💡 Business Tip - Own Your Landing Page (Issue #19)

Don't link directly to a service’s page

Photo by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash

When you’re marketing your business, you share links to various landing pages. More often than not, you’re using 3rd party services that provide functionality to complete specific tasks such as:

• Buy my product.

• Schedule a call with me.

• Join my community.

• Sign up for my newsletter.

When it's a temporary marketing campaign (e.g., a Google ad), it’s ok to link directly to the deepest conversion page. For example, linking directly to:

• Your book on Amazon’s website.

• Your schedule hosted on Calendly.

• Your product page built on Shopify.

• Your story published on Medium.

However, if you want that link to be “evergreen” because it’s in a placement with a longer life (e.g., your bio page), it’s much better to link to a URL on a domain you own. For example, you’ll always want people to sign up for your services.

You can always control what’s on your own landing page. You can control where you redirect people or what embedded service you put on the page. This ensures you don’t end up with a bunch of broken links or links pointing to services you no longer use. For example:

• I’ve changed email list services about four times.

• I’ve changed call scheduling services a few times.

• I’ve changed my community platform 4-5 times.

So, now I try to link to a landing page that’s on my domain and then I can have placements and embedded modules on those pages to use my current services. The community page on my Invincible Career website is a good example.

My newsletter is located at newsletter.invinciblesolopreneurs.com (i.e., my domain) and uses the Substack platform (i.e., someone else’s backend service). But I could switch to a different platform tomorrow and my newsletter link will point to that new provider with no interruption of service. My readers don’t have to change their bookmarks to my newsletter.

My call scheduling page is on my website and uses an embed from Acuity Scheduling. I’m probably going to switch to Calendly this year. The URL to schedule a call with me will be the same one I’ve used for over 6 years. All I need to do is replace the Acuity embed with the Calendly embed.

I learned this lesson the hard way. So, don’t make the mistake I did in the past.

Yes, it’s much faster and easier to simply link to a service provider’s page. But, all of those links will be useless in the future when you change providers, and, trust me, you will change providers more often than you think.

Create and link to your own landing pages.

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Hi, I’m Larry Cornett, a coach who can work with you 1-on-1 to design, launch, and optimize your business. I currently live in Northern California near Lake Tahoe with my wife and our Great Dane while running my businesses 100% remotely.