When you think about a website, you largely think about content that anyone can access. Your home page, about page, contact page, investment page, and more.
But have you given any thought to how you can use hidden pages? You can create unique targeted landing pages to curate specific experiences for a target audience, and hide them.
Wait what? We don’t mean hide them as in don’t let anyone see them, but don’t include them in your website navigation menu. Instead, drive traffic to those pages from advertisements, email campaigns, and more.
In this article, we’ll cover how to make hidden pages and ways you can use them for your photography business.
How to make a hidden page
Creating a hidden page is much the same as creating a normal page on your website. The main difference is one setting – page visibility. This is really easy to adjust. Once you build a page, there is a settings gear in the top right corner of the Website Builder. When you click on that gear, you will see the following page visibility options:
- Visible means the page can be seen and accessed from your main menu navigation.
- Hidden means the page is accessible from a direct link, but will not be listed in your website’s menu.
- Disabled means the page is not accessible and doesn’t work at all.
Pro Tip: In the page settings area, you’ll also see options to change the navigation name and the option to set a password to access the page.
Why use hidden pages
Setting your page visibility to hidden is valuable for many reasons.
If you are designing or redesigning pages on your website, you can hide page(s) to work without people seeing the changes until you are ready to show them off.
Or maybe you have an annual event that you don’t want people to see during a certain time of year. You can hide it until you’re ready for people to see it again.
Perhaps, you want to stop offering a certain service, but want to hang onto the content in case you want to offer it again in the future. No need to delete the page, just hide or disable it.
These are just a few examples. Keep reading for more other options to use hidden pages.
Sales funnel landing pages
When you market your business and want someone to take a specific action (sign up for your newsletter, register for an event, purchase a service), it can be helpful to guide people to a page that is focused on that action. You can create a hidden page that's not visible to the public, but can be accessed through email marketing or online ads like Google or Facebook.
Sure you could drive people to regular pages on your website for this information, but by using targeted landing pages you can better refine the messaging to your target audience, track the metrics of your marketing efforts, test out responses to different images and words, and more.
Another reason to have these pages hidden is to offer exclusive content or promotions that you don’t want just anyone to stumble on who views your website. For example, You could have a special page with a coupon for newsletter subscribers, a page with an offer for wedding couples on their first anniversary, or even a special service that you only want to offer friends and family.
Social media link page
Another way you can use hidden pages is to create a social media Linktree style page. Yes, you can make your own Linktree, (and it is better for SEO because it's on your own domain) and there are no extra costs.
You can make it as creative or simple as you’d like it to be. In fact, by building your social media landing page on your PhotoBiz website, you’ll have more options to customize it with visual elements in addition to links, if you choose.
Then you can add this page to your social media profiles and you can drive traffic to the hidden page on your website instead of a third-party landing page.
Pro Tip: Linking from your social media profiles to your own website is better for SEO than linking to third-party tools that aren’t on your domain.
Private mini session events
You may not want to offer every mini session event to every customer. Some events are exclusive, or tailored to specific customers. For example, say you are doing a boudoir mini session, but don’t want all your customers to see it, you can use a hidden page. It can help you funnel the right clients in.
Pricing information and other sensitive information
If you want to hide your pricing and investment options or other sensitive information, a hidden page that is only accessible via a password or lead generation form may be the way to go.
You still need to share that information with people, but it doesn’t have to be immediately accessible.
With the lead generation model, there is a give and take relationship. You can have a form on your website that collects people’s names and emails, before taking them to a hidden page. This makes that content feel protected and makes sure the people that access it are highly interested. And helps you build a list of leads you can build relationships with.
Members only
Similar to the concept above, you can use hidden pages in combination with password protected pages to restrict access to exclusive content.
For example, you could provide access to a video series to educate other photographers, by setting up a page with embedded videos from YouTube or Vimeo. By pointing people to your website instead of YouTube to watch the videos, you can build a branded experience with wrap around content.
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