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Iceberg Publishing

Building a website of landing pages.

Jerry Silfwer
by Jerry Silfwer

Cover photo: @jerrysilfwer

tl:dr;
Iceberg publishing involves organisations focusing less on one front page and instead on a website with "a thousand front pages" for converting user intent.

Table of contents [hide]

Iceberg pub­lish­ing is a bet­ter way of struc­tur­ing websites.

This art­icle will show why most brands should rethink their web­site structure.

As a digit­al strategist, I’ve helped many brands con­vert to ice­berg pub­lish­ing, which focuses less on one single front page and instead strives to con­struct a web­site with “a thou­sand front pages.”

Here we go:

Iceberg Publishing

You could think of your web­site as an iceberg. 

A char­ac­ter­ist­ic of an ice­berg is that whatever you see of the ice­berg float­ing above the sur­face, you can be sure that the ice­berg is many times lar­ger under­neath the surface.

“Typically about one-tenth of the volume of an ice­berg is above water, which fol­lows from Archimedes’s Principle of buoy­ancy; the dens­ity of pure ice is about 920 kg/​m3 (57 lb/​cu ft), and that of sea­wa­ter about 1,025 kg/​m3 (64 lb/​cu ft). The con­tour of the under­wa­ter por­tion can be dif­fi­cult to judge by look­ing at the por­tion above the sur­face.”
Source: Wikipedia

So, “above the sur­face” is where some of your pages are eas­ily access­ible from your site nav­ig­a­tion (menu links, foot­er links, side­bar links, etc.). And then, “beneath the sur­face”, you place a vast array of web pages not dir­ectly linked to your nav­ig­a­tion — land­ing pages.

Iceberg pub­lish­ing has five key components:

  • Landing pages.
  • Evergreen con­tent.
  • Content themes.
  • Deep con­tent.
  • Inbound shift.

The way to think about ice­berg pub­lish­ing is to ima­gine build­ing a web­site where intent-driv­en and highly con­vert­ing land­ing pages vastly out­num­ber basic and con­ven­tion­al web pages.

Learn more: Iceberg Publishing

What is a Landing Page?

What is a land­ing page?

Landing page (LP) = a single-pur­pose web page stripped of stand­ard menus and side­bars with a single CTA (call-to-action) chosen to match the visitor’s demon­strated intent.

Why do land­ing pages work well?

  • The para­dox of choice. Too many call-to-actions on any page will typ­ic­ally nev­er lead to more con­ver­sions (it’s the para­dox of choice). This is due to con­ver­sion can­ni­bal­ism, where dif­fer­ent call-to-actions pun­ish each oth­er. 1Silfwer, J. (2015, October 4). Beware of Conversion Cannibalism. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​c​o​n​v​e​r​s​i​o​n​-​c​a​n​n​i​b​a​l​i​sm/
  • Harvesting known user intent. With each click, a user demon­strates intent. Once intent has been demon­strated, it’s recom­men­ded to present the user with rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion—and noth­ing else.

A land­ing page is typ­ic­ally a web page with one sin­gu­lar call-to-action — or the same call-to-action repeated ver­tic­ally. To max­im­ise con­ver­sions, these pages are often stripped of side­bars, nav­ig­a­tion­al menus, foot­ers, etc.

For intent-driv­en and clear call-to-action inspir­a­tion, please study how Google uses their front page as a clean, high-con­vert­ing land­ing page.

Learn more: What is a Landing Page?

Types of Landing Pages

Here are a few examples of dif­fer­ent land­ing page types:

  • Lead cap­ture pages. These are designed to gath­er con­tact inform­a­tion from vis­it­ors, usu­ally in exchange for some­thing valu­able like an ebook, a webin­ar, or a free tri­al. They typ­ic­ally include a form and a brief descrip­tion of what the vis­it­or will get in return for their information.
  • Click-through pages. These pages are used primar­ily in e‑commerce and SaaS (Software as a Service) indus­tries. They provide detailed inform­a­tion about a product or offer and lead vis­it­ors to a shop­ping cart or checkout.
  • Sales pages. Focused on dir­ectly selling a product or ser­vice. They often include detailed descrip­tions, bene­fits, testi­mo­ni­als, and a strong call to action (CTA) to make a purchase.
  • Squeeze pages. A type of lead cap­ture page, squeeze pages are designed to extract inform­a­tion from vis­it­ors, usu­ally through a form. They often have min­im­al con­tent except for a pitch and a form.
  • Registration pages. These pages provide inform­a­tion about the event and include a regis­tra­tion form. They are designed to sign up vis­it­ors for an event or a webinar.
  • Thank you pages. After a vis­it­or takes action (like sign­ing up or mak­ing a pur­chase), these pages thank them and can also guide them towards the next steps, like down­load­ing a resource or check­ing related products.
  • Launch pages. These pages are used for new products or ser­vices and aim to build excite­ment and anti­cip­a­tion. They might include a count­down timer, teas­er inform­a­tion, and an option to sign up for updates.
  • Unsubscribe pages. Used when someone unsub­scribes from a ser­vice or email list. They often include options to recon­sider the decision or provide feedback.
  • Coming soon pages. Like launch pages, they are used before a web­site or product launch to build anti­cip­a­tion and gath­er early interest or email sign-ups.
  • 404 error pages. While not a typ­ic­al land­ing page, a well-designed 404 page can turn an error into an oppor­tun­ity, guid­ing lost vis­it­ors back to the main site or to spe­cif­ic actions.

Each land­ing page type serves a spe­cif­ic pur­pose in the cus­tom­er jour­ney, focus­ing on a single object­ive: increas­ing con­ver­sions by har­vest­ing demon­strated user intent.

Only your ima­gin­a­tion will determ­ine what types of effi­cient land­ing pages you can develop!

Read also: Types of Landing Pages

Examples of Landing Pages

Here are some examples of land­ing page types:

Event Landing Pages

When to use:

  • After a cli­ent pitch or presentation.
  • After a sales meet­ing (instead of leav­ing a USB stick).
  • After any event participation.

When I talk at events, people ask if they can get hold of the slides I’ve just shown.

Still, many years of exper­i­ence have gone into mani­fest­ing the know­ledge I share. I think it’s only fair that I get some­thing extra for shar­ing my present­a­tion, right?

So, instead of just send­ing over a file with my present­a­tion to the coördin­at­or, I end my sem­in­ar with a link to a land­ing page where the audi­ence can opt-in to down­load my presentation.

This way, the audi­ence gets access to my present­a­tion instantly after­wards, and I get a chance to nur­ture the new rela­tion­ship digit­ally. At this point, I think I’ve cre­ated 35 event land­ing pages. The con­ver­sion rates on these pages are often between 70% and 90%.

Thank-You Landing Pages

When to use:

  • Whenever someone subscribes.
  • Whenever someone buys.
  • Whenever someone com­pletes a form.
  • Whenever someone registers to join or leaves a comment.

Every web page needs a thank-you land­ing page, and most brands need sev­er­al dif­fer­ent thank-you land­ing pages.

About Landing Pages

When to use:

  • About the organisation.
  • About every spe­cif­ic part of the organisation.
  • About indi­vidu­als work­ing for the organisation.
  • About spe­cif­ic part­ners, vendors, resellers etc.

Most web­sites have at least one About page. Despite often being quite dull, these pages are often rel­at­ively well-vis­ited. Therefore, it makes sense to trans­form your about-pages into land­ing pages. 

About Landing Pages
One of my About Landing Pages.

Content Theme Landing Pages

When to use:

  • To focus on spe­cif­ic art­icle series.
  • To focus on import­ant industry categories.
  • To rank bet­ter in terms of SEO for keywords.
  • To re-util­ise your best-per­form­ing content.

Brands focused on online con­tent often con­cen­trate their efforts on con­tent themes. Once such a peri­od is com­pleted, cre­at­ing sep­ar­ate con­tent theme land­ing pages often makes sense.

Resource Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For all your lead magnets.
  • For all your con­tent upgrades.
  • For all your sales decks.
  • For all types of inform­a­tion­al material.

Brands focused on inbound com­mu­nic­a­tions often gen­er­ate deep con­tent, such as down­load­able assets, lead mag­nets, con­tent upgrades, infograph­ics, tem­plates, swipe files, etc. All such resources war­rant their resource land­ing pages.

Form Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For all types of con­tact forms.
  • For all kinds of sub­scriber forms.
  • For all down­load forms.
  • For lead-type forms, i.e. ask­ing, “What’s your biggest pro­fes­sion­al challenge?”
  • For all review-type forms.
  • For all sur­vey-type forms.

Instead of embed­ding your forms dir­ectly into a stand­ard web page, it’s often bet­ter to use a but­ton and point to forms embed­ded on form land­ing pages instead.

FAQ Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For each FAQ question.

Many busi­nesses get the same ques­tions repeatedly, and for this reas­on, many com­pan­ies use FAQ sec­tions. One trick is to keep each answer in your FAQ very short and fin­ish each reply with a Read More link. These links could then refer to many dif­fer­ent FAQ land­ing pages.

Automation Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For all your mini-courses.
  • For all your vir­al loops.
  • For all your double opt-in confirmations.

A brand could make good use of vari­ous online auto­ma­tion. It could be a short series of emails like a mini-course or a vir­al loop with a sequence of videos. These types of pages spell good oppor­tun­it­ies for cre­at­ing auto­ma­tion land­ing pages.

Disclaimer Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For Terms of Service disclaimers.
  • For Cookie Notice disclaimers.
  • For Integrity Policy disclaimers.

Most brands use dif­fer­ent kinds of dis­claim­ers, which are typ­ic­ally dull. With some cre­at­ive think­ing, these dis­claim­ers could be con­ver­ted into dis­claim­er land­ing pages.

Intent Landing Pages

When to use:

  • For all your pro­file links on social media.
  • For all your traffic com­ing from spe­cif­ic sites.

Think about this: Where can a vis­it­or click a link on the web and end up on your web­site? Suppose you know of such links, which can often be eas­ily iden­ti­fied by track­ing extern­al refer­rers in ana­lyt­ics. You can set up intent land­ing pages to bet­ter serve (and con­vert) inbound audiences.

Learn more: Types of Landing Pages

Evergreen Content

What’s ever­green con­tent?

Evergreen con­tent is an inbound approach to build­ing core mes­sages, con­tent themes, con­tent pack­ages, deep con­tent, and con­tent sky­scrapers.

For a piece of con­tent to be ever­green, it must sus­tain its value over time. This means the con­tent must be rel­ev­ant today, tomor­row, and the fore­see­able future.

While news con­tent might make a more sig­ni­fic­ant short-term splash, ever­green con­tent accu­mu­lates online impact over time—which requires patience.

Now, forever is a long time. I typ­ic­ally apply these arbit­rary rules to determ­ine what con­sti­tutes ever­green content:

  • Two years. To be con­sidered ever­green con­tent, it must be rel­ev­ant and valu­able for at least two years. This is an arbit­rary time frame, but if an organ­isa­tion can pro­duce con­tent that lasts two years, it will typ­ic­ally last much longer.
  • Actual interest. To be con­sidered ever­green con­tent, there must be an exist­ing volume of search engine users look­ing for the inform­a­tion. The con­tent will nev­er be ‘ever’ without ‘green’ search volumes.
  • Gentle garden­ing. Evergreen con­tent will only stay ever­green if you tend to it occa­sion­ally. To check if everything’s work­ing, add some­thing help­ful and clean out some unne­ces­sary stuff. It’s a bit like garden­ing.
  • Personal touch. Publishing some­thing unique isn’t easy. However, adding your brand’s ton­al­ity and flair to the con­tent is always pos­sible. The object­ive is to estab­lish trust and author­ity, so a touch of per­son­al­ity matters.

Learn more: The Evergreen Content PR Strategy

Content Themes

It is good prac­tice to struc­ture the con­tent cal­en­dar around con­tent themes (typ­ic­ally four per year, one per quarter) show­cas­ing vary­ing aspects of the organ­isa­tion’s core message.

Using con­tent themes comes with sev­er­al upsides:

  • Planning. Using con­tent themes makes it easi­er to plan your mes­saging for the year.
  • Visibility. Search engines love it when you pro­duce and pub­lish related content.
  • Growth. You’re provid­ing valu­able and ever­green con­tent on a niche topic.

For easy plan­ning and boost­ing SEO with con­tent sky­scrapers, I often cre­ate con­tent pack­ages for each theme.

Content Themes Example

Let’s use a fic­ti­tious example of an IT company. 

First, the IT com­pany decide on a core mes­sage for their con­tent strategy:

Core mes­sage: We make IT easy to understand.

Then, the IT com­pany breaks their core mes­sage down into four busi­ness-crit­ic­al con­tent themes:

Q1 con­tent theme: We make people under­stand the Internet of Things (IoT).

Q2 con­tent theme: We make people under­stand busi­ness auto­ma­tion.

Q3 con­tent theme: We make people under­stand cloud com­put­ing.

Q4 con­tent theme: We make people under­stand man­aged ser­vices.

Learn more: The Content Themes PR Strategy

Deep Content

Deep con­tent is focused on provid­ing increas­ingly high­er-qual­ity inform­a­tion to con­tent divers (as opposed to con­tent surfers).

In the example, five lay­ers of ever­green con­tent are stacked ver­tic­ally on a quarterly timeline:

Example of a five-lay­er deep con­tent structure:

  • Level 1: Articles
  • Level 2: Content Upgrade
  • Level 3: Resource/​Lead Magnet
  • Level 4: Ebook
  • Level 5: Online Course

This inbound logic is sim­il­ar to ice­berg pub­lish­ing and con­tent themes regard­ing struc­ture and depth.

Learn more: The Deep Content PR Strategy

The Inbound Shift

As pub­lic rela­tions pro­fes­sion­als, we must rethink how we think about pub­lics. Traditionally, many PR depart­ments have argued:

“Why should we waste budgets on ‘already acquired’ audiences?”

The truth is — it’s the oth­er way around.

The inbound shift is a fun­da­ment­al mind­set change in the pub­lic rela­tions industry.

Jerry Silfwer speaking about inbound marketing
Jerry Silfwer (Doctor Spin) speaks about inbound marketing.

Instead of “spam­ming” non-exist­ing audi­ences, pub­lic rela­tions and mar­ket­ing can do much more with exist­ing online pub­lics. 2Silfwer, J. (2015, June 11). The Publics in Public Relations. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​p​u​b​l​i​c​s​-​i​n​-​p​u​b​l​i​c​-​r​e​l​a​t​i​o​ns/

Inbound vs Outbound: The Difference

Inbound vs out­bound is the online equi­val­ent of draw­ing the line between those who know you and those who don’t.

Drawing a line between those who know you and those who don’t know you is noth­ing new:

  • Pull vs push (mar­ket­ing).
  • Hot vs cold (sales).
  • Internal vs extern­al (com­mu­nic­a­tions).

If your inbound shift PR strategy is strong, you might no longer need to pri­or­it­ise your out­bound PR strategies since your inbound audi­ence will attract out­bound publics!

Learn more: The Inbound Shift PR Strategy

How To Use Iceberg Publishing

Iceberg pub­lish­ing rests on three basic principles:

When someone clicks a link on or out­side of your web­site, they demon­strate their exact intent through their action. Therefore, you should remove all dis­trac­tions on the link target.

There should always be some­thing for the vis­it­or to do next, i.e., a call to action. The idea is that the web­site should always offer the pos­sib­il­ity to go deep­er into it.

A good rule of thumb is to have more land­ing pages than nav­ig­a­tion­al pages (minus blog art­icles or wiki-style entries) to max­im­ise usab­il­ity, SEO, and conversions.

There are many bene­fits of using ice­berg publishing:

  • You can power up your SEO.
  • Your web­site will be less cluttered.
  • You can increase all types of conversions.
  • Your web­site becomes more dynamic.
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Annotations
Annotations
1 Silfwer, J. (2015, October 4). Beware of Conversion Cannibalism. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​c​o​n​v​e​r​s​i​o​n​-​c​a​n​n​i​b​a​l​i​sm/
2 Silfwer, J. (2015, June 11). The Publics in Public Relations. Doctor Spin | The PR Blog. https://​doc​tor​spin​.net/​p​u​b​l​i​c​s​-​i​n​-​p​u​b​l​i​c​-​r​e​l​a​t​i​o​ns/
Jerry Silfwer
Jerry Silfwerhttps://doctorspin.net/
Jerry Silfwer, alias Doctor Spin, is an awarded senior adviser specialising in public relations and digital strategy. Currently CEO at Spin Factory and KIX Communication Index. Before that, he worked at Whispr Group NYC, Springtime PR, and Spotlight PR. Based in Stockholm, Sweden.

The Cover Photo

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