What are some tips that you've used successfully?
NB: I have done plenty of research on the topic I'm just looking to hear from the community here.
http://www.unbounce.com and http://www.instapaper.com are paid
http://www.launchrock.com is free
Spend all your time optimising the landing page and getting traffic to it, rather than coding one up.
Read these for landing page optimisation
http://unbounce.com/landing-page-articles/the-anatomy-of-a-l...
and
http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/7-elements-of-a-winning-la...
If you're a consumer product then well-targeted facebook ads can drive strong traffic.
http://okdork.com/2014/03/04/how-to-start-advertising-on-fac...
!!Make sure you get the users email address on your landing page!!
In terms of design - I've done a fair bit of reading on design and layout, and I worked with one of the design guys at in my sharespace to build the concept. I'm just trying to capture tips and tricks (the little stuff I might not have thought of).
Also use a expert if your spending more than a few thousand $$. I often see small business tell me how 'advertising doesn't work' where typically they tried setting it all up them-self on the cheap and got little return on the investment.
Back-end: Whatever I prefer at the time. If you're building a project with RoR, it does not mean that the landing page has to be done with that. A simple PHP/NodeJS app works great since it can be much faster to build.
All in all, I try not to spend too much time on the landing page. Usually, more time is spent figuring out what's best to show on the page itself than building it.
Our expectations was we would just start an Adwords / FB campaign and leads will start pouring automatically but it didn't happen - either we don't ran the campaign well or it isn't easy to target for early adopters.
What worked for us, was posting on subreddits (30+), Betalist (100+) and a bit of manual reach out. In the end, we managed to about 180+ emails who were interested. Now that we are almost ready, we have about 20 people whom with we can get started in polishing our product and get initial sales which sounds encouraging (although still quite low).
So my advice would be, to build the landing with minimum saleable features you can build in a short time, promote the landing page in relevant subreddits and among people who might be interested in the product and take feedback from them about what problem is they are looking to solve with your product.
Good luck!