Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Why Simple Landing Pages Work

By Bruce Alan

Are you just getting started in Internet Marketing and you want to sell something? Not having your own product, you decide to try affiliate marketing (selling someone else’s product). OK, great…but how do you do it?

You can buy hundreds of ebooks all with different “systems” or strategies and you can find lots of free information as well. Eventually though, you are going to realize that you will need to make some landing pages.

What are landing pages? Landing pages are where you want your visitor to ”land” and once there, you hope they click on your link to go to the sellers website where they will then buy the product.

Why not just link directly to the seller’s website? Why do you need a landing page at all? Well, it depends on how you are going to get your visitor to the seller’s site. A popular way is by writing articles, having them published, and having readers find those articles and click on the links inside them. The problem is that many article sites do not allow direct affiliate marketing links. They will allow links to your website or landing page but not directly to the seller.

You can learn a lot about landing pages by typing in “What are landing pages” in Google. You will find lots of useful information and tips galore on how to make great landing pages. But just like everything else on the Internet, after reading 10 or so different articles, you may be no closer to making one and confused about exactly what you should do.

I believe the best way to get started is by making simple landing pages that pretty much say to the viewer ‘here is the product and here is where you get it“. I don’t do a lot of “pre-selling” on my landing pages and many Internet marketers would disagree with that. The common consensus is that you should warm your visitor up to the sale by reviewing the item and/or telling them how great it is.

The problem with that is that it is difficult to write convincingly about something you know little about. Another problem for beginners is that their writing skills may not be up to par…at least not yet. That is why I recommend setting up something simple at first.

My opinion is that it is my job (or you might say the landing page’s job) to get the visitor to the seller’s website. It is the seller’s job from there to convert the sale. I sort of just open the door for customers to walk through and let the product and shopkeeper do the rest. If they can’t do their job, then I have to at some time move to another product.

I suggest opening a blogger.com account or Wordpress.com account (which are both free) and use those as your landing pages. Make your site as pretty and color coordinated as you can (some people will obviously be better at this than others) and do a lot of copying and pasting graphics and words from your sellers website.

Only use one link to the seller’s website though, as using free blogs for marketing is frowned on and if you overdo it they could suspend you. Ideally you should get your own domain and hosting but that can be done once you start making money. If you have a Wordpress blog you can even go to YouTube and perhaps find a video about the product you are selling and put that in your blog. Looks great and I’ve done it.

Basically you are making a big advertisement that says “This is where you get so and so product”. If the people you drive to your blog want that product, then they will click on the link to find out more. Once they do that, you have done your job. Making a landing page is the easy part…..getting targeted traffic to your website or blog is much harder.

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