• Every now and then we have to do something painful. Like Work. So I wanted to take something of the supreme grotesque William Wallace level of pain, and show you, well, as he says : “FREEDOM”

    TODAYS PAIN: Build a Single page – Landing page / Sales page. No staff, no frills.

    landing page image

    In the interest of keeping this shorter, I will ‘assume’ you have certain skills. Please comment if there is an area that you would like more instruction.

    1. Select a Domain Name

    Lets head on over to GoDaddy.com and find one that is available. My site topic (and Lord help me, I hope she never finds this on this blog) is this: I have a fantastic friend and I want to help her find a guy! I debate between marrymiriam and marrymyfriendmiriam.com and go with the latter since its obvious SHE had no involvement. I am certain there are better names, but at $7 each, I will be happy to splurge when / if necessary.

    When checking out at GoDaddy, I skip to checkout. I skip about 10 pages of offers and continue to checkout. Dont let all their offers distract you and confuse you. I use the paypal details I have on file, checkout, pay, and transaction complete. I even take 15 seconds in there to find a current coupon code so that the domain does cost me $7 as mentioned and not $10. The code OYH3 has been working for me consistenly for the last several months.

    TIME = 5 minutes

    2. Domain Hosting

    I need to host my website. I already have an account with eboundhost – an unlimited domain account. I go into my whm account, which is basically the URL of my maindomain.com/whm (the main domain is the account you signed up with originally). I click on create a new account. As instructed, I submit the new domain name, select a username and password .. which will also be my FTP user/pass – click OK and wait a few seconds.. until SUCCESS! A new account has been created.

    Time – 3 minutes

    3. Point it in the right place

    I am promptly emailed all the pertinent details for this new domain/website . Most important information is the Nameservers, user/pass, and the I.P of the doman. I go BACK to godaddy and then select manage domains. I click on my new domain – marrymyfriendmiriam.com and then click on nameservers. I select custom nameservers and basically exchange the information in the email from godaddys default nameservers to eboundhost (my web host). Click ok, and its done. It takes a few seconds, but I am already getting to step 4.

    Time – 3 minutes

    4. Allow Your Files to Connect to Your Domain!

    I head over to my FTP client. I am a bit old fashioned here, as I am using WSFTP. I dont even think you can get it now, but there is no lack of free FTP programs, and they all work pretty similarly.

    I select new account. I put in the name field however I wish to refer to it (Marry Miriam) and then in the host name field I put in the I.P address. It will look something like this 65.119.24.35 (-totally made up). After 24 hours or so I should be able to put in the domain name, but the I.P address allows it to work right away. Then I put in the username, password, (the ones my web host emailed to me), click save password and then ok..

    I am IN!!

    Time= 2 minutes

    5. Now – To connect with your Visitors! The Web Page

    My plan is to make this like a salespage, pitching my friend, and inviting single Men to leave us with their contact information. Thats the only action necessary. When you need to create a single page site, there are plenty examples that are very easy to mimic.. like almost exactly. They all look the same, and the only part that differs is the graphics. How do you do this?
    In your inbox you have probably received no less than 10 pitches in the last few days to a wide variety of incredibly similar (is that an oxymoron?) landing pages –

    a. Select the one you like the best.
    b. Go to View tab, click page source, and then copy the source – paste it into a notetab or an html editor and save it as an .htm or .html page.
    c. Make sure to also right click on images and copy those as well. Not logos, but other graphics like borders or backgrounds (EDIT: DO NOT COPY GRAPHICS THAT ARE IMAGES. THIS WAS AN ERROR. Here is what I meant to say – IF YOU SEE A BACKGROUND WITH A COLOR YOU LIKE – JUST CREATE A BACKGROUND WITH THAT SAME COLOR – often times the background you are seeing is NOT an image, rather a color – you will find out if you can read the code or when you upload the page.. .. you can easily google HTML colors and find the whole spectrum of the rainbow to select from without COPYING someone else’s images.)
    d. Go to your FTP – create an images folder and upload all the images there (binary) (REMEMBER – YOUR OWN LOGO!! YOUR OWN GRAPHICS :) !!). Put the new html page in the root folder.
    e. View the page online. Go back into the html page and remove all the unnecessary text or code or replace with your own text.

    Time: 12 minutes

    Troubleshooting:

    **Text get messed up? Did you remove a block of text, a table perhaps but neglect to remove it completely? Most of these pages are created using original HTML, which is what makes it so easy to rip off, but also not very friendly if you get something wrong. I suggest you use block out codes like (the stuff that looks like < --!) if you cant get it right. Just don't embarrass yourself and make sure to delete the copy of whatever was being originally promoted and just leave the code bare in between the blocked out signals. **Another suggestion to avoid issues. Find the source of the tables and add border="2" inside the <> to them one at a time. Then you will be able to SEE the table you are working on, whats included. When you have finished the work, go back and remove the border. This has been extremely helpful to me the past few years. I am not a big ‘code’ person so I have been shocked to find where a table started and ended!

    For the page being discussed – I have enough of my own niche landing pages, that I can just rip off from myself – but they usually originated from some other pitch.

    6. Let’s REEL Them IN.

    Once you get a lead, it is your responsibility to convert that lead into a sale. Now we head over to Aweber. Click new account. Then go to create web form. I add a little text, then save it. I click get HTML – take the javascript code so I can track results, and then just plop the code into the page, usually between some center tags to keep it centered. I have not yet created a first autoresponse, but to do so: click follow up on the list settings tabs, and then go ahead and start writing…

    Time: 5 minutes

    The only part I cannot help you with here is the graphics. I am using images of my friend, so It’s not an issue here. Typically I can head over to Rent a Coder and pick up some decent graphic work .. or I may get a minisite graphics package around the $60 price range.

    Tell me what works for you here, what’s still confusing? Thanks!

    Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.
    • Digg
    • del.icio.us
    • Google
    • DZone
    • ThisNext
    • MisterWong
    • Wists
    • Bumpzee
    • Netscape
    • StumbleUpon
    • Technorati