page, opts in for the freebie, and then should start getting nurturing emails and then sales emails before getting to a sales page. And, then, of course, anything that comes after that.

A landing page is the first step of the journey. And when you do so well either improving or creating that first step, it makes a whole lot of sense to hire you to write the rest of the journey steps, too.

Remember that whether you’re referencing landing pages as part of a free evaluation (with the plan to sell them on your writing services) or as part of a pitch email (same game plan) that you can offer helpful and gentle suggestions about what to change on the page, not how to change it. That’s your job—and that’s what they’ll hire you for.

Read More: Other Copywriting Projects

As a copywriter, you’ll be tasked with many different projects. Here are some other projects you’ll likely be assigned and what you should know about each of them:

• Proof of Concept Copywriting Projects
• How to Sell a Sales Page Project
• Writing Subject Lines for Solopreneurs
• 4 Steps to Write a Wildly Effective About Us Page

Your Turn

Do you have any other questions about landing pages? Let us know in the comments below.

Last Updated on November 14, 2023