I wanted to provide you with some follow up information on my
results with setting up a landing page with an opt-in form for
marketing affiliate products with AdWords and other pay-per-clicks
search engines.
If you recall, these landing pages were for affiliate products in
order to collect the email addresses before people went to the
merchant's website that I was marketing with AdWords and other
pay-per-clicks.
First of all I would highly recommend that you don't make it a
requirement for someone to give you their email address in order to
get to the merchant's website.
I tested this and only about 10% of the traffic I sent to the
landing page gave their email address in order to get the free bonus
I offered and gain access to the merchant's website.
If you are going to use these landing pages with an opt-in form then
you also have to give your visitors the option of not giving their
email address and just go to the merchant's website.
As an example you can look at this landing page that I created for
'The Super Affiliate's Handbook.' By the way, this is all you need
to do for a landing page for an affiliate product where the
merchant's website has a popup.
http://awebbiz.com/super-affiliate-go.htm
You can use the picture of book's cover from the merchant's website
and some short text that provides your visitor with a benefit and
the opportunity to "click here" and go to the merchant's website.
Now if you want to add an opt-in form, I would place it underneath
the book cover and the text on your landing page.
Don't forget, your opt-in offer has to be related to the affiliate
product you are promoting with your AdWords or pay-per-click ad. And
it has to offer enough value so that people will opt-in for your
list.
It can be a free course, free report, free ebook or perhaps a series
of tips. All of which will be set up with an autoresponder.
There is a catch 22 with this whole concept of having opt-ins on
landing pages for affiliate products.
The catch 22 is whether or not you want to fool around with a
profitable affiliate campaign by trying to get opt-ins. It's the old
saying, "If it isn't broke than don't fix it."
My concern is that I might make a profitable affiliate product
unprofitable by making changes to it. Personally I like to send
people directly to the merchant website without any detours.
The other side of the catch 22 is trying this whole setup with
affiliate products that haven't proven themselves to be profitable.
Do you go to the effort of creating a landing page and setting up an
autoresponder with follow up messages for an affiliate product which
just might be a poor seller?
I guess one way to get around this is to identify a niche market you
want to target and have your autoresponder set up so that the follow
ups are applicable to lots of different types of affiliate products
within the targeted niche.
That way you can keep running test campaigns for different products
within the targeted niche and continue to build up your list so that
you can make backend sales.
Backend sales are the sales you make to someone after they opt-in to
your list. So it is conceivable that you can lose money on a
campaign, but it might be worth it if you can add enough people to
your list and make a sale to them later.
In fact, that is how many successful mail order companies work. They
know the value of each of the customers on their list and based on
that knowledge they are willing to lose "X" amount of money just to
get prospect's name, address, etc.
The bottom line is this is something you are going to have to test
for yourself. If you are serious about building a niche market
business then it is worthwhile considering adding prospects to your
own lists.
In any event, I think you need to have an opt-in for all your
websites and one of the best ways to do this is with a hover ad or
float-in ad. These are the ads that look like popups, but are
actually part of the landing page since they do not open a new
window like a popup does.
You can see the hover ad I created for my website here:
www.adwordprofits.com.
This hover ad was created with free script located here:
http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicindex8/dhtmlwindow.htm
Ideally these hover ads should be set up so that they are only
displayed a certain number of times to each visitor. How that is
done I have no idea. Probably by the use of cookies.
I'm hoping to test some new software that creates hover ads and
hopefully it will have many options like how often and when the
hover ad is displayed.
The reason I suggest hover type ads is because of the fact that so
many people use pop-up blocking software. And I think an opt-in form
just placed on a web page usually doesn't get most visitor's
attention.
The last thing I'd like to mention is the new book by Ken Evoy,
'Make Your Content Presell!'
If you are creating websites that have content which either reviews
or pre-sells affiliate products then you'll want to read Ken's book.
http://mycps.sitesell.com/bs.html
He is only charging $9.95 for the book and at that price it's a
steal. Anyone who is familiar with Ken's products know that he
always over delivers.
The main reason for the low price is because Ken wants to expose
people to all his other books and products. If you don't know who
Ken is then you're probably new to ecommerce. It would help your
online success to read his books.
Here's free book from Ken which I post on my website. Just in case
you missed it and you have an interest in an eBay business.
