Category: Upkeep
3 Landing Page Conversion Tips… or What’s the Point?
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing, Design, Upkeep Sunday, 31 August 2008 11:03 2 Comments
If you’ve ever visited a website and muttered to yourself “what’s the point,” remember that your visitors will ask YOU the same question when they visit your landing pages.
A website can exceed all Quality Score guidelines, employ stunning design, and be oozing with quality content… but if it doesn’t convert, what’s the point?
If your conversions aren’t what you hoped for, these tips will help you revamp your landing pages:
TIP #1 – Think like a visitor, not like YOU. Your likes, dislikes, tastes, and hot buttons don’t matter – only your visitors’. If you’re not sure what will grab their immediate attention, research the top sites for your keywords in both natural search and first-page PPC placements. Study those landing pages carefully and take notes.
TIP #2 – Remove obstacles. Getting out of your visitor’s way is one of the easiest ways to improve a landing page. Try this exercise: load a copy of the page into your favorite html editor, then start cutting. Ruthlessly slash away anything that distracts from the main purpose. You must keep everything that contributes to a quality user experience, such as links to relevant content pages. But it’s worth seeing just how much stuff you can cut — and it often results in a much more “to the point” landing page.
TIP #3 – Put the Most Desired Action (MDA) front and center. Every landing page should have ONE goal in mind – and that’s the most desired action you want the visitor to take. Whether it’s joining your opt-in list, clicking the “Learn More” or “Buy Now” buttons, or making good on the promise of your PPC ad, that’s what should hit your visitor right between the eyes.
Finally, confused about your MDA? If you’re not sure what your Most Desired Action really should be, ask yourself these questions:
- What’s the “in your face” message of this landing page? Is it the answer to the visitor’s problem, question, or need? Is it the best price on the product they’ve searched for? Is it a coupon or free shipping deal? Is it five key comparisons between product X and product Y? Whatever it is, it needs to be the most prominent thing on the landing page.
- What do you want EVERY visitor to do? In a perfect world, what would do you want from every single visitor to your page? Of course they ALL won’t do it, but thinking about the ideal result often helps you eliminate static and clutter. It also helps you get clear on the next point…
- What’s the ONE RESULT you desire the most? Give your visitors too many options, and you’re asking them to make decisions. And if they can’t decide immediately, they’re likely to bail out — which will kill conversions. The key here is choosing ONE goal for the page and making that the most obvious choice for your visitor. Don’t make them think — make them ACT.
- What are your competitors doing, and doing well? Don’t reinvent the mousetrap, just build a better one. Scope out your competitors’ pages and ask yourself, what’s their strongest message? What’s the one in-your-face item that hits you immediately? Is there one obvious action, or are you being asked to bounce around and make decisions? And most importantly: If you were in the market for this product, would YOU do what this page asks you to do?
Landing pages don’t have to be slick or pretty to generate sales. But they do need to have ONE crystal clear purpose that get the response you want. So find that purpose. That’s the real point of your landing pages.
First There Was SEO – Then Along Came a Spider
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing, SEO, Upkeep Thursday, 9 August 2007 23:54 1 Comment
“Come into my parlor said the spider to the fly” is a line from a nursery rhyme that we have all heard from the time we were knee high to a grasshopper. And that was almost before anyone knew about Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Those nursery rhymes and stories taught us to avoid trouble and “trouble” was often personified in the shape of a spider. (“Along came a spider and sat down beside her and frightened Miss Muffet away.”) We all want to avoid those ugly creatures as often as possible but the search engine spiders are ones that we WANT to attract. They aren’t ugly. They get our websites INDEXED!
So, yes, we want to attract the search engine spiders to our websites. The question is how to do that. What does one use for spider bait?
Changing Content: Changing Content is terrific spider bait. Search engine spiders take note when content changes on a website and they are drawn to the site. So change your content and do it often.
META tags: The description tags that you put into your headers and graphics aren’t seen by your website visitors, but they are duly noted by the search engine spiders. Don’t overlook these tags. There are very good spider bait.
Site Popularity: The number of visitors to your website is noted by the search engine spiders. You want to do everything you possibly can to attract visitors to your website including writing and marketing articles and posting to blogs and forums.
Search engine spiders count visitors…not sales.
Keywords: Your use of keywords on your website is natural spider bait. Your main keyword needs to be in your heading once, in the first sentence of the first paragraph once and at least twice in the first paragraph.
Of course, there are some black hat SEO tactics, and we recommend that you don’t use those. They will attract the spiders and a lot of trouble as well.
Stick to white hat spider attracting tactics like those listed above and you won’t be killed by the Black Widow!
5 Things I’ve Learned about Indexing
Posted by Kathy Jackson in Affiliate Marketing, Blog Marketing, Niches, Upkeep Tuesday, 22 May 2007 18:15 2 Comments
I really like to do things the easy way. Unfortunately the easy way usually turns out to be either the hard way, or the way that won’t work. I admit that I have tried some shady “get indexed in 24 hours”methods, but most of them don’t work!
I have learned that if you really want to get indexed and STAY indexed, patience is a virtue and planning is essential.
Here are five things that I have learned about getting indexed:
1. Money won’t get you indexed faster. Throwing money at a problem rarely works and getting indexed isn’t an exception. Buying links or even purchasing entire high PageRank sites is no guarantee.
In fact, when a new site comes online with hundreds of back links, it raises red flags. No search engine believes that a new site can come online with a hundred sites already linking to it so not only is throwing money out there to get indexed not helpful, it might even slow the process down.
2. Plan ahead. Getting a domain and instantly going live is a big mistake. You need to plan ahead. Actually, registering your domain name a full four months before you launch the site is a really good idea.
It’s also a good idea to know the history of the domain name that you buy. Google has a long memory. Domain names can be blocked for a lot of reasons. Check out the history of the domain name that you are considering before you buy. You can check the history of domain names with Domain Tools or Way Back Machine .
3. Blog and Ping but use your head. Blogging and pinging can get you indexed faster, but do it responsibly. Overdoing the pinging can raise red flags and get you banned from ping servers.
Natural linking is always best. Contact a blogger who is active in a related niche and get a link in one of their blog posts. This is even better than links from your own blogs you’ll get real, targeted traffic. Blogmasters are often more open to giving or trading links than you might imagine.
4. If the niche is small, keep your site small. By small I mean 200 pages or less. Now some affiliates would disagree, but I side with the theory that smaller sites get indexed faster and easier than mega sites.
5. Check, double check and triple check. Make certain that your HTML is clean and watch your logs to see what happens when the spiders crawl your pages. If they never get past your home page you need to add the tag, to the HEAD in the HTML of all your other pages. And don’t forget keywords in your page title tags, using keywords in tags, and all the other basics of good on page SEO.
How a Secure Server Protects Your Profits
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Programs, Upkeep Thursday, 1 March 2007 14:34 No Comments
I’ll bet that before the thought of doing affiliate marketing ever entered your mind, you were two things: a customer, and an online customer. (Yeah, I’m really going out on a limb here!)
And, whenever you purchased online, you probably confirmed that the website through which you were making the purchase used a secure server. You may have done so by making sure the website’s URL began with https://. Or, perhaps you looked for a lock icon at the bottom of the web browser. (With the new version of IE, Microsoft moved the icon to the top. That threw me for a loop!)
A secure server is a web server that incorporates special encryption. Applied through Secure Socket Layer technology (commonly known as SSL), such encryption protects the transmission of credit card and other sensitive information during the purchase process from the clutches of Internet thieves.
I won’t go into detail on how it works. But I will answer a fundamental question: Why should you care?
After all, you’re promoting somebody else’s product on your website. You’re directing web visitors to the merchant’s site to buy the product. The only information you request from the potential customer is an email address for your opt-in list. Why worry about a secure server?
First, while you may not need security for your website, you want the merchant’s site to have it. If the merchant cannot provide that level of web security for your customers, you suffer, too.
Second, as you continue to hone your affiliate marketing instincts, you’ll discover new ways to make money from your site. That’s what the power-affiliates do. One sure-fire way to do this is to offer your own product or service. Doing so allows you to collect 100% of the profit from sales, which is sweet.
Ah, but how do you conduct the transactions from those sales? That’s when a secure server comes in handy – along with an SSL digital certificate, a credit card processing service, and a few other things. But a secure server does more than facilitate secure transactions. It instills in your customers greater confidence in your ability to provide expert content and services. And building that trust should never grow old.
Selling one’s own products may not be for everyone. But regardless of the kind of affiliate marketing you do, a secure server is essential to the process, and to your profits.
Something Is Rotten in the State of Links. . .
Posted by Matt Van Atta in Affiliate Marketing, Link Building, Upkeep Friday, 26 January 2007 17:02 2 Comments
And that something is called linkrot. It’s an ugly term (then again, any word with “rot” in it is never pretty) that describes a problem for affiliate marketing websites.
Linkrot is the process by which links from one website to another slowly become less accurate, or extinct.
As an affiliate marketer, you drive business to a merchant’s website, so your website will contain links to that site. Say you set up a link to a destination page on the merchant’s site, and turn your attention to other matters. Over time, that link could “break” or become irrelevant due to one of the following:
- The destination page’s URL may have changed.
- The destination page may have been deleted.
- The destination page’s website may have gone down temporarily – or disappeared permanently.
- The destination page’s content may have changed – the link would still work, but your supporting marketing content may not.
Those who worry about the “big picture” of the Internet – as an interconnected venue for both social interaction and commerce – consider linkrot a serious threat. It’s particularly serious for affiliate marketers.
Broken links on your website can lead your target audience to distrust your ability to deliver accurate, up-to-date information or customer service. This negatively impacts not only your revenue stream, but also your reputation – which could persist even if the merchant broke the links, and even if you sign on with another merchant.
Short-term website offers provide a breeding ground for linkrot. Once such offers expire, remove the related links immediately. Otherwise, your site will have either a broken link (because the merchant removed the page) or an active link to obsolete content. Either way, you look bad, because it appears to customers that you’re not tending to business.
Combating linkrot may be drudgery, but you should regularly do the following:
- For a new link on your site, confirm that the destination page URL is correct – especially if the merchant assigns the URL specifically to you.
- Check your site’s links (even links to other pages on your site) and remove those that are broken or no longer relevant.
- Communicate with the merchant to ensure that your links to the merchant’s website are active and that your descriptions of the destination pages match the content on those pages.
Success in affiliate marketing depends on your effectiveness at communication and information delivery. Keeping linkrot off your website will make you more effective in this regard.
