Any advice on landing pages, please?

[sylvian]

Hey, gang

I'm on a small testing budget so I haven't had the pleasure of testing enough on my own. And based on the suggestions I was given and what I've been reading here, it sounds like it would be best to initially NOT direct link but run campaigns with landing pages only instead. Do you agree?

Thanks to my currently tight funds, I also don't have access to any spying tools. So I have no idea what a successful or good landing page actually looks like. Tbh, I'm always surprised at how simplistic and basic they all look LOL – to put it very gently And because of that, I find myself second-guessing my own steps when putting them together.

I got PureLander and S3 /Cloud Front redirecting to my generic landing page domain. I use SiteSucker (on Mac) and I'm capable of taking OPP (other people's pages) and adjusting them for me. I can tweak my HTML and CSS, I kick ass in Photoshop, and I know when to use PNGs and how to compress JPGs properly. But all that is still not enough

Do you have any actionable rule of thumb