You’ve seen those fancy landing pages – the ones with the static footers in black and gold, menus that stick to the top as you scroll down, and boxes that ask for your email address in exchange for a PDF goodie guide.

Then there are the popups. Some appear immediately and block access to the content unless you subscribe, while others take their time to appear or show up when you move your mouse. Some pages even hit you with all three types of popups.

What do these landing pages have in common? They’re too distracting to be effective, and they completely annoy the visitor.

Landing pages, sales pages, and squeeze pages

These three terms can be confusing. To make it simple, a landing page is just a fancy term for a webpage with a purpose and sales pages and squeeze pages are types of landing pages.

Every page has a purpose

In order to create an effective landing page, you need to know its purpose so you can create the right kind of page. If your goal is to sell something, you’ll create a sales page. If your goal is to capture leads, you’ll create a squeeze page. It’s really that simple. What’s not simple is knowing how to create these pages effectively.

Creating effective squeeze pages to capture leads

If you’re creating a page to generate leads, you’ll want to read this thorough guide to learn how to gain your visitors’ trust and get them to give you their email address.

Squeeze pages are designed to convince the visitor to give you their email address, and the best way to do that is to come up with an irresistible lead magnet to provide in exchange.

Now that you know a little more about squeeze pages, let’s dive into how to create an effective sales page with these 4 rules:

Rule #1: Your product should be easy to purchase

It’s easy to get caught up in writing beautiful copy, but if you’re going to write a long form sales letter, you need to make sure your product is easy to purchase along the way.

With long copy, you should place buy buttons at multiple intervals down the page. Don’t make your visitors read a novel before they can buy, and don’t make them scroll endlessly down the page if they decide to buy early on.

Also, don’t bury your buy link inside of paragraphs and expect people to click on it. People are used to seeing huge “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons with Paypal, Visa, and MasterCard logos next to them, so don’t get too creative with this aspect.

Rule #2: Get rid of your menus on all sales pages

Menus have no place on your sales pages because you don’t want your visitors to navigate away from the sales process. You want them to keep reading, scrolling, and buying. Anything that allows them to get distracted will cost you the sale.

If you want your sales page to look exactly like your webpage and match your brand, complete with your logos and trademarks, you should reconsider. Sales pages are not supposed to look like your website – they’re supposed to generate a sale. The more artwork, graphics, logos, and distractions there are, the less likely you will be to make the sale.

Besides, if you’re doing it right, your visitors aren’t finding your sales pages by navigating your website, they’re finding you from paid ads or internet searches. When they’re on your sales page, they probably don’t even know who you are, and that’s an advantage for you. The less stimulus you give people to judge, the less likely they will be to find reasons not to buy.

Rule #3: Get rid of your links on all sales pages

If a link doesn’t lead to your order or payment page, it doesn’t belong on your sales page. Again, anything that takes the visitor away from the sales page means you’ve lost the sale.

Rule #4: Get rid of your popups on all sales pages

Nothing will kill a sale more than a random popup. The exit popup is sometimes the worst. Seeing the headline “wait, don’t go!” on a popup is almost as bad as hearing the late night infomercial line, “but wait, there’s more!”

You can create fancy, shiny pages with lots of bells and whistles that serve to impress visitors, or you can create pages that effectively serve to sell your products and services. Don’t be afraid to go barebones and scale back the glitter. Even if you’re already making sales, you can still see that number improve.