I am trying to join the ranks of affiliates which have review sites as pre-sell/landing pages for products that they promote. my site is http://www.thisawesomething.com I was wondering if anybody, especially the publishers could possibly let me know if there is something that I could do better in one aspect or more. The Newsletter I am still coding away at, but I will take that down when I start using the site. The main page, will list recent clickbank product reviews and the different product categories. The category page lists the different products available per category, and then the product page would have all of the information, the pre-sell along with a call to action to either join the newsletter, or click on the affiliate link. Tom
Nice There seems to be some formatting issues with some of the text up top (like a part of it is being eaten in the table cells)... I would suggest: You must break up the text/typography better, use more than one font/style. Make all your headings and big/bold topics arial bold, and perhaps a different color/darker blue/black... or a color that accents it like dark orange/red (accent colors are important). Might sound basic, but anything that is clickable, you should underline (or at least underline_on_rollover), or add a '>>' after each link etc. Because you are focusing on reviews and spending your efforts wisely with cherry picked CB products - GET RID OF ADSENSE! You'll make pennies instead of potential dollars - i see many people do this, never mix the two, instead put some graphics of your top choices for CB - most publishers will have graphics/banners etc available... Other than that I think you've come up with a creative little way to promote anything you want which may work in your favor (however vice versa too)... Mish mash sites are hard to monetize however it's not to say they can't. Hope this helps you - graphics are extremely important and branding is going to greatly improve your clickthroughs and interest - grab some graphics for some of these products, make your logo less 'effected' (i would lose the inner shadow on the letters or make it much thinner), and put some 'sizzle' to it, like a character or fun pic of lifestyle 'awesome moments' rotating etc. your site needs a brand/hook to it, that ebox and CD just don't do it justice... This is meant to inspire and help improve so please take it as such, I think you could be onto something with some tweaks and... of course.... traffic. NC.
Yeah never dilute with adsense on CB products. Also consider offering a review of two similar products on one page the most expensive first. When you offer two good products for review you be surprised how many will buy the cheaper product even though its review is not as good as the first ... Got that technique from the book in my sig.
Norb and Reapr: Thank you for the help! I have taken your advice: 1. The header has been changed completely. The book and cd are out, and a car graphic is there! Looks more fun, but changes will happen eventually. per Norb, I have decided to add an accent color (Orange) to the title, car, and the markers on the right column(Menu) 2. Text was changed from Gill Sans Mt, to Arial/Helvetica. I have also replaced the underline text decoration on all anchor links. 3. As for where the adsense is going? I will get into some hardcore PHP/MySQL, and create an admin system to control uploaded graphics for various Clickbank products. This is so, per both Reapr and Norb, to capitalize on more potential Revenue, and not be shortchanged by Adsense clicks. 4. After all of that, the primary concern would be obtaining some great traffic through links and hardcore article/email/PPC marketing. As soon as I build the newsletter system, I will also configure it to run "Virtual e-mail courses that run by themselves, then after the run of the email mini-course, switch it over to a general newsletter with the ability to still send mail blasts for individual products." Thanks again! If you have any more awesome ideas, I am very open to them! Tom
From my own point of view Review pages are the ones that convert better, Maybe change the color of the background or the color of the page to withe this proves that it helps users (customers) focus more on the main part of the page! Will increase your conversions! Well done!
Looks good man, well done. I'm very new to using your own sites to market products, so some of my questions will be extremely noobish. But first does it detract from your overall site that your reviews are spread out over a number niches or does that not have any repercussions in PPC, etc? Probably not, but figured I'd ask. Also, I suppose when doing PPC or any kind of IM you just create each of your campaigns or articles, etc, around one specific sub directory of your site, such as the weight loss products, correct? But coming back to my first question, is that what most people do when creating sites such as these, tailor them towards infinite niches and keep it general so that way you don't have to pay for and create a whole bunch of sites but just a one or two main ones and make sub folders and directorys for each niche? Thanks, I'd really appreciate some clarity on these questions.
rbf738, Thank you for the compliment! With the noob thing, it's cool! I am still in the noob department, and always will be because I want to keep fresh on new ideas all of the time! You eventually get seasoned in a few techniques, but that eventually becomes old model, and new ideas crop up, and everybody has to learn them! Unfortunately, I am not going to be using PPC for now. And I really do not have a ton of experience in the area of PPC, but eventually will master it one day soon. I primarily use article marketing for right now. I am testing the waters on creating articles and squidoo lenses rich with relevant content, which will give me better quality backlinks and potentially higher serp results. I am also using youtube videos for a couple of niches as well. With tailoring them towards different niches: I am going to use a sub-folder approach to making the different categories and product names SEO friendly. I will utilize apache code (.htaccess) to achieve this. example: The Rich Jerk reviews would be at www.thisawesomething.com/2342/The_Rich_Jerk/ instead of www.thisawesomething.com/index.php?page=product&id=2342. Despite me having a website covering so many different niches, I should have a somewhat decent traffic base, from the article marketing techniques. But everybody is different. Some folks will develop "one-pager" websites which will be a huge review sandwich boards style for the web, which will have a call to action, and maybe an opt-in to aweber or getresponse. Some folks prefer looking at a "buffet" approach and have different niches and products bundled as a single site, per my example at www.thisawesomething.com
One thing you have to realise about review sites is you probably wont get traffic looking for random reviews. You need to promote seperately each review on each product to get targeted traffic that is looking for something in that niche. The advantage of review sites is only having 1 domain for all your products, and being able to link to similar products and review them as well to let the buyer choose. If you think you can send them simply to a main page that has everything from fatloss to passing your drivers test you are not going to have targeted traffic and will get very few conversions.
wowhaxor, The thing with this review site, is that I plan to drive traffic through article marketing and email list marketing. One reason why I have built the review site, was due to wanting to eventually build an email list and suggest products every once in a while through a newsletter. The email system would also be configured, so that I could build a mini-course for different products. The email system would be automated, so that if there was a mini course to a product where someone opted-in, it would trigger mini course emails by cron job without me needing to hit a button to send them out. It gets more complicated, but I am sure you see some level of direction here with this. I am also looking to direct traffic from various article sites and other forms of marketing.