Improve Your Internet Marketing

One of the ‘building blocks’ of Internet Marketing is Landing Pages. I’ll share with you how I decide when to build a landing page, and how I go about it.

Why and When to Create Landing Pages
When I am ’starting out’ with a new offer or a new niche, I will always begin by ‘direct-linking’, using my affiliate link to go directly to the vendor’s landing page. I do this for PPC, blogs, articles, etc. (some article sites, such as ezine articles, don’t allow affiliate links, in which case I can usually get away with a simple html ‘redirect’).

I do this in order to see if the offer, or niche, is worth pursuing with a more concerted effort. If I get more than a handful of sales, this tells me there is enough potential to make it worth my while to ‘get serious’ about it.

Any offer worth pursuing beyond the occasional sale is worth creating a landing page for. Not only will your conversions improve, but you are in a better position to promote it through additional efforts.

So how do I go about creating a landing page? There are three methods I use: use a free blog, ‘build’ my own, or outsource it.

Free Blogs
Free blogs such as blogger.com and wordpress.com can be used for quick, easy, and of course free landing pages, plus it doesn’t require getting a domain name or hosting account. They are easy to set up, and for most things, they work very well. Using a free blog for your landing page lends itself best to ‘descriptive’ landing pages and ‘reviews’ or ‘comparisons’. A ‘descriptive’ landing page is just what it sounds like - you write a ‘description’ of the product. I will often simply open a Notepad window alongside the merchant’s landing page and ‘walk’ down it, reading a section at a time and then writing it in my own words. Reviews and comparisons also work well with blogs, with the additional benefit of having more than one offer on the page.

Building Your Own
Building your own landing page has a number of obvious advantages - you have the most control, you can copy it or use it as a template for future landing pages, you can do more ’sophisticated’ things than with a free blog, and it’s cheaper than outsourcing. I personally use Xsitepro, an absolutely AMAZING program which is designed with Affiliate Marketers in mind, however it is a relatively expensive program. There are also some good, free programs that can create a nice landing page, such as NVU (http://www.nvu.com).

Outsourcing
More and more, I outsource my landing pages. When I started, I had much more time than money. However I quickly found, as you will often hear from the real successful marketers, that time is my most valuable and scarce asset. In fact, if you pursue Internet Marketing on any serious level, it pays to outsource as much as you can.

I use two avenues for outsourcing landing pages - Rentacoder (http://www.rentacoder.com), and Craigslist. Craigslist has the advantages that you can usually find someone local, and you can interact with them directly, but you must be very careful in ’screening’ your source and setting up payment and ownership terms. When I use Craigslist, I put my own ad under “gigs/computer” rather than look for someone advertising under “services/computer”.

More often I go to Rentacoder (Elance is similarly good: http://www.elance.com). Before requesting bids, I will do a Google search for products similar to what I will be promoting, and jot down the URL’s of landing pages that I would buy from myself. As part of my bid request, I’ll say “Need a landing page, should be similar to …” This makes it easy to convey to the freelancer what I want and what the end deliverable will be like.

When I write my bid request, I never specify a starting bid. This way, I make my request available to the many web page designers who are willing to be very aggressive with price, are just starting out and trying to build a portfolio, or who may bid low in hopes of developing a new long-term relationship.

I describe as completely as I can what I want, for example “Need a 1 page landing page for an affiliate product I am promoting. Page should look similar to www.xxx.com, etc. You will create the page with header graphic. I will provide you the copy, you will incorporate it into a finished, ready to upload page…”

I have found that I can have a professionally produced, polished landing page done for $50-$75. Both Rentacoder and Elance use a default agreement that the freelancer must agree to in order to bid. I have found these agreements to be very solid, and automatically take care of granting me full and exclusive rights to anything the freelancer creates (except vendor’s logos, etc).