Thursday

What Makes A Landing Page Suck

Scoring a sale is more than just getting a visitor to click, it requires a sales technique projected through a quality landing page. Unfortunately, living in a world where visitors have the attention span of a gnat, we see landing pages being chocked full of flashy text telling the consumer what they want to hear. This does not always translate into a sale and more times than not will discourage the visitor and resent such an in your face sales attempt.

Images


Stock photography is another method used by landing pages that show people completely unrelated supposedly jumping for joy over whatever you are trying to sell. Guess what, buyers are not stupid, they saw those same 20 somethings excited over car insurance that are now trying to push your Viagra lead.

My suggestion, be creative, take some of your own pictures. Or at least, if you are serious about your affiliate business, try purchasing some one off photos. You gotta spend money to make money.

Long Ass Page

Ugh, the dreaded 5 page, page. It's a never ending wall of text and quotes that never seems to end, no matter how far your scroll bar takes you. If it takes you that long to sell me, chances are you need to rethink your sales tactic. Remember, consumers online generally don't have that long of an attention spam. To put it into perspective, would you really want that used cars salesman to go on for 45 mins about the $1,000 car you are about to buy?

My suggestion would be to use better descriptive terms and consolidate wordy paragraphs. Flowery talk can work depending on what niche you are working in, but generally short, sweet, and descriptive sentences will get the job done. Tell the buyer what they want to know and nothing else. This can better be accomplished by having multiple landing pages, focused on the keywords or ads used to find the page.

Unrealistic Quotes

Again, this gets back to the idea that the people you are selling to are not complete retards. Show some respect to those about to spend money with you, don't try and pull a smooth one by them by having outlandish quotes from supposed customers. I don't care how great the product is, no one will be quoted as saying that your digital download was better than an orgasm.

My suggestion, get real quotes from real customers. If you are an affiliate then generally you can contact the company offering the product and request some reviews from actual customers. If this is not possible, then please don't fall into the trap of making junk up, just leave big quote marks off of your landing page.



Afterthoughts

Look, I know not everyone can create sales worthy landing pages that convert well, but there are alternatives available. For starters there are always graphic artists available to create these pages for you, assuming you are good at writing and can write up the copy. Or, there are free landing page templates available that can get you started on the right track.

Good luck affiliating, it's been a touch summer so far for some, and the end of the year isn't looking any better.

Wednesday

Bing Not Showing Up As A Search Engine

Those of you keeping a close eye on your web stats over the past few days may have noticed that Bing is not being recorded as a search engine. As of now I've been using HiStats for my reporting and it lists Bing underneath referral websites, instead of search engine referrals. This may be happening with other tracking programs as well, so keep an eye out.

As far as Bing is concerned, I've been receiving respectable traffic from them so far. Their rankings seem to be on par with Google and I'm actually higher in a specific keywords. Hopefully this additional traffic will hold out. I hate having all my eggs in the Google basket.

Tuesday

Automatically Generate Amazon Product Posts



This is another great WordPress plugin I've been using to help populate my blogs with product posts. Amazon Auto Poster was created by Lunatic Studios and is available for immediate download for free or $29.99 for a premium version.

Basically this WP plugin will automatically generate posts, complete with comments, reviews, and descriptions from Amazon. Simply enter a keyword, starting point, how many posts, how frequent to publish, and hit go! It really is that simple to start adding post inventory, complete with your Amazon affiliate ID, to your blog.

The Amazon Auto Blog Poster plugin will also add images from Amazon.com to your blog. Each image is linked to your affiliate ID, so if a visitor clicks on the image they are taken to the Amazon sales page with your tracking cookie in place. Furthermore, the comments (reviews for each product) are also links to the Amazon product page with your tracking cookie in place as well.

See the Amazon Auto Post plugin in action on my Golfing Blog.
Click Here - To Download The Free Version of Amazon Auto Poster (Shows me Affiliate Commission Love)

Extend:
More Affiliate Plugins For Wordpress

Chitika Big Ass Ad

Believe it or not, there is a reason ads are placed in obnoxious places on websites, it's because they convert. Chitika has just released a giant ad, which converts awesome, but can look a little out of place on some websites. But, if it converts and you don't lose visitors, what's to lose?

According to Chitika the new 550x250 ad is generating close to 4 times more clicks than the next closest performing size. Like other Chitika ads, the Mega Big Ass unit comes complete with images next to the text advertisements, thus increasing your click throughs greatly.



As a side note, in regards to a Chitika Review I made a few months ago, their cost per clicks are increasing. At least in the automotive niche where the majority of my earnings come from, I'm seeing my earnings per click increase on almost a weekly basis. Where I was once only receiving 3-4 cents per click, I'm now seeing $.13- $.15 per click.

And lastly, in regards to their audited earnings report. Last month I did not receive a cut in my earnings. What was reported on a daily basis was within pennies of what I was actually paid out at the end of the month. So no worries on getting robbed of bad clicks, they do a good job of filtering out the junk live.