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| Landing Pages How To WinAffiliate marketers know that Landing Pages are the best weapon they have. Those who do not use it either do not understand the concept or are just plain lazy. More often than not, it is the latter.
By: simon birch Affiliate marketers know that Landing Pages are the best weapon they have. Those who do not use it either do not understand the concept or are just plain lazy. More often than not, it is the latter. Affiliate Marketers see that others do not use it and so, they don’t bother with it too. You see, laziness is contagious. To have an effective Landing Page, we need to understand what the Landing Page is for. A Landing Page is not just a duplicate of your sales page. It is not a page renamed to run a PPC campaign. It is, on the other hand, a page that focuses on selling the product or service. This is why all the elements of “effective design” are usually stripped out on this page. When visitors come to your site, your Landing Page should give them only two options: To Buy or To Leave. There shouldn’t be any other option aside from that. Do not distract them and make the mistake of giving more options to choose from. If you want them to subscribe for more information, create a “name squeeze” page. Keep your focus and remember that Landing Pages exist for only one reason… to make a sale. Below is a list of what I do when I create a Landing Page: 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. My biggest issue with hosting is support. If their support is awesome I can handle other downfalls, but nothing is more frustrating than when something breaks or the server goes down and there is no one to help you at 2am on Sunday. Headline – This aspect is often greatly misused. The thought of, “I must cram as many keywords as possible into my Headline for maximum performance” 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. Or worse, you can get “Google Slapped.” But one of the problems with the headline in the above example is that it is boring and doesn’t create excitement, nor is there a Call to Action. So make sure you test your headlines so you know which one is most effective and then stick with that one. Font Face, Color & Size - Avoid having a distracting and cluttered look on your Landing Page. Having four to five different fonts on your page creates a messy look that people would love to hate. While having different fonts for your headlines are fine, having different fonts in your body text is distracting. Do not even think about doing this. Use only one font for your body text. Period. Test results show that Times New Roman is the best “offline” print font and because of this, it has become the default font on the internet. This, unfortunately, is a big mistake. It turns out that Times New Roman causes rapid eye fatigue which makes it one of the worst fonts online. The best fonts for online use are Verdana and Arial. Of the two, I would recommend that you use Verdana as it consistently outperforms every font. It reduces eye strain and increases readability. This was again verified in a test I performed in March 2011. Remember to use a standard font at all times. Also keep in mind that not all computers may have the font that you use. If you want a standard headline font, it is best to create it as a graphic so it will look constant on every computer. You definitely want your message to have the look that you intend it to have. You should always aim to make your text readable. The standard size for text is “2″ and it is advisable to put dark text on white background. In fact, black text on a white background is preferred. Landing pages aren’t supposed to show off how “cute” you can be. Landing pages are supposed to sell. This is serious stuff and requires you to put 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. I have also confirmed this again with a test last month, it is still the highest performing combination. 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 these landing pages are for AdWords, not for organic traffic. 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 is 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 duplicate content indexed by Google. As has been proven, you are far more likely to get nailed with duplicate content on your own site. Make the Links Easy to Find – A cool CSS file that allows you to make the links change colors, add or remove underlines is fine so long as you do not put them on your Landing Pages. Put them on your site if you wish but never on your Landing Page. This will only confuse your visitor and you do not want that to happen. Always use standard linking practices. If a potential customer can’t distinguish between text and a link, you are going to lose. Your priority is to get them to buy. I will repeat: 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. The standard colors for links are as follows: 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, so it is official. Do not mess around with standard linking practices. I have conducted a lot of testing and the standard linking practices have always had better conversion ratios. This is because the visitor experiences some interactivity with your page and the link “catches” their eye. 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 that does. It will pay off with less time changing all of your pages individually instead of just changing one file. Color Scheme – Always match the product or service you are selling with the colors on your page. For example, soothing yellows, greens and blues are best for skin care. Choose your colors carefully as they will either bring the visitor in deeper into the sales process or turn them away. Never use pink for a site for men either as a primary color or even as a secondary color. I shouldn’t have to explain why. [IMG]file:///C:/ If you are confused as to what color to use, review the sites of your competitors. It is usually a great place to start. If you are still not sure, test. Reviewing my Kitchen Table Copy method is a good start too. http://www.seomarketingforums.com/ # # # http://www.seomarketingforums.com/ Seomarketingforums.com www.twitter.com/ End
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