Affiliate Tips: Optimizing Your Landing Page

Success in affiliate marketing is dependent on two things – traffic, and conversions. You need people to view your sales pitch, and for those people to go on to buy. The page that contains your sales pitch is called a “landing page”, because it’s the page that people land on when they click your advertisement or follow a link from your social media page. If you’ve designed your page well, people will view that page and then follow your call to action, signing up for your mailing list or purchasing your product.

Why Landing Page Optimization is Important

One mistake that many affiliate marketers make is to simply create a landing page and accept whatever conversion rate they get. If the conversion rate is low, instead of tweaking the page, they try to get more conversions by getting more traffic.

This way of thinking is a mistake because traffic costs money. Even if you’re not directly paying for the traffic through PPC marketing, you’re paying through your investment in other forms of advertising, and the extra load those new visitors are placing on the server. Instead of pushing for more visitors, why not find out what is stopping your existing visitors from becoming customers?

Improving Your Conversion Rate

There are several simple things that you can do to improve your landing page:

1. Make sure that the page loads quickly: If your page takes more than a few seconds to load, many users will hit the back button before they even see what it is that you have to offer.
2. Keep the content relevant: Visitors hate to feel like they’ve been misled. If you’re promoting “the secret to six-pack abs”, then users don’t want to see a landing page that talks exclusively about a new caffeine based supplement – they want to be told about “ a great new supplement to melt fat from your abs” which just happens to contain caffeine.
3. Display the call to action above the fold: Place a call to action above the fold. You can (and should) repeat the same call to action further down the page too. Don’t give visitors the chance to get bored and leave the page without inviting them to sign up/purchase at least once.
4. Tell the user why they should read the whole page: Make it clear exactly what you’re offering and why the user should care in the first paragraph or two. Let the user read more if they want to, but make sure that all the information they need is on the landing page. Keep extra navigation options to a minimum. The more pages the visitor can navigate to, the more likely you are to lose them.
5. Test the page thoroughly: It’s all too common for affiliates to wonder why their conversion rate is terrible only to find out from a prospective customer a month or two into a PPC campaign that their purchase page “doesn’t work in Opera”, or “looks funky in Firefox”. Most customers won’t take the time to email you to tell you that they have a problem – they’ll just move on to another seller. Test your page in every browser you can name, and try to do strange things – hit the back button while buying, or leave the purchase half completed for an hour then try to do the last step. Try everything you can think of to “break” the purchase page. Your customers will be doing those things too!

Use Google Analytics to track what people are doing on your site and to test different landing page designs. When you find something that works, use that as your default design for other landing pages. Never assume that your pages are perfect, however. You should always be testing and trying new things.

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This article was written by B Frisby on behalf of ClickSure. Find out more about ClickSure here.