If you’re an affiliate marketer, email marketer, CPA marketer, simply anyone who is selling online, you must learn how to set up and create a landing page. Why? Simply because a landing page is the number one tool when it comes to digital marketing and online business.
In this article, I’ll be showing you how to set up, create, host, connect with an email service for automation, and publish landing pages. I’ll be revealing to you how you can also publish a landing page for free, I believe this will help beginners start working online. Not only that, reading this article will give you the skill to provide this service as a freelancer, you can provide this service as a gig on Fiver or any freelancing website. Let’s get busy.
Related: How to create a WordPress website
How To Create A Landing Page For Cheap
This article will be divided into two parts. In the first part, I’ll show you how to create a landing page, and in part two, I’ll show you how to publish and host a landing page. I’ll try and make everything is done almost for free.
Part One: Creating The Landing Page
There are services out there available for you to create landing pages with, let’s take a look at them.
1. Click Funnels
With click funnels, you can create automated sales funnels and landing pages to sell products, build an email list, and much more. Click funnels is a great application, but it costs around $99/month. As a beginner, I don’t think it’s the perfect choice for you.
2. The second option is to go with an email marketing service like ConvertKit to create landing pages and forms. Convertkit is also a paid application, if you’re into email marketing, you’ll be using an email marketing service like Convertkit, Constant content, MailChimp, etc. All these services have an option to build landing pages, but you have to pay a fee per month.
3. The other option which is another email service is Sendingblue, which allows you to create landing pages also.
4. Using A WordPress Plugin
I often talk about creating and building your own email system to save money and cost, you also create opt-in forms and landing pages with WordPress and a plugin called Master Popups. Master Popups is also not free, if you go to Code Canyon you’ll see that it cost around $39. But what’s nice about this is that you’ll have two licenses and it’s only a one-time payment. You just buy it once and you Can build whatever pages you want on your website. It’s also a great option to build landing pages, opt-in forms, and any page at all.
5. Using Themeforest
You can go to a website themeforest.net and there you can search for landing pages in Html or WordPress, and you’ll be shown a lot of landing pages that you can buy for $5, $10, $16, etc.
6. A cheaper option is to buy MEGAPACK for a $29 one-time payment, which gives you free access to Pixfort Page Builder. Pixfort Page Builder is simply a web page builder. You buy it once for $29 and you can create unlimited pages, unlimited landing pages, with only a one-time fee. This is the best option for beginners to start with. You can get this MEGAPACK at ThemeForest.
After buying Pixfort, what next?
All you have to do is to log in and create a project by just dragging and dropping. You can create your landing page using Pixfort and you can connect your email marketing service. Pixfort supports multiple email marketing applications. You can use MailChimp campaign monitor, Getresponse, Aweber, Active Campaign, Mailwiz, etc. Pixfort also supports a custom email, you can collect the emails by sending them into your inbox, and collecting them manually.
How To Create A Page On Pixfort
1. log in to Pixfort.
2. At the left end of the window, click on add sections.
3. Click on forms.
4. Select the type of form template you’ll like to use and click on it and drag it to the main window.
5. Start editing customizing the template to your desired tone. The most important thing to do is to take care of is the form option. To do that, click on the mail icon, click on settings, select the form type for example Mailwiz, or Sendy, enter the list ID in your system.
Before you do that, you have to go to the Pixfort account and connect your services. Head over to settings in your Pixfort dashboard, where you can connect whatever email marketing service you want, or set a custom email. Then you can connect it to your form. All emails submitted will be automatically saved in your email marketing system or your custom email.
Part Two: Hosting
After editing and customizing the page, the next step is to host it online. If you’re using a WordPress website, Sendinblue, or Click funnels, you’ll not worry about hosting the landing page because it’ll be hosted automatically on that service. But as we’ve seen earlier, it’s somehow costly like $100/month, $60/month. For a beginner, it’s not that really a good option.
So, let’s see how we can host a landing page starting for free, and then for only $5/month. As a beginner, this will be a great option.
Part two: Preparing To Host
1. After editing and customizing your landing page on Pixfort, the next thing to do is to download it. Go to the left-end section of the window, click on settings.
2. Click on export project. By the way, you can publish it automatically using FTP if you have a hosting service, but we‘re going to do this manually in this article so that anyone can follow up and understand the concept very well.
3. Click on export page. You’ll be taken to another page.
4. Click on export project. Your project will be downloaded as a zip file. Wait a little bit for the download to be complete.
Getting A Hosting Package
As I earlier said, I’ll show you how to host with zero dollars. The first option is to visit 000webhost.com and start with totally free hosting. But if you want to be more professional, you can go with a paid plan so you can get higher performance. The best option for this is Hostinger, it allows you to start with $0.99/month only. If you navigate to their web hosting packages, their single shared hosting is $0.99/month. Also, this is a great option for beginners
Another option is to use Contabo Web Services and get a full server. Head over to their VPS servers, you’ll see that it costs around $3.99/ month. That’s like $5/month, but the specs for that price are incredible like you’ll have 2 cores, 4GB of RAM, 300GB SSD boosted, and so on. It’s an awesome option to start with for only $5
The other option which I’ll be using in this article is DigitalOcean, which allows you also to create a $5 server. Sign up with them and move on to the next section of this article to see how to host and publish your page or website.
Hosting Proper
1. Sign in.
2. Click on the create button with green color.
3. Click on Droplet. Droplet is simply a server, that’s the name Digital Ocean calls it.
4. In the image section, click on the marketplace.
5. Click on Lamp and Ubuntu. Why lamp? Simply because the server will be auto-configured with everything you need to start hosting, with PHP, MySQL, Apache, everything required for hosting, you’ll only need to upload and publish the file.
6. On the plan section, click on the $5 machine.
7. On the datacenter region section, select any region you want. If you can find your region or anyone close to you, select that one. If not, just select anyone.
8. Create a password.
9. Select a hostname. Use your domain name, I’ll talk about this later on.
10. Click on create a droplet.
By clicking on the droplet button, Digital Ocean will create an already configured server for you, you don’t need to worry about anything. The only thing you have to do is to upload the files and publish them.
Part three: Uploading And Publishing
When the has been successfully created, under the resources section, you’ll find the droplet the unique IP address of your server. Copy it.
How To Connect To The Server And Upload the files
First, install WinSCP. WinSCP is a free remote file manager that allows you to easily upload files to servers.it’s totally free to download.
1. Open WinSCP.
2. Click on new site.
3. Paste the address you copied.
4. In the username Input “root” and enter the password you used in Digital Ocean.
5. Click on Login.
6. Click “YES” to the warning. After that, wait for it to authenticate.
7. After authentication, click on the first file in the list.
8. Click on the var file.
9. Click on the www.
10. Click on the Html.
11. Delete the index file.
12. Upload the zip folder (the page you created and exported). You can go to your file explorer, and go to your download section where you can find the zip file. Copy and paste it into WinSCP to upload it. Wait for the upload to finish, and the application files will be on your server.
13. After the upload is done, extract it. The easiest and fastest way to extract is to use an application called PUTY which is an SSH client to connect and manage your server.
Installing PuTTY
I.Install PuTTY if you’ve not.
II. Open PUTY, paste your IP in the IP field.
III . Click on open.
IV. Click on yes.
V. Enter the root password you use before. You can clear the screen after every by typing “clear”, if the window is getting crowded.
VI. Install the Unzip utility. Type in “apt install unzip” and hit enter. Clear the screen again by typing “clear”
VII. Now, you’ll go to the directory, just type in “cd /var/www/html” and hit enter.
VIII. Now you’re in the directory, type “unzip project.zip”, and hit enter.
IX. Go back to Winscp and refresh it, you’ll see that your files has been extracted, and you can access your landing page.
14. Rename the second to the last program on WinSCP to index.html. You can copy your IP address to Google and check it out. Your page will start displaying.
The Last Step
Your page is now displaying with your IP address on your server, but you need to access your page using a name instead of an IP number. Of course, you want to share it on social media, or maybe you want to run ads, etc. it’s better to have a domain name. I’ll show you how to map a domain to this IP.
Part four: Mapping Domain To The IP
1. Go to your domain manager (the service managing your domain) like Godaddy, or anyone managing your domain.
2. Select the domain you want to use with the page.
3. Open it.
4. Click on manage DNS, to configure DNS record. This works on any domain provider.
5. Under records, click on add to add a subdomain.
6. For the type, select “A”.
7. Give it a name, for example, “landingpage”.
8. In the next field, paste the IP address of your server.
9. Click on save.
You’ve just pointed your “landing page” to your server address. You can now access your server using the name you just created for it. You can access it by entering the name given to your landing page followed by your website’s name. For example, landingpage/abc.com. Your landing page will display under your websites name
So this is how you can create a landing page, publish, and host it on your server. I hope this article has been helpful or at least informative. You’ve just also learned a skill that you can monetize on Fiver and other freelancing platforms. Happy Hustling.
