My own landing page or direct to affiliate site?

by wardo
20 replies
I am thinking of trying some affiliate marketing and I have read a quid that recommends writing articles which point to a landing page you have created with blogger or wordpress. This is where you would try to persuade the visitor to click through to the affiliates sales page.

Although this sounds fine, would it not be better to just link directly to the sales page? I would have thought a good sales page would convert much better. I think I remember reading that ezine articles does not allow you to link directly to a sales page with an affiliate link though. If this is true, could you just link to a page that does a redirect directly to the sales page?
#affiliate #direct #landing #page #site
  • Profile picture of the author lakshaybehl
    No you can not. And that is why you need a separate landing page that you create...
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70701].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author johnmiley
      You can try a re-direct, but Google won't let you get by with it for too long (not likely anyway)--since they've updated their policy on this recently.

      I'd suggest you create a quick landing page (blog is fine), with a bonus (free report, PLR article, etc) with an op-in, to capture subscribers' names.
      Your blog title can be very close to the product you are promoting (i.e. you're promoting widgets and your blog is "super widget bonus").

      You could put up 300 words or fewer, on your landing page, with an opt-in form from Aweber or similar vendor to capture names of visitors. Set up is quick and they offer a one month trial--$19.95 a month otherwise (or close to that).

      Once you have names, you can follow-up with your clients; otherwise, if they don't buy on their first visit, you don't have any recourse to follow-up with them.

      It's the eternally simple equation everyone recommends, so I wouldn't re-invent the wheel on this.

      Hope this helps!
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70736].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author KaiWei
      Does that affiliate program you are promoting capture the email of the visitors that you direct to them and YOU HAVE ACCESS TO?

      If so, forget about building a landing page and just direct them to the merchant's site. I tried capturing the emails at my own side and then direct them over to the merchant before, and here's my take.

      Unless you have good copy on your landing page or have some sort of a reward for doing so, visitors are not going to sign up, much less reach the sales letter.

      Have a free audio interview with the creator of the affiliate product or free eBook to complement whatever the affiliate product you are promoting. If you don't have anything for them to entice them to give you their emails, they won't.

      And I don't really recommend you use blogger or wordpress to build your landing page. You use either platform chances are your landing page will have links which will distract your visitor from clicking on your opt-in form button, unless you make sure all the unnecessary ahref links are removed, which I personally find it a pain.

      I recommend you just design a simple HTML page using Frontpage, have no links other than the opt-in form button for them to sign up, or a ABOUT link giving a short description about your website/why you are recommending the product, and put in another opt-in form on that ABOUT page.

      Remove as many distractions as possible.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70740].message }}
    • Profile picture of the author zoulkifl
      ***This following post is mostly based on personal experiences.***

      It depends on your business model really.

      If you just want to earn commissions and not worry about anything else than just direct all traffic to the sales page.

      Now if you want to maximize your efforts get your own squeeze page to collect names. Then you can promote the product to them as much as you want to. Just don't over do it. You can promote other services and products that cater to the same niche.

      So all the traffic that you direct to your squeeze page can be leveraged.

      Hope that helped.
      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70758].message }}
      • Profile picture of the author Midas3 Consulting
        I would say even if you're not going to add an opt in, STILL use a landing page to pre-sell, whether that be review based or social .

        It's incredibly rare, as long as your landing page is contructed correctly, that you won't improve conversions over sending them cold to a pitch page, at least this is certainly true if the traffic is via PPC, article based traffic might require testing.

        You can also go down the opt in route but don't force them to opt in to reach your vendor, simply offer then something highly targeted as a free gift that they can take or leave, and still include the link to whatever your promoting.

        Do not use Wordpress for a landing page there's no benefit whatsoever, as much as I love Wordpress, it's not ideal for this purpose.
        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70792].message }}
        • Profile picture of the author David Raybould
          Hi there Wardo...

          Definitely, definitely go with a landing page.

          I use article marketing to get something like 40,000 unique visitors per month spread across a variety of sites, and unless you are promoting something that's really untargeted (ringtones etc), you'll find that you'll increase the conversion rate of whatever offer you are promoting quite substantially.

          I actually tested this very specifically, I had a ton of articles pointing to a redirect on EZA and it resulted in something like 1 sale per 180 visitors, but when I changed it to a focused landing page, it very quickly tripled the sales, all from the same traffic.

          The reasoning behind it: Yes, you may get more people TO the offer if you just use a straight redirect, BUT the vast majority of them are inevitably going to be people who would never ever buy anyway, so when you use a landing page, the ones that DON'T click through to the sales page are going to be the ones that wouldn't buy anyway.

          So in reality, you may get less hops on your affiliate links, but you'll make far more money, and last time I checked, that was the name of the game...

          Does that make sense?

          Hope it helps...

          David
          Signature
          Killer Emails. Cash-spewing VSLs. Turbocharged Landing Pages.

          Whatever you need, my high converting copy puts more money in your pocket. PM for details. 10 years experience and 9 figure revenues.
          {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70835].message }}
        • Profile picture of the author wardo
          Thanks for all of your replys. They have been very helpful.

          I certainly understand the value of building a list but I'm not quite sure how to do that on my landing page. For example, say a visitor clicks on the link in my article and lands on my landing page. I would then talk about why the product is so good and tell them where to get it (my affiliate link) but where would the sign up form fit into this setup? I assume you would ask them for their name and email (by offering a free report) before showing them my affiliate link to the sales page but the process seems quite long and I suspect the visitor would get anoyed.

          As I understand it, the process would be something like this:

          article site - my landing page - sign up form - thankyou page (with link to affiliate page) - affiliate sales page - affiliate thankyou page

          Thanks very much
          {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70878].message }}
          • Profile picture of the author Nixter
            I was also wondering something along the same lines. I have a Clickbank account and am sending traffic directly to the publishers site via my hoplink. But I really want to use my own squeeze page rather than theirs (for obvious reasons) and then send the person to the publishers salespage. Can this be done? It really is a waste of my marketing efforts to send someone to someone elses squeeze page, and will probably lose sales as it is very unlikely someone would fill in two squeeze forms.

            Cheers
            {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70901].message }}
            • Profile picture of the author Frank Bruno
              There something here that nobody seems to be mentioning....

              Is that of the benefits of SEO by sending traffic to your own content pages.

              Not only will you get traffic directly from your articles, but you also get traffic from the search engines as well. So basically you just compounded your traffic by having an article and a landing content page.

              This also depends the type of article you wrote, if the article is written well enough you can actually link directly to the merchants page and make the sale.

              But again you're losing out on SEO benefits. Sure your article will get SEO benefits on the site that's hosting the article, but you lose out on making that a consistent traffic flow to your own site, owhere you could possibly have additional affiliate links and many other articles that the reader may like to read.

              Frank Bruno
              {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[70935].message }}
              • Profile picture of the author Nixter
                That's a good point Frank, thats why I would prefer to send people to my own site and squeeze page and then after that send them to the promoters sales page, not squeeze page. But the problem is that I am not sure if this is possible and how to do it.

                Any ideas anyone?
                {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[71229].message }}
                • Profile picture of the author Kym Robinson
                  If thats what you want to do, you need to create your sq/page add in the code from GR or aweber or whoever so signups end up in your account - and then do the rest through your thankyou page - whichis where they will find the link to your free report or whatever which could also be coded OR...link straight from your Thankyou page to the salespage!

                  Lots of options to do this - you need to know what you actually want to do?
                  {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[71729].message }}
                • Profile picture of the author Frank Bruno
                  Originally Posted by Nixter View Post

                  That's a good point Frank, thats why I would prefer to send people to my own site and squeeze page and then after that send them to the promoters sales page, not squeeze page. But the problem is that I am not sure if this is possible and how to do it.

                  Any ideas anyone?
                  Thats really easy to do...

                  all you have to do is put your affiliate link as your thank you page and it will direct traffic and leads to the merchants page.

                  If you use Aweber, you could choose to insert your code to the first thank you page or the second.

                  So when a lead opts in to your squeeze page, they could be immediately redirected to the merchants landing page through your affiliate link.

                  Or you could have the lead land on a page that says please verify your e-mail address, then when they verify their e-mail address then your thank you page will send them directly over through your affiliate link.


                  Frank Bruno
                  {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[71968].message }}
                  • Profile picture of the author DennisM
                    Hello,

                    I think it's a huge mistake to link an EZA article directly to the merchants sales page and here's why....

                    Whether you write articles or outsource the task, if the vendor stops selling that product then your article(s) will point to a dead link!

                    Remember, you always want to control the traffic. If that affiliate program ever goes away you can always change YOUR OWN landing page to another affiliate product that's similar in nature or basically redirect that article traffic to anything you like.

                    This extends the life of your posted articles indefinitely in theory.

                    Good luck!

                    Regards,
                    Dennis
                    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[72233].message }}
                    • Profile picture of the author ripsnorta2
                      Why don't you test it?

                      That's what I am doing. With all due respect to the far more experienced members who have posted here, the only way you'll really know for sure is to try it for yourself.

                      This is what I am doing, or will be doing once my EZA account goes to the next level.

                      1. Find an affiliate product that appears to be converting well. I'm using a Clickbank product that has high gravity. It's my understanding that high gravity means that a lot of affiliates have made sales, so I figure at least the products landing page converts well.
                      2. Register two domains. I found two domains close to the domain name of the product. The .com was gone so I bought the .net and .org. I set both the nameservers to dreamhosts.
                      3. On one of the domains at Dreamhost, instead of setting to a directory on a server, I redirect it to the product landing page with my hoplink and a unique tracking id (very important.)
                      4. With the other domain I create a standard website. On this website, the hoplink contains another unique id.
                      5. I write two articles each day, one using the .org and the other using the .net, and using a different pen name for each.
                      6. Do this until you have enough data to track the results.
                      I originally considered using this method to test the comparative effectiveness between writing articles for EZA only, and also submitting to multiple directories via iSnare. I'm considering buying yet a third domain, the .info, to test that part of the equation, but I reckon I'll just leave it at that for the time being.

                      The beauty of this method is that if one method far exceeds the other in effectiveness, you can always redirect the least effective domain to the most effective. For example, if sending article readers directly to the product page turns out not to be as effective, you can redirect to your standard website, or vice versa.
                      {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[72292].message }}
                      • Profile picture of the author kevin campbelle
                        Now that is a good method John. You may find that one method may be more effective in one niche and the other method may be more effective in another niche.

                        Might still be worthwhile to test the third method because it may turn out that you may be able to write less articles and get the same results as doing the EZA submission only.

                        Kevin.
                        {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[72914].message }}
                        • Profile picture of the author Nixter
                          thanks for the advice. My problem is not how to redirect after my squeeze page, but to redirect to the page AFTER the email captcher squeeze page of the publisher. The reason I want to do this is that I know I would lose deals if I made a customer fill my email form for a free giveaway and then send them to a page with another email form for a free giveaway. All I would want to do is to send them (via my thank you page) to the publishers "sales page" and not email squeeze capture page. And to do this through proper clickbank hoplinks (so I can get paid).

                          Any advice?
                          {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[73196].message }}
                          • Profile picture of the author KaiWei
                            Originally Posted by Nixter View Post

                            thanks for the advice. My problem is not how to redirect after my squeeze page, but to redirect to the page AFTER the email captcher squeeze page of the publisher. The reason I want to do this is that I know I would lose deals if I made a customer fill my email form for a free giveaway and then send them to a page with another email form for a free giveaway. All I would want to do is to send them (via my thank you page) to the publishers "sales page" and not email squeeze capture page. And to do this through proper clickbank hoplinks (so I can get paid).

                            Any advice?
                            Hmm...does the publisher provide any direct links to their sales letter? If not, I suggest you email them asking for the link.

                            But personally I doubt they will do it because capturing the leads is probably critical for them. But you can try.
                            {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[76984].message }}
                            • Profile picture of the author Nixter
                              I did write to the publisher directly and he wrote back today, and he was excellent and said that not only could I skip his squeeze page (and gave me a link), but I could also copy his squeeze page!! I will do that, use my own domain and then insert my own getresponse code. It just goes to show that if you don't ask you don't get. Also I had done some sales with the product already, so I guess it gave me a kind of leverage. Top Bloke anyway!
                              {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[80721].message }}
  • Profile picture of the author napoleonfirst
    You are better off using your own .com domain. Create a logo and a professional website. You can buy templates if you like it. Also know your product and your market. Create a good endorsment of the product and you ctr will be good.
    {{ DiscussionBoard.errors[71962].message }}

Trending Topics