I've read conflicting info about sending traffic directly to sales pages, home pages and landing pages. Can someone please clarify which is best and why? I'm going to use Adwords for test traffic, then for the full marketing launch: articles, solo ads, videos, classified ads and social bookmarking (additional suggestions are appreciated). I have a full site: home, articles, contact, terms etc., and sales pages for each product. Do I need landing pages and if yes what do I include on those pages? Finally: if I do add landing pages I'd like use an optin on those pages and not the sales pages (trying to keep it fair with my affiliates). Does WP have an optin plugin? If no, how do I get the form on my pages? Once the customer provides their email address for the freebie can I set up an auto responder through Hostgator to automatically send them the freebie attached in an email? I would then send weekly or bi-weekly follow ups with an article on said topic, but how do I introduce or direct them to the product I'm selling? Sorry if I wasn't clear or if anything I asked was poorly worded. Please let me know if I'm missing something or if there are better ways to accomplish this last piece of my great puzzle. Thanks in advance!
You need to scratch the Hostgator autoresponder. Get an Aweber account. I have blogs that I go after SEO with. Then I direct users to my squeeze or pitch page. When you say landing page, do you mean squeeze page? Search for something, anything other than a URL on google. How often do you see the main page of any website there? Not too often, unless they have site links. Instead you see pages off the main page.
Thanks for your response Sickthing. This is what I'm trying to figure out. As of now I only have the sales pages that are sales oriented. The sales pages are the same as the pitch page? Are squeeze pages the same as the landing page? And are they only supposed to capture emails through the opt-in? I guess what I really need to know is if I need additional pages on the site other than the sales pages and what to do with those additional pages. Thanks again!
You should create a landing page with lots of information in it. Try using attractive images and colors of the page, use site map and also a good way of navigation so that user may not get confused and leave the page...
I understand completely. I was confused about some of the terms. A pitch page is your sales page. Often called a landing page. Landing page was the term we used to use. Now people call it a pitch page, most of the time. A squeeze page is a page that you s end someone to GIVE them something. In exchange you will require them to opt into your mailing list. Please click the link in my signature. You'll see a squeeze page and you'll get a free eBook that will help you a GREAT deal. I have had to relearn everything I've been doing. I've been marking since 1996 but I've done it off and on. Now I'm getting serious and I can't believe how much I've learned in a month. A lot has changed since I was more active.
Thanks so much for helping me out. It's begining to click in my head. I'm going to sign up on that site. If I keep my full site and then create single page squeeze pages for each ebook product, how do I know which traffic to send where? You're the best and Welcome Back!
Not sure I follow you. I let my articles gather traffic. On my main page I have links to other pages. Google will pick up the other pages if they are interested in your content. Writing for other sites that already have traffic is a good way, then you put your links to where you want them to go.
Autoresponders + landing pages are the best ways for conversion and your time. Once you get an email subscriber, that person will be on there for a while and you can continually market them!
It is impossible to say, you need to test it and see what works best. Usually a pre-sell is a good idea, but not always. Test, test, and test again until you know what performs the best for your offer.