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Landing Pages: How to Dominate and Win Affiliate Marketing With Them

Landing Pages are the weapon of choice for Affiliate Marketers. Marketers who do not employ Landing Pages either do not understand the concept, or they are just plain lazy. Usually, it is the latter. Laziness is often contagious and it is often why 98% of Affiliate Marketers fail to earn over $1,000.00 a month.

A Landing Page is more than just a duplicate of your sales page renamed to match a PPC search engine. A Landing Page strips out many elements of ‘effective design’ and focuses on selling the product or service.

Your main purpose of the landing page is to give the visitor two choices: Buy or Leave. Nothing else. Don’t distract them with anything else. That is why you brought them there in the first place: to buy. Don’t make the mistake of giving them too much to choose from. Here is a short laundry list of what I do when I create my landing pages:

Webserver/Configuration - You do have a good host, right? The domain has its down IP address? A clean domain, clean IP address, with no ties with link farms, spamming, etc. is vital to your success.

Headline - This aspect is often greatly misused. The thought of, “I must cram as many keywords as possible into my Headline for maximum performance” is a thought process hooked on failure. Here is a tip that makes absolute sense, but so many people do not do it. The headline on the page should match (somewhat) to the keyword phrase being targeted.

Example: The keyword “discount widgets” could have a headline of: “This is the Place for Discount Widgets”. That alerts the visitor that they are indeed in the right place. Just by changing the headline to one that is relevant to the search causes a drop in CPC and can cause an increase in CTR.

Font Face, Color & Size: There is one thing that I hate, and that is 4-5 different fonts that clutter up the landscape of the page. Different Fonts for headlines is fine. Different fonts in your body text is not original, it is distracting. Don’t do it. Keep it to one font in your body text.

Testing shows that the best ‘off line’ (print) font is Times New Roman. This is why it is the default font on the internet. However, testing also shows that Times New Roman is one of the worst fonts online. Why? It causes rapid eye fatigue due to how it appears on the screen.

The best fonts? Verdana and Arial. I standardize on Verdana as it consistently outperforms every font out there in terms of reducing eye strain and increasing readability. You may not have known that, and it is key information.

I have seen some landing pages that use an unusual font and when I look at it on a system that is limited in fonts, the formatting looks ‘off’ and unprofessional. Use standard fonts in your body, if you want an usual font for a headline, create it as a graphic so it will look the same on every computer.

The text should be readable. The standard size is ‘2′. Text should always be dark on a white background. Landing Pages aren’t designed to allow you to show off how ‘cute’ you can be. This is serious stuff, you are selling a product or a service. Act like it by putting on your ‘best face’.

There is a reason that the top companies choose dark text on a light background. It isn’t by accident, it is by design. Follow their lead.

Don’t Let Search Engines Crawl Your Landing Pages - Many marketers want as many pages in the search engine indexes as possible. Don’t do this as I mentioned above.

Place your landing pages in separate folders and exclude those folders in your robots.txt file. If you don’t want to display those to competitors, you can instead put a placeholder file for the index.html page for the folder, or exclude the directory list from showing to a visitor. Another option are to put the exclusion in your .htaccess file or in your IIS control. The reason that you don’t want these pages indexed is because the text is often a mirror of your sales pages and you don’t want to have a duplicate content penalty in Google.

Make the Links Easy to Find - Now, having a cool CSS file that makes the links change colors, add or remove underlines is fine on your site. Knock yourself out. However, they have no business on your landing pages. You want everything standard on your landing pages. Why? Because confusing a visitor is not your priority. Wowing your visitor is not your priority. Getting them to buy and making it as easy as possible is. That is what you do.

So, use standard linking practices so there isn’t confusion. If a potential customer can’t distinguish between text and a link you are going to lose.

Standard colors are:
Unvisited Link - Underline in Blue
Active Link (when the mouse ‘hovers’ over the link - Red
Visited Link - Purple

The above information is from the W3C.

I recommend not messing around with the visited link - just have the standard unvisited and hover for your landing pages so the visitor has some interactivity and the link will ‘catch’ their eye. I have done a ton of testing on landing pages, and the standard linking practices always have better conversion ratios.

Make sure you are always using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to do your formatting. If you don’t know how to do CSS, you need to learn or find a webmaster who does. It will pay off with less time changing all of your pages individually instead of just changing one file.

Color Scheme - The colors you choose should match the product or service you are selling. Soothing yellows, greens and blues are best for skin care. Pick your color carefully as they will either bring the visitor in deeper into the sales process or turn them away. A site for men is not going to have pink as the primary color … or secondary color. Be smart with your color selection.

Not sure the colors to use? Look at the competition, as it is a great place to start.

White Space - White space has been referred to as ‘negative space’ by many designers and thus, avoided. All of those designers should lose their jobs. This is not high school art class when you are trying to get the attention of your classmates with your stunning use of color. You are selling here, remember? White space is good. White space is your friend.

When I look at a landing page with effective use of white space, I see perfection. Without white space, text becomes unreadable, and the graphics and other important elements become ‘washed out’ and the message is lost.

White space is more than just a background ‘color’ - it is a part of your conversion design.

This also leads into another area, page backgrounds. Don’t use them. Over the years I have seen floral backgrounds, vacation pictures as backgrounds, and even a woman and her cat as the background …. and these were ALL landing pages from PPC searches. Using standard white will be benefit to you.

Page Width and Page Height - Have you heard the term ‘above the fold’? I am sure you have. It comes from the newspaper industry and referred to ads and information that was above the folded area. Testing found that 86% of the people who picked up a newspaper at an airport, train station, office waiting room, never ‘flipped’ the paper over … they just looked ‘above the fold’ area only. The same is true online. Did you know that of the people who do not scroll down on a web page that 6% of them do not because they don’t know how?

Yes, you read that right. They don’t know how.

If your landing pages scrolls vertically on a 1024×768 resolution you need to redesign the page. And if you are forcing a visitor to scroll HORIZONTALLY, you are guilty of one of the worst web design mistakes of all time. The horizontal scroll bar is your enemy. Your mission is never to allow your visitors to see it.

Page Theme - A landing page is geared to sell a particular product or service. So, if I am doing a search for left-handed golf clubs or a hawaiian vacation, I am expecting to see a page about those topics. Don’t be lazy. Deliver what I want, and I will be more likely to buy. Don’t dump me on a cookie tracked version of your home page either. The content needs to match my search. If not, I may leave quickly.

Stress Benefits, Not Features - Very few people care about features, most care about benefits. Stress the benefits of the product or service and you will increase your conversions.

This also assumes that the content of your page is relevant and matches the headline and the keyword phrase being searched. It is never a good idea for a landing page to encompass multiple keywords. You need to put effort into this, and sometimes that means creating dozens of landing pages for just one product. Yeah, it is a pain, but the benefits are huge, especially with so many competitors bailing out of the system right now.

Call To Action - A no brainer, right? Wrong. Too many sites fail to have an effective Call to Action. This is typical of most new and non-experienced sales people. They fail to ask for the order. They just assume that the prospect understands. Newsflash: They don’t. Explain what you want them to do in easy to understand language, or an effective graphic. A ‘Buy Now’ is a Call to Action. Use it.

Registering - Is your landing page build to force a visitor to register to get the information they want? This can cause a higher CPC in testing. However, by adding a “preview” of the information they will be receiving, the CPC dropped and in a few test cases, dropped significantly.

Affiliate Landing Pages - If you are an affiliate, don’t make the mistake of just copying the text from your merchant’s site and putting it up on your site with a “click to order” button like a doorway page. Google only allows one affiliate advertiser. However, you can get around that rule by creating unique content (because you have used the product or service you are selling and you have your own opinion on it, right?) and then referring them to the merchant’s site through your affiliate ID. This works VERY well, especially with these new rules in place. The CPC is often lower than just hosting the text from the merchant.

Since you are an affiliate, make sure the visitor knows that it isn’t actually you they are buying the product from, but someone else. This is easily done in the text when you are explaining how you use the product or service and the benefits you receive.

301 Redirects - If you are selling a product as an affiliate do NOT make the mistake of placing the link directly to the merchant’s site on your landing page. Why? Google looks for outgoing links on the page that go to external sites. This is also a measure of the “page quality”. Instead, link to a page on your site and then 301 that page to the merchant’s site. Example:

[a href=’http://www.yourdomain.com/widgets.html]Buy Now[/a]

Redirect 301 /widgets.html http://www.merchantsite.com/buywidgets?affID=123

It just makes for a cleaner site, and if you ever change merchants, it is a simple change in your .htaccess, instead of every affiliate page on your site.

Behaving Badly - Popups, pop unders, spyware, disabling the “back” button on the browser, etc. have seen rises in CPCs, but not in a consistent basis, but I would highly recommend not using them.

The “Three Second Test” - Show your landing page to a friend, spouse, sibling, etc. Turn off the monitor after three seconds and ask them what the page is about. If the majority of them can’t tell you, you failed. The page should be crystal clear what it is about and again, it must match what the ad is promoting! This can be the most difficult and frustrating process of creating landing pages, but if you do it right, it will be the most rewarding.

Do you want to win? Have the lowest possible cost per click? Then roll up your sleeves and start putting forth the effort that you have been avoiding doing. Now, what if you have a great landing page, but your CPC is still too high. Just contact AdWords support and they will look at it for you to ensure you aren’t tripping a filter. But just make sure you really do have a solid landing page.

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Jerry West is the Director of Internet Marketing. He has been consulting on the web since 1996 and has assisted hundreds of companies gain an upper-hand over their competition. Visit Web Marketing Now for the latest in marketing tips that are tested and proven.