Landing page, brochure site or content site: which one do you need

When someone writes to me about redoing their site, the question that nearly always comes first is how many pages they need. It’s a question that can’t be answered yet, because the number of pages depends on something nobody has told me: what job the site has to do.

The three names we use can’t be compared with each other

Landing page, brochure site, content site. They look like three steps on the same ladder, but they belong to different categories. A landing page is a format: a single page. A brochure site is a way of presenting yourself. A content site is an editorial strategy.

That’s why the boundaries leak everywhere. There are brochure sites made of one page, and a blog with five articles is not a content site. If you try to place yourself using these names, you get stuck almost immediately.

What makes them comparable is to stop looking at how they’re built and ask what job they do. Since I started thinking this way, the sites I see fall into three levels, in order of increasing effort.

Level 1: the page that converts

One page, one message, no way out. No menu inviting people to wander, no “about us” section halfway down.

It works when you already have traffic and it comes from outside. The obvious case is paid campaigns, but it applies just the same to everything else you publish elsewhere: a YouTube video, a post that gets shared, a newsletter, a podcast. In all these cases the content lives outside the site, and the site only has to collect.

A difference worth keeping in mind: someone arriving from an ad is cold and the page has to do all the work, while someone arriving from one of your videos has already watched you speak for eight minutes and has vetted you while you were talking. The page is the same, but it works for two different reasons.

It’s built in days, measured in cost per lead, and it has the best ratio of result to effort of the three levels. It also has the lowest ceiling: without someone sending people to it, nothing happens.

Level 2: the site that passes the check

This level lives in a very specific moment that almost nobody considers, because it leaves no trace in the analytics.

Someone mentions you. In a chat, in a group, at dinner among colleagues. The person who got your name does what we all do: they look you up. In those thirty seconds, your site speaks for you.

The same holds when you’re the one writing first. Before replying, the recipient looks you up. The site didn’t generate that contact, but it decides whether it survives.

You don’t need many pages here, you need the right ones: what you do, for whom, with what proof, and at least an idea of how you work together. And you need pages you can send to one person, before a call, when you already know which doubt they have in mind. A negotiation with someone who has read three of your pages is a completely different conversation from one with someone who has read nothing.

Level 3: the site that generates demand

Here the site stops serving the other channels and becomes a channel itself.

It’s content that intercepts what people are searching for, stays published, and keeps working while you do something else. It’s the only one of the three levels that puts you in front of people who don’t know you, whom nobody introduced to you, and whom you didn’t pay to reach.

It’s also the only one measured in months rather than weeks, and the only one you can’t pause without losing ground. Which content you need depends on where the demand is in your industry, and I wrote about it here: when a blog is worth it for SEO, and when it isn’t.

The levels are nested, but climbing isn’t mandatory

The third level contains the second, which contains the first. They aren’t three alternative products to choose from, they’re three stages of the same site.

Which means you do climb, but not because the budget has arrived or because it seems more professional. You climb when the channel feeding the level you’re at is saturated. If your campaigns work and you could spend more, your problem isn’t writing articles. If word of mouth is going around but nobody finds you when they look you up, your problem isn’t a landing page.

The first two levels don’t create demand

This is the part I have to say even when it works against me: in the first two levels the site is a multiplier, and a multiplier of zero is zero. The channel comes first, then the site. Anyone who suggests redoing everything before anyone is arriving is selling you the wrong thing in the wrong order.

The upside is that the two problems can be told apart with a single number. If nobody arrives, it’s a channel problem. If people arrive and nothing happens, it’s a site problem.

And there’s a reason why, once the channel is there, the site is the right place for the next bit of effort. Channels don’t add up: if you switch off the campaigns they stop, if you stop sending messages the outreach stops, and work done on one doesn’t carry over to another. The site is the only element they’re all using at the same time, so it’s the only place where an improvement builds up across every channel together.

Where you are now

The right level isn’t decided by budget or ambition: it’s decided by the channel your people come from today. What sits above is work done ahead of time, what sits below is a channel you’re wasting.

And there’s a case that is neither: the site that wasn’t built for any of the three jobs. It does all three badly, gives no signal, and from the outside looks normal.

If you think you’re at the wrong level, or if your site simply isn’t working the way you’d like, tell me about it.