So, I recently got my interests back into affiliate marketing and revived my ancient account over at click bank. I found a interesting product that I'd like to promote, and already have a new domain installed with wordpress. I was advised to copy and paste the entire sales pitch upon the main site of whom I would be affiliated to. So in turn, my website would be a complete mirror site of the main website. My questions are: -Even if I'm a part of their affiliate program, would it be right or wrong to just copy their sales pitch and leave it as my own to promote their products? -If I'm promoting their product, would it be more beneficial to just re-write their entire sales pitch so it would look more legit within search engines? Because if at all possible, I'd like to avoid getting thrown or banned into the sandbox because of a cloned site. Anyways, any suggestions, opinions, ideas, are more than welcome.
Bad idea to copy the sales copy... I highly suggest rewrite what the product is and what the benefits are... don't hype it too much. Do it like a review or stat what the product is in your own words... Also, have multiple pages, with different related content... Google doesn't like one page sites.
Do a review of the product and presell the visitor. Trying to sell to the visitor TWICE is a huge affiliate marketing mistake.
So, re-writing the sales copy is the way to go in a reviewer's perspective, gotcha. But I thought having strictly one page was more beneficial? Since my site would primarily be used a "bridge page" (I think that's the correct term, correct me if I am wrong), how much word content would be ideal to have on the review page? There's about 4k words of content on the main vendor's website btw.
Probably mainly through article directories and perhaps blogposts also. And through search engines as well.
Well, you can. Alittle trick is to have some pages listed at the footer like Disclamier, Terms of Sevice, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Notice, Anti-Spam, Copyright. All of them can be made into a page. The trick is to make the user feel they only have one way to go in the page, but make the crawlers think your site is a full website. You don't have to have all the links of your site on your landing page, but one link to the main blog and the blog being content rich is still connected to the website and so the landing page is classed as a part of the website. This is how I've done landing pages in the past, really helpful when doing PPC as they won't jump to a different review of a different product for the ad they actually click on. Hope this helps.
other way round. so your page could be, http://www.mytotallyawesomesite.com/review/product-name/ Code (markup): but I don't see why the other way couldn't work... just I haven't tried that way. so I can't be sure. EDIT: If your using wordpress, the permalink could be /%category%/%postname% Code (markup):
I do it your way too. But I'm thinking having the landing page on the homepage may be more effective? Afterall, the homepage does tend to get the most pageviews.
True, it would depend if your only promoting one product for the website. If you've found a product that is converting better than others on your website... It's not a bad idea to move the converting review to the home page... which can be done really easily in wordpress.
Is it wrong or unheard of to just have a wordpress blog setup as it normally would be, to review and promote affiliate products?
Wow Houck - great feedback. Thanks for the ideas!!! gnk_corp, here are some more ideas you could consider: I also believe that it is better these days to build a niche site vs. doing one hit offer landing pages. This way you can create a web site to promote a number of related offers; affiliate offers change so often that building a single LP for each offer you want to promote is just too time consuming and short-lived. I think WP is a great way to build a basic site quickly, using plugins and pages needed for privacy, contact, about, etc. and then posting good content so that you get some search traffic over time. Pick several niches that you know something about (online dating, health, financial services, etc.) and build a site that has some long term value. You can mix it up with revenue sources including all the Affiliate networks, In Text ads like Vibrant Media, finding sponsors and text ad customers yourself and even using some Adsense placements where it makes sense. This strategy lets you quickly and easily adjust your advertising mix as payouts and offers change with your various affiliate networks and other ad programs. With some of the performance marketing plugins now available in WP and thousands of themes, you can really build a "full" site in just a few hours. Also, you can so easily make custom pages to do split testing, set up new LPs, etc. that I can't imagine anyone still coding static HTML files for affiliate marketing. WP actually allows you to build more and better landing pages too in my experience. For instance, you can use a plugin like CFORMSII to build web forms quickly or use WP Review Site to do product reviews. This gives you the ability to build good content quickly and more dynamically.
domainpubber, sounds good, i keep reading of people creating landing pages and linking them to a blog. What i have in mind is not doing that but instead doing it within a wordpress blog, completely within the blog, is that what you are suggesting above? Seems ideal to me, a more tidy way to promote various affiliate products and with the ability to easily add the neccessary pages affecting quality score in adwords for example.
Yep, exactly - the blog is your sales pitch and you incorporate your offers anywhere it makes sense; banner ads won't work but in links are great since you can really lead users to the sale. I've had very good luck building content-rich sites and then incorporating all my ad sources, which shift over time as the site matures and gains momentum. I start often with Adsense and then move on to affiliate offers, in text, text links, etc. as I see what pays out best for the site as I learn about the users and what works with that specific audience. The holy grail is when I either move on to selling my own products (I have done that with a couple of sites) or the site gets enough traffic to solicit direct advertisers (this has been the case on several sites also). Its all about having diverse revenue streams. For me, building single landing pages just to push a single offer hasn't paid out. Every time you build a page and get it going, the campaign either changes or goes away and you have to start all over. Also, the cost of getting PPC traffic is too high for me to justify relying solely on that for traffic to a single LP. Get search traffic, email subscriptions using Aweber light box sign up form, run ad campaigns on Facebook, StumbleUpon, Youtube, etc. and build a site with steady traffic that you can monetize longer term. Like Houck said, you don't need a TON of traffic to make money. I have one site for example that can make $10 a day off 100 users and just 10 clicks and 1 conversion ... because its in a great niche and I've taken time to provide compelling content that draws steady traffic that actually converts. Another might make $100 a day off 3k users and ad 200 clicks which nets maybe 20 conversions. With the ad mix I can make money from EPC and CPA instead of relying on only 1 source of revenue. Its just one strategy and everyone has different results, but for me the single LPs have just never worked very well. Good luck!
Is there a program that can help you create landing pages? I suck at programming/php/html but need a few pages done. Or, is there someone here that can create a landing page for me?