Note from Khalid: This is a guest post from Samantha Gonzales

Business is war. Any serious entrepreneur will tell you so. But businesses with online presences face especially difficult battles because of how easy it is for potential customers to choose competitors’ businesses over their own.

The Internet has made it easier for prospects to find your business, but it’s also made it easier to leave it. Gone are the days when customers had to visit brick-and-mortar establishments and make decisions to do business on-the-spot. Also absent are the business owners, sales people and other representatives that could sway a fence-sitting prospect to the other side with a little charm.

A business website speaks for you and everyone associated it. Though real people aren’t there to greet your prospects when they visit, your landing page can say exactly what you and your employees can’t. It can do the charming, the smiling and the persuading. In the most competitive of markets, your landing page can even be a rallying cry. It can inspire your prospects to heed a call-to-action and buy your product.

Take Control of Your Turf

Ever hear of the “home-field advantage”? A landing page is one of the best places to convey your brand, your product and your commitment to customers. After all, everything’s taking place on your website and as the general, you call the shots.

What sets you apart from competitors? Do you have a risk-free return policy? An unbeatable guarantee? Use your company’s web space to remind the prospect about who he’s dealing with and why he should continue pursuing the relationship.

Energize Your Troops

If prospects arrive on your page, you’ve obviously got their attention. Now you need to support their interest in your product.

Remain focused

Distraction spells disaster for any solider out in the field. The same can be said for prospects who visit your page. Your visitors are on a mission to satisfy a need or desire. Your job as a provider is to satisfy them. Put the need in the spotlight. Focus on it. Create your landing page to appeal to your prospect’s need and only that need. This makes your call-to-action irresistible. Terri Wells’s “Focus is Key for Landing Pages” explains the importance of this strategy and its relation to higher conversion rates.

Keep their eye on the prize

Ensure that your referrals line up with your product. It’s illogical of a business to lure prospects onto their website using product-specific ads and then have referral links lead to a mash-up category of products with no calls-to-action, but it happens all the time. The thinking here is that prospects will be tempted to buy more products, but prospects are more likely to be turned off from buying even the one initial product if they have to look for it.

Think about it this way: on average, every extra “thing” a prospect is forced to do on a website cuts down the probability that he will complete the transaction by 10%. It affects morale in a big way.

Sound the Trumpets

So you’ve drawn lines in the sand and pumped up your troops. What’s next? You’ve got to give your prospects a signal to take action.

Provide your audience with enough information to make an informed purchase

Ideally, the content on your landing page simultaneously educates your prospect about a product and sells it to him. Usually, content should be confined to one page without having to scroll, but different products have different needs. To avoid saying too much or too little, give your prospect enough information to sell your product and no more. Center that information and your call-to-action on the page so that your prospect is flanked by it. Roberta Rosenberg has some great tips for keeping your landing page lean, mean and ready for action.

Ensure that every element on your landing page is built to sell

That includes headlines, subheadings and your copy’s body. Craft copy from the point-of-view of prospects and make it easy on the eye with standard font faces, larger font sizes and broken-up text. Don’t forget that layouts and graphics play an important part in moving the eye. Prune potentially distracting elements like navigation bars, complex images or unrelated ads. Michael Nguyen’s “11 Ways to Improve Landing Pages” provides tips on how to design product-moving pages from the perspective of the buyer.

Psyche them up, psyche them out

One concentrated call-to-action is more effective than many scattered ones. Generally, no landing page should have more than two calls-to-action because they disrupt the landing page’s purpose. Increase the efficacy of your call-to-action by using subtle psychological cues like colors, word choice and natural eye paths like Ann Smarty describes.

Give prospects offers laced with benefits or promotions they can’t refuse

Online prospects have especially short attention spans. It’s almost like they’re looking for reason to leave your website. Work to win your prospects over by not only anticipating what they want and need, but by offering it to them quickly and with persuasive flair in an urgent call-to-action. Landing pages that clearly define the benefits of choosing products or promotions they can’t get elsewhere can keep you from prematurely waving the white flag of defeat.

Readers, what’s been your battle strategy for landing pages so far? What tactics have and haven’t worked for you?