However, there are only so many big things we can change.  When it comes to small things though, we have tons of little settings we can fool around with like colors we can change, or certain words we bold, italicize, or highlight, etc.  Each of these small things may only raise our conversion rate or CTR by 1% or even .5%, but if we do 30 of these small things we could raise our CTR or conversion rate by 30%!!!

So what exactly are some of the small things that we can test?  Did you know that certain fonts convert better than other fonts?  Did you know that certain background colors convert better?  How about the fact that by bolding or italicizing a couple words throughout your landing page could increase conversions?

Have I sparked your curiosity yet?  If so, then hopefully the list below can kinda be a checklist for you to help you remember to check the little things when you are split testing your landing pages…

Things to Split Test on your Landing Page:

• Split test what font you’re using!
• Have you split tested your background color?
• Have you tried to bold or italicize certain words or phrases that could help sell users?
• What about underlining certain things?
• Are you linking to the offer page throughout your article?
• Are you including a Go Back To Top Link at the bottom of your landing page or another Button or Link at the bottom to take your user to the offer page?
• Don’t forget to add testimonials to help build trust with your visitors if your niche allows for them.
• Can you include any endorsed by, affiliated with, or as seen (in, on, at) buttons?  For example, As seen on Oprah or Endorsed with the Good Housekeeping Seal!

The list above is just a couple of the “small things” you could be doing and adding to your landing pages in order to increase conversions and CTR’s.  If you aren’t doing them, you need to start!  If you are using them then good for you!

If you have any other “small things” that you know of that work well in increasing CTR’s and Conversions I’d love for you to share them with me in the comments below.  It’s the smalls things that sometimes make huge differences!

Affiliates should include several articles in fact on their landing sites in order to make sure they are getting the best quality score they can from content.  Google loves to see plenty of content on sites and not just plenty but also fresh content.  So most affiliates not only have a decent amount of articles on their sites when they launch a niche, they also are adding new articles weekly.

If you’re an affiliate that isn’t, you could be shoot yourself in the foot, however, this article isn’t about that, so moving on my question for the day is this…

Is the article on your actual landing page the same type as the ones you’re using throughout the rest of your site for content?  If so, why?

I think affiliates have gotten so worried about their quality score that they have forgotten that their article not only needs to provide great “content” but also sell your visitors on your product or service that you’re offering!

Your Landing Page Article is Your Opportunity to Sell!

The article on your actual landing page shouldn’t even be referred to as an article in my opinion.  It needs to be referred to as a sales letter!  Of course, I’m not talking about those long sales pages you see for a lot of e-books unless that’s what you are promoting.  I’m talking about just understanding again that while some won’t read your article there will be plenty of visitors that do and based on what your article says you could keep and convert those visitors into cash or they could simply hit their back button and move on in the search results looking for something that will help them…

Even if you have the best product or service out there, unless you tell your visitors they aren’t going to know!  You must tell them what your product or service has to offer.  Not only should you explain what your product or service is and what it has to offer but your sales letter should also include these things.

What Your Sales Letter Should Include:

• What exactly is your product or service?
• What does your product or service have to offer?
• What makes your product or service different than the 100 other ones out there?
• Why should they purchase from you and not another site that offers the same product?  (Can you offer anything special or extra that other sites can’t like a free e-book on how to use the product???)
• Make sure you use bold and italics just please don’t over do it!  And I don’t mean to try to rank for better keywords…I mean sell your visitors!
• Make use of Headline Tags – Again not for SEO purposes but to help draw attention to important parts of your sales page to increase conversions!

Understanding and knowing that your landing page article is not only an article that should supply content but also an article that should sell your visitor will help you increase conversions and with a little practice you won’t lose a bit of quality score by doing so!

So in closing, I would just like to repeat on thing!

Your landing page article should not look or read like the rest of the articles on your site!!!

This blog post will hopefully give you the pros and cons to each which will allow you to make that decision to monetize your landing pages with other sources besides the main offer your promoting…..or not!

Contextual Advertising

Let’s start with contextual advertising.  I’ll be using Google Adsense, however, any contextual program can be used.

If you’re building your landing pages correctly, by correctly I mean adding fresh content via either a blog or by adding html pages to your site, then you should have tons of extra pages or blog posts of material in which you could place Adsense on.  You could also add Adsense to the main page of your landing site.  The question is, however, should you?

I personally believe that this varies from niche to niche, however, there are a few simple guidelines you can keep in mind that should help you at least give it a try.

The most important thing I would recommend is not placing Adsense on the homepage of your landing site.  I’ve never seen this work personally in my own tests, and I’ve also never really heard of anyone that was doing this successfully without losing conversions on their main offer they were promoting!

Note: While Adsense can very well bring you in some “pocket” change by adding to your inner pages of your site, I personally feel that the time it takes to not only place the ads on your site, but also, the amount of time to optimize the ads to make the convert the best may not be worth the time.  For example, on an offer that I consistently do $15,000 dollars a month in revenue, Adsense averages about $30 dollars a month by having it on the pages.  So, its a decision you need to make.  If your just starting out, every penny helps, but if you’ve been doing it a while, it may not be for you!

Direct Ad Sales

This is a subject that isn’t talked about much around the world of affiliate marketing, however, there is a very popular ebook called “Get Google Ads for Free” if you’re interested in checking it out.

Basically, you create a landing page just like you normally would, only on your homepage you’ll have several advertising spots.  Some people place these below their main call to action, some above, generally the higher up on the page the more you can charge from them and make a profit.

This method can actually work quite well, and in fact I use it for several niches that are really competitive where the bids are higher.  However, you will most likely see a drop in conversions to your main offer that your promoting, so you need to make sure this is something that would be feasible for you to do on your site and for your niche.

Again, if you want a very detailed breakdown of how this works, you’ll definitely want to check out the “Get Google Ads for Free” ebook.  It’s no huge secret, however, the ebook will show you exactly what to do step by step.

Offer a Free Product to Get Newsletter Signups

Another great way to monetize your landing page is to offer a free ebook, product, newsletter, etc in order to get your visitors to give you their email address.  Doing this will allow you to sell a single visitor multiple times over a course of time.

For example, I have a landing page/site setup for Auto Insurance and after they click the link to goto the offer page, I have a pop-under come up as well which offers a free ebook on how to make sure your getting the best auto insurance rate possible.  Of course, in order for the visitor to receive this ebook, they must enter their email address.

I’m then able to send the visitor a couple different offers in order for them to receive more insurance quotes from different companies and for each one the visitor completes, I get paid another commission.

This works extremely well and if done properly and in a non-obtrusive way, doesn’t seem to hurt conversions to your main offer very much at all, while allowing you to possibly for years sell to this visitor.  Of course, make sure you don’t over try to oversell the visitor.  I only send out 1 maybe 2 offers per month for them to check out.

There you have it!  Three additional ways you can monetize your landing pages to increase your earnings via affiliate marketing.  I hope this helps some of you out and I know if you implement them you can definitely earn more without spending more on PPC.

If you have any other suggestions on ways to monetize affiliates sites besides the main offer of course, please let me know in the comments as I would love to hear them!

This topic will explain some common mistakes that people make when creating landing pages. Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be able to clearly understand the problems your landing page may be causing!

1. Your Call to Action is below the Fold - Your call to action is what causes your visitors to go from your landing page to the offer or service your promoting thus the reason it’s called a call to action. This could be a big red button that says sign up for free, or a list of features with a sign up now button, etc. So, why would you want your call to action below the fold when you automatically lose ~30% of your visitors if they have to scroll down?
2. Trying to Collect too Much Data – Trying to get a visitor to sign up for a newsletter is fine for future sales to an email list you put together, however, you may be hurting your conversions! The more information that you try to collect from your visitors the more likely they won’t end up completing the offer. Try to keep your data collecting to a minimum and only collect information that you truly need!
3. Missing Testimonials - Testimonials can greatly increase conversion rates and instill trust in your visitors eyes. They tend to help the visitor realize that the product/service your offering is worth their time in filling out any necessary information or even whipping out their credit card. If you can use testimonials in your niche, your only hurting yourself by not at least trying them out on your landing page!
4. Too Many Call to Actions – As said above you need to have a clear call to action above the fold. You shouldn’t ever have more than 2 call to actions on a landing page. Asking a user to sign up for an offer or service your offering would be one call to action, asking them to sign up for a newsletter would be another call to action. Asking users to subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to your RSS feed, give you a call, etc may sound like a great idea to get return customers and build up a great list, having too many can cause confusion and also end up making the visitor forget why they even came to your site, thus, you lose out on a commission!
5. Not Split Testing Landing Pages – Another mistake I see people commonly make is to not split test their landing pages. I recently wrote an article about split testing landing pages, how to do it, what parts of your landing page to split test, etc. If you haven’t check it out already, you need to as split testing can greatly increase your profits and allow you to find out which landing page(s) work best!

So there you have it, five reasons your landing page may suck! Get to work and correct the problems on your landing pages and immediately see the results. You’ll be amazed at what a few simple things can do to your conversions!

Split Testing is basically the process of testing different variations of Ad Copy (Ads), Landing Pages, Your Price, etc. The reason that we split test and especially in affiliate marketing is so that we can increase our conversion ratio or ROI (return over investment). Basically what that means is this…

Let’s say you start a campaign for dating. Let’s also assume that for every one dollar you spend on advertising via PPC you make two dollars. Now by split testing you can increase how many people that come to your landing page convert. By doing so, now when you spend one dollar on advertising via PPC, you make 3 dollars!

Split Testing allows you to make more without spending more!

Now, I’ve already wrote an article on Split Testing Ads which you may also wish to check out if your completely new to the idea of split testing or just want a refresher course.

Okay, now that I’ve explained what split testing is, let’s dive into why you should split test your landing page, the benefits of split testing your landing page, and how to split test landing pages.

Benefits of Split Testing Your Landing Page:

The benefits of split testing are numerous but I just want to touch on the most important in this article. So without further adieu…

Increased Conversion Rate – The single most important reason for split testing your landing page is to increase conversions. Increasing conversions allows you to spend the same amount of money, yet increase your revenue while paying the same amount for advertising if your using PPC (pay per click).

Quality Score – Another benefit although not always as easy to test, is the ability to increase your quality score that you receive from Google Adwords. Again this is hard to test as the quality score can take a couple days or even weeks to recalculate each time.

Again, there are several other factors that split testing can accomplish, however, in order to keep this article short and to the point I’ve decided to only list the top reasons in my opinion.

What should I split test?

Okay, so you now realize the benefits to split testing landing pages, but how do you do it? Which parts of your landing page do you change? Do you have two completely different landing pages or two similar ones with only certain parts changed?

The answer to this question is that there really isn’t a right or wrong way, although if you do use two completely different landing pages for your testing, once you find one that works well, I would recommend moving on to the latter.

So, in reference to that, below is a list of things you may want to consider changing to increase landing page conversions.

1. Split Test your Heading! Your heading is the first thing that people notice when they come to your site. Thus, people could stay or leave your site based just on that one main headline! In fact, people will leave or stay based on your headline. I’ve seen a headline instantly increase conversions by three hundred percent to five hundred percent!
2. Split Test your Sub-Headline! Your sub-headline is probably the second most important thing you should split test following right after your headline. Again, by creating another landing page with just simply your sub-headline changed you could increase your conversion rate by one hundred and fifty percent to two hundred percent!
3. Split Test each Paragraph! Split testing your paragraphs can take a lot of work, and most of the time you really only need to focus on split testing your first paragraph. Personally I only worry about the first paragraph when I’m split testing and very seldom split test my others. I will however rewrite the rest of my paragraphs once I have split tested my first paragraph and know what works for the niche I’m currently working on!
   TIP: Using 3-5 bullets stating the main points of the offer/service you are promoting generally works extremely well for your first paragraph! This is probably because most internet users will skim pages instead of taking the time to fully read each paragraph.
4. Split Test your Call to Action Line/Button! Does a green button work better than a blue button? How about a red color one? Does Order Now or Order Today work better? Can you use the word free? Your call to action button can make a customer leave your site even if they’ve read and looked over everything else. Your heading, sub-heading, and article/description could be perfect! Yet, you’ll still lose visitors if your call to action doesn’t well….call the user to perform an action!

As you can see, there are several factors to test when your split testing your landing pages, and hopefully the above steps will help you get started!

Okay, so now your wanting the code in order to do this easily correct? Well the code below allows you to test two different landing pages and each time a visitor comes to your site it will randomly send them to one or the other. Then you simply switch out the worse performing landing page with a new one every couple of days.

PHP Code for Split Testing Landing Pages


<?php
if(rand(0,1) == 0) {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split1");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split2");
}
?>

In the code where it says split1 and split2, you would replace that with whatever you call your two filenames.  Make sure you also put .html or .php after the filename depending on which extension your using.  Also, don’t forget to change www.example.com to your sites URL!

So, there you have it!  Now get out there and start increasing your ROI by split testing your landing pages!

I’m not use to posting this frequently on a blog! I guess I still have a lot to learn about when it comes to blogging and keeping ideas popping into your head! Anyways, so because I couldn’t think of anything to write about, I made a tweet on twitter asking if anyone had any questions they would like to see covered in a blog post and BlueHeronTrail asked which was better to use a landing page or a landing site (ie. blog, website, etc) I decided to include Direct Linking as well as believe it or not it still works!

So, enough of that let’s get into it!

Direct Linking

First, allow me to explain what Direct Linking is for those that are just getting started in Affiliate Marketing.

Direct Linking is when link directly to an advertisers landing page. Most affiliates normally buy a domain name, some simple hosting, and create their own landing page that they send visitors to first before sending them to the offer(s) landing page. There are two main ways to Direct Link to an affiliate offer.

The first way and most used method of Direct Linking to an affiliates page is by using the affiliate URL your given when you sign up with a company. For example the link may look like this http://x.affiliate.com/publisher/5674 That of course is just an example and doesn’t actually link to an offer.

The second way is to buy a domain name and point the domain name straight to the offers landing page. This method isn’t used as much as the first method is, however, I truly feel that this is the best way to link to an offer and I’ll explain why below.

Advantages to Direct Linking:

• Allows you to quickly test an offer to see how well it converts before building an entire site around the offer.
• If the advertisers landing page is good enough quality and having a landing pages seems to cut down on conversions instead of helping.
• Very easy to setup. You don’t need any knowledge of html, css, or php. You also don’t need to buy a domain name or hosting if you don’t wish to, however, I do recommend buying a domain for Direct Linking.

Disadvantages to Direct Linking:

• Normally its pretty hard to get a good quality score in Google Adwords when Direct Linking.
• You are unable to presell the customer. Preselling the customer can easy increase conversions by 200% if you take the time to learn how to do so properly.
• You won’t normally receive any organic (free) traffic when direct linking. You may receive a little if you are direct linking with a domain name, however, I’ve never received any amount of organic traffic worth talking about.

Why should I use a Domain Name when Direct Linking?

As I said above, most people when they direct link to an offer they don’t even use a domain name. I however, believe that using a domain name even when direct linking has some really nice benefits to it.

First, you are able to build links to your own domain name and keep them if you decide to later build a landing page or site around an offer. I submit almost every offer I run to quite a few directories to start building up some organic traffic and to rank for keywords in Google. Once I know an offer is profitable I immediately start building links to it, even if its just a few well placed ones.

Secondly, Google Adwords has recently changed their Display URL policy saying you have to use the same domain as what is in your destination URL. If your running an offer through any CPA network like AzoogleAds the link for the offer your running normally redirects through their ad server anyways. Having a good keyword rich domain name can increase everything from your Quality Score in Adwords to your CTR%.

Those are the two main reasons why I always use a domain even when testing an offer by direct linking. You can get them for so cheap I don’t see a good reason not to just buy one. If the offer doesn’t work, I get rid of the domain! Simple as that!

Landing Pages

This is by far the most used method when it comes to affiliate marketing. You buy a domain name, throw up a one page site basically called a landing page and have an article or two with several links to the offer page and that’s it.

There are several advantages to this method over direct linking and a couple disadvantages.

Advantages to a Landing Page:

• Easier to setup than a full landing site (website focused around an affiliate offer).
• Still pretty easy to get a decent quality score even with Adwords believe it or not, although it is becoming increasingly harder and I believe within another year or two, landing pages will need to become landing sites.
• Extremely great for seasonal offers as you wouldn’t want to spend too much time on offers that are only good one month out of the year.
• Allows you to presell your customers thus increasing your conversion rates significantly.
• Allows you to be more flexible. Some examples are… You can collect email addresses for sending out future offers, you are able to track using php on the keyword level fairly easily using simple cut and paste techniques!

Disadvantages to Landing Pages:

• Slowly becoming harder to get a great quality score with Adwords as they like content and lots of it.
• Requires more time to setup than direct linking which could all be in vain if the offer doesn’t convert well enough and you end up having to cancel it.

Again, Landing Pages are the now. They are what’s working and they work well. I don’t believe they will work forever, however, who’s to say they don’t work for another 5 years! Google continues to increase their quality algorithms and they love content and multi-page sites. They want websites to have value to them and not just try to hurry up and send a visitor to someone else’s site only to be redirected yet again without adding any real value to the customer.

Landing Sites

When I say Landing Site basically I’m talking about a Landing Page that has more than just one simple page. A landing site has multiple pages, multiple articles, useful information for consumers, etc. They sometimes have a blog tied to them. Basically anyway you want to do it is fine. I don’t personally believe there is one right way or wrong way when it comes to building a landing site. Some people use a blog to add content, some don’t. The choice is entirely up to you, either way seems to work fine. I’ve personally done it both ways and haven’t seen a problem yet with one or the other.

Advantages to a Landing Site:

• Google loves these sites, they love the fresh content that gets added to these sites, they love the fact that they typically help the customer and add value a little more than just a simple landing page.
• These sites can very easily rank for keywords in Organic Searches thus providing tons of free traffic.
• Easier to get good quality scores when using Google Adwords.
• Plus all the benefits of a Regular Landing Page.

Disadvantages to a Landing Site:

• Very time consuming to build these websites.
• Constantly have to be updated with fresh content in order to be most effective.

So which do I use?

I personally feel and believe that there is a purpose for each type of linking. Let me give you a few examples.

Let’s say your trying out a niche that honestly you don’t know much about but have heard it’s doing well. Your not sure what works, what doesn’t, what type of landing page to create, if it will convert for you, etc. I would personally direct link to the offer first to test out these things and to give it a quick test. Now that’s just me speaking, I know people that do nothing but direct link and they make tons of money. Direct Linking still works but it tends to be more of a short-term income. You get an offer doing well and a couple months it dies, whereas landing pages typically last a lot longer.

Let’s say you’ve tested out a niche and your breaking even, or even making a little profit, or even maybe just losing a little money. You decide that the niche has potential and you’d like to try to scale on it and build. I would then throw up a Landing Page and work on increasing my conversion rate by preselling the customer, increasing my ad ctr%, etc.

Let’s say that you realize after your landing page has been up a while that you could really scale this campaign and you not only want PPC traffic but you also want to start driving SEO traffic to the site, I would then convert my landing page to a Landing Site by either adding a blog or adding an article page.

I hope this article helped you out and explained to you the advantages and disadvantages to using each of the three methods.

Let me know if you have any other questions about the three below in the comments.

So what does this mean for Ebay Affiliates using AuctionAds? Well in my opinion and please note its only my opinion, I think Media Whiz will do a fine job with AuctionAds just as they have with Text-Link-Ads. Alot of people are concerned that payouts will be dropping as Shoemoney from the start of AuctionAds thus far has been paying out 100% of the earnings. I’m going to have to disagree with the people that think the payouts will drop.

As most of you know, AuctionAds is still going through CJ at the moment, however, I can’t see it being that way for long if it hasn’t already changed . Now because its going through CJ you know CJ has to be raking in some dough for it. If not why would CJ be doing it? So what I forsee happening is AuctionAds going directly through Ebay for the affiliate program meaning AuctionAds will be getting what CJ has been getting from it, thus allowing publisher to keep receiving the payouts they are currently receiving.

Again this is all speculation however, seems like the logical step for everyone except Commission Junction.

Huge Congrats to Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) and Dillsmack on AuctionAds and where they have brought it up to from the beginning. It is arguably one of the biggest launches of any advertising company. In only 4 months they have had over 25,000 publishers that have displayed over 1 Billion Impressions. Then sold it for what has to be (once again guessing) in the millions.

1) Graphically Oriented

This one is pretty obvious. Most landing pages are very simple, and include large colorful graphics that are attractive to the eye. You want to follow this pattern, but also keep in mind that search engines are updating. You want to have your landing pages be simple and guide the user to the affiliate offer, but still have a good amount of content on the site for quality score purposes (especially in Google).

2) Image/File Size

Most affiliate don’t realize that a good chunk of the population is still on dial-up connection. They have landing pages created with 500kb .jpeg images, not thinking that their landing pages can take minutes for dial-up users to load. The longer your page takes to load for all users, the more users click the “X” in the corner of their browser. Even if you have to sacrifice some quality, always compress images to as small and fast loading as you can (use .gifs or really compressed .jpegs).

3) Blend With Your Offer

A good tip that a lot of people don’t use is that they should blend their landing pages with the offer they want to promote. This is kind of hard if you don’t know exactly what offer you want to promote, but if you are positive on the best converting offer, try and design your landing page to look similar to it. Better blending leads people to believe that they are just continuing onto the next step, instead of just being redirected somewhere else.

4) Flashing Arrows/Text

Pretty simple, people respond more to flashing text or arrows. If you have a button on the page that says “Click Here to Continue!”, make the text flashing, or put arrows on each side of the button that flash (use animated .gifs). Check out this site, ringringmobile.com. That landing page is extremely simple, and the graphics aren’t even all that good looking. It loads really fast, and has a flashing arrow on the left side. I know of the person that owns that landing page, and he makes a TON off of ringtones.

5) Content

Search engines are starting to look more for multi-page websites over single landing pages with no content. To adapt, your landing page should have more than 1 page, with unique content on each page. You don’t have to make all the pages stand out to the user (you don’t want that, you want them to click through to the offer – although additional content wouldn’t hurt), but you do want them there. So find a way to plug in different content pages that all link together.

6)Tracking

Tracking is getting better and better, and the more tracking you have, the more money you can make. Use Crazy Egg to see heatmaps of your landing page. By installing tracking on your LP, you can see where users are clicking, and re-arrange your page accordingly to get a better CTR.

7) SEO

Although your landing page is supposed to rank high in search engines, SEO will help increase your quality score. Landing page articles should have good keyword density, links should include keywords, page titles should include keywords, use h1, h2, and h3 tags in your articles. Include a privacy policy/about us/terms and conditions on your page. The more your treat your landing page like an actual site, the better your quality score will be.

Alrighty. Hopefully those tips help you out, make sure to stick around for more, and subscribe if you would be so kind .