InsureMe Affiliate Blog: 7 Reasons Why Affiliates Need to Create a Ton of Landing Pages

Time and time again I run across affiliates who spend weeks putting together the perfect homepage for their site. They fuss over their top banner, the layout of the page, where they are going to place their affiliate links, etc. But once they have the homepage built, they call it a day and start promoting the heck out of their one page web site.

Now I’m not saying there is anything wrong with this approach. In fact, I have seen it work for affiliates in the past. But over the last year I have seen more and more of our top affiliates taking the time to build bigger, content rich, high-quality sites - and I have also watched them reap the rewards from doing this.

So today I figured I would give you a quick list of seven reasons why affiliates need to be creating sites with high-quality, focused landing pages. Here we go:

Focused consumers want focused web pages. If you clicked on an ad for a specific Canon digital camera, would you want end up on a page with a hundred digital cameras on it, or the Canon camera that you searched for? If people search for something specific, give them specifically what they want.
Specific landing pages keep visitors on track. The internet is full of distractions. I don’t know how many times I have gone to Yahoo to search for something and ended up clicking on a Yahoo News story and totally forgetting what I was looking for. Diverting or confusing your visitors with unrelated offers is bad…don’t forget that.
Google AdWords will love you for staying focused. As Google puts more weight on landing page quality in their ad serving algorithm, the advertisers with quality keyword specific landing pages will pay less to advertise and get more clicks.
Landing pages can reduce the number of clicks it takes to convert. By giving visitors exactly what they are looking for you can often remove one or two selections from your form or buying process. For example, if you were sending auto insurance traffic to your site, you would be able to use an InsureMe quote box that already has auto pre-populated…that means one less selection for your visitor and a higher chance of conversion.
Well written landing pages add credibility to your site. If your site shows knowledge and expertise in your field through your content, there is a better chance a visitor will trust the site and convert.
With more specific pages, you have a better chance of ranking for specific terms. Web pages that focus on specific keywords with good content will have a better chance of ranking in the natural results for profitable “torso” and “long tail” terms. This can be an added bonus for those of you creating landing pages primarily for PPC.
Content rich landing pages can differentiate your site. If a consumer is looking for a specific product or service and is comparing a number of different sites, chances are they will see a lot of sites that look virtually the same. By taking the time to add a decent amount of content to a page (>500 words) you can boost conversion rates by differentiating your site from other sites that spent less time on their landing pages.

Taking the time to create many quality landing pages for your site seems to be the direction that most large affiliates are heading – and for good reason. Doing so helps boost your conversion and quality score in the short term, and helps future-proof your business in the long term.

[Thanks to Shoe for the inspiration on this one.]

Comments

This is great, James. Thanks. Hey, any suggestions on what should go where on the landing page? In other words, placement of verbiage, quote box, etc?

Muchos gracios.
apes

Posted by: apes | March 14, 2007 02:40 PM