Finch Sells | Affiliate Marketing Blog

Golden Rules For A Landing Page That Converts

Feb 05 2011

One of the most common questions I see on affiliate marketing forums is the classic “Should I link directly to an offer or build a landing page?”

I can count on one hand the number of campaigns I’ve made money from without the help of a landing page. Direct linking may work for some. But it’s never outperformed any of my campaigns where I’ve pre-sold the offer ahead. Now that doesn’t mean you should take my words for gospel. The equation is altered by your choice of niche, traffic source, keyword targets, and probably what you ate for breakfast this morning.

But that’s besides the point of this post. I think if you’re going to use a landing page, the least you can do is make it a good one. I’ve seen some jawdroppingly bad landing pages over the years. So bad they could only have been designed by the Escobar Status dude (baby please come back).

If you haven’t checked it out already, StackThatMoney had a very useful post this week offering seven conversion boosting scripts. Some of these are highly relevant to the landing pages you should be creating. But while they will all make a difference, they don’t quite add the missing ingredients which most marketers tend to overlook – the language you use to persuade.

Our actual landing page copy is one of the most important links in the affiliate chain, and it’s often the last to be split-tested. We pay so much attention to our faltering CTRs and our faintly different banners that we often forget to split test this decisive persuasion tool. That’s probably because it’s a lot easier to find a new dating stock image than it is to learn how to write better copy.

The best landing pages act on the message of the ad that preceded them and channel the focus towards your end goal. Presumably to get the user to sign up to some crappy service he’d be embarrassed to tell his friends about. If you’re wondering why your landing page isn’t making a difference on your bottom line, it’s usually because the sales funnel is leaking relevance.

If your ad doesn’t gel with the benefits you’re listing in your landing page, the user is going to click away.

If the offer doesn’t deliver the benefits you’ve described in your landing page, the EPC is going to be low.

I look at dating ads on Plentyoffish and often see headlines like “Our Women Need More Tall Smokers, Join Now!” And I think to myself, okay, maybe I missed the release of Mate 1’s latest “Free Weekend Pass For Nicotineheads” landing page. But I haven’t, so is this really a sophisticated marketing ploy? No, it’s just a cheap trick to increase CTR based on user attributes. It may enjoy short lived success while the CTR is strong, but inevitably it falls apart because the correlation is wafer thin and built on cones of sand.

If you’re going to exploit user attributes for your ads, you have to choose attributes that actually have some relevance. Otherwise you’ll lose way too many eyeballs in the jump from ad to landing page. Getting a user to click from your landing page through to the merchant is actually very easy. But only if you’ve pre-qualified them with ads that tie in to the benefits you’re about to sell.

At the heart of your campaign, it doesn’t matter how great your landing page is as a standalone advertisement. It has to tie in with your previous ads in order to be effective, or the user will simply leave disenchanted.

I’ve regularly touted the benefits of using “YES language” on a landing page. This is a copywriting technique where you ask as many rhetorical questions as you can, always the with the intention of getting a resounding “YES!” from your reader. A headline like “Do You Want To Get Ripped In Time For Summer?” is more of an attention grabber than simply stating “New Formula Promises Abs Within Months”. There’s another language tool at work there, which I will come to later. It involves getting the reader to picture himself in various states. If you can control the states, you can control his emotion. And if you can steer his emotion in to a buying state of mind, congratulations, you’re a better writer than most affiliate marketers out there.

Use concise language and always write for the subordinate classes. Just because you have a degree in English literature, that’s no license to alienate 70% of your target market by typing like a pompous prick with his head up his arse. Short snappy sentences are the way to go. Something I like to remind myself in any of my copywriting is that ambiguity is never a good trait when you’re trying to sell something. It’s the mark of a copywriter who isn’t truly invested in a product or it’s benefits.

There’s a beaten dead horse lurking around affiliate marketing blogs that says you should always sell the benefits, not the features, of whatever you’re promoting.

Yes, you should. But understand that there’s a difference between selling the benefits and simply listing the benefits hoping one of them fills a “tick if applicable” box in the consumer’s head. I spy on many affiliate landing pages and it really shines through how bland and uninspiring the writing can be.

“Sell the benefits, not the features,” simply isn’t good enough. You need to sell those benefits in such a way that the reader has no choice but to imagine them sweeping through his life and making a change for the better. Reeling off the A-Z of “Things My Product Can Do For You” is technically correct in the marketing sense. But it’s just not effective, in my opinion, unless at some point those benefits flick a switch from “this could be me”, to “this WILL be me if I act now” in the reader’s head.

How do you do that?

You either have the natural talent, or you hire somebody else who does. It goes back to what I was saying in my last post about outsourcing. If you want the best, you better be the best…or be prepared to pay for the best.

Recommended This Week:

Looking for some excellent landing page case studies? If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny
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Are You The “One Man Wolf Pack” Marketer?

Feb 03 2011

Are you the marketer, designer, developer, copywriter, editor, accountant and toilet cleaner of your affiliate business? Do you consider yourself a bit of a one man wolf pack? I feel your pain. Not too long ago, I was exactly the same.

But then I hired an awkwardly polite writer from the Philippines and my pack grew by one. I gave him my linkbuilding chores and suddenly there were two of us in the wolf pack. I was alone first in the pack, and then Rizaldo joined in later. Rizaldo recommended his graphic designer to me, and I thought, “Wait a second, could it be?” And now I know for sure, I just added half of the Philippines to my wolf pack. All of us wolves, roaming around the Internet, making monies and publishing bullshit 500-word articles.

So tonight, I make a post. Asking…

Do you really want to be a One Man Wolf Pack?

One Man Wolf Pack Making money as an affiliate marketer can be hard work. Our monthly earnings fluctuate so wildly that it’s often stressful enough predicting our own expendable income without having to deal with hiring other workers. But you can only go so far on your own.

I tried for the longest time to handle every aspect of my business. Partly because I like to be in control and partly because of my lazy logic. In my mind, it would take longer to express exactly what I wanted from a hired worker than it would to do a hack job of it myself. But that’s the problem. If you take on every task of your business, you will inevitably resort to hack jobs and mediocrity.

How many times have you looked at a landing page concept, weighed up the costs of outsourcing against how triumphant you think you are with the fucking gradient wizard in Photoshop and decided to take a crack at it yourself?

I used to sit down after breakfast, load up my brushes, bust out my drop shadows, and absolutely massacre those concepts. You end up settling for second best due to your own limitations. I would alter my concepts to coincide with the capabilities of a half arsed designer. Hey, I like to bevel everything because it looks cool, okay? Your justification for going solo is that you saved $100 on what some Elance designer was trying to extort from you. But the reality? Your own stubbornness and refusal to relinquish control to somebody more accomplished has probably just kicked you in the balls.

I think the single most important aspect of your business to outsource is the accounting. For every thousand dollars I made in my first year as an affiliate marketer, I’m betting I surrendered at least a hundred bucks by not taking on expert financial advice in the form of a good accountant. I’ve rectified that now, but Christ, why did I ever think it would be a good idea to file my own taxes? If you’re just getting started as your own boss, resist the temptation to work the numbers yourself. Pay somebody else to get their panties in a twist at the end of every accounting period.

Pro tip: Spend your own time MAKING money not counting money.

Finding an accountant is generally a task I would leave to word of mouth recommendations or whoever happens to be the real deal in your local area. I’m signed up to Crunch which is a fantastic new accounting service for those of you in the UK. It has a flat rate of Â£60/month and for that, the Crunch team handles pretty much everything.

You don’t want to be placing your books and end of year returns in the hands of an offshore shantytown, no matter how many times they call you “Sir” when applying for the job. But that’s not to say you won’t find great value for money in outsourcing the donkey work. The stuff that would otherwise distract you from the tasks that make you money. If it’s linkbuilding, design work, filler article creation, data entry or just about anything that doesn’t require your sound business judgment…get it outsourced and forget about it.

There are a ton of sites you can use to find skilled workers. I would recommend checking out Elance and oDesk. oDesk is pretty batshit insane. You can watch your workers’ screens while they go about their business. No doubt, if I worked on oDesk, I’d be dismissed before lunchtime on the first day. It’s also worth checking out WickedFire where you’ll find some excellent hired help from just about every corner of our industry.

It’s tough, as a beginner, to shake the instinctive grip over every part of your business. But understand that scaling and making this thing a reality requires the balls to actually start visualizing what you do as a business that can grow over time and prosper on it’s own legs.

If you fail to utilize the talent of the skilled individuals at your disposal, don’t expect your business to be scaling out of your mum’s basement anytime soon. You’ll be trapped by self-imposed limitations that may save you money, but will almost certainly stunt your growth.

Recommended This Week:

If you’re in the UK and haven’t sorted yourself out with an accountant, check out Crunch. For Â£60/month you get an almighty weight off your chest, some sound support and the kind of financial advice that will save you money in the long haul.
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Dating On Facebook vs. Dating On POF

Jan 22 2011

When you’re deciding what to promote, there’s often the dilemma of demand vs exclusivity. Do I sell something that’s been beaten to death already? Or do I hedge my bets on slinging a product I have faith in, even if it’s greeted by nothing but blank stares over the dinner table at ASW? If that’s the case, don’t worry. It’s tough to talk shop with an affiliate marketer when all he can think about is Ian Fernando’s Party Bus.

Just because the rest of the affiliasphere has yet to go bat shit crazy over your fantasy micro-niche, that doesn’t mean there’s no money to be made in pursuing the idea. By the same token, just because every dipshit and his cousin happen to be promoting a new dating site, there’s still an open buffet of good coin to be had by following the crowd. Your challenge is to simply do it better than the rest.

Dating has been my favourite niche for over a year now. It’s a market as timeless as the weed porn on Barman’s desktop. As long as sex, romance and loneliness remain words in the human vocabulary, I will still be in business – ready and waiting to exploit those who relate to them.

I would say that in 2011, the majority of dating affiliates use social platforms such as Facebook and Plentyoffish to drive traffic to their offers. I know many affiliates who enjoy success on just Facebook, and many who can only get profitable on POF. So where do the traffic sources differentiate? How can you scale your successful campaigns from one to the other?

Many networks make a big song and dance about porting your campaigns across for easy money. But most affiliates know this is only easy money for the networks who don’t have to worry about a little friend of ours called MARGIN. Dearest Margin can fade in to the realms of negativity if you simply copy and paste a campaign from Facebook to Plentyoffish, or vice versa, without having a fundamental understanding of the two traffic sources. So let’s take a look at those differences.

Through all the thousands of dollars I’ve spent advertising on POF, it becomes clearer with every penny that the most successful dating campaigns are those that add a unique selling point to the online dating experience.

You’re advertising to registered users of a free dating site. How successful can you expect to be by serving up the same shit with a different stock image and the message that paying elsewhere is better?

With POF, you have to root out the element of frustration that would drive a member to seek out pastures new in the online dating community. To do that, your best options are:

– Offer a service directly more applicable to their needs. Are they a beach blubber whale in a sea of anorexic Size Zeros? Well then a dating site where the guys fancy “a bit of meat on the bone” is likely to be more catered to their needs. I’m not going to get bogged down by preaching the merits of race-based niche targeting. Go figure.

– Sell a service with members that are better conversationalists, and less likely to waste their time. I’ve done my fair share of hands-on market research and one of the most common complaints I find from female dating site frequenters is that the average male has the personality and conversation skills of a damp fish. For the ladies, offer the bait of sophisticated chat and an inbox that isn’t going to be stacked to the sky with time wasters. For the guys, promise girls who actually respond to messages.

Finally, ask yourself one question. There’s a reason why these POF members are still using the service. What is it? If you can find that golden nugget answer, you have the single most powerful weapon for targeting your ads.

So how is marketing on Facebook different? The most glaring difference is the fact that, hurr durr, this is Facebook. Not everybody on Facebook is out to get shagged tonight…as Justin Dupre discovered to his dismay after adding 3000 Thai girls in one late night binge. To promote dating offers on Facebook, you have to rely on greater targeting skills, badger-like tracking tendencies and…for lack of a scientific explanation, the ability to track down images that just work. There’s no other way to put it. Some images just work.

In theory, porting a campaign from Plentyoffish to Facebook CAN be immediately successful if you have a means of filtering out the uninterested eyeballs that Facebook loads you with. I’m sorry, but just because you’ve selected “single” as a targeting option, that doesn’t mean your feeding bread to a waiting duck. Keyword targeting is the way to go here.

To give you an example of how keyword targeting can be effective, let’s imagine we want to target an early twenties female crowd to be sent to some slushy matchmaking site where the preference is on finding love rather than finding crabs. How can we reach them? I think you can tell a lot about a girl by the books that she reads, and this has proven an excellent way of narrowing down my targeted users to smaller groups that I think are going to be relevant to my offers.

If I wanted to target the slushy romantic type, I could probably get a good mix by keyword targeting popular books like “A Walk To Remember”, “The Notebook” and so on. You can then build out ad copies, and in some cases images, which appeal directly to your audience. Your CTR will skyrocket, and providing you add the two missing ingredients – a good landing page and a carefully matched offer – the rewards will be waiting in your wallet.

If you want to advertise dating offers to broad markets on Facebook, you simply have to bid CPC. There was a time where nearly all ads would be more profitable if you could adapt them for CPM campaigns, but that time – in my opinion – has well and truly passed. Unless you’re hitting an unsaturated Asian or European country, at least.

You can still enjoy success with broad markets on Facebook with the combination of three must-haves: An eyecatching image, the correct dayparting (maximize your CTR by bidding after 8pm), and small age demos. I don’t have an explanation why, but I nearly always find that my ads perform better when I reduce the age groups to a maximum of four years.

Once you’ve established successful campaigns on Plentyoffish and Facebook, there are still yet more differences in how you need to maintain them. POF is notorious for campaigns with clickthrough rates that start high and then tail off dramatically in days, and sometimes even hours. You will need lots of fresh images to keep your ads profitable. I tend to run them in batches of two or three, using them for a few days and then pausing and resuming another set. Another great asset with POF is the login count which I’m not going to talk too much about because I don’t want my time to become your knowledge. So get testing and you should see some interesting data.

With Facebook, once a campaign is keyed in over a broad demo, it really is just a question of persuading Facebook to keep sending you impressions. Campaigns tend to gradually receive less traffic over time as the CTR slips. You can remedy this by deleting and relaunching new campaigns with slightly tweaked creatives. The CTR is MUCH more steady than you will see on Plentyoffish, and combined with safe CPC bidding, Facebook is generally more rewarding once you find something that works.

So there you go, just a few tips for those of you who are looking to make money from the dating niche. Argue with them, protest against them, agree with them, deny them, whatever. I’m heading to the beach tomorrow so my balls will be dangling too far in to the ocean to give a damn either way. Have a good weekend visualizing what I just said.

Recommended This Week:

I’ve said it a few times now and I’ll keep saying it – If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Excellent range of dating offers covering markets on six different continents last time I checked. They seem to convert very well.
Feel free to add Finch to your Facebook. Yes, this is the right link. My real name is not actually Finch. Also follow me on Twitter