2010 | Finch Sells

Are Your Landing Pages Failing To Convert?

Aug 10 2010

When I get asked questions about building landing pages, I’m always left with the impression that affiliates are searching for an exact science.

Unfortunately in affiliate marketing, there’s rarely such a thing as an exact science. If something works, it’ll make you money. If it doesn’t, it won’t. Everything between the margins is a matter of testing, being creative and sometimes copying what others are already doing.

Everybody has their own opinion for what makes a great landing page. But this is my blog so fuck everybody else, here’s how you do it. Finding the magic formula is a question of ticking three little boxes.

1. Am I writing in a way that my intended audience can understand?
2. Am I writing in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?
3. Am I writing in a way that gets them to act now?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, congratulations. Puff your tits, buy your copywriter some lunch and look forward to making some profit.

If the answer to any of those questions is no, it’s back to the drawing board. Your landing page probably sucks as many balls as you feared it did when the conversions failed to lift off.

There’s a fourth factor to any successful landing page. The artistic and graphical layout of the page can make a huge difference to ROI. I’ve seen landing pages with a yellow background convert irritatingly better than those with a white background. I could get deeply entrenched in the effects of changing tiny details for boosting conversions, but I don’t have the attention span today so we’re going to stick with the language.

The actual meat and potatoes of your page – the shit that’s going to dictate whether you can actually afford any meat and potatoes when the wife goes shopping – is the writing. The words you use and the language you choose. Nothing sells an offer like some badass sales copy driving daggers through the consumer’s “will I or won’t I?” doubts.

How do I write in a way that my intended audience can understand?

Just because you’ve got a full English degree, doesn’t mean you should be busting out fucking Shakespeare wordplay on a 13 year old kid.

I’ve lost track of the number of landing pages I’ve seen where the language is quite blatantly phoned in from the notepad of an affiliate marketer who expects his language to be universal. Always write to the lowest common denominator.

If there’s a good chance that 40% of your target audience is too retarded to pick up a book – and let’s face it, CPA and Retards are a match made in heaven – BE SIMPLE!

I know you want to sound impressive and knowledgeable, but most landing pages are simply a medium of showcasing what makes a product such a fantastic solution for your target. If the prospect doesn’t understand, or is struggling to digest the copy, you’re letting your artistic greed ram a fist up your own jacksy. It’s never going to make you money.

Use short sentences. They’re much easier to read. Most of America can understand this. Simple sentences increase your reading speed. They also encourage people to read more. So they’ll learn more about your product. And this can only be a good thing, right?

How do I write in a way that sells my service or product to that audience?

See the question at the end of the last paragraph? This is probably my favourite use of language for selling any service or product. It doesn’t matter what you’re promoting, if you can get consumers to answer “YES” over and over again, half your job is done.

So much of writing to sell is about building up momentum and creating a positive image in the consumer’s head. The greater the momentum and the stronger that image becomes, the more likely you are to push the final sale.

Asking questions where the consumer has no choice but to agree or nod their head can really ramp up the effectiveness of your landing pages.

We’ll take a landing page promoting a dating offer to women over 50 as an example. Of course, it helps to hit them with the features and benefits of your service. But you can also generate that helpful momentum by getting the target to agree with you.

“You’ve waited long enough for love. It’s your turn, wouldn’t you agree?”

“If you leave love to fate, it might never happen. But if you join us today, you’ll be taking one step closer to happiness. Do you care about your happiness?”

“Our women were much happier with their lives after we helped them find loving partners. Are you searching for that new spark of romance?”

After each of these sentences, the user is forced to agree. It’s just a natural flow that builds momentum and keeps them interested. It makes them aware of their weaknesses indirectly and thus much more likely to snap at your bait.

Get your targets to say yes repeatedly and they’re much more likely to say yes when it matters.

How do I write in a way that gets them to act now?

If you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Would a charity worker ever get you to sign up to donate if she just left her phone number? Of course she wouldn’t. She’s harassing your arse outside the train station, backing you in to a corner and plying you with horrific imagery until you can see no light at the end of the tunnel when she asks for your financial help.

I remember the last charity worker I met in Shepherds Bush, we had an amusing conversation where I was pretty much filling in her next sentences. “You’re gonna ask me how I can afford to eat these McCoys but not donate Â£3.50/month to orphan monkeys in the jungle wilderness, aren’t you?”

I laughed because it works. It always works. The reason charities gets donations is because they have the balls to get in your face and ask for them.

So many landing pages out there fail miserably at the last hurdle. They do a fantastic job of selling a service but they forget the importance of a Call To Action. No CTA is effective without promoting the scarcity and urgency of what you’re offering. Yet you already know this because it’s all around you.

“Sale Must End Tonight”, “If you call in the next 20 minutes, ’cause we can’t do this all day…”, “Now accepting [7] new affiliates”

You know what they’re trying to do and still you can’t fight it. Scarcity manipulates the human desire not to miss out, while urgency rams the point home and seals the sale. Combine the two attributes with an unflinching Call To Action and what do you have? Profit.

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Slice Your Way To PPV Profit… Ninja Style

Aug 01 2010

I’m going to start by apologizing for false affbuzztizing. There are no ninjas in this post. The closest to a ninja you’re going to get is the knowledge that I’m wearing nothing but an all black towel as I write this. Yeah, I’m pretty much wet and soapy.

I’ve been meaning to post about some PPV techniques for a while now, because there’s only so much rhetorical bullshit I can rehash as “lifestyle advice” before people start to call me out on a mysterious lack of…actual content.

There are two problems with PPV.

1. Everybody is doing it.
2. You’re probably not very good at it.

PPV promotion – or any kind of advertising where you’re springing pop-ups on the user – is a method of interruption marketing that has to be approached differently to your normal social campaigns. And god forbid, get back to the drawing board if you’re trying to port your Search campaigns directly to PPV.

I’ve already posted about laser targeting PPV campaigns, and shocking users in to clicking your ads. I’ve had people emailing me quoting mixed results. Some have found a lot of success using the techniques, while others…not so much. *cough* NATURAL SELECTION *cough*

Instead of replying to a thousand different scenarios with a thousand possible reasons for why they didn’t work, I thought I’d explain the thought process that goes in to my own campaigns. And of course, many of these fail too.

The way I see it, profiting from PPV is all about brainstorming and developing enough ideas to attack a campaign from different angles. So many concepts out there are beaten and battered in to a state that you’d have to be Vince Offer on crack to make the product sound original. I don’t like joining the swarming masses, and I prefer to develop campaigns that leverage a very specific appeal to a relevant audience.

That’s great, right? Nobody cares, you just want practical examples.

Let’s say you’re going to promote a dating site, what are the obvious choices for targeting your ads? What are some keywords you might use?

Singles in […]
Online dating in […]
Get a girlfriend
Chat to girls online
Meet new people
Dating advice

You’re not going to win any gold medals for envelope-pushing creativity with this kind of targeting. That’s not to say it won’t work, but you’re battling with the masses.

Many marketers fail to understand why their campaigns are failing when they’re reaching such a targeted group of users.

“If Jo Bloggs is searching for a girlfriend, why won’t he use my link? Wah wah wahhh. It’s right there! Wah wah wahhh”

These users are clearly interested in online dating so why aren’t they snapping up your bait and whacking in their credit card details? A lot of the time it’s because they’re too well trained in the market you’re trying to promote. Just because you’re pumping a pop-up with “COME FLIRT NOW” in his face, doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen the message a thousand times before and already grown sick of it.

It’s not banner blindness, but you’re targeting a type of user who clearly knows what he’s looking for. And these users are sometimes the most likely to hammer the little x on your pop-ups. Why? Because they’re already reading similar ads in the Google search listings and don’t need your crap popping up!

It’s like old school porn surfing (oh god Finch). You reach a site with that really niche midget porn you’ve been looking for. Then some motherfucker springs a pop-up over your hard work which is less targeted and frankly a pain in the arse after the seven sites you clicked through to find what you were looking for. I don’t watch midget porn.

Pro tip: If you’re going to target obvious keywords, make damn sure that your pop-up is more relevant than the actual page that the user is loading!

With my own campaigns, I like to come up with targeting strategies where the user shits himself at how close to his current state of mind my advert is striking home. If dating is your niche, you should be looking to brainstorm a little deeper. Understand the reasons WHY these people might be suitable for an online dating site.

Don’t worry about the dude searching for “chat to girls online”. Worry about finding him before he reaches breaking point and realizes that this is what he wants to do. To manage this, you need to become receptive to human psychology and use your ears. Yes, use your ears.

Clues for targeting your campaigns are all around you. I find myself phasing out in the middle of conversations with friends when my brain is latching on to things that they’ve said. I will be damned if there’s a better way of brainstorming campaign ideas for a dating offer than by spending half an hour talking to single friends. You begin to understand their psychology and thinking.

My favourite line of questioning is to ask them why they THINK they’re single.

Invariably I get answers along the lines of…

Target 1. “Because I don’t have the confidence to go and talk to girls”
Target 2. “Because there aren’t many girls that like the same things as me”
Target 3. “Because I’m still torn up over my ex”
Target 4. “Because I’m too busy to be bothered with a relationship”
Target 5. “Because I just haven’t found anyone at the moment”

This information is gold to me. My mind then turns to how I can translate these feelings in to PPV campaigns that don’t just target the right demographics, but hit them with stinging headlines that make them scream “YES” to the service I’m offering.

Let’s take target 3. For all we know, that guy who was searching for “chat to girls online” could have been the same guy who’s just suffered a horrible broken down marriage. We could target him with “chat to girls online”, yes, but it’s a LOT more powerful if we hit him before he’s reached Google. If we can reach out to him as an individual and be the solution to what bothers him most – we’ve got much more chance of nailing the conversion.

So where else could you target this guy?

How about on divorce websites? Marriage breakup Facebook groups? The thousands of articles on the web offering advice for dealing with a broken down relationship?

Not only can we catch the same target, but we can adapt a PPV campaign that is MUCH more effective than the standard dating LP you got from Justin Dupre’s Freebie Friday. Get creative with your headlines and imagery.

“You Think Your Ex Isn’t Searching Online? Get Back In The Dating Game Tonight”

This is what I would call slicing through the market and grabbing leads where you can resonate with them most. By segmenting markets and producing creatives that deal with genuine human emotions, you can be the answerer of those needs. It’s a lot easier than trying to grab your conversions from the huge pool of users searching generic dating terms.

I’ve got a couple more posts to come on PPV so check back soon if this is your thing.

Any questions, drop me a comment. I’m off to find some clothes.

Recommended This Week:

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Judging The Size Of An Affiliate’s Balls

Jul 26 2010

You can often judge the size of an affiliate’s balls by his willingness to keep scaling a successful campaign when he’s surpassed the amount of profit he was originally hoping to make.

A sense of vertigo can kill the desire of the “working class” affiliate. Maybe instead of raising the CPM bid to $0.50 and opening the traffic floodgates, he’ll settle for his slow trickle of leads at $0.45. When you’re profiting, and profiting well, you need to let go of your reservations about cranking up the heat and raising your costs. Spend serious money to make serious money. That’s how it works.

Your little friend, Volume, will make a 650% ROI micro-campaign look laughable when the powers of mass consumption are at work.

Yet many affiliates panic over the idea of bidding higher to capture more traffic, especially if they reach a level of profitability where the bills are paid and they’re living in comfort. Success isn’t just the relentless pursuit of optimized campaigns, but developing scaled campaigns that reach mass markets. A constant aching desire to increase revenue, the heartbeat of any successful entrepreneur, is why the super affiliates are wining and dining the girls you can only whack off to over Facebook in your mother’s basement.

If you want to live like a super affiliate, THINK like a super affiliate.

Don’t set yourself flimsy targets like “this month I’m going to make enough money to pay my water bills and then maybe splash out on some toys for my hamster”. If you aim low and succeed, you’ll be filled with a sense of achievement that you don’t fucking deserve.

If you’re making money with a campaign, raise the click prices. Raise those bid prices. Expand your demographics to be as all-encompassing as they possibly can be while still making you money. The broader you can survive, the sooner you’ll thrive.

There are times where I look at my Excel spreadsheet and I see a campaign with 650% ROI. Boasting any kind of volume, I’d be ready to say screw you all, pack up my blog, bust out the sun-cream and spend the rest of my life in the Bahamas. But of course, 650% ROI doesn’t mean shit unless it’s sustainable and scalable.

There are marketers out there who will tell you that to be successful, you need to tap up tiny little micro-demos and blow hundreds of dollars testing down to the smallest detail. While this can often be the case, you should allow your campaign to develop naturally before you start piss-arsing around with the “DOES THIS PERSON LIKE GAMES & PUZZLES” attribute on POF.

Every additional targeting criteria you add to your campaign is one more hurdle you’re going to have to jump in the future if you wish to scale. The truly successful super affiliates have one of two traits:

1. The ability to profit from broad ads with mainstream appeal.
2. The ability to automate hundreds of targeted ads in smaller demographics.

I’ve written many posts referring to the potential of laser targeting your campaigns down to the smallest detail. But if you’re going to take this route, you need to be able to automate the process.

Too many affiliates scratch around hopelessly to come up with a single campaign using targeting that looks like this:

I’m sorry but there are only so many Hispanic chain-smoking crackwhores in Canada.

Even if you are making a ridiculous ROI, is it really worth it? If you’re not rolling out a dozen other campaigns with similar targeting, you’re simply pandering to a small crowd in a shadowy corner. Forget the bright lights of super affiliate success, you’re not going quit your day job while you’re loitering on the outskirts of micro-niches.

The energy you put in to your work should be reflected by the potential it has to grow in to something meaningful. And I’m sorry, but if you spend entire days plotting out campaigns that are born with the disability of being critically unscalable, you’re going to spend the rest of your working life in the trenches.

This all stems back to the mindset of the affiliate. Are you looking to make enough money to survive? Or are you looking for opportunities to get a really fucking big swimming pool and a wife like Jonathan Volks?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the example of targeting I’ve outlined above, but ONLY if it’s your launch pad to mass marketing.

Look at the main niches in CPA. What do they have in common?

– Everybody is concerned with how their body looks.
– Everybody wants the chance to make more money.
– Everybody wants the comfort of a relationship.

These are all qualities that appeal to the mainstream. So instead of sitting there and wondering how you can appeal to a tiny micro slice of the market, stop thinking so small! By all means get creative with your concepts, but have the persistence and innovation to scale them to wide and far reaching demographics.

The super affiliates out there, most of them, have recognized that it only takes one winning concept to get incredibly rich. Do you really think all of these guys are smart enough to keep pulling innovative campaigns out of the bag? No, it’s usually a case that they’re more efficient when it comes to scaling what already works. They have the balls to win big.

I think many affiliates are still stuck in the financial constraints of their day job mentalities. They have a fixed monthly wage they want to earn, and the second that figure is reached, scaling becomes irrelevant. Why push on in to the unknown?

Log in to your Facebook or POF account and I’m willing to bet you’ll find campaigns where you targeted micro-niches and made a profit. Was the ROI such a burning distraction that you never ventured in to broader markets? I’m guilty of the same mistakes in the past. But if you don’t scale, you’re like the hermit worker who doesn’t have the balls to ask his boss for a pay rise. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. If you don’t scale, you’ll never know.

The next time you’re laser targeting a campaign to a small crowd, ask yourself “How scalable is this concept?” If you can’t think of a way to take it mainstream, it’s probably not worth the bother. Save your energy for campaigns where there’s potential to earn big.

Finch guest posts on PPC.bz (Because he hasn’t slagged me off yet)

I’ve recently been looking for writing opportunities on other blogs. Dearest Barbie from PPC.bz offered me the chance. I was tempted to submit a YouTube video since that seems to be his thing these days. But alas I wrote a piece called Saving FML America. Check it out, and drop me an email if you’ve got a blog I can sling my junk on.

Until then, follow me on Twitter