Have you ever heard the saying, ?You only get to make a first impression once?? How many times have you been advised to give a ?solid? handshake to project a favorable image of yourself? Whether you're in a job interview, meeting your girlfriend's parents for the first time, or trying to cement an important business deal, making a solid first impression is crucial. With advertising this concept is also true, and translates into making a strong pitch to hold your potential clients? attention. This is why advertising committees may spend millions of dollars devising a single magazine advertisement ? because they know that their window of opportunity to capture a reader's interest could only be a second or two. How many times have you flipped through a magazine and suddenly paused because a well-designed ad caught your attention?

With Internet advertising, the principles are the same. But instead of a page in a magazine, your focus is the landing page. A landing page is what the user ? your potential client ? arrives at when they click on an ad or the result from a search. Think of a landing page as your ?digital handshake? ? you need to make a solid first impression! Depending on what you want to get accomplished, landing pages can take two general forms. The first is as a transaction page, meaning it will prompt the visitor to complete a form to make a transaction ? filling out things like contact information and so on. The second type of page assumes the role of a reference page, and may feature relevant content in the form of text, videos, and graphics.

Whatever your goal for your landing page, here are a few general rules to follow if you want to make a solid first impression and retain your visitor's attention. First, be succinct. This means getting your main point across without blotting up the whole page with sentences ? don't use ten words when five will do. This is a simple tenet of effective communication. The visitor is not here on your page to read an essay, just give them the information they need. This is being considerate to their time and yours. How do you make an effective pitch? Think headlines from magazine and newspaper articles.

Second, don't make your page gaudy ? flashing images, overloaded colors, and other distracting visuals. You're trying to create a digital pathway upon which to lead your visitor, not doing your best mockup of the Las Vegas strip. This will demean the seriousness of the landing page; your visitor will feel like he's stumbled onto a shameless commercial ploy and be turned off ? a quick back click would be a likely result.

Third, don't be too cut-and-dry. Yes, be terse and efficient, but don't be boring and listless in your headlines. When creating a landing page, you are trying to retain customer attention. You need to make an effective argument for why the visitor should stay on your page. Don't just tell them to ?click for more information.? Tell them what they stand to gain by doing so, but just remember not to be too wordy.