This is a follow up to Getting Started With Affiliate Marketing - Part 3

In the last part, we discussed Search Engine Optimization and how it can create higher Search Engine rankings, thus giving you more traffic… but what happens once you get that traffic?

That leaves us to Landing Pages and Conversions.

Landing pages, simply put, are website pages that a user lands on… this could be Search Engine traffic, PPC traffic, Forum signature traffic, Direct Traffic, etc. A user will land on these pages looking for a certain piece of content, product or maybe even some type of special offer.

Some Affiliates use Squidoo lenses or Hubpages for their landing pages, which they “pre-sell” the user and then send them to the Merchants Website. Pre-selling can be tricky for some people… there are plenty of Affiliates who simply do not understand Copywriting or have a tough time writing, period. In these cases, it’s probably best to create a Comparison page that actually compares 2+ products (all similar, of course), giving 1 product a “5 star” rating, along with a link… although it’s best to link ALL products in the comparison, just in case. And, obviously, it’s a good idea to become an Affiliate for each product.

Pre-selling is simply trying to sell the Visitor before he/she even arrives at the actual Sales page on the Merchants Website. I’ve actually tested several different methods of Landing pages and found that Review sites work the best for most of the products I choose… but not all. I have had some success with Comparison websites for a few products, where Review sites didn’t work as well.

Test, test, test… and once you’re done - test some more!

What are “conversions”? A conversion is simply converting traffic into sales… this means that you take a visitor and use your pre-sales page/landing page to make that visitor “bite” and move onto the next link (going to the merchants website) and purchase the product/service that you’re an Affiliate of.

So when you hear a Merchant talk about a 1:50 conversion ratio — this means that 1 in 50 people that land on the merchants sales page make a purchase. Obviously, this is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how much it costs to convert the traffic

Let’s take, for example, a Clothing company… let’s say that they have a 1:50 conversion ratio and the average sale is $100.00 … if it costs $2.00 per visitor (for you) to make a sale, you’re breaking even (50 times 2 = 100). This is a useless scenario for any successful Affiliate. But, on the other hand, if it only costs $.50 to make a sale - this could end up being a great situation for you! This means that it only costs $25.00 to make a $100.00 sale! Not bad…

Always do the math before throwing your money into the wind. I’m terrible with math but I make sure I do not get started in a program before I know the costs of bringing that traffic to the merchants page.

Direct linking … you’ll hear about “direct linking” quite a bit in the PPC world. Direct linking is using your Affiliate link, provided by the merchant, in your PPC ads, rather than taking them to YOUR Landing page. What you’re doing is letting the Merchant make the sale for you… bypassing having to create a landing page.

So, what’s the downfall of using a Direct linking campaign? Well… that depends. Is the Merchants Sales page good? How do you know? You could and should test this to be sure, before dumping all of your money into the campaign. You should also be using your own landing page (review, comparison or a simple pre-sell or squeeze page) so you can test the differences.

In some cases - it might be cheaper to create your own landing page for your PPC campaign as relevancy plays a MAJOR role in your PPC costs… (we’ll get into this later… hopefully with a guest post with one of the best PPC marketers I know!)

Squeeze pages are simple pages used to get the user to sign up for your email list before taking the next step. This is great if you have some free, relevant content that they might be interested in. You’ve probably seen a lot of Squeeze pages in the Internet Marketing niches where you would land on a page (very simple) with a Headline, maybe some bullet points and an Opt-in form underneath. These pages work great for some markets, but not all… I would NOT suggest using a squeeze page for just any Market… you’ll most likely be wasting a lot of time and money.

As I said before - you need to make sure that you test everything you do. I remember the late, Corey Rudl… he was constantly telling his students that same line: “test, test, test… then test some more”. This is very true. You could see a major increase in sales with just a few small tweaks.

Google Website Optimizer is great for testing your landing pages. Give it a shot and read up on how to use it properly. (this tool is free!)

Another great (and free) tool that you should be using is Google Analytics. ROI Revolution has some great training programs on this - but even their Free Email Training Course can teach you A LOT about how to use Google Analytics.

I highly recommend using Google Analytics to see where your Traffic is coming from, see what Keywords they use, bounce rates, page views, etc… there’s  A LOT of useful information that you can see from Google Analytics and, once again, it’s free.

Aweber is what I use for my Email Marketing… it’s very cheap for what you get and it’s extremely useful. Aweber is definitely the most used service in the Internet Marketing community because of its high delivery rates, great support and cheap pricing.

When I refer to Email Marketing — this means I use this service to collect my optin emails… from simple opt-in forms AND Squeeze pages.

One thing I suggest you do is to learn Copywriting. Dan Kennedy has some great books on this subject - and there’s one called “The Ultimate Sales Letter”, which is available on Amazon.com for fairly cheap. Learning Copywriting can help you become a more successful Affiliate… believe it or not — it will, I promise.

We’ll continue with Landing Pages in the next post. I hope this helped you gain a little more knowledge, if not - please comment to let me know!