At least he’s honest…
If you’re involved in PPC marketing - especially as a little-guy affiliate - you need a landing page to send your offer to. You must suck it up and create at least one, at the bare minimum; super affiliates like Amit Mehta make dozens for a single offer and continually split-test them. Without a landing page, your quality score will be in the pits, your conversions will be next to zero and you will be pissing away money like the frathouse bro who loaded up on Keystone.
I have seen far too many lazy affiliates trying to take the easy way out of learning the psychology behind landing pages. These lazy affiliates that think they can get away with clever shenanigans like PHP redirects and direct linking to the offer forever. Some affiliates even run their ads only on the content network, forgetting completely about quality scores and keyword relevance - the great, uncharted land of other people’s sites and other people’s AdSense banners where you have absolutely no idea what state of mind a clicker is in when he hits your ad.
Rarely do these techniques work for anyone, but even if you manage to get away with them for a while, you’re still missing out on not only the trial-and-error learning experience that is internet marketing, but the most important reason for having a landing page in the first place - increasing your conversions by using your marketing talent to sell the product!
Sure, adding a landing page ‘complicates’ the buying procedure by putting one more click in the way of a potential customer, but it’s important to see that factor as an advantage and not a disadvantage. Creating and controlling your own landing page gives you the opportunity to really sell the prospective buyer on what you’re offering. No one except the extraordinarily gullible or very rich is going to buy immediately after being sent to an unknown merchant’s site (especially if you send them to the homepage!) It’s important to build trust - in your site, in your offer and in their brand. This is the true purpose of a landing page, and why you always need one for every offer you run.
If you’re too lazy to invest a few hours to potentially make thousands, then you’re too lazy for Internet marketing. You might as well stick to pyramid schemes and Yuwie because it takes a lot of effort to get a campaign up, running and profitable.
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27 Mar 2008 at 4:14 pm
Thanks for the article. I build websites and I have been playing around with some PPC and SEO for a client. He installs cool garage storage systems in Atlanta and I was just going to rely on the current pages I built for him on his site, but you have convinced me it is worth the effort to create a custom landing page.
30 Mar 2008 at 11:04 am
Good article, it’s true that landing pages are hugely important in PPC. I know that Marketing Sherpa have produced an excellent guide which shows the real stats behind landing pages. To be successful you need to really understand why people buy or click.