I have a blog - do I need a landing page?

Paul,
The primary purpose of a landing page, capture page, squeeze page (they are just different names for the same thing) is to collect contact information (that could be email addresses, names and email addresses, or whatever else you want to collect.) I've found that most people are more willing to give you just their emails.

Your blog is not your primary way of collecting customers. It is the place to share your ideas, passions, your creatives. It's in a sense your "internet real estate." You can place a capture page (opt in page) on your blog if you want to. But I would advise that you create a separate landing page as well. The people coming to your blog are going to be the ones that are interested in what you are posting there. So you want to capture their contact information. To do that you are going to need an autoresponder or some other way to collects those potential customers. Autoresponders are the easiest way to accomplish this. When someone opts in to your capture page they are automatically added to whatever lists you have created in your autoresponder.

The value of an autoresponder is that even if visitors to your site take no action now on whatever it is your promoting, you have captured their info for future offers you may promote. By building a list within your autoresponder you can then regularly communicate with them - offering value based content that will keep them interested in you and your blog posts.

There are dozens of autoreponders out there. You just need to decide which one will meet your needs and your wallet the best. Some are fairly inexpensive and are not as flexible in their usage, some are quite expensive and offer way more services than you'll probably need. I use two services, GVO and GetResponse. You can google them to get more information.

As for creating capture pages there are a number of websites that allow you to create your own pages. I use one called LeadPages. If you don't think that you will have a need to create a bunch of different capture pages then perhaps the best route to take is creating an opt in page on your blog. You can always decide later whether a capture page creator would be useful. For future reference I would suggest you look at LeadPages.net. They require a monthly fee but it is not as expensive as some others out there that do essentially the same thing.

Well, I guess I've rambled long enough. Feel free to contact me if you have further questions

Hi Paul,

You need to think like your audience and establish yourself as an expert.

To think like your audience, simply get yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself, will you sign up for your e-book? If yes, then you have a good book. But that is only half of your goal as you want them to eventually convert into a sale. With that, you have to ask yourself this question: will you believe the person that wrote the e-book to the point that you'll buy from that person just to help him? Yes, you heard it right. You want to buy from him not because his stuff is useful. You buy from him because he has helped you so much that you want to return the favor. If yes, then you're on the right track. If not, then refine your free e-book so that it can do that.

For the second part, you need to establish yourself as an expert, How do you do that? You need to facilitate all your channels so that anyone who will view it (any profile that links to you or your brand) will see you as an expert - that will mean constantly churning out great content and communicating with your target audience. You need to create an action plan for this.

If you want specific advice, let me take a peek at your communication channels via PM. I'll see what I can do.