Free Sign Up Page with Launch Effect for WordPress (You’ll Set it Up in Minutes)

You don’t have the time to work on the project as much as you want and they expect a website for it? No way. Well, you need at least a landing page for the people who stumble upon it. You might code it by hand, use a website builder or just create a landing page with WordPress and the free theme Landing Effect.

To call Landing Effect a theme is an insult to be honest, although it technically is true. What Launch Effect does is give you a set of tools to build a one page website where your potential users or clients can not only see that there will be something on that domain, but also subscribe to be notified of its launch.

“Preselling” Your Product With Referrers

Launch Effect describes this as creating a “viral campaign”. Why? Well, when a user does in fact subscribe to be notified of your service via email, they can invite their friends to sign up as well. For each of your friends, colleagues or just Twitter followers that subscribes, you move up the list and get a better chance of getting notified earlier.

This particular feature is ideal for services and products that want to give early access to some of their users: it shows you which users really deserve it! Its based on “classic” referrer programmes where a marketer gets paid for every commission. What you’re doing is “paying” your referrers for their word of mouth.

How to Create Your Launch Effect Landing Page

Install Launch Effect as you would any other WordPress theme. After downloading and installing WordPress, you are going to:

• Download Launch Effect for free;
• Upload it to your server via FTP or inside WordPress’ interface;
• Activate it and set the permalinks you can find in the official instructions;
• Set up Launch Effect with its settings in the WordPress admin interface;
• Finish the actual project you just set up the landing page for 😉

You won’t have to do anything more outside the WordPress admin since you can edit both the content and the appearance of your Landing Effect page within its settings: background, font, title, sub-heading, the social networks you’ll include as well as your Google Analytics code.

While Launch Effect gives you default text for the messaging on the site, you can edit each and every sentence. For example, you can add special messaging for returning visitors who want to check out how many users they sent your way.

Share to Viral

Visitors can actually share your landing page via social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Google+ and LinkedIn which you can turn off individually) or an individual, unique URL they can paste on their website, forum or emails. Be sure to encourage them to do that so they don’t forget.

You’ll be able to see all the people who singed up inside the settings tab within WordPress as well as export the whole list as a CSV file which you can open as a spreadsheet in Excel or Google Docs.

Launch Effect Premium?

The New York based Barrel team is also working on a Premium version that will include exclusive feature, premium (real) support and lifetime updates, which you can buy as a single site or unlimited site license for $35 and $65 respectively. The currently available exclusive feature is a brandable future or in other words replacing the generic Launch Effect footer with anything you want. Neat, but not yet worth the $30+.

On the other hand, they are planning to add a number of very interesting widgets and features, including:

• Animated countdown timer;
• Animate progress bar;
• Paypal integration;
• Adding extra form fields;
• …

There are a number of features that will also make Launch Effect more than a landing page theme for WordPress, including a fully-styled blog as well as page navigation. As for the rest of us, the Launch Effect team maintains a roadmap where you can see every new features and fix, including an upcoming integration with the email marketing tools Campaign Monitor and Aweber. A mobile version is in the works as well.

Have an app, blog or other project you plan to launch… sometime? Get Launch Effect and set yourself up 🙂 We could just take down the .Me blog and put a nice landing page instead since it’s that easy. 😉