Make your landing page educate the visitor and then encourage them to click thru to the merchant’s site for more info with a strong call to action.

Actually, I just thought of a free ebook that you would get a lot out of.

Download it here:

http://affiliatemarketingwithryan.com/2008/quit-your-day-job-by-jeremy-palmer-is-now-free/

Cheers,
Ryan

The e-book seems garnered around the idea of generating sites with content good enough that they’ll be picked up by natural searches themselves.

I’ve always thought about landing pages as simply one-off pages in cyberspace that receive traffic through my PPC campaigns. (Which is clearly why I haven’t experienced a lot of luck with landing pages.)

So… is the logic then that I should be thinking about creating genuine sites of their own merit that happen to incidentally link to the advertiser, or… is preselling a landing page simply another way of saying your landing page needs to have personality and voice to build relationship before you ask for the sale.

When you create your landing pages, are you creating an actual site, or is it one of those one page wonders?

And, on that note, heading off to bed. ‘preciate the input.

Direct linking can work…I’ve found some products that did very well for me. But I then turned these campaings into landing pages and made much more.

I’ve found direct linking works best as “testing the waters”. If you find a product sells this way, then you can be almost certain you’ll make more if you create a landing page for it.

But that assumes you write copy well and have a general idea of good page layout.

- Easy to read font like Verdana
- Pleny of white space
- Well-written copy that doesn’t scream “buy!”
- Relevant graphics
- etc.

The purpose of a landing page is to presell and put the visitor in a buying mood. Sure you can send direct and not waste any clicks, but what frame of mind is that person in? You don’t know (well you sorta do depending on the keywords you’re bidding on)…but with your landing page, you can influence their thoughts and make them more likely to buy.

Hope this helps,
Ryan

I’d do it, but, well, I can’t get my direct link campaigns to work very well.

Anthony Borelli / Greg Holden’s book on Affiliate Millions is what got me trying my hand online. One of the ideas that appealed to me was, why loose traffic by sending to an intermediate site, if you can send direct.

Do you have an example of a presell site that works better than direct linking? Does it have to do with whether you can deep link directly into an advertiser’s site for a specific keyterm?

Thanks for your insights.

From my experience, a presell landing page definitely converts better than direct linking…but only if you do it right.

So it’s definitely worth your time in learning how to presell…and the ebook I mentioned above should do the trick.

I will also write some blog posts on preselling as well.

That being said, I’ve had some decent success lately with direct linking and I plan on writing about this very soon.

Thanks for writing me,
Ryan

I came across you from Caroline’s twitter about you.

I’m curious, have you done A/B testing with a landing page vs. website to see which performs better with affiliate marketing? I’d be interested to hear your results if so.

Thanks!