Whether you are getting someone to sign up for your mailing list or trying to recruit a new client, landing pages are a critically important tool. This is where you sell your potential customers on the value of your services, and that makes landing pages some of the you most important marketing material.

A badly written and designed landing page will silently cost you clients, while a well-made landing page can double or triple your conversion rate.  The difference between a successful page and a failing page can be as simple as changing a few words, and I can tell you how to find the right ones.

In most industries you can expect a landing page to convert around 3% to 6% of visitors. Over at my other site, The Digital Reader, I have a landing page for my mailing list that has a conversion rate of over 20%.

Yes, one in five people who visit the landing page ended up signing up for the mailing list. What’s more, that conversion rate is rising all the time because every so often I go back and tweak the language to make the page more effective (the very first version of the page had a conversion rate of around 10%).

In this post I will explain how I wrote such a fiendishly effective landing page, and I’ll share tips you can use to improve your landing page.

Let’s start by looking at the text of the landing page. It’s very short (71 words).

Everyone knows that  authors no longer need publishers, but it can be difficult to keep up with the latest tech while also writing and marketing your books.

Sign up for our newsletter and we’ll share useful info that will help you grow your mailing list, sell more books, and bond with readers.

Plus, we’ll give you a name generator you can use to invent colorful names for just about anything!

The first thing I did was tell my audience something they believed. This built a rapport with the audience, which is great because once they agree with you on something, it will be easier to convince them they should sign up.

At the same time, I framed one of those belief statements as a problem, and then pitched my newsletter as a solution. This made it clear to my audience how they will benefit from my newsletter. Telling them how I will help them achieve their goals made it more likely they will sign up.

I also took care to use magic words like “everyone knows” or “most people” or “you know how”. When you frame your statements this way, it will sound like you are repeating a common-sense truism that everyone knows.

And finally, I offered new subscribers a freebie as a reward for signing up. I offer a name generator on the landing page, but I also have freebies, including a guide to security steps you can take to secure your site. It’s a free download.

These four tricks (five, counting the length of the text) are just a few of the reasons why people are three times more likely to sign up for my mailing list as they are for other mailing lists.

You should see how many of these tricks you can apply in your mailing list; with a little hard work you might be able to raise your conversion rate as high as mine.